Past Masters Eighty Six
Author: Various
Date: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00
Description: The 86th anthology of short fiction in the Life+70 years Public domain, gathered from magazines and newspapers and aother source. They are mostly "waifs and strays" in that many have never been reprinted since their first publication, either in the authors' own collections, or later anthologies. 1: The Twisted Inn / Hugh Walpole 2: The Diplomat / Annie S. Swan 3: Dobson's Plots / David C. Roose 4: Foghorn Fernando / Edward Boltwood 5: John Sherlock's Alibi / Anonymous 6: The Hachma Ruby / Anonymous 7: The Adventure of the German Student / Washington Irving 8: Rogue's Room / Anonymous 9: The Ad

PAST MASTERS

EIGHTY-SIX

Produced by Terry Walker

("Pulpmeister")

16 July 2022

Contents

1: The Twisted Inn / Hugh Walpole

2: The Diplomat / Annie S. Swan

3: Dobson's Plots / David C. Roose

4: Foghorn Fernando / Edward Boltwood

5: John Sherlock's Alibi / Anonymous

6: The Hachma Ruby / Anonymous

7: The Adventure of the German Student / Washington Irving

8: Rogue's Room / Anonymous

9: The Adventure of the Table Foot / Allan Ramsay

10: The Winged Ones / H. Field Leslie

11: The Burglary in Middlesex Street / Basil Thomson

12: Reward in Hell / Ralph Franklin

13: The Great God Ananzi / Stephen Chalmers

14: The Vanishing of Benjamin Vex / Robert Keene

15: A Hand-Bag Too Many / Robert Keene

16: The Dangerous Day / Robert Keene

17: Cornflower Blue / May Wynne

18: Assorted Chips / Hulbert Footner

19: The Tarn / Hugh Walpole

20: Mayfair Melody / Peter Cheyney

21: The Mystery of the Old Tin Box / Annie S. Swan

22: Dead Men's Shoes / Annie S. Swan

23: The Little Walking Corpses / Arthur Leo Zagat

24: The Ship of Silence / ‌Albert Richard Wetjen

Cumulative Index # 61-86

___________________

1: The Twisted Inn

Hugh Walpole

1884-1941

The Smart Set, June 1915

Although Walpole published 5 collections of his short stories in his lifetime, many more stories were never collected. This is one of them.

MR. BANNISTER chose his carriage with some care. He was always careful in the train because if you had work to do it was obviously necessary to have the place to yourself— when people were talking nothing could be done.

It was a dark, windy day in late November. The platform at King's Cross was nearly deserted, and it was all very cold and gloomy. The bookstall stared vacantly across the empty lines and its books and papers fluttered discontentedly as though they protested indignantly against their unhappy neglect— a porter pushed a load of luggage vacantly down the platform and ran into Mr. Bannister; he apologized still vacantly and passed on, dreaming.

Mr. Bannister chose his carriage— a dirty, unappetizing third class furnished with six highly colored representations of "The Spa Longton," "The Beach," "Hicheton-on-Sea," "The Station Hotel, Trament," "The High Street, Wotton"— illustrations that were neither truthful nor entrancing.

Mr. Bannister was thin and wore glasses; he had high cheekbones and sandy hair— his eyes were pale gray, watery and red at the edges; his great-coat was threadbare and shiny, his collar was a little frayed and his trousers had never been intended to turn up. Mr. Bannister was a journalist.

Times were hard just then, and, to be strictly truthful, his meals had, of late, been desperately uncertain. On Monday there had been breakfast, on Tuesday lunch, on Wednesday an excellent supper, owing to the happy discovery of a new friend; but to-day there had, as yet, been nothing— he sat in the corner of his carriage and thought of sausages.

During a year and a half he had worked on the Daily Post and pay had been, on the whole, regular. He was a bachelor and claims on his purse were few, so things had gone well with him.

But the Daily Post had found the world a cold and unfeeling place and had passed silently away, leaving very few to regret its departure. Mr. Bannister missed it very sincerely, and he discovered how hard life could be. Everything that he handled seemed to be a lost cause, and one paper after another faded away at his eager touch— he depended, eventually, for his living, on the crimes and misfortunes of his fellow men— the world seemed to his tired brain a procession of thieves and murderers with the divorce courts for a background.

To-day he was hurrying down to a little village in a remote part of Wiltshire to investigate a crime of the night before. It was an affair of the usual kind— a woman had been murdered and there were suspicions of a lover. Mr. Bannister went to it as he would to his bath or morning cigarette— to his heated brain murder was the game that everybody played; and he must be back again by the evening to report on a religious revival meeting in Clapham. The clouds were lifting— it was long since he had had two jobs in one day, and the Telegraph had given him both of them. The Telegraph was an excellent paper.

They had told him that he must be prepared, if necessary, to sleep there during the night— it would be annoying if that were to happen— he would miss the revival. He determined, therefore, to be as speedy as possible, and he would, he hoped, be able to catch the four-thirty train back to town.

It was dark and stormy and the wind whistled outside the carriage— the scudding clouds seemed to catch the top of the trees and drag them in their own hurrying direction— but the riots clung to the gray earth and the furious heavens tossed the trees back again to their original abiding-place.

Mr. Bannister's coat was thin and he shivered in his corner— it was too dark to see, and the train shook so that it was impossible to write; he flung his notebook down and stared moodily out of the window. He was very hungry and was inclined to regard the world as an evil place; his mind flew back to his younger days when his ambition had challenged heaven and his poverty had seemed certain proof of genius. He had breakfasted on Swinburne, lunched on Pater, and dined on Meredith— now his library had been sold to pay his debts and his debts were still unpaid; he was very hungry.

At a small wayside station there came an old woman— a very massive old woman with a bright print skirt of blue and an immense bosom; she had also a large basket, a bundle of sticks and a little boy. The basket and the sticks she placed carefully at her side; the boy she flung behind her— he fell into the corner and crouched there, against the cushions, softly sobbing.

From her treatment of the boy Mr. Bannister concluded that she was cruel, and he hated her cruelty— so he looked at her sternly and frowned. She sat staring straight in front of her, her hands planted firmly on her knees— she was an enormous woman.

It was growing very dark and horribly cold— it was curiously dark for that time of day, Mr. Bannister thought— moreover, the pangs of hunger came crowding upon him, and, to forsake their company, he plunged into conversation.

"It is strangely dark for the hour," he said, and he coughed nervously. But the woman made no reply; only the little boy ceased his sobbing and sat up in his corner to stare amazedly at Mr. Bannister.

"It is a dreary day," he said with a little sigh— but perhaps the wind and the noise of the train had drowned his words, for she gave no answer and sat there without movement.

She was rude as well as cruel, he thought, and he leaned back in his corner and desolately thought of murders and religious meetings and the profitable emotions of highly strung people.

He sat thus for a very considerable time. The train rushed furiously forward, and the landscape grew darker and darker. "There must be a terrible storm coming," thought Mr. Bannister— he watched the ebony blackness of the sky, the dark wavering outlines of fantastic trees, the sudden whites and grays of spaces of cloud and the clear shining of sudden pools.

Within the carriage there was silence, and obscurity gathered in the corners and hid the colored views mercifully in its arms; the outline of the enormous woman was black against the window and the curve of her great basket stood out hooplike in front of her.

Every now and again the train stopped, but no one ever seemed to get in or out, and the desolate little stations with their pathetically neat gardens stared at the train forlornly as though they would have liked to stay and talk for a little time.

Mr. Bannister felt quite sorry for the little gardens— he was arriving at that state of worldwide sympathy consequent on an empty stomach. He was growing vaguely uneasy— he should surely have arrived at his destination some time before. He was afraid lest he should have passed his station, and so he spoke again to the woman.

"Can you tell me," he said politely, "whether we have passed Little Dutton? I am afraid that I must have missed it."

But she did not answer him, and her silence frightened him so that he dared not speak to her again. The consequences of missing his stations would be very serious indeed at such a crisis in his affairs. There were plenty of other persons ready to take his place and the Telegraph could scarcely afford to pay men who missed their trains.

He could not understand the darkness. He had left King's Cross in the morning and, slow though the train had been, it could not be more than lunch-time now. But the carriage was most horribly dark, and only vaguely from beyond the window he caught distant outlines of trees and somber houses.

Then suddenly he saw a star. There could be no mistake. Vividly, brilliantly, it sparkled at him through the carriage windows. A star! Then the darkness was no pretense, no sudden and furious storm as he had supposed. It was night.

But it couldn't be. He was to have arrived at Little Dutton before one, and now it was dark. Then there came to him the horrible certainty that he had slept— there could be no other possible explanation. He must have slept for hours, and Little Dutton must have been left, far, far behind. The horrible discovery left him breathless. He would have to pay for all those miles that he had traveled, and he had nothing to give for them. He had ten shillings; it had been in his eyes a treasure trove on which he would have many meals in the future, and now it must go to pay for a fruitless journey, and even then it would not be enough. He began to speak excitedly to the woman.

"I have slept— I must have been sleeping for hours. Look, there's a star— and I only left King's Cross an hour ago and it was morning. I must have passed Little Dutton hours ago. It is really dreadfully unfortunate— I can't think how it happened. I've never done anything like that before. But where are we going to now? Shall I be able to get out somewhere and change and be back in Little Dutton to-night? It's really most dreadfully important— I haven't the least idea—"

And then suddenly the train stopped. Through the carriage window a station lamp gleamed mistily. The large woman collected hurriedly her basket, her sticks and her little boy and vanished through the door. Mr. Bannister hurriedly followed her.

He leaned out over the platform. It was a tiny wayside station with two lamps and a wild porter with a long beard. He cried discordantly: "All change! All change!" and rushed furiously up and down and looked into every carriage.

"All change!" he cried at Mr. Bannister and hurried on.

So Mr. Bannister got out and faced the situation. His watch, he found, had stopped; it was bitterly cold and the wind drove furiously down the platform. Above his head the stars and a round-faced jesting moon watched him coldly and without feeling.

He grasped the porter by the arm and tried to explain the situation. "I want to get back to Little Dutton to-night— I must get back— it's very important."

"Little Dutton!" The porter looked at him and laughed in the depths of his beard. "Never heard of it. But you can't, anyhow. You can't get anywhere to-night. Six in the morning— "

"There are no trains!" Mr. Bannister stared at him miserably. "Oh, but that is most unfortunate. Then I must sleep here!" He thought dismally of his ten shillings and all the noble plans that had been nipped in the bud. "There is an inn?"

"Oh, yes," said the porter, and again he laughed. "Yes, there is an inn," and he passed off down the platform.

Mr. Bannister pulled his poor cloak more tightly about him and searched for a road. It was visible enough, stretching whitely for a time in front of him and then of a sudden fearfully black where the trees closed darkly in on it. Down this went Mr. Bannister and cursed himself for a fool. By an unnecessary and ill-judged sleep he had, perhaps, missed the turning point of his career, and how he was to get back in the morning he had no idea. It occurred to him as strange that the porter had never asked him for his ticket— it was indeed a most fortunate chance and, at the thought of it, his spirits went up a great many degrees and he felt a little warmer.

He disliked the blackness of the road and fancied that he was followed. For a moment he stopped and listened to make sure, and it seemed to him that the footsteps also stopped. Then suddenly there flashed across the road in the moonlight a rabbit. His heart beat furiously and he almost screamed. Then the silence and the perplexing moonlight were too much for him, and he took to his heels and ran, panting, down the dark road.

The wind whistled as he ran— it caught his coat and wrapped it, confused, round his legs— it slapped him on the face and brought water to his eyes.

Then, at a turn of the road, he came upon the inn. It stood out very plainly in the moonlight, and he wondered whether it was the brilliant white spaces and the dark caverns of shadows that gave it its strange appearance. For that it was strange there could be no question. It stood there on the edge of a wide and moonlit moor. There seemed to be no other houses near it. It was a thing of gables and overhanging eaves and large diamond-paned windows— it was strangely crooked in shape, and, looked at from the road, seemed to lean curiously to one side. There were lights in the lower windows and the door stood ajar. He passed through it into the dim, uneven hall.

It was dark and musty, with a close, unpleasant feeling of closed windows— on his right the door was open and he turned into a small room, dusty, with the desolate air of a place long forsaken by human beings. Prim chairs of a faded pink chintz and hard little wooden legs, a round and shiny table, bare save for a little green worsted mat in the middle, and a stiff horsehair sofa were the only furniture of the room. On the walls there was nothing to hide the faded green of the wallpaper with the single exception of a large photograph hanging by the door. Onto this the quivering light of a cracked lamp shining from the window sill flung an uncertain light. Mr. Bannister started at it with horror. It was the photograph of the large-bosomed woman in the train. She glared down at him as she had stared before into space— cold, menacing, horrible.

Then he found at his side a little man whom he knew to be the innkeeper— a man round as a ball, with a chubby face and bright brown buttons on his waist-coat.

"I should like a bed," explained Mr. Bannister. "I have most unfortunately missed my train, and I cannot leave until five to-morrow morning. What are your charges?"

"The room will be three shillings— breakfast extra," said the little landlord— he had a voice like a chaffinch.

"And I will have some bread and cheese and beer," said Mr. Bannister. "Could you tell me the time?"

The landlord looked at him— his eyes dilated, his cheeks grew white and his hand shook. Then he leaned forward as though he would whisper in Mr. Bannister's ear; then, as suddenly, he stepped back again, and vanished through the door out into the passage.

Mr. Bannister chose one of the hard pink chintz chairs and waited for the bread and cheese. The room was a room of a thousand ghosts, and the lamp on the table created a shifting curtain of shadow that crept from corner to corner and stole, like the fingers of a gigantic hand, over the dark green wall. Through the little diamond-paned window glimmered the white expanse of the moor under the moon— a magic lake of frosted silver.

He felt very sleepy and hungry. He had no thought now of the expenses of to-morrow and of the letting slip of so great an opportunity. His one wish was for food and a splendid bed into which he might sink down, down, down, with the sheets billowing great waves about him, and so sail on a sea of dreams to a land where journalists were kings and hunger was for those who deserved it.

The eyes of the photograph followed him round the room and he moved from one hard little chair to another in a hopeless attempt to avoid their gaze, but he gave it up and slipped back into his corner and closed his eyes. Soon his head was nodding and he thought that he slept— but it was a very confused sleep, for people came creeping into the room and out again, and he thought that they were bringing his bread and cheese, but they only looked at him and then crept away, silent as they had come.

Then at last he awoke with a start, for someone was in the room— he sat up in his chair and rubbed his eyes; at the table were seated two men, bending over the lamp, their heads nodding as they talked and flinging giant shadows on the wall behind them.

They wore curious huge black hats that fell, villainously, with most sinister effect, over one ear; they wore, moreover, black cloaks that hung in somber folds behind them over the backs of the pink chintz chairs— he could not see their faces. At their side were large glasses filled with ale, and they glittered in the light of the lamp. Then Mr. Bannister, sitting silently in his dark corner, overheard their conversation.

"They are all asleep. There is no one here."

"No— the man is alone— we are the only travelers."

"The box is under the bed. You know your directions. I will be waiting for you at the bottom of the passage—"

"One blow will be sufficient. When I strike I strike hard."

These muttered sentences struck terror into Mr. Bannister's heart, his hands gripped the sides of his chair and his legs shook so that they knocked against each other.

Against whom could their plot be intended? Supposing it should be meant for himself? At the thought he nearly screamed aloud. But it could not be for him. They did not know that he was there; he was a traveler and there was no box beneath his bed— at any rate no box of which he had any knowledge. The woman looked down at him from the wall and he shuddered. She was in it, you might be sure.

The men were silent, but their great hats still nodded against the wall. He had seen a play once at the Kensington and the villain had worn a hat like that. He had been a horrible man, that villain, and Mr. Bannister had hissed from the upper circle. Then it came to him in a flash that it must be the landlord of whom they had been speaking; he had wanted to speak to him before and he had been horribly afraid— it was the little rosy-cheeked landlord with a voice like a canary whom these men were plotting to murder.

The men were no longer silent, for one of them was snoring— his head had sunk down onto the table and his arms sprawled in front of him; the other also was asleep— only his head was flung back and his hands were clenched— and, even now, his face was hidden under the shadow of his hat.

Mr. Bannister thought it strange that such villains should fall asleep so speedily, but now was the moment for escape. He would go and warn the landlord. He rose, trembling, from his chair and crept softly round the table, his eyes fixed on the sleepers.

One of them moved, and Mr. Bannister stood transfixed with terror, his hands clasping the edge of the table, his breath coming in short gasps, his eyes round as saucers— but nothing followed. They were, both of them, sound asleep, and he turned to the door.

The handle creaked in his grasp, and he thought that this must certainly waken them, but there was still no movement, and he escaped.

The passage was as dark as the grave. There was, he thought, no time to be lost, and he groped his way by the wall. The passage was heavy with the smell of decaying things. Mr. Bannister thought of cabbage and a damp church in winter-time.

He knew that he must hasten, but progress was very slow and the passage seemed to have no end. He had a confused feeling that people were on all sides of him, and he imagined white faces in the dark and the soft steps of hidden pursuers. He could not understand why the passage was so long. The inn had not seemed a very large place— but this was interminable. The air grew thicker and thicker around him and he wondered whether he was descending into the heart of the earth. The thought of a living grave terrified him, and he leaned against the damp wall, his poor coat flapping against his trembling knees, and his hands stretched in front of his face as though to guard it from unseen horrors into which he might at any moment plunge.

Then, with a sigh of relief, he saw light ahead, and, to his surprise, found himself back in the little entrance hall through which he had passed on his first arrival. But had he? As he glanced around him it seemed strangely familiar, and yet he had thought that he had come straight from the door into the narrow passage. On his right he saw an ancient and trembling staircase that vanished into a higher floor. It was perhaps up this that the landlord had gone— at any rate, he must warn him, and then he would escape out of this place as soon as might be.

The stairs led him on to a dim passage and he could not see the end of it, but opposite to him there was a door. There might be other doors to right and left, but he could not face the darkness that stretched on either side, and so he turned the handle and entered the room.

It was an enormous bedroom and through the open window streamed the light of the moon. There was very little furniture in the room. A large oak cupboard stood to the right of the window, and in the center there was an enormous bed— an ancient four-poster with faded red curtains and little wooden lions carved on the posts.

From one of these posts a body was hanging. At the sight of it his throat became horribly dry; his eyes burnt in his head like fire; suddenly frozen into stone, he stood there, choking with horror. It was the body of a little man, and it hung with its limbs swaying a little from side to side. The head lolled forward and was strangely gray in the light of the moon. It was the little landlord with a voice like a chaffinch. Mr. Bannister could see his brown buttons shining with the swaying of the body.

"I am too late. Oh, dear, I am too late," he cried, and then he turned to flee. But, as he turned with the handle of the door in his grasp, he heard steps on the stair. Someone was coming stealthily with muffled feet. "Stockings!" thought Mr. Bannister. He turned back into the room. He knew that the steps would not pass the door. He looked at the moon and then he looked at the body swaying in front of him and then he looked at the oak cupboard. "They will find me here," he thought; "they will think that I have done— that."

He rushed wildly to the window, but there was no escape there. There was a hideous drop that he dared not face. Then he saw the cupboard and he flew into it, closing the door behind him.

It seemed to be full of spiders' webs— they clung about his face and his hands and were thick about his hair, but he knelt there with his back against the wall, watching for the door to open.

It opened slowly, and into the light of the moon they stepped softly, their dark cloaks trailing behind them and the shadow of their black hats hiding their faces. "I knew who it would be," thought Mr. Bannister. He sank down in a heap on the floor of the cupboard and his teeth chattered in his head. He knew that there was no escape.

They did not seem to notice the body that swayed to and fro from the bedpost. They stepped slowly across the room, flung back the door of the cupboard and dragged out Mr. Bannister.

He fell in a heap at their feet. "I didn't do it," he cried. "I didn't, really. You know I didn't— I never saw him before to-night. I had only asked him for a bed and some bread and cheese. I have come from London. I have missed my train. I was going to Little Dutton."

They dragged him across the floor, one on each side of him, and in a moment the room seemed to be full of people. They poured in through the door and stood in an excited crowd sound him, and they all talked at the same time.

They wore, for the most part, large white cotton nightcaps, and many of them held little brass candlesticks with little candles burning brightly— the flames guttered a little in the breeze from the open window.

"I told you so— I knew he'd done it— he must die at once— in the middle of the night, too."

But he could only cry helplessly: "I didn't do it, I tell you. I was going to Little Dutton and night came on so quickly—" but he couldn't get any further because he couldn't remember what came next.

And then the door opened and the crowd made way respectfully. It was the woman of the train. She came toward him smiling grimly, and he knew that his doom was sealed.

"You tell them!" he cried, crawling toward her. "You know that I was in the train. I was in the same carriage. Tell them I didn't do it— you know I couldn't!"

But she smiled grimly and motioned with her hand. Someone brought forward a rope, and in a moment it was about his neck.

"No— no— not that!" he cried. "I am a journalist. It is murder!" But they raised him in their arms, and he knew that they were going to hang him from the bedpost by the side of the little landlord. The nightcaps closed round him; the candles flickered in the breeze; the woman watched him with quiet eyes.

"THIS IS Little Dutton," she said to him, and she touched him on the arm. "I hope you will forgive my waking you, sir, but this is Little Dutton, and you would have passed it."

He thanked her as he rubbed his eyes. She was sitting soberly opposite him, the basket on her knees, and the little boy watched him silently from the corner.

"Oh, thank you." He gathered his gloves and his stick. "I have been sleeping, I am afraid— thank you very much."

As he stepped out onto the platform he looked at his watch. It was a quarter to one— lunch-time; and he was very hungry.

And so it was a dream. He was conscious of a feeling of intense regret. The wind passed howling down the platform; the porter frowned at him as he gave up his ticket— the main street of Little Dutton stretched drearily in front of him.

For a moment he had touched Romance. For a moment he had been the center of a crowd— he had lived. Now he was back again— a journalist in quest of a sordid murder case.

He wrapped his shabby coat around him and sighed. Was it, after all, a dream? Perhaps for a moment he had wakened— for a moment he had been Bannister the Romantic— Bannister the center of life and death.

He turned into a shabby restaurant and ordered a chop. Opposite him there sat a commercial traveler, a little run to seed.

"Cold," said Mr. Bannister.

"Very," said the traveler— and then added as he watched the dust whirl past the window:

"It's a dull world."

"Not so dull," said Mr. Bannister, and he winked as one who has been through a great experience. "I could tell you things..." he said— and he laughed.

________________

2: The Diplomat

Annie S. Swan

Mercury (Hobart) 7 Dec 1938

[Gloucester Journal 12 Dec  1936]

Scottish author of many novels; magazine editor, and political activist involved in suffragism and Scottish nationalism. (She was a founder member of the Scottish National Party.)

IN every family there is one member who, if not exactly a fool, seems to fall short of that family's standard of efficiency and accomplishment It was quite early decided by the Marchments that Dick, the third boy, was "no good." If they had ever heard that it is very often the third child who achieves the greatest distinction and reflects the most brilliant glory on the family name, they had either forgotten the fact or failed to apply it. Anyhow, it could not possibly apply to Dick. He had no looks to speak of. The Marchments were inclined to ruddy locks, and Dick, to be quite frank, had a shock of red hair, surmounting a face of singular denseness of expression. His body was lumpy, too, and he had an awkward gait, and a habit of getting in the way, of lacking grace and tact and adaptability. In fact, he was a thorn in the side of both father and mother, and later on of his smarter brothers and sisters.

George Marchment was a successful merchant, and his business was roomy enough to admit the two elder sons within its precincts, but obviously there was no room for Dick. Mrs. Marchment would have liked a professional son, and had Dick displayed any signs of intellectual activity, undoubtedly he would have been sent to a public school, and thence to Oxford, and drafted into a profession. But he displayed such singular and pertinacious stupidity at his preparatory school that the head advised them against it.

"Mere waste of money, my dear sir," he observed, with the singular dogmatism inseparable from his class. "Make him a farmer, if you can; if not, send him abroad."

It is commonly believed by those who do not know, that farming requires no brains, which is the greatest possible mistake. Mr. Marchment made some inquiries regarding farming in England, and being discouraged by the information received, decided that Dick should be sent abroad. At 14 he was removed from school and sent to an agricultural college, from which it was proposed to send him to Canada to seek his fortune.

Dick made no remarks concerning his future, neither protesting nor acquiescing. He was more or less of an automatons. It was generally supposed that he accepted the fact of his stupidity, and was pleased to be legislated for. Dick was not at any period of his life unhappy, because nobody was actively unkind to him. He had a world of his own, however, which nobody dreamed of. He would blink his rather weak grey eyes when questioned about his use of his leisure and playtime, and smile in a sort of faraway manner which was aggravating. But obviously you cannot be very angry with a person who speaks very little and is always good-tempered.

At the agricultural college, the general verdict was accepted by everybody except a boy called Rufus Hurst, a cadet of a very old and impoverished family, who, hard put to it to know what to do with its sons, had decided upon the Far West for one.

RUFUS HURST and Dick Marchment left England together in the Spring of a certain year when both had just turned 16. Dick's father and mother saw him off at Liverpool, and the good-byes to his brothers and sisters were rather tearful. Netta, the youngest sister, and the only one who utterly believed in Dick, had shut herself up in inconsolable grief, and had further said it was cruel and horrible to send Dick so far from home when he was only a boy, and that she would never forgive them as long as she lived.

Dick had gone rather white when the time had come to say good-bye to Netta, but there were no tears in his eyes when he stood on the deck of the outward-bound ship, and had a parting from his mother and father to go through. He had been made to feel, somehow, that he was the superfluous one of the family, and though his nature was too wholesome for resentment, it had had the effect of shutting up his heart. What Dick's heart was his own people, except Netta, had no idea, until something happened years after which opened all their eyes.

"What a sweet-looking woman!" said Mrs. Marchment, suddenly drawing her husband's attention to a little group standing same distance apart. "And how very distinguished! I wonder who they can be."

"Those are Hurst's people," volunteered Dick, casually. "Rufus Hurst, you know, who was at Stoneyford with me. We're going out together."

At the moment the members of the Hurst group turned towards the Marchment group precisely as if they had been talking about them. Then the distinguished-looking woman, who wore her long cloak and floating veil with an air which was the squat Mrs. Marchment's admiration and despair, came forward, her husband and son following.

"Mr. and Mrs. Marchment, I believe? I am Lady Beatrice Hurst This is my husband, General Hurst, and my daughter, Lilah. I wished to thank your boy for his extraordinary kindness to mine at Stoneyford. Rufus is never done speaking about him, and I do hope they will see something of one another in the Far West Isn't it very dreadful that we have to send our sons from us in these days at an age when we ought to have them still in the nursery?"

Her long, slender hand fell with a caressing— almost passionate— touch on her boy's slender shoulder, and her eyes swam in tears. Something shot across Dick Marchment's stolid face. Was it a passing shade of envy? None ever knew.

MRS. MARCHMENT'S colour rose.

She felt at a loss, for quite evidently these people had discovered something in her son she herself had missed. She merely murmured that it was kind of Lady Beatrice to mention it— that she was quite sure it was not worth mentioning. But this Lady Beatrice would not listen to.

"You make light of it, of course, but it is a very great thing. My son has a shrinking disposition, and your boy has been an immense help to him. I should feel very happy indeed if they could be together. Have you any plans for Dick?"

Her eyes, as they fell on Dick's face, had an expression of such sweet kindliness that Dick turned away. He could not bear it; the whole scene tried him inexpressibly. Presently the child Lilah crept round behind and touched his arm.

"Let's go over a bit, Dick and Rue. We can talk better there, and they want to say things about us."

There was such naiveté, without pertness in her manner, that, in spite of himself, Dick laughed, and it was such a merry sound that his mother wondered she had not noticed it before. It occurred to her afterwards that Dick had laughed very little at The Poplars, Wimbledon Common.

The three young ones withdrew themselves while their elders discussed them, and the swift minutes flew. Presently the time came for strangers to leave the ship, and the last good-byes were said. When she had said good-bye to her own son, and removed his clinging arms from her neck, Lady Beatrice ran back to kiss the other woman's son, whose eyes were dry. But they were not dry when she left him.

"Stick to Rufus, darling. Be a brother to him; make him a man like you are going to be yourself, and we shall always love and pray for yon."

Mrs. Marchment saw this little scene, but did not comprehend it. She was crying herself unrestrainedly, and Marchment looked uncommonly glum.

"I hope we haven't made a mistake," George. It does seem hard— and him such a little chap! I hope it's for the best."

"Don't forget it was you who suggested Canada, Maria," replied George, a trifle testily, and they returned in rather a miserable silence to their hotel to put in three aimless hours before their train left for London.

That feeling, of half-remorseful depression, however, quickly wore off the Marchments. Successful people, well pleased with their own efforts and the results accruing from them, seldom allow themselves to be depressed for long with any feeling akin to remorse. In about three days the Marchments returned to their normal state of mind, and remained convinced that they had done the best they possibly could for Dick, and that everything must now depend on his own efforts.

He was shipped, together with young Hurst and two others, to a certain person in Vancouver, who acted as an agent in the matter, and who had pledged himself for a consideration to establish the youths in suitable homes, where they would learn the business and the ways of the new country. It may be said here, and briefly, that this person was a rascal, that he failed in his duty, and that soon after they landed the lads found themselves stranded, and obliged to earn such bread as they could get by the sweat of their brows.

THE two in whom we are interested drifted to a lumber camp, where we must leave them. In the limits of a short story it would not be possible to follow their adventures over the period of years during which they were lost to their relatives. Dick wrote two letters home and received none, which is accounted for by the unsettled state of his wanderings. The Marchments got accustomed to the idea of his absence and his silence, and after a few years his name was seldom mentioned. The father and mother sometimes shook their heads at one another, sadly wondering how it came to pass that people so worthy as themselves, so wedded to duty and propriety, should have had such an unsatisfactory son.

They accepted it as part of the discipline of life.

One day some excitement was caused at The Poplars by the sudden arrival of a very smart one-horse coupe at the gate. Two men were on the box, and one was sent up to the door to inquire whether any of the family were at home. He returned to say that only Miss Marchment was in the house, and would be pleased to see Lady Beatrice Hurst If she would be so kind as to come in. Her ladyship reflected a moment, and then decided to go in.

She was received by Netta, now the only unmarried daughter of the house— a tall, well-proportioned young woman, with a most striking repose of manner. It arose out of her perfect naturalness. Netta had grown up in a somewhat artificial atmosphere perfectly unspoiled. Remembering a somewhat impossible mother, Lady Beatrice was surprised at the daughter, and much pleased with her.

"I must apologise. I have no sort of right to come like this, and especially as your mother is not at home. But perhaps you can answer my question. I merely wish to know whether you have heard lately of your brother Dick, who went out— let me see— just eight years ago with my boy, Rufus Hurst."

To the surprise of Lady Beatrice Netta's eyes filled with tears.

"Lady Beatrice, we have never heard from him. Mamma had only one letter. We think he must have died. Do you know anything about your son?"

"Oh, yes. We have heard at odd intervals from him, but the last silence has been the longest. We had a letter yesterday from China."

"From China," said Netta falteringly. "Did you know he had gone there?"

"Not until this letter. The last one came from California. Then he had not seen Dick for three years. But In this letter he speaks of seeing him again."

"In China!" cried Netta, her eyes round with astonishment. "Is he quite sure? To us it seems quite incredible, for there was no reason at all why Dick should not write to us."

"But was there any particular reason why he should write?" inquired Lady Beatrice, and the question certainly struck Netta as odd. She faintly coloured:

"Now that you speak of it, Lady Beatrice, there was no reason at all why he should write. Everybody except myself was quite glad to get him away. But if he is alive, I think he would have written to me."

"These boys have had great hardships and some extraordinary experiences. It seems to me that your brother has been waiting all these years to find his niche, and from what Rufus says he has found it now."

"What sort of a niche?"

"A diplomatic niche of the unaccredited sort. He is working for the Government out there. It seems, from what Rufus says, that he has a most extraordinary power over the native mind. He understands it. It is a very subtle power, akin to genius."

NETTA, a keenly intelligent girl, grasped every point suggested by Lady Beatrice's words.

"Dick! That is incredible; and yet no, it is not. He was so very different from all other boys, so different from my other brothers. He always seemed to me like one waiting to be awakened."

"Precisely; nobody understood him, and he has been drifting about the outposts of civilisation all these years, waiting for the right time and the right place, and, according to my son, he has found them."

"Then what is he actually doing?"

"My dear, I can't formulate it. I have brought my boy's letter, and I will read you what lie says about Dick. Perhaps you had better copy it in pencil for your parents, as, unfortunately, the letter is of too private a nature to permit me to leave it."

Netta glided to the desk in the corner of the room, Lady Beatrice admiring the grace of her movements and her serious, intelligent face.

From her chatelaine bag Lady Beatrice drew the letter and turned to the third page.

"But of all the things that have happened to me the best bit of luck I've had in this beastly country has been running up against Dick Marchment. He's been living in Pekin for 18 months, and I haven't yet tumbled exactly to what he is doing here. He isn't idle, anyway; and he's being trusted with all sorts of odd, delicate jobs that belong properly to the Embassy, only can't be done satisfactorily there. I was dining with some chaps of the Legation last night, and they talked of nothing but Dick Marchment. The funny thing is that though he is making his way so rapidly in the confidence of the powers that be, nobody is jealous of him. They simply don't take him seriously. Nobody has ever done so anywhere, now I come to think of it, and all the time he's been getting ready to make history. I'm not going to stop in Pekin; it's rotten, and if we don't have another Boxer rising soon, why, then most people will be disappointed. It's over the Chinese themselves Marchment has this power. He's learned the language, and they seem to trust him. Everybody does. Yet he's such a quiet chap; I don't believe I ever knew anybody who talked less. But there's something fetching about Dick, mummy. Do you remember how you took to him that day on the boat? Well, he's just the same yet; he looks at you with those queer, blinking eyes of his, and you've simply got to do it. I asked him about his people, but he didn't seem to know anything about them. He said the time hadn't come, but it was coming, and the only thing he cared about was to know whether his sister Netta remembered him. I wish you'd find out that, if you can, and get her to write to him. It would buck him up awfully, and take away that sort of haunted look he has in his eyes— the look of the chap who has nobody to care about him, don't you know— the look I might have had if you'd been different, only you're not—"

Here Lady Beatrice's voice broke. As for Netta she was sobbing quietly, even while she was desperately writing down every word.

"You will write to him, won't you?" asked Lady Beatrice as she rose to go.

"Why, of course, this very day. I wish I knew how to thank you for coming. Lady Beatrice. I shall never forget it as long as I live."

"It was a little thing. I love my sons, all or them, and I couldn't bear the idea of that haunted look. It must be banished. Tell your mother I said so."

BUT even while she said that. Lady Beatrice knew that the mother had missed her opportunity, and would never find it again. Her boy's heart had gone from her keeping for ever. She kissed Netta at parting, for she was an unconventional person, with the courage of her opinions; she likewise fixed a day for the girl to spend with her in Grosvenor Square, where they were living for the Winter to economise, while their seat in a hunting county was let to rich Americans

When Mr. and Mrs. Marchment returned from town Netta showed them the letter, and they were naturally a good deal excited over it. But Netta saw quite well that they did not take it at all seriously.

"It's very vague," said Mr. Marchment, critically. "But, anyhow, it is something to know that Dick is alive and not disgracing the name he bears. We must write to him, mother; and I don't mind sending him a £10 note."

His tone was the somewhat resigned, patronising one of the man who would make the best of an indifferent situation.

Netta's heart was full, and she poured it forth on a sheet of foreign notepaper before she slept that night, then reflected that she would have to ask Lady Beatrice for some address to forward it to.

The weeks went by, and the months, and no answer came to that letter.

One day, however, Dick walked unconcernedly across Wimbledon Common and pushed open the gate of The Poplars in the most casual way, as if he had merely returned from a short stroll.

Netta, who was very fond of the garden, was bending over a bed of hyacinths in lovely bloom when she heard the gate creak and the step on the gravel?

Turning round quickly she espied a very big, tall, well-built man with a sun-burned face, a short, stubbly, reddish moustache, and a pair of spectacles shading his eyes. Her heart stood still for a moment.

"Dick!" she cried shrilly; then, "Dick, darling!"

She ran into his arms, she hugged him close and tight, she pulled down his face that she might look into it, and, wonder of wonders, they were both crying— Netta because she was so glad, and Dick because he had never expected anything like this, and because life held so much sweetness.

"There isn't anybody in but me, Dick. Father and mother have gone to Croydon to see Jim's wife— she has a new baby. I was to go, too, but something kept me. I've been so restless all day. Oh, Dick, is it really you?"

She drew him into the house, the old familiar house which had changed so little. But Dick had changed; somehow it seemed small, cramped, impossible to him. The only light in it was that which shone in his sister's eyes.

"I know now, old girl, that If I'd come home and found you married, or different, I should have slipped out and never come back any more."

"But didn't you get my letter, Dick? I wrote it ever so many months ago, last October, after Lady Beatrice had been here."

"I got no letter, but Hurst told me things were right at home. So they're all married, and what not? What luck to find you alone here! And how pretty you have grown!"

"Nonsense, Dick!" But her face flushed with happiness. "Tell me about yourself. How well you look! How-how distinguished! Something has happened to you. You've got on— you've arrived— you've found the time and the place, as Lady Beatrice said you would!"

DICK cleared his throat and took out his cigarette-case.

"Yes, I suppose I have. I've had an odd life, Netta— it would fill a book; and the last two years have been the queerest of all. I've been in the midst of mystery and intrigue, and I've steered clear through it. I've— I've been of some little use to them out there, you see, knowing the natives and the language. It was in San Francisco I got to know the Chinese really well. They interested me, and that's what drew me to China. I had a sort of way of getting at them, don't you know. I got behind the scenes in their lives, and got a hold of the ropes. Of course, they exaggerated what I did, but, to be quite honest, if I hadn't been in Pekin the last year there would have been another outbreak worse than the first."

Netta listened, open-mouthed, as one might have listened to a fairy tale

"They've been awfully decent about it, and I've come home— well, to be quite honest again, to receive my reward. I suppose you saw the paragraph in The Times this morning?

"No. Where is it? Don't say you haven't got it, boy, or I must slay you!"

He drew the paper from his pocket, turned the page, and pointed to the paragraph.

"Much interest is felt in the return to England of Mr. Richard Marchment, from Pekin, and It is an open secret that his services to the Government in Pekin have not only been warmly appreciated by those on the spot, but are likely to be handsomely acknowledged here. Mr. Marchment comes home at the request of the Foreign Office, and will be received with distinction on his arrival. The services rendered by this obscure genius at a time of most critical peril can hardly be over-estimated. They are fully appreciated by those who remember the full horrors of the Boxer rising."

"Dick— Dick Marchment! It is the most wonderful tiling in the world!"

"Oh, no; all in the day's work. I won't stop today; I'm quartered at the Savoy. You see, I wasn't sure how I might find It here. I hardly, hoped for the good luck of seeing you like this. What I want you to do is to tell them all about it, so that they won't say too much to me when I come home. Just say to Father and mother that it's all right. I'm fixed up for life. Probably I'll go back to the East, but I don't want them to ask me strings of unanswerable questions. You'll explain, won't you? You always understood everything and do it right; you were like it as a kid."

Netta's bosom was heaving; she could not yet command her voice.

NICK got up, and began to move rather restlessly about the room.

"There's just one other thing," he said, with a slight stutter in his voice. "I'm— I'm engaged. It's to Hurst's sister, Lilah. We came home in the same boat. I'm going over to Grosvenor Square now. You'll, tell them that, too— won't you?— so that they will get all the fuss over before I come back tomorrow. Mother will remember her; she was on the Canada that day we sailed, Rue and I. She had a long pigtail down her back. Netta; and she pinched my arm. You'll like her, Netta; she's your sort. Now that's all, and I'm going. I feel as nervous as a kid about meeting them all again. You'll make it right, won't you? And tell them I'll he back tomorrow."

"I will, my precious boy, and I'll tell you what, Dicky, boy— I'm going to enjoy myself tonight as I've never done since you went away. And I deserve it, too, for I'm the only one who believed in you right through."

Then they kissed one another again, as children might have done, and Dick went away. On the road that skirts the common he met the hired Victoria bearing his father and mother back from the station, but he could not stop to speak to them. The fool of the family was very shy yet. He had left his credentials, and hoped on the morrow to pay a proper call.

__________________

3: Dobson's Plots

David C. Roose

King Island News 27 Sep 1916

[Cassell’s Family Magazine, Dec 1888]

The King Island News (Tasmania) published this story anonymously. The title was distinctive enough to find it in The Index to the Fiction Magazines, and to identify the author. He was active in the 1880-1890s, but is otherwise obscure. He occasionally collaborated with Pauline W. Roose, possibly his spouse or sister.

LET NOT the reader suppose that my title refers to any dark conspiracies of which my friend Dobson was the instigator. No; his plots were as harmless as himself, which is saying a great deal, for a more good-natured, easygoing fellow than Dobson never breathed.

The fact is, I wished to write a story, and the only obstacle in my path was the want of a plot. In vain I cudgelled my brains for something original in the way of love mysteries, highway robberies, mysterious disappearances and discoveries; there was nothing new to be turned up by me in this direction. The subject of madmen engaged my attention for a time; but I could think of no fresh combination of circumstances in connection with them.

Happening one day in despair to mention my difficulty to Dobson, I was surprised at the sudden illumination of his countenance, which, sooth to say, was not generally of the brightest.

"Hard up for a plot, are you, old man?" he ejaculated, "Well, you've come to the right quarter for one. My brain literally teems with plots, and it I only had time I would write the most original and amusing stories you ever read. But, as it is, dear boy, you shall have them all, and welcome."

I was somewhat surprised, never having suspected Dobson's talents to lie in that direction. But then how likely we are to be mistaken even in those whom we think we know best! How often does a simple, dull exterior conceal the smouldering fires of genius! and, with a pang of self-reproach for the slight regard in which I had hitherto held my old friend's capabilities, I grasped him warmly by the hand, and thanked him for his generosity.

"Can you let me have one of them immediately?" I asked, being anxious to start my story without any further loss of time. I fancied Dobson seemed slightly taken aback. He rubbed his hard hand over his forehead as he answered slowly, "I can't, at this moment recall one; but"— here he brightened up again— "just look me up to-night, and I'll have one ready for you."

That evening accordingly found me, all expectation, at Dobson's lodgings. No sooner had he caught sight of me than, with a violent clap on my back— "I've got one for you!" he cried. "Just the thing!"

I begged him to come out with it at once!

"Well," began Dobson, in his most dramatic manner, "you must have a fine old country house— picture galleries, and all that sort of thing. You'll have to work it up, you know. You're on a visit there, and they put you into a splendid room— oak panellings, large four-poster hung with silken curtains, and so on. You'll know how to describe it."

" Yes; go on with the story, please," I urged.

"Well," pursued Dobson, with a confident air, and lowering his voice for the sake of effect, "that room is haunted. Do you catch on?"

"Yes?" said I, with breathless eagerness.

"At about midnight you wake up suddenly with a sort of all-overish feeling,  you know, as if someone were in the room; and there"— Dobson stretched out his hand, and mechanically I followed its direction, half expecting to behold some spectral apparition— "gliding up to your bedside in the moonlight is the figure of a beautiful young lady, hair all wet and streaming, wringing her hands together as if in anguish."

"And what did she do?" I inquired, as he came to a dead stop. The question seemed to irritate Dobson.

"Do! It was a ghost," he explained, with some show of condescension.

"Oh!" I meekly returned, though I certainly had suspected the appearance to have been of that nature; and Dobson took up his parable with renewed spirit.

"The next morning you come downstairs to breakfast, pale, and a little flurried. Your host asks you what's up, and you come out with what you have seen. Your host turns livid, mutters something under his breath, and asks you to follow him. He takes you to the picture gallery; stops before the portrait of a beautiful young lady. But you're not listening."

"Yes, indeed, I'm all attention," I assured him, recalling my wandering thoughts.

"Well," resumed Dobson, fixing me with his pale grey eye, and speaking in his most impressive manner, "that portrait was the very facsimile of the young lady who had visited your room the night before. Her lover had proved false, and she had drowned herself in the moat, more than two hundred years ago. That accounted for her dripping hair, you understand."

The thought occurred to me that the young lady might have managed to get her hair dry in two hundred years, but I kept it to myself.

"Very good," I said; " very striking, really; but do you know, Dobson, I almost think I've seen something of the kind in print."

"Impossible! " cried Dobson, with a touch of resentment in his tone. "I've never told it to a soul before."

"Don't be offended," I said, smothering my disappointment as best I could, "but I fancy ghosts are rather played out. Has nothing curious ever happened in your own experience?"

Dobson evidently withdrew his thoughts with difficulty from the subject of the haunted house, but he made an effort to fall in with my wishes, and, after a few moments' reflection, exclaimed with an ecstatic expression which at once revived my hopes, "I have it! An aunt of mine— I've often heard her tell the story— was travelling in the night mail to Scotland. There was only one other passenger in the carriage with her — a man of dark, dare-devil aspect. Well, after they had gone a little way, he begged my aunt to look away for a moment, as he had one or two changes to make in his toilet. My aunt was a very decorous old lady— spinster, you know— and she was rather alarmed at the request, though the young man's manner was perfectly civil. In about ten minutes he told her his toilet was complete. She looked round, but where was the young man gone? I've heard my aunt say it gave her quite a turn, for in the corner of the carriage where he had been sitting was  a most dignified old gentleman— fine broadcloth, gold spectacles, snow-white hair, and all that. She could hardly believe her eyes; but he was reading quietly, and took no notice of her. A few minutes afterwards they reached their station, and then my aunt discovered that she had been travelling with one of the most notorious robbers that was ever heard of, who had made his escape in that disguise."

I had a vague recollection of having met with something very like this before, but as Dobson argued that it was impossible two people should have passed through such a curious experience, and that his aunt was undeniably the heroine of the story he had just told, I could only conclude that the old lady must have published it herself, and took my leave, promising to think it over.

It is needless to say I never made use of this plot; in fact, my confidence in Dobson's ability to furnish me with what I required was considerably lessened by the evening's experience.

A few days later, as I was walking homewards, Dobson and his plots far from my thoughts, I heard his voice behind me. "Hallo, Brown, old man! Have you got your story off yet?"

"No," I replied; "I've been rather busy of late."

"Well, it's all for the best," said Dobson. "I've been considering your case, and I really think I've got a plot that will satisfy you now. "

"Indeed!" I asked, I fear without much interest in my tone.

"Yes," he rejoined; "just the other night such an odd thing happened, something out of the common, don't you know."

"What was it?" I demanded, with wakening interest.

"Well, you know," he went on glibly, "the other evening I was calling on the Smiths. Smith was out, but his daughters were all at home— he has seven, you know. I was asked in, and the strange thing is that there were only ladies in the room, fully a dozen, I should think."

Here he stopped, as if expecting me to say something.

"Where's the plot?" I said, growing slightly impatient.

"The plot!" echoed Dobson; " why, don't you see? That's just it— one gentleman amongst a dozen ladies! You could make a capital story out of it," and he gleefully rubbed his hands together, as if he saw before him the unfolding of a romance, beside which the wildest situations of Dumas, the most intricate involvements of Wilkie Collins, would show tame and feeble.

"Isn't it rather bald?" I brutally suggested.

"Bald!" retorted Dobson, somewhat crestfallen. "No; I don't see anything bald about it. None of the ladies were bald," he went on, taking refuge in what took the place with him of choice badinage, "and I've still got some hair left," passing his hand meditatively over his sparsely covered pate.

I was turning wearily away when, with recovered equanimity, for Dobson is of a buoyant disposition, he stopped me.

"You are awfully hard to please, but here's another, and you can't say it has no point. Founded on fact, too, which would make it all the more taking. Just listen," he persisted, ignoring my efforts at escape. "Do you remember how smitten I was with that McTavish girl? Well, this is a thing I've never confided to anyone. I had fully made up my mind to give her the chance of becoming Mrs. Dobson, and had actually called at her house for the express purpose of popping the question. She was standing in front of the mirror when I was shown in, and, as I hastened towards her, I caught sight of the reflection of her face. 'Pon my word, her mouth was all twisted to one side in the glass, quite altering her expression. I was thrown completely off my balance, and the occasion went by— never to return. Ha! ha! very good, ain't it? Just work it up, and you'll make a name for yourself."

"Very amusing, Dobson, but I should hardly feel justified in bringing such a delicate affair before the public. Besides. I've almost given up the idea of writing a story."

"Don't say that," protested Dobson, in genuine anxiety. "I'll find you a good plot yet."

From that hour Dobson became the torment of my life. I could never meet him without haying one or more of his plots thrust down my throat, for the poorer they became the more lavishly he bestowed them on me.

"Hallo, Brown! " he would exclaim on the most inopportune occasions, "I've got another plot for you."

And then I would be compelled to listen, perhaps, to the mad bull story, related by Dobson with all the spontaneous gusto of an improvisator; or else to the experience of that incorrigible noodle of a young lady who gets periodically overtaken by the tide, for the express purpose, so far as I can see, of inveigling some young man into wetting his feet in fishing her out.

Once it was the blood-curdling story of a doctor finding himself in the  power of a madman, who, in the suavest manner possible, and with no intent of malice, but only in the interest of science, had set himself the task of abstracting the doctor's heart, that he might perform certain long-cherished experiments on it.

Another time the idea to be worked out would be that of a heroine of an extinct dynasty, reappearing on the drama of modern life, and working strange charms, through her possession of some secret, unsuspected power, by which she was enabled to keep both decay and death at bay.

And again, the suggested nucleus of a story would be that venerable device of a missing will, turning up just in time to frustrate the machinations of some evil-disposed party, and to consummate the happiness of two mercenary young lovers. If it were not one of those antediluvian acquaintance, it would be some inane production of Dobson's own, or else the account of any trivial occurrence which might have befallen him in his unusually humdrum existence and which he would detail as something altogether remarkable, and bid one "work it up."

This mania of his, at last attained to such a pitch, his brain meanwhile becoming more and more exhausted, that he could scarcely see a cab-horse fall down, or a policeman running a small boy in, but he would eagerly suggest the incident to me as the foundation for a story. I am certain, however, that Dobson— he is such a good-natured fellow, despite his foible— will be really pleased to see that his plots have proved of some use to me after all.

_________________

4: Foghorn Fernando

Edward Boltwood

1870-1924

North Western Advocate and the Emu Bay Times, (Tas) March 1911

[Munsey’s Magazine, Nov 1910]

Author of more than a hundred short stories in Munseys, The Blue Book, The Red Book, Lippincotts and many other magazines from 1899 until his death.

AS IF THE SKY had mysteriously discharged him, Foghorn Fernando appeared for the first time in the village of Dolcuela one morning about four o'clock, and demanded admission to the Pacific Hotel. At that hour the sky was actually discharging the plump raindrops of a tropical thunder shower.

The sound of thunder was the only real noise ever heard in lazy, silent Dolcuela, where a loud, word in the 'dobe-lined streets would bring startled citizens to their doors. Over his breakfast table, Colonel Hopapple, the landlord described to his guests the stranger's advent.

'The storm was hittin' her top note,' said the colonel, in his soft, Dolcuelan drawl. 'I had just raised up from my pillow, gentlemen, and observed to myself that I hadn't harkened to such roarin' artill'ry sence I was a boy at Gettysburg. Then this greaser, he yelled out in the plaza. And, gentlemen, when he so done, the thunder, by comparison, was merely the heaven-wafted sigh of a slumberin' babe. Judge Sloat, sir, wouldn't you relish another frijole? Yes, that small greaser cert'nly caterwauled like he was a posse of all the sheriffs in Lower California!'

Judge Sloat, a disbarred attorney from Los Angeles stroked his mustache anxiously.

'Let us look over this person,' advised the judge, and they went to the sunny courtyard to inspect the new arrival.

He was leaning against a cartwheel and gazing sadly at Hopapple's aged pair of mules as they dozed in their rope harness. Cross-examined, he gave the name of Fernando. He sought employment. He was an honest man, to witness which assertion he called with emphasis upon many saints, and slapped his gaudy shirt with slender hands.

'How comes an honest man out of work?' asked the colonel unreasonably.

'How, in truth?' retorted Fernando. 'How keep I not the job? Alas! Ay! It is some curse. I toil! I slave. But, listen! I recount to you!'

The forthcoming torrent of words was not in the least intelligible, but soon the disconsolate orator seemed to be attempting, and with prospect of success, to make his story audible to the entire county of San Bernardino. The wail of his shrill voice rose and rose until it was like a fanfare by insane burglars.

The off mule gradually lifted an eyelid.

'Holee smoke!' blurted the judge. 'Is that a human throat or a steam whistle?'

'CAR-R-R-RAMBA!' roared Fernando, filling his lungs for a final effort. His shriek of woe was of miraculous volume, and the mules instantly tossed their venerable heels at the horizon, and flew panic-stricken out of the court.

The crowd jostled through the gate in pursuit, while Colonel Hopapple, who had been knocked over by the runaways, addressed Fernando warmly.

'Consarn it! Why did you howl like that?' said he.

'Ah, I was excite in the head,' explained the little Mexican. 'Always when I am excite, then must I talk with strength. But, look, señor! The mules, they came back on us already!'

The colonel's mules, in fact, had been turned by a sallying party from Hi Sing's laundry. This Asiatic ambuscade, however, had only increased their terror. They were rushing towards the hotel speedier than they had left it. A hen from the blacksmith's shop met a swift and merciful death under their hoofs, and a much graver calamity became suddenly imminent.

For between the blacksmith's and the hotel was Dolcuela's dry goods district, consisting of Thomas Monzon's store, and now from the store serenely emerged Monzon's daughter, Miss Anita, a large lady of an indolent mind. Physically and mentally, Anita moved slowly, and there she stood, as if paralyzed, in the path of danger.

It was little Fernando who scurried first to her side.

'Halt, sons of evil!' he screamed to the mules. 'Bastante, pig-children of the night! Hoop! Hoop!'

The mules, appalled by his clamor, staggered sideways as if they had been hit by a snow-plough, and trotted meekly to the gate. Miss Anita, fluttering her fan, bestowed upon her rescuer a langorous and expansive smile. The enthusiastic crowd forgot Dolcuelan tradition and cheered; but Judge Sloat, with a jealous eye on Anita, frowned in silence.

That afternoon Fernando was hired as assistant clerk in Tomas Monzon's store.

ii

FOGHORN Fernando proved to be a pretty good clerk. The blacksmith, a fugitive artificer from an American battleship, gave him his nickname, but for a fortnight the title had no application, for Fernando was as quiet as a prima donna with bronchitis.

At the end of two weeks he received his first wages, and promptly proposed to Anita behind a stack of ginghams.

'Marry! With you?' she exclaimed. 'Upon sixteen dollars the month?'

'The father promises me yet more, so that I satisfaction him,' said Fernando promptly.

'We shall see,' temporized Anita, and she allowed him to kiss her chubby hand.

Several men, indeed, had kissed Anita's hand. Judge Sloat had kissed it often. But, her mind, as had been indicated, was not decisive. Although her study of the subject of matrimony had been long and constant, she had arrived merely at the vague conclusion that it was wise to keep as many suitors as possible at her feet. The process of selection was beyond Anita.

Still, she liked Fernando, and if he should attain prosperity— why, then, perhaps! So she dropped her eyelashes tenderly, and left Foghorn alone in a paradise behind the ginghams, where he commenced to mutter rapturously to himself.

At the opposite counter Thomas Monzon was selling towels to Padre Bonar, of the mission. The mission's trade was very important, and Tomas, tip-toe on a chair, ransacked his upper shelves for the austere priest. He was leaning far to one side, when, apparently from a pile of cloth near by, there arose an abrupt and, deafening shout of joy, like the paean of a giant.

Tomas jumped.

'Ten thousand devils!' he cried, and fell, swearing wildly, upon his pastor.

Padre Bonar and Tomas rolled over the floor; a pickle barrel was capsized; it was a scene of shame.

As soon as he found footing the clergyman stalked away, speechless with indignation. Monzon seized the. broom and darted at Foghorn Fernando, who was peering around the corner of the ginghams.

'Offspring of the pit!' wheezed Tomas. 'Shall I pay you to make such Satanic noises with your, tongue of brimstone? Out! You are bounce! I fire you!  Cuerpo de— out, then, before I kick my shoe against your stomach!'

Foghorn cast a confident glance at Anita, and coughed impressively.

'But I am going to marry with your daughter,' he announced.

'You— you!' jabbered Monzon, turning a vivid purple. 'You shall marry with my broomstick, that is all,' and he pushed Fernando into the plaza by means of that inglorious weapon.

It happened that the banishment was witnessed by Padre Bonar, whose kind heart was touched by the exile's despair. The priest immediately convoyed Fernando to the mission, and assigned him to the various duties of a handy man.

In his new surroundings Foghorn worked hard, and took new hope in respect to Anita Monzon. When she occasionally encountered Fernando, on her way to and from the chapel, Anita did not disdain to smile upon him. She believed in keeping her bow plentifully strung, and besides it was soon reputed that Fernando was likely to become the well-paid overseer of the mission farm, at the wage of nine dollars a week.

One Sunday morning before the service, he contrived to whisper to Anita in the chapel porch.

'Is your love waiting for me, most adorable?' breathed Fernando.

She nodded sweetly, and returned the secret clasp of his hand beneath the folds of her mantilla.

Fernando nearly fainted with delight as he climbed the ladder to the little organ loft, where his business was to pump tho decrepit bellows. When the service was ended he leaned over the rail of the gallery.

There sat Anita directly beneath him; and Foghorn, in an ecstasy of pride, gazed down at her ample shoulders. The joy of ownership filled Fernando's soul, and his lips moved, framing soft endearments. Suddenly— what was this? His eyes seemed to leap from their sockets.

The pew next to Miss Monzon's was occupied this morning by Judge Sloat, and now, in horror, Fernando, saw the false Anita's hand steal invitingly toward the judge, and saw the judicial lingers meet and caress it, without apparent objection on the lady's part.

But not so on Foghorn's.

He lifted up his voice. Luckily, most of the congregation had already filed out of the chapel, so that the ensuing panic crushed nobody. Padre Bonar strode into the aisle with excommunication written on his angry face; and Foghorn Fernando left the mission for ever.

iii

FERNANDO thereupon applied again for employment at the Pacific Hotel; but Colonel Hopapple, before answering, pulled his chair into the shade and stared doubtfully across the plaza.

' 'Pears to me, my son,' remarked the colonel, 'that the dispensation of Providence has got you saddle-galled when it comes to keepin' jobs. That pesky syreen contraption you carry in your chest is liable at any minute to stampede stock and bust up trade, and scare folks plumb into forgettin' their meals.'

'But that loudness of me is not often,' suggested Foghorn.

The colonel waved his corn-cob.

' 'Taint't so much the quantity of it,' he went on, 'as the quality, like Sloat said when he walked dingtoed for a week after consumin' a drink of mescal. There's an outlandish sting in that voice. of yours, son, when you reely turn her loose, that kind o' jolts a man's liver and stirs up the electrical juices of his intellects. Didn't you ever take somethin' for its slippery ellum, or boneset, or somethin'? Well, by time! What's this unknown caravan a'comin'

The last question was. provoked by an enormous four-horse wagon swinging around the corner of the street. The wagon-body was boxed in by gaily painted canvas, bearing the legend:

OLD DR. GIMBLE; M.D.

GENERAL HEALER

Even though you are at

The Gates of Death
the Doc will pull you through

ONE PRICE TO ALL!

When the vehicle reached the hotel a tall, grey-bearded individual, wearing, a linen duster, leaped form the driver's seat.

'Howdy, doc?' said Hopapple pleasantly.

'Good morning, my friend,' replied the general healer. 'Can you toll me the size of this settlement?'

'You can' see it all from here, ' said the landlord, gesturing at Dolcuela with his pipe.

Dr. Gimble looked about him carefully.

'I don't guess it would pay me to stop,' he decided. 'I've got to make a county fair to-morrow, and— there ain't anybody sick in this town anyway, is there?'

'Not that I've heard of,' Hopapple rejoined. 'We're tol'rable preserved thank you.'

Then his eyes fell on Fernando, perched despondently on the hitching rail. 'Why, by mighty, I dunno, after all!' mused the colonel. 'How do you stand, doc, on the Science of the Throat?'

'Ace big,' declared the physician. 'Give me a quarter, open your mouth and say "Ah!" '

'Shucks! It ain't me!' Hopapple corrected. 'It's that little greaser. If you can cure, his voice, I'll go you two bits just for greens. Talk loud for the doc, you Fernando, and I'll hold them horses. if I can.'

Foghorn obeyed, while the plaza rang like a sounding-board. The astounded Gimble rubbed his ears and glared at Fernando with great earnestness.

'For the love of Mike!' he gasped. 'How long can you keep that up?'

'It's the easiest thing he does, and that's the trouble,' said Colonel Hopapple. 'He'd keep it up all day if he wasn't stopped. Can you cure him?'

The doctor, after a thoughtful pause, removed his silk hat, and with it clapped Fernando three deliberate strokes on the left shoulder.

'Cure him?' cried Gimble joyously. 'No, I won't cure him. If he'll hire out with me, I'll give him a hundred dollars a month and cakes. I own two medicine waggon shows and a merry-go-round, and this fellow will surely make the best bally-hoo barker in the business. Why, put him on a platform outside a six-by-nine tent, with that voice and my patter, and he'd have a county fair thinking it was Barnum and Bailey! What do you say, partner?'

Fernando, in a blissful daze, said nothing. He had understood nothing except the proposed salary, and his reticence caused the showman to be fearful of losing such a vocal treasure.

'Here's an advance of fifty to bind the contract,' added Gimble hastily. 'We'll start for Cactus City in a half hour, after I've fed up.'

iv

WHEN Fernando entered Monzon's establishment that forenoon the indignant merchant reached for his broomstick, but Foghorn never wavered. He held his head high and hummed a tune as he glanced around the store in the manner of the Emperor of Germany at a review of the troops.

'Where is the proprietor of this little shop, my good man?' said Fernando to Monzon. Tomas, unable to find suitable objurgations, puffed out his cheeks helplessly, and Fernando tossed a yellow bill. on the show-case.

'I amuse myself a minute on my travels,' he continued, 'by purchasing jewels. It is my habit. Let me see that miserable trinket, if you will,' and he pointed to an enormous breastpin of imitation gold and diamonds, which had been coveted for years by every girl in Dolcuela.

'The price,' faltered Monzon, 'is eleven—'

'Wrap it up,' directed Fernando, 'I buy!'

Tomas was overwhelmed. He waddled feebly to his safe in the rear of tho store, and emptied his money drawer in a vain attempt to make change for the yellow bill.

But his customer was not alone, for Anita Monzon glided forward from behind a pile of ginghams, thinking of the magnificent brooch which Judge Sloat had given her at Christmas.

'Sweetheart!' she murmured to Fernando.

Foghorn yawned at her elaborately. 'Is it that you also are employed here, my worthy woman?' said he; 'Show me, then, if you please, half a dozen finger-rings of your best value. I expect that I meet in Cactus City, whither I am travelling, a lady of station to whom I may wish to present slight gifts!'

_________________

5: John Sherlock's Alibi

Anonymous

North Western Advocate and
the Emu Bay Times (Tas) 22 July 1911

ONE MORNING in November, more years ago than I care to remember, tho sleepy little village of Seabridge was startled out of its usual calm by the news that during the night John Hamblyn, a wealthy old widower, who occupied a large house on the outskirts of the village, had been murdered— stabbed to the heart as he lay in bed. Sixty pounds which Hamblyn had drawn from the bank the day previous was missing, and, on the face of it, it appeared to be a murder with robbery for its motive. But, as the bed showed no sign of a struggle, and there was jewellery in the room of far greater value than the missing money, it was evident the obvious motive was not the real one.

The murderer had entered the house through the drawing-room window, which had been left unfastened, but no one had seen or heard him, and there was not tho slightest clue to his identity.

John Sherlock, the murdered man's nephew, who had a business in Liverpool, was greatly shocked by the news of the tragedy, and urged the police to spare neither expense nor effort to solve the mystery surrounding his uncle's death. After the inquest, which resulted in a verdict of 'Wilful murder against some person or persons unknown,' the chief instructed me to go down to Seabridge— on the quiet— and see if I could pick up a clue.

The morning after my arrival I went into the Bush Inn, hoping to glean something from the gossip of the customers. There were several farmers and shopkeepers in the bar parlor, but their speculations were of the wildest character, and added nothing to my knowledge of the case.

The window looked out upon the stables. In the yard an ostler was busy cleaning a trap. As I sat watching him a young woman came to the gate and beckoned him. He placed the bucket under the tap, and went to her. For some time they stood talking; then he turned off the water, and she followed him into the stable. The man next me laughed softly. I turned and looked at him.

'They're fairly gone on each other,' he said.

'Courting?' I queried.

'Strong. At it every neet. Hoo's th' 'ousemaid, at 'Amblyn's, an' when it's not 'er neet eawt 'e waits for 'er in th' wood, opposite th' orchard, an' when th' others are i' bed hoo goes an' 'as a crack wi' 'im. It's a pity they were'nar eawt on th' neet o' th' murder. If they 'ad a bin they'd a seed t'chap as did it.'

He turned to the farmer seated on his right and began chaffering over a mare he had for sale, and I finished my whiskey and left the house.

Turning by the side of the inn, I walked towards the stable. It was a wooden building, and through a knothole I saw the ostler standing with his arm round the girl's waist. She was crying, and he was trying to comfort her.

'There, don't cry, Alice,' he said. 'You see he never said anything for fear of turning suspicion on himself, so if we keep our months shut nobody'll know you were out.'

Assured by his speech and manner, Alice wiped her eyes and left the stables. I turned and strolled through the village. As I walked the links pieced themselves together in my mind. John Hamblyn retired at 9.30. Between 10 and 11 he was murdered. At that time the housemaid was talking to the ostler near the woods. In spite of her denial, she had seen and recognised someone who had not come forward for fear of turning suspicion on himself. Who was he?

When I reached the stables Jenkins, the ostler, was busy grooming a horse. A few straight questions and he collapsed. He recognised the danger his silence had brought upon him, and was afraid.

'I'll tell you everything,' he said, as soon as he recovered his control. 'It was only to shield Alice that I kept silent. As soon as the other servants were in bed Alice came to me in the wood. While we were talking, a man entered the orchard through the gap in the hedge. Clouds covered tho face of the moon, and, in the darkness, we did not fully recognise him, but we thought it was Mr. Sherlock.

'In order to give him time to get to bed Alice stayed longer than she otherwise would have done. When the clock struck 11 she left me. As she neared the house she saw the same man coming out through the drawing-room window, and, to escape his notice, crouched and hid herself behind some bushes. The moon was shining brightly, and in turning the corner he passed so close to her that she could have touched him. The man was Mr. Sherlock. Next morning, instead of telling the police what she had seen, she denied having seen or heard anyone; and I, for her sake, denied having met her that night.'

After a few searching questions I hastened to the hall and interviewed Alice Holland. She corroborated Jenkins in every particular. It was clear that John Sherlock was in the house at the time the murder was committed, and as he benefited largely by the death of his uncle it would be for him to satisfy the jury that his stealthy visit was a legitimate one.

Near the drawing-room window I found a peculiarly shaped button, which the housekeeper recognised as belonging to a suit of tweeds often worn by Mr. Sherlock. Upon this evidence John Sherlock was arrested, and, after the usual delays, was committed for trial at the next Liverpool Assizes.

His imprisonment had no apparent effect upon Sherlock. When he appeared at the assizes he was as spruce and debonair as on the morning of his arrest. His friends had unbounded confidence in his innocence, and there was not a single inhabitant of Seabridge who believed he had committed the crime. In the interval we had materially strengthened our case against him.

Link by link we had pieced together a chain of evidence so strong as to appear unanswerable. Men had seen Sherlock hastening along the road to Liverpool on his bicycle. His business was a dead loss. He owed thousands of pounds; his creditors were pressing for payment, and the Jews had refused to furnish him with any more money. He had often wished his uncle dead, and declared frequently that it was time the old man got out and gave him a chance of an innings.

His counsel did not cross-examine any of the witnesses. The case for the prosecution closed, and the court adjourned for luncheon.

'Well, what is the defence?' I asked, turning to one of the reporters.

'An alibi,' he answered promptly. 'Sherlock knows he's as safe as houses, or he could not be so utterly indifferent. The defence will be an eye-opener.'

The judge took his seat, and Caleb Breeze, the prisoner's counsel, rose to open the defence. The first dealt with Sherlock's business and manner of life. His conduct was reprehensible, but not criminal. Scores of men occupying far higher positions in life than John Sherlock lived upon their expectations. He was not the only man in Liverpool whose business was a source of loss instead of profit. Then he turned his attention to Holland and Jenkins.

'Would any jury of intelligent men credit the evidence of such inveterate liars?' he asked, with a shrug of his shoulders.

The button found in the drawing room belonged to Sherlock. But it was lost weeks before the murder. One of the witnesses would tell them that he noticed and commented upon its loss prior to that date. The evidence of those who had seen Sherlock cycling towards Liverpool he dismissed as the testimony of honest but mistaken men.

'John Hamblyn, according to the medical testimony, was murdered between the hours of ten and eleven on the night of November the 12th. Between those hours Alice Holland and Alfred Jenkins have sworn that they saw a person whom they thought to be the prisoner, John Sherlock, enter the grounds of the hall. A few minutes after eleven o'clock Alice Holland says he saw the same man leave the house by means of the drawing-room window, and, by the light of the moon, recognised him as John Sherlock.

'The defence to this charge is an alibi— complete and irrefutable. 'Between the hours of ten and eleven o'clock on the night of November 12, John Hamblyn, the uncle of the prisoner at the bar, was murdered in his bed at Seabridge. During the whole of that time the prisoner was playing billiards in the King's Arms, Liverpool.

'That fact, indisputably established, must result in his acquittal. But in order that no shadow of a doubt is to his innocence may remain, I will, by the evidence of reliable men and women, occupying responsible and honorable positions in the City of Liverpool—men and women who have known the prisoner for years— account for every moment of his time, from his arrival in Liverpool from London, at 8 p.m., until he went upstairs to bed at shortly after 1 o'clock on the following morning.'

The witnesses were, as he had stated, men and women of position, and their evidence established an alibi so complete and convincing that the jury returned their verdict of 'Not guilty' without leaving tho box. And John Sherlock left the court without a stain upon his character. But I was not satisfied.

The alibi which had convinced the jury did not alter my conviction that John Sherlock had murdered his uncle. I kept my opinion to myself, but I was nonetheless certain that his acquittal had been secured by trickery.

Immediately after the trial Sherlock realised the estate, and, accompanied by Fred. Hargreaves, the friend in whose company he had passed the fateful evening, left the country.

IN THE press of other work the matter passed my mind, and I had forgotten the Seabridge mystery and all connected with it, when one day — over two years afterwards— business took me to Bath. As I was leaving the railway station, I collided with a gentleman, and on turning to apologise found myself face to face with John Sherlock.

'Hullo, Sherlock!' I cried. 'What in the world are you doing here? I thought you were abroad. How are you?'

For a moment he looked at me in amazement. Then his eyes twinkled merrily.

'I'm all right,' he answered cheerily; 'but I'm not Sherlock, you know. My name is Frank Halston.'

'Not Sherlock?' I cried incredulously.

'No; by Jove, I must be awfully like him, for you are not the only man who has mistaken me for him— no, not by a long chalk,' he said, laughing heartily. 'Come and have a drink, and I'll tell you all about it.'

As we walked to the hotel I looked at him curiously. In spite of his denial I found it hard to believe that he was not John Sherlock. In height, build, manner, features, and voice they were identical. Seen together, there might have been noticeable points of difference between them. Apart it was impossible to distinguish one from the other.

The circumstances connected with the trial recurred to my mind. I felt that I was on the eve of a discovery that, unwittingly, I had stumbled upon the solution of the Seabridge mystery. As soon as we were comfortably seated in the smoke-room my companion asked—

'You know Sherlock well?'

'Very,' I answered.

'Then, tell me, is the resemblance between us a remarkable one?'

'So remarkable,' I answered, 'that even now I have hard work to persuade myself that you are not he.'

'Then no wonder Hargreaves won his bet,' he answered.

I looked at him inquiringly, yet feared to speak. What connection had he with Hargreaves, the principal witness at the trial, the man in whose company John Sherlock had left the country?

'About two years and a half ago,' he continued. 'I was walking down New street, Birmingham, when a gentleman greeted me as Sherlock. I had some difficulty in convincing him that he was mistaken. By the time I had done so we were quite friendly, and, as neither of us had anything on, we agreed to spend the evening together. He harped continually upon the remarkable likeness between myself and his friend Sherlock, and promised to bring about a meeting between us. He was a good sort, and I liked him. We grew confidential, and I told him my circumstances.

'I was a music hall artist at the time, and had booked for a tour in the States and Australia, but was finding it difficult to tide over the last few weeks in the old country. Before we parted he lent me a tenner, and promised to look me up in London the week following. When we met in London he told me that he had been discussing the question of doubles with his pals in Liverpool and had made a number of bets, amounting in the aggregate to £500, that he would produce a man so like one of their friends that this man should spend an evening in their company without them discovering that he was not the person they took him for. He offered me £50 if we succeeded, and we arranged that the trial should take place on the last night of my stay in England.

'I was sailing from Liverpool to New York early on the morning of November 13, and on the 12th Hargreaves met me at Lime street at 6 o'clock. As we left the station a porter greeted me as Sherlock, and from that time until nearly one in the morning my identity was never questioned. Hargreaves had sent me a suit of Sherlock's togs, and put me up to his tricks and mannerisms, and I acted the part to perfection. It was a fair takedown. Hargreaves put me up for the night, and was so delighted with the way I had managed the business that he gave me £75 instead of the £50 he had promised me.

'Before leaving the rooms I faked my face a bit, so that I might not give the show away before he was ready. He promised to let me know how he got on, but did not do so.'

Halston told the story with the air of a man who was proud of the part he had played in it.

I looked at him wonderingly. This, then, was the secret of John Sherlock's confidence.

'I have often wondered what Sherlock was doing that night,' he said reminiscently.

'Murdering his uncle,' I replied laconically. Then I told him the story. A look of horror came into his eyes as he listened.

When I had finished he pressed his hands to his brow and stared at me in the bewildered fashion of a man who doubts the evidence of his senses.

'Good Heavens!' he whispered hoarsely; 'while Sherlock was murdering the old man Hargreaves was trotting me round Liverpool arranging his alibi!'

_________________

6: The Hachma Ruby

Anonymous

Huon Times (Tas) 3 July 1917

[Bush Advocate, (New Zealand) 4 Sep 1905]

IT WAS in the month of April 189— that the little incident occurred which introduced me to my wife. It was nothing unusual— a street accident and a timely rescue— but the circumstances leading up to our subsequent betrothal and marriage were sufficiently romantic.

I went home to my dingy little flat that afternoon in a state of mental exaltation that can hardly be described.  The face of a lovely young girl smiling gratitude, and a newly awakened interest, lit by a pair of the most bewitching eyes that Nature could ever bestow, formed a picture in my mind which the most sordid details of my daily life were ineffectual to banish.

I was at the time a struggling young, medical man, obsessed by all the difficulties that beset a professional career when money and influence are conspicuously absent A competency was the limit of my most extravagant dreams; yet I had the superb audacity to fall in love with a young lady whom the remnant of my commonsense should have told me was infinitely beyond my reach.

I called at her house, and in the process of riveting my chains learned her identity. She was the only daughter of Sir Theodore Furnival, the eminent antiquary, a man famous alike for his enormous wealth and for the extent and value of his intellectual researches.

He was then travelling in the East, and the chief occupants of the princely mansion in Berkeley Square were his daughter, Gertrude, and his maiden sister, the latter an estimable lady afflicted with a certain dimness of sight, for which I felt profoundly thankful.

In the rosy glow of the shaded lamp in the drawing-room we made an excellent trio, and Gertrude and I carried on our endless confidential chats with scarcely any interruption from the grey-haired dame who nodded placidly behind her gold-rimmed spectacles. It was a season of bliss, unsullied save for one person, whose presence was obtruded on my attention at such frequent and inconvenient intervals that I could not avoid taking notice of him.

Randall, the one-eyed butler, was a distinctly unpleasant individual. Born in Calcutta, of mixed parentage, the baronet had taken him to London when returning from one of those interminable tours which absorbed so much of his time. He was sleek and ingratiating in manner, with a smile so obviously made to order, that my foot tingled in my boot whenever he addressed me. I was astonished that, considering his physical defect, he should be allowed to retain his position in the household, but subsequently learned that the relations between him and. his master were such as to render his dismissal a most unlikely contingency.

Sir Theodore possessed an almost fraternal affection for the smooth faced half-breed. Mistrusting alike the placid incompetence of his sister, and the girlish inexperience of his daughter, he had practically invested the butler with the entire control of the establishment during his absence.

Three weeks elapsed happily, and then my dreams were rudely dispelled. At the end of April the baronet returned. When I called, and made my respectful bow to him at the instance of Gertrude, I was received with a coldness so marked as to leave no doubt whatever in my mind that he had been apprised by the treacherous Randall of everything that had taken place  prior to his return. He thanked me ceremoniously for the trifling service I had rendered his daughter, but plainly indicated by his manner that in his opinion I had more than recouped myself for my trouble. It was the first crushing reminder I received of the audacity of my hopes, and in the misery and. humiliation of the moment I temporarily lost courage.

The bitter reflection that Gertrude would never be mine became a certainty, and in the background of my thoughts rose up: a picture of the placid, one-eyed butler preening himself upon his triumph.

The morning brought amends in the shape of a delicately-scented note from Gertrude containing an invitation to a dinner-party to be given by her father to some of his immediate cronies a few nights afterwards at which a private exhibition of his treasures would be made. The favour was obtained, she went on to state, by her mendaciously accrediting me with an interest in antiquities which I was far from possessing, and she concluded with the hope that I would make the most of the opportunity for ingratiating myself with her father. I kissed the note in a full, flood of rapture, and spent the rest of the day in a state of mind eminently in keeping with the best traditions of love's young dream.

Strolling into my club on the following evening, I found the smoking-room deserted save for a young. Anglo-Indian in whom I was pleased to recognise a college acquaintance. An animated chat, mainly of a reminiscent nature, ensued, and then I bethought myself, considering my friend's nationality, of the potentialities of the East, and dexterously turned the conversation to Hindustan,

My first query as to the mysteries of that home of the occult tapped a well of information that proved as interesting as it was unexpected.

'You Western people, of course, have not heard,' said my friend, 'of the calamitous affair that is agitating the very heartstrings of my native country at the present time, Nothing could better illustrate the gulf that divides the East and the West than this indifference to a matter, of the most intense moment. If a petty war springs up, or a pestilence breaks out, the Press agencies flash the news all over the world; but the loss of the eye of the god Hachma, which every true Hindoo is bewailing just now, is scarcely known beyond the  frontier.'

'It is the first I heard of it, at any rate,' I rejoined, suppressing a smile as I observed the seriousness of the Anglo-Indian's face.

'It is suspected,' he continued, 'that the gem— one of the finest rubies in the world, by the way— has been brought to London. To my certain knowledge there are three priests of the temple: of Hachma in the city on the track of the thief, and'— my friend's voice sank lower— 'if they cannot obtain the eye by fair means I they will recover it by foul. They are well supplied with funds, however, so let us hope that no unpleasantness shall accrue.'

'Whew!' I whistled. 'Have they any idea who the thief is?'

'Yes; an outcast Hindoo, whom a swift Nemesis overtook. He was found drowned in the Hooghly soon afterwards, and in the loincloth tightly bound about his hips the proceeds of the sale of the jewel were discovered. His murderers would not defile themselves by touching the money. They are now on the track of the purchaser.'

I WAS the first of the guests to arrive at Sir Theodore Furnival's, and as the baronet was putting some finishing touches to his museum at the time, Gertrude and I had a few delightful moments together. The tete-a-tete was all the more precious  as I did not see her again for the remainder of the evening.

When the other guests arrived, the time was fully occupied inspecting the museum, wading through innumerable courses at dinner, and listening to long and learned disquisitions from Sir Theodore on the nature and historical associations of his possessions.

With the coffee-and-cigar stage there came a surprise. Sir Theodore took a bunch of keys from his pocket and handed them with a whispered injunction to the butler. The latter immediately unlocked an elaborate safe in a corner, of the room and took out a small black object, which he handed to his master. The baronet then cleared his throat and addressed his guests.

'Gentlemen,' he said, 'I have reserved the most precious object of my collection till this moment. Pardon an old man's vanity. I have brought a wonder home from the East of which I am very proud. Apart from its intrinsic worth, it possesses a value which no amount of wealth could adequately represent, as being the medium through which the subtle influence of an inanimate deity filtered down on countless crowds of worshippers for hundreds of years. It is the eye of the great god Hachma.

'You are all, or most of you, connoisseurs. Look at it.'

Sir Theodore's face was suffused with a flush of pride, and his voice was vibrant with exultation. In his hand was a small morocco case, which he had just opened, revealing the jewel referred to, reposing, on a couch of satin.

The appearance of the gem immediately drew forth a little chorus of admiration. It was a truly magnificent ruby, clear, as a dewdrop, with exquisite cut facets. Against, the white background of the sating the jewel gleamed with a peerless brilliancy.

'I obtained it,' pursued the baronet, 'from a street beggar in Calcutta, a wild-eyed, hunted-looking wretch, who seemed to be on the verge of starvation. There was no competition, but the vendor was no  fool. He is now a comparatively rich man, and I have the ruby. The fame of it leaked out, however, and twice on my way home, my life was threatened. But here it is— and safe. Pass it round, Randall.'

Sir Theodore's guests were all wealthy men, with cultivated tastes. A few made the collection of objets d'art their sole hobby, while others boasted a knowledge of precious stones which the most expert diamond merchant of Hatton Garden might have envied. To one and all of them the sacred gem. was an object of enthralling interest, and the baronet's latest and greatest addition to his collection elicited many a sigh of envy and admiration.

Finally the case was closed, and Randall carried it back to his master.

'I am quite prepared to be besieged by sight-seers during the next few days,' said our host, with an expression which conveyed that the infliction would not be altogether distasteful. 'A rare curio is like a conquering general— everybody wants to feast his eyes. It is the penalty for greatness.'

The butler, before returning it to the safe, handed him the case, and with a happy smile the baronet pressed the spring. The lid flew open. Almost simultaneously a cry escaped him, and the smile froze oh his lips.

It was empty.

I fancy , the ensuing five minutes were the most uncomfortable that any of us ever spent in his life. A dead silence fell which none seemed inclined to break. Sir Theodore, growing red and pale by turns, stared at the empty casket with an air of one who is unable to credit the evidence of his senses.

Randall stood near him, a model of impassive decorum. Perhaps a flickering surprise was apparent on his composed features, but otherwise he gave no indication of the fact, the hideous fact, that stared us all In the face— that the ruby was stolen, and that one of us was the thief.

With an effort the baronet raised his eyes from the case and glanced round the table.

'This is a very good joke gentlemen,' he stammered, with a forced smile; 'but it is hardly in the best taste; To whom are we indebted for the practical jest?'

There was no reply. Consternation, however, was simulated, was apparent on every countenance. The situation rapidly grew desperate. It was apparent that something must be done at once. Recognising this, an old gentleman, one  of our host's most intimate friends, stood up and proposed that a private enquiry agent should bi sent for, and that everyone present should allow himself to be searched, sir Theodore protested against his guests submitting themselves to the indignity; but by unanimous consent on our part this course was agreed to, and a footman was despatched for Mr. Felix Greer, a private detective of well-known intelligence and distinction.

In the meantime my thoughts had I been busy trying to establish some connexion between the information I had received a few days previously relative to the eye of Hachma and the present contretemps. A cleverly planned coup, I became convinced, was being executed under my eyes. I decided to remain silent, however, and await events.

The arrival of the detective was the signal for systematic search of each  individual present, beginning with Randall. One by one we accompanied him to another apartment, and submitted as graciously as possible to the humiliating operation. When it was concluded we assembled again in the dining-room and waited for the missing gem to be restored to its owner.

In vain. The search was futile. The detective then proceeded to make an exhaustive examination of the room, and every possible and impossible hiding-place was inspected in turn. His operations were carried out with the most scrupulous thoroughness, but they were, quite abortive. Things remained in status quo.

When I left the house with the other guests shortly afterwards, I hung about outside, in order, to see the detective, who had gone to Sir Theodore's study for a consultation. He was immediately interested by what I told him relative to the conspiracy that I had been informed was on foot to recover the sacred gem. As we strolled along busily conversing, my companion suddenly ran his arm through mine, and wheeled into a by-street. He had evidently inside up his mind on some course of action, and I did not bother him with  questions.

We proceeded rapidly along this until another turn brought us into a thoroughfare parallel with that in which Sir Theodore Furnival lived. I began to. understand the motive of these manoeuvres when we emerged again, opposite the baronet's residence. The detective immediately drew me, into the shadow of a disused doorway.

'I shall watch the house for a while,' he said, in a subdued tone. 'Developments may possibly take place sooner than we expect. But perhaps your engagements will not allow you to wait?'

I had no appointments, however, and we chatted, together, for close on an hour. The thoroughfare was almost completely deserted, and as I was listening to the chiming of a quarter past ten from a neighbouring clock Sir Theodore's door opened, and the muffled figure of a man emerged. Casting a couple of quick glances right and left, he ran down the steps and walked rapidly away. My companion remained motionless till he had turned the corner, and then we hurried in pursuit.

Through several streets, chiefly residential, our man proceeded at a swift pace, and finally into a small thoroughfare of dubious respectability, and halted before the door of a house with a 'To Let' bill in the window. It was opened for him after a scarcely perceptible delay, and he disappeared inside. The upper portion of the house was in darkness; but behind the shuttered basement a flicker of light was visible. A murmur of voices was audible from below

I asked the detective what he proposed doing; but he softly motioned me to keep silent.

The discussion in the basement was a protracted one, and, at times somewhat lively to judge by the heated voices. Such fragmentary portions of the conversation as I overheard were in a language that I did not understand. Ultimately a crisis of some sort was reached. We heard a crashing of furniture, mingled with imprecations, and then a man's cry of agony. A moment afterwards the door was flung open, and three men rushed out, and fled up the streets. As they darted past I caught a  glimpse of one of their faces. It was that of a Hindoo.

Shouting to me to go in and see what was the matter, Greer started r off at full speed after them. I went into the house and gingerly made my way downstairs in the darkness. I had no matches, and was obliged to feel my way towards the room in which the fracas had occurred.

As I entered it— the kitchen it proved to be— my foot struck heavy, yielding substance on the floor, and my heart momentarily stood still. Intuitively I knew that it was a human body. A feeling at weird horror crept over me which, forced the perspiration out in drops upon my forehead. With an effort I pulled myself together, and peering through the gloom, the moribund glow of embers in the grate caught my attention. With a squill of paper, and some diligent blowing, I managed to get a light.

The operation was one of the most unpleasant I have ever experienced. The proximity of that nameless substance, which my strung imagination invested with all sorts of foolish fancies, tried my nerves as nothing else could. A stump of candle was lying on the floor, and by the aid of this I perceived that the object was the huddled-up figure of a man who was lying on his face in a small pool of blood, which kept trickling from a wound in his shoulder. I quickly turned him over, and looked at his  face.

It was Randall, the butler. A hasty examination showed that his injuries were confined to a knife thrust, which had not penetrated very deep, and, as I had water handy, I soon stanched the wound with my handkerchief, and brought him round. Opening his one eye, he looked gratefully at me, and began to mumble his thanks; but my impatience quickly cut him short.

'What is the meaning of this, Randall?' I inquired, sternly. 'You had better make a clean breast of it. I may tell you that Greer accompanied me here, and is now in pursuit of your three accomplices.'

The fellow hesitated a moment, and a look of repulsive cunning stole over his face.

'If you tell me what you know, sir, I will answer you,' he replied.

'Well, then, where is Sir Theodore's ruby?' I demanded. 'You came here, to meet the three priests of Hachma who have come to London to recover the jewel. Have they got it?'

A gleam of sullen rage suddenly transformed the butler's countenance, and his eye flashed vindictively.

'No, sir, they found me one too many for them,' he growled. 'Yes, I stole the ruby in the dining-room. They came to me a few days ago and offered, me a handsome sum, if I would filch it for them. They believed it would be useless trying to induce Sir Theodore to give it up. The bribe tempted me, and I came here to-night with the jewel to get the money. The beggarly curs, however, went back on their offer; cut it down by half, as their funds, they said had run short. What did they take me for? I wouldn't treat, and they set on me with their knives. It's all they had for it. They might search me till their hair fell off, but they wouldn't find the ruby. Ha! ha!'

'Then you have it still,'  said I. 'Come, this is better than I anticipated. You will be able to purchase your liberty, at any rate.'

'What guarantee have I of that?' was the sullen query.

A step sounded on the stairs.

'My word and that of Greer's,' I replied, as the detective came into the room with disappointment written plainly on his face. Thereupon the fellow put his hand to his blind eye, and, lifting up the eye-lid, removed the missing jewel from the socket.

Greer's pursuit of the three fanatics was unsuccessful. Perhaps it was just as well. As far as the assault on Randall was concerned, the rascal richly deserved his punishment, and he disappeared soon afterwards, with general approbation.

Sir Theodore did not retain the jewel that was the cause of all the trouble. The priests of Hachma were desperate men, and as their religious veneration for the sacred ruby entitled them to a certain amount of respect he thought it better to rid the country of their presence by voluntarily returning to them their treasure.

Need I add that I also obtained a treasure that I was in danger of losing— a jewel that stands to me in the same light, even as the eye of Hachma to the most devoted of his worshippers?

__________________

7: The Adventure of the German Student

Washington Irving

1783-1859

Tales of a Traveller, 1824

ON A STORMY NIGHT, in the tempestuous times of the French Revolution, a young German was returning to his lodgings, at a late hour, across the old part of Paris. The lightning gleamed, and the loud claps of thunder rattled through the lofty narrow streets— but I should first tell you something about this young German.

Gottfried Wolfgang was a young man of good family. He had studied for some time at Göttingen, but being of a visionary and enthusiastic character, he had wandered into those wild and speculative doctrines which have so often bewildered German students. His secluded life, his intense application, and the singular nature of his studies, had an effect on both mind and body. His health was impaired; his imagination diseased. He had been indulging in fanciful speculations on spiritual essences, until, like Swedenborg, he had an ideal world of his own around him. He took up a notion, I do not know from what cause, that there was an evil influence hanging over him; an evil genius or spirit seeking to ensnare him and ensure his perdition. Such an idea working on his melancholy temperament produced the most gloomy effects. He became haggard and desponding. His friends discovered the mental malady preying upon him, and determined that the best cure was a change of scene; he was sent, therefore, to finish his studies amidst the splendors and gayeties of Paris.

Wolfgang arrived at Paris at the breaking out of the revolution. The popular delirium at first caught his enthusiastic mind, and he was captivated by the political and philosophical theories of the day: but the scenes of blood which followed shocked his sensitive nature, disgusted him with society and the world, and made him more than ever a recluse. He shut himself up in a solitary apartment in the Pays Latin, the quarter of students. There, in a gloomy street not far from the monastic walls of the Sorbonne, he pursued his favorite speculations. Sometimes he spend hours together in the great libraries of Paris, those catacombs of departed authors, rummaging among their hoards of dusty and obsolete works in quest of food for his unhealthy appetite. He was, in a manner, a literary ghoul, feeding in the charnel-house of decayed literature.

Wolfgang, thought solitary and recluse, was of an ardent temperament, but for a time it operated merely upon his imagination. He was too shy and ignorant of the world to make any advances to the fair, but he was a passionate admirer of female beauty, and in his lonely chamber would often lose himself in reveries on forms and faces which he had seen, and his fancy would deck out images of loveliness far surpassing the reality.

While his mind was in this excited and sublimated state, a dream produced an extraordinary effect upon him. It was of a female face of transcendent beauty. So strong was the impression made, that he dreamt of it again and again. It haunted his thoughts by day, his slumbers by night; in fine, he became passionately enamored of this shadow of a dream. This lasted so long that it became one of those fixed ideas which haunt the minds of melancholy men, and are at times mistaken for madness.

Such was Gottfried Wolfgang, and such his situation at the time I mentioned. He was returning home late on stormy night, through some of the old and gloomy streets of the Marais, the ancient part of Paris. The loud claps of thunder rattled among the high houses of the narrow streets. He came to the Place de Grève, the square, where public executions are performed. The lightning quivered about the pinnacles of the ancient Hôtel de Ville, and shed flickering gleams over the open space in front. As Wolfgang was crossing the square, he shrank back with horror at finding himself close by the guillotine. It was the height of the reign of terror, when this dreadful instrument of death stood ever ready, and its scaffold was continually running with the blood of the virtuous and the brave. It had that very day been actively employed in the work of carnage, and there it stood in grim array, amidst a silent and sleeping city, waiting for fresh victims.

Wolfgang's heart sickened within him, and he was turning shuddering from the horrible engine, when he beheld a shadowy form, cowering as it were at the foot of the steps which led up to the scaffold. A succession of vivid flashes of lightning revealed it more distinctly. It was a female figure, dressed in black. She was seated on one of the lower steps of the scaffold, leaning forward, her face hid in her lap; and her long dishevelled tresses hanging to the ground, streaming with the rain which fell in torrents. Wolfgang paused. There was something awful in this solitary monument of woe. The female had the appearance of being above the common order. He knew the times to be full of vicissitude, and that many a fair head, which had once been pillowed on down, now wandered houseless. Perhaps this was some poor mourner whom the dreadful axe had rendered desolate, and who sat here heart-broken on the strand of existence, from which all that was dear to her had been launched into eternity.

He approached, and addressed her in the accents of sympathy. She raised her head and gazed wildly at him. What was his astonishment at beholding, by the bright glare of the lighting, the very face which had haunted him in his dreams. It was pale and disconsolate, but ravishingly beautiful.

Trembling with violent and conflicting emotions, Wolfgang again accosted her. He spoke something of her being exposed at such an hour of the night, and to the fury of such a storm, and offered to conduct her to her friends. She pointed to the guillotine with a gesture of dreadful signification.

"I have no friend on earth!" said she.

"But you have a home," said Wolfgang.

"Yes— in the grave!"

The heart of the student melted at the words.

"If a stranger dare make an offer," said he, "without danger of being misunderstood, I would offer my humble dwelling as a shelter; myself as a devoted friend. I am friendless myself in Paris, and a stranger in the land; but if my life could be of service, it is at your disposal, and should be sacrificed before harm or indignity should come to you."

There was an honest earnestness in the young man's manner that had its effect. His foreign accent, too, was in his favor; it showed him not to be a hackneyed inhabitant of Paris. Indeed, there is an eloquence in true enthusiasm that is not to be doubted. The homeless stranger confided herself implicitly to the protection of the student.

He supported her faltering steps across the Pont Neuf, and by the place where the statue of Henry the Fourth had been overthrown by the populace. The storm had abated, and the thunder rumbled at a distance. All Paris was quiet; that great volcano of human passion slumbered for a while, to gather fresh strength for the next day's eruption. The student conducted his charge through the ancient streets of the Pays Latin, and by the dusky walls of the Sorbonne, to the great dingy hotel which he inhabited. The old portress who admitted them stared with surprise at the unusual sight of the melancholy Wolfgang, with a female companion.

On entering his apartment, the student, for the first time, blushed at the scantiness and indifference of his dwelling. He had but one chamber— an old-fashioned saloon— heavily carved, and fantastically furnished with the remains of former magnificence, for it was one of those hotels in the quarter nobility. It was lumbered with books and papers, and all the usual apparatus of a student, and his bed stood in a recess at one end.

When lights were brought, and Wolfgang had a better opportunity of contemplating the stranger, he was more than ever intoxicated by her beauty. Her face was pale, but of a dazzling fairness, set off by a profusion of raven hair that hung clustering about it. Her eyes were large and brilliant, with a singular expression approaching almost to wildness. As far as her black dress permitted her shape to be seen, it was of perfect symmetry. Her whole appearance was highly striking, though she was dressed in the simplest style. The only thing approaching to an ornament which she wore, was a broad black band round her neck, clasped by diamonds.

The perplexity now commenced with the student how to dispose of the helpless being thus thrown upon his protection. He thought of abandoning his chamber to her, and seeking shelter for himself elsewhere. Still he was so fascinate by her charms, there seemed to be such a spell upon his thoughts and senses, that he could not tear himself from her presence. Her manner, too, was singular and unaccountable. She spoke no more of the guillotine. Her grief had abated. The attentions of the student had first won her confidence, and then, apparently, her heart. She was evidently an enthusiast like himself, and enthusiasts soon understand each other.

In the infatuation of the moment, Wolfgang avowed his passion for her. He told her the story of his mysterious dream, and how she had possessed his heart before he had even seen her. She was strangely affected by his recital, and acknowledge to have felt an impulse towards him equally unaccountable. It was the time for wild theory and wild actions. Old prejudices and superstitions were done away; everything was under the sway of the "Goddess of Reason." Among other rubbish of the old times, the forms and ceremonies of marriage began to be considered superfluous bonds for honorable minds. Social compact were the vogue. Wolfgang was too much of theorist not to be tainted by the liberal doctrines of the day.

"Why should we separate?" said he: "our heart are united; in the eye of reason and honor we are as one. What need is there of sordid forms to bind high soul together?"

The stranger listened with emotion: she had evidently received illumination at the same school.

"You have no home nor family," continued he: "Let me be everything to you, or rather let us be everything to one another. if form is necessary, form shall be observed— there is my hand. I pledge myself to you forever."

"Forever?" said the stranger, solemnly.

"Forever!" repeated Wolfgang.

The stranger clasped the hand extended to her: "Then I am yours," murmured she, and sank upon his bosom.

The next morning the student left his bride sleeping, and sallied forth at an early hour to seek more spacious apartments suitable to the change in his situation. When he returned, he found the stranger lying with her head hanging over the bed, and one arm thrown over it. He spoke to her, but received no reply. He advanced to awaken her from her uneasy posture. On taking her hand, it was cold— there was no pulsation— her face was pallid and ghastly. In a word, she was a corpse.

Horrified and frantic, he alarmed the house. A scene of confusion ensued. The police was summoned. As the officer of police entered the room, he started back on beholding the corpse.

"Great heaven!" cried he, "how did this woman come here?"

"Do you know anything about her?" said Wolfgang eagerly.

"Do I?" exclaimed the officer: "she was guillotined yesterday."

He stepped forward; undid the black collar round the neck of the corpse, and the head rolled on the floor!

The student burst into a frenzy. "The fiend! the fiend has gained possession of me!" shrieked he; "I am lost forever."

They tried to soothe him, but in vain. He was possessed with the frightful belief that an evil spirit had reanimated the dead body to ensnare him. He went distracted, and died in a mad-house.

Here the old gentleman with the haunted head finished his narrative.

"And is this really a fact?" said the inquisitive gentleman.

"A fact not to be doubted," replied the other. "I had it from the best authority. The student told it me himself. I saw him in a mad-house in Paris."

_____________________

8: Rogue's Room

Anonymous

Mail (Adelaide) 6 Dec 1924

WHEN Lord Campion was a child of four, father had risen from a whist table in St. James' street, excusing himself politely because of an important appointment. In the raw morning a little string of post-chaises had galloped over Putney bridge, one of them daring him to fight because of a woman. An hour later they brought him back again over the bridge with a bullet in his groin.

Racing and cards and women for the father, and the same straight line for the son. In the early 'sixties there was a daughter of a noble house, famous for her beauty (though here her name is of no concern) and two men mad for the love of her. Lord Campion, the son of the duellist, and an ordinary quiet gentleman, Philip Scovell.

All one night they gambled at Campion's home at Hawkhurst, these two, hating one another silently, and Dick Helstone, a friend of both. Helstone was the maddest of the three, and it was Helstone who rose at last and laughing, said he would never play again.

But he stood white-faced and watched the others. At 2 o'clock Lord Campion dealt the last hand, and it was for this stake: the winner to have a clear field to court her they both desired. Lord Campion won and a shout came from his dry lips. Scovell congratulated him and left the room, and disappeared altogether from the places that had known him.

The day after there were servants who heard Dick Helstone and their master quarrelling, their voices big with anger.

"You won't help me, then?'' they heard Helstone say.

'I'll be shot if I do.' replied Campion.

Presently their master himself came down the wide stairs with the man who had been his friend.

'You'll hear of me again,' screamed Helstone, turning in a blind rage to the open door behind him.

'Get out!' said Lord Campion, and slammed the door.

In the week that followed Helstone tried to find Scovell, but failed. None knew of him; the quickness of his vanishing made club-talk. For all the jest he had made of it, Dick Helstone had been ruined by that night's play. Men wondered why he was so anxious about Philip Scovell.

On the last day of the week he started from the Old Shop at Brighton for a moody ride. His horse took fright at the dull, leaden surface of a little pool in the downs, and bolted down the rough road over Ditchling Beacon. From his youth up that horse had been a puller, and Helstone could not hold him.

Halfway down the hill the horse was galloping alone, and Helstone was flung on the high bank with a broken neck. When Lord Campion heard the news he drew in his breath quickly and muttered 'Thank God!'

Lord Campion married the girl who in this story has no name. Her father desired it, and his house was poor. From her mother, who was faded and tired, and wept bitterly to see her go to such a man. She went with her lips set close. He was not the man for her.

She had not known till she married him how black his life had been before she came into it. Now, little by little, she learned. As a subordinate question, her eyes had been long turned to another— to the man who had disappeared. So, little by little, too her husband knew that sometimes the winner may be the loser— in cards or love or both.

For six months they lived in silence, and then, one morning when she was dressed for riding he tried to strike her. I think the cause of his resentment was grounded pride at having made so poor a bargain. He came in under a lifted riding whip, and she gave him such a slash across the forehead that he carried it as a sign through life.

Dressed as she was, troubling for nothing, she left the house at once. At home her father was the first of her family she saw.

'They are rich through me,' she said. I will not live with that man.'  And for her all argument was done.

He began to upbraid her, but she would not answer. Drawn by the harsh voice, her mother appeared at the door.

'Mother!' she cried, and crossed the room swiftly. She had not written home, but that word told the whole chapter, and the elder woman was laughing in all happiness as she strained her daughter in her arms. Her father could put no argument side by side with that. He left them there.

A bitter, soured man was my Lord Campion, for they laughed at the story in the clubs. To his wife he never spoke again; she drove past him many times, cold, unnoticing. Once she was so close to him that she could see plainly the scar, and at that her young heart leapt.

He was more than a soured man. He was a soured coward; no man could be otherwise who had taken such a blow from a woman and ended the chapter there. The very fact that his wife lived (and none ever whispered a word against her) was a hateful thing at which he cursed when he was alone. And before he was 50 the fear came.

Some of his old companions of the cups had died— some even of that crew had shunned him when they learnt the story, and shunned him still. His fear was greater than a part of him. It was a separate thing that trod always on his heels and whispered in his ear continuously and would not let him go. Every day the scenes of his black life galloped by him and left him groping blindly,  hating everything he had done or left undone, sick and afraid. His weighty secret was a thing he could not lose. He engaged a secretary to be always with him.

'You are my own age,' said he. 'You have read the books I have read. If I am out in the streets I want you to be with me; in a crowd I want you by my side. Oh, more than anything, in a crowd.'

The secretary was a quiet man of culture, with a great knowledge of books and a little of medicine, and he perceived that had Lord Campion been left to himself he would have raved within the year.

He helped him a great deal. One morning Campion, looking at the calendar. professed a sudden whim to go to Hawkhurst. They arrived in the bleak afternoon. Hawkhurst Common was swept with a cold wind as they drove along its side.

In a great room a fire blazed in the wide old hearth, and Lord Campion shivered as he looked around the walls before he walked over to it and rubbed his cold hands at the flame. By his orders they made his bed in a small room opening out of this one.

'It is the little room I used to have,'  said he.

Tonight he seemed more than ever haunted by his black shadow, and it was in vain that his companion tried to rally him to cheerful talk. He retired early, but threw himself fully dressed on the bed. The secretary stayed in the big room, reading by the red-heaped fire.  He had been there an hour when a handle clicked and the door of the little room opened.

It needed but one glance of the secretary to tell him that Lord Campion  had been fighting with his fear. He came into the big room with nervous, shaking hands.

'You're not tired, then?'

'Not very,' said the secretary. 'And the book is good.'

'I cannot sleep,' said Lord Campion. He sat down, and his dull eyes stared into the fire. 'I think I shall not sleep again. I have tried day after day to weary my body till I was worn out. How can a man weary his mind as well? Tell me that...'

'You are restless with the change. If you were to try again perhaps?'

'I am afraid,' said Campion: 'there are eyes that watch me there, and voices that whisper. "Tell, tell...." So I got up. I must tell somebody tonight. I came to tell you.'

'Sir,' said the secretary, 'if it is something that in the morning you will wish you had not told— will it not be as well tomorrow?'

'No,' shouted Lord Campion. 'It won't do. Do you know the story— my wife and I?'

'I have heard a little.'

'I tried to strike her. She was too quick, and she gave me this— this devil's mark. I have not spoken to her since. But it's before that. Dick Helstone. Scovell, and I. It was in this room we played. It was this night, years ago.'

He looked up at the clock. It was a few minutes to twelve.

'Dick Helstone got up in the morning— tomorrow morning— and laughed, and said he would play no more. We had been playing high, and he was broke and ruined. He was of no more account then, he knew, than the beggar who sweeps the road by the clubs. Do you understand?'

'Yes, yes. And Philip Scovell?'

'What's that?' said Lord Campion. 'Of course we played on— I won and won. I said to Scovell, "Shall we go on?' and he said. "Yes, yes," just as you said it then. He was always impatient. I won more. The clock struck. God— it's the same clock there now. I cried, "The last hand, Scovell. If I win, you clear out, and it is for me to marry her if I can. If you win, I do the same." He looked at me and nodded. I dealt and won. He shook hands with me and went away. For all anybody knows of him he has been dead since then.

'The next day Dick Helstone came into my room. The Jews were round him like bees, and he wanted money. He wanted much more than I could give him. I said I could not do it. "You can," he said. "Not I," I told him. "You will," he swaggered. "Yesterday you cheated in that last hand with Scovell."

'I told him to get out. He blustered and threatened when I turned him from the house. Surely there was a curse on us three who played that night, for within the week he was thrown from his horse at Ditchling, in Sussex. I married, but my wife never loved me. Scovell was not out of her mind a day.'

Lord Campion stopped, still staring into the now dying fire.

'Well,' questioned the secretary, 'I don't see clearly. Except for Helstone's accusation— many beside yourself have been unfortunate in marriage.'

'I have not quite finished.' Lord Campion's voice was level. 'It was true. I worked the cards.' He stood up, and looked again at the clock on the mantelpiece. 'It happened in this room. We are even near the time. Scovell sat within a foot of where you are sitting now.' His voice rose. 'At this hour, in this room — it's a rogue's room, by Heaven!'

It was the secretary now who sat staring, with his chin on the palms of his hands. When he looked up Lord Campion had gone back into the inner room as abruptly as and quickly as he had come.

For a long time the secretary sat by the cold, black hearth. It was not a whim then, but a call not to be denied, which had brought Lord Campion to Hawkhurst in the forbidding winter afternoon. On this anniversary of the cross-roads the call had brought him; and it was the call which had made him rid himself of his burden, if, indeed, he were rid of it even now. Not quite destitute of feeling, then, had been Lord Campion, and the secretary saw how much he must have suffered for that deliberate shuffle of the cards of that night long ago: how he must have repented of that arrangement of the counters of his life.

But the secretary could find no pity in his heart as he sent his mind back along the record of the man. Tonight the rogue had come home to roost, and the shadow of the long-kept secret was still upon him.

Suddenly a hand tugged furiously at the handle of the door to the inner room. The rogue stood there for the second time, with ashen face and shaking hands. The secretary turned round.

'Water,' cried Lord Campion. 'My throat burns. In the dark there. I swear, a hand gripped me by the throat. I can't get away from it tonight.'

'One minute,' said the secretary.

A little squat phial came from his pocket, and there was a faint pop of a tiny cork. He held the glass toward the trembling hand.

'Drink,' and he, Lord Campion was gripped by a sudden and greater fear.

'What's this?' he shouted, in a ridiculous treble.

The hand of the secretary pulled at his trim beard. The movement left a clean face, a strong face with a wide mouth and a square-set chin.

'Philip!' cried Lord Campion.

'Many years I have lived in hell, and in the dark. Not because of that, but for the hell you gave Her... Drink,' said the secretary again, and the rogue drank.

_________________

9: The Adventure of the Table Foot

Allan Ramsay

The Bohemian magazine, Jan 1894

Nothing is known of this writer, who penned this Sherlock Holmes skit under the name "Zero".

I CALLED one morning— a crisp cold wintry December day— on my friend Thinlock Bones, for the purpose of keeping him company at breakfast, and, as usual about this time of the morning, I found him running over the agony columns of the different newspapers, quietly smiling at the egotistical private-detective advertisements. He looked up and greeted me as I entered.

"Ah, Whatsoname, how d'you do? You have not had breakfast yet. And you must be hungry. I suppose that is why you drove, and in a hansom too. Yet you had time to stay and look at your barometer. You look surprised. I can easily see— any fool would see it— that you've not breakfasted, as your teeth and mouth are absolutely clean, not a crumb about. I noticed it as you smiled on your entry. You drove— it's a muddy morning and your boots are quite clean. In a hansom— don't I know what time you rise? How then could you get here so quickly without doing it in a hansom? A bus or four-wheeler couldn't do it in the time. Oh! The barometer business. Why, it's as plain as a pikestaff. It's a glorious morning, yet you've brought an umbrella thinking that it would rain. And why should you think it would rain unless the barometer told you so? I see, too, some laborer pushed up against you as you came along. The mud on your shoulder, you know."

"It was a lamppost that did it," I answered.

"It was a laborer," quietly said Bones.

At that moment a young man was shown in. He was as pale as death and trembling in every limb. Thinlock Bones settled himself for business, and, as was the usual habit with him when he was about to think, he put his two long tapered hands to his nose.

"What can I do for you, sir?" asked Bones. "Surely a young swell like you, with plenty of money, a brougham, living in the fashionable part of the West End, and the son of a Peer, can't be in trouble."

"Good God, you're right, how do you know it all?" cried the youth.

"I deduct it," said Thinlock, "you tell me it all yourself. But proceed."

"My name is St. Timon—"

"Robert St. Timon," put in Bones.

"Yes, that is so, but—"

"I saw it in your hat," said Bones.

"I am Robert St. Timon, son of Lord St. Timon, of Grosvenor Square, and am—"

"Private Secretary to him," continued Thinlock. "I see a letter marked Private and Confidential addressed to your father sticking out of your pocket."

"Quite correct," went on St. Timon, "thus it was that in my confidential capacity I heard one day from my father of an attachment, an infatuation that someone had for him, an elderly—"

"Lady," said Thinlock Bones, from the depths of his chair, showing how keenly he was following the depths of the plot as it was unfolded to him by his peculiar habit of holding his bloodless hands to his nose.

"Right again," said the young man. "Mr. Bones, you are simply marvelous. How do you manage it?"

"It is very simple," Bones replied, "but I will not stop to explain. Whatsoname here understands my little methods quite well now. He will tell you by-and-by."

"It was an elderly and immensely wealthy lady, then," Robert St. Timon continued, "named the Honorable Mrs. Goran—"

"A widow," Bones interrupted.

"Wonderful," said St. Timon, "the Honorable Mrs. Goran, a widow. It was she who was simply head over ears in love with my father, Lord St. Timon. He, although a widower, cared little for her but—"

"A lot for her money," said the quick-witted detective.

"How do you divine these things? You guess my innermost thoughts, the words before they are out of my mouth. How did you know it?" St. Timon asked.

"I know the human race," Thinlock Bones answered.

"Well, if he could manage he wanted to inherit her money without marrying her. Would she leave him her riches if he did not propose, was the question? How to find out? He was a comparatively young man and did not unnecessarily wish to tie himself to an octogenarian, although a millionairess. But he mustn't lose her wealth. If when she died he was not her husband, would he get the money? If the worst came to the worst he must marry her sooner than let the gold slip out of his grasp. But he must not espouse the old lady needlessly. How was he to find out? A project struck him, and the means offered itself. We were both asked to a dinner party at the Countess Plein de Beer's where we knew the Honorable Mrs. Goran would be present, and-

"You both accepted," interrupted Bones. "Oh," he went on before the other could ask the reasons of his swift and accurate deductions, "oh, it's very simple. I saw in The Daily Telegraph's 'London Day by Day.' "

"Yes, we accepted," continued St. Timon, "and this was our plan of campaign: I was to take the old doting lady down to dinner and to insinuate myself into her confidence— aided by good wine, of which she was a devoted admirer— in a subtle fashion and thus to extract the secret out of her. I was to find out— by the time she had arrived at the Countess's old port— whether my father was her heir or not. Whether she had left him her money without being his wife. Time was short, and if she had not my father was to propose that very night after dinner. The signal agreed on between my father and me was that if he was her heir without being her husband I was to kick him under the table and he would not propose— otherwise he would. Oh! Mr. Bones," he sobbed, turning his piteous white face to Thinlock, "this is where I want your great intellect to help me, to aid me and explain this mystery.

"The plan worked admirably," he went on, "I gleaned every fact about the disposition of her money after her death from her when she was in her cups—or rather her wineglasses. My father was her absolute and sole heir, and I thanked the heavens with all my heart that I was spared such a stepmother. I kicked, as arranged, my father under the table, but oh! Mr. Bones, immediately after dinner my father went to her and asked her to be his wife and she has accepted him! What does it all mean, what does it all mean!!"

"That you kicked the foot of the table instead!" quietly replied the greatest detective of modern times as he unraveled the intricate plot and added another success to his brilliant career.

________________

10: The Winged Ones

H. Field Leslie

Action Stories Sep 1926

Hal Field Leslie flourished in the 1920s and early 1930s, writing also as H. Field Leslie. Nothing else is known.

FROM the dim thread of an ancient trail that wound its way among grim skeletons of tortured desert growths, a pallid cloud of dust rose and hovered and moved slowly on. Stirred by the plodding hoofs of a pony, it lifted up in soft gray puffs to mingle in a choking drift that kept even pace with horse and rider— and with the two dark specks high above in the burnished arch of sky that were two patient buzzards wheeling.

The rider's eyes were bloodshot from the sting of dust and the fierce glare of sunlight that set all that silent world aflame. He kept his gaze grimly fixed upon another dust cloud weaving among distant low pinnacles of jagged rock where Roth and the Mexican, Vasquez, carrying with them a scrap of paper that was the key to a fabulous treasure, rode south ahead of him along that forgotten Camino Real.

His name was Splint Moraine, this lone rider on the old King's Road. He was small and thin and wiry. His visage was dark and his eyes were as bright and hard and cruel as any ferret's. His hands, when they moved, were like two brown, restless snakes. He was— or had been until some thirty hours ago— a jackal of the race tracks, a follower of the crowds, a pickpocket. But these thirty hours since he had swung into saddle at Tia Juana in stealthy pursuit of Roth and the Mexican, less than two days of contact with the hot savagery of the desert, had been sufficient to transform him from a slinking pickpocket, intent only upon watching his chance to steal, to a reptile as deadly as any that crawled in all that arid vastness.

Thirst had played its part in that transformation. The only water hole encountered had been dry. Now his canteen was empty. He tried to kick his patient pony into faster pace, and he cursed aloud the blasting heat, the dust, the fantastic leering skeletons of gray-green vegetation. Soulfully he consigned the whole of Baja California to perdition.

Yet he kept doggedly on, held unchanging the distance between himself and that drifting dust cloud ahead that seemed ever on the point of vanishing from his ken. And as he rode he found a measure of solace in reviewing mentally that chance conversation he had overheard at the bar of the Ultima Chanza between the huge and evil-visaged Roth and the slender Mexican, Vasquez. Unguarded words were they that had set avarice flaming in Splint Moraine's twisted little soul.

"Of a certainty there is treasure there," the Mexican was saying to Roth when Splint came unnoticed to the bar beside them and ordered his fiery brew. "Treasure enough to make any two men rich beyond their wildest hopes— and all to be had for the finding and carrying away!"

The big man toyed with his glass for a moment, considering. "If I did not know you for a man of your word, Carlos," he rumbled finally, "I should call you a liar and the story a fairy tale. Exactly where is this forgotten shrine?"

The men were conversing in Spanish. Splint understood the tongue and he listened eagerly while the Mexican made answer to the other's question.

"One does not reach it in a day, señor. It lies deep in the wild and lonely Sierra San Pedro Matir, far beyond the tumbled ruins of the ancient Mission San Borja. And that holy edifice was once considered one of the most inaccessible places on the face of the earth. Although I have never been beyond San Borja I think I know well the trail and the location of the shrine, for often have I heard my father describe both when speaking of boyhood pilgrimages, carrying offerings of silver. Legend has it that the good padres secreted all the offerings of gold and silver and jewels that came to the shrine in some nearby cavern. And there the treasure lies, intact to this day."

"Do none know where the stuff is hidden?"

"But few living, senor. I think perhaps my father knows. Some of our old—"

"Then why has it never been disturbed?" interrupted Roth.

"Because our people of the mountains are simple people and most devout," explained the Mexican. "They have fear."

"And you?" inquired Roth. "Have you no fear?"

"Of a certainty, my friend! Not for worlds would I commit such sacrilege. But I have learned much since I came down from the mountains. Were I to guide a good friend to this ruined shrine and then my back should happen to be conveniently turned—" The man Carlos shrugged expressively. "Could I be held responsible?"

Roth laughed.

"Carlos Vasquez, you are a damned hypocrite and a rascal. We shall start for that treasure in the morning. Now show me the route we must travel."

Upon the back of a manila envelope that Roth took from his pocket and tossed down upon the bar, Vasquez began to make lines. Splint Moraine cursed softly then because the great bulk of the man Roth prevented him from watching the progress of the Mexican's silver pencil.

"We ride south along the old Camino Real, senor," Vasquez explained as he sketched the route. "Here, two days down, is the deserted Mine of the Three Shafts. I make a cross for that. We should find water there— but one must carry a pail and a long rope to reach it. Next we come to the mission hamlet of San Gorgonio. There we may procure both food and lodging if we should wish. Several miles beyond the mission and a little aside from the trail to Borja is the house of my father. We will send an Indian runner ahead from the hamlet with word of our coming, so that my venerable sire may have mules in readiness for our pilgrimage into the deep mountains, where horses would be useless. This he will be glad to do, for it is now twelve years since he has looked upon my face."

"Twelve years," commented Roth. "Think you, Carlos, he will know his rascally son?"

"He will know."

The Mexican placed the tip of a slender forefinger upon a zig-zag scar that lay across his swarthy cheek. "He did that, my gentle father, with his mule whip when I was a boy— and suffered contrition ever after."

"Humph! Go on with your map!"

"From my father's house, here," continued the Mexican, "the trail leads to old San Borja. Another cross for those ancient ruins. From there a dim trail leads off into the mountains in this direction. Follow my pencil carefully, señor...."

Again Splint Moraine, attention strained to fiddle pitch that he might miss no word of that explanation, cursed under his breath because he could not look upon the map at this tantalizing moment.

"A long day's journey over the roughest trail imaginable brings you to a mighty gorge among the mountains— like this, señor. It is here, midway of the gorge as I remember my father's words, that the shrine was located. And somewhere within this circle is the treasure we seek."

"And how are we to find it, once we get there?" demanded Roth.

"By searching carefully, señor. Unless my father knows its hiding place and may be persuaded to speak."

Roth picked up the envelope with its penciled lines and dots and crosses and restored it to his pocket.

"I'll keep the map, Carlos, in case something should befall you and I be left upon my own resources in that God-forsaken country. And now let's have another drink on it."

Splint fancied he detected in these last words of Roth's an undercurrent of sinister meaning, a significance that boded ill for Carlos Vasquez. And as he slipped away and took up his station near the wide doorway where he could keep an eye upon the two men lingering under the brilliant lights at the bar, Splint chuckled grimly to himself.

Certainly the Mexican would never look upon that treasure. And neither would the evil Roth if he, Splint Moraine, could manage to get his fingers on the map and beat them to it. And so, when the two men left the Ultima Chanza together, Splint was upon their heels like a shadow.

Bad luck had been against him. He had found no opportunity that night to lift the map.... And so here was Splint Moraine, riding saddle-galled upon the old King's Road, cursing dust and buzzards and blasting heat, yet holding grimly to the trail....

The afternoon hours wore away and the sun swung low in a bank of purple and crimson haze. Twilight came, and the darkness swiftly. Soon a pinpoint flicker of light far ahead on the trail told Splint that Roth and the Mexican had halted and built their supper fire. Splint dismounted and stretched his stiffened legs. He was devilishly thirsty. That would be the Mine of the Three Shafts where the two men were camped, he reflected. Water there. But there would be no quenching thirst for him until Roth and Vasquez should be soundly asleep, so that he might safely accomplish his purpose.

In the beginning he had intended only to steal the map and reach the treasure before them. But the drag of each weary mile he had traveled this day had served to convince him of the futility of that plan. It had been all he could do to keep in view the dust cloud that marked the going of the two riders. They were accustomed to the saddle and traveled fast. Those two must be removed entirely from his path.... So, while the great stars grew overhead and the moon came up to soften the harshness of the land with a green and ghostly radiance, he chafed away the hours until midnight.

The distant campfire had long since died. Splint rode on a little way, then dismounted and tied his horse to a cactus and crept forward on stealthy feet. Taking full advantage of every bit of shadow afforded by rock or hummock or fluted giant columns of cardones, he drew near the camp unchallenged. An automatic of small caliber was in Splint's pocket. But he was an indifferent shot and dared not chance its use until he should be close enough to be sure his work would be good. He knew full well that one bungled shot would mean for him the end of the treasure trail.

The two men lay in shadow at the base of a low backbone of rock. Foot by slow foot, crawling belly down upon the sand now, Splint wormed his way toward them. In the tenuous shadow cast by a clump of ocatilla whips he paused to reconnoiter— and at what he saw a chill of fear struck him immobile. Winking like a dull crimson firefly afloat in the pool of darkness where the men lay, glowed the burn of a cigaret.

One of the two was awake! Splint flattened like a lizard hiding. He had not reckoned on the pair keeping a night watch. With infinite caution, daring scarcely to breathe, he retreated until distance made it safe for him to get to his feet. He quickly found his horse and rode back up the trail until gaunt pinnacles of naked stone beside the way gave him hiding. Here he rolled himself in his blanket against the chill of the desert night. He slept fitfully, nursing thirst until the dawn, for he had no means of knowing that Vasquez, a light sleeper, had merely chanced to awaken and was enjoying a midnight cigaret before drifting off to slumber again.

Splint dared build no morning fire. He ate his unsavory breakfast cold. And after he had waited until he was reasonably certain that the two men had broken camp and gone, he swung out into the trail.

Splint reached the mine shortly, and the smoking embers of a breakfast fire. The gray timbers of all three shaft houses were fallen into wreckage, leaving the black pits open to receive moisture in the season of rains. He found the shaft where Roth and the Mexican had drawn water. He blessed that chance remark of Vasquez's concerning the need of a rope and pail. He had brought both. Eagerly he sunk his pail into the dark depths and drew it brimming. The water was brackish and carried the odor of stagnation, but Splint drank it in great gulps. After his thirst had been appeased he filled his canteen, watered his horse and pressed on.

Twice during that forenoon Splint Moraine caught a view of the two mounted men, tiny figures crawling far ahead. The character of the country changed as he progressed, growing rough and broken. He entered at last a great gorge walled on either side with scoured cliffs. At mid-afternoon he came suddenly out upon a wider space and saw ahead the green of irrigated fields and orchards and the great bulk of a bell-towered mission.

For a while he debated whether to linger here where he had halted or to go boldly into the little hamlet as any honest traveler along the King's Road might go. He finally decided to tarry a while before showing himself. For he guessed that Roth and Vasquez having reached the mission so early in the afternoon, would probably not stay there the night but would replenish supplies and go on. He retraced his way into the throat of the gorge, withdrew behind a litter of boulders at one side of the trail. There he made himself comfortable until the sun was close to setting.

Splint rode into the one street of the little town in time to see his quarry riding out the other end. He bought tortillas and coffee, idled a while over the lunch, then followed through the dusk.

Throughout that day Roth and the Mexican had set a pace that taxed all Splint Moraine's resources to maintain. He hoped they would make camp early, for he was saddle sore and weary. He was taunted, too, by the growing fear that he would not be able to carry out his evil designs, that he would be cheated out of the treasure that lay at the end of the rapidly shortening trail. That disturbing thought roused him to desperation. Again tonight he would attempt to get the map, would try to finish those two who stood between him and uncounted riches. He shut his thin lips grimly. If he had half a chance, the deed would be done!

Roth and Vasquez did make camp soon. When their fire had died to a dull red glow of embers, Splint stalked the pair again, crept upon them with all the silence of a snake slipping from cover to cover. He reached a screen of boulders that lay a scant dozen feet away from the recumbent men. He listened keenly. Deep and steady breathing told him that both Roth and the Mexican were sleeping soundly. So sure of their treasure, now, thought Splint, that they were not troubling to keep guard. He left the boulders, breathing a fervent hope that the horses hobbled at no great distance away would not wind him and snort an alarm.

On he crept. The distance between himself and the sleeping men narrowed to a body's length. And then the sharp streaking flash of Splint's automatic cut into the night.

That first bullet caught the Mexican, Vasquez, fair and true in the temple. Beyond a convulsive flexing of muscles he never moved. But Roth, at that first crashing report, flung his blankets aside and was half erect, cursing, before Splint could swing the muzzle of his pistol on the shadowy bulk of the man's big body. In a blind panic of fear Splint fired until the magazine of his weapon was empty. Roth lunged forward, choking horribly under that deadly stream of bullets, striving to get his great hands upon the thing that had struck so viciously in the night. He fell with the life twitching out of his ponderous frame at Splint's very feet.

When Splint realized that both the men were dead, realized the ease with which the deed had been accomplished, his panic left him and he smiled a grim, cold smile. With swiftly moving hands he explored Roth's pockets and found the map. Kicking the embers of the dying fire into life, he fed the flame with handy sticks until it gave him light enough to study the route laid out by the dead Mexican's pencil.

Splint was absorbed in this task when his ears caught the faint tinkle of a mule bell coming down the trail from the direction in which the treasure seekers had been headed. Swiftly, he considered what to do. If he should leave the fire and flee in the darkness the traveler would discover the bodies and raise a hue and cry that would hound him far beyond hope of ever reaching the treasure. Better to hide the bodies. Then whoever might be approaching would suspect nothing.

Spurred to action by the growing music of the bell, the murderer dragged the bodies of Roth and the Mexican out of sight behind the nearby boulders. He was smoking calmly beside the fire when the traveler came within its radiance. He was an old man, this wayfarer, with skin like wrinkled leather and hair as white as mountain snow. He wore a tall sombrero of straw and a dingy scrape. He was mounted on a scrawny mule. And Splint discerned two or three more of the beasts, without riders, in the shadowy dark behind the old Mexican.

The old man greeted Splint courteously.

"I beg the warmth of your fire, señor, for an old man. The night is chill."

Splint grunted inhospitably. He had no desire for this man to linger. The weary ancient might elect to stay the night! He must get rid of the unwelcome caller as quickly as might be possible.

"You have far to go, old man?" he queried as the venerable Mexican dismounted and spread his bony hands to the blaze.

"Not far, señor. I go to meet my son. A runner from the mission brought me word of his coming, with another man, and also a request that I have mules in readiness for a journey into the mountains. I bring the mules now, for I could not wait his arrival. When I saw your fire in the distance I thought it might be the place of his camping, and my heart beat faster, señor. I have not looked upon the face of my son for twelve long years."

Surprise flashed across the dark face of Splint Moraine— surprise that quickly gave way to glint of cunning in his hard eyes. Here was luck indeed. Old Vasquez himself a possible guide to the treasure!

"I, too, am headed into the mountains," said Splint. "I seek the old shrine beyond San Borja."

The old Mexican regarded him curiously across the flickering fire.

"It is in ruins, señor. No man goes there now!"

Splint said nothing for a moment. He occupied the interval of silence by refilling the magazine of his automatic. When he had finished he laid the weapon across his knee so that its muzzle pointed at the lank midriff of the old man.

"I seek not alone the shrine," declared Splint coldly. "I seek also the hidden treasure there. The offerings! Gold, silver, jewels...! I have a map, old one, but you shall guide me there and save me time and trouble."

A look of fear leaped into the old man's eyes.

"No! No!" he protested. "Señor, there is no treasure!"

"That is a lie," said Splint coldly. His beady eyes narrowed upon the old man's countenance. "A lie. And you know well the hiding place of that treasure. You shall reveal it to me!"

"No, señor. There is no treasure," repeated the old Mexican. "Long since has the chest been despoiled by some vandal, and the place is accursed. It is now but the abode of the Winged Ones! No man ventures there. The wrath of the Winged Ones—"

"Hell take your Winged Ones," interrupted Splint. "I fear nothing! You shall guide me to that treasure."

"Señor, there is no—"

"Enough! That lie will not save you from going with me."

"But I cannot go, señor. I am on my way to meet my son. It is twelve years—"

"Look you, old one!" snarled Splint.

He seized a brand from the fire and got to his feet and took the old man by his skinny arm. "Come with me!"

Splint led the old man, who protested feebly, to the rocks where he had dragged the bodies of his victims. He whirled the brand into fire and thrust it close to illumine the face of the dead Mexican— the face of Vasquez with the bullet hole in his temple and the livid scar across his cheek.

"Amor di Dios!" cried the old man. "It is my son!"

He would have fallen to his knees, praying, but Splint rammed the muzzle of the automatic into his ribs and jerked him roughly upright.

"Your son, yes," he spat out viciously. "And you will go with great speed to join him in hell if you refuse to do as I wish. An hour ago he lived. An hour ago I shot him. And there is another bullet waiting for you if you prove obstinate. You will lead me to the treasure, now?"

The old Mexican gazed fixedly for a long moment into the crafty eyes of his son's murderer.

Finally he said softly:

"It shall be as you command, señor."

Splint grunted his satisfaction and led the old man back to the fire. With the strong cord he had used to draw water at the Mine of the Three Shafts, he bound the unresisting Mexican securely.

"I tie you, old one, so that you may not play me false while I sleep," said Splint as he tightened the last knot. "We start at dawn."

At the first hint of morning light Splint Moraine was awake and had the old man free. Beyond a suggestion that his captor abandon his horse for a mount on one of the mules, the old Mexican held silence unbroken.

Before the falling of dark they came to the tumbled ruins of the old Mission San Borja. Here they spent the night, corraling the mules within the still standing remnants of adobe walls, and themselves spreading blankets in the ruined nave. Again Splint carefully tied the old man as a measure of safety.

In the gray chill of early dawn the old Mexican indicated to Splint the trail they must take away from the ruined mission into the somber mountains. And Splint assured himself by a glance at the map that the old man was guiding him aright. Hour after weary hour the dim trail wormed its way into the heart of the mighty splintered hills. It led them now toiling up the boulder-studded bottom of some rough-hewed canyon, now whipsawing their way up along the bold face of some sheer precipice by a way that was no more than a path for a mountain goat.

Time after time Splint caught glimpses of tawny cougars slinking away to vanish in some high cavern among the rocks. In that forbidding world of jagged peaks and dark gorges the very silence of his patient guide began to work upon Splint Moraine's nerves. A vague and indefinable foreboding of evil hovering, of death lurking in the mysteries ahead, began to lay hold upon his overwrought imagination. But thought of fabulous treasure almost within his grasp was an anchor to hold him fast to the grim realities of the journey.

Dusk was not far distant when they came into the shadow of a mighty gorge flanked on either hand by towering cliffs and bleak mountains upthrust to the darkening sky. Midway of the gorge the old Mexican called a halt. Pointing to worn steps cut in the wall of the cliff, steps leading up to a great niche where fallen timbers were tangled like the bones of long dead men, he said:

"The shrine, senor."

"Never mind the shrine. Show me the place of the treasure!" commanded Splint.

Without more words the old man led the way along the bottom of the gorge for what seemed to Splint Moraine an interminable distance. At last he paused and directed Splint's attention to a dusky orifice high up on the face of a cracked and wind-cut cliff.

"A deep cavern is there, senor. Within is the Chest of the Offerings."

Splint Moraine's blood was hammering in his veins.

"How do you reach it? Show me the way!"

With the point of a bony forefinger the old man picked out for Splint the faint cracks and seams and inequalities of stone that would give him hold for hands and feet. Eager to be at the treasure, Splint began to climb.

It required the exercise of all Splint Moraine's wiry agility to make his way up that bold face of cliff until he at last stood upon the lip of stone at the mouth of the cavern. Looking down, he saw the face of the old man upturned, watching him with a curious intentness.

Splint had a fleeting moment of apprehension. He remembered vividly those tawny cougars he had glimpsed along the trail. He wondered if this cave might be the den of such beasts. But the lure of treasure was strong. It overrode his momentary fears and drew him on into the shadows that filled the cavern.

Once inside that vault of stone, Splint struck a match to dispel the dusky shadows and looked eagerly about him. Ah! The old Mexican had not played him false! The chest, a massive receptacle of hewed wood bound and studded with hand-wrought iron of quaint design, stood upon a low shelf of rock at the far end of the cavern. The chest was old, very old, and holes of boring insects large as a finger were in profusion all along its front. This much Splint saw before the match burned out.

He did not pause to light another. He leaped swiftly forward and threw back the ponderous lid of the chest. With an inarticulate cry of triumph he plunged both arms deep in its interior, groping hands tearing feverishly at a substance, that had the feel of tough and ancient parchment....

AT the base of the great cliff, face upturned and eyes burning with a strange smoldering fire upon the opening where the murderer of his son had disappeared, stood the old man, watching... listening...  And a smile of calm satisfaction stole over his wrinkled face as there came to his ears from the depths of the cavern a muffled shriek— the cry of a man in deadly agony.

With a swift agility that belied his hoary years the old man herded the mules a little way down the gorge. He halted where he had full view of the cavern's mouth. And quickly the murderer appeared there, screaming and desperately fighting, beating at the air about his face.

He threshed wildly about upon the high lip of stone. Suddenly he lost his balance, pitched over the edge, and came whirling down the cliff face to meet the stony floor of the gorge with bone-breaking impact.

Behind him, all about him, settling to attack until their numbers hid face and hands and grotesquely floundering body, streamed an angry horde of moscardones— those great vicious black and yellow hornets of Baja California.

After half an hour had passed and the swarm of moscardones had returned to their ruined home in the long-empty Chest of the Offerings, the old man came in the twilight and stood looking down upon the blotched and swollen face of the broken thing that had been Splint Moraine.

"Carlos, thou art avenged!" he whispered softly.

Then he spurned with his boot the body of the murderer. "And thou, animale! Didst like those caresses of the Winged Ones?"

___________________

11: The Burglary in Middlesex Street

Basil Thomson

1861-1931

From Mr. Pepper, Investigator, 1925

"I HAVE HAD a visit to-day from a new client— the representative of the Ruby Fire and Burglary Insurance Company," said Mr. Pepper. "A claim has been made against them for a burglary at a warehouse in Middlesex Street of a very daring kind. The warehouse was full of bales of cloth and furs valued at nineteen hundred and twenty-eight pounds, seventeen shillings and fourpence. The warehouse was safely locked up by the proprietor himself at six o'clock on Wednesday evening. When he opened it at nine o'clock on Thursday morning he found that a clean sweep had been made of the whole of the goods; there was absolutely nothing left except some waste paper, a bottle and a tumbler and an old broom. My client had just come from the place.

"A remarkable feature of this robbery is that according to the proprietor the door had not been tampered with and the windows were securely latched on the inside. The police at Leman Street were telephoned for and a detective sergeant called. After taking down particulars he went all over the premises, shook his head, said nothing and went away. Presently the Divisional Detective Inspector, his superior officer, came back with him and the two questioned the proprietor again. They asked for a ladder and climbed up to the fanlight over the door; then they conversed in low whispers and went off to question the neighbours. They never returned to the scene of the robbery.

"When the claim for the insurance money was made one of the Company's inspectors called at Leman Street to ask what the police were doing in the matter. He saw a cop in uniform who went to make enquiries, and then returned to say that they had no record of any burglary in Middlesex Street on Wednesday night. In reply to further questions, he admitted that a complaint had been made by a Mr. Israel Cohen that his warehouse had been entered and robbed, but that no case of warehouse-breaking or burglary was on the records."

"Carelessness, I suppose," I said, seeing that I was expected to say something.

"Not at all. The police will never commit themselves to burglary insurance people. It meant that they suspected Mr. Israel Cohen of making a fraudulent claim."

"You mean that they think he did it himself?"

My Chief nodded. "And what do you think?"

"Wait. My client has heard a story, which he has not yet verified, that this Israel Cohen has been a very unlucky man. He had two other warehouses in London, and there were fires in both of them. He was insured in both instances and the Companies, after some demur, paid the claims. Now he has this burglary."

"Then you agree with the police."

"The police, as I told you the other day, are nearly always wrong. It is not a question what I think, but what you think."

This from a great master to a pupil of a few days quite deprived me of speech. I am afraid that I gaped at him.

"I don't expect you to make up your mind on what I have told you. Take your time. Go and see Cohen and his premises for yourself, and then make up your mind. Remember that to remove all these goods the thieves must have had a horse and van. Remember, too, that if we"— (I am certain that he used the plural)— "if we succeed in clearing up the case we shall have all the Company's work for the future."

It was a terrific responsibility that was thrust upon me.

I saw Mr. Cohen the same afternoon. He was of the ancient faith— a man of about 5 feet 3, pasty in complexion and nourished to excess. So were his family, who were the only employees of the firm. His son, a youth of 21, who favoured his father though he had yet to grow three chins, was the warehouse porter; his daughter kept the books.

I represented myself as coming from the Insurance Company and he stiffened at once.

"I don't know what it is all about," he whined.  "Business is business  you insure my stock against burglars and I pay you a very high premium. Burglars come and you do not pay up. It will give your Company a very bad name when I tell the others."

"Yes, Mr. Cohen, when we are satisfied that there has been a burglary we shall pay up at once. Business is, as you say, business, and my business is to go over the ground with you and report."

By this time the son and daughter had joined him and were looking darkly at me out of their Oriental eyes.

"Very well," he said, "you shall see everything. Sophy, bring this shentleman the books."

I can never understand accounts, but as he did not know my weak spot I took it that the books did show that he had goods worth nineteen hundred pounds and that he had booked a number of orders from Jewish tailors for the cloth.

"How do you think that the burglars got in? You say that you locked the door yourself that evening. Do you suggest that they had had a special key made?"

"No, not at all. I tell the detective that it was up to the police to find out how they got in. That is not my business, but if you want to know what I think, I think that they got in through the fan-light."

I moved a table to the door, put a chair upon it and climbed up to examine the fanlight. The wood-work under the fanlight was a quarter of an inch deep in dust which had not been disturbed for half a generation.

I pointed this out to him and told him (and in this I anticipated the truth) that it would have needed a van to remove the cloth and that no one in the street had seen a van there that night. They would certainly have noticed it if there had been one.

"What will you report to the Company?" he asked.

"I will search the place before I reply to that question," I said. As he made no objection I went over the whole place from top to bottom, opening cupboards, examining windows and even the chimney in the room used as an office. When I had finished he pointed to an empty bottle and glass and said that the burglars had left them; they did not belong to the office.

I examined them in what I hoped was a professional manner, and then in a flash I saw that I had lighted on a most important piece of evidence. I asked him for a box large enough to contain the tumbler and in this I packed the glass with infinite precaution. For I had seen on the surface of the tumbler a thumb or finger-print. It was beautifully defined, and though I was not very clear how it would lead to the identification of the criminal, I knew that a number of clever people did know.

I was much too excited to waste any more of my time with the Cohen family. With my precious  burden I walked till I found a taxi and was at the office within ten minutes; perhaps I was a little incoherent. At any rate, my Chief asked me to sit down and collect myself.

"Do I understand then that you have found a finger impression on a tumbler which Cohen says was left by the burglars? It is new in my experience for burglars to bring their own glasses. The impression may be more important than we think."

"It may be Cohen's."

"That would prove nothing. Cohen would say that he made it in picking up the glass. Bring it into the laboratory."

He examined it under a lens.

"It is a very clear impression and the thumb was not very clean. Usually these chance impressions are blurred. Now, Mr. Meddleston-Jones, will you please press both your thumbs on this sheet of paper— quite a usual formality which should never be neglected."

I did as I was told. They made no visible mark. He took up a wide-mouthed bottle full of powdered charcoal, spilled some of it on the paper and dusted it gently backwards and forwards with a camel-hair brush. Then he shook off the powder, and there stood my two thumb-prints as in a developed photographic print. He compared them with the print on the glass, talking softly to himself.

"Quite an ordinary formality, but a very necessary formality;" and then he fixed me with those penetrating light blue eyes of his. "Mr. Meddleston-Jones, the  print on the glass is that of your right thumb. Come and see for yourself."

"It must be the thumb-print of my double," I said. "I was most careful."

"No two prints are identical unless they are made by the same person."

The man was right; the two prints were identical in every particular. I was a little indignant, not so much at his having found me out, but at his having suggested that my thumb was not very clean.

"Has Cohen any enemies?" he asked.

"He has me for one," I replied. "His office where the family had been having tea smelt like the Small Cat House at the Zoo."

Mr. Pepper's face became a little stern; I had noticed before that he did not approve of witticisms.

"You say that the books and invoices prove that he was in possession of the cloth?"

I had said nothing of the kind.

"He showed me a mass of papers, but of course, they may have been faked. It would help me enormously to hear your theory."

"My theory is this. Cohen had twice claimed insurance money for fires at his premises. He would not tempt Providence again by claiming on a bogus burglary. Therefore during the night the cloth was moved. I think that he had an enemy— probably a business rival who knew that he had a number of orders to fill. This enemy planned to get a false key made— not a very difficult problem in these  days. He hired men— a number of men— and carried the whole of the cloth to a hiding-place near by. A spiteful thing to do, you will say, but people are spiteful and will pay large sums of money to gratify their spite. Cohen may be a Zionist for all we know, and the other man an Anti-Zionist. We don't know enough about Cohen."

I felt that I knew quite enough about Cohen, but I did not say so.

"You must go back and make friends with the man— win his confidence— play with his children, dandle them on your knee— (I thought of the two I had seen and trembled)— buy chocolates for the wife, take tea with her, encourage her to talk."

I took my hat and left him. There was no knowing what other liberties he might ask me to take with the Cohen family.

When I reached the warehouse the two young Cohens were in the street and their father was locking the door.

"Ah !" he said, "you've come back. Is it all right? Will the Company pay me my money?"

"No, they won't."

He leaned up against the door and sobs began to shake his fat shoulders. The daughter ran to comfort him, looking wickedly at me over her shoulder. The son sauntered on; there was no one else in the street. I drew nearer. "They won't until I am able to tell them more than I know yet. Are you a Zionist?"

"Me a Zionist?" he hissed through his sobs.  "What has that to do with it? I am a ruined man, not a Zionist, and my family will have to beg their bread; and you ask me whether I am a Zionist."

"I am going to ask you a great deal more. Come back into your office where we can talk quietly."

He came, as I thought, rather unwillingly. "Come, Sophy; the shentleman will speak with us in the office."

But I had had enough of Sophy and her brother. I wanted to attack the fortress without its bastions. On the question of Sophy I was quite firm and with one withering glance the young lady went off to her tea and shrimps.

When we were seated I said, "Have you any enemies, Mr. Cohen?"

I have never seen a man drowning among floating straws, but I know from the convulsive tremor that ran through this man's triple tier of chins exactly how he would clutch.

"Enemies? Yes, every honest man who tries to do his duty has enemies. There are bad people in Middlesex Street, sir. In that house right opposite I have an enemy. He tries to steal my customers from me— sells them cloth that falls to pieces in your hand— and at prices that no honest man can compete with— damaged goods, salvage, rotten stuff full of holes. Yes, he is an enemy and I have others who would stick at nothing. Funny that you should say enemies. As I lay awake last night I said to myself, 'You have an enemy. An enemy has burgled you and stolen your good cloth.' That is the whole truth."

"Could they have taken an impression of your key?"

He laid a fat finger on my arm to press home his remarks.

"You never know what such people will do. One of them come around my place only last week. I don't know what he wanted; only talk and talk with his eyes going like this." He slid his eyes to the corners of their sockets and looked incredibly sly. "Perhaps he took an impression; perhaps he has skeleton key. Do anything— that one."

He was so eager to clinch my suggestion that a cold suspicion took hold of me.

"Do you know, Mr. Cohen, I have an idea. You just sit here while I run upstairs and have another look round. I believe I know a way in which they could have got the goods out of the house. No, don't trouble to come up; I would rather look about by myself."

I ran up the rickety stairs before he had time to get under weigh. I wanted to see whether the upper windows could have been used. The upper floor contained the office, a little cubby hole of a place, boarded off from the main room which was filled with wooden racks for the bales of cloth.

The only window was in the office; the other window had been converted into a wooden doorway with a pulley over it for hoisting bales from the street. The window was very dirty and dust was thick upon the sill. The dusky Sophy who passed her working hours in this den was not particular.

I opened the window with  some difficulty to examine the outer sill. It was clear that it had not been opened for years. The dusky Sophy did not care for fresh air.

I was about to shut it when the figure of a small boy appeared at an open window exactly opposite. It belonged to the house of Mr. Cohen's enemy. Behind the small boy, in the obscurity of the room, was an older person who seemed to be directing the small boy's movements which I took at first to be some kind of gymnastic exercise.

It was some time before I realized that he was trying to attract my attention. He would first throw out his hand towards me, then throw up his head and point obliquely towards the sky.

I shook my head and made as if to close the window. At this his mentor urged him to more passionate gestures. He beckoned with one hand as if inviting me to take flight across the street like a swallow, and with the other he made violent gestures with a pointing forefinger, but always far above my head.

To humour him I leaned far out of my window and craned my head upward. This provoked furious approbation in dumb show. It was like the game of "Hot and Cold." Gradually it dawned upon my rather dull intelligence that he was pointing to my roof. I pointed upwards and tried to indicate a question with my eyebrows.

The ecstasy displayed by the small boy at these gleams of human intelligence showed me that I was getting warmer. There was, then, something on the roof. I waved my hand and withdrew into  the room to see whether there was any access to the tiles from inside the building.

The outer room had a grimy ceiling, but one point was hidden from me by a pile of loose sacking— the sort of stuff in which bales of cloth are wrapped. It was curious, I thought, that they should be stored in so careless a fashion on the topmost rack.

I was climbing up to get a better view when I heard Cohen puffing up the stairs. He was the last person in the world who ought to see what I was doing. I clambered down in time to meet him at the top of the stairs.

"No, Mr. Cohen, I was wrong. They did not use the window. But there is something that I want you to do. Go out into the street and lock the door behind you; cross over to the opposite side, and go to the next turning just as if you were going home for the night. Stop at the turning for a few minutes as if you were looking for something in your pockets and then come back here as you would if you had forgotten something in the office. As you are passing the house where your enemy lives just raise your hat. I shall be at the window and I shall see."

"But I can point you out the house from the office window."

"Of course you could. But that would never do. They will be watching and if they are , guilty they will take alarm. Please do just as I say."

Whether my programme appealed to some latent histrionic instinct in him, or whether my determined manner conjured up a vision of an unfavourable report I do not know, but he bumped his way down the stairs and I heard the key turn in the lock as he went out into the street. His little comedy would give me about four minutes.

He could not have waddled ten paces when I had shifted the bundle of hessian and disclosed a wooden trap-door in the ceiling and, unlike every other part of the warehouse, it looked as if it had been newly dusted.

It gave to the lift of a shoulder, but I could not move it far on account of some rather soft obstruction. I had it up at last and by standing on the topmost rack I could lift my head into the loft above. It was a mere triangular space under the tiles, pitch dark and very hot and stuffy.

Fortunately I had matches and then I realized that Cohen indeed had an enemy and that his enemy was a very bright small boy who could make energetic signals.

For the entire loft was packed tight with bales of cloth stacked to the very apex of the tiles.

The Cohen family must have worked like beavers for days to have achieved such a task, Sophy and all. I was back at the window in time to see Cohen lift his hat before the small boy's house and I lifted my hat too, but from a different motive. I felt that the small boy deserved at least that act of homage.

When Cohen let himself in he said, "You saw me?"

"I did indeed, Mr. Cohen."

"And you think that you have enough now to make your report?"

"Quite enough."

He chuckled with pleasure.

I ANTICIPATED a warm welcome from my chief when I went to report my discovery, and perhaps I felt a little disappointment at the unemotional manner in which he received my story. I forgot that men at the top of their profession rarely display emotion. All he said was,

"Exactly what I thought you would find if you went more thoroughly into the case."

I could not remember that he had ever mentioned this anticipation to me. "I hope that the Company will now give you their future business."

"They will be fools if they don't, Mr. Meddlesome-Jones."

Why will people always get my name wrong?

__________________

12: Reward in Hell

Ralph Franklin

Popular Detective March 1936

One of the many unknown writers who popped up briefly in the 1930s hard boiled detective magazine boom, and then vanished. About a dozen stories appeared under this name in Ten Detective, Headquarters Detective and the like between 1935 and 1938.

THIS job held danger. It wasn't the sort of thing to tackle single-handed. The young dick knew that, but it didn't stop him. He'd asked for help— and had his hunch laughed at. So now he was going to bring it off by himself.

"No matter how it turns out," he mused, with a shrug of square-built shoulders, "the sarge is gonna be sorry. He's gonna wish he'd got his own hooks into some of that reward money. Or else he's gonna have one devil of a time breakin' in a new man to replace Detective Jack Keith— killed in action, but not in line of duty."

He ran his coupe off the road, hid it in a screen of trees, clicked off the lights. The car couldn't be spotted now. A pat on his coat told him his police .38 was in place, ready for action. He slipped out, eased the door shut, went stalking up the narrow dirt road.

On top of the hill stood the deserted old mansion, huddled back among tall oaks. By day it gleamed white in the sun. But now, in the blackness that had swooped down out of a lead-colored sky, it was just a shapeless, gloom-shrouded outline.

The dick's lean, youthful figure glided swiftly across the weed-grown lawn. Suddenly, just a step ahead, a blurred object loomed up. Keith knew what it was— a signboard, set on two posts, proclaiming:

"This Site to be Occupied by the Lakeview Sanitarium."

A grim smile was frozen on his tight mouth as he skirted around it, crept on. He pulled his coat closer. A wind, exhaled from the lake like a chill, damp breath, was groping in at the edge of his turned-up collar. It stirred the trees, set them to moaning in ghostly chorus. Like one more shadow amid a troop of others, he drifted up the cold, stone steps of the abandoned country home. On the porch he paused, lightly poised on the balls of his feet. Straight before him was the huge, oaken door. He sensed this rather than saw it. Instead of approaching, he darted fleetly to one side. An ivy-grown pillar gave him the cover he wanted. Crouched behind it, he could watch the road, could spot the lights of an oncoming car long before it arrived.

One would come. He'd gamble on that. Maybe in a few minutes, maybe not for hours. But when it did, he'd be there, ready— and there'd be action.

Officially off duty, he was playing a lone hand for big stakes. If he lost, it was his funeral. His bullet-riddled body, in this forsaken place, might not be found for days. But if he won, it meant a ten-grand reward. It meant he'd slap "Bank Buster" Mat Durkee right back into the prison he'd broken out of the day before. He might even turn up the hundred thousand in used bills that Durkee's mob had taken three months before from the Frobisher National Bank. If he did, there'd be a juicy reward in that, too.

Time dragged maddeningly. The young detective, in his restricted hiding place, shivered. It was partly the cold, partly his keyed-up nerves. Several times he moved cautiously, to work the growing numbness from hands to feet. He wanted a cigarette, wanted it badly, but didn't dare chance a light.

Suddenly he went tense, strained forward. Over a distant rise he'd spotted the twin yellow eyes of a car. It was coming fast. He waited, taut with suspense. His eyes, unblinking, were fixed on the bobbing, dancing lights. If the car went on— It did. With a roar it lurched past. Jack Keith drooped. The letdown was terrific. But wait! Mat Durkee was no fool. Of course he'd run by—to case the joint! He could smell out a trap like a fox. He'd turn at the crossroad, drive part way back—then creep up to the place on foot.

A kink in the road swallowed the car from sight. Keith choked back a groan of disappointment. He wouldn't know now whether the car turned or not. All he could do was wait, wait, wait. He wouldn't know Mat Durkee was around till the desperate escaped con came sneaking up on the porch.

AS the minutes went by, Keith's nerves strained to the breaking point. A dozen times small noises tricked him, sent his hand jerking to the butt of his gun. Nothing happened.

Maybe the sarge was right. Maybe the bank loot wasn't cached here. But it had to be! This was where, after the stickup, Mat Durkee had made his last-ditch stand. In two fast cars the bandits— five in all— had tried for their getaway. But the cops had been right on their tails. A couple of them did make a clean break, but those in the second car— Durkee and two others— took refuge in this old empty house and had to be gunned out. Durkee came out of the house on his own feet, his hands reaching high, but the two who'd holed up with him came out on stretchers, ready for the morgue.

The hijacked currency wasn't found —and Durkee wouldn't talk. Detective Jack Keith wanted to take the place apart, stick by stick, but his sergeant pooh-poohed the idea, insisted that the two who'd got away in the first car had carried the loot. That was what everyone, up to the commissioner, believed.

But Jack Keith was stubborn. He knew Mat Durkee, knew how his brain worked. Why shouldn't he? He'd had plenty of run-ins with the "Bank Buster." Under his third rib he even carried a lead souvenir from Durkee's gun. And it just wasn't in the cards that the hard-faced bandit would trust two underlings with the swag.

No! He'd keep hands on it himself. He'd carried it into this house— and come out without it. So it had to be here! And Durkee had to come tonight to get it. Why tonight? Because the daily papers had announced that tomorrow morning work would start on tearing the old house down and excavating for the new sanitarium that was to go up on the spot.

Jack Keith stiffened suddenly in his hiding place. His breath sucked in sharply. He'd heard something. The wind, the trees? No, not this time! This time it was Durkee— come for his loot! A dark shadow stole softly up the steps, crossed the porch. The dick's service gun slid from its holster into his moist palm.

A key clicked faintly in the massive door. Hinges creaked. The furtive shadow disappeared inside. Jack Keith waited, expecting some of Durkee's hoods to follow their leader. None came. Fierce exultation surged through the dick's blood. If Durkee was alone, if he had just one man to deal with—

Silent in the rubber-soled shoes he wore, Jack Keith slipped from behind the pillar. He paused, listening at the open door.

Inside he saw a flashlight flick on, send its thin beam shifting about. It came to rest on the marble post at the foot of the wide staircase. Durkee placed the light part way up the steps, so that its rays shone squarely on the ball that topped the post. Then, working in its gleam, he seized the ball with brawny arms, heaved. It came away in his grasp and was lowered to the floor. A hand flashed down inside the post, came up clutching packets of greenbacks. The loot from the Frobisher National!

KEITH stared from the door in amazement. He'd thought the post was solid marble!

He glanced narrowly at Durkee's light, lying on the steps. It made the "Bank Buster" a perfect target. But a sweep of the arm could send it crashing to the floor and plunge the place in darkness. So, from his pocket, the dick drew out his own electric torch. With it held far to one side to mislead the mobster about his position, he snapped it on.

"Lift 'em, Bank Buster!" he barked. His finger was tight on the trigger. It was ready to squeeze if the bandit whirled, went for his gun. But he didn't. He raised his hands, turned slowly. As his heavy, pock-marked face swung into the light, his thick lips were twisted— in a grin!

"Hullo, copper!" came his hoarse chuckle. "Thought you might drop in. How do yuh like your tea— lemon, cream, sugar?"

Jack Keith's eyes never wavered from the hard-faced crook. What sort of bluff was this?

Durkee laughed.

"Awright, boys! Take 'im!" Something crashed down on Jack Keith's wrist. His gun clattered on the floor. From both sides at once his arms were seized, wrenched painfully behind him. He twisted his head, stared into the leering faces of the hoods who held him. They were the two men who'd got away after the stickup.

"Nice work, boys!" Durkee grated. He stepped forward, his lips snarled back from long, pointed teeth. His fist shot out, smashed hard against Jack Keith's mouth.

"You poor sap!" he jeered. "Think I didn't know you were here? I would have— even if I hadn't just about climbed my bus on top of yours out there in the woods! Why, the dump even smelled like a cop!"

Blood was spurting from the dick's crushed lips. But his stormy eyes drilled into Durkee's and he snapped.

"You've got me, maybe— but you won't last long!"

"No?" The big fist lashed out again, caught Jack Keith on the chin. "It'll be a damn sight longer than you! You're on your way out, punk!" He stood back, his evil face twisted with hate.

"Grab his bracelets, Mike," he told one of the hoods, who still held a punishing lock on the dick's arms. "Hook 'im to— let's see, there oughta be a steam pipe. Yeah, hook 'im to that steam pipe. We'll finish 'im later!"

"Okay, boss," Mike growled. Jack Keith's face was an inscrutable mask as one of his own steel cuffs clicked tight on his wrist. The other cuff went around an old-fashioned furnace pipe. Durkee dangled the key before the helpless dick's eyes.

"Ain't this like old times!" came his sardonic sneer. "Remember, copper, when I hooked yuh to the radiator in a hotel room— an' then sent the key to police headquarters?"

Durkee's fist whammed into his eye. "Wanted the ten grand that's on my head, dincha?" he rasped. "Well, sucker— try an' collect it in hell!"

THE two henchmen had been busy stuffing a pair of brief cases with the loot from the marble post.

"All set, boss," grinned the one called Mike. "Soon as you burn the flatfoot, we can beat it."

Durkee guffawed. In his hand he held Keith's police .38.

"Whatcha mean 'we'?" he gritted. "What the hell! Think I'm gonna split with a couple of lice?"

"Boss!" yelled Mike. "Yuh can't pull a doublecross! I'm tellin' yuh!" His hand streaked under his coat, came out with an ugly short-barreled gun. Durkee didn't move. The gun clicked feebly. The hood looked at it in terror, while Durkee howled.

"No firin' pin, you fool!" he bellowed. "I took 'em out— both your gats— before we started!"

The rat-faced third crook, who had not spoken once, was crouched like a cat ready to spring. Coldly Mat Durkee blasted once with Keith's police gun. The ratty fellow fell.

"Don't do it, boss!" shrieked Mike, backing away till the wall stopped him. "You can have my cut!"

His words changed to a gurgle as the second slug from the gun hit him between the eyes. The killer turned, a mad light glinting in his eyes. He roared with fiendish laughter when he saw Jack Keith's involuntary twitch of horror.

"You killed 'em, copper!" Mat Durkee croaked. "It's your gun, ain't it? I'll take theirs— and leave mine! After I've put some punctures in your belly—"

His eyes popped wide. He tried to bring the gun up. But in that instant Jack Keith lunged free from the wall, hit him.

An open steel cuff slashed down across the killer's face, cut a deep track in the prison-pale flesh. Then a sizzling uppercut, that started at the floor, lifted him off his feet, sent him hurtling back against the wall. Jack Keith rushed in, grabbed for the gun still clutched in Mat Durkee's fist.

The killer's knee pistoned up. The dick was flung away, reeling. The gun wavered, then roared. His head rammed Mat Durkee's broad chest. They slammed to the floor. The gun crashed again, creased the dick's ribs.

Then he had Durkee's wrist pinned down. With his other hand he faked a punch, slid it instead into the killer's coat. It leaped out at once, with the automatic from Mat Durkee's shoulder holster clutched tight.

"Drop the gat!" clipped Jack Keith, as he pressed the automatic into the "Bank Buster's" ribs.

With a snarl Mat Durkee straightened the fingers of his gun-hand, dropped the dick's service gun. Keith kicked it away, leaped to his feet. He had the killer covered.

"How the hell did you get loose?" the battered mobster demanded.

Jack Keith laughed.

"Remember the time," he asked, "when you hooked me to a hotel radiator with my own cuffs? Well, since then I've carried two keys!"

Mat Durkee's eyes were cauldrons of helpless fury. "Why, you rotten—"

"If I'd got loose before you burned those two rats," the dick said, "it might've saved you the chair. But the key was sewed in the lining of my sleeve— took time. Now you'll burn! You got fooled all around, Bank Buster. You thought they were goin' to tear this place down tomorrow. Well, they won't— not for another month! I got the contractors to run that announcement— just so you'd have to come tonight!

"The state's gonna burn you, not me. That crack you made about the reward— you got it the wrong way around! I'll be spendin' mine here— while you're gettin' yours in hell!"

_________________

13: The Great God Ananzi

Stephen Chalmers

1880-1935

Adventure 1 Aug 1918

THE anvil-chorus of the kling-kling birds in the coconut palms over Sam Chung's rum-shop awoke Warden, the American visitor. What stirred the Anglo-Jamaican in his cot on the other side of the room was the whack of the American's shoe hitting that spot on the wall where a huge spider had been a second before.

Through sleepy eyes Hambridge, the sun-scorched man with the faded blue eyes and fair hair, amusedly observed his guest's apprehension over the fact that the spider had mysteriously reappeared right above the American's bed. Warden, pajamaed and slipperless, shot from his cot and armed himself with the tin wash-basin— loaded.

"Can the brute swim?" he asked, perceiving that Hambridge was awake.

"That spider," said the Anglo-Jamaican banana-man with a yawn and a drawl that had Creole languor in it; "that spider, buccra, can do anything. It can turn itself into a man or any other sort of beast. It can vanish and reappear somewhere else at will. It's the Br'er Fox of West Indian lore. Its name is 'Nancy' and it's harmless, so far as its bite goes. In darkest Africa it was the great god Ananzi— god of cunning— and it's the most infernal bad luck to kill one. Now, how about caw-fee?"

"Mean to tell me that lump of hair and legs isn't poisonous? Wow! It's as big as my fist with the fingers spread!"

"He's also the god of beneficence," said Hambridge solemnly, "if you believe in him. If you don't— ask any roadside Quashie how buzzards came by their bald heads."

The overseer chuckled but suddenly turned his head toward the jalousied door leading to the native outhouses. His voice arose in the broad dialect:

"A weh dat gyal, Habigail? Dis buccra not gwine hab cawfww dis fine marnin'?"

"Ah comin' ri' dis minnit, busha (overseer)!" sing-songed a voice from the outhouse kitchen.

"Mek it soon-soon den, for dis Banana Day— yah?" urged the busha. Warden still eyed the motionless spider on the wall above his cot. He would rather have dispelled his doubts by slaughter, for he was not superstitious. Yet who was he to cast doubt upon the mystic beliefs of darkest Africa, especially when his Anglo-Jamaican host shared them.

"I suppose if I lammed the brute," said Warden humorously, "and Pereira got ahead of you today by a single banana bunch, you'd boot me out of Rio Hacha."

"N-no," said Hambridge, rising lazily, "but if my runners heard you'd killed a Nancy before breakfast they'd chuck the fight before it was started. Ho, gyal! Weh dat cawfee?"

"Comin', busha!" The jalousied door swung open and a beaming mulatto girl entered with a bent tray bearing two tin cups of steaming Blue Mountain, flanked by a couple of star-apples and some bread buttered with canned bluenose.

"Marnin', buska," said the girl with a white-toothed grin. To the visitor she accorded less genial deference. Without the grin she bowed to Warden and said— "Marnin,' buccra."

That any fight was in the air Nature at least denied. Outside the rough shack which was the port's headquarters of the Caribbean Fruit Company, Rio Hacha lay like a dead Spanish ruin before being resurrected by the promise of new day.

It was a semi-circle of crumbling, slave-built houses on one side of a white sand road that curved inward between two horns of volcanic rock goring out to sea. On the eastern horn, under the coconut palms where the kling-kling birds clamored their anvil-chorus, Sam Chung, the heathen, let down the bars of his saltfish, quattie bread and rum store in preparation for the great business of the week— Banana Day. On the other horn, Pereira, the Portuguese Creole, emerged from the shack which was his abode and Rio Hacha headquarters of the banana trust, the Amalgamated, and scanned the field of prospective battle with his small, soft eyes.

There was no promise of conflict either in him or the scene. The world was tinged with rose. The sun's rim was not up over the edge of the still, oily Caribbean. The sea-breeze was not due for an hour, and the noon roar of the surf on the reef was but as yet a mere sigh.

Between the horns, on the inner side of the incurving sand road, Rio Hacha still slept. It would sleep late this morning, for the day would properly begin at noon and last through the ensuing night. About midday the place would wake up when Pereira took his station at the buying wharf of the Amalgamated Banana Company, when his rival, Hambridge of the Caribbean, occupied his overseer's bench at the independents' pier, and when the runners of the two companies began to squabble over the incoming drays, carts, donkeys and black humanity laden with banana bunches from the plantations and the native patches.

As the Banana Day progressed the fight would grow more bitter as price and demand soared or declined as the required fruit fell short or otherwise. The steamers of the rival lines would appear, racing neck and neck, perhaps, for the mouth of the bottle-shaped lagoon. Then would begin the loading, and when the last whaleboat was emptied of its green-gold treasure the race would be resumed for the market-ports of Baltimore, Philadelphia, New York and Boston. Then Rio Hacha, like many another port, would fall asleep again for another week.

BUT at that early hour there was no hint of the banana war, another battle of which was presently to be waged; the war which had been growing in heat for weeks between the banana trust and the independents who sought a place in the sun where the tiger defied all comers.

For a year the Amalgamated Banana Company had been making a point to put the Caribbean Fruit Company out of business. To defeat this— at Rio Hacha at least— the independents had sent Hambridge to that fruitful port to match his brains against a pastmaster of banana-running— Jose Pereira of the trust forces. Hambridge, with a white man's mental energy, plus native birth and understanding, had made good in all branches of the business, from selecting and clearing ground to reaping a crop of "straights."

Pereira, wily behind his sleek, sleepy exterior, looked as harmless a West Indian as ever lost energy by climate and slack morals. He was unhealthily fat. His smooth, swarthy cheeks trickled humidity on all occasions. His silk shirt—he had a weakness for unwashable silk—clung to his perspiring girth like a clammy balloon.

He also wore sandals, strained crash pants and a broad felt hat which it was said he bought by width— it looked like a limp parasol. And he had a fondness for a sprinkling of dried lavender sprigs in his tobacco. When the breeze wafted a whiff of lavender from the west Hambridge was wont to become profanely energetic.

Pereira, having smelled the air and scanned the eastern horizon where the steamers would appear on the race from port to port, retired to morning coffee and buttered roast plantain. Hambridge and his guest, Warden, having disposed of Blue Mountain and bluenose, strolled in their pajamas to the Rio Hacha for the morning swim. Usually they took the guns along, or Mitch-Chell, the buska's black henchman, brought the rods and live shrimps for tarpon, but— this was Banana Day.

Some power in the North who had thought not beyond his desk, or possibly was trying an experiment on public opinion, had proposed a tax on bananas. That the people howled mattered little to the banana-men at banana sources. It was all right about "the poor man's luxury" so long as the poor man bought.

At present the poor man's agents— the middlemen up North— were buying on his behalf, the other half for themselves. The dealers were stocking their refrigerators with green fruit to be ripened by raising the temperature in sympathy with the ante.

Already the price per bunch, as yet the same to the poor man who bought "fingers," "hands" at most, from the corner grocer, was soaring among the banana islands. Future bunches "fitting" on the trees were being snapped up by contract and for fancy prices. Before the tax proposal the business had been at unusually low ebb, "straights" down to thirty-five cents on the tropic wharves, seven-handed bunches down to eighteen cents, "sixes" rejected altogether as not worth their stem weight and returned with all smaller bunches for Quashie's family pot and pig-feed.

But since the tax proposal prices had moved steadily upward. The first week the Rio Hacha quotations of both the Amalgamated and the Caribbean companies fluctuated from fifty cents to fifty-five, with a tot of rum for the donkey-man who brought in not less than four "straight" bunches. The second week, while "Constant Reader" and "Pro Bono" discussed the tax up North, the islands' price went up to sixty-five and seventy cents per "straight" with frequent fist-fights between the runners of Pereira and Hambridge.

In one such fight a scared jackass, laden with five eleven-handed bunches— extra "straights"— fled with its coveted load and committed inadvertent suicide in the Rio Hacha. And once Hambridge, irritated by lavender floating down from westward, called Pereira a soor kaboocha, which Pereira, ignorant of Hindustani, but suspicious, resented.

The third week Hambridge's chief henchman, Mitch-Chell, smote the Amalgamated's chief runner in the eye, Pereira's man had called him a "t'iefin' porpus," which is not Hindustani but has to do with the questionable honesty of a person who has once been in a home for paupers. Both were arrested, but promptly released. The police force owed both Hambridge and Pereira since the last poker game— a love-feast which occurred on the evening following each Banana Day, when the nights again grew lonesome.

Now it was the dawn of the fourth Banana Day since the tax proposal. In his hip pocket Pereira had a written slip brought in the night by a black boy on a mule. It was from the Amalgamated's boss at Port Antonio. It tersely stated his instructions:

Rio Hacha: Fifteen thousand bunches— sixes up. Average seventy-five cents— dollar limit. Steamer Haciendado arrive 4 P.M. to clear at midnight.

At the Caribbean's shack Hambridge had a message from the independents' chief, whose headquarters were at Port Maria. The chief happened to be Warden's father. His son, fresh from an American college, was in Jamaica to observe Ananzi spiders, the native and other animals, and to learn the difference between Para and Guinea grass, white yams and afu, and particularly the difference between a banana and a plantain. The buska was expert in these matters.

Warden Sr.'s message of instruction was less formal:

Buy all you can lay hands on and keep out of jail. Go Pereira's limit and then some. Tax on bananas taxing demand. If we don't get the trimmings the Amalgamated will. Show the rah-rah boy something.

This message Hambridge studied again after the swim, when he and the rah-rah boy had returned to the shack. It was a perfectly clear message. There was nothing about it that should have brought a moody frown to the buska's sun-scorched brow. He studied it, turned it over, and even held it up to the light. Once when the Amalgamated had been waylaying the Caribbean's dispatch bearers, the buska himself had written an important message with banana-juice, which remained invisible until it had been laundered with a hot flatiron.

But this message from Warden Sr. was all on the surface. It was just as Hambridge had expected the wording would be. Yet he was troubled. He did not know himself why or what about. He had had the same vague feeling that time he put his money on a sure favorite in the Overseers' Sweepstakes and lost a month's pay, a saddle and faith in his own perspicacity. His abstracted reverie was disturbed by Warden Jr.

"But how can you tell it isn't a tarantula?" he asked. The Ananzi was still on the wall.

"You can tell shortly after it bites," said the banana-man irritably. "The banana bunches are full of them and I never knew one bite except in the New York papers."

He rose and went to the jalousied door.

"Mitch-Chell!" he roared. "Go bring come a gallon a rum—yah?"

"Eu-eu, busha," assented a guttural from without. "An' tell he no sen' dis buccra parafeen all color up wi' annotta like las' week," said Hambridge. "Jamaica man no fool 'bout good rum."

"As bad as all that?" said Warden when Mitch-Chell had departed Chungward.

"A nigger out of the bush will fall for a three-farthings' of rum where he'll turn down a threepence extra on the bunch," the busha growled. He went into the cubbyhole which was his office. Presently his runners, ragged, bare-footed, black and shiny as wet ebony, gathered around him for a war council over a sheet of names.

With a pencil the busha checked off this man of the hills and who were expected to bring in fruit before nightfall. This man was no good— Pereira's body and soul— Pereira had loaned him money. This fellow was doubtful, but Mitch-Chell was at his brother's wake, wasn't he? Mitch-Chell must take care of him. Pereira had been angling for this other fellow— a regular six-straight-bunch man. Give him a drink first, then talk him up!

And so on.

Pereira on the western horn was holding a similar war council with his native runners, the chiefest of whom had a bruised eye. Warden had taken a gun, after one more respectful glance at the great god Ananzi on the wall, and gone off to the Hacha swamp to pot baldpates on the rise to the hog-plum feeding in the hills.

WHEN the American visitor returned to Rio Hacha it was past noon. His steps had taken him over into the Bengal plantation where he had become interested in the barracks of the indentured coolie laborers and a beautiful but brainless creature of no caste whatever who looked like Oriental romance under the sounding name of Latchimi.

But he forgot about his Hindi flower— who had been married when she was nine, although he did not know it— when he tried to recognize Rio Hacha. The settlement which at morn had seemed as dead as the Spaniards who built it under Don Sasi, was now alive with Jamaican clamor and American hustle.

The wharves of the rival companies were scenes of activity. On the piers half-clad negroes were piling bunches of green-gold fruit, at each pile a mulatto clerk in an immense hat checking the bunches as they were passed into a whaleboat by perspiring handlers.

In the doorway of the Caribbean's wharf-building Hambridge sat under a huge pith-helmet watching the battle which was going on directly before him on the sand road. Down at the Amalgamated's wharf, where the Portuguese sat complacently breathing lavender, there was, on the other hand, comparative order.

The main road from the hills entered Rio Hacha from the east, and the incoming fruit-carriers ran the rivals' gauntlet at the Caribbean's wharf. Once past that point it was agreed that the spoils were to Pereira. But that worthy's runners were on the job with Hambridge's at the danger point. Both sides yelled, cursed, cajoled, threatened and tried to bribe the dazed Quashie from the interior, who had arrived with his humble donkey and his banana patch's yield of "fit" bunches for the week.

Clashes between the rival runners, between the banana-sellers and the over-zealous banana-buyers, were so frequent that one continuous fight was in progress. The moment one was settled and peace established, generous libations at Sam Chung's rum-counter led to renewed recriminations.

When Warden arrived on the scene he witnessed a typical collision. A well-to-do native planter had arrived with twenty "straight" bunches in a small dray dragged by an unhappy mule that was half-suspended between the shafts. The negro was a newcomer to Rio Hacha, drawn thereto by the promise of high prices.

Unused to Rio Hacha methods he flayed the belligerent runners with his cowhide whip. Failing to dislodge them from the top of his dray he turned his lash upon the mule, urging it out of this pandemonium. Knowing that if the dray once passed the Caribbean's wharf the fruit was lost to Pereira, Hambridge's runners seized the animal's head. Pereira's runners tried to dislodge them. The proprietor raised his arms to heaven and called upon his Maker to bear witness that he was a Baptist in good standing and had never backslid or in the poorhouse— whatever these virtues had to do with the case.

Then the mule took a part in the affair— resentfully. It let loose with its hind legs. The traces broke; a shaft cracked. Two minutes later Pereira got the mule and sections of harness. Hambridge's men battled in the dust with the rival runners for possession of the fruit. That which survived undamaged presumably found its way to Baltimore by the Caribbean's steamer.

The man from the hills went back to his yam-patch and his dusky bride with a smashed dray, a penitent mule in mended harness, the price of nine good bunches mostly in his head, the rest being in Sam Chung's till, five "rejects" and the remains of six mutilated banana stems. But then he had learned much.

Hambridge observed all this without once rising from his bench or removing the pipe from his mouth. Occasionally he wrote an order and had it passed to Mitch-Chell. It usually was a command to give some prospective banana-seller a la-a-arge drink of rum.

"How goes the battle, General?" asked Warden, coming to the busha's side.

"Good enough," said Hambridge, rather gloomily. "We hold our own. He's ahead of us on his contracted fruit, of course, and he's turned a lousy trick or two. But the day's young."

He spoke with a kind of abstraction, a certain doubt. Warden thought the overseer did not look quite himself— a touch of fever perhaps. He advised a personal application of the bribe-bottle as a stimulant to zest.

"I don't as a rule," said the busha thoughtfully, "but I may before I'm through."

The afternoon lengthened and swift dusk came. Into Rio Hacha trundled more donkeys, drays and natives burdened with bananas. Many lights appeared on land and sea and the tropic heavens lit their million candles. The fireflies danced among the coconut palms and the low logwood greenery.

In the semi-darkness the broad negro voices, hilarious with rum or furious with rage, and the constant squealing and braying of mules and donkeys contrasted oddly with the mirroring sea from which the day-breeze had fled. Against the dense blue of the evening sky the palms rose as stenciled things in mid-air. The kling-kling birds, returning in pairs to the palm-crests, again beat out their anvil chorus, but not with the unanimous gusts of dawn.

Already the rival steamers had appeared, the Caribbean's Amato first because it had gained time through failure to get its quota at the other ports along the coast. The Amalgamated's Haciendado was now in the lagoon, too. Her gun-ports were wide open and the trust's handlers were passing in thousands of bunches of bananas. From the wharf at the western end of the bay Pereira's loaders could be heard numbering the bunches for the checker in a singsong with doggerel rhymings:

Bana-a-ana—four!

Come gimme one mo-ore-O!

Bana-a-ana—five!

Ho, hoy, look all-ive—O!

The Amato had not begun, to load. The first whaleboat had just left the Caribbean's wharf and it would be some time before Hambridge could keep the passers as busy as the stevedores desired to be.

Things were going badly. Earlier in the afternoon he had received another dispatch from Warden Sr. at Port Maria.

Amalgamated cleaning up everything all along, Amato not half laden! It's up to you!

It was up to him. Yet what could he do to save the company from sending a half-laden steamer North, for ordinarily she cleared from Rio Hacha? And go she must with her perishable cargo ripening in her holds. But even if he captured every bunch that came into Rio Hacha, even if he stole fruit regularly contracted to Pereira, even if he assassinated the fat, lavender-soaked sponge and lifted his deliveries from the piled wharf, still he could not hope to fill the Amato.

So he told the anxious supercargo who came ashore from the Amato the minute she dropped her hook. But he went to work to do his best, although somehow that mysterious prescience followed him like a shadow. His pupil and guest, Warden, caught the fever of the game and went so far as to leap himself to the driver's seat of a newly arrived dray, shoulder the proprietor off and drive the load of bananas into the Caribbean's shed.

"There!" he cried, dismounting, flushed with battle. "I like this game, busha!"

"You —— fool!" said Hambridge thickly. "You can't do that. He's Pereira's man. It's contract fruit."

"What's the odds! He's turned a trick or two on us! All's fair—"

"Drive out that dray!" said the busha to the negro planter who had picked himself up and was calling down anathema upon "de mad young buccra from obersea."

"What's the matter with you?" demanded Warden of his father's employee.

"Nothing," said Hambridge with a queer laugh. He waved a hand to the spangled skies. "God's in's heav'n—"

HE TURNED and walked, slightly unsteady, toward the shack across the way. Warden remained, stunned out of action. Hambridge, the best man the Caribbean had, the man his governor chose for his example in the business, had been drinking!

No doubt the negro hands knew it and slacked accordingly. It seemed to Warden that most of them were drunk, too. No wonder! They did precisely what the buska did. He was a white man and could do no wrong. What he did was worthy of emulation.

No wonder Pereira was winning— had won— banana hands up! He would hate to tell the governor of this, but— he ought to. Hambridge was the company's best man. Ye gods! Drunk! Presently the busha came back. There was the curious grin on his face, the inane smirk of a man half-paralyzed by liquor.

"Come on!" said Warden, thinking the lapse might be merely temporary— a touch of fever and consequent light-headedness. "Let's lean up against it. We'll turn a trick on that lavender chest yet!"

"What's the use?" gulped Hambridge, slumping down on his bench. "He wins. —— tax on b'nanas anyway!"

"Wins!" shouted Warden, his Yankee hatred of defeat cropping out. "Not by a darn sight! And if you're that sort of weak-spined rabbit—"

Hardly knowing what he expected to accomplish right away, he grabbed a bunch of bananas from the hands of one of the negroes and— just as quickly dropped it again. He sprang back aghast. The negro also leaped away.

From the bunch had dropped a huge spider, even larger than that which had dismayed him in the shack.

"Spidah!" yelled the negro. It was Mitch-Chell. Warden, ashamed of the fact that the bunch he had dropped had burst into three pieces, sprang with both feet upon the insect, intent upon vengeance. He did not miss. That spider emerged from the impact a flat mess of pulp and quivering, hairy legs.

"Now you've done it!" said the Anglo-Jamaican overseer. "That settles it. I tell you—" He hiccouped— "might's well a killed Nancy this morning. Nancy heard ya, an'way. Killed the luck! That settl' zit. 'Ve killed a Nanzi spider!"

"But, busha—!" Mitch-Chell protested. "Shut up—you!" shouted Hambridge, glaring at his henchman.

"But, busha—"

"Will you close your black mouth!" roared the busha. "Get me a drink!"

"My God!" groaned Warden, the pupil, and he turned toward the shack in despair.

He would have to talk to the governor.

Before he entered the shack he looked back at the wharf-shed. The chief runner, Mitch-Chell, appeared to be arguing with the busha. Hambridge had gripped the negro by the shoulders— possibly for support or in drunken affection— and he was laughing in his face. Warden went to the room in the shack where he had slept every night for nearly a week— for no purpose except to be alone with his thoughts. The first thing his eyes sought and found was the Ananzi spider of the morning, still impending over his cot.

It had not moved. It was like a dead insect fastened by some invisible web. Only the light of the hurricane lamp caught two little gleaming points in its head, He shuddered slightly. He desired to kill it, attributing to the strange creature somehow the ill-luck of the day; desiring more to slay it because Hambridge seemed to believe in its power, that he himself was half-inclined... Bah! He picked up one of his still sodden bathing-shoes and balanced it for an accurate shot. But as he swung his arm a voice, thick with inebriation, said behind him:

"Don' do it! Musn' do it, ol' fella!"

Warden gave the busha one contemptuous look and hurled the shoe with all his force.

The spider vanished. The American turned furiously upon the overseer, who was chuckling inanely.

Hambridge pointed waveringly to the opposite wall. "Misshed!" said he.

There was the spider! How it had got over there, whether it had leaped or— some magic. It seemed impossible; yet there it was.

The overseer reeled toward the wash-stand. He poured a half tumbler of liquid from a black bottle which had stood there and drained it off. Then he fairly collapsed on his cot.

Warden, disgusted, dismayed beyond expression, went out into the night. A fury raged in him. He would not let his dad lose because his dad's trusted best man had fallen down.

He took charge; but he might as well have followed the busha's example, at least in the matter of going to bed. The hands listened dully to his orders, or quite ignored them. They, too, had slacked up. They, too, had been drinking. They worked slowly, clumsily. Bunches of bananas were dropped and shattered. They pitched other bunches into the whaleboat, bruising them against marketable possibility. They allowed dray after dray to run the gauntlet unchallenged. The victorious Pereira on the other horn chuckled as he heard of the doings.

"Soused— on Banana Day!" he said to his chief runner. "Never knew him take a drink before, even. Well, it's an ill wind— my tally says twenty-two thousand bunches. How about yours, Amos?"

As a last resort Warden appealed to Mitch-Chell, the faithful. Upon him, too, the spell of evil had descended. He, too, seemed more than half drunk. "Wehfado, buccra?" ("What else can we do, white man?") he said. "You no kill Nancy spidah, buccra?"

THE Amalgamated's steamer, Haciendado, cleared at midnight with her holds full. The Caribbean's Amato cleared hours later with less than half the cargo for which she had capacity. She headed back to Port Maria for instructions.

It had been a disastrous week for the independents, especially at Rio Hacha. Pereira had exceeded his order for fifteen thousand bunches by seven thousand. Hambridge shipped only nine thousand.

While the Caribbean's hands finished their debauch on the beach at the eastern end of the bay and on the other horn Pereira's victors celebrated, Warden returned to the shack, tired, disappointed. On the other cot lay the busha, apparently dead to the world. By his side was a broken chair and on it the black bottle and a glass.

What was the man drinking, anyway? The dregs in the glass were not red or brown or amber, but transparent and colorless. Was it possible he had sunk secretly to the last resort of the tropic tippler— gin? Sadly anxious to know the worst, Warden tiptoed to the side of the man he had admired until that night. He smelled of the liquid in the glass. It had no odor. Neither had the remainder of it in the black bottle.

He poured a few drops on the palm of his left hand and touched it with the tip of his tongue. It was plain water! Yet....

IN THE morning there was little to be said. The busha, naturally enough, slept late. Warden took his dip in the Rio Hacha alone.

Pereira came around, as usual after Banana Day, to talk it over, offer to shake hands and call it a deal for another week. On this occasion he expressed the sympathy of good fellowship.

"We all do it, even the best of us, at times," said he. "Suppose you have a hair of the dog, Hambridge?"

"No, massa," said Hambridge gravely. "I never touch the stuff."

Pereira chuckled and helped himself from the bottle he had brought along for diplomatic use.

When Warden came back from the river he found them seated together, quite friendly, talking over the setting of a turtle net. Warden did not like it. The dark thought occurred that these two— alone so much together— might be closer than he had been led to believe; that possibly the Amalgamated, through Pereira, had bought the busha into the secret service of the trust. He would certainly have a talk with the governor.

After the late tropic breakfast Warden announced his intention of returning to Port Maria. The busha did not press him to remain. The farewells were rather awkward. Warden felt he ought to be frank.

"I'm sorry, Hambridge," said he, "but there were things last night. I needn't say more, except that it's clearly up to me, as my father's son—"

"Go ahead," said the busha wearily. "When I make an ass of myself I bray but don't kick. It's my funeral. So long."

When Warden Jr. told Warden Sr. of the matter of which he felt he was bound to speak, the governor's face expressed utter disappointment and dismay.

"If you weren't my own son I'd call you a liar," said he. "But this explains yesterday. I've been twisting my brain for some explanation of the fall-down of Rio Hacha. We didn't expect Hambridge to raise twenty-two thousand bunches as Pereira did— he gets half that in contracted fruit— but we did bank on twelve thousand, maybe fifteen. He was authorized to go Pereira's limit, and then some. I didn't understand, but now— Hambridge! Drunk! And I'd meant to make him general manager. Well, I'll give him a fair hearing."

Hambridge, upon a summons to Port Maria next day, rode there huddled in his saddle like a bag of loose bricks. His face was stamped with woe and his brow furrowed with remorse. Possibly he had been an ass, a superstitious fool, but ever since that time he lost on the favorite in the Overseers' Sweepstakes he had been more and more inclined to listen to that inward voice. No, not voice. That... What was it the Americans called it? Ah, well, it didn't matter now.

It was therefore a much surprised overseer who, walking listlessly into Warden Sr's. office at Port Maria, suddenly found himself enclosed in that banana magnate's arms and being given a lesson in the two-step. The busha backed off. The head of the independent company trod mincingly around the office, cackling like a gander and waving a pink slip of paper.

"Go out and get drunk again, Hambridge, me boy," he chanted chortingly. "Go out and get paralyzed!"

"I never touch the stuff," said the busha, his usual languid tones heavy with melancholy.

"Eh!" ejaculated Warden Sr. "But there— that's all right. Don't discuss it. I won't. Luckiest thing ever happened, only don't do it again. Listen to this!"

He started to read the cablegram, but broke off to explain in full what the laconic words meant. "Bottom's dropped out of the boom banana market," he declaimed. "Tax on bananas gone up in smoke. 'Constant Reader' and 'Pro Bono Publico' and the 'poor man's food' and all that— killed it before it was born. Markets flooded with bananas to be sold at a loss by dealers. Prices dropped through the basement floor and—"

"And—?" the busha chimed in, leaning forward with a great light in his eyes.

"And!" roared Warden Sr. "The Amalgamated has six steamers crammed to the gunwales steaming seventeen knots to Baltimore, Philadelphia, New York and Boston, and they'll have to chuck the whole caboodle overboard, as they've done before, or further spoil the market. The Caribbean loses only a poor half cargo on the Amato, for the Jacquelin and the Portuondo of our fleet couldn't make up and turned over their fruit to the Amato and didn't sail at all!"

"Imphm!" was the busha's comment. There was a queer look on his sun-scorched face. "Now, as to my getting drunk—"

"Not a word!" interrupted Warden Sr. "As I say, it was the luckiest thing ever happened, only—"

"As to my getting drunk," continued Hambridge lazily, "it was like this. One time I bet a month's salary and a fifty-dollar saddle on a sure thing in the Overseers'—"

"Oh, can that old yarn! Only—"

"And ever since I've sort of leaned to a bet on the possibility of a rank outsider finishing first. Now, I had a feeling—"

"A hunch?" said Warden Sr., becoming grave at once.

"Much obliged," said the busha, relieved. "I've been hunting that word for nearly two days— a hunch. I had a hunch that that tax wouldn't go through, and the high prices of the last month and the way we've been flooding the market meant— you see? My hunch was for its happening this week, between sailing and arriving in the States— within these five days. It was such a strong— er—hunch. Then there was a fool thing about a Nancy spider—"

"What about the Ananzi spider?" asked some one in the doorway. It was Warden Jr., a curious grin on his face.

"Hullo, Warden," said Hambridge coolly, and went on, "Maybe that was what got me started. Your young man here missed it with his boot and it stayed right in the room all day. Maybe I pleaded for its life and— maybe Ananzi took a hand in gratitude."

Warden Sr. was shaking with mirth. He knew the native-born Jamaican's superstition about Br'er Ananzi. "The Nancy stayed in the room and I got a feeling—a hunch— it had something on its mind; that it had a hunch, too, and wanted to tip me off on a sure thing.

"When I got word how badly things were going at the other ports, I went to the shack and had a long confab with Br'er Nancy— in my mind, you know. That's what was on my mind," turning to Warden Jr. "Fever be blowed! And when you suggested a drink— a thing I never do— it occurred to me the only way to cover up a lie-down before Pereira was to get paralyzed. I drank so much water out of that black bottle that after you left I had to go over to Sam Chung's for a real drink— something I never do.

"It was just a—a hunch, you see."

"Hmm! There was a good deal of cold reasoning behind that hunch," said Warden Sr.

"I'm sorry, old man," said Warden Jr. "Honest— I thought you were really— all to the bad, and— and I was disappointed. I'm frank, and I want to apologize."

"I meant you to think so," said the busha. "I meant everybody to think so— so it would come straight to Pereira. Even Mitch-Chell believed it until I put him on and thereafter he proceeded to demoralize the whole handling staff."

"But why pretend to be drunk at all?" asked Warden Jr.

"As I never touch the stuff," the busha drawled, "it was the only thing would account to Pereira for my falling down. He would have been suspicious of anything else and would have got a— a hunch, maybe, that I had private information from headquarters. A throw-down of the tax on bananas would have been the first thing to occur to him. I didn't want him to put that into the heads of the Amalgamates at Port Antonio. I wanted 'em to go on buying— and they sure did. I helped 'em all I could,"

"But how can you give any credit to the Ananzi, or my not killing it? Didn't I smash one to pulp that time in the wharf-shed?"

"Oh, that?" said Hambridge with a queer smile. "Mitch-Chell knew. That's why I had to shut him up sharp. I wanted you to think it was a Nancy. If it had been, I'd ha' known we were really in bad. That was a tarantula!

"Your Nancy is still doing business at the same stand. It was right on the ceiling over my head last night when Pereira, Sam Chung, the police force and I had our little weekly game. Sam Chung has a mortgage now on the constable's horse and I stung Pereira for eighty-seven cold dollars."

However, when the busha was promoted to the general managership at Port Maria, Warden Sr. presented him with a seal ring upon which was engraved the great god Ananzi in the shape of a spider, somewhat reduced.

_______________

14: The Vanishing of Benjamin Vex

Robert Keene

Robert Keene Thompson, 1885-1937

The Cavalier April 1910

Robert Keene Thompson's short stories appeared in magazines such as The Cavalier and The Argosy from  about 1909 to the late 'teens, under his own name and as "Robert Keene".  He then moved into screen writing in Hollywood, a very successful career which continued until his premature death from pneumonia aged 51. Another story by this author can be found in Volume 25 of Past Masters.

MRS. VEX came down the hall and stopped before the bath-room door. Taking the knob in her hand, she rattled it noisily, calling out to her husband, who was bathing in the tub within:

"Hurry up, Benjamin! It's quarter past six, and you haven't any time to lose!"

There was no response. Impatiently Mrs. Vex took her hand off the knob and rapped with its knuckles against the square pane of opaque glass set into the locked door.

"Benjamin!" she called. "Benjamin!' more sharply. And again: " Ben-ja-min!"

Not a sound came to her from behind the door.

It was impossible that her husband could not hear her. He was only three feet away— only a single yard— lying in the tub where he had repaired to bathe not ten minutes before.

"Benjamin!" cried his wife exasperatedly. "Answer me— are you all right in there?"'

Silence.

Was it possible, thought the lady frowningly, that Mr. Vex, whose habit it was-to read in the tub, was so engrossed in magazine, book, or newspaper that he had not noticed the noise she was making at the door?

That was too unreasonable to suppose for a minute—it could not be the case.

Then why—

"Benjamin, Benjamin!" Mrs. Vex called at the top of her lungs, her voice quivering anxiously, while she beat with renewed vigor on the door. "Has anything happened to you? Are you all right in there? Speak to me, speak to me!"

She pressed her ear to the jamb of the door— listening.

Only absolute quiet could be detected inside the bath-room.

The lady's knees caved in. She clung to the knob of the door, her trembling form sagging against the woodwork, her frightened breathing sounding loud in the narrow hall.

Something had happened to her husband! Of that there could be no doubt. Something— but what ?

Through her mind a troop of fear-drawn specters marched, each one a tragically imagined conjecture of what. had happened to Mr. Vex inside that bathroom.

Perhaps the water in his bath had proved too hot. He had fainted—was lying unconscious in the tub, out of her sight, beyond her possible reach.

Any one of a score of dire calamities might have befallen him, but that one which first entered her head stuck in her mind as the real truth of the hideous matter.

He was lying senseless in the tub— prostrated by the heat of a too warm bath— and— something must be done at once to get him out of the water.

He might slip down over his head. Then he would drown!

Perhaps—already—

Mrs, Vex beat at the door, kicked at it, clawed at it, incoherently calling to her husband the while in gasping, terrified whispers that escaped her pallid lips wildly.

Oh, if only he hadn't locked that door! She could have gone to him then.

Now, somehow, some way, by somebody more capable to undertake the task than her frail self, that door must be opened— and quickly— her husband rescued, saved from the vital termination of whatever catastrophe had befallen him inside that bath-room, whereby he could not speak in answer to her call, because he could not hear her calling.

The janitor! That thought pierced her brain in a lightning flash of inspiration— stirring her to instant action.

She stepped away from the door, caught at the wall to steady her balance, then proceeded staggeringly down the hall toward the kitchen. She punched the button connecting with the bell in the janitor's quarters in the cellar.

A minute passed. She pushed frantically at the button again— again— and yet again.

Then, the wail of the dumb-waiter whistle sounding, she sped into the
kitchen, opened the door of the waiter-shaft, and called wildly down to the man.

He must come up to her apartment at once— flying. Something had happened to her husband— he was locked in the bath-room, and had met with a desperate accident.

"Bring tools— anything— something to open or break down the door!" finished Mrs. Vex hysterically. "And hurry, hurry— I'm going mad with worry!"

Two minutes later the janitor rang the front-door bell. Down the private hall of the Vex apartment he hurried after Mrs. Vex.

He tried the knob of the bath-room door, beat against the pane of glass, bellowed to the man within— without. disturbing the silence beyond the fastened portal.

Then, satisfied that there was no other alternative, he dropped on his knees and applied the tools he had brought to the lock.

While he worked, he talked to the distracted lady hovering anguished above him.

"Ye've yer street-clothes, hat an' coat, on, Mis' Vex," he said. '' Were ye out when the mister wint in here t' his bath?"

"I stepped out to telephone," explained Mrs. Vex brokenly. "Mr. Vex and I have— had— a dinner engagement to-night. My husband went in to take his bath before I went out. He took off his clothes before I left the flat. I heard him come in here and close the door behind him just as I went out of the front door. I wasn't gone ten minutes— and when I came back— I called to him—"

The lady broke down, weeping.

"There, there!" soothed the janitor, unscrewing the last fastening that held the lock to the door. '' Nothin's happened to Mr. Vex that a half-hour won't straighten out. Depind upon it—nothin' could, safe here in this bath-room where it's impossible fer him to meet wid har-rm."

He fumbled a moment over the pulling of the bolt out of the aperture left by his removal of the door-knob and lock. Then he stood' to his feet.

"There, now! She's ready to open at a turn of th' wrist. Step back a bit, Mis' Vex, an' l'ave me take a peep widin first— in case— that's right. Wait there half a second!"

The janitor opened the door and stepped inside the bath-room.

For a full ten seconds Mrs. Vex obeyed his instructions that she remain out of sight of what might be inside the room. Then, agonized by doubt and fear which took new life at the silence from the janitor, she stepped to the opened doorway.

She looked over the shirt-sleeved shoulder of the man who stood within the threshold. And the sight that met her wide eyes forced a choked cry of amazed horror from her lips.

The tub was three-quarters filled with water. It's top was as unrippled and placid as a sheet of green glass.

All that was in the water was a spread-open magazine, floating on its surface beside a cake of soap.

There was not a single drop of moisture on the rug spread beside the porcelain tub. Nor was there a spatter of water any place to be seen in the four-feet-by-seven bathroom on walls, or floor.

A neat pile of Mr. Vex's underclothes, freshly laundered and pressed, lay beside the single, upright steam-pipe against the wall opposite the tub. On top of the pile was a folded pair of Mr. Vex's socks.

Beyond that—there was nothing more that was even reminiscent of Mr. Vex in the room.

Nowhere, from ceiling to flag. from closed and locked window at one end, to the door which had been partially taken apart to give entrance to the janitor and Mrs. Vex.

And as for that lady's husband—

He was nowhere to be seen. Gone from the keenest sight that ever searched successfully for a needle in a haystack.

Out of that tightly locked-up bath-room, no bigger than a bandbox for this year's Paris hats, Mr. Vex had disappeared.

Utterly and completely vanished!

ii

THE janitor turned a mystified face to Mrs. Vex, and said unnecessarily :

"Yer husband's not here, ma'am.'

'The lady fell back against the jamb of the open door, one white hand tremblingly resting on the wash-stand bowl, her eyes popping from her chalky face.

"N-no!" she stammered dazedly. "He's— he's not here in the bath-room."

The janitor looked up at the ceiling, then down to the floor again in puzzlement. His eyes shifted to Mrs. Vex's blanched countenance, taking in the tenseness of her pose.

"Ye've made some mistake, Mis' Vex, ma'am, it's plain," he said in a reassuring tone. "Mr. Vex could not have come into the bath-room, as ye' thought he was after doing'."

"But he did!" cried the missing gentleman's wife. "I know he did!"

The janitor scratched his head,

"I can't seem to finger how he comes thin!" he said wonderingly. "An' he ain't here— me eyes ain't deserving' me, ma'am. Ye don't see hide nor hair of him yer own self, do you at all, at all, Mis' Vex?"

"I—I don't!" replied the lady quickly. "But— we haven't looked round yet—" eagerly.

The janitor surveyed the tiny room once more, the puzzlement on his face deepening.

"Where would we be after looking', thin?" he asked.

"Everywhere— anywhere!" cried Mrs. Vex shrilly. "He must be here somewhere—we'll find him if we look around us, I know, I'm sure of it— oh, he must be here; we must find him!"

Her companion stooped and looked under the wash-stand, while Mrs. Vex futilely opened the door. of the medicine cabinet above it. Revealed before her eyes was a compartment about two feet wide by one and a half high, and not more than three and a half inches deep.

It was empty of all save the serried shelves of bottles, boxes, and Mr. Vex's shaving materials. A mouse— a very small mouse, indeed— might, with painful cramping, have hidden there. But not Mr. Vex— nor a man of half that gentleman's girth and height.

Together she and her assistant looked under the bath-tub. A space of less than six inches separated the floor from its bottom. 'There was no obstruction under it which prevented a clear view to the wall against which one rim of the tub touched,

"He's not here, ma'am, any place," said the janitor, dropping to the floor. "There's nowhere to look fer him— the man, be all the seven little divvies of ill-luck, ain't here!"

"Then— then, where is he?" asked Mrs. Vex blankly.

"Th' dear only knows!" responded the other with equal barrenness of idea. "An'— that brings me back t' where we started first off. Ye've been mistaken. He never come into the bath-room. here at all— fer he couldn't have, an' got this clean away! Any wan wid half the use of a pair o' blind eyes kin see that!"

"But I tell you, Mr. Casey, I know that my husband did come into this bathroom."

"An' how do ye know that? Till me ag'in."

"I saw him take his clothes off and come down the hall toward this room."

"An? thin?"

"And then, just as I went out of the front door of this apartment, going out to telephone, as I explained before, I heard the bath-room door close behind him."

"Ah!" cried Casey. "An' there ye have it! Ye didn't see him come in here, did ye now?"

"No!" answered Mrs. Vex.

"Thin he didn't come in."

"But he did— he must have. Here are his fresh clothes and his clean socks. There is his book, floating in the water— oh, the thing is horrible! He must have been spirited out of the water, out of the tub, out of this room, in the midst of his reading—"

"Wan minute, wan minute!" broke in the janitor. "He was spirited out of the tub, ye say. Tell me, thin— why ain't there no wet feetprints on this here bathrug? Why ain't there wather spattered somewhere— anywhere— round this room if that's the case? Tell me that, now, Mis' Vex, ma'am, if ye kin do ut."

"I tell you he was spirited away! Some plot was hatched to kidnap him from this room—"

"Through a locked door?"

"I don't know, I don't know!" cried the distracted lady. "How can I believe anything impossible in the face of this weird affair, from start to finish? My husband has vanished— into thin air, by magic, and some uncanny power is responsible for it, I know!"

Indeed, the lady had just cause for this belief in the supernatural, which seemed the only means accountable, for her husband's mysterious disappearance that evening.

How he— or anybody else living, for that matter— could have left that room of his own will or otherwise was beyond figuring out.

There was the bath-room. And there was the locked door, the closed window, the absolute, positive, undoubting lack of loophole for his escape from the tiny chamber.

And there wasn't Mr. Vex.

Besides that, there wasn't, as Casey, the janitor, had pointed out, a sign or speck of spattered water anywhere on the bath-rug or floor.

Such signs would surely have been left by anybody getting out of the bath-tub. Mr, Vex had undoubtedly got out— but without leaving any such trace of so doing behind him.

Was it any wonder that Mrs. Vex, at just that moment, overcome by emotions easily to be imagined— no, difficult to conjecture, since the situation was more unusual than ever woman faced before!— was it to be wondered at, then, that she should collapse into the arms of the janitor in a dead faint?

Or was it surprising that Casey, having brought the lady to herself at the termination of five minutes' hard work, should maintain his view-point on the affair as stoutly as before?

"It's impossible, Mis' Vex, that Mr. Vex wuz ever in this here bath-room!" said he, when Mrs. Vex, restored to consciousness, stood tremblingly before him again. "Ye don't believe in spirits yerself, any more than I do, when ye stop to think things over a bit. An' so— it's out o' r'ason that he was ever in this room at all, since he couldn't have got out of it, once in."

"But how do you account for the fact that the door was locked?" asked Mrs. Vex.

The janitor rubbed his ear for a full minute of deep and profitless reflection.

"Do ye know," he said slowly, "I'd forgot entoirely that side of the matter, ma'am. How could Mr. Vex have got out of this room, whin th' dure was locked— as me own two eyes and pair o' hands knows full well that it was?"

"That's what I want you to tell me cried the lady wildly. "You say we don't either of us, on reflection, believe in the supernatural. But— how else can you account for my husband being taken from this room through that locked door?"

Casey studied the toes of his shoes.

"P'rhaps th' dure ain't the way he wint out,' he suggested at length.

"What's the matter wid what we ain't thought of before— the winder?"

"Impossible— exactly as the door is out of the question," replied Mrs. Vex quickly. "That window is locked, top and bottom, I know positively."

"Did ye try it just now?"

"No."

"Then, how d'ye know it's fastened?"

"Because— as you should remember— the thing has been out of order for the last three weeks. The catch on both sashes is stuck; it can't be opened or shut, and we have complained about it to you at least half a dozen times. That's how I know positively that my husband could not have left this room by that window."

The janitor took the single step across the floor that carried him to the window at the other end of the room. He examined it, tested it, and turned back to his companion— satisfied that she was right; the window could not be opened, and out of it Mr. Vex had certainly not gone that evening.

"Besides," said Mrs. Vex, "why should my husband want to go out that window, even if he could open it and get through it— and how could he lock it behind him, as it is now? It doesn't lead any place. He couldn't go from it any place but straight down the air-shaft to his certain death.

"And that's the strangest part of this whole thing! Way should Mr. Vex want to leave this bath-room at all— either through the door, or the window, or by any other way? It's not so much where he has gone that is killing me with anxiety, as it is why, why, why he is gone from this tub at all."

"Sure," sighed Casey, "it's a bigger riddle than ever I heard of before in all me life. I'm a plain man, Mis' Vex, ma'am, an' I ain't overstocked wid brains. But, begobs, I'll have to give this puzzle up, if ye won't belave that Mr. Vex could never, nohow, noway, have come inter this bath-room at all this night!"

"There are his underclothes," said Mrs. Vex, pointing one trembling finger at the pile of fresh clothing on the floor. "Come," she said, leading the way to the bedroom shared by her and her husband at the other end of the flat. " There are the undergarments he discarded, with the suit of clothes he took off."

She faced the janitor in the center of the room.

"Now," she demanded, "tell me where my husband could have gone if he didn't go into that bath-room, into that tub, lay: there reading— until he was—  until he— disappeared?"

"Widout a stitch of clothes t' his back," said Casey, reddening embarrassedly. "I'll agree wid ye, I don't see where he could have gone."

"We'll search the flat from end to end," said Mrs. Vex determinedly. " Come—follow me."

And then ensued such a fine-tooth-combing of that house, from one end to the other, as never was and never can be again,

All fruitlessly, for nothing, to no avail.

Mr. Vex, at the conclusion of the half-hour's scrutiny of every inch of space in the apartment, was still missing— as completely and mystifyingly as before.

"He. ain't out in the street, that's a sure thing!' commented Casey finally. "There'd be noises— lots and plenty of thim— if he was. A man— er— dressed like Adam, as the mister must be at this very minute, couldn't be trapesin' the public highways widout callin' out the reserves and makin' the establishment o' mob law necessary wherever he was."

"I know it, I know it!" sobbed the absent gentleman's nervously prostrated wife. "The thing is beyond me— beyond you— beyond anybody."

She walked unsteadily to the bathroom, and stood at the doorway looking in. Still the opened magazine, now water-logged, floated on top of the placid,
long-cold water in the tub. "Beyond that, nothing in the little, open room had motion.

Behind her stood Casey, muttering to himself as he looked over her shoulder:

"Out o' the winder means a broken neck down in the area. Out of the dure— that's as impossible as up through the ceilin'. 'Through the walls— it can't be that. Mis' Vex!"

"What is it?" cried the lady, wheeling swiftly at the tone of his voice.

"Can Mr. Vex— do ye belave it could be, tell me— can he have e-e-evaporated from layin' in the hot wather? Ye know more about such things than me— tell me, kin he have gone up in smoke, to say what | mean in me own way?"

Mrs. Vex groaned.

"That's as good an explanation as any, Mr. Casey, of what has become of my poor, dear Benjamin!" she wept. "He may have— evaporated, as you put it!"

"That's the on'y way," agreed the janitor sadly. " Unless— I'm goin' t' have a look out o' that winder, down into the air-shaft, Mis' Vex. I'll take me tools an' open her up now, an' see what I kin see— though I can't reason, poor Mr. Vex not being, as I know of, able t' flit through a pane o' glass, how he could get out through them sashes!"

In two minutes Casey had the portal open. He knelt on the window-sill and looked down the air-shaft separating the apartment-house next door from the flat-building in which he was in.

He saw nothing, looking down through the darkness, on the concrete paving of the areaway, five floors below— the Vex apartment being on the top story of the house.

Nothing, either, met his anxious sight as he looked along the walls of both his own building and the one next door.

"It's no use, ma'am," he said, jumping down on the bath-room floor. "Evaporation' s th' on'y the'ry t' account fer yer man's vanishin'."

"What shall I do?" sobbed Mrs. Vex. "This is dreadful— dreadful!"

"Ca'm yerself, ma'am!" soothed Casey.

"I can't be calm!"

'"D'ye think it wud be any use notifyin' the police, Mis' Vex— maybe a detective on th' thrail av' this mystery might be able to find some dacent, satisfyin' answer to this Chinese puzzle out av the facts—"

"That's it!" cried Mrs. Vex.  " The police— no, a private detective agency might be better. How do I get a detective, Mr. Casey? 'Tell me— quickly— use the telephone— go out— hurry, hurry—get the best man in the city to handle this— this case—"'

"I'll go at once, ma'am— janitor.

Then he stopped.

Mrs. Vex's blood ran suddenly cold in her veins.

From somewhere out of sight— somewhere, seemingly over their heads, perhaps under their feet, beside them, they did not know where— sounded a voice.

And it was the unmistakable voice of the vanished Mr. Vex!

"Martha!" said the voice of the missing man.

Mrs. Vex caught herself just as she was about to fall to the floor in another faint— bracing herself with one hand against the woodwork of the open bathroom door.

"Benjamin!' she mouthed.

Mr. Casey caught the name on her lips.

"Saints presarve us!" he gasped, staggering backward against the steam-pipe, and then quickly away again. "It's— it's Mr. Vex's voice that do be callin' to ye, ma'am?" he whispered frightenedly to the trembling Mrs. Vex.

She ignored him, her eyes— popped half out of her head— roving round the atmosphere of the bath-room, over wall and ceiling and floor in an unavailing search for her husband, whose voice had sounded so startlingly but the moment before.

And now it came again.

"Martha!" The tone was peremptory.

"Benjamin!" screamed the poor woman. "Where are you— oh, where are you, in Heaven's name? Tell me— can I see you? Can you come to me— or I to you?"

"Look up here!" ordered her husband's voice.

This time, the words sounding more distinctly— or, perhaps, her first shock having passed, leaving her ears more keen to trace the direction of the voice— Mrs. Vex looked up through the opened upper sash of the bath-room window.

And there, in the window of the top floor of the apartment-house next door— one floor higher than their own top-story flat—she saw the face of Mr. Vex.

More than that— she saw that he was not "dressed like Adam," as the janitor had put it.

She could see his neck and shoulders, as well as his face and head, and this former portion of his anatomy was correctly garbed in high collar, white lawn tie, and well-fitting evening coat.

The sight of Mr. Vex thus attired capped the climax of the entire mystery.

How— how, in the name of anything that was explainable—had her husband left that locked bath-room, dressed him-self for the dinner-party they were to attend that evening, and got out of the room itself, out of the very apartment, the building, even— and into the flat next door?

The thing was more weird, more uncanny, more supernatural, than ever before: Mrs. Vex felt reason tottering on its throne as she walked haltingly to the window and looked up at her husband looking down at her.

"What— what are you doing there, Benjamin?" she stammered.

"What are you doing there with that man— whoever he is— I heard you talking with?" countered Mr. Vex promptly, his tone angry.

For a full five minutes Mrs. Vex explained exactly what she was doing, what she was not doing, and what she would eventually do if Mr. Vex did not answer her question at once, immediately, quicker than that— and in the most complete detail that he could command.

After a minute for the gentleman to get into his head the facts that had confronted his wife with their mystery, he complied with her request as follows:

"When you went out to telephone," he began, "I had just gone into that bath-room. And no sooner had the door shut behind you than I remembered something.

"That something was a very pressing business engagement I had with Terwilliger, who, as you know, lives in this apartment from whose window I am now talking.

"I had some important papers for him to sign to-night. I should have remembered them, and taken the things up for his signature before I came home. But, however that might have been, it was up to me to see him at once, right then. So, no sooner having stepped foot inside the bath-room than I remembered all this, I stepped out again. You had only just gone out of the flat.

"How I happened to do it, I don't know. Fussed up, I suppose, over having forgotten my engagement with Terwilliger— hearing you shut the front door, and realizing vaguely that I was all alone in the flat, which made me cautious— remembering, too, that burglar who broke in through the bath-room in the Willets' flat next door— I locked the bath-room door behind me.

"Inside was the water in the tub, which I had not used, my underwear— freshly laid out for me to put on—and the magazine I meant to look through while I sat in the tub.

"I laid this, I remember, over the rim of the bath-tub before I came out. It probably fell off into the water at once— which I, having left the room and locked it up behind me, did not notice.

"Then I hurried into my evening clothes, which I meant to wear to-night. Absent-mindedly still, I took out fresh underwear and put it on— instead of remembering about the suit I had taken into the bath-room with me.

"Because I put on my dress clothes, and you found only the garments I had taken off, you thought, as you have told me you did, that I had no clothes on after my disappearance from the bath-room.

"That explains that much of what went far to make you mystified. Anyway, I left the flat before you came back. Forgot to leave a note telling you I had gone— you'd not expect me to do that, anyway, since I was only going next door, expecting to be right back; and never thought that you would worry over what you found. Then— I was delayed in getting my papers signed. We had to go out and find a notary— which took us till now. So that's the whole story, my dear. And I'm extremely sorry I've caused you any distress of mind due to my unthinking carelessness."

Mrs. Vex stepped nearer to the window.

"Benjamin Vex," she said coldly, "you come home here to me— as fast as ever you can waddle!"

Behind her, Mr. Casey, the janitor, turned silently and stepped out into the hall.

" 'Now's the toime, Oi fale it inside of me bones," he said, with a chuckle for the impending welcome home to Mr. Vex, "fer me t' do a little vanishin' act of me own, begobs!"

________________

15: A Hand-Bag Too Many

Robert Keene

Argosy, May 1909

"I BEG your pardon, madam— you dropped your bag!"

Miss Hutchison turned in the narrow, crowded aisle of the department-store. Facing her stood an alert -eyed young man, hat in hand, holding out to her a plain, black-leather shopping-case.

"Dear me!" exclaimed the little, white-haired lady, staring at the familiar-appearing chatelaine he proffered.

"Why," raising her empty hands and clapping them hastily to her belt— "why, so I did!"

The young man pressed the bag into her clasp.

"I picked it up from the floor behind you," he explained briefly, turning away. "Not at all," he called over his shoulder in answer to her half-uttered speech of thanks; "you're quite welcome!"

Then, stepping back into the crowd around them, he wheeled down another aisle, and disappeared.

"Well!" Miss Hutchison stood flusteredlv looking after his departing figure. Her eyes dropped to the shopping-case in her hands. "Well, I'm very fortunate, I'm sure, to get back my bag!

"And very stupid," she added. "to drop it."

Lifting her gaze to glance swiftly about her, she thankfully perceived that no one watched the embarrassment she felt at the exposure of her carelessness.

No one— that is, save a heavily mustached man in a brown derby hat, standing beside the opposite counter. He turned at the moment that she looked in his direction, his eyes sweeping her from head to foot in a slow stare, and then walked indifferently away.

Blushing slightly, Miss Hutchison moved forward with the stream of shoppers flowing down the aisle.

"I can't understand my carelessness in dropping that bag," she told herself. "If it weren't for that young man's honesty, I might have lost it. And suppose I had?"

She trembled at the thought. In the bag was more than two thousand dollars— a sum withdrawn from her bank not two hours before with which to purchase letters of credit— and the steamer tickets for herself and niece, who were to sail for a summer in Europe the next day.

Suppose she lost those tickets and all that money! The vision of the calamity that would follow caused her to catch her breath.

And she had nearly done it. She had escaped such ill fortune by a hair-breadth.

However, she thought gratefully, her grasp on the bag in her hand tightening, she had avoided the catastrophe.

Arrived at the end of the aisle, Miss Hutchison stepped out into the rotunda. And a glance at the clock, hung in the dome, brought an ejaculation of surprise to her lips.

It was noon, and she had arranged to meet Marion, her niece, not later than half after eleven. She was nearly half an hour late, she realized, as she turned hastily up another aisle.

An hour before, Marion and she had parted on the second floor of the store, promising to meet again at the glove counter. Miss Hutchison, arriving there fifteen minutes ahead of time, had whiled away a few tedious moments in the selection of a pair of suedes, and departed.

She intended returning promptly. But the minutes had slipped by uncounted in her aimless wandering about the store, and now she was late.

How foolish she had been to leave the counter, in the first place. Marion, arriving to find her gone, might go off in search of her ; thus they both would be lost in vain seeking of each other through the crowded store.

Still, she was only twenty minutes late  her niece would wait for her. Yet, she thought worriedly, she should not have parted front the girl at all.

There was Marion's troublesome love-affair, Miss Hutchison remembered with a catch of her breath.

When the niece had confessed to her love for Tom Somebody-or-other (her aunt did not know who nor what he was), she had put her foot emphatically down upon the match.

"You are too young— entirely too young!" was her one objection — the unalterable answer to her niece's every argument.

She refused to see the girl's lover, turned a deaf ear to all praise of his good qualities, and at last, driven to desperation, was preparing to carry Marion off with her to Europe.

"She's a dear," the girl informed Tom Clinton, who raved vainly over the impossibility of the situation; "and I know she'd agree with me that you're one, too, if she'd only agree to see you. But she won't.

"I'm all she has to love in the world, Tom, and she hates to lose me— yet. In a year or so I'm sure she'll change her mind. But, until then, we'll just have to wait. And, remember, she thinks she's doing the best thing for me. She's really a darling."

The "darling " now turned down the aisle containing the glove department. The passageway between the two counters was comparatively deserted; her swift glance down its length unobstructed. And Marion was not there.

Her worst fears were realized. They had missed each other.

She would ask the salesgirl if any one answering to her niece's description had been there. Miss Hutchison stepped hastily forward.

She was within two yards of the counter and breathlessly hurrying on — when she stopped short with a startled gasp. Lying beside a pile of boxes on the counter was a plain, black-leather shopping-case— her bag!

With widened eyes she stared at the chatelaine. There could be no doubt about it; it was her own.

Even at that distance she could see plainly a long scratch on its upturned side — a mark she remembered accidentally to have been made some time before with a hat-pin.

She readily understood how the bag came on the counter. She had carelessly left it behind when she went away from the department a half-hour ago.

But— she raised the black-leather case she held in her hands— but if the bag on the counter was hers, to whom did the one she carried belong?

The young man who gave it to her told her that he had picked it up behind her on the floor. She did not have her own bag with her ; therefore he had thought the case hers, since she alone, probably, of all the women about him, was empty-handed.

And her mistake in taking the strange chatelaine was no less simple than his error in giving it to her. The case in her hands was the exact duplicate, in point of size and general appearance, of her own — of a thousand others in daily use. Without the scratch upon her bag, she could not have told the difference between the two, even if they were placed side by side before her.

Here she had been carrying around a strange shopping-case under the impression that it was her own— congratulating herself upon the recovery of her bag— and all the time her precious chatelaine, the receptacle of her money and the steamer tickets, was lost!

For over half an hour that unpretentious-appearing shopping-case had been lying in plain view on the counter. And in it was over two thousand dollars in bills— to say nothing of the six hundred dollars' worth of tickets as well.

Surely good fortune followed in her footsteps to-day. She had thought herself lucky when the bag she imagined to be her own was returned to her. Now, she was really fortunate in actually recovering her property.

Miss Hutchison stepped quickly to the counter.

"I left my bag here a few minutes ago," she said to the saleswoman. " That is it," reaching out her hand to the case before her.

"I beg your pardon," replied the girl, picking up the bag and laying it down on the ledge of the shelf behind her. "This belongs to some one else."

"Some one else!" Miss Hutchison exclaimed. " I'm sure you're wrong— the bag belongs to me!"

The girl watched her with a smile upon her lips.

"Do you think you lost your bag, madam?" she asked slowly.

"Certainly I don't think it!" the little lady answered a trifle sharply. "I know I lost it. The bag you've just picked up is mine."

The smile deepened on the salesgirl's face. She leaned confidentially over the counter.

"You've made a mistake," she said in an amused tone. "Your bag isn't lost— you're carrying it in your hands right now!"

Miss Hutchison gasped, and, lifting the bag she held, stared from it to the young woman's smiling face.

"You're mistaken," she replied quickly. "This bag isn't mine— I don't know whose it is. But the one behind you belongs to me."

"You're sure you haven't made some mistake?" The girl's voice was kind, as though she was speaking to an unreasonable child. "Surely you wouldn't be carrying somebody else's bag instead of your own?"

Miss Hutchison sat down on the stool before the counter. The situation was aggravating in the extreme. Here she was, within sight of her bag and its precious contents, but she couldn't get it because this stupid girl thought the bag she held in her hands was her own. Oh, it was maddening!

"You wouldn't be carrying two bags, would you?" the young woman was saying.

Collecting her scattered wits, the little lady leaned forward and impressively addressed her.

"Listen," she began. "A young man picked this bag up from the floor behind me on the other side of the store, and gave it to me. I had left my bag— the one behind you— here on this counter, where I bought a pair of gloves not more than half an hour ago.

"Of course, the man thought the chatelaine was mine; I was near it, and did not carry a bag. as probably every other woman around him did. I took the bag. thinking it was mine, when I discovered that the one I owned was gone— you can see for yourself how much alike the two are.

"That young man and I both made a mistake. You're making one, too, in holding back my property. Now, won't you please return my bag to me?"

The girl looked at her in silence. The smile had left her lips, and she considered the older woman quite gravely.

"Well, you see," she said slowly at length, "it's very peculiar, you know— you having a bag in your hands and then coming to claim this one. I don't want to make any mistake."

"But that's just what you are doing!" Miss Hutchison cried earnestly. "I tell you that bag behind you on the shelf is mine!"

"Well," hesitated the girl, "you see. I don't know. Maggie — she's the girl that waited on you, I guess— she told me that somebody'd left her bag here, and to give it to the party when she called. But she didn't say anything about the person who left it having two bags. And I don't—"

"Where is the other girl— the one who waited on me? "

"Maggie? She's gone home. You see—"

"When will she return? " Miss Hutchison impatiently interrupted again. "She can identify me and give me back my bag."

"She won't be back." calmly announced the other. "She went home sick, and she won't be here till to-morrow morning."

The little lady received the information in stunned silence. This girl would not surrender her bag because she did not know her. The salesgirl who could identify her was not there. How was she to secure her property, then?

"This is most annoying!" she exclaimed at last. "I don't know what I can do to convince you that the bag you are keeping from me is really mine."

The girl pondered the situation for a moment.

"Well, ma'am," she said finally, "you understand I'm willing to give you your bag if I know it's yours. But I don't want to get into any trouble over it. If I turned it over to you, and somebody came along after you'd gone, and I found you hadn't— well—"

"I can tell you everything that's in it," cried the other, suddenly struck with the idea. "Just hold the bag down under the counter, where I can't see it, and I'll identify everything it contains."

The girl smiled again, this time pityingly.

"No, ma'am," she grinned; "that's too easy. Suppose the bag belonged to somebody you knew, and you'd seen whatever was in it— you could tell me all right. We girls that need our jobs have got to be awful careful or we'll get fired, you see."

Miss Hutchison's teeth closed with an angry snap. The situation was intolerable— and there seemed no way out of it.

Why had that young man ever handed her the hateful bag she carried? If he hadn't troubled to return to her what was not hers, she would not be in her present difficulty.

And why hadn't she been more careful in accepting it? Why hadn't she kept her wits about her and examined the bag before she took it?

Suddenly she sat erect upon the stool. Into her mind had flashed a sudden, horrifying thought.

It had not occurred to her before, but— had that young man really picked up the bag, as he said he did?

Suppose— she shuddered at the possibility — suppose lie had lied? Suppose the bag was his and he had wished to be rid of it?

Why should he wish that? Because he did not want to be seen carrying the case.

Perhaps the young man was a shoplifter.

She had read stories of the desperate means taken to avoid capture by this order of criminals.

This might be one of those stories happening in real life. The young man, if he was a shoplifter with a bag full of loot, might have been pursued through the store.

The first thing he would do would be to try to get rid of the incriminating evidence of his guilt.

And what more natural means of doing so could he devise than to hand the bag over to the first woman he saw without a shopping-case, explain that he had picked the bag up near her on the floor, trust to luck that she might indeed have dropped hers, and substitute his booty-sack for her property?

Had that happened to her? Miss Hutchison felt a cold perspiration break out on her body.

She remembered the young man's manner when he had given her the bag she held. She recalled that he had hurried off immediately after she took the case from him.

Was he a thief? Had he made her a party to his crime by turning over to her the stolen goods to escape detection?

What was in the bag he had given her? If she had looked into it in the first place, she would have avoided the mistake she had made. And if the case contained stolen property when she received it, that property was still there.

There was just one way to find out. With a swift turn of her wrist, she opened the bag she held on her knees as she sat on the low stool before the counter.

Dropping her eyes, she shot a swift glance within. Then, with a half- smothered cry, she snapped the clasp hastily shut and looked fearsomely about her.

The chatelaine was crammed— literally stuffed to bursting with a disordered mass of expensive laces, gold watches, odd bits of jewelry, an embroidered scarf or two— a jumble which fairly shrieked its identity to be "loot."

Oh, where was Marion? the little lady thought agonizedly. She needed her; needed some one near her to bolster her waning courage.

She cast a second nervous glance around her. At the realization that no one had seen the inside of the case, she drew a deep sigh of relief and sharply caught her breath.

Her eyes met those of a familiar face at the corner of the aisle, ten yards distant, on her left.

The same thickly-mustached man in the brown derby hat who had stared at her after she received the strange bag, was now watching her.

His eyes seemed to bore two holes into her head with the intensity of his gaze.

Miss Hutchison felt the color rushing into her cheeks as she turned away her timid glance.

Who was that man? He frightened her. Her eyes dropped again to the shopping-case in her lap. Did he know what was in it? she wondered nervously.

She must get rid of the bag. The danger of its contents being discovered and found in her possession was too great.

Forgotten was her previous distress at her failure to recover her own chatelaine in the new anxiety to be rid of the other.

But how was she to do away with the bag of stolen goods?

The burden of the problem was too much for her to bear unaided. If Marion would only come, she thought worriedly, they two could devise some means out of the difficulty.

"Say," broke in the voice of the sales-woman, watching her troubled face from behind the counter, "I'm awful sorry about that bag; honestly I am! I don't know but what it does belong to you, and— well— oh, gee! I wisht I knew what to do about it! "

Miss Hutchison looked up at the girl, her lip trembling at the sympathy in her voice.

The young woman had a kind face; perhaps she could help her. If she told her what was in the bag she held, possibly the girl could advise her how best to dispose of it.

Suddenly she determined to throw herself upon the shop woman's mercies. She brought the leather case up from her lap and laid it down on the counter.

Her fingers twisted tremblingly at the clasp, the bag slipped half-open— and a hand gripped her lightly on the shoulder.

The tiny little lady turned with a nervous little cry— to look up into the heavily mustached face of the man in the brown derby.

"Don't open that bag, lady!" the man said in a low, grim voice; "not unless you want to get yourself pinched before the whole store!"

Miss Hutchison stared wildly into his lowered face. His first words confirmed her suspicions as to the consequences of the discovery of the shoplifter's bag in her possession. This man, then, knew what was in it.

"I— I don't understand you!" she said weakly. "Who— who are you?"

"I'm the store-detective— see?" the man explained in a hoarse whisper. "I'm onto what you got in that grip, see? Now, you want to keep quiet and not make no fuss, or you'll have me snap the bracelets onto you right out here in front of everybody. See?"

"B-bracelets!" Miss Hutchison stuttered between her chattering teeth. " W-what d-do you m-mean?"

"Handcuffs— darbies— manacles is what I mean— see?" he whispered fiercely. " Now, you want to keep quiet and come along with me without no trouble."

She was arrested! Oh, this was terrible, terrible. If Marion would only come!

"B-but," she stammered, her eyes pleadingly searching the face of the man bending over her— "but you— you are making a mistake! I am not what you think me to be— truly. I can explain—"

"No, you won't! " the other interrupted in a hard undertone. "There's nothin' to explain. You're caught with the goods, and you'll have to come along with me."

"W-where are you going to take me?" the little lady asked helplessly.

"I'll take you to the manager's office; he'd like to see a slick shoplifter like you!  We'll search you there."

"Search me!" Miss Hutchison rose tremblingly to her feet. "Oh, you can't— you won't do that! Please— "

She broke off abruptly as her eyes, raised to the man's face, swept down the aisle behind him.

Marion was advancing toward her down the passageway.

At last! Now she would not be alone in her trouble; her niece would help her.

"Marion!" she called to the approaching girl, "Mar—"

Her voice died in her throat; the girl was not alone— with her was a man, a young man—

It was the young man who had given her the bag of stolen goods!

She turned swiftly to the fellow with the mustache standing beside her.

"There!" she cried excitedly, pointing to the advancing couple. "There is the person whom you want— there is your shoplifter!"

The man in the brown derby turned swiftly. His jaw hardened as he caught sight of the alert-eyed young man coming up the aisle.

"Why, auntie!" exclaimed Marion. "Whatever is the matter? What has happened?"

"Marion!" Miss Hutchison gasped the question. "What are you doing with that— that man?"

"Oh, it's Tom— Tom Clinton!" the girl answered hastily. "Let me introduce you. Tom, this is—"

"Stop! " the little lady checked her. Then, aquiver with indignation, she stepped forward and faced the young man.

"So you are the man who dares to love my niece!" and she addressed him in a voice which trembled with anger. " You— a common thief, a—"

"Why, aunt!" Marion broke in amazedly.

"Stop!" her aunt interrupted her. "Marion, you have been deceived in this man. He is a thief— a criminal!"

"There is some mistake here, I'm positive," and the young man addressed the indignant, flashing-eyed lady before him. "You surely do not mean—"

"You surely do not mean to deny that you gave me this bag, do you?" his accuser cried fiercely.

"I gave it to you, yes!" the other answered surprisedly. "But—"

"That will do," Miss Hutchison broke in. "You gave me this bagful of stolen lace and jewelry and other things. You hear that?" and she turned excitedly to the black-mustached man who now stood behind her. "He admits that he gave the bag to me— he is the one you can take before your manager and search! Show him this 'slick' shoplifter!"

"Will you let me explain—" Marion's companion began.

" Explain!" scornfully demanded Miss Hutchison. "Explain— what have you to explain?"

"Marion," as she turned to her niece, standing in wide-eyed astonishment beside her, "this— this man came up to me in this store half an hour ago and gave me this bag. He told me he picked it up from the floor near me— I had left my own bag here on this counter, and so took this case to be mine— and then he hurried off.

"Inside the bag is a mass of stolen property. This man was probably pursued through the store, wished to get rid of his loot, and so turned it over to me. You see—"

"Wait!" The young man stepped determinedly forward. "You must let me explain. I gave you this bag, just as you said I did, telling you that I had picked it up, from the floor behind you. That is true; I found the bag and gave it to you because you were the nearest woman to it without a bag of some sort, and I thought it belonged to you. But I did not know what was in it. I never saw it before I picked it up— it was not mine!"

Miss Hutchison stared at him speechlessly. His story was plausible; there was no reason why it could not be true. And he was the man her niece loved. Marion surely would know if he were a criminal.

Perhaps she had made a mistake in accusing him. But—

"But if you are not guilty," she stammered faintly, "who is the shoplifter to whom this bag belongs? "

The man in the brown derby cleared his throat and stepped out from behind the little lady.

"Now, don't make a fuss about this right out in the open," he cautioned the three. "You don't want to rouse the whole store, do you?"

They looked at him in silence.

"I'm the house-detective," the man explained to the girl and her fiancé.

"We can arrange this thing if you'll keep quiet, so there won't be any scandal in which the old lady "— nodding at Miss Hutchison— "is mixed up. Just keep cool now, and I'll fix this thing."

"But who is the thief to whom this bag belongs?" the little lady asked worriedly. "Until he is found, I shall be under suspicion because I have the, stolen goods."

"I don't know who he is," replied Marion's friend, "but I'm going to see if I can't find him."

He turned away. As he passed Marion, he whispered in her ear:

"This is my chance. Your aunt is in trouble ; and if I can get her out of it, I'm certain her objection to our engagement will end. I've got a clue that I'll follow up in the next five minutes and report on right away. Wait for me."

He walked hurriedly down the aisle. The man in the brown derby looked after him sharply; and then, stepping to the counter beside them, beckoned Miss Hutchison and her niece to draw near.

"Now," he said in a confidential undertone, "here's what I'll do. You turn over that bag to me, I'll report the goods in it to the office, and let you get away.

"Of course, I could pinch you and make a lot of trouble that you wouldn't like to have happen. But I'll keep my eyes shut, so to speak, this time, and let you go."

He turned to Marion and winked knowingly toward her aunt.

"I can see the old lady ain't a professional crook. I understand what's the matter with her." He wagged his head shrewdly. "Kleptomaniacs can't help their habits— she ain't to blame."

"But!" Miss Hutchison gasped amazedly; "you—"

"Say," the shopgirl behind the counter interrupted, "I've changed my mind about givin' you that bag of yours."

She cast a scornful glance at the mustached man.

"I don't believe you're a shoplifter, nor a 'klep,' neither," she announced.

With a determined gesture, she handed the little lady her precious satchel. "There you are, madam," she said, glowering again at the man beside them.

"Those fly cops think they know it all," she sniffed contemptuously; "but they don't."

The little lady hurriedly opened the bag, and the eyes of the brown-derbied man at her side glistened as he caught sight of the roll of bills within.

"Now, let's get down to business," he whispered hastily. " You give me that bag and— and a hundred dollars out of that roll, and I'll let you go."

Miss Hutchison looked uncertainly at her niece. Should she do as the man asked— pay a bribe to save herself from the consequences of a crime she had not committed? The two women stared helplessly at each other.

"Quick!" hissed the low voice at their side. "Turn over that bag and the money, and I'll beat it. If you don't, I'll take you both to the manager's office, have you searched— both of you, mind— and then take you to jail. Which is it?"

The little lady glanced questioningly again at Marion.

"Do as he says, aunt," whispered her niece. "You must save yourself from this dreadful predicament."

Miss Hutchison looked timidly at the man bending over her shoulder.

"You understand," she said slowly, "that I am innocent of any wrong-doing—"

"I only understand that I'm taking graft and runnin' the danger of gettin' fired out of my job," he answered quickly. "Come on, now; hand over that bag and a hundred dollars!"

The little lady detached a bill from the bundle in her bag and slipped it, with the shoplifter's chatelaine, into his hands. Almost before they realized it, so swift was his departure, the man was gone.

"Well," the little lady sighed wearily, "that's over with now. I've got rid of that hateful case of stolen property, and I have my own bag again. I suppose I'm very fortunate to get out of all this annoyance as easily as I have."

"That horrid man! " Marion exclaimed angrily. "To think that he would accuse you of being a— a thief! I hope he does lose his wretched job for treating you as he did— and then making you pay him for it!"

Miss Hutchison rose.

"I'm lucky, I guess, to escape anything worse," she said. "Come, dear, we'll go now."

"Oh, wait!" the girl cried in some embarrassment. "Tom— Mr. Clinton promised to be back and asked me to wait for him."

"Marion," began her aunt sharply, "we will not stay—"

"Look— auntie!" her niece interrupted, staring behind the little lady.

Miss Hutchison turned quickly.

Coming toward them down the aisle was a group of men led by Tom Clinton, in whose footsteps followed the fellow in the brown derby, his arms linked in those of two strangers.

"Here's your shoplifter. Miss Hutchison," Mr. Clinton announced as the party halted at her side. "This man who told us he was the house-detective here is the thief himself.

"I suspected that all wasn't well," he continued. "The way the man kept cautioning us to be quiet struck me as a little odd. It seemed that he was more anxious than we were to avoid notoriety.

"So I went at once to the manager of the store, asked him for a description of the detective, and was immediately introduced to this gentleman"— he bowed to one of the two men between whom the thief stood— "as none other than the genuine special officer.

"I explained the situation to the manager," he nodded to the second of the two men holding the shoplifter— "and we three started to the scene at once.

"On the way we met this crook just getting ready to leave the store, collared him, and he has confessed." He turned to the black-mustached man.

"Tell your story to the ladies as you told it to us," he ordered.

"Why, there ain't nothin' to tell, I guess, they don't already know," the man answered with a wry smile. "Somebody knocked the bag out of my hand and I saw this young feller pick it up and give it to the old lady. Then I followed her, tryin' to get it back, some way.

"I seen her open it up here at this counter, so I went up and pretended to be a detective that was goin' to arrest her— threw a scare into her so's she'd give up the bag.

"Then I seen the wad of bills she had, and I thought I could carry the game further and get some cash out of her on the bluff . If I hadn't done that," he ended ruefully, "I'd have got away. Hanging around to get that money was what gave these men a chance to get me before I got off."

Miss Hutchison looked from the thief to the young man standing at her niece's side. He came forward and returned to her the money she had given the pseudo-detective.

"Thank you," she said.

"He wasn't such a bad sort of a fellow, after all," she thought, as she carefully surveyed him. "He was quite clever, too, to foil that man's game. Perhaps—"

Marion, watching the softened expression upon her aunt's face, advanced to Tom Clinton and linked her arm in his.

"Don't you think, auntie—" she began shyly.

Miss Hutchison instantly burned her bridges.

"I think," she said firmly, "that we'd better go to lunch— all three of us!"

__________________

16: The Dangerous Day

Robert Keene

Argosy April 1916

I SUPPOSE anybody else would have picked the wallet up. I would have done so myself— on any other day. It happened, however, that I was acquainted with the date.

And for that reason, when I saw that black-leather bill-fold lying in plain view in the hall on the eighteenth floor of the Mammoth Building I smiled— a superior sort of smile.

"No, you don't!" I said to myself. "I don't bite on any old gag like that!"

The person or persons to whom I mentally addressed my remarks, I imagined to be watching me through the keyhole or the crack of a partially-opened transom in some one of the neighboring offices. They'd placed the pocketbook there to see who'd pick it up. Whoever did so would find, the moment after, that he was the victim of a practical joke.

A voice would come floating out of the keyhole or over the transom, to proclaim the finder's folly in tones of mockery: "April fool!"

The day was the first of April. It was the open season for the playing of all sorts of pranks upon the unwary— or the absent-minded, as concerned the date. But I meant to show the Merry Andrew who had placed that pocketbook there that I was not one of that kind.

Perhaps I was not the first who had seen the wallet even though it was only half past eight in the morning. Others might have come along before me and picked it up, to hear the jeers of the individual who had planted it; and, being recruited into the joke, had dropped it there again to let the next passer-by be fooled in turn as they had been.

But they weren't going to catch me. I was too wise— oh, much too wise—to be taken in by that be-whiskered japery which, next to the brick under the hat, is the most popular with those amateur joke-smiths whose busy day falls immediately after the thirty-first of March.

So, as I walked by the bill-fold, which had a fat look— from its stuffing of newspaper, probably— I allowed my toe to come in contact with it and sent it spinning across the tiled floor of the hall, giving not so much as another glance at it as I passed indifferently on to the door of my office.

I had come down early that morning, as I had been doing for the past week, because the little mail-order business I had started six months before was beginning to look up.

As a matter of fact, I had been rushed to death during the preceding six days. The firm of manufacturers who supplied me with the small and useful articles that I was to re-sell to canvassers at a profit of thirty per cent., had sent me one of their latest novelties. It was a pocket-size kit of automobile tools, guaranteed to be capable of repairing anything that could get the matter with a Flivver car, and not make a bulge in the pocket.

From the first day when I had inserted the three-line "ad" in the classified columns I had been literally besieged by professional canvassers. My office had been filled all day long with an eager mob— where before it had remained discouragingly empty, in spite of the most tempting advertisements describing the goods I had on hand.

I had been shrewd enough at the start to wire the manufacturers to grant me certain exclusive territory for the "Little Gem," which they had done; and it looked as though I might be on the way to make a name and fortune for myself as a mail-order king, after all.

I was happy over the prospect, for no selfish reason. If I could bring my income up to a respectable figure, Molly and I could get married.

Molly Olstricher and I had known, from the moment when we had first met each other at a Welsh rarebit party, that we were going to get married some day. Just when that day was going to be was a problem.

For that reason we had kept the fact of our engagement a secret. A secret from the world at large and from one person in it in particular.

The person was Molly's uncle, with whom she lived. He was well-off; worth a hundred thousand dollars, which, safely invested at five per cent., was enough to provide himself and Molly with all the comforts they needed. And I had imagined the first question he would be likely to ask me would be, could I support his niece in the way to which she had been accustomed? I had also known the only answer I could give to that question. That, unfortunately, I was not able to do so.

It would be enough to cause him to declare our contemplated match off. He might even forbid me to see Molly again. Therefore, we had decided to keep him in ignorance as to how we felt toward each other, on the theory that what he didn't know couldn't hurt— us.

This had been up till three days before. But then, judging from the way business had been going with me lately, I had made up my mind that I could safely put the matter up to the old gentleman!

If he asked me whether I was able to support Molly I could reply that if I wasn't, I soon expected to be— and let him look over my books, in which I had recorded all my sales of the "Little Gem," to prove it.

On Sunday Molly, who knew that I was coming that night to put the fatal question to her uncle, had labored all the forenoon in the kitchen to prepare, with her own fair hands, a cake of which he was especially fond.

I had found him less grouchy than usual, when I arrived at fifteen minutes past eight. After a half-hour spent in alternately wiping the cold sweat from the palms of my hands and swallowing my Adam's apple, I had blurted out the point of my call upon him.

Whether the cake she had so diplomatically baked had been the cause of it or not, the old fellow had not leaped up from his chair to start throttling me, as I had feared he might do.

Instead, handing me a cigar in a quite unexcited manner, he had asked me how my business was getting along.

I had told him. How my office was full of agents clamoring for the "Little Gem" all day long. And that I had found it necessary, for the past few days, to get down ahead of anybody else in the building but the scrubwoman and the elevator- runners, in order to snatch the time to shake the money-orders and checks out of my mail before the rush of canvassers set in.

When I had finished Molly's Uncle had sat looking thoughtfully before him for several moments, then he had told me that he would give me his answer to my request for his niece's hand in a few days. And that was how the matter had been left.

He was going to investigate the claims I had made, I supposed. Well, he could do so, and welcome. He would find that I was swamped with orders, and therefore on the road to wealth, just as I had told him. Even as I inserted my key in the door of my office I heard the telephone inside ringing.

Probably some one was calling up to put in an order for a gross or so of "Little Gems" over the wire. The phone was ringing in the deliberate, steady way that showed some one had been trying to get the number for a long time.

Throwing open the door, I hurried to take the receiver off the hook.

"Hello!" I called.

Molly's voice came to me over the wire.

Hello! hello!" she gave back. "Is that you, Tom?"

I hitched my chair closer to the desk and beamed into the black-rubber mouthpiece.

"Hello, deary!" I answered. "This is a pleasant surprise. For a hard-working man to be greeted by his sweetheart's voice just as he sits down at his desk to begin the day! You are my sweetheart, aren't—"

"Oh, Tom, stop!" she cried. "Stop and listen to me— don't be silly now, but listen, listen!"

"I'm not silly," I informed her. "I'd only be that if I didn't love you to distraction. And—"

"Tom!" Molly earnestly broke in upon me once more. "Will you listen to me? Don't say another word, but just listen!"

The excitement in her tone sobered me at once.

"Has anything happened?" I asked quickly.

"Yes!" she flung back at me over the wire desperately. "Something has happened!"

"You don't mean—?" I began.

"Listen!" she hurried on. "Every moment counts! I've been trying for the past fifteen minutes to get you on the phone to— to tell you about last night and what I heard."

"Yes. Go on."

"Have you found it?" she blurted out.

"Found what?" I asked.

I heard her give a despairing groan.

"Quick, dear!" she continued, with a return to her former tone of breathless excitement. "Look around your office for it. A black-leather wallet—"

"Hello!" I cried out excitedly in turn. "What's that you say?"

"Pick up the black-leather pocketbook you'll find somewhere on the floor of your office!" Molly quickly repeated. "Listen, Tom. I heard uncle talking with a friend of his— a man in the optical business— last night. You remember he said he would give you his 'yes' or 'no' to our getting married in a few days? Well, it seems that he wants to test your honesty first.

"I don't know whether I ever mentioned it to you or not, but uncle has a sister who married a man who turned out to be a thief. He's serving a term in a Western penitentiary now. And then there was a cousin of his who married a man who afterward went wrong— there was something about some money missing in the firm where he worked, and soon after he disappeared and has never been heard of since. It seems that Uncle Peter is obsessed with the idea of making sure that the man who marries me, whoever he may be, is honest—Hello, are you listening?" she broke off to inquire.

"Yes, yes!" I breathlessly reassured her. "Tell me what you heard last night. Quick!"

"I heard uncle planning a test that would prove whether you were honest or not," Molly went on. "He was going down to your office this morning at half-past seven, before you get there, and wait around till he saw one of the scrubwomen unlock your door with her pass-key to go in and clean up the place. Then he was going to step in and ask for you.

"When the woman wasn't looking he'd drop a bill-fold with a lot of money in it on the floor. He remembered what you'd said about your office being full of men all day long, and he knew you'd think, when you spied the pocketbook and picked it up, that some one of them had dropped it. If you returned it to the person whose card was inside, that would prove you were honest. But—"

"Whose card was in it?" I interrupted feverishly.

"One of the cards of uncle's friend, the man with the optical goods store, that I told you he was talking it over with last night," Molly answered. "You told uncle that not all the people who came into your office to buy those small sets of automobile tools were canvassers. Some of them were owners of Flivver cars themselves, who couldn't wait to find an agent who sold the repair kits, and so came straight to you to buy them. You'd suppose it was one of them who'd dropped the pocketbook.

"By putting Mr. Og's card in it he could find out if you returned the pocketbook to him, or if you didn't. But, oh, Tom, you will find it and take it right up to Mr. Og's store, won't you? Then uncle will be perfectly satisfied to let you marry me—"

"I'll try my best to find it!" I promised her through my clenched teeth. "And now, dearest, every moment counts. I'll have to ring off and dash back out there in the hall to see if it's still lying—"

"No, no—Tom! Wait, you don't understand!" Molly cried out to detain me. "I said uncle dropped it on the floor of your office, not in the hall—"

"Maybe he did!" I muttered to myself, rising and dapping the receiver back on the hook— for I couldn't waste precious time sitting there arguing over the matter with her. "But out in the hall is where that pocketbook is now— or was two minutes ago. I only hope, by a miracle, that it's still there!"

I understood in a flash how the wallet had got out in the hall where I had seen it— and, like a ninny, passed it by.

Mrs. Mulligan, the scrubwoman, was nearsighted— she had confided that affliction to me one morning when I had come down even earlier than usual and found her at work in my office. Gathering the wallet up in the waste paper from my floor, without noticing what it was, she must have carried it out in the burlap bag that she used to collect her trash in, and it had fallen out in the hall without attracting her attention.

And to think that I had actually kicked it aside—the thing that represented my one chance of some day calling Molly my wife!

Why, I should be branded as a thief. There was nothing else her uncle would think. If he didn't hear, some time within the next forty-eight hours, that I had appeared at his friend's optical goods store and given him a bill-fold with the money in it intact, he would believe that I possessed such low ethics as to determine to keep what I had found, and he would never consent to let Molly marry me.

As I bolted back out of my office into the hall I swept its tiled floor from end to end— and a despairing groan escaped my lips.

The black leather bill-fold which I had disdained to pick up, in the idiotic belief that it had been put there by some one for an April-fool joke, was no longer in sight. Somebody else had got it—somebody with more sense than I possessed.

He had seen a wallet lying in the comer of the hall to which I had kicked it, and given no thought to the day's date. And now what was I to do?

The hall was empty— no, it wasn't, either.

A man in a shabby suit and out-of-style brown derby was just getting into one of the elevators. I saw him give a furtive look back over his shoulder as he did so. That, and his unprosperous appearance, instantly convicted him in my mind.

He had picked up the pocketbook, and he was getting away with it under my nose!

"Down, eighteen!" I shouted, springing toward the car as I did so.

Too late. The door clanged shut. As I charged up to it the elevator-runner glowered at me through the grill.

"Push the button," he warned me, "when you want to go down. We stop on signal only!"

And the car dropped from sight, leaving me standing there grinding my teeth in baffled rage.

I leaped for the signal-button and held my finger upon it steadily, while I waited for another car to descend— all the time aware of the fact that every moment that went by was increasing the chances against my ever setting eyes upon the man I suspected of having pocketed that bill-fold.

If he got out into the street before I could reach the main floor he would be lost to me as effectually as the smallest needle in the biggest hay-stack.

"Quick!" I blurted out to the operator of the car which finally stopped to take me on, and I thrust a bill in his hand as I spoke. "Don't make any more stops between here and the ground floor— and get down there as quick as possible! "

He accepted the tip and my instructions. And thus, when I sprang off the elevator in the lobby below, I was just in time to see the shabby coat-tails of the man I was after flickering out of sight through the entrance of the building.

But, the thought occurred to me, as I followed him up the street, I did not know positively that he had found the wallet. I had not seen him pick it up. It might have been some one else—

At that moment I saw the man in the brown derby turn into a dairy lunch-room. And my heart bounded with the hope that I wasn't shadowing him in vain, after all.

This would be the first thing the finder of a wallet full of money would be expected to do— try to pass some of it, to find out whether or not it was real.

I entered the eating-place after him and taking one of the high stools at the marble- topped counter opposite to him, I called for a glass of milk and crullers and toyed with them while I waited for him to finish the order of ham-and-eggs, coffee and toast which he had requested the waitress to bring him.

Then I watched him take his check up to the cashier's desk beside the front door. He readied into his breast pocket and I saw him bring out the black-leather wallet which I recognized immediately as the one I had seen lying on the floor of the hall in the Mammoth Building.

He proffered a bill from it with his check through the cashier's window and received back four bills of lesser denomination and some silver in change, which he thrust into his pocket, and then passed out.

I hastened forward to the cashier's desk, threw down a coin with my check, and followed the shabbily-dressed stranger outside.

"Excuse me," I said, tapping him on the shoulder. "But that pocketbook I just saw you take out in there— you found it on the eighteenth floor of the Mammoth Building, not fifteen minutes ago, didn't you?"

He wheeled with a guilty start.

"Well, what if I did?" he asked slowly.

I held out my hand.

"I'll be obliged to you," I said, "if you'll give it to me."

"Does it belong to you?"

I hesitated whether to lie and claim the ownership of the pocketbook to which I really had no more right than he did. If I told him the truth, though, he wouldn't give it up— and there was no way he would know it if I falsely claimed the wallet to be my own.

"Yes, it does!" I answered boldly.

I looked meaningly as I did so toward the policeman who was directing the traffic in the middle of the street.

"Of course you know that 'findings is keepings' is not held to be right by the law," I went on. "I'll reward you for giving the pocketbook back to me— with ten dollars, which, added to the change of that five-dollar bill I saw you take out of it in there just now, and that I'll let you keep, too, ought to make it worth your while to do the honest thing and return your find to me. But if you'd rather have me call that officer to make you—"

Casting an apprehensive glance toward the policeman, the shabby stranger held out his hand.

"Give me the ten," said he, "and you can have your pocketbook back. When you prove that it is yours, that is."

"Of course, it's mine!" I insisted impatiently. "It's a black-leather bill-fold."

"You've got to identify it further than that," the man informed me, with a skeptical headshake. "Suppose the pocketbook doesn't belong to you any more than it does to me? Tell me what was inside it. How much money was in it?"

He had me there. Molly had forgotten to tell me the amount of money she had heard her uncle tell his friend he was going to put in the wallet. I couldn't make a guess at the sum, for if I guessed wrong it would at once prove that bill-fold did not really belong to me.

"I can't remember exactly how much money I had in it when I dropped it. What man can tell, at any given moment of the day, how much money he's carrying with him to the penny? I think I know about what the sum was," I bluffed, "but I've been spending out of it for this and that—"

"Take your time," he broke in, a cynical smile beginning to twitch at the corners of his lips as he continued to study my face. "You ought to be able to figure out exactly how much money you were carrying a half- hour ago, if you took the time to do it. Go ahead. I'm in no hurry."

If it had only been possible for me to ask the man to wait while I hurried to a telephone and called up Molly.

"Look here!" I blurted out, on the heels of a sudden idea that had popped into my head, "I can prove to you that that billfold is mine without telling you how much money there is in it. There's a card in it, isn't there?"

"Yes."

"Well, I'll tell you the name on that card. It's Og. How would I know that if the bill-fold wasn't mine? It's not a common name that I'd have been likely to make a blind guess at, is it? If that doesn't satisfy you that the pocketbook is mine," I went on, my voice dropping back to its former threatening tone as I took a step in the direction of the bluecoat, "I'll call that officer and see if it convinces him—"

"Here!" Producing the wallet from his pocket, the fellow surrendered it to me. "I guess what you tell me about its being yours is straight goods, all right. Now fork over the ten-spot! "

I did so. And the man shambled away up the street.

I stood looking down at the bill-fold— scarcely able to believe that I had it in my hands at last.

Quickly, then, I opened it and counted the money. There were four tens and a five, to which I added a five-dollar bill from my own wallet to replace the one the shabbily-dressed man had taken out of it. And then I took out the card of Mr. Og, to learn the address of his optical goods shop.

It was 2 West 42d Street— a number as short, and thus easy to remember, as was his name. Boarding a car, I rode half way up-town to the store, which I entered with a request to be allowed to see Mr. Og in person, as my business was of a private nature.

"I'm the jobber for the Little Gem auto repair kit in this city," I informed the mild, side-whiskered gentleman into whose presence I was conducted, "with an office in the Mammoth Building, down on lower Broadway."

I saw him start, and assume a guileless expression, as that introduction of myself probably fitted in with the description Molly's uncle had given him.

"Oh, yes— yes!" he stammered out— showing that he was a poor liar. "I dropped in to buy one of those— those kits from you yesterday, don't you remember?"

"Well, I see so many people in the course of a day, that I can't say I do remember your face," I answered dryly. "But you must have called on me," I went on, taking out the bill-fold as I spoke, "otherwise this pocketbook, with your name and address on the card inside, would never have been on my office floor this morning—"

"Why, I've been looking all over for that!" the optical goods merchant exclaimed, with a fair imitation of surprise and pleasure in his tone, as he took the wallet from me and began to open it. "Thank you for returning it to me, sir. Your honesty deserves to be rewarded—"

He stopped short, a look of genuine indignation wiping off the sham one on his face.

"You're not so honest as I thought!" he snapped, staring up at me from the open pocketbook with his lips pressed together.

My heart shot down into my boots. What was wrong now—?

"You imaging I wouldn't know how much money I had in this, I suppose," went on the fellow-conspirator of Molly's uncle. "So you thought you could safely take out ten dollars, and return the rest— thus establishing a reputation for honesty which you do not deserve. It happens, however, that I do know perfectly well how much money was put into— er, that I had in this, I should say. It was not fifty dollars, but sixty—"

I was on my feet, staring at him with my eyes popping from my head. What he implied was impossible— that any amount of money could have been taken out of that wallet between the time I had seen it lying on the floor of the hall, and when I had paid the shabbily-dressed man who had found it to give it up to me.

With the exception of only a very few moments, I had kept him in sight from the time he had picked it up until he had turned the bill-fold over to me. It was unnatural to suppose that, meaning to keep his find, he would have taken ten dollars from it and put it in another pocket the instant after he had picked the wallet up.

But if he hadn't taken it— and I would have sworn on a whole stack of Bibles that he had not— who had pilfered the bill which the optician claimed was missing?

"On my word," I earnestly assured him, "I didn't take anything out of that pocket-book. It's just as I found—"

"The money is ten dollars short, I tell you!" he cut in emphatically.

I pulled out my handkerchief and mopped my brow. A nice fix I was in now! Just as I was flattering myself that I had done a neat job by coming through the test Molly's uncle had arranged for me with flying colors— biff! bang! This knockout punch had to connect with my solar-plexus.

At that moment, the door was flung open. And in stalked the answer to the enigma— in the person of Mrs. Mulligan, the scrubwoman from my office building.

One of the clerks in the store followed at her heels. He seized her by the elbow and sought to drag her back out of the private office into which she had forced her way. She shook him off, walking straight up to Mr. Og's desk and laying down on the blotter before him a new ten-dollar bill.

"There you are, sor! " she panted. "I've returned ye what's yours— sind me to jail now if ye wanter! I stole that from yer pockey-book this marnin'— the pockey-book that I heard drop to the hallway behint me from the waste paper I was carryin' from the office of a young gentleman in the mailin' business, an' that I opened to find a card with yer name an' address in.

"I meant to stale the whole thing. But I hear-rd somebody comin'. 'Twould be the owner av it, I thought. Quick, I took that tin dollars out, stuffin' it in me waist an' dropped the pockey-book back on the flure. The fact that all the money wasn't in it wouldn't be knowed, I thought, till I'd got out av sight.

"I was stalin' to take the tin— I knowed that all along. I've a darter that's sickly though. It was to buy her the medicine the docter's ordered fer her that I thought I could do it. But I couldn't. Ever since what I'd done has been hauntin' me, as ye might say. At last I could stand it no longer. 'He c'n have me arrested if he likes,' I thought to mesilf, 'but I'll give the money back to him, an' before I'm an hour older. Honora Mulligan ain't no thafe.'

"I remembered the name an' the number of the door an' strate I'd seen on the card that was in the pockey-book when I opened it. Sure, 'tis easy they both are to kape in the mind after takin' only a glance at them. So, sor, there's yer tin dollars—"

"And here's one for yourself, Mrs. Mulligan!" I broke in jubilantly, stepping to her side and pressing the bill into her hand. "For your daughter, then," I urged, as she drew back, protestingly. "You've earned it by proving your honesty— and mine!"

She looked uncertainly at the optical goods merchant, who smilingly nodded in response to the unspoken question her eyes asked him.

"I think he's right," he told her. "You have done something for him, as I believe he'll find out before he's many days older, that was worth many times what he's offering you— so take it. And this, to add to it," he added neatly, presenting her with the ten-dollar bill he had placed on his desk, "to prove to you that honesty is the best policy— with the assurance that neither myself nor any one else is going to send you to jail because you happened to forget it for one rash moment! "

I understood the reference he had made to something I was going to find out to my interest within a short time, but of course I did not let him see it.

Sure that he would telephone to Molly's uncle, I took my departure— to make a telephone call myself.

It was to Molly, and she told me die knew, from the tone of my voice, before I said a word, that everything was all right.

"Oh, I'm so glad, Tom, dear!" she exclaimed. " Uncle is sure to consent now."

"Yes, he won't need to worry in the future," I grimly commented, "about having a thief for a nephew-in-law. But—"

"But what?"

"Well, after all I've gone through," I answered, "he can be sure that he's going to have one with a weak heart!"

__________________

17: Cornflower Blue

May Wynne

Mabel Winifred Knowles (1875-1949)

Townsville Daily Bulletin (Qld) 19 Aug 1926

'AT LAST,' said Graham Balford, 'I have found you—'

The girl in the shabby frock laughed up at him from beneath the shadow of a bedraggled hat. It was raining and as he had no umbrella. Her eyes were of the exact shade termed cornflower blue.

'I saw your advertisement in the paper,' she said. 'And I'll tell you why I answered it. A gentleman once told me he had never seen eyes of cornflower blue till he saw mine. So I came. Will I do? And how much does an artist's model get paid an hour?'

He waved his hand. Money was of no account to him in comparison with his resolve to get what he wanted. And yet he had his name and fortune still to make.

'I will pay you ten guineas for ten sittings,' he replied. 'Even If I do not require all the sittings. I will pay the fee. I want you to come tomorrow — or, If you like, you can start right off the reel. What Is the name?'

She grew pensive at that.

'You may call me Mollie Price,' she replied, 'but it is not my name.'

He smiled pityingly. It seemed so easy to read between the lines, for this girl with her delicate features and silvery voice was no ordinary artist's model, but a lady of refinement brought to the calculating of £.s.d. for dairy bread by some cruel trickery of Fate.

Balford defined she belonged to those who have 'come down' in the social scale. It hurt the artist to think of such a child facing the grim battle, of existence, but he was glad enough that Fate had brought her to his doors.

'Your dress will do,' said he, 'my picture is that of a flower-girl selling cornflowers at a street corner. Yours is the central figure. So— will you stand there?'

She was easy to pose, having the Instinct of an actress; and, within half an hour, Balford was absorbed In his work. It was not till two hours later that he awoke to a sense of guilt.

'You are shivering,' he said, 'and I am a brute, worse than a brute, too, to keep you standing in those wet clothes. Take off your hat and coat and my landlady shall bring tea— poor child.'

She hesitated, blushing and irresolute. Clearly enough she was undecided— but yielded quickly.

'I am dying for tea,' she said, 'and I want to know all about your work and why it was so essential to you to have a model with the one shade of color in her eyes? Surely you could have painted the eyes according to your fancy.'

He shook his head. 'That is a mistake,' he retorted. 'Character, expression, the color of hair and eyes blend together In a consistent whole. If you had brown eyes for instance you would not have the daughter of a naiad in them.'

She did not reply at once but sat watching the portly Mrs. Brown bringing in the tea. It was all solid. At any rate the tea was hot. She took possession of the tea-pot without being asked, and Balford found conviction she had never posed as an artist's model before— and her poverty was new to her. She only nibbled a corner of the substantial bread and butter.

'You won't forget to come on Wednesday,' he urged when she made her farewell, 'and do you want a guinea in advance?'

Her eyes were veiled.

'Perhaps It would be better,' she agreed, 'though I hardly like to ask It, You have been so kind.'

He paid her without comment— and long before Wednesday had grown impatient for her coming— wondering whether be would be disappointed at all. He was not.

Mollie was more charming than ever— and this time wore a bunch of cornflowers tucked into her cheap blouse. The sun was shining— and he did not offer her tea, but asked if be might walk up the street with her— even suggested a stroll In the public gardens.

She shook her head, 'No,' she decided. 'I am too shabby, and you are too well known. When one becomes an artist's model one remembers how much one has forgotten.'

'You shall remember how to laugh,' said Balford. 'Indeed I do not think you have forgotten. Would you like to tell me your story?'

She shook her head.

'Impossible,' she retorted. 'I can picture your dismay. Look over there at that gorgeous old rose curtain. I know why you hang it there— it is to hide away all the untidiness and litter. We all have curtains somewhere in our lives— so you must not ask.'

He did not ask, but before next thing he had bought the daintiest of frocks — cornflower blue and a hat to match.

'You need not any thank you.' he protested, 'but reward me by coming out into the gardens— there are public ones near— such beautiful ones — and I want to talk.'

She slipped away behind the old rose curtain and came out transformed. To the man she was the loveliest thing he had ever seen. Her eyes— But when he tried to tell her so she avoided the compliments and laughed.

'We are comrades,' she said, 'but that is all. I will come into the garden and you shall tell me about your ambitions. I want to hear.'

And he told her— though he had never told anyone before. He had found a listener— and more besides. Yet, when finally she said good-bye, re-dressed in thorn shabby clothes, he regretted the impulse. After all, she might or might not have been a lady, but the fact remained that at present she was no more than an artist's model— ready to sell her face for a small fee.

The next time when she came he welcomed her as the one woman is To tell the truth he hardly understood himself.

'You are a witch,' he told her, 'I have been dreaming of you. It is your turn now, you must tell me who you are? I want to know! I want you to take me to your home.'

She reflected— with knitted brow.

'If you really want to,' she said, 'I will take you— after you have paid me my ten guineas, and we are staying good-bye.'

He would have urged her to take him before, but she was quite firm.

'I could not have believed such a little thing as you could have been so resolved,' he complained. 'Will this persuade you?'

He leaned forward— and kissed her. She crimsoned angrily and sprang back, before he had done more than brush her lips with his own.

'How dare you,' she cried. 'You are no gentleman to insult a girl in my position. You would not have done it in one in your own class.'

He looked ashamed. but defiant.

'I love you,' he said.

She walked across the room and stood beside the picture. He had worked quickly— two more sittings and her job would be over. He was paying well.

'Do you want to marry me?' she asked, and it was his turn to show confusion.

'I have not thought of the future,' he retorted, 'but only the present. Isn't that enough? I love you.'

'To-morrow,' she said, 'I'll take you home. Afterwards I shall ask my question again, but do not make any mistake. I am not for sale.'

He spent a sleepless night as he deserved to do— and as all must do when they hesitate between love and ambition.

In the morning he stood beside his picture.

'She was not serious,' he told himself. 'Of course this will make my name. I know it. But I shall send for Thirlton to be sure. Thirlton was one of the moving powers in the world of Art. If he bought the picture, all was accomplished.

He came, the great man, pompously, patronisingly, but thawed at first glimpse of the masterpiece.

'Frankly,' he said, 'I did not believe you capable of such work. It is a picture which should live. I will pay you five hundred pounds — and make you famous.'

The bargain was struck within an hour.

When Thirlton left the studio, Graham Balford paced up and down with the restlessness of a caged animal. He could put feet under his ambitions now and allow them to run away with him.

When the girl came in he was agitated, nervous. She wore a cheap blue frock and scarf, her gloves disfigured dainty hands, and he could have wept over her walking shoes.

But he allowed her to take him to her home.

It was a weary tram journey and he hated the grey squalor of the quarter to which she brought him; he shuddered at the home before which she paused. On the step she turned to look at him.

'You'd better talk in here as if you were going to marry me,' said she, 'or I'll not answer for them—'

Had any excuse occurred to him, then he would have made his escape. Even the flowery-like beauty which had bloomed for his admiration so much of late seemed to take a drab commonplace appearance here.

It was worse within. The woman who stared at him so challengingly was rough, shabby, tired-eyed; the man was glum and awkward. He could see the girl was as ill at ease, as he, and that she sighed in relief when It was time to go. She came too— as far as the street corner.

'Well?' she asked. He had paled.

'I will write,' he whispered, 'Good-bye.'

Then he took her hand. 'It can't be good-bye,' he added. 'We shall find a way.' But she did not answer— only in those eyes of cornflower blue there lurked regret-as though their owner had been weighing him in the balance and found him— wanting.

He finished the picture that evening, and was glad to fling a cover over It. Finis— and fortune, as well as fame. One has to pay a certain price. He thought shudderingly of slum streets and the smell of kippers and friend fish. He was sensitive to environment.

The next day the buyer of his picture came and brought a friend— Cecil Huffley. The latter exclaimed at sight of the picture and went close.

'Who,' he asked, 'was your model?'

Balford frowned. 'A matter of private concern only,' he retorted. 'I cannot give the name.'

Huffley shrugged her shoulders.

'Then I can,' he replied. 'It Is Diana Petflame— Sir Auster Petflame's daughter, engaged to marry Tom Worglass— I suppose Sir Auster gave Diana leave. She is the most daring slip of girlhood in town— but a darling. Her grandmother brought her up and made rather a mess of it, too. But Tom will manage her all right, if they begin on the square. He will not like this, though; and he will be back from Egypt next week.'

'Preposterous!' said Graham Balford, his lips white. 'That girl is from the slums— a poor little waif of fortune. I thought—'

'No matter what you thought,' replied the other. 'You can prove untruth of my words if you are really not humbugging. Diana will be at the Haymarket Theatre tonight with her cousins, I know it for a fact.'

'Fact be damned!' said Graham Balford.

But he went to the Haymarket Theatre alone. It was half-way through the play when he saw her in a box with an elderly woman and two men. She was laughing merrily, and she did not see the man in the stalls below. Balford went home in a state of misery.

If only he had known! Yet, even so, what could be have done? He knew Worglass and respected him. For hours he sat raglng against this Diana, then growing tired, he became honest and raged at his own folly.

It was next day that— thanks to the telephone book — he discovered Diana's address. He was going to see her. Why, he hardly knew, but his pulses tingled as he stood outside the door of her father's flat, and thought of the conflict which had raised within him after a visit to that slum home. He could read between the lines. After all Diana was no more daring than a hundred modern girls— but she was different. If he had not failed her she could have given him— love.

It was not Diana who came in presently, but a silver haired woman, I stately in spite of a dress designed to make a travesty of honorable age. She looked ill and worried, nor did she beat about the bush.

'Cecil Huffley has told me of Diana's folly,' she said. 'Neither her father nor I had any idea she was coming to your studio— and in such a guise. I hope, Mr. Balford, you will understand , the gravity of the situation. If the picture is exhibited it will be the talk of London. Diana is well-known in society, and her beauty is a rare type— the color of her eyes alone is unusual.  It will leak out who was your model— and a scandal will be created. You are a man of the world and know what will be said. Already Diana has quarreled seriously with her fiancée, who is old-fashioned and dislikes her mad pranks, which, after all, are only the pranks of a child.

'I love Diana, and I brought her up. She has a heart of gold— but she is wilful and wild in her ways. I am sure she has been safe with you— but the world—'

Graham Balford bowed. 'I understand, Madam,' he said— and that was all. He had no more to say to this woman whose lax rule had resulted in making what Hurtley had called 'a mess of things.' And Balford did not see Diana.

There were shadows in the studio when he got in. Evening shadows. A sunbeam lay across the canvas, touching the pictured eyes of the shabby flower-seller. Eyes— of cornflower blue— eyes that laughed in tune with the merry dimples which came and went in the soft cheeks.

Balford stood looking at his masterpiece—and the girl in the picture laughed back— out there was something behind the laughter— an appeal which grew— and grew till it became a voiceless cry.

Was she to have her young life ruined through an act of wayward folly? Was her happiness to be destroyed for sake of his ambition? That was what it meant. If 'Cornflower Blue' was exhibited In the Academy Diana's fiancée would quarrel with that daring model— for the last time. And Diana's reputation…

He gritted his teeth. The world's coarse judgment must needs leave a stain— where its finger pointed in derision. An artist's model— the artist himself— could not be spared. He thought of Diana— merry, daring, challenging— or dreamy-eyed, wistful, grieving because a man had failed her.

He would not fail her again. With a groan he caught up a knife and ripped the canvass again and again. He would not be exhibiting in this year's Academy— and Thirlton might go to— the devil.

Thirlton did not go there— but he gave Balford his candid opinion. Of course, he believed the painter to have been drunk. No sober man would destroy his masterpiece and his reputation— like a maniac.

Balford squared his shoulders. By this time Tom Worglass would be home.

A few week's later he had a 'phone message— from Diana's grandmother. The Academy was open now. Balford hesitated— then answered. He was sorry he could not call. He was wondering whether he would join a certain mad Bohemian Club whose motto was 'Let us forget,' when the door opened and a girl came in.

A girl in cornflower blue— with eyes to match.

She stood on the threshold, a sunbeam resting on her curly hair.

'Where is the picture?' she asked. Balford stood up.

'I destroyed it,' he replied, 'I think we are quits.'

She laughed and danced her way across the studio.

'Tom has broken his engagement— and married an Early Victorian gem,' she said. 'So I am— free. What are you going to say to me ?'

He looked down. The sunbeam had reached her eves — and after all he was only a man.

'I love you,' he cried. 'I love you. If only— you were Mollle Price again I'd prove it. I was a fool. Ambition does not count.'

'You proved that— when—' she answered— but got no further.

There was no need— for I think true love will always give the second chance to one who falls— and repents.

_________________

18: Assorted Chips

Hulbert Footner

1879-1944

Popular Magazine 1 January 1913

YOUNG Chris McKeand was half-heartedly opening boxes and arranging his stock on the shelves of the French outfit’s store at Kakisa River. It was a tiny, log-walled interior, with beams but an inch or two above Chris’ head, a door that he was obliged to duck through, and a single small window incorrigibly out of plumb. Earlier in the day Chris had arrived to begin his annual five months’ bit, as he called it, five months’ incarceration from the sight of white men, excepting his friend and competitor, Dave Rennie, the Company’s clerk at the same lone outpost. And even Dave’s face was a thought dusky; moreover, Dave had a copper-colored wife, which made a difference. Dave was at home at Kakisa River, and Chris had nothing but a concertina.

His first customer of the season was Tommy Ascota, a slender fourteen- year-old. He came in with a brave assumption of his father’s man-to-man air, that speedily wilted into sheepishness under the white man’s grin. Tommy desired a can of condensed milk. Every year for a few days after the arrival of the traders, the Kakisa Indians must have milk in their tea. The rest of the year they do very well without it.

Chris filled his order, keeping up a humorous commentary that was lost on Tommy. It was Chris’ custom to present each of his youthful customers with a piece of candy as long as it held out. To tease Tommy, who had put childish things far behind him, he took the cover off a box labeled “Assorted Chips,” that was lying on the counter, and pushed it toward the boy. Tommy hesitated with a dark frown; then fell. Snatching a piece out of the box, he darted out of the store. Chris laughed. Tommy suddenly reappeared with a furiously angry young face, and with a round oath in perfectly good English, all he knew, threw the chip at Chris and disappeared again.

Chris examined the undamaged chip curiously. It proved to be of celluloid. “Poker chips, by gum!” he exclaimed disgustedly. “How in glory do they expect me to sell poker chips out here!”

Although it was not three o’clock, it was already growing dark. By and by Dave Rennie came in, and joined Chris beside his air-tight stove. They were excellent friends. For a few days they would have plenty to say to each other, and after that they would sit for hours, taking mute comfort out of each other’s society. Chris could not go to Dave’s cabin, because Mrs. Rennie was jealous of the white influence over her white husband.

Dave was a small man of what age it would have been hard to say. He had inherited the large, pensive brown eyes of that red ancestress of his, and he was capable, unassuming, and patient. He alone of the white men of the country could speak the uncouth Kakisa dialect fluently, and he had considerable weight in the councils of the tribe. The quiet little man made a strong contrast to the bulky, sanguine, restless young Chris.

“Well, how goes it, kid?” said Dave.

“R-r-rotten!” answered Chris, rolling the “r” to give the word additional vicious emphasis.

Dave chuckled quietly.

“You can laugh,” said Chris. “You’re well fixed here. You’ve got the trade cinched. You can speak their lingo. You’re one—” He pulled himself up.

“I’m one of them, you were going to say,” put in Dave.

"No offense meant,” said Chris gruffly.

“None taken,” said Dave quietly.

“Honest, I wish some one would tell me why they send me out here,” Chris went on querulously. “The post has never paid a cent. There are goods on the shelf that came out with the first consignment five years ago. How do they expect me to cut out your trade when you’ve known ’em for twenty years, and are related to the chief men. I believe our two concerns are in cahoots anyway. They won’t let me cut prices.”

“It’s a hard proposition,” agreed Dave.

Chris sprang up. “Hard!” he cried. “If you were twenty-five years old, and had a girl waiting for you outside, you’d know how hard it was!”

“Why don’t you apply for a transfer?” suggested Dave.

Chris sullenly sat down again. “I have, twice,” he said. “They make me sick. They say they’ll give me a better post as soon as I make good here. They put me up against a smooth wall, and then blame me because I don’t skin over it!”

“You’ll feel better in a day or so,” said Dave soothingly. “When the first strangeness wears off.”

Chris picked up his concertina. “Oh, yes, yes!” he said, with careless bitterness. “They say a man can get accustomed to a diet of arsenic in time!” He made a few flourishes on the concertina. "It’s the girl I’m thinking of,” he went on in a lower tone. “You can’t expect a girl to wait forever. She’s a queen, Dave! If it wasn’t for her letters I’d go clean off my nut. She sends me in a whole bundle by the last mail, one for each week during the winter. But there are plenty of other men on the spot. Better men than me, maybe. And five months-”

“I don’t think you need worry about the girl,” said Dave. “They’re pretty steady.”

Chris looked at him sharply, as much as to say: “What do you know about white girls?” But he held his tongue.

“Give us a tune,” said Dave.

And Chris played “As Long as the Congo Flows to the Sea,” which had just reached Fort Enterprise during the past summer. With three feet of snow outside, and a temperature of twenty below, it seemed particularly appropriate.

“You get a lot of pleasure out of that,” said Dave enviously. “Will you teach me how to squeeze it?”

“Sure!” said Chris. “It’ll help pass the time.”

He gave the first lesson on the spot, a lesson that lasted until Dave’s eldest girl came to bring him home to supper. But all the time Chris was thinking about something else.

“Did your stuff come over all right?” asked Dave as he rose.

“Same as usual.” said Chris. “Only the blank fools sent me a box of poker chips instead of the candy I ordered. Poker chips at Kakisa River!”

“We might get up a game,” suggested Dave.

“Ah-h! It’s no fun for two,” said Chris. “And if we tried to teach Lookoovar or Jimmy Providence, the priest ’ud give us what-for in the spring for corruptin’ the morals of his precious lambs.”

“Well, so long, and buck up, old top,” said Dave.

“Wait a second,” said Chris abstractedly. “Look a-here, Dave.” He was frowning now. “You know my only chance of getting out of this hole is in doing you. I want to give you fair warning. I’m going to get a share of your fur this winter or bust!”

Dave laughed. “Go as far as you like,” he said.

They shook hands on it.

When Chris was left alone he walked up and down the narrow length of his store, scowling. Anon he stopped, and went on again jerkily. He thrust his hands deep in his pockets; he drew them out, and abstractedly pulled his ears. His troubled eyes searched the floor, the walls, the stove, and along the shelves, as if he thought there must be a scheme concealed somewhere about the cabin. He finally drew a letter from his pocket, and consulted it for inspiration. There was this paragraph:

I am saving up trading stamps to buy a lamp for us to read by some day, dear. I send a picture of it from the catalogue. Everybody has the trading-stamp craze here. It’s very childish, but you can’t resist it. You know how they do it, don’t you? With every purchase of ten cents’ worth you get a stamp that you paste in a book, and when the book is full you may exchange it for all kinds of fine things. I should think you might do something like this with the Indians, you have said they are so childish. But then I suppose you have nothing you could use for stamps.

Chris’ eyes fell from the letter to the box of chips that still lay on the counter. He dug up one of the neat rolls, and let the thin spheres run clicking through his fingers. That sound, which is exactly like no other sound in the world, is inextricably associated in the male human mind with green baize and tobacco smoke. As Chris listened to it his eyes widened until they became as round as the chips themselves, and a slow, delighted smile spread to the farthest confines of his face.

“By Heaven, I have it!” he cried out loud.

Next morning Lookoovar came to make a small purchase from the French outfit, and to welcome the trader back to Kakisa River. The name Lookoovar was local patois for Le Couvert, the Blanket. The bearer of the name was not a beautiful object. His stringy gray hair was bound round with a band of dingy cotton that had not been changed within the memory of the village; his skin was wrinkled like a piece of dirty brown crepe; and, when he smiled, a hideous cavern of blackened and brown stumps was revealed. But Lookoovar was enormously good-natured.  He was very proud of his English.

“Hello! Hello!” he cried, pawing Chris’ hand and shouting with laugh¬ ter. “You good man. Glad come, me. Bienvenu! Bienvenu!”

The concertina lay conspicuously on the counter. Lookoovar, his first transports over, signified that he would like to hear a tune, whereupon Chris, negligently sitting on the counter, played “Ta-ra-ra-boom-de-ay,” the Kakisas’ favorite air. It was the only one they could be sure of recognizing. Lookoovar, laughing continually, beat time with head and hands.

“Like to try it?” suggested Chris casually.

The old man eagerly nodded, and Chris showed him how to hold the instrument, and to press it in. At the first squeak that issued from between his hands, Lookoovar jumped nervously, and would have dropped the instrument had it not been for the straps. At the second wail he took heart and began to smile. At the third excruciating discard he shouted with laughter, and began working the bellows so violently Chris was constrained to relieve him of it.

“You sell ?” asked Lookoovar eagerly.

Chris shook his head.

“Twenty-five skins? Fifty skins?”

“No sell,” said Chris coolly. "Give away.”

Lookoovar stared at him incredulously. “You give me?” he demanded to know.

Chris shrugged elaborately. “What you want to-day?” he asked.

“Plug tobacco one skin,” said Lookoovar. “You give to me?” he repeated.

Chris counted the plugs out on the counter. “You buy your flour, and blankets, and traps from me this winter?” he asked.

Lookoovar shrugged, and looked out of the window.

Chris put on top of the tobacco— one white chip. Lookoovar started to convey it to his mouth, but Chris laid a restraining hand on his arm.

“No eat,” he said. “Put away.”

Lookoovar peered at him inquiringly.

Chris studied how to convey the scheme in sufficiently simple words. “To all who buy from me I give these pieces,” he explained carefully. “One white piece with every skin’s worth of goods. One red piece for five white pieces. One blue piece for two red pieces. In the spring when I close the store, I give the singing box to the man who has the most blue pieces.”

Lookoovar pondered upon this.

“You buy your winter flour, and tea, and blankets, and traps from me,” Chris continued, “perhaps one hundred skins. Then I give you these.” He measured out two piles of fifty white chips each.

Lookoovar’s old eyes brightened. But Chris could not be sure if he understood aright. Lookoovar pocketed the chip he had received, and left the store without another word. Chris hoped that he had gone to talk it over in the village.

The young trader spent an anxious half hour. At the end of that time Lookoovar returned, bringing his three sons to lend due effect to the transaction, and ordered a complete outfit for the use of his family at the fur camps. It was a triumph for Chris. His heart sang inside him, but he was careful to preserve as stolid a face as any Indian among them. It was much the largest order he had ever received, and the payment was assured, .because the buyer was the second best hunter of the tribe. Lookoovar stowed away the chips in a tobacco bag he had brought for the purpose, and rattled them deliciously amidst the grins and the exclamations of his family. It was the nearest thing to money they had ever possessed.

A still greater triumph awaited Chris, for, by and by, who should come to the store but Jimmy Providence, the chief man of the largest family of the tribe! Jimmy was of a different type from old Lookoovar, a small, neat, agile hunter, with gentlemanly manners. He had a magnificent head of hair that was like a luxuriant black chrysanthemum clapped over his head. He disdained any other head covering.

Jimmy, after polite greetings, went directly to the heart of the matter. Pointing to the concertina, he said: “You show me?”

Chris was only too glad to give him a lesson.

Jimmy’s eyes took on a delighted, faraway look at the diverse squeaks and wails that issued from the concertina in response to the pressure of his fingers.

“You give away ?” he asked.

Chris explained the proposed offer.

Jimmy understood readily. “It is mine,” he said superbly, “not any man big store credit as much like me!”

He thereupon gave Chris a larger order than Lookoovar’s, and Chris counted out his chips.

These were the two chief men of the village, and thus Chris’ plan was crowned with success. He trembled a little at his own temerity, and wondered how far the results would reach. He had actually delivered a body blow upon the mighty Company, that was so strong and so proud it could afford to laugh at its opponents. The other store was visible through Chris’ little, crooked window, and Chris often looked in that direction, wondering how Dave was taking it. He would know, of course; there were plenty to carry the news.

Sure enough, in the middle of the day Dave came strolling carelessly over. Chris circumspectly ironed the grin out of his face.

“Morning, kid,” said Dave, offhand— there was no change in his face. “Thought I’d drop over and have a pipe with you.”

“Good!” said Chris. t He could not resist adding: “How’s business?”

“So-so,” said Dave. “How are you doing?”

“Not too badly,” said Chris, swallowing the snigger of laughter that made his diaphragm quiver.

Dave picked up the concertina, and produced a few tentative chords. “What’ll you take for it?” he indifferently inquired.

“Not for sale,” said Chris.

“Twenty-five skins?”

“I’ve already been offered fifty.”

“Seventy-five, then?”

Chris shook his head.

“A hundred?”

“Two hundred wouldn’t buy it,” said Chris.

“You could get one in from outside as good for twenty skins,” said Dave quietly.

“Sure,” said Chris. “In a year’s time, if nothing happened to it on the way. I don’t have to sell, do I?”

Dave laid it down quietly. If he was disturbed, he concealed it admirably, but it was noticeable that he forgot his expressed intention of having come for a smoke. He made for the door again.

“No hard feelings, Dave,” sang Chris.

“None in the world,” said Dave. “I just wanted to give you a chance to sell out while the price was up. It may take a tumble later.”

That was all.

After two days of heart-lifting business, the trade at Chris’ store suddenly fell away to nothing, and, as before, he played the concertina to an admiring audience that looked out of the window and smiled blandly at any mention of trade. He suspected that some move of Dave’s lay behind this, and he deputed Aleck Capot-blanc to find out. Aleck was the dandy young savage that broko trail for Chris when he traveled, and acted as his interpreter upon occasion. Chris showed Aleck an orange silk handkerchief, and became the master of his soul.

There was no difficulty in finding out. The explanation was simplicity itself. Dave had merely told all the people that if they would hold back their orders, for eight days, after that the

Company would give two white pieces with every skin’s worth of goods.

Chris whistled softly and long. He knew that Dave had dispatched a messenger by dog train to Fort Enterprise, but since he also knew that there was no concertina to be had there, and that nothing could be got in from the outside world before spring, he had not disturbed himself. He had not thought of more chips. Evidently Dave intended to issue trading stamps that he, Chris, would have to redeem. It was an ingenious idea. Chris became very thoughtful.

Ordinarily the round trip took twelve days, but if one changed dogs at the fort, and spared them neither going nor coming, it might be done in eight. Chris had plenty of time to think up a counter move. For a couple of days he was baffled, but then he received inspiration from a notice printed on the box of chips itself. He issued some private instructions to Aleck, who received them with an appreciative grin. After dark that afternoon, Aleck harnessed Chris’ dogs, and, with his brother to keep him company, set off very quietly over the trail to the fort.

The entire village looked for the return of Ahcunazie, the Company’s messenger, and, when he finally appeared on schedule, a good many of the people pushed into the Company’s store to take advantage of the offer of double chips. Chris McKeand strolled over also. He observed that Ahcunazie was hiding a strained anxiety under an air of bravado, and he smiled comfortably to himself.

Ahcunazie entered to the waiting crowd. He was a little, shriveled specimen, bundled in miscellaneous ragged garments almost out of human semblance. His face was as blank and as bland as a child's that expects a beating, but still hopes against hope. His hands were empty.

“Where is the box?” demanded Dave sharply.

Ahcunazie shrugged expressively, and spread out his hands.

Dave came threateningly from behind the counter. “I know they have them,” he said. “What have you done with the box ?”

Ahcunazie, looking to see if his line of retreat was open, made a spiral motion with his finger in the air.

Dave was fairly startled out of his quietness. “You—” he cried, making a dive for his messenger, but Ahcunazie was already out of the door. He was not to be tempted inside again, until Dave promised not to lay hands on him.

“Now tell me what happened,” said Dave.

Ahcunazie looked around the waiting circle, and, in the pleasure of having a wonderful story to tell, he forgot his fears. “I get the box from Grierson at the fort,” he began dramatically. “I come back much quick. I spell by the little lake two sleeps from the fort, and Aleck Capot-blanc and his brother come on the trail. Aleck Capot-blanc say to me: ‘Wah! What you got?’ I say: ‘White pieces, and red pieces, and blue pieces for the Company to give away.’ Aleck Capot-blanc say: ‘Let me see me.’ I say: ‘Non! It is tie by string.’

“Aleck Capot-blanc say: ‘You not let him get cold.’ ‘Why?’ I say, me. ‘If him freeze no more good,’ Aleck Capot-blanc say. Aleck, him take box, and shake him by the ear, and listen. ‘So!’ Aleck say, ‘him froze I guess. You’ll get it. Better put by the fire, you. Put box in the pan while you hitch up.’ '

“So Aleck Capot-blanc and his brother go on the trail. I feel bad me, for the pieces is froze. And when I go to catch the dogs I put the box in the pan to warm a little. Afterward I am lighting my pipe so. I think no harm at all. I go to get box. Bang! My head break open. I fall down. When I get up no box, no pan, no fire! There is big hole in the ground!”

The Indians, seeing Chris smile, were quick to understand the trick that had been played, and the cabin rang with their laughter. The prestige of the mighty Company received another blow, but Dave minimized its effect by the way he received it.

He shrugged, and forced a smile. “I lose!” he said cheerfully. From under the counter he produced the precious box of cigars that was opened only on occasions of moment. “Have one on me,” he said to Chris, to Jimmy Providence, to Lookoovar, and to Maht-sonza.

Later, as Chris was serving the custom that had transferred itself back to him, on taking down the box of chips, he caught sight of the notice on the label, and he laughed afresh.

Danger.

Celluloid.

Do not store near steam pipes or furnace flues.

On a morning in February Dave Rennie and Chris McKeand were once more seated by the air-tight stove. In the meantime a striking change had taken place in the aspect of the French outfit’s little store. The shelves, the counter, and the walls were swept clean of goods. There was not so much as a pail of lard or a last summer’s hat remaining. Chris’ limited personal belongings lay packed and roped on the floor ready to be loaded on his sledge. Chris himself was in a state of jerky exhilaration.

He played a series of arpeggios on the concertina. “Going home!” he burst out. “I wish I knew a song about it! If I have any luck I’ll catch the mail out from the fort. I’ll be outside before the ice moves. I’ll telegraph her from the lake that I’m coming after her. They’ll have to give me a post now where I can take her!”

Dave smoked sympathetically.

Chris’ thoughts took a fresh turn. “Why in thunder do you suppose the redskins' don’t come up to cash in their chips?” he exclaimed.

Springing up, he went to the door to look out. Dave cautiously picked up the concertina, and started to play “Home, Sweet Home,” with true feeling, if somewhat halting execution.

“Not a man in sight!” said Chris, coming back.

“Most of them went back to the fur camps before daylight,” said Dave quietly.

“I know,” said Chris. “Doesn’t it beat the Dutch! Here for two months they fight like politicians over the singing box, and then, just before the time comes to decide it, every man jack loses interest, and they haven’t even got the curiosity to come and see who wins it. Who could understand the beggars?”

“Who do you think has won it?” asked Dave, still attending closely to the concerting.

“Who knows?” said Chris, with a shrug. “Jimmy Providence is credited with the most chips, but it’s not so simple as that. Why, the scheme hadn’t been working a week before they were all dealing in chips among themselves. And when Aleck came back after taking the first lot of my fur to the fort, he taught ’em how to play met-o-wan, and after that whole fortunes in chips changed hands every night.”

“And the chips were used for their original purpose, after all,” put in Dave.

“It all helped me,”' said Chris. “Even after my goods gave out they kept bringing me their best fur, and I gave ’em credit for next season, and handed over the chips.”

“Yes, darn you!” said Dave amiably.

“And then, a week ago, when the last crowd came in from the camps, the lot your family came back with, instead of the boost I had a right to expect, the whole business went flat. There was a sudden tightness in the chip market. The chips simply disappeared. I couldn’t get any back in exchange for certificates, no matter what premium I offered. Jimmy, Lookoovar, Mahtsonza, Aleck, they all swore they had none, and all had lost interest in the singing box. So I decided there was nothing to do but close up. I wouldn’t get to understand these beggars in a hundred years!”

“They’re too simple for you,” remarked Dave sententiously.

Chris sprang up again. “I’m not going to wait any longer for them,” he cried. “What’ll I do with the pesky instrument ?”

Dave joined him by the counter. “I’ll take it,” he said, in his quiet way.

“You!” said Chris, astonished.

Dave thrust a hand inside his shirt, and, drawing forth a soiled canvas bag, dropped it on the counter. From within came the unmistakable click of the celluloid disks. From the same hiding place he produced another bag, and still another.

“You’ll find ’em all there except a few that were lost,” he said, with a conscientious air. “And here are the certificates you issued for those they brought back.” He pulled a bunch of papers from his pocket.

“Well, I’m jiggered!” said Chris. He repeated this with variations in several keys. “How did you get them?” he demanded.

“Traded for ’em with some of the fur my family brought in,” said Dave seriously. He was feeling for the notes of “As Long as the Congo” on the concertina. “It was my own to do what I liked with. I’ll tell you, kid, if it’s any satisfaction to you, it’s the first time in the history of the Company that a Hudson’s Bay man ever let any fur get away from him.”

Chris laughed. “I bet it cost you a pretty penny,” he said.

Dave smiled at last. “Not too much,” he said softly. “Seems it’s been going the rounds lately that the singing box was bewitched, as you might say.”

__________________

19: The Tarn

Hugh Walpole

1884-1941

Chronicle (Adelaide)  26 Jan 1924

[Success, October 1923]

Much reprinted horror story. Best known for his Herries series of novels, Hugh Seymour Walpole was also a prolific short story writer. This story was collected in "The Silver Thorn", by High Walpole, 1928.

AS FOSTER moved unconsciously across the room, bent towards the bookcase, and stood leaning forward a little, choosing now one book, now another, with his eyes, his host, seeing the muscles of the back of his thin, scraggy neck stand out above his low flannel collar, thought of the ease with which he could squeeze that throat, and the pleasure, the triumphant, lustful pleasure, that such an action would give him.

The low, white-walled, white-ceilinged room was flooded with the mellow, kindly Lakeland sun. October is a wonderful month in the English Lakes, golden, rich, and perfumed, slow suns moving through apricot-tinted skies to ruby evening glories; the shadows lie then thick about that beautiful country, in dark purple patches, in long web-like patterns of silver gauze, in thick splotches of amber and grey. The clouds pass in galleons across the mountains, now veiling, now revealing, now descending with ghost-like armies to the very breast of the plains, suddenly rising to the softest of blue skies and lying thin in lazy languorous colour.

Fenwick's cottage looked across to Low Fells; on his right, seen through side windows, sprawled the hills above Ullswater.

Fenwick looked at Foster's back and felt suddenly sick, so that he sat down, veiling his eyes for a moment with his hand. Foster had come up there, come all the way from London, to explain. It was so like Foster to want to explain, to want to put things right. For how many years had he known Foster? Why, for twenty at least, and during all those years Foster had been for ever determined to put things right with everybody. He could never bear to be disliked; he hated that anyone should think ill of him; he wanted everyone to be his friends. That was one reason, perhaps, why Foster had got on so well, had prospered so in his career; one reason, too, why Fenwick had not.

For Fenwick was the opposite of Foster in this. He did not want friends, he certainly did not care that people should like him—that is people for whom, for one reason or another, he had contempt—and he had contempt for quite a number of people.

Fenwick looked at that long, thin, bending back and felt his knees tremble. Soon Foster would turn round and that high, reedy voice would pipe out something about the books. "What jolly books you have, Fenwick!" How many, many times in the long watches of the night, when Fenwick could not sleep, had he heard that pipe sounding close there—yes, in the very shadows of his bed! And how many times had Fenwick replied to it: "I hate you! You are the cause of my failure in life! You have been in my way always. Always, always, always! Patronizing and pretending, and in truth showing others what a poor thing you thought me, how great a failure, how conceited a fool! I know. You can hide nothing from me! I can hear you!"

For twenty years now Foster had been persistently in Fenwick's way. There had been that affair, so long ago now, when Robins had wanted a sub-editor for his wonderful review, the Parthenon, and Fenwick had gone to see him and they had had a splendid talk. How magnificently Fenwick had talked that day; with what enthusiasm he had shown Robins (who was blinded by his own conceit, anyway) the kind of paper the Parthenon might be; how Robins had caught his own enthusiasm, how he had pushed his fat body about the room, crying: "Yes, yes, Fenwick—that's fine! That's fine indeed!"—and then how, after all, Foster had got that job.

The paper had only lived for a year or so, it is true, but the connection with it had brought Foster into prominence just as it might have brought Fenwick!

Then, five years later, there was Fenwick's novel, The Bitter Aloe—the novel upon which he had spent three years of blood-and-tears endeavour—and then, in the very same week of publication, Foster brings out The Circus, the novel that made his name; although, Heaven knows, the thing was poor enough sentimental trash. You may say that one novel cannot kill another—but can it not? Had not The Circus appeared would not that group of London know-alls—that conceited, limited, ignorant, self-satisfied crowd, who nevertheless can do, by their talk, so much to affect a book's good or evil fortunes—have talked about The Bitter Aloe and so forced it into prominence? As it was, the book was stillborn and The Circus went on its prancing, triumphant way.

After that there had been many occasions—some small, some big—and always in one way or another that thin, scraggy body of Foster's was interfering with Fenwick's happiness.

The thing had become, of course, an obsession with Fenwick. Hiding up there in the heart of the Lakes, with no friends, almost no company, and very little money, he was given too much to brooding over his failure. He was a failure and it was not his own fault. How could it be his own fault with his talents and his brilliance? It was the fault of modern life and its lack of culture, the fault of the stupid material mess that made up the intelligence of human beings—and the fault of Foster.

Always Fenwick hoped that Foster would keep away from him. He did not know what he would not do did he see the man. And then one day, to his amazement, he received a telegram:

Passing through this way. May I stop with you Monday and Tuesday?—Giles Foster.

Fenwick could scarcely believe his eyes, and then—from curiosity, from cynical contempt, from some deeper, more mysterious motive that he dared not analyse—he had telegraphed—Come.

And here the man was. And he had come—would you believe it?—to "put things right". He had heard from Hamlin Eddis that Fenwick was hurt with him, had some kind of grievance.

"I didn't like to feel that, old man, and so I thought I'd just stop by and have it out with you, see what the matter was, and put it right."

Last night after supper Foster had tried to put it right. Eagerly, his eyes like a good dog's who is asking for a bone that he knows he thoroughly deserves, he had held out his hand and asked Fenwick to "say what was up".

Fenwick simply had said that nothing was up; Hamlin Eddis was a damned fool.

"Oh, I'm glad to hear that!" Foster had cried, springing up out of his chair and putting his hand on Fenwick's shoulder. "I'm glad of that, old man. I couldn't bear for us not to be friends. We've been friends so long."

Lord! How Fenwick hated him at that moment!

ii

"WHAT a jolly lot of books you have!" Foster turned round and looked at Fenwick with eager, gratified eyes. "Every book here is interesting! I like your arrangement of them, too, and those open bookshelves—it always seems to me a shame to shut up books behind glass!"

Foster came forward and sat down quite close to his host. He even reached forward and laid his hand on his host's knee. "Look here! I'm mentioning it for the last time—positively! But I do want to make quite certain. There is nothing wrong between us, is there, old man? I know you assured me last night, but I just want..."

Fenwick looked at him and, surveying him, felt suddenly an exquisite pleasure of hatred. He liked the touch of the man's hand on his knee; he himself bent forward a little and, thinking how agreeable it would be to push Foster's eyes in, deep, deep into his head, crunching them, smashing them to purple, leaving the empty, staring, bloody sockets, said:

"Why, no. Of course not. I told you last night. What could there be?"

The hand gripped the knee a little more tightly.

"I am so glad! That's splendid! Splendid! I hope you won't think me ridiculous, but I've always had an affection for you ever since I can remember. I've always wanted to known you better. I've admired your talent so greatly. That novel of yours—the—the—the one about the aloe—"

"The Bitter Aloe?"

"Ah yes, that was it. That was a splendid book. Pessimistic, of course, but still fine. It ought to have done better. I remember thinking so at the time."

"Yes, it ought to have done better."

"Your time will come, though. What I say is that good work always tells in the end."

"Yes, my time will come."

The thin, piping voice went on:

"Now, I've had more success than I deserved. Oh yes, I have. You can't deny it. I'm not falsely modest. I mean it. I've got some talent, of course, but not so much as people say. And you! Why, you've got so much more than they acknowledge. You have, old man. You have indeed. Only—I do hope you'll forgive my saying this—perhaps you haven't advanced quite as you might have done. Living up here, shut away here, closed in by all these mountains, in this wet climate—always raining—why, you're out of things! You don't see people, don't talk and discover what's really going on. Why, look at me!"

Fenwick turned round and looked at him.

"Now, I have half the year in London, where one gets the best of everything, best talk, best music, best plays; and then I'm three months abroad, Italy or Greece or somewhere, and then three months in the country. Now, that's an ideal arrangement. You have everything that way."

Italy or Greece or somewhere!

Something turned in Fenwick's breast, grinding, grinding, grinding. How he had longed, oh, how passionately, for just one week in Greece, two days in Sicily! Sometimes he had thought that he might run to it, but when it had come to the actual counting of the pennies ... And how this fool, this fat-head, this self-satisfied, conceited, patronizing ...

He got up, looking out at the golden sun.

"What do you say to a walk?" he suggested. "The sun will last for a good hour yet."

iii

AS SOON as the words were out of his lips he felt as though someone else had said them for him. He even turned half round to see whether anyone else were there. Ever since Foster's arrival on the evening before he had been conscious of this sensation. A walk? Why should he take Foster for a walk, show him his beloved country, point out those curves and lines and hollows, the broad silver shield of Ullswater, the cloudy purple hills hunched like blankets about the knees of some recumbent giant? Why? It was as though he had turned round to someone behind him and had said: "You have some further design in this."

They started out. The road sank abruptly to the lake, then the path ran between trees at the water's edge. Across the lake tones of bright yellow light, crocus-hued, rode upon the blue. The hills were dark.

The very way that Foster walked bespoke the man. He was always a little ahead of you, pushing his long, thin body along with little eager jerks, as though, did he not hurry, he would miss something that would be immensely to his advantage. He talked, throwing words over his shoulder to Fenwick as you throw crumbs of bread to a robin.

"Of course I was pleased. Who would not be? After all, it's a new prize. They've only been awarding it for a year or two, but it's gratifying—really gratifying—to secure it. When I opened the envelope and found the cheque there—well, you could have knocked me down with a feather. You could, indeed. Of course, a hundred pounds isn't much. But it's the honour...."

Whither were they going? Their destiny was as certain as though they had no free will. Free will? There is no free will. All is Fate. Fenwick suddenly laughed aloud.

Foster stopped.

"Why, what is it?"

"What's what?"

"You laughed."

"Something amused me."

Foster slipped his arm through Fenwick's.

"It is jolly to be walking along together like this, arm in arm, friends. I'm a sentimental man. I won't deny it. What I say is that life is short and one must love one's fellow-beings, or where is one? You live too much alone, old man." He squeezed Fenwick's arm. "That's the truth of it."

It was torture, exquisite, heavenly torture. It was wonderful to feel that thin, bony arm pressing against his. Almost you could hear the beating of that other heart. Wonderful to feel that arm and the temptation to take it in your hands and to bend it and twist it and then to hear the bones crack ... crack ... crack.... Wonderful to feel that temptation rise through one's body like boiling water and yet not to yield to it. For a moment Fenwick's hand touched Foster's. Then he drew himself apart.

"We're at the village. This is the hotel where they all come in the summer. We turn off at the right here. I'll show you my tarn."

iv

"YOUR TARN?" asked Foster. "Forgive my ignorance, but what is a tarn exactly?"

"A tarn is a miniature lake, a pool of water lying in the lap of the hill. Very quiet, lovely, silent. Some of them are immensely deep."

"I should like to see that."

"It is some little distance—up a rough road. Do you mind?"

"Not a bit. I have long legs."

"Some of them are immensely deep—unfathomable—nobody touched the bottom—but quiet, like glass, with shadows only—"

"Do you know, Fenwick, I have always been afraid of water—I've never learnt to swim. I'm afraid to go out of my depth. Isn't that ridiculous? But it is all because at my private school, years ago, when I was a small boy, some big fellows took me and held me with my head under the water and nearly drowned me. They did indeed. They went farther than they meant to. I can see their faces."

Fenwick considered this. The picture leapt to his mind. He could see the boys—large, strong fellows, probably—and this skinny thing like a frog, their thick hands about his throat, his legs like grey sticks kicking out of the water, their laughter, their sudden sense that something was wrong, the skinny body all flaccid and still....

He drew a deep breath.

Foster was walking beside him now, not ahead of him, as though he were a little afraid and needed reassurance. Indeed, the scene had changed. Before and behind them stretched the uphill path, loose with shale and stones. On their right, on a ridge at the foot of the hill, were some quarries, almost deserted, but the more melancholy in the fading afternoon because a little work still continued there; faint sounds came from the gaunt listening chimneys, a stream of water ran and tumbled angrily into a pool below, once and again a black silhouette, like a question-mark, appeared against the darkening hill.

It was a little steep here, and Foster puffed and blew.

Fenwick hated him the-more for that. So thin and spare and still he could not keep in condition! They stumbled, keeping below the quarry, on the edge of the running water, now green, now a dirty white-grey, pushing their way along the side of the hill.

Their faces were set now towards Helvellyn. It rounded the cup of hills, closing in the base and then sprawling to the right.

"There's the tarn!" Fenwick exclaimed; and then added, "The sun's not lasting as long as I had expected. It's growing dark already."

Foster stumbled and caught Fenwick's arm.

"This twilight makes the hills look strange—like living men. I can scarcely see my way."

"We're alone here," Fenwick answered. "Don't you feel the stillness? The men will have left the quarry now and gone home. There is no one in all this place but ourselves. If you watch you will see a strange green light steal down over the hills. It lasts for but a moment and then it is dark.

"Ah, here is my tarn. Do you know how I love this place, Foster? It seems to belong especially to me, just as much as all your work and your glory and fame and success seem to belong to you. I have this and you have that. Perhaps in the end we are even, after all. Yes....

"But I feel as though that piece of water belonged to me and I to it, and as though we should never be separated—yes. ... Isn't it black?

"It is one of the deep ones. No one has ever sounded it. Only Helvellyn knows, and one day I fancy that it will take me, too, into its confidence, will whisper its secrets—"

Foster sneezed.

"Very nice. Very beautiful, Fenwick. I like your tarn. Charming. And now let's turn back. That is a difficult walk beneath the quarry. It's chilly, too."

"Do you see that little jetty there?" Fenwick led Foster by the arm. "Someone built that out into the water. He had a boat there, I suppose. Come and look down. From the end of the little jetty it looks so deep and the mountains seem to close round."

Fenwick took Foster's arm and led him to the end of the jetty. Indeed, the water looked deep here. Deep and very black. Foster peered down, then he looked up at the hills that did indeed seem to have gathered close around him. He sneezed again.

"I've caught a cold, I am afraid. Let's turn homewards, Fenwick, or we shall never find our way."

"Home, then," said Fenwick, and his hands closed about the thin, scraggy neck. For the instant the head half turned, and two startled, strangely childish eyes stared; then, with a push that was ludicrously simple, the body was impelled forward, there was a sharp cry, a splash, a stir of something white against the swiftly gathering dusk, again and then again, then far-spreading ripples, then silence.

v

THE SILENCE extended. Having enwrapped the tarn, it spread as though with finger on lip to the already quiescent hills. Fenwick shared in the silence. He luxuriated in it. He did not move at all. He stood there looking upon the inky water of the tarn, his arms folded, a man lost in intensest thought. But he was not thinking. He was only conscious of a warm, luxurious relief, a sensuous feeling that was not thought at all.

Foster was gone—that tiresome, prating, conceited, self-satisfied fool! Gone, never to return. The tarn assured him of that. It stared back into Fenwick's face approvingly as though it said: "You have done well—a clean and necessary job. We have done it together, you and I. I am proud of you."

He was proud of himself. At last he had done something definite with his life. Thought, eager, active thought, was beginning now to flood his brain. For all these years he had hung around in this place doing nothing but cherish grievances, weak, backboneless—now at last there was action. He drew himself up and looked at the hills. He was proud—and he was cold. He was shivering. He turned up the collar of his coat. Yes, there was that faint green light that always lingered in the shadows of the hills for a brief moment before darkness came. It was growing late. He had better return.

Shivering now so that his teeth chattered, he started off down the path, and then was aware that he did not wish to leave the tarn. The tarn was friendly—the only friend he had in all the world. As he stumbled along in the dark this sense of loneliness grew. He was going home to an empty house. There had been a guest in it last night. Who was it? Why, Foster, of course—Foster with his silly laugh and amiable, mediocre eyes. Well, Foster would not be there now. No, he never would be there again.

And Suddenly Fenwick started to run. He did not know why, except that, now that he had left the tarn, he was lonely. He wished that he could have stayed there all night, but because it was cold he could not, and so now he was running so that he might be at home with the lights and the familiar furniture—and all the things that he knew to reassure him.

As he ran the shale and stones scattered beneath his feet. They made a tit-tattering noise under him, and someone else seemed to be running too. He stopped, and the other runner also stopped. He breathed in the silence. He was hot now. The perspiration was trickling down his cheeks. He could feel a dribble of it down his back inside his shirt. His knees were pounding. His heart was thumping. And all around him the hills were so amazingly silent, now like india-rubber clouds that you could push in or pull out as you do those india-rubber faces, grey against the night sky of a crystal purple, upon whose surface, like the twinkling eyes of boats at sea, stars were now appearing.

His knees steadied, his heart beat less fiercely, and he began to run again. Suddenly he had turned the corner and was out at the hotel. Its lamps were kindly and reassuring. He walked then quietly along the lake-side path, and had it not been for the certainty that someone was treading behind him he would have been comfortable and at his ease. He stopped once or twice and looked back, and once he stopped and called out, "Who's there?" Only the rustling trees answered.

He had the strangest fancy, but his brain was throbbing so fiercely that he could not think, that it was the tarn that was following him, the tarn slipping, sliding along the road, being with him so that he should not be lonely. He could almost hear the tarn whisper in his ear: "We did that together, and so I do not wish you to bear all the responsibility yourself. I will stay with you, so that you are not lonely."

He climbed down the road towards home, and there were the lights of his house. He heard the gate click behind him as though it were shutting him in. He went into the sitting-room, lighted and ready. There were the books that Foster had admired.

The old woman who looked after him appeared.

"Will you be having some tea, sir?"

"No, thank you, Annie."

"Will the other gentleman be wanting any?":

"No; the other gentleman is away for the night."

"Then there will be only one for supper?"

"Yes, only one for supper."

He sat in the corner of the sofa and fell instantly into a deep slumber.

vi

HE WOKE when the old woman tapped him on the shoulder and told him that supper was served. The room was dark save for the jumping light of two uncertain candles. Those two red candlesticks—how he hated them up there on the mantelpiece! He had always hated them, and now they seemed to him to have something of the quality of Foster's voice—that thin, reedy, piping tone.

He was expecting at every moment that Foster would enter, and yet he knew that he would not. He continued to turn his head towards the door, but it was so dark there that you could not see. The whole room was dark except just there by the fireplace, where the two candlesticks went whining with their miserable twinkling plaint.

He went into the dining-room and sat down to his meal. But he could not eat anything. It was odd—that place by the table where Foster's chair should be. Odd, naked, and made a man feel lonely.

He got up once from the table and went to the window, opened it and looked out. He listened for something, A trickle as of running water, a stir, through the silence, as though some deep pool were filling to the brim. A rustle in the trees, perhaps. An owl hooted; Sharply, as though someone had spoken unexpectedly behind his shoulder, he closed the windows and looked back, peering under his dark eyebrows into the room.

Later on he went up to his bed.

vii

HAD HE been sleeping, or had he been lying lazily, as one does, half dozing, half luxuriously not thinking? He was wide awake now, utterly awake, and his heart was beating with apprehension. It was as though someone had called him by name. He slept always with his window a little open and the blind up. To-night the moonlight shadowed in sickly fashion the objects in his room. It was not a flood of light nor yet a sharp splash, silvering a square, a circle, throwing the rest into ebony darkness. The light was dim, a little green, perhaps, like the shadow that comes over the hills just before dark.

He stared at the window, and it seemed to him that something moved there. Within, or rather against, the green-grey light, something silver-tinted glistened. Fenwick stared. It had the look, exactly, of slipping water.

Slipping water! He listened, his head up, and it seemed to him that from beyond the window he caught the stir of water, not running, but rather welling up and up, gurgling with satisfaction as it filled and filled.

He sat up higher in bed, and then saw that down the wallpaper beneath the window water was undoubtedly trickling. He could see it lurch to the projecting wood of the sill, pause, and then slip, slither down the incline. The odd thing was that it fell so silently.

Beyond the window there was that odd gurgle, but in the room itself absolute silence. Whence could it come? He saw the line of silver rise and fall as the stream on the window-ledge ebbed and flowed.

He must get up and close the window. He drew his legs above the sheets and blankets and looked down.

He shrieked. The floor was covered with a shining film of water. It was rising. As he looked it had covered half the short stumpy legs of the bed. It rose without a wink, a bubble, a break! Over the sill it poured now in a steady flow, but soundless. Fenwick sat up in the bed, the clothes gathered up to his chin, his eyes blinking, the Adam's apple throbbing like a throttle in his throat.

But he must do something, he must stop this. The water was now level with the seats of the chairs, but still was soundless. Could he but reach the door!

He put down his naked foot, then cried again. The water was icy cold. Suddenly, leaning, staring at its dark, unbroken sheen, something seemed to push him forward. He fell. His head, his face was under the icy liquid; it seemed adhesive and, in the heart of its ice, hot like melting wax. He struggled to his feet. The water was breast-high. He screamed again and again. He could see the looking-glass, the row of books, the picture of Dürer's "Horse", aloof, impervious. He beat at the water, and flakes of it seemed to cling to him like scales of fish, clammy to his touch. He struggled, ploughing his way towards the door.

The water now was at his neck. Then something had caught him by the ankle. Something held him. He struggled, crying: "Let me go! Let me go! I tell you to let me go! I hate you! I hate you! I will not come down to you! I will not—"

The water covered his mouth. He felt that someone pushed in his eyeballs with bare knuckles. A cold hand reached up and caught his naked thigh.

viii

IN THE morning the little maid knocked and, receiving no answer, came in, as was her wont, with his shaving-water. What she saw made her scream. She ran for the gardener.

They took the body with its staring, protruding eyes, its tongue sticking out between the clenched teeth, and laid it on the bed.

The only sign of disorder was an overturned water-jug. A small pool of water stained the carpet.

It was a lovely morning. A twig of ivy idly, in the little breeze, tapped the pane.

________________

20: Mayfair Melody

Peter Cheyney

1896-1951

Britannia and Eve, Nov 1939

Collected in Making Crime Pay, 1951

I SUPPOSE I can only blame myself. I suppose I've asked for it really and I shall have to take what's coming to me like a gentleman. But it's damned hard, that's what it is... and all because one relied on one's friends— people one thought one could trust. Of course, I should have looked after myself from the start.

I never thought that Hubert would be so unutterably lousy, or that Paula could sink to the appalling depths of letting me down like this... and I was almost in love with her at one time, too. That makes it rather harder.

My solicitor says that there's a fearfully good chance of my going to prison, that I was really lucky to get bail. Well... if I go to prison, I shall just be another 'Mayfair man'... another sentimental sort of idiot who has been let down by his best friend and a girl that he thought the world of.

I can remember every incident in the whole thing from the start. It was on a Thursday night and Hubert and I were sitting in the back bar at The White Owl Club. It was round about supper time and we weren't feeling awfully good, because Rickaldi— who runs the place— was being a bit snorty about six dozen of champagne that Hubert and I had got from him some two months before. Rickaldi had discovered— I suppose he'd been snooping about the place in the rather underhand way these fellows have— that we'd sold the whole lot at half price to Lozzi, who runs the Padrones Club. Neither of us could see what justifiable grouse Rickaldi had, because we should have paid him some time anyway, and Hubert and I have taken good lot of people to The White Owl— people who'd spent good money there.

Hubert said that things were pretty awful. A lot of tradesmen and people were getting after him, and he was having some trouble about a cheque he'd cashed at some place that had been returned. It's extraordinary the fuss some people kick up just because you give them a cheque that bounces back. I mean to say, it's a thing that could happen to anyone, isn't it?

I was rather in the dumps too, because things weren't good with me either. I'd had a job— of sorts— selling cars on commission for a firm. Two days before they'd written me a stinking letter saying I was to finish, merely because I had sold a car for them to a fellow I knew and taken the commission in advance, after which he'd refused to take the car. They said that it was a put up job between him and me, that he'd never intended to buy the car and that I'd arranged a fake sale, so that he and I could split the commission. I suppose they thought I ought to work for nothing! Anyhow, they were the fools for paying the commission before they'd got paid for the car.

Hubert and I agreed that there was absolutely nothing at all doing in the way of business. The American crowd that one used to be able to take about and make a little money out of seemed to have disappeared entirely, and the agency place that used to pay Hubert and me three or four guineas to go to parties— thrown by people who wanted a few good-looking men who were really gentlemen about the place— had struck us off the list, just because somebody had stolen a woman's brooch at the last party we were at.

I was furious about this. It was a damned libellous thing to say. Neither Hubert or I knew anything about it, although Hubert said that he thought Mervyn Hall-Pelisse— whom we'd taken along with us— had seen the brooch lying about the place and pocketed it. Well, why the deuce don't these people lock their jewellery up! They deserve to lose it, and, anyway, Mervyn threw a hell of a party the next night— a fearfully amusing party

Just as Hubert and I were agreeing that something really must be done, Paula came in.

I'd always thought that there was something rather fine about Paula— yes, that's the word— fine. She's a fearfully good-looking girl and knows how to wear clothes. She has the sort of figure— the style— that would make an old sack look like something by Schiaparelli. She and I had known each other for quite a while, and we'd always got on together.

She came over to our table and sat down. She agreed with Hubert and I that things were absolutely lousy, and that there wasn't anything doing at all. She said that the war was frightening all the money out of the West End.

Hubert said that, anyway, it was always the wrong people who had the money. Nouveaux riches and profiteers and people of no particular culture or breeding were the only people who had money to-day. People like Wilks Greening, the fellow who had been winning big money at all the Mayfair gambling parties, who never seemed able to lose.

Paula agreed. She said that Greening was a perfect example. Just because he was rolling in money he invariably won when he gambled. Whatever he did turned into cash. She described Greening as the perfect specimen of rich bounder that one met about the place these days. Then she told us how, one night, at a gambling party at Ferdinand Tolletly's place, Greening had won fifteen hundred pounds and then refused to give her a fifty pound note afterwards, although she was the person who'd taken him along to Ferdinand's place after having met him for the first time that evening.

'The fellow is quite fearful,' Hubert said. 'He's the sort of man who ought to be taught a lesson. It would do him a lot of good if someone took some of his money off him!'

'He is rather awful,' said Paula. 'Tell us, Hubert... if you had the opportunity how would you teach him a lesson? I'm sure he deserves it.'

Hubert laughed. Then after a bit he said that he'd invented a little gadget that one could wear inside one's coat sleeve— a gadget for holding, playing cards. He said he used to use it for sleight-of-hand tricks. This gadget shot a card— one you wanted— into your hand at any moment without any of the other players seeing.

'I'd like to play cards with Greening and use that gadget,' said Hubert. 'I think it would be marvellous to watch his face while he lost all the time.'

Paula said: 'Why don't we do it? It would be great fun.' Hubert looked at me.

'Look here, Wilfred,' he said, 'why don't we teach this fellow a lesson? It would be a fearful scream if we played poker with him and won a lot of money. It would just serve him right!'

I said I thought so, too. I said that it wouldn't really be dishonest because he was such a bounder, but that I didn't see how it could be arranged.

Paula said that she could fix it. She said that if she asked Greening to dine with her one evening she would bring him back to her flat for a drink, and that we could drop in and suggest a game. Greening was mad keen on gambling. He'd fall for it at once.

'That's all very well,' said Hubert, 'but the thing would be to let him win a little money first. You've got to let a man like Greening win a bit and then he'd want to double the stakes. When the stakes are doubled I'd begin to use my gadget and give myself the most wonderful hands.'

He asked me if I'd got some money to put up, so that we could let Greening win a bit first. I said I hadn't— that I was absolutely broke— which was true.

Hubert looked a little annoyed.

'Well, surely you've got a cheque book,' he said.

I said that I had a cheque book, but no banking account. I'd had a little trouble with the bank a fortnight before and they'd closed my account. Hubert thought for a bit; then he said:

'Well that doesn't matter. Look here, Wilfred. As Paula's supplying the flat, and I'm putting up my gadget to win the money with, I think you ought to put up the capital.'

I told Hubert not to be a silly ass. How could I put up money when I hadn't got any?

He said: 'That's easy. Let's suppose that Paula can get Greening for to-morrow night. Well, you write a cheque out for two hundred pounds. I'll get it cashed to-morrow evening after the banks are closed. I know a man who'd cash it if I guaranteed it. Well... we shall win the money to-morrow night and you'll be able to pay the two hundred pounds into your bank to meet the cheque before it comes in for payment.'

I thought that over and it sounded all right. After all, it was going to take two days for the cheque to go through, and I could get the money round to the bank the morning after the next. So I said I was game to do that.

We all laughed like the devil. After all, it would be too fearfully amusing to teach Greening a lesson. It would do him an awful lot of good.

Hubert was fearfully thrilled. He ordered a bottle of champagne, and while they were bringing it Paula went off and telephoned Greening. When she came back she said we were in luck— that Greening had asked her to dinner next night and had agreed to go along to her place afterwards for a friendly game of poker.

We finished the bottle and ordered another. We'd all bucked up immensely. It's funny how the idea of teaching a first-class bounder a lesson can cheer one up. Paula said that it would be fearfully good for him: that he was mean and that one of the worst vices was meanness.

Hubert said he thought so too. Then he said it was quite on the cards that— with a bit of luck— we should get a couple of thousand or so out of Greening next night, but that having won so much around Mayfair he couldn't squeal, anyway. He said that whatever we won we'd split fairly between the three of us after I'd been given back the two hundred pounds capital that I was putting up.

We got a final bottle off Rickaldi and went along to my place, and I wrote out the cheque and gave it to Hubert. He said he knew some old fellow— a distant relative— who was an awfully trusting old bird— who'd cash it, after which we went round to Hubert's place and he showed us how the gadget worked. It was a fearfully clever bit of work. It was a sort of wire contraption that fitted inside one's shirt cuff and held two dozen cards. Hubert dealt himself a couple of poker hands and showed us how he could practically make up any hand he wanted using the reserve cards and getting rid of the discards in the same way.

We were all terribly happy and laughed a great deal and drank White Ladies and toasted Greening. When the drinks were all gone we agreed to meet at Paula's place at eleven o'clock next night and Paula and I went off our separate ways.

WE met next night as arranged. Paula and Greening were there when we arrived. They'd had an awfully amusing dinner and seemed very happy. Greening was doing his best to be inoffensive, although it was terribly easy to see that the man wasn't a gentleman. He was really quite funny at times. He said "serviette" for napkin and "commence" instead of begin, and all those sort of cad things. He and Paula had brought back half a dozen bottles of champagne with them and we laughed and talked a great deal.

We started to play poker at twelve o'clock. Whenever Hubert was dealer he gave Greening good hands and the rest of us only poor ones. Hubert had sent round sixty-five pounds each earlier in the evening to Paula and me, retaining the balance for himself. So he'd apparently cashed my cheque all right.

By one o'clock Greening had won practically all our money. Hubert said we were all having most wonderful luck and Greening said jocularly why not raise the stakes?

We all agreed and Greening put the cash in his pocket and suggested that we played with counters which Paula provided. We began to play five pound "rises", and I must say the way Hubert worked that gadget of his was too terribly clever. I've never seen such beautiful handwork.

Well, to cut a long story short, we played on until four o'clock. Greening was losing heavily, and after a final round of jackpots we agreed to stop. We added up winnings and losings and it seemed that Greening owed us three just over three thousand pounds.'

He was pretty philosophic about it too. He said that he'd been having a run of luck lately, and knew that it couldn't go on. Then he produced a cheque book and wrote out a cheque to Hubert for the three thousand two hundred and twenty, Hubert having said that he would cash it next day and pay Paula and me off.

When we were going, Greening looked a bit sheepish and put his hand in his pocket and brought out a little case and handed it to Paula. She opened it and there was a rather nice little diamond brooch inside. Greening said he hoped she would accept it and thanked her for a marvellous evening. I suppose he thought he stood a chance with Paula.

Then we three men went off. Outside Greening said that we must give him his revenge one night, and we said we would. After he'd got into his cab and gone, Hubert and I stood there laughing like fools. It was really the funniest thing.

I walked with Hubert round to his place and left him on the doorstep. He said that he'd cash the cheque and meet Paula and me at The White Owl for dinner at nine o'clock next night. Hubert said that it was a damn good evening's work and that we'd have over a thousand each after I'd got my original two hundred back. He said that, anyway, it would teach Greening a damned good lesson, and when I asked him how it could do that because Greening would never suspect that the game had been rigged, he said 'Quite', and we both stood there roaring with laughter like a pair of idiots. We just went on laughing and laughing, because, say what you like, it was really a quite divine sort of joke.

It was five o'clock next afternoon when I woke. I'd a bit of a head and I lay in bed for some time thinking about things. Suddenly I remembered the fact that I was worth over a thousand and began to plan what I'd do with it. I thought it might be fun to fly over to Paris for a week or so and see how things were over there.

I got up eventually and, after a bath and a double Martini made with Scotch, I felt like a king. I telephoned through to Paula and told her that the arrangement was that she and Hubert and I were all to meet at The White Owl for dinner, and that Hubert would have our money for us.

When I'd finished saying my piece, Paula said in an odd sort of voice; I wouldn't be so certain about getting our money, Wilfred. I think Hubert's gone.'

'What d'you mean, Paula?' I said. 'Gone... gone where?'

'Well,' she said, 'I telephoned his flat at four-thirty this afternoon, and the porter said that he'd gone. He said that Hubert had gone off about four o'clock and taken his bags with him. The porter said he thought he'd gone north for a few days.'

'My God!' I said. 'The fearful outsider! He's gone and taken our money with him. What a terrible thing to do.'

'Pretty lousy,' said Paula. 'But then I was never quite certain about Hubert. After all, that gadget thing was a bit hot, you know. It occurred to me last night when we were playing that he'd probably used it on us at different times.'

'I suppose he's cashed Greening's cheque,' I said.

'No,'' said Paula, 'he hasn't done that. He didn't wake up until three-thirty, the porter says. He's left a packet to go round to his bank first thing in the morning, and my guess is that the cheque's in it. Hubert's going to clear it in the ordinary way and draw against it wherever he is.'

'What a fearful rotter,' I said. 'To do a thing like that to his friends. This is too awful. And what am I going to do about that two hundred pounds that I've got to get into my bank first thing tomorrow morning?'

She said, rather coldly I thought; 'I don't know what you're going to do, Wilfred, but I know what I've done. I'm a girl, more or less on my own, and I've got to look after myself. Hubert has behaved like a fearful crook, and so when I'd made up my mind that he'd gone off and didn't intend to pay us I did the obvious thing.'

'The obvious thing, Paula,' I echoed. 'And what was that?'

I went straight round and saw Greening,' she said primly. 'And I told him the whole story. I said that Hubert was playing a crooked game last night, but that I didn't like to say anything then for fear of creating a scene. I advised Greening to stop payment of the cheque and he's done so.'

'That's very nice for Greening,' I said. 'So he's going to save his three thousand odd and still stick to my two hundred that he won in cash before we began to play with counters. I think I'll go round and see Mr. Greening and ask for it back!'

I don't think I'd do that, Wilfred dear, if I were you,' said Paula. 'Because I don't think you'll get it. Greening was rather grateful to me for going round and telling him about it, and he gave me five hundred for myself. I don't think he'll be too keen on paying out any more!'

I was so astounded that I could hardly speak. After all to be let down in the first place by Hubert was pretty grim, but to hear Paula talking like that was a bit too much.

'Look here, Paula,' I said. 'You know damned well that I've got to have that two hundred at least. Hubert has let us both down, but you've got to play the game. You must. Damn it, you are a gentlewoman, Paula. You've got to let me have three hundred of that five hundred that Greening's given you. You must!'

'Well, I don't see it, Wilfred,' she said sort of definitely. 'Hubert and you and I were in this thing as partners. Well, he's walked out on us and I've made the best of a bad job, and looked after myself. After all it was I who found out that Hubert bad flown, while you were still asleep, and it was I who went round and warned Greening. I'm entitled to the money he's given me but I don't see how, from any conceivable angle, you can expect me go give you any of it, and to put it quite bluntly, Wilfred dear, I'm not going to.'

I was quite speechless.

'I'm fearfully sorry of course,' she said. 'But I've got to go now. I shall be at The White Owl at nine for dinner tonight. Come along afterwards, Wilfred, and have a drink.'

She hung up.

I stood there almost gasping. After all, these people were my friends. I was almost heartbroken. Here was Hubert behaving like a first-class crook going off with Paula's and my money like a criminal— that was bad enough, and now, Paula had taken the meanest advantage of me and, by rushing round to Greening, had got herself five hundred pounds, and refused to give me a penny. When, as I told you before, I realised that at one time I had almost loved that girl, I could have shrieked. The whole thing was too shattering.

And I had put up the original capital for the whole thing. Without my two hundred pounds nothing could have been done. And on my capital Hubert had gone off with a three-thousand-pound-odd cheque, and Paula had got herself five hundred.

I stood there by the telephone and I was very near to tears. I realized that it would be impossible for me to do such a thing to people who were my friends; that I would rather have died than done anything like that either to Hubert or to Paula. I felt quite awful. Absolutely slain with sorrow and anger.

At seven o'clock I had an idea. I dressed rather carefully and strolled along to the Silver Bar. I bought a cocktail and began to pass the time of day with Harold the barman. After a bit I said:

'Tell me, Harold... you remember saying something a week or so ago about the detective who was making-enquiries about gaming parties in Mayfair. Do you know who he is?'

Harold looked round rather secretively; then he said:

'Yes, I do, sir. He's Detective-Sergeant Martin, and he's sitting over there in the corner, reading the newspaper.'

That was a bit of luck. I finished my drink and strolled over to the corner table. The detective bird looked up at me and I said:

'Look here... here's rather a funny situation. My name's Wilfred Fettingwell and last night I was at a little gambling party, and I saw a fellow win a whole lot of money by cheating. He had a gadget up his sleeve and dealt himself cards from it when he wanted to. What ought I to do?'

I sat down and signalled for drinks.

The detective asked me if I knew the man's name and I told him I did. I told him the man was Hubert Tolquhart. He made a note of it. Then he asked me if there had been anyone else at the party whom I regarded as being suspicious.

I said well... possibly. I told him how much Greening had lost, and I said that there had also been a woman there who might have been an accomplice of Tolquhart's. I said that I didn't know her name and that I hadn't seen her about Mayfair very much.

The detective fellow was awfully nice. He said that he was obliged for the information about Tolquhart and that if I could find out the name of the woman he'd be glad to have it. He said that there were all sorts of complaints going about regarding crooked gambling in the neighbourhood.

I said I'd do my best to find out for him and, if I was successful, I would telephone him at Vine Street which was, apparently, his headquarters. He gave me a card and the telephone number and I went off.

By this time I was feeling a bit better. I was getting over my shocking disappointment about Hubert and Paula. I went back to the flat and had a drink and at nine o'clock I telephoned Paula at The White Owl.

'Look here, Paula,' I said. 'I've been thinking about things and I've come to the conclusion that Hubert's an absolute crook. I had a bit of a struggle with myself, but I've done what I consider to be my duty. I've been to the police.'

'Oh, have you?' she said. 'And what did you tell them, Wilfred?'

'Well...' I answered. 'I've told them about the party and about Greening losing all that money and how Hubert cheated with that gadget of his. They asked me who else was there and I said that there was a woman there who, I thought, was a friend of Hubert's.'

Paula said, in a rather strained voice: 'You didn't mention my name, Wilfred, did you?'

'No,' I said. 'I haven't done that... not yet. I've been talking about our telephone conversation of this afternoon, Paula, and I knew that you couldn't be serious about not letting me have that three hundred. So I thought I'd telephone you once more before speaking to the detective officer. I shall probably be ringing him to-night.'

'I see,' she said. There was a little pause, and then she went on: 'You know, Wilfred, I've been thinking things over since I spoke to you earlier to-day and I came to the conclusion that I ought to let you have some of the money that Greening gave me. It would be the fair thing to do. So if you like to come round here I'll give it to you.'

I said: 'Well, Paula, I'm fearfully glad you've come to that conclusion because I think you're only doing what's really morally right. I'll come along and collect it.'

I got into a cab and dashed round to The White Owl and saw Paula. She gave me the money in an envelope. I told her that, of course, under no circumstances would I mention her name to the police now that she had done the right thing by me.

We drank a couple of Martinis and then I went off. I felt that I wanted to be alone, that things had been a bit too much for me during the last twenty-four hours. I wanted to forget about Hubert and what a complete and utter outsider he'd been.

I went back to my flat to see if there was any post. Two letters were waiting for me. One was a bill and the other was from the bank. The letter from the bank said that a cheque drawn by me on my account which had been closed, as I knew, a fortnight before, had been presented for payment, that the cheque was for two hundred pounds and that although the handwriting was rather similar to mine the signature was incorrect, the cheque having been signed 'W. G. Fettingwell' instead of with my usual signature 'Wilfred G. Fettingwell'.

I must say I grinned to myself. I felt rather pleased— having regard to Hubert's conduct— that I'd signed the cheque in that odd way. I felt glad that I'd protected myself.

I wrote a note to the bank and said that I knew nothing about the cheque. That I was not the sort of person who would write out a cheque on an account that was closed, and that the fact was proved by the incorrect signature. I said that I had missed my old cheque book a few days before and hadn't worried about the fact because I knew the account was closed, but that now I had reason to believe that the cheque had been stolen by one, Hubert Tolquhart, who, I thought, was wanted by the police.

I sealed down the envelope, stamped the letter, had another Martini and went out. I was feeling better. After all, one must be of good cheer, one must be gay, even in the face of adversity and even if one's friends do let one down.

I posted the letter at a pillar box and strolled along to Gustavo's to dine. I made a good dinner and drank a bottle of excellent champagne. I felt rather bucked when I paid my bill with one of Paula's new five-pound notes.

I remember reading somewhere or other— in the days when I used to read— that one must be greater than circumstances. I had a definite feeling that I had been greater than circumstances.

I had just lit a cigarette and was wandering out of Gustavo's when someone spoke to me. It was the police fellow— Detective-Sergeant Martin.

'Excuse me, sir,' he said, quite affably.' But I'd be very glad if you'd come along to Vine Street. The D.D.I, would like to ask you a few questions!'

I asked why. I asked why the deuce the D.D.I.— whatever that might mean— should want to question me.

He explained that D.D.I, meant Divisional Detective-Inspector. Then he produced some quite shattering news.

He said that Greening was a crook, that he had been 'working' May-fair very successfully for the last three weeks, that the police had been after him for some time.

He also explained that he had been very interested in my conversation of earlier in the evening because Hubert had apparently tried to change the cheque that Greening had given him for his losses early that evening, that the cheque, the signature and the whole box of tricks was absolutely phoney. They'd arrested Hubert at six o'clock on two other charges.

I said I was very pleased to hear it, but what had it to do with me. I was a little bit upstage with this policeman fellow. He was beginning to bore me.

He said that the note I had just given in payment of my bill was counterfeit.

I was absolutely staggered. Then I recovered myself. I told him the truth. I asked him how was I to know that. That the note had been given to me in payment of a debt by a woman friend, and that I was not to know that it was counterfeit.

He said that he was quite prepared to believe that, but that they had picked up the lady in question at The White Owl, three-quarters of an hour ago, and she had stated that the notes had been given to her by Greening, and that she had handed some of them to me.

I said that was quite in order, but I still failed to see what I had done. Of course I was prepared to make good the bad note I had given Gustavo's, and that I thought his attitude in asking me to go to Vine Street was definitely rude and that I objected to it.

He said he was sorry about that, but that the D.D.I, wished to talk to me about another little matter. That there was in fact a definite charge to be made against me.

I told him I thought he was being rather amusing and that I would very much like to know what the charge was.

Then he said that he was charging me with uttering a cheque signed in a false signature on an account which I knew to be closed, and being accessory to Hubert in cashing it.

I said, rubbish... utter rubbish...! That I had earlier received a letter from the bank about the cheque; that I had written and told them that I knew nothing about it; that whoever had written it had not even used my correct signature and that I was certain that Hubert Tolquhart had done it.

He said quite pleasantly: 'I'm afraid you'll have to explain that to the D.D.I., sir. You see, your friend, Miss Paula Meraulton, has definitely stated that she saw you write out the cheque, and is prepared to swear to that fact. Would you like to take a cab, sir, or will you walk?'

D'YOU wonder that I feel bitter? My solicitor says that he thinks I'll be rather lucky— all things considered. That I shall probably get off with six months in the second division. Of course the police have trumped up some other rubbishy charges against me.

I suppose I've only myself to blame. I trusted Paula and I trusted Hubert. I thought they were my friends and I thought they were loyal and decent. Well, they've let me down.

I suppose the Press will call me another 'Mayfair man'. Whereas in fact, as you will plainly understand, I am just a rather sentimental sort of ass who's been badly let down by his best friend and a girl he thought the world of.

_________________

21: The Mystery of the Old Tin Box

Annie S. Swan

Mrs. Annie Shepherd Swan Burnett-Smith, 1859-1943

Mercury (Hobart) 15 June 1938

JOE GARRETT whipped up the old grey mare, and left the market-place of Seaminster, where he had brought what he considered a very satisfactory bit of business to a successful conclusion.

He had sold a bit of his land— a small and unproductive waste piece about half a mile from Garrett's Mill, set like a wedge at the awkward junction of two fields. This waste ground had long been a thorn in his flesh. He had tried several crops on it without success, and had thereafter, in a passion of resentment, left it wholly neglected, not even troubling to cut down the nettles and the other noxious weeds which choked the ground.

At one corner of the wedge, there was the remnant of an old wall regarding which there was some superstition in the neighbourhood. The very old inhabitants remembered a house, or at least rumours of a house, that had stood there— a house of evil omen and repute. There had been murder done in it, they said— an old man had been killed in his bed for the sake of gold he was supposed to have, but which had never been discovered.

He was not a Garrett, though he might have, been, since the outstanding characteristic of the Garrett family was their miserliness. Joe himself was, as the neighbours expressed it, "not just with greed."

He was chuckling now, because he imagined he had got the better of the man to whom he had sold the land, a quarter of an acre for £60. Now good land in the vicinity of Seaminster could only command £100 an acre, and was then considered dear.

Joe did not wish particularly to sell the land, but was tempted by the offer, and thought the man a fool who had made it. Presently the grin broadened on his face as he came near the Slat, which, was the inexplicable title that had been given to the land in question, and which had now passed from the hands of Joe Garrett into those of Peter Clodd.

He jerked Molly up short at the corner of the road, which turned up towards the mill, and upon which the Slat jutted oddly, like a wedge with the piece of tumble-down dyke at the one corner.

It was the month of July, and all vegetation after a warm and moist Summer had grown rank and strong. Some of the great nettles were nearly 5ft. high; they almost overtopped the wall at its lower end, and the wind swept through the long grass with a sigh as if it could tell a secret, but refrained.

JOE GARRETT was a very ugly man. There are plain faces that are pleasant to look upon, by reason of their kindly expression, by the goodwill and loving-kindness that shine from them; but Joe's was not one. of these. He had a very large, loosely-, built figure. His features were harsh and his eyes shifty and cruel. Selfishness, greed, and general mulishness had set their seal on his unlovely countenance, which was one from which strangers and children naturally shrank.

He had no children of his own, but his wife's niece had been adopted by them, and had been kept, in strict subjection. Of money she had none, not even a penny for her pocket, and the girl, naturally sweet-natured and wholesome, had grown up reserved, timid, miserable, only longing for the day which should release, her from the bitter bondage of Garrett's Mill.

She was giving the chickens their afternoon feed of corn when the rumble of wheels smote her ear, and the rickety old trap trundled into the yard. Her aunt, sitting on the bench by the kitchen door, knitting busily, looked up with interest.

"Had a good day, Joe?" she asked, as she stroked Molly's rather emaciated sides, feeling sorry to see the poor old thing so spent with the heat and the exertion of pulling the heavy trap over the hilly road.

"Prime day, lass. Got something to tell you; something that'll tickle you to death. Now where has that minx got to? She must hear it, too. It consarns a friend o' her'n, Mister Peter Clodd."

"What's he been doing? Asking you again for Peggy?" asked Mrs. Garrett, eagerly.

Joe's lips parted in a slow and not attractive grin. "No, he knaws better. I gave him my mind too free last time. She shan't marry a Clodd if I can help it, nor while she's stoppln' in this house. An' ef she elects to leave it, why then we washes our hands of her, old gel, see? But though Peg's a tool, she ain't a silly fool. She's bin too well brought up fur that. Hi, Peg. come 'ere. I've got a bit or news for ye."

The girl did not hasten. There were moments when she hated her uncle intensely, and when the strength and bitterness of her feelings made her shrink from herself. She was just 21, a winsome maiden, and naturally craved for the sweetness of life which such as she are entitled to by every right. Most of all she wanted love, and it had come to her only to be banned.

She loved Peter Clodd, and he loved her, but they had been forbidden to meet. They had met, however, and would meet again, for. when did love do aught save laugh at the ban that is placed upon it?

"COME 'ere, lass. I saw the yoong spark t'day, an' a silly fool he be, to be sure. Got a legacy, they tell'd me, fra his Grandfer Bowen, a hunder pounds. Does 'e put it in a bank, like a sensible lad, worth a woman's while to look at, to make a nest egg for the day to come? No; what d'ye think he does wi' it?"

Peggy shook her head. The colour  was high in her cheek, and her eyes somewhat downcast. Yet she seemed to smile.

"He gies 60 good pounds of it to me, lass. See, there be the silly fool's cheque."

He took out his shabby old leather pocket-book, and showed her the pink slip of paper bearing Peter's name and his.

"An' what for lass, think ye? For, the Slat— no less, aha, the Slat!" he cried, and, slapping his leg with his hand, went off into a fit of uncontrolled laughter. "A fine crop of nettles an' were-weed there be theer, to be sure, so tha can go help him to harvest 'em."

"Mercy me, Joe, whatever ha's come to Peter Clodd? Whatever did you take his money for?" asked Mary with real concern. "Seems like as if he weren't quite right in his head."

"It seems like it, and I believe that's what has happened the lad," replied

Joe more soberly. "Anyways, I've got the money and 'e's got the Slat, and it's easy I am what he makes of it. Maybe it's buried treasure he's after, but if it's that, as I told him, better men nor him 'as been ower the ground more'n a dozen times."

All this time Peggy never spoke, and presently, when her uncle addressed no more words to her, she stole away.

Her aunt looked after her with a somewhat wistful expression in her eyes.

"Oh, Peggy," she said to her niece, when they went out at milking time together, "do you know anything' about why Peter has bought the Slat? It seems like a fool's doin', an' your uncle's fair chuckling over it."

"I don't know anything, aunt," replied the girl dully; "and I'm sorry Uncle Joe look Peter's money. It was mean and horrid, and I very nearly told him so."

But Mary was loyal to her, husband. "Your uncle' had something to sell that Peter Clodd" wanted, and the money changed hands, lass; that's honest business, so mind what you say."

After dark that evening Mrs. Garrett missed Peggy from the house, but made no remark. She was not actively hostile to the love affair between her niece and Peter Clodd, though she did not think him a good match. But she did not say a word as to her suspicions to her husband, who would have made a great noise had he dreamed that Peggy, in full face of his prohibitions, had gone out to keep a clandestine appointment with Clodd.

Across the dusky fields sped Peggy, with a little wrap about her shoulders, and none at all on her head. And presently at the trysting place at the corner of Boreham Wood she saw her young lover waiting, a comely enough figure in his tweed suit and gaiters, his cap pushed far back on his head, showing up his honest, good-looking face.

"I'm sorry to be late, Peter," she murmured, her colour flaming at tho ardour of his glance; "I'm afraid you've been waiting a long time; but I thought supper would never come to an end."

"Waiting! What's waiting when you come at the end of it. Peggy?" said Peter, and took her in his arms.

"Oh, Peter, what's all this about the Slat? Is it really true that you've bought that horrible little piece of waste land, where the frogs croak, from Uncle Joe for £60? Far better you had given me the money to keep for you safe at the very bottom of my box."

"It's true, darling, and I have my reasons," replied Peter with dignity. "Tell me, where is that sweet specimen, your Uncle Joe, tonight? Is he by any chance likely to be wandering about the fields?"

"Oh, no; his boots are off and he's settled for the evening. He was-up at four o'clock this morning to put in three hours' work before breakfast on account of its being market-day. So more than likely he's asleep by now."

"Good! then we'll go to the Slat, my new estate, Peggy, and take an inventory of its dimensions."

PEGGY lifted her head from her lover's shoulder, and eyed him with a sudden ruefulness.

"You're quite right in the head, aren't you, Peter? I could see very well that both Uncle Joe and Aunt Mary thought you had gone off, and upon my word I hardly know what to believe myself."

Peter Clodd laughed loud and long.

"Now, as you've been such a good girl, and your Uncle Joe, bless him, has gone to sleep, I'll tell you the meaning of my bargain in the market today."

"Yes, Peter," said Peggy, a little breathlessly, full of pride in her lover, yet acutely anxious regarding the incident of the day.

"You remember when I told you about Grandfather Bowen's legacy, I  told you there was a clause in the will which left it to me that I was chary of accepting."

"Yes, what is it?"

"I'm coming to it, dear. Honestly, I would have preferred the hundred clear. It would just have paid our passages to Canada, Peggy, where I would have made a fortune for you. But I've just enough to pay my own passage out, and if the Slat doesn't turn up trumps, why, then, you'll have to content yourself a year or two at the Mill till I get the lie of the land out there, and the little homestead built."

"But I don't see what the Slat has to do with it. Nasty, horrid place! When I have to go by it of a night I always run and throw my apron over my head."

"Poor little lass! Much good that would do you," said Peter absently. "Well, now, let me explain. My Grand-father Bowen left a letter to be given with the legacy, and what do you think was in it?"

"I'm sure I couldn't say."

"Well, it said that I was to have £100 only on condition that I offered your Uncle Joe £50 for the Slat. I was to increase it to £60 if he didn't seem inclined to sell."

"What a strange thing! Perhaps your grandfather was a very old man. not quite right in his head."

"That's what some might think," assented Peter; "but hear the rest. I was to make the bargain tight. Get a proper deed of sale, signed and sealed and delivered, so that there could be no drawing back on Joe's part. It's freehold ground, every foot of it, you see, Peggy, and nobody can interfere with Joe. He's absolutely master of the soil."

"Yes, but why buy the horrid place? That's what seems so foolish," persisted Peggy.

"You know the old story of the Slat, about the house and old Lemuel Pearse, the miser that lived in it about 100 years ago. Well, you know how they said he had buried all his treasure there."

"I've heard, but you may be quite sure that Uncle Joe, if not his father before him, turned out every bit of the ground. Indeed, Uncle Joe said so. He's just, laughing at you for your pains."

"Let them laugh that win," remarked Peter equably. "Here we are, then, sweetheart, and there's the moon just coming up behind the Squire's Wood. It'll help us to see. What are you trembling for? Are you afraid of the Slat, little girl?"

"It's a horrid place, and listen to the frogs now. They're all at it, millions of them," she said, shivering and holding tight to her lover's arm.

THEY parted for the night at the gate of the Mill House, and Peggy slipped quietly up to her room. She felt bitter at Uncle Joe, judging that he had led the young man on to put his slender legacy to such foolish use. She felt it more keenly still when, soon after breakfast, Joe looked in with a sour grin on his face, to tell her to come out and watch her lover beginning the siege. She did not go out then, but later in the day, and for many days after she could see him slowly demolishing the ruin. She had to listen, too, to all the neighbours' comments, most of them facetious, regarding Peter's search for Lemuel Pearse's gold.

But at last, after three week's hard labour, Peter seemed to come to the end of his operations. The ground was levelled up again, the gate locked, and he quietly disappeared without saying a word to anybody. He did not even come to say good-bye to Peggy, but somehow she did not feel very hurt or sad about it. Something told her that he would come, and that things would turn out all right for them both yet.

Her anxious, wistful look, however, touched her aunt's heart so much that she absolutely forbade her husband to mention the Slat or Peter Clodd to her, and for once he obeyed. One morning Peggy received a letter addressed in Peter's handwriting delivered In the ordinary way through the post. There was little in it, sim-ply a request that she would meet him that evening at the corner of Boreham Wood, as he had something of supreme importance to say to her. He did not hint that it was good-bye.

She was happier all day tor that letter, and looked it At milking-time a sudden womanly desire to confide in her aunt overtook her, and as they passed into the dairy she gave it voice.

"I heard from Peter this morning, auntie. I'm going out to see him to-night. I expect that it'll be to say good-bye. I've been feeling all the week that he's going away, quite far away, likely to Canada."

Mrs. Garrett set down her pail, and wiped her hands on the corner of her apron, at the same time looking with real kindliness into the girl's face. "Do you mind much, Peggy? Are you set on Peter Clodd?"

"Yes, I like him, auntie, but it's all going to come right. I don't know how, only I know God's like that. He lets us poor women know things sometimes when He thinks they've had enough."

The mystery and the strange presumption of this speech, albeit it was so quietly delivered, laid an odd hush on Mary Garrett's spirit, and on her tongue. She simply turned away without speaking a word. Peggy had led such an isolated life, communing so much with Nature, that she had got very near to the heart of things. Sometimes even Mary herself, a religious woman according to her lights, felt that her niece was familiar with a world she knew nothing of. She took care that nothing hindered Peggy's outgoing that evening, and that nobody questioned her.

PETER was waiting at the trysting place, and Peggy noted, woman-like, that he had a new overcoat on, quite long, reaching to his knees, and that he looked very handsome and fit.

"My own girl, it seems ages and ages since I had you here!" he cried as he took her in his arms.

"It is a long time," admitted Peggy, though she refrained from adding that it was entirely his own fault.

"I've felt so beastly about all this ghastly business, Peggy, and having everybody jeering at me. I simply couldn't bear to come near the place. Of course, you knew I didn't find anything."

"I never expected you would, Peter, nor anybody else," she answered quietly.

He laughed a trifle bitterly. "But I did find something after all," he said, with a curious note in his voice. "Lemuel Pearse must have been a bit of a humorist in his way. He liked the idea of getting the better of the fools that might come after. Grandfer Bowen was right, after all. The treasure was actually hidden in the walls under the mound. Here it is. I've brought it for you to keep safe for me, and to bring with you, when you come out to me in Canada next year."

He stepped back to the hedge, and took a box from under it— a tin box, rusty and battered, but otherwise in good preservation.

He lit a small lantern he had brought with him, and, lifting the lid, took out a book, a small square book, with leather covers and brass clasps, quite intact, only smelling a little mouldy after its years in the bowels of the earth.

"Why, whatever is it, Peter?" asked Peggy excitedly. "It looks like a Bible."

"Exactly what it is, my girl," replied Peter a trifle grimly. Then, dropping the tin box, he opened the book at the fly leaf, and drew out a small slip of paper, yellow with age, on which some words were written In a crabbed, almost illegible hand. Peggy, peering over his arm, managed to make it out.

See Matthew, Chap, sixth, verses 19 and 20

"I know them," said Peggy when Peter, with the same somewhat sardonic grin on his face, would have turned over the pages.

"Lay not up for yourself treasures upon earth, where moth and rust doth corrupt, and where thieves break through and steal."

"A bit of a humorist old Lemuel must have been," reiterated Peter as he closed the book and would have thrown it on the ground, only Peggy caught it and clasped it rather tenderly in her hands.

"But don't let us talk any more about Lemuel and his accursed money, and don't you tell anybody what I've found. I've come to say good-bye, Peggy. I wonder did you guess?"

"Yes, of course," the girl answered very quietly. "You're going to Canada. I've known it all day. I woke up in the morning knowing it. When do you sail?"

"On Saturday; but I'm leaving Seaminster tomorrow."

THERE were tears in his young eyes, and they did no dishonour to his manhood. Peggy kept hers bark; there would be plenty of time to shed them when the loneliness of the one who is left behind was hers. Meanwhile she must play the woman's part,  to cheer, to comfort, to uplift.  And. she did it with such tenderness, such power, that poor Peter Dodd, a very ordinary young man, a little weak in parts, felt himself capable of any achievement.

"I want the tin box, too, Peter," she said, smiling at last when they turned to go, "this book will be a comfort to me. I'll read in it every day, because I want you to read in mine. I brought it with me, Peter. It's only a poor, cheap little Bible, but it's got my name and all my marks in it."

Peter took it reverently, put it to his lips, and laid It in his breast pocket, where it would be, he told himself and, her, until they met again.

Mary Garrett, lying awake by her snoring husband's side, heard the girl enter softly and slip up to her room, and a little later she thought she heard her sobbing. But she did not disturb her even with an offer of sympathy,  realising that it was better for her to be alone.

IT was an exquisite evening in the early Summer when Peggy arrived at a little wayside station in the middle of the great prairie which was now to be her home. She was not alone, for Peter had met her at the port of landing, and they were now husband and wife.

"How big it is, Peter!" she said with a little wistful flutter of the lids as they drove across the level stretches, green with wheat, and variegated with the-bloom of the early prairie flowers. "Don't you feel sometimes as if you were lost, or rather as if you were very near to heaven?"

"It's a grand country, Peggy. I hope you won't be disappointed in our little shack. It's very small, not any bigger than the dairy at Garrett's Mill. But some day, when we get on a bit, I'll build you a bigger and a better house; but I want to buy the land first. I owe £200 on it yet, and the mortgage is heavy. When we've paid that off we'll begin to live."

She smiled a little tremulously, and slipped her hand in his under the linen cover of the buggy, and so they rode on into the land of hope and promise, as happy as two children. It was a very small house, and very crude and bare, hut it was her very own. Here love could work all his miracles, and the woman's heart be wholly at rest.

In the late evening. after the sun had gone down, as they sat on the little platform which Peter laughingly alluded to as the verandah, Peggy suddenly got up and went into the house. When she came out she had in her hand a small bag she had used on the train, and which contained her few personal belongings. From it she took out the old brass-bound book which Lemuel Pearse so long ago had buried among the ruins of the Slat.

She turned over the pages lovingly, with a curious look on her sweet face.

"Listen, Peter," it's such a wonderful story. I began to read it every day after you left, and one day, inside its pages I came on something thin and fine like a piece of parchment. When I looked at it I was afraid, because it was a Bank of England note for £100. I found other five like that, all good and clean and crisp. I hid them away for quite a long time, afraid to say a word to anybody, for if Uncle Joe had known about them he would have taken them away from me, I am sure. After a while I went to see Mr. Woodburn, the lawyer, in Seaminster, and I told him everything from the very beginning— all about you paying £60 to Uncle Joe for the right to dig up the Slat, and asked  him what I should do, whom the money really belonged to, and what was the law and the right of it. He was so kind and helpful, he told me exactly what to do. He said the money was absolutely yours, and that nobody, could interfere with it or take a penny from you. And he advised me to keep it safe— indeed, he kept it for me until you should send for me, then I could take it out to you, and here it is! So now you'll be able to buy the farm, and build a little bit on to the house."

THE moon rose up, and the stars peeped out, and grew brighter in the wonderful crystalline sky. Not a sound broke the stillness but the far cry of the coyote, for it was a land of songless birds.

"It's wonderful, Peggy," said Peter Clodd at last, and his young, eager voice shook. "But it's all yours. Peggy, every penny of it. But for you I should have thrown that old book into the Minster. It was what I wanted to do, I was so mad that night when I found it. So you've given me every thing, my dear, from yourself downwards; and you are the most wonderful and the most precious gift pt all. Keep the money. Do what you like with it. I don't care for anything now I've got you."

The tears in Peggy's eyes were tears of joy, because now she knew beyond all doubt that her young husband's heart was purged of the greed of gold, and that she held it in the hollow of her hand.

_________________

22: Dead Men's Shoes

Annie S. Swan

Australian Town and Country Journal (Sydney), 4 Feb 1914

THE HON. SHAFTO HUME was making the grand tour of the American continent. It was his ambition to enter Parliament when a suitable seat should present itself, and it was now his laudable desire to acquire as much first-hand information as possible, in order that he might, make a brave show when the time came. Careful consideration and observation had convinced him that Colonial affairs offered more scope for a young man than any other, and to obtain a comprehensive grasp of Canadian politics, needs, and prospects was the chief goal of his hopes and of his Journey.

After having been feted, and flattered in no small degree in the States (he, had come armed with first rate introductions); after he had seen the rich Americans at play at Newport and Long Island, and in the Catskills and White Mountains, being surprised everywhere by the luxury and completeness of their civilisation, he crossed into Canada.

The main object of this part of his trip was to find out whether he could  prevent the total annexation of Scotland by her insatiable Sister across the Atlantic, and especially the depletion of the villages or the South Country, in which he was personally and deeply interested.

There was nothing outstanding about Shafto Hume except his looks, which were certainly fine. Otherwise he was just an ordinary young man, who up to the present moment had been pursuing a very ordinary career as land-agent to one of the richer and more important branches of his family.

Suddenly an uncle died, a crusty old Edinburgh law lord, whose life had been full of storm and stress, and to Shafto's astonishment he found himself Laird of Woodhouse and the happy possessor of twenty thousand pounds in hard cash, as well as certain invested moneys which would considerably add to his income.

He was naturally much pleased, because he had a healthy young man's love for the good things of this life, and knew very well that he was not likely to achieve much by his own unaided efforts.

Shafto, when he set out on his American journey, was undoubtedly suffering in some degree from what is popularly known as swelled head, and the vigorous feting to which he had been subjected in the States had not improved him in that respect. He began to consider himself a very fine fellow indeed, to put on airs, and to dictate on things in general to everybody who would listen to him.

He was a rich and good-looking young man, belonging to one of the oldest of South Country families, and he was also engaged to be married to a very charming girl with whom he had been in love for a good few years. But he did not flaunt the fact of his engagement in the States. Perhaps it was unnecessary, and an unattached young man undoubtedly gets more attention.

He had been accepted by Marjorie Scott only under certain hard conditions. He was to enter Parliament before she would marry him, and, finally, when he got there give his support to the Women's Cause.

Shafto disapproved wholly of votes for women, but a man in love will promise anything. He cherished the old-fashioned idea that once Marjorie was safely his wife, and wholly under his influence, she would quickly settle down, as all her female ancestors had done, and attend to the duties of her family. This shows that he was quite an ordinary young man, and not acutely observant of the signs of the times.

Marjorie Scott did not love him. She was a disappointed and heart-sick woman, out of whose life the goodness had gone; and she was merely making shift with Shafto Hume, while her thoughts and interests were engaged elsewhere. She was trying to fill up the empty spaces of her being with what, she called The Cause. This was hard on Shafto, perhaps, but she had not hidden from him the state of her affections. All he had said, was with the full assurance of his age and kind, "Only give me the chance, Marjorie, and I'll teach you to forget."

Shafto was much pleased with his journey so far. He wrote sheaves of. description to Marjorie, chiefly to beguile the tedium of the long days in the train. And he suggested that they should take two months for their honeymoon, and go over all the ground again, so that her mind might also be enlarged, as his was being enlarged every day.

Travelling at moderate speed across the vast continent he began to understand the spell Canada could and does weave over those who give her a chance. Such vastness, such suggestion of possibility and power, such prospect, were almost overwhelming to the imagination.

As he made his way from shore to shore, breaking his journey at many convenient stopping places, he met many men of his own class who had apparently solved the problem of the younger son's future. He found them everywhere, on cattle ranches. On wheat farms, on railroads, earning a hard living most of them, but he did not encounter one solitary, unit who given the choice would go back to the old civilisation. The spell of the northland held them and would never let them go.

This astonished him more than anything . He felt that if Canada had done anything but solve the problem of the younger son, she had won her place among the nations, and her title to the gratitude and recognition of the older civilisations.

He was saying something of this kind in his slightly dictatorial manner to Douglas Harden, a Border cousin of his own; he had found on one of the show places of the North-West Provinces, a magnificent cattle ranch on the far side of Sweetwater Lake, near the foothills of the Rockies, and within easy distance of the mining region.

Douglas Harden, a handsome bearded man about thirty-five, regarded his young kinsman with a kind of equable indulgence.

"What you're saying's true up to a point, of course, Shafto, but don't make the mistake of thinking you've seen Canada in the few calls you've been making on the route. There's the underworld, lad. It's a big one; by God, it's a big one, and no mistake."

"Where is, it?" asked Shafto, innocently, and rather incredulously. "I. haven't come across a sign of it since I crossed Niagara River. New York had something handsome in that way to show me, of course, but it seems to me that Canada simply spells success with a big S from coast to coast."

"Oh, she's booming as a country all right, and she's going to survive; her. would-be friends if she's given a chance," said Harden, as he dexterously hammered the plug into his old pipe. "But the underworld's there, Shafto. Canada's got her acreage of failure, her toll of derelicts, and as she gets settled up they're hardly likely to decrease."

"I want to know where they're to be seen," said Shafto, rather testily.

Harden smiled, his big slow smile.

"When we get an Honorable out west we cover up our ugly bits. The derelicts! Why, they're everywhere; lounging at every township bar, working on the land, rounding up cattle on every ranch, slaving in the mining camps, lost in the drift of the cities. Say, Shafto, was anything ever heard of Pat Dinwoodie after that bust-up with his father?"

Shafto started uncomfortably, for the name suggested a train of unpleasant thought. Patrick Dinwoodie was his own cousin; it was his patrimony he was enjoying now! he was even engaged to the girl whom Pat in his wild, handsome, dare-devil days had loved. What could Harden mean by mentioning his name at such a juncture? It was, to say the least of it, awkward and wholly uncalled for.

"He's dead, of course," he answered shortly. "It isn't usual to get any further news of a chap after the last call, is it?"

"But is he dead, Shafto? I have my doubts. A lot of them are supposed to be dead out here, but are very much alive. One day up at Nelson I thought I saw him. In fact, if I was put on my oath I would say I did see him."

Shafto's cheek paled under the healthy bronze of his fine clean skin.

"Oh, come, Douglas! It must have been sheer imagination. I believe my uncle had proof positive, I heard my father and mother talking about it. If he hadn't would he, could he have left everything to me?"

Harden shook his head.

"I suppose not! and yet you know what old Dinwoodie was; I think Stevenson must have known him before he wrote Weir of Hermiston. He might have sat for his portrait. Tell me about the girl, there was a girl, wasn't there? I seem to remember something, and Pat, of course, was a lovable chap, and most of the things that were said of him were lies."

"You've got the knack of stirring up muddy waters, Douglas. I suppose you can't help it," said Shafto, a trifle sullenly. "I happen to be engaged to the girl, if you mean Marjorie Scott."

"So you've annexed everything the poor devil had! I beg your pardon, Shafto, I ought not to have said that, but I've seen queer things out here, and tragedies sufficient to keep you awake at night. Of course Pat must be dead. I daresay Lord Dinwoodie had private information. He didn't make many mistakes on the bench, but he did make one big one in private life, and that was with Pat. Let's drop the subject, I had no idea you were engaged, Shafto, or I would have kept off the grass. That's the worst of being stranded at the hack of beyond, and the home letters are seldom up to date. I got one this evening. I haven't opened it yet. Well, what shall we do to-morrow?"

"I don't know what we can do to-morrow, I'm sure. I'm your guest and you know your own resources best," he answered, and his tone indicated that he had been touched on the raw.

Harden was not seriously upset, or even sorry. Perhaps ten years batching on the north-west plains takes the finer edge off the feelings, but it does' not materially alter the nature of the man.

"I'm sorry, all my boys are on the round-up, they can't get in before next week thirteen of 'em, three younger sons among them, Shafto, two stockbrokers, one doctor, two soldiers, and an old parson for the cook, pretty fair sample of levelling Canada, eh?"

"What's a round-up?" asked Shafto, his interest awakening again, and his thirst for information thrusting his injured feelings into the background.

Harden proceeded to explain that at certain seasons of the year all the cowboys went out together to cover the entire area of the ranch, and count and brand the stock, and the operation took six weeks.

"It'll be rather slow here for a bit, so I think that if to-morrow's fine we'll ride to Blue Thunder camp. It's about twenty miles, and I can give you a mount of my own breeding that will seat you like an easy chair. Come out and see."

Shafto was a keen rider, and presently in Harden's stables forgot the discomfort of the last ten minutes.

In the pearly dawn the next day the two men rode out together, and Shafto fell under the wondrous spell of the early morning in latitudes which yet seem fresh from the hand of God. It laid a hush upon his somewhat frivolous spirit, and his garrulous tongue was astonishingly quiet.

Harden smiled as his eyes swept the far horizon. He had seen such a miracle wrought in the soul of a man before now. He had weighed the youngster up with astonishing accuracy, and was surprised that in ten years he. should have mentally grown so little. Once more he wondered that the gods should favor such as he so mightily— while others—

But here he, sighed, and after one moment, of revolt pointed out to his cousin the ugly scar in the hill to which they were hastening, and which indicated the location of "Blue Thunder Camp.

"If you've, seen one " mining village, you've seen all. Do you remember  them in the Lead Hills at home? Only we have wooden shanties here instead of brick or stone."

"It looks like Portland, Dougie," said Shafto, unearthing, an old familiar name from the book of memory. "What hive men done, any of them, to be banished to a hell like this?"

"You've asked the question, but there's no answer, Shafto. While I'm jawing to the manager, you can prospect for yourself, see what you can make of the derelicts. He's a Welshman by the by, right out from the Rhondda Valley, and mighty clever at his job."

It was the dinner hour when they rode into the camp, and they were eyed with considerable interest by the groups of men hanging about the doors of  the shanties . They made straight for the offices, where was situated also the manager's house, little more than a glorified shanty. Knowing Harden well, he bade them kindly welcome, and offered them a meal, if they could wait ten minutes or so for its preparation.

Shafto, now really athirst for information of a sensational kind, availed himself at this juncture of Harden's suggestion to take a walk by himself, and when he had left them, Harden laughed as he took out his pipe.

"He's a tenderfoot, Lewis; a very tender one at that." Lewis put a few questions, chiefly for the pleasure of hearing Harden talk. The man who has little to say is generally worth listening to, and on more than one occasion, Harden had managed to make the manager "sit up," as he. expressed it.

They talked on at intervals for about twenty minutes, then the cook-boy came to say the meal was ready, but there was no sign of Shafto coming back.

"We needn't wait. He can't get lost, and I'm hungry, Lewis; let's start without him," said Harden, as he drew in his chair.

The manager nodded, but first went out to the little verandah and swept the slope of the camp with his glass.

"I see him, he's right up at the back jawing to Scottie. I daresay he'll come when he's ready." They began and finished their meal, then Harden suggested that they should go up to Scottie's and find him.

"I can't come at the moment, for I've something to do indoors, but you can't lose yourself. It's the last house, see, that one hiding behind the clump of shumacs. The dinner hour's up, so Scottie will have to shunt him directly."

Harden went out of doors and presently beheld in, the distance, the long, lean figure of the Honorable Shafto. He sauntered out to meet him, and when he came near enough saw that there was some change in his face. The light and airy look of expectation had left it, he looked haggard, old, and drawn.

When he saw Harden he broke into a little run, and when he came up to him gripped him by the arm.

"My God, Dougie; do you know who I've found, up there? Pat! I've left him there now."

"Pat Dinwoodie?" repeated Harden, immeasurably surprised.

"Pat Dinwoodie; come and see him, or go up and see him, I've— I've had about enough."'

"Go back to the house, and get something to eat. I'll go' up' and verify what you say, though I can't believe it. Did he recognise, you or you him?"

"It was a sort of mutual business. Do you remember the drop of his left eye that used to look, like an unholy kind of a wink? He's got it yet, and when he laughed there wasn't any, mistake. He's there, Dougie, and he ought to be dead. Why isn't he dead?"

His voice broke into a kind of wail, and Harden gripped him by the arm, and half shook him.

"Be a man, Shafto, if you can!  We've got to see this thing out. This may be the best day's work you've ever done. Go back to the house, and stop there till 'I come to you."

He almost flung the slim figure from him; and strode on towards the furthest shanty, where he beheld, a solitary figure moving about the door. Afraid lest he should escape to the mine before, he reached, he quickened his steps, and just managed to meet him on the slope.

"You're Pat Dinwoodie," he said quietly, as they came within hearing, and recognition. "I'm Douglas Harden. You've seen Shafto. Now, what's to be done?"

"Done? Nothing;" answered the other dully. "He seems to be in a moral funk. You can go back and tell him he needn't tremble in his shoes. They're dead men's, but I'm not come to life for the purpose of hauling them off his feet."

He spoke with a kind of grim humor, and Harden looking, at him and knowing the way of the wilderness, understood that it had worked its will with him.

"What has he told you?"

Then Pat Dinwoodie laughed and it a horrid sound.

"Told me? He was in such a horrible funk that he simply coughed up everything. He's got my money, my place, my— my woman; but I don't want 'em, Go, back and pat the poor beggar on the back, and tell him I'd run home like a good woolly lamb, and not stray so far from the ewe-bucht another time."

The scorn in his voice was terrible.

Harden gripped him by the arm hard and fast.

"Time's up," said Pat grimly.  "I've got to get back to work."

"You don't do a stroke of work till I'm done with you. Heavens, if only I'd known you were here! How long have you been in this camp?"

"Ten months. I was getting sick of it, though, and will pull up stakes now without delay."

"That I could believe," said Harden quietly."I'm only twenty miles away, Pat."

"I knew it, but I didn't come because, well— hang it, what's the good? You  are a live man, Dougie, you've no use for a dead un."

"There's nothing dead about you. Come up to the bench, and let's thresh it out. It's got to be threshed out. There isn't only you, to be considered, as it happens. We're only puppets in this game. It's the game that matters."

Harden had a quietly dominating way with him, and after a momentary wavering Pat Dinwoodie obeyed.

"Whatever brought that cub out here?" he asked, as he leaned against the rough lintel of the shanty, his deep eyes full of strange fire. "There isn't room, out here for his kind. What's he after anyway?"

"Mush for his future constituents," answered Harden irreverently, "and he's as full of his job as an egg's full of meat."

"Let him go back to it then, and leave me alone," sat Pat quietly. "I won't see him again, Dougie, I— I can't . You'll keep him away, won't you, get clear of the camp before I'm quit for the day. If you don't, well, I must simply scoot myself."

"But I don't know that you have the right, now, Pat. Your father left the place and the money to Shafto, because he believed you to be dead. He never would have had them otherwise; you must know that."

"I don't know anything. I'm done with the whole thing, and well you know it. I'm lost, I tell you, dead, anything, only done with all that."

Harden pondered a moment. He had something up his sleeve yet, but he did not know, whether the moment had come. "He's going to marry 'Marjorie Scott, Pat. He'll go home and do it if he isn't prevented."

"In God's name, why should he be prevented? If they want to marry one another, let 'em. I'm the last man to spoil the pretty game."

Harden was silent another full minute, then he drew something from his pocket.

"That's a letter I had from my sister, Louie. You remember Louie, Pat?  She was just ages with Marjorie, and I'm going to read a bit out of it for your benefit."

Pat neither assented nor refused to listens He stood still sharing in front of him; as if he neither heard nor saw. Harden turned over the page, and began to read in a quiet, steady, monotonous voice— '

You'll be sure to have a visit from Shafto Hume, Dougie, because he came all the way over here two weeks ago to get your address, and full particulars of how to get to your place. I can't say I liked him very much, and the mystery of his engagement to Marjorie is more inscrutable, than ever. But I've, more to tell you.

I kept thinking about them both so much, that I went over to Oakenshaw's to spend a day with Marjorie. Oh, Dougie, she's most frightfully changed, you would hardly know her. I led her on to speak about Shafto, and though she's promised to marry him; she doesn't care a tiny little bit for him. She's grown into such a hard woman, talking of nothing but woman's rights, and the vote, and all that sort of stuff. And I'm nearly sure that her sole idea in promising to marry Shafto is that it offers an escape from Oakenshaw and all its memories. She talked about poor Shafto as if he were a mere peg for things to hang upon, and I felt sorry for him, though I was rather disgusted with his conceit the day he was here. I had such a nice day with Marjorie, and when it was nearly over and we went, upstairs to get ready to drive home, all of a sudden she looked at me, and went quite white! Why, do you think? Just because I happened to take up a photograph of Pat Dinwoodie which stands on her mantelpiece all by itself!

'You ought to put this away, Margie,' I said. 'It isn't fair to Shafto.'

With that she flared up, and you never saw how pretty she looked with her eyes all ablaze.

'I'll never put it away, and very well does Shafto Hume know that I'll never care for anybody in the world but Pat, and that if I knew where he was, in this world or the next, I'd walk to him barefoot.'

She actually said that, Dougie, and what I want to know is whether you think a girl should marry one man when she feels like that about another.

Harden folded the sheet, but abstained from looking at his kinsman for a full minute.

"In the face of that," he said at length, "what are you going to do?"

Dinwoodie stretched himself, and his eyes wandered to the sky, while on his face was the look of a man who sees, somewhere, the Heavens open.

"I just want ten minutes' start. You'll give it to me, Dougie. Then let the poor beggar down as gently as you can."

"It won't hurt him," said Harden, with his slow, rather hard smile. "Shafto wants something to make a man of him. This'll do."

______________

23: The Little Walking Corpses

Arthur Leo Zagat

1895-1949

Dime Mystery Magazine Nov 1937

1. Fear Comes to Staneville

FEAR was a living presence in the streets of Staneville. It was visible in the pallor that underlay the weather-beaten countenances of the small town's inhabitants, in the furtive glances with which their eyes, bloodshot by sleeplessness, searched every chance-met face with suspicion and challenge.

Worst of all, it was manifest in the flare of their nostrils as eternally they tested for an alien taint a breeze otherwise fragrant with the crisp autumn tang of the forest that coated Buzzard Mountain.

The odor of death was what they sought and found; the stench of a corpse from whose bones the flesh sloughed, moldering.

On Thursday the smell was faint as the smoke-haze from some brush fire the wardens fought where the Range dipped below the northern horizon. Between Monday and Tuesday last, it had been a fetid reek flooding a moonless midnight in which the shrill of the cicadas was stilled, and the countless small noises that make up the country's nocturnal hush were utterly absent.

No one in Staneville had not been waked by that sudden cessation of all sound. None there was who had not lain for interminable minutes stifled as by a noisome, intangible palm folded over nose and mouth while the darkness, pressing against the houses, throbbed with the beat of vast, unseeable wings.

Rousing to a breathless, sultry dawn, none at first knew his nocturnal experience to be other than a peculiarly vivid nightmare. Then the shadow of a charnal stench drifted into opened windows of the houses on the Slope, into the drab shanties of Frog Hollow, and faces turned questioningly to one another.

In dark pupils the knowledge grew that what had passed in the night had not been a dream, but before paling lips could form the words trembling upon them a scream shrilled through the hamlet.

Knifelike where the woods stretch the tentacles of their underbrush toward the last white dwellings of the well-to-do; distance-dulled yet still startling in the lowly slum west of Main Street; it pulled all Staneville into the open, and streams of half-dressed humanity frothed up the steep eastward ascent to Oxford Lane.

Pouring into the Lane they saw the woman on the trim lawn before her cottage, her countenance contorted, her dark hair a tumbled storm on nude shoulders, her arms outflung and imploring.

Sun-blaze striking through a gossamer nightgown stripped her taut body of all concealment, its broad hips and full-formed breasts, its rounded, sturdy thighs; but no one saw her as a naked woman, only as a frantic and terrified mother. For now that they were near, the scream formed into an intelligible shrill call.

"Dickie! Where are you Dickie? Dick!"

"It's Jane Horn," the word passed back to those who could not yet see nor hear. "She's screaming for her little Dickie."

Icy fingers closed on every heart at the mention of misfortune to the freckle-faced, tow-headed ten-year-old, whose cheery whistle and twinkling eyes everyone in the village knew.

Cole Simpson was already at the gate, his gaunt fingers on its latch, having beaten them there because his was the next house to the Horn's. He twisted to the fore-runners and flung at them a barked command.

"Stay back! I'll take care of this."

He went through onto the lawn, his slippers flapping on the dew-wet grass, his tall, spare figure clothed only in trousers and long-sleeved undershirt, his iron-grey hair unkempt. Behind him the first of the crowd stopped short, thrusting back against others who halted in turn. A hush spread swiftly among them and although the woman's cries had died to a sobbing whimper it was distinctly heard by even the farthest removed.

Distinctly heard too was Simpson's voice, strangely gentle, not dry and harsh as was its wont. "What is it, Jane?" The woman's head turned to him but there was no recognition in her eyes.

"Jane!" Simpson snapped sharply, grasping her elbow. "What's the matter?"

"Dick," the name ripped from her. "Gone!" With that she seemed to break up, the tenseness leaving her, her legs folding so that save for the dart of the man's arm about her waist, she would have crumpled to the ground.

"Listen," he said, his narrow, hallow-cheeked face more like grey granite than ever, "listen to me. You must hold yourself together. You must tell us exactly what has happened so that we can help you, so that we can find Dick for you. Tell us what you know."

Somewhere in the crowd a voice whispered, "That smell! It's stronger here..."

"Know?" Jane Horn was saying, looking at Simpson now, seeing him. "All I know is that I went to his room to wake him up and he wasn't there. Not there— nor anywhere."

"Maybe he sneaked out to go swimming before school, or for some other kid's nonsense."

"In his nightshirt? Barefoot? His shoes are there, all his clothes. And he wouldn't do that without telling me. Not my Dickie. Not while his father is away."

"Even your Dick might. He's a boy, after all, and thoughtless. Go into the house, my dear, and get something on. Meanwhile I'll look around. There will be footprints. The ground is soft and I've kept the people from trampling your lawn. Don't worry, we'll find him."

"Footprints! That's it. Look for them. We'll look for footprints under his window." The mother pulled free from Simpson, darted toward the side of the house, her uncovered feet splashing the dew.

There were no footprints in the loam where she bent, peering at the ground. There were no footprints anywhere on the lawn. There was nothing to tell where Dick had gone, or what had happened to him.

By the time this had been ascertained the police arrived: the trio of peace officers that was all Staneville could boast. Balloon-paunched, dull eyes fat-drowned, Chief John Mault wheezingly posted his two lank constables to bar out the buzzing throng by a show of authority less effective than Cole Simpson's simple command, and waddled through the gate to join Cole in his search.

While pendulous jowls concealed Mault's collarless state, no amount of fussy self-importance could hide his fat-brained futility, yet it was he who discovered the only trace of the vanished lad. It was a book, Ken Thomas: Junior G-Man, that he picked up out of the rank weeds where the Horn property ended at the rear of the house and the ground lifted sharply to the forest edge.

He turned it over in his pudgy hands, an abrupt stillness cloaking him. Staring at it over his shoulder, Jane Horn vented a tiny scream.

"It's Dick's!" she exclaimed. "Lou sent it to him from Buffalo. It came last night and Dick took it to bed with him. He fell asleep holding it so tightly I couldn't take it away. Give it to me."

She reached for it. Mault evaded her grasp. "No," he sighed. "No, I've... I've got to keep it." The pink of his plump cheeks had faded to a sickly green.

"What is it?" Simpson demanded, coming up. "Fingerprints?"

"No," the police officer replied, his voice low and toneless as though it were being squeezed out of a clamped larynx. "They'd be washed away by the dew. But... but..." His one hand jerked away from the book. There was a dark brown smear on it, of some viscid, sticky gum. The hand lifted to Simpson's nose.

"Smell," Mault husked.

There was no need to bring that stain so close to the man's nostrils. The stuff that Mault's hand had rubbed from Dickie's book had the unmistakable stench of rotting flesh!

Jane Horn smelled it and her mother's instinct, swifter than any man's thoughts, seized its meaning. "The Thing took him," she shrieked. "The Thing in the night." Then she was a crumpled and pitiful heap in the grass.

They heard that scream, the people buzzing in the road, and blanched, recalling the black quarter-hour they had forgotten, recalling how close the beat of vast, unseen wings had throbbed to the walls behind which their own children were.

That was when the Fear was born in Staneville, the Fear Staneville had not for one moment forgotten because never for one moment of the dreadful days or the sleepless nights since had the air been untainted by the smell of the unknown Thing in the night.

2: Death in the Graveyard

ROSALIE CARTER fought to drive the brooding fear from her classroom, piling on her nineteen charges more work than their little minds and their little hands could cope with. Smiling with her lips, though in her brown eyes there was no smile, she drove them, cruelly kind, while all the time she was poignantly conscious of the empty seat at the back of the room, of the armed men guarding the schoolhouse on Oak Street.

Last Tuesday there had been no school. The mothers had kept their children behind locked doors and barred windows while the fathers, and the young men of the village, had combed every cellar, every yard, and had quartered Buzzard Mountain and the tilled lowland west of Staneville, with no result.

Ostensibly it had been Chief Mault who directed the search, but it was Cole Simpson who had taken a map of the township, penciled numbered squares upon it and assigned each small plot to a group of three. It was Simpson who, drawn, haggard, had checked the last number against a fruitless report just as Wednesday's dawn was greying the sky.

"Nothing," he had said, tonelessly. "No trace of Dick. No trace of whoever took him. No trace, even, of the dead thing we keep smelling."

That had been in this very building. Because Simpson was principal of the Consolidated School it had been used as headquarters for the searchers. Rosalie, brewing coffee through the night for the hunters, had watched the hope drain slowly out of them and the fear grow steadily in their tired eyes. She had heard what Simpson had said at the last, had seen him throw his hands wide in token of despair.

She had come to his support when he had insisted it would be better for the children of Staneville if they resumed their normal routine rather than remain shut in with terror. Despite the alarm of the parents, there was no real evidence that the menace of the Thing was directed against them or, except for the brooding, ominous odor, that it would return at all. At all events the youngsters would be safer carried to and from their homes in convoyed buses, more easily guarded when assembled in a group.

Thus they had argued; but it was not reason, it was the force of Cole Simpson's personality, the respect for him almost amounting to awe that the parents had not lost since they had been tiny tads under his tutelage, that had prevailed.

These recollections ran through Rosalie Carter's mind while a pigtailed miss swayed from one scuffed shoe to another, dumbly twisting the hem of a flowered dress too short for her.

"Come, come, Joan," the teacher's clear, young voice chided. "You ought to know all about how the wasps lay their eggs. This is only Thursday and we heard such a grand report about them on Monday. Who was it brought in that nice composition...?" She gulped, went spinning to the window to hide the appalled dismay in her face! That had been Dick Horn's last recitation to her, his last recitation anywhere!

Her figure was slight against the bright window, graceful, with the lilting rhythm of youth and the out-of-doors. One tanned arm was visible, its firm roundness hardening as its fingers dug into the sill. A straight back shadowed under crisp, white organdie shook with a repressed sob.

"I know, teacher, I remember," an eager pipe brought Rosalie around again. "Let me tell." A spectacled youngster, half out of his seat waved an excited hand.

"All right, Charles." The girl, her winsome small countenance hardly more mature than those of the tots she taught, was for once grateful for the impetuousness of the class pest. "Go ahead."

Joan Hardie dropped into her seat as the lad stumbled into the aisle. "The wasp is the bandit of the insect world," he began in a singsong monotone whose intelligibility was somewhat impaired by the absence of two front teeth. "It stings other insects but it doesn't kill them. It makes them... in... insen..."

"Insensible, Charles," Rosalie supplied. "That means puts them to sleep so that they don't move and seem dead, though they are really alive. The word's insensible."

"Yes'm. Insensible. Then the wasp drags them to its burrow where it lays an egg on them. Then it closes up the burrow so that its enemies can't find it and..."

The boy's mouth was still open but speech was no longer coming from it. His eyes were enormously magnified behind their lenses, bulging and abruptly black. The class was a mass of pallid, staring faces, wavering queerly— and the stench of a rotting cadaver was as thick as an unfelt fluid in the blurring room!

Rosalie's dry throat gave a soundless rasp. A greyness obscured her sight, deepened swiftly into black...

Rosalie was on the floor, awkwardly jammed between iron legs of a desk and a ventilator grating in the wall. The smell had faded almost to its former vagueness. Above her there was the sound of startled movement and the beginning of scared whimperings. She shoved a desperate hand against wood gritty with chalk dust, twisted, somehow managed to regain her feet.

"It's all right, children," she called out. "There's nothing to be frightened of."

She was sick with nausea, her vision scarcely clear yet, within her brain the beat, beat of vast and dreadful wings, but she must reassure them, must ward off from them the panic that was throttling her. "Everything's all right."

The class swam out of the blur, the youngsters straightening from the desks over which they had slumped. Charley Collins was scrambling erect. Nothing was changed, nothing at all.

Get them back into routine! She must get them back.

"Go on, Charles. What happens after the wasp closes up its burrow?"

The boy wasn't looking at her. Then he was, and he was trying to tell her something but his twitching lips made no words. He pointed a grimy forefinger... at a vacant place.

It wasn't the seat Dick Horn used to occupy. It was in the front, near the door. It was where Joan Hardie ought to be, but she wasn't there. She wasn't anywhere in the room.

At Staneville's northeast corner, Oxford Lane curves west and becomes Oak Street. Along the outer edge of this curve is a low wall of lichen-covered stone blocks, and from this a graveyard runs back, gently rising till it ends against a vertical crag outthrust from the forested steep of Buzzard Mountain.

With uncommon foresight the earliest burials were made at the base of this dark and forbidding cliff, and the village of the dead grew outward toward what was in its beginning merely a road climbing to the spring, high in the mountain, whose icy flow was at that time sufficient for the infant hamlet's needs. As a result, the portion of the cemetery bordering the Lane is an expanse of velvet greensward upon which row after row of carefully tended tombstones give a decorative dignity to the graves.

Far back, however, in the shadow of the terminal precipice, neglect has allowed Time and Nature to run their course. Vines, torn by winter storms from the rocky facade, tangle with lush weeds and rank brush to form a gloomy thicket. Here oblong depressions grow slowly deeper as the dank loam settles into hollows once filled by caskets now inextricably mingled with their ancient occupants. Here green-slimed stone slabs, gnawed by decay, lean crazily askew, their inscriptions moss-filled and illegible.

Into this miniature jungle, the Thursday of that dreadful week, Jethro Anther forced his grumbling way. Brambles tore at the dirt-stained, tough fabric of his overalls. He protected his face from the lash of resentful withes with a pair of hedge-clipping shears gripped tightly in one gnarled hand, and dragged a long-handled spade after him with the other.

"Fool idea," Anther mumbled with toothless gums, "Fixin' up a grave nobody's thought of long as I been diggin' 'em here, an' that's more'n thirty year."

Completely bald, his skin leathery, hatched by fine lines and the color of sunbaked clay, there was a more than fancied resemblance between the gravedigger and his clients. Of all Staneville's inhabitants he was the least affected by what was going on. The smell of death was the odor of his livelihood. He was too old for curiosity, too old for fear.

"But mebbe I ought ter be glad Cal Thomas seed his great-gran'ther's name on thet stone, pokin' around in here Tuesday," he continued, "an' give orders ter have it made decent." He gave vent to a cackling laugh. The thicket seemed to absorb the sound, and Anther came through into a clearing, although the shadow of foliage and of the mountain was no less deep.

He halted at the edge of one of the rectangular depressions. Its stone lay on the ground at its head, fallen backward. Moss was freshly scraped away to reveal faint letters; B-REB-N-S-HO— S.

"Barebones Thomas," Anther cackled, "Mebbe thet wuz yer name when they put ye in, but there ain't even bones left o' ye now, let alone flesh ter cover 'em. Well, I better be gettin' started manicurin' yer garden."

He dropped the shears on the ground to one side, leaned the spade against his knee while he spat into his calloused palms, then gripped its handle. The heart-shaped blade went easily into the ground.

Jethro Anther lifted an unexpectedly large first shovelful, grunted. "Huh!" he exclaimed. "If I didn't know better I'd say some 'un's been an' dug this up not more'n a week ago. An'... an'," he sniffed. "Say, thet's funny. This dirt still smells..."

He checked abruptly, his wiry body rigid. There was the sound of movement behind him. A rustle of leaves, a slither. Anther started to turn...

A shriek sliced the stillness of the graveyard, a single gibbering shriek... The silence of death's sleep closed down.

3: The Shape in the Dusk

"JOAN has gone out without permission," Rosalie Carter said, surprised at her own calmness. "She knows she should not have done that." She went along the front of the desk rows. She was opening the door, was leaning out.

The long corridor was dim. From behind shut doors came the drone of the other classes. She could hear Mr. Waite's thin voice declaiming with querulous emphasis: "amo, amas, amat"... the muffled laughter of the kindergartners. There was no small, pigtailed figure in the hall. There was no patter of small, scuffed shoes.

Rosalie Carter felt eyes on her back; watching, expectant eyes. If she called out she would alarm the whole school. But she dared not leave her eighteen youngsters alone, dared not send one of them to Mr. Simpson's office upstairs.

She shut the door quietly, turned to meet the eyes that were upon her, eyes in which deepening fear mingled with childish trust.

"I'll have a talk with her when she gets back," she smiled. "A very serious talk. In the meantime get your notebooks and your spellers and copy the list of words on page twenty-seven." She strolled unconcernedly back across the room through an obedient rustle. "Five times... I want you to know them well." She reached the window, stood against it, peering out.

Her hands, in front of her and hidden from the children, gripped the sill tightly and were trembling uncontrollably. In the moment of thought Rosalie had gained for herself she had abruptly realized that time had elapsed between the surge of that odor and her struggle to rise from a floor to which she did not recall falling. She had lost consciousness for a period the length of which there was no way of estimating. The Collins boy too had fallen to the floor. Every child in the room, had known oblivion...

Every child! Joan also. Joan had not left the room. She had been taken from it!

Rosalie's body was hollow within, and the hollow was filled with a quivering jelly of dread.

A footfall thudded through the glass. Jim Tarr was coming past on his patrol, a rifle gripped in strong, capable fingers, his frame big-boned, lithe, the ripple of silky muscles somehow evident beneath the rough tweeds cloaking them. His head turned to her window, as Rosalie knew it would, and a comradely grin illuminated his blunt-jawed, broadly sculptured face.

Her arm lifted in what to any watching from behind would look like her usual wave of greeting. But the fingers of its hand beckoned imperatively, then went to her lips with a signal for discretion.

Jim's grin vanished. He nodded quick understanding, his blue eyes narrowing with concern. He wheeled, broke into a ground-covering lope. Rosalie saw the dark auburn of his hatless head vanish beyond the corner around which was the school's entrance.

Warming with the knowledge that she had secured aid, that it was Jim who was coming to help her, the teacher turned back to her class. For a short space the silence was broken only by the scrape of busy pencils. Then knuckles rapped briefly against the door. Breath hissed almost inaudibly from between the girl's cold lips as she turned the knob and opened it.

"Pardon me, Miss Carter," Jim said, his tone low but pitched just right to reach into the room. "I've just made a bet with one of the boys about how to spell a word and if you've got time we'd like to have you settle the question."

"Glad to, Mr. Tarr," Rosalie smiled, "but we mustn't disturb the class." She slipped through between the edge of the door and its jamb, keeping the portal half-open.

"What's up?" Tarr breathed. "You looked... jittery."

He wasn't alone. Cole Simpson was there beside him, grave, anxious. "Jittery?" Rosalie murmured. "I'm terrified..." and then she was telling them what had occurred, her eyes not on them but watching through the slitted opening the room where there were now two vacant places. "Joan's gone," she finished. "I'm sure she's gone just like Dickie Horn."

There was a throbbing moment in which the men's faces visibly greyed.

"She must be somewhere in the building," Jim husked. "Every side of it, every window and door is being watched by armed men and even a rat couldn't get out without someone seeing it."

"I'll have every inch of the school gone over at once," the principal put in. "Can you keep on with your class?"

Rosalie's lips were icy but there was no lack of courage in her voice. "Of course."

"Then do so. Don't worry. We'll find Joan. We'll find her if we have to take the structure apart brick by brick."

"No," Rosalie Carter said. "No. You will not find her."

Nor did they, though under Simpson's direction not even a fly's resting place was left unsearched. They had to invade the classrooms at the last, had to let the pupils know what was going on, had to question every one of them, every teacher, and send the children home in busses bristling on the outside with weapons and shuddering inside with white-lipped terror. But they did not find Joan Hardie.

Not then.

Jim Tarr had ridden the doorstep of the school bus that made the outer circuit of the town. It was returning now through the early dusk the shadow of Buzzard Mountain brings to Staneville, and he was seated alongside Walt Smeed, its driver, but his forefinger still hovered near the trigger of the rifle in his lap and his anxious look still probed the dimness gathering in Oxford Lane.

"Lou Horn got back this mornin'," Walt remarked nodding at the pale bulk of the house from which the Thing had taken its first victim. "They say he's near crazy with grief."

"I don't wonder," Tarr responded. "It would be a hell of a sight better for him and for Dickie's mother, to know what's happening to the kid than to be like this, imagining almost anything."

"Yeah," Smeed agreed. "Yeah. You're right. Even if he was a layin' in the graveyard here." He slowed for the bend just ahead.

"STOP!" Jim yelled, clawing the door handle. "Stop!" He was out of the bus, was vaulting the cemetery wall. Walt, slammed on his emergency, snatched a forty-five out of a holster hanging from the wheel, lurched to the ground, scrambled over the fence. Thudding feet gave him his direction. He saw Tarr, a spectral apparition dodging among tombstones in the spectral greyness, plunged after him.

Jim slowed, stopped as Smeed came up to him. "What is it?" the latter gasped.

Tarr peered into the colorless murk that was almost more concealing than darkness. Smeed stiffened, fiercely aware of the cadaveral odor, omnipresent for so long but weirdly appropriate here. There was no comfort in the hardness of the revolver butt grinding into his palm, but a strange sense that what menaced Staneville was immune to bullets, to any human weapon.

"What did you take out after?" he demanded again, speech an effort.

"I don't know," Tarr whispered, as though he could be overheard. "I saw— thought I saw— someone moving in here. Or some thing. It didn't seem to be shaped like anything human, no more than those..." he jerked a hand to the huddled, shapeless bulks about them that might be headstones or— beasts— crouched, motionless, waiting for a chance to spring upon them. "I saw it for just an instant and then— it was gone."

"Hell," Smeed grunted, with no assurance. "It wasn't nothing. Come on back to the bus."

Jim stared at the gloomy mass of the thicket against the cliff. "I wonder... I'd like to poke around in there. I've got a hunch..."

"You go in there, buddy, and you go alone. You're nuts anyways. The boys went through that mess with a fine tooth comb last Tuesday and Wednesday and scratches were all they got for their pains. Are you coming?"

"All right," Tarr yielded, still reluctant. "I'm coming."

They went toward where they thought the Lane was. It took so long to reach the wall that Walt began to think they were twisted around, but they hit it after awhile. They climbed over. Smeed slid in under the big steering wheel switched on headlights ceiling lights, released the brake.

"Hey!" Tarr exclaimed, behind. "There's one of the kids still... No. Good God! Walt! Look..."

Smeed turned. Tarr was halfway down the aisle his hand on a boy's shoulder. The boy was toppling forward in the seat, strangely stiff. The boy's lids were open but there were no eyes between them, only balls dully white. There was a spray of freckles across the small, still face and it was the face of Dickie Horn.

A night shirt had slipped half-off Dick's bony little chest and Jim's fingers, keeping him from falling, lay in the corner between shoulder and neck, their bronze darker by contrast with the sickly grey-whiteness of the skin there.

"Dead," Walt said. The one word, a statement, not a question, was all he could manage. Somehow he couldn't move, couldn't get up, but he knew there was something queer about Tarr, about the way he stood, rigid, about the way he stared at the small boy.

"No," Jim Tarr said. "Not dead. Maybe he'd be better off if he was."

4: Discovery

JIM TARR'S mouth was a tight, colorless line but his nostrils were flaring. Walter Smeed got it too, the smell of dead rot in the bus, stronger here than it had been in the graveyard. The odor of fear. He gulped.

"What... what do you mean?"

Jim's head lifted, turned to him, its face a deep-lined, still mask. "I felt a throb, here in the artery. Another, just now. His heart's beating, very slow, but beating. And the skin's cold, icy, but soft. He isn't dead, Walt. But..."

"But what?"

"I don't know." It was a groan. "We've got to get him to a doctor. The hospital. Get going, Walt. For God's sake get going."

The rasping burr of the starter, the roar, the bus's racketing lurch into motion and its rushing thunder as it hurtled down the long descent of Oak Street brought some sense of reality back to Smeed. It was fully dark now, but the night was filled with the yellow oblongs of lighted, blind-drawn windows, with windows tight shut, nailed shut, with houses whose doors were locked and double-locked against terror.

"What you saw," Walt threw back to Jim. "It slipped around us and put the kid in the bus while we were looking for it. If we'd been smart enough we might have caught it."

"We might have caught it," Tarr husked. "But we didn't. If any more children go..."

It was not until the dusk had deepened almost into darkness that anyone thought to switch on the light. Rob Wood, the school janitor, did it then.

Rosalie Carter, pallor lending her a fragile, almost ethereal quality, blinked. Then, from her habitual post at the window, she could see again the room where she had taught for months, unfamiliar now because its occupants were adults and not the youngsters who had trusted her and whom she had failed.

Cole Simpson sat at the big desk up front, her desk, and beside him was seated John Mault; the grey, poised slenderness of the one an almost painful contrast to the other's gross bulk. Standing to Simpson's left were the school's two handymen: stooped, shabby, stockily built Wood, competent and powerful in his suit of blue dungarees, despite the years evident in the grey bristle blurring the square line of his jaw.

The other teachers were squeezed into the children's seats, a half-dozen angular spinstresses and two men. Julius Waite, the Latin instructor was as sere as his subject; wizened, his countenance sallow and wrinkled as a dried apple; Doctor Holzer, teacher of science, white-bearded, ruddy-cheeked; even brooding fear failing to iron out the good-humored wrinkles at the corners of his small, twinkling eyes.

Grim, quivering with leashed wrath, two young men stood at the door, rifles horizontally across their chests, fingers curled on the triggers.

Mr. Simpson sighed, and began to speak. "One of you," he said in his low, harsh voice, "knows where Joan Hardie is. It is impossible, with the school watched as closely as it was, that she had been taken from it. No one but those here and the children were in the building. No one except the children has been permitted to leave it. Therefore she is somewhere within its four walls and one of you knows where."

"That's logic," Mault put in. "Nobody can't argue with that."

"I can." Surprisingly, it was Mr. Waite whose querulous tone interrupted. "I agree that the child was not seen leaving the school. But she is not in it. We have searched every nook and cranny of it."

Simpson's expressionless visage moved slightly to bear upon him. "What do you suggest, then?"

The Latin teacher shrugged. " 'Facile est descensus Averni!', 'The descent to Hell is easy', but no easier than to pose objections to a faulty solution of this mystery that confronts us."

"Nevertheless," the principal insisted, "you have something in mind or you would not have spoken. What is it?"

Mr. Waite looks like a scared brown hare, Rosalie thought, twisting a handkerchief in her fingers. He's simply terrified of answering, but Mr. Simpson will make him.

"What is it, Julius Waite?"

Waite's fleshless lip quivered. "As Miss Bunker will bear me out, Joan Hardie is neither outside nor inside of this building. Hence she must have..."

"Vanished into thin air," Dr. Holzer snorted. "Bunk! I've worked with you and Cole a quarter of a century but this is the first time I've discovered any of us is feeble-minded. I..."

"Just a minute, August," Simpson intervened. "Please let me handle this. Julius, we may in the end be forced to accept your views, but we are not yet ready to admit there is anything of the supernatural about what has happened. We will adhere to the probabilities. I want to know where each one of you was at two-twenty today, which was when I came out of my office and met young Tarr responding to Miss Carter's summons. Suppose you tell us first."

"I was in front of my class, teaching the blockheads the conjugation of amo. I..."

"That will do. How about you, Miss Bunker?"

The response of the parrot-faced English instructress was similar, as was that of the rest except for Dr. Holzer. He alone had not been in full view of a score of pupils at the crucial moment.

"I was in my office," he explained, "but the only door to it is into the laboratory and there were a dozen students there dissecting frogs. Its window is right over the lawn Tarr was patrolling and even if I were still agile enough to climb down from the second story and back again I would surely have been seen. However, you may search the room if you wish."

"We've already done that," Mault said grimly. "And found nothing. Well, Simpson, it looks like..."

Sound rattled the window panes, cutting him off; the roar of a racing motor, the blare of a frenzied horn from outside. Rosalie whipped around, peering through the glass, was jostled by others jumping to look out. A huge vehicle lurched past, its row of windows lighted.

"It's one of the school buses," someone exclaimed. "It's shooting into the hospital driveway. Something new must have happened."

The rush was away from Rosalie now, to the door, but it piled up there against the stalwart guards. "Stop!" Mault called, "You're not going out. None of you is going out till we find out who's tied up with this thing."

There was a sudden chatter of outraged protest, stilled by Simpson's calm, "Take your seats, ladies and gentlemen. Please take your seats." Rosalie noticed that she had dropped her handkerchief in the excitement, bent to pick it up.

When she straightened her pupils were dilated, her face taut, her slim frame trembling.

"We are still of the opinion that one of you is concealing something," Cole Simpson was saying, "and until that one confesses you are all under arrest. You will be held here under guard, all night, all week if necessary. There will be armed men posted outside the doors and armed men under the windows and their instructions will be to shoot to kill anyone who tries to leave."

"What about you, Simpson," Julius Waite demanded. "Seems to me you're in this as much as the rest of us. Even more. The first child disappeared from the house next to yours, and..."

"Chief Mault will be in my office with me," came the steady reply. "He cannot be suspected."

"Mr. Simpson," Rosalie found her tongue at last. "I've found out something."

"Hold it. If you've discovered something it would be better that the culprit, if he is in this room as we suspect, should not hear you. Suppose you come to my office, with me and Chief Mault, and tell us about it there."

Rosalie nodded agreement. "Meantime," Simpson continued, turning to the others, "the guards are already posted. Remember their instructions."

Rosalie Carter went down the first floor corridor between the slender old educator and the wheezing, puffing police Chief. There were too many in the hall for her to speak; too many hard-eyed, set-jawed men with guns of all description, watching her curiously. Simpson unlocked a door, clicked a switch button. The familiar furniture seemed to take on a new aspect, seen thus by artificial light. This was the outer office and Simpson led the other two toward the door to his private sanctum. He was moving very slowly, very wearily. He had to hold on to the jamb while he fumbled his key into the lock of that inner door.

"I better 'phone the hospital," Mault wheezed, "and find out about that bus. You two go on in, I'll be right with you."

The door opened. Simpson found the switch, filled the small room with light. The door closed behind Rosalie. She heard the spring lock click. The principal staggered, turned a face toward her that was green-filmed, pallid.

"I— I'm not as strong as I thought." He made a pathetic effort to smile, and suddenly Rosalie was sorry for him. "These three days... I have had no sleep."

He gained his desk, stumbled into the chair. His hands were hidden by the glass-topped walnut. "The school— my dream of the years, one great school instead of the little one room shanties scattered around— slipping away after I had attained it. If this keeps up... already the farmers are refusing to send their youngsters into Staneville, refusing to pay their assessments... the builders threatening to foreclose their mortgage... But what was it you found?"

"This." Rosalie held her handkerchief out to him. "I dropped it, rubbed it against the ventilator grating when I picked it up, and...

The wisp of linen was blotched by a dark brown smear. There was no need to bring it closer to Simpson. The odor of a corpse, the odor of the fear that had been throttling Staneville so long, was very strong in the room— as if a corpse were present.

There was something queer in the old man's eyes. "You think...?" His arm moved, as though his unseen hands were doing something under the desk-top.

"It was on the grating. The hole's large enough for a man to get through, and the network lifts out easily. It's some gas that makes you unconscious. That's the way Joan was taken!"

That smell! It was strangely more powerful! It was choking her, was stoppering speech. Rosalie swayed, clutched for support.

Through a darkening swirl she could make out Cole Simpson's face, contorted, his eyes growing till the face was all eyes, hating eyes... Simpson!

She was going down, down, down into bottomless dark. Hands caught her, lifted her...

The bus roared into the hospital courtyard, racked to a halt. Men in white sprang out of a doorway over which a brilliant lamp globe was lettered, ADMITTING ROOM— started running across the asphalt toward the ambulance.

"Take care of it, Walt," Jim Tarr snapped. "I'm off." He was in the vehicle door, was dropping to the ground.

"Hey!" Smeed blurted. "Where are you going?"

"Back to the graveyard," Jim snapped. "Back to find out what's hiding in the jumble beneath the cliff." Then he was gone, dodging the approaching orderlies; gone into the darkness that lay on Staneville like a funereal shroud.

5: Sting of the Huge Black Wasp

ROSALIE CARTER came up out of a sick nothingness to dazed awareness of motion, to dull realization that she was cradled in arms that felt her weight not at all, that she was being carried to some unknown place. There was the beat of vast, unseen wings about her, the flow past her cheek of air dank and damply chill. There was that smell in her nostrils, the stench of corrupt flesh waking memory, waking fear to claw her...

Over and over she kept sinking into oblivion, over and over, but each time the fear was greater, the dread grown, till almost the girl was praying, inchoately, that there should be no next time.

Sometimes there would be the horror of that moment of discovery that Cole Simpson, venerated and venerable, was the perpetrator of that which had come to Staneville. Sometimes there would be only the terror of what lay ahead, at the end of this strange, dark journey. But always there would be that throb, throb, throb and always the reek of a charnel house.

Time blurred and had no meaning. It might be minutes or hours since the beginning of this too real nightmare. Rosalie did not know and did not care.

At length, however, she came to a space of awakening and though the beat of something enormous but unseen met her, and the sepulchral stench, she was no longer moving, no longer held in muscular arms. There was hardness under her, a painful hardness, and there was a rustling sound about her.

She forced her lids apart.

A glow, greenish, unearthly, lay against Rosalie's aching eyes. Inconsequentially, she recalled a rotted stump once seen in the lightless woods, a luminous ghost shape. This glow was exactly like that shining inner phosphorescence of decay.

It seeped down out of a ceiling above her, so low that it seemed to press ponderously upon her, so irregular in surface that it seemed to have no shape, that it seemed momentarily about to cave in and crush her. Dark, slender threads crawled over it, immobile at the instant but surely about to wake to loathsome life.

The rustling sound rolled Rosalie's head to it, to a swirl of blackness moving toward her, apparently out of a wall eerily glowing and formless as the roof!

The Thing was man shape, yet in some curious manner not human. It was faceless in rustling, stygian draperies and the limbs growing out of it were like great black wings, but the sound they made, reaching for her, was a flutter and not the throb, throb that still beat against her ears.

Terror, imminent and awful, struck icily to the very core of the girl's being, stripping her of will, of strength, so that she was held in a nightmare paralysis. The motion of the Thing took it out of the line of her sight and she saw past it.

An abortive scream rasped the tight cords of her throat.

A black hole gaped in the wall, entrance to some tunnel. Before it, stark nude and incredibly rigid on a green-slimed pallet that had the very size and shape of a gravestone, Joan Hardie lay. One pigtail coiled in a lax position across the pitiful, small neck and tiny white fingers were outspread as if to fend off horror.

"No," the Thing had a voice, muffled, hollow. "She is not dead, my dear." And a chuckle came, slow, hateful. "Not dead, but she will remain like that for years. Forever, if I wish it so."

Yes, the apparition had a voice. Though changed by the fabric through which it came there was still something familiar in its timbre. Of course! Rosalie remembered. This was Cole Simpson. It was Cole Simpson who had tricked her into being alone with him, had gassed her to insensibility and carried her off.

"Look at her. You will be like that in a moment— and forever." He was right above her now, was bending to her, those grotesque arms of his descending to her, like wings of black horror closing down. "You know too much— but you will be silent about what you know, forever." He was going to kill her, this man whom all Staneville revered, this man she, herself, had so venerated. "Not dead, but silent, unless I choose to wake you." A hand, cold, clammy, closed on her bare arm.

"Wait!" Astounding that Rosalie could speak even with this harsh croak. "Wait." Somehow she must deter him, must stave him off. Perhaps Mault had battered down that locked door, found them gone, found the way they had gone. "What are you going to do to me?" There must be rescue for her. There must be! "What do you mean, not dead but silent forever?"

Again that slow chuckle, but the black form was stayed. "Insensible, my dear." Where had she heard that word before? "Unable to move, to speak, to see. Needing no food nor drink. Not dying even though centuries pass, because there is no waste of tissue, the functions being suspended. It can be done. I am the first man to have accomplished it, though aeons ago the way was discovered by the wasps."

The wasps! That was it! Strange that it should have been Dickie Horn who had told how the wasps stung their victims, dragged them to their burrows and left them alive for ten times their span of normal life, in order that the hatched grubs might have fresh food. Strange that thus he should have predicted his own fate.

Recollection struck at Rosalie of a digger-wasp burrow she had unearthed one spring, of the living-dead cicada bodies within and how they were acrawl with the little white grubs; eating, eating. That was what was in store for her! Here, in this dark cavern, the blind pallid crawlers of under-earth would find in her inanimate body fresh food for their hunger and...

The claw on her arm tightened, and in the other, thrust abruptly out of the black drapery, was the bright glean of a glass tube, the sharp gleam of a long, keen needle...

"This will do it," her captor husked. "The venom of a thousand wasps in this hypodermic syringe. It will..."

From the tunnel's Nubian maw there was the faint thud of distant feet. Of approaching rescue. He had not noticed it, she must keep him from noticing it. "I know why you are doing it to me, but why did you do it to the children? You have always loved them, why are you making them suffer?"

"So that others, millions of others, should not suffer." It worked! The slow thrust of that terrible needle was halted. "The world stirs to war, and with the next war will come clouds of lethal gas descending on the cities, enveloping them for years, perhaps. No way to escape it, no way to bar it out and still have air to breathe, food to eat, water to drink. But I will show them the way. A dose of the living death in this vial, then they can be closed up in chambers hermetically sealed against the gas. When it is gone the chambers will be opened and they will be taken from them and brought back to life, the children and the women who but for me would be long dead. A million against a few, but I had to devise a method to obtain the few I needed for experiment, a way to hide them..."

The oncoming feet were nearer, but still far. Too far. "Then there is a way," Rosalie said, "to bring your victims back to life."

"My subjects," he corrected. "There must be. There has to be." Was that a sigh that came out of the faceless mask? "But my knowledge was not sufficient to find it." Then a chuckle. "That is why I gave them back my first subject so that those who do have the knowledge might work on him, might find that way for me. Clever, wasn't it?"

"Clever," she praised, fighting for the little time she needed now. "As clever as the way you sent the gas through the ventilators into my classroom, making me and the children unconscious while you stole Joan from among us. Clever as the gas itself, from which people wake without knowing they have been asleep. What is that gas?"

"My own invention. An organic compound, distilled from the half-putrefied bodies of animals. I..."

He checked, whirled to the pound of feet in the tunnel mouth. Out of it lurched a bulky form. In the grisly light Rosalie glimpsed a curious contraption clamped over the man's nose and mouth, but she knew he was Rob Wood, the janitor.

"Rob!" she yelled. "Thank God you've come." She flailed hands against the gravestone beneath her, pushing herself up to aid him in the coming struggle.

"Hurry it, Chief," Wood panted. "They're comin' awake in the schoolhouse. We got ter get back quick afore they find out we're missin'... Look out! She's gettin' away!"

He jumped on Rosalie, half-risen. His spatulate fingers caught her frock at the throat, it tore away with a ripping sound. The dank air of the subterranean hollow was chill against her bared breasts, and against them his calloused palms thrust cruelly, shoving her down upon the stone, holding her down, helpless, immovable.

Above her the other's black shapelessness swooped down, and the terrible needle darted for her. A scream broke from Rosalie Carter's throat, shrill, agonized.

6:  Within the Precipice

FROM the schoolhouse on Oak Street the reek of a hundred moldering corpses was gradually fading. Among the still bodies slumped in the hallways, in the seats of the two classrooms that had been guarded as prison cells, one stirred a little, then another.

The thicket where the graveyard lay against its terminal cliff battled Jim Tarr as though it were endowed with a malevolent life. His flashlight beam bored a tight hole in the tar-barrel murk, but from the darkness on either side the bushes lashed him, thorns tore at him. He panted, struggling through it, struggling on.

What was it he thought he was going to find here?

His face, his hands, were torn and bleeding. The weariness of sleepless nights, of brooding fear, weighted his limbs so that they were numbed, leaden. Every deeper shadow, every half-seen shape blacker against the black threatened him with a menace the more dreadful because its nature was unknown. But he bored deeper into the tangle, a convulsive grip flattening his fingers on flashlight cylinder and rifle butt, his blunt jaw grimly outthrust, his eyes narrowed and smouldering.

Behind those eyes was the vision of a small form rigid in a death that was not death. Behind those eyes was the recollection of a grey shape drifting in greyness out of this thicket, drifting, he could almost swear, into it again. And in Jim's nostrils was the stench of death's putrescence, deepening as though he neared its source.

A slanting tombstone jutted out of the greenery in front of him. He veered to pass it. Something clutched his ankle— a vine loop— tripped him. He sprawled forward, throwing the rifle over his head, thumped hard, breath gusting from between his lips. The flashlight jolted from his hand, rolled beyond grasp.

Its beam scythed the blackness, fell across a ghastly visage peering through a flutter of leaves. A toothless skull half obliterated by a dark stain. Not a skull, a mummy-head, parchment skin shrunken into the hollows, and the stain dried and clotted blood.

Tarr's fists pounded the earth. He was fighting to rise, to flee. Ancestral panic prickled the hairs at the back of his neck, surged darkly in his veins. Black lips in that mummy face twitched. Sound mumbled from them.

That jerked Jim forward, to the hitherto unseen body lying crumpled in the depression of a sunken grave. "Another," he gasped. "Good God! It's Jethro Anther. What happened, man? What is it?"

"Socked me," the blackening gums mumbled. "Bruk me skull." It was only the merest shadow of a voice, as though by some hideous necromancy of hate it projected from beyond death a message of vengeance. "Rob Wood. Thought I was dead, but I saw..." The voice died, but there was a scrabble in the dark beside his contorted form, a movement of his twisted shoulder that told Tarr it was his hand that scrabbled, and an imperative jerk downward of the fleshless chin.

Jim snatched for his hand-torch, within reach, darted its light to where that scrabble came from. He saw...

Dark dirt upturned out of the ancient grave. Jutting from it a metal cylinder topped by a metal wheel, a gas tank beyond doubt!

Anther's fingers, like horny bird's claws, made a turning movement. Understanding the speechless command, Tarr reached to the valve wheel, twisted a bit. The gas hissed out, and the reek of rotted cadavers was rank in Jim Tarr's nostrils!

"What the...!" he exclaimed, twisting the valve closed. "It came from here. Leaking..."

A scream cut him off, a woman's scream, oddly muffled but still high and shrill and agonized.

Jim jumped to his feet, rifle in one hand, flashlight in the other. His frantic beam swept the thicket, impinged on the frowning rock-face. Nothing. Nothing but darkness. Nothing but netted, baffling bushes and the black, solid crag.

IN a hospital room light beat down, white and merciless on a bed where a small, still figure lay; beat mercilessly down on storm-dark hair framing the anguish ravaged face of a mother who had lived through agony only to find greater agony.

"Give him back to me," Jane Horn cried. "Give my Dickie back to me."

There was speculation, doubt, in the eyes of the man in white who tugged at a clipped Vandyke. "We might try an injection of adrenaline in the heart tissue," he mused. "It might bring him out of it. Or..."

"Or what?"

"Or it might kill him."

"Even that would be better than this. Try it doctor. Try it."

"God!" Jim Tarr groaned, staring helplessly at the defiant blackness, the scream still ringing in his ears. "Where...?"

"There." The croak came from his feet. Jethro Anther was miraculously half-raised from the ground, miraculously his quivering arm was extending. "Through there." He was pointing at the precipice. "It opens." The hand dropped, never to point again.

Jim flung himself at the crag. His fingers caught a knob. The face itself on the rock was moving, was grating inward. There was a gaping hole at his feet, visible by a strange, eerie luminescence.

Tarr jumped down into that hole, reckless of what might meet him, whirled to a sharp exclamation. He saw tawny hair, a hand clamped over Rosalie Carter's face. He saw a black, stooped shape, fingers spreading the skin over Rosalie's jugular vein, a hypodermic needle sliding sickingly into the white skin. And in the same instant, he leaped.

His flailing gun-butt crunched black-swathed skull-bone, flung the robe-wearer sprawling against the farther wall. His rifle's steel-clad heel jolted Rob Wood's chin, split it, so that as the grizzled janitor fell, scarlet blood gushing from the crushed jaw. And then Jim was kneeling to Rosalie, was gathering her in his arms. As quickly as that it was all over.

"Jim," the girl sobbed, "Oh Jim!" Suddenly she was thrusting at him, thrusting him away, from her.

She was laughing. Most awfully she was laughing the thin, high laugh of hysteria while the tears rolled down her cheeks. She was pointing past him.

"Not Simpson," she jabbered. "Look, Jim, it's not Simpson."

Tarr turned. Somehow in his fall the robes had been torn away from the head of the man in black. Through the torn fabric jutted the white-bearded, ruddy-cheeked countenance of August Holzer!

Rosalie Carter's laugh cut off. She slumped against Jim, a dead weight in his enfolding arms.

The walls were painted a cool green, and every corner was rounded, so that Rosalie knew it must be a hospital room. It was sunlight that had awakened her, and the sound of a shade rattling up to let the sunlight in.

The nurse turned to her. "I see you are awake, my dear, and feeling better. These just came and I brought them in."

"These" were flowers— a great, gorgeous bouquet glorifying the agate pitcher serving them as a vase.

"Oh, lovely," Rosalie exclaimed.

"Aren't they?" the nurse smiled. "And the gentleman who brought them is waiting outside to see you. A Mr. Tarr."

After awhile Jim Tarr was in the room, perched on the edge of a chair, his blue eyes glowing. "I've got good news for you, Miss Carter," he was saying. "Dickie Horn is all right again, and Joan Hardie will soon be."

"Oh wonderful! But what of Dr. Holzer?"

"Dead. Wood's going to live, till he burns in the chair."

"Jim, I don't understand why Holzer went after the children. He told me his idea, but I don't know. I can't decide whether it was madness or genius that impelled him to his acts." She repeated what she had learned in the lair of fear. "I can't quite judge whether he was right when he said it was just that a few suffer to save millions from suffering, but it seems to me adults would have been better subjects for his experiment than children."

"Maybe. But there was something else behind what he did than a way to save people from being killed by gas. You see, there was a scheme on foot for breaking up the school district before the building of the Consolidated School was decided on. If that had been done Simpson would have been put in charge of one of the districts and Holzer of the other, but the Consolidation stopped it. By terrifying the farmers into withdrawing from the merger he hoped to regain that position and no longer remain Simpson's underling. That's the way it's been figured out, anyway, by Julius Waite and Simpson, but we'll never know."

"No," Rosalie sighed, "we'll never know whether he was a philanthropist or a madman, a genius or a greedy, avaricious monster."

"There's no doubt about Rob Wood. Holzer had caught him accepting bribes, falsifying his records and so on. He held that knowledge over Wood's head and made him help him, promising him a fortune if his schemes were successful. It was Holzer who sprayed the gas through the Horns' window, and later filled the school's ventilating system with it from the duct in his private office. But it was Wood who actually carried the kids off. They had the cylinders buried in a grave, and Wood also went back and forth through the tunnel. That's why he killed Anther, who was digging into that very grave."

"The tunnel?"

"Oh, I forgot that you didn't know. It's the old water tunnel that used to run down from the spring on Buzzard Mountain before the new pumping system was installed. They used it to get from the school to their hidden roost in the cliff. The new aqueduct joins the old just past the hospital here, and the sound came through."

"Jim!"

"Yes?"

"Jim, I haven't thanked you yet for saving me, for taking care of me."

"Hell, you don't have to thank me for that. Matter of fact, I'd like..." The chap broke off, red suffusing his big-boned face.

"You'd like?" Rosalie prompted softly. "What is it you would like, Jim?"

Jim Tarr smiled. "Well... Might as well say it... I'd like... to take care of you... for... for..."

"For always, Jim?" Rosalie murmured. "Perhaps I would like that too. Why don't you ask me?"

Minutes later the nurse opened the door, her knocking having met with no response. She closed it again, very softly.

"Doctor or no doctor," she whispered to herself, "that's better medicine for that girl than all the drugs in the storeroom."

_______________

24: The Ship of Silence

‌Albert Richard Wetjen

1900–1948

The Blue Book Magazine July 1932

BECAUSE this is a true story, there is no ending… It was early in the night and very hot, the sticky tropical darkness pressing all about us, seeming to muffle the lights of the city ashore and rendering to a soft velvet the waters of the harbour as they rippled through the anchor chains and along the hull of the little coffee freighter that had brought me to Santos, Brazil. I had been sitting with Captain Massey and old Billings under the awning of the after-deck, drinking long, cold gin tonicas and talking of the sea in general and of ships that had vanished into its mysterious immensity. Old Billings never romanced, let it be said. He was a dignified man, red of face and with silvery hair, in his eightieth year and at that time the Lloyds surveyor and agent at Santos. He had followed the sea for some forty years before leaving it to take his present position, and so he spoke as a sailor.

"It's not so hard perhaps to account for the foundering of most ships,"  he said. "They get into bad weather and have their hatches burst in; or they're built or loaded top-heavy and capsize. That's all in the run of the game. What isn't so easy to explain is how they can sometimes drop out of sight without leaving a trace, especially in these days of wireless and with the regular sea-lanes all well travelled. But we know they do. And we know too that it's hard to sink a vessel without something floating clear— a boat, lifebuoys, hatches, oars and what-not. Of course the sea's big and it's not hard to believe that searching vessels can overlook such small things. You've only a visibility of from ten to fifteen miles on the clearest of days from a ship's deck, and hatches and lifebuoys and even bodies are level with the water, easily hidden behind the swells.

"Yet even at that it seems curious that nothing comes to light. Take the Waratah now. You'll remember her— a modern liner of over fifteen thousand tons, newly built and on her second voyage. Carrying over two hundred souls, what with passengers and crew, and running on a regular route, down the coast from Durban to Capetown in South Africa. Of course she carried no wireless. That was before the day it became compulsory for liners to carry it, and it hadn't come into general use.

"But there she was, on a thickly travelled run. Soon after leaving Durban she speaks to the freighter Clan McIntyre, drops her astern and then proceeds to disappear. Of course there was a heavy gale reported soon after and it seems reasonable to suppose she foundered. But a new ship, remember— absolutely vanished! They sent out searching vessels, of course, when she was reported overdue. For months Government and private craft patrolled the coast waters. One vessel searched for over ninety days and covered close to twenty thousand miles of sea, and there was even a vessel sent to follow the normal current-drift far to the south. But nothing was ever found. Not a body, not a hatch, not a plank!

"Then there was that American transport the Cyclops that dropped out of sight— and she did have wireless. Then only this year there was that Danish training-ship the Kobenhaven, clearing from Buenos Aires for Australia. Been overdue for months and nothing found; must have gone down— and she's taken the flower of Danish youth with her, sons of the best families. My personal opinion is that she got too far southerly, into the Antarctic ice, struck a berg and crumpled. You know.

"But that isn't really what I started out to tell you. You can set up some sort of reasonable explanation for ships that just vanish. It's the other vessels that make the real mystery— the ships that don't drop out of sight, but turn up like a lot of wandering ghosts, sound above and below but without a soul on board. In '23 or '24, I forget which, there was a schooner picked up off Diamond Shoals, to the north. Sails set, boats in place, no unreasonable amount of water below. But never a sign of her men… Why? Foundering doesn't cover that— for there's the ship!

"Somewhere in the records too you'll find notice of a Japanese steamer discovered drifting in the South Atlantic. Carried a crew of forty-odd and all they found were eight dead men on the main deck, and nothing to show how they had died. Boats all in place there too. No sign of heavy weather. No sign of fire or disease… Queer, isn't it? And then of course there was the Mary Celeste in the '70's; I suppose she's the classic of what I am trying to say.

"They found her in mid-Atlantic in calm weather, you'll remember, with all the usual signs of mystery. Everything in order. Hull and spars sound. Fair-weather sails set; not a lifeboat missing. Everything as it should be, except she had no crew. What makes her case a classic are the number of altogether peculiar features.

"There were the men's clothes hung on a line to dry. Breakfast, half eaten, was on the fo'c'stle and the main cabin tables; and the food was still good, proving she had not long been abandoned. Under the needle of a sewing-machine in the Captain's room was a child's dress, half-finished, where the Captain's wife had obviously hurriedly left it. Then they found a cutlass in its scabbard, with stains like blood on the blade, and on the rail in the starboard bow they found a deep new cut with stains about it also. Cut into the bow itself, a little above the water-line, were two deep grooves, gouged out each side, as it were, and quite fresh. Most curious of all, the only thing missing on board was the chronometer. But again— why?… Why?

"Where had everyone gone? There was no sign of mutiny or of a raid, shall we say, by pirates. How had the men left the ship— and why had they left, it, obviously in haste, in the middle of breakfast? We don't know. There have been a lot of theories put forward, but for one reason or another they can be discounted. If it were only the Mary Celeste we might let the matter go, just write it off. But there are all those other ships, not only those that drop out of sight, without trace, but those that are found, abandoned for no earthly reason. New cases still turn up too, once every decade or so— and there you are.

"I think I'm a hard-headed man. I've had lot of experience one way and the other. I don't take much stock in ghosts and I believe everything has a reasonable explanation if we could locate what it is. And yet sometimes— well, I don't know. The sea is pretty big and we haven't learned much about it and what's in it. Remember the land only covers one-fifth, or is it a quarter, of the earth's surface— and we haven't fully explored the land yet. As for the sea, we have only gone down a few hundred feet— a few hundred feet in five miles of depth, remember. Ships stick to narrow and clearly defined lanes as a rule. There are tremendous areas where I suppose vessels only wander once in fifty years, or perhaps never go into at all and never have been.

"Is it something in the sea that comes out and loots these abandoned ships of their men? I know and you know that there are queer things in the sea. There're the giant squids on which the sperm whales feed; I've heard they sometimes are a hundred feet from the tip of one arm to the other. Then there's the sea-serpent. Yes, I know landsmen laugh at us for believing in that. But why shouldn't we believe in it? It's been known from ancient times. It's been seen more than once, even if we acknowledge that a length of kelp, a barnacle-covered log or a school of porpoises in line might often have been mistaken for it. But how can you argue away the report of the Daedalus?

"Here is a British warship, certainly in command of a reliable man, certainly officered by some few gentlemen whose integrity cannot be questioned. They sight a long snakelike animal, observe it for some time and are even able to sketch it. The scientists and public may laugh, but you can't argue away the testimony of a whole ship's crew. Nor is it only the crew of the Daedalus you have to figure on. Captain Hope of another British war vessel, the Fly, saw a large animal with the body of a crocodile, a long neck and four paddlelike arms, in the Gulf of California. A Lieutenant Hayne, in command of the yacht Osborne, sighted something as queer, but I forget where. There are two other men who filed a joint report also, and they were members of the Zoological Society cruising in a yacht off the coast of Brazil. They saw a creature with a neck seven or eight feet long alone and as thick around as a man's body. I say you can't laugh away all this, and you can read the full accounts yourself if you doubt me. I've gone into the matter pretty thoroughly because— well, you'll understand in a minute.

"I don't say, mind, that any sort of animal such as the giant squid or the sea-serpent can account for these mysterious and deserted ships, nor for the actual complete disappearances. I don't know. No one knows, and we can only wonder. I do hear that some scientists have recently suggested the survival in deep waters of some of those gigantic animals that occupied the world in ancient times, before man came. It doesn't seem unreasonable to me.

"But we'll let that pass. What I wanted to tell you when I started out was of an experience that came to me. I shall never forget it. No man could. It was one of those nightmarish things that remain with a man all his life, and I suppose everyone goes through something as ghastly at least once before he dies, if he follows the sea… Yes, I'll take another drink!

"It all happened a long time ago. I was just a young third mate then, around twenty, serving my first voyage as an officer on the bark Doyon out of Sydney for Callao. We had good sailing weather, as I remember, and we were coming up to the South American coast after a couple of weeks out, when we sighted just such a ship as I have been talking of.

"I don't want to exaggerate or to imagine things after all these years, but I'll swear there was something eerie about her from the moment we first saw her. It was early in the morning, as I recall, and I had just come up from breakfast to take over from the mate— a decent sort of chap named Mathews, tall and well-built, not many years older than I was myself but very highly strung, as I afterwards discovered.

"  'That's a queer-looking packet ahead of us,' he remarked when I joined him on the poop. He had been staring through the glasses and now he handed them to me. 'Looks like she's not under control,' he said. I stared through the glasses myself and saw a small barkentine some distance ahead of us and apparently crossing our bow. She was under plain sail but her after-booms were jarring crazily and it was obvious that she was yawing all over the sea. I could discover no sign of life on her decks, nor could I locate anyone at her wheel and I suggested to Mathews that he'd better call the skipper.

"  'I've sent for him,' he observed and so we both continued to inspect the strange ship until the skipper came on deck. The morning was very calm, with a gentle wind from the south. There was no sea, just a long oily swell almost a bottle-green in colour, and the sky was a clear blue dotted with a few clouds on the weather horizon. It was warm, too, but I remember I felt uneasy and a little chilled, just as if I had a presentiment of what was to come. The skipper came on the poop rubbing his eyes, for he always slept late, and he took the glasses from the mate with considerable impatience.

"  'What is it now?' he said bad-temperedly, and he stared through the glasses for some time. Then he said, 'By George, it looks like she's abandoned!' and I knew from the sound of his voice he was feeling pleased, thinking of the salvage.

"Well, to cut a long story short, we hove the Doyon to and the skipper sent the mate and myself away in our longboat, together with four of the men. We came up under the barkentine's counter and read her name, painted in white letters, 'Robert Sutter— San Francisco,' and it didn't need a second look to tell she was abandoned all right. One of the men got aboard over her midship rail when she rolled down, and he threw us a line so the rest of us could swing up. We left two men in the boat and proceeded to inspect our prize, telling the two men who had boarded with us to look over the fo'c'stle while Mathews and myself went aft.

"It is a curious thing— but I swear I had gooseflesh all over from the first moment I put foot on the Robert Sutter's main deck. There was something so lonely about her, so— how shall I say?— uncanny! You could feel by the swing of her she was not water-logged. There was no sign of fire that a first casual inspection brought to light, and she was clean and had evidently been newly painted. Every rope and line was in place and her two boats were secure in their chocks on top of the galley house. We searched her from stem to stern and found no hint of life, save that in a large iron cage, suspended from a hook outside the galley 'midships, there was a parrot.

"The bird seemed in a bad way. It was crouched down on the bottom of the cage, lying half on its side and sort of pulsing all over, its eyes glazed and half closed. From the look of it— it was all but bald— it was a very old bird and it made no move when we approached it. 'It needs some water,' said Mathews, a fact which was obvious, and after we had brought it water, which it eagerly dragged itself up to, we went on with our search.

"Near the break of the poop, on the starboard side, we discovered what must have once been a cat. The creature had been smashed flat— as flat as a pancake, I tell you! It was just a thin sheet of black fur and dried flesh, literally sticking to the planking. But there was nothing to show how it had been killed, and at the time we did not pause to ask ourselves about it. We had to complete our searching and get back to the Doyon to make our report, you understand.

"Well, in the scuppers right opposite the port galley door we found a revolver, a bright nickel affair somewhat rusted and with every shell fired. And that was all, except that over the whole vessel there hovered a curious sort of smell, dried-up, if you know what I mean, like the stale, weedy, fishy smell you get from mud-flats when the tide runs out. But even that we didn't particularly notice at the time.

"Anyway, that was all, as I said. The ship's cargo was cut lumber, which we ascertained by lifting the hatches, and when we sounded the well we found only the usual amount of bilge water which every healthy wooden ship will take through her seams. It was all very mysterious, though, and if you can picture us staggering about the swaying deck with the spars jarring above us, the canvas thundering and slatting, the wheel and rudder creaking, every block and line making its own individual noise, and not a soul to be found, you can understand how we felt. Mathews was getting the jumps even before we were through with the inspection and I noticed he wiped the sweat from his face repeatedly.

"We went back to the Doyon at last and made our report, and the skipper didn't take much stock in what we had to say. 'She must have had a third boat,' he observed carelessly. 'They probably thought she was foundering or something and just left her. I've known whole crews to panic before. You say there's no sign of disease, and no bodies? Well, there's nothing to be afraid of, then!' He did admit it was queer that we had found her hull sound and that none of her navigation instruments appeared to be missing. Even in a panic the master and the officers of a vessel are not liable to forget their working-tools. And then in the log-book we'd discovered and brought back there was no hint of anything amiss. It was written up to within four days previously and reported only fair weather. I remember I pointed out to the skipper that no crew would be likely to abandon a vessel and leave the logbook and ship's papers behind, but he brushed all that aside. He was a man almost completely without imagination, and all he could think of was salvage.

"  'I'll give you six men,' he said to Mathews, 'and you can take the third mate along with you. Bring her to Callao and we can go into the whole matter there with the port officials.'

"Mathews wasn't a bit pleased with the prospect, though most mates would have jumped at the opportunity of making themselves a nest-egg and enjoying a first command, even if it would be only for a short time. 'I don't like the idea at all, sir,' he said. 'There's something queer about the whole business!'

"The skipper waved all that away. 'Nonsense!' he said. 'You ought to thank your stars for the chance!' But then, you see, he hadn't been on board the Robert Sutter, and we had to admit— now we were back on the Doyon, surrounded by the curious crew— that our feelings did seem rather silly. So the long and short of it was we picked out six men, or rather the skipper appointed the six most useless we had on board, and we pulled back to the deserted barkentine, four other men coming with us in the longboat to take it back. The Doyon squared away on her course again and I can remember that Mathews and I stood on the Robert Sutter's poop and watched her with something of the feeling of being deserted to our fate.

"There wasn't any use of our worrying about that, however. There we were with a perfectly sound and well-built ship, amply found with water and provisions, rolling at will on a bottle-green sea and with a fair wind blowing for Callao. Mathews pulled himself together and we got the vessel on a course, set watches, wound up the rundown chronometers, setting them from a spare one we had brought from the Doyon, and so prepared to make port.

"It was somewhat uncanny to clear out two of the cabins below ready for our occupancy, for the gear of the previous inhabitants was scattered about, and in the room I chose, which had been the mate's, there was even the imprint of his head still on the pillow and a half-whittled plug of chewing-tobacco tossed on the blankets, together with an open clasp-knife. I shook off my feelings however, before very long. I was young, healthy, usually in good spirits and it was not long before I was whistling to myself. Mathews came and stood in the doorway while I was fixing my bunk and his face was very serious, more serious than I had ever seen it. I think I have said he was a highly strung man.

"  'I don't see how the devil you can whistle!' he burst out irritably. 'Good God, man, doesn't it bother you? The crew— fourteen men, according to the articles— all gone!'

"I stopped whistling and looked at him. 'It is queer,' I agreed. 'But it doesn't do us any good to worry about it.'

"Mathews shivered and looked over his shoulder. 'But where did they go?' he said, his voice dropping. 'Where and why? It's all right for the skipper to talk of a third boat, but this ship carried no third boat. I've been over her again. There isn't a sign of one.' He went away and I could hear him muttering to himself as he straightened up the room that had been the Captain's.

"A fine sort of business, wasn't it? Yet we could have probably carried on all right and accepted things as we found them, if it hadn't been for Mathews and— something else. When I went on deck I found Mathews staring down at the splotch of black fur and dried flesh that must have once been a cat.

"  'You can figure it out,' he told me in a strained voice. 'That poor little devil was running away from something and then it was killed. Think how fast it must have been, whatever it was killed it. You know how a frightened cat can run.'

"  'What makes you think it was frightened?' I asked him. But he only shook his head. Since that time I have seen a python smash flat a running dog with a blow of its snout— and that was quick work. Yet a dog isn't as agile as a cat. You see what I mean? And that python's snout only caught the dog in the small of the back. This, that was stuck to the deck, was all flattened, head, body and tail, and all about it there was a faint but perceptible depression in the hard teak planking, a sort of circle about four feet across.

"  'Then there's this gun,' said Mathews later on, coming back to the subject. He held in his hand the nickel-plated revolver we had found in the scuppers. 'Every shot fired. What at? Why?'

"I tried to talk him out of his sombre mood, but each time I did so he would only shake his head and ask further questions— until I swear he had the whole crew of us completely jumpy when we might easily have forgotten the matter, or at least relegated it to the back of our minds… Until, of course, the next thing occurred.

"This was late that same afternoon, or rather close to evening. The men had gone for'ard, all except the helmsman, of course, and Mathews and I were pacing up and down the poop waiting for the seaman we had delegated as cook, to serve supper. The day was still fair, the sea calm and smooth. We were under full sail and making about six knots before a freshening wind which was coming up with the approach of nightfall. And then, all of a sudden, there came the most terrible scream and quite distinctly some one shouted, 'My God, Collins!'

"I can't describe the electrifying effect of the thing. That scream sent all our spines cold, froze the very blood in our veins. And that voice! There was everything in it that told of utter terror. More than that, it was a strange voice— it belonged to no one of the men we had with us.

"Mathews and I had stopped pacing the poop and were riveted to the planking. 'Good heavens!' said Mathews in a strained voice at last. 'What— who was that?'

"Before I could even venture a reply there came a whole series of screams, splitting our very ear-drums. And then we heard another voice, a different voice from the first: 'It's coming aft. It's coming aft!' And if ever there was sheer, pitiful and desperate horror in any man's tones there was in these. The crew had come running up from the fo'c'stle. The cook had come out his galley and was standing open-mouthed, looking dazedly around, one hand clutching his apron and the other holding a cleaver.

"Mathews let out an oath and dropped down the poop companion to the main deck. He was badly shaken, and he ran 'midships toward the men. I was close behind him too!

"  'Who the hell's making that racket?' he shouted hysterically.

"No one answered him. The men had stopped and were looking uneasily about. Again came those awful screams, ringing all over the ship, and the strange voice thick and hoarse with utter fear: 'It's coming aft! It's coming aft!'

"Mathews stopped short and stared about him. 'My God!' he whispered to me. 'Am I going mad?' And then we both saw the men were pointing at something and after a moment the cook exclaimed in a relieved voice, 'Why, it's only the parrot, sir!'

"I can remember the vast flood of relief that came over me. I stopped shaking and let out a big sigh, and I could see that Mathews visibly relaxed. 'I'd forgotten the parrot,' he said with a queer laugh, and he walked round to the forepart of the galley where the bird's cage hung. The men gathered about too and some of them laughed, though there was nothing of mirth in the sound and not much of reassurance. Mathews looked into the cage and I peered over his shoulder. Since we had given the bird some water that morning it had apparently recovered, for now it was sitting on its swing perch— but sort of crouched down. And I tell you it acted like no parrot I have ever seen, before or since.

"Every one of its tattered remaining feathers was erect. Its eyes were fixed and staring and did not blink. It shivered the whole length of its body at regular intervals and did not move when Mathews shoved a tentative finger through the bars and spoke to it in a soothing voice. Even as we watched it the bird crouched lower, opened its beak and gave vent to one of those horrible screams. And this time it was the sound of a man in awful pain, wave on wave, abruptly cut off. There was an aching silence for a second and then the parrot croaked distinctly, with a queer tremulous catch in its voice: 'You can't shoot it! You can't shoot a thing like that!' And the voice was again strange, the third we had heard, distinct in timbre and pitch. The voices of three separate men!

"I can remember that for at least a minute there was a tense and frozen silence. I could hear my heart thumping and the cold sweat was running down my throat. Mathews had pulled his finger back from the cage as if it burned him and he was the first to speak. 'I never thought of it,' he said, his words flat and strangely without expression. 'I never thought of it, but it's simple enough… He knows what it's all about! He knows what happened. He saw!' He spoke like a man half asleep, staring wide-eyed and ashen-faced at the crouching, shivering parrot. The men began to stir uneasily and one or two of them looked hastily over their shoulders.

"I nudged Mathews in the back. 'Pull yourself together,' I whispered. 'We can't have the men getting all jumpy.'

"But you couldn't get him away. You couldn't get the men away either; they all seemed riveted to the spot, watching that poor devil of a parrot. It mumbled to itself nearly all the time. Then it would chatter out some words we could not understand— not English words. Nor did it always use the same language. Mathews had a little command of Spanish and swore the bird often talked in that tongue. I am certain I caught German words and once or twice certain phrases in Polynesian which I'd picked up while on a trading-schooner through the Islands.

"You understand that the parrot was certainly old, incredibly old, I would say. It was almost featherless; it must have had many masters in its time. You know they say those birds live for a century or longer. And God knows where this bird had been and what it had seen. The things it muttered must have come from its ancient memory of many masters of many nationalities. And between its mutters it would let out those awful screams, exquisitely different screams— the screams of different men in agony and terror. And immediately after each scream it would choke out some phrase, not always in English, as I've said, but in other languages too.

"I don't know if a bird can go insane, but if one can that parrot was very close to it. There was only one thing we could deduce from its actions. It had been frightened almost out of its life, and the screams it gave and the words it shouted had been hammered into its head by some awful happening. The words it muttered half-mechanically were from long ago; the words it shouted were of recent memorizing. It was horrifying. It seemed trying to tell us something. From behind its fixed, unwinking eyes there seemed to hover a shadow; I even felt there was an uncanny flicker of pleading. It wanted to make us understand that it had seen something no living thing had seen before, something so monstrous and ghastly it had penetrated at once and indelibly even into its own cynical and calloused brain.

"How long we all remained about that cage, silent and shuddering, I do not know. But it was the night chill coming into the wind that roused us, that and the smell of the supper burning on the galley stove. We had all insensibly crowded together, as if each man feared to stand alone. The man at the wheel began to shout, his voice frightened. He wanted to know what was the matter and he wanted to be relieved. I told one of the other men to go aft and he went, but only with the greatest reluctance, his hand on the haft of his sheath-knife and his head continually turning to glance over his shoulder or at the darkening sea. And still at irregular intervals that crazy parrot let out its blood-curdling screams and shouted blindly at us: 'It's coming aft. It's coming aft!' or that desperate, 'My God, Collins!' or that flat, despairing, 'You can't shoot it. You can't shoot a thing like that!'

"I shook Mathews finally and told him we ought to be getting back to the poop. We hadn't eaten yet, and it was getting dark. 'Eaten?' he said, literally staggering as he went aft with me. 'Eaten? How can you talk of eating?' He stumbled up on the poop and leaned against the main cabin skylight, mopping his wet forehead. 'What was it that came aft?' He whispered hard, shivered and tried to straighten himself. 'The mate of this ship, was named Collins, according to the articles we found,' he said. 'And only the Captain would be likely to call him Collins. So it was the Captain who called out, " My God, Collins!"  And what was it that came aft?'

"  'You're acting like a damned fool!' I told him bluntly, though I was all but unnerved myself. You would have been too, to hear those terrible screams ringing through the ship every minute or so, and those strange voices of vanished men repeating those terror-stricken words! But I still had enough sense to face the fact it was only a parrot talking and that we had to get the Robert Sutter into port. I got Mathews below at last and we had a stiff drink together, after which we ate some canned beef and sea biscuit, the supper that had been preparing in the galley being hopelessly ruined. We knew for certain now there had been no third boat!

"Well, that night we faced another complication, for none of the men would remain for'ard, but insisted on bringing their mattresses aft and crouching down by the break of the poop. The helmsmen refused to be left alone and we had to let two men steer through the dark hours. Neither Mathews nor myself could sleep, with those screams ringing out, and we paced the night away together. It was uncanny to be on deck. We all had the feeling that at any moment something would loom up out of the sea and come toward us.

"You'd have thought that parrot would have grown tired, or that its throat would have worn out. But it never ceased its clamour. Hour after hour there was that terrible screaming, exquisitely depicting everything that vanished crew must have suffered in that last hour or those last minutes. And between the screaming, the voices and words of dead men shouted across the noises of the flying ship! Can you wonder we all had the same terrors a child has in the dark, a darkness it peoples with dragons and burning-eyed bogies? I have always considered myself a moderately courageous man, but I tell you that on the Robert Sutter I really knew fear, the sort of utter fear that gets you by the throat and turns your stomach and knees to water.

"As for Mathews, he was half insane, and he kept going below for a drink until he finally brought the bottle on deck with him. 'We ought to kill the damned thing!' he kept saying over and over. 'We ought to kill it!' But no one would go 'midships and kill it. I would not have gone 'midships myself that night for all the money in the world. And by the time the dawn came the sheer panic of the night had subsided enough to give Mathews some element of reason, Perhaps it was the whisky he had consumed, but he certainly evidenced more control with the coming of the tropical sun all red and gold along the horizon. And still, remember, that parrot was screaming and shouting, with never a let-up! I would never have thought any creature could survive such exhaustion as must have sapped its body.

" 'No, you're right, we can't kill the damned thing,' Mathews agreed after we'd talked it over. 'It's the only clue we have. We've got to turn it over to the authorities and let them see what they can make of it.' He swore thickly to himself. 'But I'll go mad if it doesn't stop!' He plugged up his ears with some oakum, but he did not seem able to shut out the noise. He looked exhausted, drained out by the light of dawn. I think we were all drained out and I gave the men a tot of whisky apiece and made them go for'ard.

"We tried every means to make that confounded parrot shut up. We covered its cage with a cloth, which only seemed to drive it into new frenzies; and we tried lowering it in the hold on top of the cargo, but that had an even worse effect. It would not eat but occasionally would dip its beak in water. And nearly all the time, pulsing and rising and falling, the ship was wracked with screaming and the voices of those dead men. Mathews went below, half drunk and with a false bravado at last, and with his ears still stuffed up he managed to fall asleep. With the coming of full morning and the continued repetition of that parrot's noise I recovered some of my nerve.

"I drew some comfort from the fact that we were fully a hundred miles from the spot where we had picked up the Robert Sutter, and whatever it was that had made her a crewless derelict, was far away. I went 'midships, shuddering, to listen to the bird with the same morbidness that draws you to the scene of a murderer's crime, and tried to count the different remarks it kept making. There were, as I have said, only three in English but there were several in frenzied Spanish and one of the seamen who had been on German vessels assured me there were at least a dozen words shouted in that tongue. I thought I caught snatches of French too, but I was not sure. I am speaking now only of those words obviously registered on the bird's memory in that time of recent horror.

"I got hold of a copy of the ship's original articles and discovered that to judge from the names she must have carried a mixed crew all right, as most vessels do. There had been a cook named Jose Alvarez, obviously Spanish. There had been two men with Teutonic names, and one with a French-sounding name. I judged the officers had been Americans and it seemed reasonable to suppose that each man, in the moment of stress, would have reverted to his native tongue.

"The more I thought of the matter, under the comforting bright sun of day, the more I began to see the possibilities, and to grow curious. Somewhere in all that jargon the mad parrot kept giving forth there must be a clue, must be some word that would tell what it was that had come aft. It was not unreasonable to suppose that while the men were running madly about the deck some one of them must have shouted out a word, a sentence or a fragment giving a hint as to its appearance. And if that were so such a sentence or fragment might have registered on the quivering parrot's brain to be eventually spewed forth. I thought to myself: 'If once we get that damned bird to Callao alive there'll be linguists to take down everything it's shouting out. Then we might know!'

"You see, it really was intriguing, apart from all the terror and horror those wracking words and screams provided— coming, as it were, out of nothing. We were on the track of a genuine mystery. We might have in our grasp the clue that would account for those other ships that had been found as we'd found the Robert Sutter. We might even be able to understand why ships had totally disappeared, without trace. We might catch a glimpse of Something that should have died in the youth of the world. The parrot knew! Why had those men vanished? What was it that had come on them out of the calm sea, sending them into stark convulsive terror, causing one of them, undoubtedly the Captain, to empty a nickel-plated revolver at Something which someone else had declared you could not shoot? The parrot knew— and it was trying to tell us.

"Mathews came on deck soon after noon, quite drunk, his whole body shaking and his eyes burning in his face. The parrot had not fallen silent at all, and it kept up its incredible screaming and shouting all through the day. I could hear Mathews grinding his teeth together as he paced up and down, his fingers twitching, and he kept saying to himself, 'If it would only shut up until we get to port! If it would only shut up!' But it didn't shut up and I began to find myself twitching and grinding my teeth too. I knew that Mathews would never stand the strain. Nor could he… About three bells in the first dog-watch he stopped pacing and gave a terrific oath. 'I can't stand this!' he jerked out suddenly— and he took a running jump down the poop companion to the main deck and raced 'midships. 'It's coming aft. It's coming aft!' screamed the parrot and then I saw Mathews rip one of the fire-axes from its metal holder on the bulkhead of the galley house. He disappeared round the house and there came the furious sound of metal on metal. The screaming rose continuously: 'It's coming aft! It's coming aft!— and then sudden new words, words in English we had not heard before, thick, choking, horribly sickening and despairing, 'Collins! Collins! It's got me!' What else there was, was drowned out by the high-pitched hysterical swearing of Mathews and the vicious noise of the swung axe. And then there was silence— sudden, almost ominous— and Mathews staggered back into view, rocking as if hardly able to keep his feet, and backing right to the rail against which he leaned, breathing hard, the fire-axe limp in one shaking hand. 'Throw the damned thing overboard!' he said viciously and I saw one of the men go reluctantly forward, very slowly, to drag to the side a mangled iron cage in which, bloody and limp, was what was left of the parrot.

"We all watched in utter silence as the cage curved up in the air and fell into the sea. And it seemed as if with the splash there was something oppressive lifted from the ship. She seemed to pick up, grow more buoyant.

"Probably I was the only one on board the Robert Sutter who had even a faint tinge of regret, and that mine was perhaps morbid I must admit. But I could not help reflecting that we might have found some clue, a clue to the mysteries of the sea, if we could only have brought that parrot into Callao and before men who knew languages. But there you are. The bird was gone— and we took that barkentine into port without further mishap.

"I remember I told the story to the consul there, told him what I had wondered and hoped, and he laughed at me for a fool. Mathews did not even mention the matter. He was, I fancy, rather ashamed of it. He wanted to forget it. And so whatever it was that befell the Robert Sutter remains unknown to this day. I cannot even guess. I have given up trying to guess… Nobody knows. But that parrot knew, and there are times when I wake up at night, in a cold sweat, and can hear its clamour, and see its crouching, palpitating body, and feel ringing in my ears those wild, mad words of men who had been dead for days, screaming while It came aft— and trying to shoot Something which could not be shot!"

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Index to Past Masters Nos 61-86

The "Author Index" to Issues 1-60 has been uploaded separately at MobileRead

Achmed Abdullah

Grafter and Master Grafter 84

The Fetish of Remorse 83

Framed at the Benefactors' Club 73

Interlude 84

The Mystery of the Talking Idols 63

Cleve F. Adams

Default With Doom  81

George Ade

Making the Grade 78

"A. E. P."

The End of Sherlock Holmes  67

W. L. Alden

After the Comet 67

A Case of Dual Consciousness 84

Foote's Catorium 70

How the Fat Woman Eloped 68

The St. Bernard Myth 68

A Scientific Balloon 72

Silver Plated   67

The Wild Man of Borneo 67

A Tricycle Made For Two 82

Mark Allerton

A Christmas Mix-Up 70

The Stanhope Scandal 70

Harley S. Aldinger

The Green Intelligence 85

Frederick Irving Anderson

The Signed Masterpiece  82

Anonymous

Armistice  78

A Barrack Ghost Story 76

Beauty in Flight 76

A Chance Meeting 84

Chinese Murder  80

A Detective Adventure  80

The Diamond Necklace 62

The Great Auk's Egg Affair 61

Fool Proof  75

The Hachma Ruby 86

The Hat Trick 71

Haunted  78

Jacobs and Gale, Tobacconists 70

John Sherlock's Alibi 86

Local Color 75

An Old Norman-French Story 76

The Petrie Plan 83

A Railway Murder 70

Remorse 76

Retribution 74

Revenge 74

Rogue's Room 86

The Ruins of the Abbey of Fitz-Martin 64

The Skipper's Scheme 73

A Solicitor's Story (as by "S.S.")  75

The Stamp Thief 71

The Thriller 71

The Two Chignons 85

F. Anstey

Taken By Surprise  66

Alice and Claude Askew

Heritage of Lucille Rivers 82

Francis Henry Atkins

The Lay Figure  63

Edouard A. Aujard

The Flood 75

The Swing of Sentiment  75

Laola of the Isles 85

Stacy Aumonier

A Source of Irritation 73

Straight Griggs 78

F. Britten Austin

Into the Blue 79

Irving Bacheller

Holy Poker 71

The Prodigal Village 71

Mrs. Baillie-Saunders

The Wrong Reception  83

James Barr

The Man in Moccasins  82

Robert Barr

The Last Straw 72

J. M. Barrie

The Adventure of the Two Collaborators 75

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

The Lie-Detector 73

L. Adams Beck

The Interpreter (novelette) 62

H. Bedford-Jones

The Artificial Honeymoon 66

Bradford's P-Luck 83

Breakfast at the Savoy 79

The Coral of Idris 83

Death Gave Him His Chance  63

Not Upon the Sleeve  79

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

J. D. Beresford

The Hidden Beast 75

Harold Bindloss

Trooper Jenkins 68

Ottwell Binns

The Britisher 73

Dixon's Romance 75

George A. Birmingham

Jimmy Cassidy's Picture  80

The Spy 81

Algernon Blackwood

The Kit-Bag 76

M. McDonnell Bodkin

The Will and the Man 79

Edward Boltwood

Foghorn Fernando 86

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

The Corner of John Street 80

Her Ransom 80

The Ghost of the Cabinet 80

Lady Langton's Jewels 80

A Literary Secret  66

Scarsley Moor Mystery  66

Coutts Brisbane

Without Fear 76

George Bronson-Howard

The Prophetic War Correspondent 79

K. R. G. Browne

On the 6.15  80

The Green-eyed Remedy  82

Two Women in the Case   80

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

The Inexorable Tooth 79

Just Like a Cat 71

Mr. Wellaway's Host 77

The Ninety And Nine  69

Something for the Kid 77

Blackmail Broadcast, Unlimited  80

Thomas Byrne

Prima Donna's Diamonds  80

Sir Gilbert Campbell

The Mystery of the Essex Stairs 62

Scott Campbell

In the Powder-Box 80

The Man and the Motive 83

The Point of Contact 70

The Price of Perfidy 78

A Study in Green 73

Under the Crown 70

Without Air 73

Reginald Campbell

The Howling Of Dogs 80

Agnes and Egerton Castle

The Great Todescan's Secret Thrust 70

Stephen Chalmers

The Great God Ananzi  86

Robert W. Chambers

The Princess Zimbazim 79

Mark Channing

Intrigue 74

Anna Alice Chapin

Through the Dragon's Valley  63

The Scales of Time 63

G.K. Chesterton

The Sword of Wood 65

Peter Cheyney

Christmas With a Punch 75

Cocktail For Cupid 65

Dance Without Music  64

Mayfair Melody 86

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

Anne Crawford

A Mystery of the Campagna  85

Captain Henry Curties

Redeeming Flames 79

Norbert Davis

You Bet Your Life 77

E. M. Delafield

The Luggage in the Hall  66

Donald Devereux

Mr. Keeble's Funny Story 83

Charles Caldwell Dobie

The Open Window 71

Douglas M Dold

A Creeping Terror 84

Laurence Donovan

Death Makes a Man Mad 84

He Gave Him a Gun 84

Whispering Death 84

Sir Geo. Douglas, Bart.

Unconscious Interloper 69

L C Douthwaite

The London Guillotine 66

Prospector 75

Richard Dowling

The Going Out of Alessandro Pozzone 62

The Pass of Nolan's Welcome 81

J. Allan Dunn

The Screaming Skull 85

Edward Dyson

A Golden Shanty 65

The Third Chair 65

Charlton L. Edholm

Gorilla Girl 84

Red Evidence 84

Fred Engelhardt

Heritage of Osiris 75

George Allan England

Drops of Death  68

A Question of Salvage 81

Ribbon of Fate 81

Charles J. Finger

The Lizard God 81

The Shame of Gold 81

Howard Fitzalan

The Red Hand 78

F. Scott Fitzgerald

Three Hours Between Planes 65

Francis Flagg

By the Hands of the Dead 81

The Master Ants 81

The Superman of Dr Jukes  72

Mrs. May Agnes Fleming

How The Lone Star Went Down  68

J. S. Fletcher

Ex-Officio 76

Homer Eon Flint

The Planeteer  77

Hulbert Footner

Assorted Chips 86

Ford Madox Ford

Riesenberg 61

Andrew Forrester Jr.

Arrested on Suspicion 61

Robert Edward Francillon

A Circumstantial Puzzle 62

Ralph Franklin

Reward in Hell 86

R. Austin Freeman & Clifford Piers

By the Black Deep  64

Ltnt Edgar Gardiner

The Cruise of the Vega  82

The Snake Strikes 81

Up Irrawaddy Way 74

Arthur Gask

Rejuvenation 66

Strychnine for Village Dogs 62

Theophile Gautier

The Mummy's Foot 62

George Gilbert

In Maulmain Fever-Ward  63

Lady Gilbert

Aurora's Treasure  75

J. U. Giesy

Not Down on the Bill  82

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

F. A. J. Godfrey

Not Proven 76

Dahlia Graham

Her Fatal Gift 79

Gordon Graham

The Great George Mystery 85

Frederick Graves

White Flame  62

Evelyn Everett Green

The First Class Passenger 82

The Grey Lady of Lakeside 82

Intimate Enemies 82

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

Fame For Mr. Beatty 75

Uncle Ned's Teeth 76

Julian Hawthorne

Calbot's Rival 67

Nathaniel Hawthorne

The Great Stone Face 66

Miles Henslow

Mystery Flight 75

Kenneth Herford

An Echo of the Quarter 73

Smiley's Scoop 73

Beatrice Heron-Maxwell

The Act of God 74

The Outcast 65

Robert Hichens

The Nomad 85

Headon Hill

The "Artemis" Mystery 65

The Bank Clerk's Love Story 65

The Dining-Car Clue 65

Limping Justice 65

Roy L. Hinds

The Murder Master 80

Roy W. Hinds

What He Taught Best  80

S. B. H. Hurst

The Ball of Fire  74

The Receipt 74

Washington Irving

The Adventure of the German Student 86

W. W. Jacobs

Captain Rogers 71

A Love Knot 70

M. R. James

Canon Alberic's Scrap Book  82

Malcolm Jameson

The Anarch  69

Doubled and Redoubled 85

Tricky Tonnage 81

Val Jameson

"Burglin' ain't the game it was" 61

Edgar Jepson

The Infernal Machine 79

Madderson's Mascot 79

A Troublesome Widow 79

Jerome K. Jerome

The Dancing Partner 74

Rudyard Kipling

The Phantom Rickshaw 73

A. W. Kapfer

The Phantom Drug 82

Robert Keene

The Dangerous Day 86

A Hand-Bag Too Many 86

The Vanishing of Benjamin Vex 86

Otis Adelbert Kline

The Dragoman's Secret 74

Stolen Centuries 65

Thomas H. Knight

The Man Who Was Dead 61

Alexander Kuprin

Menagerie 83

Edmund Leamy

My First Case 74

R. C. Lehmann

The Umbrosa Burglary 67

H. Field Leslie

The Winged Ones 86

Henry Leverage

The Absconder 83

Black Light 66

The Crimp 66

Crooked Charity 67

Over the Wall   76

$-Rays 84

Lazar Levi

Mistress of the Undead

Sinclair Lewis

The Cat of the Stars 68

Seven Million Dollars 68

The Willow Walk 61

Sumner Locke

A Question of Rights 82

H.P. Lovecraft

The Colour out of Space 81

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

Fred MacIsaac

The Abominable Test 76

Julia Magruder

The Secret of the White Castle 65

William J. Makin

The Death Barge 73

The Planes that Never Returned 73

Charles J. Mansford

The Brigand of Kairouin the Holy  82

The City of the Scarlet Scarabeus  82

Francis Marlowe

Hostile Witness 83

Don Marquis

Accursed Hat! 70

Richard Marsh

A Silent Witness  77

Huan Mee

The Russian Cipher 65

J. J. Meehan

The Squirrel Motor 69

Abraham Merritt

The Woman of the Wood 72

Robert Duncan Milne

Ten Thousand Years in Ice 85

William Henry Moberley

The Great Valdez Sapphire 63

C. S. Montanye

Old King's Coal   72

One Hour Back 85

That Finished Product 85

Thieves Three 84

To Skid or Not to Skid 85

White as Snow 85

F. Frankfort Moore

Joan Dark 65

Ainsworth Morgan

Lady in Lower 11   72

Ward Muir

Detective Tempest Faces the Music  80

Talbot Mundy

Bengal Rebellion 69

Edith M Nesbit

In the Dark 64

Man-Size in Marble  65

Number 17    61

Clarence Herbert New

The Passing of an Angel 79

The Warburton Mystery 82

Where There Ain't No Ten Commandments ("Culpeper Zandtt")  79

Douglas Newton

Straight Enough 73

David Wright O'Brien

Hokum Hotel  68

Fitz-James O'Brien

The Wondersmith  64

Owen Oliver

The Awakening  74

A Feminine Stand 81

Vincent O'Sullivan

The Business of Madame Jahn  64

Thomas Nelson Page

What was the Lady's Choice? 62

Miles  Overholt

Wrong Number 75

Sir Gilbert Parker

At the Sign of the Eagle  70

K. R. Patterson

Conscience 83

Max Pemberton

The Devil To Pay 63

The Dumb Avenger 75

G. G. Pendarves

The Black Camel  65

The Sin-Eater 74

The Withered Heart  74

Hugh Pendexter

Lyacus Whittle— Globetrotter 70

Ernest M Poate

A Person from the Police 63

The Cotton Stopper 79

Doctor Grimes Awaits Probate (as by Arthur Mallory)  73

Expert Testimony 74

Inside the Limousine 78

To Professional Services— $100,000   70

Muriel A. Pollexfen

The Conjurer of the Clouds 83

Melville Davisson Post

The Laughing Woman 79

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

A. T. Quiller-Couch

Our Lady of Gwithian 83

Allan Ramsay

The Adventure of the Table Foot 86

Anna Steese Richardson

Morrell's Memoriser 81

Edith Rickert

The Chair That Smiled 74

W. Pett Ridge

The Fixing of Mrs. Farwell  80

Expert Interference  82

Walter Ripperger

The Cardboard Clue 62

School For Murder 69

Morley Roberts

The Egregious Goat 73

Arthur Somers Roche

A Cancelled Sale 82

In the Money (novelette) 67

Michael Romain

Genesis   76

David C. Roose

Dobson's Plots 86

Anthony M Rud

The Invisible "Blinker" 73

Rafael Sabatini

Intelligence 84

G. Morris Sand

Carnival Killer 84

Duncan Campbell Scott

The Witching of Elspie 78

Chris Sewell

The Intruder 82

J. Johnston Smith

Queen Of Diamonds  75

Thorne Smith

Birthday Present 66

Raymond S. Spears

The Cruise of the Cadis  84

Andrew Soutar

Bluebeard 63

D. H. Souter

Conroy 74

F. St. Mars

Another Pawn of Fate 84

Charles B. Stilson

Dr. Martone's Microscope 72

The Pipe of Death 85

The Sky Woman 67

The Soul Trap 72

Halliwell Sutcliffe

Handsome Jack  67

Miss Phyllis Brown 67

Murgatroyd's Wife  67

Georges Surdez

Charles the Bold 76

Spite Corner 76

Annie S. Swan

Concession 85

Dead Men's Shoes 86

The Diplomat 86

The Mystery of the Old Tin Box 86

Carl N. Taylor

The Opium Smugglers  80

Emile C Tepperman

Coffin Cache 63

Basil Thomson

The Burglary in Middlesex Street 86

E. Temple Thurston

A Cameo 69

Roger Torrey

Black Murder 78

Dice and No Dice 77

The Frankie and  Johnny Murder 83

Justice Borrows Bullets 85

The Missing Mr. Link 83

Murder Backstage 83

Murder By Accident 77

One Escort— Missing or Dead 85

Three Dead Men 83

Ticket to Death (as by John Ryan)  77

Two Little Men 84

Edward W Townsend

A Deal in Mines and Morals 77

H. D. Umbstaetter (as by Barnes MacGreggor)

The Great Star Ruby  80

E Charles Vivian

How the Girl Came to Bentley's 62

Cyril G. Wates

The Visitation 76

Edgar Wallace

The New Doctor  76

R. A. J. Walling

A Chat With William Le Queux 68

Mrs. Rooth's "Murder" 61

The Spook of Cornelius 61

Hugh Walpole

The Tarn 86

The Twisted Inn  86

"Wanderer"

Waif of the Bush 74

Harold Ward

"Great Minds Run—"

Stanley G Weinbaum

The Red Peri  69

Albert Richard Wetjen

The Chief of the Loch McCree 61

The Devils Ransom 82

Raid on Jigger's Reef 76

The Ship of Silence 86

Harvey Wickham

The Man With the Painted Nose 75

Ethel Lina White

An Unlocked Window  78

Fred Merrick White

Early Closing Day  64

Gentlemen of the Jury  65

The Missing Blade 75

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

Bothon 78

The Chadbourne Episode 75

The Door 71

Passing of a God 75

The People of Pan 77

Sea-Tiger  78

The Shut Room 75

Sweet Grass 76

The Wonderful Thing  70

Raoul Whitfield

The Great Black 65

The Next-to-Last Laugh 79

When Sky Crooks Fall Out 84

H. C. Witwer

Money to Burns 71

Mary E Wilkins

The Shadows on the Wall  64

Edward Woodward

Clarence 75

May Wynne

Cornflower Blue 86

Leroy Yerxa

O'Sheen's Photo Finish 85

O'Sheen's Sweet Tooth 85

Arthur Leo Zagat

Coward's Kill (novelette)  69

The Little Walking Corpses 86

E. F. Ziska

Man of Ages 78

Table of Contents

- 1: The Twisted Inn / Hugh Walpole
- 2: The Diplomat / Annie S. Swan
- 3: Dobson's Plots / David C. Roose
- 4: Foghorn Fernando / Edward Boltwood
- 5: John Sherlock's Alibi / Anonymous
- 6: The Hachma Ruby / Anonymous

- 7: The Adventure of the German Student / Washington Irving

- 8: Rogue's Room / Anonymous

- 9: The Adventure of the Table Foot / Allan Ramsay

- 10: The Winged Ones / H. Field Leslie

- 11: The Burglary in Middlesex Street / Basil Thomson

- 12: Reward in Hell / Ralph Franklin

- 13: The Great God Ananzi / Stephen Chalmers

- 14: The Vanishing of Benjamin Vex / Robert Keene

- 15: A Hand-Bag Too Many / Robert Keene
- 16: The Dangerous Day / Robert Keene
- 17: Cornflower Blue / May Wynne
- 18: Assorted Chips / Hulbert Footner
- 19: The Tarn / Hugh Walpole
- 20: Mayfair Melody / Peter Cheyney

- 21: The Mystery of the Old Tin Box / Annie S. Swan

- 22: Dead Men's Shoes / Annie S. Swan

- 23: The Little Walking Corpses / Arthur Leo Zagat

- 24: The Ship of Silence / ‌Albert Richard Wetjen

- Cumulative Index # 61-86