Showing posts with label Seabury Quinn. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Seabury Quinn. Show all posts

Saturday, 14 December 2024

Saturday's Good Reading: “The Dead Hand” by Seabury Quinn (in English).

 


 

"Morbleu," exclaimed Jules de Grandin, passing his coffee cup across the breakfast table for its third replenishment, "but it seems, almost, Friend Trowbridge, as if I exercise some sinister influence on your patients! Here I have been your guest but one little week, and you all but lose that Mademoiselle Drigo, while, hélas, the so excellent Madame Richards is dead altogether entirely."

“I hardly think you can be blamed for Mrs. Richards' death," I replied as I handed back his refilled cup. "The poor lady suffered from mitral stenosis for the past two years, and the last time I examined her I was able to detect a diastolic murmur without the aid of a stethoscope. No, her trouble dated back some time before your coming, de Grandin."

"You relieve me," he asserted with a serio-comic expression on his alert face. "And now you go to offer your condolences to her sorrowing husband, yes? May I accompany you? Always, Friend Trowbridge, there is an opportunity for those who will to learn something."

 

 

"Nom d'un nom, but it is the good Sergeant Costello!" de Grandin cried delightedly as a heavy-set man closed the door of the Richards mansion behind him and strode across the wide veranda toward the steps. "Eh bien, my friend, do you not remember me?" He stretched both his slender, carefully groomed hands toward the huge Irishman. "Surely, you have not forgotten——"

"I'll say I haven’t," the big detective denied with a welcoming grin, shaking hands cordially. "You sure showed me some tricks I didn’t know was in th' book. Dr. de Grandin, when we was in that Kalmar case. Maybe you can give me a lift in this one, too. Sure, it’s like a bughouse in there." He jerked an indicative thumb over his shoulder toward the Richards residence.

"Eh, what is it you say?" de Grandin demanded, his little blue eyes dancing with sudden excitement. "A mystery? Cordieu, my friend, you interest me!"

"Will you help?" the big plain-clothes man asked with almost pathetic eagerness, half turning in his tracks.

"But most certainly," my companion assented. "A mystery to me is what the love of woman is to weaker men, my friend. Pardieu, how far I should have traveled in the profession of medicine if I had but been able to leave the solving of matters which did not concern me alone! Come, let us go in; we will shake the facts from this mystery of yours as a mother shakes stolen cookies from her enfant's blouse, cher sergent."

 

 

Willis Richards, power in Wall Street and nabob in our little sub-metropolitan community, stood on the hearth-rug before his library fire, a living testimonial to the truth of the axiom that death renders all mankind equals. For all his mop of white hair, his authoritative voice and his imposing embonpoint, the great banker was only a bereft and bewildered old man, borne down by his new sorrow and unable to realize that at last he confronted a condition not to be remedied by his signature on a five-figured check.

"Well, Sergeant," he asked, with a pitiful attempt at his usual brusk manner, as he recognized Costello at de Grandin’s elbow, "have you found out anything?"

"No, sir," the policeman confessed, "but here's Dr. de Grandin, from Paris, France, and he can help you out if anyone can. He’s done some wonderful work for us before, and——"

"A French detective!" Richards scoffed. "You don't need to get one of those foreigners to help you find a few stolen jewels, do you? Why——"

"Monsieur!" de Grandin’s angry protest brought the irate financier's expostulation to an abrupt halt; "you do forget yourself. I am Jules de Grandin, occasionally connected with the Service de Sureté, but more interested in the solution of my cases than in material reward."

"Oh, an amateur, eh?" Richards replied with even greater disgust. "This is a case for real detective work, Costello. I'm surprized that you’d bring a dabbler into my private affairs. By George, I'll telephone a New York agency and take the entire case out of your hands!"

"One moment, Mr. Richards," I interposed, relying on my position as family medical adviser to strengthen my argument. "This is Dr. Jules de Grandin, of the Sorbonne, one of Europe’s foremost criminologists and one of the world’s greatest scientists. The detection of crime is a phase of his work, just as military service was a phase of George Washington's; but you can no more compare him with professional police officers than you can compare Washington with professional soldiers."

Mr. Richards looked from de Grandin to me, then back again. "I'm sorry," he confessed, extending his hand to the little Frenchman, "and I shall be very glad for any assistance you may care to render, sir.

"To be frank"—he motioned us to seats as he began pacing the floor nervously—"Mrs. Richards' death was not quite so natural as Dr. Trowbridge believes. Though it’s perfectly true she had been suffering from heart disease for some time, it was not heart disease alone which caused her death. She was scared to death, literally.

"I returned from New York, where I’d been attending a banquet given by my alumni association, about 2 o’clock this morning, I let myself in with my latch key and went upstairs to my room, which adjoined my wife’s, and was beginning to undress when I heard her call out in terror. I flung the connecting door open and ran into her bedroom just in time to see her fall to the floor beside her bed, clutching at her throat and trying to say something about a hand."

"Ah?" de Grandin looked at our host with his sharp cat-stare. "And then?"

"And then I saw—well, I fancied I saw a—a something drift across the room, about level with my shoulders, and go out the window. I ran over to where my wife lay, and—and when I got there she was dead."

"Ah?" murmured de Grandin thoughtfully, inspecting his well-manicured nails with an air of preoccupation.

Richards gave him an annoyed look as he continued: "It was not till this morning that I discovered all my wife’s jewels and about twenty thousand dollars’ worth of unregistered Liberty bonds had disappeared from the wall-safe in her room.

"Of course," he concluded, "I didn’t really see anything in the air when I ran from my room. That’s impossible."

"Quite obviously," I agreed.

"Sure," Sergeant Costello nodded.

"Not at all," Jules de Grandin denied, shaking his head vigorously in dissent. "It is more possible your eyes did not deceive you, Monsieur. What was it that you saw?"

Richards’ annoyance deepened into exasperation. "It looked like a hand," he snapped. "A hand with four or five inches of wrist attached to it, and no body. Silly rot, of course. I didn’t see any such thing!"

"Quod erat demonstrandum!" de Grandin replied softly.

"What say?" Mr. Richards demanded testily.

"I said this is truly a remarkable case."

"Well, do you want to look at the room?" Richards turned toward the door leading to the stairway.

"But no, Monsieur," de Grandin blandly refused. "The good Sergeant Costello has already looked over the ground. Doubtless he can tell me all I need to know. I shall look elsewhere for confirmation of a possible theory."

"Oh, all right," Richards agreed with a snort of ill-concealed contempt; "tackle the matter in your own way. I’ll give you forty-eight hours to accomplish something; then I’ll call up Blynn’s agency and see what real detectives can do."

"Monsieur is more than generous in his allowance," de Grandin replied icily.

To me, as we left the house, he confided, "I should greatly enjoy pulling that Monsieur Richards’ nose. Friend Trowbridge."

 

 

"Can you come over to my house right away, Dr. Trowbridge?" a voice hailed me as de Grandin and I entered my office.

"Why, Mr. Kinnan," I answered, as I recognized the caller, "what’s the matter?"

"Huh!" he exploded. "What isn’t the matter? Hell’s broken loose. My wife’s had hysterics since this morning and I’m not sure I oughtn’t ask you to commit me to some asylum for the feeble-minded."

"Pardieu, Monsieur," de Grandin exclaimed, "that statement, he is vastly interesting, but not very instructive. You will explain, n’est-ce-pas?"

"Explain?" growled the other. "How am I going to explain something I know isn’t so? At twenty minutes past 5 this morning my wife and I saw something that wasn’t there, and saw it take the Lafayette cup, to boot!"

"Sacré nom d’un porc!" de Grandin swore. “What is it that you say? You saw that which was not there, and saw it take a cup of le Marquis de Lafayette? Non, non, non; it is I who am of the deranged mind. Friend Trowbridge, look to me. I hear remarks which this gentleman has not made!"

In spite of himself, Kinnan laughed at the little Frenchman’s tragic face. "I’ll be more explicit," he promised, seating himself opposite me and drawing a cigar case from his pocket. "Smoke?" he asked, proffering the case to each of us in turn.

"Now, here goes, and I don’t care whether you believe me or not, for I’m not at all sure I’m not a liar myself.

"The baby was fretful the entire early part of the evening, and we didn’t get him to sleep till well after midnight. Along about 5 o’clock he woke up on another rampage, and my wife and I went into the nursery to see what we could do.

"Ella, the maid, had gone to New York for the night, and, as usual, there wasn’t a drop of milk ready for the youngster. So Mrs. Kinnan and I trotted down to the dining room and I started to pasteurize some milk in the chafing dish. I can place the time exactly, for the library clock has been running erratically lately, and only yesterday I’d gotten it so it ran just ten minutes fast. Well, that clock had just struck half-past 5 when —like an echo of the gong—there came a crash at the window, and the pane was shattered, right before our eyes."

"Ah?" observed de Grandin, non-committally.

Kinnan shot him a sidelong glance as he continued, "It had been broken by a hammer."

"Ah?" de Grandin edged slightly forward on his chair.

"And whether you believe me or not, that hammer was held in a hand—a woman’s hand—and that was all! No arm, no body, just a hand—a hand that smashed that windowpane with a hammer, and floated through the air, as if it were attached to an invisible body, and took the Lafayette cup from the sideboard, then floated away with it!"

"A-a-ah!" de Grandin ejaculated on a rising accent, forgetting to puff at the cigar our caller had given him.

"Oh, I don’t expect you to believe me," Kinnan shot back. "I’d say anyone who told me such a story was full of dope, or something, myself; but I tell you I saw it—or thought I did—and so did my wife. Anyhow"—he turned to us with a gesture of finality—"the Lafayette cup is gone."

"On the contrary, Monsieur," de Grandin assured him gravely, "I do believe you, most implicitly. That same bodiless hand was seen at Monsieur Richards’ home last night."

"The deuce!" This time it was Kinnan who looked skeptical. "You say someone else saw that hand? Wh— why, they couldn't!"

"Nevertheless, my friend, they did," the Frenchman asserted. "Now tell me, this Lafayette cup, what was it?"

"It’s a silver wine goblet which belonged to my great-grandfather," Kinnan replied. "Intrinsically, I don’t suppose it’s worth more than twenty-five or thirty dollars; but it’s valuable to us as a family heirloom and because Lafayette, when he made his second visit to this country, drank out of it at a banquet given in his honor. I’ve been offered up to a thousand dollars for it by collectors."

"Morbleu!" De Grandin ground the fire from his cigar in the ash-tray and beat his fingertips together in a nervous tattoo. "This is a remarkable burglar we have here, Messieurs, a most remarkable burglar. He—or she—has a hand, but no body; he enter sick ladies’ bedrooms and frightens away their lives, then steal their jewelry; he break honest men’s windows with a hammer, then deprives them of their treasured heirlooms while they heat the milk for their babies. Cordieu, he will bear investigating, this one!"

"You don’t believe me," Kinnan declared, half truculently, half shamefacedly.

"Have I not said I do?" the Frenchman answered, almost angrily. "When you have seen what I have seen, Monsieur,—parbleu, when you have seen one-half as much!—you will learn to believe many things which fools declare impossible.

"This hammer"—he rose, almost glaring at Kinnan, so intent was his stare—"where is he? I would see him, if you please."

"It’s over at the house," our visitor answered, "lying right where it fell when the hand dropped it. Neither my wife nor I would touch it for a farm."

"Tremendous, gigantic, magnificent!" de Grandin ejaculated, nodding his head vigorously after each adjective. "Come, mes amis, let us hasten, let us fly. Trowbridge, my friend, you shall attend the so excellent Madame Kinnan. I, I shall go on the trail of this bodiless burglar, and it shall go hard, but I shall find him. Morbleu, Monsieur le Fantôme, when you kill that Madame Richards with fright, that is one thing; when you steal Monsieur Kinnan’s cup of le Marquis de Lafayette, that is also one thing, but when you think to thumb your invisible nose at Jules de Grandin,—parbleu, that is something else again! We shall see who will make one sacré singe out of whom, and that right quickly."

 

 

The hammer proved to be an ordinary one, with a nickeled head and imitation ebony handle, such as could be bought at any notion store for twenty-five cents; but de Grandin pounced on it like a hungry tom-cat on a mouse or a gold prospector on a two-pound nugget or a Kimberley miner on a twelve-carat diamond.

"But this is wonderful; this is superb!" he almost cooed as he swaddled the implement in several layers of paper and stowed it tenderly away in an inside pocket of his great coat.

"Trowbridge, my friend"—he threw me one of his quick, enigmatic smiles—"do you attend the good Madame Kinnan. I have important duties to perform elsewhere. If possible, I shall return for dinner, and if I do, I pray you will have your amiable cook prepare for me one of her so delicious apple pies. If I return not"— his little blue eyes twinkled a moment with frosty laughter—"I shall eat all that pie for breakfast, like a good Yon-kee."

 

 

Dinner was long since over, and the requested apple pie had been reposing untouched on the pantry shelf for several hours when de Grandin popped from a taxicab like a jack-in-the-box from its case and rushed up the front steps, the waxed ends of his little blond mustache twitching like the whiskers of an excited tom-cat, his arms filled with bundles—a look of triumphant exhilaration on his face. "Quick, quick, Friend Trowbridge," he ordered as he deposited his packages on my office desk, "to the telephone! Call that Monsieur Richards, that rich man who so generously allowed me forty- eight hours to recover his lost treasures, and that Monsieur Kinnan, whose so precious cup of the Marquis de Lafayette was stolen—call them both and bid them come here, right away, at once, immediately!

"Pardieu"—he strode back and forth across my office with a step which was half ran, half jig—"this Jules de Grandin, never is the task imposed too great for him!"

"What in the world’s the matter with you?" I demanded as I rang up the Richards house.

"Non, non," he replied, lighting a cigarette, then flinging it away unpuffed. "Ask me no questions, good friend, I do beseech you. Wait, only wait till those others come, then you shall hear Jules de Grandin speak. Morbleu, but he shall speak a great mouthful!"

 

 

The Richards limousine, impressive in size, like its owner, and, like its owner, heavily upholstered, was panting before my door in half an hour, and Kinnan drove up in his modest sedan almost as soon. Sergeant Costello, looking mystified, but concealing his wonder with the inborn reticence of a professional policeman, came into the office close on Kinnan’s heels.

"What’s all this nonsense, Trowbridge?" Richards demanded testily as he sank into a chair. "Couldn’t you have come over to my house, instead of dragging me out at this hour o’ night?"

"Tut, tut, Monsieur," de Grandin cut him short, running the admonitions so close together that they sounded like the exhaust of a miniature motorboat. "Tut, tut, Monsieur, is it not worth coming out into the cold to recover these?" From a brown-paper parcel before him he produced a purple velvet case which he snapped open with a dramatic gesture, disclosing an array of scintillating gems.

"These, I take it," he announced, "were once the property of Madame, your wife?"

"Great Scott!" gasped Richards, reaching out his hands for the jewels, "why, you got ’em!"

"But of course," de Grandin agreed, deftly withdrawing the stones from Richards’ reach and restoring them to their paper bag. "Also, Monsieur, I have these." From another parcel he drew a sheaf of Liberty bonds, ruffling through them as a gambler might count his cards. "You said twenty thousand dollars’ worth, I believe? Trés bien, there are just twenty one-thousand dollar certificates here, according to my count.

"Monsieur Kinnan," he bowed to our other visitor, "permit that I restore to you the cup of Monsieur le Marquis Lafayette." The Lafayette cup was duly extracted from another package and handed to its owner.

"And now," de Grandin lifted an oblong pasteboard box of the sort used for shoes and held it toward us as a prestidigitator might hold the hat from which he is about to extract a rabbit, "I will ask you to give me closest attention. Regardez, s'il vous plait. Is this not what you gentlemen saw last night?"

As he lifted the box lid we beheld, lying on a bed of crumpled tissue paper, what appeared to be the perfectly modeled reproduction of a beautiful feminine hand and wrist. The thumb and fingers, tipped with long, almond-shaped nails, were exquisitely slender and graceful, and the narrow palm, where it showed above the curling digits, was pink and soft-looking as the under side of a La France rose petal. Only the smear of collodion across the severed wrist told us we gazed on something which once pulsated with life instead of a marvelously exact reproduction.

"Is this not what you gentlemen saw last night?" de Grandin repeated, glancing from the lovely hand to Richards and Kinnan in turn.

Each nodded a mute confirmation, but forebore to speak, as though the sight of the eery, lifeless thing before him had placed a seal of silence on his lips.

"Very good; very, very good," de Grandin nodded vigorously. "Now attend me, if you please:

"When Monsieur Kinnan told me of the hammer which broke his window last night I decided the road by which to trace this bodiless burglar was mapped out on that hammer's handle. Pourquoi? Because this hand which scares sick ladies to death and breaks windowpanes is one of three things. First"—he ticked off on his fingers—"it may be some mechanical device. In that case I shall find no traces. But it may be the ghost of someone who once lived, in which case, again, it is one of two things: a ghost hand, per se, or the reanimated flesh of one who is dead. Or, perchance, it is the hand of someone who can render the rest of him invisible.

"Now, then, if it is a ghost hand, either true ghost or living-dead flesh, it is like other hands, it has ridges and valleys and loops and whorls, which can be traced and recognized by fingerprint experts. Or, if a man can, by some process unknown to me, make all of him, save his hand, invisible, why, then, his hand, too, must leave finger marks. Hein?

"'Now,' Jules de Grandin asked Jules de Grandin, 'is it not highly probable that one who steal jewels and bonds and the cup of Monsieur le Marquis de Lafayette, has stolen before, perchance been apprehended, and fingerprinted?'

"'Parbleu! It is even as you say,' Jules de Grandin answer Jules de Grandin.

"Thereupon I take that hammer from Monsieur Kinnan's house and go with it to New York. I see the Commissioner of Police. 'Monsieur le Prefet,' I say to him, 'I am Jules de Grandin. Do you know me?'

"'Morbleu, but I do,' reply that so excellent gentleman. 'Who but a fool has not heard of Jules de Grandin?'"

He paused a moment, easting a pregnant glance at Richards, then continued:

"'Monsieur le Prefet' I reply, 'I would that you permit your identification experts to examine this hammer and tell me, of their kindness, whose fingerprints appear thereon.'

"Bien, the order was given, and in good time come the report that the hammer handle is autographed with the fingerprints of one Katherine O’Brien, otherwise known to the police as Catherine Levoy, and also known as Catherine Dunstan.

"The police of New York have a dossier for this lady which would do credit to the Paris Sûreté. They tell me she was in turn a shoplifter, a decoy-woman for some badger game gentlemen, a forger and the partner of one Professor Mysterio, a theatrical hypnotist. Indeed, they tell me, she was married to this professor à l’Italienne, and with him she traveled the country, sometimes giving exhibitions, sometimes indulging in crime, such as, for instance, burglary and pocket-picking.

"Now, about a year ago, while she and the professor are exhibiting themselves at Coney Island, this lady died. Her partner gave her a most remarkable funeral; but the ceremonies were marred by one untoward incident—while her body lay in the undertaker’s mortuary some thief did climb in the window and remove one of her hands. In the dead of night he severed from the beautiful body of that wicked woman the hand which had often extracted property from other people’s pockets, and made off with it; nor could all the policemen’s efforts find out who did so ghoulish a deed.

"Meantime, the professor who was this woman’s theatrical partner has retired from the stage and lives in New Jersey on the fortune he has amassed.

"'New Jersey, New Jersey,' I say to me. 'Why, that is the place where my dear Trowbridge lives, and where these so mysterious burglaries have taken place.'

"So back I come to Sergeant Costello and ask him if any stranger whose mode of income is unknown has lately moved into this vicinity. I have a picture of this Professor Mysterio which the New York police give me from their archives, and I show the picture to the good Costello.

"'Pardieu' (in English) he say, 'but I know the gentleman! He live in the Berryman house, out on the Andover Road, and do nothing for his living but smoke a pipe and drink whisky. Come, let us gather him in.'

"While Sergeant Costello and I ride out to that house I do much thinking. Hypnotism is thought, and thought is a thing—a thing which does not die. Now, if this dead woman had been in the habit of receiving mental commands from Professor Mysterio for so long, and had been accustomed to obey those commands with all parts of her body as soon as they were given, had she not formed a habit of obedience? Trowbridge, my friend, you are a physician, you have seen men die, even as I have. You know that the suddenly killed man falls in an attitude which was characteristic of him in life, is it not so?"

I nodded agreement.

"Very well, then," de Grandin continued, "I ask me if it is not possible that the hand this professor have commanded so many times in life can not be made to do his bidding after death? Mon Dieu, the idea is novel, but not for that reason impossible! Did not that so superb Monsieur Poe hint at some such thing in his story of the dying man who remained alive because he was hypnotized? Most assuredly.

"So, when we get to the house of Professor Mysterio, Sergeant Costello points his pistol at the gentleman and says, 'Put 'em up, buddee, we've got the deceased wood upon you!' Meanwhile, I search the house.

"I find Monsieur Richards' jewelry and his bonds; I find Monsieur Kinnan's cup of Monsieur le Marquis de Lafayette. I find much else, including this hand of a dead woman which are not itself dead. Dieu de Dieu! When I go to take it from its case it attack me like a living thing, and Sergeant Costello have to promise he will blow the top from the professor’s head before he order it to be quiet. And it obeyed his voice! Parbleu! When I see that, I have the flesh of the geese all over me."

"Rot!" Richards flung the contemptuous comment like a missile. "I don’t know what kind of hocus-pocus made that hand move; but if you expect to make me believe any such nonsense as this stuff you’ve been telling, you’ve got the wrong pig by the ear. I shouldn’t be surprized if you and this Professor What's-His-Name were in cahoots in this thing, and you got cold feet and left your confederate holding the bag!"

I stared aghast at the man. De Grandin's vanity was as colossal as his ability, and though he was gentle as a woman in ordinary circumstances, like a woman, he was capable of sudden flares of vixenish temper when his regard for human life became no greater than his concern for a troublesome fly. If the little Frenchman had launched himself at his traducer like a bobcat attacking a hound I should have been less surprized than I was at the ominous calm with which he replaced the cover of the cardboard box containing the hand.

"Friend Trowbridge," he asked, the muscles of his jaws standing out like whipcords as he strove to prevent a telltale quiver from creeping into his face, "will you be good enough to represent me—ha!"

With the ejaculation he dodged suddenly downward, almost falling to the floor in his haste to avoid the flashing, white object which dashed at his face.

Nor was his dodge a split-second too soon. Like the lid of a boiling kettle, the top of the shoe box had lifted, and the slender, quiescent hand which lay within had leaped through the opening, risen throat-high in the air and hurtled across the intervening space like a quarrel from a crossbow. With delicate, firm-muscled fingers outspread, it swooped through the air like a pouncing hawk, missed de Grandin’s throat by the barest fraction of a second—and fastened itself, snapping like a strong-springed steel-trap, in the puffy flesh sagging over the collar of Willis Richards' dress shirt.

"Ah—ulp!" gasped, or, rather, croaked, the startled financier, falling backward in his chair and tearing futilely at the eldritch thing which sank its long, pointed nails into his purple skin. "Ah—God, it’s choking me!"

Costello was at his side, striving with all his force to pry those white, slender fingers open. He might as well have tried to wrench apart the clasp of a chrome-steel handcuff.

"Non, non," de Grandin shouted, "not that way, Sergeant. It is useless!"

Leaping across the room he jerked open the door of my instrument case, seized an autopsy knife and dashed his shoulder against the burly detective, almost sending him sprawling. Next instant, with the speed and precision of an expert surgeon, he was dissecting away the deadly white fingers fastened in Richards' dewlap.

"C'est complet," he announced matter-of-factly as he finished his grisly task. "A restorative, if you please, Friend Trowbridge, and an antiseptic dressing for the wounds from the nails. He will not suffer un- necessarily."

Wheeling, he seized the receiver from my desk telephone and called authoritatively: "Allo, allo, the jail, if you please, Mademoiselle Central!"

There was a brief parley, finally he received his connection, then: "Allo, Monsieur le Geôlier, can you tell me of Professor Mysterio, please? How is he; what does he do?"

A pause: "Ah, do you say so? I thought as much. Many thanks, Monsieur."

He turned to us, a look of satisfaction on his face. "My friends," he announced solemnly, "Professor Mysterio is no more. Two minutes ago the authorities at the city prison heard him call out distinctly in a loud voice, 'Katie, kill the Frenchman; I command you. Kill him!' When they rushed to his cell to discover the cause for his cries they were but in time to see him dash himself from his bed, having first bound his waist-belt firmly to his throat and the top of his barred door. The fall broke his neck. He died before they could cut him down.

"Eh bien," he shook himself like a spaniel emerging from a pond, " 'twas a lucky thing for me I saw that box top begin to lift and had the sense to dodge those dead fingers. None of you would have thought of the knife, I fear, before the thing had strangled my life away. As it is, I acted none too soon for Monsieur Richards' good."

Still red in the face, but regaining his self-possession under my ministrations, Willis Richards sat up in his chair. "If you’ll give me my property, I’ll be getting out of this hell-house," he announced gruffly, reaching for the jewels and bonds de Grandin had placed on the desk.

"Assuredly, Monsieur," de Grandin agreed. "But first you will comply with the law, n’est-ce-pas? You have offered a reward of five thousand dollars for your property's return. Make out two checks, if you please, one for half the amount to the good Sergeant Costello, the other, for a similar amount, to me."

"I'll be hanged if I do," the banker declared, glaring angrily at de Grandin. "Why should a man have to buy his own stuff back?"

Sergeant Costello rose ponderously to his feet and gathered the parcels containing Richards' belongings into his capacious hands. "Law's law," he announced decisively. "There'll be no bonds or jools returned till that reward's been paid."

"All right, all right," Richards agreed, reaching for his checkbook, "I'll pay you; but it's the damndest hold-up I've ever had pulled on me."

 

 

"H'm," growled Costello as the door slammed behind the irate banker, "if I ever catch that bird parkin' by a fireplug or exceedin' th' speed limit, he'll see a hold-up that is a hold-up. I'll give 'im every summons in my book, an' holler for more."

"Tiens, my friends, think of the swine no more,” de Grandin commanded. "In France, had a man so insulted me, I should have called him out and run him through the body. But that one? Pouf! Gold is his life’s blood. I hurt him far more by forcing the reward from him than if I had punctured his fat skin a dozen times.

"Meantime, Friend Trowbridge"—his little eyes snapped with the heat-lightning of his sudden smile—"there waits in the pantry that so delicious apple pie prepared for me by your excellent cook. Sergeant—Monsieur Kinnan, will you join us? Wind and weather permitting, Friend Trowbridge and I purpose eating ourselves into one glorious case of indigestion."

Wednesday, 27 December 2023

Good Reading: “Out of The Long Ago” by Seabury Quinn (in English)

A ROMANCE OF HEREDITY

 

[Excerpts from the diary of Prof. Simeon Warrener, D. Sc., Ph. D.]

 Sept. 20, 19—

Two letters in the afternoon mail; both requiring answers. Most important, a note from Morgan Carew, inviting me to come to Wales and join in some excavations he plans making this fall. He has stumbled over a promising-looking mound near the village of Cag na Gith, not far from Chatsworth, and expects some interesting digging. There is a dolmen in a pretty fair state of preservation on one of the hills, and Carew thinks some instructive kitchen-middens will be found in the neighborhood.

The second is a favor from Alice Frasanet, asking me to tea at 4 to-morrow. I suppose I may curse Frank Seabring for that. Ever since he met the girl he's been dancing attendance on her, singing my praises when other conversational topics failed. There are several drawbacks to having an assistant of the impressionable age. If it were not for Frank and the fact that Frasanet, père, is a liberal contributor to the Society for Anthropological Research, I'd ignore the invitation. But the boy is genuinely fond of me, besides being an able and conscientious assistant, so I shall accept both invitations.

 

Sept. 21, 19—

Taking it all in all, Alice's party was a success. During the few moments I was able to pry Frank away, I told him my project to join Carew, and asked him to get his traps together as quickly as possible, as I want to leave before the autumn storms set in. I am not a good sailor.

He seemed a little crestfallen at first, but a few minutes later came up all smiles, and assured me he’d not only be delighted to go on the expedition, but to stay at Cag na Gith long enough to dig to the center of the earth, or clear through, if I so desired. Frank is a good boy, but a little inclined to be flighty.

If ever there were a born flirt, Alice Frasanet is she. Before the guests had thinned out, she allowed herself to be teased into singing, and, with Dora Caruthers' accompaniment, rendered The Land of The Sky-Blue Water." I felt sorry for Frank. The little minx planted herself squarely in front of him, and sang as directly to him as any Broadway chorus girl torturing some hapless victim in the audience.

The half-mythical story of some remote ancestor of Frank's who married a Mohawk woman in the days when Boston Common was a cow pasture is a standing joke among his friends, and Alice declared she was addressing the charming little ballade to the drop of redskin blood in him.

Certainly she succeeded in making him a temporary aborigin, for he was red as a boiled lobster from collar to hair before she brought the song to a close.

Another incident that helped me through the dreary rounds of weak tea and vapid conversation was a story Shela Tague told me, which directly concerned Cag na Gith. I chanced to mention my plan to go there with Frank to help Carew in his digging, and at the village's name she turned as white as though a chill had suddenly come on her.

Thinking she was sickened with the fetid air, I was about to fetch her a glass of water, when she begged me to sit with her and listen to an experience she had near the place three years before.

"I was stopping at a farmhouse, about half a mile from the railway station," she began, "doing some sketching at times; but mostly walking over the hills and moors about the village.

"One afternoon, near sunset, I had set up my easel a few hundred feet from the station platform, and was painting away industriously, trying to make my colors and the daylight come out even. I chanced to glance behind me, and saw a queer-looking man sitting on a luggage truck near the station, gazing intently at me.

"There aren't more than half a dozen houses in all Cag na Gith, you know; and anything in the shape of a stranger, even a tramp, is a sensation in the place. I thought I knew everyone, human and canine, in the village; but this loafer was new to me.

"I went on with my painting until the sun had gone behind the big hill where the dolmen is, and the air began to take on the twilight chill. Once or twice I glanced back out of the tail of my eye, to see what my companion was up to, and each time I saw him sitting in the same stiffly upright position, gazing fixedly at me.

"As I folded up my easel and camp stool, and started across the tracks for my boarding place, he rose and began to walk in the same direction.

"There was no hurry in his gait, Dr. Warrener, but I felt that he was all a-tremble, and terribly eager to overtake me, I began to hasten a little, and with two long strides—positively, they were like an athlete's standing leaps!—he lessened the distance between us by fifteen feet, and I saw he'd be abreast of me before I could pass the water pit lying on the farther side of the railway. I hadn't noticed him particularly, and couldn't see him very well in the gathering dusk, but there was something about that man that horrified me, though I couldn’t say exactly what it was. He was tall, very tall, well over six feet, and startlingly thin, and seemed to be wearing a tight-fitting suit of shabby, fuzzy gray cloth. And though he walked directly on the gravel ballast of the roadbed, his feet made no sound.

"I hurried a few steps; then, when I saw I couldn't possibly shake him, I determined to brazen the thing out, and turned on him, asking angrily, 'What do you mean by following me?'

"Professor Warrener, if I live to be a hundred years old, I'll never be able to forget that face. It was small and narrow, and drawn to a point, almost like a dog's, and the teeth protruding from the great, wide mouth were long and yellow and hooked, like an animal's fangs. But the eyes were the most horrible part of it. They glowed and glowered at me like two disks of phosphorus in the half-light, and I remembered thinking for one awful moment—absurd as it may seem to you—of a quotation from 'Red Riding Hood.' Do you remember where she asks the wolf,' 'What great eyes you have, Grandmamma' and 'What great teeth you have, Grandmamma'? Those were the very words that popped into my mind, and their awful answers came running in their wake like the echo of a horror, I'll never be able to look at a book of fairy tales again, without a shudder; for since that night the story of 'Red Riding Hood' is a frightful ghost story to me, and a real one, a terribly real one.

"What the monster—I can't think of him as a man—would have done if he'd gotten to me, I don't know, and I don't like to speculate on it; but what I saw a few seconds later wakes me up screaming at night, sometimes, even now.

"While he was still fifteen or twenty feet away, a silly, little gray rabbit popped out of its hole in the rocks beside the tracks and scudded between us. As it flew past, the thing caught sight of it, and, seeming to forget me, gave chase. You know how fast a frightened rabbit can run, Professor? I assure you the poor little bunny didn't have a chance with that tall, lean pursuer on its track. He ran it down before it had covered a hundred yards. I heard the poor thing scream as he crushed it in his long, bony fingers, and lifted it, still struggling, to his mouth, and tore it to bits with his teeth.

"I ran as I'd never run before to my cottage, and got there more dead than alive, for every drop of blood in my veins seemed to be running cold as a night-sweat. My landlady shook her head when I told her what I'd seen, and said, 'Don't ee go out o' nights nae mair, Missie; for there do be bogles in the hills, an' I've heard me gran'faither say they crave human meat a' times.'"

 

Despite Shela's earnestness, I could not forbear a grin.

"We'll be looking for dead rabbit hunters; not live ones," I told her. "What you saw was probably some poor, half-starved tramp; maybe a lunatic escaped from some asylum."

"No," she insisted, "it wasn't. Nothing human could have looked like that thing. Please, please, Professor Warrener, don't go to Cag na Gith; I know something terrible will happen if you do. Why, I wouldn't go there, not even at midday, for all the money in the Bank of England."

"Possibly," I assented, "but we're looking for something more valuable than money: we're digging for relics of a vanished civilization."

To my astonishment, the little Irish-woman suddenly crossed herself.

"Digging?" she almost shrieked. "Digging? And in those hills? Professor Warrener, you don't know what you're doing. The country people wouldn't put a spade in one of those mounds for anything. They say the body of a bugwolf is buried there, and to turn the sod would liberate its spirit."

"A bugwolf?" I echoed. "That accounts for the condition of the dolmen and mounds. Fear of the werewolf has probably kept the peasantry away. Carew told me that the excellent state of the land, archeologically speaking, puzzled him. Your friend, the werewolf—or, as the Welshmen will have it, the bugwolf—has performed a valuable service to science. I'll have to propose him for honorary membership in the Society for Anthropological Research."

"Ah, Dr. Warrener, don't make light," Shela begged. "You scientists who don't believe in God nor devil think you know everything; but you don't. These stories of ghosts and werewolves are as old as humanity itself; surely there must be some truth in them, or they wouldn't have persisted so long."

"Well," I replied, "if what you saw really was a wolf-man, he'd better lie low while we're about. Frank Seabring is part Mohawk, you know. An ancestress of his was a woman of the totem of the bear; and the tribes claiming descent from the great bear, and those who had the wolf for their manitou, were always at war. If I remember my pre-colonial history rightly, the bear people usually came out ahead, too."

Shela twitched her shoulders as she rose, for all the world like a spaniel shaking the water from its fur.

"You'll be sorry if you dig in those hills," she warned.

"I'll be sorrier if the society's board of governors learns that I knew about them and didn't dig there," I countered. "Scientists of today are like bricklayers or carpenters, you know. So many bricks laid and so many nails driven, so much wages; so many scientific discoveries a year, a new appropriation; no discoveries, no salary. It's so much for so much, you know; and I think I'd rather brave your Welsh werewolf than the gaunt gray wolf that accompanies an unpaid salary."

With which bit of homely philosophy, I bade Alice adieu, got my hat and stick, and left to pack for the trip.

 

Oct. 10, 19—

CAG NA GITH. And a dreary little hole it is. Six or eight sad-looking cottages cling with despondent tenacity to the hillsides rising from the shabby little railway station. A nervous little train fusses up to the platform twice a day, always threatening to deposit a stranger in our midst, and never doing it. Even the loafers at the public house wear an air of settled gloom. The only thing of interest in the neighborhood is the great dolmen that crowns the tallest hill. There it stands, foursquare with the compass, frowning disdainfully upon these degenerate offspring of the once mighty Britons like an ancestral portrait regarding the family spend-thrift.

Carew has engaged a cottage a few minutes' walk from our digging grounds. A widow who boasts more wrinkles than I've ever seen in a human face lives a quarter-mile away, and, for a consideration, cooks our meals and otherwise ministers to our wants. The remains of an ancient stone-quarry lie about a hundred yards from the dolmen; here we have staked out a plot of promising ground. Tomorrow we commence digging.

 

Oct. 12, 19—

Nothing remarkable. Our excavations have been more productive of disappointments than anything else. A few feet down we struck a stratum of coarse sand and gravel, and one or two bits of rough blue stone, clearly not indigenous to the neighborhood. After that, water. If nothing further develops in the next two or three days we shall move our operations to another hill.

 

Oct. 13, 19—

No further discoveries of note.

A few bones, apparently canine, came to light in the moist sand today.

The weather is perceptibly cooler, and brisk winds spring up at dusk. Last night the breeze was so strong it rattled the doors and windows in a most annoying manner; once or twice my lamp flickered and nearly went out.

There is a chill quality in the air, too, which baffles all the efforts of our little fire to keep the room comfortable. Several times the gusts of air played so about the door I could have been certain a dog was snuffing at the crack. Yet when I flung the door open there was nothing there. Our house must be in the path of some air current shot down between the hills, for I chanced to look out the window while the panes were rattling, and the fir trees on the hilltop were perfectly quiet.

Frank has been very restless all day. Twice he left the work to go to the village, coming back each time with disappointment written large in his face. I suppose he has been expecting a letter from the Frasanet girl.

 

Oct. 14, 19—

It is really most extraordinary, the way the wind seems to have singled out our cottage for its pranks. Just before dawn I was awakened by the rattling of the casement. It shook and quivered till I thought someone was trying to force an entrance. Neither Carew nor Frank seemed disturbed by the noise, so I got up to investigate. Immediately I turned my flashlight on the window, the rattling ceased. The minute I left the window, the clatter recommenced; when I stood at the casement several minutes, the noise began at the back door. I hurried through the barren little kitchen, and heard it at the front of the house.

For several minutes I played a sort of crazy blind man's buff; finally I cursed myself for a fool and crawled back to bed. But the wind’s sharp, furious stabs persisted some time, knocking at windows and doors, whining and whistling about the eaves and chimneys, and buffeting the walls. Almost as abruptly as it commenced, the racket ceased, and the absolute silence of the pre-dawn settled over the house.

Old Mrs. Jones was laying the tea things when I came in a few minutes before the others this afternoon.

"Be ye goin' to-stop yer diggin' soon?" she asked, swathing the earthen pot in a tea-cozy.

"No," I answered, "we've just commenced."

"Ye'll not be diggin' by th' quarry, though?" she pursued. "Not much deeper?"

She avoided looking at me; but there was an almost feverish anxiety in her words.

"We haven't found much there," I conceded, "We'll try somewhere else if the luck doesn't turn in a few days."

The old woman busied herself with the toast and marmalade a moment, then, abruptly, "Did ye hear th' dargs last night?"

"Dogs?" I queried. "No; how do you mean?"

"Oh," she evaded, "they was howling at someat as was runnin' through the hills. Th' wind, p'aps."

"I certainly heard the wind," I assured her. "It raced round the house for an hour or more last night. Is it a habit of Welsh dogs to bark at the wind?"

"'Tis a habit of all dargs to bay th' wind when there's evil in it," she answered seriously. "Sixty-five years, girl an' woman, I've lived in these parts, an' there's always trouble come to them as dug in th' hills. I'm not sayin' it's true; but me faither used to tell of a bogle his faither had seen beside that heathen grave on th' big mound. 'Tis some as says th' old dead warn't buried deep enough, and they walks at night when their graves is scratched; an' some says it's a bogle that watches beside th' quarry; but none round here would strike a pick in th' hills for love nor gold. When our dargs howls, we knows there's things abroad."

"You think the dogs can see what you can't, then?" I asked, amused at her earnestness.

"Aye," she answered simply, "th' darg sees what mortals' eyes can't, because there's no soul in him."

I fumbled in my jacket pocket for my pipe, bringing out a small, hard object along with the briar. It was one of the bits of blue stone we'd dug from the quarry the day before. Tossing it on the mantel, I opened my tobacco pouch.

"Where'd ye come by that?"

Mrs. Jones was staring at the bit of blue rock as if she saw a specter hovering over it.

"Oh, that?" I replied. "Why, we dug it from the gravel the other day. Odd, isn't it? No stone like it anywhere about. Can't figure how it got here.

"Ye put it back—tonight!" she interrupted excitedly. "It's th' bugwolf stane. Man, man, ye don't know what ye did when ye took that bit o' rock from th' ground."

"The bugwolf stone?" I echoed. "What d'ye mean?"

She twisted the hem of her apron between her gnarled hands, and swallowed painfully.

"I'm a Christian woman, an' I don't set much store by th' old tales; but 'tis said a demon wolf used to roam th' hills, killin' all he met; an' when th' faithers kilt his body they buried it under a cairn o' them magic stanes, to hold his spirit in. Man, ye unstopped th' flask when ye took that stane from th' earth. He'll be runnin' loose again, a-pryin' at yer doors an' winders, and some time he'll get in, an' that'll be th' death o' ye."

I balanced the bit of rock in my palm a minute, then flipped it through the door.

"Let him come for his confounded stone," I said contemptuously, reaching for a blazing splinter to light my pipe.

The slamming of the door answered me. Mrs. Jones was scrambling down the path as fast as her old rheumatic legs would carry her.

 

Oct. 15, 19—

Mrs. Jones has discharged us. Bribery, threats and entreaties are alike of no avail to bring her back. An offer to replace the blue stone mollified her temporarily: but when we went to look for it, the thing was nowhere to be found. I must have tossed it farther than I realized, yesterday.

 

Oct. 18, 19—

There are certain advantages in having an assistant of the impressionable age. Alice Frasanet arrived this morning, bag and baggage, including her Aunt Anna.

Frank has been of little practical use, anyway, and the small loss of his assistance is more than compensated by Alice's services. Like the practical little person she is, Alice has taken up our care where Mrs. Jones left off, and we have already been treated to a batch of biscuit, real biscuit, American biscuit. The ladies have obtained lodgings at the Jones cottage, and if all the guile I can exercise will keep them there they shall remain till we've completed our excavations.

 

Oct. 19, 19—

Our first real find was made today. Grubbing in a half-hearted way, I unearthed what appeared to be a human tibia; in a few more strokes we had an almost perfectly articulated skeleton out of the sand. Whoever possessed those bones in life must have been a human bean pole, for the limbs are disproportionately long. His hands and feet must have given him considerable trouble, too, for their bones are half again as long as those of any modern man’s.

We laid the frame on a blanket beside the trench and searched about for the skull. Here the mystery began, for though we churned up the sand for yards round, we could find no head. Finally, after about an hour's search, we dug out a large dog's skull, which processed neatly upon the vertebræ. We shall pack these bones carefully, and hold them to compare with further discoveries. Is it possible we have stumbled on the remnant of an ancient dog-headed people, or did the old Druids have an unrecorded custom of burying the head of a dog with the malefactor in some instances of capital punishment? It is too early to indulge even in hypotheses, but the possibilities are fraught with interest.

"Maybe we've dug up Shela Tague's werewolf," Frank suggested as he and I packed the skeleton down the trail to our cottage.

"Maybe you're a fool!" I told him.

 

Oct. 20, 19—

Someone is interfering with our work. When we arrived at the quarry this morning, we found sand scratched into our trench, stakes pulled up and several of our tools missing. Prints of large, naked feet in the earth showed that the miscreant had removed his boots in an effort to hide his identity, though why he should have done this is more than I can understand. One pair of village boots is exactly like another to me.

Toward evening it blew up a rain. Carew and I smoked endless pipes and played endless games of cribbage. Frank went to the Jones cottage. It was nearly midnight when he burst in, drenched and excited.

"I saw him!" he exclaimed, flinging his dripping waterproof over a chair. "I saw him; but he got away."

"Who?" Carew and I chorused.

"The fellow who's been jazzing up our work. When I left the Jones house, that mongrel pup of the old lady's set up an awful howling—you'd have thought his grandmother was dead from the noise he made—and I spied a suspicious-looking bird down the road. I kept my eye on him as I walked along, and when he left the trail and made for the quarry, I followed him. He went straight to our trench and got down on his all-fours, scratching sand into the hole like a dog.

"I let out a yell and rushed him; but he saw me coming and streaked it across the hill."

"What'd he look like?" asked Carew.

"Darned if I know," Frank admitted. "It was raining so hard I couldn't get a good look at him at first, and he made off so fast when I yelled that I didn't get much of a line on him then. All I can say for sure is that he's about a head taller than any of us, and thin as Job's turkey-hen. His clothes looked skintight on him, and he was wearing a cap, I think—something with a long peak that stuck out in front of his face—and man, oh, man, he surely could run."

"Which way did he go?" I asked.

"That's the funny part of it," Frank shook his head doubtfully. "I'd have sworn he ran right for our back door, but I lost sight of him by that little bunch of scrub down the path. Don't suppose either of you heard anything of him?"

We talked the mystery over for half an hour, then went to bed for want of something more exciting.

 

Oct. 21, 19—

Carew is dead. Murdered.

It seems incredible that this horror should have come upon us; yet as I write, the poor fellow's body "lies by the wall"—what a beastly gruesome way of expressing themselves these Welsh have!

Last night, after supper, Frank departed for the Jones cottage as usual; and Carew and I settled ourselves for a quiet game and a smoke, The tobacco canister went empty before we'd dealt half a dozen hands, so we cut to see who should go to the village for a fresh supply. I drew an ace, Carew a ten spot.

"Be back in half an hour," he promised, pulling on his cap and jacket; "and if I catch that chap who’s been meddling with our diggings it'll go hard with one of us."

Poor Carew! It certainly went hard with him.

Ten o'clock came. No sign of Carew. I played sullenly with my cold pipe and cursed his delay. Frank came in; midnight struck; still no Carew.

"Hanged if I can stand this any longer," I said irritably. "I'm going to see what's keeping him."

"I'll go with you," Frank volunteered. "This place is too all-fired spooky to stay in alone."

We set off briskly through the chilly moonlight, keeping a sharp lookout for any signs of Carew and our tobacco. Fifteen minutes' walk brought us to the village tavern, where the sleepy boniface paused long enough in ejecting a gin-soaked farmhand from the tap room to assure us Carew had not been there. Several interested spectators of the eviction proceedings corroborated him profanely. Here was a poser. Carew had been gone almost long enough to walk to Chatsworth, yet no one had seen him. Buying a couple of tins of tobacco, we hurried back along the trail.

Out in the hills, we gave several long halloos, and the barren mounds shouted back our calls mockingly.

"D'ye suppose he could have gone over to the works, and turned his ankle, or something?" Frank hazarded.

"H'm, not likely; but we'll have a look," I answered as we left the path and struck across the hill for the quarry.

"That's where I saw that fellow scratching in the sand." Frank indicated the head of white earth beside our trench. "He was down on his knees, making his hands go like a pair of—hello, what's that?"

He pointed to a dark object lying on the sand pile.

I broke into a run without answering, for I had a presentiment of what we'd find.

Carew sprawled upon his back, his outstretched hands clutching at the yielding sand, one knee slightly flexed, the other leg hanging limply over the lip of the trench. His throat and chest were horribly lacerated, as though he had been worried by some animal of incomparable ferocity. Across his cheeks and brow several hideous gashes wrote the story of his death-struggle. But the most appalling thing was the expression of unspeakable horror stamped on his features. It was as if he had looked one awful moment on the bareboned grisliness of death before the spirit was rent from his body.

"My God!" Frank shrank against me, shivering with panic terror. "His face, man; look at his face!"

I dropped my handkerchief over my poor friend's head. I had no wish to look again.

"We'd best notify the coroner," I said, half leading, half carrying Frank away. The boy was done in with fear; never have I seen a man's nerve fail him so completely.

The fussy, fat little coroner performed his duties with all the punctilio of a rural official today. Strangers in a strange land, we were more than half suspected of our friend's murder, and might have been held for the assizes but for a bit of evidence the post-mortem disclosed. Clinging to poor Carew's nails were a few small tufts of tawny-gray hair. These, together with the terrible mangling of his throat, influenced the jury to return their strange verdict: "That Morgan Carew came to his death at the hands or teeth of some person or animal to your jurors unknown."

The village undertaker has just left. Embalming is about as much a lost art here as it is in modern Egypt, so the coffin has been put in the unused kitchen, where no heat will hasten dissolution. There, beside the skeleton of the thing—man or devil—we dug from the sand last week, is all that is mortal of my old friend. Tomorrow they ship the remains to England for burial. Carew had no near relatives; Frank and I shall go with the body and see it laid in the family vault at Mulbridge.

 

Oct. 22, 19—

What I saw last night simply could not have happened. And yet it did.

Frank and I were sitting before the fire, watching the reflection from the coals fuse with the afternoon sunbeams on the hearth, each busy with his own thoughts, when a subdued clatter in the kitchen started us up together. The tiniest noises are magnified a hundredfold in the house of death.

The same thought was in both our minds as we made for the back room. The rats were at their devilish work.

Frank took up a carving knife, big as a half-grown cutlas, as I swung the door open. I smiled at the action in spite of myself. The reflexes of elemental psychology are as unreasoning today as when our ancestors slunk naked through the primeval forests. Nothing but a blind desire to kill led to the seizure of that knife; a second's reflection would have told him that a knife is well-nigh as useless against rats as a pointed finger.

We searched the little cell of a room quickly. Nothing living, save a cricket which set up its mournful "ka-cheek" from a cranny in the stones, was there. The chest with the dog-headed skeleton lay by the cold, gaping fireplace. Carew's coffin rested starkly under its black pall on a pair of saw-horses beside the wall. One of the candles sputtering at its head leaned a little in its socket. I straightened it, pressing the melting wax with my thumb to prevent its soiling the cloth. Frank half seated himself on the rough deal table, gouging at the wood with the point of his absurd knife.

A sudden current of air, icy cold, fluttered the candle flame and shook the hem of the coffin-robe. Instinctively, I felt another presence; some evil thing, that traveled in a chill of terror. Eyes seemed boring me from behind, and I gripped the candelabrum savagely to suppress the desire to turn.

Slowly, without moving my head, I turned my eyes on Frank. He was frowning morosely at the table, chipping bits of wood from it, as though intent on serious business.

"Rat, tat, tat!"

A sudden sharp clatter of knuckles against the window pane. I wheeled in my tracks, my breath gone hot and sulfurous with fear.

Staring through the glass was a great, shaggy-haired wolf. Yet it was not a wolf. About the lupine jaws and cheeks were lines hideously reminiscent of a human face, and the phosphorescent glow of those monstrous eyes never shone in anything carnal. As I looked, the monster raised its head, and strangling horror gripped me as I saw a human neck beneath it. Very long and thin it was, corded and sinewed like the neck of a thing long dead, and covered with thick, gray fur. Then a hand, hairy, like the throat, and slender as a woman's, fingers tipped with blood-red nails, struck the glass again. I went sick with fear as I speculated how long the fragile glass would withstand it.

The thing must have seen my terror, for the corners of its devilish eyes contracted in a malevolent smile, and a rim of scarlet tongue flicked its black muzzle.

A moan behind me told Frank's abject terror.

"Oh, my God!" he quavered. "That's the thing I saw the other night. That's the thing that killed Carew. Shela Tague was right. We dug up one of them, and the other has come for us."

I swallowed at the dryness in my throat. Words were beyond me.

"Professor—" Frank had crawled across the floor and seized me by the knees—"don't let it get in; for God's sake, don't let it in!"

I pressed the boy's shoulder, not so much to comfort him as to have the feel of something human under my hand, Then my fingers closed fiercely on him, as, high, and sweet, and very lovely, I heard Alice Frasanet's voice rising from the trail at the base of the hill. She had promised to look in on us before we left with Carew's body, and bring us a plate of biscuit. Now she was coming blindly to meet this waiting horror.

 

From the land of the sky-blue water

They brought a captive maid—

 

Perpetuating her old jest at Frank's Indian ancestry, she came singing up the path. The thing outside turned at the sound, its pointed ears cocked forward, the white of its teeth showing as its lips parted in anticipation of easy prey. Slowly, bending nearly double, it crept from the window, making for the clump of withered brush at the turn of the path, crouching to spring as Alice rounded the bend.

I looked, horror-frozen in my place, waiting the tragedy as the Christian martyrs must have watched the gratings lift from the lions' dens.

Balancing the tray daintily, Alice approached the knot of shrubs. Silently as a shadow the gray thing slipped into the path, barring her way with gaping jaws and red tongue lolling from its mouth. Slowly, jaws working with a horrible, chewing motion, it advanced its hellish face nearer and nearer her throat.

I tried to speak, to shriek my horror to the evening sky; but a paralyzing dust seemed to have gathered in my throat, and only a hoarse, inarticulate whisper came. Summoning all my strength, I took a step toward the window; next instant I went reeling against the wall as a dark object hurtled past me.

Dashing panes and sash to splinters, Frank took the window at a bound. The crash of falling glass was drowned in the yell he set up as he cleared the intervening distance with long, loose-limbed strides.

It was Frank who charged that gray horror; yet it was not Frank. As Jekyll metamorphosed to Hyde, so a subtile physical change was wrought in him. It was a man no one in ten generations had seen who rushed down the hillside. It was a cry no living white man had ever heard that he raised as he brandished his great knife.

"Aie, aie, tehn-yoh-yeh-roh-noh!"

Twice he repeated the blood-freezing yell, ending the second time with a crescendoed "Aie, aie, YAH!"

It was the Mohawk war whoop—the battle cry of the people of the bear.

 

It was a miracle of heredity I beheld; an atavism, a throwback, a reversion to type. Sleeping, but never dead, the long-forgotten character of his redskin ancester had awakened in Frank Seabring at the challenge of danger to his beloved.

Before us lived and breathed the personality of a Mohawk sachem—some warrior of the totem of the bear, whose moving passion was a hatred of the wolf people.

"Aie, yah! Aie, yah!" the battle whoop rang out again.

There was something horribly comic in the wolf-thing's expression as it turned. Such a look of astonished rage the Evil One might give at defiance from a lost soul.

They sprang together, meeting in mid-air. The man-wolf struck swiftly, seeking to bury its fangs in Frank's throat. Frank's free hand sank in the coarse fur at the creature's gullet; the great knife described a half-circle, disappeared; rose and sank again, and again, and again. Stumbling, reeling, spewing blood, the bug-wolf staggered from the clinch, the light of battle fading in its eyes.

"Aie, tehn-yoh-yeh-roh-noh, YAH!"

The bear had tasted blood; but not his fill.

Again they closed; once more the wolf-thing sought to worry at Frank's throat. Again the huge knife rose and fell, blood dripping from its point and edge. And ever, as the murderous work went on, the war whoop of the Mohawk rent the mountain quiet.

Taller by a head than Frank, the wolf-thing began to sink. Slowly it went to its knees, to its side; to its back.

"Aie, aie, YAH!"

Like an executioner's simitar the great knife descended, traversing the bugwolf's throat, a dye of rusty-red staining the fur in its wake.

Once more the blade circled the man-brute's head, and Frank Seabring, product of effete New England, college man and instructor in anthropology, rose and contemplated the scalp of his slain foe.

Tucking the patch of fur in his belt, he seemed to notice Alice for the first time, where she stood ash-white, beside the path. An instant he regarded her wonderingly, then abruptly tore his Norfolk jacket apart, spreading the open edges between his outstretched hands. It was the blanket-holding, the age-old invitation of the Indian brave to his squaw.

And Alice Frasanet, fox-trotting, bridge-playing, tea-drinking Alice Frasanet, laid her fluffy, empty little head against his breast.