"I shan't keep you in suspense, Johnson, although these callous people have. Are you prepared to hear a nightmare of a yarn?"
"Are you prepared to tell it?" growled John Baringer.
"Oh, yes. I seem to have had a good bit of rest lately." I drank from a glass that Marion put to my mouth, and said, "You remember Jerry Wolfe?"
"Of course, sir."
"You were there the day he came back to the Gloucester Club and was murdered, weren't you?" I knew he had been, but I was feeling my way into the story.
"Yes, sir. I brought him and Mister Talbot here a bottle of Scotch. I saw him killed."
"He told Alec—" Alec Talbot was the chap with one arm; he'd left the other in Europe somewhere, during the latter days of the war—"he told Alec a tale that day, Johnson. It's a wild, incredible, super-fantastic tale. No sane man would believe a word of it."
"No, sir."
"But we six believe it, Johnson."
"Yes, sir. I gather it has something to do with this—"