“What-t!” Dennis sat forward tensely, and McCarty chuckled again.
“I tried to read you that about Calabar bean in that article we had at the fire house yesterday afternoon but you wouldn’t listen!” he said. “I didn’t know what was this spontaneous combustion at all, till you happened to explain this morning, little thinking what was on my mind!... But what else does Orbit say about it?”
“He goes on: ‘Fu Moy discovered it and Ching Lee put it out. Fortunately they did not find the box of Calabar bean.’—He raves on again about his feeling of power, glorying in it, but that is all.” The inspector slipped the page aside and glanced at the next. “This is dated Sunday, the nineteenth. ‘The police were active yesterday but they are quite at sea. I have no fear that they will discover anything, although the one called McCarty seems to be possessed of a certain amount of native shrewdness and logic. No uproarious comedy has ever been so excruciatingly amusing as this investigation but I am maintaining my pose of regretful employer of a worthy servant. I only wish that I could have used the gas; I made a fresh supply to-day only to be compelled to dissipate it unused. It is maddening! The death of Hughes has not satisfied this craving but intensified it. Death by violence, death that I may experience the sensation of having caused it, while it is taking place—I hunger for it!’”
The shadows were lengthening in the room and the cries of the mob outside the gates had subsided to a sullen murmur. In the moment of silence that followed the inspector’s reading of the paragraph, soft, slippered feet padded along the hall and Ching Lee stood before them.
“The door has been opened,” he announced. “There is a second steel one behind it, even stronger than the first, but the men are trying a different acid and drill.”
“Very well, Ching Lee. Turn on the lights, will you?” The inspector motioned toward the switch and in an instant the room was flooded with a brilliant glow from the low lamps scattered all about. “Tell the men to be as quick as they can, and let me know when they have finished; no one is to enter that room until we come.”
The butler bowed and turning went up the stairs again. McCarty eyed the papers still remaining in the inspector’s hands.
“Is there any entry in the diary for Monday?”
“Only this, but it means a lot, considering what came later: ‘Ching Lee reminded me that the coal has not been ordered this season. The dust from it is horrible, defiling my flowers and soiling everything. I shall not arrange for it until frost has come. Yet there is something fascinating, relentless, about the way it rushes down the chute like a miniature, sable avalanche. If we were pigmies, what death it could deal!’—Oh, there’s no doubt about it, Mac; the man is unquestionably mad!”
“His ancestors weren’t; not all of them, at any rate!” McCarty responded grimly. “If the next that he’s written is on Tuesday night, it’ll be after Horace was killed.”