“I am beginning to frame a theory about that. You see, all the time Craig has lived with the Professor, he has been a sort of dabbler with him in his studies. Where the Professor’s gone right into a thing and understood it, Craig, you see, hasn’t managed to get past the first crust. His brain wasn’t educated enough for the subjects into the consideration of which the Professor may have led him. See what I’m driving at?”
“You mean that he may have been mad?” Lenora suggested.
“Something of that sort,” Quest assented. “Seems to me the only feasible explanation. The Professor’s a bit of a terror, you know. There are some queer stories about the way he got some of his earlier specimens in South America. Science is his god. What he has gone through in some of those foreign countries, no one knows. Quite enough to unbalance any man of ordinary nerves and temperament.”
“The Professor himself is remarkably sane,” Lenora observed.
“Precisely,” Quest agreed, “but then, you see, his brain was big enough, to start with. It could hold all there was for it to hold. It’s like pouring stuff into the wrong receptacle when a man like Craig tries to follow him. However, that’s only a theory. Here we are, and the front door wide open. I wonder how our friend’s feeling to-day.”
They found the Professor on his hands and knees upon a dusty floor. Carefully arranged before him were the bones of a skeleton, each laid in some appointed place. He had a chart on either side of him, and a third one on an easel. He looked up a little impatiently at the sound of the opening of the door, but when he recognised Quest and his companion the annoyance passed from his face.
“Are we disturbing you, Mr. Ashleigh?” Quest enquired.
The Professor rose to his feet and brushed the dust from his knees.
“I shall be glad of a rest,” he said simply. “You see what I am doing? I am trying to reconstruct from memory—and a little imagination, perhaps—the important part of my missing skeleton. It’s a wonderful problem which those bones might have solved, if I had been able to place them fairly before the scientists of the world. Do you understand much about the human frame, Mr. Quest?”
Quest shook his head promptly.