Bentley noticed something clutched tightly in the man’s right hand––something that sent a chill through his body despite the heat of a mid-July noon. The officer, apparently, had not noticed it.
Soon a clanging bell announced the arrival of an ambulance, and as the crowd stepped aside to clear the way, Bentley bent over the dying man. The man’s lips were parted and he was trying with a mighty effort of will to speak.
Bentley put his ear close to the bleeding lips through which words strove to bubble. He heard parts of two words:
“...ind ...aster....”
Bentley suddenly knew what the man was trying to say. The half-uttered words could mean only––“Mind Master.”
Bentley suppressed a shudder and extended his hands to the closed right hand of the dying man. Carefully he removed from between the fingers three tufts of thick brown hair, coarse and crude of texture. There was a rattle in the naked man’s throat.
Five minutes later the ambulance intern hastily scribbled in his record the entry, “Dead on Arrival.”
Bentley, more frightened than he 33 had ever been before, entered a taxicab as soon as the body had been removed and the streets cleared. He stared closely at the tufts of hair in his hand. Maybe he had been wrong in taking them before detectives arrived on the scene, but he had to know, and he felt that these hairs proved his mad suspicions.
Caleb Barter was alive!
The hairs came from the shaggy coat of a giant anthropoid ape or a gorilla.