TABLE of CONTENTS

THE STONE IMAGE—SEABURY GRANDIN QUINN

FROM OVER THE BORDER—GREYE LA SPINA

WHEN BRASSET FORGOT—HARCOURT FARMER

THE HAUNTED LANDSCAPE—GREYE LA SPINA

THE VENGEANCE OF VISHNU—GEORGE C. JENKS

THE DEAD BOOK—HAROLD HERSEY

WHY is it, I wonder, that there must always be a rift in the lute, a fly in the ointment, a gnat in the ice-cream soda?

Take Betty and me, for example. If I might be allowed to borrow a term from our Spiritualist friends, I would say that never were husband and wife more thoroughly en rapport than Betty and I. When I call down from the bathroom and ask her where in blazes her what-d’ye-call-it is she knows perfectly well that I’m inquiring of the whereabouts of her Crême Shalimah, with which I desire to anoint my newly shaven face. When Betty calls up from the living room and asks me to throw my thing-a-bob down to her I know, as well as if she had told me, that she wishes my pocketknife for the purpose of retipping the pencil from which she had just chewed the point. This far all is well with Betty and me.

But the high gods, who are ever greenly jealous of human happiness, took an underhand method of revenge when they afflicted Betty and me with diverse tastes in things artistic. I have a partiality for etchings, pastels, and aquarelles—clean Western art—and everything savoring of the East, from teakwood to tea, is detestable to me. Betty dotes upon Oriental embroideries, bronzes, and carvings—and thereby hangs this tale.

One bright afternoon last autumn, when the florists were beginning to display chrysanthemums in their windows, and the September haze hung over the hills in the country, Betty took me for a walk down the Avenue. Her cooing amiability ought to have warned me that she was hatching up some dire plot against my peace and happiness, but what married man can fathom the depths of his wife’s depravity? So, before I had time to rush madly to the nearest police station and demand protection, I found myself gently but firmly piloted through the yawning portal of a certain little shop where a soft- spoken, coffee-colored descendant of the Forty Thieves exchanges lacquered metal, embossed chinaware, and kindred junk for real money, and beheld my life partner standing rapt in mute admiration before the most horrible concoction of carven stone that ever offended the eyes of civilized man.

In a very general way the thing resembled a human being. That is to say, it possessed the number of pectoral and pelvic limbs customarily enjoyed by man, and there the likeness stopped.

Beneath a brow as shallow as an ape’s, and as sloping as a mansard roof, the creature’s agate eyes stared forth from above its bloated cheeks with a look of unutterable hate and fury. To right and left of its knoblike nose great tusks of shining ivory protruded from the painted lips, which writhed and twisted in a snarl of rage, and the talon hands it brandished above its head were armed with claws like those of some giant vulture. It was like a vision from a nightmare, a fiend from Dante’s Inferno and a djin from some Eastern horror tale rolled into one, and my wife stood there and looked at it as she had looked at me in the days of our honeymoon! “Isn’t he per-fect-ly adorable?” breathed Betty ecstatically.

I regarded the hideous thing with a look of deepest loathing. “Now I know what the hymn means by ‘the heathen in his blindness,’” I commented as I turned my back squarely upon it.

“Ye-es, sair,” volunteered the Mocha and Java- colored bandit who owned the shop, “eet ees a var- y rare piece of carving; eet ees the great god Fo, the ruler of the air. I var-y much doubt that there is another like it in the world.”

“I hope you’re right,” I assured him. Then to Betty: “If you’re through admiring that monument to delirium tremens, we’ll be going.” And heedless of the thousand dollars’ worth of bric-a-brac which my flouncing coattails menaced I marched from the store, followed by a thoroughly indignant Betty.

We walked the next sixty yards in stony silence; Betty in a white heat of fury which set her quivering from the backbone out; I in that not altogether unpleasant state of mind experienced while devising “cutting” remarks.

I had composed the introduction to a beautiful little lecture by the time we had reached the corner, and was about to settle down to three hundred yards or so of enjoyable monologue when the opening words died on my tongue. Betty was crying, right on the Avenue, and at four o’clock in the afternoon!

“I t-think you’re perfectly horrid,” she sobbed, as the big, pearly tears began to chase each other down her trembling cheeks. “You know how I w- wanted that lovely statuette, and you wouldn’t let me g-get it or anything, and I don’t believe you love me anymore, and—” The sentence ended in a wail, and, unlike Lot’s wife, who turned back and congealed into salt crystal, my wife looked despairingly back at the shop we had just quit and nearly dissolved in salt water.

“Damn!” I muttered under my breath as a brightly painted woman cast a glance of commiseration at Betty, and her escort glared at me as if he would have liked to wring my neck. Aloud I said: “For the love of Michelangelo Casey, stop crying and we’ll go back and get the awful thing; but if we go to the poorhouse trying to pay for it,

Betty Haig, don’t say I didn’t give you fair warning.”

Betty’s tears evaporated before she could bring the absurd little dab of lace she calls her handkerchief into play. She pinioned my arm in both of hers and snuggled her cheek against my shoulder. “I just knew you’d buy it for me, Phil, old dear,” she gurgled. Of course she did. The world’s greatest clairvoyants could take lessons from Betty when it comes to reading my mind.

Between the living room and dining room of our house is a narrow, nondescript sort of room which the real-estate agent called a reception hall and Betty calls her fernery. In it she keeps a wide variety of potted ferns, palms, and flowering plants, over which a man can stumble and break a leg with the minimum expenditure of time and effort. From one end of this little room the stairs which lead to our sleeping apartments curve upward; at the other extremity is a small stained-glass window letting out of a little bay. Against this window Betty set up the petrified horror from the Orient, where its evil sneer greeted me each morning as I descended to breakfast and its misshapen shadow fell across me every evening as I went in to dinner.

For the first few days after the loathsome object was installed in its alcove I merely favored it with a disgusted frown as I passed; but my passive dislike hardened into an active detestation before it had been there three days.

It was Chang’s encounter with the thing which made me realize how violent my hate for it was.

Chang was Betty’s Siamese cat, and a more courageous grimalkin never walked the back fence by moonlight or gave battle to a wandering cur. I have seen him take on two rivals for his ladylove’s favor at once and put them both to ignominious flight; I have seen him charge full tilt against a bull terrier twice his weight and send him yelping off under a veritable barrage of saber-clawed blows and feline billingsgate; yet before the Eastern image all his valor melted into nothingness.

I had paused before the statue one morning to pay it my profane respects, when Chang, who was very fond of me, came marching from the dining room to take his usual morning’s ear-rubbing constitutional around my ankles. Halfway round my legs he came face to face with the image’s leering mask, and stopped dead still in his tracks. The hairs of his tail and along his spine began to rise, his small ears flattened against his head, his mouth slowly opened in a noiseless “spit,” and his legs bent under him till the white fur on his underside touched the floor. For a long moment he regarded the statue with the fierce, silent glare which only an angry cat can give; then from the nethermost pit of his stomach came a low, rumbling growl, the defiant war cry of a cat about to close with a stronger foe. Slowly, as if stalking a bird, he crept, belly low to earth, toward the image’s base; then, with his black nose almost against the stone, he paused, looking up at its malignant face, and suddenly, as though shot from a crossbow, turned and bolted, yowling, up the stairs. I had never seen Chang turn tail on anything, living or dead, and the sight of his abject terror almost unnerved me. Why such a valiant warrior should fly from a piece of carved stone was more than I could understand. But Chang was wise; he, too, came from the East, and he knew.

Next morning we found Chang lying dead at the creature’s stone feet, an ugly wound gaping from the blue-gray fur of his breast, and on the statue’s twisted lips and on its gleaming ivory tusks was a dull, brick-red stain, the stain that drying blood leaves.

Betty wept inconsolably at the loss of her little pet, but she refused to blame the image for it. “Poor Chang hated it so he dashed himself against its face and was killed when he struck its teeth,” she explained between sobs.

I picked up Chang’s little corpse and stroked its stiff gray fur gently. “He died like the knightly gentleman he was, defending his home against barbarian invasion,” I said, shaking my fist at the hideous face grinning into mine. “If you’ll listen to me, dear, you’ll have the beastly thing thrown out before it does more damage.”

“Indeed we won’t!” Betty answered. “I’m sorry for poor Chang, but I won’t have my lovely idol thrown away just because he committed suicide.” Then she added with mock seriousness: “You’d better be careful how you call my image a ‘beastly thing,’ Phil; who knows but it has the power of injuring its enemies?”

Lightly spoken as the words were, they sent a quick chill through me; for they voiced a thought which had been vaguely gathering in my subconscious mind. “It will be a bad day for one of us if that stone thing and I ever run foul of each other,” I promised truculently as I bore Chang’s body away.

The second member of our entourage to be driven out by the stone interloper was our cook, Nora McGinnis. Nora, who was a veritable virtuoso at the kitchen range, had been with us since our second month at housekeeping, and was at once Betty’s pride and the neighbors’ despair. She was devoted to Betty and me, too, so much so that offers of higher wages from several nearby households had been productive of nothing more than indignant refusals from her and severed diplomatic relations by Betty.

However, Nora was too thoroughly Celtic to be able to share the same roof with that Oriental abomination. Before Chang’s murder she had sidled by it like a stray cat passing a group of boys on a snowy day, after that she crossed herself devoutly each time she had to pass through the hall.

Finally she came to Betty and announced her intention of leaving forthwith.

“Oi’ve cooked fer yez an’ Oi’ve washed fer yez, an’ Oi loiks ye bot’,” she explained, “but that there haythen thing out there”—she jerked her thumb toward the hall—“wunk its oye at me whin Oi came through there jest now, an’ Oi’ll not shlape another noight in th’ same house wid it, so Oi won’t!” And she didn’t.

If a predisposition to baldness and three years of married life hadn’t rendered the operation well- nigh impossible, I should have torn my hair. “See what your precious image has let us in for now,” I stormed at Betty. “First he kills Chang, then he drives Nora off, and now I suppose we’ll all have to die of starvation.”

Betty pursed her small lips stubbornly. “I’ll do the cooking myself until we can get another maid,” she promised.

“Please, Betty,” I besought, “let’s go to a hotel and board until the new cook comes.” I had to spend the rest of the morning explaining that remark to a very much insulted wife. But we went to the hotel just the same.

We menaced our digestions with hotel fare for nearly a week before we managed to secure a Swedish girl who cooked our meals, broke our best china, and regarded the stone image with an equal degree of bovine indifference. The very sight of her passing the hateful thing with never the tribute of a sidelong glance had a steadying effect upon my nerves which more than atoned for the havoc her clumsy hands wrought among our Royal Minton cups and plates. After observing her indifference for a week or so, I, too, got so that I could go by the stone monster with no more than a shrug of disapproval.

The violence of my aversion to the image might have simmered down to nothing more than an artistic distaste if Betty’s infatuation had not seemed to increase in geometrical progression as time went by. She would stand gazing at its ugly painted face for minutes on end, almost in a state of hypnosis, till I grew actually jealous.

If it had been a piece of noble Greek artistry claiming her admiration I could have understood and condoned her love for it, for Betty is an aesthetic little person, with an intense appreciation of the beautiful. But her regard for this carven Calaban—

“Upon my word, my dear,” I told her one day, somewhat nettled by her attitude, “I do believe you’re letting that Eastern nightmare make an idolatress of you.”

Betty laughed, a little nervously, I thought. “I don’t know what there is about the thing that’s so fascinating,” she confessed. “Sometimes I think I hate it as much as you do, Phil. But”—she hesitated a second, as if doubting the wisdom of taking me into her confidence—“but sometimes, when I look at it for a while I do feel as though I ought to go on my knees before it.”

“And if I ever catch you doing such a trick,” I said, “I’ll be up in police court next morning for wife beating.”

It was a few days after this conversation that I was puzzled and annoyed by a faint odor of Chinese punk hanging in the air of the dining room when I came down to breakfast.

Incense of all kinds is distasteful to me; so much so that I never attend high-church services when I can avoid it, and of all the scents with which the nose of man is insulted I particularly detest that of Chinese punk. Even as a pretext for keeping away mosquitoes we have never burned joss sticks in the house, yet there the scent was, as plain as cabbage on a New England Thursday.

I sniffed the air like a restive hound for a few moments, then concluded that my olfactory nerves had been playing a practical joke on me, and dismissed the matter from my mind.

But the odor persisted. Some days it was more pronounced than others—occasionally it was so faint as to be no more than a reminiscent annoyance—but always it was present.

There seemed to be a subtle connection, too, between the varying strength of the perfume and Betty’s health. On mornings when the bitter-sweet effluvium hung like an invisible fog among the rafters of the hall and dining-room ceilings there were great, violet circles against the white flesh beneath her eyelids, and her eyes themselves were dull and lackluster, as though she had been troubled in her sleep. As the pungent tang of the incense waned and faded from the house, her face regained its wanted color, and the old-time sparkle returned to her eyes.

The mystery of the odor baffled me, and the changes in Betty worried me. So, like all modern philosophers, I thought much, drank much, and smoked much over the problem—and arrived nowhere.

Betty, too, fretted about the perfume because it annoyed me, and about herself because, except for toothache, measles, and similar childish ills, she had never been sick a day in her life. Betty is neither the broken lily nor drooping-violet type of woman. She can shop all morning, go to a matinee, and foxtrot half the night, which is a considerably larger contract than I should care to take on. Also she can handle a canoe like a red Indian, swim like a Sandwich Islander, and play stiff enough tennis to command the respect of any man. And here she was developing nerves and headaches and listlessness, just as though she were an ordinary woman instead of being my wife.

“I think I’ll go to see Doctor Towbridge,” she announced. “It’s not like me to be all done in at breakfast time.”

I agreed with her enthusiastically. Next to having no Betty at all, a sick Betty was the worst thing I could imagine.

When she returned from the doctor’s she was more puzzled than ever. “He couldn’t find anything wrong,” she said, “and that worries me all the more, ‘cause people don’t get this way when there’s nothing the matter with them.”

Doctor Towbridge and I rode downtown together next morning, and I begged him for some clew to Betty’s indisposition. “Wel-l,” he answered, after the manner of all physicians who find themselves in a tight place, “I don’t know that I’d care to say positively at this time just what Mrs.

Haig’s trouble is. Organically she’s as fit as a fiddle, but she seems to be suffering from a lowering of vitality, possibly induced by insomnia. And I discovered traces of hysteria, too.”

“Insomnia!” I scouted. “Why, man, Betty sleeps like a top; she sleeps as well as I do, and I’m almost as hard to rouse as Lazarus.”

Doctor Towbridge lit a fresh cigar and stared for a minute at the rows of near-colonial villas racing past the car windows. “Did Mrs. Haig ever walk in her sleep as a child?” he asked. “Somnambulism may have the same effect as insomnia, you know.”

Now, Betty and I had known each other just three months when we were married; so I had no more idea whether she had walked in her sleep as a child than I had what colored pinafores she wore when she was attending kindergarten. But Doctor Towbridge’s question gave me to think. Suppose Betty were sleepwalking! And our sleeping rooms were on the second floor. Good Lord, if she were to walk through an open window! I determined then and there to do some watchful waiting that night.

But if the old saying concerning the ultimate destination of good resolutions be true, I must have paved several blocks of infernal highways with mine; for midnight found me in bed, wooing Morpheus in no uncertain nasal tones.

Two o’clock, though, found me awake; very wide awake.

I sat up in bed. The big, white November moon, swimming easily in a surf of frothy clouds, splashed an intermittent spray of silver light over the bedroom’s polished floor. Outside the window the wind set up a shrewish scolding in the branches of the tall chestnut which grew beside the house, and up the stairs drifted the acrid, unmistakable perfume of burning joss sticks.

I looked at Betty’s bed. The covers were thrown back and there was the dint of her head in the center of her pillow; her kimono hung in its accustomed place across the back of her slipper chair. But Betty was nowhere to be seen.

“That infernal incense again!” I exclaimed as I scrambled out of bed and hurried to the stairway. “There’s something devilish going on in this house.”

Half a dozen angry strides took me to the stairhead; two more carried me to the curve of the steps. There I paused, looking down into the evilly grinning face of the stone image. Before it was Betty, clad only in her pajamas and straw bedroom sandals, lighting the last of seven joss punks set fanwise in a vase upon the floor. The stick took fire and sent its writhing coil of smoke upward to the idol’s head, and Betty, with her hands crossed over her breast, her body bent nearly double, retreated three steps, paused, and groveled to the floor; rose and backed away five more steps, repeated the genuflection; then rose to her full height, rigid as a carven thing herself.

Hands held stiffly at her sides, she continued to stare fixedly into the monster’s agate eyes as she slipped her little pink-and-white feet from their straw sandals and took one step forward barefoot. Raising her hands, palms forward, till they reached the level of her ears, she went to her knees and bent slowly forward till hands and forehead rested on the floor. Once, twice, three times she did this slowly; then her prostrations increased in speed until the soft thud-thud of her head and hands against the floor was like the ticking of a slow- movement clock.

As she swayed forward and back in this act of mad adoration she recited gaspingly:

O Fo, the Mighty,
O Fo, the Powerful,
O Fo, who holdest the thousand-starred heavens as a sunshade in thy hand,
O Thou who governest the moon and the tides,
O Thou who placest the mighty winds upon the great seas,
O Thou who bendest the skies above the earth, Have pity upon me.
O Fo, who orderest the sun and all the lights of heaven,
O Fo, who makest the lions to roar and the little beasts to keep silence,
O Fo, who bindest in the lightnings with thy grasp and whose voice is the thunder of the clouds,
O Fo, who standest upon the white mountaintops and
liest down in the green valleys,
O Fo, who driest up the rivers with thy wrath and encompasseth the dry land with thy floods,
I lay myself before thee.

Inch by inch she had crawled on her knees to the idol’s base, and that stone abomination, that misbegotten son of Eastern heathenism, leered triumphantly down while Betty—my Betty—put her soft little lips to its misshapen feet.

“Hell and furies!” I yelled, covering the distance intervening between Betty and me in a single leap. “I’ll smash that damned image if it’s the last act of my life.”

Before I put my iconoclastic threat into execution I bent above the wretched woman crouching on the floor, mad enough with berserker rage to grind her underfoot.

I seized her by the shoulders and wrenched her upright, ready to shake her as an ill-tempered terrier worries a rat. But my vengeance died stillborn. Betty’s eyes stared unseeingly into mine; her face had the set, unwitting expression of one in a hypnotic trance. She was sound asleep with her eyes open; bound fast in the fetters of somnambulism.

“Betty! Betty, dear,” I whispered contritely, drawing her slender little body to me and nursing her head against my shoulder.

A shiver ran through her, and her hands gripped my arm till the polished nails bit into my flesh through the sleeve of my robe as she nestled her face close to my breast. “Oh, Phil! Phil, dear, I’ve had such a terrible dream,” she whimpered. “Put your arms around me tight, dear; I’m so frightened.” And her hot tears wet through the silk of my robe.

With a sobbing, hysterical Betty to comfort and pacify and carry upstairs to bed, I had no time for smashing images that night, but before Betty went to sleep, with my hand cuddled in both of hers, we agreed to oust the stone demon from the house before another night.

Getting rid of a statue, however, especially one like ours, is often more easily discussed than accomplished. First, the thing weighed nearly two hundred pounds; second, it was fragile to an unbelievable degree and had to be handled as carefully as high explosive; lastly, it had cost us nearly five hundred dollars—and wasn’t entirely paid for. I would gladly have forfeited the unpaid balance for the pleasure of smashing the hateful thing into smithereens; but Betty’s frugal soul revolted at the mere suggestion. Ready as she is to pauperize herself—and me—for new things, Betty would sooner part with an arm than suffer a loss on any article once in her possession.

Then, too, the image had to be crated and packed before any drayman would consent to handle it; so, pending the time it could be properly prepared for its journey to the auction rooms, we wrapped it in rugs and stood it in a secluded corner of the backyard, where it stared in hooded fury at the blank wall of the garage and attracted the speculative interest of all the small boys in the neighborhood.

I was forever going to take a day off and box the thing up properly, but like the man who pleaded inclement weather as an excuse for not mending his leaking roof when it was raining, and lack of necessity when the weather was fine, I delayed the operation from day to day, while the image stood unpacked, save for its covering of carpet.

“You’d better get someone out from the city to crate that thing today,” Betty advised me one morning about three weeks after the statue had been evicted from the house.

“Um-m?” I answered absently, engrossed in a combination of toast, coffee, and the morning’s paper.

“Yes, you would,” she repeated, “or I’ll be leaving the house. Look!” She pointed through the dining-room window to the backyard.

I looked, and set my paper down suddenly, swallowing several mouthfuls of air in quick succession as I did so. “It can’t be!” I ejaculated.

“But it is,” Betty insisted.

And it was. The image was nearer the house by twenty feet than it had been the night before.

“How the devil did it get there?” I asked querulously of nobody in particular.

“I—I d-don’t know,” Betty faltered. But from the shakiness of her voice and the wideness of her eyes I knew that she had her own opinion.

“Well, it can’t have walked there, you know,” I argued.

“N-no, of course not,” Betty agreed a trifle too readily.

I went out to investigate, not stopping to put on either hat or overcoat. There was no doubt about it; the thing had moved nearer the house since darkness the day before. “Some of the neighborhood boys must have decided to play a joke on us, and moved the thing during the night,” I explained, after looking the ground over. “They probably intended to set it up on the front lawn, but gave it up when they found out how heavy it was.”

“Yes, that must be it,” Betty concurred rather unsteadily. “It simply couldn’t have walked there itself,” she repeated, as if anxious to convince herself of the impossibility of any such thing having happened.

With the aid of our Swedish maid, who was as strong as any man and twice as clumsy, we replaced the statue and returned to the house, I to finish my interrupted breakfast, Betty to chirp happily over the details of the dance we were going to attend that night.

By the time I returned to the house that evening I had developed one of the worst head colds it had ever been my misfortune to acquire, due to my hatless excursion into the yard that morning. Every other breath was followed by a sniff, and each time I spoke the remark was punctuated by a sneeze. In such a condition my attendance at the dance was quite impossible.

“Another score I owe that cursed image,” I muttered as I discarded the fifth handkerchief I had used that day and unfolded the sixth.

Betty’s sympathy for me was matched only by her disappointment at missing the dance.

“Miss the dance?” I echoed as I brought my seventh handkerchief into play. “Who said you’d have to miss the dance? You can go with Frank and Edith Horton in their car, and they can drop you here on the way home.”

“And you won’t mind staying here alone, and won’t get sick, old dear?” Betty asked as she picked up the telephone to tell the Hortons to call for her. “Doctor Towbridge will be there tonight, I know, and I’ll bring him home with me, if you wish.”

I gave the simple homemade cough remedy I was compounding another vigorous shake. “If you bring any sawbones into this house tonight, Betty Haig,” I threatened, “I’ll surely do him bodily injury.” I added a bit more rock candy to the flask of whisky.

“You’ll be in a state of beastly intoxication when I get back, I know,” Betty said as she viewed my bottle of rock and rye dubiously, “but that doesn’t prevent your tying these ankle ribbons for me now.” And she put a slender, pink satin-shod foot on my knee.

I laced the ribbons about her trim ankles and kissed her left shoulder blade as I dropped her evening cloak over a party frock which, like Gungha Din’s uniform, “wasn’t nothing much before, and rather less than ‘arf o’ that be’ind.”

Betty gone, I changed my coat for a house jacket and settled myself on the lounge before the fire to read, smoke, and treat my cold with copious drafts of the mixture I had prepared.

Efficacious as rock and rye is in the cure of a cold, it has one great disadvantage; it has a tendency to make a man lose count of the number of doses he’s taken. After my seventh or ninth dose—I forget which—I ceased counting, and adhered to the simple formula of a dose to a sneeze—and sometimes I caught myself sneezing without legitimate excuse.

A couple of hours’ course of this treatment, combined with the sizzle and crackling of the logs burning in the fireplace, set me nodding.

“Ol’ stone image doesn’t like it out there in the cold. Ol’ image jealous ‘cause I wouldn’t let Betty worship it—wants to come back to house and get revenge on me,” I mumbled, half maudlin, as I dropped my pipe and book and thrust my head deep into a sofa pillow.

How long I slept I do not know. Certainly it must have been several hours, for when I opened my eyes and sat up with a start the fire had burned itself to a bed of dull ashes on the hearth, and a chill had crept through the living room. My reading lamp, too, had burned itself out, and save for the fitful gleam of a nearby streetlight, shining through the window, the room was in darkness.

Lying there in that no man’s land between sleep and waking, I heard the grandfather’s clock in the hall strike off the half-hour, and put my feet to the floor sleepily. “Half past something or other,” I yawned; “must be getting late. Wonder how soon Betty will be getting home?”

The crazy little French gilt clock that Betty keeps on the parlor mantel, and which is always half an hour slow, chimed twelve times nervously. That meant we were in the middle of that eerie hour which belongs neither to the day which is gone nor the day which is to come, and which, for want of a better term, we call midnight.

The fumes of the rock and rye I had taken earlier in the evening still hung in my brain, dulling my perceptions and clouding my vision a little. In the uncertain light from the streetlamp it seemed to me I detected a movement among the inanimate objects in the room.

I opened my mouth in another prodigious yawn, and flung my arms wide in a mighty stretch, striving to shake off the remnants of my sleep. Before either yawn or stretch were finished, however, I was sitting bolt upright on the couch, listening to the sound which came to me from the veranda. It was a slow, heavy, scraping, thumping sort of noise; the kind that would be produced by the dragging of a heavy weight across the floor, or the rolling of a ponderous chest, or the walking of some great-footed animal.

Thump, thump, thump, the footsteps—if they were footsteps—sounded on the planks of the porch, around the corner of the house, across the width of the piazza, up to the very door of the vestibule. Then a silence, ten times more ominous than the noise itself.

The breath in my lungs and throat seemed suddenly impregnated with nitrous fumes, strangling and burning me at once, and tiny globules of cold perspiration seeped out upon my scalp and the palms of my hands as I sat there in the dark, resolutely closing my mind against the thought of what waited outside the door.

“B-r-r-ring!” the shrill clamor of the doorbell cut in on my terrified vigil. I jumped up with a relieved grin. Doorbells are comforting things to have about at such times; there is something reassuringly modern and human about them.

I got to my feet almost cheerfully and reached for the electric switch. My groping fingers found it readily enough but no flood of warm, yellow light followed their pressure. As frequently happens, the current was off.

In darkness, then, I shuffled along the hall to the front door.

That vague, nameless horror we all feel at times when entering a dark room alone was on me as I fumbled with the knob. Very cautiously I put back the curtain from the glass panel in the door and peeped into the shadowy vestibule. There was nothing to be seen.

“Humph!” I grunted. “Nobody there. Ears must have been playing a trick on me; bell didn’t ring at all.” Emboldened by the emptiness of the vestibule, I swung the door wide.

“Who’s there?” I called, feeling quite sure that my challenge would go unanswered.

A moment later I regretted my rashness. Just within the door, dimly outlined against the gray darkness of the outer night, crouched an ungainly, squat figure. Its staring eyes glared with a hellish phosphorescence; its ivory tusks gleamed from writhing, blood-red lips; its hideous painted face twisted in a grimace of deadly hatred.

“Why, it—it—it’s the image!” I gibbered fatuously.

It was the image. The same image that had slain poor little Chang; the same stone monster that had forced Betty to worship it; yet it was not the same. Its loathsome, bloated face changed expression; it moved; it was alive! Shaken in a very palsy of fear, I shrank back into the hall.

Swift as my retreat was, it was not quick enough. With a swaying, ungainly bound, the thing was upon me. Great hands, cruel and relentless as the coils of a serpent, closed round my neck, choking the breath from me; huge, fiery eyes glared vengefully into mine; long, gleaming tusks were gnashing at my throat, seeking the living blood in my veins.

With arms and legs and stiffened back I strained against the monster, striving to unclasp the cruel hands throttling me, pushing vainly against the terrible embrace which drew me nearer, ever nearer, the champing white teeth which flashed from the misshapen face so near mine.

As I fought against the accursed thing crushing me in its relentless grip, I thought wildly, “This is how poor Chang died,” and I braced my knee against its swollen belly.

Cold, acid sweat stood out upon my forehead and rolled down into my eyes; my lungs were bursting with the air imprisoned within them; great, sonorous gongs seemed booming in my ears; lights flashed before my eyes, and the walls of the vestibule seemed toppling in upon me.

The image and I swayed back and forth in a death grapple, went down; there was a crash, a blinding flash of light, my hands relaxed their grip on the stone shoulders, I was deathly sick at my stomach—

“Bring me another cold rag; he’ll be all right in a minute,” Doctor Towbridge’s voice sounded close beside me, and his firm, capable hands replaced a cold-water pack on my forehead.

I sat up and stared about me. I was lying on the couch in the living room. Doctor Towbridge was bending over me, and a very frightened Betty stood behind him, a cloth saturated with cold water in her hand.

“Young man,” Doctor Towbridge bent his sternest professional look upon me, “next time you feel inclined to cheat an honest physician out of his honest fee don’t risk a case of alcoholic poisoning trying to drink up all the rock and rye in town.”

“But I wasn’t drunk,” I expostulated; “that cursed image—”

“Yes, yes, we know all about that, too. We found it broken to pieces in the vestibule, and you’ve done nothing but rave about it for the past half-hour. The neighbors’ boys evidently carried out their design of putting the thing against your front door, and when you went to the vestibule it fell through the door and was broken. Too bad, too; it was a valuable piece of bric-a-brac, wasn’t it?”

I looked at them out of the corner of my eye. “Yes,” I answered meekly. If they already thought me drunk, what would they think if I were to tell them how the image really came to be broken? “Yes,” I agreed, “it cost us a lot of money; but I think we can worry along without it.”

Doctor Towbridge may have been right. Perhaps I did take too much rock and rye that night; maybe the neighbors’ boys did put the stone image in the doorway. Possibly my fight with the grisly thing was all the figment of an alcohol-inspired dream. But there is one thing I’d like the doctor to explain—if he can. For a week after that horrible night there were great purple bruises on my throat, where I had believed the monster’s terrible hands had been.

HELP! Help!”

Roused suddenly from a sound sleep, Mr. Benham sat up in bed, half-awake, awaiting with tense nerves that repetition of the cry which would prove it a reality, not an intensely vivid dream voice.

Ah, there it was again! An unutterable awe thrilled him, so terrible was the note of horror and agony in the voice.

“Help! Ah-h-h—God!” Jerked out in a kind of smothered gasp, the words died away, leaving an indescribably dreadful silence that was heavy with intangible premonitions of evil.

Broad awake by this time, the startled old bachelor sprang out of bed, flooded the room with light, and reached for his dressing gown. In a moment he had slipped it on and thrust his feet into a pair of slippers.

Unless he was vastly mistaken, that agonized midnight cry for assistance came from the apartment of the Orville Rodmans, across the corridor from his rooms. And it was borne in upon him that it was Mrs. Rodman’s voice he had heard, for although he was not personally acquainted with the lady he had often heard her voice, which was an exceptionally sweet and well-modulated one.

Thirty seconds could not have elapsed before he was knocking at the door of the Rodmans’ apartment, his heart almost stopping under the weight of the ominous silence that reigned. He had almost persuaded himself that she had called out in the throes of a nightmare, when he heard a suffocated moan that fell weak and stifled upon his straining ears. What was happening behind those closed doors? His alarm and apprehension grew until he could bear the suspense no longer; from loud raps he began to pound with bare fists upon the door. Then he grasped the knob, twisting and pulling at it as he strove to open the door, which appeared to be securely locked. No response came from within; that ghastly silence still bore down upon him, heavy with midnight terror. He was on the point of seeking other help when something happened.

The key grated in the lock—the door swung open slowly, as if under the impetus of a gust of icy air that swept out upon him with almost physical force and tangibility, pushing him to one side as though he had been a featherweight. As it enveloped him with its frosty chill, he found himself shivering with what was more than physical cold; he experienced for a moment the uncanny sensation as of a malevolent presence that laughed at him evilly as he shrank before its unseen power. Terrible as was his momentary sensation, the stress of emotion in that cry he had heard a few seconds previous drew him across the threshold.

He touched the switch, which he knew was located beside the door in a position analogous to the switch in his own apartment, flooding the room and the adjoining corridor with a blaze of light. An icy chill, entirely out of place on such a mild autumn night, lingered in the still midnight air.

Benham looked up and down the corridor; there was no one in sight, and as no one had passed him, he entered the room, confident of meeting one of the Rodmans or their maid, for one of the three must have opened the door to him. To his bewilderment, the room was entirely empty. Upon the strangeness of this he did not ponder much at the moment, a1though he was to remember it afterward; the cry he had heard was sufficient warranty for him to make all possible haste.

The door of the bedroom, which adjoined the room he had entered, was closed. The kindly intruder hesitated but a moment, tapped lightly, then entered, touching the electric switch as he crossed the threshold. For a moment he was completely staggered; he had expected to meet someone in this room, but there appeared to be no one in the apartment. To be sure, there were signs of recent, very recent, occupancy; the trailing silk and filmy laces of a delicate negligee half covered a chaise longue, and upon the chiffonier Benham’s quick scrutiny observed a discarded collar and tie, presumably removed by young Rodman, whose other garments were neatly disposed on a chair beside a great wardrobe opposite the door Benham had just entered. The bachelor could have sworn there was no human being in the room, and against this he had to put the reality of the agonized cries he had heard in Clara Rodman’s peculiarly sweet, penetrating tones.

He looked about, stupefied to see nothing but the dresser, a chiffonier, tables, chairs, the wardrobe. Positively there was something uncanny about it. As he advanced into the middle of the room the great mirror in the wardrobe reflected his disheveled figure from head to foot; he could not help seeing it, although he did not want to look at it. To observe one’s self advancing to meet one at midnight just after receiving a severe shock to one’s nerves is a far from reassuring sight, he discovered. But he felt his eyes drawn toward the mirror with a magnetic attraction that he afterward realized was strangely uncanny.

And then—unexpectedly—from within the depths of the glass started up a figure! Mr. Benham felt cold perspiration starting out over his entire body at the shock of it. The face that regarded him was a man’s face with deep-set eyes, holding such a smile of triumphant malice that the bachelor gave audible expression to his own astonishment with a loud “Ugh!” as he whirled on his heel to encounter the individual who was glaring over his shoulder.

He turned. And then he stood rooted to the spot, his mouth wide-open, his eyes staring. alone in the room, as before! No one stood behind him or to either side of him. He sprang to the door, but there was no one in the next room. Then he realized that the mirror was not in a position to reflect anyone who stood in the doorway. He turned again to the glass to meet only his own astounded, mystified, and apprehensive eyes.

It was too much for Mr. Benham. He started for the door, and would have left the uncanny mystery to solve itself, had not a muffled, smothered sound as of faint, futile struggling near at hand met his ear. Once more he looked about him, drawing a deep breath to steady his jumping nerves. The mirror reflected his figure innocently enough. He looked at it as if daring it to play him another such scurvy trick, when the truth penetrated his mind in a blinding flash of intuition. Horror grasped at him with numbing hands as he rushed to the rescue.

The wardrobe was a fraud; the mirror was the front panel of a handsome but treacherous folding bed—and the bed was closed—and within it— His thoughts failed to operate further. He began to pull and tug with frantic haste at the terrible piece of furniture, his momentary uncanny, weird impression thrust to one side by his realization of the terrible truth and the necessity to keep a clear head. The bed had been firmly closed. As he pulled he was rewarded by another faint sound that told him life yet lingered in one or both of the victims of the treacherous mechanism.

At last he had it open; with a creaking reluctance, as of some horrid monster unwillingly disgorging its prey, it had come slowly down to the floor. The covers and the mattress had sunk to the head of the bed when it rose, almost completely cutting off the air from the unfortunate sleepers. Whether or not Benham was in time to resuscitate them he dared not think, but he did not venture to leave them, knowing that every moment was precious. He drew the bedding anxiously from the huddled bodies lying so inert and motionless, and placed an eager ear at the breast of Clara Rodman and then at her husband’s. The woman’s heart fluttered faintly, but Benham’s soul was sick at the confirmation of his misgivings with respect to young Rodman; the poor young fellow was beyond mortal assistance.

Memories of a treatise on artificial breathing came dimly to the rescuer’s mind as he applied himself actively to restoring the beautiful young woman who lay there so pale and lovely in her intimate disarray, and his exertions were amply rewarded by a sigh which breathed from her parted lips with weak plaintiveness; he redoubled his efforts. Presently the long, curving lashes lifted languidly and her great dark eyes looked into Benham’s at first without recognition. As consciousness returned, a burning blush spread over her face at the realization that it was a man, and strange man at that, who was bending solicitously over her.

With a sudden access of nervous strength, she drew the disturbed coverings about her, the while her melancholy gaze questioned Benham’s with a dread beyond description.

“Who are you?” she murmured weakly. “What are you doing here? What has happened?”

“I’m Jasper Benham, your neighbor. I heard your call for help; found you shut up in this folding bed. Don’t look!” he cried out with futile warning as she stirred, pricked by sudden misgivings, to look for her husband.

She disregarded his command. Weakly she turned, to see the lifeless form of her husband. Her eyes wild with desperate fear, she reached out, caught that limp arm, pulled at it anxiously.

“Orville! Orville! Speak to me! Speak to your Clara! Oh, he does not reply; he is deaf to my voice! God have pity! Then he is dead!”

She fell back in merciful unconsciousness. Benham picked up her slender body and carried it to the chaise longue throwing the negligee over it; he dared not leave her in that treacherous bed while he went to rouse the maid, who, he now recalled, slept in the servants’ quarters. He phoned the house superintendent, informed him of the tragedy, and was finally able to leave the apartment, leaving the young widow in the capable hands of her devoted maid.

He returned to his own rooms, but found it impossible to go to bed. Every time he looked at his eminently well-behaved bedstead it was to imagine it rearing up in the night, tossing him out upon the floor, and trampling him as a trained elephant crushes a condemned criminal. The impression was so strong that he got out his pipe and determined to make himself comfortable in a morris chair for the rest of the night.

His thoughts reverted persistently to a particular incident of the night’s tragic experience that, the more he pondered it, the more inexplicable it became. This was the fact of the locked door that had been opened to him so mysteriously. Benham could have sworn that the door was locked when he tried the handle. That he had heard the sound of the key in the lock before the door opened, he now recollected with perfect distinctness. It followed logically that someone had unlocked and opened the door to him, as his own hands were not on the knob at the time.

He began to reflect the smallest incident, striving to overlook nothing, as even the smallest thing might serve to throw some light on what now appeared to be inexplicable. There had been no one but himself in the corridor, either before or after the opening of the door. He had glanced around the room as soon as he had crossed the threshold, pushing the door back against the wall instinctively as he observed no one in the room ahead of him. There was no possible chance that the owner of the hands which had unlocked the door could have slipped past him and into the corridor; nor could this person have had time to conceal himself in the Rodman apartment in the interim between the opening of the door and Benham’s abrupt entrance.

Benham hated to draw the only inference possible under the circumstances, but could not avoid doing so; either the door had not been locked—and he would have staked anything that it must have opened before his blows and shakings had it not been locked—or the person who unlocked it was invisible to the human eye. This conclusion arrived at, the old bachelor sat up straight in his chair, drew a long breath, and unconsciously threw a searching look over his shoulder as though to satisfy himself that he was quite alone; it was not a pleasant thought to entertain—the thought that the invisible might have accompanied him back to his own apartment! The paradoxical side of his action did not strike Benham at the moment.

There were other phenomena to be considered that bore upon his conclusions, also strongly in favor of the supernatural. He remembered that upon the door’s opening he had felt the chill breath of a deadly cold wind that had pushed upon him with almost tangible force. That there had been no good reason for a draft Benham was positive; he knew that the windows in the room he had entered were closed, and the bedroom door had been closed until his hand opened it, so that the wide-open windows there could not have been the originating cause of the current of air which had been so strong that it had affected him powerfully at the time.

Benham was not overimaginative, nor was he superstitious. He would much have preferred to have reasoned out the entire occurrence, uncanny as it now began to appear, on strictly material grounds. But this satisfaction was denied him; by no possible twisting of the facts could he account for the unlocking and opening of the door. And then— He laid down his pipe, for a sudden tremor shook him uncontrollably; he had remembered yet another thing which in the moment’s excitement he had thrust to one side mentally. Who and what was the man he had seen in the mirror looking over his shoulder with such malevolent triumph? Arrived at this point, Benham could not have slept a wink for the remainder of the night had he been offered a million dollars for a short nap. Who was that man? He could not deny having seen the reflection, and where there is a reflection there must be a solid body to cast it. Had there, then, been a man in the Rodman apartment, an evilly disposed stranger? The expression of that face distorted with malevolence—horrors! The mere recollection of it was disturbing. Yet had there been a man behind him, a man so close as to have appeared actually looking over his shoulder, how was it that when Benham turned briskly on his heel there was nobody behind him? No human being could have left the room without making a sound or being seen as he fled in that instant of time between Benham’s discovery of the reflection and his almost instantaneous glance behind him. Could it have been his own imagination? He denied this to himself, much as he disliked to give credence to what he had always looked upon as superstition and overcredulity.

Dawn found Benham still puffing at his pipe, still pondering the strange and uncanny occurrences of the night, no nearer to a solution than when he had begun to puzzle over them. With morning arrived the coroner, who, when he learned from Mrs. Rodman of the bachelor’s share in her rescue, dropped in at Benham’s apartment to hear his recital. He listened to the details abstractedly until Benham diffidently mentioned the strange event of the door that had apparently been unlocked and opened to him without human intervention.

“That’s odd, the door opening that way,” observed he, his forehead wrinkling. “Are you sure no one passed you into the hall? Are you positive the door was locked? Did you look behind it?”

Benham went over his calculations of the previous night, this time orally.

“The Rodman apartment is on the fifth floor,” the coroner mused. “The fire escape does not give on any room that could have been reached in that brief moment by any human being. Moreover, every window was securely fastened on the inside, except those of the bedroom, which open on a deep, wide shaft. No human agency could have opened that door,” he summed up reluctantly. “And as Mrs. Rodman also confirms your insistence about the door’s having been locked—” He shrugged his shoulders helplessly.

“I wonder if her first husband could have had anything to do with the tragedy,” he suddenly remarked, after a moment’s silent thought. “William Tolliver was mighty shrewd when alive, I’ve heard. Looks to me as though he’d lost nothing of his smartness by dying! I don’t know yet just what he may have had to do in this case, but I have a strong intuition that he’s mixed up in it somehow.”

“I didn’t know that Mrs. Rodman had had a previous marital experience,” ejaculated Benham.

“Tolliver divorced her for running off with young Rodman.”

Benham’s interest increased. He urged the coroner to share with him whatever knowledge he might have of Clara Rodman’s life, in the hope that it might throw some light on the occurrences of the past night. Agreeable to this request, the old bachelor was soon in possession of the following facts:

At seventeen her dying father urged upon her what appeared to him a most advantageous marriage with Tolliver, who loved her madly. His life seemed bound up in her. He spent his spare moments constructing the most charming bits of furniture for her and surrounded her with comforts, even luxuries, such as she had never known before. But one day, while she complacently accepted the passionate adoration of her elderly husband, appeared Orville Rodman—rich, young, romantic, handsome, aristocratic—all, in a word, that the elderly husband was not.

Clara was flattered, then fluttered, by Rodman’s attentions. And one day Tolliver, who had grown keenly suspicious, interrupted an interview that set his head whirling and almost stopped the beating of his heart. He left the room without a single word, a single glance backward that would have shown the rash young people what his sentiments might be. Clara was terrified, knowing her husband to be a man of fierce, implacable nature; she yielded at once to pleadings which up to this time she had resisted, and fled with Rodman.

Tolliver discovered them after several months, and offered to divorce his erring wife upon one condition; she and young Rodman must swear on the Bible to accept and use the wedding gift he would make them. It was assuredly a strange and unheard-of proposition.

Clara, womanlike, was anxious to regain, as far as possible, the social position she had recklessly risked; in order, then, to be free to marry the man for whom she had thrown all aside, she urged upon Rodman to accept the proposition. He yielded; they took the oath, and Tolliver kept his promise. In due course of time Clara was freed.

Rodman married her at once; to do him justice, it had not been other than a serious matter with him from the beginning. He took her abroad for a couple of years. Upon their return to the apartment he had leased, they found a letter awaiting them at Rodman’s solicitor’s—the fatal folding bed, made by the hands of the injured husband, was at their disposal, subject to the terms of their oath. Imagine the subtle irony of the gift! The young man declared, oath or no oath, he would have none of it. The pair came perilously near their first disagreement, for Clara persisted—in spite of her shrinking—in sticking conscientiously to the agreement; something of her former husband’s powerfully passionate nature seemed to influence her in holding to her decision. Tears on her part, a shrug of the shoulders from Rodman, and the unwelcome gift was installed in their chamber.

What a gift was that! What must have been the reflections of the pair who had gained their happiness over the broken heart and the violated hearthstone of another human being, as they shared that strange gift—thinking, as they surely could not resist, of the donor of the gift. William Tolliver must have been amply revenged upon the despoiler of his home and happiness night after night. The two young people became more and more reserved with each other as the days and nights, equally wretched, passed. Orville began haunting his clubs again, returning at night as though drawn by a subtly powerful magnet to toss and reflect, to grind his teeth, to toss again. Clara grew melancholy, and her maid often found her dissolved in tears and told about it in the servants’ quarters.

“After the inquest there will be more to discuss,” the coroner hinted darkly. He was quite right; the inquest brought out the final act of the tragedy and painted, strangely enough, to the interposition of Tolliver, who had been dead several days before young Rodman’s death.

The maid testified that Mrs. Rodman had received a letter which the girl had not scrupled to read when she had discovered it in her mistress’ bureau drawer. It was from William Tolliver, and was in a lofty but terrible strain. It warned her to prepare her soul for sudden death; it bade her tell her husband that he had but a short time left to enjoy that which he had deliberately stolen from another man; it told her to watch for the announcement of his death, as it would be an omen to her that her own would follow shortly.

Within a week a newspaper announced the ex- husband’s tragic death at his own hands.

The maid declared that after the receipt of this news the pair acted like people from whose shoulders a great weight had been lifted. They toasted each other at dinner, laughing. She heard them discussing the discardal of the dead man’s unwelcome gift. Orville then asked his wife if she did not consider herself absolved of her promise, now that “he” was dead. She replied that she feared him more dead than alive. Then she had burst out sobbing, crying: “Orville, Orville, swear that you do not regret your love for me! Tell me that it has compensated for everything!”

Mr. Rodman, said the girl, had soothed his wife with caresses. It was nearly eleven that night before she—the maid—had been dismissed, and she slept soundly until wakened by Mr. Benham after the tragedy.

It was impossible to question Mrs. Rodman; the unhappy young widow was in such a hysterical condition that her personal physician refused point- blank to answer for the consequences if she were questioned by the coroner at that time.

Benham discussed the subject thoughtfully with the coroner that afternoon in his own apartment. The man declared that in his opinion all the suspicion pointed at the first husband, although of course the verdict must be “Death by accident.”

“I wonder if we cannot take a look at that bed?” inquired the bachelor musingly. “Mrs. Rodman is in a private hospital, and the maid is in charge of the apartment. I have a theory that I’d like to subject to proof.”

The two men acted on Benham’s proposition, and ten minutes later had entered the dread chamber of the tragedy, shutting out the maid with her curious eyes. Benham felt strangely averse to any more witnesses than were strictly necessary. Together he and the coroner went over the bed inch by inch, letting it down cautiously. It was a curious and beautiful piece of work, ingeniously conceived, and handsomely executed. It appeared, when closed, to be a wardrobe, in the door of which was set a large full-length mirror. Perhaps it was, as a whole, a bit too heavy for a lady’s boudoir, and to Benham—after the horrible accident—there seemed something almost sinister in the thing.

He exchanged a mutually distrustful look with the coroner, and the two men pulled the bedding aside, exposing the springs, as with a single impulse. The hinges on which the bed turned were concealed in cunningly contrived metal boxes; Benham discovered that there were two at the foot of the bed from which ran long rods that connected with those at the top.

“What on earth are these for?” he said aloud. “The hinges of the bed must be at the top, where it folds up. I believe there is something diabolical about this bed!” He called to the maid for a hammer. Then he beat and battered at the round, well-oiled mechanisms until the head of the boxes screwed off, disclosing springs—some kind of clockwork arrangement inside.

Suddenly he began to see light. He backed off as though his hands had inadvertently come in contact with something horrible. He looked at the coroner, who stared back in dawning comprehension of something unutterably unbelievable. Mutually impelled by the same thought, they destroyed the mechanism and replaced the metal cap, laid the bedding in place, and pushed the terrible instrument of a dead man’s vengeance up into place again.

And then the bachelor gave a sharp exclamation. “Come here! Stand where I am standing,” he directed.

The coroner took his place before the mirror, started back with an echo of Benham’s cry. At the angle from which he looked, with the light striking the mirror from the side, he saw the distinct life- sized features of a man peering at him from over his shoulder. Intuitively, although he had never seen a likeness of him, he knew that it was the face of William Tolliver, who, with compressed lips, looked at him malevolently from deep-set eyes under shaggy eyebrows, from out the depths of the mirror.

How it had been accomplished, by what trick of the glazier’s art or the artisan’s skill, the thing had been done; staring with implacable hate from the mirror was the face of the man who had been so deeply wronged, the man who had so horribly revenged himself. No wonder the bed remained always with the mirror concealed! No wonder that the Rodmans nightly tossed and muttered, turning almost with loathing from arms that had formerly been so eager to embrace! No wonder they had discharged one girl who had put the bed down in spite of prohibitive orders, in the mistaken attempt to improve the appearance of the room!

The dead man had avenged himself horribly; he had kept his memory fresh before the miserable pair day and night in the very privacy of their nuptial chamber, with a refinement of torture that only a bitter and passionate nature could have devised. To this day Benham cannot decide whether or not the angry spirit of the wronged and embittered husband had not gone that night to gloat over the doom of those whom he had warned, with sarcastic prophecy, of their near-impending death? Had it been he who, unseen, had left the scene of his final triumph so hastily, leaving open to Benham as he went the door of that desolated home? The bachelor shudders at his own uncertainty.

But he was not surprised at hearing that Mrs. Rodman had entered a nursing sisterhood, which she had endowed with the vast properties left her by her husband’s death.

I.

I HAD always regarded Brasset as a curious kind of human duck, a strange mixture of somnolence and brain, but it wasn’t until his death that I really believed him a trifle mad. The newspapers at the time chronicled the passing of Professor Henry Layterman Brasset, with the usual accompanying stuff from their “morgues,” and ample tribute was paid to his splendid research work in the Congo. He was tireless and energetic and original. He labored in many fields. In fact, to this man the world owes the famous Brasset rubber compound for tires, a preparation that has saved the United States government thousands of dollars in equipment maintenance. And when he died there was much sincere sorrow in the scientific world.

The medical certificate stated that death was “from natural causes,” the press agreed with the doctors, the public believed what they were told, and so the world knew nothing to the contrary. But there were two men who were in a position to prove at the time that the professor’s death was distinctly unnatural; one was Taylor, who will be remembered as the brilliant editor of The Meteor— the other is myself.

For ten years a strict silence has been kept by us about the truth of the Brasset tragedy, but I think, and Taylor thinks with me, that the time has come to present the facts. It may possibly do some ethical good, and now that Brasset has become almost a myth no harm can result from lifting the curtain.

I am writing of events that took place in the fall of 1906. We had been dining together— Brasset and Taylor and I—and I was in particularly fine fettle, owing to the unexpected acceptance of a set of articles I had ground out on India. In addition, Taylor had commissioned me—I was the gayest of free lances in those days—to write up some special matter on rubber, which commodity was then all the rage. Hence this dinner with Brasset. During the dessert the talk ranged over a dozen varied topics, and later on I recalled the circumstances which led to becoming acquainted with the professor.

I first met Brasset at Nice, when he was on the eve of being swindled in a particularly complete style by the fascinating Nelly Forsyth, and I had the satisfaction of spoiling little Nelly’s pretty game once and for all. Brasset seemed profoundly grateful about this, though it wasn’t really much to bother over, and thereafter we were good friends. Nelly, by the way—but that’s another tale.

The next time I ran across the academic chappie was in London, at the Albert Hall, where I was covering the annual meeting of the Royal Geographical Society. This was some three years after the Nice episode—the professor was wont to say, in his dry way, after the Nice un-Nice episode—and I must confess I had partially forgotten all about Nelly. But the thin, metallic tones snapping from the platform brought back a good deal.

His address was quite the most interesting event in a most uninteresting program, and he told his audience—which was composed of six parts professor and two parts nondescript and the press—a few things concerning rubber, its preparations, its values, its uses, where it comes from, and what is done with it, and talked so learnedly that we all felt quite expert on the subject as a consequence.

“You are the gentleman I met at Nice?” he said, when I went up to him at the conclusion of the meeting “Under—well, rather distressing circumstances. Am I right?” I told him he was, and congratulated him on his excellent memory.

Well, on this particular night, when we were at dinner at the Savoy, over our cigars, Professor Brasset suddenly switched the current of conversation from Lloyd George to spiders, and on this peculiar topic he waxed discursive. He said he had been devoted to spiders all his life. “They give me more delight than perhaps you imagine.” We stared. He rambled out about African spiders and English domestic spiders and spiders from the Andalusian fastnesses; he told us about spiders that feed on small sparrows and spiders that will eat man’s flesh, if they can get it.

“I have seen spiders,” he said, “that would— but possibly you gentlemen would be sufficiently interested in our subject matter to see some rather curious specimens.”

“I should,” Taylor replied, and when I nodded confirmation the professor capped it by using and leading the way to the street, where a taxi transferred us, in fairly adequate style, to the Brasset flat.

Brasset was accounted eccentric because he had an aversion to entertaining. To my knowledge, he rarely invited a man to his apartments, though he was generally eager to dine a chap at the club or accept the hospitality of others. He lived with a manservant, and as he laboriously opened the door he explained with much prolixity that the man was away for two weeks “No wife, by my own choice, and no man, by his,” he chuckled.

We soon made ourselves at home. He had some drinkable whisky and some ripping cigars, and we talked and smoked and drank for a couple of hours, and while Taylor and Brasset argued some dull point about another professor’s book, I found myself wondering why Brasset had made the concrete rule of not inviting people to see him, except on state occasions. The explanation turned up a few minutes later.

“Would you care to see my spiders now?” the professor inquired politely, and, without waiting for a reply, led us to a door of a room at the other end of the apartment.

The door was painted a dull brown, almost a russet brown, and nailed along the bottom of the door were some thick, even pieces of felt. In addition to a Yale lock, it was fastened with two strong padlocks, caught between staples. While the old fellow was bending over his series of “locks, bolts, and bars” I glanced at Taylor, and he at me, quizzically.

Soon the padlocks were off, and then Brasset turned the key in the main lock, and as he did so he called out something in an unknown tongue. I think it was Arabic, but that’s only a weird guess on my part. Anyway, it was as though the sound of his voice had unlocked something in the room, concurrently with the unlocking of the door by his key, for no sooner had he shouted than we heard a sudden and strange noise inside.

I can best describe that noise by saying that it seemed like the tapping on the floor of a thousand dead men’s finger tips. I had never heard anything quite like it. Said Brasset:

“I must warn you both that on no account must you speak while in the room. If you do, I cannot be held responsible. So long as you are quiet all will be well. Come!”

He pushed open the door and entered, and we after him; then he closed the door carefully and quickly behind us. The primary and dominant impression was that we had, by some quixotic mishap, strayed into an undertaker’s embalming room after a big railroad accident I felt disgustingly sick. The stench was awful. But in a few, seconds the nausea fell away from me. Taylor, who was never what you would call robust, seemed inclined to faint, for he turned deathly pale, but with an effort pulled himself together, too. Brasset alone was unmoved. Freely with the unautomatic certainty of a man who feels wholly familiar with his surroundings, he moved into the room saying something in his gun-metal tones and the cluttering, rasping, patting noise increased!

We stood rocklike, while Brasset went right across the room, still keeping up his weird chant, his hands outstretched toward some object. What it was we could not see, for the room was dark.

Suddenly he stopped. Shrill and sharp the chant pierced the air, and a funny feeling began to tingle in my hands. I don t know if it was fear; I don’t know whether Taylor was feeling the same, but I do know that we kept a rigid silence, remembering Brasset’s injunction.

The silly song rose into a minor strain, we heard Brasset clap his hands together very softly, and then a light blazed. I say “blazed” because it seemed like a blast of yellow flame in that warm black room. In reality it was an electric bulb, shrouded carefully with dull, brownish paper So the room appeared as obscure as the professor’s native melody. But what light there was was amply sufficient.

Brasset knelt on the floor, singing his damned Arabic or whatever it was, and on his hands, his knees, his shoulders, all over the floor, on the walls, on the ceiling, in thick nests, in ones and twos and clusters and dozens, were spiders.

No normal man objects to seeing a spider once in a while under ordinary conditions, or even a couple of them, but I have to confess that the sight of a university professor in a dress suit, who had come straight from a respectable dinner at the Savoy, almost smothered by countless spiders, sickened me.

The things padded about the floor, ran up and down Brasset’s legs, pulled their way through his hair walked across his face, hid in his beard, sat on his nose, crawled in and out of his ears, and generally nested on him. The creatures who could not get near him he picked up by the handful, while they appeared to register content, as the saying goes. It may have been genuine affection on their part and genuine regard on Brasset’s part. God preserve me from such affection!

The chant went on unremittingly, and then Brasset rose, shaking himself free from his ugly pets, and held out something indistinct in his right hand. We looked closely, and saw that it was a little dead mouse. Taylor’s breath came and went in quivering gasps which he tried to stifle.

The professor rapped out a long and twisted phrase in the jargon which the spiders seemed to understated and they ran up his body in masses and along the outstretched arm. toward the mouse. I tried to count them, but my brain refused to work; at the lowest computation there must have been a thousand spiders on the man. And there were others in the room.

They reached the mouse. Brasset’s hand was hidden behind a palpitating, seething cloud of dark bodies and countless legs; one or two bright red legs here and there; two or three of the spiders uttered faint sighs, and we heard the mouse eaten.

That was the last straw for Taylor, for he turned abruptly and said in very healthy and unmistakable English: “Good God! Let’s get out of this!” and stumbled to the door.

Instantly there was a silence, and you could literally feel it. The spiders suspended their meal and appeared to listen. Brasset jerked, under his breath, “Quick!” and we both made for the door. Brasset followed us. He shut and locked the door and from within we could hear them at the door, for all the world like thousands of clay pellets being thrown at the brown panels. They were trying to get through.

“It is unsafe to speak in there,” said Brasset as we walked to the living room for a stiff drink. “They become exceedingly fierce if you say anything to them, unless one uses the particular dialect I employ.”

“Which is——” I questioned. But Brasset was lost in thought.

II.

FEW weeks later I wanted to ask the professor about a point in rubber, and one morning I rang the bell at his apartment. I rang it six times as matter of fact without response. There was no sign of either professor or valet.

I telephoned Taylor at the paper, and told him he had better meet me at Brasset’s flat. While I was waiting I hunted up the janitor of the building, but he proved as stupid as the race of men foreordained to be janitors, and all he had to say was that the valet—only he termed it valett—had not returned, and he knew nothing of the professor.

Taylor came presently, and, after talking over the situation, we decided to risk interference and get into the apartment. We allayed the janitor with a durable piece of fiction, to the effect that we wanted to see the place with a view to renting it, and a tip evoked a duplicate key. We succeeded in ridding ourselves of him for the time being, and entered. Perhaps it was ominous, but we both turned instinctively toward the room with the dull- brown door.

I called “Brasset!” and as the noise of my shout died away we heard the familiar cluttering, padding sound from inside. “Brasset!” There was no response. “Brasset!”

“He’s in there,” I said to Taylor, and cursed myself for saying it, for something told me I wasn’t far wrong. Taylor nodded.

“Burst the door in,” he said.

I thought to show how absurd his remark was by pointing at the padlocks, when I realized the padlocks were off. I tried the handle of the door. The door was unlocked!

After that it was just a matter of simple discovery. The professor’s body lay on the floor, and the yellow light, which had evidently been on for some days, showed the state of things in their hideous completeness.

What had once been flesh was now a chaos of spiders. The clothes hung in patches and threads about the bones, and only a minute piece of skin remained. Along the floor, toward us, the intruders, sidled hundreds of spiders, some fat and bloated, some thin, but all bent on the one objective.

We banged the door to and went out into the sunshine.

ONLY once in my life did I experience contact with the supernatural, and the incident is still inexplicable, looked at from the materialistic standpoint. It happened in connection with the death of a close friend of mine, Jack Lindsay, the artist.

Jack was possessed of a stubbornly determined nature; he never gave up anything once begun, no matter how difficult the circumstances in connection with it. He was especially determined in regard to his painting; he often remarked, with a touch of quite natural melancholy in character with the observation, that death alone would stop him from reaching the highest point in his artistic career before he was thirty. He was about twenty-seven when he said that.

In discussing Jack’s dogged grit with a common friend, Doctor Wilmott, the latter said: “If Jack lives to be forty he will already have become famous.” When I replied that Jack had declared it his intention to make a name for himself by the time he was thirty, our friend assented thoughtfully. “I believe he will make the attempt,” he granted; “but he has no time to lose.”

The last time I saw Jack was just before he went away on one of his frequent sketching trips. When he mentioned his itinerary, I found he was passing within a few miles of a city where a cousin of mine was living, and I penciled a few words of informal introduction on the reverse of one of my cards, which, however, as afterward transpired, he never presented. He left me, apparently in high spirits, and although I heard nothing from him for a couple of months, I thought nothing of it because he was a notoriously poor correspondent.

Then I received a notice that shocked me to the soul. The police of a certain small town had found a dead body, presumably his, in the woods, where it had lain for weeks. Their supposition was that the young artist had taken his own life, as there were no marks of violence upon the body, and apparently nothing had been removed from the pockets. My card had served to identify him. His sketching paraphernalia in its entirety had been located at the home of a farmer of the neighborhood, Pete Grimstead, one of those “poor but honest” countrymen in which America abounds.

The farmer declared that several weeks back the artist had stopped at the house for something to eat; that after lunch he asked permission to leave his sketching outfit, as he wished to take a stroll through the woods without it. Grimstead had put the things into the “front room,” which, as anyone who is at all acquainted with country people knows, is rarely used by them. Naturally they had forgotten all about the things until the hue and cry was made upon the discovery of the artist’s body, when they had immediately notified the police and given up the dead man’s effects.

Both the farmer and his wife had declared that they were glad to get rid of the things. Asked why, they said they didn’t know, but they felt there was something queer about them. And they did seem relieved to have the last vestige of the unfortunate man’s visit removed from their house.

I did not like the idea of Jack’s having committed suicide on the verge of a promising career; it was quite out of character with what I knew of him. But Grimstead and his wife were well regarded in their vicinity, and there seemed no reason to suspect that anything other than suicide or an accident of some kind had happened to poor Jack. However, the thought clung to me and persisted in obtruding itself the rest of the day when I was back at the country hotel, that there was much more back of the affair than appeared on the surface. The coroner persisted in his belief that it was a case of suicide, although I begged him to let it go down on the records as death by accident.

You know how it is when you suddenly feel an antipathy to a person without the slightest foundation for your feelings. Well, I simply “felt” that Grimstead and his wife knew more about Jack’s tragic death than they had related, and the more I thought it over the more strongly was I convinced in my intuition. There was something I didn’t like about the hanging head of the farmer; something shifty in the wife’s eyes and unpleasant in the constant restless rubbing and twisting of her thin, gnarled hands. I determined to ferret out the secret hidden back of their apparently simple story.

Jack’s effects were turned over to me, in lieu of relatives, and I put them in my room at the hotel. That night I set up the easel and put the landscape on it; I wanted to look at my friend’s last piece of work while I strove to untangle the threads of thought which threatened to become hopelessly knotted. I lit my pipe and sat back comfortably, reflecting sadly on poor Jack’s sudden and tragic death, the while my eyes took in the salient features of the landscape before me.

It was a carelessly executed bit of work, quite unfinished as yet on the right-hand side. The left side showed a bit of country with woods beyond and plowed fields toward the center. At the right appeared the roughly sketched-in outlines of a house. And it was upon this house that my attention became fixed as I smoked and reflected. Perhaps I grew drowsy; perhaps it was a case of auto- suggestion; perhaps it was the powerful will of my friend projected no one knows how. Whatever it was, the longer I looked at that house the clearer the outlines grew. Such is the magic of the imagination that it seemed to me that an invisible brush was working over the house, dashing in a bit of color here, a touch there, until the whole house stood out clearly before my eyes.

I realized that I was hardly normal; that my long reflection on my friend’s death had resulted in my becoming half drowsy, half languid; but I dreamily contemplated the picture, watching it come up, as it were, under my intent gaze, from a mere sketch into a finished piece of work. All that I saw I attributed to the vivid working of an overstimulated imagination, but at last something happened in that picture which by no means could have been attributed to imagination. A light sprang up within the house and shone through one of the windows!

II.

I RUBBED my eyes, leaned forward, taking my pipe from my lips, and looked intently, incredulously. There was no mistake about it; there was an actual flicker of light from behind one of the half-closed shutters of a window toward the rear of the house. I pinched myself vigorously and felt the pain with waking nerves, but the light did not fade away; it shone steadily on.

I whipped the picture from the easel and turned it over. It was an ordinary canvas, such as Jack had always used. A cold chill began to play down my spinal column as I returned the picture to the easel. I realized that there was in truth something unearthly about my friend’s landscape; the farmer and his wife had been correct in their assertions that there was something supernatural and queer about it. I did not blame them for wishing to be rid of such a strange and unusual painting.

As for myself, I felt certain that there was something more than appeared upon the surface of this supernatural manifestation. I held myself rigidly alert, watching that strange and weird lighting of a painted landscape. I was aware that there was a Presence in the room with me and that there was something, some message, which it desired to impart; but while I held myself open for the intuitional reception of such a message, I could not restrain the cold shiver that went over me at the realization of the propinquity of the discarnate, although I realized that my old friend could mean no harm to me.

I kept my eyes upon that mysteriously lighted window. As I watched, suddenly the door of the house seemed to open, and the light from within streamed out along the path before it. Simultaneously a shadow fell across the shaft of light, projected by moving figures within, and there appeared in the doorway a dark mass that, as it issued, could be distinguished as three figures. I strained my eyes to see the better. Good heavens, it was the figures of a man and a woman, carrying between them the limp body of another human being! As the significance of this flashed through my mind, they stopped on the threshold to close the door, shutting out the stream of light from the path. But as they passed the lighted window, where the path wound past it to the front gate, I saw, outlined against it in a broken but unmistakably familiar silhouette, the face of the honest farmer who had last seen my poor friend alive!

In my excitement I cried aloud. “You shall have justice, Jack!” I exclaimed.

The light in the window faded slowly away, but the outlines of the house remained, as did all the color work invisible hands had brushed in before my startled eyes. And the painting remained as it is today, a finished picture, the last gift of my dead friend to me.

I sat back, filled with unutterable awe at what I had witnessed. I knew that my friend had not died by his own hand; nor had he fallen and injured himself mortally in the woods. I knew that he had been foully done to death by hands which I could, and would, identify. I cannot say that I was afraid during the period of that marvelous manifestation; no, it was fury I felt that my friend must lie under the accusation of suicide when he had in reality been the victim of a sordid crime. I knew that he had come back to me to justify himself and to point out his murderers. I determined that they should be brought to justice. But how?

III.

HE rest of the night I sat smoking pipe after pipe, going over all the circumstances of Jack’s death as they had been presented to me by the police and by Grimstead and his wife. There was no flaw in the story of the latter couple; it was probable enough for the country constables to credit it readily. They had known Pete Grimstead and his wife for years, and had never seen anything to their discredit, save that they were poor and had a hard struggle for existence.

But—poverty is frequently the motive for crime. Yet what could have tempted them to kill a poor artist, who certainly had not carried on his person more than a few dollars? And the small amount found upon his body might have been all in his possession at that time. What else could he have shown them that they might have envied? His watch? It was a dollar watch, the fob a knotted black silk cord. Nothing tempting about that. Moreover, it had been found upon his body. His cuff links? Plain white buttons.

The body had been fully clothed when found. Stop! I did not remember having seen his hat. There had been no hat, and Jack had always worn—it was his only extravagance—a superfine Panama. His hat! Perhaps here was the clew to the mystery. It was not until dawn that I finally retired to sleep brokenly, sure in my heart that I had found a clew that would eventually unfold the motive and the mystery of the crime. It could not be that my poor friend had been murdered, at the threshold of a promising career, for the sake of a Panama hat! But that the hat was closely connected with the real story of his death I was fully persuaded. I was filled with impotent fury, but I determined to get a good sleep and then to make a visit to Pete Grimstead’s farm. I did not wish to present myself there with my brain stupid after a sleepless night.

It was late that afternoon when I walked up the path to the house I had seen pictured so strangely in poor friend’s last painting. I had asked the local constable to drive me out, and I recognized it immediately as the scene of the crime. He sat waiting outside in the wagon until I should have completed my questioning. I felt as though I were in a dream as I stood upon the threshold from which I had seen, the night before, that guilty pair issuing. I knocked strongly.

It was the woman who answered. She opened the door slowly, and, as it appeared to me, cautiously. When she saw who it was she uttered a single choked exclamation, and shut the door sharply in my face. I heard her hurried footsteps retreating in the hall, and then the sound of her voice calling her husband from the back door.

I kept up an occasional sharp knocking. The constable, who had not seen the door opened, called out that I’d better go to the back door, so I stepped down to the path. As I turned the corner I saw the woman on the doorstep, her face absolutely gray in the soft afternoon light, her eyes straining anxiously toward the barn, from whence came the gruff call of her husband. When she heard my footsteps she turned abruptly, threw out her hands as if to ward off something, made as though to reenter the house, and crumpled up in a heap on the door stone.

I stood rooted to the spot, torn by conflicting emotions. She was a woman, an elderly woman, and I should have gone to her assistance. She was a woman—but perhaps her hands had been stained in the blood of my dearest friend! I stood coldly aloof, awaiting events.

It was her husband who lifted her from the ground, shooting a vindictive glance at me as he bent over her. I could see that he had been suffering mentally; yet I felt nothing but fierce pleasure at the sight. He was a murderer, and it was meet that he should experience mental torture until such time as he suffered the legal punishment that was his just due.

He carried the limp form into the house and laid her down on a horsehair sofa in the front room. I followed him. The chill of that room penetrated my bones with a horrid suggestion of what had taken place there so short a time ago. He turned upon me with a sudden bracing of his shoulders and a tossing back of his head that reminded me against my will of a gallant stag driven at bay.

“Well, what do you want?” he asked, with such hopelessness in his tones that I could have felt pity for him in his plight had I not steeled my heart for what I had to do.

“I want to ask you a few more questions about the—the manner of my friend’s death,” I replied tensely, bending a piercing gaze upon him.

He took an involuntary step backward against the sofa where lay the unconscious partner of his guilt. The movement displaced a crudely decorated sofa pillow, one of two propped against either arm of the sofa. It slipped, and would have gone to the floor had he not thrown himself upon it with a desperate effort that seemed out of all proportion to the trifling incident.

“Well,” he shot at me, but in an agitated manner, “what is it you want to know?”

He remained before the sofa, his attitude that of one who hides a secret or protects something helpless. Flashing through my mind came the subconscious memory of a glint of white under the pillow. With a quick movement I sprang to the sofa, and although the farmer flung himself simultaneously against me he was too late. I pulled the cushion away with determined hand and disclosed—Jack Lindsay’s Panama hat!

IV.

I LOOKED at Grimstead with stern accusation. He regarded me with horror written large upon his weather-beaten countenance. His eyes were stricken; his shoulders, so courageously braced back a moment since in an assumption of innocence, sank in and stooped over. He was the very picture of confounded guilt.

Stepping to the door, I hallooed to the constable, who clambered out, secured the horse, and came hurrying up the path. Wordlessly I pointed to the hanging head of the guilty man and to the Panama hat, crushed up against the arm of the sofa. The officer stood with dropped jaw and straining eyes.

From the sofa came the moaning cry of the woman. “Tell them the truth, Pete! Oh, I told you it would have been better to have told it in the beginning! Such things are always found out.”

The constable looked horror-stricken at me, and I looked triumphantly back at him. I had located the murderer when no one had so much as suspected a murder; I had vindicated my poor friend from the charge of suicide, under which his noble spirit had been unable to rest in peace.

The woman’s voice went on weakly. “He came in here to get something to eat,” she wailed. “We gave him his lunch. When he got up to go he put his hands suddenly to his heart, opened his mouth as if he were going to speak, and then fell right down on the floor. He was dead! Oh, believe it or not, he was dead! We didn’t lay a hand on him. But he was dead, in our house, and we were afraid. We are poor. We were afraid of what people might think, because that very morning Pete plowed up the bag of coins he had lost thirty years ago. We wouldn’t dare spend it. We were afraid we’d be accused of killing and robbing!” Her voice rose in a shrieking crescendo of agony: “Oh, believe it or not, it is true—every word I’m telling you is God’s own truth!”

Her husband threw himself down beside her, hiding his face in his toil-worn hands.

“What did you do then?” I managed to ask, my head whirling.

Grimstead lifted a defiant face. “I don’t suppose you will believe us,” he said shortly and without bitterness, “but what my wife says is quite true. After he dropped and we found he was dead, we talked it over. We were afraid of what people might think. We decided to carry his body away to a distance and say he had left here for a walk and had never returned. I wish now,” he added dejectedly, “that we had come out with the truth in the beginning. I suppose it looks worse for us now than it would’ve looked then.”

The constable’s eyes questioned me appealingly.

I touched the Panama hat. “And this?” I questioned.

“It fell off when we were carrying him away,” said Grimstead dully. “We found it on the path when we came back, and we didn’t dare go out there with it, so we hid it here.”

“Why didn’t you burn it?” queried the constable, astonished that this incriminating evidence should have been left in such a conspicuous hiding place.

Grimstead shrugged his shoulders. “We weren’t guilty of anything. Why should we burn it? We never thought anyone would come looking here. We’d have given it up with the other things, only it might have looked queer if we’d had his hat.”

He looked directly at my companion then. “Well, why don’t you arrest me?” he demanded.

Again the constable and I exchanged glances. By common consent we stepped out of the chilling atmosphere of the room into the soft light of summer afternoon.

“I must tell you,” said the constable, “that I remember hearing, when I was a young fellow, that Pete Grimstead had the money ready to pay off the mortgage on his farm and lost it somewhere as he was plowing his fields. Hunt as he might, he could never lay hands on it again. There’s never been anything against the Grimsteads, in all the time I can remember, except that they are poor and hard working, and that isn’t really a crime. Of course, sir, if you feel that you want to go further in the matter,” his voice died away, and his eyes questioned mine.

I thought hard and fast. Perhaps, after all, my poor friend’s spirit had come to me not to bring murderers to justice, but merely to vindicate his own reputation, he who had always intended to fight it out to the end, he who had determined to become famous before death cut short his career. As I came to this conclusion I felt a lightness of heart that convinced me I had arrived at the correct significance of Jack’s manifestation.

At the expression on my face the man drew a long sigh of relief.

“I’m glad you aren’t going to pile up troubles for them.” He jerked his thumb toward the house. “I’m sure the story is just as they told it. Did your friend ever mention his having any heart trouble, now?”

Into my mind flashed Doctor Wilmott’s words. “If he lives to be forty he will be a famous man,” he had said.

As I recollected more or less distinctly, there had been a faint accentuation upon the word “lives.”

“I believe they’ve told us the truth,” I said heartily, meeting the other man’s eyes frankly. “The only thing I want now is to have the record of suicide cleared up positively once and for all. I’m sure it can be done without implicating those poor unhappy people further.”

The constable stepped to the door. “Better give me that hat,” he suggested, his cheerful, matter-of- fact voice affecting both the stricken man and his wife with sudden hope. “I’m sure you don’t want to be reminded of the affair any longer,” and he put out his hand for the Panama, which he passed on to me. Then he stretched out his right hand wordlessly to Grimstead.

The farmer took it wonderingly, his expression incredulous. So much had he suffered from his own fears for weeks that he could hardly believe the matter entirely cleared up. Not so Mrs. Grimstead. With happy tears streaming down her cheeks, she said brokenly: “God bless you both for believing us!”

The records in town were changed when the constable returned, so that my unfortunate friend was no longer charged with suicide; his death was entered as heart failure. But no mention was made of the Grimsteads. The story they had given in the beginning stood in the records as true; only the constable, the coroner, and myself knew the real facts.

Upon my return to my home city I satisfied myself that Doctor Wilmott had indeed accented the word “lives”; he had examined Jack, and had told him that only with the utmost care could he expect to live longer than five or six years and that even this time might be cut short without a moment’s notice.

As for the haunted landscape, it hangs on the walls of my room, one of the best examples of my dead friend’s masterly art. There seems to be nothing mysterious about it now, for although I have often sat late, smoking, watching the half- closed shutters of the house, never again have I seen light streaming from the windows upon the pathway before the door.

IT was a quiet night in the police station. Lieutenant Craig, behind the desk, yawned at the empty blotter and wished the clock didn’t tick so loudly. Terry Maginnis, of the reserves, in the back room, dropped his briar pipe, and it sounded almost like a pistol shot. Then, when Terry had sworn devoutly for a second or two over losing a pipeful of tobacco, the deadly silence gathered again and the lieutenant shook himself to keep awake.

He was in the middle of a long-drawn out yawn when the telephone clanged with its usual startling suddenness, and Craig reached eagerly for the instrument, hoping for something to break the monotony.

“This is the police station. What do you want?” he demanded sharply.

The voice that came jerkily over the wire had a curious, hollow sound and waxed fainter toward the end. “Send an officer to Overview Lodge and notify the morgue. I shall be dead when your man gets here.” There was a pause. Then: “Listen!”

Lieutenant Craig, experienced in the sound of gunshots, heard a roar on the wire that could have been caused only by one thing, and called out excitedly to Maginnis: “Terry, you and Jim Callery beat it to that Overview joint, overlooking the river. You know where it is. That old guy down there has just plugged himself. I heard the shot on the phone. Get a move on. I’ll call up the hospital to send an ambulance. He may not be dead, though he said he would be. Telephone me from the house.”

Maginnis and Callery were out of the front door by this time, but the former called back: “All right, ‘loot.’ I got ye. What’ll we do wid th’ corpse if there is wan?”

“We’ll send the wagon later and bring it here,” snapped Craig, who already was ringing up the hospital. “On your way!”

Overview Lodge was a rambling two-story stone house, whose damp walls suggested that the river must often creep up there while its small- paned windows, the old-fashioned weather vane on the Moorish cupola, and the filagree ornamentation of the rotting wooden veranda, were all in the style of architecture a hundred years old at least. Standing back from the narrow, unfrequented road, amid a funereal thicket of birches, elms, and hemlocks, it looked like an ideal home for a student, to whom the street noises of a great city would be a real distress.

As a matter of fact, it was a student, Doctor Theophilus Yeager, who lived there. He had inherited the home from his father and grandfather, and there he wrote his books about the strange peoples of little-known countries he had visited, and particularly about their religious beliefs and the curious manner of their devotional rites and sacrifices. Regarded as an authority on the lore of Asiatic nations, he was said to know more about Thibet and the unexplored regions north of the Himalayas than any other man in America.

With him in Overview Lodge was only one person, his tall, bronze-visaged, black-bearded, white-turbaned attendant, whom he called Chundah. This tall, silent man bought what food was required for himself and his employer, and did all other errands necessary. He also prepared their meals. The doctor did not require any personal attendance; he made his own bed, and kept his room clean himself, Chundah having no more to do with it than to supply clean linen.

Doctor Yeager—although mixing not at all with the outside world, except that he went to see his publishers now and then, and had some friends in a certain learned society to which he belonged— had not the traditional appearance of a recluse. He was an ordinary-looking person, who might have been a lawyer or business man. He wore up-to-date clothing, shaved regularly, and seemed to enjoy life in a healthy, wholesome way. Chundah also dressed like an average American—when out of doors. In the house, however, he wore the white trousers drawn in at the ankles, and a loose white blouse—both, like his turban, immaculately white—which had been his customary garb in India before he entered the service of Doctor Yeager and came with him to America.

A swift ten-minute walk brought the two policemen to the lodge. They were on the veranda, with Maginnis keeping a sharp lookout for possible thugs about the grounds, and Callery trying the front door, before the ambulance left the hospital.

“The door’s open, Maginnis,” called out Callery cautiously. “Come on!”

“D’ye mean it was act’ally open, or jist unlocked, Cal?” asked Terry.

“Open, I said,” rapped out Callery impatiently. “Where’s that Injun? Hey, Chundy!” he whispered, slipping along the dark hall to where he supposed the kitchen must be. “Come out, if you’re there.” He turned his flash light on the hall and into the kitchen, but both were empty.

“Arrah! Phwat’s th’ use o’ skitterin’ aroun’ down here, Cal?” broke in Terry Maginnis impatiently. “Sure this lad, Chundy, or phwatever his name is, has beat it. Av coorse he has. An’, be th’ same token—git up the shtairs or let me go.” And he moved to push Callery aside.

But Callery was just as eager to go up as Maginnis, and the two were side by side as they pushed open the door of the room which they knew Doctor Yeager used as a library and general living room. There was a green-shaded student lamp alight on the massive table, and some manuscript lay in front of the big swivel chair which apparently had been carelessly pushed back when its owner got up. Maginnis looked at the top sheet of paper, and he saw that the person writing on it had stopped so abruptly that he had not finished the last word, leaving it “amu,” but with an up stroke after it, like the beginning of another letter.

“Faith, phwat d’ye make o’ this now, Cal?” asked Terry, pointing to the paper. “Do ye think he was thryin’ to write ‘a mule’ an’ got tangled up in his shpellin’? Annyhow, he shtopped writin’ mighty sudden.” Maginnis had walked to a heavy portiere of wine-colored velvet, deeply edged with massive gold fringe, and swept it aside. “Howly saints, phwat’s that beyant? Come here, Cal. Begorry it’s himself. He laid down on the bed, so that he c’u’d pass out aisy—rest his sowl!—then he put th’ gun to his ear, or somewhere that suited him, pulled th’ trigger, an’ niver moved. But”— Maginnis stopped and scratched his head, knocking his cap sideways over one ear— “how th’ divil did he lay that sheet all so smooth an’ nice over his own corpse whin he was as dead as Mike Mulligan’s p’isened cow? That’s phwat stumps me.”

“He was a much smaller man than I thought, too,” remarked Callery, who, with Terry Maginnis, was staring at the long, grisly form stretched on the bed under its white covering. “He don’t make much of a ridge under the sheet.”

“Ye’re right,” assented Maginnis in awed tones. “Be the Lord, he’s shrunk a whole lot since I last laid eyes on him. He must have been sick. Well, we’ll take a look an’ see. We don’t even know he’s dead up to now.”

There was a lamp in a bracket against the wall, with a reflector which sent a powerful shaft of white light full upon the bed. Terry Maginnis, as an experienced policeman, had often seen dead persons, so it was with perfect coolness that he seized one side of the sheet, and, with a twitch, revealed what lay beneath. Then he jumped back, and from his mottled white lips there came forth, in a husky, awe-stricken whisper, as he touched himself piously on forehead and chest in the symbol of his religion: “D’ye see it, Callery? Or has the divil bewitched me eyesight? Phwat is it lyin’ there before ye?”

“It’s a skeleton, Maginnis. That’s what it is,” returned Callery, as much puzzled as his companion.

“Well, begorry, we know he’s dead annyhow,” said Terry, adding, with a sigh of relief: “Well, I’m glad I’m not crazy, Cal. If ye hadn’t said it was what ye did say it was, faith, I’d have resigned from the foorce, because I’d ha’ been no further good to it even if I shtayed.”

It was a grotesquely horrible sight upon which the two policemen gazed, for the skeleton was attired in a comparatively new suit of bright-blue silk pajamas, with a round mandarin’s cap of the same hue stuck rakishly on one side of the smooth white skull, which, together with the grinning mouth, gave the impression of an awful bald- headed creature enjoying some ghastly joke of the other world. The blue silk blouse was open at the top, revealing the crumbling breast bone and partly sunken ribs, while at the bottoms of the blue trousers long, fleshless feet, the big toe gone from one of them, pointed straight upward side by side.

There was no disorder about the bed: From all appearances, the skeleton might have gone calmly to bed like a living person, having prepared for rest in night clothes, and, straightening out comfortably, drawn the sheet over its face and dropped off to sleep. Or, what was the reasonable supposition, some person or persons had brought the dreadful relic of mortality from somewhere, dressed it in Doctor Yeager’s pajamas, and left it in the bed. Still another theory, which occurred simultaneously to both Maginnis and Callery, but was dismissed at once, was that the doctor might have died a long time ago and lain in bed long enough for his outer tissues to decay.

“Ah, what are ye talkin’ about?” grunted Terry Maginnis, when Callery ventured this suggestion. “Didn’t we both see th’ doctor on th’ street within the mont’, an’ annyhow didn’t he call up th’ station an’ say he was goin’ to die, and didn’t Craig tear th’ gun go off whin he done it?”

“And you think Doctor Yeager could have shot himself twenty minutes ago and shed all the flesh off his bones—eyes, hair, and all—by now?” sneered Callery.

“I didn’t say that,” was Terry’s indignant rejoinder. “It’s puttin’ foolish talk in me mout’ ye are. But here’s the skeleton, an’ the doctor’s gone, wid that heathen hired man av his also missin’, an’, be jabers, I’m goin’ to telephone th’ station like th’ loot told me, an’ let him say phwat’s to be done.

Howld on! There’s th’ ambulance!” he exclaimed, as the clang of a bell sounded outside. “Kape yesel’ quiet, Cal. Don’t say a worrd till th’ doctor boy gives his opinion. L’ave it all t’ me. It’s young Doc Griffiths.”

The young fellow in the white jacket and uniform cap, who breezed into the room, nodded familiarly to the policemen. “Hello, Terry! What’s broke loose in here?”

“Faith ye c’n see fer ye’sel’, doc,” returned Maginnis, stepping aside and pointing to the bed. “This here’s what we found. Give it a name if ye wull.”

Doctor Paul Griffiths glanced at the bed and turned wrathfully on the two officers. “Say, what kind of game is this you’re giving me? Who rung up the ambulance?”

“Lieutenant Craig done it,” replied Maginnis with dignity. “He didn’t know phwat was down here. All he had to go by was a repoort that there was a suicide or killin’, an’ he sint Callery an’ me to look intil it. How long sh’u’d ye say that bird on th’ bed has been there?”

Doctor Griffiths did not reply at once. His professional interest was aroused, and he was bending closely over the bed.

“Think it’s Doctor Yeager?” asked Maginnis ironically.

“It may be,” was the startling and unexpected reply of the ambulance surgeon. “Wait till I’ve finished my examination. Here’s something around the neck, held by a thin silver chain. I wonder——

Yes, here’s a clasp.”

He took the chain from around the spinal bones where in life there had been a neck, and held up to the lamp, in the hollow of his hand, a flat, bronze disk of irregular shape. On it were some strange characters that showed plainly through the green corrosive surface of the medal.

“It’s an ancient Brahminical amulet, dating from the time of Genghis Khan or thereabouts,” pronounced Griffiths, after a minute examination. “I know Doctor Yeager used to wear something of this kind around his neck under his clothing. I remember seeing it when he was operated upon at a clinic in the hospital about a year ago.”

“Sure, I rec’llect,” interrupted Maginnis. “Something th’ matter wid his head, wasn’t it?”

“Yes, there was a trepanning operation, and—

” Doctor Griffith had lifted the skull, which came away in his hand from the rotting spinal column, and at the same time the mandarin cap fell off. “By Jove! Look here, Maginnis—and Callery. Get this!

See this hole at the back? Here’s where the round piece of bone was cut out. You can see the teeth marks of the trepan if you look close. I wish I could tell when this was done by looking at it. But I can’t. But it is in exactly the same place as the operation on Doctor Yeager’s head. Could it be possible that–”

Doctor Paul Griffith did not finish his thought aloud, but, putting the chain and amulet on a table near the bed, he replaced the skull at the top of the spine, and, looking at it critically with his head on one side, remarked: “That seems to fit all right. He looks quite himself again. Now I’ll see how these bones were all arranged so well without being articulated. Without any ligaments, it is queer they hang together.”

He worked in silence for ten minutes. Then, looking up as Terry Maginnis came into the room after he and Callery had searched the house and telephoned Lieutenant Craig, he said: “I can’t tell anything about it. If that Hindu valet of his were here——”

“Well, he isn’t,” declared Terry disgustedly. “Sorra wan of him or any wan else is about the place. There ain’t a sowl here, barrin’ our three selves.”

“The only thing is to hold a regular inquest,” interrupted Griffiths in a brisk tone. “Take care of that amulet and chain, Terry. Good night!”

“You stay here an’ watch this thing on th’ bed don’t git away, Cal,” said Maginnis, when they were alone: “I’m goin’ to th’ station to repoort to the loot. It’s a quare thing—a mighty quare thing.”

II.

WHEN a real tempest is raging down the Hudson, with fiercely driving rain and spiteful squalls, then look out for a bad night on the wooded heights of upper Manhattan. It was on such a night—chilly, misty, black, and full of eerie sounds as the wind whistled through the trees or shook the creaky old slatted sun blinds of the ancient houses still numerous in that historic region—that Doctor Paul Griffiths, now a full- fledged M. D., with a practice of his own, stood by the side of the large, open fireplace in his newly furnished library, looking down at his former classmate, Murray Plange, who sat in a morris chair and puffed thoughtfully at a long-stemmed hubble-bubble.

“I tell you, Murray,” Griffiths was saying, “I never was satisfied with the perfunctory finding of that coroner’s jury in the Yeager matter. The fact was that neither the coroner nor the police could make anything of it, and they took the easiest way out. They buried the skeleton in the grave in a corner of the grounds from whence it had obviously been taken, and laid it all to somebody or other who wanted to play a grim joke. Bah! That’s nonsense!”

Murray Plange, pulling luxuriously at his pipe, expelled a mouthful of the water-cooled smoke and grunted.

“Well, go on, Murray,” blurted put Griffiths. “Say it. I can see you have a suggestion. What do you think?”

“I haven’t come to any conclusion yet,” answered the tall, lean, bronzed man in the chair, stretching his feet toward the blaze of the hickory logs on the hearth. “But didn’t the police try to find Doctor Yeager?”

“Of course they did,” was the impatient reply. “They set all the ordinary police machinery in motion, and would have made some arrests if they could have found anybody to pinch. But Doctor Yeager had lived absolutely alone except for his Indian valet, Chundah, and Chundah vanished on that night, too.”

“They went away together, eh?”

“No one knows,” said Griffiths. “They were not seen to come away from the house, either singly or otherwise. That is not strange, for the house is very lonely, and there are several ways to approach or leave it–by water, as well as land. Old Theophilus Yeager, grandfather of the last one, built the place when there were no street cars or railroads or any other public means of getting about in this neighborhood—it’s only a mile from here—and it was a natural thing for him to make a boat landing at the foot of the cliff, with rough steps leading down to the water. The old fellow was a great hand for having all conveniences. He even had his own private cemetery, in which he was interred according to strict injunctions in his will. He is the only person who was buried there, however. The second Theophilus Yeager died and was buried at sea, and the third one has vanished, as you know.”

“And all this about the last Yeager was three months ago,” observed Murray thoughtfully. “I suppose the police have stopped thinking about the case?”

“Well, yes—actively, I should say. But of course they have the records and would get busy if anything new turned up. Otherwise, it will have to go into the list of criminal mysteries never solved, of which New York, like all other large cities the world over, has its share. I’ve sometimes thought it must have been the work of a crazy man.”

“I don’t,” exclaimed Murray Plange crisply. “But go on. Was anything stolen from the house?”

“Nothing,” replied Doctor Griffiths. “Moreover, there was no confusion indicating a struggle. It seemed as if Doctor Theophilus Yeager might have dug up the bones of his grandfather himself, arranged them in his own bed, and then departed on some mysterious journey. That’s why I say it may have been the work of a crazy man. It is quite possible for a person to go insane on the instant, and this Yeager was a curious sort of chap, always delving into mysticism and uncanny possibilities, and it might have turned his brain. I was present at the trepanning operation—— By the way, I have the skull. Lieutenant Craig, of the police, was a friend of mine— he’s captain of the same precinct now—and he helped me to get it just before they closed the casket. Like to see it?”

Murray looked at him sharply. “You speak as if it were Doctor Yeager’s skull, Paul. What has the trepanning operation on his head to do with the hole in the old skull you found with the rest of the skeleton on that bed?”

Griffiths laughed as he went to a glass cabinet and unlocked it. He brought out a white skull in one hand and something that he did not at once show in the other. “I did not mean that, of course, Murray,” he said. “But it happens that a similar operation had been performed on the owner of this headpiece, whoever he was. That was one reason I wanted to have it. Look!”

“Curious coincidence,” observed Murray Plange, smoking calmly, without offering to touch the ghastly thing, although the doctor extended it. “Put it on the table, won’t you? What’s that in your other hand?”

“Not so curious, from a medical point of view,” declared Griffiths. “The brain trouble may have been hereditary. As to what I have here, you can see for yourself,” he added, as he held up a thin chain of tarnished silver, with an irregularly shaped bronze medal dangling from it. “You’ve been in India. What do you make of this?”

Murray Plange took the medal, glanced at it cursorily, and then put down his pipe and bent closer to study the characters, nearly obliterated by time, which covered it on both sides, “Where did you get this,” he asked without looking up.

“It was around the neck of the skeleton,” answered Griffiths. “I took the liberty of appropriating that, too, when the police decided it would not help them to find the people who had put the skeleton there. I could see for myself that it had the name of Genghis Khan, with some hieroglyphics I could not read, on one side, and some small writing, in what looked like Sanskrit, on the other. I could not decipher it, even if I knew the meaning of the words, anyhow. But –”

Murray Plange got up from the chair to look at the medal in the shaded light of the reading lamp on the table. Then he turned to Griffiths: “This is an amulet, given by a Brahmin priest, which preserves its wearer from punishment for all evil deeds of which he may be guilty——” He paused, and a strange light came into the clear gray eyes beneath their heavy pent of black brown. “Except one.”

“You mean——”

“I mean,” answered Murray impressively, “that the wearer of this amulet, if he were killed, must have desecrated the temple of Vishnu, the Sun God, in one of the many ways in which it can be done, especially by a white man. That, and that only, would account for his being put violently to death while he wore this protecting emblem.”

“Always presuming that he was killed by some fanatical Hindu, a follower of Brahma, eh?” smiled Griffiths.

“Great heavens, man!” burst out Plange. “Do you doubt that? Of course it was done by an East Indian. I had made up my mind to that as soon as you began to tell me about the way the skeleton was found, with all the larger bones, at least, in their places. And many of the smaller ones, too, for that matter, where it was possible to make them stay after being assembled. I spent six months in northern India, in the very shadow of the Himalayas, and although the natives never trusted me entirely—they are always suspicious of white men—I had an opportunity to see more of their religious observances than falls to the lot of the average traveler. Of course being American helped a lot. If I’d been English, I guess I’d never have come out of that region alive. Back in the hills they are not so loyal to the British flag as they are in Cawnpore, Calcutta, and Bombay. It was then I learned about these amulets. You can see that the sacred language of the Indo-Aryans, Sanskrit, is used on this one, and that the name of Genghis Khan is added, making it seem as if that jolly old potentate indorsed what is written. Nothing slow about those Brahminical priests, let me tell you.”

“But all that doesn’t explain whose skeleton this was?” objected the doctor. “The police thought the old grave of the original Yeager, who died a quarter of a century ago, had been opened, but were not sure. But even so, assuming that the bones belonged to the old man, how do you connect that skeleton with the disappearance of his grandson, who we know was alive within three months?”

“Are you sure the skeleton did not belong to the grandson?” asked Murray in a curious, tense tone. “This hole in the skull is just where, at the clinic, you saw the trepan go in. How do you know his grandfather had a similar operation?”

“By this skull,” answered Griffiths with an impatient shrug. “Here’s the hole. You are not asking me to believe that our Doctor Yeager could have been killed and all the flesh stripped from his bones between the time that the police lieutenant was called up by the dead man and the moment when the two policemen found the skeleton?”

Murray Plange smiled wearily as he placed the amulet and chain on the table and looked at the skull, still in the doctor’s hand. “My dear Paul,” he said, “in the first place we don’t know when Doctor Yeager was killed. It might have been a week before the lieutenant was called up on the phone. Of course, I don’t suppose it was the dead man who did it. You’ve said that the voice was not clear, and that it came in jerks, which would make it still easier to disguise it. These Indians are clever. They can imitate anything. And, by George, they can do anything. If you’ve ever seen the Indian fakirs——”

“I haven’t,” interjected Griffiths. “But I’ve read about them.”

“I’ve seen them,” went on Murray. “Among things I have seen them do is to take the flesh off the bones of a living man, showing a skeleton, right in the open, in broad daylight, and put it on again. Mind you, I saw that.”

“Imagination — hypnotism!” explained Griffiths with a contemptuous grin.

“Perhaps,” conceded Murray Plange. “But it didn’t seem so. Well, as I was saying, we don’t know when Doctor Yeager was killed, or whether he was killed at all. We only know that he vanished that night and that a skeleton, dressed in his pajamas, lay on his bed. Also that there is a hole in the skull such as you had seen made by surgeons in the hospital some months previously, and that there are other small scraps of evidence which indicate that this was his skull in life and that the bones on the bed were his.”

“How could they be?” ridiculed Doctor Griffiths.

“Let me see that,” requested Murray, nodding toward the skull. “No, I don’t care to handle it. Put it on the table. Have you a magnifying glass—a strong one?”

“Certainly,” replied Doctor Griffiths, going to the cabinet from whence he had taken the skull, and where an imposing array of glittering surgical instruments and other clinical paraphernalia showed in the light of the lamp and fire. “Here’s one. It’s very powerful. I need good glasses in my profession.”

Murray Plange took the magnifier without comment and held it over the skull. Then he placed a finger gingerly on the gray-white frontal bone and examined his finger tip through the glass.

“The East Indians have a process by which they remove all the flesh from a corpse in about two hours,” he said half musingly. “They use some strong corrosive which is their own secret, and afterward apply another substance that dries the bones and removes all traces of the first process— except that they can’t prevent this fine powder forming on the surface. See!” He held the glass in front of his finger, and Griffiths nodded, “Now,” went on Murray, “here’s a theory. It may be all wrong, but I give it for what it may be worth. You see, this powder——”

He stopped and looked at the door of the room leading to the rear part of the house. It was of ground glass halfway down, and silhouetted dimly on this semitransparent window was the figure of a tall man wearing a large turban. “Who’s out there?” he demanded in the sharp tones of a man whose nerves are on edge. “Looks like some one in Indian dress.”

“It’s my man,” answered Griffiths coolly. “A mighty useful fellow. Acts as chauffeur, does most of the housework that the maid finds too heavy, and has an expert knowledge of chemistry. He and I have had many pleasant hours in my laboratory. Name’s Lunga Sen, speaks excellent English, and is a high-caste Hindu. He prepares and eats his meals apart from the rest of us, and I dare say he goes through his devotions in his own way in his room on the top floor. Aside from that, he’s as matter-of-fact as you or I. Want to see him?”

Before Murray Plange could answer, the telephone on the table rang clamorously, and Paul Griffiths, picking up the instrument with the celerity of a young doctor who is after all the patients he can get, placed the receiver to his ear and sent forth a well-modulated “Hello!” A moment’s pause, and he replied to something from the other end: “Yes, this is Doctor Griffiths speaking.... What? Overview Lodge? Doctor Theophilus Yeager’s old home? Why, I thought the house had been empty for three months.... You— you are—— ... What do you say?” hurriedly, “You are Doctor—— Say it again! ... Wait! Wait!”

The awful expression of horror on his usually placid face made Murray Plange wonder just what Doctor Griffiths had heard over the wire, but he had to wait till the doctor had called in vain three or four times, and at last, after jiggling the hook without result, had banged the receiver into its place and turned to his friend with a blanched face and quivering lips.

“Murray,” he stammered in hollow tones, “it was, I think, Doctor Yeager speaking, and he said ‘Come quickly. By the time you get here I shall be dead.’”

“Good God!” exclaimed Murray Plange “Why, those were the very words of the telephone into the police station from Overview Lodge on that night three months ago, weren’t they?”

“The same—in effect, at least,” answered Griffiths, pressing an electric bell button at the side of his table to summon Lunga Sen to bring out his automobile. “Coming with me, Murray?”

“You couldn’t keep me away,” was the emphatic response.

III.

LUNGA Sen sat stonily at the steering wheel. He had not taken time to put on the long leather coat and chauffeur’s cap he usually wore in the car and his voluminous white turban shone in the blackness of the road almost like another headlight. The rain had stopped and the wind gone down, but it was one of the darkest nights Lunga Sen ever had seen in New York. There was not even a solitary star in the heavens to break the mystic, velvetlike blackness.

“Drive carefully on this road, Lunga Sen,” warned Griffiths from the rear seat, which he shared, with Murray Plange. “There are holes and big stones in the way. But we’re nearly there. The next wide gateway. You can drive right into the grounds.”

There was no reply, but Griffiths knew the taciturn Lunga Sen always did as he was told so long as he was silent. When he took the trouble to speak it was usually to make some objection, for, as a high-caste Hindu, he had somewhat inflated ideas of his own dignity and was inclined to be independent on occasion. With calm skill he slowed down the car to turn into the gateway. Then he jammed on the brake and threw off the power in one swift movement, as out of the deep shadows suddenly appeared two men, who stood full in his path. In the strong light of the car lamps it could be seen that one was in police uniform, while the other wore a civilian business suit, with a broad- brimmed soft hat pulled down over his eyes.

Griffiths recognized them at once. “Hello, captain!” he hailed. “Did you get a telephone call, too?” “I sure did, doc,” replied a gruff voice, unmistakably that of Hugh Craig, who had been a police lieutenant three months before, but who since had been made a captain, in charge of the same precinct. “It was the same nutty spiel from somebody who said he’d be dead when we got here that came to the station that night my men found the skeleton in bed. I have Maginnis with me. He’s the man who found it. How is it you are here, doc?”

“The same telephone message came to me,” replied Griffiths. “The voice was jerky, but it sounded something like Doctor Yeager’s. There’s a light up in his room, I see. I didn’t know any one was living in this house since he and his man—that East Indian guy— vanished on the same night.”

“There hasn’t been any one here till now,” broke in Maginnis. “Faith it ain’t no longer agone than lasht night thot I tuk th’ throuble to walk all ‘round th’ primises, thrying th’ dures an’ sich loike, for me own satisfaction. Not thot I wanted to be doin’ it nayther, f’r I’m not seekin’ th’ society av no man phwat passes off in th’ quare way this same Yeager––”

The pushing open of the house door by Craig cut off Maginnis’ long-winded exposition, and a minute later all four—Craig, Griffiths, Murray Plange, and Maginnis—were in the library. All except Plange had been in this same room three months before, and they noticed that the table and swivel chair looked just as they had then. The manuscript, with its half-written word at the end, was gone, but the shaded lamp, alight, was there, and in a general way there was nothing to indicate that thirteen weeks had elapsed since they had passed through to find the grisly remains of mortality stretched upon the bed in that other room.

“There’s the telephone,” remarked Captain Craig fatuously as he pointed to the instrument on the table. “But who used it? I could have sworn it was Yeager. Well,” he continued, in what he meant to be a careless tone, “I guess we’d better take a look into this other room. Want to open the door, doc? You’ll have to pull the portiere aside first.”

Doctor Paul Griffiths knew the reputation of Captain Craig for bravery, so he only smiled as he walked over to the doorway and reached for one of the heavy portieres. But he did not get a chance to move it, after all. Lunga Sen, who, unnoticed, had followed them up to this room, stepped in front of the young man, snatched the portiere out of the way, and flung the door beyond wide open.

Doctor Griffiths was the first to enter the bedroom, however. He swept past the tall Hindu, and after one glance at the bed uttered an ejaculation of horrified amazement and fell back for the others all to see.

Stretched out on the bed, in a suit of bright- blue pajamas that might have been the identical garments worn by the skeleton three months ago, and with a mandarin’s cap of blue perched on one side of his head, was Doctor Theophilus Yeager, stone dead, with a long-bladed, jewel-hilted dagger of Oriental design plugged into his left breast. Griffiths seized the handle of the weapon, and with some difficulty—for the blade had gone completely through the dead man’s heart and the point was imbedded in one of the ribs—drew it out. He hardly noticed that Lunga Sen had taken the dagger from him, for he was bending over the body to determine, if possible, how long Yeager had been dead.

“Not more than ten minutes, I should say,” was his verdict when he had assured himself that no life remained, and after he had felt the back of the neck. “It’s still warm. He must have died instantly. The dagger did not go through the pajamas, and——”

“Ah!” cried Captain Craig, stepping forward. “That looks as if he were killed before they were put on him.”

“I should say that was the way of it,” replied Doctor Griffiths coolly, as he fumbled inside the garment. “The coat was pulled open a little and the dagger forced in between the two sides in such a narrow opening that it would have been practically impossible for a hard blow, such as this was, to have been delivered while it was on. If it had been, the murderer could hardly have avoided making some kind of mark on the silk.”

“You’re sure it is Theophilus Yeager, doc?” asked Craig. “No mistake about the identity, is there?”

“I don’t think so,” replied Griffiths. “But you knew him in life. Look and tell me what you think.”

“It’s Doctor Yeager all right,” replied Craig, staring at the set, unruffled dead face. “He doesn’t look like a man that died a violent death, either. But that’s nothing. He probably got it so quick that he didn’t have time to know he was attacked.”

“Niver knowed he was hurted, I’d say,” added Terry Maginnis. “As for it’s bein’ Doctor Yeager, why, I’ll shwear to that. I’d know him anywhere, dead or alive. Thot is,” he added cautiously, “so long as he has flesh on his bones. All skeletons look alike to me, av coorse.”

“The dagger ought to help us find the person who did it,” went on Captain Craig. “Where is it, Terry?” he asked, looking about.

“Lunga Sen had it in his hand the last I saw of it,” said Griffiths over his shoulder, for he was still examining the body. “There’s no amulet around his neck, Murray,” he continued in a lower tone to Plange.

“Why should there be?” asked Plange.

“I don’t know,” was Griffiths’ slow reply as he straightened and looked steadily into his friend’s eyes. “But somehow I couldn’t help thinking that the amulet we found three months ago on the skeleton might—that is—you see——”

“There would not be anything of the kind here. The amulet you showed me at your house to- night is the only one in the possession of the Yeager family, you may be sure of that. Such things are not thrown around lightly by the Brahmin priesthood,” declared Murray in a tone of conviction.

“But don’t you think there is any connection between the disappearance and subsequent murder of this Doctor Yeager and the skeleton we found here three months ago?” asked Griffiths, rearranging the blue coat of the pajamas on the dead man’s breast where he had been searching for the amulet. “This affair now is as strange as the finding of those bones, it seems to me.”

“Say, where the deuce did that cheese knife go?” spluttered Captain Craig, who, with Maginnis, had been looking about the bed for the dagger. “If that guy in the white turban is doing any monkey business with it, he’ll find himself under arrest the first thing he knows. Terry, go down and see whether he——”

He was interrupted by a great scuffling and banging in the adjoining library, accompanied by ejaculations in a strange tongue, followed by a heavy thump, as if somebody had fallen to the floor.

Griffiths was first through the doorway, with Murray Plange by his side and the two police officers close behind. What they saw was Lunga Sen, holding the long-missing Chundah by the throat with his left hand, while with his right hand he flourished the jeweled dagger that had killed Doctor Theophilus Yeager. At his feet lay another man in the same sort of white Indian raiment, except that his turban had fallen off, allowing his long black hair to trail over the rug.

“Look out there, Terry!” bawled Captain Craig. “Get that knife!”

Terry Maginnis was too far back to get it, but Doctor Griffiths, with the activity and readiness of a skilled football player, leaped headlong at Lunga Sen and snatched the knife away just as it came within a few inches of Chundah’s breast.

“Good work, doc!” shouted Craig, his sturdy arm going around Chundah’s neck and pulling him away, while Murray secured Lunga Sen, “Look after that guy on the floor. What’s wrong with him?”

It was Murray Plange who answered. Dropping to one knee by the side of the still form, he pulled aside part of the white robe and showed a rapidly widening stain of dark red over the chest. “Stabbed through the heart, captain,” he said solemnly. “Look!” He pointed to the dead man’s forehead, on which three white lines had been made with some sort of indelible pigment. “He’s a Brahmin high priest.”

“Baboo Keshub Chundah Sen!” said Lunga Sen stonily. “I know him. He was here to avenge Vishnu, the high god. He finished his work. Then he used the dagger on himself. The vengeance of Vishnu was complete. He killed the man who insulted the god in Benares, who was the grandfather of this man on the bed. Three generations have died for it. The second Yeager was killed at sea. The third was obliged to wait till the holy moon was in the sky, which came to- night.”

“What kind of jargon is this, Lunga Sen?” demanded Griffiths angrily. “What are you talking about?”

“He is telling the truth, Paul,” interrupted Murray Plange. “The vengeance of Vishnu is always worked out in one way. The eldest son of the family of the offender is killed up to and including the third generation, as the holy writings of the god demand, and the same form is followed. The stabbing is done always when the moon is in a certain quarter, while the victim is sitting or standing. Then he is arrayed in sleeping garments and stretched upon his own bed.”

“But the skeleton we found lying on this same bed three months ago, after Doctor Yeager had telephoned the police station that he was about to die—how do you account for that, Murray?”

“If the sahib will listen, I think I can clear that up,” broke in Lunga Sen. “Baboo Keshub Chunda Sen bound me to secrecy in the name of Vishnu of the Ten Avatars. But Baboo Keshub Chundah Sen is dead, and I may speak. Know, then, that there was a secretary whose name I do not know who was in the service of Doctor Yeager, the grandfather of this one,” he pointed to the bed, but immediately brought his hands back to his side as before, “and this secretary was killed by mistake by the avengers who believed him to be the doctor, violator of the temple at Benares.”

“Can’t you get along a little faster, Lunga Sen?” urged Griffiths. “Do you mean that the skeleton we found on that bed was the secretary’s?”

“Suffering Mike!” interposed Captain Craig excitedly. “Why, that would be Morrison! I worked on that case. He disappeared when old Doctor Yeager was killed, and it was thought that the secretary might have killed Yeager. I was just on the force then I wasn’t much more than a kid, but I was big and husky, and they took me on. Go on, Lunga, or whatever it is. Let her loose!”

“The secretary was stabbed by one of the avengers. But when Baboo Keshub Chundah Sen came in to see that the work was well done he knew there had been a mistake. So he had the body taken down into the old cellar, where no one ever went, for the walls were crumbling in. A hole was dug by four of the avengers he had brought with him to America in case there might be an attempt to interfere with the holy work——”

“Holy work!” shouted Craig indignantly. “I always knew there was something wrong with these Indians snooping around up here. But go on.” “The hole was dug and the body was laid there, anointed with something that would soon remove the flesh, except at the hinges of the joints,” went on Lunga Sen coolly. “Afterward, when Doctor Yeager, the grandsire, came back to his house, he suffered the death as it had been written, and was buried in the corner of his own grounds, where the grave is to-day. It is the will of Vishnu that always a condemned man shall be warned in some way what is to be his fate, and Baboo Keshub Chundah Sen, when he found that the moon was not in the sacred quarter at the time that he and the avengers came to kill this present Yeager, three months ago, had the secretary’s skeleton brought up from the old cellar, carried on a stretcher blanket, and laid it on Doctor Yeager’s bed, dressed in the doctor’s own night raiment. Then the doctor’s amulet, which came down to him from his grandfather, was put on the neek of the skeleton, and Yeager was taken away until a fitting time should arrive for his punishment.”

“You mean to-night, Lunga Sen?” asked Murray Plange gravely.

Lunga Sen raised his eyebrows and spread out his hands, palms upward, for an instant.

“You see!” was all he said, nodding toward the bed. “According to the commands in the holy writings, it is always a skeleton that is used as a warning. The laws of the god are immutable, except when the execution must be carried out at sea, as was the case with the father of this third and last Yeager. That is all. I have told what I know.” “It is, eh?” cried Captain Craig indignantly.

“Well, if this Baboo Catchup, or whatever his name is, has croaked himself, by the Lord, we’ve got you, Lunger! Get that fellow, Maginnis!”

In a flash Terry Maginnis had seized Lunga Sen’s long brown hands and clapped handcuffs about his wrists, the Indian submitting in dignified silence.

“You don’t think Lunga Sen had anything to do with it, do you, captain?” asked Griffiths. “I should be sorry to think so, for he has always seemed to be seven-eighths American. Besides, he is hardly old enough to have taken part in killing and burying that secretary. This dead man, Baboo Keshub, is over seventy, I should say, and even Chundah must be nearly fifty.”

“That’s right,” agreed Craig. “I’m taking him, too. Get the bracelets on him, Terry. Here!” holding out a pair of handcuffs from his own pocket. “Use mine. I’m going to break up this whole Indian game as sure as I’m a policeman. I wouldn’t trust Lunger any more than I would Chundah or any of the others in the gang. I’ll take them into my back room, and if they don’t come across with the truth, why——”

It was not necessary for him to finish. The sinister meaning was all too plain. But neither Lunga Sen nor Chundah betrayed emotion. Both were standing with their hands crossed flatly on their breasts. The handcuffs just allowed them to take that attitude.

“Well, I hope you’re right—that Lunga Sen is innocent,” declared Murray with a shrug. “But that fellow, Chundah, seems to be in bad. It looks as if Baboo Keshub has had him working for Doctor Yeager just so he could play the spy and arrange matters easily for Vishnu’s orders to be carried out. Where has Chundah been for three months, and where did he keep Doctor Yeager all that time, out of sight?”

“We’ll get that,” put in Captain Craig grimly. “He’ll tell when I get to questioning him. They all do. To me it looks like the chair for him. He was the fellow who telephoned to-night to me and Doc Griffiths, I’ll bet.” He turned sharply on Chundah. “Where have you been keeping yourself since that night you faded out of here, Chundah? And who killed this Doctor Yeager?”

But Chundah, his handcuffed hands still crossed on his bosom, merely bowed his head in silence.

IT was a strange series of events that brought us together in that Godforsaken hole. Men drift around through the tropics like lost souls in hell. It isn’t considered good ethics to question them closely, either. A lot of them went out there to escape justice; some joined the army, and when their enlistments were out decided to remain; others had been disappointed in love and professed to be woman-haters. But, as a general rule, they were good fellows. Now and then we would run across a scoundrel. It did not take us long to find it out. A few nights at the club, a stretch of work, some tense moment; then, if the poor dog failed, it ended the affair. A few days later a tramp schooner would melt into the distance carrying a dejected being to another port. It was not always so easy to rid the place of their presences. There was Braxton, for instance; but that’s another story.

Kennedy has always possessed a flair for the mysterious, the unseen. In addition, he was a good talker. When you dwell on the fact that we had been marooned in Mindanao over six months, with no possible hope of returning, and had been hard put to find something which might amuse us, you will realize what Kennedy stood for. Not that he was such a jovial fellow; no one was less so. The charm of his personality lay rather in his comfortableness, his manner of repose. We watched each other closely, we four, and I am sure if one of us had proven a coward it would have been instantly discovered.

It wasn’t an easy matter to try and sleep when a thousand Moros or so beat their fiendish drums in religious ecstasy through the long, hot hours of darkness. Nor was it a simple matter to greet a column from the interior bearing the remains of some American slashed and shot to pieces. When these and a few other trifling matters are taken into consideration it will be seen how comparatively easy it might have been for us to drift into a laxity of spirit and will.

Kennedy kept us interested from the very first day. As it happened, he was the head of an engineering party that had built some sort of a plant the year before. He was waiting for orders from Manila. He expected to have another proposition on his hands by the end of that summer. We didn’t know much about his past life. From his conversation I gathered that he had been educated decently, no more, and was a reader of wide range, with a tremendous store of experiences. He had delved into Eastern thought and European philosophy, holding to his original opinions in spite of argument and despising dogmatic conceptions of any kind. It is a bit dangerous to be an original thinker when you are banished to a distant part of the world. I have seen them crumple like burned paper in the silence, those thinkers. But Kennedy had a level head.

“You’ve got to watch yourself,” he would say. “Out here it’s blamed easy to concentrate on what you’ve lost. I tried it for a while. The chief looked me over, and said that if I didn’t let the booze alone and stop getting off into a corner by myself he’d send me home as a failure. That set my thoughts in motion. I didn’t repeat. A man’s philosophy out here has got to be objective, not subjective. What he needs is plenty to do and little to think about. Don’t you remember Carson? He came here when I did. There wasn’t a finer fellow in the world. He once told me that he expected to make a fortune and return to the States. He didn’t say anything more, but we learned later that he was engaged. I found her picture in his room afterward. Then we had to wait for some machinery. That came all O.K., but it proved the usual dead stuff. We had to order again. By that time Carson began to worry. We didn’t like to say anything. We kept a close watch. Months passed. We realized that unless something happened the game was up. It did. Fred Birney found him sitting in front of his mirror with a kind of silly smile on his face, dead! The poor fellow had shot himself. We buried him quietly, but it made us all do too much thinking.

“There are three things you have to do in the Islands: forget that women ever lived, leave drink alone, and never worry.”

Kennedy lit a comfortable cigar and tipped his chair back against the railing, putting one leg over the arm and the other on a chair. He loved to sprawl. It was a particularly hot night. We could hear the continuous racket of the drums far off along the bay and now and then the odd yell of a native engaged in some peculiar work. There wasn’t another white man in the district. We were too busy listening to Kennedy to think much of this, however.

“I often wonder,” he continued, “why fear doesn’t get the best of us in the end. I haven’t met many fellows out here who experienced the emotion and got away alive. That was what was the matter with Carson. He was afraid. You couldn’t have put your hand on the exact cause of it all, yet he killed himself because of fear. The fact is, a white man never was intended for such a beastly life. It isn’t human. The slightest thing will set your nerves on edge if you are not careful. Now take the case of Carson, for instance. I’ll bet that none of you ever imagined that he shot himself because of something that happened in Manila months before he came here. You remember how we used to wonder at his dread of the tarantula. I poked fun at him until I learned the reason; then I kept still. But in a civilized community I am sure he would never have allowed the thing to prey upon him. It was in the night that he suffered most. He had his bed surrounded by three thicknesses of netting, and when he retired he would tuck the whole business carefully under a mattress so that there wasn’t a chance for a mosquito, as he claimed, to enter. I knew better. He lived in terror of the tarantula. He had heard of how they crawled into houses sometimes and walked over one in the darkness. I’ll admit it is enough to make one’s flesh creep. Well, it made him tremble. Near the end he hardly dared to sleep at all. I could have killed Birney when he put that dead one in his bed as a practical joke. Birney was sorry enough later on, but it didn’t do Carson any good.

“It was funny how I happened to be the one who learned the truth from Carson’s own lips before he died. One night—it must have been around twelve or one—I heard someone rap on my door. I was reading, and when I answered it there stood Carson, in the yellow light streaming over my shoulders, looking for all the world like a ghost. He was wearing a peculiar sort of kimono that he affected, and I was struck by the fact that he had only one slipper on. I begged him to come in. He took a cigarette, but it was some time before he spoke. ‘I suppose you think I’m a fool,’ he remarked after a while. I hastened to disagree with him. ‘Oh, don’t do that; my nerves are on edge and I can’t sleep.’ And before he left me I had listened to one of the strangest stories I have ever heard. I didn’t say anything to you fellows. He didn’t ask to have the thing kept secret, but I thought it best. Fellows like Birney never understand.

“It seems that when he first came to the Islands he was stationed for a time in Manila. He had taken rather a fancy to the old city and loved to ramble around the Luneta and through the Tondo. The sight of the natives in their ridiculous costumes amused him. It wasn’t long, however, before he began to grow a little tired of the life. It was this that led him into strange portions of the city and on long walks through the country when he ought to have been at work. He was a curiously imaginative chap, building dreams out of a mere desire. I guess that was why he thought he could get rich by coming down here. He did manage to keep away from the women, and he didn’t carouse much. Finally he got keenly interested in an old monastery that faced on the Calle Palacio in the Intramuros. You know where it is. The place is about three hundred years old and the walls look as though they were built to withstand a ten-month siege. Carson said that he heard of a book they kept there, an old hand-painted Bible which had been brought over by Magellan. It was kept chained to a table. It was already centuries old when it first came over, so the story went. The room where they kept the thing was locked all the time. Carson said that a strange tale had grown up around it. Anyone who dared to spend a night studying it never came out alive. Many students had died in this way, and it was deemed best by the prior to lock the doors and make it impossible for anyone else to run the risk.

“Carson, once his interest was fully aroused, refused to listen to any objections. In the end he convinced the authorities that they could let him examine the book without danger. The prior decided not to let him go alone, and when Carson called as per agreement he gave the keys to a trusty monk and ordered him to stay in the room during the time Carson was there. On the way down through the musty corridors they ran over the history of the book. The peculiar part about it all was that when someone read the faded print for a few hours alone they were found dead, their eyes popped out as though in abject fear, the mouth open and the hands gripping the table like vises. About fifty years previous to Carson’s visit some stranger had obtained permission to spend a night in the room, and had astounded the monks by walking out of the place the next morning as quiet and contained as when he entered it. He showed them the book lying wide open on the stand with a soft, furred thing that he had crushed. He said that while he was reading, a thin thread, alive, had curled around over the cover clasps, followed by two eyes that peeped over the great back of the book. At first he could not stir, but watched it, fascinated. His very heart seemed to stop beating. When the blurred eyes neared his own he had sprung to his feet from a sudden overflowing of courage and had closed the heavy volume with a slam. A colorless liquid had forced its way out through the leaves, and for a few moments his excited senses realized that a single tendon waved tremulously forward and backward and then stopped. An odor as of almonds hung upon the suffocating atmosphere, and he rushed for the little door in order to let in some fresh air. When the morning dawned he smilingly told the monks that there was no more danger. After eating a hearty breakfast he left them. He had not been seen again.

“The monk who accompanied Carson told the story for perhaps the thousandth time as they opened doors and tramped through seemingly endless corridors on their way to the cell where the book was kept. Carson distinctly remembered the monk telling him that he didn’t believe there was the least bit of danger. In fact, he confessed that he based his conclusions on the death of the animal or specter that had haunted those ominous pages. He smiled in a superior sort of way when Carson warned him not to place any faith in that ancient tale. ‘If people died then,’ he said, as they neared the top of a narrow staircase that led into the very bowels of the earth, ‘they can die now.’ Carson laughed as he drove this warning home. Somehow the echo of his laugh seemed to collect more echoes as it sung back of him down an empty, dark corridor. He turned his head over his shoulder after hesitating, then cursed himself for giving in to his vivid imagination. It was at this moment that the monk pulled a large key from his pocket and inserted it within a small doorway that faced directly upon the base of the spiral staircase down which they had come. After some trouble it yielded to his efforts, and he entered, followed by Carson. One match spluttered and went out in the darkness. It had been years since the place was opened, and for some time it was difficult to coax a candle into lighting. The shadows formed weird arabesques on the wall, and, as the monk moved across the floor, his shape loomed high above them and seemed to bend strangely at the juncture of the wall and ceiling. Huge cobwebs dangled in their eyes. Carson felt a thin piece of gossamer float before him, and jumped as a tiny spider ran hurriedly over his lips. He brushed it off.

“It was deathly still. For the first time he saw through the half light an oaken table and on it the heavy book chained, as was the custom in older days. The links had rusted, and he snapped one of them between his nimble fingers. He looked closely at the yellow pages, marveling at the wondrous artwork of the master who had illuminated them. Great capital letters stretched down the margins in faded greens, yellows, and reds. It was well-nigh impossible to read the sentences. He had brought a huge magnifying glass with him. He applied it, and was surprised to see how the words leaped at him as though greedy to be deciphered after a half century of retirement. In spite of the age Carson saw that the strong lines plainly held their shape. With the aid of his glass he might easily read what he desired. Raising his head, he spoke to the monk. His eye happened to catch sight of an ancient cupboard in one end of the cell. Leaving the monk to examine the Bible, he stepped over the musty floor and turned the knob. He found nothing within except a very strange odor. It might have been that of almonds. He wasn’t sure. Just then he heard a cry which he admitted to me had clung to him ever since. It wasn’t so much a cry as a sort of long- drawn-out sob that filled every crook and cranny of the tiny room. He swung about on his heels, and saw the monk falling to the floor, dragging the table over on his head. The candle went out as it followed the book in the downward crash. Carson was left in absolute, impenetrable darkness.

“As he said, it took him about a minute to collect his senses. That, as you know, is a mighty long time under such circumstances. He didn’t hear another sound, but his nostrils began to fill with that nasty odor. It seemed to madden him. He wasted twenty matches trying to light one of them. When he had found the candle and raised it above his head so as to obtain a better view of the cell he saw that the monk lay perfectly still. A corner of the table had crashed through his skull. A moving thread curled back into the leaves of the book lying at his feet. Carson saw this with startled eyes. Letting out a silly shriek, he rushed out of the door and up the winding stairs, down the long corridors, and out into the sunlight. There is something about the sun which is friendly and warm, and in a little while he was feeling better. The prior came running out into the garden, followed by the other monks. They heard the story with absolute silence. Carson spoke, as he described it to me, through chattering lips. His voice sounded far off. He waved his hands foolishly, and then collapsed.

“That was all there was to the adventure. He kept still about it because the good old prior begged him to. It would have been disbelieved anyhow. The story was given out that a heavy table killed the monk. Indeed, Carson was sure that this was what really had killed him. He was taken into a quiet room and nursed back to reason in a very short while. He really possessed a fairly level head. It isn’t surprising that he attributed the whole thing later on to some queer delusion. His fear of the tarantula, however, grew out of this. He couldn’t have sworn that that was the thing which had haunted the book. It was too large, anyhow. It was very much like one. This much he knew absolutely.”

Kennedy lit another cigar and made himself a bit more comfortable. I was conscious of not having moved during the whole recital of the story. My cramped muscles ached, and I moved a sleeping leg with some difficulty. The noise of the ceaseless drums beat on my ears more aggravatingly than ever. We waited silently. He went on:

“Well, there isn’t much more to tell. Birney came to me the following morning with white lips and begged me to go to Carson’s room. I had parted from him the night before feeling that I had effectually quieted his aroused nerves. Birney’s frightened countenance left me cold. I opened Carson’s door, and found him sitting before the mirror, clasping in one hand a large revolver. I saw what happened in a moment. While Birney ran for the servants I looked down at the smile which had frozen itself into the tight lips of the dead man. I have always been a close observer. At this time I was especially so. I couldn’t for the life of me figure out why Carson had killed himself so suddenly. Then, as I heard the steps of the servants down the hallway, my eye caught the end of a red tie protruding from a book lying on the table. I glanced back at Carson’s body, and then in the mirror for some unknown reason. I saw the book clearly. The glass was cheap and the red tie seemed to waver and fade in the distance. After they took him away I sat down in the chair myself. Turning my head slightly to the left, I could catch just a glimpse of the tie. I was startled by it. To my muddled mind it seemed to be a monstrous spider. In a flash the whole thing came over my mind. Poor Carson had returned to his room thinking that he would get a good night’s sleep. He lit the light; this was still burning, by the way, and sat down before his dresser for a second. Perhaps he was looking for something in one of the drawers. He found it, I have no doubt. When the cold steel touched his sensitive fingers he must have started back and gained his first glimpse of the tie resting in the book. I tried the same trick. I knew which drawer the revolver was kept in, as I had often seen him take it out before we went beyond the compound on a business trip. That was when the order first went into effect that no white man could go out without a revolver or rifle.

“Still sitting in the chair, I lifted my hand, as though I were holding the weapon, and pointed it over my shoulder. The reflection in the glass was so indistinct and blurred that it was difficult to aim at the book. It was clear enough to me then. He had meant to shoot what he thought was a tarantula and had by mistake killed himself. In fact the bullet had passed through the back part of his head. I have never said anything about this before because of Birney. He was sorry enough afterward, as it was, without my adding the true story of how Carson died. I have never felt that I had a right to until I learned of Birney’s death the other day.”