And, separated from it by the width of a single column, he read:
Retired Banker Disappears—Newbold Humiston a Suicide?—Friends Fear for Safety
But it was at a third item, tucked away in an obscure corner that Annister stifled a quick word in his throat. Newbold Humiston had been a friend of his father’s; it was an odd coincidence, to say the least of it. And the story went on to say that three other men, all nationally known, had, so to speak, between suns, disappeared as completely as if the earth had opened and swallowed them.
And that third news item, irrelevant as it might have been, told of an incident, odd and unusual enough; it had happened in Palos Verde, distant from Dry Bone a long twenty miles of hazardous mountain trail:
A man had come in, in rags and tatters; at first they had thought him a desert rat, a prospector, light-headed from starvation, for his incoherent babble had proclaimed him no less a personage than Rodman Axworthy, prominent banker of Mojave. The sheriff of Palos Verde, on the off chance, had wired Mojave, and the word had come back that Axworthy had been missing; they were sending a man.
With the arrival of this man, however, the mystery deepened, for it appeared that the derelict was indeed Axworthy, and yet not Axworthy at all, for whereas the true Axworthy had had a high, aquiline nose and a wide, generous mouth, the derelict was snub-nosed, swarthy, where the banker had been fair; he was, simply, another man.
But there had been this about it: on the banker’s left forearm, underneath, there had been a curious birth-mark; the derelict had spoken of it, but upon examination the arm showed smooth and bare. The investigator from Mojave had been obviously skeptical until, abruptly, the ragged claimant had taken from his pocket a curious, removable bridge; a dentist in Mojave who had made it, he said, could identify it. It fitted perfectly.
This looked like proof, but the thing was obviously impossible. And then, as “Axworthy” was being taken back to Mojave, he went suddenly stark, staring crazy, repeating over and over, with reference to the bridge:
“It’s the one thing they didn’t get—the one thing....”