Weird Tales, Volume 1, Number 1, March 1923: The unique magazine

by Various

The Basket

An Odd Little Tale

By HERBERT J. MANGHAM

MRS. BUHLER told him at first that she had no vacancies, but as he started away she thought of the little room in the basement.

He turned back at her call.

“I have got a room, too,” she said, “but it’s a very small one and in the basement. I can make you a reasonable price, though, if you’d care to look at it.”

The room was a problem. She always hesitated to show it to people, because so often they seemed insulted at her suggestion that they would be satisfied with such humble surroundings. If she gave it to the first applicant, he would likely be a disreputable character who might detract from the respectability of her house, and she would have to face the embarrassment of getting rid of him. So she was content for weeks at a time to do without the pittance the room brought her.

“How much is it?” asked the man.

“Seven dollars a month.”

“Let me see it.”

She called her husband to take her place at the desk, picked up a bunch of keys and led the way to the rear of the basement. The room was a narrow cell, whose one window was slightly below the level of a tiny, bare back yard, closed in by a board fence.

A tottering oak dresser was pushed up close to the window, and a small square table, holding a pitcher and washbowl, was standing beside it. An iron single-bed against the opposite wall left barely enough space for one straight-backed chair and a narrow path from the door to the window. A curtain, hanging across one corner, and a couple of hooks in the wall provided a substitute for a closet.

“You can have the use of the bathroom on the first floor,” said Mrs. Buhler. “There is no steam heat in the basement, but I will give you an oil stove to use if you want it. The oil won’t cost you very much. Of course, it never gets real cold in San Francisco, but when the fogs come in off the bay you ought to have something to take the chill off the room.”

“I’ll take it.”

The man pulled out a small roll of money and counted off seven one-dollar bills.

“You must be from the East,” remarked Mrs. Buhler, smiling at the paper money.

“Yes.”

Mrs. Buhler, looking at his pale hair and eyes and wan mustache, never thought of asking for references. He seemed as incapable of mischief as a retired fire horse, munching his grass and dreaming of past adventures.

He told her that his name was Dave Scannon.

And that was all the information he ever volunteered to anybody in the rooming-house.

---

AN HOUR later he moved in. By carrying in one suitcase and transferring its contents to the dresser drawers he was installed.

The other roomers scarcely noticed his advent. He always walked straight across the little lobby without looking directly at anyone, never stopping except to pay his rent, which he did promptly on the fifth of every month.

He did not leave his key at the desk when he went out, as was the custom of the house, but carried it in his pocket. The chambermaid never touched his room. At his request she gave him a broom, and every Sunday morning she left towels, sheets and a pillowcase hanging on his doorknob. When she returned, she would find his soiled towels and linen lying in a neat pile beside his door.

Impelled by curiosity, Mrs. Buhler once entered the room with her master key. There was not so much as a hair to mar the bare tidiness. A comb and brush on the dresser and a pile of newspapers were the only visible evidences of occupancy. The oil stove was gathering dust in the corner: it had never been used. She carried it out with her: it would be just the thing for that old lady in the north room who always complained of the cold in the afternoons, when the rest of the hotel was not uncomfortable enough to justify turning on the steam.

The old lady was sitting in the lobby one afternoon when he came home from work.

“Is that your basement roomer?” she asked.

She watched him until he disappeared at the end of the hall.

“Oh. I couldn’t think where I’d seen him. But I remember now—he’s a sort of porter and general helper at that large bakery on lower Market Street.”

“I really didn’t know where he worked,” admitted Mrs. Buhler. “I had thought of asking him several times, but he’s an awfully hard man to carry on a conversation with.”

He had been at the rooming-house four months when he received his first letter. Its envelope proclaimed it a hay-fever cure advertisement.

As he was not in the habit of leaving his key at the desk, the letter remained in his box for three days. Finally Mr. Buhler handed it to him as he was passing the desk on the way to his room.

He paused to read the inscription.

“You never receive any mail,” remarked Mr. Buhler. “Haven’t you any family?”

“No.”

“Where is your home?”

“Catawissa, Pennsylvania.”

“That’s a funny name. How do you spell it?”

Scannon spelled it, and went on down the hall.

“C-a-t-a-w-i-double-s-a,” repeated Mr. Buhler to his wife. “Ain’t that a funny name?”

---

IN HIS room, Scannon removed the advertisement from its envelope and read it soberly from beginning to end.

Finished, he folded it and placed it on his pile of newspapers. Then he brushed his hair and went out again.

He ate supper at one of the little lunch counters near the Civic Center. The rest of the evening he spent in the newspaper room at the public library. He picked up eastern and western papers with impartial interest, reading the whole of each page, religiously and without a change of expression, until the closing bell sounded.

He never ascended to the reference, circulation or magazine rooms. Sometimes he would take the local papers home with him and read stretched out on his bed, not seeming to notice that his hands were blue with the penetrating chill that nightly drifts in from the ocean.

On Sundays he would put on a red-striped silk shirt and a blue serge suit and take a car to Golden Gate Park. There he would sit for hours in the sun, impassively watching the hundreds of picnic parties, the squirrels, or a piece of paper retreating before the breeze. Or perhaps he would walk west to the ocean, stopping for a few minutes at each of the animal pens, and take a car home from the Cliff House.

For two years the days came and passed on in monotonous reduplication, the casual hay-fever cure circulars supplying the only touches of novelty.

Then one afternoon as he was brushing his hair, he gasped and put his hand to his throat. A sharp nausea pitched him to the floor.

Inch by inch, he dragged himself to the little table and upset it, crashing the bowl and pitcher into a dozen pieces.

His energy was spent in the effort, and he lay inert.

---

MRS. BUHLER consented to accompany her friend to the spiritualist’s only after repeated urging, and she repented her decision as soon as she arrived there.

The fusty parlor was a north room to which the sun never penetrated, and in consequence was cold and damp. The medium, a fat, untidy woman whose movements were murmurous with the rustle of silk and the tinkle of tawdry ornaments, sat facing her with one hand pressed to forehead, and delivered mysteriously-acquired information about relatives and friends.

“Who is Dave?” she asked finally.

Mrs. Buhler hastily recalled all of her husband’s and her own living relatives.

“I don’t know any Dave,” she said.

“Yes, yes, you know him,” insisted the medium. “He’s in the spirit land now. There’s death right at your very door!”

She put her hand to her throat and coughed in gruesome simulation of internal strangulation.

“But I don’t know any Dave,” reiterated Mrs. Buhler.

She regained the street with a feeling of vast relief.

“I’ll never go to one of those places again!” she asserted, as she said good-by to her friend. “It’s too creepy!”

A great fog bank was rolling in majestically from the west, blotting out the sun and dripping a fine drizzle on the pavements. Drawing her coat collar closer about her neck, Mrs. Buhler plunged into the enveloping dampness and started to climb the long hill that led to her rooming-house.

Her husband’s distended eyes and pale face warned her of bad news.

“Dave Scannon’s dead!” he whispered hoarsely.

Dave Scannon! So that was “Dave!”

“He’s been dead two or three days,” continued Mr. Buhler. “I was beating a rug in the back yard a while ago when I noticed a swarm of big blue flies buzzing about his window. It flashed over me right away that I hadn’t seen him for several days. I couldn’t unlock his door, because his key was on the inside, so I called the coroner and a policeman, and we broke it in. He was lying between the bed and the dresser, and the bowl and pitcher lay broken on the floor, where he had knocked it over when he fell. They’re taking him out now.”

Mrs. Buhler hurried to the back stairway and descended to the lower hall. Two men were carrying a long wicker basket up the little flight of steps between the back entrance and the yard. She remained straining over the banister until the basket had disappeared.

The coroner had found nothing in his room but clothing, about five dollars in change, and a faded picture in a tarnished silver frame of an anemic looking woman who might have been a mother, wife or sister.

Mrs. Buhler answered his questions nervously. Yes, the dead man had been with them about two years. They knew little of him, for he was very peculiar and never talked, and wouldn’t even allow the maid to come in and clean up his room. He had said though that he had no family and that his home was in Catawissa, Pennsylvania. She remembered the town because it had such an odd name.

The coroner wrote to authorities in Catawissa, who replied that they could find no traces of anyone by the name of Scannon. No more mail ever came for the man except the occasional hay-fever cure circulars.

The manager of the bakery telephoned to ask if the death notice in the paper referred to the same Dave Scannon who had been working for him. He knew nothing of the man except that he had been very punctual in his duties until that final day when he did not appear.

---

SEVERAL weeks later, little Mrs. Varnes, who occupied a room at the rear of the second floor, stopped at the desk to leave her key. She hovered there for a few minutes of indecision, then impulsively leaned forward.

“Mrs. Buhler, I just want to ask you something,” she said, lowering her voice. “One afternoon several weeks ago I saw some men carrying a long basket out of the back door, and I’ve been wondering what it was.”

“Probably laundry,” hazarded Mrs. Buhler.

“No, it was one of those long baskets such as the undertakers use to carry the dead in. I’ve often thought about it, but I couldn’t figure out who could have died in this house, so I decided I would ask you. I told my husband about it, and he said I was dreaming.”

“You must have been,” said Mrs. Buhler.

The
ACCUSING VOICE

A Strange Tale

By MEREDITH DAVIS

“WE, THE JURY, find the defendant, Richard Bland, guilty of murder in the first degree, in manner and form as charged.”

Allen Defoe, foreman of the twelve men, listened with impassive face as the judge read away the life of the prisoner in the dock—the man whose death warrant Defoe had signed only a few minutes before. As the judge finished, Defoe glanced warily toward the prisoner. Somehow, he preferred to avoid catching his eye.

Bland, a slight, rather uninteresting type of man, stood with bowed head; Defoe now turned his gaze full upon him.

“Has the prisoner anything to say why judgment should not be pronounced?”

The judge’s voice, coming after the short pause, sent a strange chill into the heart of Allen Defoe, juror. He hoped the prisoner’s counsel would make the customary motions for a new trial or for time in which to file an appeal. He did neither: evidently Bland believed the verdict inescapable—or else he was out of funds.

Now the judge arose in his place, donning with nervous gesture the black cap that accompanies the most tragic moment in the performance of a court’s duties. The judge seemed ill at ease in the cap. It was the first time he had worn it. The grotesque thought flitted through Defoe’s mind that perhaps the judge had borrowed the cap from one of his fellow jurists for the occasion.

The almost level rays of the western sun diffused a sombre, aureate glow athwart the judge’s bench, so that the dark figure of the standing man was in mystic indistinctness beyond the shaft of light from the window. A fly now and then craved the spotlight for a moment and lazily floated from the growing dusk of the room to the avenue of ebbing day, streaming in from the west. And always there was a constant turmoil of dust particles, visible only when they moved into the bright relief of the sun-shaft.

The handful of spectators stirred restlessly while the judge was making his preparations. The droning noises of approaching summer evening in a rural county-seat were smothered by the buzz of ill-hushed voices. Perhaps that was why the judge, in the midst of adjusting his headgear, rapped sharply thrice with his gavel—or, it may have been only his excess of nervousness.

Defoe thought the judge never would stop fumbling with his cap. And finally the judge lost track of the jury’s verdict and had to mess through the scattered papers before him until he found it. He didn’t really require it to pronounce sentence of death upon the man in the dock. Hunting it, though, delayed the inevitable a few seconds; and Defoe wondered, since he himself was near to screaming out with impatience, how the prisoner could stand it without going suddenly mad.

“For God’s sake, read the death sentence!” exclaimed Defoe under his breath, but loud enough to arouse a nod of approval from the two jurors nearest him.

A moment later the judge found his voice:

“The prisoner will face the court.”

Slowly, deliberately, the prisoner stepped forward in the dock, leaning slightly against the railing and letting one hand rest upon it. He looked squarely at the judge now, although he barely could distinguish his features in the dimness.

Again the judge spoke, and this time his voice was hurried and strained:

“The sentence of the court is that the prisoner be taken, between the hours of seven a.m. and six p.m. on Tuesday, in the week beginning October 22 next, from the place of confinement to the place of execution, and there be hanged by the neck until he is dead—dead—dead!... And may God, in His infinite wisdom, have mercy on your soul!”

The judge sank back heavily into the safety of his chair. His hand swept up to brush his forehead and with the same motion it whisked off the detestable little black cap.

The prisoner remained staring at the judge as one who is puzzled at a strange sight. Perhaps he would have stood there untold minutes if a woman’s hysterical laugh, half-choked by a sudden upraised hand, had not broken the tension of the entire room. A bailiff tiptoed to the woman, and, as if revived to duty by the same cause, a prison guard strode forward to lead the condemned man away.

Defoe could have reached out and touched Bland as he passed the jury on his way to the cell across the street. But Defoe had no desire even to look at Bland; indeed, he did not, until Bland’s back was passing out of sight through the door on the other side of the jury box. Mechanically, then, Defoe filed out with the other jurors as the judge announced adjournment.

And the black cap lay forgotten on the rim of the judge’s wastebasket, where the janitor found it that evening and crossed himself fervently as he timidly salvaged it from ignoble oblivion.

II.

DEFOE awoke with a shudder.

There was a moment or two, as is always the case when one arouses from heavy, dream-burdened slumber, during which Defoe could not tell where his dream ended and realities began. He blinked experimentally into the smouldering fire in the open grate before him; yes, he was conscious. For further verification of this he drew forth his watch and noted the hour. The glow from the fire was scarcely sufficient for reading the dial and Defoe leaned forward the better to see. He was still too drowsy even to reach around and turn on the electric lamp on the table behind him.

Still he was not certain whether he was yet dreaming, until—

“Don’t budge, Defoe! I’ve got you covered!”

The Voice was close to his left ear. Its commanding acerbity quelled Defoe’s impulse to spring to his feet; and as he gripped the arms of the chair tensely he managed to challenge his unseen intruder:

“Who are you? What do you want here?”

The Voice moved a little upward and back before it answered:

“You’ve just had a nasty dream, Defoe. Perhaps I—”

“How do you know I did!” interrupted Defoe.

“You did, though, didn’t you?” the Voice insisted.

“Yes, but how did you know?” repeated Defoe.

“Never mind how,” said the Voice. “I’ll wager you’ve had the same dream pretty often in the last dozen years, too. It must be hell to have a scene like that forever before your mind, so that you’re always in dread of dreaming about it—”

“What scene?” demanded Defoe. “Are you a mind reader—a wizard—what are you?”

The Voice chuckled.

“None of those,” it said. “As I was saying, you must be afraid, almost, to go to bed at night. I would be, if I thought I might dream of sending an innocent man to the gallows—”

“Stop!” Defoe fairly shouted. “Damn it all, come around here where I can see you!” and he made an instinctive move to turn about and confront his tormentor.

The firm pressure of an automatic barrel against his temple halted him.

“Don’t make the mistake of turning around!” again warned the Voice incisively.

Then, in a lighter tone, it went on:

“If I were in your place, Mr. Defoe, do you know what I’d do?”

A pause. Defoe mumbled a faint “No.”

“Well, I either would confess my whole knowledge of the affair—or—I’d commit suicide!”

Defoe started. It was uncanny, eerie, the way this mysterious Voice put into words the one gnawing thought that had plagued him the last dozen years of his life.

“Of course, you probably have contemplated those alternatives very often,” the Voice continued. “But have you ever considered doing both? That is, did you ever think that you might confess first, thereby clearing an innocent man’s name of murder, and then cheat the law yourself by committing sui—”

“For God’s sake, stop that infernal suicide talk!” Defoe snapped. “In the first place, I don’t know what ‘affair’ or what ‘innocent man’ you’re talking about.”

The Voice chuckled again. Defoe was beginning to hate that chuckle more than the feel of the automatic against his head. If the Voice kept on chuckling it might drive him to desperation to grapple with his armed inquisitor, even though he would court certain death in doing it.

“Why, there’s no need to explain the obvious,” the Voice replied, its chuckle rippling through the words. “Your dream ought to tell you that. Speaking of your dream again, Mr. Defoe, reminds me of a question I often wished to ask you: Did you see Bland at all after his conviction?”

“No, of course—” Defoe’s guard had been down. He was fairly tricked, so he tried to run to cover again. “What—who is this Bland you’re talking about?”

“Come, come, Mr. Defoe,” said the Voice. “Think over your dream a moment. Surely you remember the man in the prisoner’s dock—the man who took his sentence with head up, facing the judge like a Spartan! Surely you remember Richard Bland. But did you happen to see him again after that day?”

“No,” Defoe said. “Why should I have seen him after my connection with his case ended?”

“But didn’t you even write him a note expressing your regret at having had to perform the duty of—”

“Certainly not!” interrupted Defoe. “Who ever heard of a foreman of a jury doing such a thing? Besides, he deserved his punishment.”

The Voice was silent a moment or two before it replied:

“We’ll discuss the merits of the case later.... And you didn’t even go to see him hanged?”

“What manner of man do you think I am?” exclaimed Defoe. “Of course I didn’t! I wasn’t even in Chicago where he was hanged.”

“No?” said the Voice. “Where were you?”

“A few weeks after the trial I had to go to Europe on a long business trip. I was gone a year or so. When I returned to this country I made my home here in New York City.”

“So you never even read in the newspapers about Bland—” the Voice persisted. “I don’t suppose the European papers would bother with a piece of American news like that, though.”

“No. I never read anything about the case after I left this country,” said Defoe.

“That’s odd. I’d have thought you would have followed the case through to the end,” the Voice said, half-musingly. “But still, if you had, perhaps you would not be here tonight.”

“Why not? What difference would it have made?”

“I don’t know. That’s merely my surmise,” said the Voice.

A faint footstep padded through the hall outside the living-room.

“Is that you, Manuel?” Defoe asked, wondering what would happen when his Cuban valet encountered the intruder behind the chair.

The footstep halted.

“Si, senor,” answered the man-servant, at a respectful distance from his master’s chair. “I come to see why you sit up so late, senor.”

Defoe laughed mirthlessly. “Well, truth to tell, Manuel, I am detained on business,” and he wondered again how Manuel had escaped noticing the other presence in the room.

“You mean you fell asleep, senor?” asked the valet.

“I did, but some friendly caller has kept me pretty well awake the last ten minutes.”

“But he has gone? And you come to bed now?” inquired the Cuban.

Defoe, after a pause, said, “Yes; I might as well go to bed, I guess.”

The Voice behind the chair broke in:

“Tell your valet you will smoke another cigar before you retire.”

Defoe settled down again in the chair.

“You heard, Manuel?” he asked. “You see, my visitor says he wishes me to smoke another cigar.”

“But I see no visitor, senor,” said the Cuban.

“You heard what he said, though,” Defoe insisted.

“No, senor. I only hear you say he wish you to smoke another cigar,” explained the valet.

“Well, you ought to have your ears examined, Manuel. Get my box from the table and hand it to my visitor.”

Manuel fumbled in the darkness until he found the box, then handed it to Defoe. The latter waved it toward the Voice behind him.

“My guest first, Manuel,” he corrected.

The Cuban stood motionless. “I see no one else,” he insisted.

The Voice interrupted:

“Tell him I don’t care to smoke, Mr. Defoe.”

“I can see no one, senor,” the Cuban repeated.

“But didn’t you just hear him?” Defoe cried, leaning forward nervously.

“No, senor, I hear no one speak but you.”

Defoe stared up at his valet, then half rose from his chair.

“Sit down, Defoe!” commanded the Voice sharply.

Defoe sank back once more.

“There!” he exclaimed to his valet. “Now tell me you didn’t hear any one order me to sit down just then!”

The Cuban shook his head. “No, senor, I hear no one talk but you since I come in.”

His master swore helplessly. “Are you trying to make a fool of me, Manuel? Do you dare stand there and tell me no one spoke to me?”

“I don’t know, senor. I only know I hear no one speak—”

Again the Voice intruded:

“It may be that Manuel thinks you are trying to make a fool of him,” it suggested.

“Do you?” Defoe asked the Cuban.

“Do I what, senor?” the valet asked, placidly.

“Do you think I’m trying to make a fool of you?”

“I do not say so, do I, senor?” the servant replied, deprecatingly.

“No, but you heard—or did you hear?—this visitor say it!”

The Cuban, almost tearfully, denied it, becoming verbose in his protestation.

Defoe flapped his arms on the wings of his easy chair and bade his valet hush.

“Get out of here, you brown-skinned dumbbell! One of us has gone crazy tonight!”

The Cuban moved off, keeping a suspicious eye upon his master. His retreating footstep presently was heard dying away in the hall outside.

“Well, what do you think of that damned little Cuban?” Defoe asked the Voice. “I wonder what made him lie so brazenly?”

There was no response. Defoe repeated his second question.

Still silence answered him.

“Have you gone, my friend?” Defoe asked, turning part way in his chair to test the other’s watchfulness. This time no automatic punched his head and no command wilted him into the depths of his chair again.

Still doubtful of his good luck, Defoe called out once more:

“I say, stranger, have you gone?”

The only sound that greeted his ears was the faint creaking of a window in the adjoining dining-room. Defoe rose and darted to the connecting door, snapping on the electric light at the entrance to the dining-room.

The room was vacant of any soul but himself.

All he could see was the slight movement of the lace curtain at the dining-room window—and when he examined the window he found it latched.

III.

THE NEXT day Defoe went to his doctor. He wished to take stock of himself; perhaps he had been applying himself too closely to his business.

“You are badly run down, Allen,” the physician said, almost before he had sat down with his patient. “You look mentally distressed.”

“I am,” admitted Defoe. “Working too hard, I guess.”

The doctor eyed him keenly.

“Anything else troubling you?” he asked.

Defoe insisted there really was nothing at all beside his work that was affecting him. So the doctor gave the usual diagnosis: Too much nerve tension, not enough sleep, not the proper kinds of food. He ended by advising more rest and quiet.

“And avoid excitement, too,” he warned. “That old heart palpitation might crop up again, you know.”

It was all very well for the doctor to advise more rest and more sleep, but how was a man to sleep beneath a Damocles sword of mystery, of weird forebodings?

It was three weeks before Defoe felt that he was succeeding in obeying the doctor’s instructions, partly, at least. Then—.

It happened late one night. Defoe lay in bed, his back to the lighted electric lamp on the table: he had fallen asleep, reading. Suddenly he stirred at a touch on his shoulder.

“That you, Manuel?” he asked, drowsily. “All right, put out the li—”

“No, it is not Manuel—and don’t bother to turn around, Defoe!” this last sharply, as Defoe made a movement to arise in bed.

“You again!” Defoe exclaimed. “What—how did you get in?”

“That’s my problem, not yours,” said the Voice. “I merely dropped in again to inquire if you had thought any more of doing what I suggested.”

Defoe checked an insane desire to leap out of bed and make a break for the door—anything, to escape this tormentor at his back! But he remembered the automatic....

He got himself under a semblance of control before he answered:

“Your suggestions were ridiculous. Why should I have anything to confess about the Bland trial, or why should I commit suicide over it?” He even essayed a laugh meant to be derisive.

But the intruder chose to ignore Defoe’s evasions. His next remark was as startling as it was illuminating:

“Did you know,” said the Voice, “that of the other eleven jurors who convicted Bland, only seven are living—still?”

“No; I haven’t kept track of the other eleven men,” replied Defoe, annoyed subconsciously by the detachment that the Voice gave to the word “still.”

“Well, I have,” said the Voice. “Two of the surviving seven are in insane asylums; two of the four dead committed sui—.”

Defoe could brook it no longer. He wrenched around in bed to grapple with his antagonist, forgetful, in his madness, of the automatic. But before he could free himself from the bedclothes the lamp was snapped out, and Defoe was left ignominiously tumbled in the darkness on the floor.

A chuckle from the vicinity of the bedroom door told him of his guest’s departure....

When morning came, after the nerve-racking night, Defoe found it hard to realize that his two experiences with the Voice really had taken place. None the less, he knew they were preying on his vitality, on his brain-functions.

Repeatedly the thought came to him that it was all a dream like his recollection of the murder trial out of which he had awakened the night of the Voice’s first visit. But always against the theory of the dream he placed his remembrance of the feel of the automatic revolver; and, too, the fact that he had talked with Manuel and with the Voice at the same time argued against the dream explanation.

Left, then, was conscience—that is, if the visits of the Voice were simply hallucinations of a distracted mind. But why should conscience wait for twelve years to haunt and harass him?

The more he pondered it all, the greater became the dread of another visit from the Voice. The greater grew his fear, too, of losing his reason, as he sought to analyze the situation from every conceivable standpoint. With every new bit of theorizing, Defoe felt himself giving way more and more to melancholia such as he knew is frequently but the prelude to insanity. Was it possible, he wondered, for a man’s conscience to drive him to imbecility?

Defoe finally accepted the inevitable.

“Manuel,” he ordered, the second morning after the bedroom encounter with the Voice, “pack my things. We’re going away.”

“Away, senor? Where?”

Defoe’s brain groped vainly for an instant, then seized upon the only chance.

“The sea—a sea voyage. My nerves....”

Manuel busied himself among Defoe’s clothes. “Do you need many things, senor? Do you go far away—Europe, perhaps?”

“No, no. Just down the coast—Old Point Comfort, I guess. Yes, that’s it. A week or so of rest. Just my steamer trunk and a suitcase will do.”

The day of the trip down the coast was as perfect as he could have wanted for his own satisfaction. All during the forenoon the Old Dominion steamer skirted the Jersey shore line, and Defoe sat out on deck basking in the sun and already feeling better for the salt-laden air that he breathed in deeply. In the afternoon he napped most of the time and when nightfall chilled the deck promenaders he descended with the rest to the dining-saloon.

It was while sitting in the smoking-saloon, after dinner, that Defoe first had the impression that he was being watched. A poker game was going on, lackadaisically, in one corner of the saloon; scattered in chairs and cushioned seats along the windows were perhaps a dozen or fifteen men. But, for the life of him, Defoe could not pick out any one in the room who might be watching him, now he gave his fleeting impression indulgence long enough to look about him.

Finishing a cigar, Defoe decided on a deck stroll before retiring. It was too cold and damp, with a fog beginning to gather, to permit of sitting on deck, so he paced to and fro briskly up near the fore deck beneath the pilot’s tower. The nervousness of the few moments in the smoking-saloon, when he imagined himself being watched, transmuted itself into a shiver as the foggy dampness penetrated to his marrow. He lit a fresh cigar and puffed at it jerkily as if to generate bodily warmth. Presently the shiver developed into a veritable shudder such as precedes chills or certain forms of ague.

Defoe, thoroughly miserable and alarmed now at the fear of sickness on board ship, chafed his cheeks with his hands and, on his way to the entrance to the stateroom, he flailed his arms about himself to stem the onrush of the chill. Once inside the passageway of the staterooms, however, he felt warmer, and by the time he reached his stateroom door the chill had subsided almost completely.

He was still uncomfortably cold, though, as he opened the door. With one hand he unbuttoned his overcoat and with the other he reached gropingly for the electric light button on the wall. He fumbled around for it a few seconds, then swore softly in vexation because he had not noticed by daylight just where it was located.

Groping with both hands, now, he stumbled around the none-too-commodious room, feeling for the push button on the wall. He paused once and took inventory of his pockets and cursed his luck for lack of another match.

Then he went to hunting in the dark again—until his hand came full against a living body....

IV.

THE BODY stirred, eluding Defoe’s contact.

Defoe fell to quaking once more, but it was not the trembling of the chill this time. He opened his mouth to challenge the intruder, and all he could do was swallow and gag at the words that stuck in his throat.

A pressure against the pit of his stomach—a firm shove of hand upon his shoulder—and Defoe found himself stepping backward until it seemed he must have walked the length of the ship. But of course he hadn’t—he hadn’t even left the stateroom—and suddenly he was tumbled on to the edge of the berth, the pressure against his abdomen increasing.

A vague nausea gripped him. He clutched at his abdomen and his fingers wrapped themselves around the barrel of an automatic pistol. The pressure against his body became unbearable, piercing.... Defoe crumpled back into the berth and the convulsive effort restored his speech.

“What the hell are you doing?” he exploded. “Get out of here! What are you trying to do—stab me with a pistol?”

The incongruity of his question aroused a titter of amusement from the invisible presence.

“No, I only wished to make sure you weren’t trying to get away.”

That Voice again!—here! Defoe cringed in a sort of abject fear.

“What are you—who are you?” Defoe struggled to keep his voice steady, struggled, indeed, to keep his reason from flying out of balance and shattering into a thousand pieces of driveling idiocy.

“Call me anything you care to,” replied the Voice in the dark.

“I don’t believe you are—anything at all! I think you are all a dream, a nightmare, a damnable hallucination that I can’t get rid of! To hell with you! I’m going to go down to the smoking-room and—smoke you out of my mind! I’m going to stay in the light from now on, day and night, until I get over this morbid dreaming!”

Defoe really thought he meant it all, until the pressure against his stomach made him doubt his courage and defiance.

Perhaps it was the nausea—maybe seasickness; he never had thought of that!—that was griping at his vitals like the insistent pressure of a steel-barreled weapon.

“Sit down, Mr. Defoe!” commanded the Voice. “I’ve got something to say to you.”

“To hell with you!” Defoe repeated, almost hysterically now. His hands clutched at the pressure again—and once more the pistol barrel sent him squirming back into the recesses of the berth.

“I want to talk to you some more about the Bland case,” went on the Voice, unperturbed by the other’s outburst. “When are you going to confess?”

“Confess?” Defoe parried. “Confess what?”

“Confess that you knew Bland was innocent when you convicted him,” said the Voice.

“But I didn’t.” It was like wrestling with one’s conscience, Defoe thought, this interminable denying of Bland’s innocence. He was wearying of it all; his mind was revolting at the repeated “third degree” of this mysterious Voice. Soon, he feared, his brain would refuse to function.

“But you’ve said you did,” the Voice insisted.

“When? It’s a lie!” exclaimed Defoe.

The Voice chuckled, sending a shudder through the man crouching in the corner of the berth.

“You probably don’t know, Mr. Defoe, that for a number of years you have had the treacherous habit of talking in your sleep—talking volubly, excitedly, sometimes almost reconstructing entire incidents in your talk for the benefit of anyone who might happen to be listening.”

“Well?” asked Defoe.

“Simply this: Manuel has overheard enough to—”

“Manuel?” broke in Defoe. “What’s he got to do with it!”

“I forgot to tell you,” the Voice apologized. “The Cuban is my confederate—former member of the Secret Police of Havana, you know. I saved his life during the Spanish war and—well, he’s paying back an old debt, as he calls it. He let me in and out of your house, and tipped me off about this trip. You see, Manuel had overheard you say, in your sleep, that you convicted an innocent man of murder. So I knew your conscience—”

“Are you trying to be my conscience? Are you trying to plague me into confessing? Are you—”

“No,” answered the Voice, “unless you choose to call me your conscience. I’m willing. You seem to be in need of one. Do you know, Mr. Defoe,” and the Voice took on a more affable tone, “you have been fearfully distracted the last few weeks or months. You need a rest—a long rest!”

Defoe was silent, hunched in the retreat of the berth. He had no fight left in him. Presently he fell to whimpering quietly, as a child does when it is punished beyond endurance and is too frightened to cry. The Voice, it seemed, missed the old combativeness, gone so quickly after Defoe’s late outburst, so it prodded the hunted man with its chief weapon—not its pistol, but its chuckle. This time it chuckled devilishly, aggravatingly, and it rasped against the tender sensibilities of the sniveling Defoe like salt in an open wound.

Then something broke what little bonds of restraint remained in Defoe. He sprang, catlike, to the outer edge of the berth and lunged for the arm that held the pistol. In the darkness his head struck the cross-support of the berth above and he slumped forward, half dazed by the blow.

Again the chuckle sounded in his ears, now ringing with the stunning impact; and again Defoe lurched forward, only to fall dizzily to the floor. He clambered clumsily to his feet, gripping the berth for a momentary prop.

Soon his head began to clear. He was assembling out of the maze of ache and buzzing in his ears and brain some sort of coherent idea of where he was and what had been happening.

“Now I know what it all means!” he burst forth presently. “You—you sneaking, cackling little conscience, get out of here! I’m going to cheat you if I have to become a drunkard or a dope fiend the rest of my life! I’m not going to let a conscience, or a voice or a chuckle, drive me to insanity—or to confessing—or to suicide!”

Defoe was steady enough now, supporting himself against the upper berth. His voice grew more strident.

“No, I’m not going to let my conscience get the best of me! You thought you could keep after me endlessly, but I’ll get rid of you. I’m never going to be bothered with you or your voice again! Never! Now get out of here! Get out of here, I say!”

The chuckle—a croaking, sepulchral chuckle it was now—answered him out of the darkness.

“You might tell me, before I go, if you know who really did kill the man Bland was convicted of murdering,” said the Voice. “I’m curious enough to wish to know his name.” And the Voice chuckled once more.

“Damn that cackle! I’ll tell you, if you choke off that infernal cackling! I’ll tell you—yes! I can tell you, because I did it! I committed that murder, you understand? I did it! Now cackle all you want to! And I convicted Bland of it! Cackle, you damned little shriveled conscience! Ho, ho, ho-ho-ho! I think it’s my turn—to—cackle—now!”

The words of the hysterical man rose to a maudlin scream that reverberated piercingly in the little stateroom.

“Now get out of here for good!” the raving Defoe shouted, recovering coherence of speech after a time. “Get out—before—I—”

A blinding glare of light came as Defoe reached for the door. The intruder had found the push button.

Defoe stared—then toppled to the floor.

“Bland! Bland! You! It’s you....”

And before the stranger that was Bland passed from the room he felt again of the heart of the craven hulk at his feet. The doctor had been right: The tumult in the breast of the twelfth juror had been too much.

If only Defoe had known that the Governor had pardoned Bland, his secret might have been safe forever.

Walter Scott Story offers
a new conclusion to
Edgar Allen Poe’s
“Cask of Amontillado”

The Sequel

SOBERED on the instant—the padlock had clicked when Montresor passed the chain about my waist and thus fastened me to the wall—I stood upright in the little dungeon, the blood running cold in my veins.

With maniacal laughter, he withdrew from the niche, whipped a trowel from under his robe and began to wall up the narrow opening. I knew it was not a joke, a drunken jest. I saw that his drunkenness had fallen from him. The dying flambeau fell from my nerveless hand and cast a fitful bloody glow upon the whitened, dripping walls. I shook the chain frenziedly.

“For God’s sake, Montresor!” I cried.

He replied with a horrible, mocking laugh, and, like a devil from hell, lifted his voice with mine to show that it was idle to call for help.

I had always distrusted Montresor. I knew him to be a serpent. He feared me and was jealous of my person and attainments. In spite of all his fawning and his smiles, I knew he hated me deeply for the injuries I had heaped upon him and for the open insults I had added to them. And yet I swear he had never in the slightest suspected that it was not Giovanna, the tenor, who was successful with his wife, but I!

“Fortunato!” he called, and his hoarse tone echoed in a ghastly way through the gloomy catacombs of his ancestors and re-echoed along the winding crypt.

I made no reply. Cold beads of fear started from my brow as I strained against the chain and listened to the soft thud of the stones he was building into the opening to make my tomb and the accompanying tinkle of his trowel. Even then, I admired, perforce, the cleverness with which he had secured his revenge.

It was the night of the carnival. He had found me in the streets, dazed with wine, and, pretending that he wanted my judgment on a cask of sherry, had lured my staggering feet into the gloomy passages under his palazzo. And he had brought me into this narrow niche in the castle walls to entomb me alive where no one would ever find me. It was clever!

My memory fails me now, but I doubt not I cried out many times for pity and mercy; and I take no shame in thinking this may have been so. I recall his words and his horrible mouthings as he worked with more haste and zeal than skill.

But I was a brave man always. I did not yield myself to fate. It was unthinkable. I, Fortunato, to die walled in by Montresor! I cursed him and his line. I wrenched at the chain with ferocious strength, more eager to have him by the throat than to be free to live. I called upon all the saints and particularly to my patron saint. You shall see that I was not unheard.

The wall grew high—to his breast—and in the light of his flambeau set somewhere in the wall outside I could see Montresor’s sweating face as he labored with the stones.

Suddenly he thrust his torch through the opening, now no larger than his head—and to deceive him I prostrated myself upon the floor and laughed the laugh of a dying man.

I heard the thud of another stone, and looked up quickly. My flambeau had died out: Montresor’s had disappeared. And there was no opening! I was in a tomb of stone!

Absolute darkness surrounded me, and the walls seemed to press in upon me like icy blankets. And silence as absolute as the darkness reigned.

I leaped to my feet. Silence! Silence, absolute silence, save for my own labored breathing. Maria! Suppose the mortar hardened ere I could throw my weight against the poor wall he had built. Then I were lost!

I called out aloud to my holy saint. Lucky it was that I had the bodily strength of two. I strained upon the chain wildly; I seized it in my hands and tore at it with savage determination. I would not die thus! In desperation, frantic with rage and fear, I made one last violent, prodigious effort to free myself, with strength enough to make the palazzo tremble, and in that last great effort the staples of the chain tore loose from the half-rotten stone in which they were fastened.

Hot tears of joy welled in my eyes. I vowed a hundred candles to the Virgin: but I could not then take time to give thanks.

Throwing myself upon the wall Montresor had just reared, my feet desperately braced on the rough floor, I fought for liberty like a tiger. Heavens! It gave!—the wall gave!

It yielded like a stiff canvas against the push of a hand, gave slowly, but surely—bulged outward, then went rumbling down! I thrust myself through the jagged opening into the catacombs. I was free!

What joy if Montresor had been there, even though he wore his rapier and I had but my poinard!

It was very dark, and yet I could see a gleam of light in the direction from which we had come, Montresor crazed with the thought of sweet revenge, I drunk with wine. I paused and thought. Should I find him in the streets in this gay time and slay him. No! I laughed insanely, yet clearly. No! There was a better thing to do.

With haste and no mean skill, I built up the wall anew, closing the opening of what might have been my tomb—had I been a weak man—and against this new wall erected a rampart of old bones; then, thrusting the dangling ends of the chain within my doublet, began to retrace my feet toward freedom.

I struck my foot against some small, soft object, and halted with a start. I leaned over. I had kicked against Montresor’s mask, and I put it over my face.

I knew that all of his servants were away to enjoy the carnival, but it would do no harm to wear this mask—and it served my purpose. I passed through the crypt and walked back swiftly and steadily through the range of low arches through which I had come staggering to an awful doom.

Soon I was above in my false friend’s rich suites in the cheerful glow of many lights. But all was quiet. No one stirred. I was alone—safe!

I went light-footed through the deserted house—I could hear the shouts and laughter of the merry people in the street—until I came to the passage leading to the plaza.

There I stopped, with the blood jumping through my veins like wildfire. In this hall, in the corner upon a low settee, lay Montresor, sprawling in a heavy stupor, as drunk with wine as I had been when I had trustfully entered within his doors. I paused over his body. Within my bosom was the dagger with which I never part. And yet I let him lie there unharmed.

When I elbowed my way, masked, through the square, it was twelve o’clock. I was in time to keep my appointment with his wife! I laughed. What a jest!

And Montresor’s wife was awaiting me in the usual place. Such a beautiful woman! I really loved her—and I hoped he did.

I was as clever as I was brave—I was, indeed, an exceedingly clever man. I had seen my creditors pressing and all things turning toward ruin, and that was why I had converted everything possible into gold and precious stones.

That night I crept unseen into my own house, from which my servants, like Montresor’s, had stolen away to enjoy the carnival, and, securing all the wealth I had secreted, was up and away, my chain stricken off by an obscure armorer. I have no doubt that my body-servant was executed for the theft of my fortune—as indeed he should have been for watching my belongings so poorly. But I know not.

Then we left the city while the streets were still crowded and gay—Montresor’s wife and I—and went to England, where we have lived a long life very happily.

Years ago I heard a vague rumor that Montresor believed his beautiful wife had gone away with Giovanna, the tenor, who disappeared at about that time. But it was not so. As for Lady Fortunato—she may have guessed the truth.

And Montresor will believe until he dies that my bones lie crumbling in the little walled-in dungeon below his palazzo.

The Weaving
Shadows

By W. H. HOLMES

CHET BURKE was lazily reclining in his favorite easy chair, absorbed in a rare book on alchemy and black magic, when his sister answered a summons at the door.

In addition to managing the household affairs of the apartment in which she and Burke lived alone, her duties also consisted in scrutinizing the many visitors. Most of them could be persuaded to call at the book stall, which Burke conducted when not devoted to some criminal mystery that held him until it was solved. Others, whose cases were urgent, were admitted to the apartment, thus infringing on Burke’s only recreation, reading and study.

The visitors were Chief Rhyne, a friend of Burke’s, of the Rhyne Detective Agency, and a stranger.

Burke laid aside his book and greeted the callers with a friendly nod. Rhyne, a portly, flushed man, settled his sturdy body into a convenient chair. The stranger, an intelligent-looking man, appeared ill at ease. He stood self-consciously beside Rhyne, absently running the brim of his soft hat through browned, muscular-looking fingers.

“Burke,” grunted Rhyne heavily, “meet Mr. Hayden. He is bothered about a very mysterious affair. It has worked on his nerves until he has decided to consult an expert. It’s beyond me, so I brought him around to you.”

Rhyne sighed with relief, and eased back in his chair.

Hayden stuck out a rough, calloused hand to Burke. His bronzed face flushed slightly at Rhyne’s statement.

“I am more concerned,” he said, in a surprisingly agreeable voice, “about how you will receive what I have to relate. I can hardly believe yet that the things exist, although I have seen them three nights in succession.”

He shook his head in doubt, and sat down mechanically in the chair that Burke drew up.

While Hayden was gathering his thoughts, Burke quietly sized him up. Hayden appeared to be a man of about forty-five. His face was deeply tanned, and his appearance suggested many hours spent out of doors. Burke noted at once his trait of eying one direct from warm brown eyes. He was garbed quietly, and evidently in his best. His dark suit was set off by square-toed shoes, above which glared white socks. A low, soft, white collar, with a black string tie, completed his obviously habitual concession to dress. On the whole, Hayden struck the detective as a wholesome type of the practical mechanic.

“Now, Mr. Hayden,” said Burke musingly, his eyes half closed and vacant, “state your case fully. We will try not to interrupt you.”

The detective lounged down in his chair, his heavy lips slightly drooping, and his long legs crossed indolently in front of him. His eyes had their customary vague stare through the tortoise-shell glasses that veiled them.

Hayden drew a long breath, then exhaled it in a long sigh. With a brisk straightening of his shoulders he said:

“I am a carpenter. Until recently, or, to be exact, until four days ago, I lived in New Orleans. I am a bachelor, and it doesn’t make much difference to me where I live, so long as I can find work at my trade. Therefore I came up here, to Sunken Mine, in the Highlands of the Hudson, to live with a widowed sister and her daughter.”

He paused, and his eyes grew reflective. For a moment he was evidently measuring his words. With a quick intake of his breath, he resumed:

“My sister lives in an aged, pre-Revolutionary house, deep in the mountains. It is a lonely place, and a secluded dwelling. At one time it was probably a restful appearing country farmhouse. Today it is a weathered frame building, set in a grove of dead and whitened chestnut trees.

“The house is a one-story-and-attic affair, with rough stone fireplaces at the side, and a long sloping roof that pitches low at the rear. Owing to its age and the condition of the place, it is a dreary spot for one used to the city. My sister affects ancient, antique furnishings, which does not lessen the impression of living in the past. As soon as I crossed the door-sill I was affected by this vague, misty remembrance of being there before.

“It may strike you as strange that my sister picked out a place of this type to spend the remainder of her days. But she had, to her and her daughter, good reasons. Both she and my niece are earnest spiritualists. Both receive messages, and are, in truth, sincere mediums. For some reason, my sister claims that the atmosphere of the old dwelling helps them to materialize those that have gone before. I myself have considerable faith in those things, although I treat it in a practical manner. I only believe what I actually see. What I am about to relate, I have both seen and felt.”

Hayden paused for an instant to stare earnestly at Burke. The detective nodded to him to continue.

“I have read deeply,” went on Hayden, “and in my spare time I could be called a bookworm. I work at my trade, but live much in the past, especially in books. For this reason, I could be sympathetic to my sister’s idea of living close to her life’s hobby, or her ‘mission,’ as she calls it.

“There is one more reason why my sister purchased the place, six weeks ago. It was the original settling place of the family, before the Revolution. As the result of a family tragedy, some hundred years or more ago, the place passed into other hands. Few new buildings are constructed in that sparsely settled, unfertile section, and most of the houses have stood for generations. Consequently, the old Hayden house was never disturbed. At the time it came back into the family it was vacant and for sale.

“They had been living there about two months when I came there to live with them. The room I occupied Sunday night is on the second floor. It is a semi-attic room, lit by one window. Before I came, the room was occupied by my niece. On my arrival it was arranged for me, and the girl and her mother occupied a bedroom downstairs.

“It was around eleven-thirty Sunday night when I went to bed, and was soon asleep. I awoke with the feeling that something was stifling me. It was as if I had a heavy cold and found difficulty in breathing. This peculiar sensation of suffocation finally caused me to rouse into complete wakefulness. The strange smothering seemed to ease as I got more fully awake. Unable to fall asleep again, I lay looking out of the window at the stars. The bed is at the end of the room, and the window was in direct sight.

“The house was intensely still. I noticed this in particular, as I remarked the absence of the city noises I had been used to. I can’t recollect that there was so much as an insect stirring. My own breathing, as in imagination I still struggled for breath, was the only sound. It appeared to fill the room with a hoarse, rasping murmur. I likened myself to a dying man, gasping his last breath. This fancy, to one of my usual practical trend, was perplexing to myself. Still, in the few moments before the things appeared, my thoughts apparently dwelt on uncanny ideas. At the same time I was conscious of a queer tingling of my body.

“As I lay staring at the faint light of the sky, I slowly became conscious of a singular illusion, or, as I am at times led to believe, a startling visitation. The dark shadows of the room appeared to be dancing rapidly before my eyes. They were streaming in long wreaths, coiling in fantastic spirals, and wafting through the room in wide, level films of blackness.

“I don’t know how I could see this, but it was plainly visible. Yet the room, except for the faint light that came from the clear, moonless sky, was in fairly deep darkness. It seemed that the moving shadows that formed before my eyes were only discernible because of their greater density. I can only liken this uncanny movement of the shadows to swaying and floating clouds of tobacco smoke, when one is smoking slowly and freely.

“For some moments I watched the movements of the shadows. Then I observed that they were forming in a more stable order. They were now lying in long, round coils of blackness, horizontally across the room, and twisting rapidly. For several moments they lay motionless, except for their rapid turning, then, as if stirred by a firm direct breeze, they undulated toward the head of the stairs. This drift brought several horizontal layers into contact. At the moment of their touching, the shadows seemed to weave into huge rolls, which streamed from sight rapidly down the stairs. The room now appeared to grow lighter, and the air clearer. Also, all sensation of smothering had left me.

“I lay there quietly after the disappearance of the shadows, pondering over the strange affair. So far, I was fairly calm, except for the wonderment of the thing. The return of the shadows was cause of my fears and suspense as to the final outcome.

“My eyes were gazing absently out of the window, as I had not turned my eyes from the stairs after the black rolls had streamed down them. Slowly, so slowly that it scarcely seemed to move, I saw a black, humanlike form rise above the sill of the window. I could just see the top of it as it mounted the stairs. I watched it with a keen realization that it had something to do with the shadows.

“Very slowly, almost imperceptibly, the round, headlike shape continued to rise. I could now see it plainly, outlined against the lighter sky. The shape now rose to its full height. It had the form of a shapeless human figure. That is, I could distinguish the smaller head shadow above, and what would answer for a body, if one were at all imaginative. The thing passed beyond the window and drifted into the darkness at the end of the room. Yet, I could still make out its vague form by its greater blackness.

“My eyes went back to the window. Another figure was slowly blocking the cheerful light of the sky. Again a black form emerged to its full height. It joined the first. I am not a coward. I lay quiet, wondering what the thing presaged.

“The two figures advanced to the center of the room. They were now fairly discernible. One of them walked to an old-fashioned dresser at one side of the room, stood there a moment, then joined the other figure. With this, both shapes turned and passed down the stairs.

“As they were disappearing, I called. The forms were so clear, and I was by this time so far from sleep, that my mind hit on a logical reason to explain the thing. It was evidently my sister and my niece. They had wanted something from the dresser, and, not wishing to disturb me, had come up quietly, got what they wanted, and then returned to their room.

“Getting no answer to my call, I sprang out of bed to convince myself of the truth of my belief. I went downstairs, and to their room. Both were in bed and fast asleep. I awoke them. Neither one had been up since retiring. I did not tell them of the black forms, but made some excuse for awakening them. The remainder of the night I spent in the kitchen, sleeping in a large rocking chair.”

Hayden paused and stared at Burke.

---

“GO ON,” said Burke shortly. “This would not have brought you to me.” Hayden shook his head.

“No,” he said, “it was what came after. This same night, as I arose from the bed, following the disappearance of the two forms down the stairway, I had reached the center of the room when I became conscious of standing in something that was wet to my feet. I was barefooted, and when I looked at my feet I found them soiled with blood.

“Naturally I thought that I had cut myself; but a close examination revealed no cut or bruise of any sort. I lit a lamp and went back upstairs. My first glance was at the spot where I had first felt the wetness. A glance revealed the cause. Directly in the center of the bare board floor was a large pool of fresh blood. It was slowly spreading out over the floor, and sinking into the dry wood. I cleaned it up as much as possible, and then searched the room thoroughly. There was absolutely nothing that I could find that would explain the blood.

“The next morning, both my sister and my niece complained of feeling languid and fagged. My niece, a very white, frail girl, was even more colorless than usual, and her mother, noticeable for her deep intense eyes and the black rings that encircle them, seemed listless and indifferent to everything. Noting this, I scrubbed up the bloodstains before they made up the room, and said nothing of what I had seen.

“Things were normal until Monday night. Again, about the same hour, I was awakened by a smothering sensation. Once more I heard my own breathing as I gasped for air. As I got more fully awake, I found that the smothering sensation grew more intense. I sat up in bed, crouched over like one suffering with the asthma, and striving to fill my lungs with air. But this did not relieve my distress.

“Unconsciously, my eyes were fixed across the dark room. Again occurred the weaving of the shadows. Panting, stifling, and seemingly unable to arouse myself enough to get out of bed, I watched the repetition of the scene of the previous night. Once the horizontal streams of shadows were formed, my breathing became more normal, and I seemed to regain the power to move and think clearly.

“I then deliberately waited to see the finish of the affair. The banks of twisting shadows disappeared down the stairway, and the two figures repeated their previous trip. As soon as they had descended past the window, I sprang from bed and lit my lamp. My eyes went at once to the floor. The pool of fresh blood was there for the second time. I let it lay and tiptoed down stairs, and to the women’s room. Both were in a sound sleep, but I was struck at once by the haggardness of their features.

“I did not awake them. Getting a basin and water, I returned upstairs. I again scrubbed up the floor, this time with much care, as the stain had now gone deep into the aged boards. Leaving the lamp lit, I went back to bed. Finally I fell asleep. Nothing occurred during the remainder of the night.

“The morning after this second visitation,” resumed Hayden, “I again remarked the extreme pallor of my niece and the haggard, gaunt face of her mother. Still, I remained silent, determined to solve the riddle for myself.

“Last night I retired early, and I took several precautions. First, I secured an electric flashlight. Next, I powdered the stairs with flour. I also sprinkled the floor on the attic room. I now had a trap that no human being, or any mechanical figure, could tread over without leaving a trace. This done, I blew out the lamp and went to bed.

“I lay awake for a matter of two or three hours. I was determined to stay awake until the shadows commenced to form, or until I began to feel the smothering sensation. In this way, I would have a grasp on it from beginning to end. But in spite of my resolution, I fell asleep.

“I was again awakened by an uncanny feeling. Firm hands, or, rather, some peculiar force, seemed to hold my arms down on the bed. I sought to draw up my legs in order to slip out of bed, but found them held by an unyielding power. Finally, I discovered that I was unable to move any part of my body. I was certainly awake, yet I was as helpless as a person in a nightmare, who fancies that his body is totally paralyzed.

“Forced to lay motionless, I saw the black shadows stream from various parts of the room. This time they formed over my bed. I could feel them drift across my face, spinning, waving, and twisting and contorting. It was an unearthly feeling, lying there helpless to avert anything that might happen. There is nothing I can describe that would be similar to the feeling of those black forms, ceaselessly in motion. It might be likened to some invisible force that presses on one, or to a heavy fog that a person seems to feel in a material manner, with a strong impression of its dampness and chill.

“This helplessness and the weaving of the shadows went on for perhaps five minutes. Then, as the twisting rolls started to stream down the stairs, I could feel my body regaining its power. With the disappearance of the materializing forms, I became physically and mentally myself again.

“I then got the electric torch in my hand, ready to flash it at the proper moment. The figures rose above the stair, and I directed the bulb of the light toward them. I waited until they advanced to the center of the room, then I threw on the light.”

---

HAYDEN wiped his mouth with a trembling hand. His lips were dry, and his face flushed.

Then, with a slight shudder, he went on:

“At the instant of the flash, the darkness of the figures was gone. Instead, I saw two faces. They were inhuman, horrible, and impossible to describe. They leered at me with their shadowy, devilish faces, scarcely discernible in the glow of the torch. They seemed to be mocking me. They were corpse-looking and repulsive, but the eyes were terrible. They were full and real, and glowing, with a hellish, vengeful fire. But with all the horribleness of the faces, it was not they that held me motionless.

“It was at that moment that I discovered the source of the blood. It was dripping out of the air, and falling in a steady patter. I glanced up at the ceiling, but it was firm and unbroken. While I watched—it was scarcely a second—the drops seemed to form in the air above the floor. They were rapidly ceasing when my nerves gave way for the moment, and I let out an involuntary yell. With the cry, the dripping blood suddenly ceased and the faces vanished.

“This brought me to my senses. I sprang from bed, determined to see the thing through. My first act was to scan my trap. I followed the flour down the stairs, but it lay in a white, unbroken dust, as I had scattered it. That night, also, I looked in on the women. Both were sound asleep. But I was deeply shocked by their distorted faces. Shaken both mentally and bodily, I once more spent the rest of the night in the kitchen rocker.

“And now I want some one to go up there with me, examine the house, and spend the night in the room. I am troubled, nervous, and frightened: both for myself and for those with whom I live.”

“I will go there with you,” replied Burke evenly, “and I think the two of us should accomplish something. We can probably handle two shadowy forms.”

Hayden smiled dolefully.

“They handled me last night,” he said ruefully. “I’m a pretty strong man, but something held me as helpless as a baby.”

---

BURKE alighted at a lonely way-station, standing on a strip of land between a wide marsh and the Hudson.

The marsh ran to the foot of the mountains, and lay sear and rippling in the September breeze. Hayden had stated that the dwelling stood back in the hills, a distance of some five miles. On Burke’s suggestion, they started to walk. Burke wanted to study the country, and, incidentally, study his companion.

The country he found to be sparsely settled. The road wound up through forest-clad rocky hills. The dwelling stood beside a wide stretch of woods, with cleared fields to the north.

Burke scanned the dwelling as he approached it, and found it to be the usual type of farm house of a century ago, buried among dead trees.

The interior of the house was in keeping with the exterior. Oval frames held old prints, horse-hair upholstered, massive dark furniture contrasted with tables and stands covered with white marble tops, the chairs squatted grimly in the quiet rooms and rested on dull rag carpets. The woman and her daughter struck Burke like beings transported from the misty past.

The mother was a tall, sparse woman, with heavy black rings about the eyes. The eyes, black and dreamy, held Burke with a steady, unwinking stare. The daughter was the opposite of her dark, sallow mother. She seemed a lifeless, colorless sprite, seemingly alive by the power and vigor of her more intense mother. She was about twenty years of age, although her chalky face, and thin, bloodless hands, together with her slight frame and indolent movements, seemed to signify an elder age, or some wasting disease. Both were of the dreaming, musing type, speaking softly and briefly, and moving silently about the quiet house, and both were garbed in dresses of white material.

Burke’s first act was to visit the room upstairs. There was nothing to warrant his attention except the stained floor. He ripped up several splinters and put them in his pocket. He then announced his intention of visiting the nearest town, several miles to the south.

Hayden asked no questions, evidently placing the affair entirely in Burke’s hands. He remarked that he would “walk down a ways” with the detective, and await his return.

The two women were still unaware of Burke’s vocation, and accepted without comment Hayden’s statement that Burke was a friend that was to remain over night.

---

AS SOON as Burke arrived in town, he went at once to the Chief of Police. Here he inquired for some one qualified to make an examination of the bloodstained splinters. He was directed to a doctor who maintained a laboratory. The latter, after a lengthy analysis, confessed himself puzzled. Something was missing in the composition. He could not account for the peculiar results he obtained. It was human blood—and yet it was not.

Burke returned to the Chief of Police and inquired about the Haydens. The Chief was unable to give Burke any satisfaction, but directed him to an old settler in the vicinity who could probably furnish the desired information.

Burke found the family without trouble. They were willing to talk, but they knew very little about the Haydens—though a good deal about the house.

Over a hundred years before, they said, a widow and her niece had lived in the then new dwelling. The place, a flourishing farm, which had since been cut up and sold off, was managed by the woman’s step-brother. The family were more or less secluded, and seldom seen.

In the course of weeks it was noticed that no one had seen the two women. The brother was at the house alone, and refused to talk. This led to an investigation. No trace of the women was found. The brother was never brought to trial, continued to live on the place until he died of old age, and had prospered. His heirs had taken over the place, and it had been gradually dissipated, until only the house and an acre or so of land remained.

Burke listened politely, then, thanking the old couple, returned to the Hayden house. Hayden was awaiting him.

That evening, Burke sat beside the open fireplace, listening to the low, earnest conversation of the others. The woman and her daughter he observed closely. They seemed to be possessed of some restless emotion that caused them to wander aimlessly around. On the contrary, Hayden appeared to be sluggish and incapable of extended speech. This struck Burke as queer, as he had remarked the vivid description Hayden had given of the attic room.

At ten o’clock the women announced their intention of retiring. Bidding the two men good-night, they withdrew to their rooms. Burke and Hayden, the latter almost stupid and listless in his movements, went up the narrow stairs to the room above.

Both lay on the bed fully robed. Burke saw Hayden take a revolver from his pocket and shove it under his pillow.

“What shall we do?” asked Hayden heavily, seemingly unconscious of anything around him and staring vacantly at the ceiling.

“Well,” replied Burke quietly, “first, we will blow out the lamp.”

He got out of bed and put out the light. Returning, he crawled on the further side of Hayden, leaving Hayden on the outside. Burke had no desire to be on the firing side of the revolver in the event that Hayden should start shooting.

The detective lay for an hour, pondering over the strange case. Finally he spoke to Hayden. The latter did not reply. He was apparently fast asleep. Yet, as Burke listened closely, he could discern no signs of the latter’s breathing.

Burke now experienced a singular emotion aroused by the intense silence of the room. The longer he lay the more impressive it became. Downstairs he heard the low chime of a clock. It struck eleven. The minutes lagged along in the forbidding silence.

The clock chimed the half hour. Fifteen more minutes passed. Hayden, breathing heavily now, commenced to move. Burke half arose on his elbow and listened. Hayden was muttering in his sleep.

Burke eyed the dark shadows of the room with keen eyes. Nothing met his gaze. He glanced to the window. Nothing there. Hayden was suffering tortures in his struggle for breath.

The detective was on the point of shaking him, when, with a heavy, prolonged gasp, Hayden sat up. Burke sensed the horror of the man, yet he remained motionless. His eyes were fixed on the dark, silent room, wandering frequently to the window.

Nothing unusual was to be seen, and he watched the vague form of his bed-mate. The latter was now rigid, struggling with the weight that oppressed his lungs, and apparently staring off into the room. Then, to Burke’s amazement, Hayden started to breathe normally.

“Burke,” he whispered hoarsely, “did you see it? Did you see them pass down the stairs?”

“Eh?” grunted Burke sleepily.

“My God!” muttered Hayden, “you were to watch, and you fall asleep. They have gone down the stairs. They’ll come back again in four or five minutes. Watch!”

Burke made no reply. He, with his wide-awake companion, was staring intently at the window. Suddenly he felt Hayden stiffen.

“The head is just coming up the stairs!” whispered Hayden.

Burke felt the movement of Hayden’s arm as it slid under the pillow. Then came the blinding flash of the revolver and its roar. Twice Hayden pulled the trigger. By that time Burke had flashed on his electric torch. The room was empty. Burke glanced at the floor. No blood was visible.

Hayden was panting and rocking back and forth.

“I feel awful queer,” he groaned. “Something is dragging me.”

Mechanically he arose from the bed and stumbled onto the floor.

“It tells me to kill, kill!” he mumbled. “Kill with my revolver. Kill—who shall I kill?”

Burke silently followed the plodding form of the other. With measured steps Hayden stalked to the stairs and passed down, with Burke close behind.

Hayden led the way directly to the room of his sister and niece. Without hesitating, his fingers grasping a loaded “Billy,” Burke trailed close and waited for the moment when he should be needed.

Hayden appeared unconscious of the light furnished by Burke’s torch, nor did he once turn on the short journey. Reaching the side of the bed in which the women were sleeping, he paused and stared rigidly down.

Burke joined him. His light was now on the two women. He was struck by the horrible contortions of the faces, seemingly drawn in agony.

With a sudden premonition, he bent down and felt the motionless forms. The girl’s hand was limp and lifeless. He felt the pulse of the older woman.

Both were dead!

---

THE detective turned to Hayden.

He was staring down, dry-eyed.

“I see,” he said stupidly, “both dead. Kill, kill—who was I to kill? Not them. They’re dead. Something still tells me to kill!” He sank into a chair and buried his face in his hands.

Burke lit a lamp that stood on a heavy dresser and put out the torch. He stood looking down at the two women. He then noted that the room was growing shadowy. He glanced at the lamp. It was full of oil and the wick seemed to be burning freely, yet the light continued to lower.

Burke again glanced at the two women. Slowly, almost invisibly, he fancied that the agonized features were changing to the repose of death.

Hayden arose and came to the detective’s side. He was muttering and softly moaning. Burke watched him.

Hayden, with a sudden start, looked across the room.

“They’re coming back!” he mumbled, “weaving and twisting.”

His eyes moved slowly from the opposite side of the room as if he were following some moving object. They came to rest on the women’s faces.

“Streaming down their mouths!” he muttered. “They’re sucking in the twisting rolls. They’re coming to life!”

Burke glanced at the women. In the dim light he could have sworn that he saw traces of returning life. At that moment there came a crashing report at his side and a blinding flash.

With that, the light flared up bright, and the dead faces were revealed. Burke whirled around.

Hayden was sinking to the floor, a bullet hole in his head, from which the blood was slowly starting to emerge. Burke sank beside the man and lifted his head.

Slowly the heavy form relaxed. Hayden opened his eyes to stare with bewilderment at the detective.

In another moment he was dead.

Burke placed the body on the floor and went to the bed. Once again he endeavored to find a trace of pulse in the still forms. Both were lifeless. He fancied that both dead faces bore a peaceful look, and on the elder woman’s slightly-opened lips there seemed to hover an exultant smile.

Closing the room, Burke got his coat and belongings, then locked up the house. Some hours later he was sitting with the Chief of Police, relating the tragedy. The Chief drove with Burke to the Sheriff of the county, and together they went to the house. The Sheriff had called up the coroner, and they found him waiting for them.

A brief examination of the women revealed that both had died of heart failure, probably induced by some unexplainable shock. Burke took the Sheriff aside. On the detective’s suggestion, they wrecked the attic room in a thorough search. Burke wanted to locate the source of the dropping blood.

At the conclusion of their quest the mystery was finished, for Burke. But it was to Rhyne that he confessed his failure.

Returning to his apartment in New York, he found Rhyne there.

“Well,” cried the latter, as soon as he appeared, “did you solve the mystery?”

“No,” replied Burke. “I did not.”

Rhyne’s eyes opened. “Well—what did you find?”

“Over the attic room,” said Burke musingly, “we found a small, cryptlike space between the ceiling of the attic room and the roof of the house. It was encased in plaster. As we broke through the ceiling, a mass of human bones came tumbling down. The coroner pronounced them the skeletons of a woman and a girl. Both had been dead for generations.

“Through the shoulder blade of the girl’s skeleton was a jagged hole. When the bones fell, the elder woman’s skull rolled to my feet. I picked it up. Something rattled inside and I worked it out through the eye socket. It was a slug of lead.

“Both the woman and the girl had been murdered.”

Queer Tribe of Savages Found in Africa

ONE of the strangest tribes in Africa is that of the El Molo. Ruled by a blind chief, they live on an island near the east shore of Lake Rudolf in East Africa, their shelter being crude huts fashioned from palm leaves. They live entirely on fish, which they spear and eat raw, and they drink nothing except the water in the lake, which the white man considers unfit to drink. It is said they cannot live for more than an hour without water, their lips swelling and bleeding if they try to go longer. They use a language of their own, different from that of the other African tribes.

African Brides Must Be Plump

THE wild tribes of Africa consider no girl beautiful unless she is abnormally fat. Hence their young girls are fed on milk and fattening foods, and are not permitted to exercise. This forced fattening is not only a necessary preparation for marriage—it is also good business for a girl’s parents. When a girl marries, the bridegroom pays her parents for her, and the amount he pays is based on the degree of plumpness of the bride whom they have fattened for him.

An Odd, Fantastic Little Story
of the Stone Age

Nimba, the
Cave Girl

By R. T. M. Scott

MANY thousands of years ago, when the poles of the earth were its pleasant spots and when the tropics were too hot for human life, Nimba grew to her full height and was still a maid.

Many had been her suitors, but, from the time she had pulled down her first wild animal, she had lived much apart from others of her kind and had become known as a mighty traveler and hunter. She could run a hundred miles in one day over the worst kind of country, and she had matched her brains successfully against the most wonderful of animal cunning. Unaided, she could support herself, and she did not want a mate—at least, not yet.

Somewhere, not far south of what is now called James Bay, is a beautiful lake lying between steep-sloping, wood-covered hills. At one end of this lake a great boulder once stood, heaving its huge mass a full hundred feet above the water. At its back the steep hillside gave access to its summit. At its front the water rippled or dashed against one hundred feet of straight wall.

Yet not quite perfect was this wall. In its very center, and slightly overhanging the lake, was a tiny cave, an irregular cavity large enough to shelter two or three people. Fifty feet above the water and fifty feet below the top of the great rock, this natural shelter against rain or enemy seemed inaccessible to anything without wings. But the skin of a long-haired animal was stretched to dry against the back of this little cave—pegged to the cracks and crannies by means of great thorns. Scattered here and there were bleached bones—relics of past meals eaten by Nimba.

---

IT WAS a hot afternoon, and the sun was beating the earth in its usual relentless fury. To the south the great cloud-masses of steam were rising and tumbling upon themselves in rain, only to revaporize and rise again.

The air was still with a breathless quiet, which presaged continued fine weather and little danger of the hot humidity of the south being blown northward. On the eastern horizon a mighty mountain belched its head off and sent a column of fire into the sky that rivaled the glare of the sun.

Suddenly the bushes parted behind the great rock-sentinel of the lake. Nimba sprang out and ran to the highest vantage point. There she stood, motionless, gazing at the burning mountain. Fire did not frighten her as it did the creatures which ran on four legs; rather it attracted her.

She stood long, viewing the new magnificence of the eastern horizon, her coppery-tanned skin glistening in the sun and her firm young breasts rising and falling as if they, too, saw and wondered in dreamy contemplation. Lithe were her legs and arms, and slender her waist, with hips full big but boy-like in their taper. Her hair was bound with little tendrils into a cue that reached below her waist and then was doubled to keep it off the ground. Sunburned, its hue was a golden glory. A deep scar marked her face, but this only added to its barbaric beauty.

Of a sudden, she bent as in the act of listening and then leaped back into the bushes, only to return with a small animal she had killed, and dragging behind her a stout creeper of great length. Fastening one end of the creeper to a jutting rock, she threw the other end over the face of the great boulder and, holding with one hand the animal’s leg, lowered herself to the cave in the wall with all the agility of a monkey.

Scarcely had she entered her tiny abode before she noticed that her creeper ladder was being violently agitated from above. She leaned far out from her cave in a perilous manner and saw descending toward her a long pair of hairy legs followed by the rest of a man.

Picking up a stout club from the back of her cave, Nimba waited until the legs came within reach and then caught the man a blow on his thigh that caused him to yell lustily and to ascend a few feet with great rapidity.

He did not entirely retreat, however, but, turning around like a caterpillar on a thread, again descended, this time head first in order to keep a bright outlook.

---

NIMBA now saw the man’s face, and she disliked it more than his legs. Her small features convulsed with rage, and she spat at him and beat the wall with her club in a frenzy. She knew him well.

He was Oomba, one of the strong and cruel men of her tribe. When he was fifteen he had killed his grandfather for a stoneheaded club. He had caught the old man unawares, which act of caution had been construed as timidity so that he had few friends until he became too strong to withstand.

When Oomba had descended until his face was within twelve inches beyond the reach of the girl’s club, he hung there, gloating over her with greedy, lustful eyes. For half an hour he hung, face downward, sensuously intoning to the infuriated girl.

“With me hunt! With me eat! With me sleep!”

At the end of half an hour Nimba was still spitting at him and still clubbing the wall with unabated energy.

“Oomba go! Oomba go! Me you will not touch!” she screamed at intervals.

Finally Oomba climbed back to the top of the rock—but he did not give up. He pulled the great creeper up after him. He would trap the little spit-cat, he thought, and so tame her.

But he did not know Nimba.

As soon as the object of her hatred became lost to sight Nimba calmed herself. When she saw her rope of escape withdrawn she waited for some time in silence. Then she stepped to the edge of her cave home—and her body flashed forward through the sunlit air like a gleam of gold. For fifty feet the gleam curved, then struck the water silently like a knife. Fifteen yards from where she struck, Nimba’s face appeared above the surface glancing upward toward the top of the rock.

Oomba peering over the rock, witnessed Nimba’s mighty dive. For a moment he scowled at her before dashing into the bushes just as Nimba swam into shallow water.

---

NIMBA rose near the shore, her club dripping in her hand. She bounded along the rough shore line, keeping at least ankle deep in the water. Rounding a small, wooded point, she came to an overhanging bough upon which she climbed.

Here she broke two or three small branches and sped on into the next tree and the next, throwing herself from limb to limb and breaking small branches in her flight. Finally she broke a very small branch and leaped into a densely foliaged tree without so much as crushing a leaf. And here she ensconced herself from sight.

Her trap was laid. She clung to a limb as silent and watchful as any animal of prey, her long club between her young body and the bark on which she lay.

The minutes passed while Nimba’s dark eyes kept constant watch through the green leaves that formed her mask. Abruptly, as she watched, a young man stepped out and stood beneath her tree. Strong and straight was he. His eyes were bright and the hair on his face was short and soft. Not a leaf rustled as Nimba watched with growing interest. Below her the man stood quietly scenting the air.

Suddenly a twig snapped, and the young man turned like a flash, only to receive Oomba’s mighty club full on the head. So silently had Oomba approached that the listening Nimba had not detected the slightest sound. Now he stood looking down at his victim and contemptuously turning the bleeding head from side to side with his foot, quite unconscious of any lurking danger.

Clinging only by her feet from the bough upon which she had been lying, Nimba reached down and swung her club with vicious force upon the side of Oomba’s head. Beside his own victim he fell, while Nimba dropped lightly to the ground, turning in the air like a cat and landing upon her feet.

Quickly she dragged Oomba to one side, where two rocks abutted, and wedged his head vicelike between them. Then she beat it with her club until it had no shape at all and the leaves and little green things nearby were spattered with blood. There was no doubt about it: Oomba was dead.

---

GREAT satisfaction showed on Nimba’s face when her bloody task was done.

She washed the blood from her body in the lake and returned to examine the young man who had first been struck down. Apparently satisfied with his condition, she picked him up and, trailing her bloody club, returned to her great rock at the head of the lake. Here she found the creeper where Oomba had left it and experienced little difficulty in climbing down to the privacy of her cave with the senseless man under one arm.

Two trips she made for water, which was carried in a gourd and stored in a hollow in the cave floor. This done, Nimba washed the young man’s face, wet his hair and propped him in a corner to recover his senses.

Her work of mercy finished, Nimba turned her attention to the animal which she had killed earlier in the day. Dragging it from its corner, she placed both feet upon the body while she tore off a leg with one furious wrench. As the sun was setting and the deep purple of the hills became bordered with gold, Nimba commenced the one meal of the day to which she was accustomed. It would soon be time to sleep.

Almost as the last shaft of sunlight shot over the distant hills consciousness returned to the young man as he sat propped in the corner of the cave. Slowly he looked about him. He rose to his feet and walked to the edge of the cave, where he gazed down at the lake and examined the dangling creeper down which he had been carried.

Finally the young man approached Nimba, who had stopped eating and was silently watching him, her mouth bloody from her raw repast. He dragged the animal from her side and shoved her into a corner, where a jagged stone cut her shoulder, causing the blood to flow. Having eaten his fill, the man lay down to sleep.

The great moon rose and silvered the sleeping lake. A night-bird screeched as it swept by the entrance to the cave and Nimba crept from her corner. Still bleeding, she stretched herself beside the sleeping man. Her body touched his and some blood from her shoulder mingled with his in a tiny pool.

Below them, in the water, a reptile splashed its way among the reeds. Nimba and her master slept.

Nimba had taken her mate.

What Comes After Death?

An Anonymous Author Gives a
Startling Answer in

The
YOUNG MAN
who
WANTED TO
DIE

By ? ? ?

FIRST EPISODE.

IN A MEAN, miserable, two-dollar-a-week bedroom in a Chicago lodging-house a young man was calmly and deliberately preparing to kill himself.

He possessed youth, health, affluence and comeliness—and yet he was preparing to kill himself. Calmly and deliberately. In the shabby room of a shabby hovel.

With a penknife, he was ripping the bedclothes to ribbons and wedging them into chinks and crannies. At last satisfied that the room was as near gas-tight as he could make it, he stripped to his underclothing and sat down at the battered bureau and began to write:

“As soon as my dead body is found the newspapers will want to know why I did it. I’ll tell them. And they may scarehead it as much as they like. I don’t care. I’ve destroyed every clue to my identity, and though I am wealthy enough to be pointed to and stared at, there is not one in this vast city whom I know, not one who cares whether I am alive tomorrow morning, or dead.

“A love motive? Yes. But there is also something else—something equally potent to me, however weak and flimsy it may appear to others. I loved and do still love a girl whom I have known from childhood, but always there has been this thing that stood between us, and which is chiefly accountable for what I am about to do. It is not drink—nor gambling, nor hereditary disease.

“It is a Curiosity. An awful, overwhelming, unconquerable Curiosity. As far back as I can remember, I’ve had a terrible desire to know what follows death. As I grew up, this craving increased until it was a positive mania. I devoured every book on theosophy and kindred subjects I could lay hands on; I attended meetings of psychic societies; at college my avidity for psychology was remarked by everybody. At length I had reached the point where I yearned to tear aside the black veil of death and discover her secret. Why wait? I asked myself. Since you are bound to go some day, why not go now?

“One day I half-playfully voiced some such sentiment to her. It led to a dispute, which led to a violent quarrel; and that night she left the town where we both lived.

“I traced her as far as Chicago, and here I have lost her. For three years now I have searched the city for her, but not a trace have I found. And so I have given it up. It is hopeless. I shall never see her again.

“Like myself, she is alone in the world, but, unlike me, she is very poor. And somewhere in this great, monstrous city she is living even as I write these words—perhaps miles away—perhaps in the next block—perhaps ... God alone knows, and God protect her!”

He stopped, put down his pencil, and placed his hand before his eyes. Thus he sat for several minutes. The yellow gas flames flickered weirdly at either side of the shoddy bureau; the clangor of a distant street car reached him faintly; a motor-truck rumbled heavily in the street below; a bickering couple jawed and wrangled ceaselessly in the next room.

After awhile he picked up the pencil and went on:

“Well anyway, I’m going to gratify that Curiosity. In a few hours I shall be in an unknown country I have always longed to explore. I’ve an idea I’ll find a happiness there I have never known on this earth.

“In any event, I shall leave some good front page stuff for the newspapers. It ought to make an interesting story: ‘Rich young man, seeking his lost sweetheart in the great city, gives way to despair and kills himself.’ If the girl is found next door, without money to buy food or pay her room rent—”

He arose abruptly with a sharp curse, and tore up what he had written. Then he turned off both gas jets, then turned them on full, and then lay down upon the cot in a corner of the room....

It was perhaps some twenty minutes before his body began to twitch convulsively.

“Lily May!” he murmured huskily. Then more hoarsely still, “Lily May—forgive—Lily May!”

... His body was writhing and twisting horribly now. His hands were clutching at the air, at his clothing, at the mattress; his legs were contracting and relaxing spasmodically. His face turned purple; he choked and gasped.

“Lily May!” he cried in a stifling whisper, and attempted to lift his arms.

But he could not, and his lips ceased moving and his head fell back, and he lay very still.

SECOND EPISODE.

WHEN the deadly gas fumes reached the youth on the cot he turned over on his back, threw his arms out, and breathed long and deeply of the poisoned air.

His head throbbed and pounded; his heart pumped madly; his eyes started from their sockets. Yet still he lay with outstretched arms, inhaling evenly and steadily.

Then everything within him seemed to warp and become distorted and askew. His veins tied themselves in knots. His blood choked and clogged. An awful weight crushed and crunched his breast.

But he set his teeth and clenched his fists, and continued to gulp in the murderous air.

Then he felt himself dropping, gently, gently—down, down, down—as though invisible hands were lowering him into some bottomless, pitch black cavern.

But suddenly there burst upon his vision a dazzling golden light, and far above him he saw a blazing throne, sparkling and flashing with a strange brilliancy, and on the throne a girl, her hair undone, her body clothed in a virginal robe. And she gazed down upon him with eyes full of sadness and reproach. And he tried to call out to her, and tried to lift his arms to her....

And the fiendish darkness swept all away and closed in upon him and crushed him, and he knew no more.

THIRD EPISODE.

EONS of time had passed.

All was impenetrable blackness. With incredible velocity, he was whizzing through infinite space. Nothing supported him; nothing touched him. Some unseen, unfelt, unthinkable Force was hurling him outward into a Stygian, unbounded void.

Then, so gradually that it was scarcely perceptible, the blackness was dyed a pallid, ghastly hue. And with a shocking suddenness it became alive with a horrible larvae. Bloodless and transparent things, they seemed, filling the air with a swarming, wriggling magnitude of loathsome life. And he was a part of this!

He put out his hand; and though he felt no touch, he saw the squirming mass of worms pass through his flesh as though nothing were there. And he knew his body swarmed with them as though it were decayed cheese, and an unspeakable, revolting nausea surged through him.

Then the paleness vanished, and the larvae with it, and he was still shooting through the horrible darkness.

---

ANOTHER eon had passed.

Nor had his terrible flight abated. Outward, through unlighted infinitude, he swept untiringly. Unearthly sounds now filled the air—voices screaming in agony, cries and moans as of tortured souls, insane laughter and maniacal shrieks. Anon, with a howl and a hiss, some shrieking air dragon would roar past him. And, all around, he could hear the bellow and screech of monsters of the air in terrible conflict.

Then all turned to an ocean of living blood; and great crimson bellows belched over him, wave upon horrid wave. And the frightful aerial mammals, invisible a moment before, were now seen leaping and plunging through that scarlet sea.

Under him and over him they ducked and bounded—gigantic, green-hued monsters extravagantly hideous. Now and again one would dart for him, mouth distended. But the next second he would be far away, with the ghastly creature in hopeless pursuit.

Slowly the liquid redness merged into a shimmering rainbow of vivid colors. Yellow and green, and purple and blue and orange, streaked the air with a prismatic glory, glittering and scintillating with a marvelous beauty.

Then, with a terrific suddenness, like a noiseless thunderclap, the blackness rushed in and blotted out the dazzling iridescence, and cloaked all in Cimmerian darkness.

FOURTH EPISODE.

ANOTHER eon.

So far away it seemed a distant star, the lone traveler through the infinite Void discerned a dull red glow. Larger and larger it grew as he soared toward it with lightning velocity.

And now it seemed a great mass of flameless fire, shedding its cold rays for millions of miles. With every second it grew in size until it was come to inconceivable proportion. And then it seemed to shrivel up, and turn ashen and wrinkled, and become as a dead and crumbling sun.

But suddenly the husk burst open, and the wayfarer described, dimly at first, what seemed the outermost rim of some gorgeous, primeval world.

Awhile it was as though he were watching it from afar off; but he traversed thousands of leagues in as many seconds, and swiftly it took definite shape as he flew nearer and yet nearer.

And then his journey through illimitable space was at an end, and he had alighted upon this unknown world, and was wandering through a dense jungle of some marvelous fungus that attained a wondrous height.

Seemingly without his own volition, he at length found himself lying on a verdant mound overlooking a vast tropical morass that reached off on all sides into endless vista.

And while he lay there he witnessed in that untracked wilderness a diabolical spectacle appalling as hell itself!

Grisly, indescribable Things—satyrs and ogres and demons and fiends—appeared in countless numbers, and held orgies that were Madness intensified. Now they were reveling and cavorting in wanton abandon; anon battling among themselves in murderous ferocity.

After a time he viewed a sight still more horrible. Off to the right, he saw a monstrous snake’s head, as huge as the body of a hippopotamus, rise up from the swamp and gaze on ravenously at the riotous revel.

An instant later the licentious carousal was become wildest terror. The forest was alive with frightful reptiles—gigantic, stupendous things that passed the extent of all imagination. Down they swooped upon their terrified prey, their enormous, slippery bodies undulating in great writhing leaps.

The horde of unearthly Things, disporting in hellish debauchery a moment before, were swiftly swallowed up by the serpents. Left in possession of the swamp, they flopped about venomously for a time, demolishing and laying waste all about them.

They then fell upon one another in unspeakable combat, wriggling and squirming slimily together, their repulsive, green-black lengths intertwined like enormous angle worms. And they killed and devoured each other, until at last there was left but one hideous, swollen monster.

It leaped and dashed about, lashing its great tail furiously, tearing down giant trees as though they were weeds. And as the young man watched, the incredible thing seemed to swell larger and larger. And then he saw it stop suddenly in its Brobdingnagian gambol and rigidly poise its hideous head. And he looked straight into its horrifying eyes!

They were fixed steadily upon him. But a moment it staid thus; then its head dropped, and he saw its mammoth body undulating swiftly toward him through the swamp.

He strove to cry out, but could utter no sound. He tried to move, but his body was as lead.

On came the thing with frightful rapidity; parts of its writhing length now sinking in the quagmire, now towering high above it. Now he could see that massive head swinging from side to side. Now only a dark, slimy greenish mass, describing an arch above the swamp, showed its location.

Now it was close upon him. Its vast head swooped up a scant distance away. Its fulsome eyes blazed upon him with a furious fire. Its great drooping jaws swung open. They bristled with venomous fangs.

The monster gathered itself in a dozen gigantic coils and lept through the air—

“GOD!” he shrieked.

“There, there,” soothed a tender voice. “Don’t excite yourself. You’ll be all right presently. Just remain quiet, that’s all.”

A cool hand was laid gently upon his brow. He looked up at the young nurse who sat beside his cot.

Without saying a word, he stared for quite a long time at her face, until her cheeks were as crimson as the ribbon at her throat. When at length he spoke, he was half laughing, half sobbing, and the syntax of his utterance would scarcely have delighted a professor of English at Harvard University.

“Well, I’ve been, girl,” said he. “Got a round trip ticket. But never, never again. What’d you run away for? Yep, I’ve had my fill; no more metaphysics. Phew! Such reptiles! Big as this room, some of ’em. I looked three years, and it ran me crazy. Ugh! those snakes and lizards. Hired detectives, too, but it was no use. And I thought it was all sunshine and flowers and sweet music. You won’t run away again, will you? Could you get me a little brandy, Lily May? I’m feeling a bit faint.”

LAST EPISODE.

THE YOUNG man made a mistake about the newspapers. One inch was all he got, tucked snugly between a patent medicine advertisement and the notice of a sheriff’s sale. It read:

“An unidentified youth attempted to take his life in a North Side rooming-house last night by inhaling gas. The landlady smelled the odor of gas and called the police. Miss Lily May Kettering, a nurse at the National Emergency Hospital, who seems to know the young man, although refusing to divulge his identity, reports that he is on the road to recovery.”

There’s an Eerie Thrill in

The Scarlet Night

By WILLIAM SANFORD

DR. LANGLEY was in love with my wife.

This had been very evident to me for many weeks. Also it was most evident to me that his love was entirely reciprocated.

The doctor was a young and handsome fellow, who bore the reputation of being more or less unscrupulous. An unpleasant story had followed him from another city—the story of the drowning of a young girl. Although the coroner’s verdict had been that of accidental drowning, there were those, it was said, who thought that the doctor knew much more of the matter than had been brought to light, and rumor had it that he had left the place because he was no longer popular there.

The doctor had a pleasing personality, however, and a way with him that had the effect of disarming any prejudice against him. He was, in brief, a ladies’ man, possessing all of the little attentions and flatteries so dear to the heart of women. And he gave them all with a subtle manner of sincerity that made them doubly potent.

The doctor’s practice was fairly large, and he had also succeeded in having himself appointed local medical examiner for our town. He was deeply interested in his chosen profession, and still fascinated by the dissecting-room. He owned a handsome touring-car with which, as I knew, my wife was very familiar.

My wife was twenty-five—fifteen years my junior—pretty and with much charm of manner, yet possessed of a certain hardness of nature and lack of sympathy for the suffering of others, unusual in a young woman of good breeding. She came of excellent family, was well educated and always had associated with good people.

I had been somewhat addicted to strong drink before we were married, but had managed to keep it from her to a certain extent. She knew that I drank, but thought that it was no more than many men do at their clubs. Of my several wild sprees out of town she had never heard.

We had been married two years when Dr. Langley took up his practice in our town, and from the moment he made a professional call on my wife, for some minor ailment, they had become intensely interested in each other.

My drinking habits had increased, rather than diminished, since my marriage, and I no longer made any effort to keep occasional lurid fits of intoxication from her. My love for liquor became as much a part of my life as food or sleep. My position as assistant manager in a large wholesale house was fairly secure, however, and one not easy to fill, which perhaps accounted for the firm still holding me.

One cold, bleak evening in November, while I was playing cards at my club—and, thanks to the rum-runners who thrived in our town, drinking whisky—I heard a strangely-familiar voice call my name in greeting, and, looking up, I was overjoyed to behold an old friend of bygone days, whom I had not seen in several years. He had dropped off on his way to another city.

The time was ripe for a celebration in honor of our meeting. My friend produced a quart flask of whisky from his suitcase, saying that it was the duplicate of one he had already sampled, and spoke to me of its age, strength, fine quality, and the high price he had been obliged to pay for it. Thereupon he presented it to me. I thanked him heartily and opened the flask, and we all drank a couple of rounds from it. All of that day, and the day previous, I had been drinking more or less heavily.

Cards were resumed and we played until after midnight, when, with many a handshake, I bade good-by to my friend, who was obliged to catch a train to reach his destination the following noon. The card game being broken up, we had a farewell round of drinks, and I stumbled out into the night.

The cool air soon revived my somewhat befuddled brain. Also, I was soon shaking with the cold. Remembering the generous sized flask of whisky in my pocket, the gift of my friend, I uncorked it and took a long drink, rejoicing in the fact that the bottle was still almost two-thirds full.

Reaching home, I went at once to my bedroom. My wife was seated in a chair by the window in her dressing-gown. As I entered, she rose and, without any preliminaries of speech, she asked that I at once give her a divorce so that she might marry Dr. Langley. She said there was no reason why I should not do this, since I might then marry some woman who cared for me, and that she would be happy with the man she had learned to love.

The abruptness of her request, together with the cold, matter-of-fact way in which she put it dumfounded me, but, hastily regaining my composure, I flatly refused any such action, told my wife that she must remain true to her marriage vows, and that nothing would ever induce me to give her the divorce she wanted. Furthermore, I told her that the doctor was a scoundrel—that many people believed he had murdered a girl before coming to our town.

At this, my wife became livid with fury, accused me of deliberately besmirching the doctor’s character because of jealousy, and declared she would never live with me again.

The next day, however, she seemed much changed. She was very agreeable, even tender, to me. We walked about the little garden of our home, as we had often done in the early days of our marriage, and I felt confident that she had decided to put the doctor out of her mind and allow our married life to go on as usual.

We chatted pleasantly together at the dinner table that evening, and as usual I drank a cup of strong coffee after the meal.

A few moments later a heavy drowsiness came over me and I knew no more....

---

I AWOKE with a feeling of suffocation—as if a thousand tons of weight were resting on my chest.

I gasped for breath. I was suffering torture. All about me was blackness—impenetrable blackness. I moved my hands and encountered boards, above and on every side. Gradually, to my numbed senses, the horrible realization came to me, and the cold sweat started out on my body—I had been buried alive!

The terrible realization had a tendency to clear my mind somewhat, in spite of the difficulty I encountered in breathing. I saw it all now. My wife had given me some powerful drug in my coffee, a drug obtained from the doctor. They had planned and plotted the thing in case I refused to consent to a divorce.

They probably had known I was still alive when I was buried. The doctor, as medical examiner, had filed some fictitious report of death from natural causes, and they had contrived to have a hasty funeral. How I had managed to breathe for so long in the coffin, while under the power of the drug, I did not know. Now that I was fully conscious again I felt myself stifling.

No power of imagination can picture the horror and torture of mind that my terrible predicament forced upon me. I must die a slow, terrible death, while those who were responsible for the hellish crime enjoyed themselves and went unpunished. The minutes seemed to drag into hours, as I lay there struggling for breath.

Suddenly, out of the horrible black stillness, I heard a noise above me. Listening, with every racked nerve on edge, I heard it come nearer—nearer. At first I could not make it out—could not understand—and then, suddenly, the truth dawned upon me with a horrible intensity: The body snatchers were after me for the dissecting-room!

I tried to cry out, but was unable to make a sound, because of my stifling condition. They reached the coffin, and I heard the shovel scraping against it. Then I felt myself being slowly lifted upward, and the coffin was dumped on the ground.

Now I heard a voice, and my blood ran cold, for it was the voice of Dr. Langley.

“The drug was an Oriental one,” he was saying. “It causes a semblance of death that lasts a long time, but he probably died a few minutes after he was buried. I am anxious to dissect to see what effect such a drug has on the human body!”

And then, with a terrible shock, I heard the voice of my wife:

“I don’t care. Do as you wish. I hated him from the moment he refused to give me a divorce. I could even watch you cut up his body!”

I struggled to rise in the coffin, gasping for the breath of life, and then the lid was pried off, and, summoning all my dying strength, I rose to my feet, waving my arms wildly back and forth and inhaling a great breath of life-giving night air.

The doctor let the shovel fall to the ground without a word, and staggered back and sank to his knees, while my wife gave a hideous scream of terror. Then she snatched a knife from his kit of dissecting instruments and drew the razor-sharp blade across her throat. She then threw herself upon the prostrate doctor, her blood drenching his body.

My senses reeling, I staggered forward, tripped over my coffin and fell swooning to the ground.

---

NONE believe my story. Neither will you. I have told it to them all, but they will not believe it.

I am in a hospital, where they tell me I have been for several days. It is a prison hospital, where guards in uniform patrol the corridors, lest even the sick try to escape.

They ask me if I cannot remember that I came home that night from the club in a blind frenzy of drink and found my wife and Dr. Langley together. They tell me that I choked him with such ferocity and strength that my fingers broke into the flesh of his neck. They tell me that my wife, screaming with terror, tried to escape, and that, just as the people in the adjoining apartment burst into the room, I seized a razor from the bureau and slashed her throat from ear to ear, and threw her body, with the blood streaming from the wound, across that of the doctor.

Are they going to hang me for this double crime that I did not commit?

They will not believe my story. Yet every detail of it is as clear to me as the stars that shine in the heavens.

Read of the Frightful Thing
That Came from

The
Extraordinary
Experiment of
Dr. Calgroni

By Joseph Faus and James Bennett Wooding

THERE is much concerning the queer Dr. Calgroni that I can not give to the world.

It should be remembered that I had never been inside his house until after I beheld him frantically emerge from its big front door, that rainy night, his wizened face as white as death, and, scantily-clad, rush headlong for the depot.

That he was a surgeon of extraordinary ability I readily acknowledge. But Belleville was the last place where one would expect to find a man of such surgical skill, and, most undoubtedly, the last place one would choose for the scene of the startling events brought about as a result of the doctor’s purchase of the ape “Horace” from Barber’s World-famous 3-Ring Show.

Had the doctor merely put up at the hotel I might have believed him, like myself, merely summering at Belleville. For it was a restful hamlet, situated in a mountainous valley, something like a day’s run from New York. But his renting of the Thornsdale place aroused latent suspicions in my mind, probably instilled there by that strange article I had read in The Surgical Monthly.

Large enough for a hotel or boarding-house, but out-of-the-way located—also because of the enormous rent demanded by its heirs—the Thornsdale place had stood vacant since the last of the Thornsdale line had died ten years before. Its doors had been closed and padlocked, and its windows barricaded.

It had been the finest residence in the old town in its day, but was now regarded as a sort of historic oddity. On the whole, it afforded a formidable appearance, crouching behind its great elms, looming huge and weather-beaten, with its board-shuttered and frowning windows. But just the sort of place the eccentric Dr. Calgroni could work in, unmolested.

I saw the peculiar doctor one morning as I was leaving the small post office. It was just after train time, and many of the villagers were loitering about the place, among them a young man named Jason Murdock.

Murdock was of that type one always hears of in a small community—the village “devil.” He came of a good family, and had plenty of money and all that: but had succeeded, despite rich heritage-blood, in igniting more fire and brimstone than all five of the village preachers had in their imagination conceived. He was coarsely good-looking, and big and husky.

Aristocratic hoodlum though he was, all rather secretly admired the fellow, probably because he injected “pep” into the lazy old town.

I beheld Jason Murdock pointing to a shriveled-up figure of a little man, stooped of shoulder.

“There he goes—that Dr. Can-groanee, who’s movin’ into the Thornsdale place. I wonder if there’s any good liquor in his cellar? That old Thornsdale dump has a good wine cellar.”

Dr. Calgroni paid not the slightest attention to Jason’s insolent babble, but walked hurriedly along, his clean-shaven, dried-up countenance turning neither to the right nor left.

“Who is that man?” I asked the postmaster, who had now come to the door for air.

“I dunno, excepting his mail is addressed Dr.—I’ll have to spell it—C-A-L-G-R-O-N-I—and it is mostly foreign, out of Vienna, forwarded here from New York.”

“Sort of a man of mystery, eh?” I hazarded.

“I should say he’s sort of a fool for rentin’ that old Thornsdale rat-trap, for God-knows-what, that’s stood vacant these ten years.”

I nodded and left in the direction taken by the doctor.

Here was an element of mystery; for I alone, of all the villagers, knew that this eminent surgeon’s presence in Belleville boded ill.

---

I soon caught sight of the doctor. For a man of his age and physique, his gait was exceedingly fast—as though propelled by a nervous dynamo.

Stretching my legs, I kept a safe distance between him and myself, until he swung open the tall wooden gate and quickly vanished through the wilderness of tall bushes and low trees into the Thornsdale house. I halted safe from observation and lighted my pipe.

Leaning against a tree there, I ran over in my mind the odd significance of that remarkable article I had recently read in the staid and ever-authentic Surgical Monthly.

This Dr. Calgroni, it appeared, had stated to the interviewer that he was here from Austria on a vacation—and to feel out the opinions of American surgeons anent his new theory. One Herr von Meine, a noted surgeon of Vienna, he added with some asperity, had scoffed at the absurdity and unorthodox idea of the unprecedented theory advanced by him, and had declared that his, Calgroni’s, operation was extremely impossible, not to say foolish—that it would never be a success.

Dr. Calgroni claimed that he could prolong a human life indefinitely by the insertion of a live thigh gland from a young quadrumanous mammal, such as the Pithecoid.

Much discussion and argument had been provoked throughout the entire medical world by the famous doctor’s theory, and consensus was that he was an impracticable theorist gone mad.

And now here was Dr. Calgroni, living in the quiet little town of Belleville, where none was aware of his sensational hypothesis, renting this immense old ramshackle place, and his remarkable intent known to no one but himself.

I had taken a seat on a tree stump, in front of the gate, which had a ring stapled to it, used in former days as a hitching-post. Time hung heavily upon me in Belleville, but this new element of mystery promised some possible interest and excitement.

Having sat there until my pipe was empty and cold, I was aroused by the noise of the gate opening behind me, followed by the tap-tap of a hammer. I turned.

There stood the doctor in his shirt sleeves, tacking a sign to the gate post. Crudely painted in black on white cardboard I read:

POSITIVELY NO ADMITTANCE!
Anyone entering here does so at his own risk.

T. Calgroni.

Without even casting a glance my way, the doctor closed the gate behind him and seemed about to depart up the weed-grown gravel walk, when, glancing down the dusky street, he checked himself.

My gaze followed the direction of his eyes. A wagon was approaching. It drew up at the stump and halted. Loaded with big boxes, the mules were sweating after the pull. Their surly-faced driver stopped twenty feet away and turned to the doctor:

“I know I’m late,” I overheard him grumble, “but I handled the boxes carefully as you said. Shall I drive in?”

“You’d better,” returned Calgroni in crisp English, still not noticing me. “And remember, if there’s a thing broken not a cent do you get.” And he wheeled up the path.

“Dam’ him!” swore the teamster, turning to me. “Did you ever see such an old crab?”

“Glass inside the boxes?” I suggested.

The fellow looked at me suspiciously then his lips contracted like a vise and he turned to his mules. I watched him drive through the wagon gate, and on up through the moss-covered trees to the house.

II.

THE NEXT morning I arose early, with the intention of strolling past the old Thornsdale place. I found Main Street lifeless, except for two men busily engaged in posting up the glaring announcement of the coming of:

“BARBER’S WORLD-FAMOUS 3-RING SHOW”

Pausing, I watched them swab the long multi-hued strips of paper with their paste brush and sling them upon the billboard. A small crowd of big-eyed youngsters and loafers gradually congregated about the busy circus advance men.

The most glaring and conspicuous poster represented two gorillas peering angrily out from behind the bars of their cage. Beneath it was lithographed in huge, red letters:

“MIMMIE AND HORACE ONLY WILD GORILLAS IN CAPTIVITY!”

I turned to leave—and, momentarily startled, faced what seemed to be one of the gorillas at large! Only it wore clothes. Gazing at the poster with a look of blank curiosity, was a man, short in stature, immense of shoulder and deep of chest, his hair thatching his forehead almost to his bushy eyebrows. He was hideous to look upon. I recognized him, though, after an instant, as the village half-wit, known as “Simple Will.”

I had seen him before, a poor, weak-minded creature, wandering helplessly about the village, pitied, but spurned except when someone needed the help of powerful hands and a strong back.

Drooling and muttering, Will followed the circus men as they started off.

I idly strolled down the first street; then, reaching the outskirts of town, I found myself in the rear of the Thornsdale place. To my surprise, I beheld another warning notice similar to the one that Dr. Calgroni had tacked to his front gate last evening. Not only in one but many places, on trees and the high fence, I saw the warning signs of “No Trespassing.” The doctor himself was nowhere to be seen.

A week slipped by and nothing happened further than gossip concerning the queer doctor. Occasionally Dr. Calgroni, in person, purchased supplies and called for his mail. Although I contrived to be near him whenever possible, he seldom uttered more than half a dozen words—and never to me. Once, though, I thought I caught him peering surreptitiously at me in a queer manner.

Obviously, the doctor was his own servant, housekeeper and cook. No one took the risk of entering his place—not even the daring Jason Murdock.

Several days before the circus arrived, I noticed what I considered a peculiarly significant happening—Dr. Calgroni walking toward his abode, with Simple Will tagging, doglike, a few paces behind.

At discreet distance, I followed them. Arriving at the Thornsdale place, I was surprised to see the doctor close the gate behind him, leaving Will standing outside. The half-wit stood there until Dr. Calgroni disappeared.

The day before the show came, I saw the doctor clapping Will on the shoulder and talking to him.

That night such a terrible conclusion shaped itself in my mind as to the meaning of the singular boxes, the hostile notices, Will’s attitude toward the doctor, and the latter’s interest in him, that it kept me wide awake.

In ill humor at myself, I rose at the first appearance of the sun. Remembering the circus, I strolled over to the tracks to watch it unload.

Some villagers had gathered about the few wretched travel-scarred cars that made up the second-rate circus train, and particularly in front of the car containing the cage of Mimmie and Horace.

Doctor Calgroni was there, and, at his heels, Simple Will. The doctor was talking very earnestly to the trainer.

“You say Mr. Barber has offered to sell either of these animals,” the doctor was saying, as I drew up on the outer fringe of the curious crowd.

“Yes sir. He will sell one because they fight continually. They have to be carefully watched, or they might kill each other. You don’t know what ferocious beasts gorillas are—”

The doctor smiled.

“I would like to talk to Mr. Barber,” he interposed.

The gorilla trainer hesitated, then, pulling shut the sliding doors of the animal car:

“Sure; just follow me,” he said.

The doctor, at the man’s side, walked to a coach ahead, the combination ticket-and-executive office of the Barber Shows. For an instant, Simple Will seemed to hesitate, but he didn’t trail Dr. Calgroni—the unseen things inside of the gigantic cage nearby seemed to hold his hypnotic attention. Several big drops of rain splashed upon the cinder-strewn ground. The heavens hung black and dismal; the sun had completely vanished.

I watched Simple Will. He was ill-at-ease, hovering uneasily about the gorillas’ car. The other people nearby paid no attention to the half-wit. Presently the trainer and Dr. Calgroni returned, accompanied by another man, who was counting a roll of bills.

“You say,” the latter remarked as they passed me, “that you want ‘Horace’ delivered at once?”

“Yes,” replied the doctor concisely.

“All right. Hank, call the gang, unload the cage and put Horace in that red single cage. Dr. Calgroni has relieved us of him!”

At this, Simple Will approached the surgeon and touched his sleeve.

“You buy hairy animal-man?” he mumbled.

The doctor laid his blue-veined and thin old hand upon Will’s broad shoulder.

“Yes, Will, and I’m going to give you a job—a job as his valet!” The show men exchanged winks, and from the car rolled an empty, iron-barred cage. Will’s expressionless features twisted into what on his idiot countenance registered pleasure.

Dr. Calgroni beckoned to the man whom I had seen deliver the strange-appearing boxes that first afternoon.

“Got your team?”

The fellow nodded.

A scene of bustle had sprung up about me. An excited and larger crowd of villagers had assembled.

The big cage containing Mimmie and Horace was lowered to the track side. They were two of the finest animals of their type I have ever looked upon.

Horace was transferred to the single cage and its strong door doubly padlocked upon him. The mule team drew up with the wagon.

“Here, Will,” said the doctor to the half-wit, “climb into the wagon. We’re going before we get wet.” The doctor appeared highly elated.

Simple Will, who had stood by as if in a stupor, swung his heavy body up behind the gorilla’s cage.

No sooner had the wagon drawn out of sight than the heavens seemed to loosen in wrath. Rain fell in torrents, driving the spectators in a wild rush for shelter. As I reached the hotel, the water dripping from my drenched garments, the storm increased its fury. All that day it rained—and the next.

As I lay on my bed that night and listened to the roar of wind and rain beating upon the roof and window panes, my mind kept drifting to the inmates of Thornsdale place—the queer doctor, Simple Will and his ward, Horace, the gigantic gorilla.

III.

IT WAS three days later that I learned Dr. Calgroni had wired to New York, and on the next morning an exceptionally well-dressed stranger, whose goatee, bearing and satchel smacked of a medical man, stepped off the train.

Espying me, he asked:

“Will you kindly direct me to the Thornsdale place?”

I told him the best way to reach Dr. Calgroni’s without wading in mud, and he departed, with a brief “Thank You.”

The next night I saw the stranger, ashen of face and decidedly inwardly shaken, hurriedly purchase a ticket and leave on the 9:45 train for New York.

Immediately I sought the telegraph dispatcher.

“You are aware of the queer actions of Dr. Calgroni—”

“I should say! He’s a nut.”

“I can’t say as to that, but to whom did he send the message the other night?”

“You won’t let it out I tipped you off?”

I solemnly held up my right hand.

“Well,” in a whisper, “he wired a hospital for their best surgical man.”

So the assistant had gone back, frightened. And why?

Several weeks later Barber’s World-famous 3-Ring Show gave a return exhibition at Belleville. That night I wandered toward the Thornsdale place.

Again the clouds had banked for a storm, fitful rays of the moon now and then shifting through, only to be absorbed in mist.

Drawing around in front of the old homestead, looming dark behind the gloom-shadowed trees, I seated myself on the stump hitching-post. I was glad that in my coat pocket nestled a neat automatic. Why I lingered there in front of the quiet old place I do not know. Not a light glimmered in the house; not a noise issued from its muffled depths.

Then to my ears came a shriek and to my startled gaze a light flared in the house. I could dimly see that a figure appeared at its open door. It looked behind it for an instant, then madly bolted toward me.

Upon the wet gravel came the tread of rapidly-moving feet, and the gate in front of me swung abruptly back. In the hazy reflected light, I got one look at Dr. Calgroni who, hat and raincoat in his hands, the muscles of his face quivering, his face deathly pale, emerged and turned, running madly toward town.

I drew back, automatic in hand, waiting for whatever might follow the doctor. Nothing happened. Obeying an impulse, I took out after the fleeing surgeon. Over soggy soil I followed him, around corners, down Main Street to the depot. I got there in time to see him swing on the platform of the rear coach of the 9:45 train, bound for New York.

Throbbing with excitement, scarce knowing what I was doing, I made my way back toward the Thornsdale place. Several blocks away, I caught a glimpse of a broad-shouldered, thick-set disheveled figure in breech-clout, running—or, rather, prancing and hopping—toward the circus grounds. The automatic in my hand, I followed.

A block from the circus grounds, under the street lamp, I saw a figure on horseback that I recognized as Jason Murdock, evidently bound for home.

Then, snarling, the Thing I had seen hopped out from behind a tree trunk, on all fours. Gaining its hind feet, it made a flying leap at Jason, knocking him from his horse. On the ground they rolled, the powerful Jason helpless in the Thing’s clutch. Its fingers closed chokingly about the man’s throat.

I tried to shoot, only to find my gun jammed; tried to shout, and could not.

At that instant the brass band struck up “There’ll Be A Hot Time In The Old Town Tonight!” As the quick, dancing strains smote the night air, the Thing suddenly ceased in the act of strangling Jason, looking attentively up. There seemed to be a responsive, obedient look on its horrible countenance. I could see its wild-eyes and bearded face—God! It was Simple Will!

Bounding first on all fours, then half-upright on his feet, the crazed idiot was making for the show grounds just as the clouds broke in a downpour. To the rear of the big tent bounded Will, as the crowd scattered for home.

As if familiar with his surrounding, he made for a side-show tent in front of which sputtered a gas torch. The crowd, fleeing in the rain, had in the confusion failed to see the half-wit and myself on the mad run. But several men were following me, as Will tore aside the entrance flaps.

Inside, poorly-lighted though it was, I could plainly see the cage of Mimmie, the female-gorilla. Her trainer turned at the noise of our entrance, and hastily reached for his knife-pointed pole—but too late. Uttering a cry, piercing and antagonistic, Will flung himself at Mimmie’s cage, who, with an answering cry of battle, reached both her long hairy arms through her cage, clawing and tearing at the fiercely struggling man on the outside.

The trainer rushed in with his prong, thrusting it at Mimmie. For an instant she drew back; then several of us quickly pulled Will, bleeding profusely, back from the enraged animal, who again lurched forward as though recognizing in Will the reincarnation of her mate, Horace.

Foaming at the mouth, Will sank limply to the floor. From the hue of the blood, ebbing from the side of his neck, I saw at a glance that he was done for—Mimmie’s claws had severed his jugular vein.

Among the men who had helped me thrust the poor fellow out of Mimmie’s reach, was the sheriff of the county.

“What does this mean?” he demanded, grasping my shoulders.

“Follow me!” I cried.

A crowd of excited men, headed by the sheriff and myself, made for the Thornsdale place. The light still dimly illuminated the hall through the open door.

“I’ll go in first, sheriff,” I offered. “Have your men surround the place.”

I stole into the hall. A terrible stench greeted me. I found it came from a door opening out into the hall. A feeble light burned within. About me stood several boxes, with the sides torn open, and excelsior hanging and strewn about them.

Before me, completely assembled in every detail, stood what the boxes had contained—an operating table and all its many surgical accessories. Out of a long box in the corner sprawled the hairy limbs of the fast-decaying Horace, the male gorilla.

Taking a small oil lamp from the stand, I turned to examine the dead body; and I noticed a paper, which fell to the floor. A quick look at the side of the beast’s head revealed a great gash, rottening at the edges, through which, it was evident, the brain had been removed.

I hastily recalled Dr. Calgroni’s theories. Could it be—

My eyes chanced to drop to the floor. Holding forth the lamp, I saw there was handwriting on the bit of paper.

I picked it up and read the note, which, even at the last stand, Calgroni had directed to me, Von Meine, chief disparager of his wild theories:

“Herr Von Meine, of Vienna, you said I could not do it. You berated me for my endeavors to alleviate the distress of the insane and feeble-minded. Yet I know now that I have accomplished it, without killing the subject as you claimed would be the result of such an operation. That’s why I followed you here, to show you! It was successful, Von Meine. I could tell by the way his eyes looked into mine, when he finally came to. But I could see the brain I had substituted for Will’s atrophied one was too vigorous—that expression didn’t belong to Simple Will. I am fleeing before he gains his strength. I admit my fear; for after this operation the former half-wit will be a dangerous customer, with the too vigorous and ferocious brain of the Gorilla Horace in his head!”

Ten Pallbearers For This Mammoth Woman

WHEN Mrs. Martha Carmas, of Middle Village, Queensboro, New York, died of elephantiasis, ten men were required to carry her body from the hospital to Lutz Church for funeral services. She weighed 710 pounds. A special coffin of immense size was made for the body. Mrs. Carmas was only thirty-three years of age, and, until she contracted the dreadful elephantiasis, she was not unusually heavy.

Woman Starves Herself To Feed Cats

IN a mean neighborhood in New York City dwelt Mary Bosanti, the “Cat Woman.” The neighbors gave her that name because of her excessive love for cats. All the cats in that part of town seemed to be attracted to her house. Every day she went to the corner grocery and bought six quarts of milk, which she carried back to her room. Twenty or more cats always tagged at her heels, and when she spoke to them in a lowered tone they seemed to know what she said. They obeyed her every command. Then, one morning, a neighbor heard groans issuing from the “Cat Woman’s” room and called the other tenants of the house. They broke the door in—and found the “Cat Woman” starving, surrounded by a great swarm of cats and more than 200 empty milk bottles.

Here’s a “Creepy” Tale That
Ends In a Shuddering,
Breath-taking Way

The Return of
Paul Slavsky

By Capt. George Warburton Lewis

Author of “Trailing the Jungle Man,” “Wine of the Wilderness,” Etc.

FROM Petrograd came Paul Slavsky, with what his Nihilist associates might have styled a clean record and no bungled jobs, but what Larry Brandon classified as a criminal record de luxe.

It was natural that such a record should bring about Slavsky’s early acquaintance with Inspector Brandon, of the Central Office and it followed, as day follows dawn, that the Terrorist should become the object of the shrewdest surveillance the Chief Inspector could design.

Whether Paul Slavsky actually discovered, or merely suspected, that he was being shadowed, matters little. A notation on an old blotter shows that he boldly attempted to pave the way for future criminal enterprises by calling at the Central Office in the role of a persecuted citizen, who had journeyed here from his native land to escape the hell which he declared the Russian Secret Police had made his life.

It took three months of intensive investigation to convince Larry Brandon that Slavsky was all the Secret Police had painted him and more, and that the Terrorist had not emigrated to America with even the remotest intention of reforming. It took the detective three months more to satisfy himself beyond all doubt that Slavsky had, marvelously enough, established an active branch of his old order and was undoubtedly spreading the doctrine of Gorgias and Fichte under the very noses of the Central Office experts. However, the evidence necessary to a conviction was lacking, so nothing could be done.

A little later the men of the same nationality as the Nihilist, whom Brandon had used to great advantage on the case, began, one by one, to drop quietly out of existence. This was not only mysterious—it was uncanny. Finally the decomposed bodies of some of these operatives were found and unmistakably identified.

In each instance the head had been completely severed from the trunk.

Recollecting that the Terrorist order, to which Paul Slavsky had belonged, had signalized its outrages by decapitating its victims, Brandon was enabled to initiate definite plans which, in due course, culminated in his running his man to earth.

But Paul Slavsky never beheld the fatal Chair nor served time. He chose the other route. He had elected to live in rebellion against man’s orderly institutions, and in this same unreasoning revolt he resolved to die. Like most of his ilk, the Terrorist in physical combat was a hard man, and he really fought a great fight, but he fought it with a master craftsman in the conquering of such as he, and inevitably he lost, with many of Larry Brandon’s bullets in his great body and only life enough left in him to greet—and almost at once to take final leave of—his favorite sister, Olga, who had arrived in Europe a little late as it transpired, to join her brother in his sinister calling.

Olga Slavsky, years younger than her lamented brother, was as pretty a little specimen of dark-eyed femininity as ever enchanted fastidious masculine eye. Yet so is the tigress beautiful.

Still, that is not quite the idea I wish to convey. If you can think of a woman in repose being as beautiful as a tigress and, in smoldering hate and loathing as repulsive, as hideous as a preying vampire, then you will get nearer my meaning. Olga, like her brother, was a staunch exponent of the Terrorist doctrine.

What Brandon expected soon came to pass. The strange girl, whom men called beautiful and women envied, was promptly elected to her brother’s place in what was known in the underworld of unlawful secret orders as the “League.” In this way she immediately crossed swords with the man who had ended the career of her brother Paul, and ere long she became aware, through members of the League detailed as spies, that still another noted criminologist, Joe Seagraves, was unpleasantly hot on her trail.

But Olga was undaunted. For daring and ingenuity, she by far eclipsed her cunning and resourceful brother, who had blazed the path of her iconoclastic pilgrimage.

Since little could thus far be proved against Olga, Seagraves believed that it might be better to declare a sort of armistice and, if possible, gradually win her over to the side of law and order. To this end, he openly called and laid his ideas before her. She frankly flouted his implied interest in her well-being, but showed a spirit of compromise by offering the crime specialist a cigarette.

In such a mood Olga became a docile and purring tiger kitten, only one never quite forgot her claws. She was highly superstitious, Seagraves discovered; but then her whole character was so anomalous and so replete with unexpectedly outcropping traits and wildly illogical beliefs that it was almost to be expected she would believe in ghosts.

She clung tenaciously to the belief, so Brandon told Seagraves, that some day Paul would return and end the life of the man who—the Terrorist had told his sister shortly before his death—had done him to death.

“Do you still believe, Olga, that Paul is going to come back one day and carry Brandon away with him into the Unknown?” asked Seagraves.

Olga’s dark eyes grew suddenly darker as she slowly removed a cigarette from between her too red lips.

“Not only is he coming,” she answered, “but he is coming soon. Only night before last I talk with him. I tell him hurry. You see his spirit cannot rest until his murder is—ah, my very bad English!—avenge’.”

“You’re a very foolish woman, Olga,” admonished Seagraves. “If you refuse to listen to my warning you’re going to find yourself in lots of trouble. I want you to understand that.”

Then the drowsing tigress put out her claws.

“You threaten me!” she fairly hissed, tossing away her cigarette and rising. “I am a free woman. You are, after all, like my own people. You would make slaves of all who cannot buy their freedom of—of thought and action.”

She glanced about queerly before she concluded:

“Don’t interest yourself too far. You may be great, but remember—I am no longer to be despised. You have waited too long. Should I choose, for example, I could have shot you where you sit.”

Joe Seagraves leaped out of his chair, an automatic in his experienced hand and menacing the mysterious woman steadily.

But already the allegorical vampire, which the detective had seen reflected in Olga’s piercing eyes and heard in her studied but crisp and stinging words, had spread its skinny wings and flown. Olga was laughing in such sincere, or well-feigned, mockery at his alarm that the dignified detective momentarily felt abashed.

He put his weapon away, nevertheless, only after a searching glance about the very ordinary little room in which the extraordinary woman had received him. He recalled that the last victim of Olga’s brother, mutilated, headless and repellent, had been found in this same neighborhood, if not in this same house.

“Please—please forgive me,” the strange girl was pleading. “You see, I forgot that you are not like—like Brandon. For him there is no forgiveness. He must perish. But we—you and I—why must we be enemies?”

“There’s but one reason, Olga,” replied Seagraves seriously, “and that is a strong one. It is simply the nature of our respective callings.”

“Then I can only be sorry,” she said in a low voice. “Still, my principles are more—what word?—more sacred than your friendship.”

As the woman paused, Seagraves could have taken an oath that he caught the sound of whispering voices through a door standing slightly ajar not three paces from his elbow. Of a sudden, he stepped forward and flung the door wide with a resounding bang.

A gray-walled room, quite empty, was all that rewarded his examination. He turned and found Olga smiling again.

“Did you surprise them?” she inquired sweetly.

“Surprise whom?” demanded the detective.

“The rats,” she said ingenuously, still smiling.

“I’ve seen but one rat here,” murmured Seagraves in an impersonal tone: “I see it now. It has wings that fold up like an umbrella. It is called a vampire.”

Olga smiled on placidly, even after Joe Seagraves had closed the door on her and was gone.

---

IN THE language of the man who knotted the noose, Olga, as her kind are certain to do, came at last to the end of her rope.

Conspiracy, blackmail and extortion were at last brought home to her; and it chanced that the same eminent crime expert who had hurried the career of her brother to an inglorious finish was likewise destined to be the instrument of fate in the undoing of Olga.

In time the pursuit narrowed down to the end of a most imperfect day for both quarry and hunters. Then all night, as Brandon and Seagraves gradually drew their web closer and ever closer about the elusive Terrorist, she tricked them at every angle and turn with the cunning of a fox, and it was not until three sleepless days and nights that the two renowned sleuths effected her capture more than five hundred miles distant from the field of her long-continued operations.

“She’ll be as slippery as an eel,” Brandon warned Seagraves, when they were ready to start back with their prisoner. “I’ll never consent to any Pullman for her, even though we ignore the law and handcuff her to the seat. One of us is going to have to keep his eyes on her constantly.”

“Only one of us could sleep at a time, anyhow,” said Seagraves; “and surely we can stand it one more night, don’t you think? Suppose we both sit it out with her.”

They at length did decide to “sit it out” with their prisoner, and with that understanding they took her aboard the train.

At the moment of entering the train, a telegram was handed to Brandon, and as soon as the three were comfortably seated in their section the inspector read it with lips compressed and eyes oddly squinted. Then he handed the message to Seagraves, who read:

“Police record Olga Slavsky arrived. Wanted in three countries for complicity in murder nine counts. Escaped Russian Secret Police three times. At present fugitive from justice. Keep close watch on her. Renfrow, Chief Inspector.”

Seagraves returned the telegram to Brandon, winking an eye disparagingly and smiling at what the Chief Inspector had evidently considered a necessary precaution.

The afternoon waned. Early evening found the train three-quarters of an hour behind time. If this kept up they would not arrive before two in the morning.

Olga sat besides Seagraves facing Brandon.

“I would give much for a cigarette,” she announced out of a long silence at ten o’clock, addressing herself to Seagraves.

“This isn’t a smoker,” observed the crime specialist, glancing around, “but there are only two other passengers in the car. Try it.”

He offered her his box, and she took one and lighted it. Filling her lungs with the comforting smoke, she exhaled it in a great cloud and, after a meditative pause, murmured:

“At last I am to see poor Paul.”

She looked Seagraves steadily in the eye and added in a queer tone that she felt her brother was very near tonight.

It was a mixed train, and the day coaches appeared to have much the better of the sleepers as to occupancy. Seagraves noted casually that, besides themselves, their car boasted but two other passengers, and though they might have been snugly asleep in their respective berths, they had apparently elected to sit out the short run, evidently preferring reclining to rising and dressing at 1:30 or 2 o’clock A. M.

“Do you see the man sitting all alone in the last seat with the handkerchief over his face, to keep the light out of his eyes?” Olga’s ruminant voice finally broke in upon the monotonous clackety-clack of wheels upon rail-joints.

“Yes—what about him?” asked Seagraves.

“Nothing, only he—he looks like Paul,” she answered in a guarded voice, as though she feared Brandon, cat-napping now, might overhear her strange language.

“Olga!” ridiculed the detective, “get a grip on yourself.”

Having thus counseled the prisoner, Seagraves was thoughtful for a long space; then he looked over at Olga, saw an odd, uneasy expression on her pretty face and quickly said:

“Here—have another cigarette, Olga. Burn ’em up!”

---

AT MIDNIGHT the conductor passed through the car.

“We’ll make the city a little before two o’clock,” he said in answer to a sleepy-voiced interrogation from Brandon, who seemed to have banished sleep and was blinking about the car.

“What—we all alone?” he asked Seagraves. Then he caught sight of the two lonely passengers at the far end of the car. “No; two others,” he murmured, answering his own question.

He was turning his gaze away from the man with the handkerchief over his face when something, Seagraves noted, drew his eyes inquiringly back to the sleeper’s hunched figure. The movement caused Seagraves to follow Brandon’s scrutiny. He marked the fact that the handkerchief had fallen from their fellow-passenger’s face, and—was it because of Olga’s suggestion, or was it merely a silly midnight fancy?—he assuredly seemed to trace a certain vague resemblance between the solitary sleeper and the notorious Paul Slavsky, long ago dead.

The idea brought with it a queer, though distinct, sense of unpleasantness. The booming voice of Brandon, breaking in upon his wholly disagreeable train of thought, was highly reassuring.

“Huh!” laughed the Inspector, “I thought I recognized that chap.”

At a quarter to one, Seagraves shook Brandon out of a doze and said, “Keep the lady company for a few minutes. I’m going into the smoker.”

“All right, Joe,” drawled Brandon opening his slightly reddened eyes and seeming to be perfectly wide awake.

Seagraves disappeared into the smoking-room, returning some ten or fifteen minutes later. To his surprise he noted that Brandon, evidently not caring to take a chance on Olga’s diving out of the open window, had handcuffed her fast to the seat and had once more fallen asleep. Olga herself appeared a trifle more cheerful. She even smiled, though somewhat wearily, as Seagraves resumed his seat beside her.

“I told you it would be Paul,” the woman whispered to Seagraves, as though determined to share no part of her secret with the despised Brandon. “See,” she insisted, growing almost jubilant, “it is my brother Paul—come back to me at last!”

“For God’s sake, Olga,” cried Seagraves disgustedly, “stop that foolishness. It gets on my nerves.”

Stillness then for several minutes.

Of a sudden Seagraves felt cold. He turned up his coat collar and, somehow rather depressed, sat looking across at the muffled figure of Brandon who, also evidently having felt the night chill, had wound a great muffler about his neck and pulled his ample Stetson low over his face. Seagraves reflected that this would be a fitting case with which to crown a long list of his old friend’s successes. Tomorrow he would congratulate him.

A long wild shriek from the locomotive startled Seagraves like an unexpected blow.

“Ha!” he said, “I must be developing nerves after all these years. Anyhow, we’re getting in.”

Then he raised his eyes and saw that the man, who, he had imagined, resembled Paul Slavsky, had disappeared. So had the only other passenger who had occupied a seat near him. It struck Seagraves as singular.

Another long wail from the locomotive blent dissonantly with the dreary clackety-clack, clackety-clack of the car-wheels, and at the same instant the vestibule door was smashed open. Through it came stumbling, covered with blood, clothing torn to tatters, the identical man who had resembled Paul Slavsky.

His hands were securely cuffed, and he was being partly shoved and partly dragged forward along the aisle for all the world as though he were a wax dummy. His captor was no other than the traveler whom the detective had seen sitting near the dead Terrorist’s double.

“He fought like a tiger, Mr. Seagraves, but I finally got him. He’s one of Olga’s bunch—a second brother of hers, in fact. He heard that she was hard pressed and just landed from Europe to help her escape.”

Joe Seagraves sat like one stupefied. Jim McLean, of the Central Office, cleverly disguised as an innocent-looking rustic, had captured a third Slavsky, but how—where?

“It’s all right,” McLean was explaining. “You see, Renfrow got wind of this fellow’s game, got hold of a picture of him and sent me out to ride back with you and Brandon and the lady. I fell asleep in earnest, while pretending to be, and waked up just as my man was slipping out of the car. I got a good look at his face then and, recognizing him, made the first move in a scrap that lasted through six coaches and clear up to the coal-tender.”

“Why was the man slipping out?” demanded Seagraves, perplexedly.

“Ah! that’s it. I missed you from the car and suspected something wrong. Brandon seemed to be asleep and the woman was laughing. That was enough. I collared my man.”

Joe Seagraves reached over and gently shook Brandon, who, still sleeping like a rock, had slumped low down in the angle formed by the seat and the window.

“Come out of it!” the detective bawled at his companion, “we’re getting in.”

But Brandon slept on. Seagraves waited a moment, then shook him again, almost violently.

“Come on, Larry!” he said, himself rising.

But Brandon did not stir, and Seagraves darted a questioning glance at Olga, still handcuffed fast to the seat. To his amazement and alarm the woman was smiling, triumphantly, terribly. A vague surmise, which had come into Seagraves head hours before, was now confirmed.

There was no doubting that leering and awful smile. She had bitten the blood from her carmine lips. Olga Slavsky had gone stark mad!

In all the years that followed, Joe Seagraves was never able to free his memory from the haunting horror of the thing he beheld when, Brandon not reacting to violent shakes, he grew suspicious and lifted his unresponsive friend’s big hat off his head—or rather off—a vacant-eyed and staring dummy head!

---

PAUL SLAVSKY had not returned as Olga had predicted he would, but a last gruesome reminder of his own hideous handiwork was nevertheless present.

When the first shock of horror had passed, and Seagraves and McLean again focused their incredulous eyes on Olga Slavsky, they knew that the woman, though handcuffed, had herself participated in this last act of terrorism in America. It was incredible, but there, before the detectives’ eyes, were the facts themselves.

The blood from her bitten lips streaking her Patrician chin, Olga sat composedly folding and unfolding her daintily-patterned hands, quite as a vampire folds and unfolds its repellent wings; toying, as might a child, with the polished handcuffs which supposedly had held her a prisoner, and—before the amazed eyes of her beholders—slipping the locked manacles on and off over her tiny, flexible hands!

Unearth Vast Wealth in Egyptian Tomb

RARE treasures of art, priceless gems and the royal trappings of ancient times were discovered by archaeologists when they tunneled their way into the funeral chambers of King Tutankhamen [1358-1350, B. C.] in the Valley of Kings near Luxor, Egypt. Describing the discovery, Lord Carnarvon wrote to a Chicago newspaper correspondent:

“At last a passage was cleared. We again reached a sealed door or wall. We wondered if we should find another staircase, probably blocked, behind this wall, or whether we should get into a chamber. I asked Mr. Carter to take out a few stones and have a look in. He pushed his head partly into the aperture. With the help of a candle, he could dimly discern what was inside.... ‘These are marvelous objects here,’ he said.

“I myself went to the hole, and I could with difficulty restrain my excitement. At the first sight, with the inadequate light, all that one could see was what appeared to be gold bars. On getting a little more accustomed to the light, it became apparent that there were colossal gilt couches with extraordinary heads, boxes here and boxes there. We enlarged the hole and Mr. Carter managed to scramble in—the chamber is sunk two feet below the bottom passage—and then, as he moved around with a candle, we knew we had found something unique and unprecedented.”

Among the many treasures which they found in the tomb were royal robes, embroidered with precious stones, the state throne of King Tutankhamen, portraits of the king and queen, incrusted with turquoises, lapis lazuli and other gems, two life-sized golden statues of the king, with gold scepter and mace, and four gem-studded chariots.

The
HOUSE of DEATH

A Strange Tale

By F. GEORGIA STROUP

THE THREE women looked about the little kitchen. For some reason, each seemed to avoid the eyes of the other.

“My land, but it’s hot in here!” Mrs. Prentis moved to the north window to raise it.

As she propped up the heavy sash with a thin board that lay on the sill, a gust of hot wind swept through the room from a drought-parched Kansas cornfield.

Seeking relief in action, her daughter, Selina, hastened to the opposite window and pushed it up, as a cloud of dust thickened in the road in front of the house. A small herd of bawling cattle were milling past the house in the heat and glare of the August sun. Their heads drooped dejectedly and their tongues lolled from parched mouths.

“My land, Seliny, there goes another bunch of cattle out west. Does beat all how hard ’tis to get water in this country. Jes’ seems to me sometimes like I’d die for a sight of mountains an’ green things an’ a tumblin’ little stream that’d run an’ ripple all summer.”

Motherly Mrs. Collins wiped the perspiration from her large, red face and fanned herself with her blue sunbonnet.

“Didn’t Mamie Judy come from the mountain country?” she asked.

“Yes; we went to the same school. When she was a girl she had the blackest eyes and the prettiest red cheeks of any girl you ever did see. Didn’t look much like she does now! A farmer’s wife soon goes to pieces. She was such a lively girl, too—so full of fun. An’ now jes’ to think what the poor thing’s come to!”

Again the three women avoided each other’s eyes. Then Selina spoke nervously:

“Do you ’spose she did it, Ma?”

“There you go with your ’sposin’ again! Better get to work and straighten up this house. That’s what we come over for, ain’t it?”

Mrs. Collins rose heavily from her chair and unrolled and donned a carefully-ironed, blue-checked apron.

“Seems kinda funny to have the funeral here, don’t it?”

“Oh, I don’t know. The graveyard’s handy an’ it’s so far to the church.”

“Yes, that’s so; ’tain’t far to the cemetry. Always seemed to me that Mamie’d found it kinda spooky, always seein’ the graveyard right through that window there over the stove. Bein’ up on top of that rise, an’ only half a mile away, would make it seem to me kinda like livin’ in a graveyard.”

“Selina, take this here bucket an’ bring in some water. My land, I don’t see how Mamie ever got through with all her work an’ took care of the baby. Her bein’ so old, an’ it her first, made it harder, too. Never thought her an’ Jed would have any children.”

“Things do need reddin’ up pretty considerable,” spoke Mrs. Collins, as she picked up some odds and ends of clothing from a corner, where they had lain long enough to accumulate a coating of acrid dust.

“My jes’ look at the linin’ in this firebox! How d’you ever ’spose Mamie managed to cook on it?”

“Must have been pretty hard. She didn’t have things fixed as handy as some of the rest of us, even. You see, they didn’t have much money to spend on things. Farmin’ in Kansas ain’t been a payin’ business the last few years. When ’tain’t too wet, it’s too dry, or too hot, or too cold, or somethin’.”

“Yes, it seems like there’s always somethin’. There—I’ve got that sweepin’ done. We’ll let Selina scrub, while we fix up the front room.”

The two women opened the door into the “front” room. The blinds were tightly drawn and the musty odor testified to its lengthy isolation.

---

“MY LAND! look at that, will you?”

Mrs. Prentis pointed to a cheap colored glass on the center-table, which held a pitiful little bouquet of one immortelle, six pale spears of a rank grass and a carefully-cut-out letterhead of a printed spray of orange blossoms.

“Who’d a thought of tryin’ to make a bouquet out o’ that? I remember, when we were back in Tennessee, that Mamie was always findin’ the first deer’s tongues and other kinds of little early flowers. Us big girls always helped fill her little hands. Seemed like she never could get all she wanted. An’ then think of livin’ out here where there ain’t water enough for things that has to have it, let alone flowers. Why, I remember one summer when we even saved the dishwater to use several times, and then fed it to the pigs ’cause water was so scarce.”

“Yes; the way farmer’s wives have to worry ’long, ’tain’t much wonder so many of ’em go crazy. I read in th’ paper that was ’round a bundle that come from the store that a bigger part of farmers’ wives went crazy than any other kind of women.”

“Yes, I’ve heard that too. Let’s jes’ step in an’ pick up in the bedroom, and then sweep both these rooms out together. The wind’s in th’ right direction.”

“Yes, you come with me. We—we could get done sooner, workin’ together.”

“That must be the pallet an’ this th’ pillow. They say the baby had been dead for several hours when Jed found it.”

“Yes, an’ Mamie settin’ out there in the barn door, with her head in her lap. Not cryin’ nor nothin’.”

The two women hesitated, lingered at their task. Something kept them from moving the things that the coroner had kept in so rigidly exact a position.

“Yes; there’s somethin’ mighty queer about it. My land, jes’ think, she might be—HUNG!” in a hoarse whisper.

Both faces blanched at the hitherto unspoken possibility. A woman—neighbor and friend, and the childhood acquaintance of one of them—was imprisoned on the charge of killing her baby.

They felt that they ought to have a feeling of horror. It was a terrible crime, with seemingly only one explanation, but to both there arose visions of the unexpected satisfying of the craving mother heart of the work-worn farm drudge; of her seeming happiness and joy at the little cuddling head in the hollow of her arm and the soft lips on the breast, as the little form was held tightly to its mother’s bosom.

“I don’t care what the coroner’s jury said, I don’t believe Mamie could ’a’ done it. But still—if she didn’t, who did?”

“Yes, an’ then, if she didn’t do it, why don’t she say so? She knows they might hang her.”

“They say she ain’t said one word since Jed found her out there in the barn door. My land, but ain’t it hot?”

“Yes, there bein’ no trees ’round here, jes’ seems like the sun bakes right through the roof. Well, we might as well begin to pick up. The funeral’s at ten tomorrow. I can come over early; can you?”

“Yes, I’ll be here. I’m goin’ to stay an’ set up tonight. Mr. and Mrs. Shinkle said they’d come over. Selina can get supper for her pa an’ th’ boys.”

“We’d better change them cloths.”

The women tiptoed into the little lean-to, with that expectant hush that the presence of death always causes.

On an improvised table, a little form lay covered with a sheet, above a box of slowly melting ice. The country ministrations of neighborly service were completed, and the women left the room and returned to their task of cleaning in the front of the little farmhouse.

“My land, but it’s quiet here! Bein’ so far off the main road, seems like a person never sees nor hears nobody. It’s enough to drive a person crazy.”

---

THE older woman had been standing for several minutes, with her mind preoccupied by struggling thought. At last she spoke:

“See here, Mis’ Prentis, if this pillow’d been standing up like this, it could’ve fell over on the baby. See?”

Both women bent over the carefully-folded bedclothing, placed upon the floor for the sake of a slightly cooler strata of air and also to obviate the possibility of the baby rolling off, while the mother was busy in some of the many tasks of the unaided farmer’s wife.

Little by little, the bedroom was straightened and the two rooms swept and dusted. Then Mrs. Prentis paused as she gave a final look around the rooms, walked to one of the windows on the south and ran a speculative finger over the glass. It was so heavily coated with dust as to be practically opaque. Then she stepped to the two windows on the east side of the room and looked at them. The panes of glass in both were clean and carefully polished.

“Now why do you suppose that is?” she asked.

Mrs. Collins, who had been following her moves, shook her head.

“I don’t know,” she answered, “Did you notice that the one in the kitchen, on the south side above the stove, hadn’t been washed, either? I noticed it when I went over to look at the firebox when you spoke.”

“Yes, that’s so,” said Mrs. Prentis, standing in the kitchen door and glancing at the south windows of one room and then at the other.

“See here, do you ’spose—that is—I mean both of these windows on the south side are toward the graveyard—do you ’spose that Mamie left ’em that way on purpose?”

“Well, there’s a good deal to do on a farm, and mebbe she got as far as the south side washin’ windows some day, and then had to quit for some reason.”

“Yes, but these ain’t been washed for months. Poor little Mamie! Mebbe she just couldn’t stand to be everlastingly seein’ them gravestones.”

“I wish, oh how I wish, I’d ’a ’come over here oftener! We don’t live so far away; but seems like I never get time to get all my work done, and when I do there’s not time to walk, or I’m too tired, an’ o’ course the horses are always busy.

“What with fruit cannin’, and hayin’ hands, an’ threshin’, an’ little chickens, the summer’s gone ’fore you know it, an’ then the winter’s too cold and snowy, or too wet an’ muddy to get out, an’ the first thing you know another year’s slipped by.”

Motherly Mrs. Collins nodded her head in sympathy. An older and a heavier woman, all that Mrs. Prentis had said applied better than equally well to her.

“No wonder Mamie loved the baby so,” she said, “though she ain’t been overly strong since it was born. Jes’ think of the years and years she was here all alone, for Jed used to work out a good deal an’ she done all the work here. Years an’ years of stillness—an’ then the baby she’d never give up wantin’ and hopin’ for.”

“Yes, when I think what a woman’s got to go through here on a farm, I don’t never want Selina should get married. Seems like it’s enough sometimes to make a mother wish her girl baby could die when it’s little—”

She gasped. Both women gave a frightened start.

“No; ’course I don’t mean that,” she added hastily. “I jes’ mean you love ’em so that it don’t seem no ways right for ’em to have to grow up to what you see in front of ’em.”

“Well, we better quit talkin’ an’ lay out th’ baby’s things. ’Spose we look in the bureau in the bedroom.”

They moved again to the inner room and pulled out the top drawer of the old-fashioned marble-topped bureau.

A few shirts, a pile of carefully mended underwear and some socks, rolled and turned together in two’s, met their gaze.

“That’s Jed’s drawer. Let’s see what’s in the next one.”

The second drawer revealed a freshly-ironed white waist carefully folded above a meager pile of woman’s underwear. Without a word, Mrs. Prentis pushed it shut.

The third drawer proved to be the one they wanted. Small piles of carefully made baby clothing of cheap material, but workmanship of infinite pains, met their view.

Mrs. Collins wiped the tears from her cheeks with the corner of her apron.

“See—they’re nearly ever’one made by hand and all white. Most of ’em jes’ flour sacks, but look how Mamie’s bleached ’em. An’ see this drawn-work.”

As she spoke, she placed a work-reddened hand beneath a narrow strip of openwork.

“Yes, you can go home now,” in answer to a question from Selina in the kitchen.

“My, the pains she’s took on all these little things! Seems ’s if she must ’a’ been gettin’ ’em ready all these years, an’ now—” Her voice trailed off into silence.

The little clothing was laid on the bed in readiness for the morrow, and the women looked about as though hunting something more to do. Used to the busy hours of farm life, they felt impelled to some task that would occupy the passing hours.

“Let’s see if there’s anything we ought to do upstairs.”

They climbed the narrow ladderlike stairway to an unfinished half-story garretlike room above.

---

“MY LAND, she was house-cleanin’ this hot weather!”

Half of the stuffy little room had been thoroughly overhauled and the other end begun. A little old horse-hair trunk stood in the middle of the floor, with portions of its contents scattered about.

“I’ll bet she was goin’ to empty that for the baby’s things. I showed her mine, jes’ like it, that I fixed up for Selina when she was little.”

“Well, we might as well pick up the things and put ’em back,” said orderly Mrs. Collins, who suited the word to the action by laboriously bending with a slight grunt.

Mrs. Prentis pushed her back.

“Here, let me pick ’em up. There ain’t no call for you to go stoopin’ ’round in this heat. First thing you know you’ll be havin’ a stroke.”

Some clothing and small articles were collected, and several bundles of yellowed old letters lay on the floor. From one of the packages the string had broken, evidently when it had been lifted from the trunk. One letter lay crumpled near its empty envelope, where it had been dropped.

With a wondering glance, the two women smoothed it out. The first paragraph was so yellowed and faded as to be illegible, but part of the second paragraph had been protected by the folded paper and they could read:

“ ... will say that your wife is hopelessly insane. She may live for years, but will never regain her mentality, as cases like hers are incurable. We find upon investigation that the women of her family, for several generations, have become hopelessly insane at her age.

“In view of the fact that your small daughter is tainted with this inherited insanity, we strongly advise you to take her to some new environment and, when she grows older, explain to her why marriage should be considered impossible for her.

“As we can see the matter now, it is too bad that her mother was not warned of the same fact, and in view of all our information it would seem to have been better if we had not pulled her through that severe illness. If you—”

The remainder of the letter was undecipherable. The two neighbors looked at each other, their eyes wide with horror. At last Mrs. Prentis gasped hoarsely:

“Do you ’spose that bundle broke open and Mamie read this letter? Her father died ’fore she was old enough to marry and left her this place partly paid for, and I remember when her and Jed was married how they planned to pay the rest of it off jes’ as soon as possible.”

“But,” interrupted Mrs. Collins, “the coroner’s jury said yesterday that they wasn’t any manner of doubt but that she wasn’t crazy. She jes’ set there, with her solemn big eyes, and looked straight ahead and never said a word.

“I wonder how a woman’d feel to know that the baby girl she loved better’n her own life would have to grow up in this drudgery and then finally spend the last of her years in a ’sylum?”

“Yes and ’spose Mamie went crazy herself long ’fore the little girl grew up?”

“I wonder if a woman really loved her baby girl if she wouldn’t rather—” she stopped once more with a frightened look.

Wheels were heard coming down the lane.

Mrs. Prentis spoke quickly: “Sarah Ann Collins, we’re goin’ right downstairs and stick this letter in that cook-stove, quick!”

---

IN THE little kitchen below, the women were cooking supper when the county attorney and another man entered.

“Good evening, ladies,” said the attorney. “We decided to come out again and go carefully over the field to see if we could find any evidence. You haven’t, by chance, found anything, have you?”

Mrs. Prentis looked covertly at Mrs. Collins, then answered:

“No; we jes’ been cleanin’ up. We ain’t been lookin’ for no evidence.”

“Well, Walters,” said the attorney, “you know juries when it comes to women. If there never is found a definite reason for her wanting the baby to die, no jury will ever believe she is guilty.”

“Evil Demon” Drives Man to Orgy of Crime

SPURNED by his young niece, Estanislao Puyat, a Filipino, ran amuck in the streets of Manila, after throwing the girl from an upper window to the ground and almost killing her. Grabbing his bolo, he rushed down the street, stabbed an aged woman in the eye, cut off the hands of two other women, slashed another, stabbed a Chinese merchant and a cart driver, cut another woman on the forehead, wounded a child and a young Filipino girl, and then, reaching the Bay, threw himself into the water in an effort to commit suicide. Capt. H. H. Elarth threw a noose over his head and dragged him ashore. The Filipinos say that Puyat was “de malas,” meaning he was possessed of an evil demon.

A Five-minute Story

The Gallows

By I. W. D. PETERS

TOMORROW morning, at sunrise, I am to hang for the murder of a man.

At sunrise on the ninth of June, the anniversary of my wedding day. I am to be hanged by the neck until I am dead.

I am glad this state has not yet adopted the use of electricity in executions. I prefer to spend my last moments out in the open under the sky.

The building of the gallows is finished; the workmen are gone, and it seems that the execution at sunrise is certain to take place; but every step along the corridor sends my heart into my mouth. Gladys is working for a reprieve. I am praying she will not succeed.

The Governor is off on a fishing trip, away from railroad and telegraph. If they do not locate him in the next few hours I shall be hanged. God grant they fail to find him!

It is Glady’s will against mine. She usually wins, but every passing minute lessens her chance to have her way in this. It is now ten minutes to midnight. Dr. Brander, the prison chaplain, has just left me, gratified, poor fellow, that he has succeeded in reconciling me to my fate. If he had known that the tall skeleton of wood outside, with its lank line of rope, was in my mind a refuge, he would have turned from me in horror.

The next five hours will be the longest of my life. Every step in the corridor strikes fear to my heart. It is not because I am guilty of the crime, for which I was sentenced, that I am glad to die. I am guilty, but that doesn’t mean that I deserve to die.

I am going to hang tomorrow at sunrise because I want to be hung!

I could have saved myself, but refused to do so, solely because life had lost its savor, a great wave of disgust with living possessed and still possesses me. I am writing these words now that Gladys may know the truth. She has tried to see me, ever since I was brought here, and I have refused to be seen. That is one right a condemned man has—to refuse to see visitors.

---

FROM the day we were married, Gladys demanded to know my every thought, my every act every hour of the day.

If every one of them was not concerned with her she criticised, condemned or cried. She resented, in bitterly-spoken words and equally bitter acts, the small recesses of my soul that I, for the sake of my own self-respect, kept to myself.

Finally she determined to show me that there were other men who appreciated her, if I did not. For a while, after that, all hours of the day and evening my home was infested with lounge lizards. I endured it without a word, which infuriated her.

Lester Caine, a young fellow, honest and simple, was her first victim. The first time I found him seated close beside her on the dimly lit porch I welcomed him warmly. We smoked and talked of our days in the army together. I felt that Gladys could safely enough flirt with such as Lester, if that was what she wanted: but Lester called only a few times after that.

For two months there was a succession of young fellows about the place. Our house was not far from the Westmoor Country Club, and the golf links came almost up to our side-yard. Our porch was a convenient place to “drop in.”

Suddenly all that sort of thing ceased. Gladys was away a great deal, but as her mother lived in a town just a few miles away I thought nothing of that. She became very quiet, was thoughtful, absent-minded, flushed easily, seemed not herself.

At first I was a good deal puzzled, then, suddenly an explanation for the change in her dawned on me. Joy filled my soul. I was inordinately gentle with her, bought her a small automobile for her birthday, did everything I could think of for her comfort and pleasure.

After all, I told myself, the emotional phase she had passed through was natural. Marriage is a more difficult readjustment with some than others. It had evidently been so with Gladys. If a child came to us it would make everything right.

A child—our child! It was wonderful to think of. She had always refused to consider the subject saying she wished to enjoy life while she was young. But she knew I wanted a son to bear my name, a daughter to inherit her beauty, and she had accepted the inevitable. A wave of exaltation made me feel as if I were treading on clouds. I longed to mention the subject to her, but I felt that the first word about it should come from her.

I spent hours thinking of tender, loving things to do for her. She accepted everything quietly, sometimes with averted face and flushed cheeks. I would draw her inert figure into my arms and hold her close, but she made no response to my demonstrative affection.

At this stage of affairs my firm sent me on a ten-day trip to close a Western deal. It was hard to leave Gladys, but now, more than ever, I felt that we would need money, and lots of it.

We arranged for Gladys to go to her mother’s, and I was to join her there on my return.

It is the same old story. I came home before I was expected, and went straight to our cottage, with the intention of having Glady’s room redecorated before bringing her home.

At the gate stood Gladys’ car. I rushed into the house, but there was no one on the lower floor, nor in Gladys’ room, nor mine. I was about to descend the stairs when I heard a low laugh—a man’s laugh—from the third floor. I dashed up there and stood gazing at the closed door of the spare room.

“What’s the idea, running away from me?” asked the man. “You can’t blow hot and cold with me.”

“I told you not to come here again. It’s not safe.”

“I’m not afraid of that husband of yours. You’re mine, and you’re going to stay mine.”

I had listened intently, but could not recognize the man’s voice.

“Go now,” pleaded Gladys, “and I’ll come to your rooms this evening.”

“Not on your life! I’m here now, and I am going to stay.”

“Let go of me—you are hurting my shoulder.”

There was a sound of scuffing. I tried the door. It was locked. I put my shoulder to it. The lock snapped.

Gladys gave a cry, leaped away from the man—a man whom I had never seen before. The full-lipped, black-browed type, big, soft. As I took in the scene—the tousled woman, the flushed-faced man—a great wave of disgust almost overwhelmed me.

“Well,” said the man, sneeringly, “what are you going to do about it?”

“If you take her away now and treat her right—nothing.”

“And if I don’t take her away?”

“I’ll meet that situation when it comes.”

“It has come,” he said, with a laugh, and walked out.

I am tall, slender, delicate-looking, but I knew I was a match for that overfed brute.

I listened to the clatter of his feet on the stairs. Then I followed him.

---

THE man was hastening toward a street car.

I cranked Gladys’ car and followed. It was easy to keep the street car in sight and to keep an eye on his sleek black head.

He left the car at Hanson Street. I, without a glance toward him, kept on ahead. I turned at the corner, in time to see him enter an office building. I was not far behind him when he took the elevator. The man in the elevator gave me the number of his office.

He was telling a joke to his typist as I entered, but his laughter died when he saw me.

“You dirty thief! You’ll never cheat another man out of money!”

His look of astonishment, as I shouted these words, was amusing. He tried to give blow for blow, but I meant what I said when I shouted at him “I’ve come here to kill you!”

To choke the life out of an overfed beast is not so hard to an infuriated man. In less than a quarter of an hour he was dead. The police, for whom the typist had called, filled the room even before I had straightened my disheveled clothing.

I practically tried my own case, and I was skillful enough to make every word, apparently uttered in my own defense, sound black against me.

Gladys tried to save me by telling the true story of the affair, but I made a picture of her as a devoted, self-sacrificing wife, willing to ruin even her spotless name to save her husband. I enjoyed seeing her cringe as I did this.

So skillfully had she and the big brute managed that there was not a bit of evidence to substantiate her story. On the other hand, there was the typist’s story to help me, and, too, it was known I had speculated in the past, and that I had lost some money.

I made the most of everything against me, and it was enough. I was sentenced to hang on the ninth day of June at sunrise.

Gladys came to the jail to see me while the trial was going on, but I managed to act just as if my story were the true one and hers the false, and, though she pleaded with me to let the truth come out, I would not admit that the truth had not come out. The sentence was a terrible shock to her. Her mother carried her from the court-room in a faint. Before she recovered I was in prison.

---

I SHALL welcome the hour of sunrise as I never welcomed any moment of my life.

Not until then will the fear of a reprieve leave me. Gladys is moving heaven and earth to locate the Governor. God grant that she does not succeed!

It is four forty-five. I have spent much time at the window, gazing out into the darkness. What comes after death? That is the question, I suppose, that all men ask at the end of life. I have never done so. It is a futile question—one which none of us can answer. But I believe there will be surcease from the nausea that comes to those who have known disillusion and disappointment.

Ten minutes of five—now surely I am safe from even a chance of a reprieve!

Footsteps in the corridor! Is it my escort to the gallows, or—what I fear most on earth?

---

A STATEMENT by the warden of Larsen Penitentiary:

“If Traylor had spent the brief period, always allotted to a criminal for a few last words, his reprieve would have reached us in time to stay the execution; but he walked calmly, unfalteringly up to the gallows and helped us, with steady hands, adjust the cap and ropes—and he was dead two minutes before the Governor’s message reached us.”

For a Grim Tale With a Terrifying
End We Recommend

The
SKULL

By HAROLD WARD

KIMBALL held up his hand, warningly.

“Listen!” he exclaimed in a whisper.

Then he shoved the bottle back from his elbow and reached for his revolver, which hung just above the table. Buckling the belt about his waist, he leaped for the door and threw it open.

The house, raised on pile foundations a dozen feet above the ground, shook beneath the rush of retreating footsteps. With the swiftness of a wild animal, he gathered himself for the spring—and landed squarely astride the back of the last of the blacks to quit the place.

The weight of the white man brought the native to the ground. Seizing the black by the hair, he jerked him to his feet, keeping the naked body between himself and the crowd that lurked in the darkness, just beyond the ring of light that shone down through the open door.

“What name?” he demanded in the beche-de-mer of the Islands. “What for you come around big fella house? I knock seven bells out of you quick!”

Still grasping the man’s kinky wool with his left hand, his right shot out, landing a terrific blow on the native’s mouth. The black, spitting blood and broken teeth, squirmed in agony and attempted to give a side glance at his fellows. Seeing that none intended to aid him, he jerked his head to one side in an effort to escape. The white man straightened it with another blow.

“What name?” he demanded again.

“Me good fella boy,” the black answered with an effort. “Me fella missionary!”

“Then you say one fella prayer damn quick!”

Kimball rained blow after blow on his face. The savage shrieked with agony. In the shadow, the blacks shuffled uneasily, like a herd of cattle ready to stampede, but the white man seemingly gave them no heed.

At last, the punishment completed, he jerked the bow and arrows from the unresisting hand of his victim and, whirling him suddenly, gave him a kick and a shove which landed him on all fours in the midst of the others. Then, turning, seemingly ignoring the thoroughly frightened blacks, he reëntered the house.

Throwing the bow and arrows on the table, he poured himself a stiff drink of gin and downed it at a gulp. And then, sitting down beside the table, he picked up the weapon and examined it gingerly.

“Poisoned!” he remarked casually to the man lying on the bed. “I knocked bloody hell out of Tulagi as a lesson to the rest of ’em. They’re getting insolent, with only one of us to handle ’em. Wish to heaven you were up and around again.”

“Upon the platform, eh?” the sick man listlessly inquired.

Kimball nodded.

“They’re gettin’ bold,” he said shortly. “Five hundred niggers are too many for one man to keep straight. It’s been plain hell since you went down—and then the dog had to turn up his toes. When Donaldson comes in next week with the Scary-Saray we’ll have to send after a new nigger-chaser. Chipin’s got a couple extra ones he’s been trainin’ over at Berande.”

The sick man rolled over with a groan.

“Thank heaven I was taken sick!” he remarked bitterly. “It’s hard, God knows, but it gave me a chance to find out just what sort of a cur you are, Kimball.”

Kimball scowled. He half opened his mouth as if to answer. Then, thinking better of it, he poured himself another drink and resumed his occupation of examining the weapon he had taken from the native. He swayed slightly in his chair under the load of liquor he was carrying, yet his voice was unblurred as, after a minute’s silence, he looked across at the other.

“Can’t you get that out of your head, Hansen?” he remarked. “I’m getting bloody well fed up on it.”

Hansen raised himself on an elbow and angrily shook his fist at the other.

“Oh, you’re ‘getting bloody well fed up on it,’ are you?” he mimicked. “I should think you would be! I suppose I’m hurtin’ your delicate feelings by mentioning it to you, eh? It’s nothing a man should howl about, is it?—having one he thought was his best friend pull off a dirty stunt like that!”

Kimball poured himself another drink. His hand shook slightly as he raised the glass to his lips.

“Oh, forget it and go to sleep!” he growled.

“Yes, ‘forget it,’ you damned crooked, lyin’, double-crosser! I’m apt t’ forget how you wrote to Gladys and told her I’d taken a nigger wife! Wanted her yourself, didn’t you, you low-down, gin-guzzling rat! It was just a piece of luck that I was taken sick and you had t’ look after the plantation instead of goin’ after th’mail last time, or I’d never have got that letter from her telling me why she’d turned me down.”

“I’m telling you now, for th’ last time, that I didn’t write that stuff to her!” Kimball snarled back. “I’m tellin’ you it’s a lie. I showed you the letter I wrote to her, giving her my word of honor that somebody’d been doin’ you dirt.”

“Who else is there here on the Island that knew her back home?” Hansen demanded, dropping back onto the pillows again. “And who else knew that we were engaged?”

“How in hell do I know?” Kimball answered thickly, reaching unsteadily for the bottle. “You’re a sick man, Hansen, or I’d beat you up for th’ way you’re talkin’ to me.”

The sick man raised himself from the pillows again with a snort of anger, his face flushed, his eyes gleaming feverishly.

“It’s a long road that’s got no turn in it!” he muttered. “It’s my money that’s in this plantation, Kimball—my money against your experience. And keep that damned arrow pointed th’ other way, you fool! You’re drunk—too drunk to be monkeyin’ with weapons. You’d just as soon shoot me as not: if you do, I’ll get you if I have to come back from th’ grave to do it! And remember this, Kimball: Soon’s I’m able to be up and around again, we’ll have a settlement. And out you’ll go from this plantation, you—”

Whether it was an accident, or plain murder nobody knows. Kimball was drunk—beastly so. The arrow was loaded in the bow and clasped between his trembling fingers, the bow-string taut. And Hansen had annoyed him, angered him, bullied him, cursed him. At any rate, as he slumped forward in his chair, the bow-string slipped from between his thumb and finger, and—

Hansen dropped back onto the pillows with a smothered scream, the arrow buried deep in his temple!

II.

IT WAS past midnight when Kimball awoke from his drunken stupor.

For an instant, he had no recollection of what had happened. The oil lamp still burned brightly, throwing the figure of the man on the bed in bold relief.

Kimball half arose on his tiptoes so as not to awaken Hansen. His foot touched the bow lying on the floor. Then a flood of realization swept over him. He suddenly remembered that he was a murderer.

Whether he had killed Hansen intentionally or not he was unable to recall. Memory had ceased on the second he sprawled forward, his tired brain benumbed with the liquor he had consumed during the evening. He knew that they had quarreled—that Hansen had been more abusive than usual and had cursed him.

He stepped across to the bed. A single glance at the bloated face already turning black—at the glassy eyes staring back at him fixedly—told him that his surmise had been correct: the arrow had been dipped in poison. He shuddered as he pushed the remaining arrows, which he had taken from Tulagi, to the back of the table and poured himself another drink.

He must act at once. Donaldson and the Scary-Saray would arrive within a few days. And Donaldson was no fool. Nor was Svensen, his mate. Both of them knew that there was bad blood between the partners. And should one of the house boys find the body in the morning it would cause no end of talk among the niggers. Some of them would be certain to talk to Donaldson. The big trader might be able to put two and two together and take his suspicions to the authorities.

Reaching up, he pulled down his revolver and, buckling the belt around his waist, tiptoed to the door. The rain was falling in torrents, and the sound of the surf was booming loudly. The sky was split by lightning, while the thunder rolled and grumbled.

It was a typical island squall; he knew it would last but a short time. Yet, while it lasted, the blacks would all be under cover, making him safe from spying eyes if he acted at once.

But fear—fear of he knew not what—caused him to pull down the shades until not a vestige of light showed at sides or bottom.

Then, nerving himself with another pull at the bottle, he turned down the lamp until the room was in semi-darkness. Again he stepped to the door and, holding it open an inch or two, listened.

Satisfied, he returned to the bed and picked up the dead form of Hansen and threw it across his shoulder with a mighty effort. He extinguished the lamp with a single puff as he passed the table.

Then, feeling his way carefully with his feet lest he strike against some piece of furniture in the darkness, he sought the door.

Bending his body against the force of the wind, he gained the steps and dodged around the corner of the house opposite the blacks’ quarters. At the edge of the cocoanut grove, he again paused to listen.

Not a sound came from the direction of the black barracks. Presently, beating against the wind, he see-sawed through the grove for a quarter of a mile.

Satisfied that he was far enough from the house, he dropped his ghastly burden to the ground and turned back. The storm would obliterate his tracks by morning. With the coming of daylight, he would give the alarm, as if he had just discovered the absence of Hansen.

He had gone over the whole thing in his mind as he struggled along. It would be easy enough to foist his story upon the simple-minded blacks. He would tell them that the sick man had gotten up in the night and wandered away. Fevers are common in the Islands: so, too, is delirium. And, when the body was found with the arrow in the skull, they would believe that their master had fallen a victim to some wandering savage.

There were half a dozen runaways—deserters from the plantation—hiding back in the bush, afraid to go into the hills for fear of the ferocious hill men and, at the same time, fearful of the punishment certain to be meted out to them should they return to the plantation. One of them would be blamed for Hansen’s death. The blacks would vouch for such a story when he told it to Donaldson and Svensen upon their arrival.

He had covered a small part of the distance back to the house, his head bent low in thought, when a rustling among the palms at his right caused him to turn suddenly. As he did so, a spear whizzed past his head, imbedding itself in the tree beside him.

Whirling, he drew his revolver and pumped the clip of shells in the direction from which the spear had been thrown. It was too dark to make for good shooting; and an instant later a flash of lightning showed him a naked figure dodging behind a tree in the distance. Too late, he realized that he had left the house without an extra clip of cartridges. Unarmed, he broke into a run, dodging here and there among the long avenues of trees until he reached the edge of the grove.

The blacks were already tumbling out of their quarters, chattering excitedly.

“Ornburi!” he snapped at one of the houseboys. “You tell ’m fella boys sick marster, him run away. Got devil-devil in head. Me go after him. Meet bad black fella. Black fella kill him mebbe. You look. You catch ’m black fella, plenty kai-kai in morning, no work, plenty tobacco—plenty everything!”

As Ornburi stepped forward, proud of being singled out from among his fellows, and explained to the late comers what had happened, Kimball dashed back up the steps and into the house. Returning an instant later with his rifle and bandolier of cartridges, he found the blacks arming themselves with their native weapons, squealing and chattering their glee at the prospect of the man-hunt and the holiday to follow in case of their success.

In spite of his efforts to maintain some semblance of order, however, assisted by the elated Ornburi, it was nearly daylight when the expedition was ready to start. The rain was nearly over, but a glance showed him that the night’s downpour had completely washed out the trail he had made. Dodging here and there among the trees, savagely alert for their hidden enemies, it was almost an hour before the natives had covered the distance that Kimball, loaded down as he had been, had covered in twenty minutes.

The body of Hansen lay where he had thrown it.

But the head had been hacked off!

III.

In his own mind, Kimball had no doubt as to the identity of the black who had hurled the spear at him in the darkness, for a checkup of the laborers showed Tulagi missing.

Bitter at the trouncing Kimball had administered, the native had bolted. Hiding in the darkness, nursing his anger, fate had thrown in his way the man who had whipped him. The same fate had caused him to miss his mark when he had thrown the spear.

And Tulagi was of a tribe that believed in taking heads for souvenirs.

With the coming of Donaldson and Svensen in the Scary-Saray three days later, giving him enough white aid to handle the plantation without fear of an uprising, Kimball renewed the search for the runaway. Tulagi, at large, would be a constant menace, not only to his own safety, but to the peace and quiet of the blacks. The runaway was a man of considerable influence among the others, and there was already too much dissatisfaction among the laborers to allow any additional trouble to creep in.

The body of the murdered Hansen had been decently buried close to the edge of the cocoanut grove under Kimball’s direction.

Donaldson and Svensen never for a moment doubted his story, which was corroborated by Ornburi and the blacks. Such things are not uncommon among the Islands. Both volunteered to aid him in running down the supposed murderer. For the supremacy of the white man must be maintained for the common good of all.

It was near the end of the second day that they found that for which they were searching. Beside a skeleton lay a skull, the point of an arrow driven through the temple. A great ant hill close by told a grisly story.

That one of Kimball’s bullets had found its mark there was little doubt. Tulagi, wounded nigh unto death, had, nevertheless stopped long enough to hack off the ghastly souvenir, then made his way back toward the hills as best he could.

Exhausted from loss of blood, he had dropped, only to fall a victim to the ants.

IV.

AS THE three white men made their way toward the clearing, the sight of a schooner anchored close to the Scary-Saray met their gaze. Drawn up on the beach, close to the house, was a whale boat.

“From the looks of her, that’ll be Captain Grant’s Dolphin from Malatita,” Donaldson remarked, shading his eyes from the glare of the sun. “Didn’t know he ever got this far. Wonder if his daughter’s with him? Ever see her, Kimball? She’s a peach!”

Before Kimball, walking slightly behind the others and carrying the skull, could make a reply, a man and woman emerged from the house to meet them. Donaldson turned quickly.

“That’s her!” he exclaimed. “Prettiest girl on the Islands. Hide that damned skull, Kimball! It’s no sight for a woman of her breeding to see.”

They were a scant hundred yards apart now, the girl waving her handkerchief to them.

“It’s a wonder you wouldn’t stay at home to welcome your guests, Karl,” she called out. “And Fred Hansen—where is he?”

Kimball strode ahead of the others.

“Gladys!” he exclaimed.

“Hide that damned skull, I tell you!” Donaldson growled in an undertone.

They were almost together now. Kimball shoved the skull under his coat. As he did so, it nearly dropped from his sweaty hands and, in an effort to hold it, his finger slid into one of the eyeless sockets.

The point of the arrow, protruding through the bone, scratched his skin. For the moment he forgot it in the happiness of meeting the woman he loved.

“Dad wanted to make a trading trip out this way, and brought me along for company,” she was saying, as he stepped forward to grasp her outstretched hand. “Say that you’re surprised to see me.”

Before she could reach him, his legs doubled under him and he fell forward. The skull, dropping from beneath his coat, rolled and bounded half a dozen yards away, bringing up at the foot of a little hummock.

They leaped forward to catch him as he fell. But too late. With a mighty effort he raised himself to his knees.

“Hansen!” he screamed. “I killed him! He swore that he’d get even, and he has! The—damned—thing—was poisoned!”

He pitched forward onto his face.

At the foot of the hummock, the skull grinned sardonically.

A Novelette of Weird Happenings—

The
Ape-Man

By J. B. M. CLARKE, JR

“LET’S GO and call on him now then,” said Norton in his impulsive way, rising and crossing to the window.

The fine rain, which had been swishing intermittently against the panes with each gust of wind, had ceased for some time, and as Norton lifted the blind and peered forth he got the first glimpse of a wan moon struggling through an uneven copper-edged break in the swift-moving clouds.

“I was to have gone over there this evening,” he said, “but ’phoned the engagement off on account of the storm. However, it’s not too late....”

It did not take much persuasion to induce Meldrum to consent, for, although a year or two Norton’s senior and inclined in consequence to give him paternal advice now and again, he generally indulged his whims.

“You can’t break a teacher of the lecturing habit,” was the way Norton expressed it.

He himself was an architect, and both were single men, although Norton was striving hard to build up a connection that would enable him to marry one of the prettiest girls in town, with whom he was then “keeping company.” Meldrum locked the door of his apartment behind him, and the pair sallied forth into the fresh damp air of a night in early spring.

“After all you have told me, I am rather curious to see your South African friend again,” said Meldrum, setting his pace with his friend’s. “While no doubt an interest in animals is wholesome enough, his particular taste seems to run unpleasantly to apes and monkeys. Some of those experiments of his, of which you spoke, seem rather purposeless—making baboons drunk for instance....”

“If you could have seen him when he was telling me about that baboon business you would have taken a dislike to him too,” said Norton, making a gesture of displeasure with his hand. “Although I will admit I had an aversion toward him from the first—I didn’t quite know why. He had a trick of laying his hot heavy hand on my shoulder that used to irritate me dreadfully when we were in the Inspection Department in Washington.”

“What was he doing there?” asked Meldrum.

“He had been inspecting aeroplane spruce in British Columbia,” replied Norton, “and he had a desk in our office. I was there for about three months after being invalided home, before I was sent to New York.”

After a few moments’ silence, Norton added:

“He is more than queer. He is a throw-back.”

“A what?” said Meldrum, puzzled.

“A throw-back—an atavistic specimen,” said Norton firmly. “A mixture of old and new, and a bad one at that.”

“That’s a pretty nasty accusation, Harry,” said Meldrum.

“You may think so,” said Norton obstinately, “but I tell you I’m not simply guessing. Apart from his peculiar build, with his monstrous length of arm and leg, short body, and small head, and his perpetual and unnatural theories and experiments with apes and things, there is still further evidence that I saw with my own eyes when we went to New York together one weekend and visited the zoo. It was not my fancy, I can assure you, Meldrum, that made me imagine the very brutes were interested in my companion. I tell you, there was scarcely one of those creatures that did not show excitement of some kind, some of rage, others of fear, but generally of anger.

“One big chimpanzee went simply wild for a time—so much so that an attendant came along to see what the trouble was. It capered furiously, thundered at the bars of its cage, and then executed a hideous kind of cluttering dance, beating its hands and feet on the floor with extraordinary rapidity. Yet all Needham had done was to make a peculiar kind of clucking noise in his throat and smile his sinister smile. I’ll bet the brutes recognized him as one of their kind. Some of them looked as if they expected him to open the cage doors....”

“What is he doing here in Burlington now?” asked Meldrum.

“Something in connection with lumber, I believe,” said Norton, as they entered North Avenue and turned in the direction of the park. “He has rented a small house out here on this street and lives there alone. He seems to prefer being alone always.”

They walked on for some little distance, and then Norton said, “This is the place,” and indicated a small two-story residence standing alone in a neat garden some twenty yards from the thoroughfare.

It was quite dark save for one lighted window upstairs. The pair went up the path to the front door and Norton, after a little fumbling, found and pressed an electric button, without, however, producing any effect as far as could be observed.

“The bell doesn’t seem to ring,” said Norton, pressing again and again. “Perhaps it’s out of order.”

He knocked at the door and listened. Everything was quiet inside. Heavy drops of water splashed down from the roof, intensifying the silence. A trolley-car hummed on the street, throwing a brilliant light on the trees and shrubs of the garden, and then leaving them darker than ever. Again Norton knocked loudly, but without result.

“That’s not his bedroom, I know,” he said, nodding up at the lighted room, “for he told me he hated the noise of the cars passing under his window. He must have fallen asleep over a book or something. I might throw a stone at the window.”

“No I wouldn’t do that,” said Meldrum, walking back a few paces and staring up. “Perhaps we had better just go away. I can meet him again.”

“But I would like you to see him, now that you’ve come,” said Norton. “Wait a minute.”

He tried the door and found it unlocked. Entering the hall, he called:

“Needham, Ho, Needham!”

Again they listened, and again nothing happened. As he groped in the darkness, Norton’s hand encountered the electric switch and he turned on the light. A narrow stairway was revealed, leading overhead.

“Just wait a minute,” he said to Meldrum, “and I’ll run upstairs. I’m sure he’s there.”

He disappeared swiftly, and, after an interval of a few moments, came quietly down again.

“Come up,” he said, beckoning to his friend. “He is sound asleep in his chair. Come and look.”

II.

TOGETHER they crept up. The room door was ajar, and they noiselessly entered what was evidently a sitting-room. Needham sat in a large armchair, with his back to the window, sleeping quietly. A reading lamp on the table was the sole source of illumination, and, since it was fitted with a heavy red shade, the upper portion of the chamber was in comparative darkness.

The full light of the lamp, however, fell upon the form of the sleeping man, who had sunk low in his chair and was indeed in an extraordinary attitude. His book had fallen to the floor, and his long arms hung over the sides of the chair, the hands resting palm upwards on the rug. His huge thighs sloped upward from the depths of the chair to the point made by his knees, and his long shins disappeared below the table.

Norton glanced at Meldrum, who was looking at the sleeper curiously.

“Ho, Needham!” said Norton, loudly. “Wake up!”

The slumberer was roused at last, but in a startling manner. With a lightning movement, he sat bolt upright and clutched the arms of the chair, his features working convulsively, while a stream of horrible gibberish, delivered in a high piercing tone, burst from his lips. Norton went as pale as death, while Meldrum remained rooted to the spot where he stood.

Then, recovering himself, Norton ran forward and, seizing Needham by the arm, shook him violently, exclaiming:

“It’s all right, Needham! It’s only Norton come to see you.”

The man in the chair regained his composure as quickly as he had lost it, and, as if unaware that anything unusual had happened, got to his feet and said:

“Hullo, Norton, old chap! Take a seat. I must have fallen asleep and had some beastly dream or something. Sit down.”

He crossed to the wall near the fireplace and switched on some lights that illuminated the whole room. Then, seeing Meldrum for the first time, he advanced toward him and shook hands.

“It’s not quite the right thing to steal into a man’s house in this way, I know,” said Meldrum. “I am sorry if we startled you. We rang and raised a rumpus down below, but without effect. I was taking a walk with Norton after the storm, and it occurred to him to come up and see you and apologize for his absence this evening. So we came together.”

“It’s quite all right,” said Needham, in his peculiar nasal tones. “I am glad you came. I sleep pretty heavily and had a beastly dream just when you came in. I was back in Africa.”

He was moving about as he spoke, placing a box of cigars, a bottle of whisky, some glasses and a siphon of soda-water on the table, and Meldrum observed him carefully. His peculiar build was not so noticeable when he was on his feet, the design of his loose tweed suit seeming to make him appear better proportioned. At times he looked almost handsome, but at other times, with a different perspective, the extraordinary length of his arms and legs was very apparent, while still another view made him appear almost grotesque, the singular shape of his small head, with its closely-cropped black hair, offending the sense of just proportions. His eyes were brown with muddy whites, and the sinister effect of his high cackling laugh (which was very frequent), accompanied as it was by a downward movement of his large hooked nose and an upward twist of his little black mustache, was not lost upon the observant teacher.

The room itself was dirty and untidy in the extreme. Stale tobacco fumes filled the air, and articles of wearing apparel were scattered around. Some unwashed dishes stood on a small table near the fireplace, and remnants of food lay on the floor. Books, papers and magazines were flung about in disorder and Needham’s huge muddy boots lay where he had thrown them, below the chair on which Norton sat.

“What were you doing back in Africa?” asked Meldrum pleasantly, helping himself to a cigar.

“Back amongst those beastly baboons,” said Needham, with his unpleasant laugh, at the same time proceeding to fill the glasses. “You know, I once ran into a bunch of them when I was out alone on a hunting trip, and I saw a curious sight. There was a big fight on among them—there would be about twenty of them, I should think. I saw the whole business, and it was some fight, I can tell you. Rocks and chunks of wood were flying in all directions, and they were clubbing one another in great shape. As far as I could judge, they were roughly divided into two lots, but it was pretty much of a mix-up.

“But there was one old gray fellow that took my fancy rather. He seemed to be the chief egger-on. Whenever things looked like calming down a bit, he stirred them up again by means of a number of curious calls. I could not quite make out what part he was playing, or what side he favored, for he seemed to keep pretty well outside of the fight, only concerning himself with those that went down. He finished them up in the most methodical manner as they lay. And if two were attacking one he would throw himself in on the side of the two to help finish the odd fellow—and then he seemed to set the remaining two fighting one another. I think he gave false signals at times. At any rate, he was the freshest of the three or four survivors when it was all over. And then they sat down and had a kind of powwow.”

Norton glanced again at Meldrum, who smiled at him slightly, then said to Needham:

“Really? How very extraordinary that you should witness all this. Did they not attempt to molest you?”

“No,” said Needham, with his evil smile. “They didn’t attempt to interfere with us—didn’t seem to mind me at all, which is rather unusual for them, for they are shy of humans as a rule. I stood on a big boulder and watched the whole business. The old chap had his eye on me, but either he understood firearms (I had my rifle and revolver, of course), or else I was lucky when I imitated some of his peculiar noises. He seemed quite scared when I came away with one of his favorite calls, and when they finally cleared out, after covering up the dead with branches and leaves, he gave me a most significant look—seeming to beg that I would not give him away.

“At least that’s how it appeared to me. And, strangely enough, I was instrumental in capturing the very same animal later on, together with some others, during a hunt. I lured them to a certain spot by that very noise.”

He had thrown himself down in his easy chair again, and as he laughed afresh his crooked yellow teeth uncovered, and his little eyes glittered unpleasantly. Meldrum was filled with a strong sense of repulsion.

“What was that particular noise like?” Norton struck in for the first time.

Needham put down his glass and, laying his head back slightly, made a peculiar kind of clucking gurgle in his throat. In an instant, from the corner behind Norton’s chair, came a shrill chatter of terror, and a little red figure hurried across the floor and dived below the table. Norton almost dropped his glass, and Meldrum gave a startled exclamation. Needham alone was calm.

“Ah Fifi, you rascal!” he said. “Did I scare you again? That’s too bad. Come here.”

A small long-tailed monkey, clad in a little red jacket, came slowly from below the table and advanced timidly toward Needham, who spoke coaxingly to it, and finally made a kind of rippling noise with his tongue that seemed to reassure it, for it jumped on the arm of his chair and sat quietly blinking at the visitors. Needham tickled its head with his large forefinger.

“I bought Fifi from an Italian,” he said, noting his guests’ look of astonishment. “She is good company—catches flies, switches the lights on and off, and does other useful things—eh, Fifi?”

The little animal looked up at him intelligently, and with a sudden movement Needham wound his great fingers about its throat. With a plaintive cry, the little creature made futile efforts to tear away the strong hand about its neck, plucking frantically with its small paws.

“Don’t!” said Norton in a sharp voice. “I can’t bear to see animals tormented.”

“I’m not hurting her,” said Needham, removing his hand. “She’s a nervous little thing and must be taught not to be so frightened. I think the Italian must have ill-used her. But she is clever, for all that,” continued Needham, laughing. “She is learning to play the piano.”

Lifting the little monkey, he crossed the room with long strides to the corner, where a small cottage piano stood, and seated himself on the stool. “Now play, Fifi,” he said.

The intelligent creature leant forward and commenced striking sharply here and there among the notes, producing a curious kind of tinkling resemblance to certain bars from “Old Black Joe”. Meldrum was conscious of a strange prickling sensation—he did not quite know why.

After a few moments, Needham rose again and, putting the monkey in a box in the corner of the room, returned again to his chair.

III.

IT WAS late before the friends took their departure, Needham holding their interest with stories of his adventures in different parts of the world. Indeed, it was only when Meldrum became aware, by the restless movements of his friend, that Norton was not enjoying himself that he recollected the lateness of the hour and suggested it was time they took their leave.

“You fellows mustn’t be too critical of my quarters, you know,” said Needham, laughing, as they descended the stairs together. “I confess I am not a tidy person. I have led the rough bachelor life too long. But you fellows should understand something about that.”

He accompanied them to the sidewalk, and after some desultory remarks about the weather, the visitors set off toward Norton’s home. The moon was shining brightly and after the heavy rain and wind the air smelt fresh and moist. Meldrum inhaled it with evident pleasure.

“Now that I have seen your friend at close quarters,” he said, “I must confess that I do not feel so strongly inclined in his favor. The state of that room was disgraceful even for a bachelor, and there is no excuse for anyone at all shutting out the fresh air. But, although his tastes seem to run unpleasantly to monkeys, I hardly think he deserves the appellation you bestowed on him.”

“Perhaps not,” said Norton, who seemed in better spirits, now that he was in the free fresh air again. “As far as the atmosphere of his house is concerned, he once explained that to me by saying that since he had been in Africa he had to keep the temperature up. I think he said he had rheumatism. But I don’t like him.”

There was silence for several minutes, and then he burst out:

“And of course he pays attention to Elsie.”

“Ah!” said Meldrum significantly. “Perhaps a lover’s jealousy has something to do with the case.”

“We met him one day on Church Street,” said Norton, “and of course I had to introduce him. He made himself very agreeable, and yet it seemed to my fancy that he was not so much taken up with the girl as anxious to do me an ill turn. Other fellows pay attention to her, too, of course, but that’s because they admire her. It was not so in his case, I am convinced. After we left him Elsie said: ‘What a fine-looking man!’ And then she added: ‘No he isn’t—he’s a horror!’”

“Well,” said Meldrum heartily, “apparently you do not need to fear her falling in love with him, however it may be in his case. I really am afraid it’s a case of ‘I do not like thee, Dr. Fell.’” Meldrum laughed. “But I hardly think,” he wound up, “you have any solid grounds for quarreling with him. The world is wide enough to hold both of you.”

Often in the days that followed, Meldrum, moved by a curiosity he could not quite account for, took his evening walk out on North Avenue past Needham’s house. Of Needham himself he saw nothing. Once he heard the weird tinkling of the piano, but generally the form of the little monkey in its red jacket could be seen sitting motionless at the upper front window looking out on the street. It struck Meldrum as strange that the creatures should sit so quietly. In the course of his progress past the house he did not observe it stir or alter its position. Its gaze seemed fixed on that point of the road where Meldrum fancied its master would first come into sight on his way home from town.

“Never knew they were such devoted things,” Meldrum ruminated. “What a queer kind of a pet to keep! And what a queer life to live, anyway, alone in that house. He doesn’t even get anyone to clean it up apparently. Some strange people in this old world!”

With this philosophical reflection, Meldrum passed on in the direction of the park.

Term examinations kept Meldrum busily occupied during the days that followed, and the friends did not have occasion to see one another for nearly two weeks. Then, when they did meet, it was again through the instrumentality of Needham, after the evening of the party at the Miner home. The Miners were neighbors of Norton’s sweetheart and lived out some distance beyond Ethan Allen Park.

Thus it came about that after seeing his young lady to her home Norton found himself, some time after midnight, at a point perhaps a couple of miles from his rooms and with the area of the Park lying almost directly between himself and his objective. He determined to cut across it, a thing he did quite frequently.

The night was cool and cloudy, with fitful bursts of moonlight which tended rather to accentuate the blackness of the intervening spells of darkness. Had Norton not been thoroughly familiar with the topography of the land he might have had some difficulty in keeping his direction. But he kept going forward confidently, noting certain well-known landmarks. He skirted the base of the hill on which the tower is situated, and was just on the point of plunging into a thick grove of trees, leading down toward the main gateway, when he chanced to look behind. And there he saw rather a disquieting sight.

The moon had just struggled through again and its pale light revealed to the apprehensive Norton the gigantic form of Needham perched on the top of a large boulder in a crouching position as if about to spring down. It might have been perhaps fifty yards from the spot where Norton stood. Even as he gazed Needham leapt down (from a height of some ten feet) and disappeared. Norton stood waiting, but there was no further sound. He walked on again, wondering uneasily what Needham might be doing in the park at such an hour—unless perhaps he, too, was taking a short cut. But Norton felt uneasy nevertheless.

Entering the grove he pushed forward briskly. It was very dark now, the moon being hidden once more, and the gloom and whispering of the trees made his flesh creep. Several times he looked behind him, but could see nothing. Then a crackling of branches, this time much nearer, brought him to a dead halt, and, facing about, he called loudly:

“Hello, Needham! Is that you?”

There was no response, and Norton stood with straining ears and eyes, his heart thumping in alarm. And even as he stood the horrible thing happened.

He was almost directly under a huge gnarled oak tree, and as he laid a hand on the trunk for a moment to steady himself he happened to glance up, and the hair bristled on his scalp to find a pair of luminous yellow eyes gazing down upon him.

Ere he could recover, a form seemed to detach itself from the shadows and a pair of great hands reached down and clutched at his throat, while a chuckling voice said:

“Aha! You would give me away, would you!”

IV.

IN HIS terror, Norton did what was possibly the best thing in the circumstances—fell to the ground. For this action seemed to upset the equilibrium of the figure in the tree (which seemed to be suspended by the lower limbs) and caused it to relax its hold and draw up its arms for an instant. And in that instant Norton had recovered and was off, running as he had never run before, slipping, dashing, plunging, colliding, but never stopping and never looking back.

How he ever found his way out to the street was always a mystery to him, but he became aware, presently, that he was on North Avenue once more, and in the light of the first arc lamp he slowed down and finally stopped to recover. There was no sign of Needham, although Norton had heard him crashing along in pursuit.

Everything was still, and not a soul was in sight. Fear overcoming him again, Norton hurried on and did not stop until he was safe in his room and had locked the door. But he enjoyed little sleep during the remainder of that night.

Next evening Norton hastened to Meldrum’s apartment and poured the whole story into his friend’s sympathetic ear.

“You see,” he said excitedly, “I was right about him, after all. He is a throw-back—he came at me from the trees. His instincts drove him there. Talking, too, about my giving him away! He knows I know what he is....”

“He possibly played a practical joke on you,” said Meldrum cheerily. “He tried to give you a fright and succeeded. You called him, and he came—although not quite in the manner you expected, eh?”

“Well I am not such a nervous person as all that, either,” said Norton. “I admit, however, that in sober daylight it does not look quite so bad. It did not seem like a joke at the time, though. I am convinced he meant me harm.”

“I do not think you are justified in that belief, Harry,” said Meldrum decisively. “The man is trying to be friendly to you and you keep rebuffing him. And as for ‘giving him away’ that’s nonsense, and you know it. What have you to give away? Simply that you don’t like him and have strange ideas about him? That won’t hold water, you know. You had better forget your fancies and come along with me and see this new circus that has just struck the town. I notice by the placards they have some baboons and I am rather curious about the creatures since hearing Needham’s stories. Come along! You need something to take you out of yourself. And if I were you I would not mention that business the next time you see Needham, unless he broaches the subject....”

Tasker’s, “The Greatest Show on Earth,” had pitched its camp some distance from the town over toward Winooski, and after a brisk walk the friends found themselves in the enclosure in which the curious were beginning to gather. There were the usual games of hazard, cocoanut shies, roundabouts, candy stalls, and side shows of all kinds clustered round the main tents where the grand performance was held later in the evening. Presently they discovered the whereabouts of the baboons, which did not, when viewed, present quite the appearance of the monstrous creatures portrayed in vivid colors on the outside of the tents.

Meldrum and Norton stood observing the animals in silence for some moments when Norton, happening to glance in the direction of the tent opening, saw the tall form of Needham in the act of paying his admission fee. Norton’s heart beat faster with the recollection of his experience on the previous evening, but Needham smiled and waved a greeting, as if nothing unusual had happened. Norton turned again to the cage—to discover that there were others interested in the arrival of the newcomer.

There were three baboons in all, two apparently not yet full grown, and an old fellow of hoary aspect, who sat by himself for the most part near the front of the cage, watching the passers-by. He was treated with great respect by the two younger ones and was evidently still strong enough to be reckoned with. The old baboon had risen to its feet and was gazing intently at the approaching figure.

For some moments it stood thus, then, seizing the bars of the cage in its hands, it rattled the framework with tremendous force, at the same time giving vent to a peculiar sound. At its cry, the other two ran forward and the extraordinary spectacle was seen of all three creatures staring fixedly at Needham as he made his way toward them.

There were not many people in the tent—the hour being early—but the few who were there turned toward the spot. Needham laughed and shook hands with Meldrum, at the same time waving one of his hands playfully in the direction of the old baboon. Like lightning, a long hairy arm shot forth toward him, but the distance was too great for the creature. Again it thundered on the bars.

“Hey Kruger, what’s the matter now?” shouted an attendant, approaching. “Quit that! Do you want to bring the house down?”

He struck with a pole at the hands of the animal on the bars, making it shift them from place to place. But it was not to be driven back, and it still continued to stare at Needham.

The attendant drew away, saying in a sulky tone: “Don’t meddle with the animals, please.”

“It’s all right, old chap,” said Needham pleasantly. “He wanted to shake hands with me, but I declined with thanks.”

“Don’t do nothin’ to annoy him, please,” said the man in surly tones, preparing to depart. “God knows what might happen if he got loose. He did once, and we had a hell of a time. He nearly killed a man.”

“Ah, did he?” said Needham, with interest. “He’s pretty strong, I take it?”

“You can bet your sweet life he is!” the man called back over his shoulder. “We take no chances with him.”

“By Jove!” said Needham, gazing at the baboon. “He’s mighty like the old fellow in the fight I told you about, now that I look at him closely.”

The three walked away from the spot at Meldrum’s suggestion, but, looking back every now and then, the teacher noted, with some uneasiness, that the creature still retained its position and still followed Needham’s figure with attentive eyes. There were a few other cages in the tent containing smaller monkeys and other animals and, having strolled past these, they soon found themselves once more opposite the baboons.

The place was now clearer than before, and Needham, glancing around to see that he was not observed, made a swift cross-wise motion with his hand and emitted the peculiar noise that Meldrum had heard him make on the night of their visit. Its effect was electrical. The two younger baboons, who had seat themselves near their older companion, ran at once to the back of the cage, where they cowered, whimpering and exhibiting every indication of alarm.

But the old baboon acted differently. The tension, which had up to this point kept its figure severely rigid, now relaxed. It squatted down on the floor of the cage and commenced nodding its head briskly up and down, its features distorted by what, to Meldrum’s fancy, looked extraordinarily like a grin. Needham smiled, too, and, glancing from one to the other, Meldrum felt his flesh creep slightly.

“Let us go,” he said hastily. “We have seen enough of these brutes.”

Needham acquiesced, and they made their way to the exit.

V.

“BEASTLY clever things, though,” said Needham, as they passed out into the clear night air. “And strong as the very devil. I think myself there is something in the old idea of the African natives that apes pretend not to understand speech for fear they should be made to work.” He laughed his unpleasant laugh, and again Meldrum felt squeamish.

“You seem to have given them some study,” said Meldrum, as they made their way toward the main tent.

“I have seen a good deal of them one way and another,” said Needham carelessly, “and read a little, too. A curious thing I discovered was that when under the influence of liquor (and it’s some sight to see, believe me!) they are peculiarly receptive to autosuggestion. I believe a fortune could be made by putting them through tricks in this way—if the authorities allowed it. As for thieving, they would ‘steal the milk out of your tea’ as the old song says.”

In the excitement of the extensive and elaborate circus performance provided by Tasker’s Needham and Meldrum soon forgot about the baboons, and it was late in the evening when the three made their way back to Burlington. Emerging from Church Street, Norton and Meldrum turned up toward the University, while Needham strode off in the direction of the lake.

“Better lay aside your prejudice and think the best of the man,” said Meldrum to Norton as they parted. “He is a mighty interesting fellow, and has a fund of knowledge that is remarkable.”

Two days later found all Burlington in a state of excitement. Through a piece of carelessness the door of the baboon’s cage had been left unlocked and the old gray baboon had made a successful dash for liberty and got clear away. It happened in the evening, and the fading light hampered pursuit. When last seen, the brute was heading away from Winooski toward the lake shore.

Search was kept up throughout the night without result, and then, next day, word came that the creature had been seen in a tree near the entrance to Ethan Allen Park. As soon as possible the entire park was surrounded, and a contracting circle of hunters and curious people scoured the woods and shrubbery, but apparently the animal had moved on again to fresh quarters.

Word was sent all over the surrounding countryside, and no effort was spared to locate the missing animal, but several days passed without result. Numerous stories got into circulation regarding supposed escapades on the part of the missing baboon, and there were no end of rumors as to its being seen—at one time on the railway near the freight yard, at another waving from the tower in the park; and, again, far along the lake shore. Nervous persons kept to busy thoroughfares after dark. But the actual whereabouts of the creature remained a mystery.

Fresh stories went around of stealthy prowlings round houses and mysterious rattling of doors in the small hours of the morning. Chancing to see some of this in one of the evening papers, Meldrum’s attention was again drawn to the subject, and there returned to his mind his encounter with Needham at the circus. Obeying a sudden impulse, he set off in the direction of Needham’s dwelling in North Avenue. He had not been near it for some time, but he found himself possessed of a curious desire to see whether the little monkey still sat looking out of the front window.

Walking sharply, Meldrum soon came in view of the quaint wooden house with its trees and grass plots. The sun had not yet set, and in the clear evening light Meldrum could see the small crouching figure sitting in its accustomed place. He stopped, as he reached the house, and stood watching a moment, and then, suddenly became petrified with astonishment.

For there came all at once into view, over and beyond the head of the small monkey, the great gray face of the old baboon with its long lips curled back and its doglike tusks displayed!

It gazed forth for an instant, seeming to hold back with one hand the lace curtain that overhung the window, and then disappeared as suddenly as it had come. Meldrum rubbed his eyes, then continued staring stupidly. The little monkey made no sign.

Thinking that perhaps the baboon had found its way into the house through an open window during Needham’s absence, Meldrum felt that he ought to warn the South African, without delay, of his unpleasant visitor. He went up the path to the house and rang the bell. He thought that at the sound he detected a far off scampering, but no one came in answer to his summons. He tried the door and found it locked.

In some perplexity, Meldrum came down the garden path to the sidewalk, wondering exactly what course to pursue. He looked again at the window. The little monkey still sat gazing intently at the street. Of the baboon there was no sign.

“It may have been imagination,” mused Meldrum. “But it looked uncommonly real.”

He had turned his steps back in the direction of the town, and was meditating whether or not to communicate his fears to the authorities, when to his relief he saw the tall figure of Needham striding toward him. They stopped to greet one another, and Meldrum hastened to tell the other what he had seen.

“Oh, nonsense!” said Needham, his moustache twitching. “They don’t come around houses like that—not in the day time, anyway. The place was all right at midday and has been locked up tight ever since. No; you must have imagined it.”

He laughed lightly, and in a subconscious kind of way Meldrum seemed to get the impression that the tall man was more anxious to laugh the story off than to continue to discuss it. However, he offered to accompany Needham home and help search the house.

“Just wait there for a moment if you don’t mind,” said Needham (again with nervous haste, it seemed to Meldrum) “and I’ll walk around and have a look at the windows. If they are all right I’ll give you a wave.”

He hastened off, and after a short interval again made his appearance at the front of the house and waved his hand. Meldrum waved back.

“Everything O. K.?” he asked.

“Quite O. K.,” called Needham. “So long, old man. See you later.”

Somewhat puzzled, Meldrum set off in the direction of the town.

On the evening of the next day the telephone in Meldrum’s sitting room tinkled briskly and Norton’s voice came over the line.

“Needham has just ’phoned down,” he said, “and has asked me to go round to his place tonight to get some old African stamps he has hunted out for me. I once asked him if he had any and he promised to get me some. I wish now that I hadn’t asked him.”

He laughed rather nervously, and then added:

“I wish I’d just said ‘no,’ for I don’t much want to go. However I promised to look in for a few minutes. Would you care to come along if I come round for you?”

“Too busy with examination papers just at the moment,” said Meldrum, “and it would bring you out of your way to come over here. It’s after eight o’clock now. I might be free about ten and pick you up when I take my usual stroll. How would that do?”

Norton said, “All right,” and Meldrum hung up the receiver.

As he did so, a strange sense of foreboding came upon him and the vision of the baboon rushed back to his mind. He shook himself in annoyance and resumed his work.

But he could not regain his ease of mind, and after spending nearly an hour in a vain attempt to concentrate on some problems in algebra he closed up his books impatiently and sought his hat and coat.

He stood irresolutely in the hallway for some moments, and then, with a laugh, opened a drawer and drew forth a revolver, which he slipped into his overcoat pocket, after seeing that all its chambers were filled. He laughed again as he descended to the street, but drew some comfort, nevertheless, from the touch of the cold steel upon his hand.

VI.

THE night was dark, but the air was clear and invigorating. Meldrum walked smartly in a direction away from Needham’s residence, since he was earlier than usual and had but plenty of time to meet Norton. Finding that he could not free his mind from an unaccountable anxiety, he swung round presently and made his way to North Avenue.

It did not take him long to reach the house, and as he drew near he observed, with a slight feeling of surprise, that one of the downstairs rooms was illuminated—a room he had never yet seen lighted. It lay toward the rear of the house, its windows facing a broad gallery.

Obeying a sudden impulse, Meldrum, instead of going to the front door, walked quietly along the gallery and peeped through a corner of the blind into the room. What he saw there made his blood run cold.

The room was about fifteen feet square, with blue paper on the walls and plain oak furniture. A square table stood in the center at which several figures were seated. Needham sat with his back to the window, and in the chair on his left sat Norton, a pile of postage stamps on the table before him, and over opposite Needham, directly facing the window, sat, or rather sprawled, the figure of the gray baboon!

On the table was a decanter of whisky, and all three had tumblers. Norton’s glass was half empty, standing beside the postage stamps, but Needham and the creature were both drinking, the animal seemingly following the movements of the man, lifting the tumbler to its lips and setting it down again as Needham did, as far as Meldrum could judge by the movements of his right arm, which was visible. The brute’s eyes were fixed upon the man across the table, and from its appearance and the limpness of its figure Meldrum decided it was in an advanced state of intoxication.

Norton seemed to be spellbound, staring fixedly at the scene before him. Occasionally he passed his hand in a bewildered way over his forehead, or looked stupidly at the half empty tumbler before him. But he seemed incapable of either speech or action.

In horror and indignation, Meldrum continued to gaze. As fast as the baboon’s whisky was gulped down Needham filled its glass again. From the fact that he did not fill his own very frequently, Meldrum concluded that he did not drink every time he pretended to do so—apparently deceiving the befuddled creature.

Like a flash, Meldrum remembered Needham’s remark about the intoxicated baboon and autosuggestion. And with a fast beating heart he gripped his revolver and waited.

From being limp and sluggish, the ape now began to show signs of animation. It sat more erect, its eyes began to glitter, and occasionally it turned its head and gazed at Norton who still sat in apparent stupefaction. Every time it did this it seemed to grin at Needham with frightful suggestiveness, nodding its head as it had done when in the cage at the menagerie.

Fearing he knew not what mischief, Meldrum went quietly and hurriedly to the front door, opened it with extreme caution, and managed to make his way undetected to the door of the room in which the trio sat. Through the half open doorway, he could now get a view of Needham’s face, and its diabolical contortions were dreadful to behold. It was apparent that he was working the animal up to something, but what that something was the creature apparently did not quite seem to grasp.

Presently Needham made the strange clucking noise in his throat, at the same time stretching out his arms toward Norton. That gave the brute its clue. It rose unsteadily to its feet, and turning its evil eyes toward the recumbent figure of Norton, seemed about to spring at his throat.

With a crash, Meldrum kicked open the door and entered the room, covering Needham with his revolver. The baboon, its attention distracted by the noise of Meldrum’s entry and apparently finding Needham’s influence withdrawn, now appeared to feel the full effect of the whisky fumes once more, and sank back into the armchair more fuddled than ever. Norton had by this time fallen back in his seat, his head tilted toward the ceiling. Needham, however, has his wits about him, and his ghastly yellow face, convulsed with fury, attempted to force a sickly smile.

“Needham,” said Meldrum sternly, “I don’t know what abominable deviltry you are up to, but it must stop here and now. If you can right things here go ahead. If not, I shoot—either you or the brute, I am not particular which.”

Although outwardly calm, Meldrum’s heart was beating furiously and he was hunting desperately in his mind for the proper way to handle the situation. It was not clear to him as yet.

“Why, Meldrum!” said Needham in a thick voice, cunningly feigning drunkenness, although he was perfectly sober. “What’s all this? Revolvers? We are all friends. Norton had a drop too much—old man baboon dropped in and joined the party—I was going to get him to do some tricks....”

“That’s quite enough,” said Meldrum sharply. “You are no more drunk than I am. Open that window and let Norton have some air. Loosen his collar—”

A sudden chattering caused him to pause and drew his attention for a moment to the mantel over the fireplace, on to which the little monkey had suddenly jumped from some nearby corner.

“Ha, Fifi!” said Needham quickly. “Lights!” The switch was within easy reach of the creature’s hand, and in an instant the room was plunged in darkness.

The hallway being also without illumination, the blackness was profound. Utterly unable to tell what might happen, and fearing the baboon to be the principal danger point, Meldrum came to a swift decision and fired in the direction of the creature’s chair. A frightful scream broke the silence followed by a wild gibbering, punctuated at times by what appeared to be Needham’s voice shouting commands.

Then there came a loud crash of glass, as the table was overturned, followed by snarling, cursing and pandemonium. Stumbling blindly in the darkness, Meldrum endeavored, without success, to locate the switch in the hallway, but finally a faint glimmer showed him the outline of the front door, and he dashed forth into the street.

Several people had collected on hearing the shot, and aid was quickly forthcoming. Together with several neighbors and others, Meldrum again entered the house, and the light in the hall was turned on. The door of the occupied room had been swung shut and the dreadful snarling din still continued.

“The baboon must have broken in and attacked my friends,” was Meldrum’s hurried explanation, as they forced open the room door and finally got the lights turned on.

A hideous litter of broken furniture, pieces of glass, liquor, and bloodstains were everywhere revealed. Needham and the baboon, locked in a death grapple, were rolling among the ruins. By a curious chance, Norton’s chair had been left standing, and he still sat there, limp and motionless, unaffected by all the noise.

With difficulty, the baboon was overpowered and secured. It was still bleeding copiously from the bullet wound in its shoulder, but it gnashed and tore at its captors with undiminished fury. Needham was bleeding from many wounds and presented a dreadful spectacle, much of his clothing being torn to shreds. In addition to receiving many cuts, he had been badly mauled by the infuriated animal, whose wrath, by some strange combination of circumstances, had been turned against himself. He sat breathing heavily, too exhausted to talk to those around him.

The removal of the animal drew off most of the curious and some sort of order was restored. Realizing that Norton had apparently been drugged, but not wishing just then to say anything of what he had seen, Meldrum made the plea that his friend had evidently been overcome as a result of the terrible scene he had just witnessed, and, procuring a cab, took him first to his own chambers and then to his home, where he was prostrated for some weeks as the result of the shock.

Needham disappeared almost immediately, and Norton’s relatives did not deem it expedient to search for him. He was never heard of again in that city, and later it transpired that he had returned to Africa.

The baboon lived for some years after its strange adventure, but on dying it made no confession. And such mysteries as to how long it had been the guest of the South African, whether or not it was the same creature that he had once betrayed into captivity, to what extent the two understood one another, and whether or not it was incited to murder on that dreadful evening, were never solved.

And, indeed, nobody had any great desire that they should be.