“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....”