Murder of the Circus Queen
Author: Anthony Abbott
Date: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00
Description: Anthony Abbott, 1893-1952 Anthony Abbott was the pen-name of Fulton Oursler, who also wrote non-fiction under his real name, reserving Abbott for his crime fiction. His output of crime fiction was small, about a dozen novels featuring Thatcher Colt of the NYPD. High-flying trapeze queen is murdered while performing in Madison Square Garden.

About the

MURDER OF THE

CIRCUS QUEEN

Anthony Abbot

1932

Contents

Chapter 1 | Chapter 2

Chapter 3 | Chapter 4

Chapter 5 | Chapter 6

Chapter 7 | Chapter 8

Chapter 9 | Chapter 10

Chapter 11 | Chapter 12

Chapter 13 | Chapter 14

Chapter 15 | Chapter 16

Chapter 17 | Chapter 18

Epilogue

____________

Chapter 1

IT was Friday, the thirteenth.

Against the windows in the private office of the Police Commissioner an

April rain pattered rest-lessly. The spring down-pour filled with premature dusk the dark-panelled room in Suite 200, at the north end of the second floor of the old Headquarters Building in Centre Street. On Thatcher Colt's desk a greenshaded lamp spilled a circle of white light. Bent forward in a hunched posture of concentration was the Commissioner, shuffling proof sheets of his annual report to the Mayor.

It was about 3.30 o'clock when a knock sounded at the door and Captain— now Inspector— Israel Henry, the officer in charge of the Commissioner's suite, handed me a card, heavily embossed in gilded script, which read:

"Colonel Tod Robinson, Owner and Manager, Robinson Brothers' and Dawson and Woodruff's Combined Greatest Shows on Earth."

When I laid the flamboyant card before Thatcher Colt his sombre dark eyes sparkled with pleasure.

"Tod Robinson!" he exclaimed. "His show opens at the Garden tonight! Send him right in!"

With a gusty chuckle the Commissioner shoved aside his proof sheets. I knew, of course, that Colt loved the circus. Except for the Patrolmen's Benevolent Association, his favorite fraternity is the Circus Fans. Whenever possible he attends the New York Chapter's monthly luncheon, served at the Hotel Roosevelt in a private diningroom fitted up like a tent, with posters, mementoes, and curios of sawdust celebrities, grass mats on the floor and table linen of red and white check, reminiscent of the cook-tent.

The Commissioner was smiling jovially as through the door from the octagonal reception room came the famous showman. Tall, bronzed, and silver-haired, Colonel Tod Robinson looked the tan-bark veteran, accustomed to floods and fires, mud and mires, panics, blow-downs, the deaths of costly animals, and all manner of familiar catastrophes, commonly called "acts of God." The Colonel was the type of circus owner who could do everything "on the show," from training the elephants to repairing the portable electric lighting plant. Grinning expansively. Robinson shook hands with Colt, sat on the edge of the desk, bit a chunk from a cake of tobacco, and announced:

"Chief, I'm in hot water. And I've come to you to help me out."

Colt was pouring a palmful of special mixture into the bowl of his Algerian briar.

"Glad to help you, Colonel, if I can."

"Would you listen to a quick story?"

"The floor is all yours."

Colonel Robinson began by explaining how he had obtained his engagement at Madison Square Garden. That year the Ringline Brothers and Barnum and Bailey troups, toured Europe. In the big show's absence Colonel Robinson, last of the large independents, saw his golden opportunity. He purchased and trained new animals, built gorgeous gilded waggons, bought new uniforms and costumes, and engaged expensive acts.

"But then, Mr. Colt," the circus man continued, "a lot of funny things began to happen to me."

"Funny things?"

"I mean that some mighty queer monkey business is going on in my little horse opera," Robinson amended. "It is more than any jinx, Mr. Colt— in my opinion, it's become a matter for the police. I'll admit that at first I took it just as a run of tough luck. Before we even started we had three accidents down South― three men killed— and it kept up. No sooner did we pull out from our winter headquarters in Georgia than other things began to happen. Near Richmond we had a train wreck, knocked two display floats into toothpicks, and set fire to a gondola loaded with bleachers and grandstand seats. Next, sickness broke out along the elephant line; a peculiar malady attacked all but three of the bulls. And then on the five-hour trip from Washington to New York our prize lion, 'Spitfire,' died of indigestion. As if that wasn't enough, at the Pennsylvania Railroad Terminal the trained clown mule, a valuable attraction too, broke its leg while being led out of its stall, and had to be shot. And let me tell you, all these accidents mean heavy losses to us."

Colt looked only mildly impressed.

"You surely don't attribute those misfortunes to any malicious persecution, do you?" he challenged.

Colonel Tod Robinson ran a gnarled hand through tousled silver locks, and a gleam of torment flickered in his eyes.

"I haven't told you everything," he evaded. "Wait till you hear what's happened since. My star performers have been receiving threatening letters through the mail!"

"Threatening what?"

"They were served notice not to exhibit their best tricks during the New York engagement— under penalty of death!"

The frown cleared from the fine features of Thatcher Colt. Settling back in his chair, serene and relaxed, he murmured:

"And I suppose you are advising the newspapers that in spite of these thrilling death threats your star performers are positively going to appear, rain or shine—"

"Oh, don't be sarcastic about it, Chief— this is no press agent's frame-up—"

"What are the names of the performers who were threatened?" Colt interrupted.

Robinson quickly recited a list, which I jotted down:

"Flandrin, the young trapeze artist, and his wife, LaTour—"

"Is that the great Josie LaTour?"

"You bet! Speaking impartially, she's the greatest performer in the ring— and she's paid the biggest'salary in the history of the business."

"Who else?"

"Signor Sebastian, called the 'King of the Air'— and, speaking impartially, Sebastian is all of that, too— and Murillo, one of the wire dancers. I think that's all."

The big showman straightened up, hesitated, and added, with a trace of diffidence:

"There's another nasty side to it, too. You see, tonight is Friday, the thirteenth— so none of my people want to open. I don't either, but I've got to. My financial backer— probably you know him, Marburg Lovell, the millionaire?— well, he's sore about our delayed opening. Our overhead runs about fifteen thousand dollars a day, we've had big losses, and he is getting very discouraged, threatening to sell out his interest for a song. So I've got to open tonight no matter what date it is. Of course," he added, a note of defensive pride creeping into his voice, "our show would be a big money maker. We always do good business— if it wasn't for those damn funny accidents."

The showman snorted into a silk handkerchief and then grinned good naturedly.

"Our business is always full of hell," he conceded. "Much worse than any of this, most of the time. Just the same, Chief— three sudden deaths! I still say it doesn't all seem natural— not with those threatening letters. I don't know why I stay in it anyhow— I had some money left me not long ago: I could retire if I felt like it. Here I have kicked all the mobsters and shortchangers out of my outfit. It's a strictly family attraction now. And what does my honesty get me? Only more grief! The old-timers will tell you the grifters keep the bad luck away. Speaking impartially, maybe there's something in this old-time bunk after all."

Colt stood up, smiling politely.

"I shall tell one of our men to look into the matter."

"But, Chief— I was hoping that you would sort of go into it yourself—"

Before Colt could decline Robinson's earnest appeal the door opened and Captain Henry's face looked in at us.

"I'm sorry, Mr. Commissioner," he apologised, "but they've had an accident up at the Garden— Colonel Robinson is wanted on the telephone."

There was a moment of apprehensive silence. "

"Connect the call in here," directed Thatcher Colt, as the circus man grabbed the receiver and listened. We heard a strident voice breaking bad news in broken, explosive sentences. It was with a heavy hand that Colonel Robinson hung up the receiver: all good nature was gone from his face.

"My boss mechanic went up on some high wire rigging, toppled off a platform— and was killed."

And after a moment's pause, he added mournfully: "I guess I ought to be getting right up there."

Colt was emptying the ashes from his pipe; his eyes were narrowed an¿ serious.

"I will take personal charge of the investigation as you have requested," he decided. "Meet me in the lobby of the Garden at seven tonight. Take us back to meet the people who got those threatening notes."

"Much obliged, chief!" murmured Colonel Robinson and, shaking hands limply, departed like a man in a daze.

"ROBINSON'S case is by no means unique," remarked Colt when we were left alone.

"You take those death notes seriously, then?" I exclaimed. "In spite of what he said, I thought they were only the publicity man's ballyhoo."

Risen from the desk, Thatcher Colt was reaching for top hat, gloves, and stick.

"I take those death notes very seriously," he admitted. "Generally, in such cases, we eventually find that one of the persons who received the notes actually wrote them all."

"But if one intends to kill, why write warnings?"

"The vanity of the criminals. Such uncontrollable Impulses have been the undoing of more than one clever killer who could not resist the temptation to show off. That is why I have hopes of being able to find the writer of those notes tonight."

"By comparing handwriting?"

"Not at all. I have come to the conclusion that victims of murderous delusions almost invariably betray themselves to the acute observer of human behaviour. Hence I wish to observe all the people who received threatening notes and out of the lot try to pick the guilty one, and prove it."

"All before the show opens? You will find you have a real job on your hands," I predicted.

"And a challenge to any detective's skill," added Colt, his worried face partly clearing. "If this theoretical, undiscovered killer actually exists and is not caught in time, he will certainly commit another crime.... Did you have a previous engagement for tonight?"

"Only with Betty!"

"Bring your wife along, by all means. It's been ages since I saw her. Let's try to combine pleasure with business."

It was now 4.15 o'clock and in fifteen minutes the Commissioner was due to attend special exercises at City Hall, where the Mayor was to bestow medals of honour in recognition of the heroism of twenty policemen, nine of whom had been killed in the performance of their duty; their widows and mothers would receive the decorations.

"Ask District Attorney Dougherty to join us in our box," suggested the Commissioner, lifting a gardenia from the Persian tear bottle on his desk. Carefully he fixed the white bloom in his lapel.

"Get Inspector Flynn," he instructed. "Tell him to check up on all those accidents Colonel Robinson told us about. Tell him to see what the railroad authorities have learned about that wreck near Washington— and the accident to the clown mule. Tell him also to get whatever we have in the files about Mr. Marburg Lovell, who has been so hard hit financially by all these accidents. Of course, Flynn will need two or three good men to check on the death of this mechanic in the Garden. And if he can get any information on any of the circus people, so much the better. Incidentally, prepare Betty to go home unescorted. And be sure you have your revolver handy."

The door closed behind the Police Commissioner.

Chapter 2

A FEW minutes before seven o'clock that April evening, Betty and I reached the noisy lobby of the Madison Square Garden. The doors were just opening. Lines of men and women plodded toward the several ticket offices and the night resounded with the cries of the barkers, candy butchers, and popcorn men. To protect the public, Police Commissioner Thatcher Colt had assigned a special squad of policemen to the grand foyer, as well as to the six other public, and the five private entrances. But these uniformed men were little more than traffic supervisors for the bright-faced crowds shuffling across the terazzo floors. The real police work would fall to a detail of plainclothes men, selected from eighteen hundred operatives of many scattered detective districts and technical squads. As the crowds swept through the turnstiles, these swift-glancing hawks of the law would eye face after face, their memories racing through the Rogues' Gallery.

In the midst of the early swarm of spectators, I soon discovered the portly figure of District Attorney Merle K. Dougherty. Holding by each hand a small and almost toothless boy, the relentless prosecutor of our criminal courts stood enrapt before a highly coloured three-sheet circus poster. The District Attorney was a huge and fleshy man with curly red hair and prognathous jaw; a vital and magnetic firebrand. At my tap on his shoulder, he turned with unwieldy agility, the joy of circus time a-glisten in his bulging blue eyes.

"Hello, you two honeymooners!" he boomed. "Betty, you are getting prettier every day. Meet my nephews, aged nine and ten— Al and Jimmy."

"Has Thatcher Colt heard any rumours about this outfit?" went on Dougherty. "Hogan, my county detective, told me they had a very suspicious accident this afternoon—"

HE fell silent as we were joined by Colonel Tod Robinson. On his own grounds, the circus owner seemed a more impressive person than our afternoon caller at Headquarters. Wearing faultless evening raiment, but still chewing tobacco, Colonel Robinson carried himself like the ruler of a private domain. But he looked deeply worried. I introduced him and asked, with a casual air, if all went well behind the scenes.

"Our show starts at eight o'clock, no matter what happens," was the enigmatic reply as Robinson chewed off the corner of his cake of tobacco. "Meanwhile our troubles multiply. I just left a beautiful argument, on my way out here— a ruckus with these infernal Ubangis— I hope it doesn't spoil our show tonight."

"The Ubangis?" echoed Betty, puzzled.

"The big-lipped ladies," I reminded my wife.

"Those horrible-looking African savages with huge wooden rings grown in their mouths?"

"Exactly— the dark, platter-lipped lassies!" grinned Colonel Robinson, affably. "This is their second season with us. They've picked up a little English and can talk to American negroes, and so now they're beginning to get ideas. But— speaking impartially— tonight they went too far, Of course, you've heard of Josie LaTour— she gets the biggest salary in the history of the business— well, when she showed up to-night LaTour found two Ubangi women in her dressing-room. They wouldn't tell how they got in nor what they wanted."

"Thieving?" suggested Dougherty.

"I suppose so. Anyway, LaTour lost her temper. She's always doing that— just a human tiger cat, anyhow. She grabs a khoubash— a whip made of rhinoceros hide— and lets the two Ubangi women have it."

A frown deepened above Colonel Robinson's troubled eyes.

"You can't whip people in the United States of America," he remarked plaintively. "Not even African savages. And the Ubangi savages have found that out. They are all sore at LaTour and right now they are having a council meeting in their dressing-room. I don't know what is going to happen!"

The Colonel hesitated a moment, and then added:

"I'll admit these Ubangis give me the creeps sometimes. They know more about vegetable poisons than all the college professors put together. In the bush, you know, they are considered great magicians. They can kill their enemies at a distance by the right spells."

As Colonel Robinson made this incredible statement, we were suddenly joined by Thatcher Colt. Out of the crowd the Commissioner appeared, precisely at seven o'clock, top-hatted and wearing the inevitable gardenia.

After an exchange of greetings, Colt drew Colonel Robinson aside and confided:

"I have a partial report on the death of your boss mechanic. At exactly three o'clock this afternoon he was standing on a perfectly rigid platform used during the show by an acrobat called Flandrin, and there is no evidence to show how he fell, unless he had an attack of vertigo. The autopsy is not yet complete."

"He never had vertigo before," asserted Colonel Robinson flatly.

"Well, if someone caused his death deliberately, how could it have been done?" demanded Thatcher Colt. "True, a number of acts were rehearsing at the time as well as the orchestra— but we have checked on everyone in the arena at the time— no one was near him. And of course, it was rather dark in the Garden at the time; very few lights were on."

"Just another peculiar accident!" muttered Colonel Robinson, with a disbelieving roll of his eyes. "But this circus is jinxed and let me tell you it's getting on my people's nerves. Murillo, the wire-dancer— you remember, he had one of those threatening letters— Murillo has quit cold. Jumped his contract, walked out on me an hour ago. And there may be others doing the same thing before we start the show."

"Didn't you tell me that the acrobat, Flandrin, also received one of those notes?"

"Yes, Flandrin got one!"

"And it was from Flandrin's platform the mechanic fell!"

"Why, yes!"

"Was Flandrin in the Garden at the time?"

"No— he has just landed from a steamer— returning from abroad."

"But Murillo has disappeared?"

"Well, I know where he is. Murillo merely quit. On the other hand-"

But Thatcher Colt, interrupting, reminded Robinson that we were to be taken on a tour behind the scenes. Without more delay, we followed the Colonel through the gates and then down a flight of concrete steps at the exhibition hall under the arena of Madison Square Garden. Here were the animal cages of Robinson's portable menageries, and the gaudy banner-line of the side-show. Crowds of groundlings were already gaping at the wild beasts and human freaks.

BETTY turned to me with a wise smile, full of wifely acumen.

"If Mr. Dougherty doesn't mind," she proposed, "I shall take charge of his nephews— show them everything to be seen down here and then take them to our box. You men can join us there!"

Down the aisle of the menagerie, she led the two miniature Doughertys. In a few words, for Dougherty's benefit. Colt condensed the story that had brought us together.

"But, of course, they are all nothing but coincidences," Dougherty promptly declaimed.

Colt paused in lighting a cigarette.

"You can't dismiss those coincidences with a wave of the hand," he objected. "Four men in this show have died. There is sound reason for the Colonel to believe someone is trying to ruin him. It may well be sheer accident but on the other hand we may be dealing with the most dangerous kind of enemy— a madman with a fixed idea for revenge, yet cunning enough to deceive anybody into believing he is perfectly sane. Perhaps we had better be starting."

"This way-past the cages of the carnivora," invited Colonel Robinson, taking on his hat in his best arena manner. "Someday I am going to have the greatest circus in the world— the one show that nobody will ever top. That is the only ambition I have in the world. And if I don't lose my backer, I'll bust the whole trust before I get through."

On the subject of the show, Colonel Robinson was positively lyrical.

The big circus cats, he explained garrulously, unless "born on the show" were captured in the jungle regions with traps and pits covered with jungle foliage and baited with young goats. But a new method o:fcapturing some wild beasts alive had beet devised, by the use of asphyxiating bullets When the creatures wake up, they are prisoners but unharmed. In his enthusiasm Colonel Robinson seemed quite to forget our curious errand. Colt had to urge on our journey.

"Why don't we get right back stage?' grumbled Dougherty, falling into step with me.

"I heard the Commissioner say he wanted to look around here first," I explained.

"What for?"

I SHOOK my head. I did not know. We had stopped in front of the Congress of Freaks and Wonders. At a chin level with the platform, we stood in front of the Ubangis, the principal attraction of the side-show. Nine of the savages stood on the platform ; five women and four men. It was my first sight of these fantastic people, lured to New York from an Isolated triangle of land in French Equatorial Africa. The great wooden rings in the women's mouths were intended to make their faces hideous, thus discouraging women stealers from other stronger tribes. Duck-billed and disc-lipped, the Ubangi women were called, and deservedly: they were like bloated monstrosities from some old book on demonology.

"These people are of the Mazzi tribe, from along the Shari River, south of Lake Chad," lectured Robinson, with a great show of knowledge.

"What language do they speak?" asked Thatcher Colt.

"Their own tribal dialect, of course— and a kind of pidgin French."

"Do none of them speak English?"

"Only Keblia— their witch doctor."

"Can he write English?"

"Beautifully. Keblia was educated In England."

"And where is Keblia now?"

"I don't know. He should be on the platform, but he seems to have disappeared."

I was relieved when we moved away, turning our back on these duck-billed negresses aux plateaux.

I had fallen a little behind. For some inexplicable reason, I had begun to feel nervous and jumpy. Although we were surrounded by jabbering crowds, moving in every direction, I had the uneasy impression that someone or something was following close upon our heels.

It seemed a silly suspicion and yet I could not resist turning and glancing over my shoulder. Then I stopped in my tracks. Not ten feet behind, a face was staring after us with a concentrated expression. It was a dark face, savage and full of scars, and with wild eyes rolling in deep sockets.

"Dougherty," I called, seizing the elbow of the District Attorney, "look at what is following us."

But when the District Attorney looked around, I felt very foolish, for the scarred lace of the black man had disappeared!

Chapter 3

PERHAPS then and there I should have reported to Thatcher Colt the threatening face that had seemed to be following us. But there was no immediate opportunity. The Commissioner was eager now to meet and size up those performers who had been threatened, and Colonel Robinson kept glancing at his watch, remarking that our time was very short, as he led us to a gate guarding the region of the performers' dressing-rooms― a barrier that we were soon to realise was a door from one kind of world into another.

Through the gate, our route lay mid a confused assembly of portable dressing rooms and booths, and mazes of costumed performers. Stretching beyond all this was a lane of make-up tables, at which sat scores of men, painting their faces in bright colours and comic designs.

"Clown Alley," explained Colonel Robinson, slowing up.

The phrase comes back to me now, a reproach to my own congenital stupidity. Yet how, was I to guess that here and now in Clown Alley, Thatcher Colt was to discover the decisive clue in a classic mystery?

"Clown Alley is where I started my own career," confessed Colonel Robinson, biting off another morsel of tobacco plug. "I was a clown acrobat and I could still earn my living that way if I had to."

The manager was standing at the foot of a broad concrete stairway; in a moment he was to lead us upstairs to the regions behind the amphitheatre, where the star acts, the high-salaried performers, had their dressing-rooms. Yet even here he made a delay while he tied the lacings of his left shoe.

"Did you happen to notice that every one of those clowns had a different make-up?" he asked Colt. "Once a Joey, as a clown calls himself, fixes up his face according to his own original design, then that design belongs to him and to nobody else. It's sort of unwritten law. No other Joey would think of copying it. You know Barnum once said clowns were pegs to hang circuses on. Well, the old boy wasn't so far wrong."

Years afterwards, I was to look back and remember Colonel Robinson as he stood at the foot of the concrete steps, pausing in a serious investigation to tie the lace of his left shoe. And Thatcher Colt was to remember the moment long before I.

It was seven-fifteen o'clock when we followed Colonel Robinson to the upper floor. To the eyes of an outsider, this part of the "back-yard" was a place of incredible chaos. The manager, smiling mysteriously, led us to a small dressing-room and knocked. While we waited, he explained that Flandrin, whom we were now to meet, had reached New York only half an hour before -barely in time to make the opening performance. He had been performing In Berlin during the winter and the ship on which he had returned was delayed by spring fogs.

"In fact," explained the Colonel, knocking again, "he got here so late that he had not had time to say 'hello' to his wife."

"She was not abroad with him then?" asked Colt.

"No. LaTour was on the West Coast all the winter, in vaudeville." Colonel Robin-son knocked a third time, much more loudly. This time there was a response.

A voice called out sharply and Colonel Robinson opened the door and led us In-side. Bending over a mirror, a man in green tights was plying a green grease-paint pencil across his throat in great strokes, stretching from ear to ear. At last we had come face to face with one of Colonel Robinson's threatened stars.

The face turned toward the door was grotesquely distorted by the clown make-up; enormous red lips, onion-shaped nose, and green cheeks and chin. Such a countenance was in shocking contrast to the graceful athletic body and the strikingly beautiful silk costume. While this performer made his entrance as a clown, he gradually discarded fur coat and baggy trousers, disclosing his tights, and finally managing also to wipe away his make-up while swinging on the high trapeze.

"Pardon, Flandrin!" called Colonel Robinson. "I would like to present you to Mr. Thatcher Colt, the Police Commissioner.''

There was something alert, feline, in the startled grace that animated Flandrin. With the ease and awareness of one of the big cats in the cages below, he turned and bowed.

"Flandrin," explained Colonel Robinson, trying rather ineptly to put all at ease, "is one of the highbrows of the circus. He was a post-graduate student chemist in Munich long before he ever thought of going into the show business. His wife thinks he knew as much about chemistry as any man in Germany. Acrobatics was only his hobby— he would have been working in a laboratory yet if he hadn't fallen in love."

With his painted and enormously exaggerated lips, Flandrin smiled vaguely and then looked over Robinson's head. Meanwhile Colt seemed to be paying no attention. His eyes drifted from one part of the dressing-room to another. I saw him lift a pencil with thick, soft, blue lead from the table, examine, it, and put it back in its place.

"Flandrin," went on the Colonel, "is married to one of the greatest women in the world. Yes, I mean Josie LaTour—"

"Who gets the biggest salary in the history of the business," chanted Dougherty.

"Sorry to intrude on the night of the big opening," interposed Thatcher Colt, "but Colonel Robinson says you received a mysterious and threatening letter-"

Flandrin wheeled half-way round with a soundless alacrity. From a suitcase on a chair he produced a folded piece of paper which he handed to Colt. The Commissioner read the note aloud:

"Be very careful what you do. Above all, do not try the double twist in New York. This is a friendly warning. The double twist will positively mean your death if you attempt it. You will die at the opening performance— and not in the way you expect."

THERE was no signature.

Without a word, Thatcher Colt passed the note to the heavy-breathing District Attorney. The paper was of the white wrapping paper variety, the kind used for bundling merchandise in drug stores. The letters of the message had been blocked in soft, blue pencil. All eyes were on the note in Dougherty's hand: I was the only spectator of what happened next. Colt was standing behind Flandrin; now the Commissioner spoke very softly:

"Are you going to do the double twist to-night?"

Flandrin did not answer at once. But m the silence I saw Colt's hand go back to the table, noiselessly lift the pencil of soft blue lead he had found there and put it in his pocket.

"Well, Flandrin," prodded the Commissioner, "why don't you answer?"

"I have yet to decide whether I shall do the double twist," replied Flandrin, with an aloof air. He spoke with a foreign accent, curiously tainted with the tang of the American street voice.

"Say, what on earth is a double twist, anyhow?" wheezed Dougherty.

Robinson promptly explained.

"Flandrin is talking about a trick, a combination of double somersault and twist, which every ambitious acrobat in the world would like to accomplish. All of them have failed, because it defies the known laws of gymnastics."

The acrobat in his green fleshings and preposterous make-up raised a deprecatory hand.

"Pardon me. I have managed on several occasions to perform the double twist," he corrected in a gentle and humourless voice "I am probably the first person ever to have done that. But I cannot do it as yet every time I try. It is dangerous, too— but I shall reduce that danger to nothing. It was LaTour who inspired me to try to master it. And she will continue to inspire me, until I have worked out the perfect routine. Then I can do the double twist whenever I want to All the credit will really belong to my wife, the great, the famous Josie LaTour. And if I decide to try it to-night, no threats of death can stop me!"

This singular harangue was delivered in a singsong voice, almost as if uttered in sleep.

"Noble sentiments," pronounced Colt, with a bland smile. "I have heard a great deal about the professional jealousy of husbands and wives in the theatre and the pictures. Evidently it doesn't exist in the circus."

Again Flandrin made his dancing-master bow.

"No, no— there can be no jealousy between a talented artist like myself and a genius like LaTour," was the grandiloquent reply.

"How will you decide whether or not to do your special trick?"

"The double twist? My wife will know that. I have not seen her as yet. I must ask her advice."

Colt's eyes narrowed; the acrobat was »rowing more and more annoyed at the questions.

"Where did you find this note?" inquired Colt, suddenly direct and sharp.

"It must have come in the mail to-day. I found it here, on the table, left there by Colonel Robinson who had received it from my wife. She opened it in my absence. Now. please, is there anything else?"

"Can you identify the handwriting?"

"No, no!"

"And you have no suspicions?'

"No, no, Mr. Colt. I am not of a suspicious nature. Probably just a crank letter. What is it you Americans say? I mind my own business."

"Before we go— can you tell me when you will decide whether or not to do the double twist?"

"When?"

"Yes— before the show starts, before you go into the ring, or—"

Flandrin shrugged.

"I will have only a minute with my wife, if that. Colonel Robinson has arranged a series of interviews with the reporters for me, in between my appearances in the arena. I doubt if I shall do it— I must talk with LaTour!"

IT was on this unresolved and puzzling reply that we left Flandrin, once more plying his green make-up pencil from ear to ear. Outside the dressing-room door, Colt reclaimed and gave to me the Flandrin note of warning. But he made no reference to the pencil. In the Crime Museum of the New York Police Academy, the letter may be seen today, mounted and glazed.

Colonel Robinson glanced at his watch.

"We must not linger," he cautioned, "because all the performers will have to appear in the opening spectacle."

As we started off, my head was beginning to seethe with questions. Had Colt believed the pencil on the dressing-room table was a clue to the note-writer? True, the quality and colour of lead were similar. But any clever criminal would be too careful to leave such damning evidence about. Yet Colt had abstracted the pencil. Had he noted any betraying characteristics in Flandrin's behaviour that made him suspicious? Meanwhile, the circus owner had brought us to another dressing-room door on which he rapped. A bass voice boomed an answer and presently we were shaking hands with a giant Mephistopheles, swaggering in red tights, cloak, and sword, tail and horns.

"Here, chief," cried Colonel Robinson, as if he were announcing to a vast audience "is the acknowledged king of the circus— Signor Sebastian!"

At this flamboyant introduction, Signor Sebastian threw back his head, struck out a long, waggling tongue, and twiddled his thumbs in his ears.

"Flatterer!" roared the King of the Air. patting two enormous palms resoundingly against his middle. "Ah, Mr Colt— you hear how Papa Robinson tries to keep in good humour his poor, underpaid artists?"

Though already past forty, Sebastian, like most aerial stars, was a strikingly handsome human animal. With his shock of reddish hair, bushy and wild, infernal mustachios, and hellish blue and yellow circles painted under his eyes, he radiated a spirit of confident wickedness. One felt he was, indeed, a ruler in his infernal realm. There were seven persons in Sebastian's set, including brothers, cousins, and two grown sons. But they were scattered in other dressing rooms: Sebastian, the King, dressed alone.

"You received a threatening note," Thatcher Colt smilingly reminded him. "May I see it?"

The painted face of the Mephistophelean
acrobat looked startled.

"You have reported this note to the police?" he cried, wheeling on Colonel Robinson. All his complacent good humour suddenly vanished. "Now my family will hear about it— my wife will perish of fear."

"Let the Commissioner see the note," snapped Robinson, not pleased at the objections of the trapeze king. Grunting disapproval, Sebastian walked into a deep closet at the far end of the room, lifted a brief case down from a shelf, and began to finger through its jumble of contents.

"Sebastian is a real trouper," explained Robinson, at once himself again. "They all resent outsiders— but he would give you his shirt. Born in a tent and wants to die nowhere else but in the show— the son, the grandson, and the great-grandson of an acrobat. The Sebastian family is famous all over Europe."

At a moment's notice, Robinson declared, the King of the Air could give a good account of himself as a bareback rider; he was a tumbler, a juggler and a marksman, and, merely as a hobby, he could make a slide for life on his neck down a steel wire from the vaulted roof to the sawdust floor.

With an imposing stride, the devilishly costumed Signor Sebastian returned and passed his death note to Thatcher Colt. In texture of paper and character of script the letter was like Flandrin's. But the wording was different:

"Let the King of the Air watch out for himself or he will lose his throne. This is no time to show off. Do not do your flying headstand. You will be murdered at the opening performance if you try it. There are good reasons for you not to disobey this warning."

Sebastian stuck out his mocking tongue and rolled his scornful eyes.

"I have been introducing the flying head-stand for years," he scoffed. "My public expect it."

"Then you will attempt the flying head-stand to-night?" asked Robinson eagerly.

"Have I ever failed you yet, slave driver?" roared Sebastian.

Thatcher Colt retained the paper and entrusted it to me— the second note, too, may be seen at the Crime Museum.

Sebastian insisted the handwriting gave him no clue to the identity of his mysterious correspondent; he suspected no one, and he did not believe he had an enemy in the world.

"I think it is all just a practical joke," he put forward, meanwhile adding a few delicate touches to his make-up. "Maybe," he added with a sly laugh, "it is a little game of our publicity man."

As we stepped outside and the door closed Robinson was about to speak but was prevented by a man who rushed forward suddenly and clapped hands on the showman's shoulders. The newcomer was a thin faced little man, almost all profile. He had a cast in his left eye and a mouthful of gold teeth.

"What is it, Crumps?" snapped Robinson brusquely.

"I just wanted to let you know," Crumps began, in a nasal whine, "that your backer, Marburg Lovell, is out front tonight. He sent for me-you know. Mr. Lovell is a big game hunter and he likes to have a little talk with me now and then told me I was the best boss animal man in the business. Just trying to get around me, I guess. Seems like he's in a good humour. He even spilled that old joke about the lion-tamer who married one of the Siamese twins. And then he got me to carry a note back to―"

The boss animal man stopped and closed his eyes discreetly, jerking his head backward and smiling.

The manager swore deeply.

"Josie LaTour has got one note to upset her already— she did not need another. Is that all, Crumps?"

"Sure. Only LaTour slapped my jaw when I gave her the note. She hasn't got any reason, what-an-soever, to hit me, you know, boss. I'm important to this show, too. She may get a bigger salary than I do— and I never found out why, either— but does that give her any right to poke me in the face when I was only trying to do the show's backer a favour? I'll tell you this much: Lovell says he is getting tired of a lot of show folks carrying things with a high hand in an outfit he's losing his money in."

Robinson took him aside and spoke soothingly, confidentially and sent Crumps on his way appeased. With long strides he departed, swinging his low-hanging hands.

"How long has that man been with you?" Colt asked Robinson.

"Oh, for eighteen years, continuously, except for two years he spent in a mental asylum after typhoid fever— but he got over that long ago. We must get going."

But we did not get going immediately. What prevented us was the sudden reappearance of Sebastian. His dressing room door opened violently, and the Mephistopheles himself stepped angrily out. Stalking to our group the acrobat shook a massive forefinger under Colonel Robinson's nose.

"I heard what my pal, Crumps, told you," cried Sebastian, mouthing a passion. "I've warned Crumps to keep away from Lovell. That old hound doesn't mean any good to performers. He's shown me his house and all his fancy things, all smelling like women. He won't get around me. and I am here to tell you if Marburg Lovell doesn't let Josie LaTour alone I am going to break his back! I am going to break his back! I mean it, Mr. Robinson-and Crumps knows I mean it."

"Pipe down, for God's sake! We're starting in twenty minutes!" grated the manager. "Flandrin can take care of his wife without calling in you or the rest of the show.... Follow me, gentlemen!"

AS we turned our backs on Sebastian and walked on, I realised what a rip tide of loves and hates, jealousies and ambitions swirled in strong currents behind the circus arena. Robinson marched ahead of us, turning and crossing to the other side of the building. There, flushed and breathing hard, he paused to apologise.

"Without Marburg Lovell's financial support, I would have gone under many a time," he explained devoutly. "But— speaking impartially— the hell of it is, Mr. Lovell does try to get too friendly with some of the ladies in the show. And the performers just don't like it. Now, I hope that won't be mentioned to the party we're going to call on right now— Miss LaTour!"

We were standing before a door on which was painted a dark star. I studied Colt's face, but his expression was inscrutable. Had he yet encountered one whose behaviour seemed to be suspicious? Or were we to meet that person now? From the Commissioner's blank countenance, I could guess nothing of his thoughts. Very discreetly Robinson knocked. As we waited, I looked back and an unreasonable chill pricked the skin on my back. Again I saw the black face with criss-cross scars and rolling eyes and again it was darting furtively behind a pillar. There was no doubt about it―our party was being followed.

But even as I resolved to speak to Colt, the door with the dark star was opened. I caught a glimpse of an Ali Baba vase crowded with rhododendron blossoms. Then a face looked out at us: the wrinkled face of a stout and elderly woman with a waspish expression. Lips pursed, she stared grimly at Colonel Robinson.

"Isabel, I want the Police Commissioner to talk with Miss LaTour," explained Colonel Robinson. "It's about that note she received.

Beside the lumpy figure of the maid appeared a petite woman, robed in a Japanese dressing-gown, her tiny face covered with cold cream. In a sweet, husky voice, she said:

"I tore the damn thing up and threw it in the fire."

"And what did it warn you not to do?" pressed Thatcher Colt.

"Oh, it merely advised me to keep out of the ring altogether— say, listen, Commissioner, I can't waste time on that. To hell with it! If you want to keep your Boy Scouts busy, order some cops to find out about that old muffle head over there— if you are looking for a crook, there is the biggest one in town, right there!"

With that the door was slammed shut. At her angry words, Colt had quickly turned to see a tall man, his back turned towards us, walking away with Colonel Robinson volubly explaining at his side.

"That is Marburg Lovell," muttered the Commissioner. "And Robinson is trying to square it. Poor Robinson— how does he keep cool with all this on his hands? It will be a miracle if hell doesn't pop somewhere in this show tonight."

Having persuaded Lovell to go back to his box, the circus owner returned to us, mop-ping his brow. Colt and Dougherty fore-stalled any apologies.

"I think we ought to be getting to our seats, anyway," grinned the District Attorney.

As he conducted us towards the arena, Colonel Robinson was verbose with explanations.

"These people," he explained, "are more than just mere acrobats. They are superior people, with all the foibles and character of artists, and they have to be treated as such. They have their prima donna outbursts. Josie LaTour is to the circus what a social leader is to the four hundred-the unquestioned ruler of our lots. And don't get me wrong-Josie's a good scout, for all her excitable disposition. No one will do more for a fellow-performer; and she is frantic about children— in her business she can't have any, of course. I understand she and Flandrin are looking forward to a Sabbatical year— but hell, they can't afford it. They spend every dollar they make, anyhow."

"Is this her first marriage?" inquired Thatcher Colt.

Tod Robinson shook his head.

"No. Not her first— nor his first. She was married to an acrobat before. His first wife was a University woman. But neither was happy. Josie was in vaudeville a while with her first husband...."

We arrived at a door that would lead us forth from this back-world of illusion into an atmosphere more real and familiar. From beyond the door came the droning buzz of thousands of voices— Madison Square Garden was filling up.

"There's something I've got to tell you, Mr. Colt. I've been waiting to for half an hour," I said. "Before we get out-we're being followed."

"Where, Tony?"

"Who could be following us?" put in Colonel Robinson sceptically.

"A tall negro with a scarred face—"

"You don't mean that fellow there, do you?" asked Colt. "I've noticed him, too."

I looked over my shoulder, just as a tall and muscular negro, his gleaming silk hat rakishly to one side, came loping up to us with forefinger uplifted. The creature that had been following for the last half hour had overtaken us.

"Colonel Robinson," the black man called. "I have something to say to you!"

NOW that the dark man was at our side, he seemed to me an even more unprepossessing person. The scars on his face were jagged welts, and his teeth were sharpened to fine points. As I learned later, the teeth were filed as a mark of bravery and leadership; and the welts had been raised by stuffing salt into self-inflicted knife wounds. He was wearing a striped grey suit, tailored in the Broadway mode; his monocle dangled on a braided silken cord and he carried a gold-headed cane— he looked a caricature of a coloured sporting man. His bloated eyes seemed popping from some inner turmoil.

"What is it, Keblia?" asked Colonel Robinson, crossly. "And why aren't you dressed and ready for the spectacle?"

"I shall be in the spectacle in good time," returned the black man proudly. "I heard you have with you a great and wise man=-I wanted to warn Mr. Thatcher Colt."

"This is Keblia— the Ubangi's witch doctor," the showman explained.

"I, too, am a wise man," admitted Keblia solemnly, looking only at the Police Commissioner. "When my people are angry, I call council and settle the quarrel. I plead with you to stop the show to-night or the evil ones will make trouble."

"How do you know that?" asked Thatcher Colt.

The tall savage gave the Commissioner a sidelong glance and replied: "The information comes to me as I dream."

"Did you receive a letter, threatening you with an unnatural death?" pressed Colt.

"There is no such thing as a natural death," disputed the witch doctor. Lifting both hands, he turned reddish palms towards Colt. "Death is always the work of demons— or enemies. And both are stalking tonight."

"Who is to die, Keblia?"

The witch doctor shook his head and muttered that he did not know.

"My people sing to the elephants," he went on tonelessly. "They beat their tom-toms, made of elephants' ears. They chant old music. My own wives are singing loudest of all. My wife, Kananinboungo, and my wife, Kimalaguetti, who wear the biggest lip discs of all our people, they are singing at the top of their voices. Why, Mr. Thatcher Colt? Because they know that death is coming-and death is always unnatural. But there is still time to head it off."

There was a moment's silence. From beyond the door came the brazen crash of the band.

"Keblia, get into your costume!" ordered Colonel Robinson. "And don't stand there talking like a damned fool. I wouldn't cancel this show to-night for the ghost of P. T. Barnum himself."

Eyes full of entreaty were fixed on Thatcher Colt as the Ubangi magic man waited a moment. Then, with a tragic grimace. Keblia shook himself, turned, and marched off, losing himself in the milling throng of performers.

"He speaks a decent English," remarked Thatcher Colt, "and seems to have a fair education. What can have stirred him up so?"

"Drink, most likely," was Robinson's explanation. "Keblia has been acting very strangely of late. I found him prowling around some of our ring equipment and especially some new floodlight boxes at three o'clock this morning. You never know when these savages are going bush on you. But, speaking impartially, I believe he's just putting on airs now. When a Ubangi really knows anything, he never tells it to strangers."

"Exactly!" agreed the Police Commissioner. "That is what troubles me. Keblia warned us— but he told us nothing."

"Because he knows nothing," retorted Robinson. "Let's go!"

"Did you find your man?" I asked Thatcher Colt.

"Who said I was looking for a man?" parried the Commissioner.

We followed the showman through a public passage like a concrete tunnel, en-circling the ribs of the Garden. Soon we emerged amid rows of boxes lining the hippodrome track. Our first visit to the strange other world of the circus was at an end. I did not guess that within the last few minutes we had been very near a murderer, even then preparing to strike.

Chapter 4

MADISON SQUARE GARDEN was packed to the ring-curb. Every ticket had been sold. Seventeen thousand people thronged the long tiers of seats, rising in two levels above the arena floor. The Garden, a vast rectangular frame of steel encased in grey concrete, was gay tonight with lights and coloured bunting and the flags of all nations.

Colonel Robinson led us to Box Eighty, which is in the centre of the Forty-ninth Street side, adjoining a wide arena entrance through which performers come and go. Our box was directly in front of the middle ring, with a clear view of everything. Betty and Dougherty's toothless nephews occupied the front chairs; in the second row sat Thatcher Colt, Dougherty, and myself. After escorting us to our places, Colonel Robinson hastened off, promising to rejoin us later, so the third row of seats in our box was empty.

It was just eight o'clock and the grand entry was beginning. Here, in one weaving, glittering procession, was the whole circus, the horses, the elephants, the clowns, the whole fantastic conglomeration of light and colour, warmth and wonder, glamorously on the march. Like one mesmerised, I was watching the procession when Colt leaned forward and recalled me to reality.

"In the box next to us— that one man sitting alone— is Marburg Lovell— five times a millionaire and Robinson's backer."

Casually my glance drifted to the neigh-boring box. Exiled from behind the scenes, Mr. Marburg Lovell sat there, a tall muscular man, in full evening dress, with pale, debauched skin, sparse hair, and a startling black patch over one eye.

"Lovell seems to have lost his head," whispered Thatcher Colt. "He wrote LaTour letters— sent her flowers— and jewels. But Robinson swears the little lady wasn't interested."

"Surely, she must have been flattered," I argued. "What did she do with the flowers and jewels?"

"Robinson told me she sent back the jewels but took the flowers to a chapel and laid them before a shrine to the Virgin."

"The letters, too?"

"No— her husband kept the letters!"

"And do you suppose Flandrin blacked Lovell's eye?"

"Remember he was on the ship. But earlier today, as I happen to have heard at Headquarters, Lovell reported a burglary in his house. Perhaps that's how he got hurt."

"THESE circus people have their own code of vendetta," sighed the Police Commissioner. "The situation here tonight is loaded with dynamite."

Before us in the arena, spangled battalions of performers were following one after another in swift and startling exhibitions— troupes of trained horses, prancing and curvetting in sidewise gallopades, wire leapers, the man who walks up stairs on his head, sea-lions, living statues, and death-defying gymnasts.

But it was not until Sebastian entered the eastern ring for his first act that I was really thrilled. Here was the first of the threatened performers to appear before his audience. Star of Display Number Sixteen, according to the official programme. Sebastian appeared, blowing a brass trumpet; he was a colourful fiend in his flamboyant costume. Following him came seven others of his troupe, all blowing smaller trumpets and all garbed as imps. The big, good-humoured Mephistopheles had sneered at the death warning and then he himself had uttered a threat against Marburg Lovell. Was the trouble that Robinson dreaded about to begin? As the red-cloaked acrobat with the sinister blue and yellow circles under his eyes began to mount a rope ladder, Colonel Robinson returned to our box and sat in the rear. The manager locked in better spirits; the show was going well.

"Sebastian is as cool as a cucumber. He carries himself like a cavalryman and a lancer," gloated Robinson. "That's what he used to be in the Austrian army. Now watch him. You will never forget him!"

Never forget him! I see him now, re-moving his cloak, discarding sword and trumpet, making ready for his daredevil feats. Small likelihood that I shall ever forget Signor Sebastian. In spite of his forty years, the voltigeur behaved like a young thoroughbred― nervous, supple, rebellious and full of aquiline strength, as he swung by his heels on a wide-flung bar, the uneasy throne of this monarch of the air. His flying headstand, performed in defiance of the threatening note, brought down the house. As he bowed to the applause, it seemed to me that Sebastian waved his devil's cap impudently towards Marburg Lovell.

"Well, he did the flying headstand and nothing happened!" grinned Dougherty. "Looks like a false alarm to me."

"Sebastian does another act later on, near the finish," Tod Robinson answered hastily. "His night is not over yet!"

The manager sat back as the liberty horses, the haute ecole of equestrian exhibitions, began trotting around the rings. My glances played truant towards the box where Marburg Lovell still sat, ignoring the performance, his visible eye closed. I wondered if the millionaire was asleep.

"No, he is awake enough," was Robinson's opinion. "His eyes will be open wide enough when Josie LaTour comes on, but hell, he hasn't a chance! Josie and her husband are a perfect love match. One of the great romances of the circus world."

"When does Josie's husband appear?" asked Thatcher Colt.

"There he is now!" replied Tod Robinson, pointing to the centre of the ring.

THE horses were trotting off, and a new group of aerialists were mounting ladders. It was not hard to identify the husband of Josie LaTour. In his fur coat and grotesque make-up, Flandrin swayed and staggered comically at the foot of a tall ladder.

There was unfaltering determination in every movement of Flandrin's supple body— as if he knew his unknown enemy was present, ready to pounce. Would he perform the double twist to-night in defiance of that invisible foe?

If Sebastian was Hercules, then the husband of Josie LaTour was Adonis. In spite of his clumsy costume, he went gracefully up the rope rungs to the perch of his exalted ladder. Across the netted abyss waited his catcher, Flandreau, a big man with heavily-muscled shoulders and arms. And with the catcher, posed Flandra, the woman In the act, ready to be tossed from hand to hand in the weaving aerial routine.

Fearlessly, Flandrin looked around him, his monstrously bedaubed face drawing squeals of laughter. He was standing, I suddenly realised, on the very platform from which, several hours before, the boss mechanic had tumbled to his death.

But Flandrin seemed to be in the best of health and spirits. With a kind of Attic grace, he swung out from the bar of the flying trapeze, changing and re-changing in waltz rhythm with the darting figure of Flandra. Again and again Flandrin caught her, passed her, and himself flew out in somersault and twist to crash safely into the steel hands of Flandreau. But as yet he had not attempted the perilous double twist. Upon Flandrin, as if waiting for that daring attempt, Thatcher Colt's attention seemed exclusively fixed. Yet presently, the Commissioner, without altering his gaze, called to Robinson:

"Who is that young woman wrapped in a cloak and standing in the performers' entrance? Her eyes never leave Flandrin."

"That," explained Robinson, with a smile, "is LaTour, the highest salaried—"

"But I thought it was not allowed," interrupted the Commissioner. "I have always understood there was a superstition―"

"Against a wife watching a husband's act or vice versa? So there was, in the old days. But LaTour broke that up. She watches Flandrin's act at every performance."

THE Flandrin act was nearing its climax. The green-tighted acrobat, his tramp costume now in the discard, his clown make-up miraculously removed, bolted back and forth across the net. Finally he stood on the platform be-hind his trapeze. His hand was held up to claim all the eyes of the spectators. On Flandrin's perch there was a movable bar, fitted in sockets, on which he stood for the take-off. As this bar was raised in higher notches, the trapeze could be swung in longer, more dangerous arcs. Even as we watched, the aerialist lifted the cross-bar to the highest notch.

Flandrin was about to try the double twist !

Smiling, he looked around him, until his gaze reached the woman in the cloak, standing in the performers' entrance. Distinctly she shook her head; LaTour was imperatively forbidding her husband to attempt the master-feat. Even at that distance I could see the cloud of disappointment on Flandrin's face. With a wide-flung motion of his hands, he yielded, signalling to his partners that his turn was over. The applause was scattered as he descended, but grew in volume as Flandrin stalked from the amphitheatre to disappear between the flags.

Long before he reached there, the cloaked figure of Josie LaTour had slipped out of sight.

"Is he yellow?" cried Dougherty, disgustedly. "I thought he was going to do that special stunt. Something must have got his goat. He was mad all over when he went back stage."

"Josie must be devoted to Flandrin!" was Colt's comment.

"They are devoted to each other," amended Tod Robinson fervently. "I know— I was sweet on Josie myself, but she never tumbled to anybody until she found Flandrin. I believe either of them would be through if anything happened to the other. A little later on you will see Flandrin in the same place watching while his wife does her act. I think I had better go back and see if everything is all right between them."

had to wait for Josie LaTour. She was held back almost to the end, the stellar attraction of the show. When the time arrived, every other activity in the arena came to an end. The equestrian director lifted both arms, invoking silence, as he made a long, extravagant announcement. At its climax, he threw back his head and shouted:

"Ladies and gentlemen: I present the greatest circus performer in the history of the world— Miss Josie LaTour!"

Throughout the audience there was a humming sound, a stir of interest. The lights of the great arena went softly out. The rings and platforms were empty. It was the special honour of "La merveilleuse" to be the only performer in the Robinson circus who appeared alone. As we watched for her, not an attendant moved across the darkened amphitheatre ; there was only the spotlight searching the performers' entrance, with its draped flags. From the bandstand came a shrill fanfare of the brasses, a long roll of drums.

Then through the flags bounced the first lady of the air. Wrapped in a cloak of gleaming sequins, she romped forward, as if she had lingered too long behind the scenes. She bowed and blew kisses to the applauding spectators, as the maid Isabel hastened into the ring and caught in her ample arms the tossed cloak of sequins.

Out of her wrap, Josie LaTour was indeed a lovely, child-like apparition in her white silken ballet skirts and gay-coloured ribbons.

"What force!" I told myself. "What dynamic energy! The grace of a swan, the strength of a tigress."

"She is the greatest woman aerialist," mumbled Tod Robinson piously, like a man at his prayers. He had come back to watch her act with us. "And she gets the biggest salary in the history of the business."

They said LaTour was nearly thirty years old, and the most powerful of living women. But she did not look her age, nor yet athletic. Her bust was youthful and charming, her neck delicate, and her little dark head was carried proudly on shoulders which, in spite of the steel rings, remained utterly feminine. But her head was lowered and her eyes closed.

"The spotlights bother her," explained Tod Robinson. "Hurt her eyes. Yet LaTour wouldn't give up that spotlight for twice her salary."

She looked so pretty, so unconscious of danger!

MEANWHILE, from the trusses of the roof, ropes were lowered, dangling two large, nickel-plated rings. Working the rigging from the other side of the ring was a man assistant in blue uniform and gold braid. In a flat voice, this man called a signal to LaTour.

From the ceiling now dropped a canvas covered rope which LaTour grasped with one childishly small hand. For a moment she hesitated, twirling the loose end of the rope around in snake-like provocative writhings, as if teasing the spectators. Then with an unexpected leap she began her long ascent up to the rings high overhead. LaTour's method of mounting this rope was, in itself, a bravura feat of strength and daring— literally rolling herself up a little way, the releasing her hold and catching the rope again, a little higher. With such heartless jerkings and writhings she brought herself quickly up, forty-five netless feet above the amphitheatre. There she swung out from the rope and on to the rings.

As LaTour's hands seized those gleaming rings, the high, sweet sound of her laughter echoed above the applause. Into an old-fashioned waltz the music glided, as, with one hand on each ring, head down, feet reaching towards the ceiling, the girlish figure remained rigid and balanced. She swayed, shivered, and then dropped, with sudden, frightening force. But the tiny hands held firm and LaTour laughed once more as she drew her feet cosily inside the rings. Now the waltzing music died away and from the band-stand, shattering the brief silence, came a long and ominous rolling sound, the ruffling of the full battery of drums. LaTour slipped down slowly, hanging pendant from a ring, between roof and floor, forty-five feet in space, by one small hand. She was ready for the feat that made her supreme among the world's aerialists— LaTour's "giant half-flange!"

Without warning the little body gathered itself together; she seemed to fling herself upward and over her own shoulder. It took strength to do such a thing even once, yet LaTour was doing it over and over again, in repeated violent convulsions. It was dangerous to the point of recklessness; the little, half-portion of a woman at that perilous height, kept on pitching and turning like a creature possessed of suicidal mania. In precise rhythm with every turn and twist of the flying body the incessant drums rolled and rattled. The audience was cheering and applauding; it seemed as if she would never stop.

"She's already passed her record of two hundred times and she's keeping on," exulted Tod Robinson. "By all that's right and holy she ought to be safely down, and that note warned her not to go up at all to-night."

Just then a singular incident occurred. At the Eighth Avenue end of the darkened Garden a dog began to bark. Colonel Robinson cursed behind his teeth.

"That damn clown dog is loose again," he raged. "That's enough to drive LaTour frantic at a time like this. It happened three times last season. I've got to catch that!"

PRESENTLY Thatcher Colt leaned forward, his face grave and startled.

"There was another odd sound," he told me. "Did you hear it?"

"I did not. What was it like?"

"It may have been an explosion or a drum beat;-but it made a change in the rhythm of the drums."

I had heard nothing unusual, nor had Dougherty. On her gleaming rings. Josie LaTour still turned with daring violence and beauty of movement. But only a few seconds later I saw that she was in trouble. Something strange was happening to Josie LaTour. All at once her passionate acrobatics were ended-now the woman seemed struggling to keep her grip on the ring. The little body was shaking visibly, as if she had come to grips with some cruel, over-mastering enemy.

In the next instant, she uttered a cry of anguish and fell.

I still wake up in the middle of the night, sprung from a bad dream-a nightmare that haunts me with the dreadfully repeated sound of Josie LaTour's body striking the ground. One universal gasp of dismay rose from the crowd. Crumpled and unmoving, the Queen of the Sawdust lay on her back In the centre of the ring. A figure in green tights rushed out of the performers' entrance, got to her side, and bent over the broken body. Flandrin lifted his wife in his arms. Swiftly he carried her through the draped flags and out of sight.

Confusion was beginning to spread through the double tiers, when a whistle sounded shrilly; then booming through the silence came the iron voice of the announcer. At the top of his throat, he bellowed that the little lady was not badly hurt— she had known many such falls. Everything was all right and the performance would go on. The audience sighed with relief. The lights came up. The show did go on. In the darkness, other per-formers had long before taken their positions on trapezes and high wires and platforms; the scene changed quickly from tragedy to a whirling mass of flying acrobats and whooping clowns, Mephistopheles and Pierrot, Uncle Sam and Mickey Mouse. The band blared cheerfully.

I turned and looked at the next box. Marburg Lovell still sat there, with his hands on the railing, staring up at the rings from which a lady fair had dropped away.

"What a horrible accident," groaned District Attorney Dougherty.

Police Commissioner Thatcher Colt turned a white face towards the District Attorney. His dark and sombre eyes had the look of a man who had seen an utterly damnable sight.

"Dougherty," said Colt. "I think you had better go back to the dressing-room with me. What we saw was not an accident. It was murder!"

Chapter 5

MURDER!

The word roared in my mind while we hastily prepared to return behind the scenes. Betty agreed to take charge of the young Doughertys and get them safely home in a department car. Colt, Dougherty, and myself hurried on, under the front seats, and through a shadowy passageway that curved back to the dressing-rooms.

"Thatcher," panted Dougherty, "why in God's name do you say it is murder?"

"Josie got one of those death-threat notes— the others escaped but she was killed. Some of the violence that happened in this show in the last few days has been premeditated. Specifically, Dougherty, I was watching LaTour intently— just after the dog barked. Her expression was one of amazement; she was stunned with incredibility and terror— as if suddenly attacked by someone-or something— she could not see."

"Vertigo!" from the breathless Dougherty.

"Oh, yes— also the cause of the boss mechanic's death," replied Colt with a sardonic glance backward. "No, I believe the boss mechanic's death was a kind of dress rehearsal for what happened to-night— and besides. Dougherty— I was listening to the drums."

"The drums!"

"Yes— their rhythm was interrupted by an off-beat sound that I could swear was a shot."

"But she wasn't shot!" argued Dougherty.

"How do you know? She has not yet been examined."

"But the shot would have been seen— a flash of fire—"

"Look what's coming toward us," I interrupted.

In the long and dismal corridor suddenly appeared the running figure of a giant negro in tail coat, top hat, and monocle. Seeing us, he halted— Keblia, witch doctor, barred our way in this deserted tunnel. The Ubangi's fathomless black eyes were set In a glassy, almost drunken stare and the over-large mouth was quaking. Both enormous hands were balled into tight-clenched fists. Thatcher Colt, too, came to a full halt.

"Your prediction came true in a hurry," began the Commissioner.

THE black man shivered as he replied:

"I told you there was no such thing as a natural death. Enemies! Or demons! Now she is dead! Only Keblia can find the truth."

"You were sure there would be a sudden death-and you were right. Now you are sure you can find her murderer."

"Very soon."

"What makes you so confident?"

"I have found a part of the truth already."

"What have you found?"

"An Ubangi tells nothing. He is his own judge and jury!"

"Keblia," began Thatcher Colt, "you are not in the jungle. You are in New York City. You must help the police. I wish you to come with me. In a little while I shall talk with you."

Keblia nodded earnestly.

"An Ubangi," he declared, "must obey the law— but you will never be able to make me talk."

IT WAS just ten fifteen o'clock when, with Keblia following, we came again to the dressing-rooms of the circus principals. First Colt paused before a door hung with a green and white flag, the colours flown by the hospital tent. This room was ominously empty. Next the Commissioner called a policeman hurrying past, and gave him orders to guard Keblia.

"Don't let him out of your sight," warned the Commissioner. "Just stay here with him until I call."

Then Colt went directly to the door with the dark star, the dressing-room of LaTour, halfway back from Eighth Avenue on the Forty-ninth Street side.

No crowds of grieving, curious performers or employees stood near the door. Such was the inflexible discipline of the circus that one would have thought all was well. Three policemen came running up: Colt told them to stand back and wait. The open space around the door was deserted except for one man standing like a sentry— a stout rugged man in shirt sleeves and with a stethoscope hanging loosely around his neck.

"Doctor Ransom?" asked the Police Commissioner, and the physician nodded. Colt had told me about this Doctor Ransom, physician-in-ordinary to the entire personnel of the show. In addition, he was physician-in-waiting to the crowds, attending hysterical women and vomiting children. Ransom had the largest private practice in the world.

Colt introduced himself.

"There is nothing that we can do!" the doctor rumbled gloomily. "I have stepped out here to let the family be alone. Of course, you understand there was never any hope— it was instantaneous-"

"What do you think caused her fall?" asked Thatcher Colt.

Doctor Ransom's glance was startled.

"Broken neck— fractured skull— naturally—"

"Not what caused her death-what caused her fall?" persisted Colt.

Before Ransom could frame a reply, the door behind him opened and another man emerged from the dressing-room. Very softly he closed the door, then turned and stared impudently from one face to an-other. He was a small, bearded man with a heavily tanned face.

"Meet Doctor Charavay," invited Ransom in a melancholy voice. "He is on the show, too."

I had also heard of Doctor Charavay; he was the French specialist in tropical diseases who had found the Ubangi people and arranged their American tour; a bacteriologist who had forsaken his profession to become an entrepreneur of these sideshow savages. Plainly, the Frenchman was profoundly disturbed; the calm inscrutability of the medical man was gone.

"It is terrible!" he fervently exclaimed. "The poor little child. The whole show loved her. She was so sweet, so good, so kind to everyone. And then this dreadful accident had to happen!!'

"And what do you thing made her fall?" asked Colt of the lamenting Doctor Charavay.

The Frenchman shrugged.

"Does it matter?" he asked, with a roll of his eyes.

WITHOUT replying, Colt struck the door lightly with his knuckles.

"But stop!" protested Charavay. "You must not do that ! The family—"

At this moment Colonel Tod Robinson stepped up swiftly from behind us.

"I could hear what you were saying," he told Colt. "My God, Chief, don't let's have any more trouble, please! It was only an accident— that and nothing more— get that straight— and there is no call for the Police Department to make a mystery out of it."

"The Medical Examiner will have to investigate― you know that," returned Colt testily. "I am sorry to insist that I must go in that room now!"

Doctor Charavay edged forward.

"But both Doctor Ransom and myself will give a certificate of accidental death," he proposed. "Surely we do not have to prolong unpleasant details."

As Colt waved him aside, Doctor Charavay turned outraged eyes on Colonel Robinson. In answer to Colt's knock the door opened and Isabel, the maid, looked out. Not ungently, Colt pressed on the door, and stepped inside. I stood with Dougherty on the threshold.

At first I felt as if I were at Coney Island, looking in at some particularly excruciating section of the wax-works. The room was filled with living people, standing, sitting and kneeling in stiff, unlifelike attitudes. Isabel stood on her toes, resolutely balanced, as she stared at us with an unwelcoming expression. Near the maid, mute and still, was the ring mechanic, pale and wretched in his uniform of blue velvet and gold braid. Flandreau, the big-shouldered trapeze catcher, was still in costume, as he stood erect and mountainous in the centre of the room. His mighty arm was around the waist of Flandra, his wife. Kneeling beside the couch was an athlete in green silken tights— Flandrin, dry-eyed and statue-like. In a tight grip, he held the dead hands that had been so alive and strong— those hands, I thought, would still be warm even in the grave.

No one spoke. The silence was becoming intolerable. Distractedly I looked away to stare around me at the ceiling, the walls, the furniture-at anything other than these people in their communal trance of despair.

"I regret this intrusion, deeply," Colt began. "If you will all help me, I shall not remain long."

Flandrin leaped to his feet and swayed before the Commissioner, his posture a grotesque echo of his comedy in the ring.

"Go away!" he commanded in a sleep-walker's voice. "Leave her be! She is my wife. Do not touch her. Go away!"

"Flandrin!" cried the Commissioner sternly. "I am from the police!"

But the husband's eyes did not change their set expression.

"But why the police?" he asked in that same hypnotised tone.

FROM the centre of the room now spoke up Flandreau, the big muscled catcher.

"Is America like Germany? Cannot a woman die without police interference?"

He would have gone on if another voice had not spoken.

"Courage. Flandrin!" came the voice. "It is only a formality. I advise you to let them do whatever they desire— and soon the police will be gone! Then we can be by ourselves."

The speaker was Sebastian, just back from his second exhibition, in his devil's garb, and carrying his sword and trumpet, a strange anomaly at such a scene.

"Very well, then, Mr. Colt," agreed Flandrin, bowing his head. "Let the police work quickly and get it over with!"

As if there were a Masonic understanding among them, everyone in the room moved back at Flandrin's decision. Alone before the couch, Thatcher Colt looked down at LaTour. Very gently the chief bent over the still little form. Hastily and without touching the body, he studied the bruises and abrasions. Then he brought his nostrils close to the still lips and smelled. This action is one of the primary police tactics, if poison is at all suspected. But did Colt suspect poison?

Instantly straightening up, the Commissioner now lifted the right arm of the dead girl. Intently he studied a deep and twisted scar on the flesh between the forearm and biceps. At a glance from Thatcher Colt, I called Doctor Ransom back into the room. On being shown the scar, he made an immediate statement:

"Medically speaking, that is a third degree burn. But it has no significance now. I've treated LaTour for all her troubles-sore throats and head colds on the East Coast, intestinal and stomach disorders in the Middle West during the hot spells, colds again on the Gulf, and so on over the route. The burn on her arm is a very old one."

"I know that, too," replied Colt patiently. "But I wish to know how she got it. Mind?"

"I'll tell you how it happened!" burst out Isabel, coming tearfully, resentfully, forward. "I can give you a precise explanation."

Colt looked at the maid with a keen interest. Her suave finishing-school accent and her explosive emotion did not mix well.

"It happened three seasons ago," Isabel revealed. "LaTour was rolling up the rope. She started to fall. And she caught her arm— she called it her iron arm— around the rope to save herself, just where you see the scar. That arm really acted as a brake for her as she slid to the ground. But the friction set the flesh on fire. The rope burned deeper and deeper into the arm. I was in the ring at the time and I saw the smoke and smelt it, too. Does that answer you completely to your satisfaction, Mr. Colt?"

As she spoke that bitterly impertinent question, the maid seemed to be spokesman for every circus person in the room. There was a psychic wall separating these show folk from us. They looked upon us as invaders. Even if they believed a crime had been committed, they would be angered at the interference of the police.

"What Isabel Chant has told you is only a part of the truth," resumed Doctor Ransom, placatingly. "There are scars all over that iron arm of LaTour's, farther up, under the sleeve-see for yourself. The same accident happened more than once. No one could ever devise a shield that would really protect her arm in the work she was doing. Last season she got an infection. I told her she was endangering her life by continuing to appear, and when she insisted on appearing, I earnestly advised her to use her left arm."

Doctor Charavay stepped aggressively into the room.

"Now the gendarmes know about the scars," he sneered, "is there any other mystery they wish revealed?"

"Why are you so anxious to get me away?" Colt queried. "You have, none of you, I feel sure, anything to hide. Then why object?"

Tod Robinson lunged forward.

"Why suspect anything?" he countered argumentatively. "Speaking impartially, it all seems very simple to me. In my opinion, Josie LaTour is another victim of crystallisation. Why not just take a look at the Roman rings and see— maybe that will end it."

Colt's sombre eyes flashed me a glance. I hastened to the door, gave orders to a plainclothes man who had just arrived, and sent him hurrying towards the circus property chief. At a word from Colonel Robinson, a man in circus uniform went with the detective.

"Crystallisation!"

Like echoes, Flandreau and Sebastian repeated the word aloud.

"And precisely what do you mean by crystallisation?" asked District Attorney Dougherty.

"A chemical change that occurs in various metals under certain conditions," explained Colonel Robinson. "It turns metal brittle as glass. No one can tell when it is happening-overnight a trusted ring or bar or support of some kind may change from good, trustworthy steel into pot-metal. What I personally believe happened is that a hook-a swivel hook that held the main guard-snapped and down she came."

COLT listened attentively.

There was in his unbent height and transfixed attitude a strange, suspended emotion. Could he be mistaken in his suspicion? His thoughtful eyes travelled from face to face.

"And how do we know this is a case of crystallisation?" asked Dougherty.

A jingling of metal sounded in the outer corridor and the pale man in blue velvet and gold braid came back to us, flanked by the detective sergeant. In the assistant's coarse hands was a heap of canvas-covered rope and gleaming nickel-plated rings.

"This is Eddie Stevens," announced Colonel Robinson. "He was the special mechanic for LaTour. He had charge of all her equipment; he put it up and he took it down. So Eddie ought to know. Bring that stuff in here, Eddie."

Eddie Stevens was about five feet tall, with grey hair and a mouse-like skin, but muscular and strong. Perhaps he had been a bantam-weight fighter in his youth. In his velvet uniform, gold braid and visored cap, he was not hard to identify as the attendant in the ring when Josie LaTour fell to her death. As Eddie Stevens held out the rope and rings towards Robinson, Colt's voice cut the hot silence:

"This man turned his back tonight, when the accident occurred."

Blotches of pink spread under the greyish skin, as Eddie Stevens looked helplessly at Colt.

"I didn't mean to turn my back!" he whimpered. "It was my job to watch every minute— to stand by and break her fall if she came down—"

"Why didn't you do it?" growled Dougherty.

"Something sudden made me turn around— some sound— I think it was the barking of a dog— and when I looked back-oh, God.

"Let me see the apparatus," snapped Colt. '

HIS piercing eyes brooded I over the disorderly heap of rope and rings. Back and forth and around he turned and twisted the rings, twiddling the swivels between thumb and finger. At last he looked up with a direct glance at Robinson.

"Nothing is wrong with these rings," he announced. "LaTour's death was not caused by crystallisation."

"Then she must have had a dizzy spell!" cried Colonel Robinson, excitedly. "Now, look here, Chief— you've got to be reasonable. Nobody wants any scandal. There is LaTour's husband. Ask Flandrin if he wants any trouble about this. You know he doesn't. And speaking impartially, the circus doesn't, either. Fifteen newspaper men are out in the alley right now, and if they get one whiff at what you have suggested here—"

With one lift of chin and eyes, Thatcher Colt silenced the showman.

"We are wasting time," he interposed. "I shall have to get on with the investigation."

He turned back to the couch. Again he bent over the body of Josie LaTour. But now his eyes dallied neither with the right arm with its scars of old burns, nor the left, so fair and womanly. Close to the dead face itself hovered the Police Commissioner's eyes, searching the very pores. One cautious finger he raised, pointing to the firm line of her cheek-bone.

"A stain on the make-up," he remarked aloud, and I knew this was for my note-book. "In fact, stains on both sides of the face."

The Commissioner, without rising, looked around over his shoulder and requested:

"Colonel Robinson, will you please send for Keblia! I left him in charge of an officer outside the door."

With a muttered comment, the circus owner left to summon the witch doctor. Intent upon his immediate task, Colt turned back to the body. Now he was studying the dead girl's costume. With minute attention, his hands toyed with a circlet of spangles at the yoked neck of her dress. From his taut attitude I knew at once that he had come upon something that seemed to him important; and when I glimpsed his face I realised that Thatcher Colt was suddenly, mysteriously, profoundly affected.

Standing erect, but with his fingers still holding the spangled neckband, the Commissioner asked softly:

"Where is the maid, Isabel?"

The attendant of Josie LaTour stepped forward. Her stout figure seemed to grow rigid as she faced Colt.

"What is your name?" "Isabel Chant."

"How long have you been with Miss LaTour?"

"About four years."

"Would you say that your mistress was a careful dresser?"

"Meticulous. She deserved the best, and she got it," was the prompt reply. "But why—"

Colt pointed at the cloak of sequins lying on the floor.

"That cloak, for instance, seems to be in excellent condition," he commented. "Looks as if it had just come from the couturier."

"No woman in the circus ever had a wardrobe like LaTour's," boasted Isabel Chant, between closed teeth, "and she kept it up all the time. Everything about her was like a queen. That was the way she wanted it to be and that was the way it was."

"And it was your job, was it not, to see that her wardrobe was kept in perfect condition?"

"That was what she paid me for, and that was what I did. May I ask why—"

"You prepared her costume for this evening?"

"I did."

"Did you examine it before she put it on?"

"Of course I did, and so did she. And for the love of heaven, what does it matter, anyway?"

With his free hand Colt pointed to the spangled collar.

"Look at these ornaments. Were they not new?"

"Yes! But—"

"Come closer and look at them now!"

Colt's voice was very low. Isabel Chant bent her head forward so that her shadow fell across the dead face. Moon-eyed she stared down at the spangles. She blinked and frowned, and then, without speaking, turned and with a trot-like running movement crossed the floor and picked up from a table an enormous pair of gold-rimmed spectacles. With these at a lopsided angle on her nose, she trotted back again to the body and looked down, for a long irresolute moment. But as she reached out her right hand, Colt seized her wrist.

"DONT touch!" he admonished. "But tell me— do you see any difference in those spangles now from their appearance when Josie LaTour left this room?"

"Yes— I do!"

"What do you see?"

"One of those spangles is dented— almost broken."

"You see it as if it had been struck by some blunt instrument. Something struck her with enough force to break or dent the spangle, but not to penetrate the body."

"Yes!"

"Have you any idea how that spangle was broken?"

"Not the slightest. She fell on her back, so it couldn't be that!"

"Do you notice anything else unusual in these spangles?"

"I don't know what you're getting at, but I never permitted Miss Josie to go into the ring with spangles like that. They were always glittering and shining bright. Now they are dull. Their lustre is all gone. There's a kind of film over them— and the life is gone out of them, as if they died, too. They were golden and now they look like lead. Does that really mean anything, Mr. colt?"

With a weary motion, Colt passed his hands briefly over his eyes. The Police Commissioner of New York City seemed more profoundly shaken than I had ever seen him before. He turned directly to Flandrin.

"I am sorry to tell you," said Colt, "that I am now quite satisfied your wife was deliberately murdered. But it will require the full resources of the Police Department to bring her assassin to justice."

He turned to Isabel Chant.

"Cover the body with a sheet," he ordered curtly. "I must ask all of you ladies and gentlemen to wait outside in the first convenient dressing-room. I shall send for you a little later on. Tony— that telephone on the table— notify the Homicide Division. Dougherty, send patrolmen to guard the centre ring in the arena— and whether the show is over or not, be sure that no other person sets foot inside that ring-curb. And when Colonel Robinson gets back with that African magician, I want to see him at once. Meanwhile-please leave us in this room alone."

EXCEPT for Dougherty, talking to the policeman, no one moved. There was defiance in the very air. The District Attorney, his errand performed, took his place beside Colt, and the three of us stood there facing the other group, so that the cleavage was organised, physical, and visible. It was as if that glamorous and alien thing, the circus, had ranged itself besides its dead, opposed to the world with which it was utterly out of sympathy. And, as Colt was afterwards to point out, this was no more than natural. True, in recent years the circus world had laboured to establish public confidence. Its standards lifted, it became an honourable institution in American amusement life. But behind that new estate jangled more than a century of another kind of feeling altogether-the spirit of the old times, when the circus was a world of grafters preying on the public, and when the call of "hey rube" meant broken heads and bloody clashes between performers and customers. Now, suddenly, all those years were wiped away. We on the one side stood for the law, and, deep In the sub-consciousness of those others, the law was the common enemy of their kind. Closer they clustered together, drawn into a phalanx about the corpse of one of their great ones.

I dwell upon this here because it was one of the chief factors in delaying Thatcher Colt's solution of the crime. The circus people would not co-operate with us. Even when the final and utterly damning evidence lay before them, indisputable, they did not want to believe.

"The Medical Examiner and the others are on their way," I reported, as I hung up the receiver. At my words, Flandrin seemed dynamited into life. In one leap he sprang before Colt.

"Medical Examiner!" he choked. "That means coroner. That means-autopsy— a post-mortem. No, no, Mr. Colt. Don't! She wouldn't want it! You heard what she said about her left arm— it was so beautiful. Even if someone had murdered her, she wouldn't want to be cut up. I think all this talk is mad-but If she was killed, then leave it all to me. Tell me what you know, or suspect, and I will do the rest. I promise you I will save the police the trouble. But no doctors can use their knives on her now! I'll go to court to stop you— no, I won't wait for that! You shall not cut up my wife!"

Defiantly he faced Thatcher Colt, as if ready to spring upon the Police Commissioner. The others crowded around the acrobat; the very air quivered with challenge.

Every eye in the room was fixed on Thatcher Colt.

Chapter 6

POLICE are always puzzled when a relative opposes an autopsy. Nothing could be more natural than such objections, and yet the very naturalness makes them a perfect excuse for anyone who has a criminal motive in opposing a post-mortem examination.

"Take hold of yourself, Flandrin," Colt said sternly. "Be a man. not a boy. This job is mine, not yours, and I am going to finish it!"

And as Colt spoke, two bluecoats stood in the doorway. Others filled in the back-ground beyond-the corridor was blue with police. Flandrin looked into those hard, red faces, and from them back to Colt. The acrobat's glance, trapped and beaten, was tragic to see. The massive shoulders sagged in the green silken tights, as he walked out of the room. One by one the others followed Flandrin in the order of their standing in the tinsel universe— Flandra, followed by Flandreau, and after them Sebastian, Doctor Charavay, Doctor Ransom, Isabel Chant, and Eddie Stevens. With a policeman stationed outside, the door was closed. The Police Commissioner, the District Attorney, and I were alone with the lifeless Josie LaTour.

I looked at Thatcher Colt and got the shock of my life. Something wet glistened in the eyes of the Police commissioner! But he pretended not to know. He was wasting no time. Having finished a brief examination of the room, the Commissioner sent once more for Eddie Stevens, LaTour's assistant in the ring. A moment later, the grey little man in the bright uniform, with his mouse-like skin, his ophidian forehead, and his dead grey eyes, stood nervously at the bottom of the couch, waiting his private examination, with Thatcher Colt at the top and the body between them.

"How long have you been working for Josie LaTour?"

"Five years."

"Before she married Flandrin?"

"Sure."

"Know of any enemies of LaTour?"

"Never heard she had any."

Colt looked sceptically at the District Attorney and then at me.

"Can you shoot?" asked Thatcher Colt unexpectedly. The question surprised me, although I knew that Colt thought he had heard a shot.

The mechanic nodded and gulped.

"Anybody around a circus soon learns to shoot."

"You are a marksman?"

"Fair."

"With rifles?"

"And revolver. I can shoot anything— but I haven't shot anything tonight."

"Hold him until the Homicide Squad gets here," ordered Thatcher Colt. "Then send him to the nearest police station with a detective. If you know anything else, Eddie— better tell it now. We'll know it, anyhow before morning."

I turned the twitching Eddie Stevens over to an officer. Colt next questioned Flandra and, after her, Flandreau, partners of LaTour's husband on the high bars. Man and wife, they had a perfect account to give of themselves, and seemed to care little about anything else.

"Where were you when LaTour fell?" Colt demanded.

Each told the same story. They were playing bridge with two barrel Jugglers, and only a minute's inquiry was needed to con-firm their statements. Their alibi was impeccable.

AT Colt's further word, I brought Isabel Chant again into the room. The Commissioner started in by asking the maid if she could shoot. In a most glacial tone she replied that she was a topping pistol shot. Her over-nice manner and toad-like eyes did not incline me favourably towards Isabel, and I could see that Colt shared my repugnance. But her story was brief and logical. She was an Australian woman— she said girl— of excellent family, who had married an army captain; a great come-down, for which her family disowned her. Later her captain was killed by a fall in the bath-tub and she had had to earn her own living. For a while she was governess. Then, when Josie LaTour was in London, Mrs. Chant answered an advertisement and was given the position.

"I did everything for her," declared Isabel. "I was her masseuse, her reader, and her duenna all the time Flandrin was courting her— in fact, I was her closest friend."

"Then you got on well together?"

"Like sisters!"

"Can you tell me of any person who would desire to kill Josie LaTour?"

"No!"

"Sure?"

"Sure."

"You haven't heard any threats?"

"Only that letter— no, wait— Mr. Colt. I did hear something."

"Go on, Isabel?"

"It was the day before yesterday. Miss Josie and I had opened up the flat on Seventy-ninth Street. We had been working hard, house-cleaning all day, because Miss Josie wanted the place to be looking right before Flandrin got home from Europe. I was very tired and went to bed after dinner. I was awakened by the sound of angry voices. They were quarrelling—"

"Man or woman?"

"It was a man quarrelling with Miss Josie. She told him she was going ahead with her plans if it was the last thing she ever did. And the man said it would be the last thing she ever did, and I heard the door slam."

"Who was the man?"

"I don't know. I got up and went to Miss Josie. But she had locked herself in her room. And she wouldn't tell me who the man was. I hinted several times."

"Was his voice familiar?"

"Yes— and no. You see, I'm a little deaf, and I'm not very good on identifying voices."

"You can throw no other light on this tragedy?"

"I still think it was an accident and nothing more."

THEN we were again alone, Colt said:

"Make a note to have that old girl's passport papers looked up. She seems all right, but we can't take anything for granted. Now-before we talk to Flandrin— let's have a preliminary word with that sinister and somehow suspicious gentleman called Sebastian."

But here I had to report failure. Sebastian, having consoled Flandrin, his friend, had then departed with his wife and his seven cousins and brothers and sons. As I returned with this report, Colt told me to find Mr. Bradfield, the musical director.

"The band leader?" exclaimed Dougherty disapprovingly. "He was at the other end of the arena when that woman fell. What can he know? How can he help?"

But Colt only smiled and said there was one detail to be checked up. I went off in search of Warner Bradfield, an old-timer who, as it turned out, was waiting just out-side the door.

"I've been trying to find Colonel Robinson," he explained.

"And he is trying to find Keblia," I replied. "And they both seem to have vanished. Meanwhile, Mr. Colt wants to see you."

"Bradfield," Colt began, "you had all the drums going during the LaTour act?"

"Yes, sir— bass and side and kettle-drum."

"And yet just before her fall your perfect rhythm was disturbed by an off-beat sound."

"Right. I heard it, too!" confirmed Bradfield easily. "I noticed it at the time and then I guess I forgot about it. It did come just before she fell. What do you think it was? A pistol shot?"

Colt had opened the door.

"Just remember hearing that extraneous sound," he advised. "You may be asked to testify some day."

As the startled Bradfield was leaving, Assistant Chief Inspector Flynn appeared in the doorway, leading the men from the Homicide Squad.

Grouped behind Flynn around the entrance of the dressing-room were many familiar faces, men who had served with Colt in his investigations of previous tragic mysteries. With these representatives of the Homicide Squad were two specialists with whom we had often worked before Sergeant Wiekes from the Statistical and Criminal Identification Bureau, and Fred Merkle, the official photographer. Behind all these and elbowing his way aggressively forward was Doctor J. L. Multooler, Assistant Medical Examiner.

To the physician and Flynn Colt explained what had happened.

"I want a post-mortem as soon as possible. And particularly I want her dress taken off and sent down to Doctor Clesleek."

"Clesleek is home in bed with a cold," Doctor Multooler objected.

"Get him," reiterated the Commissioner emphatically. "He is the best chemist attached to our office-and this job needs him. Yank him out of bed if you have to, but get him to work. Have him analyse the dress— especially those spangles."

DOCTOR MULTOOLER'S gaze was deeply puzzled as he looked from the Commissioner to the body on the couch. But he made no comment. Three seconds later a variety of weird activities started in the jade dressing-room.

These activities set in motion, Colt asked me rather impatiently what had become of Colonel Robinson— and Keblia.

"Nobody has seen either of them," I reported. "I have two police officers hunting for them."

For a moment Colt looked perplexed, then seemed to shake off some unworthy suspicion. Turning back to Flynn, he said:

"There is a famous clown dog in the show. Get the owner. I want an explanation of how it was the dog escaped and got back in the ring, barking distractedly just a few seconds before she fell. Meanwhile, I am going to let you men work in here while I commandeer a dressing-room and talk to Flandrin."

Inspector Flynn's rugged face flushed slightly.

"Flandrin? That's the deceased's husband?"

"Correct. Do you know him?"

"No. But I picked up something on the way in here. One of my men slipped me the tip that Flandrin's first wife— divorced, get it, and hated the deceased— well, the first wife was out in front tonight."

"Better get that woman, too!" advised Dougherty, and Flynn said he would have a search made for her.

"Meanwhile," said Thatcher Colt, "we can find a room and question Flandrin."

Two minutes later we were in a bare room with concrete walls, the sort of room used by minor pugilists, dressing for a Garden bout. With a kitchen table between us, we gathered together. Dougherty, Colt, and myself. Dressed in natty street clothing, Flandrin, the acrobat, sat on the other side of the table, arms folded, ready to be examined. His dazed manner had passed off; he was calm and polite and expressed himself as ready and willing to answer all questions.

Colt began with the same question he had asked the others:

"Flandrin, can you shoot?"

"I am an expert pistol shot."

"And how old are you, Flandrin?"

"Twenty-six— oh, well— I am really thirty-two. You see, an artist must seem young to his public."

"And I understand you have been married to Josie LaTour about two years. During that two years have you ever known LaTour to be in danger from any enemy?"

Flandrin gave a weary shake of his head.

"No, no— she risked her life at every performance. But no one tried to injure her—"

"You are sure of that?" Flandrin frowned.

"When you ask me like that, I am really not so sure. Last January we nearly cracked up in our car, out in California. We found the steering wheel was defective and somebody said it had been tampered with."

"Who suggested that?"

"Well, nobody of any importance, Mr. Colt."

"But who, please?"

"Keblia— the Ubangis were with a winter circus last January."

"Exactly what did Keblia tell you?"

"He said a demon or an enemy was after us, and he warned us to be very c careful— and I remember he said there was no such thing as a natural death."

"But you did not take the suggestion seriously?"

"No, no— I thought it was nonsense, and I still think so."

OF all this testimony, I was making a complete stenographic record. Long ago I had learned to carry two India paper notebooks wherever I went with Thatcher Colt. Of course, my duties as confidential secretary to the Police Commissioner were in no sense calligraphic. But in emergency and in specially confidential matters I often took down the record. Tonight I sat at the kitchen table with notebook and pencil, and it is from those notes, made at that time, that I am able to give here an exact reproduction of the examination.

Next, Thatcher Colt asked Flandrin for a brief account of himself.

The name, Flandrin, suggested a French origin, but we now learned that it was only a part of the usual circus hocus-pocus. Actually Flandrin was a German, named Heisse. Early In life he ran off on a ship and sailed around the world. It was on this trip, from an old circus man turned sailor, that Flandrin learned his first tricks, performed on shrouds and cross-trees. But the Heisse family had reclaimed the runaway, taking him back to Germany where he eventually was graduated from Heidelberg. There he married and remained for two years of post-graduate work, during which he met Josie LaTour. It was LaTour who lured him from the laboratory to the circus, and she gave him his French-sounding name. For her new inamorata, she obtained a small place with a family of European acrobats. At her urging, he studied and practised to make himself a star performer. Under the spell of her love, Flandrin completely forsook science for the show world. His strength, his youth, his scientifically-trained mind, all worked in his favour. Soon he formed his own team, giving to his partners variants of his own new name. Thus, Flandreau and Flandra were merely employees whose real name was Osterman. Divorces having been procured, LaTour and Flandrin became man and wife. From that moment on, his fortunes began to rise.

Flandrin told his biography simply and humbly, but with eyes that constantly wandered, wishing him well free of his inquisition. The trapezist kept looking over his shoulder, as if his eyes might pierce the walls of steel and masonry, and look into that next room, where the Assistant Medical Examiner, in his shirt sleeves, still busied himself upon the naked body of the fallen star.

"Now, Flandrin," resumed Colt, "about your previous marriage— who was your first wife?"

The acrobat's lips curled disdainfully.

"She, too, was a chemical student. She came to this country recently-about a year ago-following my marriage to Josie. Her name-Flora Becker."

"And where does she live now?"

"In a rooming house in West Forty-third Street, called the 'Little Florence.' "

"Any children?"

"No."

"Are you and Flora on bad terms?"

"No, no— of course, we don't bill and coo. It is better so. I don't admire the modern custom of getting divorced and remaining friends. I think it is bad taste. Flora was angry at Josie, of course; she I had an idea Josie stole me away, but that I was not so. The fact was that I stole I Josie away from her first husband— I am quite proud of that action, too."

Colt bent forward earnestly, his hands flat on the kitchen table, as if he would magnetise it. But his eyes were on Flandrin.

"If your second wife were murdered, I would you be inclined to think your first wife capable of such a deed?"

Flandrin bent his head and his strong fingers played nervously around his iron jaw.

"Impossible," he decided.

"Why do you say so?"

"Flora has a will of her own, of course; I she's the deep quiet kind, and she holds a grudge for a long, long time, but she would not try to kill Josie. She is too religious a person."

"Have you seen her lately?" Flandrin shook his head.

"Not often. I've been playing abroad practically all winter," he revealed. "So I wouldn't have had much chance to see her."

"When were you married to Josie?"

"Two years ago, in Bordeaux."

"And where are you staying now in New York?"

"We have an apartment in a brownstone-front house in West Seventy-ninth Street."

"I see. Now, make one point clear to me— when the circus is on the road, you have a cook-tent in which the meals for the performers are served— isn't that right?"

"Yes."

"Is that system continued while the circus is at the Garden?"

"No, no! There's a building for the help— the roustabouts and the razor-backs, mechanics and people like that— up on Fiftieth Street, between Eighth and Ninth Avenues. But while we are in New York the artists eat wherever they please and pay for it themselves."

"And where did you and Josie eat your dinner to-night?"

"We did not eat together. My ship docked late. I had only a word with LaTour before she died."

"You don't know what she had for dinner?"

"Do you mean-she was poisoned?"

"Perhaps. I can't tell. But the puffiness around the eyes indicates some profound chemical action in the body. Do you know what she had to eat?"

FLANDRIN ran a great hand wearily through his bushy locks.

"Isabel can tell you," he choked.

Again I recalled the maid, who said:

"We had shrimp cocktail, mushroom soup, roast veal stuffed, canned ears of corn, Idaho baked potatoes, beets and broccoli, endives for the salad, strawberry shortcake, and coffee. It was Miss Josie's favourite menu."

At a signal from Colt, I led the maid from the room and gave a memorandum of LaTour's last menu to Doctor Multooler. The Assistant Medical Examiner thanked me with an owlish glance. When I re-turned to our extempore inquisition chamber, I found that Colt was drawing from Flandrin certain facts about the past of Josie LaTour.

"My wife was born in Budapest. She was brought over here when she was a little girl, with the Waring troupe. Her mother was a performer in that troupe. Her grandmother and her great-grandmother were both performers. She used to tell me that for as long as she could remember she had the ambition to thrill the whole world with difficult gymnastics. And she succeeded, gentlemen. You may see her trophies in our apartment. There wasn't a man anywhere who could duplicate my wife's work."

"What was her real name?"

"I suppose you would have to know that, too. Well, it was Zegum— Theresa Zegum. Of course she's been known as Josie LaTour since childhood. She has a brother. Edward Zegum, who is a mathematics teacher in the public schools in Middle Village, Massachusetts. We always looked forward to going to New England.... It cannot be any more now!"

Colt reached for a fresh cigarette.

"What was the name of her former husband?" he inquired suddenly.

Flandrin shrugged lightly.

"LaTour's first husband," he explained, in an off-hand voice, "was of no account. His name was Raphaelo, and he really was an Italian— a good acrobat, once upon a time, but old-fashioned. The trouble with him was he was such a jealous beast. But he is dead— more than a year now. In his own way," went on Flandrin, speaking judicially, "I think Raphaelo adored LaTour. Drink cost him his wife and his job— finally his life. He fell from a high perch— dizzy spell...."

There was a moment of reflective silence. Then Thatcher Colt leaned forward, looking Flandrin straight in the eyes.

"And what," asked the Commissioner, "about Marburg Lovell?"

THE effect of that question was out of all proportion to the others. It seemed to Ignite some kind of powder train in the head of the unhappy acrobat. With a muffled cry, he leaped up from the table, face white, eyes haunted.

"Marburg Lovell! Well— what about him— who cares anything about him?"

It was Colt's turn to shrug.

"You know he had been sending your wife flowers. You know that he admired her. You know that he wrote her letters. What about that, Flandrin?"

Flandrin shook his head from side to side, as if to clear his mind of some poisonous miasma.

"Marburg Lovell is nothing in our lives," he said distinctly. "People talk too much, that is all. Lovell is Robinson's backer— but he is a dirty old man!"

A knock came to the door, but Colt stayed me with a warning hand.

"Just a minute before you answer that, Tony. It was a fact, was it not, Flandrin, that Madame LaTour always watched your act from the wings?"

"And I always watched hers."

"Did you watch to-night?"

"Certainly."

"Keep your eyes on her all the time?"

"Practically-yes."

"What do you mean— practically? Do you remember looking away at any particular time?"

"Yes— when the dog barked."

"I see. And then, when she fell, you ran from the performers' entrance to the ring, lifted her in your arms, and carried her off— through the corridor under the front seats, up the steps, and into her dressing room. That's right, isn't it?"

"To the last detail but—"

"Did your wife, at any time that she was in your arms, regain consciousness?"

"No, no!"

"Said nothing at all?"

"Nothing."

"Did she open her eyes?"

"Never. It is my belief that she died when she struck the ground."

Again came that knocking, and this time Colt signalled to me to open the door. Doctor Multooler stepped briskly into the room and said:

"I can give you a preliminary statement right now, if we can be alone for a minute."

Colt's sombre gaze darkened.

"This is the lady's husband," the Commissioner explained. "He is entitled to know the facts. Speak out, Doctor."

"You were right, Mr. Colt. Not a doubt of it, sir."

"How do you know?"

"There are definite symptoms of chemical action in the preliminary examination."

"Know what was used?"

"Only the complete autopsy will show that! The indications, such as they are, puzzle me deeply."

"It could not have been— cyanide of potassium?" asked Dougherty.

The physician opened his owlish eyes in astonishment.

"Impossible!"

"Isn't it true that the action of cyanide of potassium is practically instantaneous?"

"Absolutely. But how could Josie LaTour get a dose of cyanide of potassium while she was throwing her body over her shoulder fifty feet in the air? Unless you assume suicide?"

"My wife did not take her own life," Flandrin protested. "She loved life!"

"It is possible," argued Doctor Multooler, "that she tired of her life. Many people do, you know. If she had a vial or a packet—"

Colt shook his head vigorously.

"Suicide is too fantastic to believe! You see, Doctor, I happened to have learned from Robinson that just before she left the dressing-room Josie LaTour sent out a messenger boy for sandwiches. She did not expect to die— she meant to eat. It is most unlikely that a woman contemplating suicide would have stipulated rye bread for herself and no mayonnaise, as distinguished from white bread for Flandrin and mayonnaise."

"All that sounds reasonable," sighed Dougherty, "but admitting that, where does it get you? She couldn't have swallowed poison by accident in the middle of her act."

Colt turned to Flandrin.

"Would you mind leaving here now— and going to your apartment in West Seventy-ninth Street? I shall join you there in less than an hour."

Flandrin's pale face had blanched a shade whiter.

"Can I take her body?" he asked huskily.

"Not yet."

HAPLESSLY, Flandrin strode away. A moment later I slipped from the room, at a word from Colt, and sought out Inspector Flynn. When Flandrin left Madison Square Garden, he would be tailed by a detective of the Homicide Squad.

Colt and Multooler were talking together when I got back in the room.

"You're sending the body down to Bellevue, Doctor?"

"It's gone now— I'm about to follow it. I'll do my best to find what you need."

Colt shook hands with the Assistant Medical Examiner. The two men looked at each other, eye to eye, and both understood. Multooler, shrewd veteran of forensic surgery, buttoned his spring overcoat and waddled off upon his grisly errand, to the autopsy room of the Bellevue Morgue.

"Well, Thatcher," began the District Attorney, "it looks to me like there's a hell of a lot that bird Flandrin will have to explain."

Colt was patting the pockets of his dinner jacket, frisking himself for his pipe. But the Algerian briar was not there; he had left it at home. With a sigh, he produced a silver case and lit a cigarette.

"For once, Dougherty," he sighed, "I'm inclined to agree with you. Flandrin's behaviour was slightly suspicious. The thing that impressed me most was that he failed to speak of his wife's notorious temper. It was common knowledge that her husband suffered from it. In any event, a crime as clever as this could only have been accomplished by someone intimately familiar with the show life routine. No one could have done it who did not live in this atmosphere, or who had not carefully studied it at first hand."

There came then a loud knocking and the door was thrown suddenly open by a patrol-man behind whom stood Eddie Stevens, the grey-faced little property man, and Isabel Chant. All three were plainly excited.

"What is it?" snapped Colt.

"Something hanging over the doorway!" exploded the policeman. "And these people―"

"We saw it first!" cried Eddie Stevens.

"I saw it first and showed it to you!" squealed Isabel.

"Quiet!" roared Dougherty.

The patrolman pointed to Eddie Stevens "He's got it in his hands," he sneered "He wouldn't let me touch the thing."

And the patrolman crossed himself.

"Bring it here, whatever it is," rasped Dougherty.

Eddie Stevens shuffled into the room. He was bent forward; his hands were clasped loosely together as if concealing between palm and fingers some object about the size of an apple. Behind him, purple-faced and pop-eyed, was Isabel Chant. The two of them looked at each other.

"You tell him," proposed Isabel.

"No," objected Eddie. "I'll show him― you tell him."

The maid faced Thatcher Colt.

"It's those black devils," she said between her teeth.

Colt's eyes narrowed. "The Ubangi?"

"If anybody did anything to poor LaTour, they did. And Flandrin was always palling around with them— said he was interested in their poisons. Those savages pretended to love her— but I believe they hated her. You see, Mr. Colt, we all loved Miss Josie, but she was a great artist. She was like Mary Garden— Tetrazzini— Jeritza— temperamental-"

"You mean," inserted District Attorney Dougherty, "that she had a temper."

"She didn't like the Ubangi," went on Isabel. "The sight of their protruding lips offended her. She felt that Colonel Robinson made a mistake in bringing them over here-that they belonged to another era of the circus— that the public had gone beyond all that. At first, whenever the Ubangis would come near her, she would put up her hands to her ears and shut her eyes. But she was kind to them, especially Keblia― she thought him amusing in his loud clothes. The Ubangi looked up to Josie LaTour like a goddess. Until to-night-"

"She whipped two of them. I know about that. Go on," said Colt.

"But she had whipped them before!" cried Isabel. "Even Keblia. He made a remark to her and it made her furiously angry."

"What did he say?" Dougherty wanted to know.

"I don't know. Whatever it was, Miss Josie resented it as an impertinence. She whipped Keblia until he screamed. Of course, they made it up afterwards. But I've heard strange stories— stories about the magic of Africa. Those aborigines have strange ways, Mr. Colt-ways that we white people do not understand."

SHE stopped here and looked at Eddie Stevens. The mechanic began to walk forward slowly, with the step of a somnambulist. His hands were still held out in front of him, cupping a mysterious object. He reached the Police Commissioner, lifted his right hand, and thrust forward the left where something curiously shaped lay in the deep hollow of his palm. Colt stared at it in astonishment. I heard him mutter the word: "Ju-ju!"

The object in the mechanic's hand was a tiny image made of mud— a jungle eidolon. Crude, awkwardly shaped, as it was, the little figure nevertheless bore a definite and forceful resemblance to Josie LaTour. There was in this tiny piece of earthen sculpture the same proportion of hip and shoulders, the same gallant set of LaTour's head, and in all its ineptitude, some inscrutable reflection of her vitality, strength, and grace. The thing was weird, but weirder still was the small gleaming object that pierced it— a long sharp needle, driven straight through the place where the heart would be.

"Where did you find this?" asked Colt, with a lustrous glance towards Biddie.

"I found it hanging by a string, tied to a small nail, driven above the door of Josie LaTour's dressing-room," he replied.

A deep silence followed this extraordinary disclosure. Finally Thatcher Colt reached out and took from the mechanic's calloused palm that miniature image of the dead performer.

"That is a very strange thing," he remarked thoughtfully. "So that's why the Ubangi women were hiding in LaTour's dressing-room tonight. I wonder―"

"We all know what it is," interposed Dougherty, his popping eyes following the object at Colt's fingertips as if the District Attorney expected the tiny doll to come to life. "It looks very suspicious to me, Thatcher. In the first place, LaTour horse-whipped a witch doctor of the Ubangi. That was bad."

Thatcher Colt nodded solemnly.

"Any reader of African adventure stories will realise that," he conceded.

"Never mind the irony," growled Dougherty. "What I said is still true. She lashed the bare backs of two savages, and once before she whipped the witch doctor of the tribe. And the tribe happens to be notorious for its knowledge of poisons— and Josie LaTour may have been poisoned."

COLT lifted the gardenia from the glass of water— a certain signal that he would soon depart. He looked at Dougherty thoughtfully.

"You have made out a case," he agreed, "as far as it goes. But it leaves such a lot to be explained."

"Such as—" challenged Dougherty.

Colt delayed his answer for a moment while he wrapped the mud image in a handkerchief, sent for Sergeant Wiekes, and instructed him to treat it for finger-prints. Then, waving the disconcerted Eddie and Isabel out of the room, he replied to the District Attorney's question:

"Such as where is Colonel Robinson right now, Dougherty? And where is Keblia? I want more information about that witch doctor. Because I am Interested in the circus, I happen to know a little-but not enough. For one thing, I know that the big man of the tribe— King Keblia— is an expert shot with a knife. He can throw a two-pronged knife some two hundred yards with accuracy and, according to his manager, he has killed three hundred buffalo with it. That may have a direct bearing on the case. But we cannot grasp the entire background of such people, and that is where a large part of our difficulty will lie. I know, too, that these savages come from deKaybe, in French Equatorial Africa, about fifty miles from Fort Archambault, which is named after a Legionnaire who was killed there-and, some say, by a mysterious poison, administered at a distance. That, too, may be significant. That is why I want to question Keblia. If only—"

The door was pushed violently open. Colonel Robinson stalked in, his bronzed face flushed, his silver locks in tangled disorder.

"Mr. Colt," he said, "I have looked high and low for King Keblia and he simply cannot be found."

"Keblia is gone?"

"Vanished. I've looked for him all over."

"But I left him in charge of an officer!"

"Yes," chuckled Robinson grimly. "But he's missing, too!"

Before Colt could reply, Inspector Flynn burst into the room.

"Mr. Colt!" he cried. "Hell is popping outside. You told Officer Cohallan to guard an African heathen. Well, the officer kept him in a dressing-room-until all at once he felt dizzy— an attack of vertigo— and fainted."

"A cop-fainted?" howled Dougherty.

"Sure he did. So did Napoleon once. Cohallan fainted. Doctor Charavay says it's from a poison dart— and his heathen prisoner got away!"

Chapter 7

BY no outward sign did Thatcher Colt betray his surprise and disappointment. Turning to Robinson, his voice crackled a question:

"If he got out of this building, where did he go?"

Colonel Robinson spread wide his hands.

"How would I know?"

"Have the Ubangi any connections here in the city— any special place they would be likely to go?"

Tod Robinson's smile was slightly bitter. "I'll tell you what I think happened," he replied slowly. "Keblia got away from the white police so's he could solve the crime his own way."

"Flynn," said Thatcher Colt. "Send out an alarm for this miss.ng black man at once! Put it on the radio signal system, and get it to every police car in New York City. Robinson will give you a description of the missing man. No matter what else you do-get me the Ubangi witch doctor."

"You'll have him, chief!"

"Incidentally," grated Dougherty, "we had our men looking high and low for you, Colonel Robinson, and we couldn't find you!"

"We must have missed each other then. I was all over the Garden— looking for Keblia."

Colt stood up and looked at Robinson with a mysterious smile.

"I may need you later tonight," he said. "Where can I be sure to find you?"

"Right here in the Garden, in my office. I'll be here all night."

For a few minutes longer the Commissioner and Dougherty talked with Flynn. Colt's orders were to obtain samples of handwriting from all suspects, so that Centre Street experts could compare the samples with the death notes. Also Flynn was told to close the dressing-room of LaTour, locking the door and sealing the room under police guard until further orders. There are attendants in Madison Square Gardens who to this day shun LaTour's dressing-room— especially when the crowds are gone and the lights are out, and the corridors are dim and phantomesque.

"One thing more, Mr. Commissioner," continued Flynn. "I talked to the owner of that clown dog, but I can't do much with him."

"Did you ask him whose voice the dog would follow?"

"I did. And he named about thirty people."

"How does he account for the presence of the dog to-night?"

"He thinks he forgot to lock the gate to the kennel."

"Was that all that was necessary? Unlatch a gate and the dog would find his own way back to the ring?"

"Exactly. He's that kind of dog. And as soon as he gets to the ring, he start's to bark. It has happened several times before."

"Then anybody could have released the dog and we would have had the same results?"

"So his owner says, Mr. Colt."

"Thanks, Flynn. Now, one thing more― keep plenty of men here at the Garden. I want reports on the comings and goings here for the rest of the night."

"I get it, Mr. Colt."

"And send Eddie Stevens over to the station house with a detective— and try to make him talk."

ON this, Colt left Flynn, and with Dougherty and me, led the way back under the front seats and thence into the arena. Now it was a vast, deserted, and darkened place. Only a few pale lights gave illumination while the mechanics worked at laying out the rigging and apparatus for the next afternoon's show. Three policemen stood stolid guard at the centre ring.

Colt stood at the kerb, one hand resting lightly on Dougherty's bulky shoulder.

"The sawdust and shavings within this circular kerb-line are practically in the same condition as when LaTour Tell," he said. "No one has been allowed to cross those kerb-lines since I issued orders. Somewhere, in the sawdust and shavings and microscopic debris, there may be a clue Flynn will have all this stuff carefully gathered up in bags and sent to the laboratory of Professor Luckner for analysis."

"Are you sure you don't know what you're looking for?" Dougherty asked, suspiciously.

"I do not," confessed Colt, "but I do remember that shortly before the accident LaTour brought her hands together. I imagine she held some resin bags. If so, we must find them. They may have been doctored with something else."

Without further word, Thatcher Colt led the way towards one of the private exits of Madison Square Garden. Presently we had reached the sidewalk. It was raining again.

Drawn up at the kerb, with the plate faced Neil McMahon watchfully at the wheel, was the Police Commissioner's car― a de luxe vehicle for police work, equipped with every design from bullet-proof window panes to a concealed machine gun, forward and back. But Colt did not immediately enter his car, which had already borne us upon so many strange adventures. The Commissioner lingered in the doorway, his eyes staring through the blur of street lamps and falling rain and darkness. Following the direction of his gaze, I saw that he was studying a car parked behind his own; it was an expensive foreign model of extravagant design, and on the door, in decorative pattern, was the monogram "J.L."― Josie LaTour's automobile!

Colt stalked across the sidewalk and opened the door beside the steering wheel. A tall, massive man, in cap and uniform, slumped over the wheel; his heavily lined face was very pale, but he smiled comfortably at Thatcher Colt and drawled:

"Hello, Commissioner!"

"You are LaTour's chauffeur?"

"Sure! I've been wondering whether the cops would look me up or not."

"Queer that no one mentioned you," returned Colt. "Why should you expect a visit from the police? And why didn't you drive Flandrin home?"

"Oh, I heard about what's been going on inside there for the last two hours-and everybody says the police suspect foul play. I haven't seen Flandrin."

"WHO told you about what the police suspect?"

"Eddie Stevens."

"The mechanic in the Josie LaTour act?"

"You guessed it right, Commissioner."

Colt paused to light a cigarette. Then, speaking over the lighted match, he barked:

"Record!"

"Who— me?" Colt nodded.

"No, sir— not me. Never been arrested― not even a ticket for parking too long."

"Name?"

"John Smith. I know it sounds phoney. But it's on the level. After all, there are such people as real John Smiths in the world― no counterfeit without the original, you know— well, my name is John Smith."

Colt nodded agreeably.

"Why didn't you come back stage when you heard about the accident?"

"I did. And when I told them I was Miss Josie's chauffeur, they told me eighteen other guys had tried the same dodge. There I was— on the level and nobody believing me."

"Wasn't that pitiful?" exclaimed Colt, with a sarcastic glance. "Have you any information to volunteer?"

"Not me. But I'm ready to answer any and all questions."

"Any idea who killed her?"

"Hell, no! as far as I'm concerned, it's just terrible, and that's all. You can't drag me into it. I've been sitting here all the time— witnesses and plenty of them will testify to that—"

"Nobody is suggesting that you had anything to do with it," interrupted Dougherty, pushing forward and lifting a drenched red hand. "What Mr. Colt wants to know is whether you have any information or theory that might be valuable to the police."

The sharp eyes of John Smith leaped from the face of the District Attorney to Thatcher Colt— and lingered there.

"Maybe I have a theory," he admitted.

"What is it? Don't act so damned coy!" cried Dougherty impatiently.

Again that sly glance from face to face. "There was one man who was burned up enough to kill her. Not because he hated her-do you get me-not because he hated her, but because he was nuts about her."

"Are you referring to Marburg Lovell?" asked Dougherty.

"Naw— not at all. These bum millionaires don't care as much as that for what they're after, now, do they though? You know better than that. But there is one poor guy that broods all the time because he loves her and she don't love him. He saw her first, too— while Flandrin was still a college guy. But even after Miss Josie married Flandrin— that didn't stop this other guy moping, and wishing things was different, and all like that, see? I know what I'm talking about there— because I've carried the guy in this very car and I've heard him talking out loud, until it was enough to give you the willies."

DOUGHERTY took a step forward. "You've stalled enough," he remonstrated. "Who is this man you are talking about?"

"Well, hell— I mean Flandreau."

"Flandreau?" gasped Dougherty, as I felt a pang of pride. Almost from the beginning I had suspected the muscular catcher.

"You mean Flandrin's partner?" from Thatcher Colt.

"Yes— exactly. Flandreau is still in love with Josie. The whole circus knows that. But not one of them will tell you. It's a shut-mouthed mob, no matter how you take them."

"But Flandreau is married!"

"Sure— I know that!"

"And why are you telling us?" bore down Colt.

"Didn't you ask me?" was Smith's surly reply. "What are you standing there for, if not to keep me on the hot spot? You're the police. All right— I'm scared then, the way I ought to be. You want to know what I think— well, I told you, that's all."

Colt threw away his cigarette.

"You believe Flandreau did it," he recited. "You think the motive was jealousy. But how do you believe the murder was committed?"

"I don't know."

"Don't you think it is a rather high-handed proceeding, just guessing that a man is a murderer— solely because you think he had a motive?"

John Smith shrugged.

"If he is innocent, my guess can't do him any real harm. But it's not all guess. Get that straight. I saw something!"

"What?"

"I saw Flandreau come out of the performers' entrance there, just a few minutes after LaTour fell. I saw him across the street, carrying a long bundle under his arm, and when he came back, he did not have the bundle."

Colt squinted up the darkened street.

"The performers' entrance is a long way off. How could you be sure it was Flandreau you saw?"

"By his overcoat. A typical acrobat's overcoat with broad stripes. I couldn't be mistaken."

"Did you ever have any trouble with Flandreau?" asked Colt quietly.

"Not very often," answered John Smith, with a nonchalant air. "You see, Flandreau tried to make love to her, if they were alone in the car together, every so often. And sometimes I had to interfere, but Josie wouldn't let me tell Flandrin— you see how it was?"

"So Flandrin never knew?"

"Not from me— and I don't think from Josie— Miss LaTour!"

"I see."

"And there's another thing," the garrulous John Smith chatted on. "Flandreau has had too much to whisper about with Eddie Stevens lately!"

Eddie Stevens again!

The little mechanic who was in the ring when LaTour fell, the man she had trusted and who had been looking the other way.

Colt had taken a step to his right. From this new point of vantage, he got a clear view of the chauffeur's profile. It was a defeated face, hopeless and not a little bitter, as if only a few years ago, this brazen-throated man had had his ambitions. Colt spoke to him with quiet decisiveness.

"You are not to repeat this story to anyone," the Commissioner cautioned him. "If it leads to anything I shall talk with you again."

"Well, hell," cried the loud-voiced John Smith. "Mum's the word so far as I'm concerned."

As we made our way towards our own car, Dougherty touched Colt's sleeve.

"Aren't we going back to question Flandreau about that bundle?" he wished to know.

Colt shook his head.

"We know that Flandreau has a perfect alibi!"

"But—"

"But the real question is— who impersonated Flandreau by putting on his so easily distinguished overcoat?"

"Exactly! And—"

"And that question will never be answered until certain other basic facts are in our hands!"

Dougherty desisted with a sigh.

In Colt's car, the three of us hurried off then towards Seventy-ninth Street-but not before Colt had sent me back to Flynn, with instructions to get the past of LaTour's chauffeur, complete.

Swiftly, our car reached Columbus Circle and now, skirting the fluted shaft with its three stone ships and admiral, we turned into Central Park West and headed north-ward. Only a minute later, the machine halted before that house in Seventy-ninth Street in which LaTour and Flandrin had their apartment.

It was eleven-fifteen o'clock by my watch as we left the car and hurried through the rain, across the sidewalk, up the steps and into the dimmish light of the vestibule.

"I didn't see any light. I certainly hope that Flandrin is waiting for us," muttered Dougherty. "I am just waiting for my chance to talk with him."

Colt again rang the bell.

"You have your doubts about Flandrin?" "I never pre-judge a case, Thatcher," remonstrated Dougherty severely. "All I say is that the dead woman's husband has to clear up certain features about this death that are not clear to me."

As he finished the door was opened by a sad-faced man who, at Colt's brief command, showed us up to the second floor, where the Flandrin apartment was situated. There Colt stood, staring about him.

HE pointed to the horizontal top-piece of the largest of the four doorways opening from the LaTour flat into this long corridor. From this lintel above the main entrance to the rooms there hung an object, dangling on a piece of string. One glance told us what it was― another image of Josie LaTour, malformed in mud, badly made and yet with a certain crude likeness to the subject. Voodoo! Magic! Witchcraft dangling above the threshold across which the lovely Josie would never walk again!

It was Colt who reached above the door-way and snatched down the mud image. Across his left palm he laid it, and for a full minute he studied it intently. Then, wrapped in a handkerchief, the image was passed to me; the original is with the other relics of the case at the crime museum.

"I think," remarked Thatcher Colt, "that the time is rapidly coming when we shall need some scientific authority to help us with this jungle magic."

Saying which, he seemed to dismiss the subject, as he knocked briskly on the door. There was no immediate answer, and we waited in silence. Finally Colt knocked again. He tried the key but the door would not yield.

It was bolted from the inside!

"Who's in there?" called Thatcher Colt. "We are the police. Open this door or we will break it down!"

There was still no answer.

"Lend a shoulder. Dougherty!" cried Thatcher Colt.

The three of us hurled ourselves against the heavy door, but it resisted our united efforts. Finally Thatcher Colt borrowed my revolver-in all his days as Commissioner he did not carry a weapon of his own-and set its muzzle on a sharp angle against the edge, five inches from the knob.

"I calculate," he said, "the bolt is about here."

He fired, filling the narrow hallway with reverberating echoes and the acrid smell of powder. On the floors above us we heard the opening of doors, startled voices of women calling shrilly to their men. But to these we gave no heed. Thatcher Colt had guessed well; with one shot he had broken the woodwork and dislodged the bolt. The doorway to LaTour's apartment was open.

The rooms inside were utterly dark and silent. Warily Colt stepped in, returning my revolver as he entered. I held it, with the trigger off guard, as I followed the Commissioner. Dougherty came last, his hands groping along the walls for a light switch. And presently he found it. The bracket-lamps in the corridor were turned on, and room by room, we traversed the apartment and turned on all the lights.

Not a living thing was visible except our-selves. The apartment was empty!

THE new problem confronting us was like the mystification of some conjurer's trick-where now was the person who had bolted those doors? If he was not in the apartment, how had he got out?

He was no fantasy. Tangible evidence of his presence here confronted our eyes on every side. Not only he, but someone else, had been here, for from one end of the apartment to the other the rooms showed the remains of a violent and disorderly struggle.

Two men had fought— two strong men fighting as if for dear life. The signs of the battle showed plainly that the encounter must have been of terrific ferocity, as if not men, but jungle beasts had quarrelled here. Through neat rooms now upturned in a sinister tableau of arrested wrath, we walked as men walk among the ruins of a natural disaster. From kitchen to dining-room, living and bedrooms, we followed Thatcher Colt, discovering with him the debris of Josie LaTour's treasures.

By the splintered telephone table, we paused and looked at each other. And In each man's eyes was the bewilderment of a dark riddle.

"It seems impossible," said Thatcher Colt at last. "There is no such thing as magic— not even Ubangi magic, witch doctors and all. Yet here is the puzzle of a sealed apartment! There is apparently only one way to get in or out of these rooms— through the doors, where we were watching— where we know no one escaped. We I must find how that trick was done."

Chapter 8

WITH quick steps, Colt led the way back to the kitchen— a thoroughly modern, electrified kitchen in this old-fashioned house of the period of President McKinley. Realising the enigma we were called upon to solve, I looked around me carefully. We were on the second floor; the kitchen had two windows overlooking a backyard, with a tree in the centre. At first glance these windows seemed the natural means of escape. But a nearer examination increased Colt's perplexity. There was a sheer drop of thirty feet to the pavement of the yard.

"From here," the Commissioner pointed out, "we are almost as far from the ground as was Josie LaTour when she fell. And there is, as you see, no sign of a rope to go up or down— and literally no toe-hold in that sheer wall above or below us."

"It couldn't have been at this side of the house he got away," rumbled Dougherty. "The thing would be impossible-"

"Unless," interposed Thatcher Colt, "we look at it another way. A strong, powerful man— with the skill and daring of a cat—"

"I don't see how!" puffed Dougherty with a shake of his head, as he peered out of the window at the rainy night.

"The tree!" pointed out Thatcher Colt, spraying the dripping branches with the light from his three-hundred-foot radius pocket torch. "Notice that middle branch. If a man were a practiced athlete— let us say a circus performer— he could, conceivably, swing out from here on a plunge, grasp the tree branch as an acrobat might seize a trapeze bar— and get safely to the ground!"

"By heaven, Thatcher, I think you're right!" cried Dougherty.

"And further," Colt pointed out, "the same agile person could, by swinging on the tree branch, get into this room as well as out of it!"

"Right again!" agreed Dougherty excitedly.

"And in such monkey-like, jungle practices as swinging from tree branches," Colt went on, a tighter note in his voice, "the intruder must have left some traces of his coming and going. That is what we must look for now!"

He had bent over the window-sill, training on the painted wood-work the rays of his powerful pocket lamp.

"As I had hoped," Colt resumed, "there are signs— left there by two separate persons and at two different times."

"I notice nothing of the kind," lamented Dougherty, with heavy dignity. "And I don't believe in numerology, astrology—"

"Here!" interrupted Thatcher Colt. "And here! This woodwork is alive and crawling with information. For instance, Dougherty, this rounded impression left in the dust—"

"Milk bottle, probably!"

"Not at all— that mark was made by the knee of a man. The weave of his suit is plainly shown in the dust. Now what is beside it, and overlapping it just a little, but the print of a human foot?"

"Where?"

Huskily the District Attorney breathed that question, as he squatted slightly and studied the markings Colt had found.

"It isn't a shoe!" he complained. "And it isn't a naked foot. What on earth is it, Thatcher?"

"A mark made by a man in his stockinged feet! And if anthropometrical records mean anything it is probably certain that the knee mark and the foot mark were made by the same person. At least, the correspondence in size would indicate that. But the kneecap, with the contour of the continuing impression of the shank behind it, shows clearly that it was made on the way in, while the toes of the stockinged foot point outward— so one of our visitors went out the way he came in."

Dougherty grinned appreciatively.

"Of course you are right enough. But you said two persons—"

"I referred to other marks here— the most puzzling of all."

"These thumb marks?"

"Notice how simple it is to get the whole picture, Dougherty. The human fly— or let us say, the human monkey— who made the knee mark and later the foot mark— left no usable thumb print. Try to imagine what happened. He was, let us suppose, a man thoroughly familiar with this house and its backyard. He wants to get inside these rooms without being observed. Slipping through the alleyway, he scales the fence, and gets into this yard. Then he removes his shoes; his entrance shall be soundless. He climbs the tree with the ease of a jungle ape. He swings on the tall branches of the tree, back and forth— and then lets go. The open window is like the bar of a trapeze, or the hands of a fellow athlete— he catches and holds on. Now he pulls himself up— resting one knee on the sill as he does so-and creeps inside. But when he gets into this kitchen he finds that someone has got here ahead of him."

"How could you know such a thing?" scoffed Dougherty.

"By using my head. When our monkey man clung to the sill, he left the marks of his fingers in the dust under the inner sill. Here they are-showing silk meshes. He wore gloves! Let us call this Intruder Number One. But note again, this thumb print in the dust— not with meshes, but with the honest-to-God whorls and loops of human skin. Call him— or her— Intruder Number Two. He, too, swung from the tree, so he must know the same tricks as the other man. At all events he swung up here from the tree branch, got in and turned on the light switch. Here is his second thumb print. Clearly then, two men came in— but we find the signs of only one going out."

"And that means?" I asked involuntarily.

"That he may still be here," supplied Dougherty, hoarsely. "We will have to search this place from top to bottom."

"Of course," Colt reminded us, "all this may have no bearing whatever on the death of Josie LaTour. The fact that these mysterious happenings occurred in her apartment may be only a coincidence."

"Very unlikely, Thatcher."

"I agree. You and Tony go ahead with your search. I want to make some telephone calls."

Dougherty blinked suspiciously.

"Who to, Thatcher— or is it a secret?"

Colt smiled as he lifted the receiver of the kitchen telephone extension.

"First to get a detective who will make us plaster moulds of those markings on the window sill. After that— Professor Luckner!"

Dougherty rolled his eyes upwards as If praying to Allah.

"What can old Luckner do in a case like this?" he challenged.

"Very little, perhaps," Colt acquiesced good-naturedly. "Hello-Professor Luckner? This is Thatcher Colt. Yes. I want you to find me a man, Herr Professor— the one man in New York who can help the police tonight."

"The New York police are again beyond help!" chaffed the Professor; his harsh, sputtering voice was audible throughout the kitchen. "What kind of man?"

"One who speaks the dialect of the Ubangi people."

Professor Luckner chortled. "The Ubangi, nein? You could never call up sometimes with an easy question, Herr Commissioner? Nein, that is far too much to hope for, of course. So you want a man who can speak the Ubangi dialect? Gott im Himmel! Of course, you realise the Ubangi speak a combination of two or three Arabic dialects— a combination, my dear Mr. Thatcher Colt, almost unknown to any American. It is true that the President of the Duquesne University can speak several Arabic dialects. But Colt, my poor friend, there are forty-four such Arabic dialects. There is only one man who may know the dialect the Ubangi use

"Who is he-and where is he?" Colt managed to interject.

Again I heard the derisive laughter of that mocking old Teuton.

"His name is Gminder. G-M-I-N-D-E-R. Yes. yes, yes— that is the gentleman's name. As to where he is— I think he may be in Africa."

Colt swore softly.

"Or," went on the tantalising professor, "he may be at a rent-party in Harlem to-night. Gminder has a passion for the rent-parties of our black citizens."

"I'll send out men," began Thatcher Colt, but Professor Luckner interrupted.

"Never mind that. Herr Commissioner. If Gminder is in New York, I can and will find him for you. Where are you now?"

Colt gave the street address and the telephone number. With deep expressions of gratitude to the eccentric Herr Luckner, the Police Commissioner hung up the receiver.

"Thatcher." pleaded Dougherty, "why are you pausing here to go after these duck-billed niggers?"

Colt glanced towards the window again. "Because," he replied, "if I may again answer that in anthropometrical terms, there are evidences in that thumb print that it was made by a giant negro."

"The witch doctor?" muttered Dougherty, with an uneasy pitch of his enormous eyes.

"Let's search this place thoroughly," proposed Thatcher Colt.

WE were now in the living-room. Here Colt made straight for a desk in which a mass of papers was tumbled. He commenced to go through them. He hastily checked the deposits and withdrawals in savings bank books and with a jaundiced eye raced through several mortgages. Suddenly he looked up at the fascinated Dougherty, and declared:

"LaTour was hard up— their financial situation is rather desperate. The stock market ruined them; they have been robbing Peter to pay Paul and his three Swede uncles."

"But now," insinuated Dougherty, "will not Flandrin be able to meet all his obligations by insurance?"

"There is here an insurance policy for one hundred thousand dollars on Josie's life," revealed Colt. "It was carried at an enormous premium, naturally, because of the hazard of her daily work. But with double indemnity, too, so that now Flandrin will get two hundred thousand dollars! And here is something even more to the point."

The Commissioner pushed back his chair and stared at the pile of jumbled papers in the desk.

"We have here an absolute embarrassment of riches," he groaned. "Notice that these documents, important papers, are thrust loosely into a contraption like this. I am inclined to believe they have been taken from some other receptacle and jammed into this desk with the greatest haste and violence. In the midst of it all, lies this!"

He held up a diary, bound in red velvet and closed with a brass lock. Only a moment's work with Colt's skeleton key and the lock fell open. Colt began to scan the latest entries in LaTour's self-kept record of her life. Page after page, the Commissioner turned in disappointed silence.

"Here is the only significant thing I have found in a hasty examination," re-marked Colt, and I made notes as he read:

"That devil is after me again. He is afraid of me now— and that makes it different. But never mind— Flandrin will soon be home."

Colt closed the book with a snap.

"That was the last time she ever wrote in that book. Tony. And it gains a great deal in importance when read in connection with the next item."

Prom the top of the heap. Thatcher Colt lifted an envelope on which was written in printed characters:

"Dear Flan: This came to-day before you landed. I saw it was her handwriting and of course I opened it. Read it your-self. I can explain. As long as there is confidence between us, nothing can harm our love!"

Colt drew out the folded note, spread it on his palm, and read to us:

My dear husband— you will always be that to me, no matter if you are now the great Flandrin, divorced from me and married to another— still my husband, my own, in spite of man, devil, or God— I have something to tell you that may change your cold feelings to me. You believe your Josie is true to you. But she is really making a fool of you.

"I can prove that Josie spent this afternoon with Marburg Lovell on the sly. I'll face her and tell her so. No matter whatever went on between us, I was always faithful to you and you know lt. But Josie is playing you for a sucker. Are you a man or not? How long are you going to stand for it? And always know that when at last you are through with her, my arms are open to you. I am your first and only wife, and I would go through hell on my knees to get back to you.

Your loving,

FLORA.

For a moment the ticking of my wrist watch was the only sound in the room.

"Well!" exploded Dougherty at last. "That letter sets you thinking."

"The first wife has certainly been trying to envenom Flandrin's mind against Josie," added Colt, with a worried expression. "With this note, I found a picture."

He held up an old-style cabinet photograph of a woman with weak eyes, thickly puffed hair and long, thin lips. It bore the single name, "Flora" signed in the lower corner. The picture had been torn across; it was in two jagged halves.

"Probably the first wife of Flandrin," Colt went on. "Observe that the photographer is in München. One can guess what happened. The jealous Josie received the letter and picture while Flandrin was away on his trip. In a rage she tore it across. Then she decided to keep the pieces to show him when he returned— but look what she wrote on the back!"

DOUGHERTY and I crowded closer to Thatcher Colt. In those same printed characters, we read:

"This is my most dangerous and desperate enemy. And yet Flan and I must pay her money— or she can send Flan to gaol. God, what a country!"

Dougherty reached for a cigar, a certain sign that he had come to a crisis in his thinking.

"Any address on that letter from the first wife?"

"Yes— Seven Hundred Fifty-eight West Forty-third Street. That's a rooming house. But I don't mind telling you that Colonel Robinson says she never stays in one place very long. If we must face the truth about it, he says she's a hop-head. While she tells everybody that Josie took Flandrin away from her, I know that's not so either. Flandrin left her because she was on the dope."

In the sudden silence, I heard a creaking sound from the room beyond. The obese District Attorney heard the sound also, and turned quickly, his bulging eyes fixed on the door. Colt was calmly selecting a cigarette as a shadow fell through the doorway, the dark forerunner of the man who followed it across the threshold.

Flandrin, the missing husband, had come back to his home.

Chapter 9

AS Flandrin stood on the threshold of his own drawing-room, he lad the air of one who had washed his hands of living and was ready to tell the truth.

"I am sorry to be late," he apologised, with a placating glance at Colt. "I meant to be here to admit you into our home."

"You didn't use your car, did you?" blurted Dougherty. '

"Why not?"

Flandrin glared at the District Attorney's red face and bulging blue eyes then, with an exquisite shiver, full of hauteur, he looked back at Thatcher Colt.

"Mr. Colt," he said. "I was in a daze. I did not know what I was doing. I tramped the streets— I do not recall even what streets. At last I came home. Can you understand that?"

For the moment, at least. Colt expressed himself as satisfied. Flandrin had been secretly followed by one of our detectives. Colt would soon have a complete history of where the acrobat had been and what he had done. With a sweep of his arm, Colt encompassed the room.

"You see this confusion—"

For the first time, the disorder of the furnishings, the evidence of the battle, seemed to penetrate the consciousness of Flandrin.

"What could have happened?" he asked blankly.

"Oh, pshaw!" cried Dougherty incredulously and, turning his back, walked to the other side of the room. The District Attorney plainly regarded Flandrin's amazement as a piece of acting. But imperturbably, Thatcher Colt went along with the acrobat.

"Two people have got into your flat by felonious entrance," he explained. "While here they fought. We have evidence that one has gone. We do not know what has happened to the other."

Flandrin blinked in manifest confusion. "But who?" he demanded. "Who were these people—"

"Are you having trouble with your first wife?" barked Dougherty.

Flandrin blinked.

"I? With Flora? No, no! She is out of our lives— except on the first of the month."

"You never see her?"

"NO! Why?"

Colt paused and lit a cigarette. In the silence Flandrin sensed that we knew he had lied.

"Of course I have seen her now and then," he supplemented. "But such interviews are distasteful to me."

"Your alimony is pretty high, isn't it?" rumbled Dougherty.

"Far too high! My wife brought an action in the American courts which gave her the protection of your extraordinary laws:"

"And you are in debt?"

"Helas! Yes!"

"Is it not true that you still care for Flora?"

"No, no!"

Dougherty was about to pound at Flandrin on a whole series of questions, but at a warning glance from Colt, the District Attorney desisted. The Police Commissioner was playing Flandrin like a great fish on a hook who must be handled with skill and understanding.

"In a very little while," Colt announced, "Inspector Flynn and his aides will be here to make a thorough search of these rooms. In the meantime, Flandrin, is there any suggestion you can make of any papers that would help us in our search?"

Flandrin's voice was freezing: "What are you looking for?"

"We are going to look at everything,"

Dougherty Interposed, making a diffusive gesture with his hands. "Documents, diaries, letters—"

"Good God!" exclaimed Flandrin. "Why?"

"To find some indication of a man or woman who hated your wife enough to plan and execute her death. To see if there are letters here from such a person. It might even be from some lunatic she had never seen but who fancied himself in love with her."

Flandrin, who had sat bolt upright in a chair, now rose excitedly and began pacing back and forth.

"There are many silly letters here," he admitted, "but they don't mean anything."

"What kind of letters?"

"Oh"— Flandrin threw his arms above his head—"people write silly letters to performers. My wife got them. I got them."

"And you kept them?"

"Yes— as an amusement— to paste away in scrap-books."

Colt nodded understandingly.

"That isn't what I'm looking for. I realise that women and men the world over will write love letters to well-made Adams and Eves. By the way, did you ever see any letters to your wife from Marburg Lovell?"

Again Colt scored with the mention of that name. A sudden oath was ripped from the side of Flandrin's mouth. His arms came up like a fighter's; for one second his face was tragically wrinkled. But instantly he mastered himself and was calm again.

"Yes, Lovell wrote her. He thought she was game for him. He didn't know how she despised him. I know some people gossiped about Josie. My first wife always tried to tell me Josie had lovers. She loved me-and me alone!"

COLT'S hands dawdled over selecting another cigarette from his silver case.

"But suppose she did not love you?" he murmured. "Wait— only suppose she did not. Suppose Josie LaTour had actually betrayed you. What would you have done?"

Darkly and unflinchingly the acrobat looked into the eyes of the police Commissioner.

"I would have killed her," he said; and then, as the flush deepened on his face, he added, "but I would have killed her with my bare hands— I would not have sneaked up in the dark and done it!"

"And would you then," Colt asked, in a soothing voice, "having killed your wife, have given yourself up to the authorities?"

"No," replied Flandrin promptly. "Why should I?"

Dougherty had risen and was standing behind Colt as the two men looked into the defiant face.

"Then," charged Colt, "having made these admissions, you will also admit that if we could prove you did know that your wife was guilty of having a lover, we would then be in a fair way to show that you yourself were her murderer."

Flandrin folded his arms and briefly smiled.

"By no means," he countered. "You would then have to prove opportunity and method. If I were guilty, Mr. Colt, I would fight you to the last. And while it would be but poor sport for a simple-minded acrobat like myself to pit wits against the giant brain of the Police Commissioner of New York City, nevertheless I would fight you to the last ditch."

"Now, further," said the acrobat, "in spite of the fact that I have lost my wife in a sudden tragedy, I have tried to meet you halfway. What more do you want? I will do everything you ask me to-but let's get it over with!"

"My dear Flandrin." Colt replied with a patient sigh, "I shall probably be here for hours yet. I shall examine your papers and I shall ask you more questions. If you don't wish to co-operate, I shall lock you up."

As If expecting no reply, the Police Commissioner resumed that familiar prowl of his around the scene of a crime. From etchings to magazines he roamed; he studied furniture and curtains. Finally at a little shelf he paused, bent down and lifted a box-like leather case.

"What is this?" he asked. Flandrin's eyes narrowed.

"That is our home moving picture camera," he explained. "I gave it to LaTour on her birthday."

"Do you have a projector as well?"

"And the latest patent screen," replied Flandrin quickly. There was a pathetic pride of possession in the quick glance he gave the Commissioner.

"And you have taken pictures with it?" pursued Colt.

"Not very many films so far— we haven't had time."

"The films you did take are here?"

Flandrin regarded Thatcher Colt steadily. He seemed to be struggling with some mental enigma. I found myself also wondering— surely Colt did not mean to suggest that these pictures now be exhibited. It seemed a callous, cruel, unnecessary performance. There were no reels of Josie's fatal five seconds on the Roman rings. What purpose could be served by any other pictures?

Nevertheless, the exhibition of those motion pictures was the precise object of Colt's questions.

"I should like to see them now. Mind?" With an unhappy shrug of his shoulders Flandrin at once made ready to comply.

The patent screen, that rolled into a long box but could be set erect and rigid with one movement of the hand, was put in position on a small guerdon at one end of the living-room. Another small table was pulled out from the wall and the projector connected with a floor-plug, while a small reel of narrow celluloid was clamped in place. Presently the lights were extinguished, and in the darkness of the living-room the reel began to unwind. It was a bizarre moment:-we were to watch the picture image of that vital and buoyant LaTour whose life had ended before our eyes.

The picture which now began to pass before us had been taken on the circus lot, while the big show was on tour the previous season. We saw the long train steaming into a small town; then the canvas-jacks and razor-backs unloading tents, boxes, horses and animal cages; we saw the big top and seat and plank crews building a tented city out of confusion and chaos. Then came more intimate glimpses, first of LaTour's friends Sebastian, the male star of the circus, in his practice clothes, bowed and smirked into the camera.

"Was he jealous of your wife's fame?" asked Colt.

Flandrin made a derisive sound in his throat.

"Not Sebastian," he declared. "He considered himself so far above LaTour that it would degrade him to be jealous of her. Of course that was nonsense. She was immeasurably superior to him, but he would never acknowledge that— he was king of all the performers, and she was only the queen."

MEANWHILE the picture of Sebastian had been followed by one of Flandrin, cavorting on the screen, leaping and performing various feats of strength and agility. I remembered again the old department admonition that to understand a crime, one must know its background. So I was not surprised when Colt continued to ask questions about matters back-stage.

"Of whom, then, is Sebastian jealous?" he persisted.

Flandrin grunted, in that singular guttural that Europeans use with all manner of nuances, and which is so curiously akin to the emotional expression of the American Indians.

"I don't think he is jealous of anyone," he replied. "He has no reason to be— yet."

"Yet?" repeated Colt.

"Oh, well, Sebastian is getting old. I am much younger. You see, LaTour and I had our dreams. They will never be realised now. But LaTour had a private ambition— some day I would be able to do the double twist, and then while LaTour would still be queen, I might be king."

Colt seemed satisfied. But he was more thoughtful as he leaned forward concentrating his attention on the dancing images on the mottled screen. We watched Flandrin attempt the double twist and fall. Then we saw Eddie Stevens, the property man, appear on the silver sheet. Sebastian gave him a glance and they exchanged a few words. Colt, to the amazement of Flandrin, translated their conversation; lip reading was one of the Police Commissioner's most valuable accomplishments.

"Sebastian had just reprimanded Eddie Stevens-told him to be more careful in looking after the equipment."

"That was Eddie's one fault," confirmed Flandrin. "But he was as devoted as a dog to LaTour. Once she had saved his life, during a tornado in Kansas. After that, he would have died for her. I say that although I admit," added Flandrin, in a hollow voice, "that if Eddie had been on the job to-night he might have broken her fall. But I am sure he did not turn his back on purpose. I have never known Eddie Stevens to tell a lie," urged Flandrin, warming to his defence. "Eddie is one of the most trustworthy men I know. I think you can absolutely dismiss him from your investigations."

To this Colt made no reply. On the screen, a new and instantly recognised character had appeared— Isabel Chant, the maid, parading into the ring and smiling with a condescending air at the camera.

"How long have you known this woman?" inquired Thatcher Colt.

"She was with my wife before our marriage."

"Know anything about her background?"

"Do we?" snapped Flandrin resentfully. "We have heard so much about it that we got tired. You see Isabel was once a gentlewoman, or so she says. She considered herself far above her station in life now. She's a cranky woman— bitter, too."

THIS opinion was immediately confirmed by a little comedy that now appeared on the screen. Suddenly Josie LaTour appeared, coming out of a tent and approaching a practice rigging, beside which stood Isabel Chant and Eddie Stevens. The shock of seeing the image of the living LaTour was instantly obliterated by our interest In the circus star's extraordinary behaviour. LaTour was in a livid and passionate rage, as she turned to her two employees, hand lifted as if aching for a whip.

"Don't mind any of this," murmured Flandrin. "LaTour had the artistic temperament, you know. Just like any opera star. Every once in so often-but it never lasted long— she went into little pets like this! I took this picture when she didn't know I was near."

Flandrin called it a "little pet." but I do not remember ever having seen such a consuming, boiling, ferocious rage in any other human being. Her anger had been aroused by the condition of some of the apparatus. From her gestures, it seemed as if she were calling Isabel's and Eddie's attention to a loose bolt. She reached forward, slapped the maid in the face, seized Eddie by the shoulders, and her small fingers clawed visibly into the man's thin neck. It actually seemed as if she would choke the fellow to death, there and then, in front of the camera. Then she looked towards the lens, discovered that she was being observed, and let out a flogging oath— then the picture suddenly went blank. Flandrin had photographed no more of his wife's temper.

"LaTour always used to laugh at that picture," the husband explained. "It showed herself to herself. She refused to let me destroy it. Of course, she was terribly sorry, and Isabel and Eddie understood perfectly."

I WONDERED. For the thing that had struck me— and Colt, too, I felt sure— was the look on the face of Isabel Chant. If the mistress were angered, so was the maid. The former gentlewoman had taken the abuse of the circus acrobat with deadly bad grace.

Meanwhile the scene had completely changed. Now we saw a panorama of people— the complete crew of the show, from the cook-house flunkeys and the boss canvas-jack, to the principal performers. Then came Flandreau practising tumbling feats on the ground, while Josie stood beside him, her bright face eager, lighted with interest and approval, her small hands clapping. As Flandreau rose from a particularly difficult tumbling feat, he made a mock flourish to his audience, composed solely of the sawdust queen. As he bowed, Josie applauded even more vigorously, and then they stood together, his arm around her, and blew kisses at the camera.

It seemed an innocent and playful exhibition, and yet what followed made an indelible mark on my memory. As they stood there a curious creature crept into the picture, a tall and vigorous black man with monocle and walking-stick and great white teeth, that showed even when he did not smile.

"Keblia!" exclaimed Dougherty quickly.

The witch doctor showed a child-like interest in the man and woman posing for the camera. He seemed to wish to talk with LaTour. Flandreau tried to shoo him away, to wave him off, at which Keblia became indignant. An argument followed, all of which the camera had faithfully recorded. But at last LaTour listened, and Keblia spoke to her earnestly; Colt read his lips and translated aloud:

"There are strange dangers. Be careful every minute All deaths are unnatural. Look high! The guilty one is very high!"

There the picture abruptly ended. The reel was finished. As the lights came up, my eyes met the sombre glance of Thatcher Colt. His gaze was deeply thoughtful.

"Well, I certainly got something from that," sighed Dougherty, rising restlessly. "We are not wasting our time. Perhaps I should take those reels with me."

At the District Attorney's proposal, a dangerous flush crossed the strained features of Flandrin.

"What for?" he demanded. "These are only trivial souvenirs, but they mean a great deal to me. why should I lose them? Why should the police have them? What good are they to you?"

Dougherty waved one beefy hand accusingly.

"Why should you object?" he countered. "When the police are through, then you will get them back."

But Flandrin stood his ground

"The films can be of no possible use to the police. But to me they are sacred. I do not wish them used for such a purpose."

Dougherty's eyes rolled ominously; the District Attorney was growing angry, and a hot flush was spilling across his vast jowls.

"Flandrin," he grated, "you might as well know now that I consider your behaviour most suspicious!"

The acrobat closed his eyes for a moment, and then recovered.

"I lost my head," he confessed. "And I had sworn to myself I would not do that. But who can blame me— when every word you say is as if you accused me of killing my wife!"

His voice had risen to a shrill cry:

"I did not hurt her! I loved her! And all I want now is to be alone with her!"

"Alone!" gasped District Attorney Dougherty. "Thatcher, if I can be alone with this man, and question him, I am certain he will tell me the truth,"

The odd request seemed to strike Colt as an admirable one. It was evident to us all that Flandrin's nerve was breaking.

"Why not try the kitchen?" he suggested. "That will leave the rest of the rooms for Tony and myself to search through."

Drawing Colt aside, Dougherty delivered a private monologue in a deep, rumbling undertone. To all that the District Attorney told him, Thatcher Colt nodded tacit concurrence. And presently Dougherty led the graceful and athletic Flandrin into the kitchen and closed the door.

I looked at Colt with some surprise. Why did he not question Flandrin himself? There was a distant twinkle in Colt's eyes as he said;

"Tony, we have something more important to do than to try to get a story from a fellow who, in spite of everything, will not tell what he means to keep to himself. Flandrin is no fool and the DA. will soon find that out, while you and I, Tony—"

The Commissioner winked good-humouredly and turned back to the desk, off again on a concentrated search of the papers and other small properties of Josie LaTour.

Nothing coming to light here, Colt led the way to the bedroom. With mathematical precision, he began his investigation here, mentally partitioning the cubicle into sections and himself going over every inch of bureau, dresser, and clothes closets, every little dainty feminine box and appurtenance, all the equipment of Josie's boudoir.

"Unless we know all about this woman," he told me, "and all about her life and loves. I do not know how we are to find the roots. At the moment, this seems to be a crime of unfathomable malignity."

HE closed the bureau drawer and passed to the mantelpiece. There he dawdled among many loose odds and ends, advertising pamphlets, a travel-ling clock that had stopped, and some loose silver coins.

"We may as well admit from the start that it looks bad for Flandrin. The man had many motives to kill his wife— I am almost tempted to say too many And yet, consider what curious motives may exist in the terra incognita of the circus. Certain of them are already clear. We know that Flandrin was jealous of his wife— it is in his very voice when he mentions her name. Perhaps he most likely had more cause for his jealousy than he is willing to admit-and because of the very clannishness of the circus, it is going to be very hard to get anyone to talk about that. Flandrin is a man of furious temper. If Josie were faithless to him, that might be motive enough, without looking further. But we have to look further— and when we do, we find a second motive that directly contradicts the first— the two are frankly irreconcilable. If Flandrin was still in love with his first wife, then it was not for jealousy of Josie that he killed, but in order to get back to Flora. Both motives would hardly be present in the same man. Let's hope Dougherty breaks something on that. On the other hand, Flandrin may well have been envious of Josie's superiority as a performer and a box office attraction. He was successful in his own right, but did you notice how ardently he had been working to attain that double twist trick? Why? To be more important than his wife? Then again, he might have become fed up with LaTour's explosive temper. Forging still farther on, we come to an additional motive for Flandrin-the life Insurance! It may not have been the main cause. But it may well have been the contributing cause. He was in financial straits. There was a way out. Then, of course, comes the question which we cannot answer as yet; was he himself in love with someone else— not his first wife, but some charmer of whom we know nothing whatever? It is a possibility always present In such cases.

"So Flandrin had motives. Did he have the opportunity? We know that he did. The woman was in some way drugged. It is taking a long time for Doctor Multooler to find out what chemical was used. But when we do know that, we can go forward a little faster. Meanwhile, we do know that Flandrin was a student of chemistry; he knows poisons. Dougherty certainly pointed out his opportunity."

"But how," I interposed, "did he know she would fall from the rings?"

FROM the mantelpiece, Colt turned towards me, his eyes luminous.

"To-night was not the first night she fell," he reminded me. "It happened every once in so often. Flandrin always stood at the performers' entrance, watching his wife's act. Josie and Flandrin, in fact, watched each other's acts. Now, can't you fancy a state of mind of Flandrin in which he could wait, night after night, biding his time, until she fell-and always being pre-pared for that fall, with a poisoned preparation in some form, ready for the emergency? That it happened on the very first night of the new season might only be his good luck, even though it is Friday, the thirteenth!"

Colt turned his back on the mantel-piece.

"We have to consider all these possibilities," he pointed out, "although I scarcely credit them. I watched LaTour's face on the rings and I still believe she got her death blow there. I have even considered the theory that the poison might have been injected into the resin which she rubbed into her hands, just before she climbed up her rope If that resin turns out to be poisoned, the knottiest tangle In this whole problem will be solved."

Now Colt was at the twin beds, stripping them.

As he studied the separated parts of those beds, his voice marched on:

"But there are other suspects. Take the case of the two doctors. Either one of them had the opportunity to poison her. They both are acquainted with deadly poison— the circus physician not so intimately, but think of Doctor Charavay who brought the Ubangi duck-billed gals over here. Charavay was a specialist in tropical diseases, medicines, and poisons, before he ever thought of exploiting those poor black people and bringing them over here like a lot of slaves. Certainly Doctor Charavay knew enough about poison to pick an effective one for Josie, if he wished to do so. Or he could help someone else. But why?"

Colt was through with the beds. Next the Commissioner turned to a cedar chest under the bed. He rolled it out Into the open, threw up the lid, and began removing garments in armfuls.

"And again," he resumed, "look at Flandreau. It is apparent that Flandreau was In love with Josie— in fact, he loved her first and Flandrin cut him out. And we know that Flandreau is always playing second fiddle to a stranger. Flandrin is his boss; he is more gifted and handsomer. Just as Flandrin may have been envious of his own wife's success, so Flandreau may be jealous in love and envious in work. Remember that it is a difficult, unreal background that we have to understand in this crime. Robinson will not admit to outsiders that such jealousies exist In the circus, but they do. Yet why, If he was jealous of Flandrin, should Flandreau kill the other's wife? Is it because he loved Josie and she would not have him? Again, If it is Flandrin he wishes to injure, what greater harm could be done to Flandrin than to kill the thing he loves the most? It is a fiendish kind of cruelty to assume, but we have to face the possibilities."

I was jotting down all these comments. As I looked up now, Colt was dejectedly but neatly returning all the garments into the cedar chest. Once more he had drawn a blank, and he had begun to look disheartened.

"There must be something here that will point the way," he complained, with a melancholy sweep of his eyes around the walls. "Next let's have a try at this chest for a man's clothing."

Drawer after drawer slid out Into his hands, as he studied Flandrin's handkerchiefs, ties, collars, underwear, and shirts. At each heap he looked with attention, neglecting not even the laundry marks.

"Meanwhile," he resumed, "there is the curious personality of Isabel Chant. From all accounts, she must have lived a dog's life. It is possible to conceive that she had a motive in the accumulated hatred of seasons, spent in the service of a female martinet. I have heard it said that four times a day, regularly, for years, Isabel had been discharged. She had been bullied, ragged, and picked on. The public legend was that they loved each other like mother and daughter. Maybe they fought as only people who love and understand each other can sometimes fight. But if I am any judge of character, Isabel Chant, in her heart of hearts, decidedly hated and detested Josie LaTour. Remember that she was a woman born well above such a station. She considered herself a lady, but she was looked down upon as a servant. She may have a delusion of persecution. I have a hunch that someone physically close to the ring committed this crime."

HE closed the drawers of the cabinet with a slight bang of impatience. Next, opening the door of a closet, he began to explore its contents; his voice came to me, muffled, from the depths of the cupboard.

"I have certainly not absolved certain other suspects, either. There is the ineffable Signor Sebastian, for example. I am not sure what his motive could be, unless to get rid of a professional rival. I do not know what his opportunity was. But he exudes too much goodwill to please me; I have taken a dislike to him, so deep that I find myself hoping he is the murderer. Yet why should he kill her? And how could he do it? He was on his perch, high in the air, and more than a hundred yards away when she fell."

A grunt came from the closet. Colt had found a trunk and was dragging it toilsomely out into the light. It was what was known as a circus special trunk, of a variety now somewhat outdated; a box-like affair about sixty inches long, thirty inches wide, and forty inches deep, built of three-ply veneer and covered with oil-painted canvas finished in black and a bright red Japanese lacquer. The bottom was covered with galvanised iron. Colt lifted the lid, disclosing a tray filled with papers, old letters, books, boxes tied with ribbons, a hodge-podge of personal souvenirs. Drawing up a chair, the Commissioner sat down before the trunk with an interested air and began going through each separate piece meticulously.

"Anyway," Colt resumed, "we shall keep Signor Sebastian in mind. He is a remote possibility. We then pass on to the case of Eddie Stevens. I have felt, from the very first, that his actions were suspicious. Yet this was a crime of ingenuity, of cunning, of decision. That little man has none of those qualities. On the other hand, it was Eddie Stevens who found the first image with the needle stuck through it. That looks like the fakiest sort of affair. No one else had seen it, until Eddie found it. One might easily fancy that he did it to divert suspicion to the Ubangi witch doctor. But where could Eddie Stevens get a mysterious drug? How did he use it? And why? Until we can answer those questions, it will be hard to get an indictment against Eddie."

With a sigh, Colt now lifted out the tray of the trunk and looked inside. Then he drew back with a cry.

Hunched in the trunk, crammed down in a grotesque position, was a human body! It was a dark, contorted body, and quite dead. The face looked up at us with a sleepy and lidless stare, the teeth parted in a smile.

It was Keblia, witch doctor of the Ubangi— and his throat had been cut from ear to ear!

Chapter 10

THE body of Keblia had been crammed into the trunk in a hunched position, like the crouch burials of prehistoric man. The head was forced down, so that the brutal chin lay upon the breast bone; the monocle dangled idly to one side; the whole position of the body much. like the helpless, hunched attitude of some dark and fabulous unborn child. All this was rendered the more hideous by the black face, slanted in a sinister oblique. One open, glassy eye was cocked upward, fixed upon us in a kind of sly, deathless humour.

For a long spell, we stood there, too taken by surprise to speak. In that interlude, my nostrils were filled with a sweetish door rising from the death-trunk— it was the smell of a barber-shop pomade in the kinky hair of the foppish witch doctor.

Colt's fingers again rummaged in his pockets for the pipe that was not there. But he did find cigarettes, and not until he had lit one and breathed in three grateful lungsful of pungent smoke did he trust himself to speak.

"One thing is certain," he declared. "The murderer who put that large and powerful black man in this trunk must be himself large and powerful-strong to an almost incredible degree."

And after another few puffs he added:

"Throat cut— and yet very little blood in the trunk; none at all leaked from the seams. That means he was killed and bled somewhere else. A jagged cut, too, on the top of the head. Where is the weapon? Surely all this must have happened as the result of the fight which left these rooms in such disorder. Here we have one of our intruders. If we had the other, perhaps we would have the murderer!"

"You think the same person killed LaTour and—"

Colt lifted a warning hand.

"It's too early to theorise," he protested. "But, one way or another, this witch doctor's murder is the radix of the whole affair. So, before we call in Dougherty, let us see what we can find out for ourselves."

The Commissioner's course of action was prompt and characteristic.

FALLING to his knees, he began to examine the dark dead body with intent interest. Making sure that he touched no part of the murdered man, nor even the sides or bottom of the trunk, he nevertheless craned his neck, bent far over, peered under and around the mighty shoulders and cramped knees of the cadaver. The witch doctor had worn to his death the same tail coat that he had boasted when we had last seen him alive In Madison Square Garden. Crushed beneath the weight of the body, lying on the right side, was the glistening wreckage of his silk hat.

"There is one singular fact about this business," remarked Thatcher Colt, as he threw away one cigarette and lighted another. "Here we find a trunk tray filled to overbrimming with a litter of odds and ends. But in the bottom of the trunk there are only this corpse and its high silk hat. Now it is hardly likely that a trunk tray can be overflowing with things and its interior left empty. In other words, what were and where are the contents of this trunk? Must have been the papers I found in the desk!"

Colt rose and walked about the bedroom. His eyes seemed to look through me, through the walls, through the world itself, and into infinity. And still walking in that slow and thoughtful pace, he began to speak in a low voice:

"Over the lintel of the doorway of LaTour's dressing-room Eddie Stevens found a witch doctor's mud doll. A ju-ju image. And when I sent for the witch doctor he was gone. Where was Keblia then? We had seen him five minutes before. Obviously he must have come here. Why?"

The darkly luminous eyes fixed themselves in a gaze that seemed almost evocative upon the dreadful thing in the trunk.

It was an eerie moment.

"He came here. Why? Perhaps to destroy some evidence that would connect him with the crime. Why, then, was he killed? If Keblia killed Josie LaTour, who would want to kill Keblia? It all lies very deep, Tony, and yet-"

Once more Colt fell to his knees and stared down into the black face, with its glistening teeth and opened eye.

"The pieces of the puzzle will not fit," he complained. "If the witch doctor were guilty, killed by some outraged friend of Josie, why this mystery? And how, Tony?"

"It had to be, a skilled athlete," I reminded him.

Suddenly Colt gave a little breathless exclamation of surprise. Bending far over he lowered his hand into the temporary sarcophagus of a theatrical trunk. And when Colt rose again he held something in his hands that flushed his face and set his dark eyes gleaming. When he spoke, his voice was low, deep, and vibrant with the consuming passion of discovery.

"This puts an entirely different light on the matter," he declared, and held out his discovery for me to see. What Colt had found was a metal object that looked like an immense bullet, the size of a banana. It was a brass cartridge case, but far too large for any ordinary rifle; its calibre must have been one and one-half inch. But instead of a lead ball of the ordinary rifle cartridge, there was here an aluminum cap.

WHAT manner of missile could this be? From what weapon could such an object be discharged? What would be its effect? Why was it in LaTour's trunk, under the body of the murdered black man?

All these questions were in my mind as I returned Colt's startled and excited stare.

"You seemed to know it was there beforehand," I remarked.

Colt shook his head.

"No— I only felt I had not looked far enough. Now that I have found this I am more puzzled than ever. But it does give me one extraordinary suggestion."

I heard the knob of the door rattle stiffly. In the same instant Colt thrust the strange cartridge into his breast pocket, and dropped the lid of the trunk. Composed and taciturn, he freed the door as it slowly opened and Dougherty stood heavily on the threshold.

"I can't get a thing out of Flandrin," confessed the District Attorney. "I think you ought to have a try at him, Thatcher. But I had to stop, anyway-a friend of yours is here— Professor Gminder!"

Colt's eyes brightened warmly.

"I've never seen the man, but let him come in— I need him now! Where is Flandrin?"

"In the kitchen," answered Dougherty, and turning his head, called: "Come right in, Professor Gminder."

Through the doorway now crept a little, bald-headed man, with a ring of orange hair above his ears, so that he looked like a tonsured priest in mufti. The professor blinked at Colt through double-lensed spectacles, and pompously extended a hairy and heavily freckled hand.

"Thanks, Professor Gminder, for coming down," was Colt's greeting. Briefly he explained what had happened in Madison Square Garden. "Doctor Luckner tells me you know about the Ubangi."

"I do!" replied Gminder with a hand-shake full of pride. "I am the only American who speaks their dialect. I know all about their history and customs. I shall be glad to help you."

"Thanks!" smiled Colt. "First off, Professor, about ju-ju—"

"I beg your pardon— magic? I have not been called down here to be asked about ju-ju— by the Police Commissioner?"

"Apologies by the thousands, my dear Professor— but that is the fact."

"I don't understand at all, but what do you care to know about ju-ju? Of course no sensible man believes in such silly stuff— although I have spent much time in Africa and they say there you either accept ju-ju or you do not, depending on how long you are in Africa, and what you happen to see. I know it is nonsense."

"You are familiar, are you not," resumed Colt, "with those little magic images the Ubangi make out of mud?"

"I am."

"Well— sometimes they pierce them with needles, do they not? Yes? And that is a spell to bring death to an enemy? What's that? It's not?"

Professor Gminder was shaking his head from side to side with the demure primness of a Vermont schoolteacher.

"I tell you it means nothing of the kind," he answered with an ex-cathedra air.

"It is not a curse?"

"I tell you, no— not necessarily, nothing like it."

Colt leaned forward, profoundly beguiled. "Would you mind explaining what these mud images are meant to be?" he pleaded.

With a self-conscious clearing of the throat, Professor Gminder responded:

"Instead of being used only to cast spells of evil, and to cause the death of enemies, they are just as often, in fact, more often, made and hung to protect the person they are supposed to resemble."

"Show him the latest one, Tony," directed the Commissioner. "See for yourself-this thing has a needle through its heart."

PROFESSOR GMINDER gave my proffered exhibit only a disdainful glance.

"Exactly— I have seen thousands— and it may be that the Ubangi witch doctor, when you question him, will have a very logical explanation. He might tell you the spirits warned him there was some evil plot abroad against Josie LaTour. He wished to protect her— so he made this effigy and pierced the heart with a needle. Thus the thing over the female acrobat's door is explained. His idea very likely was that when the evil spirits came to attack the circus woman they would first see this dummy figure— would think it was really Josie LaTour— already dead— pierced through the heart— and go away satisfied. In other words, these figures are sometimes the lightning-rods of demonology."

"Even so." Dougherty came in, impatiently, "what possible effect can all that erudition have on this case?"

Colt smiled encouragingly.

"It can have the most positive effect," he declared earnestly. "Suppose that it was not the spirits who warned the witch doctor. Suppose, instead, that by one means or another, he had learned of a plot against Josie LaTour's life. Suppose, now, Keblia makes the image to protect her. He finds the evidence of how she was killed-in a queer, unexplained cartridge shell, now in my pocket. You shall hear all about that later. He comes here to tell Flandrin about the murderer, show him the cartridge, and is killed because he knew too much!"

"Killed!" Dougherty repeated aghast.

"Killed!" echoed Thatcher Colt sharply. His glance sped across the District Attorney's shoulder to the white face of another man who had come quietly in the doorway— Flandrin!

Colt lifted the lid of the trunk. Dougherty gave an animal-like grunt of astonishment. Professor Gminder covered his eyes with his hands, while Flandrin took a step forward and stared as one dumbfounded.

"I found it only a moment ago," explained Colt softly. "Pull yourself together, Professor— you're working for the police now— take a look at it and tell me if you see anything significant."

Dougherty stood close to Colt, his bulging eyes watching Flandrin with accusing intensity. The professor from Morningside Heights wiped his face with a handkerchief and swallowed hard.

"I must do my duty," he muttered, and looked down at the body of the Ubangi.

Long and courageously he stared down this queer little man with his comic fringe of clown-yellow hair. His hands were clasped primly in the small of his back, and he peered through his spectacles. At last, the Professor cleared his throat, and said in a matter-of-fact voice:

"This is not a ritualistic matter— if that is what you mean. A Ubangi would most probably kill with a poisoned dart. He would not cut a throat, for the Ubangi are a blood-fearing people. But I believe, Mr. Colt, from my knowledge of the priest-like relation between a witch doctor and his tribesmen, that the way to find out about this is to go to the Ubangi savages themselves and ask them what they think. They are savage, but they are not stupid. I have a high admiration for the shrewdness of these people."

Colt turned to me.

"Tony, get Tod Robinson on the phone and tell him to keep the Ubangi together for questioning."

As I went to the telephone, I could not help but think of how our difficulties were increasing.

At last, Robinson answered the telephone, from his office in Madison Square Garden. The Ubangi, he explained, were kept in two rooms of the great concrete amphitheatre.

"Tell him," Colt instructed, "that Professor Gminder and I will be there some time before breakfast;-that he will please wait for us— we will want to talk to him and the Ubangi."

Colonel Robinson promised he would be there.

"And now," said Colt, as I replaced the receiver, "I shall ask you, Professor, and you, Flandrin, to retire to the kitchen There is a lot of work before us here. Tony, notify Headquarters to reach Flynn— and get the Homicide Squad up here tout de suite."

As I put through the call, Colt suddenly called out to Gminder:

"One moment more, Professor. Will you kindly look at this?"

Colt had lifted one dead hand from the trunk.

"I see the hand," fluttered Professor Gminder. "But what—"

"Look at the finger-tips."

"Yes—"

"Don't you observe that film of paste on the fleshy cushions of the finger-tips— and under the broad flat nails?"

"Uh— yes— it's sticky and green—"

"Exactly. Ever know a Ubangi to use stuff like that on his finger for any purpose?"

"Never!" groaned Professor Gminder. "By all means, never!"

And Professor Gminder went off into his strange exile with Flandrin in the kitchen. Heaven only knows what they had to say to each other. Meanwhile I was talking to the Night Captain at Police Headquarters. To him I conveyed the exciting news of our second murder; in a short while, the cohorts of the Homicide Squad would join us.

"Thatcher!" cried Dougherty. "What in heaven's name do you think can have happened here?"

"Too early to theorise much," reiterated the Police Commissioner, leading the way to the bathroom.

"The killer knocked out the witch doctor in the dining-room," he reasoned. "That is shown by a kinky black hair near the break in the glass on the centre table and the small cut in the black man's head. Then the body was dragged here; there is a spot of blood on the wall in two places— drippings from the head wound. Then the body was thrown halfway across the tub and the throat cut. The blood passed off down the sink. A fiendish and fairly competent job. As soon as the bleeding stopped, the body was put into the trunk-"

VOICES were heard in the corridor outside. Two minutes later the apartment of Josie LaTour was filled with police. The whole detail was there, and with them came an alert young detective, Crowder, who reported personally to Thatcher Colt.

"I was detailed by Inspector Flynn to follow Flandrin from the Garden," he related.

"Well? What did he do?" snapped the Commissioner.

"I am sorry to report that I lost him," disclosed the detective.

Colt was startled and furious. "Where did you lose him?"

"Three blocks from here. He took a very roundabout course from the Garden up-town. Criss-crossed streets and me after him. But three blocks down, on Broadway, he ducked into a store. I followed him in there. But when I got inside he was gone. You see, Mr. Colt—"

"No explanations needed. You should have had a partner. Not your fault. What did you do after that?"

"I tried to pick up his trail. But I couldn't raise him anywhere. So I reported in, and they told me to come here."

Colt looked at me.

"Flandrin had a lot of time to himself," he commented. "This makes it tough!"

For five minutes the room was in confusion. Merkle's camera was up, and artificial lighting from the magnesium flash-light gun glinted through the boudoir, as pictures from all angles were taken of the body of the murdered man in the box. The finger-print man was rolling his black ink across the glass slab, presently to ink the dead fingers and thumbs for the Centre Street records. And meanwhile Thatcher Colt explained to Inspector Flynn and his other aides all that had happened since he and I had been left alone in these tragic rooms.

"I want the whole flat gone over for finger-prints," he instructed. "Further, I want not only plaster moulds of the window sill prints, but also all the dust found on the window sill collected in a vacuum cleaner and examined before morning. Also there is a queer kind of coloured film on the dead fellow's fingers. Get that— especially the stuff under the nails— analysed before morning, if possible."

And as the grim Inspector Flynn nodded his understanding of these orders, Colt drew from his pocket the brass cartridge we had found in the trunk. Flynn studied the un-familiar object in critical amazement. With one eye fast shut, he listened to the story of how it was found. The tough old Inspector held the cartridge to his nose, sniffed at it with the wary caution of a blood-hound, frowned, and put away the shell in the innermost pocket of his coat.

"That's a queer one," he vouchsafed at last. "What the hell is it, chief?"

"Get the boys in the ballistics department to work on it," advised Thatcher Colt.

But that was never really necessary. As Colt was speaking, the telephone rang and I answered it. At the other end was Doctor Clesleek, the department chemical expert. His voice was trembling as he said:

"Tell the Commissioner he was right― we've proved that the method he suggested was the method used to kill Josie LaTour."

My mind was a blank. Turning to Colt, I blurted out the incomprehensible message. The dark eyes of the Commissioner glowed at the news and he took the telephone Instrument from my hands.

"Hello, Clesleek. Did you test the spangles? You did? And the dress? And both showed. What was the chemical base— just wait till I make a note of it— let me have that again ! And did Doctor Multooler look at the membrane of the eye? Thanks, Clesleek. A good night's work-now get me up the report in the regular form."

As the Commissioner dropped the telephone, Dougherty lumbered forward.

"Thatcher, don't keep me in any more suspense," he entreated. "I didn't know you sent a recent message to the chemist."

Colt looked very serious.

"I saw that Tony noticed," he said, a shrill overtone of exuberant excitement just touching his voice, "that when I walked from the body of Josie LaTour there were tears in my eyes."

"I did, chief," I replied feelingly. "I understood—"

"You did not understand, I am sorry to say— and your sympathy was not appreciated. You should have known by this time that I am not a crying police officer."

"But, chief—"

"I noticed the spangles had turned dull. I touched the dress and some of the stuff got on my fingers. I rubbed my eyes and I knew!"

"You know what, Thatcher?" demanded Dougherty, red with exasperation.

"Tear gas!"

"Tear gas!"

Dougherty and I repeated the words simultaneously.

"Tear gas, yes. I am sure that banana-sized bullet I just turned over to Flynn is, in effect, a tear-gas cartridge."

Dougherty put his hands on his hips.

"How could tear gas have been used?" he asked, sceptically. "I know something about tear gas. Why, the whole place would have been in an uproar. You could see it— it makes a thick, white cloud. Thatcher, it couldn't be done!" cried the District Attorney resoundingly. "It simply couldn't be done."

At a nod from Colt, Flynn turned away, to direct his men about their gruesome work in the police ritual of murder. Colt lit a fresh cigarette.

"But it was done," he insisted. "I confess that the details are not clear. I admit that someone in the audience should have seen or at least smelled gas. But so far it seems no one did. All right— LaTour's ballet dress reeked of the stuff, just the same. What a fiendish idea! By some hocus pocus we have not yet discovered, that gas reached LaTour on the rings. She was gassed and so she fell— and the fall killed her. It is a poetic and Imaginative murder, Dougherty— we shall have to look for a clever criminal this time."

"Who on earth would be smart enough around this circus to think up a killing like that?" rumbled Dougherty, very thoughtful.

"Clesleek said the gas was chloracetophenone, a solid," went on Colt, referring to the notes he had made while at the telephone. "When driven off by heat, it first appears as a light bluish-coloured cloud. This cloud is instantly so irritating to the eyes that within a second, anyone in the path of the cloud is temporarily blinded. It causes considerable smarting and very profuse tears, which, even to the smallest amount, continue for two to five minutes.

"That explains the tear stains on the cheeks of Josie LaTour all right— but we found an undischarged gas bullet in the witch doctor's trunk. How did Keblia get the bullet? What magic told him—"

The chief suddenly checked himself, went to the telephone, called Headquarters and rattled forth orders like a human machinegun. He instructed the Night Captain to get hold of Captain Hurley of the Ballistics Department and have him called back at once.

Meanwhile Dougherty had been pacing the floor in deep cogitation. Now he said:

"Thatcher, no one yet has thought to search Flandrin or the other suspects. No one knew what to look for. Now I would like to take one of your men and search Flandrin."

"What do you hope to find?"

"Who knows, Thatcher? I would just like to try."

"But why?"

"Have you forgotten that Flandrin was a student of chemistry?"

"By all means, do as you like," assented Colt, as the finger-print expert came up. He waited until Dougherty had gone off to the kitchen, then saluted and reported:

"Just found a clear set of prints by the electric light in the kitchen."

"Belong to the witch doctor?"

"How did you guess that, sir?"

"Tell me— was there any grease on those prints?"

"None, sir."

"Then that coloured paste, whatever it was, got on to Keblia's fingers after his arrival here. Excellent! Any more?"

"All for the present, chief— but I'm keeping right on going!"

THE telephone rang and I talked to Captain Hurley of the Ballistics staff. At Colt's request he promised to arrive at the house in ten minutes. Just as I was finished, Dougherty burst tumultuously into the room.

"Thatcher!" he cried exultantly. "It's all over. I've got the evidence complete— the case for the jury."

Colt looked around in astonishment.

"What have you found?" he demanded.

"The case is clear as daylight," exulted the District Attorney. "Who knew chemical gases? Flandrin! Who had the opportunity to fire such a bullet? Flandrin, hiding in the shadow of the performers' entrance, watching his wife's act. He had been hob-nobbing with the Ubangi— he could get into this apartment and kill Keblia— he had all the motives in the world— I tell you, Thatcher, it all adds up."

"Certainly impressive," Colt conceded. "Why did he do it? Was he Jealous? Revengeful? Greedy for insurance money? In love with his first wife? Or what?"

"Thatcher," expounded Dougherty huskily, "it's a cinch. You've cracked most of these cases, but I think this time you will have to pat the old District Attorney on the back. I can see the whole thing now! I've had Flandrin on the grill. He's a smart boy, too, but not too smart for your old side-kick! He tried to tell me his theory of this murder. His idea was that the witch doctor did it-that's what he tried to make me believe. He even went so far as to say that he thought it was done by magic. He pretended to believe in such things. But I will get the truth out of him. His first wife said she had the goods on Josie. She had actually followed her. She had seen Josie and Marburg Lovell together, just as we read in that note. She wanted him back-he admitted that-and, Thatcher, as sure as you and I are standing here, the two of them decided to get rid of Josie LaTour! The first wife was actually in the audience tonight— I found that out — and he knew it."

Colt's face was impassive.

"Get anything more?" he asked.

"Yes, yes, yes!" exulted Dougherty. "Sure, I've got more! I searched Flandrin-and the clothes in his closet you hadn't got to yet—"

Dougherty turned his head to one side of his enormous red neck, and his lopsided smile was broad and happy.

"Take a look at what was in his dressing robe pocket— see for yourself!"

AND into Thatcher Colt's hand the District Attorney laid a large brass cartridge— an exact duplicate of the one we had found in the trunk.

Colt's hand was thrust forward with an involuntary movement of astonishment.

"But what does Flandrin say about it?"

The District Attorney snorted contemptuously.

"The flimsiest lie you ever heard in the world, Thatcher. He tried to tell me that he had never seen it before."

As he considered this second magnum of a bullet, the Commissioner's face was extremely grave.

"What do you wish to do, Dougherty?" he inquired.

"I want to take Flandrin downtown and let Hogan, my county detective, and myself really get to work on him. It's about two-thirty o'clock now— I believe we can have a confession before breakfast."

"You are perfectly satisfied with your theory of both crimes?"

"Enough to want to go ahead. Her fall was not an accident, just as you said. She knew how to fall, and the fall itself would probably not have been fatal, if she had been herself. Hell, Thatcher, why go into details? With the finding of that bullet, the case is complete. We will sweat the rest of the details out of Flandrin."

Turning with cumbersome grace, Dougherty levelled a pudgy forefinger at Flandrin, who had reappeared in the doorway.

"You killed her— you, the man who had a hobby for chemistry— you, whose love had turned to jealous hate-you killed her, and by heaven, I'm going to arrest you here and now for the murder of your wife I"

I looked at Thatcher Colt. His face was grim. I had expected some protest against Dougherty's precipitate actions. But now he stood silent for a moment and then turned and said to Dougherty:

"Take him downtown. There are two officers outside. Go easy with him, but try to make him come through."

Dougherty was flushed and triumphant, as two policemen stood beside Flandrin.

"Aren't you coming with us?" gasped the District Attorney as Flandrin was led out by the two policemen.

"No," said Thatcher Colt, "I've got to stay here awhile— and then go elsewhere."

"Doing what, Thatcher?"

"Oh," said Colt, with a slight smile. "I've got a big job ahead of me. I've got to find the real murderer of Josie LaTour!"

Chapter 11

FOR a little while Colt maintained a fixed, grave silence. I heard the door slam after the heavy footfalls of District Attorney Dougherty, and through the open window of the front room of the flat came the District Attorney's familiar cough. It was followed by the buzzing of a self-starter, the groan of meshed gears, and the sound of a departing automobile. Flandrin was on his way downtown.

As if this were the signal for a general departure, Flynn now reported that the routine police work was done. The body of the witch doctor, many times photo-graphed, had been removed from the trunk, sent to Bellevue, to lie beside the remains of Josie LaTour. The trunk was on its way to Centre Street. On the bed-table in Josie's murder-haunted boudoir, lay a long knife which had been found under his body at the bottom of the trunk. It was a bread knife that matched the other hardware found in the kitchen; not a finger-print was on it. Whoever had cut the witch doctor's throat had known enough to wear a glove. The plaster cast of the window sill had been made, the dust collected as Colt had asked, and experts at Headquarters would study them at once.

The photographer and the finger-print expert were leaving, and with them would go the Assistant Medical Examiner.

After talking over a few more details, Flynn went on his way. Except for Gminder, still exiled in the kitchen, Thatcher Colt and I were left alone in the flat.

"There is much more we can do here," Colt confided, "and we may have a chance to sit back a moment and speculate."

But both of Colt's hopes were doomed by a knocking at the door. I admitted Captain Hurley, a short, grey-haired man with close clipped, salt-and-pepper moustache. Colt laid before him the singular cartridge found in Flandrin's dressing robe.

"Ever seen a bullet like this before?" Hurley whistled softly.

"Not exactly like this, sir. It is a new one on the police— but I do remember now that a shell like this was patented only recently. I caught it in the 'Patent Office Gazette.' "

"A tear-gas cartridge?"

"Yes, sir. It was designed as a means of using tear gas at long ranges up to one hundred and fifty yards— and if I recall it, with a new variant of the gas that made it almost invisible. But I didn't know it was already on the market."

"Too bad that such devices do not come under police control," observed Colt.

"Don't I wish there was such a law!" Captain Hurley groaned.

"What I want are the basic facts. Who are the most reliable manufacturers of tear-gas equipment?"

"The Federal Laboratories, Inc., in Pittsburgh. I know one of the officers—"

"Then get him on long-distance— rout him out of bed— hurry!"

After the call had been launched, Colt continued to question Hurley about tear-gas weapons.

"Is it the Federal concern that makes our riot guns?" he asked.

"Yes. We use a lot of them in the department and in the prisons. Their gas doesn't kill— it merely knocks people out. Actually it isn't even a gas— it is really a solid, crystalline substance. But it is vaporised by a heating agent when the contents are discharged, by something like a time fuse. The effect is to cause excruciating pain to the eyes. So intense is the pain that the victim must close the eyes and stumble blindly away from the gas area."

"It all matches up, all right," murmured Colt. "Yet I cannot understand why the cartridge left no mark on LaTour's body. It left no wound of any kind-merely dented a metal spangle."

"Easily explained," Captain Hurley replied. "This light aluminium shell is propelled with sufficient force to shatter an ordinary pane of glass at about seventy-five yards. But it has no penetrating power as far as solid or fleshy objects are concerned. It could not inflict serious injury, except at a distance of about twenty to thirty feet."

"Is there a noise when it is shot off?"

"A fairly loud noise!"

For the first time since the murder, Colt flashed a brief smile at me.

"An explosive sound, out of rhythm with the drums. Remember. Tony?"

"Hello!" shouted Hurley into the telephone. "Is Mr. Replogle there?"

A moment later Colt was speaking, voice to voice, with the greatest American expert on tear-gas apparatus.

"Mr. Replogle? Do you people manufacture a shell of one and one-half inch calibre marked 2x162?... You do not?... Know who does?... The Continental Tear Gas Company in New York?... Whom do I talk to there?... How's that?... Hankley?... Thanks, Mr. Replogle.... Is there anything new about that new Continental bullet?... New gas?... Oh, it is almost invisible?... Thanks again. Would there be any use for that gas around a circus?... What's that, Mr. Replogle? Say that again!... Various big-game hunters have attempted to use the new bullet to capture wild animals alive?... Thanks three times!"

At the other end of the wire, Mr. Replogle was elaborating.

"But the gas hasn't been very successful with wild animals! You see, Mr. Colt, the effect of tear gas is on the membrane of the eye. Only the dog and certain other animals have eye membranes that are sensitive to the gas. A lion, for example, isn't greatly affected by the discharge of a gas grenade. Walks right through it. Disappointing, don't you think?"

"Not at all, Mr. Replogle!" carolled Thatcher Colt. "Can you tell me of any circus people who have experimented with the gas?"

"No— but you might ask Mr. Hankley of the Continental people about it."

Colt hung up the receiver and turned to me.

"Telephone Hankley of the Continental— step on it, Tony!"

It was not an easy assignment, but I finally managed to find Mr. Cedric Hankley, president of the Continental Tear Gas Company. Into his sleepy ears I poured my story three times before he had an ink-ling of what I was saying.

"But it is three o'clock in the morning," he finally protested.

"Nevertheless, the police need— at once— a list of every person to whom you have sold your new invisible gas cartridge."

"I have such a list— see me tomorrow morning at the office—"

"Now!" I replied with uncompromising severity.

As a civic duty. Mr. Hankley finally consented to meet Captain Hurley at his office in half an hour. The departing ballistics expert promised to telephone back to us at the LaTour-Flandrin apartment.

Once again we were left alone, In the bedroom. As we stood there talking, we heard a creaking footstep and Professor Gminder looked timidly in.

"Look here, both of you," he advanced primly. "I happen to have a flask on my hip. Wouldn't you like the tip of a nip?"

Before either of us could reply-and my answer would certainly have been in the affirmative— we heard a sudden, inexplicable sound. On the acute stillness of these rooms came suddenly a cry— the unearthly voice of a woman weeping as if her heart were broken— a sound like the cry of a banshee!

But from where did it come— and whom?

Chapter 12

IT was not an illusion.

Our hearing had not been tricked Somewhere in this sinister apartment there was a living woman, crying at the top of her voice.

As with one accord. Colt and I rushed from the bedroom, with Gminder at our heels. Through the intervening rooms we raced, pausing at last in the kitchen But it, too. was empty as were all the others

"The voice is coming from the outer hall," decided Thatcher Colt. He threw back the door, put one foot over the threshold, and looked out. I was peering over his shoulder and together we found the weeping lady She was standing before us, full-bodied and altogether earthly. In the subdued light of the overhead electric lamp, she crouched against the wall— a tall and robust woman, but in hysterics.

"You are Flora?" asked Thatcher Colt.

"I am Flandrin's wife," the woman answered, straightening up and dabbing at her eyes with a handkerchief. Her crying stopped, she stared suspiciously at Colt.

Flora, as Flandrin had called her, was cheaply but attractively dressed in a costume of red, relieved with a tie and belt of a gay, blue-checked pattern— the dress fitting a little too tightly, the hem a little too high, colours somewhat too bright for a woman of her years. I suppose she was well into her thirties; her flat yellow hair, which reminded me of the littered straw of the circus, had undoubtedly been dyed, and the make-up was overdone— yet there was something tragically child-like under all her make-believe.

"Step inside," invited the Police Commissioner.

Staring straight ahead of her, Flora obeyed, entering the living room and at once flouncing wearily down into an arm-chair drawn up against a courtyard window. Out of the corner of her eye. she watched Colt furtively. One would have thought the Commissioner quite disinterested. It was an old police device: Nothing so worries a witness as waiting. Knowing the police would question her, the first wife of Flandrin instinctively began to nerve herself for the ordeal. And like many other witnesses, she would probably be ready to snap before the ordeal even began.

As Gminder returned to the kitchen, to have his drink all alone, Thatcher Colt turned his back on her and went to his former task. And all the while the first wife of Flandrin sat waiting, her resolution slowly oozing away. She closed her eyes and sighed, crossed her legs and then uncrossed them. Her eyes roved around the room, darted at Colt, and then looked away. Before long the woman's hands were trembling; at any moment she might scream. She had had enough-and sensing precisely the most unbearable instant of the long wait. Colt turned and faced her.

"Your full name?"

SHE straightened up, her hands tightly griping the arms of the chair.

"Flora Becker Heisse."

"Age?"

"Twenty-six."

(We learned later that Flora was thirty-four, but all women are elusive on this subject.)

"Where are you living now?"

"I have a room at the Little Florence in West Forty-third Street. It's a rooming-house."

"Are you working?"

"No— my first husband pays all my expenses and supports me in idleness— it is a charming custom I discovered in this country."

Like Flandrin, she spoke in the American vernacular with an overlay of discrimination and more than a slight edge of foreign accent.

"Where were you born?"

"Stuttgart."

"How long have you been in the United States?"

"A year."

"Doing what?"

"Living. It was in Europe my husband gave up his studies and left me— I followed him here."

"Why did your husband leave you?"

"To marry Josie, of course."

"Was he to blame?"

"Of course not. He was like a child In that woman's hands. She filled him up with a lot of flattery— made him think he was too good for me. Some women know how to do that. She made him think that I was holding him back. He imagined it was all a great romance— and his early marriage to me a great mistake."

Colt lit a cigarette.

"No wonder you feel bitter about it," was his comment.

"Bitter? Not I!" she denied. "I felt sorry for my husband. Some day I knew he would come back to me. I knew that she made his life one unshirted hell— that was her expression, not mine, but I heard it."

Thatcher Colt closed his eyes.

"How did you know Josie LaTour had spent this afternoon with Marburg Lovell?"

Flora coloured violently.

"I followed her. I have often followed her. I was determined to get something on her."

"You saw her go to Lovell's home?"

"I did."

"What time?"

"She went in about two-thirty and it was nearly five before she came out."

"As God is your witness?"

"Yes— amen to that!"

"You have been seeing your husband recently?"

"Yes— until he went away on that trip. He fell back in his alimony, and I have met him several times. Although I love him much, I did consider taking legal action against him."

"Is that why you came here to-night?"

THERE was a long pause while Flora considered this question. At last she answered.

"No. I came here tonight because I knew my husband needed me."

"You mean you just had a hunch?"

"No— I knew what had happened— in fact, I saw it happen."

"You were in the Garden?"

"Of course I was. I couldn't miss the opening. I have to see the performance of my husband."

Colt opened his eyes suddenly. "Where were you sitting?"

"In an upper tier, front row."

"Do you remember the number of your seat?"

With fingers whose quiverings could not be governed, Flora drew forth from a bag of alligator skin the orange stub of a pasteboard ticket. I put the stub in an envelope and marked it for identification. Colt went on:

"You were sitting in Section J. That was in line with the Roman rings of Josie LaTour, was it not?"

"Directly."

"Were you watching when she fell?"

"Yes."

"Notice anything peculiar just before that?"

"I don't know whether you would call it peculiar or not, but I got a look at her face and she looked scared to me— but I always did say she was yellow— if something tough suddenly got in her way, she would be bound, I knew, to get what you call cold feet. That's all I know about it."

Colt nodded thoughtfully.

"And after she fell— what did you do?" She shrugged her shoulders.

"I cleared out as soon as I could. I came up here. Maybe it wasn't the lady-like thing to do— but I didn't care about that. The woman who had wrecked my husband's life and mine was out of the way. No matter what anybody thought of me, I wanted to let him know that I was sorry for him and I'd do anything for him. I guess you think it would have been better if I didn't come. But that's not the way I look at it."

Colt made an eloquent gesture with his hands.

"I'm not criticising you," he protested. "What I am anxious to know is what you did after you got here."

"I walked in downstairs. The front door is always open and the janitor in this place is generally drunk. So I walked in and tried the front door of this apartment, and it was locked. So were the other doors. So I went downstairs and decided to wait outside. I thought Flandrin would be home any minute. I saw lights go on and then go off and I couldn't figure that out. I saw you three come up. I didn't want to get mixed up in anything, so I just loafed on the other side of the street. I saw my husband when he went in— I called to him but he didn't hear me. So I said to myself, 'I'll just wait till the police go, then walk up and ring the bell.' Then other cops came and finally I saw the big fat man with red curls come down with Flandrin and two policemen with them. I ran over and spoke— and my own husband refused to speak to me. They all drove away. I suppose I lost my head over that— I came up here and as soon I got to the top of the stairs I began to cry— and you came out."

The Police Commissioner looked at his watch.

"The fall," he reminded her, "occurred at exactly ten-twenty p.m.

"Yes, sir."

"What time did you leave the Garden?"

"About five minutes later."

"You came here in a cab?"

"No, sir— I walked."

"What time did you get here?"

"About a quarter to eleven, I guess."

"See any persons you recognised at the windows of this apartment during all that time?"

"Nobody could have got in the front door or gone out that way. I was watching the whole time. Wasn't I waiting for Flandrin to come back?"

Colt studied Flora with great deliberation. In the bitter lines of her face, one could read the story of a woman who had found hope a good aperitif but a poor dessert.

"Now, Mrs. Heisse," the Commissioner resumed, "is it not true that you have tried to sell the story of your marriage and divorce to one of the picture papers?"

"I? Who told you such a thing?"

"Colonel Robinson, earlier this evening. He called it blackmail."

A horse-shoe frown gathered in the forehead of this large and powerful woman.

SHE could not withdraw her eyes from the stern gaze of her accuser. The muscles of her large face began to jerk and twitch. Her eyes rolled in her head and her large lips parted, exposing uneven teeth. She moaned and then suddenly, unexpectedly, she cried out:

"You think I helped him to kill her. I didn't! She deserved to die, but I didn't do it. I even tried to stop him. I begged him not to do lt."

Colt did not move. Like a statue, pale and grim, he continued to gaze at her and now her arms weaved and her whole body quivered as if trying to extricate herself from his spell.

"You can't blame me," she screamed. "He was mad to do it. I warned him not to try. I can't stand any more. I've had enough. Talk to the guilty one, not to me— talk to Flandrin!"

Her body crumbled and she toppled forward in a clumsy heap on the floor.

Startled, I sprang to my feet. I felt horribly shaken. But Thatcher Colt seemed only mournful and disgruntled, as he towered above the over-large, awkward body sprawled at our feet.

"Good God!" I gasped. "Dougherty will have a bullet-proof case now!"

"Bullet-proof?"

Colt's sombre eyes glittered.

"Bullet-proof, Tony? Here, help me lift this woman up to the bed. There-now take off her hat. You've been in the Police Department long enough to know her talk is bunk. And you don't need a psychiatrist to tell you that she is neurotic. She was in the Garden tonight, gathering all the gossip she could; she learned that murder was suspected. If Josie was murdered, did Flandrin do it? Had her stories about Lovell worked on his imagination: If so, there might be a chance of reconciliation. So, thinking that she will find him at the flat, she comes here. On his way down town with Dougherty, Flandrin repudiates her. Again the poison works in her mind. When my questions got on her nerves, she exploded— by confessing and involving him."

"But can any woman be as low as that? Try to send an innocent man to the chair for a murder he did not commit?"

Colt smiled whimsically.

"That seldom happens. A woman knows she can always change her mind. She would clear him, long before. But meanwhile she would like to make him suffer, and taste her power over him. More, she would like to put him under obligation to her, to feel superior, to be the one who saved his life— it is an experience common enough to the police, Tony. When it is over. Flora will go back to the tabloids and make an unclean breast of it all."

The telephone was ringing. Captain Hurley was calling to dictate to me a list of rifle purchasers from the Continental Tear Gas Company. I wrote out the list in long-hand as it came over the wire and passed it, name by name, to Thatcher Colt.

"We must check all these," muttered Colt, "but so far none of them seems to mean anything."

But just as he said that I laid before the Commissioner the last of the names. The Commissioner stared incredulously at the pencilled memorandum.

"This is fantastic!" he exclaimed. "Why would this man buy a tear-gas rifle?"

No wonder Thatcher Colt was surprised. For the name was that of Josie LaTour's admirer, the millionaire who had ardently pursued her with flowers and jewels— Marburg Lovell!

Chapter 13

COLT seized his hat and stick.

"We're off, Tony!" he cried, his voice tingling with excitement. "Get Gminder. We've got to ask a few questions of Mr. Marburg Lovell."

"But what about Flora— she's still out."

"Leave her," was Colt's indifferent recommendation. "She won't disappear."

In the hallway, we found a sergeant and two patrolmen. Colt explained the situation and one of the bluecoats was delegated to telephone Dougherty about the wife's statement and then wait by Flora's side to take her to the D-A.'s office, if desired.

Drawn up at the curb was the Commissioner's private car. At the wheel sat the placid and platter-faced Neil McMahon, impassive and intrepid madman. The same Neil carried an old knife-wound In his thigh and eleven bullet scars in various parts of his anatomy— souvenirs of nights and days with Thatcher Colt.

Giving as a direction one of the most aristocratic old corners of upper Fifth Avenue, Colt sprang lightly into his car, Gminder and I following. In a second we were off, snorting across Eightieth Street, and through Central Park eastward towards our destination. The rain had come and gone; the lights of New York were dimmed, and most decent citizens were now asleep. Over the city fell a spell of charmed moon shine.

Colt lit a cigarette, frowning at the absence of his pipe.

"I am a fair historian of crime," he said, between annoyed, dissatisfied puffs, "and I have tried to find a parallel In the past for this fantastic business. Except the glass ball bombs I mentioned, I don't recall a single case that resembles it. Of course, lethal gases have been used before— especially in the epidemic of garage murders, some years ago, with carbon monoxide as the death agency. Most of these were passed off as suicides, and many a wife, really a murderess, lived, unsuspected, off the first husband's insurance money and married another man more to her taste.

"BUT such cases have only a remote resemblance in fact to the death of the circus queen. It is quite probable, Tony, that we are facing a crime really unique in criminology. That is why— while chatting with you on this exceedingly bumpy ride— my brain has been trying to formulate some rule of practice to follow. Certain notions force themselves on one's attention. I ask myself. 'Where did the killer stand when he fired the shot that killed Josie LaTour?' And you know, Tony, that question alone is almost impossible to answer— that is, with the facts now in hand. For there was bound to be a flash from the gun— and that flash of fire was bound to be seen. True, the rolling of the drums obscured the sound of the shot. But what hid the sight of flame and smoke when the shot was fired? Remember, the whole arena was dark, except for the spotlights trained on LaTour. If a man lit a cigarette at the other end of the Garden, the glow of his match would have been visible to nearly twenty thousand persons. So you see what an important and-for the present-in-soluble riddle this one question seems to be?"

"Have you formed any working theory about it?"

Colt smiled enigmatically.

"Perhaps the gun was fired in front of all eyes," he replied. "But it would have to be concealed so that the gun-flash was invisible."

"But how?" I persisted.

Colt did not reply: with a jerking swoop Into the kerb, the car halted in front of the Fifth Avenue mansion of Marburg Lovell.

The Lovell house was designed after the Palazzo Pesaro, in the style of late Venetian Renaissance. Our four-o'clock-in-the-morning moon cast an unearthly silver-green light upon marble facing cut in diamond-shaped blocks, and pierced by square windows and two arched doorways, topped by grotesques. The two upper storeys displayed pillars, balconies, and the heads of warriors wearing plumed helmets.

In silence, Professor Gminder and I followed Colt through one of the arched doorways, and up a curving flight of marble steps with a graceful banister. The Commissioner pressed the bell button. On the stillness we heard the ringing like the sound of far-off chimes. Again and again, Colt pushed the button, more and more insistently, until at last a feeble light appeared between the iron grillwork and glass of the massive front doors, and we saw a figure in a dressing gown descending the inner stairs.

A butler opened the door a little way and stared at us balefully.

"Mr. Lovell has retired," he announced without ceremony.

"We are from the police," returned the Commissioner with decision. "Tell Mr. Lovell that Mr. Thatcher Colt must see him at once!"

"Certainly, Mr. Commissioner," announced the butler, his manner immediately deferential, "if you will wait just a minute, I will tell Mr. Lovell you are here." He turned swiftly and disappeared up the staircase. Fascinated, my gaze followed his bulky figure as it vanished around the bend in the ascent; the man walked with a certain muscular prowess, taking two steps at a time and mounting with this double stride as if that were the way he walked all the time.

NOISELESSLY, after a brief absence, the butler returned down the stairs, still two steps at a time and without visible effort.

"Mr. Lovell will see you in the library!"

Taking only one step at a time, Colt and I, leaving Gminder in the lower hall, followed the butler to the second floor, walking down wide corridors lined with paintings in gilded frames, and arriving at last before a pair of lofty double doors of carved and ponderous oak. One of these doors was opened, and from the corridor I looked through to an immense room, half a city block in length, its walls lined with book-shelves, reached by long travelling ladders. At the far end was a single painting, probably an original Rembrandt, centred in the wall of books.

In the middle of the room was a desk of the most florid Louis Quatorze style, and, standing behind, his pallid face with its green eye-patch reflecting the light of an overhanging lamp, loomed "the owner of these premises.

"Good evening, Mr. Commissioner," greeted Lovell urbanely; his voice was resonant and manly. "Or, should I say, good morning?"

The two of us stood before the desk now. "Chairs, gentlemen," invited Marburg Lovell, with a fastidious gesture, "and may I offer you refreshments-brandy, coffee, what you wish?"

Colt waved aside the hospitality.

"We have come here, as you probably guess, to talk with you about the death of Josie LaTour!" the Commissioner explained, sinking Into an armchair in front of Lovell's desk. The millionaire's stare widened.

"The police are working on that?" he exclaimed. "I am twice astonished— first, that there should be any need for police investigation— second, that you should include me in your labours!"

And settling down In his chair, this Croesus with the patch over his eye opened a humidor, lifted out for himself a long cigar, and calmly proceeded to bite its end and light it. His superb indifference to a surprise visit from the authorities, his tranquil superiority, might easily have angered Thatcher Colt. Perhaps, indeed, it did anger him. At all events, he said:

"We know, Lovell, that you did your best to become the lover of Josie LaTour."

"Yes? Well, that is true— I did!"

"And we know that you did not get very far!"

"Again, I repeat— yes!"

"She was here yesterday afternoon."

Lovell opened his mouth in frank astonishment.

"How in God's name did you know that?"

"What does it matter? Did you talk with her?"

"No— I did not know she was coming. I was away. Poor child, she waited two hours, but I got back much later."

"Know what she came for?"

"I do not. I tried to find out— but I was chased away from her door— I, who own most of that damned circus, the more fool me. I hear you like the circus, Mr. Colt. I will sell you my share for a song!"

Colt did not criticise this lame attempt to change the subject. Instead, he changed it himself. He leaned forward with a mild lifting of his dark brows, a narrowing of his lids, and turning down of his lips as he tilted his head to one side.

"Is it not true that you own a weapon known as a tear-gas rifle?"

LOVELL showed no signs of being surprised, as he calmly replied:

"I did."

"One of powerful range, Isn't it capable of hitting a mark at more than one hundred and fifty yards?"

"Yes. And please, Mr. Colt; what of it? There is no law against owning such a weapon— the Sullivan law does not embrace tear-gas rifles."

"May I see the gun?"

Mr. Marburg Lovell slid his upturned palms outward from his shoulders in a mocking gesture.

"You are asking me that, Mr. Colt? But then, perhaps, you have been so busy with more Important matters that you did not recall my small misfortune!"

Thatcher Colt's voice crackled:

"I do not understand your remark. Will you kindly answer my question!"

Lovell leaned forward, and the two men stared at each other across the ancient mahogany of the desk.

"Certainly," complied Lovell. There was no mistaking the underlying slur in his tone. "My tear-gas rifle was stolen from this house. I reported the loss to the authorities early yesterday. You see, Mr. Commissioner, I made the mistake of assuming that you knew more about the affairs of your own department than, apparently, you do!"

I felt like striding forward and acquainting the unharmed .eye of Mr. Marburg Lovell with the hardened knuckles of my right hand. But Colt's smile was one of benevolent scepticism.

"I did know about your burglary report," he replied, "and told my assistant, Mr. Abbot, about it tonight, in the box at Madison Square Garden— the box just next to yours, Mr. Lovell, the box just facing the centre ring, and about sixty feet from where Josie LaTour died, while you leaned against the railing and watched. But I had not been informed that the loss you reported was the theft of a tear-gas rifle."

"Well, you know it now," snapped Marburg Lovell, ungraciously. He turned a shade paler, as he dropped back in his chair. But Thatcher Colt remained leaning forward, rigid, inflexible, and quite un-shaken by the contemptuous attitude of his host.

"How did it happen?" he pursued, "that you ever bought such a rifle? How did you ever hear of it? And why did you wish one?"

LOVELL struck the polished top of the desk with his fist.

"And why do you ask me any such questions?" he demanded, showing his teeth. "What is the object of this sudden descent on me. and these inquisitorial catechisms at such an hour? What in hell are you driving at with your offensive questions?"

"You will have to answer them, Mr. Lovell, here and now, or subject yourself to a more disagreeable method, down at Headquarters."

Lovell threw down his cigar with a heated oath.

"Hell, what have I got to hide?" he demanded. "You know and all New York knows that I am a big game hunter. I have shot at least one of every kind of animal worth shooting in Africa, Asia, and parts of South America. Well, you also know that I am. to my cost, financial backer of this circus. There's where I heard of this new type of tear-gas gun. Crumps, the boss animal man, told me about it. So I ordered one. I was curious to see if this new bullet would have any appreciable effect on wild animals, and Crumps promised to make a test for me. That's how I got the gun."

"And when was it delivered?"

"Within the last three days— since Crumps came into town from Georgia on the show."

"What model gun, please?"

"Oh, I don't know— how would I remember that?"

"It carried those large, banana-sized shells?"

"That's right."

"How many of those bullets did you buy at the time you acquired the rifle, three days ago?"

"How many? Oh. let me see— well, as I recall it there were only four or five. They were so large, I didn't want too many cluttering up the house. I got this injury to my eye experimenting with the gun."

"Where are those bullets now?"

Marburg Lovell looked blankly at Thatcher Colt.

"Stolen!" he declared.

"The bullets, too?"

"Yes, Mr. Colt."

"At what time did you report this burglary?"

"Oh, about nine o'clock yesterday morning."

"And approximately when do you think your house was entered and those bullets and rifle stolen?"

"Some time during the night before— I don't know what hour. Look here, Colt― was Josie LaTour murdered?"

"Yes!"

Marburg Lovell put his elbows on his desk and his jaw-bones in his palms.

"You are trying to connect me with her death?"

"I am trying to find who killed her," corrected Colt. "It happens that her death was caused by tear gas. And of all the persons touching her life, even remotely, you are the only one discovered so far who owns, a tear-gas outfit."

Lovell's face was eloquent of surprise and something like admiration.

"How in God's name did you ever find out she was killed by tear gas?"

Colt's eyes narrowed.

"You are quick enough to see that such a method of killing would be hard to detect," he remarked. "Sorry that at this stage of the investigation I can't enlighten you as to our means of detecting it."

Marburg Lovell shrugged as if the matter were really trivial.

"But meanwhile," pursued Colt, "I would like to have all the facts about the burglary."

"Facts? There are no facts. The gun was here when I went to bed and gone when I woke up."

"Now, Mr. Lovell, you and I are not going to get anywhere if you try to equivocate. There are plenty of facts and I want them all!"

"What facts, then?"

"This house is protected by the Druckland Automatic Electric Protection Service, isn't it?"

Lovell straightened up and looked at Colt incredulously.

"How in hell did you know that?" he rasped. "How-"

"The wiring in your hallway makes it very evident," replied Colt. "What I want to know is this: was the Druckland Protection Signal turned on when you went to bed?"

"It certainly was!"

"And yet your house was burgled?"

"Right!"

"No alarm?"

"None. I am sorry if I have seemed brusque, Mr. Colt― I did not mean to be― but this thing got on my nerves. Here some fellow gets into my house, steals my rifle and gets away, and not a flicker from the burglary detection device. I thought that electric protection system could not be beat."

COLT permitted himself the luxury of a frail smile. "Such systems are excellent," he said, "but there are any number of ways of beating them, if the criminal is clever enough."

"Will you tell me how?"

"Gladly— when we have the time. Now I want to see where you kept the gun and the bullets."

Silently Marburg Lovell turned and walked towards the rear of the library. Colt and I followed. As I crossed the richly-carpeted treasury of books, strange questions were buzzing in my head. Could it be possible that this patch-eyed millionaire had any real connection with the death of Josie LaTour? What could be his motive? Mad jealousy? Or to rid himself of blackmail? Or— and this question bothered me most— was he actually telling the truth? Perhaps someone had burgled his home, stolen the gun, and killed LaTour with the hope that Marburg Lovell, known owner of such a weapon, would be accused.

"I stored the gun and the bullets here," explained Marburg Lovell, approaching an ancient wooden chest, set against the wall. It was a tall, double-bodied cabinet, with four doors, elaborately carved, probably of the time of Cardinal Richelieu. As its owner opened the ornamental upper doors, the musty smell of centuries issued forth, but the interior was perfectly empty.

"The gun and bullets reposed in here?" asked Colt.

"Yes. Nothing else had ever been stored in there by me."

Colt thrust his head in the cabinet, then, backing out, bent over, looking for dust and telltale marks. .He found none. Then his hand reached down and tugged at the lower doors, until they swung outward.

The next instant Colt stood back, his eyes wide with amazement.

"What is that?" he asked in a low voice. Marburg Lovell glanced curiously at the Commissioner, then, bending over, he squinted frowningly into the depths of the bottom half of his ancient cupboard.

"God Almighty!" Lovell ejaculated.

The gleaming object on the floor of the chest was visible to all— a stubby rifle, of strange design-undoubtedly the missing tear-gas gun!

Chapter 14

THE weapon looked like a cross between a rifle and a sawn-off shotgun. The shoulder-rest and trigger resembled a rifle, but the barrel was thick, pudgy, and sullen for all that it was gaily finished in chromium.

"Had you looked in that lower half of the box since the gun was missed?" demanded the Commissioner.

"I had not."

Out of the strange hiding place, Colt lifted the rifle, carried it over to the light of a floor-lamp, and studied it intently. The gun was about twenty-six inches overall.

"This is quite similar to the type of tear-gas guns we use in Sing Sing, Auburn, and Dannemora," remarked the Commissioner. "And also like the standard type of equipment used by the New York State Police. But I see there are some important modifications."

Then bending lower and squinting, he added:

"I was hoping for more than modifications— something like scratches, marks on the chromium-plated barrel. I had rather anticipated that some kind of metallic attachment was clamped on there."

The millionaire reached out to receive the rifle. But Colt withheld it while he instructed Lovell to cover his palms and fingers with handkerchiefs; he wanted no spoiling of possible identification prints.

"I do not deny that you will find my own fingerprints on my own rifle," grumbled Lovell, again exhibiting signs of the surly nature for which he was renowned.

"But you don't wish to obliterate any possible trace of others?" Colt suggested with the utmost in friendly smiles.

Lovell took the gun in silence.

"I see no scratches," he growled. "I do not know why you should expect to find them or what device could have made them."

Colt's face was quite close to the patched eye of Marburg Lovell; his voice became very confidential as he murmured:

"Some new kind of gimmick was used on it!"

"But a silencer would not scratch it— you surely must know that, Mr. Colt."

"I did not say silencer. This gun or one like it, was aimed at Josie LaTour-and fired. The noise of the explosion was covered by the drum beats. But what about the powder-flash? In the darkened auditorium it would certainly be seen unless—"

COLT paused. Lovell cleared his throat uneasily.

"I see what you mean— a long funnel clamped to the end would hide the flash."

"Perhaps."

"But, Mr. Colt— if anybody, sitting in Madison Square Garden, produced, levelled, and aimed such a large and formidable-looking weapon as that, he would start a panic. He could not hope to do such a thing unnoticed."

Colt's smile was almost imperceptible.

"I see you have well considered the difficulties," he emphasised, "but you must also have realised that discovery would depend on where the marksman was standing— or sitting."

Lovell had paled slightly.

"No," he disclaimed. "I have not so far considered that. Look here, Colt-you don't have any serious suspicion that I am mixed up in that poor girl's death?"

Colt's sombre eyes were straight and steady.

"You were In love with her," he pointed out. "You may have had reasons—"

"Preposterous!"

"And I repeat you are the only person among her friends and acquaintances known to own a weapon of the type by which she was killed."

"And I repeat I had nothing to do with her death. I wished her to live, frankly for my own sake as well as for hers."

"You mean you still had hopes—"

"Yes, I do mean that. On the other hand, what possible cause could I have to wish her dead?"

Colt chose not to answer the question as he passed to me the tear-gas gun.

"I told Neil to send for some additional detectives and have them wait for me downstairs," he revealed. "Send one of them down town to turn this gun over to the ballistics department and the finger-print men. Tell them to work fast."

MY errand performed, I hastened again upstairs, in time to hear Colt summarising very clearly to Marburg Lovell the difficulties of the situation.

"Your story seems quite impossible," the Commissioner was pointing out. "Like many other rich men these times, you have filled your house with guards. And you have an electric burglary system. You say your tear-gas gun was stolen— yet when I search for it, I find it."

"Yes, but—"

"Yes, but tell me— what do you expect me to believe from a set of facts like that? Am I to suppose the unknown got in here, not once, but twice, in spite of your guards?"

"I know it sounds mad— but what else could have happened?" argued Lovell.

"That, Mr. Lovell, is what I am asking you. Are we to look for a murderer who gained access to your premises, in spite of your electric burglar alarm, stole the gun, put a funnel on it, carried it unnoticed into Madison Square Garden, killed Josie LaTour with no one the wiser, got out of the Garden, returned here, into your house, hid the gun in your cabinet, and finally escaped? Is that what I am to believe?"

Marburg Lovell threw up his hands.

"It's as good a theory as any other, isn't it?" he rasped, and his expression was that of a man whose teeth were being drilled. "I don't know anything about it. I didn't kill her—"

"So you said before," Colt reminded him soothingly. "You go ahead with your whisky and soda, Mr. Lovell— and let me prowl around. Mind?"

It was a command, more than a request. We left Marburg Lovell at the library desk, as Colt led me once more on one of those tireless and detailed searches, from room to room, on all four floors of the rich man's house. Never had Colt moved with greater determination or speed. He began in the Italian garden at the back of the house, and here he made what he plainly considered an important discovery. Weaving his powerful pocket lamp, Colt had covered all the lawn and garden plots and came at last to the base of a set of enormous iron bars.

"An agile, skilled athlete could easily climb those bars," the Commissioner re-marked thoughtfully.

"But the electric alarm?"

"That is quite a different problem," returned Colt absently. He had knelt suddenly on the pebbled walk and his hand had flattened on the earth at the feet of the iron bars. Something was in his hand— as he lifted it and held it in the powerful rays of his torch. What he had found was like a small piece of dried mud. He had found it in a recess under the bars, where the rain had not been able to soak it.

In the dark of the garden, Colt smiled at me.

"Tony," he said, "I think I am getting old, beginning to lose my faculties. Why, I have been wrong on this case almost from the very start— wrong— wrong—"

He sprang excitedly to his feet and seized my wrist.

"Hurry!" he cried. "We still have a lot of work to do."

I had to possess my soul in patience. No use trying to question him now. Right or wrong, he had found a clue that he considered vital. We searched the house swiftly, drastically. In twenty minutes we stood on a small balcony of the top floor, looking down on the darkness of what seemed a bottomless pit. Really, it was the rear courtyard of the house, the garden we had explored. In silence Colt stared down; from his hip pocket he again produced his powerful electric torch and sprayed with light the area beneath us.

"How carefully the pale Mr. Lovell bars himself in— and the world out!" remarked Colt with an undertone of melancholy in his voice. "See the tops of those curving iron stakes in front of the long, narrow windows-the cruel, pointed tips of those stakes. Old-fashioned, but still effective against criminals except—"

He was silent for so long that my curiosity goaded me:

"Except, chief?"

"Except that in this instance it might well be that these bars helped the intruder, instead of hindering him. How? Remember, Tony, that he comes from that cyclopean organisation, the circus. To such people, heights are not terrifying-and those curving iron bars no more than the trunks of jungle trees."

"Jungle?"

"Some sure-footed creature got into the LaTour-Flandrin apartment. In fact, two sure-footed creatures, one now dead. Suppose the other had scaled these bars, too— got to that ledge—"

The rays of the pocket torch now played on a narrow parapet which ran the full course of the fourth story and ended only at the balustrade by which we two stood together

"Tony-see there! In the dirt-the dust— it looks human— and it is—"

"Where-what?"

"A foot-print!"

THEN I saw it, too— a human footprint on that dizzy ledge-way, four stories above the cement pavement of the Lovell back-yard. Before I could utter a word of protest, Thatcher Colt, his glistening top hat far back on his head, climbed over the balustrade and crept slowly forward towards that tell-tale mark.

"Stay behind, Tony," he called warningly. "There is not room for two of us. But go ahead downstairs and see if the detectives from Headquarters have arrived. We will need a plaster-print and photograph of this footprint. This is a stroke of good luck— the footprint is under a projecting cornice; there must have been several others, but they were exposed to the rain and washed away— the burglar must have counted on the rain— thank God for that cornice!"

It began to look as if Marburg Lovell had told the truth. Had some mysterious intruder really come to steal and again to return the gun? As I rushed down the stairs, my mind played with a daring theory— one which perhaps had not yet occurred to Thatcher Colt. Suppose that Marburg Lovell were really guilty— and that, to bolster up his theory he had make a mark of a footprint not his own on that giddy parapet?

AT the front door I found Detective Glover, who put in a telephone call to the nearest precinct station for the plaster equipment to make a permanent matrix of that mysterious footprint. Meanwhile I hastened back upstairs. On the second landing I paused, startled to hear Colt's voice crackling with rage. Following the sound, I traced him to the library; the Commissioner was seated at Lovell's desk and talking through Lovell's telephone.

"I want to tell you, Doctor Clesleek," the Commissioner was saying to our harassed city toxicologist, "that I consider your failure a disgrace to the Police Department of New York City. I know you did good work earlier to-night with the tear gas— but how can that help me now? If you can't take a little smear of salve from a dead man's fingers and find out what kind of salve it is, what is the use of your having a laboratory at the city's expense? You get in a department car and meet me in fifteen minutes in front of the Metropolitan Museum and have that salve with you. What's that? I'm going to take it to a chemist who knows this job, that's all!

"Now, get Inspector Flynn back on the wire.... Hello. Flynn? Have you any report on the plaster-prints of those marks left on the window sill? What did he say? Put the dust in an envelope and send it up to me with the analysis. Yes, send it along with Clesleek's package of green paste that he couldn't break down. That's right. Broadcloth, eh? Well, Flynn-I don't mind telling you that coupled with something I found in the garden I regard that as close to a decisive clue. I'll talk to you later. Good-by!"

Thatcher Colt replaced the receiver, stood up and smiled briefly at Marburg Lovell. With one hand he pointed to a coil of wire lying in the centre of the top of the ornate desk.

"There," disclosed the Police Commissioner, "is the secret of how your apartment was burgled In spite of your electric patrol system. It is an intricate electrical feat, by which the current is deflected into a coil, travelling in a futile circle and on back in the main wires. The device is easily attached to a wire, if one can be reached. But that is not easy. Consequently, I am certain that this burglary was an inside job— that is, the man who rigged this up on your fourth-floor balcony was no stranger in this house."

Marburg Lovell lifted the heap of wires with a dismal air.

"Another illusion gone to hell," he cried wrathfully "Well, Mr. Commissioner, what am I supposed to do now?"

"Our man will be working upstairs for a little while," Colt replied. "After he is finished, I shan't trouble you any longer― for to-night at least. Tony― lead the detective upstairs and show him the foot-print. Then meet me at the front door downstairs. Now, one word more, Mr. Lovell— could your butler let me have, out of your kitchen, two or three bags of salt?"

What did Thatcher Colt mean to do with two bags of salt? I felt as if my world were getting out of my grasp, as the door closed behind me and I rushed downstairs. Yet I knew Thatcher Colt would never have made such a request except for some practical reason.

I found Glover just finishing his telephone conversation, led him upstairs, , showed him the footprint on the ledge, and again descended the staircase. As I passed the library, Colt was bidding adieu to Mar-burg Lovell.

"One word more," said the millionaire solemnly. "No matter what Colonel Robinson may tell you, do not trust the Ubangi. I own part of that circus and I know what I am talking about. In trying to do what you have just discussed, you are literally putting your life into their hands. Be careful!"

Down the wide spiral of the marble stair-case, we hastened, picked up Gminder again, and hurried out to the car: Colt told Neil to drive to the Metropolitan Museum, but uttered never a word beyond that. In front of the broad-stepped entrance to the Museum we drew up beside another department car and the crestfallen Doctor Clesleek ran up to us.

"Oh, Mr. Colt, you don't understand—" he began, then gasped and fell back as Colt snatched two parcels, one of green paste, the other of dust, from the chemist's hands and slammed shut the door.

"Professor Luckner's on Morningside Heights!" was the Commissioner's next direction, and off we darted, leaving a be-wildered chemist reeling at the kerb.

I was startled and a little disappointed. I had expected that now we would head straight for the disc-lipped Ubangi. Instead we were driving to the apartment of that curious scientist, Professor Luckner, the inscrutable old Viennese who, with his ultramicroscope, had solved for us the strange way of death which had come to Lola Carewe. Luckner was an argumentative and superior old Austrian who more than once had taken Thatcher Colt's clues into his laboratory and issued forth hours later with precise instructions as to how to catch the criminal.

BEYOND Long Island the first grey streaks ripped the dark spaces of the sky as we came to the door of Professor Luckner's apartment house.

The blear-eyed elevator boy, only half awake, grouchily agreed to announce us. The response was instantaneous. Professor Luckner was awake-probably at work with test-tubes, Bunsen burners, and queer shaped jugs and jars— a true witch doctor himself He was at the door to greet us when we stepped out of the elevator. The professor was a bean-pole of a man with a red beard turning grey, his eyes twinkling behind double-lensed spectacles, and his long, thin head topped with scraggy grey hair. He was in a long white coat, and his hands were enclosed in greenish rubber gloves. An eye-shade was cocked like an impudent crown of thorns over his left eye, and he was smoking an odious stogie.

"Stumped again, eh?" he jeered. "Know-it-all police sneak in the dark hours of the morning to an impoverished old scientist to get the dope— am I right, Master Thatcher― nein? Have a stogie?"

Colt refused with effusive politeness, and produced the envelope containing a glass slab, carefully protected, on which had been spread the grease-like substance from the black man's fingers.

"I want to know what that stuff is, Professor."

"Why not go to your department expert?" asked Professor Luckner suspiciously. "Why come to me, a scholastic and impractical theorist— in fact, a mere doctrinaire?" And Professor Luckner made a mocking grimace.

"I did do that; but our department expert cannot tell me what it is!"

"Tut! Tut!" exploded the Professor sarcastically. "Then I certainly can't."

"Can't? That's the first time I ever heard you say that, Professor."

The old man looked out through his open window at a splotch of pink spilling above the long reaches of the Hellgate Bridge.

"It's my bedtime, Colt," he complained. "I haven't been to sleep—" Suddenly he whirled. "What do you want to know for?"

Colt suppressed a chuckle. The fact was that the emaciated Professor Luckner was incredibly romantic. He despised literature and read only the divorce cases and the more brutal murders in the tabloids. He had a shop-girl enjoyment of sweet murders. With his carrot-like beard crunched in his green gloves, he squatted on a case of Scotch whisky bottles and gave little animal grunts of satisfaction while Colt crisply told the story of the night's two murders.

"Beautiful!" murmured the unkempt Professor Luckner, with a rapt glance. "A masterpiece! And you can't catch them, nein? You're utterly baffled and defeated, aren't you, Thatcher? Ah, well-you should thank God I'm a soft-hearted person....Have a drink?"

Colt and I looked at each other. Perhaps it is not legal for sworn officers of the law to have a drink— but it was five o'clock in the morning and we had been working many strenuous hours. The professor did not wait for a decision. He was a philosophical prophet. He mixed whiskies and soda—"schnapps from the Empress" he informed us with an unholy grin. "Good for catching murderers."

Glasses clinked in a Heidelberg salute.

"And now," fussed Professor Luckner, "on your way! Leave your little clue with me. I will also have my assistant test the sweepings from the circus ring."

As we stepped Into the elevator, I had a last look at him— tall, lean, with a reddish chin whisker, strong, lance-like teeth, an enormous nose and blue eyes whose glances seemed to zip out like bullets from under the shaggy jungle of his hair. A queer fellow, Professor Luckner. All barbs and darts, knowledge and tireless energy, and childishness. In his hand he held the slab with the green paste. The elevator door rumbled and clanged shut, and we saw him no more.

Dawn seemed to be breathing red fire over the park and the roof tops below us, as we emerged again on the rampart-like street of Morningside Heights. There was a chill in the air, as if winter had stolen back for a farewell embrace of spring.

Beside Neil in the front seat of the car, Professor Gminder was fast asleep. But as I followed Colt into the rear seats and Neil turned the car and sped downtown, the African dialect expert woke up. Over his shoulder he gave us a startled glance.

"The point is." he declared emphatically, and as if not once had he dozed, "I came to you at Professor Luckner's request, ready and willing to help the police with any special knowledge I may have. But what can I do if you go away and leave me?"

Colt chuckled.

"We won't run away and leave you any more," he promised. "As a matter of fact, I think our case has boiled down to this: unless we can get your friends, the Ubangi, to talk, we are likely to be on this case for a long time to come. We couldn't do with-out you as our dragoman, Professor."

At last we were back at Madison Square Garden. The vast building looked old and grey and tired as we drew up at one of the side entrances. Avoiding a lingering knot of newspapermen, we hastened to the little office, halfway upstairs from the main lobby, where the circus management was installed.

Colt opened the door. Over the Commissioner's shoulders, Gminder and I looked through the office where five men sat around a table, playing cards-Crumps, the animal boss, Sebastian, King of the Air, Doctor Ransom, the show's physician, Doctor Charavay, who had brought the Ubangi troupe to the United States, and Colonel Tod Robinson, owner and general manager. All were in overalls, pyjamas, or other lounging suits. At sight of Colt, the owner of the circus leaped to his feet, dropped his cards, and strode up to the Commissioner. Most of the manager's former friendliness was gone. There was antagonism and challenge in the set grimness of his jaws and the glint of his half-closed eyes. Tod Robinson, who had helped reform the whole circus world, was again his old self of the days when every man in .the circus had to fight-and the fallen were buried in the ring banks.

"I don't want to have any misunderstanding with the police," he began, "but I want to say right off I don't like the way things are going on. You cops haven't got anything on Flandrin, and you know it. Yet you arrested him! One of my stars. Speaking impartially, if I know anything at all, you're breaking that lad's spirit. He'll never have the nerve to go up again— much less do that double twist he set his heart on. He'll be through— and this show can't afford anything like that. One star dead! Another under arrest! Hell!" expostulated Robinson with a pugnacious tilt of his chin, "how long is this thing going to keep up!"

"Not for long, I hope," Colt returned, lighting a cigarette. "As for Flandrin, he can take care of himself all right. If he's guilty, you can't save him from the chair― and if he's innocent, the public will mob Madison Square Garden to get a look at him as soon as he gets out."

"I don't want that kind of publicity," grated Robinson. "But just the same— how soon can he get out?"

"The situation at the moment is quite discouraging. I have department experts and others working on clues that should some day lead us out of the woods. But the processes are very slow. Meanwhile, we may be losing valuable time— the guilty may escape— unless we get some direct information."

"Of what kind, chief?" asked Robinson, interested in spite of himself.

"I truthfully don't know. I am at a standstill for a moment. But I am satisfied your Congo natives know something. I must get them to talk. That is why I have brought Professor Gminder here— an authority on the dialects of Equatorial Africa— may I present Professor Gminder, gentlemen-"

As Colt pronounced, one by one, the names of the four men around the table, I noticed a blank look of dismay cross the tanned face of Doctor Charavay. It was as if, full of instinctive repulsion, he drew back from this stranger who affected to know something about the region of the French-man's special knowledge. An instant later I dismissed the observation as sheer nonsense; of course Charavay and Gminder would distrust each other— so do most African explorers.

"I will lead you at once to the Ubangi's room," agreed Colonel Robinson. "We keep them right here in the Garden— the sight of them is what we have to sell, so we keep them here out of sight. Go ahead with the game, boys."

DOWN the stairs the circus owner led us again, across the empty and echoing lobby, through the dark Exhibition Hall with its cages of wild beasts, and thence again into the backyard of the dressing-rooms. But on the way Colt paused to receive a whispered and somewhat lengthy report from Detective H. H. Harris, who had been designated by Inspector Flynn to supervise the work of three plainclothes men in the Garden. These men had watched the comings in and goings out of the circus principals from Crumps to Sebastian and from the red cloaked Mephistopheles to Colonel Robinson himself. Colt listened attentively to the report of Detective Harris and then said:

"I am going to give you a highly difficult and important job. I want you to steal a costume for me. Get to Headquarters and then telephone me for further instructions."

"What do you want stolen?" asked Harris eagerly.

But I did not hear the answer to that question for, at that moment, Signor Sebastian crossed the floor, approaching Colonel Robinson, who had waited for us out of earshot. As soon as he saw Sebastian Colt gave me a signal and I returned to Robinson's side just as the King of the Air reached him. But I could have spared my haste; Sebastian merely wanted to borrow fifty dollars in order to go on in the poker game upstairs. Meanwhile, Detective Harris had gone, and as Colt rejoined us, we resumed our journey towards the haunts of the Ubangi. The dimly lit corridors stretched away in furtive and mysterious curves, but Colonel Robinson, untroubled, led us directly to a door. For a moment he hesitated, bending down, his ear against the keyhole.

"They must be asleep," he murmured. "But I don't hear any snores, either."

He opened the door and his groping hand found a switch. He turned on the ceiling lights and then swore in astonishment. The large, straw-littered room was empty!

Where could the strange black people have gone? This was their only shelter In New York. Here they had spent their time placidly sleeping and smoking and eating their fish and boiled rice and drinking their beloved cider. Since their leader had been mysteriously slain, they had seemed to melt into thin air.

In a very mild voice, Professor Gminder spoke up:

"Mr. Colt, if I may be permitted to make an elementary suggestion. These people come from a fiercely hot country and they find the North American climate very trying— and this has been a raw, damp twenty-four hours. Why not look in the boiler-room, where it's warm!"

"By heaven!" exclaimed Colonel Robinson, "I wouldn't be at all surprised if you were right. Now why didn't I think of that before?"

IT was well after five a.m. when we started our descent into the lower internal regions of Madison Square Garden. At first I was amused. But as I descended the staircase a troupe of images passed through my mind, full of vague and ominous import. I thought of Crumps, the boss animal man, with those crafty eyes, that had no iris in them. He was deep in talk now with the two physicians and Sebastian, the acrobat. What was he saying, this man who had instructed Marburg Lovell about the tear-gas gun?

Through my head flitted these and other questions, like winged creatures of the night, as lower and lower we descended the dark and curving iron stairway. At last we were at the bottom. I began to feel chilly and unhappy-and then I started back with a frightened gasp as an invisible but ice-cold hand touched my cheek.

But it was only Professor Gminder wanting to make awfully sure that some other human being was close to him. It was now pitch black all around us-as if we were in a portable piece of the jungle itself, boxed and crated and sent to Manhattan. Let me confess I did find myself timid. I, too, have my battle scars. More than one gangster's bullet has left its mark on my flesh. But this was something different:— the terror of the unknown. As I stood there, my mind was suddenly like an old trunk with the tray shaken off and nothing Inside but the crouched figure of an African witch doctor, throat cut from ear to ear.

Suddenly, as we lingered in the silence, I heard a sound-a low, moaning cry-a wail in the darkness. In the tonality of that unexpected voice was something indefinably horrible. At the same moment, three brisk raps sounded. Thatcher Colt had found a door and was knocking on lt. Almost immediately the wailing sound ceased; I heard the rattle of a knob and the turning of a key creaking in the lock. Very slowly the door was opened. A dim light shone from within. And in that light I suddenly saw a face ... a huge, black face, with eyes that seemed full of boiling light. From the lower part of the face protruded two colossal and distorted lips. It was such a face as one sees only in nightmares. But this was reality. We had come at last face to face with the Ubangi!

Chapter 15

PAST those enormous lips of the black woman on the threshold I looked into the room Itself -a vacant storage place, its two electric lamps draped with dried leaves and its walls quivering with a vast litter of shadows— irregularly and fantastically shaped and moving in flying blotches of baroque design. Through the door came to us a whiff of foul and poisonous air, a mephitic smell that was a combination of smoke from a pan of live coals In the middle of the floor and the reek of sweat from agitated jungle bodies. Covered from head to foot with blankets, the Ubangis, men and women, were moving about the room in a fretful and seemingly aimless walk. They took short steps that led them forward and sideward and back, but got them nowhere. Was this, I wondered, some tribal ju-ju ritual— Negro witchcraft?

"They are holding some kind of trial and therefore a dance," whispered Professor Gminder in Colt's ear. "They are annoyed at your interruption but they will not stop now until the invocation is pronounced."

"Tell this woman at the door who stares at us so that I would like to speak to their leader," directed Colt.

But Colonel Robinson protested.

"I think it most unwise to interfere at such a time as this," he objected. "They are getting ready for something important; I don't speak their language, but I know that much. Soon they will be scraping their palm drums, jabbering together, and holding up their spears to drive the devil away. It's dangerous to interfere at such a time."

"What of it?" countered Thatcher Colt. "Pass the word along, Gminder."

"Right!" agreed the Professor. "In a little while it will be too late; you won't be able to get a word from them. They will go about in a kind of daze; it will be maybe half a day before you can question them. I have seen them like that before, after such a dance, in Africa. That was when a little black baby was found murdered in a field."

The tall, Amazonian woman with the gigantic lips remained mute, arms folded, glaring straight before her. Professor Gminder now addressed her, his speech a series of rolling guttural sounds, punctuated with sudden, whistle-like sibilants. At hearing a white man speak her tongue, the woman showed no astonishment. Turning on her heels, she walked into the room.

"I am afraid it is too late, already," muttered Gminder.

"I do think we had better go and leave them to themselves," urged Colonel Robinson.

"What are they saying. Professor?" asked Thatcher Colt.

"They have elected a new witch doctor!"

"They know Keblia is dead?"

"They know he is missing. They are holding a trial to punish the killer of Josie LaTour— they mean here and now, by magic, to invoke her slayer's death."

"Will they name the guilty person?"

"Don't say anything more." cautioned Professor Gminder. "Here comes the new witch doctor."

THROUGH the smoke, a doddering figure was heading for the doorway. He covered half the distance ; then he paused and stubbornly shook his head. The same big lipped woman who had taken Colt's message returned and spoke in deep-throated monosyllables to Professor Gminder. His translation was crisp and to the point:

"The witch doctor says to go away: he will talk with you when the ceremony of invocation is over."

"But tell him the police are here!"

"He will reply that he cannot stop now; he is a priest."

The old man. seen only dimly through the smoke, had lifted his hands and now began a passionate, long-drawn-out utterance, punctuated by deep-toned responses from his shuffling fellows. And as the old witch doctor cried on and on in his strange jargon, Professor Gminder, in a breathless undertone, grimly translated for us every word of the invocation:

"Help us to find the murderer, the guilty one who killed the beautiful and good Josie LaTour. Help us. gods of the trees! Help us, gods of the sun! Help us, gods of the moon! Help us because Josie was good."

It sounds mad.

Yes, at six o'clock of that spring morning in New York City, Borough of Manhattan, a tribal death-dance was in full shuffle; new coals were being lighted and death was being prayed for, danced for, around a smoke fire.

A MOMENT more and the invocation was over. The weaving bodies slowed down like tops with exhausted momentum. But their harsh voices still resounded like the quacking of great ducks. Through the smoke, the tottering figure of the witch doctor moved again, creeping towards us with painful but determined steps. As he came nearer. I saw him clearly for the first time; this second witch doctor in our experience was a feeble and wrinkled substitute for the magniloquent Keblia. The old man's hands were outstretched and in the long brown fingers of the right hand he held a little wooden image.

"He has gone into the park," murmured Gminder in hasty explanation. "In the sunlight and under the trees he has pronounced the death prayer for the evils done by an unknown enemy. Then he has taken a piece of wood and carved it like a human being. Now it is supposed to be ready for the reception of the enemy's soul."

He said no more, for the ancient black man had reached the doorway and stood, hands still outstretched, fingers clutching the wooden manikin, beady eyes fixed on Thatcher Colt. His appearance was rendered all the more remarkable because of the peculiar performance of the smoke rising from the pan full of coals. By some process, natural, no doubt, but still mysterious to me, the Ubangi, as they shuffled around the cement floor, exercised a strange control over the smoke. One woman with vast protruding lips and with wide rings hanging from her ears, stood weaving her hands, and it was as if the billows of thick white vapour were forced to follow her will, and make a magical dancing cloud behind the little old witch doctor who looked like Mahatma Ghandi.

The witch doctor stared at us and shook his little wooden image and strange words rolled and crackled from beneath his long red tongue.

"He says," whispered Gminder, "that he will discover who it was that killed Josie LaTour and he will discover, infallibly, who killed Keblia. They heard about Keblia's murder an hour ago. In a very little while, he says, the soul of the killer will pass into that N'kissi held in his paw. They are driving nails into the little figure and that will procure vengeance on the In-dwelling spirit."

Thatcher Colt held out towards the witch doctor the paper bags which he had carried from the home of Marburg Lovell.

"Tell him," said the Commissioner, appealing to Gminder, "that here is salt given by a friend."

Rapidly Gminder translated. A glimmer of greed flickered in the eyes of the old savage. The Ubangi are salt addicts They eat it ravenously as if it were a drug, swallowing great handfuls. The witch doctor took the bags lovingly into his hands. With a swift, darting movement he rolled them into the folds of his blanket.

"Explain to him now," pursued Thatcher Colt, "that the police are determined to find the murderer of their leader."

When the message was rendered into his own tongue, the witch doctor waved his hands in great impatience, and a long stream of words tumbled from his withered lips.

"He says," explained Gminder, "that he thanks you but he can have nothing to do with you. It is the law of the tribe that they are their own police, jury, and judge."

Colt frowned.

"But point out to him that this is New York City, and not the jungle. In his country the New York police would be helpless, and in this country their methods will be useless."

To which Gminder presently brought back the reply:

"The gods are not helpless anywhere. Josie LaTour is good. Keblia is good. We cannot deal with the police. It is useless to talk about it any more."

Colt obstinately held his ground.

"Tell him," he reiterated, "that the white man's police are baffled. If the jungle gods of the sun and the moon and the trees can help us, we are grateful for their help. But we, too, have gods. We have the gods of the finger prints and radio alarm cars. Why will he not trade the gifts of our gods for theirs?"

This required a long parley. Finally, Professor Gminder translated in a low voice :

"What do you propose?"

"I propose," promptly returned Colt, "to tell them all that we know about the crime in exchange for what they know."

MORE parley. More gutturals and sibilants. More whining, more coals on the fire, more weaving bodies dancing through the smoke.

"He invites you to tell him what you know." announced Gminder at last.

And Thatcher Colt kept the faith with the black magician. The Police Commissioner of the City of New York told the new witch doctor of the Ubangi nearly all of the essentials of our hunt for the killer. He told him of the knee and shank prints on the sill of LaTour's flat. He told him of the footprint on the ledge of the wall at the home of Marburg Lovell. Of the finding of the tear-gas clue he informed them, and the recovery of the missing rifle, and the green smear on the fingers of their fallen leader.

To these singular affairs the witch doctor harkened with fascinated attention. Like a running chorus he grunted and wheezed comments on each fresh revelation. And when that last clue was given him. the smear of green on the fingers of the dead necromancer. he placed his fingers over his mouth and cried like a Red Indian.

"And now," urged Colt, "the Ubangi must tell me what they know."

"A bargain is a bargain." was the translated response. "This is what the Ubangi know. The people of this tribe from Lake Chad have come to love LaTour. LaTour was good. It is silly to talk about how she whipped us. We are used to whipping. It was not important. LaTour was good to the Ubangi. She helped them when they were sick. She held their hands when doctors scraped their arms. LaTour was good. Do not think, then, that the Ubangi hated her. They loved her.

"A little while ago, Keblia, who was our leader, made a discovery. He knew there is no such thing as natural death. He knew that many unnatural things were occurring in this village. He investigated. He found the person who was causing these misfortunes. He went to our best friend in this village— to the good LaTour he went and told her what he had discovered. The good Josie LaTour had a talk with the guilty one. Three days ago she had that talk, in her own home, late at night. But Keblia was there and listened. He knew that because of what happened then, the good Josie LaTour was in danger. Keblia came back and told the tribe of her danger. For her we made mud-images and hung them over her doors, to keep away death. But Keblia would not tell us the name of the guilty person, but only said again what he hid been saying for a long while: 'Look high for the guilty one. Look high!' A long time, Keblia had suspected; only since we left the warm South had he been sure. Still he would not pronounce the name, except to our best friend, to the good Josie LaTour. And now he knew that LaTour had a poisonous enemy in this village. Keblia called the council together. He told them that Josie had an enemy, sworn to kill her. And he offered himself as her champion against her secret enemy, and prayed for the blessing of the gods."

"To-night Keblia called us together again. He had been watchful. He had followed the enemy of Josie. He had seen him steal a magic gun. Because of this, our women stole to Josie's room and hung the mud image to draw the fire. But alas! It was all in vain. Keblia called us together. He said he had gone to the private room of that enemy. Still he would not name him. He had found one of the magic bullets. But the enemy had seen him. Nevertheless, he was setting off to tell Flandrin, who had gone home. And soon the police told us that Keblia had been killed. Alas!"

With strained attention, we had listened through Gminder's translation of the witch doctor's choking utterance of this story.

"But who was the man?" cried Colt.

The witch doctor hunched his shoulders and his tiny body seemed to contract into an even smaller compass.

"Keblia did not tell us that. We are praying for the name. But we do know that one man was listening at the door when Keblia called us into council. We saw him running down the corridor. We think that is the enemy. But we have no proof. We shall work unceasingly until we have the proof. That is the purpose now. You have interrupted. Will you not go away and leave us to our work?"

"But you surely will name the man whom you saw running away!" insisted the Police Commissioner.

"No!"

The old priest shook his head and most discourteously waved the backs of his hands toward us as if brushing us away from the door.

"When I learn his name I will tell you!" promised Colt.

"And when I am sure I will tell you!" was the compact of the witch doctor.

With that we had to be content. The door closed on the Ubangi, and we retraced our steps back to the upper regions of the garden. But as we trod carefully down that dark tunnel, my thoughts lagged behind, lingering in that boiler room where the women with the colossal lips danced with the tall, dark men and prayed their magic prayers to the gods of the trees, the sun, and the moon. How ironic, thought I, that the Commissioner of Police of the City of New York should join hands with these childish people to fasten a crime on the murderer.

"What next?" I asked Colt, as we began the curving ascent of the iron stairway.

"Back to what we used to call normalcy," was Colt's answer. "No more ju-ju. Know where they got the word ju-ju? It is from the French word meaning a game— a corruption that means a toy, a play-thing. We have no time for the play-things of another race. We will get back to our own toys and play-things, to our chemical laboratories where a coloured film of grease is being analysed, and to our Bureau of Criminal Identification where finger-prints are being studied and to all that white man's hocus pocus which has got to lead us somewhere, Tony, or else we ought to get out of the department."

By this time we had arrived at the door of Colonel Robinson's office. A familiar figure stood on the threshold. His red curls in a tangled riot, his jowls dangling with fatigue, his blue eyes popping from his head, our reception committee was District Attorney Merle K. Dougherty.

"Well, Thatcher," boomed the District Attorney, "I don't know what you've been up to, down in the boiler-room with a lot of niggers, but I've certainly got news to tell you. The LaTour murder mystery is solved— and I have solved it!"

Chapter 16

"STEP inside, Dougherty," was Colt's only comment. A hasty command from Colonel Robinson sent the others scurrying from the office; Crumps, Sebastian, and the two circus physicians dropped their cards and left us alone-the circus owner, the District Attorney, the Police Commissioner, and myself.

"What has happened?" demanded Thatcher Colt.

"It's all over," Dougherty maintained "We took Flandrin downtown and gave him the works!"

"You tortured him!" charged Colonel Robinson furiously.

Dougherty gave the circus man a disdainful glance.

"Do you understand you are talking to the District Attorney?" he rasped. "What do you think my office is— the back room of a station house? Well, Thatcher, it wasn't easy. I took him over the same ground for hours, making him repeat his story until he was sick of it— the old method that so very seldom fails. I thought he was weakening after two hours of it, and then they put through a call to me— your message about Flandrin's first wife. I got Flora downstairs and played one against the other."

"And then?" prodded Colt, as Dougherty took his time, lighting a ravelled cigar.

"They both admit it, now," carolled the District Attorney, blowing forth a triumphant trumpet of smoke.

"You mean they both were hysterical."

"I mean I have two signed confessions," insisted Dougherty with an irritated flash, "and I deserve your congratulations."

"Flandrin never did it!" groaned Colonel Robinson.

"Confessions to both murders?" pursued Colt.

"Well, they were a little vague," admitted Dougherty. "In fact, they were in no condition to talk any longer. Flora admits they killed Josie. But Flandrin will only admit that he killed the darky. I got the confessions and then let them take a rest. Before noon, though, we'll have the complete story-they're both guilty of both murders, of course."

I saw that Colt's eyes had inexplicably brightened.

"Forgive my Zoilean commentary, Dougherty," murmured the Commissioner softly, "but there is so much that needs explaining. Where did Flora say that Flandrin got the tear-gas gun?"

"She has promised to explain all that later!"

"And the torn photograph of Flora in LaTour's papers?"

"Just a whim of LaTour's to keep the picture of her enemy."

"But what original facts did either give you?"

"Plenty. I tell you, I have a confession from Flandrin."

"And his motive?"

"Well, that's a curious thing, too— he refused to state the motive for killing Keblia until he has talked with his lawyer!"

"I tell you again— he could not have done it!" exclaimed Colonel Robinson.

Colt turned on the circus manager swiftly. "And who should know better than you?" he exclaimed. "You have worked with him. You know the kind of man he is. Your faith in him is reassuring, Colonel. But you know that he is a weak sort of fellow— in character, I mean. Isn't that so?"

"Weak, Mr. Colt?"

"Well, wasn't he? Didn't he need Josie LaTour to give him backbone enough to try that double twist!"

"Yes— that is true— but—"

"Flandrin was tired of the District Attorney's third degree. He made a confession to get rid of his tormentors. In a few hours he will utterly repudiate it. So will his first wife. They are both hysterical. That happens in police work every day— and still, Dougherty, you take such statements seriously. You have been a most energetic official this evening."

"And that's all?"

"And that's too much," snapped Colt.

"And you think Flandrin and his first wife are entirely blameless?"

"I don't know. They may be guilty, as you say. Our problem is to prove it, regardless of those confessions, which are not worth the paper they are written on. If you look at the facts sensibly for two minutes you will know it too. Listen, Dougherty—" and here Colt laid a hand on his friend's arm and his voice sank to a persuasive minor—"we have a certain set of facts to reconcile. You don't know all of those facts. The case is still a deep mystery, as far as I am concerned."

But Dougherty was angry. He felt that Colt had derided what he considered a stroke of accomplishment. He shook him-self free, and with hands on his hips retorted:

"At least my office has done something. What have you men to show?"

"Very little!" agreed Thatcher Colt. "Well, good-night, Dougherty. You may be right. But at present I prefer, in all good humour, to reserve my congratulations."

They shook hands and parted. Colt thanked Professor Gminder and sent him home. He disposed guards to watch the Ubangi, and promised Colonel Robinson to communicate with him later. Then the Commissioner and I returned to the automobile. Colt told Neil to drive us to West Seventieth Street, where the Commissioner lives in a house that has long been known as "Little Headquarters."

The air of that morning's dawn was damp and cold. The very aurora in the air looked chill and the early glow on the fronts of buildings and the asphalt of the dismal streets seemed to make them only more drab. Our ride up Eighth Avenue was cheerless, and silent; Colt sat hunched and unhappy. As we crossed a side street, we heard the beat and whine of a Cuban rumba from the windows of a night club that was still doing business. From the gutters, scavengers called to each other, wielding long-handled brushes and pushing ash cans on wheels. A mendicant grey friar, a Franciscan, odd sight at any time in Manhattan, was crossing diagonally the deserted expanse of Columbus Circle.

It was with a sigh of thankfulness that I saw we were turning into the narrow ravine between apartment houses that is called West Seventieth Street.

ARTHUR, the dusky Jamaican, long Colt's faithful attendant, opened the door for us as we entered the house with the green trim and the prospering flower boxes. The moment he was within his own four walls, Colt seemed to breathe more freely. I wondered if he would go to the weapons chamber, his private "ballistics" research room, the poison garret, or the library.

"Your bath is ready, sir," announced Arthur, with a panoramic smile.

So it was to his bedroom that we hastened first. On the Commissioner's bed-table were books that he had meant to read when the circus performance was ended. But now he had no eyes for any familiar objects as he rapidly un-dressed. Nor did he speak, except to order a drink for us. The dark Arthur brought me a glass of Colt's ravishing port, but to the master of the house he offered a tiny portion of prunelle. Colt put it aside.

I have never seen the Commissioner quite so unhappy. His eyes were tragic. In the tub he seemed to squirm as he struck at his own body with a dripping sponge.

"I tell you, Tony," he said at last, turning his face towards me and grinning through the dribbling rivulets that ran from his hair down over his face, "it would have been almost impossible for Flandrin to have committed both those crimes. Or either one of them for that matter."

"But doesn't the evidence seem rather convincing?" I argued. "I don't like to add to your worries—"

"The evidence is most unconvincing!" he retorted, with a chuckle of returning good spirits, "As the apologist of this administration. Tony, you should know better than to ask such a thing. My hope, though, is that which we shall hear from Inspector Flynn— and Luckner."

And what could Flynn tell him, I wondered? I had followed his every move and yet I could not remember any salient point Flynn had been assigned to establish. I sat there, feeling depressed as each moment the chief seemed to grow more buoyant under the stimulant of his cold bath. Presently the telephone rang I heard Arthur's mellow voice answering, and presently he entered the bathroom, telephone in hand, and plugged it into a baseboard socket. From the tub, Colt reached for the phone and greeted Flynn.

Briefly he listened and then I heard him chuckle: he was hearing pleasing news. When at last he had given some cryptic instructions, hung up the receiver, and set the phone on the tiled floor, he was laughing like a boy.

"Now, Tony," he exulted, "at least we know something. I can't tell you all yet, but this I know— the murderer fired at Josie LaTour with the gun that belongs to Marburg Lovell. The ballistics boys have proved that to their satisfaction, and no matter what Dougherty says, that's good enough for me. And, further, traces of tear gas were found on the membrane of the eyes of the boss mechanic. And that— as you must see— eliminates Flandrin from at least one of the murders!"

"But how?" I pleaded.

Colt turned on more water and splashed about boisterously.

"How?" he echoed reprovingly. "Tony, consider the facts. First, I checked up on the people who were at the Garden when the boss mechanic was killed Flandrin had not yet got off the ship. That means Flandrin did not kill the boss mechanic. And yet all the evidence points to the conclusion that the murder of the boss mechanic was a rehearsal for LaTour's murder. Unless we believe Flandrin had an accomplice, this is a vital point in his favour. I know that some of our other suspects were present when the mechanic was murdered-there is a time discrepancy there that is of vital significance. But that is not all. Flandrin was followed by Crowder, our detective. True, Crowder lost him, for a while. But the time that Flandrin had to himself, unobserved by our detective, was not enough to enable him to commit a burglary on the East Side and a murder on the West Side, too.

"Follow the time sequence and see how unreasonable such a theory must be. Could Flandrin have burglarised Lovell's house, put the gun back in place, and then get back to the house on West Seventy-ninth Street, fight the witch doctor, kill him, and get away? All of it is perhaps theoretically conceivable-but it would be superhuman."

"Then we are still in the dark?" I sighed.

HE again turned on the cold water.

"Not entirely, Tony. We are not going as fast as I would like to go, but still plodding on. and by heaven, Tony, that is the real method of the Department, and don't forget it. Flynn reported on a number of leads. He got Washington busy looking up the passport of Isabel Chant. Everything to order there."

"That's what you thought from the first."

"Well, we have to investigate everything. Flynn even traced Murillo, the wire dancer who quit— he gets a clean bill of health. The resin bags with which LaTour rubbed her hands, just before going up the rope, showed nothing wrong, either. Just plain, everyday resin. That clue died, anyhow, as soon as we knew how she was really killed. I told you that the tear gas was found in the autopsy on the boss mechanic. Another thing-I was struck by the fact that Flandrin told us how Raphaelo died. He said LaTour's first husband fell off a high perch from vertigo. I had the records looked up on that: Flynn telegraphed and got the Medical Examiner's verdict. The first husband of LaTour died of apoplexy, which was proved by a post-mortem So there was no connection there."

"I actually suspected that Flandrin killed him, too," I admitted. "But you did not?"

"I traced the story back, didn't I?" laughed Colt. "Then Flynn also gave me the report on John Smith, LaTour's chauffeur. He was pretty much on the level. And he certainly told the truth about Flandreau. But it was not Flandreau he saw leave the Garden with the bundle. There is no doubt that Flandreau had a romantic desire for LaTour. I suppose that is treachery, and yet Flandrin must have known about it, and still went on, trusting his life to his rival, at every performance. I have known of many such cases in the circus; it sounds weird, but it is so. And that incalculable background is what makes a business like this hard to settle. Anyway, I traced back on the chauffeur's charge that Flandreau and Eddie Stevens, the mechanic, had been putting their heads together. The detectives who were questioning Eddie at the station house got to the bottom of that. Eddie confessed that he had been acting as a spy for Flandreau. He had been trying to prove that LaTour was unfaithful to her husband. Pleasant little comedy all around-yet the facts are there. Eddie admits that he spied on LaTour, but denies any complicity in the crime. I am inclined to believe he is telling the truth.

BUT one other report of Flynn seemed quite significant. He went after the owner of the clown dog again. And that helps our case— the dog owner admitted that among those who knew the dog well enough to entice him back to the ring were those we suspected."

"Who on earth were they?" I asked eagerly.

"Keblia was one. Flandrin, Flandreau, Flandra, Sebastian, Robinson, Doctor Charavay, and Crumps were some of the others."

"Still, it seems to be you are making progress, chief."

"But not fast enough. There is the matter of the handwriting. Flynn got samples of everybody's handwriting, and had them checked against the death notice. But the experts said they didn't have a chance. The printing was too deliberate. We are dealing with a schemer of deadly thoughtfulness, Tony. But I am inclined to think, not deadly enough. Of course, Flynn is trying to trace the paper— and the pencil— but we don't hope for much from that. That pencil bothered me for a little while."

"The one you found in Flandrin's room?"

"Yes. It looked like evidence against Flandrin. But Flandrin denies having ever used such a pencil. And Keblia had a boxful in his quarters, according to Flynn."

"Then who—"

"Can't tell yet!" cried Thatcher Colt. "But be sure it was put there by the murderer, for a purpose."

He leaped from the tub— a dripping and splendid figure.

"There remains the evidence of the plaster moulds," he panted. "I shall make good use of those moulds, by stacking them against the Bertillon measurements of our leading suspects. But I also have a new use for them, as you shall see presently."

As Colt shaved and dressed, and I bathed, my errant thoughts roved below stairs, from where arose a pleasing aroma of eggs and coffee. Break-fast was coming and I thanked heaven for that.

At the table, with its starched napery and gleaming silver. Colt looked as fresh as if he had enjoyed a night's sound sleep.

"We must not forget the gun," he reminded me, as he buttered a roll. "I have been thinking that if some funnel-like affair was used to hide the flash of fire, who had such a funnel?"

"The musicians!"

"But they were at the other end of the arena. And there should have been some scratches on the gun, if that were the method used."

Here Arthur entered the room, once more with a portable telephone in his hands.

"Professor Luckner is on the telephone," he announced.

Colt nodded to me to hasten to the hall-way. Listening in on the extension, I took down complete notes of the conversation.

"Good-morning, Herr Professor!"

"Ach! Gut' Morgen, Herr Commissioner! Wie befinden Sie sich?"

"Sehr gut! Und Sie?"

"Ja wohl! But you sound impatient, Herr Commissioner― what is it that makes you so impatient?"

"Have pity on a poor cop, Professor!" pleaded Colt. "Have you broken down that paste?"

"Such a question you have the impudence to ask me before I have had my breakfast. And after your own experts could not find out what the greasy stuff was! You did not wish to Insult me, nein?"

"Now, Professor—"

"Now, Mr. Commissioner-if you are suffering so dreadfully as all that, then I sup-pose I must accelerate that end of your torment. First from the sweeping of the circus floor I got nothing of any value to you. Second: I analysed the very light traces of green grease which you turned over to me. It has been an all night job. But the ingredients finally turned out to be very simple indeed-no more than oil, spermaceti, and wax."

"And what does that combination represent?"

"Ah, Herr Commissioner, your curiosity is like mine— it knows no bounds. I have been at the most elaborate plans to discover that secret. And like most good secrets it turned out to be very simple. It is theatrical grease paint!"

"Grease paint!" ejaculated the Commissioner.

"Only that and nothing more," carolled Luckner. "Now do you recognise the superiority of the laboratory method over the stupidity of the organised police? Never mind! I am too tired to debate the subject— I am going to bed and stay there for days. Good-morning, Herr Commissioner-I will send you my bill!"

Green grease paint!

"I remember," murmured Colt as he handed back the telephone and rose excitedly from the table, "that Colonel Robinson told us something that may be decisive here! No two clowns wear the same make-up! The man who killed Keblia in order to silence him raced up there to Flandrin's apartment, in pursuit of the witch doctor. He was in a hurry and had had no time to get all the make-up off; probably swabbed at his face with a towel and that was all. Traces of his make-up still remained on his face. In the fight, the fingers of the witch doctor clawed at the murderer's face and some of the grease paint came off on his fingers."

A cold sensation was fluttering down the middle of my back.

"And you and I both remember that Flandrin's make-up was green!" I said softly.

"But I have proved to you that Flandrin could not have committed both crimes!" he returned. "And now I tell you that blue and yellow also make green— and that we've got business back in Madison Square Garden— quick!"

When we reached the Garden, Thatcher Colt was met by a man from Headquarters who gave him a large bundle. This bundle Colt passed to me and then entered the building. Without seeking Colonel Robin-son, he strode directly back to the dressing room quarters. A guard tried to hold the Police Commissioner, but we hastened past him to a dressing-room.

"Wait here, Tony," Colt requested, "and call out at once if anyone approaches."

As he entered the dressing-room door I suddenly remembered with a shock that this was the room where we had first met Sebastian. Presently Colt came out again and now he carried another bulky object wrapped in a red cloak.

"The trouble with this case," he informed me, "has been not to pick the criminal so much as to prove the case. But I think now I have the essential clue. There is one thing still puzzling me. Where did the murderer stand when that shot was fired? Let's go to the ring."

A moment later we stood in the dimly lit amphitheatre. No lights were burning and only a little of the early morning daylight had penetrated the vast reaches of the place. Straight to the centre ring walked Thatcher Colt, and looked around. His face was inscrutable but there was a gleam of hope in his eyes.

"I need Robinson's help," he said. "Will you ask him to come here?"

I found Colonel Robinson still sitting in the poker game and beckoned him aside. His face lighted up when I told him that Colt believed he was on the brink of cracking the case.

When we reached the ring again, I was astounded to find Colt sitting on a clown's barrel holding his left ankle. He looked at me with a wry smile.

"Silly thing," he said. "I stumbled over a ring kerbing and gave my ankle a severe sprain. There is an all-night drug store around here. Will you get me a bandage, Tony?"

Deeply concerned, I hurried off while Colt was explaining to Colonel Robinson that he wanted him to point out every possible point of concealment from which the gun might have been fired. Fully twenty minutes passed before I returned to find Colt limping around the hippodrome, supporting his weight on Colonel Robinson's shoulder. Gratefully he allowed the showman and myself to bandage his bruised and swollen ankle.

"And now," said Colt, with a melancholy chuckle, "I think we have done all the harm we can do here. Colonel Robinson, there is one place you have not shown me."

"What is that?" asked the Colonel.

"Your new flood-light box. Isn't that it over there, at the right of box eighty?"

"The flood-light box?" repeated Robinson, deeply puzzled.

"Yes, the one around which you found Keblia prowling at three o'clock yesterday morning."

"Oh, yes, that box is right over there. It hasn't been used yet."

"Will you take me inside?"

Colonel Robinson and I helped the Police Commissioner inside a steel box, equipped with heavy flood-light projectors, set against the base of the tier of boxes on the hippodrome track. It was an enclosure very much like a motion picture projection room, fireproof, with tiny windows through which the searchlights sprayed their radiance.

With one arm hung around my shoulder, Colt stood Inside this metal enclosure, and smiled triumphantly.

"We are on the spot," he said, "where Josie LaTour was murdered. Her killer stood here, firing through this window. This metal enclosure hid the flash of fire and deadened the sound of the explosion!"

Colonel Robinson was aghast.

"Can you tell who did it?" he asked, incredulously.

"I can. Come back to your office where I can sit down, and I'll tell you everything."

The poker game was still going on. Robinson's office, on the landing between the ground and first floors of Madison Square Garden, smoked like a stale volcano. The largest pile of chips was stacked near the right hand of Doctor Charavay, and that eminent French expert on tropical diseases was just dealing a new hand as the Commissioner of Police appeared in the doorway.

Without speaking, the four men at the table looked up at us with haggard politeness. It was as if they hated the very area in space that our bodies occupied, but realised they must observe the amenities of the occasion.

"Well, chief," blurted Colonel Robinson, after waiting in vain for Colt to speak. "Let's have it."

"I THINK we are really able to lay our hands on the murderer," Colt replied, sitting on a camp stool.

"So, what next?" sighed Sebastian.

"First, just to listen. I am sorry to interrupt this game. But you may go on playing as soon as I get some doubts settled in my mind."

"Doubts, chief? You mean—"

"Not what you mean, Colonel. I feel certain," Colt assured Robinson as he sat down on a camp stool. "I merely want you to follow a brief reconstruction of what happened. In doing that, I shall name one person as X. When I am finished, I am going to leave it to your common sense to tell me who, in your opinion, this X is likely to be."

"We will agree, then," continued Thatcher Colt, "that X is a symbol for the murderer. Now we will come to a real personality. I mean our friend here, Mr. Crumps— the boss animal man of this circus."

Crumps struggled to his feet and swayed in an ungainly and terrified attitude.

"You mean I have something to do with this? Like hell I have. I don't know anything about it whatever."

"But you do!" charged Colt, waving him back to his chair. "You know all about tear-gas guns. It was you who advised Marburg Lovell to buy one. And I am assuming that X is a friend of yours. So I begin with the belief that, innocently or not, you gave X, the murderer, his first knowledge of a tear-gas gun, and how it operates."

"I didn't have anything to do with the murder," grumbled Crumps, but at a word from Doctor Charavay he sank back into his chair and remained quiet, his face lowered in his palms, elbows on the table.

"This mysterious person called 'X,' " resumed the Commissioner, "knew that Marburg Lovell had purchased a tear-gas gun on the recommendation of Crumps. It is likely that X had also visited the Lovell home, in company with Crumps. Thus he knew where the gun was kept, and he knew the floor plan of the house. He could burglarise it, if necessary.

"In a little while, a man from Headquarters will come to this room. With him he is bringing a plaster cast— what the French police call a moulage— of a foot-print on a ledge, outside a window of Marburg Lovell's house, and others from the kitchen window sill of the Flandrin apartment. From these footprints we shall be able to help fix the identity of X-but meanwhile, his footprint shows us that Marburg Lovell told the truth, that his house was feloniously entered, the gun taken, murder committed with it, the house again burglarised and the weapon returned.

"Why? The answer to that one question, gentlemen, will answer several other curious riddles in the case. The fact is that our unidentified Mr. X is vain. He has the foolish vanity of the artist. He wished to commit the perfect crime. He even had to write letters and terrify his victims. And he heartlessly held a rehearsal of his crime, killing the boss mechanic to make sure his plan would work. He had thought it out, as he foolishly imagined, to the last detail. It was common gossip on the lot that Marburg Lovell, backer of this show, sought to make a conquest of the unconquerable Josie LaTour. Here was a possible motive; here was the chance to cast suspicion on an utterly innocent man. Hence the two burglaries, and hence, too, the original and brilliant idea of using the tear-gas gun.

"Now our list of suspects begins to narrow down. Who had free authority to come and go in the circus, as a part of it, a kind of free agent in it— for that freedom, as we know, was imperatively necessary.

"Here, as you see, we are coming nearer to the realm of concrete suspicion. But we may go a step further. Who knew the circus routine so well that he could count even on the musicians? Who, in planning such a crime, knew that the drums would roll for a certain period while Josie LaTour was in the air?

"You will begin to appreciate with me that this crime was a deadly piece of planning. Apparently nothing was left to chance. Nowhere did we find a finger print of this impeccable Mr. X. On all his nefarious errands, he wore protective gloves.

"But there are certain other traces— more like psychic finger prints-which no gloves could conceal. For instance, the fantastic business of the barking dog. That could not, in my judgment, have been a coincidence. It happened just at the proper moment. Again, why? And again I answer you that the reason lies in the culprit's vanity. Desiring as he did desire, so deeply, to commit the perfect crime— every shred of evidence we have points to that passion, if to nothing else— he arranged to create that distraction. Once the dog started to bark, that was his cue to shoot. Mr. X knew that several times last season the dog had escaped into the arena and stood there barking until removed. So tonight he abstracted the dog and took him to the arena, deliberately. He waited, then, until the dog started to bark-and the barking served two purposes. With the drums, it helped to drown the sound of the shot. But that was minor, incidental. Its real purpose was to draw all eyes to that part of the arena: they did not notice, at once, then, that Josie was struggling on the rings; did not see the faint but momentarily visible cloud of tear gas in the air— and further, it drew away the eyes of Eddie Stevens and Isabel— both were too late to break the fall of their doomed mistress!"

"Oh, my God!" groaned Crumps through his fingers. "If only he hadn't fallen for that dog!"

"Now, however," continued Thatcher Colt with increasing enthusiasm, "you will begin to realise that we are coming nearer and nearer to Mr. X. By this process of reasoning we are, so to speak, enclosing him in a narrow circle of deduction. We know, that is, that he had access to the backyard and to the arena. We know, then, that he must be one of the circus. We know that he brought the barking dog into the arena. Was he about to make his appearance as a performer? That would considerably narrow the circumference of the search. The gun which he fired had a range of about one hundred and fifty yards. That meant he had to lug around with him a large and cumbersome weapon. That also means that he had to shoot at LaTour from a considerable distance. He had to be a marksman.

"So the circle grows even smaller. For there are still other questions, we may ask ourselves. No man in the audience could have aimed and fired at Josie LaTour without being detected by his neighbours, and probably lynched. He could not have stood in any of the performers' entrances nor any of the others; we had policemen stationed in all of them. We know where he stood-in an electric flood-light box; a new type of lighting operated from the hippodrome tracks.

"With such knowledge, let us attempt a further reconstruction. I confess that when I started to study this case, I was working on a false theory. I had believed that this gun could be carried into the arena by a performer, possibly in some funnel-like apparatus that would fit over the gun and hide the flash. Who had such a funnel-like apparatus? I remembered Sebastian's trumpet. I have the trumpet here, wrapped in Sebastian's cloak of Mephistopheles, but the mouth is too small. It would have to have been especially cut for such a purpose."

"You suspected me?" roared Sebastian. "What for?"

"You had a perfect motive," returned Colt amiably, "and some day you may like to hear about it. But Mr. X had a more potent motive. In his case, it was strictly business. Avarice goaded by a kind of madness, too. That madness is indicated in much that the man does. He has a mania for perfection. It comes out in the management of his affairs and in his desire to commit the perfect crime: a kind of mental disease with him."

Colonel Robinson glared. He seemed to find something personal in Colt's remarks.

"Why don't you come to the point?" grumbled the show owner. "Why don't you say who this man is?"

"I mean you," said Thatcher Colt.

"I?"

"You! Colonel Robinson, you are under arrest charged with the murder of Josie LaTour and Keblia, the Ubangi witch doctor, and other nefarious crimes!"

Chapter 17

COLONEL ROBINSON stood up, his fist balled, his tan face pale.

"If this is a joke. Mr. Colt, I don't get the point," he grated.

Colt eyed him closely

"Sit down, Colonel." he said, "and I'll tell you all that you know already."

"I am listening," glared Robinson, "but I prefer to stand."

"You forget," returned Thatcher Colt, "that you are a prisoner and must do as I say. Sit down!"

With a haggard glance of injured innocence, Colonel Robinson obeyed.

"It was apparent," said Colt, speaking directly to Robinson, "that all the misfortunes that had attended your circus had some direct bearing on this crime. lt was easy to see that you were ambitious. You wanted to have the greatest circus in the world, and you wanted to own it all. You had a legacy. If you could discourage Marburg Lovell to the point where he was willing to sell out his interest for a song, you could buy that interest with the legacy and achieve a life's ambition."

"And that's why he killed his best performer?" snarled Sebastian.

Ignoring the interruption. Colt went on "You began a campaign of sabotage involving law suits, you made everything go wrong, and each time, Lovell had to pay and pay heavily. Train wrecks, dying lion: and elephants, mules with broken legs, all sorts of misfortunes you inspired and the plan worked. Only a few hours ago. Marburg Lovell said he would sell his interest for practically nothing. You had worn him out.

"But you had not counted on the cunning of those simple-minded people that you exhibit to a morbid public. You knew that Keblia was on to you and that Keblia confided his suspicions to LaTour. LaTour was alone, and it is no secret, for you yourself admitted it, that you had tried to press your attentions upon her. I assume that when her husband was away, you tried again and then she told you what she knew about you. Being a high-tempered person herself, she decided to expose you. You may ask how I know that you pressed your attentions on her in the absence of her husband. The evidence is in her diary. She made a record of it and I read that record. In her resentment of that, she threatened you with exposure, in an interview you had with her in her apartment three nights ago, an interview that was partly overheard by Isabel Chant and was overheard by Keblia, who had stolen into the house through the kitchen window. I know some of the things that were said in that interview and that you threatened her then, but Josie was not frightened by your threats. The next day she went to see Marburg Lovell. Unfortunately Lovell was not at home, and last night when he tried to see her In the dressing-room you prevented it. I should have known the truth then. Only because I took something for granted did I slip up. Josie told me at the door to watch out for you and I thought she meant Lovell. I shall never cease to regret that I misunderstood what she was saying. If I had only realised then, I might have saved her life.

"From the time you left Josie LaTour's apartment, after that exciting interview, you made up your mind that she had to be killed, even though she was your star attraction. Thanks to a letter written by the first Mrs. Flandrin, I learned that Josie LaTour had visited Lovell but I learned more than that, Colonel Robinson. I learned that you too had visited Marburg Lovell. You— who knew how to do everything on the show from training elephants to repairing the electric light system— knew how to rig the patent electric burglar system so that you could get in without sounding an alarm; you, who were formerly an acrobatic clown, knew how to scale these walls and get in. But one thing you overlooked, as does every criminal who plots the perfect crime. You overlooked your one habitual weakness, forgetting that it is distinctive. You chew tobacco, Colonel Robinson, and while you were in the garden behind Marburg Lovell's house you spat out a lump of the stuff. I found it like a dry cake of mud. It put you on the scene. It is Planter's Leaf Tobacco, sold in Georgia, and not in the New York shops, or else I miss my guess. It won't be hard for our experts to prove that.

"You stole the tear-gas gun and the bullets, and you went back to Madison Square Garden and put the gun in the flood-light box. How do I know that? Because you told me so. You said that you had found Keblia prowling around that box at three o'clock in the morning. But I had to ask myself what you were doing around the flood-light box yourself at three o'clock in the morning? You may wonder now I discovered it was from the flood-light box that you fired the shot. Again, Colonel Robinson, you told me. I must confess that you did it unconsciously, because of a subterfuge. I sprained my ankle on purpose.

"Then I asked you— I was already satisfied of your guilt— to let me lean on you as I limped around the ring. Surely in your experience with show business you have learned the trick that is called 'mind reading' and that it is really muscle reading; a trick in which the mind reader touches the person who has hidden something and by the instinctive muscular reactions of the other, is able to find the hidden object. I read your muscles. Colonel Robinson. You tried to keep me away from one side of the ring, all the time. You didn't know it but your muscles were giving you away every time they dragged in an opposite direction and by a process of elimination, you yourself led me to that flood-box as time and time again we walked around that hippodrome track.

"It was from that flood-light box that you callously murdered the boss mechanic, where again you showed a singular cunning. You left word that you could be reached at my office around three-thirty. Then, unobserved, you slipped into the flood-light box and fired a fatal shot. The orchestra was rehearsing and that deadened the noise. And only a few lights were lit, as I have taken pains to learn. In the confusion you slipped out of the Garden and came down to see me, and while you were there, word came of the latest tragedy. It had all the effect of exculpating you. You expected me to believe that the boss mechanic had fallen to his death while you were in my office. But you did not count on the exactitude of the police. The first thing I told you when I met you last night in the lobby was that the boss mechanic had fallen at exactly 3 o'clock. You reached my office at 3.30.

"The plan having worked, you were ready for the night. And time was now the essence. Fortunately for you, Flandrin had arrived late. You had arranged interviews with him with reporters to keep him from his wife. If she had a chance to tell Flandrin what she knew, you would have to kill both of them and even that might not save you. So like a devil you worked to keep them apart, convinced that Josie must die before she left the ring.

"Now, what happened at the time? You came to our box and went away a number of times. You left after Flandrin's act to be sure that all was well between him and LaTour, you said, but really to see that she had no chance to tell him her dangerous message. Not until Josie LaTour came Into the ring did you return to our box. And on the way back you lifted the latch and let the dog into the ring. You sat there, watching her, knowing what would happen. The dog was sure to come to the ring and bark. As soon as you heard him you left on the excuse that you must get the dog. But instead you went into the light box. You waited until the dog barked again, then you fired. The whole garden was dark. No one had seen you. And now in the confusion after Josie's fall, you made a quick appearance in our box and then naturally hurried away. All seemed to have gone well for you. But there was still more to be done.

"In the confusion you grabbed that gun. You got back to the dressing-rooms, abstracted Flandreau's coat, and, wearing that, went out of the Garden and put the gun in your own car. You did not believe that the police would be clever enough to discover the method by which Josie LaTour had fallen to her death. But my hand on her dress and then against my own eyes gave me the clue, that and the broken spangle.

"Of all this you knew nothing at all, for you had new troubles of your own. I sent you for Keblia. You found that Keblia had drugged a policeman and escaped. You followed to his door and looked in. What you saw was Keblia with a gas bullet In his hands. You knew that he was on to you. Josie LaTour could have told you that. Now you knew for yourself. So you followed Keblia. Nothing else mattered to you then. When Keblia got a taxicab you got into your car and followed him. When Keblia crawled into the kitchen of the LaTour apartment you went after him. You had a terrific fight, and you killed him. You cut his throat and you put his body in the trunk— to postpone discovery and give you time to reshape your own plans. You will want to know how I can prove that. I can prove it with evidence. Once again you left behind you the sign of your presence on the scene. The prints of your knee and shank were on the window sill. I had moulds made of them, and a tailor looked and saw that it was broad-cloth. You were in evening clothes, made of broadcloth That was not evidence enough. But then when I saw that you had changed your clothes, I sent a man to your dressing-room. He stole your suit, and we put the vacuum cleaners on the knees of your trousers. We got the dust and analysed it, and we compared that with the dust found on the window sill. The same old dust, Colonel! Trifling little specks of dust, but they marked you as the man we want.

"You were just a little too smart. You even rubbed some green make-up paint on the fingers of Keblia, to make it seem as if Flandrin had done it. But by this time, Colonel Robinson, you were losing your hold. You left that gas bullet in the trunk and put another one in Flandrin's dressing-robe, when it would have been so much better to have carried both off with you and thrown them away. That desire for perfection overreached itself.

"But you didn't know that, when you came back to the Garden and reported to me that you could not find Keblia. You were a good actor. At that time I was quite deceived. It was not until I found that wad of tobacco that I realised that I'd been on the wrong track. I had suspected Sebastian, but even so I had left detectives on guard here in the Garden to tell me who came and went and when. You left the Garden and were gone for half an hour. It is not hard to surmise where you went. Your job was to return the gun to Marburg Lovell. Thus you thought you had put the finishing touches on a perfect crime.

"Sorry, Colonel, the game is up."

Colonel Robinson stood up, his fists beating the air.

"Lies!" he cried huskily. "What jury would believe a fantastic story like that? It is monstrous! It is nothing but—"

Then suddenly a terrible pallor spread over the face of Colonel Robinson. He grabbed his hands to the back of his neck.

"What's that?" he screamed. "What is it? The whole room is getting dark. I can't see any more!"

With one mighty spasm the giant body was contorted and then crashed to the floor. In that same instant, Robinson died.

"Don't touch him!" shuddered Doctor Charavay. "I can tell by the look on his face what happened. He was struck by a poison dart— its effect is instantaneous!"

With a shocked gasp, Colt turned to the door. The transom was open. But when we rushed outside, the corridor was absolutely empty, nor was there a trace of any other human being in sight. When we sought the Ubangi they were, all of them, stretched on the floor of their beloved boiler room, snoring loudly. The mystery of who despatched that poison dart has never been solved, but Colt and I had not forgotten that the witch doctor had declared the tribe was its own jury and judge and executioner.

Chapter 18

LATER that day Thatcher Colt and I were in the office of District Attorney Dougherty. Flandrin was there— a broken man with eyes stricken and bewildered.

"I feel like I have been somewhere else and have just come back," he said. "I want you gentlemen to know that I haven't any hard feelings. Mr. Dougherty was pretty determined with me last night, and I will never forgive myself for confessing a crime I could not commit; but it seemed the only way that I could get back to myself and grieve for my poor little girl. I am taking her away, to have the funeral all to ourselves. I don't know what I'll do after that-but I know I'm through with circus life. I can never go up again."

Then Thatcher Colt laid a steadying hand on the shoulder of the young acrobat.

"You've got to go up again!" he told him. "She wanted you to do that double twist-and you've got to do it-for Josie!"

Epilogue

A YEAR had passed.

Again spring had come to Centre Street— that restless season when small boys and the Police Commissioner of New York City are unsettled by the sight of gaudy posters of elephants and clowns and the heralds proclaiming that the circus is coming again to Madison Square Garden.

In the old office at the north end of the second floor of Police Headquarters, Thatcher Colt and I were working our way through a stack of routine papers. There was more than the usual crop of abandoned infants-one of the by-products of the depression. A reorganisation of the mounted division was under way, changes coming in the pickpocket squad, the safe and loft squad, and the narcotic bureau. And be-fore us was a discouraging series of reports— crimes of the last twenty-four hours in the great American metropolis.

As Colt ploughed his way through these case reports the door opened and Captain Israel Henry appeared. He passed me a card, embossed in golden curlicues, and reading:

"Pickney Snowden, Owner and Manager of Snowden Brothers' and Dawson and Woodruff's Greatest Combined Shows."

"Well," said Thatcher Colt, "this is the late lamented Colonel Robinson's successor. Bring him in!"

Pickney Snowden was a stout, amiable little man who had come to offer the Police Commissioner a box for the opening night of the circus. Colt accepted gladly for himself, Betty and me, and for the entire family of the District Attorney.

"We'll come!" promised Colt. "But there's one thing I'd like to know. Is Flandrin all right?"

"Oh, sure— he's fine!"

"But I mean— will he ever manage the double twist?"

The new circus manager looked far away.

"Not that I know of," he replied. "I don't think he'll ever do that now that Josie's gone. You know, Mr. Colt— it's a very funny thing— I'm not superstitious

"Far from it," agreed Colt.

"But whenever I see Flandrin go up on the high bar, I always have the feeling that she's over there by the flags, you know, the performers' entrance-where they say she used to stand, wrapped in a cloak, watching him. When he got through, he always bowed to her. And sometimes I expect to see him do it now— but of course he never does."

They shook hands and agreed to meet after the show.

EARLY that April evening we made another rendezvous In the lobby of Madison Square Garden. Everything seemed the same— the cries of the candy butchers, the shouts of the ticket men, the jostles and smells of the crowds-even the posters of the Ubangi. The only change I noticed was that Dougherty's two nephews, Al and Jimmy, were a little stouter and not so toothless.

But this time we did not go behind the scenes, but at once took our places in the box. We watched the horses and the elephants, the wire-dancers, and all the motley and daring performers of rings and platforms and hippodrome tracks, until at last we heard the announcement that the greatest of all the performers was next to appear— Flandrin, King of the Air.

He came into the arena with Flandreau and Flandra; but it was upon that Adonis who had loved Josie LaTour the crowd fixed its gaze. There was a new air of assurance— an élan— in Flandrin's manner, as he tossed off his cloak and bravely saluted the applause. Up the tall ladder he climbed with swift, small movements, full of feline grace. Out upon his uneasy throne the new King of the Air swung lightly— his trapeze fifty feet above the ground.

While the music played its saddest Viennese waltz the three of them in their green tights swung back and forth, rose and fell, leaped, clasped, and disentangled themselves— all in the perfect rhythm of the three-quarter time. Again and again Flandrin plunging out from the heaving bar, turned a twist and somersault and landed safely in the steel clasp of Flandreau's mighty hands.

At last the act was over, and Flandrin, high on his perch, bowed and waved to the thunder of clapping and applauding cries.

I thought he was finished, and was turning my eyes away, when suddenly I saw him lift his hand peremptorily. Across the gulf of the arena he called sharply to his catcher. Flandreau was startled.

"No! No!" he cried. "Don't do that!"

But Flandrin's voice came masterfully through the silence.

"Get ready for me!"

He turned as the crowd waited breathlessly. On his perch there was a movable bar, fitted in sockets. When this was lifted the trapeze could be swung in arcs longer, more dangerous. Now Flandrin lifted that bar and fitted it into the topmost notch. He caught the trapeze and swung it. It sped out and up so high that it seemed ready to touch the roof-as if the ropes would slacken. Then it shot back, and Flandrin caught it, and darted out into mid-air.

LIKE a stone from a sling his body was catapulted: first a somersault, out of which he came into a twist; then back into a somersault, and then into another twist and then— miracle of miracles— he flew safely into his catcher's waiting hands.

Flandrin had done the double twist!

A crowd, a first night circus-wise mob, yelled and screamed and beat its feet, making a clamour to split the steel trusses of the roof. But to all that prolonged and noisy approbation Flandrin, the acrobat, seemed deaf and blind.

High on the ladder he stood and his eyes were turned to that opening In the arena draped with flags. My gaze followed his; and I could almost believe that I saw there a tiny figure wrapped in a dark cloak.

Flandrin must have seen it, for it was, towards something very real to him there that he bowed. And it was there he blew his kisses.

The end

As published in the Australian Women's Weekly, 6 April 1935

Table of Contents

- Chapter 1
- Chapter 2
- Chapter 3
- Chapter 4
- Chapter 5
- Chapter 6
- Chapter 7
- Chapter 8
- Chapter 9
- Chapter 10
- Chapter 11
- Chapter 12
- Chapter 13
- Chapter 14
- Chapter 15
- Chapter 16
- Chapter 17
- Chapter 18
- Epilogue