Past Masters Seventy Two
Author: Various
Date: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00
Description: Sixteen short stories in the Life + 70 Public Domain, gathered from magazines and newspapers. Among the authors is "John J Chichester", pseudonym of Christopher B Booth, usually seen where he has a story under his own name in the same magazine issue. A bit of humour, a bit of creepy, and a bit of hard-boiled. 1: Old King's Coal / C. S. Montanye 2: The Soul Trap / Charles B. Stilson 3: Dr. Martone's Microscope / Charles B. Stilson 4: The Superman of Dr Jukes / Francis Flagg 5: The Last Straw / Robert Barr 6: My Brother Henry / J. M. Barrie 7: The Masked Monster / Guy Gilpatric 8: The Woman of t

PAST MASTERS

SEVENTY TWO

8 April 2022

Produced by Terry Walker

("Pulpmeister")

Contents

1: Old King's Coal / C. S. Montanye

2: The Soul Trap / Charles B. Stilson

3: Dr. Martone's Microscope / Charles B. Stilson

4: The Superman of Dr Jukes / Francis Flagg

5: The Last Straw / Robert Barr

6: My Brother Henry / J. M. Barrie

7: The Masked Monster / Guy Gilpatric

8: The Woman of the Wood / Abraham Merritt

9: Lady in Lower 11 / Ainsworth Morgan

10: "Doc" Meets the Train / John Jay Chichester

11: Death on an Atoll / James Norman Hall

12: A Scientific Balloon / W. L. Alden

13: By Right Of Conquest / Guy Boothby

14: Baleston's Secret Reef / John Arthur Barry

15: The Thirteenth Degree / Irvin S Cobb

16: The Eminent Dr. Deeves / Irvin S. Cobb

Cumulative Index # 61-72

________________

1: Old King's Coal

C. S. Montanye

1892-1948

Popular Magazine 20 Aug 1924

ACCORDING to Marcus Borealis, younger brother of Aurora, one of the literati who roamed about Rome a year or so before the Eagles became sea gulls, "Twice blest is he who can forever retain what is his own." Marcus might have been a shark or a bust as the Shakespeare of his day but upon that one remark alone he deserves everlasting credit and a prominent place in the textbooks. It's a fact that any bim who has nerve and gets a lucky break can collect the sugar, but it takes one who is smarter than smart to hang onto it once he's leveled off and has it.

I'm right, am I not?

In this age of dashing yachtsmen who make frequent trips to the West Indies on business, yeggs, eggs, race tracks, bobbed-hair bandits, to say nothing of all the strangers from out of town who take Broadway and make themselves eligible for doing time by lifting watches, head waiters, waiters with no heads, the tin-can pirates with crooked meters, chorus girls, cloakroom burglars and— finish it yourself— any one who can retain what good fortune, gray matter or Mistress Luck has bequeathed him deserves all the medals. Shylock, himself, would have been looking for space on the bread line had he ever dropped off at the port of New York to stretch at the tall buildings.

This zippy narrative hasn't a thing in the world to do with Shylock although it does concern a certain blockhead who undoubtedly traces directly back to the famous money lender. The name, as you probably suspect, reads Ottie Scandrel.

Friend Ottie, a Manhattan hick who'd believe that Adam smashed baggage in the Garden of Eden if you looked him in the eye when you told him so, was one of the kind the Borealis boy must have been thinking about when he dipped his fountain pen in the ink to pen his wise crack. Scandrel, with more ups and downs than a second-hand roadster on a tough detour, had knocked out an eye-widening fortune aided and abetted by luck and pluck, had clowned around on the dough, loafing like bread until the Stock Exchange shook him like a cocktail, cleaned him like a carpet and dried him like a bath towel before removing his last nickel and showing him the nearest exit.

It was pence to shillings that any one else slapped over the jumps in this manner would have called it a day and gotten a job as a bookkeeper or a bootlegger but not so with the former pride of the Broadway farm. Ottie had staged a comeback by a climb into the prize ring and, riding in on the long end of the purse, had copped a piece of important money. Right here is where the sense of Marcus gets in its fine work with the cents of Scandrel and proves without a doubt that what was good a few centuries ago can get across to-day without difficulty.

Just for fun let me tell you about it.

Scandrel with a fresh bankroll turned overnight into the well-dressed boulevardier he had been before the bulls and the bears had given him the crash. He began dining three times a day, ate between meals, bought another car whose wheels were all present and then began running up to my gym in the Bronx to snicker at the tomato-catchup sockers who were working their heads and hands off around the premises in order to get edged for some notorious prelim that was to start them off on the road to fame. Ottie had a laugh for the lightweights, the welters and the top heavies, a giggle for all his old pals and a sneer for Looie Pitz, the little fight manager, who, like the brook, went on forever.

Pitz and Ottie were always as friendly as a couple of Airedales in a strange kennel but for once Looie had the bulge on him. Somewhere in the great wide world the little Scandinavian had dug up a two-fisted welterweight who was the real case goods. The puncher answered to the name of "Right Hook" Lane and made the same kind of an impression on the Manhattan fight fans as a "Follies" queen would on a hick village. Pitz's boy had everything including a disposition like a tormented hornet and a love for taking and giving it. He fought in the ring, in his dressing room, in the street, up alleys arfd on corners and he fought his way up the ladder like an Irish bricklayer working with a half dozen Italians. It looked like the welter crown sure, and Pitz, who had formerly traded in nothing but champion floppers, was so tickled that he bought himself a silk dicer and two clean shirts.

Really, Right Hook Lane had the stuff that would make a butterfly talk back to a vulture!

Every one around the Bronnix gym thought so too except Ottie who rolled up a couple of days after he first began spending real jack again to look things over and cast an optic at Lane, who was tearing up a couple of his sparring partners and getting a lot of amusement out of it.

"It looks as if Pitz had struck gold at last, don't it?" I said when the second frame began with Lane steaming up his wallops.

Ottie glanced carelessly up at the slug-fest and curled an immediate lip.

"Yeah? You think so, so I'm taking an opposite stand. Sure, this is a fast job, but I had a look at his record in the paper the other night and who did he ever fight except old men, nearly-wases, never-wases and other guys who think gloves are something you wear when you go to a wedding. Match him up with a first-rater and you'll see Looie going back to that funny derby hat he used to wear. A laugh, positively."

As he finished speaking Pitz saw us and came over, dragging down his cuffs to prove they were clean.

"I guess I ain't got it now?" he chuckled, waving a finger at the fast-moving Mr. Lane. "Look at that boy sock! Look at his footwork! Look at the way he crosses that left, and don't overlook that wonderful right of his! He's there, I'm telling you!"

"But do I believe you?" Ottie yawned. "Where did you pick up this tramp?"

Pitz licked his lips.

"Out in Pennsylvania— fighting around the coal mines for nothing and enjoying every minute of it. He's a natural or I can find comfort in a telephone booth. He's going right up until he sits pretty on the throne. Sweet, no?"

Scandrel nudged me.

"Get every word of this, Joe. Looie thinks he's out before a circus. You poor fish," he hissed at the optimistic manager, "I was just telling O'Grady here that your world beater ain't hardly anything at all. If I had time I'd step up there now and drop him like a cut-rate sale in a drug store. Sitting pretty on the throne, hey? That means somebody's going to crown him. Get away with that stuff. I could go out now and find any number of boys who, with a week or two of work, could put him to bed like flowers."

One glance at Looie Pitz was sufficient: to show that he was being singed.

"Come on now, you two!" I cut in hastily. "If you want to fight join the police force or get married. Don't mind him, Looie. He's taking you out for a gallop. Er— what did you want to see me about?" I asked Scandrel.

He consulted his notes, fingered one of his ruined ears and coughed.

"That's right, Joe. I come all the way up here for a piece of talk with you. If you've got a couple of minutes that are running to waste can I see you in your private office?"

"Go in and lock the safe first!" Pitz advised. "I'll lock you perfectly safe!" Scandrel hollered. "You've got too much to say for your size. Don't forget you're handling Right Hook Lane— not Benny Leonard. Take a walk for yourself or I'll knock the top of your nut off!"

Before he could carry out the threat or promise Lane had punched his luckless sparring partner out of the ring and in the excitement I managed to get Ottie away. In the office I closed and locked the door while he dropped comfortably into a chair, put his new shoes on the edge of the desk, buttoned his new waistcoat, hung up his new tile and inhaled the fragrance of the silk kerchief that went with his balloon trousers and seven-dollar cravat.

"That guy Pitz!" he mumbled. "He's a human felony I'd like to take for plenty. If that silly smacker of his is the future champ the Prince of Wales can ride horses. Honest "

"Is that what you came up here to see me about?" I interrupted.

He wiped off his chin, wound his new wrist watch and sighed.

"To be truthful— no. Listen, Joe. Now I got a wad again I'm looking around for a good investment. I want to buy in on a graft that earns as much as rum running, pays profits like the ladies' clothing business, is as safe as a political pull and as interesting as musical comedy. I might be wrong but I think I've found my future profession."

"What is it— pocket picking?"

Ottie coughed again.

"Your comedy's rotten, Joe. No, it ain't pocket picking any more than law is medicine. Leave me tell you about it. The other day when I went to shop for a new bus I got a steer over to the Night-and-Day Garage which is nearer the East River than it is to Times Square. I didn't pick up a bargain there for the reason that the head of the works can't tell the difference between a new car and a used car when it comes to prices. The name of this party is Jerry King and he told me he's thinking of selling out on account of the tough hours and having to watch out that nobody gives him the oil to steal his gas. He says that it's a bargain for any one looking for a nifty investment and while I only had a sneer for the proposition I've been thinking it over ever since. It's a cinch that nobody could steal gas off me "

"Why should they steal it when you give it to them for nothing?" I cut in.

"Well, to lay a long story with a punch in the eye, I'm set now to talk money with this King baby. Give me an hour out of your life and we'll run down and look the works over. I'll pass you in as an expert so he won't try to gyp me and we'll see which is what. Correct?"

My answer was such that two o'clock the same afternoon found us delving into a neighborhood somewhere between the Battery and Harlem where nobody's life was safe after twilight.

Future presidents and gunmen played in the gutters, in the middle of the street and on the slippery sidewalks. Somebody's wash was drying on a hundred fire escapes and peddlers with pushcarts that sold everything from suspicious herring to fur coats bargained along the way. We had to push a path through a couple of gang fights, cross two avenues and turn down another side street before we reached our destination.

The Night-and-Day Garage was located in a three-story edifice and was all wet. Two open touring cars that had given up the struggle had died at the front door, a couple of taxies with yellow fever lay in ruins back of them and a couple of sportive car washers with an equal number of hoses responsible for the general dampness were spraying a limousine that looked as if it might have given Noah a joy ride. For the rest there was the perfume of grease and gas and wet rubber.

Ottie sniffed it and reached for his pipe.

"It don't smell so good," he admitted, "but neither does glue and look at all the money in it if you stick around on the job. Hey, Mac!" he bawled at one of the moist pair. "A little attention now!"

The washer swung around and handed us a stream from the hose before he was able to turn the water off at the nozzle. My boy friend chased his new skimmer, caught it before it flowed to the gutter and returning pasted the offender.

"Trying to beat Saturday night out, hey? Get under that boat and look at the axles. You, Herman," he roared at the other one. "Where's the boss?"

The second mechanic shrugged.

"Down in the cellar with the bells and the bags," he replied indifferently. "If you boys have got a bill to collect rush over and push that bell near the office door. I'd do it myself only I ain't no bell hop."

Scandrel was about to put him on the floor with his friend when a door in the rear of the place opened and Jerry King, the proprietor, walked casually in.

King was a trifle breath-taking. I expected to behold some ex-mechanic who by preying on the customers had collected enough to go in for wholesale brigandage but saw instead a well-built, handsome youth with a Harvard face, a Yale accent and a Princeton polish. King wore gray-flannel trousers, white tennis shoes and a silk shirt over which he was pulling a heavy sweater before he smoothed down his carefully parted hair and sauntered over to us with the languid grace of a matinee idol stepping out to take his fifteenth curtain call.

"Well, here we are," Ottie began. "A little wet but all together otherwise. Meet my friend, Joe O'Grady, who knows more about the garage graft than most paying tellers do about time-tables. For a fact, Joe can run a bus on a gallon of cold water and get fifty miles or more out of it. He knows as much about cars as the party who runs the subway, even if he does hang out in the Bronx. Let's go inside and talk about this and that and so and so."

The handsome and well-bred Jerry King agreed with a languid nod, smothered a yawn and led us into a small office which he unlocked wfith two keys. Once inside he waved us into chairs. Ottie promptly took two— one for himself and one for his feet.

"Now I know where I've seen you before," King murmured politely. "You're the prospective purchaser who was here the other day. Your face is not easily forgotten."

"Never mind my face," Ottie growled. "Who did you think I was— Mary's lamb? Listen, I'm here with my pal to talk dollars and sense. Leave us look over your books and then we'll come down to brass tacks. Right?"

King waved a weary hand at a safe that was half open.

"The books? Oh, quite naturally. Just help yourself, old top. You'll find them all there, but you'll notice that on some days there were no entries. I couldn't afford to keep a bookkeeper and I was so frightfully enervated at times I really couldn't do it myself. But do help yourself. Maybe you can understand the figures— I can't."

With his usual swagger Scandrel hauled out the ledgers and began running through them. He had no idea of what it was all about. A double entry to him meant two horses entered in a race by the same owner and for all he knew a debit was some kind of a dope fiend who used opium. Twenty minutes of close examination that told him absolutely nothing sufficed. With a knowing nod he hurled the books back in the safe, coughed and took his chair.

"Your accounts look O.K. to me, feller. Now for the most important item. What is your reason for selling out this here establishment? Be truthful. Liars to me are the same as second-story men to the flat-feet— I get them in the end. Come clean, bo."

King helped himself to a cigarette and leaned farther back in his chair.

"It's rather a long story, you know. And a bit of a fanciful yarn though perfectly true. Favor me with your attention for a few minutes and I'll try and explain matters. I think you'll be surprised."

We were.

To begin with we learned that Jerry King was no other than the only son of the millionaire coal magnate who was known to the press, pulpit and his associaes in highway robbery as "Old King." It seemed that he was one of these efficiency whales who wanted everybody on the job— except himself— every minute of the day. It also seemed that his most ardent desire was that his son and heir be a chip of the old block-head. Jerry King frankly admitted that he had been born lazy and wasn't ashamed of it. He went on to tell how his father had taken him into the business only to throw him out when he had found him, not asleep at the switch, but doing a doze at a one-hundred-and-eighty-dollar mahogany desk.

It was a sad, sad story.

"Father," young King continued, "was simply furious when he caught me napping. It was about the fifth or sixth time so perhaps he had reason to be. He called me a shiftless waster and other unpleasant epithets. Not only was he very disagreeable but he said he was through with me until I could prove to his satisfaction that I possessed some disguised qualifications he had never been able to find. He said I was a failure and, inasmuch as he hates failures, informed me that I need not come back to the fold until I had proved to his satisfaction that I could do some one thing better than any one else could. Father don't care if it is driving a truck, cleaning the streets or manipulating an elevator. If I can excel in something and prove that I can earn money by my own ability, he'll be glad to bury the battle-ax, knowing I'm not quite as lazy and worthless as he believes me. So after the jolly old talk he wrote me out a check, I cashed it and purchased this garage from a gentleman who didn't like the police commissioner and didn't want to stay in the same city where he was."

"And the jolly old garage is a flop," Ottie horned in. "Well, well. So that's the way it was? You sound like a library book reads, but go right along. Tell me lots more."

Young King obliged.

It seemed that his father, following the traits of numerous rich men who had discovered that office hours interfered with golf, was about to retire and hand the business over intact, not to a little group of faithful employees but to one Adolphus McSweeney.

"McSweeney," King explained, "is a cousin of mine who lives five hundred or a thousand miles from New York."

"A distant cousin," Scandrel grinned. "What about him?"

"It's so beastly unfair," the other went on. "I haven't seen Adolphus for years, though I understand he has developed into a somewhat uncouth and low person with odd hobbies. If father does fulfill his threat my cousin will surely wreck the business. Whereas, if father handed it over to me I feel perfectly confident I could handle it successfully."

"The same way you keep books, hey?" Ottie grunted.

Jerry King flushed.

"There's a difference," he pointed out stiffly, "between doing the work yourself and having some one do it for you. The head of a vast corporation such as father's coal business has only to sign letters and checks. My chirography is splendid, if I do say so myself, and competent aids will handle all the necessary routine, leaving me merely to push buttons. This is why I'm selling out this garage. It's not my line and there's no use to continue on. You may have it for one third of my original investment."

"Fair enough," Ottie replied briskly. "Get your lawyers to draw up the papers, telephone me at the Swank Club over on Third Avenue when they're ready to be signed and I'll stop in with a certificate check to close the deal. The car business is a made-to-order fit for me. I'll collect heavy on this grift."

King promising to have everything ready for the transfer of the property before the end of the week, bowed us languidly out, Ottie as pleased as a laundress with a new washboard.

"So you think you can make a success of it?" I murmured when we reached the runway that led to the street.

"Think it?" was his answer. "I know it! I ain't got a college education and for all I know Mussolini is something you catch in the mud at low tide, but I'll clean on this, I positively will. Let me tell you—"

He was cut short by the appearance of a canary-colored roadster that shot in from the street and came to a panting stop, its brakes burning, its radiator boiling over and its five tires as flat as the sole of a traveling salesman's shoe.

From this colorful example of the automotive industries' art alighted a young lady who resembled a magazine advertisement that had come to life. She owned hair the same shade as the car, Broadway eyes, a Riverside Drive smile and a West End Avenue hauteur. She was as trim and twice as neat as a package of pins, as pleasing to look at as twilight across a lake and as fascinating as roulette.

While she got out and slammed the door Ottie, his eyes bulging, stepped forward and she snapped her pretty fingers twice.

"Here, my man," she ordered, "just take a wrench and find out what's the trouble with my car. Don't stand there gaping at me like a fish. I had the motor as far north as Central Park when I heard something drop and since then it hasn't been running well at all. Be quick now."

Ottie looked at me, coughed and unbuttoned his jacket so she could get a glimpse of his new platinum watch chain.

"Er— you've got me wrong, Peachy," he began with a smirk. "I ain't no more a mechanic here than you're t!he janitress and I couldn't tell you what ails your job if you promised on your word of honor to wed me at four o'clock. The name is Otto Scandrel. If you hail from New York or its suburbs you probably know all about me."

The girl shook her yellow head.

"I'm afraid I don't. I'm sorry I made such a dreadful mistake. But do you suppose I can have the car fixed so I can use it after the show to-night? I want to take two of my girl friends up to the Outside Inn."

"The show?" Ottie hollered. "So you're in the show business? I might have known it. No doll with beauty like yours is letting it go to waste. Be at ease with me. The show business is my profession also, you might say. I used to help Georgie Cohan write his songs and plays, I always give the Shubert boys tips when they build a new theayter and I pick out the 'Follies' chorus for Ziegfeld every season. That ought to make us pals on the spot. What did you say your name was?"

"Merla Nevin. I'm playing the ingenue in 'Come On Feet, Let's Go!' the new revue at the St. Jaundice. You must stop in some time."

"Try to keep me away!" Scandrel giggled. "And meet one of my pals— Joe O'Grady, on the left. When we go out on parties we'll find somebody for Joe— maybe you got an aunt whose rheumatism ain't so bad in warm weather. Joe's not much to look at but he's got a nice disposition and money flows with him like cement. Excuse me now while I go and get some one to look over your car. Don't go away. I'll be right back."

He returned with all the employees of the place armed with everything from nail files to sledge hammers. By cuffing a few and bawling out the others he got them all to the yellow roadster and snapped up the hood.

"Now— go!"

With joyous shouts the bunch rushed forward and began tearing the engine apart.

While they threw half of it away Ottie and Miss Nevin held animated conversation.

"You know," the good-looking blonde confessed, "I begin to think I was rooked when I bought that car. I paid twelve hundred— or almost half a week's salary for it— and I've had nothing but trouble from the day I first owned it. It's yellow in more ways than its paint. I hate it, I hate it!"

"After a while I'll go over and kick it for you!" Ottie said. "Why don't you sell it? A snapper like you needs pearls hung around her neck, not a wreck like that. You know it— so do I."

Merla Nevin smiled grimly. "Sell it? Who'd buy themselves trouble?" She gave Ottie a sharp look, laughed a little and continued. "You know it isn't really such a bad car after all. The upholstery is lovely and when the wind shield is clean you can see right through it. Would— would you be interested in buying it from me for nine hundred dollars?"

This was Ottie's cue to snicker out loud. "No, baby. There are limits to even friendship and admiration. But I'll tell you what I will do, Merla— yes, I'm calling you that because I can see we're due to be regular pals. I'm practically set to snap this sink up outright and once I do I'll advertise the can and wish it off on the first person who comes in here with a loose fifty megs. Right? I'll see you back to Broadway in a taxi— if you don't mind and have your pocketbook with you. This neighborhood is so tough that they boil nails here instead of cabbage."

The girl looked in my direction.

"But is Mr. McShady coming too?"

He made a careless gesture. "Stay around and see that these tramps don't lay down on the job, Joe. The boss mechanic tells me that with any kind of luck that calliope will be running like a phonograph within a week and a half. So long— see you Tuesday."

Some two weeks or fourteen days later Ottie became the proprietor of the Night-and-Day Garage and on the afternoon after that the weary Mr. Jerry King called around to remove the last of his personal belongings. These, as he explained, were behind lock and key in the cellar.

"The nose paint, hey?" Ottie questioned, all attention. "I'm sorry, cull, but there's nothing doing. All the case goods on the premises belong to me now. Good afternoon. Call again when you're in need of service. We'll fix your mud guards and sell you four square gallons of gas every time you order five."

Instead of seeking the nearest door King raised a brow.

"I'm afraid that you misunderstand me entirely. I have no liquor here that I wish to take away. If you and your friend will come downstairs I'll jolly soon show you what I called for."

We slid across the garage to a flight of stairs, fell down them and waited until our host produced a key and unlocked the door he had led us up to. A dazzling electric light was switched on and what we saw was a fairly spacious chamber that had been fitted up as a makeshift gymnasium. There were rows of Indian clubs and dumb-bells, chest-weight machines, a sand dummy, skipping ropes, flopping mats, and a soap box full of gloves.

Ottie swallowed his disappointment and rolled a lamp hastily about.

"So this is what Water, the car washer, meant when he said you were down with the bells and the bags, eh? What's the big idea?"

King smiled sheepishly.

"I rather imagine that I will be more successful in the prize ring than in the garage business. At college I used to spar a bit and more than once several people told me that I should go out after amateur welter-weight laurels. I've always kept fit and top hole, you know. Personally, I believe the ring is where I can convince father that I'm not quite the unambitious, shiftless waster he imagines. At least it's worth a trial. The very worst thing that can happen to me will be a damaged nasal appendage."

"Yeah? Don't kid yourself. You're as liable as not to draw a busted beak," Ottie cut in. "So you're set to be a slapper, is that so? I don't know whether you read the papers but I used to be in the box business myself. How many battles have you pulled, if so when, where, why and what's your record?"

King coughed and buttoned his neat tweed jacket.

"To be perfectly candid I've had only one professional engagement so far. That was one night last week at the Paralytic A. C. in Jersey City. Under the nom de plume of 'Left Hook' Swain I opened the card and went six rounds to a draw with some local rowdy who was introduced as 'Cock-eye' Callahan."

"Callahan!" Ottie broke in. "I know that jobbie. He's got a punch that could kill a hippo— when he's sober. If you kept the small of your back off the mat and did six stanzas with him you can't be so terrible. Who's your manager, where do you train and what's the next date, if any, on your slate?"

The handsome King gave orders to a couple of day laborers who shuffled in to pack the gym stuff up before going through with the third degree.

"I've been both managing and training myself so far, you know. Perhaps I've neglected the latter because the garage business distracted me and frequently I was too tired to put my entire mind to it. My next encounter, you ask? It's rather odd. After the Jersey City affair I was approached by a Mr. Pitz. This Pitz has charge of a pugilist who has been somewhat of a sensation and who is called Right Hook Lane. He wants me to sign articles to meet Lane next month in a final bout at the Metropolis A. C. I'm to let him know definitely by Thursday."

At this Ottie's eyes lighted like bonfires. He smacked his lips and shook hands with me.

"I hope you didn't miss any of that, Joe. Looie, the little stiff, is trying to match that wiz of his with what he thinks is a set-up. Don't you get it? A little easy jack, a K. O. in the first frame and all the newspaper gab. Fond mamma! I'd like to tip over his apple cart and knock his plans for a loop. Picture that mountain lion of his getting chewed up by what the pair of them think is a Pekingese lap cat. Maybe it wouldn't be a sight worth seeing! Listen," he said to King, with what might be described as a dash of excitement, "I know these two tramps not well but too well. Pitz talks too much with his mouth and Lane ought to be stiffened on general principles. Now pay attention. Give me the name of the gym where you expect to work and I'll call around and watch you step. If you've got anything at all except a pair of arms I'll manage you myself for nothing, shape you up like the Winter Garden and teach you tricks you'd have to have your head beaten off to learn otherwse. Make me?"

The former owner of the Night-and-Day Garage looked a trifle surprised but didn't hesitate.

"I've made arrangements to practice at Harry O'Rosenblum 's gymnasium over on Fifty-sixth Street. I'll be there to-morrow morning from ten o'clock until noon, at which time I would be most happy to have you call. It will be jolly nice of you and if you can furnish me with a fair estimate of my prowess and ability you may be sure I'll be deeply appreciative."

"A return to prosperity has undoubtedly unbalanced you," I told the big egg when King and an express wagon full of the gymnasium paraphernalia departed. "You might think Lane is as phony as the Bell System but I'm telling you that he's the next welterweight champ of the world. It's a crime to send a green boy in against him."

Scandrel shrugged this off with the indifference of a duck getting rid of a raindrop.

"You think so, but let me tell you this. The bim I train is trained. If King looks good to me in action I'll have him ready to crash Dempsey, Harry Wills, Greb and Tunney all in one ring at the same time." He threw a glance at his arm clock and another at the back of the garage where the herd of busy mechanics were still working on Merla Nevin's horseless carriage. "I got a date now with the lady who owns that ark, so stay around, keep an eye on the gas pump, don't let no one short change me and if there are any callers from the advertisement I put in the paper for Cutey's car start with a thousand dollars but don't take less than eighty-five cash. And be sure to meet me to-morrow morning. You can clean out the office while you're waiting, if you want. I'll let you."

A nice fellar, what?

More out of curiosity than for any other reason I met Ottie the following morning at the rendezvous. He showed up rubbing his hands and grinning like a child at the sight of a new drum.

"You seem," I murmured, "pleased about something. What did you do— look in the mirror?"

He took off his new hat, admired it, put it back and sighed.

"Like the party said whose wife threw the contents of the kitchen at him— everything is coming my way. Equal this if you're able, Joe. Not thirty minutes ago by a grandfather's clock a customer who read the advertisement comes down to the carriage to look at the four-wheeled cup of custard. It's Right Hook Lane or I can touch the back of my neck with the end of my heel. I didn't tell him my name and I don't think he recognized me. He said the car was just exactly what he was looking for but he didn't want to meet the price. He only wants to pay two fifty and I'm holding out for two 'sixty-five. He's to think it over and let me know before the end of the month. It's a sure sale and I kill two stones with one bird. Not only do I set myself in right with the little blond lady who wears the classy shrouds but I stick Pitz's world beater with the most renowned piece of junk ever seen since the last crop of heavyweights. Come on, let's go up and slant King."

Harry O'Rosenblum, an ex-convict who had switched from the wire to the bag tappers, greeted us at the door and after listening to what Scandrel had to say nodded like a cuckoo in a Swiss clock.

"You're talking from King, mebbe? Do I know is he good, do I know is he bad? Esk me and I can't tell you. He pays me twelve dollars a day for the use of the gym and for twelve dollars he could be a half-wit, what I care? He's inside getting dressed like a chorus girl. He tells me he expects it company this morning and that I should get him a good tough boy to play with."

"Who's the good tough boy?" our hero inquired.

O'Rosenblum risked a smile that let us in on the secret of his one tooth.

" 'Rusty' Hogan. Go ahead in and look around. How is business by you, O'Grady?"

We mingled with a couple of dozen cast-iron gangsters, plug-uglies and pugilists who were throwing the dice and the bull. In twenty minutes or so Jerry King came out of his boudoir wrapped up in a violent violet kimono. The good-looking son of Old King, the coal millionaire, yawned behind his gloved hand and greeted us with some enthusiasm.

We had time only for a short sample of his patter before Rusty Hogan, a former stevedore who was unfavorably known in sporting circles as a boxer and who had at least fifty pounds on King, swaggered in. With his wire hair, his brassy smile, his steely gaze and his iron jaw Hogan was a walking hardware store.

He cast one contemptuous look at King, threw away the drag he was puffing on and climbed into the ring. A big mockie in a faded red sweater volunteered to act as timekeeper and a few of his playmates left the dice tournament to come over and bid King good-by.

Even O'Rosenblum seemed slightly agitated.

"I hope the police don't hound me for this," he muttered. "With my record they should railroad me for twenty, thirty years, mebbe. This ain't business— this is taking a chance!"

"Simply watch my style of action," King requested. "I realize that I have a jolly lot to learn before I meet Right Hook Lane. I'll be thankful for advice, you know."

He dropped the bath robe, revealing a well-knit body, a chest big enough to support locomotives and a waist like a debutante. Then he swung up into the ring, said something to Hogan and an instant later, without bothering to shake hands or kiss, the fray was on.

Our one regret was that it hadn't been staged in Madison Square Garden!

Disregarding and not waiting for the bell, King and Hogan tore into each other like a pair of cats from different neighborhoods. There was action from the first punch to the last punch and the Marquis of Queensberry might have drawn up a set of rules governing parchesi for all the notice either took of them. Catching King short with a left and a right, Hogan jabbed a hook to the mouth and a left to the body. We looked for the heir to the coal business to take the pad with alacrity but he weathered both wallops and came through with a sizzling uppercut that rocked Hogan like an old-fashioned cradle.

Hogan hung on, used a wicked rabbit punch in the break, hit low in the next exchange and continued with a variety of unsportsmanlike tactics that no more stopped King than a paper fence would a runaway horse.

With all the inmates of the gymnasium yelling their heads off, he fought Hogan across the ring with rights and lefts while O'Rosenblum in his excitement, swung upon the ropes and offered his favorite blackjack. The timekeeper rang the gong frantically but the end of the round meant as little to King and Hogan as a Fourteenth Street department store to the Vanderbilt family.

With the claret flowing freely, one of King's glims out for good and Hogan's face a complete ruin, they took turns spilling each other but fooling the crowd by jumping up and coming back for further assault and battery without waiting to take any part of a count.

O sole mio!

In the center of the ring King did terrible damage with a straight right to the kidneys and a scissors hook to the head. Hogan hung on, missed with a left jab and a right swing and had three punches thrown at him before he could cover up. He closed in and they stood toe to toe and slugged, but it was a cinch to see King had all the advantage of it and that Hogan was tiring rapidly.

With encouraging shouts from the gallery who overlooked the fact that Hogan was one of them, King tore loose and prepared to administer a final pasting. With his left he jabbed the groggy Hogan off so he could measure him and unleashed a mattress wallop.

"That's pretty!" Ottie roared above the tumult. "The old right now and take your time, kid! Measure him and then straight to the button. Let her go!"

King obliged and Master Hogan shot through the ropes, doubled up like a blanket and broke three camp chairs when he landed. Then, just to make it even all around, King rushed over and knocked the wildly excited Mr. O'Rosenblum cold, kicked the timekeeper in the face and would have beaten up the rest of the gym if Ottie hadn't grabbed a red pail marked "Fire" and dashed the contents over him.

At that he had to hit King with the bucket before he could restore order.

"A fighting fool and no mistake, Joe! So Right Hook Lane is a bear cat in action? Well, he'd better have his obituary set up in type because this baby is going to take him the same as Pershing took Manila Bay. I'll get O'Rosenblum to act as manager so Pitz won't suspect there's a West Indian in the woodpile, we'll sign immediately on any terms and then I'll toss a stiff dose of condition into Jerry. Look— he's emerging from it!"

King sat up, shook some water away, grinned sheepishly and yawned.

"What happened? Really, I remember my antagonist fouling me on several occasions. Did I lose my temper? And tell me— in what respect is improvement necessary?"

To continue.

The articles and terms of combat for an engagement between Right Hook Lane and Left Hook Swain were signed the next day and later the same afternoon Looie Pitz strolled into the Bronx gym, his silk hat newly ironed, Lane a pace back of him.

The dangerous welter was a tough-looking proposition who wore a sneer, a smile as false as his teeth, one good ear and some burlesque clothing. Pitz seated him and tossed a grin at me.

"We just now signed for a roll over, O'Grady. I'm letting the kid earn a little pin money by sticking the count on some mate who copies us by going around as Left Hook Swain. He's a flashy proposition and the one round he stays will go swell with the scribes. Why shouldn't we take something soft while we're waiting for the champ to accept one of our daily challenges?"

"I understand Swain went six rounds with Callahan," I said by way of diversion.

"Callahan?" Lane sneered. "That bolognie is as soft as an omelet. I could put on my shoes with one hand and lick him with the other. Who is this Swain guy? He looks like a duke or something to me."

He continued mumbling threats until it was half past five and Pitz led him off for an interview with some sporting editor who had a four-o'clock appointment with them both.

While tempus fugited Ottie, running the garage and training Jerry King, was as busy as a queen bee on the first day of spring. He had set up training quarters on the top floor of the Night-and-Day Garage, he used the mechanics as sparring partners and he let the well-bred youth do his roadwork along the East River. No reporters ever ventured into the lair because Ottie kept his protege's whereabouts dark and his only expense was bribes for the cops who grabbed their nightsticks and rushed after King with cries of "Stop thief!" when he was doing a morning spin!

As a day-and-night caller at the garage with a finger on the pulse of the situation it wasn't difficult for me to see that King was coming along nicely. Under Ottie's tutelage he was discovering how to get everything out of a punch, how to use his left and what to do with his feet. Planting me to watch the gas pump, Ottie had developed the habit of rushing up to the top floor every afternoon to lace on the gloves and give King his daily music lesson.

Scandrel might have been a conceited ignoramus, the fool of luck and so small that he could ride horseback on an ant, but when he made up his mind to put something across bullets couldn't stop him!

I understood vaguely that he was rushing around Broadway with Merla Nevin, the Queen of the Blondes, in his spare minutes, but I never suspected what he was framing up until he displayed a solid-diamond, real-gold engagement ring that he had taken out of pawn on a ticket he had found in the back seat of one of the cars stored in the garage.

This he displayed in confidence one afternoon a few days before the fight when King was doing a kip on an upstairs couch and one of the mechanics was preparing repair bills by slipping around the motors and stealthily removing a dozen or more of their magnetos.

"When a gal asks some gils for a ring they get an alarm clock," Scandrel chuckled, dropping the engagement ice carelessly back in his waistcoat pocket. "Wait'll Merla gets a peek at this inducement. I'll give her the ring first and ask her afterward. And picture me with a wiff earning two grand or so a week. All I'll have to worry about in the future is how long she will keep her looks and be able to sing and dance."

"Then it's all arranged?"

"Er— not exactly. After the fight's over I'm taking her to the Golden Slipper Supper Club and that's where I goal her with the hock rock and the proposition. I can't lose on this "

He was interrupted by the appearance of a mechanic who had twelve dollars' worth of lubricating oil on his pan and overalls.

"There's a fifteen-thousand-dollar Rolls-Arrow outside, boss," this number stated. "The party inside it wants to see you. What'll I do?"

"Send him in," Ottie directed, "and while he's talking to me puncture a back shoe so we'll be sure of a little something. Get me?"

The other touched his cap and ducked.

There was a few minutes' intermission and then we had with us an elderly gentleman who closely resembled Palm Beach in the winter, Newport in the summer and Wall Street the rest of the year. He was a little gray and careworn and leaned heavily on his stick.

"Our aim is service," was Ottie's greeting. "Carbon burned out for a buck a cylinder, brakes lined with the care of fur coats and batteries charged like the Light Brigade. How much of a strain can you stand?"

The caller smiled slightly and sat down.

"I think," he began, "I had better introduce myself. My name is Benjamin King, sometimes known as Old King. My son Jeremiah telephoned me last night and explained the details of his latest enterprise. Prize fighting is a manly art and some of my fondest recollections are battles of the old guard— 'Lanky Bob' Fitzsimmons, Tom Sharkey, Peter Maher, Jim Corbett— fighting men who fought like men. Jeremiah tells me that you are handling him. In confidence— how good or bad is the boy?"

Ottie made a gesture.

"He's the crocodile's cough, Mr. King, and don't let no one tell you different. He might be as lazy as a daisy in the sun but once he's in a ring and gets a couple of clouts to wake him up he's a tiger."

The elder King nodded.

"That's exactly what I wanted to learn. The outcome of this prize fight is of great importance. I've decided that upon it shall rest the future of my business. If Jeremiah can win it will be proof enough for me that he has the stuff in him to do something well and to fight the battle of business. If he loses, I'm practically certain that I'll hand the entire establishment over to my sister's boy, my young nephew, McSweeney. Ah— there will be a few thousand dollars in it for you if the lad wins. You need not tell Jeremiah I was here to-day. He will see me at the ringside where I have already reserved seats. That, I believe, is all. Thank you. Good day."

"The same to you— don't mention it," Ottie whinnied, opening and closing the door. "A few thousand in it for me, Joe? This is a big day for me. I forgot to tell you that Right Hook Lane has decided to buy the yellow-dog roadster for two hundred and sixty-five dollars and seventy-five cents precisely. That also will help along the proposal. Lady Luck is certainly carrying on an outrageous flirtation with me!"

The night of the Lane-Swain bout found Jerry King polished up like a brass front-door knob, as cool as all summer resorts are advertising to be and as confident as a crook in the dock with a political lawyer whispering to the judge. I didn't invade the dressing room but went directly to my ringside seat which was one row removed from the chairs occupied by Benjamin King and several of his business acquaintances. As I sat down I noticed King handing a couple of letters to a young man who looked like a secretary but failed to see more for the reason that in the excitement of the semifinal a stout gentleman on my left used my ear as an ash receiver.

With old King champing at the bit the star bout was finally ready to go on. Left Hook Swain entered the ring first to mild applause and Lane, trailed by his seconds and handlers, showed up a minute later and won a roar of admiring approval. Then Ottie had a lot to say that meant little, bandages were examined, the announcer announced, Pitz took himself and his silk hat out of the ring, the rest of the bunch followed suit, the gong clanged and the battle began.

It's perfectly safe to say that no fan present felt that he wasn't receiving full value in return for the price of his admission ticket. The mill was scheduled to go twelve rounds and went the limit with terrific action characterizing every minute of them and the pendulum of victory swinging first in Lane's direction and then in King's. Knockdowns were as frequent as Reds in Russia. If Lane won a round, King was certain to even it up by taking the next and when the final bell rang and the draw that was a foregone conclusion was handed out, the crowd showed their appreciation of the fair verdict by getting up on their heels and cheering for twenty minutes straight.

The only one who failed to register delight was Scandrel.

"Them crooks!" he moaned when I went down to the dressing room. "Jerry had it on points nine out of the twelve chapters. A tough break for you, kid," he went on, turning to the handsome youth. "You lose the coal business and I'm out them few thousand your old gent mentioned. Let's catch this Lane baby upstairs and knock his nut off. What do you say?"

Before King could say anything the dressing-room door opened and his father and cane entered. The anthracite magnate swept the room with a glance, handed Ottie a check and crossing to his son slapped him heartily on the back.

"Splendid, splendid, Jeremiah! I knew that once you learned the true identity of your opponent and he learned yours the bout would be sensational from the instant it began."

"Hold everything!" Ottie bawled, shoving the check in a side pocket. "You're as mysterious as a detective going up a fire escape, Mr. King. What do you mean— the identity of his opponent? Who is Right Hook Lane?"

Jerry King stretched languidly and smiled.

"Lane? He's merely Adolphus McSweeney, the uncouth cousin I told you about. Father had him looked up, learned that he was a pugilist and just before we both left for the ring sent his secretary down with a note to each of us explaining matters and telling us that the winner would be the one who received the business. Jolly idea, what? Just like a book or a movie."

Benjamin King turned his shrewd eyes affectionately on his son.

"Neither of you won, so it's up to me to be the referee. Jeremiah, the coal business is yours! Take it, keep it running, but don't bother me with anything concerning it. I'm off to Pinehurst in the morning to play golf until I haven't enough strength to reach the green with an iron. Take it, my boy, it's yours!"

Young King yawned.

"Thanks a lot, father. Jolly nice of you and all that. But I don't think I'm interested. You'd better speak to Adolphus. I understand he's worked around the coal mines of Pennsylvania and he's probably looking for a soft-coal job. I've found the one thing I can do better than anything else and with Mr. Scandrel to guide me, I'm going to try and get a crack at fame, fortune and the champ!"

Exactly twenty minutes after that we rushed into the Golden Slipper Supper Club and discovered the beautiful Merla Nevin waiting for us in the foyer. The blondie was chuckling at something that amused her greatly. While Ottie's fingers went directly to his waistcoat pocket she broke into silvery laughter and spilled it.

"You simply must pardon my mirth," she gurgled. "A girl on the stage receives the most laughable propositions at times. Let me tell you about one of them. For quite some time now Right Hook Lane, the prize fighter, has been paying me devoted attention, never dreaming I've been happily married for the past seven years. This afternoon after the matinee he called at the theater to propose matrimony and offer me an unusual inducement to accept. You can never, never guess what this inducement was."

Ottie slipped the pawn-ticket diamond ring out of his vest pocket, handed it to the girl in charge of the coatroom, drew a breath and tried to smile.

"If we can't guess you had better tell us. What was the inducement?"

Merla Nevin giggled again.

"Right Hook Lane wanted to give me a car," she explained. "A beautiful yellow roadster he had just purchased at some garage uptown and which he claimed was as good as new. Fancy that!"

___________________

2: The Soul Trap

Charles B. Stilson

1880-1932

Source: Fantastic Novels July 1950

[All-Story Weekly 10 March 1917 as "Liberty or Death".]

SATISFIED from his first glance that the case was hopeless, the doctor laid his medicine-case on the table and seated himself beside the couch to wait for the end. It would not be long delayed.

He would have liked to have questioned the servant who had summoned him; but the man was a deaf-mute, and old and inane to boot. He pottered about the room for a few moments, his vacuous eyes staring owlishly from the physician to the dying man, and then withdrew to the rear of the house, rubbing his lean old hands together and shaking his head. There was no one else to keep the watch with Pennerton.

Near the foot of the couch a tall, old- fashioned clock ticked steadily. Beyond the open windows the poplars whispered endlessly to their neighbor pines: "When? When? When?" And from within the old clock answered them. "Not yet; not yet."

White lilacs, unnaturally pallid in the light of the moon, peered through the casements and nodded in the night breeze as they watched the master die. Except for these and death and the dying, Pennerton was alone.

The man died hard. Never in the course of a considerable professional experience had the doctor seen a vitality more persistent than that which was being forced slowly from its citadel before his eyes. By all the rules of the grim old game, death should have turned down the cards hours before.

Half of the long body lay very quiet; for it was paralyzed from the waist. In that part of its domain still left to it, life struggled furiously to remain. He was an old man, too. Wasted tissues, withered hands, the creases in the neck, the wrinkled brow, all gave the lie to the curling black hair and bush of beard that age had failed to blanch.

And strong; for the ceaselessly groping hands had torn the tough, hemmed linen of the sheets to fringe. Not for an instant did the long fingers cea.se their fretting. The thin shoulders twitched. The chest scarcely rose for a breath that was not a shudder. With eyes fast closed, the features of the face writhed continually; but always they registered one of two expressions— iron determination was succeeded by overmastering terror.

On Pennerton, watching, there grew the impression that there must be a strong and terrible reason for such unnatural, such fierce tenacity; that in this gaunt, half-dead body an intelligence was still keenly, fearfully alive; that, with its defenses nearly battered down, a quenchless spirit was holding death at bay until a great purpose should be accomplished.

So powerful was that impression that the physician found himself straining forward in his chair like one who has a hazard in a hard-fought game and seeks by stress of his own will and body to urge on to victory the player he has favored.

For a long hour the ancient clock ticked out its repeated message of procrastination. And then, as such old clocks sometimes do, it changed its tenor and its tone.

"Time's up! Time's up!" It seemed to say.

The man on the couch gasped. His head rolled from side to side on his pillow; he opened his eyes, saw Pennerton bending toward him, and by a surpeme effort raised himself on his elbow. His lips worked. Then fils gaze strayed from the watcher's face to a closed door at the far side of the room; and over his features spread an expression of such frenzied and unutterable horror that the doctor shuddered and turned pale.

Raising his free hand as If to ward off a deadly stroke, the dying man opened his lips; and though the palsied vocal cords did not respond, the effect on Pennerton of that soundless shriek was more awful than a wail from hell.

Twice and thrice the quivering Jaw fell and twitched back. The old man glared around at Pennerton. The warding arm stiffened and pointed to the closed door. Then words came.

"Break! Break! Break!" The voice died into inarticulate yammering, then burst forth again in full-throated speech.

"For the love of God— break the crystal case!"

The agony, the terror, the appeal in that cry will echo in Pennerton's memory for years.

Seeing the look of incomprehension on the doctor's face, the old man swung around, and his fist crashed down on a litter of papers which lay on a small table at the head of the couch.

"Read! Read! And— and— break—" He choked, collapsed on the pillow— and was gone.

PENNERTON eased the twisted body on the couch. He folded the bony hands on the gaunt chest and smoothed the disordered coverings. The dead man's eyes, wide open, seemed to follow his every movement. From their depths they still sent forth that agonized, compelling appeal that had been their last message when the hand of death had closed.

Pennerton found a couple of silver quarters in his pocket, and closing the staring eyes laid the coins on the lids. He had only to summon the old servant and take his departure. But he did not go. The physician found it hard to ignore the message of those eyes. Through the closed lids with their sliver weights they still were staring, urging, commanding.

What was it that this man would have him do? What fear had left that dread impress that even death had not effaced? What was this crystal case that must be broken? What Jay beyond that closed door?

The doctor stood by the couch and stared at the door. It was of oak, paneled, heavy, and substantial, as everything In this house was substantial. A key was set In the lock. Was it locked or unlocked? Pen- nerton wondered. Had the dead man turned that key to intervene between him- self and some fearful transaction on the other side of the door? Or had he left the lock free, so that by a turn of the knob he might pass In and face whatever thing it was beyond that he had dreaded?

Pah! The man was crazed. Illness had unsettled his reason. His wild terror was a vagary born of disease and solitude. There was nothing beyond the closed door— nothing at any rate that a healthy-minded man should dread. Pennerton smiled at himself for having allowed his fancy to be so played upon. And yet— with a resolute set to his shoulders, the doctor crossed the room and gripped the white china knob of the door.

It turned in his grasp. The door was not locked. It yielded, opened. It gave on a steep and narrow stair, a dark staircase with a gleam of faint light above, as of moonbeams filtering through the branches of trees. A draft of cool air drew down the stairway and fanned Pennerton's cheeks; air so cool that It chilled his flesh— and it was nearly June. He shivered and closed the door. And quite unconsciously his fingers turned the key in the lock.

What was in that upper chamber, or attic— for the physician remembered now that the house in which he stood was one of those quaint, rambling, story-and-a- half structures of a type popular three- quarters of a century ago— could wait until morning for investigation. He would come again then and lay this foolish fantasy that had taken passing hold of his imagination.

He recrossed the room to the table to get his medicine case and his hat. Wliat need to waken the old servant now? There was nothing to be done; let the man sleep. He stepped to the smaller table at the head of the couch to extinguish the light that burned there. His fingers were on the key of the lamp when his attention was arrested by the superscription of a large square envelope that lay on the table.

"To the physician whom the servant has gone to fetch—" it read.

So the dying man had known then that Pennerton was coming when he addressed this envelope.

A sheaf of papers, loosely folded, was thrust part way into the envelope In dls-array, as though the hand that had placed them there had faltered at Its task. They were covered with fine chirography, its lines closely written for the most part, but sprawling painfully at intervals, and in some places illegible. The doctor glanced at the opening sentences, then settled himself in a chair and read without pause to the end:

YOU, who will read these lines, I do not know you. I. Theron Karker, who write, was born in this house; for nearly forty years, since I was schooled, I have carried on continual labors here; yet I do not know the name even of the village doctor. Truly, I have been in this hamlet, but not of it. I know not if you are homeopath or allopath. No matter; I am beyond all your skill at dosing. An hour, perhaps two, and I am done. So I must make haste, haste. For there is a task I must lay upon you— God grant that you be of strong heart to do it— and it must be done, must be. And another than myself must do it. I am stricken of a deadly numbness of my lower limbs and cannot leave this couch. I have tried to drag myself by my hands; but my strength has failed and I cannot.

Go into the upper chamber, above this room where I lie, and break the crystal case that you will find there. Ah, you cannot refuse to do this.' If you would set free a soul from tortures more terrible than hell hath dreamed, shatter those crystal walls!

(Here a number of sentences of the manuscript were illegible).

...would have asked the servant; but he is old and foolish. He would not understand, and would flee the house in terror and leave me with my task undone, that must be done. So in my extremity I turn to you, a stranger. I have refused to allow a physician to be fetched before, thinking that I mighty mend, might at least gain strength to reach that chamber. But I cannot, and it is too great a task for the old man's feeble limbs to carry me thither.

Tonight I feel that I am dying; so he has gone to fetch you. It grows late. He may not find you readily; his wit is as decrepit as his body. Probably I shall not live—

(Another unreadable scrawl) .

...if time is vouchsafed me before the final summons comes, explain to you this request that must seem both strange and meaningless.

From my earliest memory as a reasoning being, it seems to me, my mind had engrossed itself in speculation on the problem of the race, the great unanswered question of the ages; What is, and what the destiny of, that part of man that still lives on when the body perishes? When I returned hither from my college studies, the analysis of theories, the dissection of religions, the vivisection of creeds, had grown on me, was an obsession. I made it a life study. Around me here I have gathered them all— the religions and the philosophies of the centuries, the living creeds and the dead.

In my labors I have gone farther than most. Now, as the end of those labors is nearing, I wonder with the poet, "Is it true that the wisest wander farthest and most hopelessly are lost?" Is all the groping, struggling, the toiling of these forty years wasted and futile?

Of the creeds that I have examined, I would say that most are founded on truth; but in none of them, search as I would, could I find man's naked soul, his self, his ego. So I passed dowfi the list of those stern, tender, terrible beliefs that humanity has nurtured so long and so faithfully, until I came at length to one which, if less ably garnished with theories than some of the others, did at least offer me more of the manisfestations of that which I sought.

TIME for me is too brief to tell you all of what I found among the Spiritualists. But they convinced me— not of the truth of all that they hold is true, but that there is a part of man that survives his mortal shell; and that— in a feeble, halting fashion— they could hold communication with it.

And there was the veil I could not pierce, but only dimly see through its mesh. I was balked and halted. For the "messages" the mediums brought me were such pitiful, meager, puerile fragments. Farther than this they could not aid me; that the soul passed beyond, like that newly come to this world. Is weak and inexperienced in its state and must develop and progress, as a child's mind unfolds. And when the soul does gain in strength and expression, it straightway uses its new-found powers to pass on into another realm, whejice no mediumistic summons may recall it.

Then, on an accursed day, I reasoned, if all these things be true, and a man find some way to cage a spirit and confine it, he might find it to progress and grow under his hand, in a hot-house as it were, and control it to his purpose.

Familiarity with the sciences of the laboratory led me to ponder this problem to a conclusion. Spirits, I argued. must have some material qualities; else how can they produce audible phenomena, how rap on walls, play musical instruments, move articles of furniture? If so, If the soul is capable of such manifestations— and I had experienced them often— it must be in the nature of an ethereal fluid or essence; and such may be confined.

A fluid, an essence, may pass through the air unseen, may penetrate wherever air may penetrate. But, of all the substances wherewith the chemists work, there is one through which only sound and light may pass— and they are vibrations and not fluids. That substance is glass. Air does not pass through glass. It may be used to enclose a vacuum. Even that mysterious and powerful fluid we call electricity meets in glass an impassable barrier.

Why should not glass contain a soul? I asked myself.... So the man, he was an Italian, came across the sea and helped me.

He was a clever artisan, skilled in all the devices of the glass-worklng craft. Under my direction, he constructed it, slowly and with care, a casket of solid glass, seven feet square, with never a seam or a break in its entire structure, save at its top an opening large— large enough to pass the body of a man.

I paid the craftsman, and he went away to Italy again. But his brazier was left behind and a supply of glass. And l had learned of him, while we worked together, enough to finish my task.

I became a human spider then, waiting for a human fly, that I might suck the soul of in my wondrous crystal web.

At last I found a victim. Do not misread me. I have done no offense against human laws. Would that I had, and that merely, and were to suffer only human justice for it.

He was a man I had known and near forgotten, James Irvin, a college-mate of years ago. Knowledge came to me that he had met evil days, was dying slowly of tuberculosis in a county hospital in another state, alone and unfriended. I was glad; for none must know my purpose with him. I must risk no prying interference.

I fetched Irvin here. I told them where he was that I would take him away, and for the sake of our old-time friendship would make his last days easy. There was no obstacle. They were glad, I think, to escape the care of him. And Irvin, God forgive me, he was extremely grateful.

With what impatience, then, I waited for Irvin to die! The more so when I discovered in myself the symptoms of the incurable malady that has laid me low. Every hour that he lived was withholding from me the fruits of my life's labor. How I grudged him those last poor hours! And how I watched him, that he might not slip away and leave me only his useless corpse! But, terrible as my impatience was, I did nothing to hasten on his end. Of that at least I stand guiltless.

Well, he died at last one night; but he did not escape me.

He had grown very weak. Life hung by a thread so slender that I dared not quit his bedside for mor? than moments, day or night; or sleep, lest it should snap and balk me.

All my preparations had been made. In the great glass case above I had taken, piece by piece, and set up, a low pallet and a small writing table. On the table I laid two hundred sheets of white paper and two dozen pencils, carefully pointed. I nailed small cleats around the table edges, so that the pencils should not roll from it and break on the crystal floor. I suspended a block and tackle from a rafter above the casket. In the last few days I kept my brazier fired day and night, that my glass might be in readiness for instant use.

The time came. Irvin lay in the room back in the library here, so nearly gone that I dared to wait no longer. His death was a matter of minutes only. And I? I was elated, gripped by an exaltation that recked not of lack of sleep and days in which I scarcely had tasted food. I was strong and confident. Only my feet were numb, with a growing numbness that pre- saged the advance of the malady that had seized me.

I ascended to the upper chamber and lighted the lamp that stood on a table beside the casket. The brazier was burning. The molten glass was ready. I stood and gazed at that shimmering crystal mausoleum as the lamplight gleamed through its transparent walls, and it was more fair to me in its seeming than any scintillant palace that fancy ever constructed; and fit for its purpose, too, it seemed— to be the abode of an immortal soul. Then the whole structure trembled, wavered. I felt myself falling. I threw out my hands, and I felt the cold and polished wall of glass as my palms slid down its surface, where my fingers could clutch no hold. My senses left me.

How long I lay unconscious I do not know; but I awoke at last, awoke with a horrible fear of defeat. While I had swooned weakly, had Irvin died and left my toiling of the years with miserable failure as its end? I hastened down the stair. No, I was not too late. His condition was unchanged. But there was not a moment to be wasted.

I looked down at the dying man, an unlovely thing of bones and skin and hard-fetched breath, so weak now that even his racking cough was stilled. A strange wave of nausea swept over me. I fought it fiercely, but succumbed, and once more I fell unconscious. That swoon was of brief duration. I arose from it, shook it off, and addressed myself to the completion of my task.

Again my brain was clear and confident, and I was strong. I plucked Irvin from his pillow— his weight was little more than that of a child— and carried him on my shoulders to the chamber above. I laid him in the canvas sling that I had made ready, and with my block and tackle I raised him to the dome of the crystal case and lowered him within It. I entered after him and laid him on the cot.

The disturbance and the motion had set his heart to beating faster. He opened his eyes— the first time in many hours— and looked at me. I thought I read a question and a growing terror in his eyes. Then his jaw fell and his throat began to rattle. In mad haste I clambered from the casket. I fetched glass and blowpipe, and, working on the little scaffold at the dome, I drew the molten crystal up to a point, twisted it, and cut it with my pliers. The work was done. The crystal cell was sealed.

Within five minutes the lifeless corpse of James Irvin lay on the cot in the great crypt of glass. And his spirit?— time would tell.

I must have stumbled from the chamber to my couch; for there I awoke after many hours of slumber.

Then began days of unceasing vigil. My will has never been feeble. I fought off the demands of nature. I scarcely slept. I might have starved but for my old servant, Marc Terriss.

He had long before been forbidden acxess to the upper chamber. I kept the door locked always. But many a time his in- sistent rapping at the stair-door roused me from my watch to partake of the food that I had forgotten. One thing my will could not conquer; that was the slow, insidious advance of the malady that your experience will have taught you can neither be retarded nor hastened. With my hands almost gripping the infinite to Impart its secrets to the world of men, the infinite itself reached out to me to take me away.

D ays passed, and only death's ally, decay, seemed busy in the crystal case. The meager features of James Irvin became swollen and discolored. His clawlike hands festered. But his spirit stirred not.

Was it gone? Had It passed, thinner than a shadow's shadow, through the glass walls of the trap that I had set for it? Had it escaped me? Those were days of doubt; but I remembered what the mediums had told me and was steadfast. By day I watched with the sunlight that streamed through those walls of crystal. By night I kept vigil with three powerful lamps that I had provided.

And then one day at noontide I strained forward with eyes staring and my face pressed flat against the crystal wall. Something stirred within the casket! It was only a sheet of paper, one of those paper sheets that lay on the writing table. But it moved! Aye, gently as though an infant's breath had disturbed it, it half rolled up, turned over, and fluttered to the floor. In my ears the blood pounded, roaring like the surging sea. And in my heart was a mighty triumph.

For in that sealed crypt no thing on earth could stir!

That was all. For many hours, perhaps days, no other motion disturbed the awful serenity of that crystal chamber.

It was a pencil next that Irvin's spirit essayed to move, did move. It was in the dead of night; but I was watching, waiting. I saw it. The end pencil of the row detached itself from its fellows and rolled to the table's edge, against the cleat that I had nailed there. It struggled there, rolling back and forth, upending an inch or two and falling back; and finally, balancing on the cleat, It oscillated, tipped, and fell and lay on the glass floor with broken point!

I was struck with consternation. Here was a contingency against which I was not provided. Should Irvin's blundering spirit break the points of all my pencils, how could it communicate with me?

With a devilish persistence, it seemed to me, that spirit labored to undo my work. While I looked on in torture, one by one, it let fall and broke four more pencils, returning from each catastrophe to effect another.

Then It appeared to tire, and desired. For another period of long hours there was no sign within the casket to tell me that It was haunted by a prisoned soul.

Ah, the mediums were right! It gained strength. When next it moved a pencil. It lifted it. Despite myself, I shuddered and the hair at my neck rose when the bit of wood and graphite stood erect on its point and staggered dizzily across the topmost sheet of paper, leaving an irregu- lar, meaningless line behind it.

Many sheets of paper it covered with those futile lines before it learned to control a pencil and to write— for it did write. Always it threw its failures to the floor, to essay anew on a fresh page.

From mere lines to illegible scrawling and then to unconnected, rambling sentences the spirit progressed. Its first coherent message, and those that followed, were appeals to me for its release. Pleading, bitterness, defiance, menace; It ran the gamut of them all. It upbraided me for withholding it from Its path to paradise. It pleaded eloquently with me to break its prison and set It free to go on its appointed way. It pictured to me the horror of its confinement, mewed up with the body that it could no longer tenant— the body that it had loved— now decaying into loathsome putrescence. But I was obdurate and ruthless.

Through the glass that intervened between us it read my object, divined my every thought. It taunted me and tantalized me with hints at greater knowledge that it possessed, but would not—

(Here another passage of Karker's narrative was illegible).

...I grow weaker. This chronicle must end soon. Elsewhere, in my diary, I have set down fully the messages that I received from the spirit of James Irvin. They may be confirmed from the originals: they are all there, in the crystal case. Would to God that I had yielded!

Yesterday came the last. It was—

(A number of sentences blotted out) .

...God! I have tried to write it, but I cannot. It was of such appalling horror, a threat of a doom so hideous, that even I recoiled in terror. I fled that chamber as from a pestilence. I fell upon my couch here. When sense returned, I found that my limbs were paralyzed. I could not move them.

Had I all the treasures of Golconda I would barter them gladly for the strength to ascend once more to that chamber, to enter, to break that crystal cell and set free that poor, tortured soul. You must do this! For God's sake, break that case and set froin's spirit free!

And I, though I shall lie here seemingly dead, insensate clay, I shall know! Yes; for that is a part of punishment— to know— part of the penalty that is so awful that I cannot, will not, write it to haunt fellow mortals through all their days.

Ah, you will believe me and do this thing! Go up into that chamber. It is all there. The crystal is there. The records are there. Read them— and believe.

I have dared to tamper with the great laws of being, and I shall suffer— God, the suffering! My body is perishing; but my mind works on, as clearly now as ever it did in my life— he said it would!

My pen grows heavy, too heavy

KARKER'S writing, which had grown more tremulous and uneven toward its close, ended in a wavering line. On the carpet at Pennerton's feet lay the dead man's pen. Having read the burden of the dread record it had written, the doctor did not wonder that it had fallen from those weary, faltering fingers. He felt his own hands trembling as he laid the pages by.

Once more he heard the rhythmic ticking of the tall old clock as its tireless pendulum swung to and fro. He heard the whisperings of the trees, the fretting of leafy boughs against the clapboards of the house.

God! Could this thing be true? Pennerton, a man strong of sense and with imagination well-disciplined, swung around in his chair and faced that closed door and felt the swimming horror of the dead man's revelation overmastering him. What monstrous thing dwelt in that silent room above him?

"My God! I dare not enter that chamber— not now!" he breathed.

The sound of his own whisper roused him. He brushed a hand across his forehead. The perspiration there was chill as tombstone damp. He left his seat and began pacing Theron Karker's library floor.

When he passed the closed door, he shuddered. Banished for this night were all thoughts of home and slumber. It were easier for him to quit this house were he fettered in chains of brass than to disregard that wild appeal that Karker had sent to him across the gap of death. But he could not do the dead man's bidding now— not yet. He must wait for the light of day to cross the threshold and face the tenant of that chamber.

On the shelved walls of the library around him in their quiet rows stood the annals of the world's religions, the sum of human philosophies. Here were cold Kant and ponderous Schopenhauer and the visions of Swedenborg: here, Hegel and Darwin: and there, Drummond and the warmer imageries of Blavatsky, Besant and the Hindu mystics. There, too, were the printed bulwarks of the captains of Christ and Mohammed, Buddha and Confucius, and a legion of the lesser ones, the names of whom were unknown to Pennerton.

Many of them were in languages that were beyond the knowledge of the doctor and the contents of which he could only guess. This was the soul-laboratory of Theron Karker, where he had sought what he called truth in that eager, bitter search of forty years, where he had striven to analyze and classify the immortal part of mortal man.

The light burned dim in the big student's lamp at the head of the couch. Pennerton shook it to renewed life for a while; but at length it failed him utterly and went out. Then, strong man though he was, because he could not bear the flickering shadows that the moonlight played across the still face of a dead man, he quitted the library and went out on the front porch to wait with his pipe for the coming of the dawn.

As the last blue mists of the night were fading from yard and hill and landscape, Pennerton arose and went within.

In the hours he had passed on the porch the strong nature of the man had reasserted itself: his poise had returned. The thing that he had read was preposterous. It was not; it could not be. Either Theron Karker was a madman, crazed by his morbid researches and unreined fancies, or he had played a ghastly joke when he had set his pen to that gruesome chronicle of his.

So Pennerton turned back the key in the door that he had locked and climbed the steep stairway. As he ascended the stairs he was fully convinced that he should find not a trace above of the unholy tragedy that he believed had existed only in the demented brain of the sick man.

It still was dusk in the attic chamber. The sun had not yet risen high enough to send its rays through the windows and the skylight of the cupola that topped the house and dispel the shadows of the room. A big room it was, wide and high, extend- ing well over half the house.

Pennerton stood hesitant at the head of the stairs and strained his eyes to pierce the gloom of that dim twilight of the morning. To one side of him was a piled litter of ancient furniture, and near it a big closed cabinet of dark wood with a work-bench in front of it.

The physician peered on past the wooden cabinet. Then he saw— it, and a chill hand seemed to grip his heart and hold it motionless. Its outlines gleaming, glittering, through the dim light that was full of shadows, a great case of crystal stood just below the windowed cupola! Within the walls of glass, half concealed and half defined, Pennerton could see the outlines of a small table, and nearer the floor, a long, low cot, covered over with white.

Theron Karker's words were true!

For a second time since he had set foot In this house Pennerton's hard and ingrained sensibility deserted him. He did not stay to see more, but stumbled down the narrow stair in such haste that he was near to falling headlong.

It was there! And the doctor's skepticism was shattered to its foundations.

The crystal case was there! What more besides, he dared not to conjecture. Of one thing was he certain; he would not go back into that chamber until the fullest light of day shone in it; and then he would go back.

Hideous as might be the revelation that awaited him there, he would face it and have done with it. He returned to his porch and pipe to wait for the height of the sun.

For another hour the doctor waited.

When the old lawn was bathed in sunlight and the sleepy twitterings of the birds had changed into their glad morning-song, he left the porch, ascended the attic stair and stood before the crystal chamber.

Work of a master craftsman indeed was here. Seven feet high and long and broad it stood, and domed at its top. Broad rays of the sun shone on its splendid structure through the windows and the skylights of the cupola. Playing through its shimmering sides, the beams cast their prismatic color patterns along the floor and walls of the attic room, like reflections from the facets of a monstrous gem.

A marvel ; but within it a greater marvel was revealed to Pennerton's reluctant eyes.

On a small table in the center of the crypt, a table cleated around its edges, lay two hundred sheets of immaculate white paper, unmarked and undisturbed. Beside the pages in an orderly row lay two dozen lead pencils, carefully pointed; and on the floor beside the table— an empty cot!

That was all. There was no other thing within the chamber.

Above it swung a block and tackle, attached to the rafters. Nearby stood a large brazier, its fires long dead. An earthen crucible on the brazier was nearly filled with glass that once had been molten, but now was hard and cold. On a rack at the brazier's side hung a blowpipe and other tools of the glass-worker's art. Three wooden stands stood about the sides of the crystal case, and on each was a large brass lamp.

All was as Theron Karker had described it; but—

His brain in a maze, his body sick with the revulsion of feeling, Pennerton turned from those things and went down the stairs. In the library he met Marc Terriss. The servant was bending over his dead master. As he straightened up, Pennerton thought his rheumy old eyes were moist. But Terriss could not voice his grief.

Seizing his prescription pad. the doctor wrote:

"Has a man named James Irvin been in this house?"

Old Marc took the paper from him and stared at it vacantly. Then a gleam of intelligence came into his eyes. He took a pencil from his pocket and scrawled:

"Yes."

"Where is he now?" wrote Pennerton, and waited breathless while the old man's tremulous fingers traced the answer.

"Dead."

"What became of his body?" persisted Pennerton.

"Buried in the churchyard. Mr. Karker brought him here. He was dying. He died one night about three weeks ago. I found him dead in his bed. Mr. Karker had been with him and had fainted on the floor beside the bed. Mr. Karker was ill too. I got him to bed. His mind was not right after that night. He used to rave at times. I never told him that Irvin had died. I did not want to worry him with that. I got the coroner, and they buried Irvin in the churchyard."

"When was Karker last able to be about— on his feet?" queried the doctor.

"He never walked again after I found him on the floor that night. He was paralyzed."

Pennerton made no more queries, but stood lost in thought. Old Marc hesitated for a moment and then shuffled away. When he had gone, Pennerton stepped to the side of the couch. He looked down at the dead man and his face grew solemn With pity. Slowly he said:

"Ah, the poor tortured spirit was not there, not in the crystal chamber, my friend. It was here;" and he laid his hand on Theron Karker's cold forehead.

_____________________

3: Dr. Martone's Microscope

Charles B. Stilson

All-Story Weekly, 27 March 1920

I REMEMBERED how Dr. Martone had started as the housekeeper showed me into his laboratory on the occasion of my visit to him. I think that he cursed viciously under his breath at the interruption. He had been sitting in this same easy chair where I sat now— he was a luxury-loving old sybarite— and looking into a long-barreled microscope, sitting all hunched up over it, and so absorbed that he hadn't heard us come in.

That was the only time I had seen him. My impression had been of a swarthy, curly-headed, greasy, leering old devil, and none too clean. Nervous, too; for his ugly, hairy hands trembled and his yellow eyes goggled wildly as he jumped away from the instrument and confronted us, showing his teeth through his mustache in a dog's snarl, which rearranged itself into a grin when he learned that I had come from the firm. I think that the housekeeper muttered a prayer of relief when she saw that he had decided not to be angry. Pasquale Martone was not a lovely object when he chose to be amiable. Aroused, he must have been little less than fiendish.

"So veree many agents, you know. Mr. Burke." I can hear his silky, hissing voice yet, and feel the devouring stare of his evil old eyes. "They are so veree troublesome to a man with temperament."

And then we had talked about the formula which he was working out for our firm, and I had handed him the check which Mr. Henderson had sent, and had gone away again.

He had accompanied me down to the door, twisting and smoothing the slip of paper with his long, hairy fingers and leering at me out of those preying eyes. He was like a hideous old spider which sees with regret a too strong fly departing from its web.

Flies! It was not strange that I should think of such a simile, seeing that it was a question of flies which had taken me up to see him.

And now Dr. Martone was dead, and I was sitting in his easy chair. Here in front of me was the very microscope into which he had been staring. But what, in the name of time, had he done with his fly formula; or had he "done" us? It was nowhere to be found, not a shred of it. It was not the loss of my promised bonus which made me feel so blue; nor was it any sorrow at the demise of Dr. Martone. I was sorry for Mr. Henderson.

As a man, I don't think that any member of our establishment mourned the doctor. Mr. Henderson, our chief, hit it about right when he said that Martone was a rotter of the first water, any way you looked at him.

But as a business proposition— we are manufacturing chemists— the loss of the doctor was a shock.

To begin with, the formula for the Pasquale Martone Hair-Restorer had put us in Dun's and Bradstreet's at a time when our future was very dubious,. We were grateful for that, of course.

Later, when the doctor declared that he had hopes of the discovery of a bacillus which would incite a contagious fungus which would exterminate the common house-fly—which would be a very great discovery, indeed, if you stop to think of it— the company was only too glad to advance the considerable sums which he demanded for experimental expenses.

That and the doctor's sudden death were what had taken me on my second visit to the Martone residence at Yonkers, one June evening.

All of us in the laboratory felt mighty blue on the day the announcement of the sudden death of the doctor from heart trouble came out in the newspapers. We knew that Mr. Henderson had backed the old rascal with a lot of money, and that a great deal more had been put into the preliminaries for a world-wide advertising campaign to push the fly-destroyer.

For, say what one may— and the least the better— of his personality, Dr. Martone was a Class A scientist; and when he announced that his experiments were turning out splendidly, the advertising department was told to go ahead, and no one thought the order was premature. Naturally we wanted to get the fly-killer on the market before August. So Martone's death was a facer.

On the third day after it happened, Mr. Henderson called me into his office. He was looking pretty much worried. There was an unlighted cigar between his teeth; and it looked as though he might have been chewing it for hours.

Though I am only a young chap, I always had a bent for chemistry; and Mr. Henderson has placed considerable confidence in me.

"I want you to go up to Martone's place, Burke," he said. "Go through his laboratory with a fine-toothed comb, and see if you can scare up that accursed formula. I've been talking the matter over with the doctor's attorney. He realizes that this thing hits us hard, and he has consented to allow us to make a search. Here is his written authority. I think he has notified Martone's housekeeper and young Martone to be on the lookout for you."

"Young Martone?" I questioned. "I thought the doctor was a bachelor."

"He was. This young chap is his nephew. I understand that he will inherit what there is. I guess it won't be much. It's to his interest as well as ours that you find that fly formula. If you can dig up enough of it for us to go on with, I'll see that it brings you a neat bonus. Let's see; you're not married, are you, Jack?"

I admitted that I wasn't, and didn't intend to be.

"That's what they all say, my boy; but they do it; and you will, too." Mr. Henderson lighted the remnant of his cigar and laid a hand on my shoulder. "Find that formula, and make it work, my lad, and the girl who gets you will never have to do the dishes."

As I have remarked, I am but a young fellow. It was a feather in my cap to get this assignment. The implied trust was an incentive much more powerful than hopes for the bonus. Before I shook hands with Mr. Henderson, my mind was made up that it was going to be death to the flies, if I could lay hands on a scrap at the Martone formula.

If you read the advertising sections of the magazines last summer, you know already that I didn't find it. Flies still thrive; and the old firm is still meandering along indifferently with the hair- restorer. But I did find something else that was worth a great deal more to me; though I can't say that it helped Mr. Henderson any.

After supper at one of the Yonkers hotels, I walked out to the doctor's residence, which is about a quarter of a mile northeast of the town. It was a perfect night. All of nature's most restful chemicals were compounded in the formula: June, a temperature of seventy degrees after a rather oppressive day, no humidity, absolutely no wind, and a glorious flood of moonlight.

Martone's place was the third in a row of quite pretentious residences with English-walled grounds and gardens, and their front lawns terraced up some ten feet above the sidewalk level— the kind of places a poor young beggar can't help feeling that he'd like to own some day, along with an eighty- horse-power juggernaut and the other customary trimmings.

It was shortly after seven o'clock when the housekeeper admitted me to the house.

"We have been expecting you, Mr. Burke," she said. "Mr. Annis notified us that you would be coming up and that you were to have the run of the laboratory. I've been up and turned on the lights for you." She shivered a little, I thought. "No one has been in there since he died. He was found dead there, you know. Mr. Carlo is out; but he phoned me to see that you were made to feel at home. Won't you have some lunch before you go up? I have it all ready. No? Then I'll show you right up. I understand that it's something quite important."

I will spare you the details of my search. By half-past ten o'clock I had convinced myself that old Martone hadn't left a single jotting of his miraculous formula—if indeed the formula ever had progressed to the jotting stage. I couldn't see from anything that he had left in the laboratory that it had. To be sure, there were plenty and to spare of flies in the place; live flies buzzing in net-covered jars, and dead ones in test-tubes, in air-pumps, and under observation glasses. Good-by to the firm's hopes.

So there I sat in the doctor's easy chair, smoking one of his own Russian cigarettes, listening to the droning of those infernal flies, and extending my silent sympathy to Mr. Henderson. I remember that I fancied that if old Martone's ghost were hanging about the place, it must be leering at me and rubbing its hands.

That was a comfortless thought. The old doctor had been a scamp, but he had been a man of decided personality; and that deserted laboratory actually "felt" pretty strongly of him. I didn't wonder the housekeeper had shivered.

There was everything on his desk, just as he had left it. At my right hand was the microscope. If I wasn't mistaken, the same drop of something or other which he had been examining was still on the little glass plate under the lens. What had the old man been so interested in, anyhow? Flies' blood, perhaps. I reached for the instrument.

Halloa! the thing was screwed fast to the desktop. I hadn't noticed that before. He must have used it for very delicate observations indeed. I dragged the chair nearer and applied an eye to the barrel of the instrument: but it was out of focus, and all I could make out was a misty, hazy appearance. Turning the focusing button didn't seem to improve matters.

While I was trying to discover what ailed the thing. I noticed a small push-button near the base of the brass frame. It was a very unobtrusive button. If I had not been looking quite closely, I should not have seen it. Thinking that it might control a light- bulb in the interior of the mechanism, I pressed it. I recall that as I did so I heard a clock in the lower hall striking eleven.

Inside of the brass barrel a spring clicked, and I saw the mechanism quiver a bit from the jar of it. I looked into the instrument again, and for the fraction of a second there was the glimmer and glamour of impossible things in my brain.

Maybe you've read "The Girl in the Golden Atom" and some other stories where scientists have discovered infinitesimally small human beings and trees and the like, all in the interior of a drop of ditch water, or a diamond, or something or other, and only to be seen through an immensely powerful magnifying lens.

Well, I was staring straight into a miniature scene of that sort, except that there weren't any humans visible. But it only took, me long enough to laugh at the fancy to figure out that what I was looking at was not to be found in a coagulated drop of flies' blood, or whatever the substance was that Martone had left on the observation plate of his microscope.

When that spring clicked, it must have connected the lenses up with something else Perhaps you have seen these paper-cutters and similar trinkets with a magnifying glass the size of a pinhead in them, which, if you hold it quite close to your eye, shows you a view of Niagara Falls, or the Lord's Prayer, or the Capitol at Washington?

That was the effect I got in that microscope, only the picture was much larger and clearer— so clear and deep that it did not seem to be a picture at all, but the real thing; for it was all in natural colors.

It was mighty pretty; a circular view of center of a park or garden with a marble basin in the foreground, and steps leading down into the water, like a Roman bath. Around the rim of the basin were a number of marble seats and one or two groups of statuary and there was a small Psyche kneeling to look at her reflection in the center of the pool.

This was all lighted up by a great, gorgeous ray of moonlight that seemed to play down upon it through an opening among the branches of the tall pines which stood around the pool and formed a dark background beyond the radius of the moonlight.

It was a pretty picture; but before I had time to appreciate half its beauties, I received my second shock.

A fish leaped in the pool.

There was no doubt about it. I saw the flash of its scales, the glitter of the drops of water which it threw up, and then the skitter of its tail as it turned and dived, and the slowly widening circles made by its plunge on the surface of the pool.

What kind of a private little movie show was Dr. Martone in the habit of treating himself to? I wondered. Kinemacolor, too! Knowing the doctor's reputation— it was women that had given him his bad name— I was prepared to see something which I could tell the bunch about in the morning. What was it going to be? Then I stopped speculating; for she appeared.

I'm not good at describing a woman's charms; and if I were, I could not make you see her as I did when she came from among the trunks of the dark pines and stepped out where the moonlight was playing upon the white marble and gold-green water.

Ouida writes a character into one of her romances when she describes as belle à faire peur, which I believe means "beautiful to cause fear." The girl in the picture was beautiful like that.

The instant that I saw her face with the moonlight on it I was afraid.

There was the one girl in all the world— in a miniature movie film on the desk of a dead doctor— and how was I ever going to find her? I suppose that I might have thought logically of a lot of other obstacles; but I didn't just then. That one was enough.

One thing I knew with certainty: However old Martone came by this picture, there was going to be nothing wrong with it. There are faces which forbid all thoughts of wrong, and I was looking at one of them.

While those things were flitting through my mind, the girl came to the top of the three or four steps which led down to the pool. I could see her reflected image— she was dressed in white— quite distinctly in the still water. She looked up at the moon, I think that she nodded to it ever so slightly; for I saw her smile. Then she sat on one of the marble seats and gazed at the water and seemed to think. That memory of her will abide with me and be clear when all else has dimmed.

I saw her start, as at an unexpected noise, and arise and stand listening, her profile pure and clear against the dark of the trees. A man came out of the shadow and stood beside her.

It is within the bounds of presumption that I should have felt antagonistic to an angel from Heaven, had one appeared to take an interest in that girl, so quickly and so powerfully had my feeling for her formed and set. The man who had stepped into the picture was far from angelic, unless his thin, dark face and cruel mouth belied him.

True, his features lighted up when he addressed her, and his sneer was not for her; but it was there, lurking at the corners of his mouth, and all his smiles could not obscure it.

How I hated him! What a wave of helpless misery swept my spirit as I saw him standing there and talking to her! Yet it was only a picture— the fantom of something that once had happened.

From a casual beginning, their conversation became animated, on his part at least, earnest; although she seemed to be making an effort to carry it lightly. Almost imperceptibly she was edging away from him toward the direction from which she had come. Thank God! she was trying to avoid him. He was pointing, pleading eagerly; she, shaking her head and drawing back.

I saw him catch at her hand. She eluded him. He swept her into his arms and bent his dark face above hers. She struck him across the lips with all her strength.

He released her then and stood back a pace. The soul that looked out of his eyes belonged to hell. His hand glided to his breast. She did not seem to notice, but stood panting and staring at him. And I, poor fool, who forgot that it was but a picture, a senseless thing of film and lights and shadows, I screamed a warning at her.

A blue flash in the moonlight, and he was gone, and she lay there on the topmost marble step above the silent pool. Her face was turned from me. One arm hung down. I saw the fingers of her hand tight clenched, and then open slowly. A red stain crept down the gleaming whiteness of the marble. All motion ceased.

The picture was played through.

I started away from that accursed machine with a gasp of pain. I had gripped its framework with such force that the brass had cut me to the quick. Great drops of sweat rolled down my cheeks and chilled the flesh. I laughed then, but shakily. After all, it was only a picture.

A rap on the laboratory door set all my nerves to jangling. I leaped up from the desk as Dr. Martone had leaped that other day when we had come upon him suddenly.

"Who's there?" I called.

"It is I, Mrs. Kirkly," replied the housekeeper's voice. "I thought that I heard you call, Mr. Burke."

I explained to her that I had cut my finger and had exclaimed at the pain of it.

As there was nothing more to be done about the formula, I went away. Before I left the laboratory, I stole on tiptoe to Martone's desk and looked once more into the barrel of his microscope. But I made no attempt to find the mechanism that controlled the picture. I had no desire to see that film played again.

Somewhere, if that girl were living, I would find her. She was none of the great actresses of the screen. I was familiar with all their faces. She could not be a professional actress; or her beauty would have made her great. It would be a difficult task.

In the dusk under the trees along the doctor's walk I met a man. He stopped me and asked me how my search had prospered. He was Carlo Martone. It was too dark for us to see each other's face. But in the gloom there was something familiar in the set of his broad shoulders, something familiar, too, in the silky tones of his well modulated voice. When we had passed on I turned involuntarily and glanced after his receding figure.

"If I do not miss my guess, you take strongly after your unlamented uncle," I muttered.

Mr. Henderson took the disappointment of my report calmly.

"What time was it when you left Martone's last night?" he asked.

I told him that it must have been about half after eleven.

"Then you were right next door to a crime and didn't know it." he said. "You haven't seen the papers?" He handed me a copy of one of the morning dailies.

I fell weakly into a chair. Smiling at me from the front page was the face of the girl of Martone's microscope. Eleanor Hall was the name under the picture. She had been stabbed, but not dangerously. Oh, thank God for that!

Rapidly and worse muddled at every line, I ran my eyes through the details of the crime. There could be no doubt that somehow I had seen it. But how? And here, what was this?

"Miss Hall is unable to give any description of her unknown assailant."

What could that mean?

Below I read that Detective Hamilton was in charge of the case. I knew Hamilton well.

Mr. Henderson looked for surprised comment from me. He was somewhat taken aback when I asked him for the day off and rather unceremoniously bundled myself out of his presence without a word of explanation I found Hamilton at Yonkers. "See here, Joe; I was up in this neighborhood last night, and I might be able to help you out," I told him; "but I've got to see her first."

Hamilton shook his head, but not in refusal. "There is something deucedly queer about the affair," he answered. "Yes, you may see her."

When she had heard my story— and she was able to sit up to hear it though she was very pale— she inclined toward me a very little.

"But you are not going to say anything, Mr. Burke. I was indiscreet. I should never have met him."

"No; I will say noting."

"And you will come again— to tell me how it was that you saw us— when you have found it out?"

"I will come again, if I may."

"Yes; there is something decidedly queer about this case," was Hamilton's comment when I informed him that I had been mistaken. I knew that he did not believe me; but he did not press me.

In Martone's front yard a man was playing with a terrier dog. It was Carlo Martone. It was also the man of the picture. I had guessed that. I turned in.

"Come with me to the laboratory," I told him. The brass-barreled instrument was as I had left it. I looked into it while he stood by curiously. There were the pool and the trees, as they had been, only now there was sunlight upon them. There was still a faint stain upon the marble. I told Martone to look. When he raised his face, the color had gone out of it. He understood.

"I— I forgot myself. Wouldn't have had it happen for the world," he mumbled, and then eagerly: "But she will not say anything."

"Nor will I— if you go."

Martone bowed

"To-morrow," he answered; and he kept his word.

I have already hinted that I found something of great value to myself in my search for the fly-killing formula. I found it through the complicated periscope with which that greasy old rascal used to spy upon the doings of his neighbors.

I have the original of the picture.

_________________

4: The Superman of Dr Jukes

Francis Flagg

Henry George Weiss, 1898-1946

Startling Stories, Fall 1945

[Wonder Stories, Nov 1931]

1: Human Experiment

HE WAS slim and of medium height, with the phenomenon of cold gray eyes in a dark face and under a thatch of black hair. His father had been an Italian immigrant and his mother a descendant of "dark Irish," those sons and daughters of old Spanish blood—the blood of the crew of the great Armada that Philip sent out in pride and pomp to subdue Elizabethan England, that Drake and Frobisher scattered, and that storms cast away on the inhospitable shores of Scotland, and on the rock coast of the Green Isle.

Chicago had bred him, and in the Windy City he was known as "Killer Mike." He did not look the killer, but in his case looks were deceiving. As a matter of fact, he was as deadly as a rattlesnake. but he struck only in the matter of business and never for the mere love of slaughter. Young, he was. under thirty, and personable, with the smatterings of a fair education. It was only when the "Big Shot." whose bodyguard he was, tried to put him on "the spot," that he left Chicago hurriedly. The Big Shot held organized gangsterism in the hollow of his hand and to attempt. openly, to live and function without his permission and protection was suicidal.

So the Killer had fled, conscious that the long arm of his erstwhile chief "was reaching out to slay. East to Boston, and from Boston by steamer to Halifax. Here he breathed easily for a moment. But one night a shot stabbed at him through the dark so he staked aboard a train for Montreal. From Montreal he swung across the border to Detroit, and from Detroit zigzagged west to Arizona, losing himself in the vast armies of unemployed who rode freights. By this time his money was gone, his sleekness, and he wore frowsy overalls and a jumper. Lolling on the grass by the Fourth Street subway in Tucson, not knowing what moment he might be bagged by a policeman, an elderly gentleman with a large protruding nose accosted him.

"I suppose work is pretty hard to get these days," he remarked.

"Yes, said the killer. He was properly suspicious of all strangers, but a cursory inspection served to show that here was no likely henchman of the Big Shot. The elderly man was well- dressed in clothes of a good cut and quality, but carelessly, as if clothes were of little importance to him.

"It must be hell on those poor devils with wives and families to support."

"I've no one but myself," said the Killer.

"But you need employment. I presume?"

"In the worst way."

THE elderly man studied him thoughtfully.

"My name," he said at length, "is Jukes— Doctor Jukes. Ever hear of it?"

"No."

"Ah, well," said the Doctor, "it isn't quite unknown to science. I am by way of being a physicist of some reputation. My papers on—" he brought himself up with a jerk. "What I meant to say is that I am interested in certain experiments for which I need a human subject. Nothing dangerous, you understand—mostly a matter of routine. But still important." He stroked his chin. "I'm willing to pay a young man like yourself forty dollars a week for a few weeks' employment at the most. Food and lodging included. You would, of course, lead a secluded life under my supervision for the duration of the experiments. What do you say?"

The Killer thought swiftly. Here was an opportunity to drop from sight for some time to tome, a sanctuary in which to rest up while recouping his pocket-book. The old boy was lying, of course— there must be some risk to the experiment— but not as much risk as dying of lead poisoning.

"All right," he said briefly, "you've hired me."

The Doctor smiled Benevolently. "And your name?"

"Brown." said the Killer without the least flicker of hesitation.

"Very well. Brown," said the Doctor, "if you'll follow me to my car—"

But the Killer shook his head. It was not likely that he was being observed, yet one never

"Just slip me your address," he said. "I'll be around later."

Doctor Jukes' residence was out on St. Mary's road, in the foothills of the Tucson Mountains. Five acres of land were enclosed by a high fence of net-wire. Four buildings stood in this enclosure. The Doctor introduced the Killer to one of them, really a wing of the main residence, but only connected to it by a roofed passageway. This annex contained a suite of rooms which, if not luxurious— and the Killer was accustomed to a certain amount of luxury and refinement in his surroundings—were comfortably furnished.

There was a bedroom, bath and sitting-room, and a door led to a small patio or garden, some yards in extent, which was surrounded by a six-foot concrete wall.

"I believe you will find everything comfortable," said the Doctor.

A man servant, middle-aged, taciturn, prepared a bath, laid out shaving gear, and provided fresh linen and a suit of white duck that fitted the guest fairly well. The Killer wondered from whence they came and, if he had known, might not have felt so easy in his mind.

As it was, he relaxed, and over a tastefully served meal studied his surroundings. Bars criss-crossed the high windows, he noticed, and when the servant finally went away by the passage door and left him to a magazine and a cigarette, the door automatically locked behind him. But these trifles failed to disturb the Killer. Of course the Doctor could not be expected to give every stranger the run of his place. He congratulated himself on his luck in finding as secure a hiding place.

The next morning he was made rather ill by the injection of a solution into his arm.

"You'll be all right tomorrow," said the Doctor. But every day there was a new injection, and a week passed before he felt himself. Then he picked up surprisingly. It was a quiet existence. He walked or read in the little patio and sunned himself. Sometimes the Doctor's assistant, a stout nervous individual of uncertain age named Doctor Burdo, walked with him, taking notes of his condition. He was an old school-mate of Doctor Jukes and devoted to his interests. All this he told the Killer in his pleasant inconsequential chatter.

"Doctor Jukes is a great man," he said. "Famous, a genius."

Day by day the Killer found himself tingling more and more with the zest of living. His wits seemed to clarify. He thought of a thousand ways in which he could have disposed of the Big Shot and wondered why they had never occurred to him before. Also his sight became keener, almost microscopic in its keenness, he thought, and laughed at the conceit. But nothing escaped his eyes. The little lizards darting up the wall, and the activities of certain small bugs and insects.

He spent hours watching them. His increasing ability to hear was almost uncanny— the creaking of the floor, the soughing of the wind, and a myriad of small things rubbing wings and crawling. He was not alarmed. He knew these phenomena were the results of the Doctor's injections. The assistant quizzed him about them, made interminable notes.

One day in the garden he turned on him with a swift movement, a movement almost as swift and as lithe as that of a panther.

"Ah, but I feel strong," said the Killer. He flexed his arms. "I feel as if I could lift you over my head like an Indian club."

He caught the assistant playfully by the waist, and to his huge surprise— the assistant weighed nearly two hundred pounds— whirled him aloft like a feather. Once more on his feet, the assistant laughed shakily.

"I'll say you're strong."

THAT EVENING the assistant spoke at length to Doctor Jukes. The Doctor nodded.

"The experiment has been a glorious success. There's no need to carry it further. Give him the quietus in the morning."

The assistant hesitated. "Such a splendid fellow. It seems a pity Mo—"

"Come, come, Charles," laughed the Doctor. "No mawkish sentimentalism. Tomorrow," he said more seriously, "I am to meet Asbury, so I must leave the giving of the quietus to you."

The Killer was restless, his mind abnormally active. For the first time he resented being locked in at night. He gave one of the window-bars a tentative twist and it came away in his hand. With the sinuous grace of an animal he swung through the aperture and dropped to the ground beyond. It was cooler in the gardens than in his room. His nostrils quivered with delight. The night was intoxicatingly odorous, filled with murmurous sounds.

For awhile he paced back and forth, but soon it occurred to him that he had never seen beyond the confines of the walls hemming him in. On the other side was the laboratory, and the quarters of the assistant. Why not surprise Burdo with a call? He scaled the wall with ease. The laboratory door was latched but not locked. Unfortunately, however, the assistant had chosen that evening to dine out.

Filled with curiosity the Killer struck a match and turned on an electric light. It dimly revealed a long room almost meticulously neat. White porcelain sinks set against the wall, and stands and shelves with orderly rows of test-tubes and bottles containing chemical compounds or cultures.

Beyond was still another room, and when he opened its door something moaned and flashed by him with a screech. There was a crash behind him. Turning, he perceived that the creature, a monstrous pink rat, had taken refuge on a shelf over a sink, upsetting a number of bottles in doing so. At his approach it leaped from the shelf and fled through the outer door into the night. None of the bottles were broken. As nearly as possible, he rearranged them in their niches on the shelf, and somewhat ashamed of his misadventure, returned to his apartment and went to bed.

The bottles were similar in size, their contents colorless as water and indentifiable by the numbers over the niches in which they stood. A corresponding number was labeled on each bottle, but for the most part were small and almost illegible.

Still drowsy from the unaccustomed lack of sleep for it had been after midnight when he turned in, the assistant reached automatically and with hardly a glance, for a certain bottle. Unwittingly he filled his hypodermic with— not the lethal dose intended— but the pure, undiluted secretion, minute quantities of which the Doctor had been injecting into his patient over a series of days. And it was this solution he shot into the Killer's arm.

2: The Quietus

TWO men were seated in the uptown office of Joshua Jukes, famous surgeon and scientist. One was Doctor Jukes himself, slim, with well-spaced eyes and a towering balded brow. The other was not less a personage than Vincent Asbury, Secretary of War. In some circles it was more than hinted that he was Frazzini's man. The Doctor either didn't now this or didn't care. He was a scientist, not a politician. His own motives were clear enough. He had made known his discovery to the War Department, offered his formula for sale, and as for the rest—

Vincent Asbury was speaking. He was a handsome man of fifty, with narrow, crafty eyes, and when standing carried his tall figure with noticeable distinction.

"You mean to tell me, Doctor Jukes, that this thing is possible?"

"Indeed, yes."

"But it sounds like a miracle."

"And one not to broadcast to the world. First my country—"

"Oh, yes, your country." Asbury carefully kept the smile from his face. "And if you can properly demonstrate your discovery, your country will reward you well. But how does it

"That's rather difficult to make clear to the lay mind. But you know the glandular theory?"

"Slightly."

"Well, it's through the injection of extracts, of course. Certain ductless glands have a secretion lately analyzed which empties directly into the blood. This secretion is what keeps the nerves of the body normal and healthy. It has been ascertained that too little flow produces nervous depression, sciatica, rheumatism, while too much brings about that abnormal condition which is usually diagnosed as genius or insanity. Walters of England, and Swenson of Sweden, have made important discoveries in this field. Indeed their Fol-Fos extract is now being used to heal certain types of mental disorders. What I have told you so far is the secret of no particular scientist or country."

"But this other?" asked Asbury anxiously.

"Is. You must know that I have devoted the last ten years of my life to the same research work engrossing Walters and Swenson. Curious things in relation to ductless glands early claimed my attention. Some of my findings I published in medical and scientific journals, but others I kept to myself. First, because I had not substantiated them with the proper amount of proof; second, because I did not wish to be anticipated in the thing I sought to discover.

"But I have produced rats as large as cats, mice as large as rats, and other things which I had better not mention. Dogs grown into nightmares, rabbits that a little lack of manganese rob of the 'instinct' of mother love, and even of the desire and ability to mate. But enough. You understand that I worked, that I spared nothing in my investigations. Not even," said the scientist coolly, "men."

"Good heavens!"

"What would you? Some of them died, of course, and others went mad and had to be killed. But one must verify certain conclusions on the human. There is no other way. They were poor devils— martyrs to science, if you will. At any rate, they made possible what I have finally achieved."

Asbury made no audible retort, though he could not keep the distaste out of his face. Yet Doctor Jukes was right. The ethical value placed on human life is an uncertain thing. For reasons they knew nothing of, and that might not even concern them, he would send millions of soldiers to die and think little of it.

The scientist went on; "If one could handle the process which caused an increase in secretion in the ductless glands I have alluded to, would not that open the way to speeding up every function of the human body? That was, at first, a wild surmise on my part. But consider that man is a creature of his nerves. The sense perceptions, the reflex actions, even speed of thought itself, is dependent on the nervous system. The glands speed up the nerves, the nerves every sense and faculty of the human organism, including that of mind. And mind reacting back upon the nerves and glands again, keys up every sense and organ of the human

"This was the basis on which I worked. Failure after failure but increased my determination to succeed. Finally I met with some success in the case of animals. Then it was that I used, and am still using men. No need to relate the successes and failures there. Even the successes it was necessary to kill. I see you do not like that, but consider—could I allow my experiments to be bruited around? After years of work I was intoxicated with victory. See this bottle? Ten drops of its contents is enough to raise the normal powers of a healthy man ten times in excess of what he possesses. There is fol-fos in it, of course, and a portion of adrenalin, and— but that is my secret."

THE habitual calmness of the great scientist returned to him. He placed the bottle carefully back on the desk and regarded the Secretary of War.

"Well, my dear sir?" he questioned.

Vincent Asbury said slowly, "I am thinking," and he was. He was visualizing a picked body of men with their physical powers raised to the zenith. What power could withstand them? His eyes narrowed. "If you can prove this secretion?"

"I can."

"Then listen..."

Doctor Jukes came from his interview with Vincent Asbury with a feeling that everything was well in the best of all possible worlds. He did not like Asbury, but money was to be his for further scientific investigations, and just in the nick of time, since his other resources had well-nigh dwindled away. Blithely he entered his home.

"Well, Charles?"

The assistant glanced at the clock. "I gave him the quietus at nine-thirty and never saw a man pass out so suddenly. I left him lying on the bed until your return."

The Doctor nodded. "I'll take a look at him before lunch."

He walked through the open passage. "A nice day," he thought, 'but hot." Nothing warned him that he was making his last observation on the weather.

How strong the accelerating secretion injected mistakenly into the Killer's arm was will never be known, but it must have been tremendous. Had his system not been accustomed gradually to increased doses over a period of days, the results would have been fatal. As it was, the sudden acceleration of heart and lung action brought him to the verge of death.

Darkness struck at the base of his skull with the suddenness of a sledgehammer and he collapsed into an inanimate heap. The assistant felt for his pulse, but the beat of it was so incredibly rapid as to register as no pulse at all. But the Killer was not dead, and during the hours he lay in a state of coma his whole bodily organization underwent a miraculous change. As suddenly as it had left him, consciousness returned and found him staring wide-eyed at the ceiling. Giddy, he was, and sick, but this soon passed, and in the moment of its passing Doctor Jukes entered the room and knelt by his side. The first thing the Doctor found remarkable was the heat radiating from the supposedly dead body and the flexibility of the wrist he took.

"What the devil!" he cried, starting up. "Here, Charles! The lad isn't dead." He stared at the wide glowing eyes. "You couldn't have given the quietus; you must have—"

But he never finished the sentence. Like a flickering shadow the Killer's hand shot out and took him by the throat. There was a sharp snap as the neck broke, and in the same instant the body hurtled the room to crash against the far wall. The Killer surged to his feet. He had heard the Doctor's words, understood the situation and all that it implied.

"Kill me, would he, the dirty rat!" The motion of the Doctor's body fascinated him. It seemed to loaf along at snail-like speed. In reality its transit through the air occupied not three seconds. But everything in time and space had altered for the Killer. The assistant running for the door seemed a figure shown on a screen by a slow motion-picture camera. The lifting of his feet, the bending of knees, in fact, every motion of flight, was almost painfully slow and measured. Each detail could be watched.

The Killer had seen pictures of animals running like that. Long-legged giraffes sailing gracefully over African landscapes—slender deer slowed up in their flight so that patrons in theaters might study their methods of locomotion. For a moment he was startled. Then working at lightning speed, his mind grasped the explanation.

For weeks they had been speeding up his bodily organization, and now, now—

He moved. It was done with such swiftness that one might be forgiven for comparing it with that atom or electron which is said to shift positions without any intermediate action. In mid-stride he caught the assistant. One brush of the hand. It was like pushing over a mannequin that refused to fall, save as a feather topples. Then bare-headed, and clad in but trousers and a soft-collared shirt, he was out of the building, the grounds, and striding up the road.

An automobile crawled towards him, a taxicab, doing twenty miles an hour. Now was the test, his own strength against that of the gleaming car. Deliberately he blocked its way. The driver screamed at the sudden materialization of this slender, dark-faced man. Almost wildly he bore down on the brakes, sought to swerve, but the yawing machine was brought to an abrupt stop that catapulted him over the wheel, that flung the white-faced man in the rear seat forward across his shoulders.

With one negligent hand the Killer held the taxi motionless while its engine roared under a shaking hood, while its wheels still bit impotently at the packed dirt of the road.

3: "Two Men Have Been Killed"

WHEN Doctor Jukes left Vincent Asbury, Asbury went to his apartments in the exclusive Green Hotel and dismissed his secretary and valet.

"I'll not be needing you, Robbins," he told the man-servant, "until dinner-time. You may have the afternoon off." He was in Tucson incognito and, save for one or two discreet individuals, unknown.

Assured of privacy, he placed on a table a dark case that looked not unlike the container for a portable typewriter and raised the lid. The case certainly contained a machine but not of the typewriter variety.

At first glance it might have been mistaken for a radio. Indeed it was that, and something more. In fact the contrivance represented the last word in radio-television devices, the invention of a great inventor who had sold it for a price—five million dollars to be exact. The inner surface of the upraised lid was a burnished screen. Connecting the device to a light socket by means of an extension cord, Asbury threw a switch and twirled a dial.

Instantly the room was filled with a sputtering noise. 302 M-9b, he speit carefully. The sputtering fell, rose, died away. He leaned so that his face was fully caught by the light of a bluish bulb. The burnished screen clouded, clarified, and in it grew the features of a man.

"Hello," said a voice faintly, as if from an immense distance.

"Hello yourself. This Number Two speaking. Yes, Number Two. Is the Big Shot there?"

"Sure," said the faint voice. "He's been waiting for your call. Just a moment." The features faded, and in a minute was succeeded by those of a man whose face expressed ruthless power. The eyes were wide-set, with heavy lids, and even in this television picture, which gave no distinct colors, save white and black, you knew that they were greenish.

The cheeks were fleshy, the lips thick but well-shaped, and one cheek was scarred as if by an old burn. The newspapers of the world had broadcast that face. It had been shown in newsreels and magazines. A nationally known face it was, as familiar as that of the President of the United States, or of a movie star— the face of Frazzini, millionaire bootlegger, king of racketeers. It smiled genially now, showing a set of white even teeth.

"That you, Vincent?"

"Yes. I'm speaking from Tucson."

"How is everything?"

"I saw Doctor Jukes about that discovery of his he offered the government— through me." He laughed softly. "Of course he thinks he's doing business with Uncle Sam."

"And the discovery?"

"It's a wonderful thing. Listen, Frazzini, a shot of it would make our boys irresistible." He went into details. "The effect wears off in time, but while it lasts—"

"You made him an offer?"

"Of a million cash— with a hundred thousand yearly for further research work. He understands that the deal is secret— for reasons of State, ha, ha!"

Frazzini spoke incisively. "See the Doctor at once and tell him you will have a government official and two secret-service men call on him tomorrow for a practical demonstration. I shall leave here with Landy and Cococetti almost immediately. Reserve rooms for us at your hotel. Understand?"

"Yes. On the top floor, I suppose? Chicago is twelve hundred miles away as the crow flies. That means you will get in—"

"In twelve hours at the outside. Have everything arranged. Good-by."

Thoughtfully Vincent Asbury removed the connections and closed the case. Lighting a cigarette he moved over and stared unseeingly out of the window. Frazzini could make him president of the United States—and would. But nevertheless he irked under the gang chieftain's control. Given the opportunity, he would blot out Frazzini— like that. But right now he needed him, and the organization he controlled.

His mind busy with all its torturous thoughts, he called up the desk and asked that a taxi be summoned. At the same time he reserved the rooms. It was summer and not difficult to get the location desired. Descending, he took his seat in the taxi and giving Doctor Jukes' address, sank back with closed eyes. Up Congress the car sped, then north, and then west again. Suddenly the car stopped with a jerk and he was hurled violently forward into the back of the driver. The shock nearly dislocated his neck.

"What the devil!" he cried when he had recovered his breath. "What does this mean?" and then paused with mouth half open, staring into a dark expressionless face and cold grey eyes!

Every atom was rioting in Killer Mike's body. By almost imperceptible degrees the potent solution was increasing in intensity. There was no reckoning how fast the Killer's faculties were functioning. He laughed sardonically, an eerie

"Ha, ha! If it isn't Number Two!" Even in that brief second of stopping the car, and while Asbury was yet engrossed in his own thoughts, the Killer heard him thinking. Yes, heard; for him it seemed that Vincent Asbury had been talking aloud. The Behaviorists claim that all reasoning is a matter of sub-vocalization, that literally one does talk to himself when thinking. To the ears of the Killer this subvocalizing process was audible as sound.

HE HEARD the war secretary mention the Big Shot's name, the Doctor's, think of the coming of Frazzini, mouth over his own plans, ambitions— and all in a fraction of time quite long to him. The taxi-driver, knocked limp for the moment, recovered with a curse, and took his foot from the gas.

"Hey, you!" he bellowed, lunging at the Killer with intent to grab him by the collar. "What do you mean by this, hey?"

The Killer watched the lunge with impersonal interest. Bah! The fellow was slow! He seemed to float through space, split seconds being minutes. The killer brushed him away lazily, and watched him going backward in the same leisurely fashion to collapse in a heap from which he did not stir. But to the war secretary the action had taken place with almost unbelievable swiftness. He had recognized Killer Mike, as Killer Mike had recognized him, and knew that he was condemned by the Big Shot and his life

In the very instant that the driver surged forward he drew his automatic and fired. But the Killer's eyes caught the gesture. Without trouble he avoided the bullet and threw out his fist. Struck by what he never had a chance to see. Vincent Asbury sagged back.

Again the Killer laughed, an eerie whisper of a laugh, and turned and was gone so swiftly that to the staring occupant of the second-hand Buick that had pulled up behind the taxi, and to the man in the office of the greenhouse bordering one side of the road, he seemed to flicker and vanish into nothing. The taxi stood with throbbing engine.

"What the devil!" said the driver of the second-hand Buick, rubbing his eyes. Then he clambered from his seat and peered into the taxi.

At what he saw, he gave a gasp of horror. The man from the greenhouse came running across the road.

"What's the matter?" he panted.

"Matter— matter— Can't you see what's the matter?" He pointed wildly at the bloody features of the taxi-driver, at the horribly crushed in skull of the secretary of war. "That's what's the matter! Murder! Two men have been killed!"

But the Killer did not hear. He was gone like a wraith. The world seemed to stand still as he glided along. The scent of mankind was heavy in his nostrils— but above all the individual odor of Asbury. It hung in the hot air like a thin, evil trail. It smelled, thought the Killer sardonically, like one might expect the crooked, oily mind of Asbury to look. It was not difficult to follow. In a few minutes he was at the hotel.

The clerk did not see him. nor the bellhops sitting in a braided row. The fat man coming down the stairs to get the exercise his doctor ordered, wondered what it was that brushed by and nearly sent him sprawling. He could have sworn that a voice said, "I beg your pardon," but no one was in sight. Much shaken in mind and body he waddled to the elevator shaft and rang the bell. Blast the doctors! It was a hot day and too much exertion made a man feel queer.

Still following the trail, the Killer came to the correct door and opened it by the simple expedient of pushing. Yes, there was the television-radio. His face twisted into a deadly grin. Every atom and fibre of his body was dancing. Put him on the spot, would he? Why nothing could touch him now. nothing—neither men nor gun! And if he wished—

With a swift, lithe motion he opened the television case.

In the underworld of America they spoke of him with bated breath, his friends admiringly, fawningly, his enemies bitterly and with curses.

Rumor had it that he had started his career in a gambling house. When Big Tim was chief, he had been his favorite guard. When Little Arne broke through Big Tim's defense, those in the know said that Arne had first fixed it with him. If that were the truth, it hadn't kept him from driving past Little Arne's flowershop one day and riddling him with lead.

He was ambitious, ruthless, and with more than a touch of organizing genius. The result was that where other gang leaders went to the grave-yard or abroad, he built up a vast illegal business of forty millions a year. Over his immediate followers he ruled with an iron hand, the whilst he wiped out competition with bribes—or a machine gun. He was king, despot, the one and only chief of racketeers, Frazzini, the Big Shot, the most feared and powerful man in the country.

His Chicago home was a fortress. It stood on the top of a skyscraper. The approach to the roof was cunningly guarded. Frazzini knew, none better, that there were envious souls who would like to bump him off—some for the honor of doing it—and some to step into his shoes. At the particular moment we see him, he has turned from speaking to Asbury on the television-radio. He is a big man with broad shoulders, forty years of age.

"Get in touch with the boys at once, Jim," he directs his lieutenant, "and tell them we leave for the West within the hour. Have the planes made ready."

Jim Landy nods and leaves the room.

He is a man of few words. Soon Frazzini hears the mechanic tuning up the engines of the specially constructed autogiros. With rotating wings of the most advanced design, they could take off in a fifteen-yard run, land at twelve miles an hour, and carry twelve passengers apiece in their comfortable cabins. For a moment Frazzini hesitates and then rings a bell. To the man answering, he speaks tersely.

"Tell my wife I wish to see her."

SHE came at length, a queenly creature in a trailing robe, with sleek, dark hair and a colorless face.

"Well?" she questioned tonelessly.

"Nothing," he said, "only I thought you'd better know—" He broke off abruptly. "Why in the devil are you going on like this?"

"Am I going on?"

"You know what I mean."

Her eyes flashed.

He said stormily: "It's me who ought to be sore. Who picked you out of a dance hall, made you what you are?"

"As if I should be grateful for that! What am I, anyway?"

"You are my wife."

"Oh, yes, your wife. How wonderful! The vice-king's wife."

"You didn't talk like that when I asked you to

"Would to God I had!"

He paced the room for a moment.

"Gloria," he said more softly, laying a hand on her shoulder, "you used to love me a little. Isn't there some of that liking left?"

She shrugged from his hand. "Don't touch me, please. Your hands are dirty."

"Because I run booze?"

"You know what I mean. I don't care about that. It's the other vile traffic."

"I swear to you—"

"Please don't lie," she said contemptuously. "You lied to me before. I found out."

His mouth narrowed into a thin slit. "From that traitorous rat Killer Mike! But he won't betray any more secrets."

"What have you done with him?"

"Ha, ha! So that touched you, eh? Worried about Mike?"

"You know that's a falsehood."

"Yes," he almost whispered at length, "I believe it is. If I didn't—"

With a gust of hungry emotion he swept her into his arms.

"Gloria, Gloria! Look at me, girl! You're mine, see! And you love me in spite of yourself! Yes, you do. I'm bad and vile, but you love me! I've got to go on—don't you see that? I can't stop— and Killer Mike is in my way. It wasn't only because he spoke to you— I could forgive that— but he actually plotted!" He freed her and stepped back. "Plotted to split the gang and rule in my shoes." He raised a fateful hand. "Do you think he can do that and get away with it? No, I must make an example of him for the benefit of others. Killer Mike is doomed." He stopped abruptly. "What is that?"

The whirr of the television-radio sounder filled the room. He stepped forward and threw the switch, standing so that the blue light irradiated his features, scanning the burnished screen set against the wall.

"Hello, Frazzini speaking. Is that you, Asbury?"

A thin eerie laugh swept out of the device.

'"No," said a metallic voice. It seemed to come from an immense distance. "This isn't Asbury. This is—"

Frazzini's wife gave an audible gasp. In the burnished depths of the screen grew a face, a cold, dark face with frosty gleaming eyes.

"Killer Mike!" exclaimed Frazzini.

"Yes," said the metallic voice, "Killer Mike."

Again the eerie laugh swept the room. "You'll never see Asbury alive again. I was obliged to remove him. Do you understand, Frazzini? Place him on the spot— as I intend to place you! No," went on the metallic voice, "I'm not crazy, not all hopped up as you think. Not with coke. I can read your mind, Frazzini. You are thinking you'll wire the police to hold me until you come. How clever you are! But not as clever as me, Frazzini. Not as clever 'as the Man-plus'."

4: Into the Desert

THE sensational automobile murders, the slaying of the famous Doctor Jukes and his assistant, were headline news. Within an hour of their discovery, a half dozen extras were being sold.

"Mystery Murders on The St. Mary's Road," screamed one black streamer. Others shrieked "Fiendish Murders Shrouded in Mystery: Police Baffled."

The two witnesses of the automobile murders were quoted.

"The taxi suddenly stopped, just like that," said the driver of the second-hand Buick. "I had to jam on the brakes hard to keep from running into it."

"Yes," corroborated the other, "I was looking out my greenhouse windows and saw the whole thing. A man was clinging to the side of the
taxi, though I don't know where he came from."

Both witnesses described the man as being of medium height, clad in white trousers and a soft white shirt. Neither saw the actual killings. One was too far away, and the other's view was interrupted by the rear of the taxi.

Doctor Jukes' servant testified that a young man answering such a description had been a patient of the Doctor. But the greatest sensation transpired when one of the bodies in the taxi was identified as that of Vincent Asbury. The identification was made by Robbins, the valet, and by his private secretary.

"Yes," said the secretary, "Mr. Asbury had been in Tucson incognito on government business." No. he didn't know what that business was, but it had to do with the department he headed and a chemical discovery of Doctor Jukes.

"Secretary of War Murdered For War Secret," captioned one paper. Excitement was running high when the chief of police received the following telegram from Chicago authorities:

CONFIDENTIAL INFORMATION THAT ASBURY, WAR SECRETARY, KILLED OR INJURED. ARREST AT ONCE MICHAEL FLIANI, ALIAS 'KILLER MIKE,' NOTORIOUS GUNMAN AND GANGSTER. DESCRIPTION: HEIGHT, FIVE FEET, SEVEN AND ONE-HALF INCHES; WEIGHT, ONE- HUNDRED FIFTY POUNDS; COMPLEXION DARK, WITH BLACK HAIR AND GREY EYES. LOOKS LIKE AN ITALIAN. OFFICERS ARRIVING BY AIR. ANSWER.

"Well what do you think of that!" muttered the chief of police. But he was canny enough to keep the telegram from the reporters; and in the early hours of the morning a big autogiro fell silently out of the heavens and settled on the flat roof of the Green Hotel.

From it stepped Frazzini and went at once to the suite Asbury had reserved, surrounded by a bodyguard of slim hard-faced men with hands on ready weapons. With him was a prominent member of a Chicago strike-breaking agency, really a henchman of Frazzini. The Big Shot sent word to the agency head that he wanted to see him. It was actually a summons from the gang chieftain. The head of the strike-breakers stared with reverent awe at the king of racketeers. Frazzini did the talking.

"This Killer Mike used to be a member of my organization, see? But he raised a ruckus and I threw him out. Why he wanted to kill Asbury is a mystery to me." Of course the visitor had his own opinion about that. He knew of the rumors connecting the war secretary with the man who spoke. "Now I want my men to cooperate with yours in hunting him down and through you I wish to offer a five thousand dollar reward for his capture. Understand?"

The visitor nodded. He understood.

"There's another planeful of my men coming. Will be here in an hour or so. This killer Mike must be captured. He—"

The low whisper of a laugh filled the room. "What's that?" cried Frazzini. The gunmen were on their feet, weapons in hand.

"Ha, ha, ha!"

Frazzini whirled. Behind him, almost against the wall, stood the figure of a man in white duck trousers and a light shirt. He hadn't been there a moment before, no one had seen him enter, and yet he had walked through a corridor dominated by armed men, entered the open door of the room with a stride.

"Ha, ha, ha!" It was the Killer laughing. He saw the weapons of the gunmen go up— slowly— as if manipulated by men scarcely able to move. When Frazzini whirled it was as if the motion would never be finished. Lazily he sidestepped the loafing bullets. But to the astounded gunmen it appeared as if he had flickered out of existence at one point and into it again at another. The bullets buried themselves in the wall. There was a splintering of plaster, and from somewhere beyond frightened cries.

"It's no use, boys," said the Killer. "Bullets can't hit me."

The guards shrank back with scared faces. At bottom they were a superstitious lot. Knowing nothing of Doctor Jukes' accelerating solution, the phenomenon witnessed admitted of but one explanation. The Killer was dead. They were fighting the Killer's ghost!

But Frazzini understood. The marvelous discovery of Doctor Jukes was being utilized by Killer Mike. He was speeded up in sense and faculty.

"So you realize the truth," hissed the Killer. "Yes, I am speeded up. I can even hear your thoughts. Compared to me, ordinary men are as snails. I can out-move, out-think, out-fight— Ah, you would, would you!" His hand flicked out and the Chicago strike-breaker, of sterner metal than his companions, went back with a crash and lay in a still heap upon the floor. "I have waited for you, Frazzini, as I said I would, to put you on the spot. But the spot isn't here. First, I'm taking you for a ride, Frazzini."

He moved. Chairs went over with a crash. A gunman fired. There was a stifled scream, and then seized in an overmastering grip and carried forward at tremendous speed, the king of the racketeers lost consciousness.

STRANGE things were happening to the Killer. Bearing his burden he strode through the night like a wraith. First he went north until he reached the desert, and then northwest. He was Killer Mike, the Big Shot and the empire of gangsterdom was in the hollow of his hand. And not alone the empire of gangsterdom—that of America, the world. He laughed, and his wild eerie laugh echoed through the night. White-faced men and women paused to listen.

"A coyote," said some. "No coyote ever howled like that," said others.

Official Tucson was in a ferment. Posses were being formed. But the killer strode on. Not only every sense and faculty was now accelerated, not only every atom and molecule, but under his clothes his flesh was shimmering, expanding, as the atoms and molecules whirled in ever increasing orbits. The heat was unbearable.

He tore the binding clothes from his body as he walked. Where the Oracle Road turned off from the main highway he paused. Passing motorists saw the gigantic figure of a naked giant brooding under the stars. This giant carried the limp figure of another man in his arms. Stopped by policeman, the motorists related what they had seen. But when the former, armed with machine guns and gas bombs reached the spot, the Killer had vanished.

It was four o'clock in the morning when he came to Oracle. Sleep hovered over that mountain hamlet of eighty-nine souls and no one witnessed his coming. He had covered hundreds of miles in his wandering, quartering this way and that. Once he had even stood on the peak above the "window" in the Catalinas and looked down upon Tucson far, far below. He approached Oracle from the south, over the hills and ranges, and on a rocky eminence behind the small town set his burden down.

Frazzini was not dead. He came to himself in the clear mountain dawn lying on a stubble of rock and coarse grass. His uncomprehending eyes at first took in the sky, the rugged scenery and northward purple distance. He sat up, and in the act of doing so saw the Killer. But was this Killer Mike, this naked, seven-foot giant whose silvery flesh seemed to seethe and churn? Frazzini was a brave man, he possessed undoubted physical courage, but in this situation was something so strange, so weird and uncanny, that the heart fluttered in his bosom, the blood ran cold, and for the first time in his life he really understood the meaning of the word fear.

In the ever deepening dawn a Mexican lad passed with a string of burros and stared fearfully at the two figures on the crest of the hill.

"Madre Dios!" he cried.

His ragged heels beat a frightened tattoo into the sides of his mount as he urged it by at its best speed. Where the narrow trail crossed a dirt road a half mile beyond, he met a car of armed men and a woman.

"Si, señors," he said, in answer to their questions, "I saw two hombres." He crossed himself devoutly. "One naked. Surely the devil himself! And the other—" But the armed men and the woman were running up the trail down which he had come.

Madness, or perhaps it was a clarity of vision beyond that of earth, had the Killer in its grip. The acceleration of every sense and faculty was sweeping swiftly towards an incredible climax. Earth and sky were shifting, changing. The thoughts of Frazzini beat on his ears. Who was this Frazzini? Frazzini was his enemy. But what meaning could that phrase have for him when the whole world was heaving, churning. His glowing eyes chained those of the other.

"Be still," he commanded. Frazzini was silent. Even his thought was stilled. It was good to be free of the clamoring noise that was the other's terrified mind, twisting, turning.

Even as it ceased, he forgot Frazzini's existence, for Frazzini disappeared; the rugged hillside, the sweep of brown landscape going down to the river and sweeping up again, miles away, to the Mammoth Range, was also blotted out, and he gazed into a new world, another dimension!

It was an ethereal place, a place of indescribable loveliness, and far away under the rays of an emerald sun formed the spires and domes of a mystical city. Out of the crystal clarity of western sky, just after the sun has dipped below illusive hills and before night comes to mantle the desert, seemed this city fashioned, and almost as impalpable and remote— a crystal city in an opalescent world.

Was it the figment of a delirious mind, or did it actually exist an octave or two beyond the vibration of earthly matter? If it did really exist, then only the Killer's vision achieved a note high enough to glimpse it. For his body never passed beyond the fleshly rhythm that chained his feet to this world.

Though he ran like the wind and came to the environs of that mystical city, though he saw celestial beings of a god-like stature and beauty, and wonders indescribable, though he wandered through the space they occupied, everything remained just that to him—space, and nothing more. Sometimes things were below him, sometimes above and sometimes all around. But wherever they were, he could not touch, he could not handle, he could not make himself real, and in the end they faded.

AS THE accelerating fluid in his system reached its weird climax and began to recede, it was with devastating swiftness. The giant body shrunk in on itself, the eyes became burnt out coals. Searching for the vision he had lost, the mystical city always beyond the horizon, hungry and thirsty and mad, the Killer wandered through the desert, until at last he stumbled over a mound of earth and lacked the strength to rise.

They found Frazzini sitting dumbly on the hillside. But the Big Shot only stared at them uncomprehendingly.

"What's the matter, chief?" begged his henchmen. Frazzini did not answer. His wife who had come to Tucson on the second plane, sank beside him and took him in her arms. Forgotten was her bitterness. "Tony," she wept, "Tony! Don't you know me, dear?"

But no recognition or intelligence would ever look out of those blank eyes. The perverted genius that would have made the very government of the United States a department in an empire of vice was dead— and ironically enough, the man who had willed this mind, this genius to cease, and who alone could bid it again to exist, had forgotten the fact, was himself mad.

But though they found Frazzini. the Killer was never found. Rewards were offered for him, dead or alive. The desert was scoured. But all in vain. Once a group of searchers paused at an old Mexican woman's abode. This was near the New Mexican border. No, the old woman said, they tended the sheep, she and her son out there, but they had never seen any one.

But she told them nothing of the one great experience of her life— how her son had died from a snakebite the week before and in her loneliness and grief she had prayed the Virgin Mary to restore him to her. Nor how she had dreamed that this prayer was answered, and when she had gone to the grave, it was to find a man's body lying across it. The man did not look like her son, it is true, but she was old and superstitious and persuaded that a miracle had happened.

So for her the dead had risen, and the Killer became her son.

Only somewhere in his befogged brain remained the memory of a celestial city— the old woman who understood English and who listened to his mutterings, thought he talked of the heaven he had left to return to her— and as he tended the sheep he would stare longingly at the blue distance. Sometimes the old mother would have to come and lead him home.

But of other things, he remembered nothing.

_______________

5: The Last Straw

Robert Barr

1850-1912

Australian Town and Country Journal 24 June 1914

YOUNG Mrs. Stansfield (it isn't necessary to designate her as Mrs. Edward Stansfield for there were now no others of the name in the neighbourhood except her youthful, easy-going husband), Priscilla Stansfield stood beside the stone-mullioned window, one of three, and looked southward down the avenue, watching for the postman, who was a little late that morning. Her husband had just finished a letter which the postman must take away with him, and if he missed this Government official, Edward would be compelled to bestride his horse and ride five miles to the village of Morton Farwell, for the letter must be: in London by next morning.

After folding the. letter, he looked for some moments at the cheque he had signed, wondering if on second thoughts the banker would refuse it. Never before had Stansfield met such difficulty in persuading the manager of the Morton Farwell branch to allow him to overdraw, and now having received this permission, the young man knew not where to turn; for money to square his bank account within the time he had promised the manager, to shift his balance from the wrong side to the right side of his credit line.

"He's coming, Ned;" said the girl, turning half round.

"All right; I'm ready for him," replied her husband, as he sealed and stamped the letter.

The young woman rang an old-fashioned pull bell (there was no electricity in the dilapidated Manor House) and when the grimy maid-of-all-work responded, the letter was handed to her, and she disappeared to meet the postman. Priscilla sat down beside her husband, and laid her hand on his, that had just relinquished the pen.

"Discouraged, Edward?" she asked. "Well, Priscilla, I am, rather. What an insatiable monster a mortgage is! Night and day the interest accumulates, and it does seem as if the periods of payment tread on each other's heels."

"Ah, but now this is settled, you have another six months to turn round in."

"I've had to turn round so often, Priscilla, that I am becoming giddy with the process. I tell you what it is, my girl; I'm a rank failure."

"Not as a husband, Ned."

The young man permitted himself a little wan smile.

"A husband's first duty is to provide sufficient money for the household, and that I seem unable to do:. Why, Priscilla, should any of my creditors persistently press a claim, even if only for a sovereign, I shall go smash, and curiously enough, I'm haunted by a sort of semi-certainty that the postman is bringing the claim, putting upon my back that well-hackneyed object, the last straw."

"A letter for you, sir," said the servant, entering, and placing the missive on the table, address side down. Stansfield did not lift it up.

"Aren't you going to read it?" asked his wife.

"I'm afraid," said the young man, with a wry grin. "See how thin it is! I'm certain it's the last straw."

"I don't think so," said Priscilla. "The last straw would be a bill, wouldn't it?"

"I suppose it might take that shape."

"Well, a bill is thicker than that envelope, and is usually sent with a half-penny stamp. This communication is sealed."

"You're optimistic, Priscilla. Bearing a half-penny stamp, it would merely say 'A cheque would oblige,' but a sealed letter from a creditor is ominous. This man has not sent a bill. He simply informs me that as his previous requests for a settlement have been ignored, he is most reluctantly obliged to take proceedings for the. recovery of six pounds three and tenpence, and signs himself 'Yours and so forth' instead of 'Yours obediently' or 'Yours respectfully.' "

"I'll bear half the straw!" cried Priscilla. "Let's take the plunge," and before he could prevent her, she turned the letter face upwards.

"Tracts, by Jingo!" exclaimed Edward.

"Both wrong. A Canadian stamp, as I live."

"I'm not wrong. I said from the first it wasn't the straw," insisted Priscilla. "Courage, dear boy, and open it."

"Let us enjoy a respite while we may. That handwriting is unknown to me. it has a decidedly foreign look, and the person who wrote it never went to school in England. I judge him to be an unlettered man, probably a western farmer.''

"Go on with your surmises," said Priscilla. "I'm a practical person, and always prefer certainty to doubt."

With that she took up a penknife lying on the table, slit open the envelope, and drew forth the letter; four closely written pages on very thin paper. The huge hand of her husband came down flat upon the missive, preventing her from reading it. With his other hand he picked up the envelope, and scrutinised it.

"An ignorant man, I should say, for he has placed a five-cent, stamp on this letter, apparently not knowing that penny postage has been inaugurated between Canada and England."

"You're very tantalising, Ned. Either read it yourself, or allow me to read it."

With a harassed laugh the young man withdrew his hand. "You read it, my dear, for my nerves are rather unstrung. Better peruse it in silence, and then break, the news to me gently."

He leaned back in his chair, hands clasped behind his head, and closed his eyes.

"Hello! He begins with an insult!" exclaimed Priscilla, in tones of indignation tinged with dismay. "Have you any relatives in Canada?"

Edward opened his eyes. "Not that I know of, but it seems to me I heard my father say— I think he got an impertinent letter. What does it say, Priscilla?"

Sir,

I suppose there is a fraudulent Stansfield at Stansfield-Morton as there has been any time this last twenty or thirty years. All right, says I. You people have had a good long innings, and it's time you should turn out, for I am the rightful Edward Stansfield, and you know it. Whenever I think of you I get mad clear through. Often when I have to sleep by the side of a road or under a haystack, or in the woods, and I think of my snobbish English relatives rolling in the lap of luxury, with money to burn, and a Manor house equal to Windsor Castle, full of servants and flunkies and lackies and those sort of animals....

"Good Lord!" groaned Edward.

...Why, then I sit up and swear till all's blue.

Of course you know all about it, and so it isn't for your information but for the legal purposes that I write down the particulars. My grandfather, who seems to have been a good deal of a fool, like the majority of the family, got mad at his father, both of them Edward Stansfields, and vamoosed the ranch, coming over here to do hard pioneer work. The estate belonged to him, and his old man couldn't will it away, even if he wanted to. He wrote for money after he cooled down, but none was sent him. That put his back up, so he saw a lawyer about it, and the lawyer said he could have the estate any time he went to claim it. My grandfather didn't want to go back just then, so the lawyer told him he could keep the claim alive by writing for money every now and then, stating these facts. He did that, and my father did that, and now I do it, only I differ from the rest of them; I'm going right across there now to take possession, and don't you forget it. And so that you may know you've got a tough nut to deal with, I state right here that I'm a tramp, and have been all my life. I always tell folks that ask me why I live the life I do that I guess there must be something of the English gentleman about me, because I always did hate work, and never would do it, and now I'd rather sleep out of doors than in.

"But nevertheless, right is right, and that property is mine, so you may expect me when you see me, and I give you fair notice I'm going to jump your claim. I shall land in Liverpool from a tramp steamer, which is the kind of boat that suits my way of life, and then I'll hoof it from the port to Stansfield-Morton.

Your affectionate forty-second cousin,

Edward Stansfield.

(The genuine article.)

" Edward Stansfield, "the imitation, if this letter were true, was now wide awake, and sitting straight enough.

"Priscilla," he said, "this isn't the last straw. It's a whole straw stack, weighing 20 tons. By Jove," he added, laughing, "I'll dismiss my hundred flunkies, and let the last straw have the place, mortgage and all. He'll be the fellow lying awake then, wondering how he's to raise the money for the interest!"

"Oh. Edward, don't laugh," pleaded the girl, her face pale. "Is there any truth in this awful letter?"

"I rather think there is, my dear, but don't you see it doesn't matter in the least? It's more than likely that the claim is outlawed long ago, but it would just serve the impertinent chap right if I dumped on his shoulders all that's left of the Manor. The lap of luxury! Windsor Castle, indeed, when the old roof won't keep out the weather much longer!"

A week later the last straw put in an appearance. They watched him coming up the avenue, slouching, with a hang-dog look, pausing every now and then as if making a mental estimate about the value of the property. He was not exactly in rags, but his rough clothing looked' as though it ought to be tattered.

Edward and his wife stook back from the window so that they could not be seen from outside.

"I say, Priscilla," remarked the young man, "I'm going out to greet my relative."

"Oh dear, ob dear," she sighed, "he'll be here soon enough."

"Not at the rate he's coming on. Do you know, dear. I feel sorry for him. There's not a soul in all England that he knows, and in spite of his slouch there is something Stansfieldian about him." The young wife covered her face with open hands, as if to shut out the horrid vision, and she shuddered as Edward left her.

"Good-day to you!" he cried, going down the avenue.

The tramp had been standing still since the door opened.

"Is this my long-lost relative?"

"It's the genuine article," said the last straw, with an accent on the "uine." "I suppose you're the imitation?"

The Englishman laughed, and held out his hand, which the other took somewhat reluctantly.

"I understand," continued the English Stansfield, "we're to fight that out in the Law Courts."

"Just as you say," replied the tramp, indifferently. "I'm as independent as a hog on ice; go or stay, that's me."

"I should say off-hand that a hog on ice is rather helpless," commented Stansfield. but the other went on: "And now say, Mr. Imitation, I don't want to intrude, and if you'd just as lief I wouldn't come into the house, say so."

"Why, I've come out to drag you in. Do you think we're going to let you escape? We're not so simple here in old England as you imagine. Behold Windsor Castle!" He waved his hand toward the house. "The flunkies are all concealed, and the lackies under cover, but the moment we get you in, and the door shut, down you go through a trap door into a dungeon cell. That's the welcome the rightful heir always gets when he comes home, and we do this sort of thing every day in England."

The tramp grinned. He appeared to have a sense of humour.

"All right. Bring on your dungeon. I guess I have slept in worse places, and I suppose you feed your prisoners?"

"Yes; your bread and water will be laid out in the dining-room as soon as you can come in."

"Good enough," replied the tramp. "I hope there's plenty of bread, for I'm hungry. So this is the Manor House, is it? It seems a little out of repair."

"Yes," said Stansfield. "We're gradually letting it go to ruin so that we may make money by charging excursionists sixpence each for being shown over the place."

"Well, you don't get any sixpence from me."

"I didn't expect one; besides, we haven't begun the caretaking trade yet, telling the history of the house in expectation of a tip."

"Has it got a history? Do any ghosts wander round it?"

"Only myself and my wife, accompanied by the ghost of prosperity. There is a sort of legend that the prosperity of Stansfield-Morton would depart this life if ever the rightful heir abandoned the estate and that seems to be true, for there was plenty of money in your grandfather's time and before that, but since his departure we younger members of the family have managed very badly. The estate has been gradually eaten up with mortgages, and we've lost bit by bit, until only part of the Home Farm remains, and considering the price of agricultural land nowadays, I doubt if a sale would produce the money lent on it."

"Humph!" growled the tramp. "That doesn't seem very encouraging to the rightful heir."

"I'm sorry," said Stansfield, "if you are disappointed. Had you given me time, and an address in Canada, I should have written to you, and revealed our real situation."

"Oh, would you?" sneered the mendicant. "I very much doubt it. Your branch of the family never answered the letters sent by the elder line, so if you had written, it's not likely I'd have believed you. Sure there's no gold hidden in one of the dungeons?"

Edward Stansfield laughed. You're quite welcome to search, and if you find any, I hope you'll give me a share of it."

By this time they had reached the dining-room, and Priscilla, watching their entrance, gazed upon her kinsman by marriage with something like fear and repulsion. He was a very rough-looking customer, unkempt and rather haggard, seemingly between 45 and 50 years of age. His shaggy locks tinged with grey showed no acquaintance with either scissors or comb, and his hard, deeply-lined face was burnt to a deep brown by the action of an ardent sun and exposure to all kinds of weather.

"My dear," said her husband, "this is our kinsman and my namesake, Edward Stansfield, of Canada."

Priscilla could not conscientiously say she was pleased to see him, but extending a half-reluctant hand, she gave him what greeting she could call to her lips. He seemed abashed and awkward in her presence, and his volubility of a short time before sank into silence. His embarrassment, however, did not interfere with his appetite, and he evidently relished the meal prepared for him.

"Did you walk all the way from Liverpool?" asked Priscilla.

"Yes, ma'am, every step," he replied. "England doesn't seem to be a very friendly country," he went on. "If I'd been tramping in Canada, and a man drove past, he'd be sure to offer me a ride, but nobody did that over here."

THIS was the beginning of a very unhappy month for Priscilla. She did not know what to do with the last straw, as she and her husband invariably termed their visitor when they were alone.

He proved a most embarrassing guest, paying no attention to household rules. He despised the best bedroom, preferring to sleep out of doors, or perhaps in one of the farm buildings. He tramped all over the place, and would sometimes disappear for days together without giving any notice. He pretended to be anxious about correspondence from Canada, and when day after day they told him no letter had arrived, he did not conceal a suspicion that they might have intercepted it. Priscilla's dislike of him grew as time went on, but this dislike her husband did not share. The man interested him, and he related to his wife a conversation they had had, each reproaching the other for his method of life.

"Why," the tramp has said, "you're the most inane, helpless individual I ever saw. Here you are with a farm of your own in the very centre of the world's best markets, yet you aren't able to grow enough to keep yourself alive, let alone pay your debts. You allow farmers from the backwoods of Canada to beat you in market right at your doors. You ought to be ashamed of yourself, a young man like you."

Stansfield had laughed.

"I like that," he replied, "coming from a tramp. What on earth is more shiftless than an individual who begs his way from door to door? Good gracious; if I'm useless, you're worse, for you live on the provender earned by others. You don't seem to care for any useful work. Why haven't you a farm of your own in Canada, if you can beat us English farmers so easily?"

The man had shrugged his shoulders. "I couldn't content myself," he said, "settling down in any one place. I've simply got to be tramping the country. I've always done it, and I suppose always shall until I die, and then," he said, with a harsh laugh, "they'll find I've left everything to you, for I haven't any other relative that I know of, and I rather like you, though you're no good."

"WHY doesn't he dispossess us if he's going to," cried the exasperated wife. "He says nothing but insulting things, and yet he stops on and on. It's like the sword of Damocles hanging over us."

"I rather imagine," mused her husband, "that my offer to turn the place over to him without any legal compulsion has mollified his rancour, and after all, there's a certain shrewdness about the man. He sees quite plainly that instead of acquiring an asset, he is taking over a liability. I think he'll leave us before very long, and I confess that I shall miss him."

"Well, I shan't," replied Mrs. Stansfield.

ONE morning the last straw became in reality the last straw so far as Priscilla was concerned. The tramp had come down early, and the morning's mail being on the dining-room table, he had actually opened a letter which, though addressed to Edward Stansfield, he must have known was not intended for him.

He did not await breakfast, but went off no one knew where. Priscilla found the opened letter, and her indignation was tinged with dismay When she discovered written on it, in the tramp's uneducated handwriting:

"Opened in mistake, by the Last Straw."

The terrible man had learned in some manner their nickname for him, and perhaps he took this way of showing his resentment. Her husband laughed when he read the message, but his merriment ceased as lie read the curt note within the violated envelope.

"Sir," wrote the banker: "If the £43 7s 6d which you borrowed a month ago is not paid within three days, I shall reluctantly be compelled to take proceedings for its recovery."

"Oh, lord!" exclaimed Edward, "the sword of Damocles has fallen, and it isn't the Last Straw that has cut the thread."

Absent-mindedly he tore open the remaining letters, and from one of 'them fell out a document which he scrutinised with wide-open eyes.

It was a draft on the Canadian Bank of Commerce, No. 2 Lombard-street, London, E.C., for £6342 14s 10d.

"Great heavens!" he cried, turning to the covering letter.

Dear Mr. Stansfield," it said:— "I enclose current dividend from your Cobalt mine. You will see that it amounts to more than the thirty thousand dollars you anticipated, but your estimate was pretty nearly correct. I enclose as ordered a draft on the Bank of Commerce to your order for six thousand three hundred and forty-two pounds, fourteen shillings and tenpence. "Yours most sincerely,

Alexander S. M'Leod.

Stansfield glanced at the envelope. It bore a Canadian stamp and a Toronto postmark.

"By Jove!" he cried, "here's the Last Straw's long-expected communication, and I have opened it. So you see, it's six of one and half a dozen of the other. The Last Straw is evidently a rich man. I wonder if he'll help me with my banker?"

That night they waited dinner half an hour for the Last Straw, but the tramp did not enter until the meal was half finished.

"I'm as hungry as a hear," he said, sitting down in his usual place. "Say, I opened a letter of yours this morning, and what's more, I read it. Seems to me, my friend, you're up against it. That banker of yours isn't going to wait."

"I'm not up against it," said Stansfield.

"You've got the cash, then?"

"I haven't got the cash, but something just as satisfactory. One good turn deserves another, you know. You opened my letter from a bank, and I've opened your letter from a bank. You found that I was short about fifty pounds, and I find you're in funds to the extent of nearly six thousand five hundred pounds, so I'll either borrow the fifty pounds from you, or charge you fifty pounds for transferring this estate to you without any law suit, whichever you like," and Stansfield, from the end of the table, tossed over the letter from Canada.

The tramp looked at his draft, and muttered:

"Six thousand three hundred and forty-two pounds, fourteen shillings and tenpence. I say, Farmer," he cried, looking up, "how much is that in real money? Why the deuce don't you adopt decimal currency in this benighted country? What is this in real dollars?"

"In round numbers, about thirty-one thousand, seven hundred."

"And you've had this draft in your possession all day?"

"Since breakfast time; yes."

"And the bank manager a-threatening of you? Why didn't you take it and cash it in?"

"For the simple reason it wasn't mine."

"But it's made out in your name, don't you see? Well, Ned, you're a pretty honest fellow. You know, I couldn't have resisted the temptation to go to that bank manager, plank the draft down on his counter and say, 'Put this to my credit, and don't trouble me for trivialities like fifty pounds.'

"I'm going back to Canada to-morrow. This country's too damp to sleep out-doors. and besides, it's too civilised and cultivated. If a man lies down behind a hedge he's sure to be disturbed by a policeman. I'd as soon think of sleeping out in Yonge-street, Toronto. I've slept in the woods and in shanties and in camps for the last thirty years, always prospecting for minerals, and I've got some of the best mines there is. I'm a tramp in spirit, all right enough, yet I've an income of two hundred and fifty thousand dollars a year that's no particular use to me, for I've no family to inherit. Always was a bachelor; always will be.

"Now, you take this draft and put it in your bank, and tell that manager not to write to one of our family in the discourteous way he did that letter I opened."

"That's merely business form, cousin."

"Oh, I know all about business forms. You'll see his business form change to abjectness when this six thousand tumbles into your balance. Now, after I'm gone, you find out quietly what it will cost to buy the Stansfield-Morton estate as it was in my grandfather's time, and I'll send over the money to do it. I don't believe I'll ever come back to this slow old country, but there's no saying what crazy thing a man may do when he begins to get on in years. Anyhow, the representative of the elder branch of the family will be partner with a representative of the younger branch, and we'll see if that doesn't bring back the Stansfield luck you were speaking about."

___________________

6: My Brother Henry

J. M. Barrie

1860-1937

Humorous Readings and Recitations, 1889

AT FIRST SIGHT it may not, perhaps, seem quite the thing that I should be hilarious because I have at last had the courage to kill my brother Henry. For some time, however, Henry had been annoying me. Strictly speaking, I never had a brother Henry. It is just fifteen months since I began to acknowledge that there was such a person. It came about in this way:—

I HAVE a friend of the name of Fenton, who, like myself, lives in London. His house is so conveniently situated that I can go there and back in one day. About a year and a half ago I was at Fenton's, and he remarked that he had met a man the day before who knew my brother Henry. Not having a brother Henry, I felt that there must be a mistake somewhere; so I suggested that Fenton's friend had gone wrong in the name. My only brother, I pointed out with the suavity of manner that makes me a general favourite, was called Alexander.

"Yes," said Fenton, "but he spoke of Alexander also."

Even this did not convince me that I had a brother Henry, and I asked Fenton the name of his friend. Scudamour was the name, and the gentleman had met my brothers Alexander and Henry some six years previously in Paris.

When I heard this I probably frowned; for then I knew who my brother Henry was. Strange though it may seem, I was my own brother Henry. I distinctly remembered meeting this man Scudamour at Paris during the time that Alexander and I were there for a week's pleasure, and quarrelled every day.

I explained this to Fenton; and there, for the time being, the matter rested.

I had, however, by no means heard the last of Henry. Several times afterwards I heard from various persons that Scudamour wanted to meet me because he knew my brother Henry.

At last we did meet, at a Bohemian supper-party in Furnival's Inn; and, almost as soon as he saw me, Scudamour asked where Henry was now.

This was precisely what I feared. I am a man who always looks like a boy. There are few persons of my age in London who retain their boyish appearance as long as I have done; indeed, this is the curse of my life. Though I am approaching the age of thirty, I pass for twenty; and I have observed old gentlemen frown at my precocity when I said a good thing or helped myself to a second glass of wine. There was, therefore, nothing surprising in Scudamour's remark that, when he had the pleasure of meeting Henry, Henry must have been about the age that I had now reached.

All would have been well had I explained the real state of affairs to this annoying man; but, unfortunately for myself, I loathe entering upon explanations to anybody about anything. When I ring for my boots and my servant thinks I want a glass of water, I drink the water and remain indoors.

Much, then, did I dread a discussion with Scudamour, his surprise when he heard that I was Henry (my Christian name is Thomas), and his comments on my youthful appearance. Besides, I was at that moment carving a tough fowl; and, as I learned to carve from a handbook, I can make no progress unless I keep muttering to myself, "Cut from A to B, taking care to pass along the line C D, and sever the wing K from the body at the point F."

There was no likelihood of my meeting Scudamour again, so the easiest way to get rid of him seemed to be to humour him. I therefore told him that Henry was in India, married, and doing well.

"Remember me to Henry when you write to him," was Scudamour's last remark to me that evening.

A few weeks later someone tapped me on the shoulder in Oxford Street. It was Scudamour.

"Heard from Henry?" he asked.

I said I had heard by the last mail.

"Anything particular in the letter?"

I felt it would not do to say there was nothing particular in a letter which had come all the way from India, so I hinted that Henry had had trouble with his wife. By this I meant that her health was bad; but he took it up in another way, and I did not set him right.

"Ah, ah!" he said, shaking his head sagaciously, "I'm sorry to hear that. Poor Henry!"

"Poor old boy!" was all I could think of replying.

"How about the children?" Scudamour asked.

"Oh, the children," I said, with what I thought presence of mind, "are coming to England."

"To stay with Alexander?" he asked; for Alexander is a married man.

My answer was that Alexander was expecting them by the middle of next month; and eventually Scudamour went away muttering "Poor Henry!"

IN A month or so we met again. "No word of Henry's getting leave of absence?" asked Scudamour.

I replied shortly that Henry had gone to live in Bombay, and would not be home for years. He saw that I was brusque, so what does he do but draw me aside for a quiet explanation.

"I suppose," he said, "you are annoyed because I told Fenton that Henry's wife had run away from him. The fact is I did it for your good. You see I happened to make a remark to Fenton about your brother Henry, and he said that there was no such person. Of course I laughed at that, and pointed out not only that I had the pleasure of Henry's acquaintance, but that you and I had a talk about the old fellow every time we met. 'Well,' Fenton said, 'this is a most remarkable thing; for Tom,' meaning you, 'said to me in this very room, sitting in that very chair, that Alexander was his only brother.' I saw that Fenton resented your concealing the existence of your brother Henry from him, so I thought the most friendly thing I could do was to tell him that your reticence was doubtless due to the fact that Henry's private affairs were troubling you. Naturally, in the circumstances, you did not want to talk about Henry."

I shook Scudamour by the hand, telling him that he had acted judiciously; but if I could have stabbed him quietly at that moment I dare say I should have done it.

I did not see Scudamour again for a long time, for I took care to keep out of his way; but I heard first from him and then of him. One day he wrote to me saying that his nephew was going to Bombay, and would I be so good as to give the youth an introduction to my brother Henry? He also asked me to dine with him and his nephew. I declined the dinner, but I sent the nephew the required note of introduction to Henry.

The next I heard of Scudamour was from Fenton.

"By the way," said Fenton, "Scudamour is in Edinburgh at present."

I trembled, for Edinburgh is where Alexander lives.

"What has taken him there?" I asked, with assumed carelessness.

Fenton believed it was business; "but," he added, "Scudamour asked me to tell you that he meant to call on Alexander, as he was anxious to see Henry's children."

A few days afterwards I had a telegram from Alexander, who generally uses this means of communication when he corresponds with me.

"Do you know a man Scudamour? reply," was what Alexander said.

I thought of answering that we had met a man of that name when we were in Paris; but, on the whole, replied boldly: "Know no one of the name of Scudamour."

About two months ago I passed Scudamour in Regent Street, and he did not recognise me. This I could have borne if there had been no more of Henry; but I knew that Scudamour was now telling everybody about Henry's wife. By-and-by I got a letter from an old friend of Alexander's, asking me if there was any truth in a report that Alexander was going to Bombay.

Soon afterwards Alexander wrote to me to say that he had been told by several persons that I was going to Bombay. In short, I saw that the time had come for killing Henry. So I told Fenton that Henry had died of fever, deeply regretted; and asked him to be sure to tell Scudamour, who had always been interested in the deceased's welfare.

The other day Fenton told me that he had communicated the sad intelligence to Scudamour.

"How did he take it?" I asked.

"Well," Fenton said, reluctantly, "he told me that when he was up in Edinburgh he did not get on well with Alexander; but he expressed great curiosity as to Henry's children."

"Ah," I said, "the children were both drowned in the Forth; a sad affair— we can't bear to talk of it."

I am not likely to see much of Scudamour again, nor is Alexander. Scudamour now goes about saying that Henry was the only one of us he really liked.

___________________

7: The Masked Monster

Guy Gilpatric

1896-1950

The Saturday Evening Post 22 Nov 1947

This is the last "Glencannon" short story written by Guy Gilpatric. Glencannon appeared just once more, in an adventure with the legendary Tugboat Annie. The full-length novel was co-written by Gilpatric and Norman Reilly Raine, (1895-1971), creator of the long running "Tugboat Annie" series of stories.

FOR NEARLY six months the S.S. Inchcliffe Castle had been making regular runs from the Clyde to French North African ports with machinery and chemicals, and then back to Glasgow with baled Tunisian esparto grass which she picked up at Sfax. Early one recent evening, she lay in the Mullingraw Dock, awaiting the settlement of a strike to begin unloading the bales which filled her holds to capacity, and were stacked on her decks to such a height that she looked like a floating hay barn. Esparto is used in the manufacture of certain grades of paper. It smells musty and is infested with ticks.

Fed up with the smell and with being fed upon by the ticks, Mr. Colin Glencannon, the chief engineer, decided to seek a few hours respite ashore. His way from the waterfront to the bus stop on the Dumbarton Road led through West Mullingraw Street, a once-busy thoroughfare now dark, deserted, and flanked by the mouldering ruins of great factories, fire-blitzed during the war. Their blackened walls echoed his footfalls on the cobbles, while from within them came the eerie noises that come from all dead buildings in the night.

"Braugh!" he shuddered, quickening his pace. "It may be only the rats, the cats, or the bats— but will any o' them guarontee it in writing?" A pattering, shuffling sound came from somewhere behind him. Peering back into the gloom, he was horrified to behold a bulky, misshapen creature, somewhat like a cross between a goblin and a gorilla, capering and skipping about the roadway in a macabre rigadoon. As he watched it, spellbound, it thrashed out with its mighty arms as though engaged in combat with a ghostly adversary; it pranced backwards, leaped sidewise and straight up into the air, snorting through its nose. Despite its bulk, it moved with surprising speed and agility. Suddenly spying Mr. Glencannon, it emitted a hoarse bellow and came bounding toward him.

It would be inaccurate to say that Mr. Glencannon's blood turned to water, for in that awful instant it was closer akin to the sub-zero liquid that circulates in the tubes of refrigerators. He turned tail and fled as though jet propelled, the Thing loping soft-footed after him. "Ach, horrors!" he croaked. "Has some fiend from the pit come to claim me?" Far ahead a lone street lamp marked the corner of the Dumbarton Road. He sped toward this beacon even as on another fearful night Tam O'Shanter and his gray mare Meg raced the ghosts of Kirk Alloway. Mr. Glencannon, however, was not handicapped by a horse.

On and ever on he ran, his eldritch pursuer padding after him in the darkness. He felt its hot breath scorching his neck. Desperately, he measured the distance to the light. "Whurra, lad— ye'll never mak' it!" he told himself. "Any second noo, yere heart will conk oot and yere varicose veins go pop. Whoosh! Ye've no' even got wind enough to scream for help."

Wheezing, heaving, and utterly spent, he had almost resigned himself to being torn limb from limb when a voice at his shoulder said, "Easy, noo!— I've got a guid sweat, so let's slow doon."

Mr. Glencannon collapsed upon the cobbles, breathing stertorously. "Phew!" said the voice. "Ye gave me a nice little sprint, Muster. Monny thonks for the wurrk-oot!" He opened his eyes and forced himself to look up. He saw a loutish, ruddy face, like that of a par-boiled butcher boy.

"Duncan!" he gasped. "Is it— you?"

"—Unh? Aye!— Why, hel-lo, Uncle Colin! Weel, weel, weel!"

Mr. Glencannon rose to his feet, his fists clenched and his brows knotted in a scowl. "Ho, foosh and for shame, ye great, hulking lump!" he thundered. "Here it's the feerst time we've met since before the war, and the best ye can do is chivvy me through the streets lik' the Stog At Bay! What do ye mean by it— and why aren't ye at sea, procticing yere honorable profession?"

Duncan Glencannon pushed back his cap from his dripping forehead, ran his forefinger around the turtle neck of his sweater, and shrugged his massive shoulders within his three sweat shirts and leather wind breaker. "Why am I no' at sea? Hunh!" he grunted. "Why, simply because the Board o' Trade tuk awa' my certificate in 1938 and I canna get a Theerd Engineer's berth withoot it. Luckily, during the war, I sairved in the Commandos, where they gave me a special course in how to strongle Huns with either hond. Ever since I got de-mobbed, I've been putting my militurra training to use as a wrestler."

"A— wrestler?" Mr. Glencannon sniffed. "Weel, ye always were a muscular young booby, particularly in the head. But I still dinna ken what ye were doncing and proncing aboot in the street for, and what was yere idea in chasing me."

"I'm oot doing my daily stint o' road wurrk," Duncan explained. "I was only chasing you because I thocht ye were pacing me. Noturally, I didna reecognize ye."

"Hm'ph! Why don't ye do yere training in the daytime in Kelvingrove Park, lik' all the respectable bruisers?"

Duncan winked mysteriously. "Because I have to train in secret, where the public canna see me. It's all part o' the buildup." He expanded his chest and thumped it resoundingly. "Uncle Colin, I hoppen to be none other more nor less than the celebrated Mosked Munster!" He stepped back a pace and bowed.

"The Mosked Munster?" Mr. Glencannon repeated the name blankly. "Weel, aside from you being him and him being you, who the heel is he?"

"Swith, dinna ye read the papers? He's Scotland's Mighty Mysturra Mauler— the Rising Star o' the Wrestling Ring— the Roughest, Toughest Groppler since Hercules and Hackenschmidt, that's who!" Duncan pounded his chest again. "If ye dinna believe me, just drap aroond to the Caledonian Sports Arena tomorra nicht and see what I do to Earthquake Garfunkel, the Brooklyn Bulldozer, in the main bout!"

Mr. Glencannon shook his head. "I'm afraid I cudna dignify the brutal exhibition with my presence. However, just to humor ye, I'll stop in at yere dressing room afterward and collect the twenty quid ye've owed me since 1936."

"Unh? Twenty quid?— Hunh?" Duncan's face clouded. "Oh, noo, see here, Uncle Colin, dinna be unreasonable. I'm getting only ten poonds for the motch! But after I win it I'll be making big money, and— er— Wait!" he snapped his fingers, "I've got an idea!"

"Weel, dinna sprain yersel' on it," said Mr. Glencannon, sourly. "Ye can tell me aboot it while we're finding the nearest pub."

"Richt!" said Duncan, falling into step beside him. "Noo listen, Uncle Colin— I'm absolutely certain o' winning tomorra nicht. Why, I cud balance a piano on my head and lick Garfunkel at the same time— but just to mak' sure o' the bets, tomorra's match is fixed."

"Fixed?— Ye mean it's cruckid?"

"Aye! Muster Daninos, the promoter, has ordered Garfunkel to let me knock him oot any time after the second fall. Why, ye can clean up a foortune by betting on me, Uncle Colin!"

"Oh, ho! So yere idea is to settle yere debt to me by letting me in on this sure thing, eh? H'm!" said Mr. Glencannon, thoughtfully. "Weel, I am opposed to gombling in all its forms, but as lang as this is a pure swundle, with no taint o' gombling whatsoever, I feel I can tak' advontage o' it withoot in any way violating my prunciples. How shud I go aboot placing my bets, Duncan?"

"I'll give ye a list o' the bookies' runners and the pubs they hong oot in. But o' course, Uncle Colin, ye must be sure to use a fake name. Muster Daninos is letting a few o' his friends in on it, but if he ever suspected I'd tipped off an ootsider— weel, my career wud be ruined!"

"Tush, lad, never fear!" said Mr. Glencannon, with dignity. "D'ye think a spoortsmon o' my choracter and stonding wud care to reveal himsel' as the uncle o' a professional athlete?"

BY NINE O'CLOCK the following evening, Mr. Glencannon had completed a round of the pubs on Duncan's list and transacted his business with a succession of shifty-eyed characters named Joe. He had wagered twenty-eight pounds and, though not superstitious, he had been careful to drink a good luck toast to each and every one of them. He was about to drink a twenty-ninth for the sheer sport of it when he realized that it was time to start for the wrestling matches. "Pairdon me, Muss, but how do I get to the Caledonian Sports Arena?" he inquired of the barmaid.

"Go oot, turn to yere richt and follow the trom line to Dundas Street," she directed. He tipped her lavishly with a handful of potato chips and hobbled, clattering, toward the door. Fortunately, the brass spittoon which he was wearing on his left foot dropped off before he reached it. Gratefully inhaling the chill night air and exhaling it as superheated rocket fuel, he strode briskly down the street. A tram car met him face to face and came to a halt in the nick of time, its bell clanging stridently. After a spirited argument with the driver and passengers as to who had the right of way, he was persuaded by a policeman to proceed upon the sidewalk.

From within the brightly-lighted portals of the Caledonian Arena came dull thuds, savage howls, rasping grunts, bestial snarls, agonized screams and ghoulish shrieks, punctuated at frequent intervals by the roar of an infuriated mob. "Ah, losh!" he murmured, "If I didna ken what was octually going on inside, I'd be inclined to osk what time Muster Mulitoff was scheduled to speak. Give me a front row ringside seat doon front in the front row at the ringside," he bade the man in the ticket booth.

As he passed into the smoke-filled arena and was ushered to his seat, the announcer was introducing a revolting specimen of Pithecanthropus erectus called Yuzzuf Bey, the Turkish Torturer, and a furtive, bandy-legged Irishman described simply as the Liverpool Rat. The Moslem prostrated himself devoutly in what he thought was the direction of Mecca, but actually was that of Manchester, and then opened the bout in sportsmanlike fashion by attempting to twist the Rat's left arm off. The Rat broke the hold by kicking him in the Adam's apple. Yuzzuf gasped and gagged, the audience stamped and howled, and Mr. Glencannon dropped peacefully off to sleep.

He had slumbered through two boisterous bouts and outsnored an interlude of bagpipe music rendered in the interests of a local veterans' charity, when he was awakened by a piercing scream of bafflement and rage. The voice was disturbingly familiar. Opening his eyes, he saw that the screamer, whose head was sheathed in a tight-fitting black mask but who otherwise resembled a sixty-gallon petrol drum with carrot-colored hair sprouting out of it, was being swung through the air in dizzying circles by a swarthy giant who grasped him by the ankles. The faster he was whirled, the louder he screamed. As the centrifugal force increased, he streamed straight out, like a banner in the wind. At the twentieth revolution, the swarthy giant let go. The Masked Monster went soaring head first over the ropes.

There was a seismic shock, a shattering crash, followed by a moment of awe-filled silence; then the house lights blazed on, and through the clouds of tobacco smoke, the horrified audience saw at the ringside a tangled heap composed of the Masked Monster, Mr. Glencannon, and the fragments of his chair. Even as they watched, the Monster stirred, shook his head stupidly and glared up at the ring. Earthquake Garfunkel was strutting around it, shaking his clasped hands above his head. Duncan seized a chair leg, sprang bellowing through the ropes, and with a mighty clout laid his betrayer low. He was just starting for the referee when a policeman came pounding down the aisle, truncheon unlimbered for the fray. As he clambered up onto the canvas, the chair leg smote him resoundingly on the helmet and he went down stern first. Pandemonium not only reigned— it poured.

WHEN Mr. Glencannon regained consciousness, he was lying on a bench in a room that smelled of perspiration and liniment. As he remembered what had happened to him, financially as well as physically, red rage flooded his soul.

"Domn!" he thought. "Ye've been dooble-crossed!— Duped!— Diddled! Come, Glencannon— ye must gird up yere loins and dupe the diddling dooble-crosser— whoever he turns oot to be!" Warily, from under lowered lids, he watched a doctor putting a stethoscope away in a bag while a beady-eyed, black-mustached little man in a dinner jacket paced nervously back and forth, studying an insurance policy.

"No," the doctor was saying, "there are no bones broken, but of course there may be internal injuries.— Can't say until he sobers up.— Does your policy cover you in accidents of this sort, Mr. Daninos?"

The promoter pressed his hands to his sleek, pomaded head in a tragic gesture. "It doesn't, damn it!" he said, with a trace of a foreign accent. "My only hope is that he's so drunk I can talk him into signing a release form before he realizes he can sue me. Sh!— He's opening his eyes.— You'd better clear out, Doctor!— Oh, my dear Captain Ball!" he leaned over Mr. Glencannon, solicitously, "I cannot begin to tell you how much I regret this unfor...."

Mr. Glencannon sat up with a jerk, his brows beetling. "Eh? How does it hoppen that ye hoppen to know my name?" he demanded.

Mr. Daninos' ophidan eyes shifted slightly. "Oh, er, I believe some chap named Joe identified you.— Said he'd met you in a bar this evening.— By the way, my name's Daninos. As I was saying, Captain, I can't begin to tell you how much I regret...."

"Foosh! Ye'll regret it a million times more than merely much, I promise ye that!" Mr. Glencannon roared. "By the time I've dragged ye through the law courts and sued ye oot o' every last farthing ye've got on yere back, ye'll lairn it's a vurra costly business to encourage yere brutal thugs to go crippling decent people!"

"Oh, now, Captain— Please be reasonable! I know perfectly well you could sue me, but I believe we can arrange it much more satisfactorily. Come— my car is outside. Let's drop around to a nightclub, knock back a friendly drink or two and...."

"Stop! How dare ye?" Mr. Glencannon interrupted him. "Here I am, writhing in agony with serious inteernal injuries (OUCH!) and yet ye've got the brazen audocity to suggest that I go boozing with ye in some disreputable shebeen! Ye'll hear from my lawyers in due course, sir; meanwhile, pairmit me to bid ye a vurra guid evening." He bowed from the waist, belched from the esophagus, and lurched toward the door.

Mr. Daninos hastened to restrain him. "Oh, my dear fellow— at least let me take you wherever you are going in my car!"

"M'm, weel (OUCH!) I— I'm afraid I have no choice," the sufferer acquiesced. "At least, it will save me my toxicob fare."

As they drove through the outskirts of Glasgow and headed down the fog-shrouded riverside, the promoter unleashed his most persuasive eloquence in an effort to settle the case out of court. His offer of ten pounds was received in sullen silence. He went up to fifteen, with like result. Even his bid of twenty pounds and a season pass to the Caledonian Sports Arena was rejected with a hollow groan. Mr. Glencannon had made up his mind to extract at least double the amount he had been swindled out of if it took all night.

"Aye, domn it!" he thought. "Maybe I ocht to hold oot for a hundred quid— or even a hundred and fifty! The prublem is how to keep this dooble-crossing scoondrel with me till it's settled." Had he only known it, Mr. Daninos was pondering that problem, too, but in reverse.

They drove past the ruins of the Great Northern Marine Boiler Works to the Mullingraw Dock. With her deck cargo of bales, the S.S. Inchcliffe Castle loomed in the midnight mist like Noah's Ark.

"Weel, here we (OUCH!) are," announced Mr. Glencannon, clutching at his side. "I— I'm afraid I'll have to osk ye to help me up the gongplonk, though."

"Yes, yes, by all means! Please take my arm, Captain.— F'mff?" Mr. Daninos sniffed the air questioningly. "F'mff?— That musty smell! By George, I'd almost be willing to bet there's some Tunisian esparto grass around here, somewhere!"

"Weel, if yere eyes were as sharp as yere nose, ye'd see ye're stonding face to face with an entire shipload o' it. We've just brocht it here from Sf-ic! Sf-oc! Sfax."

"Sfax? Well, I'll be damned! "the other exclaimed. "Captain, this is really a most extraordinary coincidence! Believe it or not, I was born and brought up in Sfax."

"No!— Is that a Sfax?" said Mr. Glencannon, acidly.

Mr. Daninos suppressed a shudder.

They halted at the head of the gangway while he surveyed the bales piled on the fore and after-well decks. "My word, Captain, you do carry a lot of it! Are the holds full, too?"

"Aye, clear up to the hatch covers. And as soon as it's unloaded we'll go richt back to Sfax for more o' the fulthy stuff."

"Oh, you will?— H'm!" Mr. Daninos stroked his mustache with the tip of his yellow-gloved forefinger. For a long moment, he stood silent in thought; then, "Now, see here, my friend," he said impressively, "let's cut out all this petty haggling and sparring. I've just had an idea by which I think both of us can make money. I don't mean a few paltry pounds— I mean a real packet!— Of course, if you're still of a mind to sue me, I'll say good night and take my idea elsewhere. Well—" he paused, "— are you interested?"

Without a word, Mr. Glencannon led the way to his room, opened the door and switched on the light. "Sit doon and mak' yersel' comfortable, Muster Daninos."

"Thank you," said the other. Before shedding his topcoat, he took a bottle from the pocket and stood it on the wash stand. "I brought it along in case you felt faint," he explained, with a wink.

Mr. Glencannon filled a tumbler to the rim and held it up to the light. "Exockly what is this beeverage?" he inquired.

"That," said Mr. Daninos unctuously, "that, Captain, is Duggan's Dew of Kirkintilloch, distilled nine years before the First World War. It is the very finest whisky the black market affords."

"Odd!" Mr. Glencannon commented. "I always thocht whisky had bubbles in it. Ah, weel— live and lairn! But ye were aboot to talk aboot money," he reminded, brusquely.

"Ah, yes, quite." Mr. Daninos rubbed his hands. "I hope you'll forgive me if I begin with a few words about myself and my brother. Er— in addition to my sports promotions, I have interests in the nightclub, used car, and cash loan businesses here in Glasgow. My brother, Ahmed Daninos, is in business in Sfax. Like myself, he is a man of varied interests. Well, when the American Army withdrew from Tunisia, leaving only a few officers and men to dispose of their materiel, Ahmed managed to, er, acquire vast quantities of their cigarettes. He has sold some of them in the black markets of Tunis and Algiers— but at a profit of only a little over twelve hundred percent.— Tsk, tsk!— Ridiculous, what? Fortunately, the bulk of them still remain in his warehouse in Sfax, begging— yes, begging, Captain Ball— to be sold at a decent profit, here in the British black market. Until now, the problem has been how to get them here."

"—And yere idea, o' course, is to smoogle them in esparto bales.— A-weel," Mr. Glencannon took a mouthful of whisky and swashed it around with his tongue. "I can see no reason why it cudna be done. If yere brother cud deliver the bales on the wharf at Sfax withoot interference from the French authorities, I'd see that they got stowed aboard in a safe and suitable place."

"Could you? Ha! That's what I was hoping!— But what about the customs inspectors, here in Glasgow? Can they be fixed?"

"No— and ordunurrila, they're vurra nosey and obnuxious. But they never pay the slichtest attention to esparto cargoes, because esparto itsel' is duty free and they know there's nothing produced in all o' Tunisia that's wurrth smoogling inside the bales. But even if some ower-diligent snooper shud go checking the weight o' a few o' them, the cigarettes wud weigh almost exockly the same as the grass and he'd be none the wiser."

"Ah, precisely! About how many bales do you think you could handle, Captain Ball?"

"Weel, to be pairfickly safe, let's say ten."

"H'm! They measure about four feet square by seven feet long, don't they? Well, now, let's see." Mr. Daninos jotted some calculations in his notebook. "Allowing for a good safe thickness of grass outside, I figure we could pack something like five hundred cartons in each bale. At the current B. M. price for American cigarettes, ten bales would contain, er— wait!— No!— Yes, by Jove! Those ten bales would contain approximately twelve thousand, five hundred pounds' worth of merchandise! Whew!"

"Whew!" Mr. Glencannon echoed his gasp. "Whew, indeed! It's a stoggering sum! It's— it's colussal!" With trembling hands, he poured another drink. "Mr. Daninos, I'm afraid ye'll have to count me oot, after all. As ye dootless know, some vurra desperate choracters lurk alang the waterfront in Sfax. If wurrd o' the shipment were to leak oot and a gong o' the bondits decided to hi-jock it with Tummy gunns, my life wudna be wurrth a pin's forfeit!"

Mr. Daninos smiled a cunning smile. "Oh, don't worry, my dear fellow— I'd already thought of that! Naturally, I'd provide a bodyguard— to protect my own interests as well as your hide! I happen to have a number of, er, associates in my, er, organization who know how to handle such jobs.— That Masked Monster chap, for example."

"The— Mosked Munster?" Mr. Glencannon was unable to conceal his surprise.

"Yes. You see, he had the bad judgment to slug a policeman this evening, and there's hell's own fuss about it. I've got him safely hidden for the moment, but I know he'll welcome a bit of a sea trip until the hue and cry dies down.— Glencannon, his name is."

Mr. Glencannon frowned and chewed the overhand of his walrus mustache thoughtfully. "A-weel, it's an ugly name and I'd rather ye'd send Garfunkel, but suit yersel'. We'd have to sign him on as a member o' the crew, but that cud be arranged. Oh, and that reminds me— the mates, the bosun, and two or three others wud have to be bribed, but if ye slipped me a hundred quid, I'd guarontee to grease the lot. For obvious reasons, it wud be wiser for ye no' to come aboard here again."

"Yes, I quite see your point. But now, Captain, what about your own cut, eh?"

Mr. Glencannon looked down at his feet and shuffled them embarrassedly. "Losh, I— I hardly know what to say! After all, the idea is yere ain and the cigarettes are yere brother's. My sole responsibility will be getting them on the ship. How much do ye think wud be fair, Muster Daninos?"

"Well, what would you say to a hundred quid the day you leave Glasgow and two hundred more, which I'll deposit to your bank account, as soon as my brother wires me that the shipment has left Sfax?"

"I'd say it was more than sotisfocturra, sir. It's— it's vurra, vurra hondsome indeed!"

"Not at all, old boy— not at all!— Well, this little discussion has covered quite a bit of ground, hasn't it? If you'll be at my office at the Arena at ten in the morning, I'll have some of my key men there. We'll start working out the details and get off a preliminary air-mail letter to my brother." He rose, put on his coat and extended a limp and clammy hand. "Well, good night, partner!" he said, jovially. "I'll leave that bottle with you— in case you feel faint, y'know!— Ha, ha, ha!"

Mr. Glencannon accompanied him to the gangplank and stood watching the lights of the car until they disappeared. Then he took a sheaf of bookmaker's receipts from his pocket, tore them into fragments and sent them fluttering down into the Clyde. "Twenty-eight quid!" he muttered, "— Cast lik' bread upon the waters!"

THE MIDNIGHT moon soared slowly westward across the African sky. Faintly, from somewhere in the maze of streets in the Arab quarter, a drum thumped, cymbals clashed, and voices howled an interminable three-note cacophony. Nearer, in the tawdry French boites along the Rue de la Republique, pianos, saxophones, and trumpets gave off what was intended to be le jazz hot but actually was le schmaltz sour. The rest of the ancient, chalk-white city of Sfax sprawled sleeping in the moonlight.

Down in the port, however, the Quai Ain Halib was a scene of turmoil as the S.S. Inchcliffe Castle prepared to put to sea. Floodlights glared, steam hissed, winches chattered, and stevedores yelled in French, Arabic and Italian as the few remaining esparto bales were jerked up in the slings and swung inboard by the derricks. But all this activity was confined to the forward part of the ship. Her after-deck was already loaded and therefore dark and quiet.

Mr. Montgomery, the mate, made his way along it through the narrow passage between the bales and the bulwark and ascended to the poop. He found Mr. Glencannon leaning with his elbows on the rail, peering anxiously toward the shadowy entrance of the Rue Zous-el-Souk.

"See 'ere, you, it's getting late!" Mr. Montgomery whispered. "The pilot's aboard and we're pretty near set to shove off. I've left the two arfter rows empty for yer bales, but where the 'ell are they?"

Mr. Glencannon looked at his watch. "They'll be here at any minute," he said. "In fact— aye, look yon!" From the narrow, black mouth of the street directly opposite came a motorcar, then two covered trucks, and then another car. Mr. Glencannon's flashlight winked twice. There was an answering signal from the leading car. With military precision, the little convoy rolled alongside the ship and came to a stop directly below where the pair were waiting.

"Stond by to hondle the bales," Mr. Glencannon ordered. "I'm going doon to check them with Duncan."

By the time he reached the quay, Arabs in tarbooshes and dungarees had sprung from the trucks and were unloading bales along the edge of it. As he walked past the vehicles, he heard the faint, menacing click of automatic-carbine safeties being released.

"Ps-s-st! Duncan! Are ye keeping careful tally, lad?"

"Aye, aye, Uncle Colin— I'm counting on my fingers," came a hoarse whisper from the shadow of the Inchcliffe Castle's side. "That one was noomber nine and here comes the tenth and last."

Their task finished, the Arabs swung aboard the trucks and the convoy rolled away as swiftly and silently as it had come.

"Haw! All set, Muster Montgomery!" Mr. Glencannon waved his hand. "Get the sling doon here and we'll— er— er...."

A pair of customs guards emerged from the shadow of a pile of wine barrels and approached with measured tread. In the nocturnal manner of all French policemen, they were peering about them with elaborate suspicion and muttering melodramatically in fierce Corsican accents. Mustachios bristling, they halted squarely before Mr. Glencannon, tossed their capes back over their shoulders, and eyed him from head to foot.

"Pardon, Meestair," said one of them. "You speak English?"

"Aye, I speak it lik' a Rogue's Scholar." Mr. Glencannon fumbled in his pocket for his brass knuckles only to discover he had forgotten them. "What shall we talk aboot, Moonseer?"

"About these ballots d'esparto which 'ave just now arrive. It must that we examine them."

"Exomine them? Exomine them why?"

"We do not know for why. This is for why we must examine them." He motioned to his colleague, advanced to the nearest bale and commenced tearing handfuls of grass from it.

"Noo, wait a minute!" Mr. Glencannon protested. "If ye think I'm going to stond here and let ye scatter my brond new esparto gross all over the wharf, ye're sodly mistaken. I'll— "

"Ferme ta gueule!" snapped the other, snatching out his pistol and pressing it against Mr. Glencannon's abdomen.

"Duncan!" Mr. Glencannon's voice was the merest croak, but the response was instantaneous. Snarling like the behemoth of Holy Writ, his nephew leapt out of the shadows, clutched a guard's cross-belt with each hand, and bashed the hapless fellows together with an atom-splitting impact. Bang! Whop! Thud!— He repeated the process as rapidly as he could pull them apart and thump them together again. Except for its greater scope, his arm action resembled that of an accordion player. After the fourth collision, the victims hung senseless and drooping in his grasp, like a pair of loosely packed duffel bags.

"Haw! Guid lad!" Mr. Glencannon slapped his nephew's bulging shoulder as a farmer might slap that of a faithful ox. "Drog them into yon shed and then hurry aboard.— All richt, Muster Montgomery!" he called to the mate. "Lower the sling, send doon yere men, and we'll get this stuff loaded in three shakes o' a jiffick!"

NEXT MORNING, as the Inchcliffe Castle was snouting her way through the sapphire sea between Cape Bon and Pantelleria, Mr. Glencannon stood in the sunshine on deck, counting his blessings and his bales. Presently he was joined by Mr. Montgomery and Duncan.

"Welp, I got 'em aboard and stowed exackly like you wanted, didn't I?" smirked the mate, obviously pleased with himself. "Neither Captain Ball nor nobody else suspects even so much as a thing, neither.— So now, me bucko, 'ow about 'anding over the five quid you promised me for my cooperation?"

"I'll pay ye exockly when and where I said I wud, Muster Montgomery— in other wurrds, as soon as we put the bales ashore at Rotterdam."

"—Rotterdam?— Hunh?" Duncan Glencannon's beefy face gaped open incredulously. "Why, I— I thocht we were going back to Glasgow, Uncle Cohn!"

"Haw! And so, apparently, did our clever friend, Muster Dooble-Crossing Daninos," Mr. Glencannon chuckled. "At any rate, he didna trooble to osk!"

____________________

8: The Woman of the Wood

Abraham Merritt

1884-1943

Weird Tales August 1926

McKAY sat on the balcony of the little inn that squatted like a brown gnome among the pines on the eastern shore of the lake.

It was a small and lonely lake high up in the Vosges; and yet, lonely is not just the word with which to tag its spirit; rather was it aloof, withdrawn. The mountains came down on every side, making a great tree-lined bowl that seemed, when McKay first saw it, to be filled with the still wine of peace.

McKay had worn the wings in the world war with honor, flying first with the French and later with his own country's forces. And as a bird loves the trees, so did McKay love them. To him they were not merely trunks and roots, branches and leaves; to him they were personalities. He was acutely aware of differences in character even among the same species— that pine was benevolent and jolly; that one austere and monkish; there stood a swaggering bravo, and there dwelt a sage wrapped in green meditation; that birch was a wanton— the birch near her was virginal, still a dream.

The war had sapped him, nerve and brain and soul. Through all the years that had passed since then the wound had kept open. But now, as he slid his car down the vast green bowl, he felt its spirit reach out to him; reach out to him and caress and quiet him, promising him healing. He seemed to drift like a falling leaf through the clustered woods; to be cradled by gentle hands of the trees.

He had stopped at the little gnome of an inn, and there he had lingered, day after day, week after week.

The trees had nursed him; soft whisperings of leaves, slow chant of the needled pines, had first deadened, then driven from him the re-echoing clamor of the war and its sorrow. The open wound of his spirit had closed under their green healing; had closed and become scar; and even the scar had been covered and buried, as the scars on Earth's breast are covered and buried beneath the falling leaves of Autumn. The trees had laid green healing hands on his eyes, banishing the pictures of war. He had sucked strength from the green breasts of the hills.

Yet as strength flowed back to him and mind and spirit healed, McKay had grown steadily aware that the place was troubled; that its tranquillity was not perfect; that there was ferment of fear within it.

It was as though the trees had waited until he himself had become whole before they made their own unrest known to him. Now they were trying to tell him something; there was a shrillness as of apprehension, of anger, in the whispering of the leaves, the needled chanting of the pines.

And it was this that had kept McKay at the inn— a definite consciousness of appeal, consciousness of something wrong— something wrong that he was being asked to right. He strained his ears to catch words in the rustling branches, words that trembled on the brink of his human understanding.

Never did they cross that brink.

Gradually he had orientated himself, had focused himself, so he believed, to the point of the valley's unease.

On all the shores of the lake there were but two dwellings. One was the inn, and around the inn the trees clustered protectively, confiding; friendly. It was as though they had not only accepted it, but had made it part of themselves.

Not so was it of the other habitation. Once it had been the hunting lodge of long dead lords; now it was half ruined, forlorn. It stood across the lake almost exactly opposite the inn and back upon the slope a half mile from the shore. Once there had been fat fields around it and a fair orchard.

The forest had marched down upon them. Here and there in the fields, scattered pines and poplars stood like soldiers guarding some outpost; scouting parties of saplings lurked among the gaunt and broken fruit trees. But the forest had not had its way unchecked; ragged stumps showed where those who dwelt in the old lodge had cut down the invaders, blackened patches of the woodland showed where they had fired the woods.

Here was the conflict he had sensed. Here the green folk of the forest were both menaced and menacing; at war. The lodge was a fortress beleaguered by the woods, a fortress whose garrison sallied forth with axe and torch to take their toll of the besiegers.

Yet McKay sensed the inexorable pressing-in of the forest; he saw it as a green army ever filling the gaps in its enclosing ranks, shooting its seeds into the cleared places, sending its roots out to sap them; and armed always with a crushing patience, a patience drawn from the stone breasts of the eternal hills.

He had the impression of constant regard of watchfulness, as though night and day the forest kept its myriads of eyes upon the lodge; inexorably, not to be swerved from its purpose. He had spoken of this impression to the inn keeper and his wife, and they had looked at him oddly.

"Old Polleau does not love the trees, no," the old man had said. "No, nor do his two sons. They do not love the trees— and very certainly the trees do not love them."

Between the lodge and the shore, marching down to the verge of the lake was a singularly beautiful little coppice of silver birches and firs. The coppice stretched for perhaps a quarter of a mile, was not more than a hundred feet or two in depth, and it was not alone the beauty of its trees but their curious grouping that aroused McKay's interest so vividly. At each end of the coppice were a dozen or more of the glistening needled firs, not clustered but spread out as though in open marching order; at widely spaced intervals along its other two sides paced single firs. The birches, slender and delicate, grew within the guard of these sturdier trees, yet not so thickly as to crowd each other.

To McKay the silver birches were for all the world like some gay caravan of lovely demoiselles under the protection of debonair knights. With that odd other sense of his he saw the birches as delectable damsels, merry and laughing— the pines as lovers, troubadours in their green needled mail. And when the winds blew and the crests of the trees bent under them, it was as though dainty demoiselles picked up fluttering, leafy skirts, bent leafy hoods and danced while the knights of the firs drew closer round them, locked arms with theirs and danced with them to the roaring horns of the winds. At such times he almost heard sweet laughter from the birches, shoutings from the firs.

Of all the trees in that place McKay loved best this little wood; had rowed across and rested in its shade, had dreamed there and, dreaming, had heard again elfin echoes of the sweet laughter; eyes closed, had heard mysterious whisperings and the sound of dancing feet light as falling leaves; had taken dream draught of that gaiety which was the soul of the little wood.

And two days ago he had seen Polleau and his two sons. McKay had been dreaming in the coppice all that afternoon. As dusk began to fall he had reluctantly arisen and begun the row back to the inn. When he had been a few hundred feet from shore three men had come out from the trees and had stood watching him— three grim, powerful men taller than the average French peasant.

He had called a friendly greeting to them, but they had not answered it; stood there, scowling. Then as he bent again to his oars, one of the sons had raised a hatchet and had driven it savagely into the trunk of a slim birch beside him. He thought he heard a thin wailing cry from the stricken tree, a sigh from all the little wood.

McKay had felt as though the keen edge had bitten into his own flesh.

"Stop that!" he had cried, "Stop it, damn you!"

For answer the son had struck again— and never had McKay seen hate etched so deep as on his face as he struck. Cursing, a killing rage in heart, had swung the boat around, raced back to shore. He had heard the hatchet strike again and again and, close now to shore, had heard a crackling and over it once more the thin, high wailing. He had turned to look.

The birch was tottering, was falling. But as it had fallen he had seen a curious thing. Close beside it grew one of the firs, and, as the smaller tree crashed over, it dropped upon the fir like a fainting maid in the arms of a lover. And as it lay and trembled there, one of the great branches of the fir slipped from under it, whipped out and smote the hatchet wielder a crushing blow upon the head, sending him to earth.

It had been, of course, only the chance blow of a bough, bent by pressure of the fallen tree and then released as that tree slipped down. But there had been such suggestion of conscious action in the branch's recoil, so much of bitter anger in it, so much, in truth, had it been like the vengeful blow of a man that McKay had felt an eerie prickling of his scalp, his heart had missed its beat.

For a moment Polleau and the standing son had stared at the sturdy fir with the silvery birch lying on its green breast and folded in, shielded by, its needled boughs as though— again the swift impression came to McKay —as though it were a wounded maid stretched on breast, in arms, of knightly lover. For a long moment father and son had stared.

Then, still wordless but with that same bitter hatred on both their faces, they had stopped and picked up the other and with his arms around the neck of each had borne him limply away.

McKay, sitting on the balcony of the inn that morning, went over and over that scene; realized more and more clearly the human aspect of fallen birch and clasping fir, and the conscious deliberateness of the fir's blow. And during the two days that had elapsed since then, he had felt the unease of the trees increase, their whispering appeal became more urgent.

What were they trying to tell him? What did they want him to do?

Troubled, he stared across the lake, trying to pierce the mists that hung over it and hid the opposite shore. And suddenly it seemed that he heard the coppice calling him, felt it pull the point of his attention toward it irresistibly, as the lodestone swings and holds the compass needle.

The coppice called him, bade him come to it.

Instantly McKay obeyed the command; he arose and walked down to the boat landing; he stepped into his skiff and began to row across the lake. As his oars touched the water his trouble fell from him. In its place flowed peace and a curious exaltation.

The mist was thick upon the lake. There was no breath of wind, yet the mist billowed and drifted, shook and curtained under the touch of unfelt airy hands.

They were alive— the mists; they formed themselves into fantastic palaces past whose opalescent facades he flew; they built themselves into hills and valleys and circled plains whose floors were rippling silk. Tiny rainbows gleamed out among them, and upon the water prismatic patches shone and spread like spilled wine of opals. He had the illusion of vast distances— the hills of mist were real mountains, the valleys between them were not illusory. He was a colossus cleaving through some elfin world. A trout broke, and it was like leviathan leaping from the fathomless deep. Around the arc of its body rainbows interlaced and then dissolved into rain of softly gleaming gems— diamonds in dance with sapphires, flame hearted rubies and pearls with shimmering souls of rose. The fish vanished, diving cleanly without sound; the jeweled bows vanished with it; a tiny irised whirlpool swirled for an instant where trout and flashing arcs had been.

Nowhere was there sound. He let his oars drop and leaned forward, drifting. In the silence, before him and around him, he felt opening the gateways of an unknown world.

And suddenly he heard the sound of voices, many voices; faint at first and murmurous; louder they became, swiftly; women's voices sweet and lilting and mingled with them the deeper tones of men. Voices that lifted and fell in a wild, gay chanting through whose joyousness ran undertones both of sorrow and of rage— as though faery weavers threaded through silk spun of sunbeams sombre strands dipped in the black of graves and crimson strands stained in the red of wrathful sunsets.

He drifted on, scarce daring to breathe lest even that faint sound break the elfin song. Closer it rang and clearer; and now he became aware that the speed of his boat was increasing, that it was no longer drifting; that it was as though the little waves on each side were pushing him ahead with soft and noiseless palms. His boat grounded and as it rustled along over the smooth pebbles of the beach the song ceased.

McKay half arose and peered before him. The mists were thicker here but he could see the outlines of the coppice. It was like looking at it through many curtains of fine gauze; its trees seemed shifting, ethereal, unreal. And moving among the trees were figures that threaded the boles and flitted in rhythmic measures like the shadows of leafy boughs swaying to some cadenced wind.

He stepped ashore and made his way slowly toward them. The mists dropped behind him, shutting off all sight of shore.

The rhythmic flittings ceased; there was now no movement as there was no sound among the trees— yet he felt the little woods abrim with watching life. McKay tried to speak; there was a spell of silence on his mouth.

"You called me. I have come to listen to you— to help you if I can."

The words formed within his mind, but utter them he could not. Over and over he tried, desperately; the words seemed to die before his lips could give them life.

A pillar of mist whirled forward and halted, eddying half an arm length away. And suddenly out of it peered a woman's face, eyes level with his own. A woman's face— yes; but McKay, staring into those strange eyes probing his, knew that face though it seemed it was that of no woman of human breed. They were without pupils, the irises deer-like and of the soft green of deep forest dells; within them sparkled tiny star points of light like motes in a moon beam. The eyes were wide and set far apart beneath a broad, low brow over which was piled braid upon braid of hair of palest gold, braids that seemed spun of shining ashes of gold. Her nose was small and straight, her mouth scarlet and exquisite. The face was oval, tapering to a delicately pointed chin.

Beautiful was that face, but its beauty was an alien one; elfin. For long moments the strange eyes thrust their gaze deep into his. Then out of the mist two slender white arms stole, the hands long, fingers tapering. The tapering fingers touched his ears.

"He shall hear," whispered the red lips.

Immediately from all about him a cry arose; in it was the whispering and rustling of the leaves beneath the breath of the winds, the shrilling of the harp strings of the boughs, the laughter of hidden brooks, the shoutings of waters flinging themselves down to deep and rocky pools—the voices of the woods made articulate.

"He shall hear!" they cried.

The long white fingers rested on his lips, and their touch was cool as bark of birch on cheek after some long upward climb through forest; cool and subtly sweet.

"He shall speak," whispered the scarlet lips.

"He shall speak!" answered the wood voices again, as though in litany.

"He shall see," whispered the woman and the cool fingers touched his eyes.

"He shall see!" echoed the wood voices.

The mists that had hidden the coppice from McKay wavered, thinned and were gone. In their place was a limpid, translucent, palely green ether, faintly luminous— as though he stood within some clear wan emerald. His feet pressed a golden moss spangled with tiny starry bluets. Fully revealed before him was the woman of the strange eyes and the face of elfin beauty. He dwelt for a moment upon the slender shoulders, the firm small tip-tilted breasts, the willow litheness of her body. From neck to knees a smock covered her, sheer and silken and delicate as though spun of cobwebs; through it her body gleamed as though fire of the young Spring moon ran in her veins.

Beyond her, upon the golden moss were other women like her, many of them; they stared at him with the same wide set green eyes in which danced the clouds of sparkling moonbeam motes; like her they were crowned with glistening, pallidly golden hair; like hers too were their oval faces with the pointed chins and perilous elfin beauty. Only where she stared at him gravely, measuring him, weighing him— there were those of these her sisters whose eyes were mocking; and those whose eyes called to him with a weirdly tingling allure, their mouths athirst; those whose eyes looked upon him with curiosity alone and those whose great eyes pleaded with him, prayed to him.

Within that pellucid, greenly luminous air McKay was abruptly aware that the trees of the coppice still had a place. Only now they were spectral indeed; they were like white shadows cast athwart a glaucous screen; trunk and bough, twig and leaf they arose around him and they were as though etched in air by phantom craftsmen— thin, unsubstantial; they were ghost trees rooted in another space.

Suddenly he was aware that there were men among the women; men whose eyes were set wide apart as were theirs, as strange and pupilless as were theirs but with irises of brown and blue; men with pointed chins and oval faces, broad shouldered and clad in kirtles of darkest green; swarthy-skinned men muscular and strong, with that same lithe grace of the women—and like them of a beauty alien and elfin.

McKay heard a little wailing cry. He turned. Close beside him lay a girl clasped in the arms of one of the swarthy, green clad men. She lay upon his breast. His eyes were filled with a black flame of wrath, and hers were misted, anguished. For an instant McKay had a glimpse of the birch old Polleau's son had sent crashing down into the boughs of the fir. He saw birch and fir as immaterial outlines around the man and girl. For an instant girl and man and birch and fir seemed one and the same. The scarlet lipped woman touched his shoulder, and the confusion cleared.

"She withers," sighed the woman, and in her voice McKay heard a faint rustling as of mournful leaves. "Now is it not pitiful that she withers— our sister who was so young, so slender and so lovely?"

McKay looked again at the girl. The white skin seemed shrunken; the moon radiance that gleamed through the bodies of the others in hers was dim and pallid; her slim arms hung listlessly; her body drooped. The mouth too was wan and parched, the long and misted green eyes dull. The palely golden hair lusterless, and dry. He looked on slow death— a withering death.

"May the arm that struck her down wither!" the green clad man who held her shouted, and in his voice McKay heard a savage strumming as of winter winds through bleak boughs: "May his heart wither and the sun blast him! May the rain and the waters deny him and the winds scourge him!"

"I thirst," whispered the girl.

There was a stirring among the watching women. One came forward holding a chalice that was like thin leaves turned to green crystal. She paused beside the trunk of one of the spectral trees, reached up and drew down to her a branch. A slim girl with half-frightened, half-resentful eyes glided to her side and threw her arms around the ghostly bole. The woman with the chalice bent the branch and cut it deep with what seemed an arrow-shaped flake of jade. From the wound a faintly opalescent liquid slowly filled the cup. When it was filled the woman beside McKay stepped forward and pressed her own long hands around the bleeding branch. She stepped away and McKay saw that the stream had ceased to flow. She touched the trembling girl and unclasped her arms.

"It is healed," said the woman gently. "And it was your turn little sister. The wound is healed. Soon, you will have forgotten."

The woman with the chalice knelt and set it to the wan, dry lips of her who was— withering. She drank of it, thirstily, to the last drop. The misty eyes cleared, they sparkled; the lips that had been so parched and pale grew red, the white body gleamed as though the waning light had been fed with new.

"Sing, sisters," she cried, and shrilly. "Dance for me, sisters!"

Again burst out that chant McKay had heard as he had floated through the mists upon the lake. Now, as then, despite his opened ears, he could distinguish no words, but clearly he understood its mingled themes— the joy of Spring's awakening, rebirth, with the green life streaming singing up through every bough, swelling the buds, burgeoning with tender leaves the branches; the dance of the trees in the scented winds of Spring; the drums of the jubilant rain on leafy hoods; passion of Summer sun pouring its golden flood down upon the trees; the moon passing with stately step and slow and green hands stretching up to her and drawing from her breast milk of silver fire; riot of wild gay winds with their mad pipings and strummings;— soft interlacing of boughs, the kiss of amorous leaves— all these and more, much more that McKay could not understand since it dealt with hidden, secret things for which man has no images, were in that chanting.

And all these and more were in the measures, the rhythms of the dancing of those strange, green eyed women and brown skinned men; something incredibly ancient yet young as the speeding moment, something of a world before and beyond man.

McKay listened, McKay watched, lost in wonder; his own world more than half forgotten; his mind meshed in web of green sorcery.

The woman beside him touched his arm. She pointed to the girl.

"Yet she withers," she said. "And not all our life, if we poured it through her lips, could save her."

He looked; he saw that the red was draining slowly from the girl's lips, the luminous life tides waning; the eyes that had been so bright were misting and growing dull once more, suddenly a great pity and a great rage shook him. He knelt beside her, took her hands in his.

"Take them away! Take away your hands! They burn me!" she moaned.

"He tries to help you," whispered the green clad man, gently. But he reached over and drew McKay's hands away.

"Not so can you help her," said the woman.

"What can I do?" McKay arose, looked helplessly from one to the other. "What can I do to help?"

The chanting died, the dance stopped. A silence fell and he felt upon him the eyes of all. They were tense— waiting. The woman took his hands. Their touch was cool and sent a strange sweetness sweeping through his veins.

"There are three men yonder," she said. "They hate us. Soon we shall be as she is there— withering. They have sworn it, and as they have sworn so will they do. Unless—"

She paused; and McKay felt the stirrings of a curious unease. The moonbeam-dancing motes in her eyes had changed to tiny sparklings of red. In a way, deep down, they terrified him—those red sparklings.

"Three men?"— in his clouded mind was the memory of Polleau and his two strong sons. "Three men," he repeated, stupidly— "But what are three men to you who are so many? What could three men do against those stalwart gallants of yours?"

"No," she shook her head. "No— there is nothing our— men— can do; nothing that we can do. Once, night and day, we were gay. Now we fear— night and day. They mean to destroy us. Our kin have warned us. And our kin cannot help us. Those three are masters of blade and flame. Against blade and flame we are helpless."

"Blade and flame!" echoed the listeners. "Against blade and flame we are helpless."

"Surely will they destroy us," murmured the woman. "We shall wither all of us. Like her there, or burn— unless—"

Suddenly she threw white arms around McKay's neck. She pressed her lithe body close to him. Her scarlet mouth sought and found his lips and clung to them. Through all McKay's body ran swift, sweet flames, green fire of desire. His own arms went round her, crushed her to him.

"You shall not die!" he cried. "No— by God, you shall not!"

She drew back her head, looked deep into his eyes.

"They have sworn to destroy us," she said, "and soon. With blade and flame they will destroy us— these three— unless—"

"Unless?" he asked, fiercely.

"Unless you— slay them first!" she answered.

A cold shock ran through McKay, chilling the green sweet fires of his desire. He dropped his arm from around the woman; thrust her from him. For an instant she trembled before him.

"Slay!" he heard her whisper— and she was gone. The spectral trees wavered; their outlines thickened out of immateriality into substance. The green translucence darkened. He had a swift vertiginous moment as though he swung between two worlds. He closed his eyes. The vertigo passed and he opened them, looked around him.

McKay stood on the lakeward skirts of the little coppice. There were no shadows flitting, no sign of the white women and the swarthy, green clad men. His feet were on green moss; gone was the soft golden carpet with its blue starlets. Birches and firs clustered solidly before him. At his left was a sturdy fir in whose needled arms a broken birch tree lay withering. It was the birch that Polleau's men had so wantonly slashed down. For an instant he saw within the fir and birch the immaterial outlines of the green clad man and the slim girl who withered. For that instant birch and fir and girl and man seemed one and the same. He stepped back, and his hands touched the smooth, cool bark of another birch that rose close at his right.

Upon his hands the touch of that bark was like— was like?— yes, curiously was it like the touch of the long slim hands of the woman of the scarlet lips. But it gave him none of that alien rapture, that pulse of green life her touch had brought. Yet, now as then, the touch steadied him. The outlines of girl and man were gone.

He looked upon nothing but a sturdy fir with a withering birch fallen into its branches.

McKay stood there, staring, wondering, like a man who has but half awakened from dream. And suddenly a little wind stirred the leaves of the rounded birch beside him. The leaves murmured, sighed. The wind grew stronger and the leaves whispered.

"Slay!" he heard them whisper— and again: "Slay! Help us! Slay!"

And the whisper was the voice of the woman of the scarlet lips!

Rage, swift and unreasoning, sprang up in McKay. He began to run up through the coppice, up to where he knew was the old lodge in which dwelt Polleau and his sons. And as he ran the wind blew stronger, and louder and louder grew the whisperings of the trees.

"Slay!" they whispered. "Slay them! Save us! Slay!"

"I will slay! I will save you!" McKay, panting, hammer pulse beating in his ears, rushing through the woods heard himself answering that ever louder, ever more insistent command. And in his mind was but one desire—to clutch the throats of Polleau and his sons, to crack their necks; to stand by them then and watch them wither; wither like that slim girl in the arms of the green clad man.

So crying, he came to the edge of the coppice and burst from it out into a flood of sunshine. For a hundred feet he ran, and then he was aware that the whispering command was stilled; that he heard no more that maddening rustling of wrathful leaves. A spell seemed to have been loosed from him; it was as though he had broken through some web of sorcery. McKay stopped, dropped upon the ground, buried his face in the grasses.

He lay there, marshaling his thoughts into some order of sanity. What had he been about to do? To rush berserk upon those three who lived in the old lodge and— kill them! And for what? Because that elfin, scarlet lipped woman whose kisses he still could feel upon his mouth had bade him! Because the whispering trees of the little wood had maddened him with that same command!

And for this he had been about to kill three men!

What were that woman and her sisters and the green clad swarthy gallants of theirs? Illusions of some waking dream— phantoms born of the hypnosis of the swirling mists through which he had rowed and floated across the lake? Such things were not uncommon. McKay knew of those who by watching the shifting clouds could create and dwell for a time with wide open eyes within some similar land of fantasy; knew others who needed but to stare at smoothly falling water to set themselves within a world of waking dream; there were those who could summon dreams by gazing into a ball of crystal, others found their phantoms in saucers of shining ebon ink.

Might not the moving mists have laid those same hypnotic fingers upon his own mind— and his love for the trees the sense of appeal that he had felt so long and his memory of the wanton slaughter of the slim birch have all combined to paint upon his drugged consciousness the phantasms he had beheld?

Then in the flood of sunshine the spell had melted, his consciousness leaped awake?

McKay arose to his feet, shakily enough. He looked back at the coppice. There was no wind now, the leaves were silent, motionless. Again he saw it as the caravan of demoiselles with their marching knights and troubadours. But no longer was it gay. The words of the scarlet lipped woman came back to him— that gaiety had fled and fear had taken its place. Dream phantom or— dryad, whatever she was, half of that at least was truth.

He turned, a plan forming in his mind. Reason with himself as he might, something deep within him stubbornly asserted the reality of his experience. At any rate, he told himself, the little wood was far too beautiful to be despoiled. He would put aside the experience as dream— but he would save the little wood for the essence of beauty that it held in its green cup.

The old lodge was about a quarter of a mile away. A path led up to it through the ragged fields. McKay walked up the path, climbed rickety steps and paused, listening. He heard voices and knocked. The door was flung open and old Polleau stood there, peering at him through half shut, suspicious eyes. One of the sons stood close behind him. They stared at McKay with grim, hostile faces.

He thought he heard a faint, far off despairing whisper from the distant wood. And it was as though the pair in the doorway heard it too, for their gaze shifted from him to the coppice, and he saw hatred nicker swiftly across their grim faces; their gaze swept back to him.

"What do you want?" demanded Polleau, curtly.

"I am a neighbor of yours, stopping at the inn—" began McKay, courteously.

"I know who you are," Polleau interrupted brusquely, "But what is it that you want?"

"I find the air of this place good for me," McKay stifled a rising anger. "I am thinking of staying for a year or more until my health is fully recovered. I would like to buy some of your land and build me a lodge upon it."

"Yes, M'sieu?" there was acid politeness now in the powerful old man's voice. "But is it permitted to ask why you do not remain at the inn? Its fare is excellent and you are well liked there."

"I have desire to be alone," replied McKay. "I do not like people too close to me. I would have my own land, and sleep under my own roof."

"But why come to me?" asked Polleau. "There are many places upon the far side of the lake that you could secure. It is happy there, and this side is not happy, M'sieu. But tell me, what part of my land is it that you desire?"

"That little wood yonder," answered McKay, and pointed to the coppice.

"Ah! I thought so!" whispered Polleau, and between him and his sons passed a look of bitter understanding. He looked at McKay, somberly.

"That wood is not for sale, M'sieu," he said at last.

"I can afford to pay well for what I want," said McKay. "Name your price."

"It is not for sale," repeated Polleau, stolidly, "at any price."

"Oh, come," laughed McKay, although his heart sank at the finality in that answer. "You have many acres and what is it but a few trees? I can afford to gratify my fancies. I will give you all the worth of your other land for it."

"You have asked what that place that you so desire is, and you have answered that it is but a few trees," said Polleau, slowly, and the tall son behind him laughed, abruptly, maliciously. "But it is more than that, M'sieu— Oh, much more than that. And you know it, else why would you pay such price? Yes, you know it— since you know also that we are ready to destroy it, and you would save it. And who told you all that, M'sieu?" he snarled.

There was such malignance in the face thrust suddenly close to McKay's, teeth bared by uplifted lip, that involuntarily he recoiled.

"But a few trees!" snarled old Polleau. "Then who told him what we mean to do— eh, Pierre?"

Again the son laughed. And at that laughter McKay felt within him resurgence of his own blind hatred as he had fled through the whispering wood. He mastered himself, turned away, there was nothing he could do— now. Polleau halted him.

"M'sieu," he said, "Wait. Enter. There is something I would tell you; something too I would show you. Something, perhaps, that I would ask you."

He stood aside, bowing with a rough courtesy. McKay walked through the doorway. Polleau with his son followed him. He entered a large, dim room whose ceiling was spanned with smoke blackened beams. From these beams hung onion strings and herbs and smoke cured meats. On one side was a wide fireplace. Huddled beside it sat Polleau's other son. He glanced up as they entered and McKay saw that a bandage covered one side of his head, hiding his left eye. McKay recognized him as the one who had cut down the slim birch. The blow of the fir, he reflected with a certain satisfaction, had been no futile one.

Old Polleau strode over to that son.

"Look, M'sieu," he said and lifted the bandage.

McKay with a faint tremor of horror, saw a gaping blackened socket, red rimmed and eyeless.

"Good God, Polleau!" he cried. "But this man needs medical attention. I know something of wounds. Let me go across the lake and bring back my kit. I will attend him."

Old Polleau shook his head, although his grim face for the first time softened. He drew the bandages back in place.

"It heals," he said. "We have some skill in such things. You saw what did it. You watched from your boat as the cursed tree struck him. The eye was crushed and lay upon his cheek. I cut it away. Now he heals. We do not need your aid, M'sieu."

"Yet he ought not have cut the birch," muttered McKay, more to himself than to be heard.

"Why not?" asked old Polleau, fiercely, "Since it hated him."

McKay stared at him. What did this old peasant know? The words strengthened that deep stubborn conviction that what he had seen and heard in the coppice had been actuality— no dream. And still more did Polleau's next words strengthen that conviction.

"M'sieu," he said, "you come here as ambassador— of a sort. The wood has spoken to you. Well, as ambassador I shall speak to you. Four centuries my people have lived in this place. A century we have owned this land. M'sieu, in all those years there has been no moment that the trees have not hated us— nor we the trees.

"For all those hundred years there have been hatred and battle between us and the forest. My father, M'sieu, was crushed by a tree; my elder brother crippled by another. My father's father, woodsman that he was, was lost in the forest— he came back to us with mind gone, raving of wood women who had bewitched and mocked him, luring him into swamp and fen and tangled thicket, tormenting him. In every generation the trees have taken their toll of us— women as well as men— maiming or killing us."

"Accidents," interrupted McKay. "This is childish, Polleau. You cannot blame the trees."

"In your heart you do not believe so," said Polleau. "Listen, the feud is an ancient one. Centuries ago it began when we were serfs, slaves of the nobles. To cook, to keep us warm in winter, they let us pick up the fagots, the dead branches and twigs that dropped from the trees. But if we cut down a tree to keep us warm, to keep our women and our children warm, yes, if we but tore down a branch— they hanged us, or they threw us into dungeons to rot, or whipped us till our backs were red lattices.

"They had their broad fields, the nobles— but we must raise our food in the patches where the trees disdained to grow. And if they did thrust themselves into our poor patches, then, M'sieu, we must let them have their way— or be flogged, or be thrown into the dungeons or be hanged.

"They pressed us in— the trees," the old man's voice grew sharp with fanatic hatred. "They stole our fields and they took the food from the mouths of our children; they dropped their fagots to us like dole to beggars; they tempted us to warmth when the cold struck our bones— and they bore us as fruit a-swing at the end of the foresters' ropes if we yielded to their tempting.

"Yes, M'sieu— we died of cold that they might live! Our children died of hunger that their young might find root space! They despised us— the trees! We died that they might live— and we were men!

"Then, M'sieu came the Revolution and the freedom. Ah, M'sieu, then we took our toll! Great logs roaring in the winter cold— no more huddling over the alms of fagots. Fields where the trees had been— no more starving of our children that theirs might live. Now the trees were the slaves and we the masters.

"And the trees knew and they hated us!

"But blow for blow, a hundred of their lives for each life of ours— we have returned their hatred. With axe and torch we have fought them—

"The trees!" shrieked Polleau, suddenly, eyes blazing red rage, face writhing, foam at the corners of his mouth and gray hair clutched in rigid hands— "The cursed trees! Armies of the trees creeping— creeping— closer, ever closer— crushing us in! Stealing our fields as they did of old! Building their dungeon round us as they built of old the dungeons of stone! Creeping— creeping! Armies of trees! Legions of trees! The trees! The cursed trees!"

McKay listened, appalled. Here was crimson heart of hate. Madness! But what was at the root of it? Some deep inherited instinct, coming down from forefathers who had hated the forest as the symbol of their masters. Forefathers whose tides of hatred had overflowed to the green life on which the nobles had laid their tabu— as one neglected child will hate the favorite on whom love and gifts are lavished? In such warped minds the crushing fall of a tree, the maiming sweep of a branch, might well appear as deliberate, the natural growth of the forest seem the implacable advance of an enemy.

And yet— the blow of the fir as the cut birch fell had been deliberate! and there had been those women of the wood—

"Patience," the standing son touched the old man's shoulder. "Patience! Soon we strike our blow."

Some of the frenzy died out of Polleau's face.

"Though we cut down a hundred," he whispered, "By the hundred they return! But one of us, when they strike— he does not return. No! They have numbers and they have— time. We are now but three, and we have little time. They watch us as we go through the forest, alert to trip, to strike, to crush!

"But M'sieu," he turned blood-shot eyes to McKay. "We strike our blow, even as Pierre has said. We strike at the coppice that you so desire. We strike there because it is the very heart of the forest. There the secret life of the forest runs at full tide. We know— and you know! Something that, destroyed, will take the heart out of the forest— will make it know us for its masters."

"The women!" the standing son's eyes glittered, "I have seen the women there! The fair women with the shining skins who invite— and mock and vanish before hands can seize them."

"The fair women who peer into our windows in the night— and mock us!" muttered the eyeless son.

"They shall mock no more!" shouted Polleau, the frenzy again taking him. "Soon they shall lie, dying! All of them— all of them! They die!"

He caught McKay by the shoulders, shook him like a child.

"Go tell them that!" he shouted. "Say to them that this very day we destroy them. Say to them it is we who will laugh when winter comes and we watch their round white bodies blaze in this hearth of ours and warm us! Go —tell them that!"

He spun McKay around, pushed him to the door, opened it and flung him staggering down the steps. He heard the tall son laugh, the door close. Blind with rage he rushed up the steps and hurled himself against the door. Again the tall son laughed. McKay beat at the door with clenched fists, cursing. The three within paid no heed. Despair began to dull his rage. Could the trees help him— counsel him? He turned and walked slowly down the field path to the little wood.

Slowly and ever more slowly he went as he neared it. He had failed. He was a messenger bearing a warrant of death. The birches were motionless; their leaves hung listlessly. It was as though they knew he had failed. He paused at the edge of the coppice. He looked at his watch, noted with faint surprise that already it was high noon. Short shrift enough had the little wood. The work of destruction would not be long delayed.

McKay squared his shoulders and passed in between the trees. It was strangely silent in the coppice. And it was mournful. He had a sense of life brooding around him, withdrawn into itself; sorrowing. He passed through the silent, mournful wood until he reached the spot where the rounded, gleaming barked tree stood close to the fir that held the withering birch. Still there was no sound, no movement. He laid his hands upon the cool bark of the rounded tree.

"Let me see again!" he whispered. "Let me hear! Speak to me!"

There was no answer. Again and again he called. The coppice was silent. He wandered through it, whispering, calling. The slim birches stood, passive with limbs and leaves adroop like listless arms and hands of captive maids awaiting with dull woe the will of conquerors. The firs seemed to crouch like hopeless men with heads in hands. His heart ached to the woe that filled the little wood, this hopeless submission of the trees.

When, he wondered, would Polleau strike. He looked at his watch again; an hour had gone by. How long would Polleau wait? He dropped to the moss, back against a smooth bole.

And suddenly it seemed to McKay that he was a madman— as mad as Polleau and his sons. Calmly, he went over the old peasant's indictment of the forest; recalled the face and eyes filled with the fanatic hate. Madness! After all, the trees were— only trees. Polleau and his sons— so he reasoned— had transferred to them the bitter hatred their forefathers had felt for those old lords who had enslaved them; had laid upon them too all the bitterness of their own struggle to exist in this high forest land. When they struck at the trees, it was the ghosts of these forefathers striking at the nobles who had oppressed them; it was themselves striking against their own destiny. The trees were but symbols. It was the warped minds of Polleau and his sons that clothed them in false semblance of conscious life in blind striving to wreak vengeance against the ancient masters and the destiny that had made their lives hard and unceasing battle against Nature. The nobles were long dead; destiny can be brought to grips by no man. But the trees were here and alive. Clothed in mirage, through them the driving lust for vengeance could be sated.

And he, McKay, was it not his own deep love and sympathy for the trees that similarly had clothed them in that false semblance of conscious life? Had he not built his own mirage? The trees did not really mourn, could not suffer, could not— know. It was his own sorrow that he had transferred to them; only his own sorrow that he felt echoing back to him from them.

The trees were— only trees.

Instantly, upon the heels of that thought, as though it were an answer, he was aware that the trunk against which he leaned was trembling; that the whole coppice was trembling; that all the little leaves were shaking, tremulously.

McKay, bewildered, leaped to his feet. Reason told him that it was the wind— yet there was no wind!

And as he stood there, a sighing arose as though a mournful breeze were blowing through the trees— and again there was no wind!

Louder grew the sighing and within it now faint wailings.

"They come! They come! Farewell sisters! Sisters— farewell!"

Clearly he heard the mournful whispers.

McKay began to run through the trees to the trail that led out to the fields of the old lodge. And as he ran the wood darkened as though clear shadows gathered in it, as though vast unseen wings hovered over it. The trembling of the coppice increased; bough touched bough, clung to each other; and louder became the sorrowful crying:

"Farewell sister! Sister— farewell!"

McKay burst out into the open. Halfway between him and the lodge were Polleau and his sons. They saw him; they pointed and lifted mockingly to him bright axes. He crouched, waiting for them to come, all fine spun theories gone and rising within him that same rage that hours before had sent him out to slay.

So crouching, he heard from the forested hills a roaring clamor. From every quarter it came, wrathful, menacing; like the voices of legions of great trees bellowing through the horns of tempest. The clamor maddened McKay; fanned the flame of rage to white heat.

If the three men heard it, they gave no sign. They came on steadily, jeering at him, waving their keen blades. He ran to meet them.

"Go back!" he shouted. "Go back, Polleau! I warn you!"

"He warns us!" jeered Polleau. "He— Pierre, Jean— he warns us!"

The old peasant's arm shot out and his hand caught McKay's shoulder with a grip that pinched to the bone. The arm flexed and hurled him against the unmaimed son. The son caught him, twisted him about and whirled him headlong a dozen yards, crashing him through the brush at the skirt of the wood.

McKay sprang to his feet howling like a wolf. The clamor of the forest had grown stronger.

"Kill!" it roared. "Kill!"

The unmaimed son had raised his axe. He brought it down upon the trunk of a birch, half splitting it with one blow. McKay heard a wail go up from the little wood. Before the axe could be withdrawn he had crashed a fist in the axe wielder's face. The head of Polleau's son rocked back; he yelped, and before McKay could strike again had wrapped strong arms around him, crushing breath from him. McKay relaxed, went limp, and the son loosened his grip. Instantly McKay slipped out of it and struck again, springing aside to avoid the rib breaking clasp. Polleau's son was quicker than he, the long arms caught him. But as the arms tightened, there was the sound of sharp splintering and the birch into which the axe had bitten toppled. It struck the ground directly behind the wrestling men. Its branches seemed to reach out and clutch at the feet of Polleau's son.

He tripped and fell backward, McKay upon him. The shock of the fall broke his grip and again McKay writhed free. Again he was upon his feet, and again Polleau's strong son, quick as he, faced him. Twice McKay's blows found their mark beneath his heart before once more the long arms trapped him. But their grip was weaker; McKay felt that now his strength was equal.

Round and round they rocked, McKay straining to break away. They fell, and over they rolled and over, arms and legs locked, each striving to free a hand to grip the other's throat. Around them ran Polleau and the one-eyed son, shouting encouragement to Pierre, yet neither daring to strike at McKay lest the blow miss and be taken by the other.

And all that time McKay heard the little wood shouting. Gone from it now was all mournfulness, all passive resignation. The wood was alive and raging. He saw the trees shake and bend as though torn by a tempest. Dimly he realized that the others must hear none of this, see none of it; as dimly wondered why this should be.

"Kill!" shouted the coppice— and over its tumult he heard the roar of the great forest:

"Kill! Kill!"

He became aware of two shadowy shapes, shadowy shapes of swarthy green clad men, that pressed close to him as he rolled and fought.

"Kill!" they whispered. "Let his blood flow! Kill! Let his blood flow!"

He tore a wrist free from the son's clutch. Instantly he felt within his hand the hilt of a knife.

"Kill!" whispered the shadowy men.

"Kill!" shrieked the coppice.

"Kill!" roared the forest.

McKay's free arm swept up and plunged the knife into the throat of Polleau's son! He heard a choking sob; heard Polleau shriek; felt the hot blood spurt in face and over hand; smelt its salt and faintly acrid odor. The encircling arms dropped from him; he reeled to his feet.

As though the blood had been a bridge, the shadowy men leaped from immateriality into substances. One threw himself upon the man McKay had stabbed; the other hurled upon old Polleau. The maimed son turned and fled, howling with terror. A white woman sprang out from the shadow, threw herself at his feet, clutched them and brought him down. Another woman and another dropped upon him. The note of his shrieking changed from fear to agony; then died abruptly into silence.

And now McKay could see none of the three, neither old Polleau or his sons, for the green clad men and the white women covered them!

McKay stood stupidly, staring at his red hands. The roar of the forest had changed to a deep triumphal chanting. The coppice was mad with joy. The trees had become thin phantoms etched in emerald translucent air as they had been when first the green sorcery had enmeshed him. And all around him wove and danced the slim, gleaming women of the wood.

They ringed him, their song bird-sweet and shrill; jubilant. Beyond them he saw gliding toward him the woman of the misty pillars whose kisses had poured the sweet green fire into his veins. Her arms were outstretched to him, her strange wide eyes were rapt on his, her white body gleamed with the moon radiance, her red lips were parted and smiling— a scarlet chalice filled with the promise of undreamed ecstasies. The dancing circle, chanting, broke to let her through.

Abruptly, a horror filled McKay. Not of this fair woman, not of her jubilant sisters— but of himself.

He had killed! And the wound the war had left in his soul, the wound he thought had healed, had opened.

He rushed through the broken circle, thrust the shining woman aside with his blood stained hands and ran, weeping, toward the lake shore. The singing ceased. He heard little cries, tender, appealing; little cries of pity; soft voices calling on him to stop, to return. Behind him was the sound of little racing feet, light as the fall of leaves upon the moss.

McKay ran on. The coppice lightened, the beach was before him. He heard the fair woman call him, felt the touch of her hand upon his shoulder. He did not heed her. He ran across the narrow strip of beach, thrust his boat out into the water and wading through the shallows threw himself into it.

He lay there for a moment, sobbing; then drew himself up, caught at the oars. He looked back at the shore now a score of feet away. At the edge of the coppice stood the woman, staring at him with pitying, wise eyes. Behind her clustered the white faces of her sisters, the swarthy faces of the green clad men.

"Come back!" the woman whispered, and held out to him slender arms.

McKay hesitated, his horror lessening in that clear, wise, pitying gaze. He half swung the boat around. His gaze dropped upon his blood-stained hands and again the hysteria gripped him. One thought only was in his mind— to get far away from where Polleau's son lay with his throat ripped open, to put the lake between that body and him.

Head bent low, McKay bowed to the oars, skimming swiftly outward. When he looked up a curtain of mist had fallen between him and the shore. It hid the coppice and from beyond it there came to him no sound. He glanced behind him, back toward the inn. The mists swung there, too, concealing it.

McKay gave silent thanks for these vaporous curtains that hid him from both the dead and the alive. He slipped limply under the thwarts. After a while he leaned over the side of the boat and, shuddering, washed the blood from his hands. He scrubbed the oar blades where his hands had left red patches. He ripped the lining out of his coat and drenching it in the lake he cleansed his face. He took off the stained coat, wrapped it with the lining round the anchor stone in the skiff and sunk it in the lake. There were other stains upon his shirt; but these he would have to let be.

For a time he rowed aimlessly, finding in the exertion a lessening of his soul sickness. His numbed mind began to function, analyzing his plight, planning how to meet the future— how to save him.

What ought he do? Confess that he had killed Polleau's son? What reason could he give? Only that he had killed because the man had been about to cut down some trees—trees that were his father's to do with as he willed!

And if he told of the wood woman, the wood women, the shadowy shapes of their green gallants who had helped him— who would believe?

They would think him mad— mad as he half believed himself to be.

No, none would believe him. None! Nor would confession bring back life to him he had slain. No; he would not confess.

But stay— another thought came! Might he not be— accused? What actually had happened to old Polleau and his other son? He had taken it for granted that they were dead; that they had died under those bodies white and swarthy. But had they? While the green sorcery had meshed him he had held no doubt of this— else why the jubilance of the little wood, the triumphant chanting of the forest?

Were they dead— Polleau and the one-eyed son? Clearly it came to him that they had not heard as he had, had not seen as he had. To them McKay and his enemy had been but two men battling, in a woodland glade; nothing more than that— until the last! Until the last? Had they seen more than that even then?

No, all that he could depend upon as real was that he had ripped out the throat of one of old Polleau's sons. That was the one unassailable verity. He had washed the blood of that man from his hands and his face.

All else might have been mirage— but one thing was true. He had murdered Polleau's son!

Remorse? He had thought that he had felt it. He knew now that he did not; that he had no shadow of remorse for what he had done. It had been panic that had shaken him, panic realization of the strangenesses, reaction from the battle lust, echoes of the war. He had been justified in that— execution. What right had those men to destroy the little wood; to wipe wantonly its beauty away?

None! He was glad that he had killed!

At that moment McKay would gladly have turned his boat and raced away to drink of the crimson chalice of the wood woman's lips. But the mists were raising, He saw that he was close to the landing of the inn.

There was no one about. Now was his time to remove the last of those accusing stains. After that—

Quickly he drew up, fastened the skiff, slipped unseen to his room. He locked the door, started to undress. Then sudden sleep swept over him like a wave, drew him helplessly down into ocean depths of sleep.

A knocking at the door awakened McKay, and the innkeeper's voice summoned him to dinner. Sleepily, he answered, and as the old man's footsteps died away, he roused himself. His eyes fell upon his shirt and the great stains now rusty brown. Puzzled, he stared at them for a moment, then full memory clicked back in place.

He walked to the window. It was dusk. A wind was blowing and the trees were singing, all the little leaves dancing; the forest hummed a cheerful vespers. Gone was all the unease, all the inarticulate trouble and the fear. The forest was tranquil and it was happy.

He sought the coppice through the gathering twilight. Its demoiselles were dancing lightly in the wind, leafy hoods dipping, leafy skirts ablow. Beside them marched the green troubadours, carefree, waving their needled arms. Gay was the little wood, gay as when its beauty had first drawn him to it.

McKay undressed, hid the stained shirt in his traveling trunk, bathed and put on a fresh outfit, sauntered down to dinner. He ate excellently. Wonder now and then crossed his mind that he felt no regret, no sorrow even, for the man he had killed. Half he was inclined to believe it all a dream— so little of any emotion did he feel. He had even ceased to think of what discovery might mean.

His mind was quiet; he heard the forest chanting to him that there was nothing he need fear; and when he sat for a time that night upon the balcony a peace that was half an ecstasy stole in upon him from the murmuring woods and enfolded him. Cradled by it he slept dreamlessly.

McKay did not go far from the inn that next day. The little wood danced gaily and beckoned him, but he paid no heed. Something whispered to wait, to keep the lake between him and it until word came of what lay or had lain there. And the peace still was on him.

Only the old innkeeper seemed to grow uneasy as the hours went by. He went often to the landing, scanning the further shore.

"It is strange," he said at last to McKay as the sun was dipping behind the summits. "Polleau was to see me here today. He never breaks his word. If he could not come he would have sent one of his sons."

McKay nodded, carelessly.

"There is another thing I do not understand," went on the old man. "I have seen no smoke from the lodge all day. It is as though they were not there."

"Where could they be?" asked McKay, indifferently.

"I do not know," the voice was more perturbed. "It all troubles me, M'sieu. Polleau is hard, yes; but he is my neighbor. Perhaps an accident—"

"They would let you know soon enough if there was anything wrong," McKay said.

"Perhaps, but—" the old man hesitated. "If he does not come tomorrow and again I see no smoke I will go to him," he ended.

McKay felt a little shock run through him— tomorrow then he would know, definitely know, what it was that had happened in the little wood.

"I would if I were you," he said. "I'd not wait too long either. After all— well, accidents do happen."

"Will you go with me, M'sieu," asked the old man.

"No!" whispered the warning voice within McKay. "No! Do not go!"

"Sorry," he said, aloud. "But I've some writing to do. If you should need me send back your man. I'll come."

And all that night he slept, again dreamlessly, while the crooning forest cradled him.

The morning passed without sign from the opposite shore. An hour after noon he watched the old innkeeper and his man row across the lake. And suddenly McKay's composure was shaken, his serene certainty wavered. He unstrapped his field glasses and kept them on the pair until they had beached the boat and entered the coppice. His heart was beating uncomfortably, his hands felt hot and his lips dry. He scanned the shore. How long had they been in the wood? It must have been an hour! What were they doing there? What had they found? He looked at his watch, incredulously. Less than fifteen minutes had passed.

Slowly the seconds ticked by. And it was all of an hour indeed before he saw them come out upon the shore and drag their boat into the water. McKay, throat curiously dry, a deafening pulse within his ears, steadied himself; forced himself to stroll leisurely down to the landing.

"Everything all right?" he called as they were near. They did not answer; but as the skiff warped against the landing they looked up at him and on their faces were stamped horror and a great wonder.

"They are dead, M'sieu," whispered the innkeeper. "Polleau and his two sons— all dead!"

McKay's heart gave a great leap, a swift faintness took him.

"Dead!" he cried. "What killed them?"

"What but the trees, M'sieu?" answered the old man, and McKay thought his gaze dwelt upon him strangely. "The trees killed them. See— we went up the little path through the wood, and close to its end we found it blocked by fallen trees. The flies buzzed round those trees, M'sieu, so we searched there. They were under them, Polleau and his sons. A fir had fallen upon Polleau and had crushed in his chest. Another son we found beneath a fir and upturned birches. They had broken his back, and an eye had been torn out— but that was no new wound, the latter." He paused.

"It must have been a sudden wind," said his man. "Yet I never knew of a wind like that must have been. There were no trees down except those that lay upon them. And of those it was as though they had leaped out of the ground! Yes, as though they had leaped out of the ground upon them. Or it was as though giants had torn them out for clubs. They were not broken—their roots were bare—"

"But the other son— Polleau had two?"— try as he might, McKay could not keep the tremor out of his voice.

"Pierre," said the old man, and again McKay felt that strange quality in his gaze. "He lay beneath a fir. His throat was torn out!"

"His throat torn out!" whispered McKay, His knife! The knife that had been slipped into his hand by the shadowy shapes!

"His throat was torn out," repeated the innkeeper. "And in it still was the broken branch that had done it. A broken branch, M'sieu, pointed as a knife. It must have caught Pierre as the fir fell and ripping through his throat— been broken off as the tree crashed."

McKay stood, mind whirling in wild conjecture. "You said— a broken branch?" McKay asked through lips gone white.

"A broken branch, M'sieu," the innkeeper's eyes searched him. "It was very plain— what it was that happened. Jacques," he turned to his man. "Go up to the house."

He watched until the man shuffled out of sight. "Yet not all plain, M'sieu," he spoke low to McKay. "For in Pierre's hand I found— this."

He reached into a pocket and drew out a button from which hung a strip of cloth. Cloth and button had once been part of that blood-stained coat which McKay had sunk within the lake; torn away no doubt when death had struck Polleau's son!

McKay strove to speak. The old man raised his hand. Button and cloth fell from it, into the water. A wave took it and floated it away; another and another. They watched it silently until it had vanished.

"Tell me nothing, M'sieu," the old innkeeper turned to him, "Polleau was hard and hard men, too, were his sons. The trees hated them. The trees killed them. And now the trees are happy. That is all. And the— souvenir— is gone. I have forgotten I saw it. Only M'sieu would better also— go."

That night McKay packed. When dawn had broken he stood at his window, looked long at the little wood. It was awakening, stirring sleepily like drowsy delicate demoiselles. He drank in its beauty— for the last time; waved it farewell.

McKay breakfasted well. He dropped into the driver's seat; set the engine humming. The old innkeeper and his wife, solicitous as ever for his welfare, bade him Godspeed. On both their faces was full friendliness— and in the old man's eyes somewhat of puzzled awe.

His road lay through the thick forest. Soon inn and lake were far behind him.

And singing went McKay, soft whisperings of leaves following him, glad chanting of needled pines; the voice of the forest tender, friendly, caressing— the forest pouring into him as farewell gift its peace, its happiness, its strength.

___________________

9: Lady in Lower 11

Ainsworth Morgan

Detective Story 9 July 1932

The author of a small number of crime stories published between 1930 and 1932. Nothing else is known.

THE Twentieth Century glided smoothly out of the Grand Central Terminal. James Montague Holt III turned the pages of the paper he was reading and glanced at the person sitting opposite him. It was a woman of about thirty-five, but she was so obviously made up, that it is doubtful whether she would have admitted more than twenty-six. And it made the youthful, unworldly James Montague Holt a little bit uncomfortable to find that his section companion was staring directly into his eyes. To hide his embarrassment, he straightened the paper and read and reread an intensely uninteresting article on foreign exchange.

But like all people who are being stared at, it is virtually impossible to help stealing an occasional look at the person who is doing the staring. So young Mr. Holt looked at the woman again. This time, her attention was fixed on his suitcase, and she seemed to be trying to read his name on the tag. She was apparently successful, for she lifted her eyes and almost smiled— half to herself and half at James Montague Holt III. James reddened and glanced across the corridor by way of ignoring her.

In the opposite section, there was an old gentleman with a red, bulbous nose and white hair. He was on the verge of falling asleep and gave James one of those expressionless looks characteristic of a half-conscious mentality. Soon, his eyes closed, his mouth opened, and he started snoring.

James crossed and recrossed his legs, for he knew the painted lady was again staring at him. He felt it, like one would feel the heat from a near-by electric-light bulb.

Suddenly, the lady was taken with a paroxysm of coughing and, indirectly, this was the undoing of James. She coughed so violently that her purse fell off her lap. With instinctive politeness, James reached down and picked up the purse. He handed it back to her with a self-conscious bow.

"Oh, thanks," said the lady between coughs. "Thanks very much. I've— I've got a rotten cold."

James agreed sympathetically that her cold sounded quite serious, and made a few inane remarks about colds in general.

"I'm sure I caught this one on the train the other night," continued the lady. "Sleepers are such drafty places, aren't they?"

James supposed they were, merely because the question was too unimportant to warrant an argument. In an attempt to halt any further conversation, James looked out the window, but the absurdity of looking out a window upon the black nothingness of a tunnel forced him to look back again.

The old gentleman across the corridor was now snoring with sonorous regularity. The lady made some remark about its being a pity he hadn't had his adenoids removed as a child. James laughed for politeness's sake. Then the lady grew suddenly and alarmingly personal.

"Wasn't it your father," she said, "who helped rebuild devastated France?"

That his identity had been established annoyed James. But it was foolish to deny a fact. The name of James Montague Holt III on his bag had definitely branded him as the son of the great philanthropist, James Montague Holt II.

So James said: "Yes, I guess it was."

"And didn't he endow a Children's Hospital in New York?" asked the lady.

James admitted, uncomfortably, that the "old man" was that way.

There was a moment's silence during which the lady may or may not have been appraising the older man's wealth.

The snoring gentleman across the corridor knocked a sluggish fly off his nose and opened his eyes just long enough to watch the fly depart in the direction of James.

Feeling that the lady was about to ask another personal question, James attempted to rise and escape to the smoking car. But the lady's mind worked faster than James's legs, and the question was out before he was t up.

"Don't go," she said. "I was just going to ask a favor of you. That is, if you promise not to think I'm either rude or crazy."

James sat down again. He wondered if the lady was going to ask him to take her in to dinner. He hoped not.

"What is it?" he murmured warily.

The lady blew her nose unattractively. Then she said:

"It sounds ridiculous, I know. But I have this rotten cold and I feel the slightest draft. I was just wondering if you'd mind letting me take your upper. There's no draft from the window up there. I'd appreciate it lots, if you don't mind."

James felt relieved, to say the least. It was certainly a strange sort of request, but a harmless one.

"Why, of course," he said. "You're more than welcome to it. As a matter of fact, I hate the upper, but couldn't get a lower the last minute. Sure, by all means, use it."

The painted lady smiled gratefully. James returned her smile, equally grateful, stepped over her ankles, and disappeared in the direction of the smoking car.

Being of an innately courteous nature, James felt it was the proper thing to allow the lady sufficient time to get well established in the section before turning in himself. Therefore, after dinner, he lingered a good two hours in the smoker. He toyed with a glass of grape juice, read the newspaper, and watched the bulbous-nosed old gentleman who had been snoring in his car, doze off again over a copy of a law magazine. In fact, the old gentleman left the smoking car about half an hour before James himself decided to turn in.

When he returned to his Pullman, he noticed the sign saying: "Quiet Requested." Quietly, he made his way to Section 11, pulled his suitcase from under the berth and retired to the men's room. When he came back, clothes in one hand and bag in the other, the lights were out. He could hear the old gentleman snoring across the corridor. He slipped the bag under the lower berth. Kicking off his slippers, he opened the curtain, and threw his clothes into the dark void. Then, with a stretch and a yawn, he ducked his head and hopped in the lower berth.

There was a yell! To James's astonishment and horror he had landed on something very soft and warm.

"Help! Help!" cried a female voice.

Sharp nails dug into James's cheeks. He struggled to break loose, but he was held in a death grip as the woman continued shrieking for help.

The lights in the car were switched on, and hands from somewhere tugged violently at James's legs. Finally, the woman released him, and he fell in a heap on the corridor floor. Speechless, he looked up to meet the censoring glares of a porter and a conductor.

Curious heads poked from upper and lower berths. Strangers gathered around him. Every one talked, and no one listened until the conductor held up his hand and asserted his authority.

"Everybody quiet now!" he ordered. He then faced the lady in Lower 11 and addressed her as the porter helped the disfigured James to his feet. "What's th' trouble, ma'am?" he asked.

The lady sat bolt upright on the edge of the berth. Her silk nightgown was torn from her shoulders. Her eyes were aflame with rage.

"That man! That creature!" she cried, pointing an accusing finger at James Montague Holt. "He tried to steal—"

"It's a lie!" shouted James. "A monstrous lie! The lady— that woman asked me to trade berths with her. She wanted my upper one. I—"

The conductor measured James with frowning eyes.

It was obvious that popular opinion was all for the woman; all against James Montague Holt.

"But I tell you it's the truth!" said James, red with anger.

The conductor asked to see the tickets. The lady, waving hers in her hand, resumed her attack.

"A likely thing that I'd trade a lower for an upper," she said sarcastically. "Look! Here's my ticket. Lower 11! Ask that creature to show you his." She handed the ticket to the conductor. The conductor examined it and then looked at James.

"That's a pretty weak story, young man," he said. "It's types like you that make traveling unsafe for womenfolks."

The curious group of onlookers nodded their heads in agreement with the conductor.

"What's your name and business?" he asked James.

"James Montague Holt. And I'm a student at Harvard. And that woman's a liar!"

But there followed a salvo of accusations from the onlookers which checked any attempt James might have made to defend himself.

"Throw him off the train!"

"Maniac!"

"Poor woman!"

Then something within James Montague Holt snapped.

"The whole thing's a frame-up," he shouted. And a quick thought came to him. "She's nothing but a dirty blackmailer!"

"Save that gag for the courtroom," said the conductor. "I'm turning you over to the police at Cleveland."

Once again, the onlooking prosecution opened fire on the helpless defendant. James was cornered. He was about to surrender, about to give himself up as a victim to injustice and wire his father for legal advice and assistance. But, like fresh forces appearing at the critical moment of defeat, something happened.

The old gentleman of the bulbous nose stuck his white head out of the opposite lower.

"Listen here, conductor," he said. All eyes immediately turned toward him. "I'm Judge Rankin of the surrogate court of Trenton, New Jersey, and I just want to tell you that I heard that woman ask the defendant to trade berths with her. So take that if it'll help matters any!" The old gentleman said no more. With the same suddenness he had appeared, he disappeared.

James Montague Holt III resumed breathing. The glares of the onlookers switched to the woman. The conductor assumed a new air of authority.

"Well, lady," he said, "what you got to say about that?"

The lady appeared stunned. She looked from one face to the next, across to the closed curtains of the opposite berth, and then fixed her eyes on James.

"Well?" said the conductor. "Let's hear it."

"I refuse to speak!" she answered angrily. "Go away— all of you! Quit staring at me! Do you hear what I say?"

Like magic, the batteries of accusation changed their objective.

"Vat a doity trick. Setch a wimin!"

"Poor guy, he doesn't look like the type who'd—"

"Nothin' but blackmail, pure and simple."

The lady flashed curses from her eyes. She pulled her torn nightdress close about her throat. She turned on her heels, swished open the curtains to Lower 11, disappeared into the darkness, and closed the curtains in fury. In a moment, the curtains opened again, and James Montague Holt's clothes were hurled into the corridor.

Then comparative quiet followed.

Passengers returned to their respective berths amid mumbled comments. The conductor gave whispered orders to the porter, and James climbed into Upper 11, sore in mind and body, but acquitted of any criminal suspicion.

At seven thirty the following morning— after a sleepless night— he rang for the porter.

"Where's that woman?" James whispered into his ear.

"She done skipped off dis heah train befo' Ah was up dis mornin'," the man answered. "Ah guess she's playin' precautious!"

James dressed hurriedly. His foremost thought was to find the kind old gentleman with the bulbous nose and thank him from the bottom of his heart for his great kindness in coming to his assistance. He finally located him on the rear platform of the observation car. He dropped into a chair beside him and extended a hand rigid with gratitude.

"Judge," he said, "I want to thank you for what you did for me last night. Why, if you hadn't come to my rescue, if you hadn't admitted you overheard that woman ask me to trade berths with her, I—"

But the old gentleman interrupted James.

"Overhear?" he said, "why, I never overheard a thing! But I had to get some sleep and, besides, I liked your face and your father's an old friend of mine."

____________________

10: "Doc" Meets the Train

John Jay Chichester

(Christopher B. Booth, 1889-1950)

Detective Story Magazine, 5 Feb 1921

KENNETH WILLIAMS pushed the hair, tangled and disheveled from three hours of rumpling, back from his perspiring forehead and stared hopelessly at the long column of figures. The carefully, often verified total remained the same; for the first time in his life he prayed for an adding machine, a luxury which the little bank was not disposed to indulge in.

"I'm wrong somewhere, but hanged if I can find it," he muttered as his troubled gaze wandered from the bank ledger, past the filigreed wicker window, down the street where the severely plain one and two-story mercantile buildings made up the business section of the village.

Old Sampson Harvey, president and virtual owner of the Farmers' Bank, in addition to being proprietor of the big grain elevator, having finished some correspondence, written in heavy, blunt longhand so like the man himself, rose from his desk and walked to the door. Williams snapped the freshly sharpened lead of his pencil with an angry, impatient jab.

"Darn!" he exclaimed.

Fred Blinn, the bank's cashier, checking up the days' business, looked up.

"What's the trouble, Ken?" he asked.

"If you've got a moment to spare, Fred, I wish you would add up this column for me," replied Williams.

"What!" exclaimed the cashier. "Are you, the human adding machine, asking some one to cast a total for you? You're kidding me."

"No, I mean it, Fred," replied Williams with an uneasy laugh. "I can't make 'em balance, and I'm getting mighty rotten at addition or I'm short a little over three thousand."

"Bosh!" retorted Blinn. "You'll find it; I'll be with you in a jiffy."

A few minutes later Blinn, having finished his own work, went over the figures which had puzzled Williams.

"Nope," he decreed at last, "you've got it right—right to the last cent."

"But—but, Fred, it—it can't be right," stammered Kenneth Williams in sudden panic. "It—it can't be right, for if those figures are right I'm short, and I'm not short."

"Don't let it worry you, old man," said Blinn. "You'll find it somewhere."

"Find it!" exclaimed the young bank clerk. "I've been checking it back and forth all afternoon."

"Sure, that's natural," reassured Blinn with a friendly pat on the shoulder. "You've been overlooking some item that'll bob up as plain as the nose on your face. Tell you what we'll do, Ken; we'll come back to the bank after supper and find that little old 'shortage' of yours."

"That's splendid of you, Fred. Gosh, it sure gets on my nerves when I can't strike a balance; I remember one time—"

His voice ended abruptly, and his face colored as the front door of the bank opened and Alicia Harvey, the attractive daughter of the bank's president, tripped inside. She was a wholesome, out-of-doors girl with large dark eyes and hair so blond that it made a startling but most pleasant contrast.

"Hello, Ken; hello, Fred," she greeted cheerfully. ''Where's dad?"

"Over at the elevator, Alicia," the two men almost chorused, and it was to be noted that the eyes of both were somewhat brighter than ordinary.

"Don't forget, Ken," the girl called over her shoulder as she made a graceful exit, "you're to come over to the house to-night."

"I— I may be a little late, Alicia," responded the bank clerk regretfully. "I've made an error in the books, and I've got to get it straightened out."

"Yes," cut in Blinn with a laugh, "our human adding machine has slipped a cog somewhere, and he's afraid that he's short a few thousands or so."

"Well, don't put him in jail right away; I want him up at the house tonight to the party," said the girl with a laugh.

"Party?" questioned Blinn with a frown. "I hadn't heard—"

"Oh, this is a young folks' party, Fred," replied Alicia, and Fred Blinn flushed until the color suffused the bald spot on top of his head. The cashier of the Farmers' Bank was forty-one, but he did not consider that old. The girl saw that she had offended him, so she made haste to add: "But I'll have you up one night next week."

"That will be fine, Alicia," said Blinn with a smile, but the expression on the face of Kenneth Williams failed to convey the impression that he agreed that it would be "fine."

ii

FRED BLINN closed the bank ledger with a hopeless gesture and sat down very heavily.

"Ken," he whispered, "what— what did you do it for? How could you?"

Williams, perspiring over another fresh effort to achieve the elusive balance, looked up.

"Why did I do what?" he demanded. "What the devil is the matter with you? What are you looking at me like that for?"

"Come, Ken; don't make matters any worse," said Blinn plaintively. "You're short three thousand and four hundred dollars !"

"You're joking, Fred. You don't think I'm short; you know I'm not. Why, you do mean it!"

"Yes, I do mean it, Ken," said Blinn a bit grimly. "I've found the missing items— in your books. You're short three thousand and four hundred. What on earth did you want with the money, Ken? What induced you—"

Kenneth Williams got slowly down from his stool, his face crimson and white by turns; his fists doubled and his eyes blazed. Blinn drew back in alarm.

"Look here, Fred Blinn," he cried, "you'd better look out who you call a thief. I didn't take any money; you say that again and I'll paste you one on the nose."

But Williams was not a man to nurse anger for very long; his temper flamed high, but died quickly.

"I'm sorry I said that, Fred," he apologized; "but, honest, I didn't take any of the bank's money. I know you wouldn't say you thought that unless the lfpoks are a little mixed up. Let's go over them again until we find the mistake, for— I'm sure, Fred, you won't find a penny missing. Be reasonable. If I had been short would I have called your attention to the fact that I couldn't get a balance? Would I have asked you to go over the books for me? That proves that I'm innocent, doesn't it? Why, Fred, you don't look at my books once in six months; if I had been short—"

Fred Blinn began to pace the floor.

"No, that doesn't prove anything— except that I am a little less credulous than you expected me to be, Ken," he said slowly. "You thought, of course, that I would swallow any sort of story that you would hand me, and perhaps I would, except—"

"But," argued Williams pleadingly, "don't accuse me of being short until you know; search the books again. You know all about my personal habits; you know that I am not extravagant; you know all about me. What on earth would I steal three thousand dollars for— tell me that?"

Fred Blinn halted his nervous pacings across the floor and paused in front of Williams.

"A little something that Postmaster Lowery said yesterday gave me the chance to put two and two together," he said sternly. "Lowery just happened to remark that you were sending a lot of money lately to that shiftless brother of yours; money orders lately have been amounting to quite a sum."

"But— but I can explain that," said Williams hastily.

"Huh! That sort of knocked the wind out of your sails, eh, Ken? You didn't think that any one would remark about those money orders. And you didn't want any one to know, eh? That's why you bought money orders instead of sending bank drafts, eh? You didn't want us fellows in the bank to find out how much money you were sending away; isn't that it?"

"Yes, partly, but— please let me explain, Fred. I'm only going to tell you the truth. Brother Daniel isn't so wild as the folks here in this town think he is, but he is improvident and always getting sick without having any money saved up, so before mother died she called me in and said to me: 'Ken, you're steady and reliable and you will make your way because you've got a balance wheel; now I want you to take this thousand that I've got saved up and keep it to use for Daniel if he ever needs it real bad.' So she gave the thousand dollars to me in cash, and I put it—"

Blinn laughed incredulously.

"You mean to tell me that your mother kept a thousand dollars in cash around the house?' he asked with a sneer.

"Yes, I was surprised, too; she'd been saving it up for years. She kept it in the cookie box in the pantry; it had a sort of false bottom, and I knew that it was safe there, so I kept the tin and when Daniel needed money I sent him some. I'll swear that's the truth."

"Oh, I know that's where the money went to, but I know also that it was the bank's money—the three thousand odd that you stole!"

"Please, Fred; please—"

"Don't add to your offense by lying, Ken," said Blinn. "I've found out just where you managed to take it; there's old Gardner's account—you got five hundred out of that. He's careless about his book being balanced, and you found it easy to slip in a couple of forged checks and stamp them 'Paid.' There it is; you don't presume to tell me that's old Gardner's signature."

Williams looked at the check. "Yes, I admit that is a forged signature— but I didn't do it. Oh, don't worry; I'm not going to tear it up," he said as Blinn kept it in his own fingers.

"It wouldn't do you any good to tear that one up; there are others, as you know. Then there's a forged note for three hundred, and you've put that in among your cash. So the entire shortage will be easily traced, and—"

"But, Fred," protested Kenneth Wilims desperately, "I'll swear that I didn't know—"

"I'm afraid the word, the oath of a thief—"

"Please, please, Fred; don't— don't call me that!" choked Williams as his head dropped into his trembling hands.

"Yes, those checks and that note are forgeries; a child could almost see that, but I didn't do it, and I— I can't understand."

Williams' lips compressed and he struggled for calmer possession of his thoughts.

"I— I don't see how I am going to prove my innocence," he admitted sadly, "but if there is such a thing as justice in the world my innocence will be proved. Surely Providence would not permit such a thing as this."

"I don't believe that I would lament too ardently for 'justice,' " scoffed Blinn. "Old man Harvey is likely to take you at your word; he's a hard man at times. He won't show much mercy for a man who has violated his trust."

At mention of Harvey's name Kenneth Williams' face paled— for two reasons, and those two reasons were that two faces arose before his mental vision: the one stern, tight-lipped, and cold-eyed without a whit of compassion or mercy; that was the face of old Sampson Harvey. The other was that of Alicia, and he wondered if he would see in her dark eyes revolting horror as she heard the news. He shuddered, but squared his shoulders as if to brace himself for the great burden that they must bear.

"All right, Fred," he said huskily, "I guess there isn't any more that either of us can say. I am innocent, but I don't know that I can blame you for thinking the other way—with all of this evidence here. There's only one thing that you can do, of course; you'll have to tell Mr. Harvey. We'll go to his house now; he'll probably want to drive me over to the county seat right away and turn me over to the sheriff. But it'll work out right some way; it's bound to."

Fred Blinn sat staring thoughtfully at the floor.

"You're right," he nodded. "Harvey will turn you right over to the sheriff; that'll be his way, you know. And I don't see how you've got any hope. Of course, you took the money and you'll go to the penitentiary for a good many years. I don't care if you are a thief, Ken, but it hurts like the dickens to send you to prison. I can never forget what a good friend your old father was to me. Your dad had money in those days, and he helped me over many a rough spot; he loaned me the money to go to business college because I was alone in the world, and got me into the bank here. It's— it's pretty tough to send you to prison, If I had the three thousand I would make up the loss personally, but I haven't got it, Ken."

There was a silence of nearly five minutes, broken only by the tick of the big wall clock and the occasional taptap of Blinn's shoe on the floor. Finally the bank cashier leaned forward and gripped Williams' knee.

"Ken," he whispered, as if in fear that the walls had ears, "you and I are the only ones that know about this — yet. If— if I gave you a chance to skip out—would you keep your mouth shut if you were caught?"

"Skip out!" echoed Williams. "Why— why that would be a confession of my guilt."

"Don't stage act with me any more," said Blinn impatiently. "You're guilty, and it means a long term in prison— prison's an awful place, Ken." And he shuddered so eloquently that Kenneth Williams shuddered also. "A fine way to pay my debt of gratitude to your father— to send his boy to prison! To prison!

"If there was the slightest possibility of your innocence, or of proving it in court, you know that I would stick by you and be the first to urge that you clear your skirts, but— it's hopeless, my boy— hopeless!"

"But— but—"

"No more protestations, Ken," commanded Blinn. "I'm giving you the only chance that you have; I am making myself an accessory after the fact, but—Il'll give you three days' start before telling Harvey of your shortage. That'll give you a chance to get away and lose yourself. I've got a couple of hundred; I'm sorry that's all I can spare. Of course, if they do catch you, you've got to keep your mouth shut."

Kenneth Williams, his mind in a daze, tried to think his way out. He realized that there was prima-facie evidence of his guilt, that the chances were all against proving his innocence. He hated to run away, but the pictures of the towering walls of gray stone, shutting him in from the rest of the world, of the clammy, cold cells, of the place where men seldom smile and speak only in whispers were frightfully vivid.

"You can get the train at two a. m. in the morning," whispered Fred Blinn. "I'll tell Harvey that you told me you were going to the city in answer to a wire from your brother Daniel. I'll give you three days' start, old man."

Kenneth Williams swallowed the lump in his throat and nodded dumbly.

iii

CASHIER Blinn locked the bank door and walked up the street beside Williams.

"I don't suppose that you'll be wanting to go to Harvey's house— now," he suggested.

"No-o!" choked Williams. couldn't go there— now!"

And the other man would never know of the pain which stabbed his heart, for Kenneth Williams had decided, a good many hours before, that he would this night propose to Alicia Harvey. Alicia's smile had been very sweet and her eyes very tender when turned in his direction of late.

"Fred," he said, catching the cashier's arm between convulsive fingers, "I— I wish that you would do me a favor; I wish—"

"Yes, Ken, what is it? I'll do it if  I can."

"I wish— if there is a way— that— that Alicia wouldn't have to know— to know that I—r an away."

Fred Blinn's face hardened under the single incandescent street light as they passed the corner.

"I'm afraid that isn't possible," he said shortly. "You can't keep this sort of thing quiet, you know."

"Yes, I guess it isn't possible," agreed Williams with almost a sob. They were approaching the block in which the Harveys lived— a big, rambling, comfortable, and homy old house, painted white, and with green shutters, nestling amid a grove of big maple trees.

"I'll justify you all I can," said Blinn more kindly. "You see, Alicia and I—"

Williams stopped dead in his tracks.

"Oh," he muttered, "I—I didn't know, didn't suspect. Try and make her—happy, Fred."

The fleeing bank clerk started across the street.

"I— I don't think I'd better pass by the house," he said weakly. "I'd— I'd rather not."

"Well, I'll drop in and tell Alicia that you've been kept late with your books; that you've got some work to finish before you get the early-morning train to the city."

"Thank you, Fred," said Williams, but the words were gall to his tongue.

Kenneth moved mechanically under the archway of big trees which formed a canopy across the sidewalk, making his miserable and dazed way home. He generally vaulted over the picket fence and cut across the corner of the yard of the Scott home, where he boarded, but his legs seemed too heavy and numb for such exertion. He went in by the gate and slipped around the side of the house to go to his room by the back stairs.

As his form loomed out in the shadows a big mastiff leaped out with a joyous bark and snuggled against his legs.

Kenneth dropped to the steps and hugged the dog to his breast.

"You believe in me, Doc," he said, "you know I'm square and honest, don't you, Doc? And now I've got to go away and leave you—the only true friend I've got left."

The mastiff licked Williams' hands and whined happily.

At a quarter to two Kenneth was at the depot, nervously pacing the platform, waiting for the train.

Squires, the station agent—he was the railroad's only employee at Rowena, for there were only four trains a day— had come up the street with a lantern in his hand, grumbling over his broken sleep.

"You goin' away, Ken?" he called when he had identified the solitary passenger.

"Yes," answered Williams. 'I'm going to the city; my brother's sick."

"He's been sick a heap, ain't he, Ken? Must be costin' you a pile of money payin' Daniel's doctor bills and such. An' he's got a wife to support now, ain't he?"

A few minutes later the bright glare of the headlight burst through the blanket of night toward the west, and the passenger train came puffing up the grade just around the bend in the track.

Williams dropped to his knees beside the platform and threw his arms about the neck of the dog which had followed him to the station.

"Good-by, Doc," he said. 'We're going to miss each other, old fellow, but things are going to work out all right; I just feel it."

Squires, the station agent, snorted.

"Huh! Ken's sillier over that durn dog than anything I ever saw. Acts like he was never goin' to see 'im no more. Dern idjit makin' such a fuss over a dog!"

iv

THERE were no block signals to insure the safety of passengers on the B., L. & T., and neither was there an adequate appropriation for track maintenance. The train, a motley collection of wooden, open-vestibuled cars and a single Pullman, majestic by comparison, swayed and jolted over the poorly kept roadbed.

It seemed, however, that the odds had been safely overcome, for the lights of the city were blinking in the distance ahead and dawn was just breaking when the wheels of the locomotive plunged from the rust-eaten rails and plowed through the soft earth of the embankment, taking its six cars along with it.

Kenneth Williams, trying in vain to count himself to sleep and thus escape the harrowing thoughts which haunted him, was pitched forward against the next seat as the train left the rails and a shower of glass from the breaking windows rained in upon him. There was the crash of parting timbers as the ancient wooden coaches were reduced almost to splinters.

The old-fashioned heating stoves, one at each end of every car, showered fire amid the wreckage, and in an amazingly short time eager tongues of flame were licking hungrily through the cars

Williams, cut and bleeding, was surprised to find himself alive at all. He was, if anything, a little sorry that fate had not relieved him of all future worry. Getting painfully to his feet, he looked around for a way of escape; he could, by reaching upward to the window, now directly over his head, pull himself outside. Despite the throbbing ache of his shoulder, he stumbled about through the car, seeing if there were any other survivors. Fortunately, there had been but few passengers on the train.

They were mostly wedged about in the wreckage, so securely that rescue was impossible, and in most cases, it was evident, they were beyond hope. As Williams tugged valiantly, but hopelessly, to free one body, his pocketbook, which contained all of his worldly capital, slipped from the breast pocket of his coat, unnoticed, into the débris. Realizing that he could do nothing by himself, Williams climbed from the car.

It was broad daylight when the relief train, rushed out from the city, arrived. It had begun to rain, and Williams stood beside a hastily built fire near the tracks with the twenty-odd other survivors, watching the rescue work. A count showed that the dead numbered fourteen; their bodies were charred beyond all recognition.

A staff of railroad officials were hard at work striving to identify the dead; in this they were aided by a small army of newspaper reporters who had been rushed out in an automobile.

Kenneth Williams was within ear-shot when one of the railroad men exhibited a pocketbook— the pocketbook which Williams had himself lost.

"Well, we've got one fellow identified, anyhow," said the railroad employee. 'Here's his pocketbook ; name's Williams, judging from these scorched papers; lives back at Rowena; quite a little wad he's carrying, too. A little burned, but very spendable. Two hundred, three hundred, four hundred dollars and a few smaller bills."

Williams with a panicky dash of his own fingers realized that it was his pocketbook which they had found; he had not missed it. And then came the idea—

He was dead; fear of arrest and prison were ended. He would not defy the fate which had offered this solution of his troubles. They would never know that the fire-charred body was not his own.

Williams had a little change in his trousers, enough for fare on the trolley, which, he knew, ran into the city from a point about a mile and a half distant. He turned his back upon the smoking ruins of the wreck, leaving behind—himself!

"I am dead!" he muttered. "I am— who in the dickens am I, anyhow? I'll have to pick out another name."

As he trudged along the road toward the trolley line the plan came to him, and he was somewhat shocked that his conscience accepted it with so weak a struggle.

He searched his pockets to destroy any chance papers which might link him with Kenneth Williams. In his vest he found a little scrap of paper, not more than two inches square upon which he had jotted down the new combination number of the bank's safe. Blinn had changed it after old Ferguson had left the bank; only Blinn and Williams had the combination.

The idea was born of bitterness; that bitterness possible within the breast of the honest man who is branded as a thief.

"Why not?" he argued, going to the mat with his conscience. "What difference is there from being branded as a thief and actually being one? Who will lose? The bonding company, and they have lots of money; they can afford it. I am going out into the world without a dollar— without a cent! I am dead, and no one will ever know. It will give me a clean start, a good start."

He was thinking of the unusually heavy amount of cash which would repose in the safe of the Farmers' Bank beginning next week; the cash with which to pay the farmers of the vicinity for their wheat.

"Thirty or forty thousand— in cash," he murmured. "A fine start."

Perhaps the knowledge that he had lost Alicia, the one person for whose good opinion he seemed to care, destroyed the great bulwark which separated him from temptation. But now he had no ties; he was a man without a name, unknown to any person in the world— for Kenneth Williams, accused bank embezzler, was dead!

The plan was really exceedingly simple. He would spend a week or two in the city, turning his hand to any job that came along, giving him enough money for the actual expenses of the trip to Rowena, which was only railroad fare. This passage of time would permit him also to grow a beard.

He would reach Rowena on the midnight train; he would swing off on the side away from the railroad station and slide down the embankment, where he would remain in hiding until Squires, the station agent, had relocked the station and returned to his home and to his interrupted night of slumber. The quiet, deeply shaded streets offered handy shadows for just such an errand as that.

He would slip along through the alley back of Main Street, a distance of only one short block, to the bank. He had neglected to give his own key to Blinn; entrance by way of the side door would be but the matter of a moment.

Five minutes more and he would have crammed into his grip the packages of bills, quietly relocked the safe, and sneaked back to the railroad tracks again, where he would hide down the side of the embankment until the two o'clock train, citybound, puffed in. He would find it simple to scramble to the top of the embankment and swing aboard the open vestibule of one of the coaches as the train got in motion.

He would pay cash fare, and by the time the robbery was discovered the next morning— about nine o'clock or so — he would be lost in the maze of the big city, a man without a name, a man whom not a person in the world knew was alive.

v

WILLIAMS, slouched in the rear of the car, cap pulled low over his eyes, and a straggly growth of beard disguising his features, felt a thrill of satisfaction as he saw Bud Hawkins stare curiously from seat to seat for the sight of an acquaintance with whom he might start a conversation ; Bud was companionable and a great talker. He failed to identify Williams.

When, as midnight came and the train puffed into Rowena, Williams saw that Hawkins was the only passenger to be discharged at Rowena. He left the car by the opposite vestibule, and, as the locomotive slackened speed, swung down from the steps and dropped the five feet to the ditch on the side of the track.

The night was very still, as nights always are in Rowena, and the only noise was the thump of the air pumps of the engine and the murmur of voices as the conductor passed a word with Squires, the station agent. The stop was brief; the conductor waved his lantern, and the train puffed away.

Williams hugged the side of the embankment, lest Hawkins, who lived on that side of town, should cut across tracks to save a little time.

"Howdy, Mr. Hawkins," said Squires. "Get a good price for the cattle?"

"No," boomed the resonant voice of the cattle shipper, "they went off two cents yesterday. Drat th' dern luck! Now, if I'd of shipped 'em Friday— Huh! Here's that blame' dog of Ken Williams' again."

Williams felt a start of surprise at mention of his own name; he had never expected to hear it again. It gave him a creepy sensation as he imagined he might have felt if he had seen a ghost.

"That dog sure must 'a' thought a lot of Ken," he heard Squires say. "He ain't missed meetin' a single train since Ken went away. Ever' time th' train whistles here comes Doc, runnin' fit to kill, to th' dee-po. And, honest, Mr. Hawkins, it's kinda touchin' to see th' way that dog acts when Ken don't come. Gosh, you know if I knew how to talk dog language, I wouldn't tell this critter that Ken was killed in th' wreck— now that would be cruelty to animals !"

"I reckon, like as not, he'd go right out and jump under th' wheels and kill hisse'f," rumbled Bud Hawkins.

Williams felt the tears welling up in his eyes.

"Good, faithful, old Doc!' he muttered. "I wish I could take you back with me, old boy; I sure wish I could!"

And he began to struggle with the problem of accomplishing it. Hawkins plunged across the railroad tracks and passed within twenty feet of Williams without seeing him. Squires made his grumbling way back home, his lantern bobbing like a playful firefly in the darkness.

The big mastiff walked the length of the platform, and stood forlornly watching the distance where the train had disappeared. Then the dog walked slowly back toward home. But as he reached the point opposite Williams a breath of wind stirred and the scent of his master was borne to his suddenly quivering nostrils.

With a loud bay, Doc sprang across the tracks and down the embankment,

At first hint of that throaty bark of happiness, Williams got to his feet in alarm. The dog was about to spoil his carefully laid plan.

"Doc!" he commanded in terse tones. "Be quiet, Doc!"

But the dog was mad with joy; one spring of the haunches and he landed in the ditch, barking as he came. The big mastiff's forefeet struck Williams' chest, and the man, on his uncertain footing, was hurled backward.

All was very silent again. The dog, frightened by his master's strange silence, stood whining and licking his face. Kenneth Williams did not move; his head, in the fall, had struck an abandoned cross tie.

vi

WILLIAMS' first sensation was that he was in heaven and that an angel was stroking his throbbing brow. When he opened his eyes he had no reason to amend this semiconscious impression. One of Alicia Harvey's hands soothed his forehead, and the other— was it possible?— nestled within his own palm.

"He's coming to, papa," said Alicia to the big man at the window. Old Sampson Harvey turned to the bed and smiled.

"Well, Ken," he said, "you're about the livest ghost that ever showed up in these parts. How do you feel?"

Williams blinked in bewilderment. Why did he call him—"Ken?" Why did he speak so heartily, so friendly ?

"Didn't— didn't Blinn— didn't he tell you— that— that—" he stammered.

"You bet he did, Ken! He told us all about it— everything," answered Harvey.

"But, if— he told you; then— well, I don't understand. Has it all been a— a dream?"

He slipped his hand away from Alicia's; he could not endure the repugnant gesture with which she would disengage her fingers when she did know the truth —that she was at the bedside of an accused embezzler.

"I don't believe he understands a bit, papa," said Alicia; "I don't believe his mind is clear yet."

"Well, he wants to hurry up and get it cleared then," grunted Harvey, "with all the wheat coming in and me needed down at the elevator every minute of the day, I need Ken to run the bank. I can't run 'em both at th' same time."

Kenneth sat up on his elbow.

"You—you want me at the bank— me?" he demanded.

"Oh, Ken, don't you understand?" exclaimed Alicia. "We know all about it. Fred Blinn had an accident the day after you left— a terrible accident. His automobile ran into the ditch, and— then he told daddy the truth about it— about you. You see, he took the money; he'd been gambling with stocks. Oh, you poor, trusting boy, couldn't you see it? If you weren't guilty Fred Blinn was the only man who could be."

"But— but he treated me so fine; sent me away to keep me out of— prison, and—"

"Yes," she replied with a flash of anger, "so that it would appear certain that you were the thief; he could never have proved it if you had stayed. He just bluffed you into leaving; don't you see? Isn't it all clear now, dear?"

He started at her use of the endearment.

"Not— not quite all, Alicia," he whispered. "Blinn told me that he and you— that—"

"That old bald-headed thing! I shouldn't call him that because he's dead, but— ugh! Never!"

"I love you, Alicia!" he said.

"I've known that for a long time, Ken," she said.

"You— you did!' he exclaimed in surprise. "Why— why I never told you."

"You didn't have to tell me, dear; I knew."

Through the open door came Doc. He walked over to Kenneth's bed and rubbed his head against the coverings. With one hand Williams squeezed Alicia's fingers; with the other he patted Doc's head.

"I guess," he said softly, "that women and dogs don't have to be told things; they just seem to know and understand. It's all very wonderful, Alicia, and— it's all because Doc met me at the train!"

"And that's my secret and Doc's; isn't it, Doc, old boy?"

And Doc gave a short little bark, which Kenneth was quite sure was the big mastiff's promise that the secret was safe.

___________________

11: Death on an Atoll

James Norman Hall

1887-1951

The Atlantic Monthly, March 1931

I HAD been reading late that evening. Sitting on my verandah, with a shaded lamp on the table beside me, I had entered at once, without effort, into a world revealed so vividly, with such imaginative insight, that although the air my body breathed was heavy with the humid spicy fragrance of tropical vegetation, and crickets were chirping in the hibiscus shrubbery close by, I had traveled in spirit as far as Russia and was conscious only of 'the clear black sky of the northern winter, decorated with the sumptuous fires of the stars.' It will be understood that I returned with difficulty to an awareness of present circumstances. Chancing to look up from my book, I thought for the fraction of a second that I had seen an apparition.

The man, a powerfully built native of middle age, barefoot, and dressed in blue denim trousers and a coat of white drill, was standing hat in hand just outside the circle of lamplight. I had heard no slightest sound, and it had not occurred to him, apparently, to attract my attention by clearing his throat or rapping on one of the verandah posts. I wondered how long he might have been standing thus, quietly waiting for me to notice him. The moment I did so he came forward with the customary Polynesian greeting, 'May you live!' He had arrived at Tahiti late that afternoon and had walked out from Papeete, three miles distant, to bring me a letter which, he said, would explain the reason for this late visit. The white man who had written it had asked him to deliver it as soon as possible. I read it at once.

Tanao

Low Archipelago

Dear Sir: —

It is nearly five years since we last met, and you may have left Tahiti long since. Nevertheless I must write, even though there is little chance that my message will reach you.

The service I am about to ask of you is one that I should hesitate to ask even of an old friend; but you are the only white man whom I know in this part of the world, and circumstances have arisen which make it imperative for me to appeal to you, however reluctantly.

I am ill, and as I have grave doubts as to my recovery it is necessary that I put my affairs in order. I have no one here but an old servant, Ling Foo, whom you may remember. Could you come to see me? I have chartered a Paumotu cutter for the purpose of carrying this letter to you, and if you find it possible to come, this same cutter will bring you to the island. I quite realize that you may not be able to come at once, on such short notice, and I have therefore given instructions to the man who brings this letter—he is the owner of the vessel— to await your orders.

Yours very truly,

Ronald Crichton

The letter had been written by hand, on a sheet of foolscap, but the lines did not follow the ruled spaces. They ran unevenly across the page, meeting, even crossing, in some places, far apart in others. Plainly it had been written by a man so ill that he could scarcely hold the pen. The appearance of the letter as well as the message it contained convinced me of the urgency of this matter. I asked the native who had brought it how he had chanced to call at Tanao. He explained that he and two other men (all three of them inhabitants of the island of Hao) had been returning there from Mangareva, an island at the southeastern extremity of the Low Archipelago, where they had gone for the pearl-diving season, and had been blown off their course by a southerly gale. After the storm they had passed close by Tanao, and, observing a signal fire lighted on the beach, two of them had gone ashore to see what was wanted. An old Chinaman was awaiting them, who led them to the house of the white man. The popaa was very ill and had offered him ten thousand francs if he would go to Tahiti at once and try to deliver the letter he would give him.

'There was no one with him except his Chinese servant?' I asked.

'No one.'

'What did he tell you to do in case I could not be found?'

'He asked me to return as soon as possible and carry his Chinese servant to some island where he might take passage in a trading schooner to Tahiti.'

'Did he speak of wanting a doctor?'

'He said there was no need for one.'

'What do you think of his condition? Is it serious?'

He stretched out his hand with his thumb and forefinger held slightly apart. 'When I saw him,' he said, 'he was no farther than that from his grave.'

ii

AT ONE O'CLOCK the following afternoon we were well out at sea, and as soon as we had passed the northern extremity of Tahiti the cutter was set on the course of her seven-hundred-mile voyage. There were four of us aboard: Maiti, the owner of the vessel, his two companions, Nau and Mangi, and myself. The barometer had fallen slightly and the sky looked threatening. The wind was blowing from the westward, more strongly every moment as we came out from under the shelter of the island. Westerly and southwesterly winds usually mean bad weather in this part of the Pacific, but the month was June and nothing more serious than a moderate gale was to be expected, with frequent heavy squalls of rain. Small though she was, the cutter was an excellent sea boat, and I watched with satisfaction as she settled down to her work. It was a fair wind for us.

Two days later it went round to the southeast again, and, having blown freshly for several hours, died away completely; but by that time we had three hundred miles of the voyage behind us. As the cutter rocked over the long glassy undulations the reef points pattered against the canvas with a sound like the drumming of so many nervous fingers impatient in idleness. Nau and Mangi fastened a pandanus mat to the boom and crawled under it to sleep. Presently Maiti joined them; there was no reason for sitting longer at the wheel. The sun set in a sea that reflected perfectly the shapes of a few fleecy clouds. It was what the natives call é huihui mania, a great calm. There was nothing to do but wait.

I wondered whether Crichton, as well, was waiting, or whether we were not already too late. Maiti had told me that the voyage from Tanao to Tahiti had taken sixteen days. It was more than possible that the return voyage would require three weeks, what with the calms and head winds we had reason to expect at that time of year. A feeling of desolation came over me as I pictured Crichton dying on that remote atoll with only a taciturn old Chinese servant for company.

Sitting on the wheel box, in the gathering darkness, I went back in thought to the day, in February 1920, when I first met him. I had been demobilized from the army only a few months earlier, and, feeling a need of solitude after the herded life in war-time France, I sailed from San Francisco for an indefinite sojourn in the South Seas. Arriving at Tahiti, I found that island, with its European colony, its hotels, motor cars, and motion-picture theatres, not at all the retreat I had hoped for, so I took the first opportunity that presented itself for moving on. This was a small trading schooner, the Caleb Winship, bound to the Paumotu, or, as it is more commonly called, the Low, or Dangerous, Archipelago. Crichton chanced to be a passenger on this vessel. He was traveling in company with a dignified, gentle-mannered old Polynesian lady whom he called 'Mama-Ruau' (Grandma), a woman of sixty or thereabout, dressed in a flowered Mother Hubbard, with her white hair hanging in a single braid.

I decided at first sight that he was English and wondered in an idle way what he was doing in that part of the world. Tino, the half-caste supercargo of the Winship, was both curious and puzzled, and on that first evening at sea took me aside to speak of Crichton. Who was he, where did he come from, and what in the name of common sense did he mean to do on that God-forsaken stretch of reef called Tanao? It was a worthless island, he told me. There was scarcely enough land above sea level to stretch your legs over, and even if it were all planted to coconut palms, in full bearing, the output would n't amount to ten tons of copra per year. And yet, here was this Englishman, or whatever he was, going out there to settle with the old Kanaka woman who owned the place! He had taken a ten years' lease on it, with the option of purchase at the end of that time.

This much Tino had gathered from the old woman. Her family had owned Tanao time out of mind, but they had all died off. Her husband had long been dead, and her two sons, her only remaining children, had been drowned at sea while fishing. After this she had lived alone for nearly two years until a passing schooner had given her an opportunity to go to Tahiti, where she had relatives.

'She stayed there for some time; then, it seems, the poor old thing got to hankering for home again. It's queer how these natives love their islands. It may be nothing but a sand bank with half a dozen coconut palms on it, a thousand miles from nowhere, but they'll never be happy away from it. She tried to persuade some of her relatives to go back there with her. They said no, of course. Tahiti was home to them, and they were n't such fools as to leave a high island for a place where there is nothing to eat but coconuts and fish. Then, somehow, she met this Crichton, and he jumped at the chance she offered him. The old lady says he's promised to stay, for good. He speaks native, and good native, too; I've heard him talking with her, although he has n't said yes or no or how-do-you-do to me since he came aboard. Where did he pick it up? He must have been living somewhere in this part of the Pacific for a long time. Tanao! Wait till he sees it! Tell you what I'll do— I'll bet you a five-gallon demijohn of the best rum in Tahiti that he'll be coming back with us. He don't know what he's let himself in for— that's my opinion.'

Apparently he did know, however; at any rate he failed to return with us. We remained one day at the island, unloading supplies for him, and although he was courteous enough, I felt that he was impatient for us to be gone. He treated the Mama-Ruau with invariable kindness and consideration, but it seemed to me that he wished her away as well; that he wanted to be entirely alone on the island. What was it, I wondered— a form of selfishness? A longing to be, like Crusoe, monarch of all he surveyed? Or had he, perhaps, as Tino suggested later, been mixed up in some affair that he was ashamed of, that made it necessary for him to hide away from the sight of other men? But this latter possibility I put aside at once. I knew nothing of his past life, but if his was not a trustworthy face, then I had never seen one. I would have taken my oath that he was incapable of a dishonorable act.

My conclusion, after summing up the little evidence I had to go by, was that solitude was a vital need of his nature; not a temporary need, as with most men, but an appetite as fundamental as hunger or thirst, but unlike these in that he had never yet been able to satisfy it. I gathered from one or two remarks of his that he had long been searching for just such an island as Tanao. He told me on the day we landed there that it more than fulfilled his expectations, and when I asked how long he meant to stay he said, 'Always. As long as I live.' I had never met a man who seemed so detached from life, so lacking in dependence upon any sort of companionship, brute or human. Nevertheless, as I sat on the rail aft, watching the atoll dwindling and blurring far in the distance, I doubted whether any man could be happy for long in a place so inconceivably lonely.

iii

FOUR YEARS passed. Meanwhile, like many another ex-soldier, I had been wandering here and there, looking on at life in an unfamiliar world, but having little desire to take an active part in it again. I seemed to have lost the faculty for living in a settled, purposeful way. After a year of voyaging from island to island in the Pacific I returned to the United States, where I continued my nomadic existence, camping in hotels and the guest bedrooms in the houses of old friends, but never staying long in any one place. I went to Iceland and spent a winter there, traveling on horseback through that beautiful, sparsely populated country and gazing at the northern lights from vantage points along the arctic circle. Then I went to the Faroe Islands and from there to Norway. Then home again, via New York, and westward to the Pacific Coast across the prairies and plains and the vast deserts of Arizona and New Mexico.

Crichton was often in my thoughts during these years. I could not account for the deepness of the impression he had made upon me in the course of our brief voyage on the Caleb Winship. We had, to be sure, been thrown much together during that voyage, but our companionship had rested on very slight foundations. That was his fault, rather than mine. He was very reserved at all times and seemed to have an instinctive distrust of any relationship approaching intimacy. I knew nothing of his serious thoughts and interests, and he nothing of mine; and yet, ever since I had left the island, in the strangest places and at the most unlikely moments a picture of the place would float into consciousness and focus itself at once, and I would see Crichton sitting in the shade at the inner border of a glaring white beach, looking out over the empty sea. I wondered about him, and for some reason was disturbed about him. It was an unusual thing for a man of his age— he was only twenty-eight— to bury himself as he had done. Even for an authentic lover of solitude such a procedure seemed more than a little dangerous. However, i took comfort in the thought that he himself must have realized this long since and have gone to a more habitable spot.

I returned to Tahiti in 1924, having decided in the future to make my home there for a part of each year; and on the day of my arrival I set out along the water front in the hope that I might gather some news of Crichton. After many fruitless inquiries I learned that he was still on Tanao. Not only that: he had never once left the island since the day he landed there.

A Chinaman, Chan Lee, owner of the schooner Toafa, gave me this information. He, apparently, was the only man on Tahiti who knew anything of Crichton, and he knew little. He told me that he chanced to pass the atoll in 1920— it must have been only two or three months after my visit— and had sent his ship's boat ashore for some drinking coconuts and a supply of firewood for the galley stove. He had not known there was anyone living on the island. Crichton had come out to the schooner and had then arranged with him to call once yearly to bring him supplies. He had also arranged to have Chan bring him some more lumber and half a dozen natives from another island to clear his land and help build his house. As soon as the work was finished these men returned home, since which time Crichton had lived alone on the island except for the old native woman and one Chinese servant whom he, Chan, had engaged for Crichton in Papeete.

Chan also told me of carrying out a load of household furnishings which had arrived for Crichton from England, and of the enormous difficulty they had in taking them ashore over the reef. Once Crichton had spoken of me, and had asked him, in case he chanced to see me, to invite me to come out with the Toafa the next time she called. This was three years before, but as Chan was about to leave for his annual visit I decided to consider the invitation still open and go with him.

It was at this time that I became convinced, intuitively, that Crichton's destiny was, or would be, a tragic one— that he was, somehow, doomed. During the voyage with Chan Lee, I considered the situation from every point of view; took myself in hand, so to speak, as though trying to convince another man of the absurdity of his apprehensions. What was there to be concerned about? What ground had I for supposing that anything was amiss with Crichton? Here was a young Englishman, of cultivated tastes, evidently of good family, who happened to be not socially inclined, and who for this reason chose to live on a small coral island in the middle of the Pacific. Was there, necessarily, anything strange, or unnatural, or even dangerous in that? Other men of similar character and temperament had cut themselves off from the world and had found happiness in doing so. Why not this one? Self-confidence in such a man usually meant self-knowledge. This was not the case of one foolishly enamored of a form of life for which he was unfitted. He had chosen it because he loved it and was conscious of resources within himself to make solitude not only endurable but pleasant. The fact that he was still living on Tanao was proof enough, surely, that he had not been mistaken in this.

So I tried, uselessly, to reason myself out of my misgivings; nevertheless when we reached the island, late of a fine afternoon, it did seem, at first, that I had been indulging in a great deal of gratuitous anxiety. Crichton and the old woman were awaiting us at the landing place; it seemed only yesterday that I bade them good-bye. Mama-Ruau, with tears of welcome in her eyes, kissed me on both cheeks, in the native fashion. She looked much frailer than when I had last seen her,— a natural change in a woman of her advanced years,— but Crichton was the same deeply tanned, healthy-looking man I remembered, except that he now wore dark glasses, a precaution against the glare of the sun. He greeted me in his quiet, reserved manner, and was, I thought, really glad to see me.

Tanao, like many another atoll in the Paumotu Archipelago, has no entrance into the lagoon. One goes ashore through the surf, in a ship's boat, and a schooner visiting the island must stand off and on. There were supplies to land, and as we should not be leaving till the following day I accepted with pleasure Crichton's invitation that I spend the night ashore.

We walked across the island to his house, which stood on the lagoon beach, a quarter of a mile from the ocean beach. After a few perfunctory remarks he fell silent. Apparently he had nothing more to say, and his preoccupied manner made me feel a little uncomfortable. When we reached the steps leading to the verandah he stopped, and for a long moment stared at the ground as though deep in thought. Then he excused himself; he said that he had some business matters to arrange with Chan Lee before the schooner stood out to sea for the night. 'Please make yourself comfortable,' he added. 'You might look over my house if you care to.'

That was the last I saw of him. I waited for an hour, an hour and a half, two hours. Then a gong was sounded, and, walking through the passageway to the lagoon-side verandah, I found dinner awaiting me, served by Ling Foo, his servant, a weird, gnomelike little man who might have stepped out of some centuries-old book of Chinese fairy tales. He moved as soundlessly as a shadow, and although I tried several times to persuade him to speak, he merely regarded me with a detached, contemplative expression as one might look at a rock or a tree while thinking of something else. As soon as dinner was over he placed a lighted lamp on the front verandah and another in the room where I was to sleep; then he too vanished as though he had conjured himself away with the napkin he carried over his arm, and I was left alone in the midst of a silence that seemed as wide as space, as old as the beginning of the world— a silence accentuated by a ship's-bell clock ticking away with self-important industry as though convinced that, if it should stop, time itself would be no more.

I was as forlorn as it is possible for a man to be— a guest in a house where I knew that I was not wanted. Common sense should have warned me that a man who had chosen the loneliest coral island in the Pacific as a home had not done so because he craved companionship. Nevertheless, taking this into account and putting my unheralded arrival in the most unfavorable light possible, I felt that he was lacking in courtesy, to say the least, to abandon me as he had. I had come ashore at his invitation, and the obligations of hospitality demanded that he should not shame me. It would have been easy for him to plead illness; almost any excuse would have been better than no excuse.

I returned to the front verandah and gave myself up to disquieting reflections. It was impossible to account for Crichton's actions except on the hypothesis that four years of complete isolation had made unbearable to him the prospect of a renewed contact, however slight, with anyone from the outside world. It might even have unbalanced his mind. Many a man before his time had gone mad through loneliness.

Later in the evening I became convinced that he was there in the house with me— in his own room, and this conviction so disturbed me that I tiptoed across the verandah and down the steps and spent the rest of the night walking up and down the lonely outer beach longing for daylight and the return of the schooner. When she came in, at dawn, I went aboard with the first boatload of copra, and, being tired after my all-night vigil, I lay down in my bunk and went to sleep atonce. When I awoke we were headed westward again, and Tanao was only a faint bluish haze far to windward.

During the years that followed, although I often thought of Tanao and its lonely white inhabitant, I heard nothing of either until the evening when Maiti walked into the circle of lamp-light on my verandah and gave me the letter telling of Crichton's illness.

iv

THIS THIRD voyage seemed interminable— calms, head winds, calms, head winds, day after day after day. I was beginning to fear that Maiti, who depended upon the stars and instinct for guidance, had mistaken his course; but on the morning of the twenty-fifth day we sighted the atoll. With a faint breeze we approached slowly, and toward noon were within a quarter of a mile of the landing place. The cutter was brought to, my luggage was loaded into the ship's boat, and Nau and Maiti rowed me ashore. As we approached I examined the shore line carefully, but saw no sign of life excepting a flock of white terns floating aimlessly over the scrub at the far end of the main island. We might have been the first men ever to view that lonely place.

Fortunately the sea was calm and we got over the reef without mishap. Then something I had thought was a round black rock detached itself from the sand and moved down to the edge of the beach. I soon made it out to be an umbrella almost completely hiding the person beneath it. Maiti and Nau jumped out into waist-deep water and guided the boat across the shallows. The umbrella moved away as we approached, up the beach to the roadway leading across the island. Ling Foo was the man carrying it. He kept some twenty paces ahead of us, tilting up his sunshade now and then to see that we were following, and running on again. I called out to him, but his only reply was to glance back, without stopping, and make a quick beckoning gesture.

Crichton was lying, propped up with pillows, on a sofa on the verandah. He was shockingly altered, so pale and emaciated that I should never have recognized him elsewhere. Indeed, I thought for a moment that we had arrived just too late, for his eyes were closed in their cavernous hollows, his hands folded on his breast, and his face wore the expression of peace and indifference one sees on the faces of the dead. Ling Foo ran noiselessly across the verandah and stood beside him, looking from Crichton to me and back again. Maiti halted at the top step as though he had been stopped by a viewless barrier. No one spoke. The clock with the ship's-bell attachment was still engaged in measuring eternity by seconds. It struck half-past twelve.

Crichton opened his eyes at the sound and stared vacantly before him; then he turned his head wearily on the pillow.

'Ling Foo? Are you there?' he said.

The old servant touched him lightly on the shoulder.

'Go down again to the beach. They must be close inshore by this time.'

I stepped forward. 'Don't you know me, Crichton?'

His worn face lighted up. 'You're here?' he exclaimed. 'Is it possible? Please forgive me! I must have been asleep.' He held out his hand gropingly. 'I can't tell you how— how grateful I am.'

I could think of nothing to say. A sudden feeling of compassion came over me at the thought of this man's friendlessness. The fact that he had had no one but me to turn to in his need gave me a truer conception of his aloneness in the world. Nearly a decade had passed since the Caleb Winship had brought him here. The events of that well-remembered day, viewed in the light of all that had since happened to me, seemed to have taken place in the course of a previous existence. To find him still here was a shock to my sense of probability, like that one would feel at discovering a man swimming alone in mid-ocean. The imagination in this case lagged behind the senses, was reluctant to accept their evidence.

For all my sympathy I was conscious of a feeling of dull anger against him. What possible reason or excuse could he, a young man with the best of life before him, have had for throwing that life away? What a senseless waste of abilities, of opportunities! And now there would be no more opportunities. He was dying— there was little question of that. It seemed to me that he must have been keeping himself alive for weeks by sheer strength of will.

'I had only the faintest hope,' he went on. 'I knew that there was not
one chance in a thousand of my letter reaching you. And yet I clung to that hope.'

'I've been living at Tahiti for some time past,' I said. 'Fortunately your letter found me at home.'

'You have? Living there? I wish I had known, earlier. In that case— No matter. You've come. I should have written before, but there was no opportunity to send a letter.'

'Doesn't the Toafa call here now?'

'Yes, she still comes once a year, but she is not due again until September. When she was last here Chan Lee told me that he would be trading in the Marquesas most of this year. I suppose he's there now. But you must be tired after your long voyage. Ling Foo has lunch ready for you. Afterward perhaps you would like a siesta? It's very hot here in the middle of the day.'

I was glad of an excuse for leaving him for a time, for he was very weak and I could see that it tired him to talk. After lunch I returned with Maiti to the beach. Nau had been spearing fish during our absence and had prepared his own food Low Island fashion— raw fish dipped in sea water and eaten with the meat of ripe coconuts. Maiti had eaten sparingly of Ling Foo's luncheon. He joined Nau in his meal and the two men ate with enormous appetite, squatting on a slab of coral in the shallows beside a pool of still water that reflected their faces and the sky. Behind them was the reef where the surf spouted up in fountains of spume, luminous in the sunlight, and beyond that the sea, ruffled to the deepest blue by the breeze and empty save for the cutter half a mile offshore.

It was a lonely picture, full of harmony and beauty with those natives in the foreground. Maiti and Nau belonged in such a setting. They were as much a part of it as the sea birds skimming along the slopes of the combers rising to break on the reef; but I had only to close my eyes and to imagine Crichton in their place, and immediately the beauty seemed to become hostile beauty and mid-sea silence the measure of Nature's disapproval of the incongruous element. As I sat there with that silence flowing over and around me [ again tried, ineffectually, to assign some reason for his ten years' exile. Why, why, why? The question kept reiterating itself in my mind, and I could find no answer, nor so much as a clue to one.

When the two men had finished their meal I discussed plans with them. They had been long from home and were, I knew, anxious to have news of their families. It seemed useless to keep them waiting at Tanao, the more so as there was no anchorage for the cutter. Therefore I arranged with them that they should go to their own island of Hao, two hundred and fifty miles distant, and return within ten days' time, if possible. The wind was favorable for their voyage, and as soon as they had gathered a supply of green drinking coconuts they rowed out to the cutter, hauled in their boat, and stood off to the northwest. I sat in the shade watching the little vessel creep up the long slope of the sea until she was lost to view.

v

IT WAS getting on toward mid-afternoon when I returned to the house. Crichton was sleeping; at least I thought he was asleep. A low table stood beside his couch, with a tumbler and a pitcher of water on it, and a hand bell for summoning Ling Foo.

I went through to the kitchen, a spacious, airy building connected with the main house by a covered passageway. Here, as elsewhere, everything was in scrupulous order. Pots and pans, burnished and shining, hung from hooks along the wall. The stove was brightly polished, and sticks of firewood, each of them cut at precisely the same length, were neatly corded up in a bin against the wall. Ling Foo was not there. I returned to the front verandah and, taking a book from a shelf, seated myself near Crichton's couch. Looking up presently, I found that he was awake, regarding me with a vacant and, at the same time, a thoughtful expression. I waited, surprised that he didn't speak. At length I forced myself to say, 'Is there anything you want, Crichton?'

He started slightly at the sound of my voice. 'Oh,' he said, 'I'm sorry. I didn't know you were back. You must have come in very quietly.'

'Crichton! You're not— Haven't you seen me sitting here?'

Even as I asked the question I realized that he had not seen me— that he was blind.

He told me then what I had quite forgotten until that moment, of the trouble he had had with his eyes at the time of my last visit, caused by the glare of the sun reflected from the lagoon and the beaches of white sand.

'I didn't realize that it was at all serious, he went on, 'and at first I took no precautions. It was very unwise. Unfortunately I had no dark glasses, and by the time I was able to get them it was too late; the damage was done.'

'How long have you been like this?'

'Nearly four years. I can still see the faint outline of objects close by, directly in front of me, but that's all.'

There was nothing one could say in the face of such a calamity as that. I admired him for his stoicism. He spoke quietly of his loss, as though it were a matter of no great consequence.

'I know the place so well, every foot of beach, nearly every tree and shrub on it, that I've not been hampered as much as you might think; and Ling Foo has been a faithful old servant, one in a thousand. Without him, of course, I should have had a hard time of it this past six months. You remember Mama-Ruau, don't you? She died two years ago. I've missed her more than I can say; she was as good to me as a man's own mother could be. She told me that she would always watch over me after her death. It's curious; at times I've been all but convinced of her presence. One has strange fancies in such a lonely place.'

'That's an extraordinary old servant of yours,' I remarked. 'Is he always so silent? I've never yet heard him utter so much as a word.'

'That's because of an impediment in his speech. Poor Ling! It's pathetic to hear him try to talk. He's almost given up trying. How old would you say he is?'

'I've often wondered. At least sixty.'

'He tells me that he was seventy-five his last birthday. He's a truly remarkable old chap, full of energy despite his age and never for a moment idle. He's been with me now for eight years. Fortunately he seems perfectly contented here. I used to urge him to go back to Tahiti with Chan Lee's schooner, to visit his friends, but he's never wanted to go.'

'And you, Crichton? Have you never left Tanao in all these years?'

'Never, he said, and fell silent. For a moment the expression on his face grew sombre. I was sorry I had spoken.

'Do you know, I feel much better,' he went on. 'Your coming has done me good.'

'I'm delighted to hear you say that. By the way, I've let the cutter go. The men were anxious to have news of their families—'

'Naturally. I was going to suggest that you do just what you've done. When will they be coming back?'

'In ten days, or perhaps two weeks, depending on the weather. Now what I have in mind is this: supposing they return two weeks from to-day; do you think you might be strong enough by that time to make the voyage to Tahiti? If not, then we can hold the cutter here until you are. You need a change, Crichton. It will do you a world of good. Will you come?'

He smiled faintly and shook his head.

'My dear chap, I'm at the end of my rope. I know that. I shall be dead before the cutter returns.'

I was about to speak when he interrupted me: 'Tahiti? No, I have a longer journey than that to make. Don't imagine that I regret it. On the contrary. But let's not talk of this. Let's not discuss my affairs this afternoon. There will be ample time for that to-morrow. Do you know what I'd like, now, if it is n't too much of an imposition? I said just now that I hadn't minded so much losing my sight, but I have minded in one respect. I'm awfully book-hungry. Would you be willing to read to me for an hour or two?'

I read all through the afternoon until dinner time. He was a great admirer of Thoreau, and we began with his favorite chapters in Walden and passages from the Journals. Then he asked for Comus and, after that, the first part of Henry the Fourth. Ling Foo brought our food to the table by Crichton's couch, and he ate with some appetite, for the first time in weeks, he said. Throughout the meal he talked with great animation; he seemed as starved for conversation as he was for reading. We discussed books, chiefly, and as we proceeded from one to another his eyes lighted up with interest and enthusiasm, and a faint touch of color suffused itself over his cheeks. This was a Crichton I had never seen before, a delightful companion, urbane, wholly at his ease, almost light-hearted in manner.

Afterward, when the lamps had been lit, I continued reading: from Keats, Walt Whitman, Charles Lamb's Letters, Montaigne's Essays— whatever he asked for. We forgot time and place and circumstance, and it was not until the clock struck eleven that he said, 'Good Lord! Can it be as late as that?'

I told him that I would gladly continue reading as long as he liked.

'No, not another word! You must be worn out. Thanks ever so much. I can't tell you what a treat this has been for me.'

We chatted for a moment; then I called Ling Foo, who was dozing in a chair by the kitchen table. He brought his sleeping mat and a pillow and lay down on the floor beside Crichton's couch in case he should be wanted in the night. I retired to my room— the same room that had been prepared for me at the time of my last visit; but on this occasion I went to bed and slept soundly until morning.

vi

WE SPENT the forenoon of that day in settling up his affairs. He had made his will years ago, before coming out to Tanao, and a copy of this had been filed long since with his attorney in London. He asked me to read over to him his own copy. I was not surprised to learn that he was a man of considerable means. He had a fortune of twenty-five thousand pounds invested in securities in England, together with real estate inherited from a maternal uncle. All of his property in England was to be divided equally between two nephews and a niece, his only surviving relatives. What he particularly wished me to do was to send to his attorney— together with a personal letter which I wrote at his dictation— the official papers to be secured from the French authorities at Tahiti, establishing the fact of his death. He had something over a thousand pounds on deposit in the Banque de L'IndoChine, in Papeete, and this money was to go to Ling Foo, who had served him so faithfully all these years. In order to avoid legal complications I suggested that he make out a check for this amount, payable to Ling Foo. I knew the president of the bank and promised to explain matters to him so that the old Chinaman would have no difficulty in securing the money.

It was a problem to decide what to do with his household possessions. He wanted me to accept them, but I explained what he already knew, that I had a great dislike for accumulating possessions and preferred not to encumber myself with more than the bare minimum necessary for comfort, which I already had. I confess that I was sorely tempted to accept his library; but I had no room for it in my own small house, and therefore suggested that all of his books as well as his fine collection of Polynesian curios be given to the colonial museum and library at Papeete. As for his other household furnishings, they could only be removed with great difficulty, owing to the fact that they would have to be carried aboard a schooner over the reef, in a ship's boat. Therefore it was decided to leave them where they were, for the benefit of Mama-Ruau's relatives, if ever they should visit Tanao. The island had come to them at her death, although Crichton's ten-year lease had still some months to run.

It seemed very strange to me to be discussing these matters with Crichton. He was businesslike, methodical, painstaking. Death was in the background, and yet, because of his quiet, matter-of-fact way of speaking of it, I had no emotional conviction of its nearness. The last thing he asked me to do was to go through his desk and clear out all of his papers and notebooks, including half a dozen thick manuscript volumes. These, I imagine, contained a record of his life at Tanao until the loss of his eyesight had made writing no longer possible. There was a legacy I should have been glad to accept, but it was not offered. 'Will you please burn all this?' he said. 'It contains matter of purely personal interest. I shall feel much better when you tell me that it has been destroyed.' It required half an hour of poking and stirring the fire to consume the journals, but in the end they were all reduced to ashes.

On the evening of that day, Ling Foo and I carried Crichton on his couch to the open verandah built out over the water on the opposite side of the house. It was a glorious night, perfectly still, without a cloud in the sky. The air was cool and Crichton was covered with a rug. I stretched out in a long chair near by. As darkness came on we seemed to be suspended between an upper and a nether firmament, so bright and clear were the reflections of the stars in the lagoon. I felt uneasy about Crichton; he was much weaker than he had been the previous day. The business of settling up his affairs had exhausted his little reserve of strength, and he was running a temperature which made him restless and light-headed. Neither of us spoke for a long time; then he asked for a glass of water, which he drank greedily. A few moments later he roused himself with an effort.

'There is something I have long had on my conscience,' he said. 'You will remember, when you were last here, my— my strange behavior. What must you have thought of me, leaving you like that— and a guest in my own house, too!'

'My dear Crichton! Don't speak of it. If apologies are in order, let mine come first. I barged in upon you without—'

'No— please! You have nothing to reproach yourself for. I was guilty of an unpardonable breach of hospitality. I owe you the fullest explanation of my actions on that occasion; but I don't see how I can explain without saying more than... Would you mind very much if I were to tell you something that I have never before spoken of to anyone?'

'No, not if you want to tell me.'

'I do want to; but whether it will be possible... I have kept this matter a secret for so many years that it will be hard to break silence now. Let me ask you a question: have you ever wondered why I came out here to live?'

'Many times.'

'What was your supposition?'

'I have never found a satisfactory one. You have always been a puzzle to me, Crichton.'

'You're being quite frank with me? You don't know why I have hidden myself away here?'

'I haven't the slightest idea.'

'I believe you. Well, let me get this out, if I can. It will explain so much; and for some reason I feel a great need to speak— for the first and last time.

'I am one of those men—' He broke off and was long silent. Then he began again. 'I am one of those men who— who are— mistakes of Nature.

'Does this mean anything to you?' he said, after another silence. 'Do you understand what I am trying to say? Mistakes of Nature— tragic, irremediable mistakes. Or experiments, perhaps— who can say? How many there are, of how many kinds! There is one— the fate of a victim of that blunder in creation is the saddest, surely, that can befall a human being. That was my fate.

'This sounds maudlin. I am aware of the fact; but I ask you to believe that I am not indulging here in self-pity. I have long since given up that habit. If you like, in this darkness think of me only as a disembodied voice, speaking of a man who no longer exists. That is not far from the truth.

'It was many years before I knew. My people never knew. They are all dead now. My father and mother died while I was at the university, within six months of each other. The war wiped out the rest of my family— three brothers, two older and one younger than myself. I was the one to be spared. The irony of that fact has given me some bitter moments.

'My boyhood at home was all that boyhood at its best can be. My father and mother made comrades of their children, and they had no reason to suspect that anything was amiss with one of them. Their great desire was to make our childhood happy, and, as we grew older, to help us shape our destinies according to our own wishes and abilities. My father believed that education was, in the beginning, a matter of arousing in our minds a disciplined curiosity about life, and in my case he wanted me to be furnished with certain tools to work with— principally languages, ancient and modern, and mathematics. Thanks to his guidance and my own inclinations I went to school with the keenest desire to acquire mastery in the use of these tools, realizing beforehand that the drudgery entailed was necessary, and that the tools were not ends in themselves, but the means to ends far beyond.

'You may wonder why I speak of this. It is to make clear why I remained so long in ignorance of— of one side of my nature. If this is not the reason I can assign no other. At school I lived a healthy Spartan life, devoted to hard play and hard study. I had neither the time nor the inclination for self-exploration on the emotional side. I was more studious than most boys of my years, and believed that scholarship was of more importance than sport; otherwise I was not eccentric in any way.

'At seventeen I went up to the university where my father and grand-father and great-grandfather had gone before me. The freedom there, after public school, was like the breath of life to me. I could live as austerely as I chose, without attracting comment, favorable or otherwise; and some of the drudgery of education was past. I now began to know a few, at least, of its pure delights. And what can equal them? Or what joy is keener than that of a young man when he first becomes conscious of the unfolding of his powers and looks forward to years of quiet, uninterrupted study? I already knew what my life work was to be. I had a scholarship in chemistry, and with the confidence and the arrogance of youth I determined to be the greatest chemist in England.

'In my second year at the university I discovered— what had to be discovered. It was a gradual revelation, but, in the end, complete and— terrible. My case may have been exceptional, and from what I know now I think it was. The fact remains that I was unaware even of the existence of such— of such abnormality until I discovered it in myself.

'Imagine, if you can, the desolation of spirit I suffered as a result of that discovery. No one else knew of it— not even my friend who unconsciously brought it about. He never suspected that my feeling toward him was other than that of a devoted comrade. I had the pride and the strength of will necessary to spare him and to save myself— but I left the university.

'I went to Germany to continue my studies. It was the worst move I could have made— it seems. What happened there— Oh, I'm so mortally tired!'

That cry went to my heart. 'Crichton! Don't go on,' I said. 'Believe me, I—'

'Wait — I beg your pardon.' He raised himself to a sitting posture and his voice became hard and cold as ice.

'Don't misunderstand me. I was not on the point of making any sordid confessions. There is nothing of that nature to confess. Allow me to finish. I have little more to say.'

He sank back on the pillow and lay still.

'Have you ever visited the Grand Canyon of the Colorado? Once, in boyhood, I passed that way with my father. Imagine a chasm wider, infinitely deeper, and filled with shadow, with black night. In Germany I found myself on the brink of such an abyss— so at least I conceived of it. I looked down. I saw unfortunate creatures like myself moving about in those depths— both men and women, and neither the one nor the other. I pitied them from my heart, but it was loathing that saved me. I differed from them only in this: they had accepted their fate; many of them, I discovered, gloried in it. I would not accept mine— at least I would not accept the common implications of that fate. I saw what I had to do. I gave up my plans for a career. I cut myself off from family and friends. You see, I didn't trust myself. I did n't know what wretched folly friendship might lead me into. I set out in search of some place, preferably an island, where there could be no question of friendship, not even of companionship. When I found that place I remained— as you know.'

vii

HE DIED very peacefully three days later. I had been sitting with him, and we had talked a little of common things; then he fell into a quiet sleep. About an hour later he awoke and asked me to help him turn on his side. That was the last time he spoke.

Ling Foo and I buried him at the spot he had chosen. It was not in the ancient cemetery at the far end of the island, but near the lagoon beach at the head of a small mirrorlike cove.

In accordance with his own wishes no stone— not even a border of sea shells— was placed to mark his grave. It is marked, adequately and beautifully, by the shadows of palm fronds moving to and fro over the coral sand.

A lonely end to an appallingly lonely life.

________________

12: A Scientific Balloon

W. L. Alden

1837-1908

Windsor Magazine Jan 1896

"YOU'RE quite right, sir," remarked the Colonel in reply to young Thompson's question, "I have been in some pretty tight places in the course of my life. A man can't fool along through fifty or sixty years of active life without finding himself occasionally in middling tight places. But wherever I am, so long as I am on solid ground, I generally calculate to be able to work myself out of almost any difficulty. It's when you put me aboard a ship, or in a balloon, that I begin to lose my grip. Speaking of balloons, I'll tell you right here, if you don't mind, of a little adventure I had— the only time that I ever was fool enough to trust myself in a balloon.

"One day there came to my house in New Berlinopolisville a fellow with a letter of introduction from Sam Kendall, who used to be ring-master of the 'Hail! Columbia' circus at the time when I was the manager and proprietor of the concern. Sam was one of the best of fellows, and consequently any friend of his was welcome at my house. Professor Montgomery, which was the name of Sam's friend, was a small, determined- looking chap that at first sight I would have taken for a light-weight fighting man, but, as it appeared, he was a balloonist. It's a singular thing that every man who goes up in a balloon professionally calls himself a Professor, while a miner who goes down a shaft professionally never thinks of giving himself any such title. Sam's letter didn't say that Professor Montgomery was a balloonist, and I supposed he was a regular college Professor who had caught the look of a fighting man through teaching football and other athletic games to the students. So when he accepted my invitation to dinner, I just sent over for my old friend Professor Van Wagener, the great electric sharp, to come and join us, thinking that the two Professors would be good company for one another.

"Now it happened that Van Wagener, who was always interested in everything that was scientific and useless, was mightily interested in ballooning, and instead of being disappointed when he found out that Montgomery was an ignorant chap, who couldn't speak ten words of good grammar, he was just delighted to find that the man was a practical balloonist. The two got to work and talked balloon till you couldn't rest. Van Wagener said that it was his belief that a balloon properly constructed ought to be able to stay in the air for a month or a year at a time, and when Montgomery said that the thing wasn't possible, Van Wagener wanted him to explain why.

"It's plain enough," says the balloonist. "When your balloon rises and gets into thinner air the gas expands and escapes through the mouth of the bag. Even if it didn't escape it would always leak out through the silk or cotton, or whatever stuff the bag is made of. That's the reason why you can't stay up only a few hours. No man ain't never been able to invent a balloon that won't lose gas, and nobody never will invent one, for it can't be done.'

" 'If I make a balloon that can't possibly leak a single cubic inch of gas will you make an ascension with me, and attend to the practical management of the machine?' says Van Wagener.

" 'You can just bet I will,' says the other chap. 'Why, man, there'd be an everlasting fortune in such a balloon. But what's the use of talking about it? The thing can't be done, as you'll find out when you set down to invent your gas-tight balloon.'

"Well, upshot of it was that Yan Wagener set to work and made a balloon that even I could see was going to meet his requirement. The main balloon was a big globe of aluminium, and on the top of that was a bag of thick rubber connected with the globe by an automatic valve. The idea was that the globe would hold just enough gas to float the balloon at a height of two hundred feet above the earth. Now, being at that height, if the balloonist wanted to rise, all he had to do was to light a big spirit lamp that would heat the gas in the globe and make it expand. When it had expanded to a certain point it would flow over into the rubber bag, and the lifting capacity of the machine would be increased about one third. Of course the balloon would rise, and when the balloonist wanted to descend again, all he would have to do, according to Van Wagener, would be to put out his lamp and let the globe cool off. It was a mighty ingenious contrivance, and Montgomery, who began by having no sort of confidence in Van Wagener, ended by thinking that perhaps he had really invented a balloon that could be made to stay up for ever. Nothing would satisfy Van Wagener but that I should go along on the trial trip of the balloon. I wasn't in the least anxious to do it, for solid ground was always good enough for me; but Van Wagener, being an old friend, and liable, like all scientific chaps, to get himself into difficulties when he didn't have some practical man to look after him, I finally agreed to go. The ascension was to be made from my back-yard, where we would be out of sight of Mrs. Van Wagener and the general public. The machine was carted over to my house after dark, and the next morning, when we were ready to start, no one knew anything of our intention except my coloured man, and he knew how to hold his tongue.

"I was surprised to find that Van Wagener had calculated the lifting power of the balloon so closely that he knew to an ounce just what weight she must carry in order to float, as he meant her to, a couple of hundred feet above the earth, and stay right there. Consequently all three of us had to be weighed, and we were a good two hours in reducing the weight of things in our pockets, or of increasing our weight with bits of gravel, until at last Van Wagener was satisfied that the whole weight of the machine, with us and our instruments and traps in it, would be exactly what he calculated that it ought to be. Then came the filling of the globe with pure hydrogen made on the spot, and consequently it was five o'clock in the afternoon before everything was ready and we made our start. The balloon rose slow and gentle, and when it was up to about the height of the steeple of the ltoman Catholic church it gradually ceased rising and hung here perfectly quiet. There wasn't a breath of air stirring, so the thing had no sort of drift, and promised to stay just where she was until the wind should rise. The Professor was mightily pleased, and to my mind Montgomery ought to have been satisfied that the invention was all right, but he seemed a little uneasy, so I asked him what fault he had to find with the balloon.

" 'We're all right so far,' says he, 'but the difficulty is going to be in keeping our weight just up to the standard and no more. I'll have more confidence in tliish yer thing when the trial trip is over, and nobody killed. There's one thing that I don't exactly see, and that is how we are going to descend.'

" 'I declare I forgot to provide for that,' says Van Wagener. 'However it will be time enough to think of that when we get through ascending.'

"He was as delighted as a child, and about as capable of looking into the future. With that he lights his spirit lamp, and presently the balloon begins to rise, just as he said it would.

" 'What do you say to that?' says Van Wagener to Montgomery.

" 'That's all right,' says Montgomery; 'she'll rise fast enough, but she ain't going to rise no more this afternoon,' and he blows out the spirit lamp.

"Van Wagener was pretty mad, and demanded to know what Montgomery meant by putting out the lamp.

"Van Wagener and I both looked over the side, and we could see that we were about twice as high in the air as we had been. Just then the machine took a fresh start, and we could feel her going up at a pretty good pace.

" 'What's the matter now?' says I.

" 'Matter enough,' says Van Wagener, 'I've dropped my false teeth overboard.'

" 'More weight gone,' says Montgomery. ' Now we'll go up till the balloon busts. If I'd known that you had false teeth I'd never have trusted myself here with you. I might have known that you would have been heaving of 'em overboard the first chance you could get. I never see a scientific man yet that was fit to be trusted.'

" 'Do you really mean,' said I, 'that this balloon is bound to keep on going up.'

" 'We've only one chance,' says Montgomery. 'If there's a heavy fall of dew tonight it may weigh us down enough to make up for the Professor's teeth and the spirit he's been burning. It's our only chance.'

"I knew then that I was in a pretty tight place, and I'd have given considerable if I'd never agreed to go along with Van Wagener. However there was nothing to be done except to wait for the dew, and so we all sat down in the car and waited.

"Luckily there was a heavy dew. Montgomery made us take off our coats and hang them over the side so that they could catch all the dew there was, and about eight o'clock we found, by throwing over a bit of tissue paper, that we were gradually sinking. We kept on sinking most of the night, as I judge, and when the morning came we found we were about six hundred feet above the earth, and that we had drifted out of sight of New Berlinopolisville.

"Van Wagener was in high spirits, and began wringing out his coat and putting it on again. All of a sudden he sings out something which I didn't quite understand, not being familiar with scientific terms, and at the same time the balloon began to mount up again.

" 'What has that blasted scientific idjot dropped overboard now ? ' yells Montgomery.

" 'I happened to drop my purse out of my coat pocket,' says Van Wagener; 'but that is no excuse for your objectionable language.'

" 'I knew it,' says Montgomery. 'Now we are done for; the sun will be out presently, and then the gas will expand. Colonel, I'm sorry you're in this scrape, but I'm glad you're not a family man.'

"It did look middling scary. We sailed slowly upwards till the sun had warmed up the aluminium globe, and then we travelled straight up at a pace that couldn't fail to bring us up to twenty or thirty thousand feet before noon. There was only one way of making the balloon descend, and that was by letting out the gas. There being, however, no escape valve, we couldn't let out gas, and it didn't seem as if there was any possible way for us to escape. I will say this for Montgomery and the Professor, that they both showed that they were brave men. Montgomery cussed Van Wagener and science generally, but that was natural under the circumstances. Van Wagener sat quietly on the bottom of the car watching the barometer and making entries in his notebook, which je said would be of immense value to science in case they should be found. Neither of the men flinched a particle, though they knew that in all probability they would in course of time have a clean fall of say forty thousand feet. Of the two I was more sorry for Montgomery than for the Professor, for he didn't have the love of science to sustain him which the Professor had.

"We went up and up. The gas expanded with the heat of the sun and flowed over into the rubber bag, as Van Wagener had meant it should, and when this happened we about doubled our pace. We lost sight of the earth by nine o'clock in the morning, and by eleven o'clock the air had grown so thin that we began to have difficulty in breathing. Professor Van Wagener, whose lungs were weak, suffered worse than the rest of us, but he kept right on making his scientific notes, and to all appearance was enjoying himself as much as he had ever done in his life. Montgomery sat quiet, having grown tired of cussin' the Professor, and not having anything else to occupy his mind. I turned around to look over the side when the hilt of my revolver, which was in my hip pocket,  caught in the wicker work of the car and gave me an idea.

" 'See here, Montgomery,' I said, 'I can let the gas out of this balloon, but we'll have to take the risk of it's escaping so fast that we shall land in almost as much of a hurry as we will when the thing bursts.'

" 'I'll take the chances,' says Montgomery. 'If you let out the gas we shall have a chance, even if it is a slim one ; but if you don't let it out we're as dead as Julius Caesar.'

" 'What do you say, Professor?' said I, for I didn't want to act rashly.

" 'Certainly!' says the Professor. 'By all means try your experiment, Colonel, though I should prefer that you should wait till we reach an elevation of twenty-seven thousand feet, which will be greater than anyone else has ever attained.'

" 'We're high enough,' says Montgomery. 'I ain't pining to get among the angels just yet. Terry finny is good enough for me.'

"I All right,' says I, and I drew my revolver and fired at the aluminium globe. Of course the bullet went through it as if it was paper, making one hole where it went in and another where it came out. This gave the gas the choice of two ways of escaping, and it took them both.

"In the course of the next five minutes the balloon began to sink, and I had hopes that we might reach land safely. But Montgomery knew better. The balloon kept sinking faster and faster as more and more gas escaped, and in a little while we were dropping down almost as fast as we would have done had the balloon burst. The earth wasn't long in coming in sight, and the trees and fields and houses seemed to be rushing up to meet us.

"There was a good breeze blowing when we were, as Montgomery judged, about a mile high, and it drifted us westward towards a good-sized lake.

" 'If we can only stay up till we're over that lake we shall be all right,' said Montgomery. 'Colonel, just heave overboard everything there is in this car.'

"With that he seized whatever he could lay his hands on, and I did the same, and for a minute or two it just rained instruments and things over that section of the country.

"Off with your boots, coats, waistcoats and hats,' yells Montgomery. 'Professor, if you've got any more portable teeth heave 'em over. We must get rid of every ounce of weight if we want to reach that lake.'

"Well we reduced our clothing down to a pretty low point, and Van Wagener went so far as to throw over his glass eye, he having no more teeth ready for discharging. Then we sat down and waited to see what the end would be.

"We were perhaps a quarter of a mile high when we came over the lake, and the moment we got where the water looked as if it might be fairly deep, Montgomery caught the Professor in his arms and threw him over without waiting to ask him if he was ready to go. Then Montgomery yelled to me to jump, and we all three left that balloon so suddenly that we all struck the water at pretty near the same time.

"I went down to the bottom, which was, as I judged, about fifty miles from the surface, though I afterwards heard that the lake was nowhere over forty feet deep. When I came up, Montgomery and the Professor were already swimming for land, and I followed their example. All the people of the neighbourhood had seen the balloon, and there was already a crowd of men, women and children on the shore waiting for us to land.

" 'This is exceedingly awkward,' says the Professor. I really can't face those people with only one eye and no teeth. Colonel, there's the balloon floating out there ; I think we had better swim back to her and wait for an opportunity to land after dark.'

" 'I'm going ashore,' said Montgomery, 'and I'd go if I hadn't a limb left, and every female boarding-school in Illinois was standing on the shore.' However the Professor's general appearance was so ghastly that most of the women and children didn't care to wait for us.

"We came quietly ashore, and a farmer rigged us out with dry clothes that fitted about as badly as a French soldier's uniform, and then drove us twenty-two miles to Hew Berlinopolisville.

"The Professor seemed as happy as a young man coming back from a picnic with his best girl. He kept on talking about the tremendous success of his balloon, and what a fortune there would be in it when he should have invented some way of getting it down from the clouds at a reasonable pace. But Montgomery was mad all the way through. He wouldn't open his mouth till we got to our door, and then he turned on the Professor and told him that sooner than go up in a balloon that a scientific man had invented he would take and fill his pockets with dynamite and then get a Hew York policeman to club him. Then he said good-night to me, and went off down the street, swearing to himself in a way that was really unfit for publication. I never saw or heard of the man again."

________________

13: By Right Of Conquest

Guy Boothby

1867-1905

The Windsor Magazine April 1896

A fair good night to thee, love,

A fair good night to thee,

And pleasant he thy path, love,

Though it end not with me.

Liking light as ours, love,

Was never meant to last;

It was a moment’s fantasy

And as such it has passed.

—A Ball-room Romance.

THIS story would be quite worth printing, if only to place on record the amazing impudence of Sub-lieutenant George Thomas Hoskyns, of her Majesty’s ship Blunderbuss, now serving on the Australian station. It is also sworn evidence as to the enormous and dangerous power vested in the hands of the opposite sex, and of the necessity for proper legislation them affecting.

Solely for the welfare of my country, of course, I bring the following facts under the notice of the Lords Commissioners, and if anything goes wrong hereafter it’s their fault, not mine.

Mrs. De Courcy Fenning will go down to posterity famous for many things, but undoubtedly her greatest talent lay in marrying her daughters well. For this reason an irreverent aide once bestowed upon her the title of the “Official Handicapper,” and by that name she is celebrated through the length and breadth of four colonies.

Her daughters were all very charming and accomplished girls. The eldest, Marion, married a globe-trotter, with ten thousand a year; the second, Gertrude, jilted Burgan, of the Lands Department, to marry an Irish earl; and the third, Ethelwyn, when this story opens, had just “come out.”

Naturally enough Mrs. De Courcy Fenning was very much concerned about the future of this youngest born. The marriage-market that year was unusually depressed, and her list of eligibles only contained a squatter and a permanent Under-Secretary. Either would have done at a pinch, but she was not a Protectionist she said; Free Trade was her motto. She wanted something European and distinguished. Then Fate, or the Admiralty, stepped in and sent her the very man.

Rear-Admiral Sir Dominic Denby, K.C B was a bachelor, and a most gallant and polite old gentleman. Like most of his profession he had an eye for a pretty face and a well turned ankle, and in spite of his years he was still susceptible to their fascinations. He was, moreover, sociably inclined, entertained hospitably, and the officers of Ins squadron ably seconded bis efforts.

When the fleet had been in Sydney harbour a fortnight or so he issued cards for an afternoon “At home” aboard his flagship. Mrs. De Courcy Fenning and Miss Ethelwyn Fenning were among those invited.

Sir Dominic had met the younger lady half, a dozen times before, and on each occasion he had become more and more enamoured of her beauty and accomplishments.

On the evening of the day upon which the invitation arrived she attended the Beetons’ Cinderella. A number of naval men were present, and among them was a certain Sub-lieutenant George Hoskyns. He was a nice enough young fellow, very pink and clean looking, and irreproachably upholstered. However impossible such a thing may seem, it was a case of love at first sight. They danced and sat out four numbers together, and, because it was the one thing they should have avoided, laid the foundation of a very strong attachment. Her friends noticed this behaviour and told her mother, who next day carpeted her daughter soundly.

TO QUOTE the Press, the Blunderbuss “At home” was a brilliant success. The harbour looked its loveliest, and the arrangements were beyond reproach. Steam launches conveyed the guests between the warship and the shore. The flagship herself was decorated with true nautical taste, and the bright uniforms and varied colours of the ladies’ dresses lent an additional lustre to the picture. The fleet band played on the quarterdeck, and a camera obscura was arranged upon the bridge. The latter is important.

Mrs. and Miss De Courcy Fenning were among the first to arrive, and the Rear-Admiral coloured like a school-boy as he stepped forward to receive them. The young lady's toilet had been made with exquisite care, and everyone thought it suited her charmingly. Sir Dominic Denby thought so too.

By the exercise of considerable diplomacy he managed to keep her continually by his side, and allowed it to be seen that he paid her open and unmistakable attention. The mother could hardly conceal her delight, but it was evident to us that her daughter was not so pleased.

Sub-lieutenant Hoskyns watched them from a distance, and in consequence his conversation with pretty Miss Fetterby was disjointed and fragmentary in the extreme. He was being afforded a practical illustration of a naval situation which would prove of value to him in his after career.

When the vice-regal launch was signalled, the guard of honour formed, and the Rear-Admiral had advanced to the gangway to receive the Governor, Hoskyns edged up alongside Miss Ethelwyn and said something in a low voice. There he made a mistake, for she withered him with a glance, and they spoke no more throughout the afternoon.

The officers of the Blunderbuss are proverbially good hosts, and amusements followed thick and fast upon each other. When the Government House party left the ship the Admiral felt at liberty to devote his attention exclusively to Miss Fenning, and he himself escorted her over the vessel. They wound up with the camera obscura tent, where they found themselves alone. Being a woman, her instinct told her what was coming.

For a space they talked the ordinary trivialities. Then while she was examining the picture of the harbour and its shipping, as delineated on the calico disk, Sir Dominic, assuming his most pompous manner, revealed the state of his affections, hummed and hawed over his declaration of the passion that was consuming him, and finally wound up by entreating her to so far honour him as to become my Lady Denby, etc.

It would be hard for an Admiral to hit upon a better place to plead his cause than the bridge of his own flagship. And Miss Ethelwyn, remembering certain advice given her beforehand, turned deadly white and faltered an assent. He was delighted beyond measure. I caught his eye as they left the tent, and I saw that though his hair was gray and his back bent, he was in reality only twenty-three. Mrs. Fenning was devoutly and ostentatiously thankful when she heard the news.

Everybody said (Sublieutenant Hoskyns of course included) that they were a heartless, family, and many added various other spiteful assertions just to prove their own disappointment and their vast superiority to- the fortunate Sir Dominic.

Next morning the Admiral called upon Mrs. Fenning and placed matters on an. eminently satisfactory basis. When the business interview was ended he went into the garden to find his fiancee, who, upon meeting him, thrust a note hurriedly into her pocket. Her eyes were red and she did not seem best pleased to see him. But he was a kind-hearted old gentleman, in the seventh heaven of happiness, and she found it impossible to be angry with him. for long.

After lunch they drove to a jeweller’s shop- in George Street, where she chose for an engagement ring a neat half hoop of diamonds, and as a souvenir of the occasion a bracelet that would have brought tears, into the eyes of any ordinary girl. His courteous manner of presenting the gifts, equalled their value, and Miss Fenning returned home feeling that after all the situation was not quite as horrible as she had imagined. She told herself repeatedly that, she could have endured it well enough if she had never seen Sub-lieutenant Hoskyns. That little “if”!

Because we are essentially a reciprocating people, a number of ladies clubbed together to give a farewell dance to the officers before the fleet put out to sea. Mrs. De Courcy Fenning was on the committee, and she requested her future son-in-law to allow them the services of a few blue-jackets to assist in the decoration of the ball-room.. The petition was immediately granted, and Sub-lieutenant Hoskyns obtained permission to go ashore to superintend their exertions.

Now any chaperon of experience will tell you that the preparation of a ball-room is a. dangerous business; it presents so many opportunities for flirtation.

Miss Fenning undertook the decoration of the supper room, and the Sublieutenant, discovered that it behoved him to assist her. People whom it did not concern wondered what Sir Dominic would have said had he seen them.

During the afternoon their behaviour became so noticeable that the “Official Handicapper” was compelled to draw her daughter on one side and remonstrate with her. But it had no effect, her conduct became even less restrained than before. There was a desperate air about it that for thinking- people had its own meaning.

Towards dusk Sir Dominic dropped in to an al fresco afternoon tea among the debris. Before he left his fiancee escorted him round the, room. In duty bound he praised all the arrangements— the supper room In particular. He prophesied that he would enjoy himself immensely.

The invitations were for nine o’clock, and the guests were received by the ladies of the committee. The large lobby had been arranged as a drawing-room, and somebody had insisted that it should be provided with little snuggeries partitioned off with palms and high green stuff. A knowledge of the geography of this room is essential to the success of my story.

It was really a beautiful little dance, admirably arranged and carried out, yet four people did not enjoy it one bit.

Miss Ethelwyn Fenning arrived in a feverishly excited state that so frightened her maternal parent that she almost forgot she was to dance the opening lancers with his Excellency himself. The young lady was faultlessly dressed, and her heightened colour, radiant beauty and dashing carriage electrified everyone.

She danced the opening set with the Rear-Admiral, and the first waltz with his Sub-lieutenant. My gracious! how she carried on! She dashed through everything at break-neck pace, complaining that the waltzes were too slow, and that the polkas sounded like dirges. Her temper was by no means amiable, and her partners suffered accordingly. Her eyes sparkled like the brilliants on her wrist.

No. 15 was a Pas de Quatre, No. 16 a square. Hoskyns was her partner for the first, Sir Dominic for the second.

She whirled and bounded through the Pas de Quatre like a mad woman— dashing, crashing, leaping, prancing like a professional danseuse. It was a gorgeous performance, and by no means the least remarkable part of it was the study of her mother’s face. Nobody who saw that will ever forget it.

The Admiral watched from an alcove in amazement, while numbers of the other dancers stopped to look on. Presently the conductor of the orchestra caught the infection, and the band played faster and faster. The couple tore round and round at headlong speed, leaping, whirling, twirling like two possessed. It was glorious!

When the music ceased the Admiral crossed the floor, and in defiance of ball-room etiquette took Miss Fenning from her partner’s arm. Then they passed through the drawing-room into one of the snuggeries together.

For some minutes she was too exhausted to speak, and her future husband watched her with an anxious face. Recovering as the orchestra commenced the lancers, she made as if to rise, but he signed her back to her seat.

“Ethelwyn,” he said softly, “I can see there is something very wrong. What is it, my dear— can you tell me?”

She did not answer, and an expression of almost terror swept across her face.

He leaned towards her and took her hand.

“Am I not worthy of your trust, Ethelwyn?”

In reply, and before he could prevent her, the poor child had fallen on her knees before him, sobbing as though her heart would break.

“Oh, yes, yes,” she moaned, “too worthy, far too worthy!”

He took a seat on the sofa beside her and gently drew her towards him. Then bit by bit, with infinite tact, he coaxed her into telling him everything, and in the telling she stabbed remorselessly at the heart that loved her best.

He heard her out, striving to conceal the pain of the bitter blow she was dealing him. When she had finished, he said simply—

“Child, I am glad you had the courage to tell me this. It is all my fault. I should have known that it would be impossible for you to love an old man like me. I will show you how much I love you by considering your happiness before my own— if you will leave it to me ? I will do my best for you.”

NEXT DAY he called upon Mrs. De Courcy Fenning. When the interview was over he had won her consent to the transference of her daughter’s engagement to Sub-lieutenant George Hoskyns, vice Rear-Admiral Sir Dominic Denby, K.C.B., resigned.

On his return to the flagship he sent for his rival. When they were alone together he commenced abruptly—

“Mr. Hoskyns, Miss Ethelwyn Fenning has told me of your mutual attachment. I presume you are certain as to the stability of your affection?”

“Really, Sir Dominic—”

“No procrastination, sir!” the Admiral thundered. “Are you certain?”

“Quite certain, sir.”

“Then understand that I have arranged the matter with the young lady’s mother, who sanctions your engagement. Your career, provided you behave yourself, will be my particular care. But markee this ! If ever you give Miss Fenning cause to regret her action, by God, sir, I’ll keel-haul you through the fleet! Now go!”

The sentry, who had overheard the foregoing, affirms that after the Sublieutenant had passed out, a sound very like that of a man crying came from the state-room of Rear-Admiral Sir Dominic Denby, K.C.B.

_______________

14: Baleston's Secret Reef

John Arthur Barry

1851-1911

The Clutha Leader, Balclutha, NZ, 16 & 23 Feb 1900

The test is sourced from Project Gutenberg Australia, corrected by inserting a number of missing end-quotes, and changing "Katherine" to "Katharine" in the opening para (a reference to St Katharine's Dock next to the Tower of London.)  Barry, Devonshire born, spent his later life in Australia as a journalist, after a period at sea. He wrote many short stories for newspapers, usually on a marine theme.

1: Second of the Urania

FOR MANY DAYS I had been tramping round the London docks, from Katharine's to Tilbury, looking for a ship. But no one seemed to want a mate or a second, or, in fact, anything at all in the way of officers. And my clothes were getting shabby, my boots worn and thin, and the bottoms of my trousers beginning to fag out like a bunch of rope-yarns— a very sure sign, this last, of a southerly wind in their pockets.

This particular fine midsummer afternoon I had been doing the South-West India Dock, and, after a score of rebuffs, I brought up in despair, and took a seat on the platform of one of the hydraulic cranes, in front of a big iron sailer, to think things over a bit, and have a rest.

I sat down and mechanically watched the ship. As I could see, she was nearly ready for a start, with her sails all bent and her cargo under hatches.

Urania was the name on her bows, and she was a big lump of a vessel with lofty spars and square yards, straight-bowed and round-sterned; some 1,800 tons or so I guessed her at.

As my eye listlessly took in these details, two men came down the gangway and stepped on to the dock. One— the taller of the pair— wore a frock coat, patent leather boots with great spats, and a bell-topper hat. He was a sandy-whiskered, red-faced customer, with small, cold, twinkling blue eyes; and, spite of his swell, long-shore rig, labelled sailor all over to any man who used the sea.

His companion was a shorter, stouter man, clean-shaved except for a heavy reddish moustache completely hiding his mouth, but with the same peculiar restless blue eyes as the other. He was dressed in a suit of tweeds and hard-felt hat, and, as unmistakably as his companion, bore about him the stamp of a seafarer. The men were brothers.

They stood talking in low tones at the foot of the gangway. Presently odd words came to my ears. The tall man was speaking. 'Sign on in the morning,' I heard. . . 'Foreigners to a man... wait till we get to sea... know all about it... then any poor swab'll do... we've only our two selves to consider... ay, ay, you'll be as wise as myself then... always an inquisitive dog.

The speaker laughed, and was stepping briskly off, leaving the other standing there with a puzzled expression on his rather heavy features, when moved by some sudden impulse, I stuffed my pipe away, and cut across his path, mouthing for the twentieth time that day the sickening question, 'Want a mate or a second, sir?'

He stopped instantly, his dancing little eyes playing all over me, from well-worn cap to worn-out boots, as he pulled at his straw-coloured beard and took my measure.

'Ticket?' he asked sharply, at last. And out from my breast pocket came the thin tin case containing discharges and my chief mate's certificate.

'Um, um,' he muttered, as he just glanced at the latter, and then ran through the long list of 'V.G.' mate's discharges that I placed in his hands.

'I could do with a second, if Mr Baleston there hasn't got one in view. On your uppers, eh? Glad to take anything, I s'pose, eh?' His manner was distinctly bad, almost insulting, and I had hard work to stomach it, as I answered surlily enough in the affirmative.

'Want a second mate, Mr Baleston?' he sung out. 'This chap's papers are all right. Anybody you know for the job, eh?'

'No,' replied the mate, approaching and taking stock of me, much as the other had done. 'There's dozens of 'em at the office, though. Still, I suppose this man'll do as well as any of the rest.'

'All right,' said the captain— for such he was— turning to me. 'Be on hand at Green's in the morning, and you'll get first show.'

'Baleston, Baleston,' remarked the grey-haired old Home superintendent, when I told him the captain's name. 'Why, yes, of course I've heard of him. He's one of your advanced, newfangled navigators— goes in for hydrography and half-a-dozen different ologies, and all that sort of thing. Unlucky beggar, though, in spite of his scientific fads. Lost a ship, I recollect, some years back, for the same firm he's with now— Shroud, Catblock, and Co., isn't it? He got the sack at last. And now, you say, they've given him the Urania. Well, I only hope he'll have better luck with her! Curious how forgiving some firms are!'

Next morning, in company with a crew composed wholly of Germans, Swedes, and a couple of Norwegians, I found myself on the Urania's articles. Not that I cared much about the nationality of the crowd, for just then I felt willing to get away in a ship manned by baboons, so long as I was at sea. Nor ever did I experience more pleasure than in seeing the well-known greens and whites of the channel landscape slip by, outward bound.

2: Felony on the High Seas

TO ME Captain Baleston seldom or never spoke except to give an order. And of this I was glad, not in the least liking his haughty style. About the steering he was most particular, sending man after man away from the wheel until he found four to please him, and these he made quartermasters.

'Well,' I thought to myself, as I watched him hovering about the compasses and comparing them critically, 'you don't mean to take any risks, this trip foreigners or not.'

The mate, I now discovered, was but a puppet in his hands, a mere tool, with opinions and ideas moulded absolutely on his brother's; he regarded the captain as a little marine god from whose lightest word and act there was no possible appeal.

Frederick Baleston was nevertheless, a good seaman and a first-class navigator, doing almost all this part of the ship's work, whilst his brother fiddled about with his scientific instruments—of which he had a large stock—determining the heat of the sea at various depths; noting soundings; and perfecting an instrument to supersede the deviascope, and automatically correct compass errors in iron and steel ships. But with all this preoccupation nothing escaped the ever-shifting glances of those small sharp eyes. With a look they appeared to take in every detail alow and aloft; and was there the least thing lacking, the intolerant acrid voice quickly made itself heard, as well to his brother as myself.

One other matter he was to a degree particular about in addition to the steering. Never in all my time at sea had I been on any vessel where the boats were kept in such a complete state of preparation as the Urania. Water, provisions, compasses, charts, masts— all their furniture, in fact, was seen to constantly. Also, at regular intervals, the watches were called to swing them out, on which occasion the Captain himself narrowly inspected davits, falls and other belonging gear.

'Decidedly,' I said to myself for the second time, 'this man takes no risks. If he has once lost a ship, it couldn't have been for want of looking after her. Or, perhaps, all this care is the outcome of the experience gained in that disaster. Anyhow, it's satisfactory.'

One evening, having had tea, as usual, by myself, I went out to relieve the mate, who had finished his some time before. I was suffering from toothache that night, and finding I had forgotten the silk kerchief I used to tie round my face as some protection from the air, I presently slipped down the poop ladder and into my berth on the starboard side of the saloon.

It was a few minutes before I could lay my hand on the thing in the dark. Then, just as I was pulling my door open, I heard voices in the saloon, and the rustling of papers. I don't know why I didn't boldly go out at once. But I hesitated for a minute, and heard the Captain say to his brother, 'Where's Morris?'

'On deck.' replied the other. 'He relieved me ten minutes ago.'

'That's all right then,' said the Captain. 'He's no more brains than a serving mallet, and not two ideas above his work. All the same, I don't want him, or anyone else, to hear what I'm going to tell you.'

Just here, I decided to stay where I was.

'I suppose you can guess,' continued the skipper, 'from what I've already let drop, that this won't be a long voyage?'

'Well, yes,' assented his brother, I've thought as much. But I never knew—'

'No, I didn't intend you should,' interrupted the other, brusquely, 'till the time was close at hand. I want one man, at any rate, besides myself, who won't lose his head when the pinch comes and who will back me up all he knows how. That's why I brought you out of the County of Durham. Now, do you see, this is our exact position at the present moment. In 30 hours we shall be there.'

Peering through the crack in the not-quite-closed door, I saw the Captain bending over a chart with a pair of compasses in his hand. On the other side of the table sprawled his brother, staring intently at the point indicated. Over their heads swung the lamp, making a big patch of white light on the table and paper.

'And there,' went on the Captain, with a modulated accent of triumph in his voice, 'as nearly as I can judge, at about, four bells in the middle watch the voyage ends.'

No glimmering of his meaning as yet reached my brain. I simply thought the man was mad— mad as a hatter— and that his brother was only humoring him. But I was presently undeceived.

'There, you see,' said the Captain, '31deg 15min W. 42deg 10min N. That's the exact spot in which we leave the good ship Urania with her valuable cargo,' and he laughed silently— 'insured for £75,000 in London, Paris, Bremen and Hamburg

Now at last, I understood, or thought I did. He was going to scuttle the ship. I had heard of such things happening in bygone days. And, yet, one can't bore holes in iron or—'

'But— but,' stammered his brother, bending low over the chart, there's nothing there.'

'Look at this,' said the captain, unrolling another map. What do you see at the same spot?'

'Broken water. Doubtful,' was the answer.

'Exactly, only it isn't among the doubtfuls at all,' continued the other. 'Although the bat-eyed survey people couldn't find it, I did. When I was in the Blink Bonnie, trading to the Western Islands, I spotted it first. Water only breaks with a S.S.E. wind— perhaps not more than two or three times a year, and then very slightly. Well, I reported it; and the Falcon was sent to look for it. But in vain. So, although on the strength of my assertion they marked it temporarily on the old maps, you see it's been taken off the latest Admiralty chartings. I've seen it once or twice since.

'One trip in the Bonny it fell dead calm within a couple of hundred yards of where I knew the thing to be. So I sculled myself over to the place, and looking down I saw four big, broad, wide-gapped fangs of rock sticking up to within some ten feet of the surface, and shoals of fish playing about the weeds that covered them. Bah! I know of lots more uncharted peaks and prongs— especially in the China Seas. I don't report them all.'

And the Agenoria affair?'

'Something the same,' replied the skipper with a laugh. 'A private reef. Now this is the kind of thing you'll read in a week or so:—

"Curious Coincidence.— Some years ago Captain Baleston, well known for his valued contributions to marine hydrography, reported broken water and presumably, therefore, a rock or rocks— as existing in a certain spot in the North Atlantic. The authorities at once investigated the matter, sending H.M.S Falcon, whose officers, after a thorough search, assured themselves that no such danger to navigation was so be found. Naturally, Captain Baleston imagined he must have been mistaken. But, quite recently, being in command of a fine vessel, the Urania, he unfortunately demonstrated the correctness of his original discovery by running her on the very same reef that he reported to the authorities so long ago, which it appears is almost on the track usually taken by sailing ships bound to the Cape. Much sympathy is felt for the Captain, as his misfortune is undoubtedly owing to official incompetency. Fortunately no lives were lost. The vessel, we hear, was fully insured and doubtless her master will be held free from all blame in the matter."

'It's a wonder the navy men didn't drop on it,' remarked the mate, who had listened to his brother with open-mouthed admiration.

'Not a bit of it,' returned the other. 'They might have sounded and sounded for years without being any the wiser and ships might sail within a foot of it and never suspect its existence. And— well, it wasn't until afterwards that I took the trouble to verify my present bearings beyond all doubt. So it's just possible they may not have been within a degree of the exact spot.

'Then I got into my present employ and finding that such a secret might prove valuable, I said no more about it. I made money out of the Agenoria affair; and so did they. Now this is their last sailer—all the rest; are steamers. They were offered £3 a ton for her the other day— considerably less than her hull alone cost. So, as old Catblock put it, better turn her into a fixed deposit at 400 fathoms. The chances are she'll hang when she takes the reef. But, even if she slips off again, her fore-compartment will give us ample time to get clear.

'If she hangs she will break up in a few hours, so it matters little one way or the other. You'll take a couple of thousand out of the job. I shall make enough to give up the sea and devote myself wholly to some new inventions I have in mind. Now that's all. Oh, when you relieve Morris put a new compass the— Thomson one— in the binnacle. I want her steered like a steamer for the rest of the time.'

Well, here was a pretty kettle of fish indeed! But I had no leisure to think it over. Already I had been far too long away from my post; and I was glad as I presently heard the mate go into his berth and close the door. Peering, I saw that the Captain had also left the saloon. Now was my time evidently, and I slipped noiselessly out and made for the main deck entrance. Just as I gained it I turned and saw the Captain staring hard at me.

By this time I was in the shadow of the little alley-way, close to the pantry, and whether he had recognised me or not was doubtful. He might have come out of his berth, the door of which was close to the head of the table, before I had got the whole length of the saloon. In that case he must guess where I had been and what I had heard. But from his attitude I was inclined to think he had only just caught sight of me.

However, I lost no time in getting on to the poop.

As I tramped backwards and forwards I fell to considering over what I had lately heard. What was I to do in the matter? Was it any concern of mine at all?

An appeal to the crew was not to be thought of. The chances were that they would not believe me and, even if they did, I knew the Germans and the rest too well to think they would dare interfere. The more I thought the matter over the less I saw my way out of it. Doubtless, the insurance companies and the underwriters would lose heavily. But I had myself to consider. And if I held my tongue before the act, I was well aware that it was of no use letting it wag afterwards. I was on the horns of dilemma, and at last I made up my mind to take a seat between the prongs and lie low.

2:  A Frilled Nightcap

AT TEN o'clock as I walked to the bell and struck it, the Captain, tossing away his cigar stump, suddenly came up to me and asked quietly, 'How much did you hear, Mr Morris, when you were in your berth, whilst, my brother and I were talking?'

For a moment I was taken flat aback. Then, evasive words of subterfuge rose to my lips. But suddenly the notion came into my mind that now, as he knew so much, it would be far better to have it out and done with. Thus I replied after the momentary pause, speaking quietly as himself, 'Well, sir, pretty nearly everything that was said, I imagine.'

'So?' he replied. 'And what do you think of the affair, looking at it from a speculative point of view?'

'I think,' I replied boldly, and staring him squarely, 'that it's about the most cunning, rascally scheme of wholesale robbery I every heard of and that if I had anyone besides myself who had heard as much as I heard, penal servitude for life would be the share of its promoters.'

'Aha,' replied he, 'I'm glad you see your weak point. You're alone, fortunately, and no statements you could make would be entertained for a moment as against my name and reputation. You've more sense than I credited you with. I thought when I picked you off the dock a week ago, starving and shabby that you were the common type of sea dog who is only too glad to bark when he'd told, and leave well alone.'

This made me angry, and I tried a chance shot with, 'Anyhow, Captain Baleston, you'll hardly attempt the game now, whilst I'm with you. And perhaps, in port, I may find somebody to at least believe me as far as a sworn statement will go respecting the nature of your cargo.'

It was a rash and utterly reckless speech, but I was pleased to hear his teeth gritting against each other with rage, and know that my wild words had hit a mark.

Taking a few paces along the deck he looked into the binnacle, muttered something in German to the man at the wheel, and came back to me, saying—

'You shall have £500 to stand in with us?'

'Far too much for a mere sea-dog with no more brains than a serving-mallet,' I replied politely. 'Thank God,' I continued, I'm a fairly honest man, and want no share in such tricks as you've made your money by, and which'll yet land you behind iron bars!'

'Another £500 for poor old honesty,' he retorted, in a jeering tone, 'and that's as far as I'm inclined to go. You'd better take it. But please yourself.'

'Not for fifty times the amount,' I replied, angrily. 'And now wreck the ship, if you dare! You won't find it such simple tea-drinking as the Agenoria business seems to have been. Now you can do your worst, and plague on you and all such cursed pirates!'

I was by this time thoroughly vexed and losing my temper.

As I spoke the captain walked away, and disappeared down the companion, making no answer whatever. Presently, looking through the open skylight, I saw him come out of his stateroom and pour whisky from the decanter in the swinging tray. He took nearly half a tumblerful— neat. Then he went into his brother's berth and I could well imagine the pair plotting to counteract this unexpected check.

At eight bells, when the mate relieved me, I could detect nothing out of the common in his manner, which was always pretty cordial. As was my invariable custom before turning in, I mixed myself a tumbler of grog, taking the whisky out of the same decanter I had seen the captain use.

Then I went to my berth, and— first, however, doing what I never had done before— viz., slipping the bolt of my door I lit my pipe and the lamp, undressed, and lay down to think matters over.

Gradually, I became aware of a sense of lethargy taking possession of me, accompanied by a not unpleasant feeling of drowsiness. My pipe fell out of my mouth on to the floor, and I watched unconcernedly the hot ashes making little black holes in the strip of carpet. Presently the smell of the smouldering wool became disagreeable, and I wished to rise and extinguish it.

To my dismay I found that I could move neither hand nor foot, My brain was active as ever, but all power of slightest motion had completely disappeared. I imagined at first that I had received 'a stroke' of some mysterious description. But, in that case, I argued, surely I should feel sick and ill. And I never felt better internally. I made tremendous efforts to stir—a finger even— but without avail.

What was this dreadful thing that had come upon me in a flash, and without the least warning? Probably it would disappear as quickly. I was lying on my side, facing the door. Over the latter was a glass fanlight that moved on a 'midship swivel. A noise at this made me look up. It was turning, and the next moment I saw the captain's face framed in the square aperture. He was grinning, with a row of white teeth showing under his straw-coloured moustache and I caught quite clearly the dancing devil in his eyes as he fixed them intently on mine.

For fully three minutes we stared at each other. I tried to speak; but, to my horror, tongue and jaws refused their office. Presently the face at the fanlight disappeared, with a noise as of a person stepping off a chair or a stool. There was some whispering outside, and all at once I saw my door giving slowly but surely. The bolt was but a flimsy thing at best; and now, under heavy pressure, it first bent, then the brass socket carried away, and the door flew open, disclosing the two Balestons.

'He's all right, Fred,' said the skipper. 'Let me introduce you to the gentleman who's going to play up with us in such style. Your grog was doctored, Mr Morris; the nightcap had a frill to it,' he went on, as, one at my head, the other at my legs, they lifted me out of the bunk like a log. 'And now you're going down amongst the dead men, to tell 'em the Urania's coming. Gently through the door, Fred, or you'll bump his head.'

Out on the quarterdeck, with the fresh breeze blowing cool on my face, they carried me. It was dark, much darker than when I came below, and clouds were gathering over the stars. Between them, panting, they hoisted me on to the rail just be-aft the main rigging.

'The beggar's heavy,' exclaimed the Captain, 'and he'll make a devil of a splash! Take the t'gallant halliards, Fred, and shove the bight of 'em round him under the arms, and we'll lower him down easily.'

The mate, who had not spoken a word, silently obeyed, whilst the other held me half on the pin-rail, half on the t'gallant one, in a reclining posture, with my back against the rigging. Again and again I strove to utter a cry; but my tongue felt like a lump of lead in a throat swollen to the verge of suffocation. In vain my despairing eyes— the only members I could use— swept the deck, Not a soul was to be seen, not a sound heard except the steady hum of the wind as it blew under the foot of the mainsail.

The high break of the poop sheltered us from the sight of the helmsman, even had the darkness not sufficed. Gazing outboard, my glance swept the black waste of white-tipped furrows, and the bitterness of death entered into my soul, as already I seemed to feel them closing over my dumb and helpless body.

'Better take a round turn,' muttered the captain, 'or he'll slip before we're ready. Now, then, good-bye, good-bye, Mr Morris. A thousand pounds or Davy Jones! Yow chose the last. You've got no choice left. Take a turn under the pin. So, together! Over he goes!'

As he spoke, the pair pushed and lifted together, and I fell about six feet with such a shock as seemed to bring some slight sense of feeling into my numbed limbs. As I hung there, already the sliding waves washed up to my knees. Lower still, and they were breaking over my head and shoulders, whilst I swallowed big mouthfuls of bitter salt water. Why did they not let go, I wondered?

Ah, now I knew! The round turn had jammed under my arms, and they were pulling and hauling furiously on the single part they still held. All at once— in a second— hanging one moment under water, the next hove up by the roll of the ship, I vomited violently and suddenly, with a dreadful tearing sort of pain, there came back to me the use of both limbs and voice.

But even as, with a gurgling, half-choked cry, I raised my hands to clutch the rope, it cleared whilst released, I sank, to rise again the next moment breathless, panting, beating the water wildly, and only dimly conscious of a dark patch bulking high, with one twinkling light, like a yellow eye, ever receding, and glaring at me there, left struggling alone to perish miserably.

As soon as I recovered my voice I shouted and screamed at that pitiless eye lifting and lowering in the Urania's stern as if nodding a ponderous farewell to me, swimming wildly, helplessly after it in all the strength that supreme fear of death gives.

But with my first collected thought came back the utter futility of what I was doing, and I suddenly ceased to breast the curving waves that met and broke smarting and stinging over face and eyes, and turning my back to wind and sea I let myself float at random.

In the water I had been at home all my life, and now lightly clad in under-flannels, and feeling fairly warm I had no doubt of keeping afloat, if I wished, for many hours. And I determined, at all events, to wait for the dawn, before dropping to those dreary depths below. At last I saw the eastern sky grow grey, and watched the sun rise with the resigned gaze of a man who knows that, beyond all doubt, it is to be the last one he will ever see.

I raised myself as high as I could, and stared steadily around the horizon. Empty from rim to rim! A lovely morning, too!

Stay! a black object was bobbing away scarce half a mile distant. Certainly it was not a boat; and yet it rode high and had a massive look with it. Well, at any rate, it was worth investigating; and with slow strokes I swarm towards it. Drawing nearer, I recognised the object. Yesterday, during my morning watch, we had passed it— the half of a ship's lower mast with yard, top, and topmast— rigging attached.

Almost mechanically I swam alongside it and caught hold of some of the gear, climbed up, and sat on the rim of the top whilst the hot sun warmed my sodden limbs, and sent the chilled life-stream once more coursing through my veins.

Was it worth while, I wondered? I was fair in the track of ships. And it was no use throwing away a chance. A few minutes ago I was knocking for admission at the very gate of death, and now—. Well, then, till to-morrow at any rate.

4: An Ocean Tramp

JUDGING from its appearance, I thought the wreckage could not have been in the water very long— perhaps a fortnight or so. And as I perched on the top I wondered about the ship that had come to grief, and whether this was the extent of if, or had worse happened. But first, thirst, and then hunger, soon put an end to any thoughts or cares except personal ones. The sun's heat, grateful for awhile, now was so intense that every few minutes I had to slip down and soak to obtain relief; and as the day dragged slowly along, and my sufferings increased, I began to doubt whether I should be able to hang out to my set limit— another sunrise.

One thing I had noticed was that, evidently in the set of some strong current, my spars were making an easterly drift of fully a couple of knots per hour. But there was no great comfort in that; although at a rough calculation I reckoned I could not be at this moment more than a hundred miles to the westward of the Azores, if so much.

The day wore on; and, worn out with all I had gone through, towards the middle of the afternoon I gave up any continuous and useless staring around the horizon, and, taking a few turns about my waist with a length of rope, I stretched out along the incline of the topmast rigging and dozed off into an uneasy sleep. I woke with a start.

The sun was still a couple of hours high. I had slipped down the trailing rigging till my knees were awash. But what had disturbed me? Something, I was certain, for the sound of it was in my ears still. Hurriedly throwing off my lashings, I crawled on to the rim of the top, and only a few cables' length away was a big steamer coming along, her screw kicking up white water behind her as she towered flying light, with rusty wall-sides 20 feet high.

Owing to my position, I had been quite hidden from the sight of those on board. But eyes were on the wreckage; and almost as soon as I showed my body on the top I heard her engine bells clanging, and could see her gradually slow down, until she came gliding along with her sharp tall bows nearly overhanging me, whilst her screw squashed and whisked astern to stop her way. There was no need for hailing or talk, and in a very few minutes a boat was in the water; a few more, and I was in her and, without help— such momentary heart had my rescue put into me— able to climb up the gangway ladder of the Norseman.

Once on deck, however, I staggered and would have fallen but for the arm of a short, stout, red-faced man who held me up and led me into the steamer's saloon, where food, drink, a hot bath, and some clean clothes soon made a new man of me.

Captain Craigie and his chief officer listened to my story with interest, but also an amount of incredulity that I was not altogether unprepared for. Not that they said openly I was lying; but from an unmistakable coolness in their manner as I finished, I could see they thought so.

Perhaps if it had been any other but Baleston who was concerned they might have been more ready to credit the yarn. But Baleston had a reputation. Also that secret reef affair, I could see, by the stare and half laugh passed from skipper to mate, would by no means go down.

'If I've been close to there once, I've been close to there fifty times, and never seen anything,' remarked the former when I put a pencil on the chart as nearly as I could make the spot bear from our present position.

'A very curious story, Mr Morris,' he continued, coldly, and regarding me with evident disfavor. 'However, it's no particular business of ours. You're welcome to a passage as far as Belize— our first port of call. I hope you may be able to get a ship there.'

I could almost have cried with rage and vexation as he went on deck, followed by the mate.

At a glance I saw I was on board a cargo tramp of some 3000 tons, and an eight knot speed, doing her best. Her bridge was stuck far away for'ard, and the rest of her was mostly hatches, steam winches, and a grove of ventilators amidships.

The sun was setting as I went below again, and in a very sour temper— first telling the steward not to call me for tea— went to the berth assigned me and turned in for a good sleep, which I badly wanted. It seemed to me that I had been asleep only a few minutes when I felt a hand shake me, and a voice shot loudly in my ear. Half awake, I turned and said something uncomplimentary to the disturber of my rest, who had struck a match and was lighting the berth lamp.

'I've come to ask your pardon, Mr Morris,' said somebody who, presently, as I sat up in my bunk rubbing my sleepy eyes, I saw, to my great surprise, was Captain Craigie himself. 'I confess I didn't believe a word of your yarn,' he went on; 'and I know you saw it but we've just had an accident. Run down a boat belonging to the Urania. Only one man saved. He says Captain Baleston was in her. Says, too, that the Urania went on to the reef right enough. Will you come on deck and see him?'

Would I not! In a jiff I was into my clothes and out of the saloon at a half run. The night was dark as pitch with splashes of electric light here and there about the ship. A stiff breeze was blowing dead ahead, with an awkward lump of a cross-sea on. The Norseman's engines were stopped and the big steamer rolling uneasily and giving a dive now and again that sent white water seething aft along her iron decks.

At intervals her siren blared, making noise enough to wake the dead, whilst blue lights shed a ghostly glare over the sea and ship. As I hurried for'ard I noticed davitfalls hanging slack, and knew that a boat was battling away somewhere in the black smother outboard.

On the lower bridge I found a dripping creature, wild-looking and pallid, who shivered and gesticulated and shrank back when he caught sight of me. I knew him at once for one of the Urania's quartermasters— the man, in fact, who had been at the wheel when I and her Captain were having our momentous talk.

As I came into the light the chief mate stepped out of the chart-room and shook hands, saying something handsome at the same time— I forgot but to similar purpose as the skipper. Anyhow, between the pair of them I felt a man again; which was more than I had done when I turned in eight hours ago.

Carl Hansen hadn't as much English as would bail up a cow. But the second engineer was a Hamburger, and interpreted. From Hansen's statement, boiled down, it appeared that in the middle watch that very night, or actually only a few hours ago, the Urania had rushed on to reef, her fore-topmast going at the same time. The alarm and terror of the crew were intense. The Captain and mate, however, kept quite cool, and in no time the two quarter boats were lowered and, with all hands, pulled away from the wreck, Captain Baleston taking charge of one, his brother of the other.

The former, the quartermaster said, had seemed terribly cut up about my loss, and the ship was searched from end to end in efforts to find me. In the darkness the boats had separated. Under sail, the port quarter boat had been running at a great rate when, without a second's warning, the Norseman's bow had cut her fair in halves. Hansen had been saved by a miracle. A bundle of fireman's sweat-rags happened to be towing overboard amidships. Blindly sweeping past, the lump of stuff, just awash, had touched him; and, with a wild, outspread, drowning clutch, he held the rope and was presently drawn up— the only one, as it proved. There was not, he said, even time for a shout before their doom was upon them.

Warmed and fed, he went more into detail. For two hours before the Urania took the reef, the Captain had fidgeted about the binnacle, altering the course now and again by as much as a quarter of a point, but never leaving the compass for long. The night was fine with a smart breeze, and the ship had everything set when, about four bells, she struck, appearing, Hansen said, to glide and bump and glide and then, heeling over just a little, she lay fairly quiet, giving now and again a lift for'ard, and seeming to wedge herself more firmly amongst the rocks. Actually, though, so sudden and unexpected had the whole affair been, and so complete the preparations for departure, that some of the bewildered crew hardly realised what had happened until they found themselves pulling away into the night.

Captain Craigie was in his room over-hauling charts. As presently I entered to his call, he looked up, saying, 'I've found the map marked "Broken water. Doubtful." It's seven years old, though. And on none of the latter ones is there, any allusion to such a thing. Now, Mr Morris, I'm going to have a look at this private reef of Baleston's— he won't have need of it any more— and I fancy somewhere about W.S.W. ¾ W. should put us pretty close to the spot from here. What do you think?'

'Thereabouts,' I replied. 'But at best it's only a needle-in-a-haystack business, unless one could get the bearings exact, or see something in the shape of white water.'

The captain nodded in agreement, and coming out on the bridge, gave orders that presently sent us going slow, and well to the westward of south.

5: A Matter of £4,000

ALL THE REST of that night I never left the bridge. To Baleston and his fate I hardly gave a thought. He had served me very badly; and though when paddling about waiting for daylight to drown myself I had freely forgiven him his wickedness, I found it difficult to do so now when dry, full-bellied, and my own man again.

But, I desperately wanted to find that reef, and so render my story complete, rounded off and beyond cavil. Therefore I kept my eyes skinned, at times even journeying up to the lookout nest on the foremast and sweeping the sea with a night glass— all trouble I might have saved myself. But there it is! One never knows! Towards morning we ran into a smooth sea, the wind shifting to the nor'ard and coming very light.

All through the ship was more or less excitement and watching; the grimy firemen, even, when they came off duty, pausing to cast bloodshot glances around, whilst the Norseman forged slowly ahead as if herself in doubt of hitting something that might not agree with her. At dawn nothing was visible; but as the sky astern of us grew all aflame, the look-out man from his canvas nest cried, 'Sail on the port bow!' followed immediately by an exclamation from the mate, who continued, as he stared through his glasses, 'A derelict with her fore-topmast gone. Down by the head like a pig, and with a list on her like a rotten haystack!'

'The Urania!' I shouted a moment later, in loud exultant tones. "Hard and fast on Baleston's reef!'

'By heavens, you're right, sir, I do believe,' said the captain, as I handed him the glass. And as we drew nearer, beyond all doubt there was the murdered ship— a forlorn-looking object enough, with her foretopmast, t'gallant and royal masts hanging over the foc'sle-head, her stern cocked up, and her nose down as if just about to take the deep final dive of all. And around her the little waves lapped brisk and smiling in the sunshine, but giving no hint of the treacherous trap underneath that gripped her with its iron teeth.

Steaming alongside we gazed at the poor thing in pity, mingled with a detestation that found vent in low curses from more lips than mine. Meanwhile, the captain, watching her intently with his head on one side, and a long end of grizzled moustache between his teeth, suddenly ordered his gig into the water.

'We'll have a squint, Mr Morris,' said he, 'at what's got hold of her. Bosun, put a hand lead in the boat, and— yes— get up the 6-inch steel hawser and the 12-inch manilla. I may want them.'

Pulling round the Urania's bows we saw, looking down through the clear water, that she had been driven over a sort of rocky platform and through a pair of great perpendicular rocks as clean as a thread through a needle. But these, forking higher than the approach to them, kept her nose well up, and against one of them she lay over, resting upon its thickly-weeded contour, standing out in plain relief to her bright red bottom.

'One hour of a fairly stiff breeze,' remarked the captain, and she goes to pieces. But, hang me, if I think that, so far, she's mortally wounded. Sink or swim, I'll have a bid for her. Let's get aboard and sound the well.'

I brought the rod and carefully lowered it down. Two feet! And on a list! Salvage smelling high! Twenty minutes afterwards, and the Norseman, with her engines at full speed ahead, and the 6-inch steel rope fast from her after bitts to the Urania's mizzen-mast was scratch-pulling all she knew how.

The first five minutes' drag took no effect. At the second the steel rope snapped like a rope yarn.

'Coir 12-inch to the front!' was the order. Men worked like Trojans with that smell of salvage in their nostrils.

'All ready below, Mr Carmichael?'

The chief engineer nodded.

'Let her rip then.'

Ting-a-ling— ling— ling— clang! went the gongs, the great rope straightened out its crackling curve, dense volumes of smoke poured from the Norseman's squab stacks, the whole iron fabric of her trembled, her engines rattled and clattered and thumped, the coir strained and cracked, strained and grew smaller and smaller until of only the thickness of a man's wrist.

'Send them for all they're worth, sir,' said the captain to the chief.

Ting-a-ling-ling! again.

'Stand clear the hawser there for'ard! Something's got to go in a minute!'

But it was the Urania that came.

'I suppose you'll run her into Fayal or Gibraltar, sir?' asked the chief mate a little later, as with sails furled, and for'ard wreckage clear, the Urania lay alongside; whilst we in the Norseman's cabin drank whisky and soda, and the crew tossed off their nip of rum in honour of the occasion.

'Please the Lord and the weather,' said Captain Craigie piously, with a shrewd smile, 'I'll never cry crack till I get to Falmouth.'

During the passage the captain and myself had one day taken a notion to overhaul some of the Urania's cargo. The first case was full of grindstones, so was the second and a third all unnoted in the manifest. The skipper looked blank. But, presently, we made out enough to show us that though there was under hatches a very large proportion of these, useful but not particularly valuable articles, still the bulk of the cargo was genuine 'general.'

Messrs. Shroud and Catblock, the owners, answered Captain Craigie's telegram in person; and at first seemed inclined to give themselves airs. This was before I had been introduced to them. Not that I said much. I left it all to the skipper, who took them into his room, where the trio stayed a long time. When the two owners came on deck again they looked like men just recovering from a severe illness.

'Settled by private contract,' remarked the captain, coming up to me and slapping me on the back, as the two swindlers he had brought to book went over the side silent, downcast, sulky. 'No Admiralty Court and Elder Brethren are to have a finger in this pie,' he continued. 'And I let them off far more easily than the judge and jury before whom, if everything was to be done according to Cocker, Messrs. Shroud and Catblock should make their appearance. I suppose I am compounding a felony. But I'm going to take all chances as to that. Briefly, then, the Urania and her cargo is to be sold for the benefit of the owners, officers, and crew of the Norseman. Luckily I'm half owner myself, and I can answer for my partner. We all divide pro rata.'

Here the captain paused for a moment to thoroughly enjoy my, I daresay, rather blank look. Then he laughed and continued, 'Also, for the late second mate of the Urania I've got a cheque in my desk below to the tune of £4,000. Will that do? I held out for five, because I know it's a rich firm as well as a rascally one. However, I remembered that they'd have another party to settle with directly, if the mate's boat ever turns up; so I knocked off the thousand.'

Four— thousand— pounds! It took my breath away. Of course I never expected nearly such a sum, my hopes seldom soaring above a quarter of it at the very outside.

_________________

15: The Thirteenth Degree

Irvin S Cobb

1876-1944

Cosmopolitan Feb 1923

HERE the other day you may have seen by the morning paper that former Inspector Daniel P. Bryce was dead at his farm up in the Catskills. It was only a paragraph, though, that the paper gave him, giving his age and a scant chronology of his service in the police department and winding up the briefened obituary with the date of his retirement.

In the account you probably saw his official connection with the Caspar murder was disposed of in a couple of lines. But at the end of the week one of the Sunday editions followed up with one of those full page specials so beloved of Sunday specialists. There was a spread head and a heavy picture layout, and much emphasis was put upon the Nemesis which, it would seem, had pursued so many of those individuals who figured prominently in the Caspar affair.

Anyhow, the writer of the article professed to see in it the Dread Hand of Nemesis— which is his phrase, not mine. He set forth a whole sequence of fatalities; a sudden death or a tragic one for first this and then that actor in what had been a famous drama out of real life— the drowning of the woman in the case; the accidental poisoning of the chief attorney for the defense— some ptomaine in some canned lobster did for him; the foreman of the jury losing his life in an automobile smash-up; his honor, the trial judge, stricken by heart failure on the bench within the past year, and so forth and so on; and now, for a climax, ex-Inspector Bryce passing out while yet in the prime of life.

But in his mortality list he failed to include the name of Ben Ali Crisp, late city editor of the Daily Star, and this was an oversight which certainly should be corrected. Still, and after all, the bright young man of the Sunday staff was not so much to be waned; his sin of omission was an unintentional sin, no doubt.

Even at the time— and the time is some fifteen years back of us now— probably not half a dozen persons knew of Crisp's part in the affair. The Star got glory for a beautiful beat; Bryce took a promotion. But Crisp garnered his rewards anonymously— in private satisfaction and a handsome bonus from his journalistic overlord. He was like boozy old Omar in at least one respect: just slip him the cash and he'd as lief let the credit go.

The Caspar murder story was one of those stories which are as jam and whipped cream to a city desk. It had mystery in it— and everything. It furthermore was unique in this respect, namely: that of the three individuals who fell under suspicion, each one of the three presumably had a motive for killing the man who was killed. Finally, there was the personality of the victim to be played up and made much of. It was a veiled and a sordid life that Watkins Caspar had lived, and his death, by its manner and in its setting, was of a pattern to match with the rest of his earthly. material.

Briefly, these were the prior facts of the case: Before he reached middle age Watkins Caspar had made a tidy fortune out of Dr. Blue's Bitter Balsam, a proprietary pain killer. He owned it, name, trade mark and formula. It was a panacea, so advertised, and fine for whatever ailed you. It carried forty percent of alcohol in the blend, with a good strong dash of morphine and certain flavory essences to make the mixture bland to the taste. Those who tried one bottle usually returned for another, praising it as a remedy and for its invigorating and tonic properties. But a muckraking magazine went prying into the patent medicine field and put a crimp in its popularity; and shortly thereafter, along came the Federal Pure Foods Act and practically ruined the market so far as this particular cure-all was concern Mr. Caspar took his and got out while the getting was good. As the saying is, he retired from active business on his earnings.

But the game must have got into his blood. He kept on play- ing it from under cover. Right on up to the end of his life, when he was in the sixties, he played it. He furnished the brains and the financial backing for a ring of ver 'ers of forbidden narcotics. They peddled the stuff— cocaine, hashish, heroin, opium, what not— among drug fiends, looking to him for their stock in trade. They took most of the risks and fifty percent of the profits. He, dealing with these retailers through a middleman or go-between, took none of the open risks and the remaining fifty percent. The go-between was a man named August Melody, who passed for Caspar's confidential secretary but who really was his man-of-all-chores— a sort of combination of butler, valet and associate in an unhallowed and despicable huckstering. This Melody was a drunkard and a thief.

Two persons other than Caspar, the master, and Melody, the underling, lived in the Caspar mansion. Let it be stated that it wasn't a mansion really— that was what the newspapers would have it— but a weather-beaten, monstrous bulk of frame, all jig saw cornices and wooden belfries and slate mansards, that dated back to the dark ages of our native domestic architecture. It spraddled its weird and rambling contours under the neglected trees of a two acre plot in a part of the Bronx already threatened but not yet entirely beleaguered by a creeping invasion of model tenements. There was something pathetic, something almost wistful in its shabby state and utter homeliness, and yet its hooded dormers, with blinds that never opened, gave a sinister aspect, too— like a sloven mid-Victorian damsel wearing a highwayman's mask. It was precisely the sort of house any fiction writer would have picked on as fitting background and locale for a conventional detective yarn— a prison place for an abducted heiress, a hiding place for coiners or conspirators, the scene of some dark and unfathomable homicide. For once, fact was to live up to the conformed demands of story book fancy.

As just stated, two others had a home of sorts there. One of these was a woman who, for respectability's sake, called herself the housekeeper. Well, to her credit it should be said that she did do such housekeeping as was done for those who abode under this roof, also the cooking and the chamber work. She was a washed-out, dyed-in blonde of forty or thereabouts. In her day she had been a professional fortune teller, a self-ordained trance medium, a keeper of a furnished room house in the old Tender- loin. She spoke of herself as Madame Cabanne; her real name, it appeared, was Sarah Ann Morgan.

Caspar's nephew and his only known kinsman by blood was the fourth member of the household. This was one Jared Rusk, a man in his late thirties. He, however, was scarcely to be reckoned as a regular resident. He came and went. Operating on capital furnished by his uncle, he was a partner in a bucket shop down in Wall Street. Even by the flexible and generous ratings of his brother bucketeers he was of a most dubious repute.

This, then, was the confederated group of dwellers in the said establishment— a clutch of four bad eggs, as you might say, all in the one fouled nest. You'll understand, though, that the world generally neither knew nor cared what the past behaviors of the several individuals had been, nor what their present traflickings might be, until a thing occurred which thrust them out of a congenial obscurity into the broad sun-glare of publicity. That which occurred was the murder of the patron of the remaining three, Caspar; it was then that the police— and the reporters— dug out these historical details.

The act of the murder was discovered on a morning in September. A milkman coming soon after sunrise took note that the window sashes of a front room on the lower floor were raised and the shutters thrown back; also that behind the drawn curtains lights seemed to be burning. These small phenomena quickened his curiosity; he made so bold as to set his eye to a convenient peep hole where the curtains at one window failed to overlap. What he saw then sent him, with a face almost as white as his own milk, running to find a policeman— or somebody.

It was a policeman he found and the policeman climbed in through the window. It was a most untidy living room that he invaded, but the untidiest object in it was its late owner, clumped in a stiff ugly posture in an armchair, his legs spraddled, his arms dragging, and his shirt front a mess of dried red stains.

Someone, presumably someone who stalked him from the rear, had stabbed him in the throat with a dagger, a knife or a sword— anyway, with some slender sharp blade— so that, probably without struggling, he had bled to death where he sat. The weapon itself was nowhere about; the murderer must have withdrawn it from the wound and carried it away. Apparently, robbery or intended robbery had been no part of the purpose. The dead man's wallet, containing a considerable sum of money, was in the dead man's pocket and seemingly nothing of value was missing from the room or from the house.

Madame Cabanne was asleep, or apparently asleep, in her room on the second floor. As regards Melody, there was no possible doubt that he slept when the policeman came to his door, his being the profound slumber of drunkenness. Both professed a complete ignorance of the murder. The woman said she had left Melody and Caspar in company when she retired shortly before eleven o'clock. They had been drinking together all evening but they had fallen to quarreling, she said, as she went upstairs. Melody admitted the drinking, and under pressure of cross-questioning, the quarrel. Dispute had arisen, he said, over certain money matters but he swore that when he quit his master, shortly after midnight, the latter was quite as usual except for the effects of liquor. Melody was tremulous and frightened; he broke into tears when confronted with the Madame's story of a violent dispute, and quite went to pieces on being told he would be held for further inquiry.

The woman, when she saw the body, had an attack of hysterics— or, rather, what those thought who watched her, eager for any betraying signs, was a creditable imitation of one. She turned defiant and abusive after they told her that she also would be kept in custody as one having in possession material facts.

Shortly after eight o'clock the nephew, Jared Rusk, reached the house. Detectives halted him as he entered the front gate. He had not been in the Bronx at all, he declared, since the afternoon previous. He had spent the evening at a theater and the rest of the night at bachelor apartments which he maintained in west Fortieth Street. Arising early, he had come by subway. to the borough for some private papers which he left behind him after changing his outer garments the day before. The first he knew of his uncle's death was when the officers told him of it. This was his story and he stuck to it.

He stuck to it in the face of circumstances immediately transpiring. So, too, did the remaining pair of suspects maintain their respective positions, proclaiming their innocence in the face of more or less correlated developments. Very soon, then, the men of the detective bureau and the newspapermen working with them came smack up against a most extraordinary situation, to wit, as follows:

To begin with, there was no scrap of proof to support the theory that a thief, entering the late Mr. Caspar's house by stealth, had killed the late Mr. Caspar. By simple reasoning it therefore followed that the killing had been accomplished either by a person already in the house or by a person having access to it and familiar with its interior.

Now, of such persons there were three and three only— the so-styled housekeeper, Madame Cabanne; the inebriate odd- jobsman, Melody; the dissolute nephew, Jared Rusk. Which one of these three, each of them with a more or less unsavory past, had plausibly a reason for desiring that Caspar be put out of the way?

That was the big question. The answer to it was that, each one of the three had a reason, which, from the standpoint of the investigators, was no proper answer at all. They had set out, aiming, through processes of deduction, to eliminate two of the suspects, which naturally would put the burden of presumptive guilt upon the third. And lo and behold! they found now that though there was no seeming collusion, nevertheless they could eliminate neither one nor yet two of them. They had to include the whole trio. There was a three way trail to follow and following it, by this route or that, merely brought you right back where you had started from. Like this:

First: Take Melody. He had been stealing from his employer for months past, perhaps for years past. In his stealings he finally had been detected and had been faced with the proof of them. The early phases of the inquisition brought this out. That drunken quarrel of the evening before, to which the woman had testified and which Melody himself admitted— that had been an outgrowth of it. Under fire he owned up that Caspar, in a maudlin rage, had threatened him with prosecution. If Melody, himself already far gone in liquor and fearing prison, had stabbed Caspar to death as the other lolled in his chair helpless from drink, why, see, wasn't that exactly the sort of thing which a man of Melody's habits and nature might logically have been expected to do? Score a heavy mark against Melody.

Second: But there still was the woman to be reckoned with. The inquiry very soon showed that she had even more at stake than Melody had. Not ten days before his death, as shown by the date on the instrument, Caspar had made a will in her favor, leaving her practically all the worldly goods that he owned, which were considerable. He had not signed it, but she thought he had— thought so up until the moment when it was brought forth from a wall safe that was in the room where the murder took place. Seeing it then, all properly done in the dead man's writing, but lacking his signature and the signatures of witnesses, she genuinely renewed her hysteria, using most shocking language under stress of a terrific disappointment. Set a black line opposite the name of Sarah Ann Morgan, alias Cabanne.

Third: The third bracket stands for Jared Rusk. He did not know until now that his uncle had been cajoled into drawing up a will by which he was disinherited. He figured himself the sole heir. At his uncle's death he had expectation of coming into sundry hundreds of thousands of dollars in realty and funds, and in stocks and bonds on hand.

Moreover, he was at this particular moment in acute want of money. While he and his partner had been cheating the gulls who patronized their deadfall of a bucket shop, he, not content with a trapper's half share, privily had been cheating his partner; and the partner had found it out and had demanded restitution and was undeniably in position to press the demand to the point of putting him back of a row of steel bars. Besides this, he had other needs and pressing ones— needs having to do with bad checks and the claims of a lady in a leg show.

Altogether, it would seem the wasteful and self-indulgent young Mr. Rusk had wound himself in a tight mesh of entanglements. For him, in this emergency, there had been but one conceivable way out and that way was by coming into immediate possession of the Caspar estate. In the equation let X represent the desperate and harassed nephew.

And there you were—at a standstill, with three separate indi- viduals under scrutiny and under suspicion; three persons having three separate motives, three persons capable, any one of them, you would figure offhand, of doing the thing. And yet, as the issue stood, there was no skein of tangible evidence against any one of them— no footprints, no accusing finger marks, no blood- stains on garments or person, no nothing, really, that was definitely incriminating.

The papers went at the story— naturally they spread-eagled it all over the front pages.

There were times when the Daily Star, being by policy a great one for crusades and investigations and reform campaigns, was on the outs with the Department. When in doubt, pound the cops— this axiom was matrixed into the editorial creed. Then again there were times when the paper and the police pulled together, amiable as seasoned yokemates. It so happened this was a season of truce between them, which same considerably simplified things for Captain Bryce, at present in command of the Bronx detective bureau.

On an evening when the Caspar mystery, unsolved and seem- ingly impregnable, was turning the corner of its second: week, Captain Bryce sat across the table from City Editor Crisp, of the Star, in a good little chop house under one of the Manhattan-side arches of the Brooklyn Bridge. Orders had been given; their double sirloin was on the fire.

In the ancient days of the old Intelligencer when Crisp had been its star reporter, Danny Bryce had been its spriest office boy. A good many office boys graduate into sport writers or circulation rustlers; but Danny, growing up a tall and handsome stripling, followed in the broad-flanged footsteps of his Irish- Scotch dad and joined the force and rose therein. He was the youngest captain in it. He had ambition to rise yet higher.

He sat now, fiddling with his plated tableware. Crisp, pronging a fork into the pickled beets, squinted a chill gray eye at sight of this finger play.

"Well, Danny," he said as the waiter passed on beyond earshot, "what seems to be weighing on your mind? Heiney says that steak ought to be here inside of two minutes; that means we'll wait at least twenty. By the way, you look a bit jumpy."

"It's that damn Caspar case," said the younger man. "It's got me groggy for fair— I can't sleep. I'm working on it day and night and not getting anywheres. I need to get a new slant on it, just like I'm telling you when I calls you up this afternoon asking you as a special favor will you meet me here at Mallory's for a bite and a talk after you're through at the shop. I need help— need it bad, and that's the holy truth."

"What makes you think I can be of any help?" asked Crisp, reaching for the rye bread.

"You? Think I'm ever going to forget the times you're setting this man's town on fire covering police under old Pop Stein, and I'm a runny nose kid hustling copy for you and tagging you every chance, trying to pick up pointers from seeing you work?" The boy worship of his youth was revived in Bryce's tone. "Think I don't remember that night when you turns up with the kidnaped Starbuck baby after the cops have all fallen down on their foolish faces? Think I don't know that if you hadn't went and sewed yourself to a city desk vou could give any professional detective in this country cards and spades and then go out on him? Well, I do— and knowing it, I'm asking you, for old times' sake, to lend me a hand in this case if you can."

If this evidence of a sincere admiration coddled Crisp's vanity he chose not to betray it.

"Never mind the old times' stuff," he said, ignoring the flattery. 'We'll put it on a plain business basis. It would mean a lot to you, wouldn't it, to find out who killed Caspar? Well, it would mean something to the Star to pull off a nice juicy beat. I don't mind telling you this story appeals to me. I've been wishing all the week that I was on the outside again, covering the assignment. I think I know what angle I'd take."

"What'd that be?" In his eagerness Bryce snapped the question.

"Never mind that now— I want to get your reactions. Looking at it from your end, how does it stand?"

"Right where it did two days after Caspar gets bumped off. We're holding three parties. I pull the regular routine on 'em— arraign 'em on short affidavits. None of 'em give bond and so I've got 'em under my eye right from fhe start. Now, one of 'em just naturally has to be the right party. It's a cinch, but which one—"

"Hold on," said Crisp, "you're only telling me what I know and what every- body else knows, for that matter. Come down to date. You've had these suspects on the griddle, of course? Been third degreeing 'em, no doubt, and all that sort of thing?"

"The whole works. I've tried every trick in the box on 'em— nothing doing!"

"All right then. But if, on what you've got on 'em, you had to go to the Grand Jury tonight, what name would you want written on the indictment?"

"Blessed if I know. Sometimes I say it must be the woman— if I'm any judge, she's mean as a snake and money crazy besides. And she's plenty smart enough in her way. Then again, I take a swing around in my mind and I put it on this party, Rusk. For one thing, he's got more brains, even, than she's got— anyway, he's got more imagination. He's one of these excitable, high strung ones, but at that you can't trip him up. Being stowed away where he can't hit up the booze hasn't helped his nerves any but he's still there with the nerve— get what I mean? There's one place, though, where he's weak—the alibi he's offered is not any too good, seems to me."

"What does that get you? It's not up to him to prove where he wasn't that night— it's up to you to prove where he was."

"Yes, that's right too," conceded Bryce ruefully. "Then there's this third party, Melody. There're times again when I'm almost sure he must have done it. Get him in a corner and I'll say he's dangerous and liable to do anything. He's a pretty average low grade animal, taking him one way and another. Outside of the dope peddling trade, all he seems to know is hitting the red eye and following the big league teams. He's one of these box score fans— got the averages of every pro- fessional ball player that ever lived in the back part of his head. You know those nuts!"

"I certainly do,' said Crisp crisply. This scrap of superfluous information seemed to have quiekened his interest. "So that's his fad, eh? Good!" He bent across the table, sharpening his voice. "Danny, if, going home tonight, you should see a mishap of some sort or a curious happening— in fact, almost anything imaginable that's slightly out of the ordinary— what's the first thing that you are going to turn to when you open your morning paper at breakfast tomorrow?''

"Why, I suppose I'll be looking for the write-up of the thing I saw myself going home tonight.'' Bryce plainly was puzzled by this sudden switching of subjects.

"Right! And why?"

"Oh, well"— he fumbled for the words— "well, because I just naturally would. Force of habit, I suppose you'd call it."

"Force of habit be blowed! Danny, I'm ashamed of you. I might forgive you for so far forgetting your early education as to call a story a 'case.' I can even stand for your present-tensing everything you say, cop-fashion; but you've no excuse to be thinking like a harness bull. You were a pretty wise youngster once, and you had good training. What could 'force of habit' have to do with it? Human nature— that's the answer. Hand any man a newspaper and watch him skip the important stories in order to get at the story of some com- paratively trivial thing— an accident, say, or a street row or a scene in court or anything else of which he has actual knowledge and in which he has a personal interest, either because he figured in it as a spectator or actual participant, or else because somebody close to him figured in it. If there are two stories in the same paper which appeal to him in this way he'll invariably turn first to the one which interests him the most. And then he'll probably go rummaging round for copies of all the other papers to see whether any of them agrees with his version of it. Watch him— that's all. And the same thing applies to a woman or a boy or a child— applies to anybody that can read. They're all merely obeying a law of human nature— and that's a law with no exceptions to it that I know of.

"And Danny, my boy, listen to me: These suspects of yours— that's the law we're going to try them by. Between us, we've got two pretty powerful agencies to fall back on. You've got the machinery of the police department. I've got a newspaper shop with its facilities and appliances behind me. We'll use them both. Since we're partners on the deal, I'll be fair with you. I'm not going to pretend that the idea has just now jumped at me out of a clear sky. I've been carrying it in my mind for years, meaning to make a demon- stration of my theory sometime or other when a suitable opportunity came; but what you just said about this chap Melody brought it up again in my mind. To me this looks like a bully chance to test it out. You say that trying on the third degree hasn't got you anywhere. Well, this thing will be the Third Degree Plus.

"As I understand it, you're holding all three of your prisoners in the House of Detention? All right, then. Tomorrow morning, on some pretext or other, you bring 'em down to Headquarters and stick 'em in separate cells, see? Keep them there all day without letting them see their law- yers or anybody else and without letting any of them get a peep at a newspaper— that's specially important. Just leave them where they are, as though you had forgotten them. Then along toward evening drop by one of the cells— say the one where you've got the woman locked up and jolly her along a bit and tell her she'll have a good hot supper presently, and generally act friendly. Then, as if you'd just remembered it, you haul a copy of the Star out of your pocket and tell her there's something in it she possibly might want to read, and pass it in to her through the grating.

"Then watch her, Danny—watch her out of the corner of your eye without let- ting her know she's being watched, and see what she reads first. After that you go to Melody's cell and then to Rush's and do exactly the same thing with them that you've just done with the woman."

"Boss," said the young captain, "it must be I'm thick in the head tonight. I'm trying to follow your trail but I swear I don't get you yet."

"Don't you? Well, you will in just a minute... Oh, here comes our steak! Smells good, too, even at this distance."

"Damn the steak! It'll wait. Let Heiney slip a cover over it and keep it warm. What's the big idea behind this paper reading stunt, Boss?"

"Simple enough," said Crisp, "and yet not so dad-blamed simple, at that. We've got this in our faver to start on— that each one of these three has, or should have, a vital interest in a certain definite subject. With Melody, so you tell me, it's baseball. The woman, as we both know, used to be a fake spiritualist and give bogus séances. It's been in print half a dozen times this past week how she learned her trade under that old crook, Ellen Prime, who's now doing a six year bit up at Auburn for extortion. Which likewise is lucky for us, as I see it— circumstances playing right into our hands. And Rusk, you remember, has lately been blowing his money— or his customers' money— on the races." In moments of stress or enthusiasm Crisp had a trick of thinking in headlines and speaking in them, too. Unconsciously he quoted one now:

" 'Evidence Just Unearthed Shows Caspar's Nephew Fell for Ponies along with Burlesque Beauty's Charms— Wine, Women, Song and the Gee-Gees!' "

"But still it's not clear to me," protested Bryce. "I don't see—"

"You will. Listen, Danny: Tomorrow morning I'll get busy on a special edition of the Daily Star. It'll be a limited edition— restricted to exactly four copies. One copy I'll keep as a souvenir; the other three I'll shoot up to you by messenger for distribution among your cage pets. I'll take the regular home edition and make it over for our purposes. First I'll lift the running Caspar story and, whatever length it may be, I'll cut it down to half a column or so and stick it away somewhere on one of the inside pages under a single column head. Then, right across the front page I'll smear three stories— all of 'em absolutely imaginary but written so as to sound plausible and authentic.

"I'll detail the swiftest rewrite man I've got on my staff to turn 'em out for me first thing in the morning. He'll do the whole job in an hour and a half. The first one will be a fiction yarn about Bingo Driscoll, star left-hander of the Giants, having broken three of his ribs so he can't pitch in the crucial series with the Chicago Cubs that's starting day after tomorrow at the Polo Grounds. That little joker will be for Melody's express benefit.

"The second one will purport to be a dispatch from our Auburn correspondent saying that old Ellen Prime, under the preachings of the prison chaplain, has got religion and is now writing a book of confessions in which she exposes all the secrets of the trance-medium game, including her own. And the third one will be a double-leaded story playing up a purely supposititious crusade that's to be started against the hand-bookmakers and the pool rooms. We'll have the District Attorney announcing that he's going to clean up the tracks and drive all the talent out of town on the next train; we'll pile on the customary buncombe of threats and promises knee deep. You know the sort of thing: 'Startling Revelations of Graft and Police Collusion Impending— Protection for Gangsters Imperiled— Official Probe to Sink Deep.' "

Again the listener almost could see the headline gashing the white news print with its black-faced capitals, as Crisp mechanically ticked off his swinging phrases, letter by letter, on his fingers. He fell back into the explanatory tone: "And that one— that last one— is the identical fairy tale that ought to nail Rusk's eye— unless he's more deeply concerned with something else."

A grin of understanding was widening Captain Bryce's lower face.

"I begin to get you at last, Boss," he said, almost reverently.

"I thought you would— eventually. Well, how does it strike you? If from any cause the stunt fails we'll only be out a little trouble. It won't cost the Star fifty dollars to turn out that trick extra of ours— and I'd be willing to stand that much loss out of my own pocket just to test out the scheme. If it works— if one of the three instead of starting in right off to read the thing that's displayed on the front page should merely glance at it and then begin digging through the paper to find the Caspar story where it'll be tucked away in some corner— why, in that case it's a sign to you that here is the particular suspect you want to concentrate on for a while. Following along this line may not clear up the killing but at least it'll give you a definite lead. Instead of ranging about at random the way you're doing now, you'll be able to focus, and while you're focusing we'll be trying, between us, to cook up something else in the way of experiments... Say, how about tackling that sirloin of ours?"

NEXT DAY'S sporting extra off his hands and sent away, Crisp, instead of locking his desk and departing, lingered on in the cluttered city room, deserted now except for the four-hand crew of the late shift. At five-thirty came a copy boy:

"Call fur you on the telephone, Mr. Crisp. Police Headquarters speakin'. Says it's poisonal."'

He lifted the receiver off his private desk instrument.

"All right, Danny,'' he said. Crisp— shoot."

"Boss," came back the answer, "it's worked— just like you figured it would." Over the wire he could catch the jubilant quaver in his voice— a professional detective stirred out of the studied professional calm. "Yes sir, your little patent invention worked as slick as grease. I follows the plan just like you mapped it out. I takes 'em the papers you sent me— one by one. Two of 'em takes a flash at those phoney spreads and falls for 'em regardless of everything else. But the third one only gives the front page the quick once-over and then begins digging through to find the cut down murder story and reads it all through twice before turning back to look for anything else. Guess which one that was?"

"I only want one guess, I think," said Crisp dryly. "Rusk."

"You're a wonder," answered Bryce. "That's just exactly who it was, by gollies! How'd you dope it?"

"I had him picked as my favorite entry from the beginning," said Crisp. "Privately, I've been playing him clear across the board all the time. All right then, so far so good. Now then, if you're willing to go on with the next step, this is it— turn your man loose!"

He could almost hear Bryce's jaw droping.

"Turn him loose when, according to your own calculations, he's the right party? Why, say—"

"Danny, have sense!" Crisp sunk his voice, making sure that Whitby, at the copy desk twenty feet away, could by no chance overhear. "Merely because a certain individual shows a preference for a certain sample of the Star's literary productions doesn't justify you in swearing out a murder warrant— does it, now?"

"But it's only last night at Mallory's you says to me—"

"Last night was last night. This is a new day and there's to be some different strategy; the old plan of campaign is all switched around. Danny, after I left you down by the Bridge and started uptown I dropped into Keefe's theater. I always try to go to a vaudeville show when I've got any hard thinking to do— usually nothing happens on the stage to distract my attention. But this time something did happen. I saw a thing that gave me a whale of a hunch, and if you'll only be reasonable we'll play it. If you don't trail with me, why that partnership agreement of ours is off right now." It was the masterful star reporter of two decades back speaking to an adoring copy kid. "I'm not going to tell you the notion over the telephone— it'll keep for a few hours; but if the thing we've just pulled was the sublimated third degree you can bet this one is going to be the thirteenth. At that it's a long shot. But then, I like long chances. Now, here's what I want you to do:

"Hold all three of your prisoners right where they are, say, two days more, or anyhow until day after tomorrow; there's one phase of my scheme that calls for a leeway of time. Then you go to Rusk and you beg his pardon for having kept him locked up so long on a false supposition. Make him believe, if you can, that you're fully convinced now you haven't got an earthly thing on him. Then, through arrangement with your District Attorney's office up there in the Bronx, have him let out."

"'But suppose he beats it?"

"Behave yourself— you're letting your eagerness run away with your judgment. If he did the thing— and of that I'm surer than ever— he did it with one purpose in mind— to get the old man's money. If he had nerve enough for cold blooded murder and if he's had nerve enough through eight days to give you the laugh whenever you were grilling him, he's got too much nerve to dish his prospects by running away now when he thinks all he'll have to do is to stick round and wait for the courts to turn over the property to him. Anyway, your men will be shadowing him, won't they? If they're any good he'll never get out of their sight. And if our new stunt fails they can rearrest him any minute that suits 'em. You're not really giving him his freedom— you're only giving him a little rope. And rope, Danny, is what men hang themselves with.

"You have him turned free, just as I'm telling you to do. But before that you give out a statement for publication saying that, as a result of important developments, Mr. Jared Rusk has been entirely eliminated from suspicion. In the interview you can throw out hints about sensational clues pointing to another quarter. Be mysterious about it— the reporters will do the rest. They'll help your plant along without ever dreaming that they're helping it. To make the bluff still stronger, you must act as though all of a sudden you'd got something definite on Melody and the Cabanne woman. Fuss over them as though they were too valu- able to lose. Detail about four men in uniform to take 'em back to the House of Detention. Better still, handcuff 'em together and lead 'em past the door of Rusk's cell just a few minutes before you let him loose. For his benefit make the play as convincing as you possibly can.

"That's day after tomorrow's program. Tonight there'll be some preliminary tactics afoot. For one thing, I want you to meet me at Keefe's at nine-fifteen— in time for the second act on the bill. After you've seen it, I'm going to take you round back stage to meet a certain person— I saw him last night and he'll be expecting us. In the meanwhile here's a private job for you to tackle and when you see me you'll understand that this is the most important part of all— the success or failure of the whole scheme practically depends on it.

"I'm assuming that after the coroner's physicians got through with their autopsy the body was embalmed and sent to the morgue... Good! Then of course it's still there. Well then, you get busy right away and arrange matters so that anybody you may bring or send over there tomorrow morning will have the run of the place all day with nobody snooping about keeping tabs on him and maybe tipping your hand by loose talk.. That part of it can be fixed easily enough, can't it?... Fine! I figured it could... How'sthat?... I'm keeping you in the dark? You bet I am, sonny; I'm taking no chances on some outsider listening in on this wire. You'll get the whole layout tonight. But, oh Danny, you take it from me this is going to be one jim-dandy of a smash if only we can pull it off!"

Even though he held his voice at sub- dued pitch Crisp was fairly singing his words—a huntsman's song, really, it was. A man chase with a human life for the stake is the most exciting sport in the world and Crisp belonged to a predatory breed: he was a newspaperman; not a journalist, for that's a very different matter, but a newspaperman, and made after the proper model of his kind— tireless in the pursuit and with a beagle's nose for an obscured scent. He finished with an authoritative snap: "Remember Keefe's at nine-fifteen. "Bye!"

THE first thing Jared Rusk did after he walked out of Sessions was to go to the nearest saloon. There he drank raw spirits greedily. For more than a week. his denied and tormented fibers had been crying for their customary alcohol; with the whisky stowed in him, this inner screeching subsided to a soothing purr. And the second thing he did was to betake himself to his bachelor's suite in west Fortieth Street. Arrived there, and locked in, with the telephone receiver off its hook as a bar against interruptions, he proceeded to invoice his present situation.

He now was stimulated by a great exultation; but even so, he promised himself he was not going to let confidence merge into carelessness— no sir, not for a minute. From the outset he had held himself warily in hand, bearing himseif in all situations as one unjustly suspected; disdaining even to canvass for a possible bondsman. His pose throughout had been that of an innocent man having no concern for the outcome other than the hope of seeing justice done and the real assassin apprehended and punished. He would continue to hold this pose. If only he sat tight and made no false moves— if only he didn't rock the boat, as the saying went— the big prize for which he had played would be dropping into his lap like a ripe pear from a bough. Things were shaping beautifully. It would do neither Melody nor the Morgan woman any hurt to bide in a cell awhile longer. Indeed, he rather approved the prospect of their continued imprisonment. They were in no actual peril— not that he specially cared whether they were or not.

It was not humanly possible that either of them ultimately would be punished for an act in which neither had a hand. Nobody would be convicted— probably nobody ever would be brought to trial. Sooner or later the authorities, tacitly confessing failure, would turn these two loose and there would be an end to the whole pother. Merely another entry would be added to an already abundantly long list of New York's unreadable homicides.

All along the police had been so consistently idiotic. At thought of their blundering idiocy figuratively he shook hands with himself. At every turn they had confirmed his prior belief in their stupidity; and today's gorgeous joke— well, that surely was the capsheaf to all that had gone before. But the stupidest of the lot had been this self-sufficient, pouter-breasted Bryce— first with his cocksureness, his blatant belief in his own ability as a detective, his clumsy and shelf-worn artifices for extorting a confession or an incriminating admission; and now, by contrast, this forenoon he had been so crestfallen, so shrunken in port and manner.

Comforting himself from a bottle of whisky, Rusk rehearsed the day's outstanding events.  The scene in court had been a perfunctory scene, one without drama to it; the Assistant District Attorney, in moving for the release from further detention of one of the three individuals a at present in custody, had borne himself almost listlessly, as though he had lostinterest in the proceedings. And, before that, in their private conversation down at Headquarters, Captain Bryce had been downright apologetic. He recreated the picture of the diminished Bryce as that person had said: "Of course, Mr. Rusk"— it was "Mr. Rusk" now, instead of the rough "Say, you" of the station house back room— "of course, Mr. Rusk, you'll understand I'veonly been doing my duty in holding you and putting you to all this inconvenience. It's up to me not to overlook any bets; but when I've made a mistake, like I have in your case, I'm the first one to admit it. So now, if you're willing to let bygones be | bygones we'll shake hands, friendly. How about it?"

And Rusk, outwardly indifferent but inwardly rejoiceful, had said he was willing to let bygones be bygones. And then, still jn that new placating tone, Brycehad gone on:

"Naturally I'll have to ask you to keep in touch with me, sort of. It's likely from time to time there'll be things coming up in connection with these other parties that Dll want to ask you about— you knowing more than anybody else about your uncle's personal habits and all— get what I mean? I'll bother you just as little as I can... Oh, yes! come to think about it, there is one small detail where I'll have to have your help. I'll have to ask you to meet me up there at your uncle's house— or rather, I should say, it's practically the same as your house now— this evening at eight-thirty. Try to be there on time, won't you? I'm going to have a lot of other things to do tonight, I won't keep you more than a few minutes,

"For one thing, I want to turn the premises back over to you, officially, so to speak. And for another thing, while just the two of us are there on the spot by ourselves, if want you to go with me over the diagrams and photographs that we've been making of the room where— where it happened— so as to be sure we've got the layout all properly charted and marked. But the most important thing of all is for me to have you see for yourself that the furnish- ings and all are in the right places so the men I've had on duty there will be clear in case anything should turn up missing afterwards. Of course, coming up there may not be the pleasantest job in the world for you, considering everything, but be- lieve me, Mr. Rusk, it's absolutely necessary or I wouldn't be pressing it."

Rusk had consented readily enough. Wanting that thing known as a moral sense, he had no remorse and, by the same token, not the slightest repugnance to revisiting the spot where the thing had been done. that of a willing aide to the police in their fumbling endeavors? And all the time, secretly, he would be laughing to himself over the gorgeous farce comedy of it all. It was almost too good to be true: these poor, deluded limbs of the law— these broken legs of the law— asking his help, humbly invoking cooperation from him, of all men! Certainly he would go.

He went, slightly befuddled. An empty bottle in his rooms might testify, though, that it had taken the full strength of a commercial quart to produce this result. The stuff hummed pleasantly in him as he came out into the street, bound for the Bronx. His nerves had needed a plentiful lacing of whisky before they warmed and relaxed; all day, until the liquor took hold on them, they had been nagging at him. A conscience he lacked, or even the rudi- ments of one, but he did have nerves; otherwise this Jared Rusk might have made a perfect type of killer.

The subway carried him to a station within three blocks of his destination. He came up the exit steps and out of the kiosk into a district of lights and movement, there being tall new apartment houses about him and smart new shops on the lowermost floors of all of these. But as he swung eastward and rounded the second turning to the north he passed very quickly out of this hiving congeries into a neighborhood most entirely unlike. Here the darkness of a moonless night contended with the inadequate efforts of street lights spaced widely apart, and old-fashioned detached dwellings reared themselves well back from the pavement lines, each with its complement of spindly shade trees which already had begun to drop their yellowed leaves so that, in places, lacings of bare limbs showed dimly against the sky line.

The third house from the corner was his house, a formless clump in the enveloping blackness excepting for three squares of toned brightness which, set in the ground floor to the right of the porched doorway, marked the curtained windows of the limbs room.

Abruptly this place, familiar as it was to him, took on a forbidding and formidable look. Never before had it worn for him this daunting aspect. All at once he began to regret that he had come by night to it; surely daytime would have served as well,

In this sudden frame of regret and almost of indecision, he hesitated, fumbling with the latch of the iron gate in the tall fence of rusted iron pickets. But the metal snicked sharply under his touch and the form of a man materialized where a sprayed clump of shrubbery rose just inside the fence.

"That you, Mr. Rusk? Well, I've been sort of waitin' for you."

The voice he recognized as that of a plainclothes man of Bryce's staff with whom in the past week he had had forced dealings. But the two stood tonight on a different footing; the man's next words, by their cordiality, gave proof of the changed status of things. No longer was it the hectoring truculent detective matching his will and his wits against the wits and will of a prisoner under suspicion. Now it was the good natured policeman showing proper deference to a potentially wealthy citizen:

"I just wanted to catch you when you showed up— wanted to say to you that I hope you ain't got any ill feelin's on account of any little thing that come up while you was under arrest. Well, sir, the captain's waitin' for you... He's alone inside there. Just walk right on in, sir." He fell into step by Rusk as the latter went up the bricked path which crosscut the "Purty dark out here, ain't it? But then, I guess you know the way here better'n I do, at that."

With a manner that was ingratiating, the other accompanied him into the wide, dusty smelling hall; then, still in the rdle of usher, opened the first door to the right of the entrance and, becoming suddenly official, made the announcement: "Mr. Rusk to see you, Captain."

As Rusk passed through the opening the man closed the door behind the visitor and stood in the hall with the knob of the door held in both his hands and his body pressed into the angle of the door jamb.

Bryce was bending over a flat-topped desk which stood against the farther wall of the living room. He half turned his head. "How are you by now, Mr. Rusk?" he said pleasantly. "Be at your service in half a minute— just going over these diagrams again."

But Rusk scarcely was aware of him, and the concluding words of the young captain's casual speech had fallen upon ears that did not hear them. For Jared Rusk was seeing something. With eyes popped and riveted, he was seeing something which it was not good for any human in normal case to see, much less one whose nerves had lately been on strain.

There, in that armchair at the farther end of the center table, lolled a slumped figure in soiled dressing gown and wom bedroom slippers. Indubitably it was a solid and tangible shape having flesh and bones and members. And yet it was the shape of his uncle, Watkins Caspar, in posture and dress just as he had seen it there nine nights before— with the great red fresh stains spreading over the bosom of the rumpled, collarless shirt, with the high bald forehead turned waxen white, exactly as he, watching his victim, had seen it turn, with the nostrils pinching in, with the lower jaw dropped so that the teeth showed between the colorless lips— his uncle, dead by all rights, dead by all looks, except for two bright blazing eyes that stared now out of that corpse face and held his fascinated gaze. And now it was moving. It shifted and swayed between the cushioned arm rests, and wriggled its head as though its neck pained it. And now, next, very slowly and stiffly, it was getting on its feet. It shuffled toward him, taking one step— two steps— a third—

With his shuddering body flat on the floor and his face in the carpet and his fingers clutched about Bryce's ankles the murderer made his confession. He made it all the while sensing that The Thing stood very near him, and in his agony hideously fearing that It would put hands on him unless very quickly he told all there was to be told. A dozen times, never lifting his head, though, he broke into his confession to beg Bryce to keep It away from him, not to let It touch him, please to make it go away and stay away until he was through.

AFTER Crisp's death, here a couple of years or so ago, two of his late associates went through his personal belongings, making a sort of unofficial inventory. There were things among the effects which, being lumped together, gave them a better understanding of the man than ever they had had while he was alive; things which enabled them to figure out a creature most curiously complex, a compound of elements seemingly insoluble yet herein shrewdly blended.

For the time, the search took on rather the aspect of a post mortem appraisal of character. By the evidence brought forth from filing cases and table drawers and by certain further evidence which was contained in scrap books and clipping files, they established a case for and against the contrasting facets of a curious mentality, matching paradox with paradox, balancing an incredible professional callousness on a shy, well concealed instinct of charity, finding here abundant testimony to a vast egotism, and there proofs of a cloaked and unsuspected sensitiveness.

There was one item, though, or rather a brace of items, which puzzled them. These two objects seemed to have no connection with any revealed episode of Crisp's private life nor yet any bearing upon any one or another of his journalistic coups.

Upon an upper shelf of a locked cabinet one of the searchers came upon a wooden box that was like a casket in shape, measuring a foot across and perhaps eighteen inches lengthwise. On a slip of paper pasted to the cover was set down in Crisp's handwriting the cryptic legend: "Third Degree— Thirteenth Degree." There were two articles in the box. On was a copy of the Daily Star bearing a | date of late September of the year 1907; with age it had begun to turn yellowish and brittle. The other was a false face, but a false face raised to the nth enlargement of a graphic and flexible realism; with a wig attached for added disguising and so elaborated as to enclose whoever wore it, from the nape of his neck behind to the base of his throat in front. Skull, ears, throat, all would be covered. Plainly, the face of some elderly person had served as its model; the hair was gray and coarse and frayed, and it fringed away to a baldness on the frontlet of the enveloping scalp piece. Somehow the finder of it knew that here he beheld a copy that was faithful, in contour and likeness and expression, to the original.

"Well, by Jove," he said as he drew it forth from its keeping place, "I never knew he went in for masquerade parties. See here, Foster, give this cheery little exhibit a look, will you? Why on earth would anybody treasure such a ghastly, uncanny, awful looking proposition as this?"

"I don't know what he wanted to keep it for," said the other man, who was the Daily Star's dramatic critic, taking the thing in his hands. 'There were a lot of curious angles, it seems, to old Ben Alibi's nature— maybe he had his morbid side, too. But I know where it came from, or rather, I know who made it. I recognize the handiwork— there never was but one man who could turn out such a job as this, Don't you remember that foreigner, Borgo, who came over here a good long while back— oh, it must be all of twelve or four. teen years!— and broke into vaudeville with that wonderful act of his that he called 'The Dance of the Masques' and made such a hit that one of the roof shows signed him up fora long contract? I was subbing on dramatics for the Trib then and got to know him well— nice, friendly chap he was, and a real artist. But I'd say this must have been one of his masterpieces." He slid the wig part up over his forehead, pressing the shell in to fit snugly. "Life-like, eh?"

"Yes, all of that— but death-like, too! It was gruesome enough before, like a death mask vivified in some unhealthy, devilish sort of way. By Jove, I believe that's exactly what it is, or was to start with—a death mask! But now, with your eyes shining through those openings, it turns you into a corpse that walks— you're just a corpse with a lost and tor mented soul held prisoner inside you— ugh! One look at you, standing there now, would give anybody the horrors. Here, give me the damned thing and let me stick it back in its— its coffin— where it belongs!

___________________

16: The Eminent Dr. Deeves

Irvin S. Cobb

Cosmopolitan April 1923

THE eminent Doctor Deeves lived in a cottage which fitted into an indent in the high wall of rough field stones that bounded the grounds of his sanitarium on all four of its sides. The front breadth of this wall was the first thing, nearly always, to take the eye of a traveler turning out of the main county turnpike into the quieter byway that led north-ward past the establishment. It rose up straight and blank and it stretched away for a formidable run of four hundred feet. No gate or gap broke into it; the entrance, which opened on a graveled: drive that skirted the east face of the enclosure, was entirely out of sight from the public road. It suggested seclusion and aloofness, which were the intents; and it made a mystery of what might lie back of it, and that was inevitable, and yet perhaps, on the part of its proprietor, not altogether undesirable.

This sanitarium, as it was called in deference to. certain popular prejudices, was a place for the confinement and the care of persons suffering from mental and nervous disorders. It was a private asylum, or as those might say who favored the crueler old English name, a madhouse.

First, the approaching stranger would see the wall, then, coming nearer and alongside, would be aware of a massing of trees behind the barrier and, from one point where the road humped itself over a slight elevation in the earth, he could see if he continued to look that way— the upper floors of some large buildings, like barracks or dormitories, rising in the middle distance. He must pass on several rods farther before he caught sight of the doctor’s cottage where it snuggled into its jog or recess. At the back, the wall was joined to it, so that its rear elevation formed a proper part of the boundary.

It was rather a gay and jaunty little house, with a mottled slate roof on it to relieve the gray of its masonry construction, and with many windows looking out on the flower beds and the narrow strip of lawn which made the approach for it. The passer-by felt that the architect had done well to invest this dwelling with the look of a home, seeing that always it must contend for its cheerfulness against the frowning dominance of that long tall wall, springing away from it on the right flank and the left. But in the summer, awnings and vines and porch furniture helped to give it brightness. Also, frequently visible, there was a child.

At least, in times gone by there had been a child. Doctor Deeves was a widower with one child, a daughter. At the time this account properly begins, though, she had grown out of childhood into girlhood. Doctor Deeves’s wife was dead when he gave up practice in the city to move out here, three miles from e small town of Amitydale, and set up this now famous institution of his.

The daughter’s name was Hazel Deeves and at eighteen she was pretty, in a subdued, quiet sort of way. If we bar the servants and a governess she had for a while as a little thing, before Doctor Deeves himself took over the undertaking of her education, and, after that, a housekeeper who served until the little mistress was old enough to assume the domestic duties, these two— the distinguished specialist and the young girl— were the only regular residents that the house in the shadow of the sanitarium walls had ever sheltered. So far back as her memory went it was the one home she always had known; she was a baby on a pillow when her father brought her from the East.

Back there in the East he had been distinguished as an alienist. Now he preferred to be known as a psychiatrist, which to one versed in the shadings of meaning conveyed by the phraseology of his calling marked a change in the doctor’s scientific estate. To the layman the titles might be interchangeable; inside the profession there was a subtle distinction between them. Once upon a time his learned opinions, given in court under the head of expert testimony, had broken more than one will, had saved more than one insane murderer from the chair and had sent more than one sane malingerer to it. Now, in these latter days, his reputation more largely rested upon his diagnostic talents and upon his system of treatment— which sometimes worked cures— for unfortunate humans whose brains had gone awry. To him the work he was doing was of such tremendous importance that he had neither time nor patience for anything else. It held him, to the exclusion of practically all lesser interests. Excepting when he dealt with his own business he had about him an air of supreme absorption, as though his thoughts were too precious for exnosure to the common currents of discussion. He had no small talk for a company. Also he had about him the cocksureness which so frequently accompanies preeminence in a brilliant man’s affairs. You couldn’t tell Doctor Deeves anything, because if you agreed with his conclusions that merely was to him added evidence— not that he needed it— to demonstrate that he was right, and if you disagreed with him, why, that then was proof of either your blindness or your stupidity; so, in either event, what you had to say was of no consequence.

Make a mental picture of an arrogant, quick-gaited, generally silent man, with double-lensed glasses riding his nose and with a short harsh beard bristling forth from a stubborn chin and accenting rather than cloaking the clamped and dogmatic set of his lips, and for the purposes of this narrative you have a sufficiently full likeness of the eminent Doctor Deeves. See him once and you would know him again anywhere.

By all outward favors, his daughter was of another cast. She must have taken after her mother; certainly she seemed in no visible way to follow the parental mold. She was a gentle, almost a timid little thing, self-effacing, docile by nature, and in her temperament borrowing a protective coloration from objects about her. It was a strange life she led at eighteen, but no stranger than the life she always had led. Mad people had been her comrades from the hour she reached the age when comradeship began to mean something to her. She had no fear of them, and no distrust. They were, to her, as matter-of-fact as normal playfellows would be to a child brought up in different surroundings.

Her little world, the one she knew the best and loved the best, lay back of the cottage, on the sanitarium’s shut-in acres. To the uninformed, viewing the place from without, it conveyed with its walls the impression of being jail-like, so built and so ordered as to insure that its inmates would be safely held. She could not recall a time when her understanding of the meaning of the boundary had not been a better one. It was set there as a bar against morbid curiosity; its intent was to save those who dwelt within it from prying eyes and mischievous annoyances. It was not their prison wall but a wall of protection for them. Shielded by it, they followed their pursuits and devices, which were many.

The housing of demented folk has gone a long way along the road of compassion and sympathy since the times of Bedlam with its iron chains for the limbs of the insane and its rods for the scourging of their poor backs.

If there are strait-jackets and padded cells and detention harnesses in the modern asylum, the casual visitor does not see them. He sees no maniacs mewing at barred windows. Workshops and reading rooms and rest-rooms; singing birds in cages and flowers in pots; comfortably furnished rooms and wards; broad wide sunlit corridors; some times isolated cottages whose doors are not locked; pleasant walks winding along under shade trees and across wide smooth stretches of lawns; tennis courts and ornamental gardens— these are what he sees. Excepting for the look out of the eyes of some who live there and except for the gait of some of them— the legs lifted high at each step and then the feet thrown forward with a jerk— it is possible that in his visit he will see or hear scarcely a thing to suggest that these men and these women, here concerned with their various occupations and diversions, are in any wise abnormal.

This, then, was the sort of place the child, Hazel Deeves, grew up in. Her father’s sanitarium was an expensive one. Only those unfortunates whose people might afford to pay well for their keep were sent to him, and only the most scientific, the most merciful and the most advanced methods were here employed. Music, sports, healthful employments, were provided; in the surroundings was all possible beauty and comeliness.

So the child’s world was a world of flowers and trees and green grass, and for playmates she mainly had those who in age were adults but who, because of their infirmity, were in thought and habit children. There was a woman who played at dolls with her— a woman whose mind had stopped growing when she was twelve years old. There was an old man with a white beard and a soft brogue in his voice; he took her with him to far corners of the grounds on a search for a little man in a red jacket with a green feather in his hat, who worked magic. He was quite as sure as she was— surer even— that sooner or later they would find this little man.

Another of her favorite companions was also an old gentleman, one with chubby pink cheeks and a benevolent manner. He gave her advice for the fashioning of mud pies and the building of sand fortresses, but no actual help in their construction. For this there was a reason.

Seen at a distance, he appeared to have both his hands thrust into a curious sort of leather muff, rather like an overgrown roll for carrying sheet music. On drawing nearer one would discover that his wrists were strapped fast inside the device and that a light steel chain which threaded through a steel ring in his muff was fastened behind his back with a special lock.

Among all the patients who had run of the outdoor spaces this old man alone wore bonds. He had a passion for plucking the hair out of other persons’ heads; otherwise he was quite rational. He was very vain of his leather wristlets and his chain. The inconvenience of wearing them was balanced by the distinction they gave him. He was most happy and cheerful, though, when he was with or near the little girl. liked him tremendously. He told such splendid fairy tales,

Sometimes in the night, and more especially in a moonligh night, there came wailing cries from a certain secluded of one of the buildings; they went on for hour after hour. In her bed in the cottage the child could hear them as she dropped asleep, but they did not frighten her or give her bad dreams. She knew that when the fit passed the men and women who uttered those sounds would be quite friendly and quiet and that from them she need fear nothing.

Indeed, there were many among the inmates who would have died to protect her. She appreciated this fact, as it were, instinctively. She accepted their vagaries as verities; their delusions fitted in, often enough, with her childish conceptions of causes and effects. Her father made use of their devotion for his little daughter. When all else failed— cajolery or persuasion or disciplinary measures— there were certain patients who could be brought back from the beginnings of violent outbreaks by the threat that Hazel should not be permitted to speak with them or visit them. To Doctor Deeves it seemed perfectly proper that in controlling his more unruly charges he should invoke the power of his daughter’s influence.

Nor could he see any possibility of harm coming to her from these associations. In his detached way he loved her as he loved his profession, which meant that he loved her with all his heart. For her he had all possible fatherly pride and devotion. He would have been the first, as often he told himself, to take her entirely away had he sensed peril of whatsoever sort for her in the life she lived. But he could sense none. All his own experiences and all the recorded experiences of authenticated neurologists from the earliest times to these present ones, told him that contact with the insane never had affected adversely the mentality of a sanely minded individual. There were no data to support so fantastic a theory as the contrary of this.

Once his younger sister came on from Baltimore to visit him and she, being a spinster, naturally and inevitably had pronounced notions of her own touching on the rearing of children, She was decidedly afraid of this autocratic brother of hers, but eventually a solicitude for the welfare of her little niece rose above her fearsomeness and led her to remonstrate with him. She did not get very far. The contemptuousness which blazed from his eyes and made two hot little burning glasses of his spectacle lenses silenced her, even before he made answer.

“Henrietta,” he bade her, “don’t be a fool. Hazel is not lonely. I deny emphatically that she is lonely. Merely because she is thrown so little with other children is no sign that she is lonely. For a child, her life is remarkably full. She never lacks for a playfellow. She gives comfort to these patients and they give company and pleasure to her. According to my best observation and belief, she is happier in their society than when she is with children of her own age. She is never in the slightest danger from any of them. I doubt whether there is a patient here who would offer to injure her. Besides, some one of staff— a nurse or a man attendant or one of my assistants— is always within sight and hearing and easy reach. What danger could there be?”

“I wasn’t thinking of any physical danger, Edgar,” said the sister. “But don’t you think that such constant intimacy with persons whose minds are deranged may in the long run be for her own mind? That’s what I was trying to say— what I meant— the mental and the temperamental results— and all.”

“Henrietta,” he snapped, “again I repeat, don’t make a fool of yourself.” He bit the words off sharp and hard. “Insanity invariably arises from certain sources— congenital causes. hereditary causes, from disease, from shock sometimes, from grief, from bad habits, from alcoholism, from other things. But it is not contagious. It is not an infection which floats about in the air. All my active life I have been in constant contact with every imaginable phase of insanity. Am I insane? Do you expect me to go insane?

“Bah! Hazel is all right. I only trust that when she grows up her future may be as well safeguarded as her childhood has been. Kindly endeavor to disabuse your mind of these silly fancies which you seem to have entertained concerning my daughter. And, whether or not you succeed in doing that, please do not refer to the matter again to me or to any other person about these premises. Above all, do not speak to Hazel— I’ll have no false notions put in her innocent little head.” During the remainder of her visit Miss Henrietta Deeves steadfastly heeded the warning. No one else ever so much as dared to suggest to Doctor Deeves that the course he had followed, and still followed, in the bringing up of his daughter might be open to criticism. So he went on, this earnest, conceited, single-purposed scien- list, following his bent and never suspecting, even in his occasional hours of introspection, that in certain respects he was neglecting the child. Such education as she got— and in some respects it was thorough enough— she got from him. Such traveling as she did was done with him and none other, so that at home or abroad she dwelt constantly in the coils of his will and his personality.

Frequently, even when she was with him, he was but half aware of her. He might love her dearly but she did not interest him— she was not a case. So she grew up to the edge of her womanhood and was pretty in a pallid, almost a colorless fashion, and at eighteen the enclosure behind the walls still was where she spent the greater part of her time and where she felt the greatest measure of peace and content.

It has taken this much space and this many words to bring Hazel Deeves forward to within a few weeks of her nineteenth birthday. Until now, her youth had been leisurely, placid, cloistered almost. Within the little mured community where she spent the greater part of her time one uneventful month had followed another without jar or jostle. For her, the place was like one of those quarters in the Orient where the white foreigners bide, knowing little of the races that hive and swarm outside the sheltering compound.

Now, though, came an interruption in the smoothened and isolated currents of her life. The thing may be summed in a sentence or two. She met a young man, five years her senior, by name Stephen Shire; for months they were in daily contact. Without exactly witting it, she fell in love with him. He fell in love with her, too. But on his side there was knowledge of what was happening. Under conditions that were peculiar the affair went forward, ripening with rapidity. The condition was most peculiar, indeed. She was the daughter of the great psychiatrist and he was one of that distinguished gentleman’s patients.

One day in the fall of the year this young man, Shire, was brought to Doctor Deeves’s sanitarium. He had gone overseas as first lieutenant of a company in a National Guard regiment for service against Germany and had been invalided home, a victim of shell-shock, with nerves pitiably shattered and his body wasted. His state was bad enough when they brought him back to America; and several months in a government hospital did not help him. Indeed, he grew steadily worse; his mind showed signs of weakening.

His nearest of kin was an older brother, who also was co-heir with him to a considerable estate. This brother took certain legal steps in conjunction with certain medical steps and the upshot of these proceedings was that a court, acting in the best of faith, declared the sufferer incompetent to care for himself or to administer his own affairs, and signed an order for his com. mitment to a suitable place of detention. So he was put into the capable hands of Doctor Deeves.

At the sanitarium, under treatment, he very soon showed signs of betterment. Mentally and physically he improved. But there was no hope, ever, for his complete recovery. Doctor Deeves himself said so, saying it with that finality and that unshakable emphasis which invariably marked his professional judgments. Eliminating the hard words and the long ones which enriched his speech, the situation in this case, as summed up and set forth by Doctor Deeves, left no room for doubt. Here it stood:

By reason of hardships and the strain he had undergone in France, the poor young man’s reason irreparably had been over- thrown. His malady was progressive and incurable. True, for a while he might show signs of mending— as, indeed, he already had done— and with proper care might at times appear to be quite rational. But one must not be deceived by such seemingly favorable indications; one must be guided by one’s knowledge and one’s experience; one must separate the prospects for a restoration to bodily health from the mental aspects of the case. Regardless of any temporary rallies, this man was to be accepted as one indubitably and definitely cursed with the seeds of de- rangement. Sooner or later the quality of his derangement would increase. This, in brief, was Doctor Deeves’s pronouncement. It is fair to assume that the decision did not altogether displease the older brother.

There is no telling just when the young ex-lieutenant first began to take an active interest in the girl or when she began to feel for him an emotion deeper than pity. Perhaps to both of them the quickening came at once. It is true that very soon after their first meeting each began to seek and to desire the company of the other. His listlessness would quit him, at sight of her, coming along the walk toward where he sat, on fine mild days in the late fall, drawing in strength for his limbs from the sunshine and the air and the peace of outdoors; and his melancholia had quit him almost overnight. Her step would brisken as she neared him. She would read to him, he listening for hours on end, soothed and comforted by the sound of her voice and by the mere fact of her being near him.

In the winter, as he grew stronger, they walked together often. No one seemed to take cognizance of their growing intimacy. It was a part of the routine of the establishment that Miss Deeves should spend a part at least of nearly every day with this patient or that; her presence in the wards or about the grounds was accepted as a matter of course by the attendants. Probably none of them thought to look for romance in such surroundings as these, where the faculty for loving, like all the other faculties, was skewed and out of joint.

So then, this was how and why it was that, unsuspected by others and, in a way of speaking, unsuspected by her, the love between these two grew and strengthened itself.

As vigor came back to his limbs and as his nerves untautened, he made her subject him to all possible tests of his sanity. He did this as much for her sake as for his own. Already he had convinced himself that, mentally, he was quite re- stored to the normal. His job now was to convince her of it. This being done and completely done, he told her his story— all of it.

It was such a story as those who deal with the inmates of an asylum hear often enough; it was such a story as she herself had heard many a time, all the while knowing the wildness of the claim set up by the one telling it. But this time she believed. He made her believe, and, besides, with all her heart she wanted to believe.

Even so, she must draw heavily upon what reserve of resolution she might have before she ventured to approach her father in Shire’s behalf. You see, she knew her father much better than she knew herself; she knew that to ask him to consider revising his professional opinion would almost be in the nature of a personal affront to him. Finally, though, she went, frightened inwardly but armed with a sense of the justice of her petition.

He listened without interruption to what she had to say. It was his way when opposed or questioned in his decisions to listen for a bit silently and then suddenly to blast the adversary with one fierce sweeping counter-volley. Successfully the citadel of his conceit never yet had been assaulted; it was impregnable. You cannot, with argument, breach a fortress so built as to be absolutely proof against such ammunition. His daughter was wise enough to attempt no extended argument. She set forth her case, rather, in the form of a claim— a plea for the reconsideration and the reopening of an issue closed.

It was a simple enough thing that she asked. And she started out, bravely enough, to ask it. If, toward the close of her speech, she faltered and stammered and repeated herself it was because he sat there so quietly, with no change of expression, with no softening of the glower of disapproval that had formed on his face at those opening words from her which made clear the motive of her mission.

Doctor Deeves was exceedingly fond of his daughter but not even the daughter of an absolute monarch may altogether be excused for lese majesty to the father who must number his child among the subjects of his empire. Rebellion from those closest to the throne always has been most abhorrent to despots. And Doctor Deeves, with the best intentions in the world, nevertheless and to the contrary notwithstanding, was a despot.

“Are you quite through?” he said, when finally she made an end of what she had come to say. ‘Very well, then, now kindly give heed to me: This is the only time you have ever offered, directly or indirectly, to interfere in the management of my institution. I hope it may continue to be the only time. If it were any other person on earth than you who presumed in this way upon my stock of forbearance I know what the manner of my response would be. I think you also know what the manner of it would be. But because you are my own child I shall be patient with you. I shall do what I should not do in the case of another—I shall take the time required to show you how utterly wrong you are in coming to me with such a request as this one.

“T see very plainly what has happened. This young man’s case has appealed to you; that is only natural. He is young; he has served his country in war; he has his whole life before him. But, my child, you must learn not to let your sympathies run away with your judgment.

“How often, in the course of a year or a month, is the claim set up by some person here—some person whom you know to be a lunatic—that he or she has been railroaded to this place, has been unjustly deprived of freedom on a trumped-up charge of insanity made by designing kinspeople, with selfish or dishonor- able or dishonest motives at the back of it all? I hear it said every day; so do vou—the commonest delusion of common madmen—and said generally by individuals who at that very moment, by their behavior, their language or their looks, betray the fact that they are hopelessly insane.

“Now then, merely because, in this particular instance, the patient has somehow convinced you that for the moment at least he is seemingly rational, that is no reason to assume that he is the exception to the rule. To me, it merely is added proof of what I have known from the time he was brought here. I studied his case with my usual care; I diagnosed it, I passed on it. In the statement which I made at that time I predicted what would follow. I said that for a time he might, and probably would, show some improvement. But sooner or later he will relapse; there is no other prospect, no other possible contingency. He is here because he belongs here, or in some similar place. This is the sort of place where always he will belong. As I have just said, I gave a verdict in his case when he was brought to me. I pronounced it incurable then. I pronounce it incurable now— absolutely. So, my daughter, let us consider this incident as closed for all time to come.”

The belligerent tone in his voice softened somewhat: “Let me look at you, child. Hum, it strikes me you do not look well. You have been losing a little flesh, haven’t you? And now that I think of it, it seems to me your appetite has been indifferent lately. I think I shall have to take you with me for a little change of air and scene on the next trip that I make. It will do you good to get away. And in the meantime I insist that you must not brood over things which are out of your control or beyond your understanding— remember, I insist on this.” His eye strayed back to the mass of papers and printers’ proofs on his desk.

“Well, now then, my dear, I think you’d better be running along. Concern yourself with what falls within your proper scope of activities. Just leave me to manage the professional side of this business. By your gauges I may be getting pretty old, but I’m not quite ready to retire yet awhile.” He smiled at his conceit, and in his wiry beard the rows of firm, locked teeth showed like the tight edges of a strung trap.

So she went away from him and that afternoon when nobody was within earshot she told Stephen Shire what she had done and what the result of it had been.

It was early springtime by now, and the cherry tree under which they stood while she made her confession was a glorified bouquet of white blooms. She had acted on her own initiative; the original impulse had been hers without any prompting from him, and all the while her plan was taking shape and her courage hardening for the interview with her father, he had been left in entire ignorance of the design.

He was not disappointed at the outcome; some weeks before he privately had besought Doctor Deeves to submit him to an examination, however rigorous, and the manner of the refusal had convinced him that in this quarter lay no hope for him. Rather, by what he heard now, he was relieved. There was pleasure to him in knowing that he had this gentle little champion and that she had confidence in him and the hardihood to make, in his interests, and singly, the appeal she just had made. The appeal had failed utterly; very well, then, he must move for his deliverance in other directions and by other ways.

He told her, that same afternoon, what he had in mind, making it plain to her that he might need her help; and she, who never before in word or deed had crossed or deceived her father. consented to aid him.

Circumstances ran together to aid the pair of young plotters. Either Doctor Deeves forgot or he postponed his intention of taking his daughter traveling with him.

Anyhow, he was engaged that spring in writing the last chapters of his book, his great authoritative work upon disorders of the brain. Also, a little later on, in June, he would go to one of the leading Eastern universities to receive an honorary degree. Doctor Deeves collected degrees as a stamp collector collects stamps; getting one made him covet more. His vanity exulted in the string of letters he might tail after his name. Just at present his time, which he never wasted, was to him especially precious.

So, taking note somewhat absently that his daughter gained none in flesh and that she seemed paler than common and was abstracted and almost moody, he bought a small car for her and insisted that she learn to run it and that she spend so many hours a day driving about the country.

Only in part, though, did she obey him. She learned to operate the runabout but she shirked the country drives. She would start out alone, but very soon she would come hurrying back. It was as though the wide open spaces daunted her; as though the ability to whiz along quiet lanes and over the smooth-surfaced turnpikes gave her no pleasure. Nevertheless, the fact that now she owned an automobile and was in all respects mistress of it exactly fitted into the scheme which young Shire was devising.

On a day in the latter part of May, just after the noon hour, the two young people ran away together in the swift little car. Before this, though, there had been a deal of conspiring between them.

Under the sanitarium rules, a supervision was exercised over letters written by the patients. Through Hazel Deeves’s connivance Stephen Shire evaded the censorship. Secretly he wrote a letter to a man of consequence, a certain Colonel Dougherty, in whose regiment of the A.E.F. he had served, and this letter he smuggled into the girl’s hands and she mailed it in the town, supplementing it with one of her own.

Colonel Dougherty’s answer, addressed to her, came back promptly. With the evidence of his former lieutenant’s own statement before him, every word in it bespeaking a rational and ordered mind, he could not help believing that Shire was the victim of a great and a cruel injustice, and, guided by that belief, he stood ready and willing to offer the protection and the assistance which Shire had asked of him; so the Colonel wrote.

Let Shire make his escape from his confinement, and let him get safely into the state where Colonel Dougherty lived, which would mean out of the jurisdiction and beyond the ordinary legal processes of the state of which the young man was a citizen and in which he had been committed to detention. These things accomplished, Dougherty, for his part, promised to give him asylum under his roof and to furnish such surety as might be required for the orderly behavior of the fugitive and, finally, to invoke the proper authorities, whoever they might be, for an impartial hearing before an impartial tribunal with a view to establishing the present mental competency of his friend.

As Dougherty understood the case, what Shire desired was, first, his liberty and then a chance to prove his sanity. After that, in the Federal courts, he might seek redress against his brother for his denied property rights. The Colonel was no lawyer but he had heard, he said, of similar cases in which this procedure had been followed with success.

Now, Dougherty was a man of influence and consequence; his help would be a tower of strength, as Shire made plain to the girl. There was yet a further fact operating in the prisoner’s favor. From the asylum gates to the river which marked the western boundary of the state, the distance was less than twenty miles. Even over indifferent roads an automobile could cover it in an hour or less. And Dougherty lived in a small city on the opposite bank of the river not ten miles north of where the refugee— if he succeeded in getting away from his warders— would cross on the ferry which plied between the shores. With a fair share of luck, one more main difficulty would be ironed out to smoothness.

The escape was simplicity itself; nothing delayed it and no alarm followed it. On the appointed day, just after luncheon had been eaten, young Shire came forth from the dining hall of the building in which he was lodged. On the lawn, as if by chance, he met the girl. Casually they walked diagonally through the grounds to where an elderly man named James Eggers sat on duty in his regular post alongside the main gates which opened in the east wall.

At a word from Miss Deeves, Eggers, touching his cap in salute, let them pass through. At least a third of the patients, including nearly all held to be harmless and known ordinarily to be well behaved, were allowed, under suitable escort, to leave the enclosure for cross-country strolls; a few even were permitted to accompany the attendants tothetown. Their absence for hours, even for a whole forenoon or a whole afternoon, would not be regarded with concern. Shire, these last few months, had been listed in this favored group. True, by the regulations a nurse or a male keeper should now be with him. But in Eggers’s eyes the daughter of his employer was, in effect, a qualified member of the administrative staff. If she elected to stand sponsor for this young iellow the responsibility would be hers.

Suspecting nothing, the gatekeeper watched them until they passed from his sight along the graveled drive that skirted the wall. He had not taken notice that Miss Deeves was very white and that she was trembling. His one glance of official scrutiny had been for the patient and about the latter the gatekeeper had seen nothing which was calculated to make him look a second time. He settled back in his chair and lighted his pipe. The warm soft air invited him to loaf and forget his private worries— if he had any such. He need not think again of the pair until toward evening.

An eighth of a mile away, under the rear wall of the compound, the girl’s car, with oil cups and gas tank newly filled, stood where she had left it half an hour before. No one saw them mount to its seat; no one who knew either of the pair saw them driving southward along a back road to where it joined the turnpike running to the west. Westward then they traveled, going rapidly. In the run to the river they stopped only once; that was at a small railroad station, where Shire handed a rush message, which had been written beforehand, and a coin in payment, to a listless person serving there as train dispatcher and telegraph agent.

They drove on then, with speed, until they came to the edge of a slope where the shelving bank went down to meet the mile- wide river. The ferryboat, a clumsy, double-ended craft, was in midstream, headed their way but making slow work of it against the strong current. They would have at least twenty minutes to wait, and perhaps half an hour, before the boat landed and put ashore what freight she had brought and began her return trip. Of pursuit before dark there was now little danger. Looking back frequently as they sped along, young Shire had seen behind him no signs to suggest a chase. By heavy odds of probability he was quite safe— certainly as safe as he could hope to be until he touched the soil of the adjoining state. Nevertheless, it was at his suggestion that the car was turned off the road into the thick fringing of hazel bushes and stunted haws that ran along the brow of the low ridge above the landing. Here in this shielded place they were out of sight of any save an especially keen-eyed passer-by. In part, this move was dictated by his instincts of prudence, in part by another purpose which he had in mind. In due time the ferryboat came to bank, discharged her cargo, took on another and headed away again for the opposite shore. No automobile went aboard her, though, but only a couple of farm wagons and a dusty buggy. Nor was there a young man or a young girl among the foot-passengers. Three countrymen and an old woman and a small boy made up the list of passengers. In his own automobile on the far shore waited Colonel Dougherty. He had received a telegram half an hour before; he had come swiftly to the crossing place to meet his friend. He waited and waited until nightfall, then drove homeward, alone and perplexed by apprehensions.

Along towards four o’clock of this same May afternoon Doctor. Deeves sat in his library, which was a room opening off the reception hall of his cottage. Since luncheon he had been there, making final revision of the proofs of his book— the book that would live long after he was gone, bearing his knowledge down to enrich the learning of men in generations yet to come. Subconsciously he heard the front door open and close. Then his own door was flung open and there before him stood one of his charges, this young man, Stephen Shire. The famous specialist laid down his pen and reared back in his swivel chair; he was mildly startled by the intrusion. His patients did not have the run of his private residence, naturally. Even so, Doctor Deeves retained the unruffied magisterial air which he used in his intercourse with the inmates of his asylum.

“Well,” he said, “what does this mean?”

“It means I’ve come back,” said the younger man. He was breathing hard as though under great stress, and now Doctor. Deeves saw that the intruder’s face was streaked with dust and his clothing, too.

“You’ve come back, eh?” he said soothingly. He was accustomed to vaga- ries and hallucinations; he flattered him- self he knew how to deal with them. Doctor Deeves was forever flattering himself on one count or another. “And where have you been?”

“Twenty miles away— and twenty miles back. I ran away from here— two hours and a half ago. Hold on!” He spoke out sharply as Doctor Deeves’s hand reached toward a push button set in the wall just behind him. “You needn’t ring that bell, Nobody at the sanitarium knows I got away, I think. I haven’t been missed yet. Nobody need know. I came back of my own free will. And I brought her back with me.”

“Her?” Doctor Deeves half lifted from his chair. He knew now he was confronted by realities, not by delusional fancies; a quick suspicion was rising in his mind. “Her? Who do you mean?”

“Your daughter, Hazel Deeves. It was in her car that I got away. I drove it— but she went with me. Wait— I didn’t steal her— I didn’t abduct her, She helped me get away. But we’ve both come back— God help us— yes, and God help you, too!”

“Why that? Where is she? What has happened, man?” Doctor Deeves was scarcely aware— and yet somehow was definitely aware— that he spoke now as one rational man to another rational man. He had shed his professional manner as a runner might shed a garment, hindering him. He was all the concerned father— the imperturbable scientist, with his pose of infallibility, had vanished utterly.

“She’s upstairs in her own room— safe enough— she hasn’t been hurt in any way. Sit down! Don’t go to her yet. Wait until you hear what I have to tell you.”

It was as though Shire gave his orders with due authority to give them. Mechanically the older man obeyed. All at once now the young ex-soldier dominated the room. He thrust his head forward, fairly flinging his words in the other’s face. His intensity armed him with a sort of straightforward eloquence:

“Doctor Deeves, listen: I’m a sane man— you’ve got to believe that. And here’s another thing you’ve got to believe because in another minute or two I'll be proving it to you— I love your daughter. And she loves me. If you’d been able to see anything except the things you’re interested in, you’d have seen it months ago. But you— you couldn’t see— you were blind. Oh, my God, how blind you’ve been!

“She loves me— she loved me well enough to plot with me to get away from this place today. We made for the river. I’ve got friends on the other side who'd have helped me prove my case— friends standing ready to provide me with funds until I could get back what rightfully belongs to me. Never mind that now. She loved me well enough to be willing to come back here after I’d gotten beyond your reach— to come back alone and face you and your anger.

“But I had a different plan in my mind. I didn’t tell it to her, though, until we were within sight of the crossing. Then I told her— then I began to plead: with her to go on with mie fo the other side and when we were on that other side; to marry me. That was what I begged her to do— at the first, until

“But wait, I'll go back a little so you'll understand more clearly; I’ve been going, ahead too fast in what I’m telling you.

“As we were making for the river I felt confident and overjoyed and not a bit worried over the final outcome. I was beating you at your own game; I was sure I could keep on beating you. The human being I loved best in all this world was with me, helping me. But somehow she seemed very much frightened. She kept trembling. She was as white as death. Suddenly I realized how frail she was and how wasted and thin. Like a little weak shadow! She kept looking about her on every side as though she expected enemies would be hiding behind every tree and every bush. I tried to soothe her.

“And then, when we’d got to the river and the ferry was in sight, coming toward us, I started to tell her the rest of my purpose; the biggest part of it. I told her I was no such coward as to induce her to help me get away and then let her come back alone to face the consequences. I told her how deeply I loved her and how sure I felt of my sanity and how certain I was of my ability to care for her. I begged her to go on across. that river with me.

“She told me she couldn’t. Not that she didn’t care for me. I knew, without her telling me, that she cared for me. She said she couldn’t go because she was afraid. I asked her what she was afraid of— was it me she feared? She said, no. She said— oh, listen, man, while I tell you what she said!—she said she must get back inside these walls here. She said this was the only place she felt safe. She said that away from here she was in danger. Still, I thought she was only overwrought, that the excitement had been too much for her. I asked her what danger there could possibly be.

“And she said— pointing with her poor shaking finger this way and that— she said: ‘Stephen, they’re squatting here in these bushes all about us. I can’t see them but I can hear them and I know how they look. I didn’t tell you of them before but now I must tell you. They have black masks on their faces and they’ve long, shiny blowpipes in their hands. They’re waiting to blow their poisonous vapors at me. They’ll destroy me when you’re gone unless I go back and get inside the wall. They won’t dare follow me in there. But out in the world, even with you, I’ll never be safe, Stephen. There’s only one place where I ever will be safe from them.’

“That’s what your daughter, Hazel Deeves, said to me, Doctor Deeves!

“So I turned around and I brought her back—brought her back to the only fit place for her to be. And I came back because I love her, because I couldn’t desert her now, because I want to be near her when she’s cured.

“Oh, man, man, man, don’t you see what you’ve done? You kept her here all her life with mad people about her. You didn’t think that contact with them could hurt her— I heard her say months ago that that was your belief. And you— all so blind and besotted in your own egotism— you didn’t see that her loss of flesh and her loss of spirits meant anything. You didn’t see what was beginning to prey on her, didn’t see that a strain or a shock might carry her across the dividing line. You, who are supposed to know so much of mental diseases, and she, your own flesh and blood, your own daughter— and still you couldn’t see it— could you?

“But now, by God, you’ve got to see it! She’s mad, Doctor Deeves, she’s mad I tell you. Go up yonder to her rooms go speak with her and see for yourself,” That’s all. You'll find me here when yoy come back.”

And Doctor Deeves went, running.

All the fire and force seemed to go out of the young ex-lieutenant in a puff. He fell down on his knees upon the floor, his arms on the littered desk-top and his face in his arms. He was still there fifteen minutes later when stumbling, fumbling footsteps sounded on the stairs outside the door. He lifted his head as the uncertain footfalls came into the room where he was, and seeing before him then a figure of a shrunken broken man, stripped of all arrogance, physically twisted by an anguish that racked and wrenched his frame and made years older in a breath of time, the young man for all his own grief could not but feel a pang of pity for the other.

You’d hardly have known this man, so marred and altered as he was, for the eminent Doctor Deeves.

__________________

Index to Past Masters Nos 61-72

The "Author Index" to Issues 1-60 has been uploaded separately.

Achmed Abdullah

The Mystery of the Talking Idols 63

"A. E. P."

The End of Sherlock Holmes  67

W. L. Alden

After the Comet 67

Foote's Catorium 70

How the Fat Woman Eloped 68

A Scientific Balloon 72

Silver Plated   67

The Wild Man of Borneo 67

Mark Allerton

A Christmas Mix-Up 70

The Stanhope Scandal 70

Anonymous

The Diamond Necklace 62

The Great Auk's Egg Affair 61

The Hat Trick 71

Jacobs and Gale, Tobacconists 70

A Railway Murder 70

The Ruins of the Abbey of Fitz-Martin 64

The Stamp Thief 71

The Thriller 71

F. Anstey

Taken By Surprise  66

Francis Henry Atkins

The Lay Figure  63

Irving Bacheller

Holy Poker 71

The Prodigal Village 71

Robert Barr

The Last Straw 72

J. M. Barrie

My Brother Henry 72

John Arthur Barry

Baleston's Secret Reef 72

The Mystery of the "Mountain Maid"  64

Frederick R. Bechdolt

Before Michael Came  63

L. Adams Beck

The Interpreter (novelette) 62

H. Bedford-Jones

The Artificial Honeymoon 66

Death Gave Him His Chance  63

J. J. Bell

The Lovely Little Dinner 70

The Price of a House  63

"Sir William"  61

E. F. Benson

Negotium Perambulans  64

The Terrace 69

Harold Bindloss

Trooper Jenkins 68

Christopher B. Booth

"Doc" Meets the Train (as by John Jay Chichester)  72

Mr Clackworthy Collects 63

Mr Clackworthy Gets His Tonic 64

Mr Clackworthy Sells Short  63

Mr Clackworthy Stakes a Friend 70

Solly's Last Forgery 64

When Mr. Clackworthy Needed a Bracer 64

Guy Boothby

By Right Of Conquest 72

B. M. Bower

The Ghost in the Red Shirt  63

Jack Boyle

The Beauty-Fountain 70

A Woman Without Fear 70

Mary Elizabeth Braddon

Good Lady Ducayne  71

Max Brand

Five Minutes to Twelve 61

Honor Bright 64

Lion Heart 61

Percy James Brebner

Cat or Devil 65

A Literary Secret  66

Scarsley Moor Mystery  66

Thomas Burke

The Bloomsbury Wonder 61

The Horrible God 62

Laughing Lillian 62

The Yellow Imps 62

Edgar Rice Burroughs

Who Murdered Mr. Thomas? 68

Ellis Parker Butler

Just Like a Cat 71

The Ninety And Nine  69

Sir Gilbert Campbell

The Mystery of the Essex Stairs 62

Scott Campbell

The Point of Contact 70

Under the Crown 70

Agnes and Egerton Castle

The Great Todescan's Secret Thrust 70

Anna Alice Chapin

Through the Dragon's Valley  63

The Scales of Time 63

G.K. Chesterton

The Sword of Wood 65

Peter Cheyney

Cocktail For Cupid 65

Dance Without Music  64

Irvin S. Cobb

The Eminent Dr. Deeves 72

Faith, Hope And Charity 71

The Thirteenth Degree 72

Sylvanus Cobb, Jun.

The Bottomless Jug  64

J. J. Connington

After Death the Doctor 63

Dorothea Conyers

Meave's Ride  69

E. M. Delafield

The Luggage in the Hall  66

Charles Caldwell Dobie

The Open Window 71

Sir Geo. Douglas, Bart.

Unconscious Interloper 69

L C Douthwaite

The London Guillotine 66

Richard Dowling

The Going Out of Alessandro Pozzone 62

Edward Dyson

A Golden Shanty 65

The Third Chair 65

George Allan England

Drops of Death  68

F. Scott Fitzgerald

Three Hours Between Planes 65

Francis Flagg

The Superman of Dr Jukes  72

Mrs. May Agnes Fleming

How The Lone Star Went Down  68

Ford Madox Ford

Riesenberg 61

Andrew Forrester Jr.

Arrested on Suspicion 61

Robert Edward Francillon

A Circumstantial Puzzle 62

R. Austin Freeman & Clifford Piers

By the Black Deep  64

Arthur Gask

Rejuvenation 66

Strychnine for Village Dogs 62

Theophile Gautier

The Mummy's Foot 62

George Gilbert

In Maulmain Fever-Ward  63

Charlotte Perkins Gilman

The Yellow Wallpaper  64

Why I wrote "The Yellow Wallpaper" 64

Guy Gilpatric

The Artful Mr. Glencannon 70

Crocodile Tears 68

The Glasgow Phantom 66

The Homestretch 61

The Masked Monster 72

Where Early Fa's the Dew 65

Susan Glaspell

A Jury of Her Peers 67

Frederick Graves

White Flame  62

Fred V Green

Markham's New Partner 65

A. S. Gregory

The Death Window 68

Valentine Gregory

Third Time Unlucky 71

While on Remand 71

James Norman Hall

Death on an Atoll 72

Julian Hawthorne

Calbot's Rival 67

Nathaniel Hawthorne

The Great Stone Face 66

Beatrice Heron-Maxwell

The Outcast 65

Headon Hill

The "Artemis" Mystery 65

The Bank Clerk's Love Story 65

The Dining-Car Clue 65

Limping Justice 65

W. W. Jacobs

Captain Rogers 71

A Love Knot 70

Malcolm Jameson

The Anarch  69

Val Jameson

"Burglin' ain't the game it was" 61

Otis Adelbert Kline

Stolen Centuries 65

Thomas H. Knight

The Man Who Was Dead 61

Henry Leverage

Black Light 66

The Crimp 66

Crooked Charity 67

R. C. Lehmann

The Umbrosa Burglary 67

Sinclair Lewis

The Cat of the Stars 68

Seven Million Dollars 68

The Willow Walk 61

H.P. Lovecraft

Obit: Henry St. Clair Whitehead 71

Marie Belloc Lowndes

An Unrecorded Instance 61

Richard Mace

The Emerald Beetle  62

Arthur Machen

The Shining Pyramid 71

Julia Magruder

The Secret of the White Castle 65

Don Marquis

Accursed Hat! 70

Huan Mee

The Russian Cipher 65

J. J. Meehan

The Squirrel Motor 69

Abraham Merritt

The Woman of the Wood 72

William Henry Moberley

The Great Valdez Sapphire 63

C. S. Montanye

Old King's Coal   72

F. Frankfort Moore

Joan Dark 65

Ainsworth Morgan

Lady in Lower 11   72

Talbot Mundy

Bengal Rebellion 69

Edith M Nesbit

In the Dark 64

Man-Size in Marble  65

Number 17    61

David Wright O'Brien

Hokum Hotel  68

Fitz-James O'Brien

The Wondersmith  64

Vincent O'Sullivan

The Business of Madame Jahn  64

Thomas Nelson Page

What was the Lady's Choice? 62

Sir Gilbert Parker

At the Sign of the Eagle  70

Max Pemberton

The Devil To Pay 63

G. G. Pendarves

The Black Camel  65

Hugh Pendexter

Lyacus Whittle— Globetrotter 70

Ernest M Poate

A Person from the Police 63

To Professional Services— $100,000 70

William Le Queux

The Baron's Snapdragon 68

The Faith of Men 62

The Mystery Man 68

The Mystery of the Third Thumb 68

The Story of the Chief of Police 61

The Third Cracker 68

The Velvet Hand  68

The Woman Who Hated London 68

The Yellow Jasmine 68

Walter Ripperger

The Cardboard Clue 62

School For Murder 69

Arthur Somers Roche (novelette)

In the Money 67

Thorne Smith

Birthday Present 66

Andrew Soutar

Bluebeard 63

Charles B. Stilson

Dr. Martone's Microscope 72

The Sky Woman 67

The Soul Trap 72

Halliwell Sutcliffe

Handsome Jack  67

Miss Phyllis Brown 67

Murgatroyd's Wife  67

Emile C Tepperman

Coffin Cache 63

E. Temple Thurston

A Cameo 69

E Charles Vivian

How the Girl Came to Bentley's 62

R. A. J. Walling

A Chat With William Le Queux 68

Mrs. Rooth's "Murder" 61

The Spook of Cornelius 61

Stanley G Weinbaum

The Red Peri  69

Albert Richard Wetjen

The Chief of the Loch McCree 61

Fred Merrick White

Early Closing Day  64

Gentlemen of the Jury  65

The Purple Terror 66

Victor L. Whitechurch

The Convict's Revenge  61

How the Captain Tracked a German Spy 61

In a Tight Fix 61

Henry S. Whitehead

The Wonderful Thing  70

The Door 71

Raoul Whitfield

The Great Black 65

H. C. Witwer

Money to Burns 71

Mary E Wilkins

The Shadows on the Wall  64

Arthur Leo Zagat

Coward's Kill (novelette)  69

___________________

Table of Contents

- 1: Old King's Coal / C. S. Montanye

- 2: The Soul Trap / Charles B. Stilson

- 3: Dr. Martone's Microscope / Charles B. Stilson

- 4: The Superman of Dr Jukes / Francis Flagg
- 5: The Last Straw / Robert Barr
- 6: My Brother Henry / J. M. Barrie
- 7: The Masked Monster / Guy Gilpatric
- 8: The Woman of the Wood / Abraham Merritt
- 9: Lady in Lower 11 / Ainsworth Morgan

- 10: "Doc" Meets the Train / John Jay Chichester

- 11: Death on an Atoll / James Norman Hall
- 12: A Scientific Balloon / W. L. Alden
- 13: By Right Of Conquest / Guy Boothby

- 14: Baleston's Secret Reef / John Arthur Barry

- 15: The Thirteenth Degree / Irvin S Cobb
- 16: The Eminent Dr. Deeves / Irvin S. Cobb
- Cumulative Index # 61-72