[i]

THEY called me—when I walked the earth in a body of dense matter—Richard Devaney. Though my story has little to do with the war, I was killed in the second battle of the Marne, on July 24, 1918.

Many times, as men were wont to do who felt the daily, hourly imminence of death in the trenches, I had pictured that event in my mind and wondered what it would be like. Mainly I had inclined toward a belief in total extinction. That, when the vigorous, full-blooded body I possessed should lie bereft of its faculties, I, as a creature apart from it, should go on, was beyond credence.[8] The play of life through the human machine, I reasoned, was like the flow of gasoline into the motor of an automobile. Shut off that flow, and the motor became inert, dead, while the fluid which had given it power was in itself nothing.

And so, I confess, it was a surprise to discover that I was dead and yet not dead.

I did not make the discovery at once. There had been a blinding concussion, a moment of darkness, a sensation of falling—falling—into a deep abyss. An indefinite time afterward, I found myself standing dazedly on the hillside, toward the crest of which we had been pressing against the enemy. The thought came that I must have momentarily lost consciousness. Yet now I felt strangely free from physical discomfort.

What had I been doing when that moment of blackness blotted everything out? I had been dominated by a purpose, a flaming desire——

Like a flash, recollection burst upon me, and, with it, a blaze of hatred—not toward the Boche gunners, ensconced in the woods above us, but toward the private enemy I had been about to kill.

It had been the opportunity for which I had waited interminable days and nights. In the open formation, he kept a few paces ahead of me. As we alternately ran forward, then dropped on our bellies and fired, I had watched my chance. No one would suspect, with the dozens who were falling every moment under the merciless fire from the trees beyond, that the bullet which ended Louis Winston’s career came from a comrade’s rifle.

Twice I had taken aim, but withheld my fire—not from indecision, but lest, in my vengeful heat, I might fail to reach a vital spot. When I raised my rifle the third time, he offered a fair target.

God! how I hated him. With fingers itching to speed the steel toward his heart, I forced myself to remain calm—to hold fire for that fragment of a second that would insure careful aim.

Then, as the pressure of my finger tightened against the trigger, came the blinding flash—the moment of blackness.

I HAD evidently remained unconscious longer than I realized.

Save for a few figures that lay motionless or squirming in agony on the field, the regiment had passed on, to be lost in the trees at the crest of the hill. With a pang of disappointment, I realized that Louis would be among them.

Involuntarily I started onward, driven still by that impulse of burning hatred, when I heard my name called.

Turning in surprise, I saw a helmeted figure crouching beside something huddled in the tall grass. No second glance was needed to tell me that the huddled something was the body of a soldier. I had eyes only for the man who was bending over him. Fate had been kind to me. It was Louis.

Apparently, in his preoccupation, he had not noticed me. Coolly I raised my rifle and fired.

The result was startling. Louis neither dropped headlong nor looked up at the report. Vaguely I questioned whether there had been a report.

Thwarted, I felt the lust to kill mounting in me with redoubled fury. With rifle upraised, I ran toward him. A terrific swing, and I crashed the stock against his head.

It passed clear through! Louis remained unmoved.

Uncomprehending, snarling, I flung the useless weapon away and fell upon him with bare hands—with fingers that strained to rend and tear and strangle.

Instead of encountering solid flesh and bone, they too passed through him.

Was it a mirage? A dream? Had I gone crazy? Sobered—for a moment forgetful of my fury—I drew back and tried to reduce the thing to reason. Was Louis but a figment of the imagination—a phantom?

My glance fell upon the figure beside which he was sobbing incoherent words of entreaty.

[9]

I gave a start, then looked more closely.

The dead man—for there was no question about his condition, with a bloody shrapnel wound in the side of his head—was myself!

Gradually the import of this penetrated my consciousness. Then I realized that it was Louis who had called my name—that even now he was sobbing it over and over.

The irony of it struck me at the moment of realization. I was dead—I was the phantom—who had meant to kill Louis!

I looked at my hands, my uniform—I touched my body. Apparently I was as substantial as before the shrapnel buried itself in my head. Yet, when I had tried to grasp Louis, my hand seemed to encompass only space.

Louis lived, and I was dead!

The discovery for a time benumbed my feeling toward him. With impersonal curiosity, I saw him close the eyes of the dead man—the man who, somehow or other, had been me. I saw him search the pockets and draw forth a letter I had written only that morning, a letter addressed to——

With a sudden surge of dismay, I darted forward to snatch it from his hands. He should not read that letter!

Again I was reminded of my impalpability.

But Louis did not open the envelope, although it was unsealed. He read the superscription, kissed it, as sobs rent his frame, and thrust the letter inside his khaki jacket.

“Dick! Buddie!” he cried brokenly. “Best pal man ever had—how can I take this news back to her!”

My lips curled. To Louis, I was his pal, his buddie. Not a suspicion of the hate I bore him—had borne him ever since I discovered in him a rival for Velma Roth.

Oh, I had been clever! It was our “unselfish friendship” that endeared us both to her. A sign of jealousy, of ill nature, and I would have forfeited the paradise of her regard that apparently I shared with Louis.

I had never felt secure of my place in that paradise. True, I could always awaken a response in her, but I must put forth effort in order to do so. He held her interest, it seemed, without trying. They were happy with each other and in each other.

Our relations might be expressed by likening her to the water of a placid pool, Louis to the basin that held her, me to the wind that swept over it. By exerting myself, I could agitate the surface of her nature into ripples of pleasurable excitement—could even lash her emotion into a tempest. She responded to the stimulation of my mood, yet, in my absence, settled contentedly into the peaceful comfort of Louis’ steadfast love.

I felt vaguely then—and am certain now, with a broader perspective toward realities—that Velma intuitively recognized Louis as her mate, yet feared to yield herself to him because of my sway over her emotional nature.

When the great war came, we all, I am convinced, felt that it would absolve Velma from the task of choosing between us.

Whether the agony that spoke from the violet depths of her eyes when we said good-by was chiefly for Louis or for me, I could not tell. I doubt if she could have done so. But in my mind was the determination that only one of us should return, and—Louis would not be that one.

Did I feel no repugnance at thought of murdering the man who stood in my way? Very little. I was a savage at heart—a savage in whom desire outweighed anything that might stand in the way of gaining its object. From my point of view, I would have been a fool to pass the opportunity.

Why I should have so hated him—a mere obstacle in my path—I do not know. It may have been due to a prescience of the intangible barrier his blood would always raise between Velma and me—or to a slumbering sense of remorse.

But, speculation aside, here I was, in a state of being that the world calls death, while Louis lived—was free to return home—to claim Velma—to flaunt his possession of all that I held precious.

[10]

It was maddening! Must I stand idly by, helpless to prevent this?

I HAVE wondered, since, how I could remain so long in touch with the objective world—why I did not at once, or very soon, find myself shut off from earthly sights and sounds as those in physical form are shut off from the things beyond.

The matter seems to have been determined by my will. Like weights of lead, envy of Louis and passionate longing for Velma held my feet to the sphere of dense matter.

Vengeful, despairing, I watched beside Louis. When at last he turned away from my body and, with tears streaming from his eyes, began to drag a useless leg toward the trenches we had left, I realized why he had not gone on with the others to the crest of the hill. He, too, was a victim of Boche gunnery.

I walked beside the stretcher-bearers when they had picked him up and were conveying him toward the base hospital. Throughout the weeks that followed I hovered near his cot, watching the doctors as they bound up the lacerated tendons in his thigh, and missing no detail of his battle with the fever.

Over his shoulder I read the first letter he wrote home to Velma, in which he gave a belated account of my death, dwelling upon the glory of my sacrifice.

Had I known it, I could have followed this letter across seas—could, in fact, have passed it and, by an exercise of the will, have been at Velma’s side in the twinkling of an eye. But my ignorance of the laws of the new plane was total. All my thoughts were centered upon a problem of entirely different character.

Never was hold upon earthly treasure more reluctantly relinquished than was my hope of possessing Velma. Surely, death could not erect so absolute a barrier. There must be a way—some loophole of communication—some chance for a disembodied man to contend with his corporeal rival for a woman’s love.

Slowly, very slowly, dawned the light of a plan. So feeble was the glimmer that it would scarcely have comforted one in less desperate straits, but to me it appeared to offer a possible hope. I set about methodically, with infinite patience, evolving it into something tangible, even though I had but the most indefinite idea of what the outcome might be.

The first suggestion came when Louis had so far recovered that but little trace of the fever remained. One afternoon, as he lay sleeping, the mail-distributor handed a letter to the nurse who happened to be standing beside his cot. She glanced at it, then tucked it under his pillow.

The letter was from Velma, and I was hungry for the contents. I did not then know that I could have read it easily, sealed though it was. In a frenzy of impatience, I exclaimed:

“Wake up, confound it, and read your letter!”

With a start, he opened his eyes. He looked around with a bewildered expression.

“Under your pillow!” I fumed. “Look under your pillow!”

In a dazed manner, he put his hand under the pillow and drew forth the letter.

A few hours later, I heard him commenting on the experience to the nurse.

“Something seemed to wake me up,” he said, “and I had a peculiar impulse to feel under the pillow. It was just as if I knew I would find the letter there.”

The circumstances seemed as remarkable to me as it did to him. It might be coincidence, but I determined to make a further test.

A series of experiments convinced me that I could, to a very slight degree, impress my thoughts and will upon Louis, especially when he was tired or[11] on the borderland of sleep. Occasionally I was able to control the direction of his thoughts as he wrote home to Velma.

On one occasion, he was describing for her a funny little French woman who visited the hospital with a basket that always was filled with cigarettes and candy.

“Last time” [he wrote], “she brought with her a boy whom she called....”

He paused, with pencil upraised, trying to recall the name.

A moment later, he looked down at the page and stared with astonishment. The words, “She called him Maurice,” had been added below the unfinished line.

“I must be going daffy,” he muttered. “I’d swear I didn’t write that.”

Behind him, I stood rubbing my hands in triumph. It was my first successful effort to guide the pencil while his thoughts strayed elsewhere.

Another time, he wrote to Velma:

He paused here so long that I made another attempt to take advantage of his abstraction.

By an effort of the will that it is difficult to explain, I guided his hand into the formation of the words:

Just then, Louis looked down.

“Good God!” he exclaimed, as if he had seen a ghost.

“WINKIE” was a pet name I had given Velma when we were children together.

Louis always maintained there was no sense in it, and refused to adopt it, though I frequently called her by the name in later years. And of his own volition, Louis would never have mentioned anything so convivial as a jugful of kisses.

So, through the weary months before he was invalided home, I worked. When he left France at the debarkation point, he still walked on crutches, but with the promise of regaining the unassisted use of his leg before very long. Throughout the voyage, I hovered near him, sharing his impatience, his longing for the one we both held dearest.

Over the exquisite pain of the reunion—at which I was present, yet not present—I shall pass briefly. More beautiful than ever, more appealing with her vivid, deep coloring, Velma in the flesh was a vision that stirred my longing into an intense flame.

Louis limped painfully down the gangplank. When they met, she rested her head silently on his shoulder for a moment, then—her eyes brimming with tears—assisted him, with the tender solicitude of a mother, to the machine she had in waiting.

Two months later they were married. I felt the pain of this less deeply than I would have done had it not been essential to my designs.

Whatever vague hope I may have had, however, of vicariously enjoying the delights of love were disappointed. I could not have explained why—I only knew that something barred me from intruding upon the sacred intimacies of their life, as if a defensive wall were interposed. It was baffling, but a very present fact, against which I found it useless to rebel. I have since learned—but no matter. * * *

This had no bearing on my purpose, which hinged upon the ability I was acquiring of influencing Louis’ thoughts and actions—of taking partial control of his faculties.

The occupation into which he drifted, restricted in choice as he was by the stiffened leg, helped me materially. Often, after an interminable shift at the bank, he would plod home at night with brain so weary and benumbed that it was a simple matter to impress my will upon him. Each successful attempt, too, made the next one easier.

[12]

The inevitable consequence was that in time Velma should notice his aberrations and betray concern.

“Why did you say to me, when you came in last night, ‘There’s a blue Billy-goat on the stairs—I wish they’d drive him out’?” she demanded one morning.

He looked down shamefacedly at the tablecloth.

“I don’t know what made me say it. I seemed to want to say it, and that was the only way to get it off my mind. I thought you’d take it as a joke.” He shifted his shoulders, as if trying to dislodge an unpleasant burden.

“And was that what made you wear a necktie to bed?” she asked, ironically.

He nodded an affirmative. “I knew it was idiotic—but the idea kept running in my mind. It seemed as if the only way I could go to sleep was to give in to it. I don’t have these freaks unless I’m very tired.”

She said nothing more at the time, but that evening she broached the subject of his looking for an opening in some less sedentary occupation—a subject to which she thereafter constantly recurred.

Then came a development that surprised and excited me with its possibilities.

Exhausted, drained to the last drop of his nerve-force, Louis was returning late one night from the bank, following the usual month-end overtime grind. As he walked from the car-line, I hovered over him, subduing his personality, forcing it under control, with the effort of will I had gradually learned to direct upon him. The process can only be explained in a crude way: It was as if I contended with him, sometimes successfully, for possession of the steering-wheel of the human car that he drove.

Velma was waiting when we arrived. As Louis’ feet sounded on the threshold of their apartment, she opened the door, caught his hands, and drew him inside.

At the action, I felt inexplicably thrilled. It was as if some marvelous change had come over me. And then, as I met her gaze, I knew what that change was.

I held her hands in real flesh-and-blood contact. I was looking at her with Louis’ sight!

THE shock of it cost me what I had gained. Shaken from my poise, I felt the personality I had subdued regain its sway.

The next moment, Louis was staring at Velma in bewilderment. Her eyes were filled with alarm.

“You—you frightened me!” she gasped, withdrawing her hands, which I had all but crushed. “Louis, dear—don’t ever look at me again like that!”

I can imagine the devouring intensity of gaze that had blazed forth from the features in that brief moment when they were mine.

From this time, my plans quickly took form. Two modes of action presented themselves. The first and more alluring, however, I was forced to abandon. It was none other than the wild dream of acquiring exclusive possession of Louis’ body—of forcing him down, out, and into the secondary place I had occupied.

Despite the progress I had made, this proved inexpressibly difficult. For one thing, there seemed an affinity between Louis’ body and his personality, which forced me out when he was moderately rested. This bond I might have weakened, but there were other factors.

One was the growing conviction on his part that something was radically wrong. With a faculty I had discovered of putting myself en rapport with him and reading his thoughts, I knew that at times he feared that he was going insane.

I once had the experience of accompanying him to an alienist and there, like the proverbial fly on the wall, overhearing learned scientific names applied to my efforts. The alienist spoke of “dual personality,” “amnesia,” and “the subconscious mind,” while I laughed in my (shall I say?) ghostly sleeve.

But he advised Louis to seek a complete rest and, if possible, to go into the country to build up physically—which[13] was what I desired most to prevent.

I could not play the Mr. Hyde to his Dr. Jekyll if Louis maintained his normal virility.

Velma’s fears, too, I knew were growing more acute. As insistently as she could, without betraying too openly her alarm, she pressed him to give up the bank position and seek work in the open air—work that would prove less devitalizing to a person of his peculiar temperament.

One of the results of debility from overwork is, apparently, that it deprives the victim of his initiative—makes him fearful of giving up his hold upon the meager means of sustenance that he has, lest he shall be unable to grasp another. Louis was in debt, earning scarcely enough for their living expenses, too proud to let Velma help as she longed to do, his game leg putting him at a disadvantage in the industrial field. In fact, he was in just the predicament I desired, but I knew that in time her wishes would prevail.

The circumstances, however, that deprived me of all hope of completely usurping his place was this: I could not, for any length of time, face the gaze of Velma’s eyes. The personified truth, the purity that dwelt in them, seemed to dissolve my power, to beat me back into the secondary relationship I had come to occupy toward Louis.

He was sometimes tempted to tell her: “You give me my one grip on sanity.”

I have witnessed his panic at the thought of losing her, at the thought that some day she might give him up in disgust at his aberrations, and abandon him to the formless “thing” that haunted him.

Curious—to be of the world and yet not of it—to enjoy a perspective that reveals the hidden side of effects, which seem so mysterious from the material side of the veil. But I would gladly have given all the advantages of my disembodied state for one hour of flesh-and-blood companionship with Velma.

My alternative plan was this:

If I could not enter her world, what was to prevent me from bringing Velma into mine?

DARING? To be sure.

Unversed as I was in the laws that govern this mystery of passing from the physical into another state of existence, I could only hope that the plan would work. It might—and that was enough for me. I took a gambler’s chance. By risking all, I might gain all—might gain—

The thought of what I might gain transported me to a heaven of pain and ecstasy.

Velma and I—in a world apart—a world of our own—free from the sordid trammels that mar the perfection of the rosiest earth-existence. Velma and I—together through all eternity!

This much reason I had for hoping! I observed that other persons passed through the change called death, and that some entered a state of being in which I was conscious of them and they of me. Uninteresting creatures they were, almost wholly preoccupied with their former earth-interests; but they were as much in the world as I had been in the world of Velma and Louis before that fragment of shrapnel ruled me out of the game.

A few, it was true, on passing from their physical habitations, seemed to emerge into a sphere to which I could not follow. This troubled me. Velma might do likewise. Yet I refused to admit the probability—refused to consider the possible failure of my plan. The very intensity of my longing would draw her to me.

The gulf that separated us was spanned by the grave. Once Velma had crossed to my side of the abyss, there would be no going back to Louis.

Yet I was cunning. She must not come to me with overpowering regrets that would cause her to hover about Louis as I now hovered about her. If I could inspire her with horror and loathing for him—ah! if I only could!

As a preliminary step, I must induce Louis to buy the instrument with which[14] my purpose was to be accomplished. This was not easy, for on nights when he left the bank during shopping hours he was sufficiently vigorous to resist my will. I could work only through suggestion.

In a pawnshop window that he passed daily I had noticed a revolver prominently displayed. My whole effort was concentrated upon bringing this to his attention.

The second night, he glanced at the revolver, but did not stop. Three nights later, drawn by a fascination for which he could not have accounted, he paused and looked at it for several minutes, fighting an urge that seemed to command: “Step in and buy! Buy! Buy!”

When, a few evenings later, he arrived home with the revolver and a box of cartridges that the pawnbroker had included in the sale, he put them hastily out of sight in a drawer of his desk.

He said nothing about his purchase, but the next day Velma came across the weapon and questioned him regarding it.

Visibly confused, he replied: “Oh, I thought we might need something of the sort. Saw it in a window, and the notion of having it sort of took hold of me. There’s been a lot of housebreaking lately, and it’s just as well to be prepared.”

And now with impatience I waited for the opportunity to stage my dénouement.

It came, naturally, at the end of the month, when Louis, after a prolonged day’s work, returned home, soon after midnight, his brain benumbed with poring over interminable columns of figures. When his feet ascended the stairs to his apartment it was not his faculties that directed them, but mine—cunning, alert, aflame with deadly purpose.

Never was more weird preliminary to a murder—the entering, in guise of a dear, familiar form, of a fiend incarnate, intent upon destroying the flower of the home.

I speak of a fiend incarnate, even though I was that fiend, for I did not enter Louis’s body in full expression of my faculties. Taking up physical life, my recollection of existence as a spirit entity was always shadowy. I carried through the dominating impulses that had actuated me on entering the body, but scarcely more.

And the impulse I had carried through that night was the impulse to kill.

WITH utmost caution, I entered the bedroom.

My control of Louis’s body was complete. I felt, for perhaps the first time, so corporeally secure that the vague dread of being driven out did not oppress me.

The room was dark, but the soft, regular breathing of Velma, asleep, reached my ears. It was like the invitation that rises in the scent of old wine which the lips are about to quaff—quickening my eagerness and setting my brain on fire.

I did not think of love. I lusted—but my lust was to destroy that beautiful body—to kill!

However, I was cunning—cunning. With caution, I felt my way toward the desk and secured the revolver, filling its chambers with leaden emissaries of death.

When all was in readiness, I switched on the light.

She wakened almost instantly. As the radiance flooded the room, a startled cry rose to her lips. It froze, unuttered, as—half rising—she met my gaze.

Her beauty—the raven blackness of her hair falling over her bare shoulders and full, heaving bosom, fanned the flame of my gory passion into fury. In an ecstasy of triumph, I stood drinking in the picture.

While I temporized with the lust to kill—prolonging the exquisite sensation—she was battling for self-control.

“Louis!” The name was gasped through bloodless lips.

Involuntarily, I shrank, reeling a little under her gaze. A dormant something seemed to rise in feeble protest at what I sought to do. The leveled revolver wavered in my hand.

[15]

But the note of panic in her voice revived my purpose. I laughed—mockingly.

“Louis!” her tone was sharp, but edged with terror. “Louis—put down that pistol! You don’t know what you are doing.”

She struggled to her feet and now stood before me. God! how beautiful—how tempting that bare white bosom!

“Put down that pistol!” she ordered hysterically.

She was frantic with fear. And her fear was like the blast of a forge upon the white heat of my passion.

I mocked her. A shrill, maniacal laugh burst from my throat. She had said I didn’t know what I was doing! Oh, yes, I did.

“I’m going to kill you!—kill you!” I shrieked, and laughed again.

She swayed forward like a wraith, as I fired. Or perhaps that was the trick played by my eyes as darkness overwhelmed me.

A FEW fragmentary pictures stand out in my recollection like clear-etched cameos on the scroll of the past.

One is of Louis, standing dazedly—slightly swaying as with vertigo—looking down at the smoking revolver in his hand. On the floor before him a crumpled figure in ebony and white and vivid crimson.

Then a confusion of frightened men and women in oddly assorted nondescript attire—uniformed officers bursting into the room and taking the revolver from Louis’s unresisting hand—clumsy efforts at lifting the white-robed body to the bed—a crimson stain spreading over the sheet—a doctor, attired in collarless shirt and wearing slippers, bending over her * * *

Finally, after a lapse of hours, a hushed atmosphere—efficient nurses—the beginning of delirium.

And one other picture—of Louis, cringing behind the bars of his cell, denied the privilege of visiting his wife’s bedside—crushed, dreading the hourly announcement of her death—filled with unspeakable horror of himself.

Velma still lived. The bullet had pierced her left lung and life hung by a tenuous thread. Hovering near I watched with dispassionate interest the battle for life. For the time I seemed emotionally spent. I had made a supreme effort—events would now take their inevitable course and show whether I had accomplished my purpose. I felt neither anxious nor overjoyed, neither regretful nor triumphant—merely impersonally curious.

A fever set in lessening Velma’s slender chances of recovery. In her delirium, her thoughts seemed always of Louis. Sometimes she breathed his name pleadingly, tenderly, then cried out in terror at some fleeting rehearsal of the scene in which he stood before her, the glitter of insanity in his eyes, the leveled revolver in his hand. Again she pleaded with him to give up his work at the bank; and at other times she seemed to think of him as over on the battlefields of Europe.

Only once did she apparently think of me—when she whispered the name by which I had called her, “Winkie!” and added, “Dick!” But, save for this exception, it was always “Louis! Louis!”

Her constant reiteration of his name finally dispelled the apathy of my spirit.

Louis! All the vengeful fury toward him I had experienced when my soul went hurtling into the region of the disembodied returned with thwarted intensity.

When Velma’s fever subsided, when the long fight for recovery began and she fluttered from the borderland back into the realm of the physical, when I knew I had failed—balked of my prey, I had at least this satisfaction:

Never again would these two—the man I hated and the woman for whom I hungered—never again would they be to each other as they had been in the past. The perfection of their love had been irretrievably marred. Never would she meet his gaze without an inward shrinking. Always on his part—on[16] both their parts—there would be an undercurrent of fear that the incident might recur—a grizzly menace, poisoning each moment of their lives together.

I had not schemed and contrived—and dared—in vain.

This was the thought I hugged when Louis was released from jail, upon her refusal to prosecute. It caused me sardonic amusement when, in their first embrace, the tears of despair rained down their cheeks. It recurred when they began their pitiful attempt to build anew on the shattered foundation of love.

And then—creepingly, slyly, like a bird of ill omen casting the shadow of its silent wings over the landscape—came retribution.

Many times, in retrospect, I lived over that brief hour of my return to physical expression—my hour of realization. Wraithlike, arose a vision of Velma—Velma as she had stood before me that night, staring at me with horror. I saw the horror deepen—deepen to abject despair.

How beautiful she had looked! But when I tried to picture that beauty, I could recall only her eyes. It mattered not whether I wished to see them—they filled my vision.

They seemed to haunt me. From being vaguely conscious of them, I became acutely so. Disconcertingly, they looked out at me from everywhere—eyes brimming with fear—eyes fixed and staring—filled with horrified accusation.

The beauty I had once coveted became a thing forbidden, even in memory. If I sought to peer through the veil as formerly—to witness her pathetic attempts to resume the old life with Louis—again those eyes!

It may perhaps sound strange for a disembodied creature—one whom you would call a ghost—to wail of being haunted. Yet haunting is of the spirit, and we of the spirit world are immeasurably more subject to its conditions than those whose consciousness is centered in the material sphere.

God! Those eyes. There is a refinement of physical torture which consists of allowing water to fall, drop by drop, for an eternity of hours, upon the forehead of the victim. Conceive of this torture increased a thousandfold, and a faint idea may be gained of the torture that was mine—from seeing everywhere, constantly, interminably, two orbs ever filled with the same expression of horror and reproach.

Much have I learned since entering the Land of the Shades. At that time I did not know, as I know now, that my punishment was no affliction from without, but the simple result of natural law. Causes set in motion must work out their full reaction. The pebble, cast into a quiet pool, makes ripples which in time return to the place of their origin. I had cast more than a pebble of disturbance into the harmony of human life, and through my intense preoccupation in a single aim had delayed longer than usual the reaction, I created for myself a hell. Inevitably I was drawn into it.

Gone was every desire I had known to hover near the two who had so long engrossed my attention. Haunted, harried, scourged by those dreadful accusers, I sought to fly from them to the ends of the earth. There was no escape, yet, driven frantic, I still struggled to escape, because that is the blind impulse of suffering creatures.

The emotions that had so swayed me when I tried to blast the lives of two who held me dear now seemed puny and insignificant in comparison with my suffering. No physical torment can be likened to that which engulfed me until my very being was but a seething mass of agony. Through it, I hurled maledictions upon the world, upon myself, upon the creator. Horrible blasphemies I uttered.

And, at last—I prayed.

It was but a cry for mercy—the inarticulate appeal of a tortured soul for surcease of pain—but suddenly a peace seemed to have come upon the universe.

Bereft of suffering, I felt like one who has ceased to exist.

Out of the silence came a wordless response. It beat upon my consciousness like the buffeting of the waves.

[17]

Words known to human ears would not convey the meaning of the message that was borne upon me—whether from outside source or welling up from within, I do not know. All I know is that it filled me with a strange hope.

A thousand years or a single instant—for time is a relative thing—the respite lasted. Then, I sank, as it seemed, to the old level of consciousness, and the torment was renewed.

Endure it now I knew that I must—and why. A strange new purpose filled my being. The light of understanding had dawned upon my soul.

And so I came to resume my vigil in the home of Velma and Louis.

A BRAVE heart was Velma’s—dauntless and true.

With the effects of the tragedy still apparent in her pallor and weakness, and in the shaken demeanor and furtive, self-distrustful attitude of Louis, she yet succeeded in finding a place for him as overseer of a small country estate.

I have said that I ceased to feel the torment of passion for Velma in the greater torment of her reproach. Ah! but I had never ceased to love her. As I now realized, I had desecrated that love, had transmuted it into a horrible travesty, had, in my abysmal ignorance, sought to obtain what I desired by destroying it; yet, beneath all, I had loved.

Well I know, now, that had I succeeded in my intention toward her, Velma would have ascended to a sphere utterly beyond my comprehension. Merciful fate had diverted my aim—had made possible some faint restitution.

I returned to Velma, loving her with a love that had come into its own, a love unselfish, untainted by thought of possession.

But, to help her, I must again hurt her cruelly.

Out of the chaos of her life she had slowly restored a semblance of harmony. Almost she succeeded in convincing Louis that their old peaceful companionship had returned; but to one who could read her thoughts, the nightmare thing that hovered between them weighed cruelly upon her soul.

She was never quite able to look into her husband’s eyes without a lurking suspicion of what might lie in their depths; never able to compose herself for sleep without a tremor lest she should wake to find herself confronted by a fiend in his form. I had done my work only too well!

Now, slowly and inexorably, I began again undermining Louis’ mental control. The old ground must be traversed anew, because he had gained in strength from the respite I had allowed him, and his outdoor life gave him a mental vigor with which I had not been obliged to contend before. On the other hand, I was equipped with new knowledge of the power I intended to wield.

I shall not relate again the successive stages by which I succeeded, first in influencing his will, then in partially subduing it, and, finally, in driving his personality into the background for indefinite periods. The terror that overwhelmed him when he realized that he was becoming a prey to his former aberrations may be imagined.

To shield Velma, I performed my experiments, when possible, while he was away from her. But she could not long be unaware of the moodiness, the haggard droop of his shoulders which accompanied his realization that the old malady had returned. The deepening terror in her expression was like a scourge upon my spirit—but I must wound her in order to cure.

More than once, I was forced to exert my power over Louis to prevent him from taking violent measures against himself. As I gained the ascendancy, a determination to end it all grew upon him. He feared that unless he took himself out of Velma’s life, the insanity would return and force him again to commit a frenzied assault upon the one he held most dear. Nor could he avoid seeing the apprehension in her manner that told him[18] she knew—the shrinking that she bravely tried to conceal.

Though my power over him was greater than before, it was intermittent. I could not always exercise it. I could not, for example, prevent his borrowing a revolver one day from a neighboring farmer, on pretense of using it against a marauding dog that had lately visited the poultry yard.

Though I knew his true intention, the utmost that I could do—for his personality was strong at the time—was to influence him to postpone the deed he contemplated.

That night, I took possession of his body while he slept. Velma lay, breathing quietly, in the next room—for as this dreaded thing came upon him they had, through tacit understanding, come to occupy separate bedrooms.

Partially dressing, I stole downstairs and out to the tool-shed where Louis—fearing to trust it near him in the house—had hidden the revolver. As I returned, my whole being rebelled at the task before me—yet it was unavoidable, if I would restore to Velma what I had wrenched from her.

Quietly though I entered her room, a gasp—or rather a quick, hysterical intake of breath—warned me that she had wakened.

I flashed on the light.

She made no sound. Her face went white as marble. The expression in her eyes was that which had tortured me into the depths of a hell more frightful than any conceived by human imagination.

A moment I stood swaying before her, with leveled revolver—as I had stood on that other occasion, months before.

Slowly, I lowered the revolver, and smiled—not as Louis would have smiled but as a maniac, formed in his likeness, would have smiled.

Her lips framed the word “Louis,” but, in the grip of despair, she made no sound. It was the despair not merely of a woman who felt herself doomed to death, but of a woman who consigned her loved one to a fate worse than death.

Still I smiled—with growing difficulty, for Louis’ personality was restive and my time in the usurped body was short.

In that moment, I was not anxious to give up his body. At this new glimpse of her beauty through physical sight, my love for Velma flamed into hitherto unrealized intensity. For an instant my purpose in returning was forgotten. Forgotten was the knowledge of the ages which I had sipped since last I occupied the body in which I faced her. Forgotten was everything save—Velma.

As I took a step forward, my arms outstretched, my eyes expressing God knows what depth of yearning, she uttered a scream.

Blackness surged over me. I stumbled. I was being forced out—out—— That cry of terror had vibrated through the soul of Louis and he was struggling to answer it.

Instinctively, I battled against the darkness, clung to my hard-won ascendancy. A moment of conflict, and again I prevailed.

Once more I smiled. The effect of it must have been weird, for I was growing weaker and Louis had returned to the attack with overwhelming persistence. My tongue strove for expression:

“Sorry—Winkie—it won’t happen again—I’m not—coming—back——”

WHEN I recovered from the momentary unconsciousness that accompanies transition from the physical to spiritual, Louis was looking in affright at the huddled figure of Velma, who had fainted away. The next instant, he had gathered her in his arms.

Though I had come near failing in the attempt to deliver my message, I had no fear that my visit would prove in vain. With clear prescience, I knew that my utterance of that old familiar nickname, “Winkie,” would carry untold meaning to Velma—that hereafter she would fear no more what she might see in the depths of her husband’s eyes—that with a return of her old confidence in him, the specter of apprehension would be banished forever from their lives.

IN THE heart of a second-growth piney-woods jungle of southern Alabama, a region sparsely settled save by backwoods blacks and Cajans—that queer, half-wild people descended from Acadian exiles of the middle eighteenth century—stands a strange, enormous ruin.

Interminable trailers of Cherokee rose, white-laden during a single month of spring, have climbed the heights of its three remaining walls. Palmetto fans rise knee high above the base. A dozen scattered live oaks, now belying their nomenclature because of choking tufts of gray, Spanish moss and two-foot circlets of mistletoe parasite which have stripped bare of foliage the gnarled, knotted limbs, lean fantastic beards against the crumbling brick.

Immediately beyond, where the ground becomes soggier and lower—dropping away hopelessly into the tangle of dogwood, holly, poison sumac and pitcher plants that is Moccasin Swamp—undergrowth of titi and annis has formed a protecting wall impenetrable to all save the furtive ones. Some few outcasts utilize the stinking depths of that sinister swamp, distilling “shinny” or “pure cawn” liquor for illicit trade.

Tradition states that this is the case, at least—a tradition which antedates that of the premature ruin by many decades. I believe it, for during evenings intervening between investigations of the awesome spot I often was approached as a possible customer by wood-billies who could not fathom how anyone dared venture near without plenteous fortification of liquid courage.

I knew “shinny,” therefore I did not purchase it for personal consumption. A dozen times I bought a quart or two, merely to establish credit among the Cajans, pouring away the vile stuff immediately into the sodden ground. It seemed then that only through filtration and condensation of their dozens of weird tales regarding “Daid House” could I arrive at understanding of the mystery and weight of horror hanging about the place.

Certain it is that out of all the superstitious cautioning, head-wagging and whispered nonsensities I obtained only two indisputable facts. The first was that no money, and no supporting battery of ten-gauge shotguns loaded with chilled shot, could induce either Cajan or darky of the region to approach within five hundred yards of that flowering wall! The second fact I shall dwell upon later.

Perhaps it would be as well, as I am only a mouthpiece in this chronicle, to relate in brief why I came to Alabama on this mission.

I am a scribbler of general fact articles, no fiction writer as was Lee Cranmer—though doubtless the confession is superfluous. Lee was my roommate during college days. I knew his family well, admiring John Corliss Cranmer even more than I admired the son and friend—and almost as much as Peggy Breede whom Lee married. Peggy liked me, but that was all. I cherish sanctified memory of her for[20] just that much, as no other woman before or since has granted this gangling dyspeptic even a hint of joyous and sorrowful intimacy.

Work kept me to the city. Lee, on the other hand, coming of wealthy family—and, from the first, earning from his short-stories and novel royalties more than I wrested from editorial coffers—needed no anchorage. He and Peggy honeymooned a four-month trip to Alaska, visited Honolulu next winter, fished for salmon on Cain’s River, New Brunswick, and generally enjoyed the outdoors at all seasons.

They kept an apartment in Wilmette, near Chicago, yet, during the few spring and fall seasons they were “home,” both preferred to rent a suite at one of the country clubs to which Lee belonged. I suppose they spent thrice or five times the amount Lee actually earned, yet for my part I only honored that the two should find such great happiness in life and still accomplish artistic triumph.

They were honest, zestful young Americans, the type—and pretty nearly the only type—two million dollars cannot spoil. John Corliss Cranmer, father of Lee, though as different from his boy as a microscope is different from a painting by Remington, was even further from being dollar conscious. He lived in a world bounded only by the widening horizon of biological science—and his love for the two who would carry on that Cranmer name.

Many a time I used to wonder how it could be that as gentle, clean-souled and lovable a gentleman as John Corliss Cranmer could have ventured so far into scientific research without attaining small-caliber atheism. Few do. He believed both in God and human kind. To accuse him of murdering his boy and the girl wife who had come to be loved as the mother of baby Elsie—as well as blood and flesh of his own family—was a gruesome, terrible absurdity! Yes, even when John Corliss Cranmer was declared unmistakably insane!

Lacking a relative in the world, baby Elsie was given to me—and the middle-aged couple who had accompanied the three as servants about half of the known world. Elsie would be Peggy over again. I worshiped her, knowing that if my stewardship of her interests could make of her a woman of Peggy’s loveliness and worth I should not have lived in vain. And at four Elsie stretched out her arms to me after a vain attempt to jerk out the bobbed tail of Lord Dick, my tolerant old Airedale—and called me “papa.”

I felt a deep down choking ... yes, those strangely long black lashes some day might droop in fun or coquetry, but now baby Elsie held a wistful, trusting seriousness in depths of ultramarine eyes—that same seriousness which only Lee had brought to Peggy.

Responsibility in one instant became double. That she might come to love me as more than foster parent was my dearest wish. Still, through selfishness I could not rob her of rightful heritage; she must know in after years. And the tale that I would tell her must not be the horrible suspicion which had been bandied about in common talk!

I went to Alabama, leaving Elsie in the competent hands of Mrs. Daniels and her husband, who had helped care for her since birth.

In my possession, prior to the trip, were the scant facts known to authorities at the time of John Corliss Cranmer’s escape and disappearance. They were incredible enough.

For conducting biological research[21] upon forms of protozoan life, John Corliss Cranmer had hit upon this region of Alabama. Near a great swamp teeming with microscopic organisms, and situated in a semi-tropical belt where freezing weather rarely intruded to harden the bogs, the spot seemed ideal for his purpose.

Through Mobile he could secure supplies daily by truck. The isolation suited. With only an octoroon man to act as chef, houseman and valet for the times he entertained no visitors, he brought down scientific apparatus, occupying temporary quarters in the village of Burdett’s Corners while his woods house was in process of construction.

By all accounts the Lodge, as he termed it, was a substantial affair of eight or nine rooms, built of logs and planed lumber bought at Oak Grove. Lee and Peggy were expected to spend a portion of each year with him; quail, wild turkey and deer abounded, which fact made such a vacation certain to please the pair. At other times all save four rooms was closed.

This was in 1907, the year of Lee’s marriage. Six years later when I came down, no sign of a house remained except certain mangled and rotting timbers projecting from viscid soil—or what seemed like soil. And a twelve-foot wall of brick had been built to enclose the house completely! One portion of this had fallen inward!

I WASTED weeks of time at first, interviewing officials of the police department at Mobile, the town marshals and county sheriffs of Washington and Mobile counties, and officials of the psychopathic hospital from which Cranmer made his escape.

In substance the story was one of baseless homicidal mania. Cranmer the elder had been away until late fall, attending two scientific conferences in the North, and then going abroad to compare certain of his findings with those of a Dr. Gemmler of Prague University. Unfortunately, Gemmler was assassinated by a religious fanatic shortly afterward. The fanatic voiced virulent objection to all Mendelian research as blasphemous. This was his only defense. He was hanged.

Search of Gemmler’s notes and effects revealed nothing save an immense amount of laboratory data on karyokinesis—the process of chromosome arrangement occurring in first growing cells of higher animal embryos. Apparently Cranmer had hoped to develop some similarities, or point out differences between hereditary factors occurring in lower forms of life and those half-demonstrated in the cat and monkey. The authorities had found nothing that helped me. Cranmer had gone crazy; was that not sufficient explanation?

Perhaps it was for them, but not for me—and Elsie.

But to the slim basis of fact I was able to unearth:

No one wondered when a fortnight passed without appearance of any person from the Lodge. Why should anyone worry? A provision salesman in Mobile called up twice, but failed to complete a connection. He merely shrugged. The Cranmers had gone away somewhere on a trip. In a week, a month, a year they would be back. Meanwhile he lost commissions, but what of it? He had no responsibility for these queer nuts up there in the piney-woods. Crazy? Of course! Why should any guy with millions to spend shut himself up among the Cajans and draw microscope-enlarged notebook pictures of—what the salesman called—“germs?”

A stir was aroused at the end of the fortnight, but the commotion confined itself to building circles. Twenty carloads of building brick, fifty bricklayers, and a quarter-acre of fine-meshed wire—the sort used for screening off pens of rodents and small marsupials in a zoological garden—were ordered, damn expense, hurry! by an unshaved, tattered man who identified himself with difficulty as John Corliss Cranmer.

He looked strange, even then. A certified check for the total amount, given in advance, and another check of absurd size slung toward a labor entrepreneur,[22] silenced objection, however. These millionaires were apt to be flighty. When they wanted something they wanted it at tap of the bell. Well, why not drag down the big profits? A poorer man would have been jacked up in a day. Cranmer’s fluid gold bathed him in immunity to criticism.

The encircling wall was built, and roofed with wire netting which drooped about the squat-pitch of the Lodge. Curious inquiries of workmen went unanswered until the final day.

Then Cranmer, a strange, intense apparition who showed himself more shabby than a quay derelict, assembled every man jack of the workmen. In one hand he grasped a wad of blue slips—fifty-six of them. In the other he held a Luger automatic.

“I offer each man a thousand dollars for silence!” he announced. “As an alternative—death! You know little. Will all of you consent to swear upon your honor that nothing which has occurred here will be mentioned elsewhere? By this I mean absolute silence! You will not come back here to investigate anything. You will not tell your wives. You will not open your mouths even upon the witness stand in case you are called! My price is one thousand apiece.

“In case one of you betrays me I give you my word that this man shall die! I am rich. I can hire men to do murder. Well, what do you say?”

The men glanced apprehensively about. The threatening Luger decided them. To a man they accepted the blue slips—and, save for one witness who lost all sense of fear and morality in drink, none of the fifty-six has broken his pledge, as far as I know. That one bricklayer died later in delirium tremens.

It might have been different had not John Corliss Cranmer escaped.

THEY found him the first time, mouthing meaningless phrases concerning an amœba—one of the tiny forms of protoplasmic life he was known to have studied. Also he leaped into a hysteria of self-accusation. He had murdered two innocent people! The tragedy was his crime. He had drowned them in ooze! Ah, God!

Unfortunately for all concerned, Cranmer, dazed and indubitably stark insane, chose to perform a strange travesty on fishing four miles to the west of his lodge—on the further border of Moccasin Swamp. His clothing had been torn to shreds, his hat was gone, and he was coated from head to foot with gluey mire. It was far from strange that the good folk of Shanksville, who never had glimpsed the eccentric millionaire, failed to associate him with Cranmer.

They took him in, searched his pockets—finding no sign save an inordinate sum of money—and then put him under medical care. Two precious weeks elapsed before Dr. Quirk reluctantly acknowledged that he could do nothing more for this patient, and notified the proper authorities.

Then much more time was wasted. Hot April and half of still hotter May passed by before the loose ends were connected. Then it did little good to know that this raving unfortunate was Cranmer, or that the two persons of whom he shouted in disconnected delirium actually had disappeared. Alienists absolved him of responsibility. He was confined in a cell reserved for the violent.

Meanwhile, strange things occurred back at the Lodge—which now, for good and sufficient reason, was becoming known to dwellers of the woods as Dead House. Until one of the walls fell in, however, there had been no chance to see—unless one possessed the temerity to climb either one of the tall live oaks, or mount the barrier itself. No doors or opening of any sort had been placed in that hastily-constructed wall!

By the time the western side of the wall fell, not a native for miles around but feared the spot far more than even the bottomless, snake-infested bogs which lay to west and north.

The single statement was all John Corliss Cranmer ever gave to the world. It proved sufficient. An immediate[23] search was instituted. It showed that less than three weeks before the day of initial reckoning, his son and Peggy had come to visit him for the second time that winter—leaving Elsie behind in company of the Daniels pair. They had rented a pair of Gordons for quail hunting, and had gone out. That was the last anyone had seen of them.

The backwoods negro who glimpsed them stalking a covey behind their two pointing dogs had known no more—even when sweated through twelve hours of third degree. Certain suspicious circumstances (having to do only with his regular pursuit of “shinny” transportation) had caused him to fall under suspicious at first. He was dropped.

Two days later the scientist himself was apprehended—a gibbering idiot who sloughed his pole—holding on to the baited hook—into a marsh where nothing save moccasins, an errant alligator, or amphibian life could have been snared.

His mind was three-quarters dead. Cranmer then was in the state of the dope fiend who rouses to a sitting position to ask seriously how many Bolshevists were killed by Julius Caesar before he was stabbed by Brutus, or why it was that Roller canaries sang only on Wednesday evenings. He knew that tragedy of the most sinister sort had stalked through his life—but little more, at first.

Later the police obtained that one statement that he had murdered two human beings, but never could means or motive be established. Official guess as to the means was no more than wild conjecture; it mentioned enticing the victims to the noisome depths of Moccasin Swamp, there to let them flounder and sink.

The two were his son and daughter-in-law, Lee and Peggy!

BY FEIGNING coma—then awakening with suddenness to assault three attendants with incredible ferocity and strength—John Corliss Cranmer escaped from Elizabeth Ritter Hospital.

How he hid, how he managed to traverse sixty-odd intervening miles and still balk detection, remains a minor mystery to be explained only by the assumption that maniacal cunning sufficed to outwit saner intellects.

Traverse these miles he did, though until I was fortunate enough to uncover evidence to this effect, it was supposed generally that he had made his escape as stowaway on one of the banana boats, or had buried himself in some portion of the nearer woods where he was unknown. The truth ought to be welcome to householders of Shanksville, Burdett’s Corners and vicinage—those excusably prudent ones who to this day keep loaded shotguns handy and barricade their doors at nightfall.

The first ten days of my investigation may be touched upon in brief. I made headquarters in Burdett’s Corners, and drove out each morning, carrying lunch and returning for my grits and piney-woods pork or mutton before nightfall. My first plan had been to camp out at the edge of the swamp, for opportunity to enjoy the outdoors comes rarely in my direction. Yet after one cursory examination of the premises I abandoned the idea. I did not want to camp alone there. And I am less superstitious than a real estate agent.

It was, perhaps, psychic warning; more probably the queer, faint, salty odor as of fish left to decay, which hung about the ruin, made too unpleasant an impression upon my olfactory sense. I experienced a distinct chill every time the lengthening shadows caught me near Dead House.

The smell impressed me. In newspaper reports of the case one ingenious explanation had been worked out. To the rear of the spot where Dead House had stood—inside the wall—was a swampy hollow circular in shape. Only a little real mud lay in the bottom of the bowllike depression now, but one reporter on the staff of The Mobile Register guessed that during the tenancy of the lodge it had been a fishpool. Drying up of the water had killed the fish, who now permeated the remnant of mud with this foul odor.

[24]

The possibility that Cranmer had needed to keep fresh fish at hand for some of his experiments silenced the natural objection that in a country where every stream holds gar pike, bass, catfish and many other edible varieties, no one would dream of stocking a stagnant puddle.

After tramping about the enclosure, testing the queerly brittle, desiccated top stratum of earth within and speculating concerning the possible purpose of the wall, I cut off a long limb of chinaberry and probed the mud. One fragment of fish spine would confirm the guess of that imaginative reporter.

I found nothing resembling a piscal skeleton, but established several facts. First, this mud crater had definite bottom only three or four feet below the surface of remaining ooze. Second, the fishy stench became stronger as I stirred. Third, at one time the mud, water, or whatever had comprised the balance of content, had reached the rim of the bowl. The last showed by certain marks plain enough when the crusty, two-inch stratum of upper coating was broken away. It was puzzling.

The nature of that thin, desiccated effluvium which seemed to cover everything even to the lower foot or two of brick, came in for next inspection. It was strange stuff, unlike any earth I ever had seen, though undoubtedly some form of scum drained in from the swamp at the time of river floods or cloudbursts (which in this section are common enough in spring and fall). It crumbled beneath the fingers. When I walked over it, the stuff crunched hollowly. In fainter degree it possessed the fishy odor also.

I took some samples where it lay thickest upon the ground, and also a few where there seemed to be no more than a depth of a sheet of paper. Later I would have a laboratory analysis made.

Apart from any possible bearing the stuff might have upon the disappearance of my three friends, I felt the tug of article interest—that wonder over anything strange or seemingly inexplicable which lends the hunt for fact a certain glamor and romance all its own. To myself I was going to have to explain sooner or later just why this layer covered the entire space within the walls and was not perceptible anywhere outside! The enigma could wait, however—or so I decided.

Far more interesting were the traces of violence apparent on wall and what once had been a house. The latter seemed to have been ripped from its foundations by a giant hand, crushed out of semblance to a dwelling, and then cast in fragments about the base of wall—mainly on the south side, where heaps of twisted, broken timbers lay in profusion. On the opposite side there had been such heaps once, but now only charred sticks, coated with that gray-black, omnipresent coat of desiccation, remained. These piles of charcoal had been sifted and examined most carefully by the authorities, as one theory had been advanced that Cranmer had burned the bodies of his victims. Yet no sign whatever of human remains was discovered.

The fire, however, pointed out one odd fact which controverted the reconstructions made by detectives months before. The latter, suggesting the dried scum to have drained in from the swamp, believed that the house timbers had floated out to the sides of the wall—there to arrange themselves in a series of piles! The absurdity of such a theory showed even more plainly in the fact that if the scum had filtered through in such a flood, the timbers most certainly had been dragged into piles previously! Some had burned—and the scum coated their charred surfaces!

What had been the force which had torn the lodge to bits as if in spiteful fury? Why had the parts of the wreckage been burned, the rest to escape?

Right here I felt was the keynote to the mystery, yet I could imagine no explanation. That John Corliss Cranmer himself—physically sound, yet a man who for decades had led a sedentary life—could have accomplished such destruction, unaided, was difficult to believe.

[25]

I TURNED my attention to the wall, hoping for evidence which might suggest another theory.

That wall had been an example of the worst snide construction. Though little more than a year old, the parts left standing showed evidence that they had begun to decay the day the last brick was laid. The mortar had fallen from the interstices. Here and there a brick had cracked and dropped out. Fibrils of the climbing vines had penetrated crevices, working for early destruction.

And one side already had fallen.

It was here that the first glimmering suspicion of the terrible truth was forced upon me. The scattered bricks, even those which had rolled inward toward the gaping foundation lodge, had not been coated with scum! This was curious, yet it could be explained by surmise that the flood itself undermined this weakest portion of the wall. I cleared away a mass of brick from the spot on which the structure had stood; to my surprise I found it exceptionally firm! Hard red clay lay beneath! The flood conception was faulty; only some great force, exerted from inside or outside, could have wreaked such destruction.

When careful measurement, analysis and deduction convinced me—mainly from the fact that the lowermost layers of brick all had fallen outward, while the upper portions toppled in—I began to link up this mysterious and horrific force with the one which had rent the Lodge asunder. It looked as though a typhoon or gigantic centrifuge had needed elbow room in ripping down the wooden structure.

But I got nowhere with the theory, though in ordinary affairs I am called a man of too great imaginative tendencies. No less than three editors have cautioned me on this point. Perhaps it was the narrowing influence of great personal sympathy—yes, and love. I make no excuses, though beyond a dim understanding that some terrific, implacable force must have made this spot his playground, I ended my ninth day of note-taking and investigation almost as much in the dark as I had been while a thousand miles away in Chicago.

Then I started among the darkies and Cajans. A whole day I listened to yarns of the days which preceded Cranmer’s escape from Elizabeth Ritter Hospital—days in which furtive men sniffed poisoned air for miles around Dead House, finding the odor intolerable. Days in which it seemed none possessed nerve enough to approach close. Days when the most fanciful tales of mediaeval superstitions were spun. These tales I shall not give; the truth is incredible enough.

At noon upon the eleventh day I chanced upon Rori Pailleron, a Cajan—and one of the least prepossessing of all with whom I had come in contact. “Chanced” perhaps is a bad word. I had listed every dweller of the woods within a five mile radius. Rori was sixteenth on my list. I went to him only after interviewing all four of the Crabiers and two whole families of Pichons. And Rori regarded me with the utmost suspicion until I made him a present of the two quarts of “shinny” purchased of the Pichons.

Because long practice has perfected me in the technique of seeming to drink another man’s awful liquor—no, I’m not an absolute prohibitionist; fine wine or twelve-year-in-cask Bourbon whisky arouses my definite interest—I fooled Pailleron from the start. I shall omit preliminaries, and leap to the first admission from him that he knew more concerning Dead House and its former inmates than any of the other darkies or Cajans roundabout.

“...But I ain’t talkin’. Sacre! If I should open my gab, what might fly out? It is for keeping silent, y’r damn’ right!...”

I agreed. He was a wise man—educated to some extent in the queer schools and churches maintained exclusively by Cajans in the depths of the woods, yet naive withal.

We drank. And I never had to ask another leading question. The liquor made him want to interest me; and the only extraordinary topic in this whole neck of the woods was the Dead House.

[26]

Three-quarters of a pint of acrid, nauseous fluid, and he hinted darkly. A pint, and he told me something I scarcely could believe. Another half-pint.... But I shall give his confession in condensed form.

He had known Joe Sibley, the octoroon chef, houseman and valet who served Cranmer. Through Joe, Rori had furnished certain indispensables in way of food to the Cranmer household. At first, these salable articles had been exclusively vegetable—white and yellow turnip, sweet potatoes, corn and beans—but later, meat!

Yes, meat especially—whole lambs, slaughtered and quartered, the coarsest variety of piney-woods pork and beef, all in immense quantity!

IN DECEMBER of the fatal winter Lee and his wife stopped down at the Lodge for ten days or thereabouts.

They were enroute to Cuba at the time, intending to be away five or six weeks. Their original plan had been only to wait over a day or so in the piney-woods, but something caused an amendment to the scheme.

The two dallied. Lee seemed to have become vastly absorbed in something—so much absorbed that it was only when Peggy insisted upon continuing their trip, that he could tear himself away.

It was during those ten days that he began buying meat. Meager bits of it at first—a rabbit, a pair of squirrels, or perhaps a few quail beyond the number he and Peggy shot. Rori furnished the game, thinking nothing of it except that Lee paid double prices—and insisted upon keeping the purchases secret from other members of the household.

“I’m putting it across on the Governor, Rori!” he said once with a wink. “Going to give him the shock of his life. So you mustn’t let on, even to Joe about what I want you to do. Maybe it won’t work out, but if it does ...! Dad’ll have the scientific world at his feet! He doesn’t blow his own horn anywhere near enough, you know.”

Rori didn’t know. Hadn’t a suspicion what Lee was talking about. Still, if this rich, young idiot wanted to pay him a half dollar in good silver coin for a quail that anyone—himself included—could knock down with a five-cent shell, Rori was well satisfied to keep his mouth shut. Each evening he brought some of the small game. And each day Lee Cranmer seemed to have use for an additional quail or so....

When he was ready to leave for Cuba, Lee came forward with the strangest of propositions. He fairly whispered his vehemence and desire for secrecy! He would tell Rori, and would pay the Cajan five hundred dollars—half in advance, and half at the end of five weeks when Lee himself would return from Cuba—provided Rori agreed to adhere absolutely to a certain secret program! The money was more than a fortune to Rori; it was undreamt-of affluence. The Cajan acceded.

“He wuz tellin’ me then how the ol’ man had raised some kind of pet,” Rori confided, “an’ wanted to get shet of it. So he give it to Lee, tellin’ him to kill it, but Lee was sot on foolin’ him. W’at I ask yer is, w’at kind of a pet is it w’at lives down in a mud sink an’ eats a couple hawgs every night?”

I couldn’t imagine, so I pressed him for further details. Here at last was something which sounded like a clue!

He really knew too little. The agreement with Lee provided that if Rori carried out the provisions exactly, he should be paid extra and at his exorbitant scale of all additional outlay, when Lee returned.

The young man gave him a daily schedule which Rori showed. Each evening he was to procure, slaughter and cut up a definite—and growing—amount of meat. Every item was checked, and I saw that they ran from five pounds up to forty!

“What in heaven’s name did you do with it?” I demanded, excited now and pouring him an additional drink for fear caution might return to him.

“Took it through the bushes in back an’ slung it in the mud sink there! An’ suthin’ come up an’ drug it down!”

“A ’gator?”

“Diable! How should I know? It[27] was dark. I wouldn’t go close.” He shuddered, and the fingers which lifted his glass shook as with sudden chill. “Mebbe you’d of done it, huh? Not me, though! The young fellah tole me to sling it in, an’ I slung it.

“A couple times I come around in the light, but there wasn’t nuthin’ there you could see. Jes’ mud, an’ some water. Mebbe the thing didn’t come out in daytimes....”

“Perhaps not,” I agreed, straining every mental resource to imagine what Lee’s sinister pet could have been. “But you said something about two hogs a day? What did you mean by that? This paper, proof enough that you’re telling the truth so far, states that on the thirty-fifth day you were to throw forty pounds of meat—any kind—into the sink. Two hogs, even the piney-woods variety, weigh a lot more than forty pounds!”

“Them was after—after he come back!”

From this point onward, Rori’s tale became more and more enmeshed in the vagaries induced by bad liquor. His tongue thickened. I shall give his story without attempt to reproduce further verbal barbarities, or the occasional prodding I had to give in order to keep him from maundering into foolish jargon.

Lee had paid munificently. His only objection to the manner in which Rori had carried out his orders was that the orders themselves had been deficient. The pet, he said had grown enormously. It was hungry, ravenous. Lee himself had supplemented the fare with huge pails of scraps from the kitchen.

From that day Lee purchased from Rori whole sheep and hogs! The Cajan continued to bring the carcasses at nightfall, but no longer did Lee permit him to approach the pool. The young man appeared chronically excited now. He had a tremendous secret—one the extent of which even his father did not guess, and one which would astonish the world! Only a week or two more and he would spring it. First he would have to arrange certain data.

Then came the day when everyone disappeared from Dead House. Rori came around several times, but concluded that all of the occupants had folded tents and departed—doubtless taking their mysterious “pet” along. Only when he saw from a distance Joe, the octoroon servant, returning along the road on foot toward the Lodge, did his slow mental processes begin to ferment. That afternoon Rori visited the strange place for the next to last time.

He did not go to the Lodge itself—and there were reasons. While still some hundreds of yards away from the place a terrible, sustained screaming reached his ears! It was faint, yet unmistakably the voice of Joe! Throwing a pair of number two shells into the breech of his shotgun, Rori hurried on, taking his usual path through the brush at the back.

He saw—and as he told me even “shinny” drunkenness fled his chattering tones—Joe, the octoroon. Aye, he stood in the yard, far from the pool into which Rori had thrown the carcasses—and Joe could not move!

Rori failed to explain in full, but something, a slimy, amorphous something, which glistened in the sunlight, already had engulfed the man to his shoulders! Breath was cut off. Joe’s contorted face writhed with horror and beginning suffocation. One hand—all that was free of the rest of him!—beat feebly upon the rubbery, translucent thing that was engulfing his body!

Then Joe sank from sight....

FIVE days of liquored indulgence passed before Rori, alone in his shaky cabin, convinced himself that he had seen a phantasy born of alcohol. He came back the last time—to find a high wall of brick surrounding the Lodge, and including the pool of mud into which he had thrown the meat!

While he hesitated, circling the place without discovering an opening—which he would not have dared to use, even had he found it—a crashing, tearing of timbers, and persistent sound of awesome destruction came from within. He swung himself into one of the oaks near the wall. And he was just in time to[28] see the last supporting stanchions of the Lodge give way outward!

The whole structure came apart. The roof fell in—yet seemed to move after it had fallen! Logs of wall deserted retaining grasp of their spikes like layers of plywood in the grasp of the shearing machine!

That was all. Soddenly intoxicated now, Rori mumbled more phrases, giving me the idea that on another day when he became sober once more, he might add to his statements, but I—numbed to the soul—scarcely cared. If that which he related was true, what nightmare of madness must have been consummated here!

I could vision some things now which concerned Lee and Peggy, horrible things. Only remembrance of Elsie kept me faced forward in the search—for now it seemed almost that the handiwork of a madman must be preferred to what Rori claimed to have seen! What had been that sinister, translucent thing? That glistening thing which jumped upward about a man, smothering, engulfing?

Queerly enough, though such a theory as came most easily to mind now would have outraged reason in me if suggested concerning total strangers, I asked myself only what details of Rori’s revelation had been exaggerated by fright and fumes of liquor. And as I sat on the creaking bench in his cabin, staring unseeing as he lurched down to the floor, fumbling with a lock box of green tin which lay under his cot, and muttering, the answer to all my questions lay within reach!

IT WAS not until next day, however, that I made the discovery. Heavy of heart I had reexamined the spot where the Lodge had stood, then made my way to the Cajan’s cabin again, seeking sober confirmation of what he had told me during intoxication.

In imagining that such a spree for Rori would be ended by a single night, however, I was mistaken. He lay sprawled almost as I had left him. Only two factors were changed. No “shinny” was left—and lying open, with its miscellaneous contents strewed about, was the tin box. Rori somehow had managed to open it with the tiny key still clutched in his hand.

Concern for his safety alone was what made me notice the box. It was a receptacle for small fishing tackle of the sort carried here and there by any sportsman. Tangles of Dowagiac minnows, spoon hooks ranging in size to silver-backed number eights; three reels still carrying line of different weights, spinners, casting plugs, wobblers, floating baits, were spilled out upon the rough plank flooring where they might snag Rori badly if he rolled. I gathered them, intending to save him an accident.

With the miscellaneous assortment in my hands, however, I stopped dead. Something had caught my eye—something lying flush with the bottom of the lock box! I stared, and then swiftly tossed the hooks and other impedimenta upon the table. What I had glimpsed there in the box was a loose-leaf notebook of the sort used for recording laboratory data! And Rori scarcely could read, let alone write!

Feverishly, a riot of recognition, surmise, hope and fear bubbling in my brain, I grabbed the book and threw it open. At once I knew that this was the end. The pages were scribbled in pencil, but the handwriting was that precise chirography I knew as belonging to John Corliss Cranmer, the scientist!

These were the words at top of the first page which met my eye.

Because knowledge of the circumstances, the relation of which I pried out of the reluctant Rori only some days later when I had him in Mobile as a police witness for the sake of my friend’s vindication, is necessary to understanding, I shall interpolate.

Rori had not told me everything. On his late visit to the vicinage of Dead House he saw more. A crouching figure, seated Turk fashion on top of the wall, appeared to be writing industriously. Rori recognized the man as[29] Cranmer, yet did not hail him. He had no opportunity.

Just as the Cajan came near, Cranmer rose, thrust the notebook, which had rested across his knees, into the box. Then he turned, tossed outside the wall both the locked box and a ribbon to which was attached the key.

Then his arms raised toward heaven. For five seconds he seemed to invoke the mercy of Power beyond all of man’s scientific prying. And finally he leaped, inside ...!

Rori did not climb to investigate. He knew that directly below this portion of wall lay the mud sink into which he had thrown the chunks of meat!

THIS is a true transcription of the statement I inscribed, telling the sequence of actual events at Dead House. The original of the statement now lies in the archives of the detective department.

Cranmer’s notebook, though written in a precise hand, yet betrayed the man’s insanity by incoherence and frequent repetitions. My statement has been accepted now, both by alienists and by detectives who had entertained different theories in respect to the case. It quashes the noisome hints and suspicions regarding three of the finest Americans who ever lived—and also one queer supposition dealing with supposed criminal tendencies in poor Joe, the octoroon.

John Corliss Cranmer went insane for sufficient cause!

AS READERS of popular fiction know well, Lee Cranmer’s forte was the writing of what is called—among fellows in the craft—the pseudo-scientific story. In plain words, this means a yarn, based upon solid fact in the field of astronomy, chemistry, anthropology or whatnot, which carries to logical conclusion unproved theories of men who devote their lives to searching out further nadirs of fact.

In certain fashion these men are allies of science. Often they visualize something which has not been imagined even by the best of men from whom they secure data, thus opening new horizons of possibility. In a large way Jules Verne was one of these men in his day; Lee Cranmer bade fair to carry on the work in worthy fashion—work taken up for a period by an Englishman named Wells, but abandoned for stories of a different—and, in my humble opinion, less absorbing—type.

Lee wrote three novels, all published, which dealt with such subjects—two of the three secured from his own father’s labors, and the other speculating upon the discovery and possible uses of interatomic energy. Upon John Corliss Cranmer’s return from Prague that fatal winter, the father informed Lee that a greater subject than any with which the young man had dealt, now could be tapped.

Cranmer, senior, had devised a way in which the limiting factors in protozoic life and growth, could be nullified; in time, and with cooperation of biologists who specialized upon karyokinesis and embryology of higher forms, he hoped—to put the theory in pragmatic terms—to be able to grow swine the size of elephants, quail or woodcock with breasts from which a hundredweight of white meat could be cut away, and steers whose dehorned heads might butt at the third story of a skyscraper!

Such result would revolutionize the methods of food supply, of course. It also would hold out hope for all undersized specimens of humanity—provided only that if factors inhibiting growth could be deleted, some method of stopping gianthood also could be developed.

Cranmer the elder, through use of an undescribed (in the notebook) growth medium of which one constituent was agar-agar, and the use of radium emanations, had succeeded in bringing about apparently unrestricted growth in the paramœcium protozoan, certain of the vegetable growths (among which were bacteria), and in the amorphous cell of protoplasm known as the amœba—the last a single cell containing only neucleolus, neucleus, and a space known as the contractile vacuole which somehow aided in throwing off particles impossible[30] to assimilate directly. This point may be remembered in respect to the piles of lumber left near the outside walls surrounding Dead House!

When Lee Cranmer and his wife came south to visit, John Corliss Cranmer showed his son an amœba—normally an organism visible under low-power microscope—which he had absolved from natural growth inhibitions. This amœba, a rubbery, amorphous mass of protoplasm, was of the size then of a large beef liver. It could have been held in two cupped hands, placed side by side.

“How large could it grow?” asked Lee, wide-eyed and interested.

“So far as I know,” answered the father, “there is no limit—now! It might, if it got food enough, grow to be as big as the Masonic Temple!

“But take it out and kill it. Destroy the organism utterly—burning the fragment—else there is no telling what might happen. The amœba, as I have explained, reproduces by simple division. Any fragment remaining might be dangerous.”

Lee took the rubbery, translucent giant cell—but he did not obey orders. Instead of destroying it as his father had directed, Lee thought out a plan. Suppose he should grow this organism to tremendous size? Suppose, when the tale of his father’s accomplishment were spread, an amœba of many tons weight could be shown in evidence? Lee, of somewhat sensational cast of mind, determined instantly to keep secret the fact that he was not destroying the organism, but encouraging its further growth. Thought of possible peril never crossed his mind.

He arranged to have the thing fed—allowing for normal increase of size in an abnormal thing. It fooled him only in growing much more rapidly. When he came back from Cuba the amœba practically filled the whole of the mud sink hollow. He had to give it much greater supplies....

The giant cell came to absorb as much as two hogs in a single day. During daylight, while hunger still was appeased, it never emerged, however. That remained for the time that it could secure no more food near at hand to satisfy its ravenous and increasing appetite.

Only instinct for the sensational kept Lee from telling Peggy, his wife, all about the matter. Lee hoped to spring a coup which would immortalize his father, and surprise his wife terrifically. Therefore, he kept his own counsel—and made bargains with the Cajan, Rori, who supplied food daily for the shapeless monster of the pool.

The tragedy itself came suddenly and unexpectedly. Peggy, feeding the two Gordon setters that Lee and she used for quail hunting, was in the Lodge yard before sunset. She romped alone, as Lee himself was dressing.

Of a sudden her screams cut the still air! Without her knowledge, ten-foot pseudopods—those flowing tentacles of protoplasm sent forth by the sinister occupant of the pool—slid out and around her putteed ankles.

For a moment she did not understand. Then, at first suspicion of the horrid truth, her cries rent the air. Lee, at that time struggling to lace a pair of high shoes, straightened, paled, and grabbed a revolver as he dashed out.

In another room a scientist, absorbed in his note-taking, glanced up, frowned, and then—recognizing the voice—shed his white gown and came out. He was too late to do aught but gasp with horror.

In the yard Peggy was half engulfed in a squamous, rubbery something which at first glance he could not analyze.

Lee, his boy, was fighting with the sticky folds, and slowly, surely, losing his own grip upon the earth!

JOHN CORLISS CRANMER was by no means a coward. He stared, cried aloud, then ran indoors, seizing the first two weapons which came to hand—a shotgun and hunting knife which lay in sheath in a cartridged belt across a hook of the hall-tree. The knife was ten inches in length and razor keen.

[31]

Cranmer rushed out again. He saw an indecent fluid something—which as yet he had not had time to classify—lumping itself into a six-foot-high center before his very eyes! It looked like one of the micro-organisms he had studied! One grown to frightful dimensions. An amœba!

There, some minutes suffocated in the rubbery folds—yet still apparent beneath the glistening ooze of this monster—were two bodies.

They were dead. He knew it. Nevertheless he attacked the flowing, senseless monster with his knife. Shot would do no good. And he found that even the deep, terrific slashes made by his knife closed together in a moment and healed. The monster was invulnerable to ordinary attack!

A pair of pseudopods sought out his ankles, attempting to bring him low. Both of these he severed—and escaped. Why did he try? He did not know. The two whom he had sought to rescue were dead, buried under folds of this horrid thing he knew to be his own discovery and fabrication.

Then it was that revulsion and insanity came upon him.

There ended the story of John Corliss Cranmer, save for one hastily scribbled paragraph—evidently written at the time Rori had seen him atop the wall.

May we not supply with assurance the intervening steps?

Cranmer was known to have purchased a whole pen of hogs a day or two following the tragedy. These animals never were seen again. During the time the wall was being constructed is it not reasonable to assume that he fed the giant organism within—to keep it quiet? His scientist brain must have visualized clearly the havoc and horror which could be wrought by the loathsome thing if it ever were driven by hunger to flow away from the Lodge and prey upon the countryside!

With the wall once in place, he evidently figured that starvation or some other means which he could supply would kill the thing. One of the means had been made by setting fire to several piles of the disgorged timbers; probably this had no effect whatever.

The amœba was to accomplish still more destruction. In the throes of hunger it threw its gigantic, formless strength against the house walls from the inside; then every edible morsel within was assimilated, the logs, rafters and other fragments being worked out through the contractile vacuole.

During some of its last struggles, undoubtedly, the side wall of brick was weakened—not to collapse, however, until the giant amœba no longer could take advantage of the breach.

In final death lassitude, the amœba stretched itself out in a thin layer over the ground. There it succumbed, though there is no means of estimating how long a time intervened.

The last paragraph in Cranmer’s notebook, scrawled so badly that it is possible some words I have not deciphered correctly, read as follows:

It is better not to think of that last leap, and the struggle of an insane man in the grip of the dying monster.

[32]

UNCLE JIM was dead.

I could scarcely believe it, but the little yellow missive, which had just been handed to me by the Western Union messenger boy, left no room for doubt. It was short and convincing:

I should explain here that Uncle Jim, my mother’s brother, was my only living near relative. Having lost both father and mother in the Iroquois Theatre Fire at the age of twelve years, I should have been forced to abandon my plans for a high school and commercial education but for his noble generosity. In his home town he was believed to be comfortably well off, but I had learned not long since that it had meant a considerable sacrifice for him to furnish the fifteen hundred dollars a year to put me through high school and business college, and I was glad when the time came for me to find employment, and thus become independent of his bounty.

My position as bookkeeper for a commission firm in South Water Street, while not particularly remunerative, at least provided a comfortable living, and[33] I was happy in it—until the message of his death came.

I took the telegram to my employer, obtained a week’s leave-of-absence, and was soon on the way to the Union Depot.

All the way to Peoria I thought about Uncle Jim. He was not old—only forty-five—and when I had last seen him he had seemed particularly hale and hearty. This sudden loss of my nearest and dearest friend was, therefore, almost unbelievable. I carried a leaden weight in my heart, and it seemed that the lump in my throat would choke me.

Uncle Jim had lived on a three-hundred-and-twenty acre farm near Peoria. Being a bachelor, he had employed a housekeeper. The farm work was looked after by a family named Severs—man, wife and two sons—who lived in the tenant house, perhaps a thousand feet to the rear of the owner’s residence, in convenient proximity to the barn, silos and other farm buildings.

As I have said, my uncle’s neighbors believed him to be comfortably well off, but I knew the place was mortgaged to the limit, so that the income from the fertile acres was practically absorbed by overhead expenses and interest.

Had my uncle been a business man in the true sense of the term, no doubt he could have been wealthy. But he was a scientist and dreamer, inclined to let the farm run itself while he devoted his time to study and research. His hobby was psychic phenomena. His thirst for more facts regarding the human mind was insatiable. In the pursuit of his favorite study, he had attended seances in this country and abroad with the leading spiritualists of the world.

He was a member of the London Society for Psychical Research, as well as the American Society, and corresponded regularly with noted scientists, psychologists and spiritualists. As an authority on psychic phenomena, he had contributed articles to the leading scientific publications from time to time, and was the author of a dozen well-known books on the subject.

Thus, grief-filled though I was, my mind kept presenting to me memory after memory of Uncle Jim’s scientific attainments and scholarly life, while the rumbling car wheels left the miles behind; and the thought that such a man had been lost to me and to the world was almost unbearable.

I arrived in Peoria shortly before midnight, and was glad to find Joe Severs, son of my uncle’s tenant, waiting for me with a flivver. After a five-mile ride in inky darkness over a rough road, we came to the farm.

I was greeted at the door by the housekeeper, Mrs. Rhodes, and one of two men, nearby neighbors, who had kindly volunteered to “set up” with the corpse. The woman’s eyes were red with weeping, and her tears flowed afresh as she led me to the room where my uncle’s body lay in a gray casket.

A dim kerosene lamp burned in one corner of the room, and after the silent watcher had greeted me with a handclasp and a sad shake of the head, I walked up to view the remains of my dearest friend on earth.

As I looked down on that noble, kindly face, the old lump, which had for a time subsided, came back in my throat. I expected tears, heartrending sobs, but they did not come. I seemed dazed—bewildered.

Suddenly, and apparently against my own reason, I heard myself saying aloud, “He is not dead—only sleeping.”

When the watchers looked at me in amazement I repeated, “Uncle Jim is not dead! He is only sleeping.”

Mrs. Rhodes looked compassionately at me, and by a meaning glance at the others said as plainly as if she had spoken, “His mind is affected.”

She and Mr. Newberry, the neighbor whom I had first met, gently led me from the room. I was, myself dumfounded at the words I had uttered, nor could I find a reason for them.

My uncle was undoubtedly dead, at least as far as this physical world was concerned. There was nothing about the appearance of the pale, rigid corpse to indicate life, and he had, without doubt, been pronounced dead by a physician. Why, then, had I made this unusual, uncalled for—in fact, ridiculous—statement? I did not know. I[34] concluded that I must have been crazed with grief—beside myself for the moment.

I had announced my intention to keep watch with Mr. Newberry and the other neighbor, Mr. Glitch, but was finally prevailed upon to go to my room, on the ground that my nerves were overwrought and I must have rest. It was decided, therefore, that the housekeeper, who had scarcely slept a wink the night before, and I should retire, while the two neighbors alternately kept two-hour watches, one sitting up while the other slept on a davenport near the fireplace.

Mrs. Rhodes conducted me to my room. I quickly undressed, blew out the kerosene light and got into bed. It was some time before I could compose myself for sleep, and I remember that just as I was dozing off I seemed to hear my name pronounced as if someone were calling me from a great distance:

“Billy!” and then, in the same far-away voice: “Save me, Billy!”

I had slept for perhaps fifteen minutes when I awoke with a start. Either I was dreaming, or something about the size and shape of a half-grown conger eel was creeping across my bed.

For the moment I was frozen with horror, as I perceived the white, nameless thing, in the dim light from my window. With a convulsive movement I threw the bedclothes from me, leaped to the floor, struck a match, and quickly lit the lamp. Then, taking my heavy walking-stick in hand, I advanced on the bed.

Moving the bedclothing cautiously with the stick and prodding here and there, I at length discovered that the thing was gone. The door was closed, there was no transom, and the window was screened. I therefore concluded that it must still be in the room.

With this thought in mind, I carefully searched every inch of space, looking under and behind the furniture, with the lamp in one hand and stick in the other. I then removed all the bedding and opened the dresser drawers, and found—nothing!

After completely satisfying myself that the animal I had seen, or perhaps seemed to see, could not possibly be in the room, I decided that I had been suffering from a nightmare, and again retired. Because of my nervousness from the experience, I did not again blow out the light, but instead turned it low.

After a half hour of restless turning and tossing, I succeeded in going to sleep; this time for possibly twenty minutes, when I was once more aroused. The same feeling of horror came over me, as I distinctly heard a rolling, scraping sound beneath my bed. I kept perfectly still and waited while the sound went on. Something was apparently creeping underneath my bed, and it seemed to be moving toward the foot, slowly and laboriously.

Stealthily I sat up, leaned forward and peered over the foot-board. The sounds grew more distinct, and a white, round mass, which looked like a porcupine rolled into a ball with bristles projecting, emerged from under my bed. I uttered a choking cry of fright, and the thing disappeared before my eyes!

Without waiting to search the room further, I leaped from the bed to the spot nearest the door, wrenched it open, and started on a run for the living-room, attired only in pajamas. As I neared the room, however, part of my lost courage came back to me, and I slowed down to a walk. I reasoned that a precipitate entrance into the room would arouse the household, and that possibly, after all, I was only the victim of a second nightmare. I resolved, therefore, to say nothing to the watchers about my experience, but to tell them only that I was unable to sleep and had come down for company.

Newberry met me at the door.

“Why what’s the matter?” he asked. “You look pale. Anything wrong?”

“Nothing but a slight attack of indigestion. Couldn’t sleep, so I came down for company.”

“You should have brought a dressing-gown or something. You may take cold.”

“Oh, I feel quite comfortable enough,” I said.

[35]

Newberry stirred the logs in the fireplace to a blaze, and we moved our chairs close to the flickering circle of warmth. The dim light was still burning in the corner of the room, and Glitch was snoring on the davenport.

“Funny thing,” said Newberry, “the instructions your uncle left.”

“Instructions? What instructions?” I asked.

“Why, didn’t you know? But of course you didn’t. He left written instructions with Mrs. Rhodes that in case of his sudden death his body was not to be embalmed, packed in ice, or preserved in any way, and that it was not to be buried under any consideration, until decomposition had set in. He also ordered that no autopsy should be held until it had been definitely decided that putrefaction had taken place.”

“Have these instructions been carried out?” I asked.

“To the letter,” he replied.

“And how long will it take for putrefaction to set in?”

“The doctors say it will probably be noticed in twenty-four hours.”

I reflected on this strange order of my uncle’s. It seemed to me that he must have feared being buried alive, or something of the sort, and I recalled several instances, of which I had heard, where bodies, upon being exhumed, were found turned over in their coffins, while others had apparently torn their hair and clawed the lid in their efforts to escape from a living tomb.

I was beginning to feel sleepy again and had just started to doze, when Newberry grasped my arm.

“Look!” he exclaimed, pointing toward the body.

I looked quickly and seemed to see something white for an instant, near the nostrils.

“Did you see it?” he asked breathlessly.

“See what?” I replied, wishing to learn if he had seen the same thing I had.

“I saw something white, like a thick vapor or filmy veil, come out of his nose. When I spoke to you it seemed to jerk back. Didn’t you see it?”

“Thought I saw a white flash there when you spoke, but it must have been imagination.”

The time had now arrived for Glitch to watch, so my companion wakened him, and they exchanged places. Newberry was soon asleep, and Glitch, being a stoical German, said little. I presently became drowsy, and was asleep in my chair in a short time.

A cry from Glitch brought me to my feet. “Vake up and help catch der cat!”

“What cat?” demanded Newberry, also awakening.

“Der big vite cat,” said Glitch, visibly excited. “Chust now he came der door through and yumped der coffin in.”

The three of us rushed to the coffin, but there was no sign of a cat, and everything seemed undisturbed.

“Dot’s funny,” said Glitch. “Maybe it’s hiding someveres in der room.”

We searched the room, without result.

“You’ve been seeing things,” said Newberry.

“What did the animal look like?” I asked.

“Vite, und big as a dog. It kommt der door in, so, und galloped across der floor, so, und yumped in der casket chust like dot. Ach! It vos a fierce-looking beast.”

Glitch was very much in earnest and gesticulated rapidly as he described the appearance and movements of the feline. Perhaps I should have felt inclined to laugh, had it not been for my own experience that night. I noticed, too, that Newberry’s expression was anything but jocular.

It was now nearly four o’clock, time for Newberry to watch, but Glitch protested that he could not sleep another wink, so the three of us drew chairs up close to the fire. On each side of the fireplace was a large window. The shades were completely drawn and the windows were draped with heavy lace curtains. Happening to look up at the window to the left, I noticed something of a mouse-gray color hanging near the top of one of the curtains. As I looked, I fancied I saw a slight movement as of a wing being stretched a bit and[36] then folded, and the thing took on the appearance of a large vampire bat, hanging upside down.

I called the attention of my companions to our singular visitor, and both saw it as plainly as I.

“How do you suppose he got in?” asked Newberry.

“Funny ve didn’t see him before,” said Glitch.

I picked up the fire tongs and Newberry seized the poker. Creeping softly up to the curtain, I stood on tiptoe and reached up to seize the animal with the tongs. It was too quick for me, however, and fluttered out of my reach. There followed a chase around the room, which lasted several minutes. Seeing that it would be impossible for us to capture the creature by this method, we gave up the chase, whereupon it calmed down and suspended itself from the picture molding, upside down.

On seeing this, Glitch, who had taken a heavy book from the table, hurled it at our unwelcome visitor. His aim was good, and the thing uttered a squeak as it was crushed against the wall.

At this moment I thought I heard a moan from the direction of the casket, but could not be certain.

Newberry and I rushed over to where the book had fallen, intent on dispatching the thing with poker and tongs, but only the book lay on the floor. The creature had completely disappeared.

I picked up the book, and noticed, as I did so, a grayish smear on the back cover. Taking this over to the light, we saw that it had a soapy appearance. As we looked, the substance apparently became absorbed, either by the atmosphere or into the cloth cover of the book. There remained, however, a dry, white, faintly-defined splotch on the book cover.

“What do you make of it?” I asked them.

“Strange!” said Newberry.

I turned to Glitch, and noticed for the first time that his eyes were wide with fear. He shook his head and cast furtive glances toward the casket.

“What do you think it is?” I asked.

“A vampire, maybe. A real vampire.”

“What do you mean by a real vampire?”

Glitch then described how, in the folk lore of his native land, there were stories current of corpses which lived on in the grave. It was believed that the spirits of these corpses assumed the form of huge vampire bats at night, and went about sucking the blood of living persons, with which they would return to the grave from time to time and nourish the corpse. This proceeding was kept up indefinitely, unless the corpse were exhumed and a stake driven through the heart.

He related, in particular, the story of a Hungarian named Arnold Paul, whose body was dug up after it had been buried forty days. It was found that his cheeks were flushed with blood, and that his hair, beard and nails had grown in the grave. When the stake was driven through his heart, he had uttered a frightful shriek and a torrent of blood gushed from his mouth.

This vampire story seized on my imagination in a peculiar way. I thought again of my uncle’s strange request regarding the disposition of his body, and of the strange apparitions I had seen. For the moment I was a convert to the vampire theory.

My better judgment, however, soon convinced me that there could not be such a thing as a vampire, and, even if there were, a man whose character had been so noble as that of my deceased uncle would most certainly never resort to such hideous and revolting practices.

We sat together in silence as the first faint streaks of dawn showed in the east. A few minutes later the welcome aroma of coffee and frying bacon greeted our nostrils, and Mrs. Rhodes came in to announce that breakfast was ready.

After breakfast, my newly-made friends departed for their homes, both assuring me that they would be glad to come and watch with me again that night.

However, I read something in the uneasy manner of Glitch which led[37] me to believe that I could not count on him, and I was, therefore, not greatly surprised when he telephoned me an hour later, stating that his wife was ill, and that he would not be able to come.

I STROLLED outdoors to enjoy a cigar, comforted by the rays of the morning sun after my night’s experience.

It was pleasant, I reflected, to be once more in the realm of the natural, to see the trees attired in the autumn foliage, to feel the rustle of fallen leaves underfoot, to fill my lungs with the spicy, invigorating October air.

A gray squirrel scampered across my pathway, his cheek pouches bulging with acorns. A flock of blackbirds, migrating southward, stopped for a few moments in the trees above my head, chattering vociferously; then resumed their journey with a sudden whirr of wings and a few hoarse notes of farewell.

“It is but a step,” I reflected, “from the natural to the supernatural.”

This observation started a new line of thought. After all, could anything be supernatural—above nature? Nature, according to my belief, was only another name for God, eternal mind, omnipotent, omnipresent, omniscient ruler of the universe. If He were omnipotent, could anything take place contrary to His laws? Obviously not.

The word “supernatural” was, after all, only an expression invented by man in his finite ignorance, to define those things which he did not understand. Telegraphy, telephony, the phonograph, the moving picture—all would have been regarded with superstition by an age less advanced than ours. Man had only to become familiar with the laws governing them, in order to discard the word “supernatural” as applied to their manifestations.

What right, then, had I to term the phenomena, which I had just witnessed, supernatural? I might call them supernormal, but to think of them as supernatural would be to believe the impossible; namely, that that which is all-powerful had been overpowered.

I resolved, then and there, that if further phenomena manifested themselves that night, I would, as far as it were possible, curb my superstition and fear, regard them with the eye of a philosopher, and endeavor to learn their cause, which must necessarily be governed by natural law.

A gray cloud of dust and the whirring of a motor announced the coming of an automobile. The next minute an ancient flivver, with whose bumps of eccentricity I had gained some acquaintance, turned into the driveway and stopped opposite me. Joe Severs, older son of my uncle’s tenant, stepped out and came running toward me.

“Glitch’s wife died this morning,” he panted, “and he swears Mr. Braddock is a vampire and sucked her blood.”

“What rot!” I replied. “Nobody believes him, of course?”

“I ain’t so sure of that,” said Joe. “Some of the farmers are takin’ it mighty serious. One of the Langdon boys, first farm north of here, was took sick this mornin’. Doctor don’t know what’s the matter of him. Folks say it looks mighty queer.”

Mrs. Rhodes appeared on the front porch.

“A telephone call for you, sir,” she said.

I hastened to the ’phone. A woman was speaking.

“This is Mrs. Newberry,” she said. “My husband is dreadfully ill, and asked me to tell you that he cannot come to sit up with you tonight.”

I thanked the lady, offered my condolences, and tendered my sincere wishes for her husband’s speedy recovery. This done, I wrote a note of sympathy to Mr. Glitch, and dispatched Joe with it.

Here, indeed, was a pretty situation. Glitch’s wife dead, Newberry seriously ill, and the whole countryside frightened by this impossible vampire story! I knew it would be useless to ask any of the other neighbors to keep watch with me. Obviously, I was destined to face the terrors of the coming night[38] alone. Was I equal to the task? Could my nerves, already unstrung by the previous night’s experience, withstand the ordeal?

I must confess, and not without a feeling of shame, that at this juncture I felt impelled to flee, anywhere, and leave my deceased uncle’s affairs to shape themselves as they would.

With this idea in mind, I repaired to my room and started to pack my grip. Something fell to the floor. It was my uncle’s last letter, received only the day before the telegram arrived announcing his death. I hesitated—then picked it up and opened it. The last paragraph held my attention:

A flush of guilt came over me. The reproach of my conscience was keen and painful. I had been about to commit a cowardly, dishonorable deed.

“Thank God, for the accidental intervention of that letter,” I said fervently.

My resolution was firmly made now. I would see the thing through at all costs. The noble love, the generous self-sacrifice of my uncle, should not go unrequited.

I quickly unpacked my bag and walked downstairs. The rest of the day was uneventful, but the night—how I dreaded the coming of the night! As I stood on the porch and watched the last faint glow of sunset slowly fading, I wished that I, like Joshua, might cause the sun and moon to stand still.

Twilight came on all too quickly, accelerated by a bank of heavy clouds which appeared on the western horizon; and darkness succeeded twilight with unwonted rapidity.

I entered the house and trod the hallway leading to the living-room, with much the same feeling, no doubt, that a convict experiences when entering the death cell.

The housekeeper was just placing the lamp, freshly cleaned and filled, in the room. Joe Severs’ younger brother, Sam, had placed logs in the fireplace, with kindling and paper beneath them, ready for lighting. Mrs. Rhodes bade me a kindly “Good-night, sir,” and departed noiselessly.

At last the dreaded moment had arrived. I was alone with the nameless powers of darkness.

I shuddered involuntarily. A damp chill pervaded the air, and I ignited the kindling beneath the logs in the fireplace. Then, drawing the shades to shut out the pitchy blackness of the night, I lighted my pipe and stood in the warm glow.

Under the genial influence of pipe and warmth, my feeling of fear was temporarily dissipated. Taking a book from the library table, I settled down to read. It was called “The Reality of Materialization Phenomena,” and had been written by my uncle. The publishers were Bulwer & Sons, New York and London.

It was apparently a record of the observations made by my uncle at materialization seances in this country and Europe. Contrary to my usual custom on starting a book, I read the author’s introduction. He began by expressing the wish that those who might read the work should first lay aside all prejudice and all preconceived ideas regarding the subject, which were not based on positive knowledge; then weigh the facts as he had found them before drawing a definite conclusion.

The following passage, in particular, held my attention:

A roll of thunder, quickly followed by a rush of wind, rudely interrupted my reading. The housekeeper appeared in the doorway, lamp in hand.

“Would you mind helping me close the windows, sir?” she asked. “There is a big rainstorm coming, and they must be closed quickly, or the furnishings and wall paper will be soaked.”

Together we ascended the stairs. I rushed from window to window, while she lighted the way with the dim lamp. This duty attended to, she again bade me “Good-night,” and I returned to the living-room.

As I entered, I glanced at the casket; then looked again while a feeling of horror crept over me. Either I was dreaming, or it had been completely draped with a white sheet during my absence.

I rubbed my eyes, pinched myself, and advanced to confirm the evidence of my eyesight by the sense of touch. As I extended my hand, the center of the sheet rose in a sharp peak, as if lifted by some invisible presence, and the entire fabric traveled upward toward the ceiling. I drew back with a cry of dread, watching it with perhaps the same fascination that is experienced by a doomed bird or animal looking into the eyes of a serpent that is about to devour it.

The point touched the ceiling. There was a crash of thunder, accompanied by a blinding flash of lightning which illuminated the room through the sides of the ill-fitting window shades, and I found myself staring at the bare ceiling.

Walking dazedly to the fireplace, I poked the logs until they blazed, and then sat down to collect my thoughts. Torrents of rain were beating against the window panes. Thunder roared and lightning flashed incessantly.

I took up my pipe and was about to light it when a strange sight interrupted me. Something round and flat, about six inches in diameter, and of a grayish color, was moving along the floor from the casket toward the center of the room. I watched it, fascinated, while the blood seemed to congeal in my veins. It did not roll or slide along the floor, but seemed rather to flow forward.

It reminded me, more than anything else, of an amœba, one of those microscopic, unicellular animalcule which I had examined in the study of zoology: an amœba magnified, perhaps, several million diameters. I could plainly see it put forth projections, resembling pseudopods, from time to time, and again withdraw them quickly into the body mass.

The lighted match burned my fingers, and I dropped it on the hearth. In the meantime the creature had reached the center of the room and stopped. A metamorphosis was now taking place before my eyes. To my surprise, I beheld, in place of a magnified amœba, a gigantic trilobite, larger, it is true, than any specimen which has ever been found, but, nevertheless, true to form in every detail.

The trilobite, in turn, changed to a brilliantly-hued star-fish with active, wriggling tentacles. The star-fish became a crab, and the crab, a porpoise swimming about in the air as if it had[40] been water. The porpoise then became a huge green lizard that crawled about the floor.

Soon the lizard grew large webbed wings, its tail shortened, its jaws lengthened out with a pelicanlike pouch beneath them, and its body seemed partially covered with scales of a rusty black color. I afterward learned that this was a phantasmic representation of a pterodactyl, or prehistoric flying reptile. To me, in my terrified condition, it looked like a creature from hell.

The thing stood erect, stretched its wings and beat the air as if to try them; then rose and circled twice about the room, flapping lazily like a heron, and once more alighted in the middle of the floor.

It folded its wings carefully, and I noticed many new changes taking place. The scales were becoming feathers—the legs lengthened out and were encased in a thick, scaly skin. The claws thickened into two-toed feet, like those of an ostrich. The head also looked ostrich-like, while the wings were shortened and feathered, but not plumed. The bird was much larger than any ostrich or emu I have ever seen, and stalked about majestically, its head nearly touching the ceiling.

Soon it, too, stopped in the center of the room—the neck grew shorter and shorter—the feathers became fur—the wings lengthened into arms which reached below the knees, and I was face to face with a huge, gorilla-like creature. It roared horribly, casting quick glances about the room, its deep-set eyes glowing like coals of fire.

I felt that my end had come, but could make no move to escape. I wanted to get up and leap through the window, but my nerveless limbs would not function. As I looked, the fur on the creature turned to a thin covering of hair, and it began to assume a manlike form. I closed my eyes and shuddered.

When I opened them a moment later, I beheld what might have been the “missing link,” half man, half beast. The face, with its receding forehead and beetling brows, was apelike and yet manlike. Wrapped about its loins was a large tiger skin. In its right hand it brandished a huge, knotted club.

Gradually it became more manlike and less apelike. The club changed to a spear, the spear to a sword, and I beheld a Roman soldier, fully accoutered for battle, with helmet, armor, target and sandals.

The Roman soldier became a knight, and the knight a musketeer. The musketeer became a colonial soldier.

At that instant there was a crash of glass, and the branch of a tree projected through the window on the right of the fireplace. The shade flew up with a snap, and the soldier disappeared, as a brilliant flash of lightning illuminated the room.

I rushed to the window, and saw that the overhanging limb of an elm had been broken off by the wind and hurled through the glass. The rain was coming in in torrents.

The housekeeper, who had heard the noise, appeared in the doorway. Seeing the rain blowing in at the window, she left and returned a moment later with a hammer, tacks and a folded sheet. I tacked the sheet to the window frame with difficulty, on account of the strong wind, and again pulled down the shade.

Mrs. Rhodes retired.

I consulted my watch. It lacked just one minute of midnight.

Only half of the night gone! Would I be strong enough to endure the other half?

[41]

AYE, SIR, since you have asked, there has been many a guess about where Black Jean finally disappeared to.

He was a French-Canadian and a weed of a man—six-feet-five in his socks; his eyes were little and close together and black; he wore a long thin mustache that drooped; and he was as hairy as his two bears.

He just drifted up here to the North, I guess, picking up what scanty living he could by wrestling with the bears and making them wrestle each other. ’Twas in the King William hotel that many’s the time I’ve seen Black Jean drink whisky by the cupful and feed it to the bears. Yes, he was interesting, especially to us boys.

Along about the time the French-Canadian and his trick animals were getting to be an old story, there comes—begging your pardon—a Yankee, who said he would put up a windmill at Morgan’s Cove if he could get the quicklime to make the mortar with.

Black Jean said he knew how to make lime and if they would give him time he would put up a kiln. So the French-Canadian went to work and built that limekiln you see standing there.

I was a youngster then, and I know how Black Jean, a little later, built his cabin. I used to hide and watch him and his bears. They worked like men together, with an ugly-looking woman that had joined them. They put up the cabin, the bears doing most of the heavy lifting work.

The place he picked for the cabin—over there where that clump of trees.... No, not that way—more to the right, half a mile about—that place is called “Split Hill,” because there is a deep crack in the rock made by some earthquake. The French-Canadian built his cabin across the crack, and as the woman quarreled with him about the bears sleeping in the cabin he made a trap-door in the floor of the building and stuck a small log down it, so the bears could climb up and down from their den below.

The kiln, you can see for yourself, is a pit-kiln, so called because it is in the side of a hill and the limestone is fed from the top and the fuel from the bottom. Like a big chimney it works, and[42] when Black Jean got the fire started and going good it would roar up through the stone and cook it. You could see the blaze for a mile.

One day Black Jean came to the King William looking for that Yankee. Seems that individual hadn’t paid for his lime. When Black Jean didn’t find him at the tavern he started for the Cove.

I have never known who struck first; but they say the Yankee called Black Jean a damn frog-eater and there was a fight; and that afternoon the French-Canadian came to the tavern with his bears and all three of them got drunk. Black Jean used to keep a muzzle on the larger of the bears, but by tilting the brute’s head he could pour whisky down its throat. They got pretty drunk, and then someone dared Black Jean to wrestle the muzzled bear.

There was a big tree standing in front of the tavern, and close by was a worn-out pump having a big iron handle. Black Jean and the bear went at it under the tree, the two of them clinching and hugging and swearing until they both gasped for air. This day the big bear was rougher than usual, and Black Jean lost his temper. It was his custom when he got in too tight a place to kick the bear in the stomach; and this time he began using his feet.

Suddenly we heard a rip of clothing. The bear had unsheathed his claws; they were sharp as razors and tore Black Jean’s clothing into shreds and brought blood. Black Jean broke loose, his eyes flashing, his teeth gritting. Like lightning, he grabbed his dirk and leaped at the brute and jabbed the knife into its eye and gave a quick twist. The eyeball popped out and hung down by shreds alongside the bear’s jaw.

Never can I forget the human-sounding shriek that bear gave, and how my father caught me up and scrambled behind the tree as the bear started for Black Jean. But the animal was near blinded, and Black Jean had time to jerk the iron handle out of the pump; and then, using it as if it didn’t weigh any more than a spider’s thought, he beat the bear over the head. He knocked it cold.

Then my father said: “That bear will kill you some day, Jean.”

Black Jean stuck the iron pump handle back into its place.

“Bagosh! you t’ink dat true?” he sneered. “Mebbe I keel her, eh?”

Our place was next to the piece where Black Jean lived, and it was only next morning we heard a loud yelling over at Split Hill. I was a little fellow but spry, and when I reached Black Jean’s cabin I was ahead of my father. I saw the French-Canadian leaning against a stump all alone, the blood streaming from his face.

“By God, M’sieu!” he blurted, when my father came up. “She scrat’ my eye out.”

My father thought he meant the woman.

“Who did?” he asked.

“Dat dam’ bear,” said Black Jean. “She just walk up an’ steeck her foots in my eye.”

Father caught hold of Black Jean and helped him to the cabin.

“Which bear was it?” he asked.

Black Jean slumped forward without answering. He had fainted.

I helped father get him into the house—he was more than one man could carry—and just as we went inside there was a growling and snarling, and the big muzzled bear went sliding down that pole to her nest.

[43]

Well, we looked all around for the woman, expecting to get her help; but we couldn’t find her, which was the first we knew that she had left Black Jean.

It took the French-Canadian’s eye two or three months to heal, and then he came to our place to get something to wear over the empty socket. So father hammered out a circular piece of copper about twice the size of a silver dollar and bored a hole in opposite sides for a leather thong to hold it in place. Black Jean always wore it after that. He seemed vain of that piece of copper, for he used to keep it polished and shined until it glowed on a bright day like a bit of fire.

THAT fall the settlers opened up the first school in the district and imported a woman teacher from “The States.”

I must tell you about that teacher. She was a thin, little mite of a thing that you would think the wind would blow away. Some said she was pretty and some that she wasn’t. I could have called her pretty if her eyes hadn’t been so black—hereabouts you don’t see many eyes that are black—brown, maybe, and blue and gray, but not black. Fact is, there were just two people in these parts having those black eyes: Black Jean and the little mite of a school teacher.

Well she came. And she hadn’t been here a month before it was noticed that Black Jean was coming to town more regular. And, what is more, he was coming down by the school and waiting around there with his bears.

This went on. They say that at first she didn’t pay any attention to him, but I can’t speak for that as I was too young. But in time there was talk and it came to me: then I watched. And I remember one afternoon after the teacher let us out we all went over to where the bears were. The teacher followed.

Black Jean was grinning and showing his white teeth.

“Beautiful ladee,” says he. “Sooch eyes, mooch black like the back of a water-bug.”

Teacher smiled and said something I couldn’t understand. It must have been French. I had never seen a Frenchman around women before, and Black Jean’s manners were new to me. Here was a big weed of a man bowing and scraping and standing with his cap in his hand. We boys laughed at that—holding his cap in his hand.

The long and short of it was the French-Canadian was sparking the school teacher. And everybody talked about it, of course; they said it was a shame; they said if she didn’t have sense enough to see what kind of a man he was, someone should tell her.

I have often wondered since what would have happened if anybody had gone to that woman with stories of Black Jean. I know I’d never dared to, because, without knowing why, I was afraid of her. I guess maybe that is why the others didn’t, either.

There was no mistaking she was encouraging to Black Jean. She didn’t seem to object in the slightest to his attentions, and I can see them yet: her, little and pretty and in a white dress, and Black Jean lingering there with his bears, dirty, and towering head and shoulders above her.

BLACK JEAN kept coming and people went on talking, and finally somebody said she had been to Split Hill.

And one day I began to understand it, too. It was the time she was punishing some pupils. Three of them were lined up before her, and she started along whacking the outstretched hands with a stout ruler. Right in front of where I was sitting stood Ben Anger. He was the smallest of the lot and was trembling like a leaf.

Her first clip at him must have raised a welt on his hands, because he whimpered. She hit him again, and he closed his fingers. At that she caught up the jackknife he’d been whittling at his desk with and pried at his fingers until the blood came.

Sitting where I was, I saw her face while she was at it. It had the expression of a female devil. I didn’t say anything[44] to my folks about that; but I wasn’t surprised when word came next week that we were to have a new teacher—the little one had gone to live with Black Jean.

Well, there was more talk—talk of rail-riding the pair of them out of the district. But nothing was done, and one evening, a month later, there was a rap at our door and the French-Canadian staggered in. He was carrying the school teacher in his arms.

“What has happened?” my father demanded.

“Dat dam’ leetle bear,” snarled Black Jean—“She try to keel Madam.”

He laid the woman on the bed. She looked pretty badly cut up, and we sent for the doctor. Mother would only let her stay in the house that night, being shocked at the way she was living with the French-Canadian.

It turned out she wasn’t much hurt, and father kept trying to find out just what had happened. But he couldn’t. I knew, however. Most of my time, when I wasn’t in school or running errands for the folks, I was spending watching that couple, and only that afternoon I had seen her stick a hot poker into the side of the smaller bear and wind it up into his fur until he screamed. And the bear must have bided his time and gone for her—those brutes were just like folks.

Next morning Black Jean came and got his woman, and I stole out and followed. I knew there would be more to it. I was right. The two of them went into the cabin, and pretty soon I heard a rumpus and out comes Black Jean with the smaller bear and behind them the woman. She was carrying a cowhide whip.

The French-Canadian had a chain looped about each forepaw of the animal, and, pulling it under a tree, he tossed the free end of the chain over a stout branch and yanked the bear off his feet. Then he wound the end of the chain about the trunk of the tree and sat down. So the bear hung, his feet trussed, and squirming and helpless.

And there in that clear day and warm sunshine, the woman started at the bear with the whip. She lashed it until it cried like a child. Black Jean watched the proceedings and grinned.

“Bah!” he shouted, after the woman had begun to tire. “She t’ink you foolin’. Heet harder. Heet the eyes!”

Again the woman went at it and kept it up until the bear quit moaning, and its head drooped and its body got limp. I was feeling sick at the sight, and I stole away.

But next morning, when I crawled back, there was the bear still hanging. It was dead.

THAT woman was a fair mate for Black Jean.

She kept him working steady over here to this kiln—most any night you could see the reflection of the blaze—and it was something to watch Black Jean when he was feeding his fire with the light playing on that copper piece and making it look like a big red eye flashing in the night. I saw it many times.

And it was noticed that Black Jean wasn’t getting drunk any more, and he wasn’t wrestling the one-eyed bear any more. He had good reason for that. I began to believe Black Jean was afraid of that brute.

But he made it work for him in the kiln, using the whip, and it was a curious animal, growling and snarling most of the time, as it pulled and lifted big sticks of wood and lugged them to the kiln.

When Black Jean wasn’t working he was over at the cabin where he would follow the woman around like a dog. She could make him do anything. She was getting thinner and crosser, and I was more afraid of her than ever I was of Black Jean.

Once she caught me watching her from my spying-place in a tree. She had been petting the one-eyed bear, rubbing his snout and feeding him sugar. She ran to the house and got a rifle and, my friends, I came down out of that tree lickety split.

[45]

When I reached the ground she didn’t say a word—just let her eyes rest on mine. After that I was more careful.

THEN something happened.

I was hoeing corn one afternoon in a field next the road when I spied a woman coming along from the village. She was big and blowsy and was wearing a shawl. I knew she was headed for Black Jean’s, because she climbed through the fence on his side of the road.

Keeping her in sight, I followed along my side and crossed over when I came to a place where she couldn’t see me. I followed her because I knew she was the woman who had come to Black Jean when he first landed in the district. She walked up to the cabin, and I was wondering who she would find home, when out comes Black Jean.

“Sacre!” he exclaimed, putting one hand to his eye. “Spik queeck! Ees it Marie?”

“Yes,” the woman said. “I have come back.”

Black Jean looked around fearfully.

“Wat you want?” he demanded.

“I’d like to know who knocked your eye out,” she laughed.

Black Jean did not laugh.

“You steal hunder’ dollar from me an’ run ’way,” he snarled. “Bagosh! You give me dat monee.”

“You fool!” said the woman. “You think I don’t know where you got that money? You killed—”

A sound of rustling leaves in the wood nearby interrupted.

“Ssh!” hissed Black Jean, his face blanching. “For de love o’ God, nod so loud.”

He listened a moment; then his expression grew crafty. His teeth showed, and he went close to the woman and said something and started into the cabin.

The next instant I knew someone else had seen them. It was no other than the little ex-school teacher—and she was running away! I lay still a moment, scared out of my wits. Then I went home.

“Did you see Black Jean’s wife?” my mother asked.

“You mean the school teacher woman?” I said.

“Yes,” my mother said. “Who else?”

“I did,” I said, “a while ago.”

“I mean just now,” said my mother, breathing quick. “She rushed in here, right into the house, and before I could stop her she snatched your father’s rifle from the wall and ran out.”

I DIDN’T wait to hear more.

I set off through the fields for Black Jean’s. Before I had run half the distance, I heard shooting, and it was father’s rifle—I knew the sound of her only too well.

When I got to my spying-place it was all quiet at Black Jean’s. I could not see a thing stirring about the cabin.

Then I thought of mother and started home. Father had gone over to the Cove that morning, with a load of wheat for the Yankee’s mill, and wasn’t to get back until late. So mother and I waited.

It was nearly one o’clock in the morning when we heard father’s wagon, and I rushed outside.

“Hello, son,” he exclaimed. “You’re up late. And here’s mother, too.”

Father listened to what we told him, without saying a word.

“Well,” he said, when we had finished. “I don’t really see anything to worry about. Black Jean can take care of himself. Look there!”

He was pointing over here to this limekiln.

“Jean’s had her loaded for a week,” said father, “waiting for better weather.”

Later, in the house, my father said: “It is none of our business, anyway.”

And in a little he added, as if worried some: “But I am going over there after my rifle.”

THE following Sunday—three days later—father and I went to Black Jean’s to get the rifle.

The door of the cabin opened, and the little woman came out. She was carrying the rifle. Somehow, she looked thin and old and her hands were like[46] claws. But her eyes were bright and as sharp as the teeth of a weazel trap.

“I suppose,” she said, as cool as a cucumber and as sweet as honey, “you have come after the rifle.”

“That is what,” said my father, sternly.

She handed it over.

“Please apologize to your wife for me,” she said, “for the sudden way I took it. I was in a hurry. I saw a deer down by the marsh.”

“Did you get the deer?” I piped in.

“No,” she said. “I missed it.”

Father and I started away. But he stopped and called: “Where is Black Jean this morning?”

“Black Jean!” she laughed. “Oh, he’s got another sweetheart. He has gone away with her.”

“Good-day,” said father.

“Good-day,” said she.

And that was the end of that.

Neither Black Jean nor the big blowsy woman was ever seen again, nor hide nor hair of them. But there was lots of talk. You see, there hadn’t been any deer in these parts for many years; and besides it just was not possible for so well known a character as Black Jean to vanish so completely, without leaving a single trace.

Well, finally someone laid information in the county seat and over comes a smart young chap. He questioned father and mother and made me tell him all I knew, and took it all down in writing; then he gets a constable and goes over and they arrest the little black-eyed woman.

There was no trouble about it. They say she just smiled and asked what she was being arrested for—and they told her for the murder of Black Jean. She didn’t say anything to that; only asked that someone feed the big one-eyed bear during the time she was locked up.

Then the people started coming. They came on horseback, they came afoot, they came in canoes, they came in lumber wagons—no matter how far away they lived—and brought their own food along. I calculate near every soul in the district turned out and made it a sort of general holiday and lay-off, for certain it is that no one cared anything about Black Jean himself.

Every inch of the land hereabouts was searched; they poked along the entire length of that earthquake crack, and in the clearings, and in the bush, looking for fresh-turned earth. But they could not find a thing—not a thing!

Now you gentlemen know that you can’t convict a person for murder unless you have got positive proof that murder’s been done—the dead body itself. Which was the case here, and that smart youth from the county seat had to let the little woman go free. So she came back to the cabin, living there as quiet as you please and minding her own precise business.

HERE is a pocket-piece I have had for some time. You can see for yourself that it is copper.

It is the thing my father made for Black Jean to wear over his bad eye. I found that piece of copper two years after the little woman died—near twelve years after Black Jean disappeared. And I found it in the ashes and stone at the bottom of the limekiln standing there, half-tumbled down.

A lot of people hereabouts say it doesn’t follow that Black Jean’s body was burned in the kiln—cremated, I guess you city chaps would call it. They can’t figure out how the mischief a little ninety-pound woman could have lugged those two bodies after she shot them with my father’s rifle, the distance from the cabin to the kiln—a good half mile and more.

They point out that the body of Black Jean must have weighed over two hundred pounds, not to mention that the other woman was big and fat. But they make me weary.

It is as simple as the nose on your face: The big one-eyed bear did the job for her!

[47]

THE END of this story was first brought to my attention when Fromwiller returned from his trip to Mount Kemmel, with a very strange tale indeed and one extremely hard to believe.

But I believed it enough to go back to the Mount with “From” to see if we could discover anything more. And after digging for awhile at the place where “From’s” story began, we made our way into an old dugout that had been caved in, or at least where all the entrances had been filled with dirt, and there we found, written on German correspondence paper, a terrible story.

We found the story on Christmas day, 1918, while making the trip in the colonel’s machine from Watou, in Flanders, where our regiment was stationed. Of course, you have heard of Mount Kemmel in Flanders: more than once it figured in newspaper reports as it changed hands during some of the fiercest fighting of the war. And when the Germans were finally driven from this point of vantage, in October, 1918, a retreat was started which did not end until it became a race to see who could get into Germany first.

The advance was so fast that the victorious British and French forces had no time to bury their dead, and, terrible as it may seem to those who have not seen it, in December of that year one could see the rotting corpses of the unburied dead scattered here and there over the top of Mount Kemmel. It was a place of ghastly sights and sickening odors. And it was there that we found this tale.

With the chaplain’s help, we translated the story, which follows:

“FOR two weeks I have been buried alive! For two weeks I have not seen daylight, nor heard the sound of another person’s voice. Unless I can find something to do, besides this everlasting digging, I shall go mad. So I shall write. As long as my candles last, I will pass part of the time each day in setting down on paper my experiences.

“Not that I need to do this in order to remember them. God knows that when I get out the first thing I shall do will be to try to forget them! But if I should not get out!...

“I am an Ober-lieutenant in the Imperial German Army. Two weeks ago my regiment was holding Mount Kemmel in Flanders. We were surrounded on three sides and subjected to a terrific artillery fire, but on account of the commanding position we were ordered to hold the Mount to the last man. Our engineers, however, had made things very comfortable. Numerous deep dugouts had been constructed, and in them we were comparatively safe from shell-fire.

“Many of these had been connected by passageways so that there was a regular little underground city, and the majority of the garrison never left the protection of the dugouts. But even under these conditions our casualties were heavy. Lookouts had to be maintained above ground, and once in a while a direct hit by one of the huge railway guns would even destroy some of the dugouts.

[48]

“A little over two weeks ago—I can’t be sure, because I have lost track of the exact number of days—the usual shelling was increased a hundred fold. With about twenty others, I was sleeping in one of the shallower dugouts. The tremendous increase in shelling awakened me with a start, and my first impulse was to go at once into a deeper dugout, which was connected to the one I was in by an underground passageway.

“It was a smaller dugout, built a few feet lower than the one I was in. It had been used as a sort of a storeroom and no one was supposed to sleep there. But it seemed safer to me, and, alone, I crept into it. A thousand times since I have wished I had taken another man with me. But my chances for doing it were soon gone.

“I had hardly entered the smaller dugout when there was a tremendous explosion behind me. The ground shook as if a mine had exploded below us. Whether that was indeed the case, or whether some extra large caliber explosive shell had struck the dugout behind me, I never knew.

“After the shock of the explosion had passed I went back to the passageway. When about half-way along it, I found the timbers above had fallen, allowing the earth to settle, and my way was effectually blocked.

“So I returned to the dugout and waited alone through several hours of terrific shelling. The only other entrance to the dugout I was in was the main entrance from the trench above, and all those who had been above ground had gone into dugouts long before this. So I could not expect anyone to enter while the shelling continued; and when it ceased there would surely be an attack.

“As I did not want to be killed by a grenade thrown down the entrance; I remained awake in order to rush out at the first signs of cessation of the bombardment and join what comrades there might be left on the hill.

“After about six hours of the heavy bombardment, all sound above ground seemed to cease. Five minutes went by, then ten; surely the attack was coming. I rushed to the stairway leading out to the air. I took a couple of strides up the stairs. There was a blinding flash and a deafening explosion.

“I felt myself falling. Then darkness swallowed everything.”

“HOW long I lay unconscious in the dugout I never knew.

“But after what seemed like a long time, I practically grew conscious of a dull ache in my left arm. I could not move it. I opened my eyes and found only darkness. I felt pain and a stiffness all over my body.

“Slowly I rose, struck a match, found a candle and lit it and looked at my watch. It had stopped. I did not know how long I had remained there unconscious. All noise of bombardment had ceased. I stood and listened for some time, but could hear no sound of any kind.

“My gaze fell on the stairway entrance. I started in alarm. The end of the dugout, where the entrance was, was half filled with dirt.

“I went over and looked closer. The entrance was completely filled with dirt at the bottom, and no light of any kind could be seen from above. I went to the passageway to the other dugout, although I remembered it had caved in. I examined the fallen timbers closely. Between two of them I could feel a slight movement of air. Here was an opening to the outside world.

“I tried to move the timbers, as well as I could with one arm, only to precipitate a small avalanche of dirt which filled the crack. Quickly I dug at the dirt until again I could feel the movement of air. This might be the only place where I could obtain fresh air.

“I was convinced that it would take some little work to open up either of the passageways, and I began to feel hungry. Luckily, there was a good supply of canned foods and hard bread, for the officers had kept their rations stored in this dugout. I also found a keg of water and about a dozen bottles of wine, which I discovered to be very good. After I had relieved my appetite and finished one of the bottles of wine, I[49] felt sleepy and, although my left arm pained me considerably, I soon dropped off to sleep.

“The time I have allowed myself for writing is up, so I will stop for today. After I have performed my daily task of digging tomorrow, I shall again write. Already my mind feels easier. Surely help will come soon. At any rate, within two more weeks I shall have liberated myself. Already I am half way up the stairs. And my rations will last that long. I have divided them so they will.”

“YESTERDAY I did not feel like writing after I finished my digging. My arm pained me considerably. I guess I used it too much.

“But today I was more careful with it, and it feels better. And I am worried again. Twice today big piles of earth caved in, where the timbers above were loose, and each time as much dirt fell into the passageway as I can remove in a day. Two days more before I can count on getting out by myself.

“The rations will have to be stretched out some more. The daily amount is already pretty small. But I shall go on with my account.

“From the time I became conscious I started my watch, and since then I have kept track of the days. On the second day I took stock of the food, water, wood, matches, candles, etc., and found a plentiful supply for two weeks at least. At that time I did not look forward to a stay of more than a few days in my prison.

“Either the enemy or ourselves will occupy the hill I told myself, because it is such an important position. And whoever now holds the hill will be compelled to dig in deeply in order to hold it.

“So to my mind it was only a matter of a few days until either the entrance or the passageway would be cleared, and my only doubts were as to whether it would be friends or enemies that would discover me. My arm felt better, although I could not use it much, and so I spent the day in reading an old newspaper which I found among the food supplies, and in waiting for help to come. What fool I was! If I had only worked from the start, I would be just that many days nearer deliverance.

“On the third day I was annoyed by water, which began dripping from the roof and seeping in at the sides of the dugout. I cursed that muddy water, then, as I have often cursed such dugout nuisances before, but it may be that I shall yet bless that water and it shall save my life.

“But it certainly made things uncomfortable; so I spent the day in moving my bunk, food and water supplies, candles, etc., up into the passageway. For a space of about ten feet it was unobstructed, and, being slightly higher than the dugout, was dryer and more comfortable. Besides, the air was much better here, as I had found that practically all my supply of fresh air came in through the crack between the timbers, and I thought maybe the rats wouldn’t bother me so much at night. Again I spent the balance of the day simply in waiting for help.

“It was not until well into the fourth day that I really began to feel uneasy. It suddenly became impressed on my consciousness that I had not heard the sound of a gun, or felt the earth shake from the force of a concussion, since the fatal shell that had filled the entrance. What was the meaning of the silence? Why did I hear no sounds of fighting? It was as still as the grave.

“What a horrible death to die! Buried Alive! A panic of fear swept over me. But my will and reason reasserted itself. In time, I should be able to dig myself out by my own efforts. It would take time but it could be done.

“So, although I could not use my left arm as yet, I spent the rest of that day and all of the two following days in digging dirt from the entrance and carrying it back into the far corner of the dugout.

“On the seventh day after regaining consciousness I was tired and stiff from my unwanted exertions of the three previous days. I could see by this time that it was a matter of weeks—two or three, at least—before I could hope to[50] liberate myself. I might be rescued at an earlier date, but, without outside aid, it would take probably three more weeks of labor before I could dig my way out.

“Already dirt had caved in from the top, where the timbers had sprung apart, and I could repair the damage to the roof of the stairway only in a crude way with one arm. But my left arm was much better. With a day’s rest, I would be able to use it pretty well. Besides, I must conserve my energy. So I spent the seventh day in rest and prayer for my speedy release from a living grave.

“I also reapportioned my food on the basis of three more weeks. It made the daily portions pretty small, especially as the digging was strenuous work. There was a large supply of candles, so that I had plenty of light for my work. But the supply of water bothered me. Almost half of the small keg was gone in the first week. I decided to drink only once a day.

“The following six days were all days of feverish labor, light eating and even lighter drinking. But, despite all my efforts, only a quarter of the keg was left at the end of two weeks. And the horror of the situation grew on me. My imagination would not be quiet. I would picture to myself the agonies to come, when I would have even less food and water than at present. My mind would run on and on—to death by starvation—to the finding of my emaciated body by those who would eventually open up the dugout—even to their attempts to reconstruct the story of my end.

“And, adding to my physical discomfort, were the swarming vermin infesting the dugout and my person. A month had gone by since I had had a bath, and I could not now spare a drop of water even to wash my face. The rats had become so bold that I had to leave a candle burning all night in order to protect myself in my sleep.

“Partly to relieve my mind, I started to write this tale of my experiences. It did act as a relief at first, but now, as I read it over, the growing terror of this awful place grips me. I would cease writing, but some impulse urges me to write each day.”

“THREE weeks have passed since I was buried in this living tomb.

“Today I drank the last drop of water in the keg. There is a pool of stagnant water on the dugout floor—dirty, slimy and alive with vermin—always standing there, fed by drippings from the roof. As yet I cannot bring myself to touch it.

“Today I divided up my food supply for another week. God knows the portions were already small enough! But there have been so many cave-ins recently that I can never finish clearing the entrance in another week.

“Sometimes I feel that I shall never clear it. But I must! I can never bear to die here. I must will myself to escape, and I shall escape!

“Did not the captain often say that the will to win was half the victory? I shall rest no more. Every waking hour must be spent in removing the treacherous dirt.

“Even my writing must cease.”

“OH, GOD! I am afraid, afraid!

“I must write to relieve my mind. Last night I went to sleep at nine by my watch. At twelve I woke to find myself in the dark, frantically digging with my bare hands at the hard sides of the dugout. After some trouble I found a candle and lit it.

“The whole dugout was upset. My food supplies were lying in the mud. The box of candles had been spilled. My finger nails were broken and bloody from clawing at the ground.

“The realization dawned upon me that I had been out of my head. And then came the fear—dark, raging fear—fear of insanity. I have been drinking the stagnant water from the floor for days. I do not know how many.

“I have only about one meal left, but I must save it.”

“I HAD a meal today. For three days I have been without food.

“But today I caught one of the rats that infest the place. He was a big[51] one, too. Gave me a bad bite, but I killed him. I feel lots better today. Have had some bad dreams lately, but they don’t bother me now.

“That rat was tough, though. Think I’ll finish this digging and go back to my regiment in a day or two.”

“HEAVEN have mercy! I must be out of my head half the time now.

“I have absolutely no recollection of having written that last entry. And I feel feverish and weak.

“If I had my strength, I think I could finish clearing the entrance in a day or two. But I can only work a short time at a stretch.

“I am beginning to give up hope.”

“WILD spells come on me oftener now. I awake tired out from exertions, which I cannot remember.

“Bones of rats, picked clean, are scattered about, yet I do not remember eating them. In my lucid moments I don’t seem to be able to catch them, for they are too wary and I am too weak.

“I get some relief by chewing the candles, but I dare not eat them all. I am afraid of the dark, I am afraid of the rats, but worst of all is the hideous fear of myself.

“My mind is breaking down. I must escape soon, or I will be little better than a wild animal. Oh, God, send help! I am going mad!”

“Terror, desperation, despair—is this the end?”

“FOR a long time I have been resting.

“I have had a brilliant idea. Rest brings back strength. The longer a person rests the stronger they should get. I have been resting a long time now. Weeks or months, I don’t know which. So I must be very strong. I feel strong. My fever has left me. So listen! There is only a little dirt left in the entrance way. I am going out and crawl through it. Just like a mole. Right out into the sunlight. I feel much stronger than a mole. So this is the end of my little tale. A sad tale, but one with a happy ending. Sunlight! A very happy ending.”

AND that was the end of the manuscript. There only remains to tell Fromwiller’s tale.

At first, I didn’t believe it. But now I do. I put it down, though, just as Fromwiller told it to me, and you can take it or leave it as you choose.

“Soon after we were billeted at Watou,” said Fromwiller, “I decided to go out and see Mount Kemmel. I had heard that things were rather gruesome out there, but I was really not prepared for the conditions that I found. I had seen unburied dead around Roulers and in the Argonne, but it had been almost two months since the fighting on Mount Kemmel and there were still many unburied dead. But there was another thing that I had never seen, and that was the buried living!

“As I came up to the highest point of the Mount, I was attracted by a movement of loose dirt on the edge of a huge shell hole. The dirt seemed to be falling in to a common center, as if the dirt below was being removed. As I watched, suddenly I was horrified to see a long, skinny human arm emerge from the ground.

“It disappeared, drawing back some of the earth with it. There was a movement of dirt over a larger area, and the arm reappeared, together with a man’s head and shoulders. He pulled himself up out of the very ground, as it seemed, shook the dirt from his body like a huge, gaunt dog, and stood erect. I never want to see such another creature!

“Hardly a strip of clothing was visible, and, what little there was, was so torn and dirty that it was impossible to tell what kind it had been. The skin was drawn tightly over the bones, and there was a vacant stare in the protruding eyes. It looked like a corpse that had lain in the grave a long time.

“This apparition looked directly at me, and yet did not appear to see me. He looked as if the light bothered him. I spoke, and a look of fear came over his face. He seemed filled with terror.

[52]

“I stepped toward him, shaking loose a piece of barbed wire which had caught in my puttees. Quick as a flash, he turned and started to run from me.

“For a second I was too astonished to move. Then I started to follow him. In a straight line he ran, looking neither to the right or left. Directly ahead of him was a deep and wide trench. He was running straight toward it. Suddenly it dawned on me that he did not see it.

“I called out, but it seemed to terrify him all the more, and with one last lunge he stepped into the trench and fell. I heard his body strike the other side of the trench and fell with a splash into the water at the bottom.

“I followed and looked down into the trench. There he lay, with his head bent back in such a position that I was sure his neck was broken. He was half in and half out of the water, and as I looked at him I could scarcely believe what I had seen. Surely he looked as if he had been dead as long as some of the other corpses, scattered over the hillside. I turned and left him as he was.

“Buried while living, I left him unburied when dead.”

[53]

WE SAT in the Purple Lily—Tain Dirk, that far too handsome young man, with me.

I drank coffee; Tain Dirk drank liquor—secretly and alone. The night was drenched with sweating summer heat, but I felt cold as ice. Presently we went up to the Palm Grove Roof, where Bimi Tal was to dance.

“Who is this Bimi Tal, Hammer?” Dirk asked me, drumming his fingers.

“A woman.”

“You’re a queer one, Jerry Hammer!” said Dirk, narrowing his cold yellow eyes.

Still he drummed his blunt fingers. Sharp—tat! tat! tat! Something deep inside me—my liver, perhaps—shivered and grew white at hearing that klirring sound.

I didn’t answer him right away. Slowly I sent up smoke rings to circle the huge stars. We sat in a cave of potted palms close by the dancing floor. Over us lay blue-black night, strange and deep. Yellow as roses were the splotches of stars swimming down the sky.

“It shows you’ve been away from New York, Dirk, if you don’t know Bimi Tal. She’s made herself more famous as a dancer than ever was Ynecita. Some mystery is supposed to hang about her; and these simple children of New York love mysteries.”

“I’ve been away three years,” said Dirk sulkily, his eyes contracting....

“That long? It was three years ago that Ynecita was killed.”

“Well?” asked Dirk. His finger-drumming droned away.

“I thought you might have known her, Dirk.”

“I?” His wide, thin lips twitched. “Why, Ynecita was common to half New York!”

“But once,” I said, “once, it may be assumed, she was true to one man only, Tain Dirk.”

“I’m not interested in women,” said Dirk.

That was like him. He drank liquor only—secretly and alone.

“I was interested in Ynecita, Dirk. We used to talk together—”

“She talked to you?” repeated Dirk.

“Strange how she died! No trace, no one arrested. Yet she’d had her lovers. Sometimes I think, Dirk, we’ll find the beast who killed Ynecita.”

Tain Dirk touched my wrist. His blunt fingers were cold and clammy. Incomprehensible that women had loved his hands! Yet they were artist’s hands, and could mold and chisel. Wet clay, his hands!

“What makes you say that, Hammer?”

I looked up at the stars. “It was a beast who killed Ynecita, Dirk. Some vile snake with blood as cold as this lemon ice. Those marks of teeth on her upper arm! Deep in, bringing blood![54] What madman killed that girl? Mad, I say!”

Dirk twisted. He wiped his brown forehead, on which sweat glistened in little beads like scales. “Too hot a night to talk about such things, Hammer. Let’s talk of something else. Tell me about this Bimi Tal.”

“You’ll see her soon enough,” I said, watching him. “A girl of about your own age; you’re not more than twenty-four, are you?”

“Born first of January, ’99.”

“And famous already!”

“Yes,” said Tain Dirk. “I guess you’ve heard of me.”

“Oh, I’ve heard lots of you,” I said; and saw he didn’t like it.

“You’ve heard I’m fast with women, eh?” asked Dirk, after a pause.

“But Ynecita—”

“Why do you talk of her?” asked Dirk, irritably. “I never knew her.”

“Those marks of teeth on Ynecita’s arm—two sharp canines, sharp and hooked; barely scratching the skin—like fangs of a snake, Dirk—”

Tain Dirk’s hand crept to his lips, which were thin, red, and dry. The light in his eyes darkened from yellow to purple. Softly his blunt fingers began to drum his lips. Tat! tat! tat! But silent as a snake in grass.

“A curious thing about teeth, Dirk—you’re a sculptor; maybe you’ve observed it—a curious thing that no two are quite alike. We took prints, Dirk, of those marks in the arm of Ynecita—”

Dirk’s thin lips opened. His coarsely-formed, but marvelously sensitive, fingers felt the hardness of his teeth. That gesture was sly. At once he knew I’d seen him. He crouched back in his chair, his strong, broad head drawn in between his shoulders.

“Who are you?” he hissed.

Again the klirring of his fingertips—a dusty drumming.

“Why, I am only Jerry Hammer—a wanderer, and a soldier of bad fortune.”

“Who are you!”

“Brother of Stella Hammer, who was known as Ynecita, the dancer.”

Upon the Palm Grove Roof, beneath those gigantic stars the orchestra began to play. A brass and cymbal tune. The air was hot. From far in the pit of streets rose up the noises of the city. Loud! Discord shot with flames. I trembled.

Tain Dirk’s fingers drummed. His head commenced to sway.

BIMI TAL danced barefooted on the glazed umber tiles of the Roof.

Her dark red hair was free on her naked shoulders. Stamp! stamp! stamp! her feet struck flatly on the tiles. Her head was bent back almost to the level of her waist. Bracelets jangled on her wrists and ankles.

Shaking her clump of red hair; her strong muscled limbs weaving; laughing at me with all her eyes. How like she looked to a man dead long years before! How like her glances to the glances of Red Roane! On her breasts two glittering shields of spangles. About her waist a kirtle seemingly woven of long strands of marsh grass, rustling, shivering with whispers. The sinews of her trunk and limbs rippled beneath her clear brown skin.

The head of Tain Dirk swayed sideways, slowly. The drumming of his fingers on the table was a reiterative rattle. His eyes—liquid, subtle—dulled with a look near to stupidity, then blazed to golden fire. Thin and wide were his unsmiling lips. His tongue flicked them. Tat! tat! tat!

“She’s a beauty!” whispered Dirk.

His terrible eyes seemed to call Bimi Tal as they had called other women. Mesmerism—what was it? Singing, she pranced toward the den of potted palms where we were sitting. Her skirt rustled like the marshes. Wind of summer.

Little searchlights, playing colored lights on Bimi Tal, grew darker. Red and violet deepened to brown and green. Still the hot stars above us. In that artificial paper Palm Grove, with the silky puffy women and the beefsteak-guzzling men looking stupidly, was born the mystery of the great savannahs.

Dirk’s head nodding. Dirk’s thin lips slowly opening. Dirk’s golden eyes[55] glimmering. Tat! tat! tat! Dirk’s steady fingers.

The great savannahs and the tropic marshes. Bimi Tal dancing. Stealthily, the music softened from that brass and cymbal tune. It rustled. It crawled. It reared fanged heads.

For a little while I did not see Bimi Tal nor Dirk, but the steamy Everglades. Winter noon. Grass leaves silvered by sea-wind; puddles stirring at the roots of the grasses. Silence booming like the loud silence of death.

Bimi Tal was dancing her snake dance. Dirk’s lips quivered.

The marsh wind makes a little stir (it is the whispering flute.) The marsh waters make a little moan (it is the violin).

WHERE was the soul of Bimi Tal dwelling that tropic winter so many years ago? On her mother’s breast, a little bud of love, crooned over with the song of sleep? Or meshed in bleeding poinsettia or rose? Or a soul yet unborn?

I close my eyes. The vision does not fade. Florida; the marshlands; winter noon. January’s first day, 1899. Where was lovely Bimi Tal on that stifling day we saw the fanged thing coil, and death struck us there by Okechobee?

Your eyes, Bimi Tal, are the laughing eyes of Red Roane!...

Now the snake dance. The piccolo screams.

Life immortal in your glistening lips, Bimi Tal; in your deep bosom promise of everlasting fecundity. Passion and power of the earth! Life is immortal. Your laughing eyes, Bimi Tal, will never dull. Yet I saw Red Roane die....

Beneath the shifting lights, Bimi Tal leaped and spun, scarcely treading the floor. Her eyes sparkled at me. She did not see Tain Dirk. Stamp! Stamp! Stamp! Her bare feet struck the tiles, tightening the muscles of her calves. Her bangles rang.

I could not keep my eyes from Dirk. His broad brown-and-golden head swayed continually. His thin lips worked, and I caught the flash of his teeth. His eyes drowsed, then flashed open with sudden flame. Tat! tat! tat! The rattling of his fingers was never still.

That swaying head! It was loaded with the wisdom of the serpent that harkens to the wind, swaying with the marsh grass, winding its golden coils, curving its neck to the sun—Hark! The rattle!

... Red is the sun. Two men plow through the marshes. O endless pain (the harsh viol quivers), a life struggles in the womb. Who will die, and what will die, that this new life may be born? Whimpering agony. And an old crone singing a song....

All people who sat within the Palm Grove were hushed, watching Bimi Tal. Fat hands fanning powdered breasts; silk handkerchiefs wiping ox necks; sweat beneath armpits. Still heat. Far away thunder. The stars going by.

Music swelled. Beneath its discord sounded a steady drumming rhythm. The arms of Bimi Tal waved about her head. She shouted for joy of life.

The pale eyes of Dirk, basking in mystery, gleamed into fire, blazed up in fury and hate undying! His dry lips opened. I saw his teeth.

... Through the breast-high grasses surge on the two marching men. Their boots sough in the muck. (Softly strums the bass viol.) Something waiting in the marshes! Something with golden eyes and swaying head. Hark! The rattle! Beware, for death is in the path!...

Bimi Tal was close to Dirk, not seeing him. She laughed and waved her jangling arms at me. Dirk’s eyes sparkled with madness, his lips were tightened terribly. Bimi Tal was almost over him. His fingers drummed. Louder played the music.

... Hark! The rattle! Gaily the two men plow through the bladed grasses. The coiled thing waits, hate within its eyes. They are nearer—nearer! (Drums begin to beat)....

In an avalanche of sound, crashed viol and violin, and stammering drum. Dirk’s drawn head lunged upward with his shoulders, his lips opened and lifted.

[56]

Venomous his look. Deathly his intensity.

STRONG and young, fresh from the Cuban wars, Red Roane and I went north from the keys through the Everglades of Florida.

Through the fens as in God’s first day. Through the reptile age, alive yet and crawling. Through strangling vegetation, which steams and rots beneath eternal suns. Through the everlasting Everglades, with their fern and frond and sorrowful, hoary cypress, Red Roane and I went north. Onward with laughter. What joy lay in our hearts! We sang many songs.

Fern and flower embracing in fecundity. Grasses thick with sap. Blossoms wilting at a touch. Mire teeming with creeping life. Above all, the gay sun. Beneath all, the coiling serpent eyes and the opened fangs. Hark! The rattle!

We sailed lagoons in crazy craft; dreamt on shady shores through sultry noons; shouted to the dead logs on river banks till they took fear, and dived and splashed away. We pitched our tents by black waters. We beat brave trails through the fens.

“I’d like to stay here forever,” said Red Roane.

By what way I go, with what drinks I drink, in what bed I lie down, I remember you who got your prayer, Red Roane—you who are in the swamp grass and swamp water forever.

Beating our way slow and heavily, at high noon, of the new year’s first day in 1899, near Okechobee in the marshes, came we two on a hidden hut. It was fashioned of the raff of the slough—dead fronds, rotting branches, withered marsh grasses. Its sad gray-green were in the living wilderness like a monument to death. Better the naked swamp. Better the clean quagmire for bed.

An old crone, moaning within that dreary hut, drowned out the sharp, short gasps of another woman. Red Roane came up singing, slapping his deep chest, swinging his muscular arms. Sunlight on his brown face, and sunlight in his red hair. At the hut’s door, facing us, lounged a man with yellow eyes. Poor white trash. A gun was in his arm’s crook. He spat tobacco juice at the earth. There was loathing, murder venom in his face!

Red Roane faltered back from that stare. He stopped short, and laughter left him. His brave eyes were troubled by that madman’s hate. Yellow eyes staring—eyes of a rattlesnake!

An old Indian crone peered out beneath the crooked elbow of the ruffian in the doorway, she who had been dolorously singing. With a scream, she thrust out her skinny old arm, pointing it at Red Roane.

“He dies!” she screamed. “We want his soul!”

Another woman, hidden, moaning within the hut; a woman in her travail. New life from the womb—a life must die! I grasped the arm of Red Roane.

“Come away!” I said, “Come away from these mad witches!”

In three steps that gray-green hovel was hidden in the cypresses. A dream it seemed. But we could yet hear the old witch woman singing. Something dragged at our heels, and it was not suction of the muck.

Toe to heel, Red Roane paced me, and we sang a song together. A crimson flower, short-stemmed, yellow-hearted, was almost beneath my boot. I stooped—who will not stoop to pick a crimson wild flower? A rattling, like the shaking of peas. A klirring like the drumming of a man’s fingertips. Hark! The rattle!

A yawning head flashed beneath my hand, striking too low. Heavy as a hard-flung stone, the snake’s head struck my ankle; yawning gullet, white-hooked fangs of the deathly rattlesnake. Out of the crimson flower that beast of gold and brown. Its yellow eyes flickered. Its thin lips were dry. How near I had touched to death!

“Thank God for those heavy boots, Jerry!”

With blazing eyes the snake writhed, coiling for another strike. Its sharp tail, pointed upward, vibrated continuously with dusty laughter. Its golden rippling body was thick as my arm.

Red Roane swung down his heavy marching stock. Crash! Its leaden end[57] struck that lunging mottled head. Halted in mid-strike, that evil wisdom splattered like an egg, brain pan ripped wide.

The rattler lashed in its last agony, its tremendously muscular tail beating the ground with thumping blows, its yellow eyes still blazing with hate, but closing fast in doom.

I tried to say “Thanks, Red!”

Some mesmerism in those yellow, dying eyes! Shaking with disgust, Red Roane bent above that foul fen watcher, put down his hand to pick up that stricken skin, over whose eyes thin eye-membrane already lowered in death.

“Don’t touch it, Red! Wait till the sun goes down.”

Hark! The rattle! Those opaque eyes shuttered back. Those yellow glances, though in mortal pain, were still furious and glistening. Those horny tail-bells clattered. Fangs in that shattered, insensate head yawned, closing in Red Roane’s arm above the wrist.

I see him. Sweat upon his broad brown forehead; his laughing eyes astounded; his thick strong body shivering; wind stirring up his dark red hair. Behind him the brown-green marshes, grasses rippling, a stir going through their depths. His cheeks had never been so red.

Before I could move, he unlocked those jaws and hollow fangs, gripped hard in his arm with mortal rigor. He shivered now from the knees. His face went white.

“Cut!” he whispered. “I’ll sit down.”

With hunting knife I slashed his arm, deep driving four crossed cuts. He laughed, and tried to shout. Howling would have been more pleasant. I sucked those wounds, out of which slow blood was spouting from an artery. We panted now, both of us. He leaned heavily on my shoulder—he, the strong. I bound his arm, my own fingers so numb I fumbled at the work. Sweat on Red Roane’s face was cold, and cold his wrists.

My arms clung about him. He swayed, almost toppling, clutching at grass stems with fading laughter. I picked up his marching stock and beat that golden, gory thing within the mire. Beat it till clay-white flesh, and bone and skin were one with the mucky mire of the swamp. But still its heart ebbed with deep purple pulsing. A smashing blow, and that, too, died.

“It’s over!” Grimly I flung the bloody stave into the swaying grass.

“Yes, Jerry,” whispered Red Roane, “it’s nearly over.”

I could not believe it. Red Roane, the strong man, the shouter, the singer, the gay-hearted lover! Is death then, so much stronger than life?

“A woman, Jerry,” he whispered, “in Havana—Dolores! She dances—”

“For God’s sake, Red, wake up!”

“Dances at the—”

“Red! Red Roane! I’m here, boy!”

Out from the way, whence we had come, faintly I heard a cry. Who wept thus for the soul departing, sang paean for the dead? Was it wind over the stagnant grasses? Frail in the solitude, rose that wail again. The whimper of new-born life! In the squatter’s hut the child had found its soul!

“Dolores!” whispered Red Roane. Beneath that brazen sky he whispered the name of love. “Dolores!”

Past a hundred miles of swamp, past a hundred miles of sea, did Dolores, the dancer, hear him calling her?

“Dolores!”

I hope she heard, for he was a lad, though wild.

With a throat strangling in sobs, I sang to Red Roane. His eyes were closed, yet he heard me. Old campaign songs, songs of the march and the bivouac. Marchers’ tunes.

Then he whispered for a lullaby, and, last of all, for a drinking song.

BIMI TAL had danced up to us—Bimi Tal, daughter of Red Roane and of Dolores, the dancer.

She laughed and tossed her dark red hair. Her broad nostrils sucked in the hot night wind.

“I am the daughter of the morning!
I shout, I dance. I laugh away.
Follow, lover! Hear my warnings.
I, the laugher, do not stay....”

[58]

Stamp! Stamp! Stamp! Her body rippled. She cast her eyes at me.

Tain Dirk’s head was rising. His thin, dry, red lips opened wide. His golden eyes burned with undying hate. Tat! tat! tat! his fingers drummed.

“In a minute, Jerry,” whispered Bimi Tal, not pausing from her dance.

Her lovely eyes looked downward, seeing Dirk. She screamed. The music silenced. She struck her arm at him, not knowing what she did.

Mad! the Man was mad! His jaw was opened wide. He bit her arm above the wrist.

Before the rush of frantic people had fallen over us, I struck his venomous face. With both fists, blow on blow. Blood came from his damned lips.

What madness had seized him I don’t know. Likely it was memory surging back through dead life—the venom of the rattler, hate undying. But of that, who can say? A strange thing is memory.

Yet I knew for sure that to him, the mad sculptor, born in that hut in the hot savannahs, had passed the soul of the dying rattlesnake.

Hands dragged me back from him. I shouted and tore. He quivered, wounded heavily. His nervous fingers faintly clattered on the table, drumming with dreadful music. Police came in.

“Look!” I shouted to them. “Look at those marks of teeth on Bimi Tal’s wrist. Two deep fangs. There’s the man who killed Ynecita, the dancer!”

[59]

IF EVERY one of the sixty guards and officials at Granite River Prison had been asked for the name of the most popular guard on the force, there would have been sixty answers—“Asa Shores.” If each of the fifteen hundred convicts in the prison had been asked which guard was most disliked by the convicts, fifteen hundred answers would have been the same—“Asa Shores!”

If some curious person had asked of each convict and each guard, “Who is considered the most desperate, the hardest, the shrewdest criminal in the prison?” the answer would have been unanimous, “Malcolm Hulsey, the ‘lifer.’”

True, it does not seem reasonable that Asa Shores should be liked by every guard and official and disliked by every convict. To those not familiar with the duties of prison guards it would seem that Asa Shores’ method of handling the convicts, if disapproved of by fifteen hundred convicts, would surely be disapproved of by at least one of the sixty guards. But the explanation is simple.

Asa Shores’ great great-grandfather had followed the prisons as mariners follow the seas. Then Asa’s grandfather took up the work and followed it, with an iron hand and an inflexible will, until one day a cell-made knife in the hands of a long-time “con” entered his back at a point where his suspenders crossed, deviating enough to the left to pierce his heart. Came next Asa Shores’ father, who went down in attempting to quell the famous Stromberg break of 1895.

Asa, therefore, his prison methods impelled perhaps by heredity, looked upon every wearer of gray behind the walls as a convict, nothing more, nothing less. He neither abused or favored any convict. A one-year man was to Asa a convict and no better than the man who was serving a life sentence.

The crime for which any convict was sent up was of little moment to Asa; neither did he bother about who among the inmates were considered desperate. The fact that a man wore prison gray was sufficient, whether he be a six-months sneak-thief or a ninety-nine-year murderer.

When Asa shot and killed Richard (“Mutt”) Allison, when the latter attempted to escape, the warden had said:

“There was really no need of killing that half-witted short-termer, Asa. He was doing only a year and was perfectly harmless. A shot in the leg or foot would have been better.”

And Asa’s reply had been:

“I had no idea who the man was, though I have seen him dozens of times, and I did not know how long he[60] was doing. But I would have made no difference if I had known. He was a convict, sir, and he was attempting to escape. If he was only half-witted, as you say, he should have been in the insane asylum, not in the penitentiary.”

So that was that.

If Asa ever gave a convict a smile it had never been recorded. It is a known fact that he was never seen to frown upon a convict. He was, in short, the smileless, unyielding personification of “duty,” and every convict hated him for what he was. When Asa shot he shot to kill—and he never missed. Four little white crosses on the bleak hillside near the prison proclaimed his flawless marksmanship.

Why was this big sandy-haired, steel-blue-eyed, middle-aged Asa Shores liked by his brother guards? There were many reasons why. It was as if Asa’s unnatural, cold, vigilant, unfeeling attitude toward the convicts was offset each day when he came off duty by a healthy, wholesome desire to drop duty as a work-horse sheds an irritating harness. He was the life of the guards’ quarters; a big good-natured, playful fellow, who thoroughly enjoyed a practical joke, whether he be the victim of the joke or the instigator. If he had a temper he had never allowed it to come to the surface. He excelled in all sports in the gymnasium, and somewhere, somehow, he found more funny stories than any other man on the force. The trite old saying that “he would give a friend the shirt off his back” fitted him like a new kid glove. He gave freely to his friends, and, in giving, seemed to find real joy.

After twelve years’ service on the guardline, Asa was still an ordinary wall guard. This would seem discouraging to many; but not so to Asa. It was not generally known that he drew a larger salary than did the other wall guards. He was an excellent wall guard. Hence, he was kept on the wall, while newer men on the force were promoted to better positions. But Asa drew the salary of a shift captain and was therefore content.

He did not even seem to mind when he was taken from comfortable Tower Number One, morning shift, and detailed permanently to Tower Number Three on the “graveyard” shift at night from eight P. M. to four A. M. This change was deemed necessary for several reasons. First, because Asa positively refused to discriminate between short-termers and long-termers, or desperate men and harmless “nuts,” when using his rifle to stop a “break” or the attempt of a single convict to escape.

The men being locked in their cells at night, Asa, as a night guard, would have little opportunity to practice rifle shooting with a running convict as the target. Another reason for detailing him to Tower Number Three was because trouble was expected some night at that point in the yard, and with sure-fire Asa on the job the officials felt that any attempt of the convicts to escape would be promptly frustrated.

One of Asa’s wholesome habits, when no convicts were near him, was singing. It was not singing, really, but Asa thought it was and he shortened the long, lonesome hours at night on Tower Number Three with songs—song, rather, because he knew and sang but one. It was not a late or popular song, and, as Asa sang it, it sounded like the frogs that croak in the marshes at night:

Not a pretty song; nor did it make cheerful those guards who passed near Tower Number Three while making the night rounds. But Asa loved that song.

IT WAS while the wall was being extended another two hundred feet to make room within the inclosure for a new cell house that Asa shot the “lifer,” Malcolm Hulsey.

[61]

The end wall, extending from Tower Number Three to Tower Number Four, had been torn down and the stones moved two hundred feet farther south to be used on the new wall. A temporary barbed-wire fence had been erected about the area in which the convicts worked on the new wall. Extra armed guards were stationed at intervals of fifty feet outside the inclosure to guard the working convicts.

Malcolm Hulsey had successfully feigned illness one day and was allowed to remain in his cell. Cell house guards had seen him lying in his bunk, only the top of his head showing above the blankets. At lock-up time the cell house guards making the count, saw a foot protruding from under the blankets in Hulsey’s bunk and what they believed to be the top of his head showing at the head of the bed.

At ten-fifteen that night the eagle-eyed Asa Shores, on Tower Number Three, saw a dark figure slip under the lower wire of the temporary fence and run. Asa fired once and saw the man fall.

Then Asa, to comply with the prison rules, yelled “halt!” The command, of course, was needless, Hulsey having halted abruptly when a thirty-thirty rifle ball plowed through his shoulder.

After the convict had been carried to the hospital, his cell was opened by the curious guards. A cleverly carved wooden foot protruded from under the blankets at the foot of the bed, several bags of old clothing reposed under the blankets and a thatch of black horse-hair showed at the head of the bed.

Before Hulsey left the hospital the new wall was completed. Tower Number Four, across from Tower Number Three, had been torn down and a new Tower Number Four built on the new corner of the wall, two hundred feet farther south. On the other corner, across from New Tower Number Four, was New Tower Number Three. Old Tower Number Three was left standing until further orders. Asa Shores remained on the graveyard shift on Old Tower Number Three.

While off duty one day Asa, prowling about inside the walls, met Malcolm Hulsey. The “lifer” was still a bit pale and weak from the gunshot wound.

“One thing I’d like to have you explain, Mr. Shores,” said Hulsey. “You plugged me in the shoulder, then yelled ‘halt!’ Why didn’t you command me to stop before firing?”

“Well, it was this way, Hulsey,” Asa replied, unsmiling and looking the convict squarely in the eye. “I aimed at the spot where I calculated your heart ought to be, but the light was poor and I had to shoot quick. I naturally supposed you were dead when I commanded you to halt, and, believing you dead, I could see no reason for being in a hurry with the command. Sorry I bungled the job that way, but my intentions were good.”

“But,” the scowling “lifer” persisted, “you haven’t told me yet why you shot before commanding me to halt.”

“Oh, that?” Asa drawled with a deprecatory shrug of his massive shoulders. “That is merely a matter of form with me. I very often, after shooting a convict, yell ‘halt’ some time the next day—or week. Besides, if you had a nice chance to bump me off, you wouldn’t say, ‘Beware, Mr. Shores, I’m about to kill you.’”

For a half minute convict and keeper gazed into each others eyes.

“I get yuh,” Hulsey finally said. “And I guess you’re right. I have an idear though that my turn comes next, Mr. Shores; and there’ll be no preliminary command or argument.”

“Fair enough, Hulsey,” Asa replied as he turned away.

AT LAST the big new cell house was completed.

Asa wondered whether he would be left on Old Tower Number Three. It had been decided, he knew, that the old tower would be left on the wall but perhaps not used.

To celebrate the completion of the new building, the warden declared a holiday and issued orders that all the inmates be given the privilege of the yard that day. There was to be wrestling, boxing, foot-racing and other sports.

Asa Shores’ sleeping quarters was a[62] low-ceilinged room on the ground floor in one of the towers of the old cell house. Asa had been warned a number of times that his room was not a safe place to sleep in the day time. Convicts in the yard could enter the room at any time during the day, without being seen by the yard guards or wall guards. Though the one door to the room was thick and heavy, Asa seldom if ever locked it.

Asa had risen in the afternoon, complaining to himself about the noise being made by the convicts in the yard. His peevishness vanished, however, after a cold wash, and he sang as he stood looking out at one of the windows and brushing his hair:

Asa’s song ended there—ended in a horrible gurgle. A “trusty” found him an hour later lying in a pool of blood near the open window.

His throat had been cut by a sharp instrument in the hand of a person unknown.

Hulsey the “lifer” was questioned, of course, but there was absolutely nothing to indicate that it was he who committed the murder.

The guards looked sadly upon all that remained of Asa Shores and said to each other in hushed voices:

“It had to come. Asa was too good a convict guard not to be murdered.”

And though the prison stool pigeons kept their ears and eyes opened, though each guard became a detective, the murder of Asa Shores remained a mystery.

Old Tower Number Three was closed and the doors locked. There was no immediate use for it; but the warden was contemplating the advisability of having another guards’ entrance gate cut through the wall under the tower. In this case, of course, the tower would be used again.

NIGHT Captain Jesse Dunlap sat alone in the guards’ lookout, inside the walls, at one o’clock on the morning following the murder of Asa Shores. Bill Wilton, the night yard guard, was making his round about the buildings in the yard.

Captain Dunlap lazily watched the brass indicators on the report board before him. The indicator for Tower Number One made a half turn to the left and a small bell on the board rang. The captain lifted the receiver from the telephone at his elbow and received the report, “Tower Number One. Anderson on duty. All O. K.”

Dunlap merely grunted a response and replaced the receiver on the hook. Presently the indicator for Tower Number Two turned to the left, the bell tinkled, and Dunlap again took the receiver from the hook.

“Tower Number Two. Briggs on duty. All O. K.” came the report over the wire.

Then came New Tower Number Three; next Tower Number Four. From the three outside guard-posts came the reports, and one from the cell house, each guard turning in his post number, his name and the usual “O. K.”

All the indicators on the board, except that for Old Tower Number Three, were now turned. Captain Dunlap relaxed in his chair, sighed heavily and lit his pipe. Lazily his eyes wandered back to the indicator board.

The unturned indicator for Old Tower Number Three held his gaze and utter sadness gripped him for a moment. Night after night, promptly on the hour, he had seen the indicator for Old Tower Number Three flip jauntily to the left and had heard the tinkle of the little bell on the board. It had always seemed to him that the indicator for Asa Shores’ tower turned with more pep than the other indicators, that the bell had tinkled more cheerily, that good old Asa Shores’ report carried a note of cheerfulness that lightened the lonesome watches of the night.

[63]

Now the old tower was cold, even as poor old Asa was cold; the doors were locked and barred. Never again, thought Dunlap, would be heard Asa Shores’ familiar song on the quiet night air. What were the words to that song?

“When I am dead and buried deep,
“I’ll return at night to take a peep
“At those who hated—”

Captain Dunlap suddenly sat erect in his chair. The pipe fell from his lips and clattered on the floor, as his lower jaw dropped and his eyes opened wide to stare at the indicator board; for—

The indicator for Old Tower Number Three was moving—moving, not with a quick turn to the left, but in a hesitant, jerky way that caused the root of every hair on Captain Dunlap’s head to tingle. Never before had the captain seen an indicator behave like that. In fact, the indicator system was designed and constructed in such a way that, being controlled by electric contacts, the various indicators would snap into position when a push button in each tower was pressed by the guard on duty in that tower.

In short, an indicator, in accordance with all the rules of electricity as applied to the system, must remain stationary or jerk to the left when the button in the tower was pressed. But here was indicator for Old Tower Number Three wavering, trembling to the left, only to fall back repeatedly to a vertical position. Then again, jerkily, hesitantly to the left, as if a vagrant soul strove to brush aside the veil that banished it from the living.

Captain Dunlap sat rigid and watched the uncanny movements of the bright brass indicator. Vague, fleeting, chaotic thoughts of crossed wires, practical jokers, wandering souls tumbled one after another through his brain.

If only the bell would not tinkle! If it did ring? Well, death then, though it had taken away what was mortal of Asa Shores, had not conquered his eternal vigilance and strict attention to duty.

Farther to the left wavered the indicator, hesitatingly, uncertainly, then—the bell rang!

A weak, slow ring, it was, that sounded strange and unnatural in the deathlike silence of the dimly lighted lookout.

CAPTAIN DUNLAP was a brave man. He had smilingly faced death a dozen times in Granite River Prison.

But always his danger was known to be from living, breathing men. Abject terror gripped him now; a nameless terror that seemed to freeze the blood in his veins, contract every muscle and nerve of his body, smother his heart.

But even then reasoning struggled for recognition in his mind. What if it were a part of Asa Shores, a part of him that remained on earth to defy death and carry on? Hasn’t Asa always been Captain Dunlap’s friend? Why should he fear the spirit of a friend?

Dunlap reached forth a trembling hand, took the receiver from the hook and slowly, reluctantly, placed it to his ear. How he wished, hoped, prayed that no voice would come over the wire!

But it did come, preceded by a faint whispering sound:

“Old t-t-t-tow—” a long pause, then weakly, almost inaudibly, as if the message came from a million miles away—“Old t-t-tower n-n-n—three. S-S-Sho—”

Another pause, a jumble of meaningless words, then a chuckle. God! Asa’s familiar chuckle!

“On duty. All O-O—all O—”

A light laugh, a sharp buzzing sound, a sigh, the faint tinkle of a bell, then silence!

Dunlap heard no click of a receiver being replaced on a hook. The line was apparently still open.

Still holding the receiver to his ear, the captain moistened his dry lips with the tip of his tongue. His free hand went involuntarily to his forehead in a vague uncertain gesture and came away damp with perspiration. Must[64] he answer that ghost call? Must he speak to the thing that held the line.

When he at last spoke his voice was husky, a strange voice even to him:

“Who—who did it, Asa? Who—who—if you are dead—if this is you, Asa, tell me—who did it.”

Again that queer, unfamiliar buzzing sound. Then, from Old Tower Number Three, or from beyond the grave perhaps, came a faint, whispering, uncertain voice:

“He—he—it was....”

The voice ended in a gurgle.

Dunlap replaced the receiver on the hook, and as he did so his eyes rested on the indicator board and he gasped sharply; for the indicator for Old Tower Number Three went wavering, trembling back to a vertical position on the time dial!

This unheard-of behavior of the indicator was the deepest mystery of all. The indicators, each controlled independent of the others by push buttons in each tower, were constructed mechanically to turn only from right to left.

The indicator for Old Tower Number Three had turned back from left to right!

CAPTAIN DUNLAP made no effort to solve the mystery.

Old Tower Number Three was securely locked and could not be approached except by crossing over the wall from New Tower Number Three on the Southeast corner of the wall, or from Tower Number Two on the Northeast corner of the wall. Dunlap himself had closed and locked the doors and windows of the tower. There was but one key to the tower doors, and that key was in Dunlap’s pocket.

Unlike the other towers, Old Tower Number Three could not be entered from the ground outside the wall. It was built solidly of stone from the ground up, and the only entrances were the two doors communicating with the top of the wall on either side of the tower.

Besides, strict orders had been given that no one enter the tower unless ordered there by a shift captain. And, too, in the glare of the arc lights near the wall, it would be impossible for anyone to cross the wall to the tower, without being seen by other wall guards.

Could the mysterious report have come from one of the other wall towers? Impossible for this reason: When the push button in one of the wall towers—say, that in Old Tower Number Three—was pressed by the man on duty there, the indicator on the board in the captain’s lookout turned to the left a quarter-turn on the time dial, the small bell on the board rang and all telephone connections with the other wall towers were automatically cut off until the captain had replaced the telephone receiver on the hook after receiving the report from Old Tower Number Three.

Dunlap said nothing to Bill Wilton when the latter returned to the yard lookout, after making his round in the yard. It would be best, he reasoned, to say nothing to anybody about the mysterious call. They would only laugh at him if he told them about it. If the indicator had not returned to a vertical position on the time dial he would have some proof on which to base his wild story of the ghost call. But the indicator had, before his own eyes, returned to its former position after the call.

An hour later, at two A.M., Dunlap fearfully watched the indicator for Old Tower Number Three. Reports from all other posts had been received. Then, just once, the indicator trembled uncertainly, made almost a quarter turn to the left and snapped back to a vertical position. At three o’clock it did not move. Nor did it move at four o’clock.

A week passed. Not a tremor disturbed the “ghost tower” indicator.

Then, one morning at one-thirty o’clock, an unearthly, piercing scream in the cell house awaked half the men in the building and sent the cell house guard scurrying down to cell twenty-one on the corridor; for it was from this cell that the blood-chilling scream had come.

The bloodless, perspiration-dampened face of Malcolm Hulsey, the “lifer,” was pressed against the bars of the cell door when the guard arrived. The convict’s[184] great hands grasped the bars and his two-hundred-and-fifty-pound bulk, clad in only a regulation undershirt, twitched, started and trembled from head to foot. A horrible fear distended his eyes, his teeth clicked together and the muscles of his face worked spasmodically.

“Sick, Hulsey?” the guard demanded, hardened to such nerve-shattering outbursts in a building full of tortured souls.

“I saw—I saw—” Hulsey began, his teeth chattering and rendering speech well-nigh impossible. “I saw—Oh, Mr. Hill, please give me a cellmate—now, tonight! I—I’m a sick man, Mr. Hill. Nerves all shot to pieces, I guess. Can’t I have a cellmate to talk to, Mr. Hill?”

“What did you see?” the guard asked.

“He was standing right where you are now,” Hulsey whispered hoarsely. “Pointing his finger at me, he was, when I opened my eyes and saw him. Smiling, too. I—I”—a violent shudder—“I could see through him, Mr. Hill; could see the bars on that window beyond him. I—”

“Who? See who?” the guard interrupted.

Hulsey seemed to realize, then, that he was talking too much; that he was not conducting himself as the hardest convict in the prison should.

“Why,” he stammered. “I saw—I thought I saw—an old pal o’ mine. He’s been dead a long time. Nerves, I guess. Thinking too much about my old pal and the good old days. Nightmare, I guess.”

“Yeah—nightmare is right!” the unsympathetic guard growled. “But don’t let another blat like that out of you, or we’ll throw you into a padded cell. Got the whole wing stirred up. Get to bed now and forget that good old pal of yours.”

“If I only could!” Hulsey whispered huskily to himself, as he got back into the bunk.

TWO WEEKS passed.

There were no more outbursts from cell twenty-one. The “ghost tower” on the wall was silent, cold.

Then, at two o’clock one morning, Captain Dunlap saw the indicator move. It sickened him, made him wish ardently that he was a thousand miles from Granite River Prison.

The indicator moved slowly, hesitantly, to the left and the bell tinkled weakly. The captain placed the receiver to his ear, but no sound came; the line was dead. The indicator fell back to its original position as the captain replaced the receiver on the crotch.

A few minutes later the yard guard entered the lookout. Bill Wilton, the regular yard guard on the graveyard shift, was away on leave and the substitute guard was new at the prison.

“Didn’t I understand you to say, Mr. Dunlap,” the new guard said, “that there was no one on Old Tower Number Three?”

“You sure did,” Dunlap answered.

The guard pulled his left ear and looked puzzled.

“Funny,” he finally remarked. “Was sure I heard somebody in that tower, singing soft and low like, when I passed under it a few minutes ago.”

“What was he singing?” the captain asked, bending forward and fixing a penetrating gaze on the recent arrival at the prison.

“Let me see now,” said the guard meditatively. “Couldn’t make out much of the song. Something about ‘when I die in the ocean deep,’—No, that wasn’t it. ‘When I die and am buried deep’—that’s it. Then there was something in it about this dead guy coming back to ha’nt people, and a lot of bunk like that.”

“I see,” said Dunlap, as he eased himself out of the chair. “I’m going up and have a look around in that tower. You stay in here until I return.”

Dunlap went outside the walls and up through New Tower Number Three, where he questioned Guard Jim Humphrey. Humphrey had not seen or heard anything unusual in or about Old Tower Number Three.

[186]

Captain Dunlap, as he walked over the wall toward the ghost tower, admitted frankly to himself that he was “scared stiff.” Pausing at the door, he glanced nervously through the window.

The yard lights lit up the interior of the tower sufficiently to assure him that no one—or “thing”—was inside. He unlocked the door and entered.

With a flashlight, he thoroughly examined the telephone. Dust had settled on the instrument. The receiver and the transmitter had apparently not been touched since Asa Shores left the tower. Dust had settled on the doorknobs inside. That the knobs had not been touched since Shores’ death was obvious. The one chair, the window-sills, the small washstand and wash basin, all were covered with a thin, undisturbed film of fine dust.

There on the telephone battery box reposed Asa’s old corncob pipe and, near it, a small box of matches. The window latches were just as Dunlap had left them when he closed and securely locked the tower a month before.

It was a puzzled and nervous prison official that left the tower, relocked the doors and returned to the inside lookout.

Next day Malcolm Hulsey, the “lifer” was admitted to the hospital. The doctor’s diagnosis was “nervous breakdown.”

BUT HULSEY, though his nerves were all shot to pieces, was still capable of shrewd plotting.

His admittance to the hospital had been hastened by a diet of soap. Hulsey was so anxious to get far away from Granite River Prison, and was so certain of his ability to do so if he could only be admitted to the hospital, that he had resorted to the old but effective expedient of soap eating.

Soap, taken internally in small doses, will produce various baffling and apparently serious physiological changes in the body. Hulsey looked sick and felt sick, but he was not dangerously ill.

[187]

For many months Malcolm Hulsey had been watching closely the movements of the night guards. During his stay in the hospital, while recovering from the gunshot wound in his shoulder he had “doped out” a possible means of escape, and he was on the point of making the attempt when the doctor pronounced him sufficiently recovered to be returned to the cell house.

The “lifer’s” plan of escape was simply this: At midnight, while Captain Dunlap and his crew were on duty, the yard guard made his round, counted the patients in the hospital and left the yard through the guards’ gate to eat his lunch in the guards’ dining-room outside the walls. When the yard guard returned to the inside lookout he carried with him a hot lunch for Captain Dunlap.

In counting the men in the hospital, the yard guard did not as a rule enter the building. He merely turned on the lights in the one large ward and looked through the window. The convict hospital nurse on night duty stood ready, and when the lights were turned on, proceeded from bed to bed and partly uncovered each patient so that the yard guard outside could see and count them.

There were several factors in Hulsey’s favor now, one being that a new substitute guard was on duty over the guards’ entrance gate during the absence of the regular guard who was away on vacation. There was only one patient in the hospital besides Hulsey. The yard guard must be lured into the hospital, overpowered, his uniform stripped from him, then Hulsey, garbed in the uniform, would attempt to deceive the guard at the gate and be given the keys.

At fifteen minutes to midnight, on Hulsey’s first day in the hospital, the “lifer” quietly rose from his bed while the white-clad convict nurse’s back was turned. Three minutes later the unsuspecting nurse had been neatly laid out from a well-directed blow behind the ear, bound with sheets, gagged, stripped of his white suit and tenderly tucked in the bed recently occupied by Mr. Malcolm Hulsey.

The other patient, a feeble old convict, [188] was gagged and tied down in his bed with sheets. Hulsey then donned the nurse’s white suit and, after arranging the nurse and the old convict in their beds so that they appeared to be sleeping peacefully, the “lifer” lay face down on the floor and awaited developments.

At twelve o’clock the new guard appeared at the hospital window and switched on the lights. Having counted the men in the hospital every hour since eight o’clock, the guard intended now to give the patients a hasty glance and proceed to the gate. There were his two patients, apparently sleeping peacefully. But where was the nurse?

Hulsey’s heart pounded like a riveting hammer as he lay sprawled on the floor. Would the ruse work? Would the guard enter the hospital to investigate, or would he report to Captain Dunlap when he saw the white-clad figure on the floor?

The guard’s eyes then rested on the man on the floor.

“Huh!” he ejaculated. “Funny place for nursie to be sleeping!”

But the nurse’s sprawled form did not indicate slumber. The guard was puzzled. Perhaps the nurse had fainted, or fallen and hurt himself. The guard tapped on the window with a key. No answer, no movement of nurse or patients.

Then the unsuspecting “screw” unlocked the door and entered. An older guard would have reported to the Captain. He was in the act of bending over to turn the pseudo-nurse upon his back when his ankles were suddenly seized and his feet perked from under him.

The guard’s head struck an iron bedstead as he fell, thus relieving Hulsey of the unpleasant job of beating him into unconsciousness.

Several minutes later the “lifer,” wearing the guard’s uniform, boldly approached the gate.

“What’s on the menu tonight, Frank?” Hulsey casually asked, pulling his hat further down over his eyes.

“Same old thing—hash,” the gate guard answered, as he lowered the keys.

Though the suspense, anxiety and[190] uncertainty were terrible, Hulsey whistled calmly as he unlocked the first gate. The large bull lock on the outside gate was not so easily unlocked. Hulsey fumbled, his hands shook, his whistling, in spite of all he could do to keep it up, wheezed, went off key, then died in a discordant wail.

“Say!” the gate guard suddenly blurted. “Look up here! By cracky, your actions don’t look good to me.”

HULSEY did not look up. He gave the key another frantic twist, and the lock opened.

In that short space of time the wall guard had raced into the lookout and seized a shotgun. As he stepped to the door of the lookout, a dark figure disappeared around the corner of a building twenty feet from the gate.

A moment later the alarm in the guards’ quarters rang frantically, and a dozen sleepy-eyed men tumbled from their beds, slipped on shoes and trousers and ran out into the yard.

The gate guard could only tell where he last saw the escaping convict. To capture the man on such a dark night seemed hopeless, considering, too, that the fleeing man had a seven-minute start. However, the half-dressed guards scattered and made for a heavy willow thicket several hundred yards beyond the spot where the convict was last seen.

For five minutes after the pursuing guards disappeared in the darkness, silence reigned over the prison. Then—

From a distant point in the dark thicket a hair-raising, half-animal, half-human shriek of mortal terror shattered the stillness of the night and echoed and re-echoed about the high prison walls.

White faced guards, temporarily unnerved by that fearful wail, crashed through the brush, their flashlights playing about like the eyes of spending demons. Then they found Malcolm Hulsey the “lifer.”

Groveling face down in the mud of a little creek bank, hands clutching at empty air, great spasms of maniacal[191] terror passing through his body, the one time terror of the prison muttered insane, incoherent things.

Two guards pulled him to his knees. Others turned flashlights on his face—a face such as is seen in horrible nightmares; a ghastly face, partly covered with black mud; an avid face where it shown through the grime. The eyes were wide, protruding, glassy.

“See! See!” the convict rasped hoarsely, pointing a mud-smeared hand at a dense black nook in the thicket. “See! He stands there and points at me—and laughs! It’s Asa Shores! He’s been in my cell every night for weeks—laughing at me! He sang a death song to me—always sang—always laughed! Wouldn’t let me sleep! He’s coming toward me! Stop him! Please—”

Then another horrible shriek, a shudder, a gasp, and the guards dropped the lifeless form of Malcolm Hulsey in the mud.

By some queer whim of fate, the speechless guards involuntarily switched off their flashlights. Utter darkness, utter silence enveloped them. Then a faint sound was heard.

“Listen!” came the hoarse voice of Guard Jerry Clark. “Do you hear it?”

Very little of it could be heard. It was a faint sound and growing fainter.

“When I die and am buried deep,
I’ll return at night to ...”

Then it was gone, and all was still again.

[65]

THIS is Chris Bonner’s tale, not mine. Please remember that.

I positively will not stand sponsor for it. I used to have a deal of faith in Chris Bonner’s veracity, but that is a thing of the past. He is a liar; a liar without conscience. I as good as told him so to his face. I wonder what kind of fool he thinks I am!

Attend, now, and you shall hear that remarkable tale he told me. It was, and is, a lie. I shall always think so.

He came marching into my igloo up there at Aurora Bay. That is in Alaska, you know, on the Arctic sea. I had been in the back-country trading for pelts for a New York concern, and due to bad luck I didn’t reach the coast until the third day after the last steamer out had gone. And there I was marooned for the winter, without chance of getting out until spring, with a few dozen ignorant Indians for companions. Thank heaven I had plenty of white man’s grub in tins!

As I said, here came Chris Bonner marching in on me the same as you would go down the block a few doors to call on a neighbor.

“And where the devil did you drop in from?” I demanded, helping him off with his stiff parka.

“Down there,” he answered, jerking an elbow toward the south. “Let’s have something to eat, MacNeal. I’m hungry as hell. Look at the pack, will you!”

I had already looked at the pack he had cast off his shoulders to the fur-covered floor of the igloo. It was as lean as a starved hound. I heated a can of beef bouillon and some beans, and made a pot of coffee over the blubber-fat fire that served for both heat and light, and put these and some crackers before my guest. He tore into his meal wolfishly.

“Now a pipe and some tobac, MacNeal,” he ordered, pushing the empty dishes aside.

I gave him one of my pipes and my tobacco-pouch. He filled and lighted up. He seemed to relish the smoke; I imagined he hadn’t had one for some[66] time. He sat silent for a while staring into the flickering flame.

“Say, MacNeal,” he spoke at length; “what do you know about a theory that says once on a time this old world of ours revolved on its axis in a different plane? I’ve heard it said the earth tipped up about seventy degrees. What d’you know about it?”

That was a queer thing for Chris Bonner to ask. He was simon-pure prospector and I had never known him to get far away from the subject of mining and prospecting. He had been hunting gold from Panama to the Arctic Circle for the past thirty years.

“No more than you do, probably,” I answered his question. “I’ve heard of that theory, too. I’d say it is any man’s guess.”

“This theory holds that the North Pole used to be where the Equator is now,” he said. “Do you believe that?”

“I don’t know anything about it, Chris,” I replied. “But I do know that they have found things up this way that are now generally recognized as being peculiarly tropical in nature.”

“What, for instance?”

“Palms and ferns, a species of parrot, saber-tooth tigers; and also mastodons, members of the elephant family. All fossils and parts of skeletons, you understand.”

“No human beings, MacNeal? Any skeletons or fossils of those up this way?”

“Never heard of it. Prehistoric people are being found in England and France, however.”

“Huh,” he said.

He pondered, puffing at his pipe, his eyes on the fire. He looked perplexed about something.

“Look here, MacNeal,” he said suddenly. “Say a man dies. He’s dead, ain’t he?”

“No doubt of it,” I laughed, wondering.

“Couldn’t come to life again, eh?”

“Hardly. Not if he were really dead. I’ve heard of cases of suspended animation. The heart, apparently, quits beating for one, two or possibly ten minutes. It doesn’t in fact, though; it’s simply that its beating can’t be detected. When a man’s heart stops beating he’s dead.”

Bonner nodded.

“‘Suspended animation,’” he muttered, more to himself than to me. “That must be it. That’s the only thing that’ll explain it; nothing else will. If it could cover a period of ten minutes, why not a period of twenty or even a hundred thousand years—”

“If you’d like to turn in and get some rest, Chris, I’ll fix you up,” I broke in.

He caught the significance of my tone and grinned.

“You think I’m crazy, eh?” he said. “I’m not. It’s a wonder, though, considering what I’ve seen and what I—here, let me show you something!”

HE THRUST a hand into his lean pack and brought forth an object that at first glance I thought to be a butcher’s knife.

He handed it to me and I at once saw that it was not a butcher’s knife as I knew such knives. It was a curious sort of knife, and one for which a collector of the antique would have paid good money.

It was a very dark color, almost black; corroded, it seemed to me, as if it had lain for a long time in a damp cellar. It was in one piece, the handle about five inches long and the blade perhaps ten inches. Both edges of the blade were sharp and the end was pointed like a dagger. And it certainly wasn’t steel. I scratched one side of the blade with my thumb nail and exposed a creamy yellow under the veneer of black.

“Part of that’s blood you scraped away, MacNeal,” Bonner said. “Now what’s that knife made of?”

I examined the yellow spot closely. The knife was made of ivory. Not the kind of ivory I was acquainted with, however; it was a very much coarser grain than any ivory I had ever seen.

“That came out of a mastodon’s tusk, MacNeal,” Bonner said.

I looked at him. He was nodding, seriously. He apparently believed what he said, at any rate.

“Nice curio, Chris,” I commented,[67] handing the thing back to him. “Heirloom, no doubt. Picked it up in one of the Indian villages, eh?”

He did not speak at once. He sat puffing, looking at the fire. Once he puckered his brows in a deep frown. I waited.

“I’ve been prospecting, as usual,” he said at length. “Down there around the headquarters of the Tukuvuk. It’s an awful place; nobody ever goes there. The Indians tell me the spirits of the dead live there. I can believe it; it’s an ideal place for imps and devils. And I was right through the heart of it. I believe I’m the first. No matter how I got there; I came up from the south last summer. You see, I had an idea there was gold in that country.

“The place where I finally settled down was in a little valley on one of the branches of the Tukuvuk between two ranges of hills running from five hundred to maybe three thousand feet high. Messy-looking place, it was; all littered up, as if the Lord had a few sizable chunks of stuff left over and just threw ’em down there to be out of the way.

“But the gold was there; I could almost smell it. I’d been getting some mighty nice color in my pan; that’s what made me decide to stay there. I got there about the middle of July, and I spent the rest of the summer sinking holes in the edge of the creek and along the benches above. What I found indicated that there was a mighty rich vein of the yellow metal thereabouts, with one end of it laying in a pocket of the stuff. If I could locate that pocket, I thought, I’d have the United States treasury backed off the map. But I wasn’t able to run the pocket down by taking bearings from my holes, because the holes didn’t line up in any particular direction.

“What with my interest in trying to get a line on that pocket, I didn’t notice that the season was getting late. But I’d brought in enough grub to last the winter through, so that didn’t matter. Just the same it was up to me to get some sort of shelter over my head, so I hustled up a one-room shack about twelve by twelve I cut from the timber on the slopes with my hand-ax. Nothing fancy, but tight enough. I put in a fireplace and cut and stacked a lot of wood outside.

“That done, winter was on me; I simply couldn’t resist the temptation to have one more try at finding the pocket that spewed the yellow metal all around there. As I said, I got no information from the holes sunk, and it was pure guesswork. I guessed I’d find my pocket on the side of a certain hill, about two hundred feet above creek level. A glacier flowed down the side of that hill through a little gulley, and my idea was that the ice ground away at the pocket and brought the metal down to the creek, and the creek scattered it. This theory was borne out to some extent by the fact that my best showings of color always came from a point a little below the conjunction of the creek and glacier.

“It was snowing the morning I took my pan and shovel and started up the side of the hill, keeping to the edge of the glacier. It wasn’t much of a glacier for size; say, about fifteen feet wide. I could see it winding up the side of the hill until it went out of sight through a cleft about a thousand feet up. Fed by a lake up there, probably.

“I had climbed the hill maybe a hundred feet, following the edge of the glacier, when I caught sight of a dark blotch in the edge of the ice. It was about two feet under the surface. I brushed away the film of snow to have a look. The ice was as clear as a crystal, of a blue color. And what d’you think, MacNeal? It was a man’s body!”

He paused and gave me a quick glance. He wanted to see how I took that, I presume.

“The body of a man,” he went on. “And the queerest-looking man I ever saw in my life. He was lying on his belly and I didn’t get a look at the front of him just then, but I knew it was a man all right. He was covered all over with long hair like a—well, like a bear, say. Not a stitch of clothes.”

“What did you do?” I asked.

“Why, I was that surprised I let my[68] pan and shovel drop and stared at the damn thing with the eyes near popping out of my head. What would anybody do, finding a hair-covered thing like that frozen in a glacier? I won’t deny I was a bit scared, MacNeal.

“Well, I stood there staring at the thing for I don’t know how long. It didn’t occur to me, then, to ask myself how the thing got there. Certainly the idea of fossils or prehistoric men didn’t enter my head. I didn’t think much about anything; I just stood there gaping.

“You know me, MacNeal; I guess I’m pretty soft-hearted in some respects. I’d stop to bury a dead dog I found in the road. I knew I wouldn’t rest easy until I’d cut that thing out of the glacier and given it decent burial. Moreover, I didn’t want it where I’d be seeing it when I went to work on that hillside in the spring; and it would surely be there in the spring, because I imagine that glacier didn’t move an inch a year.

“So I went back to the shack and got my ax, and with none too good a heart for the job turned to and made the chips fly. It took me about three hours to get the thing out of the glacier. You see, as I came down to it I went slow; I don’t care to hack even a dead man.

“Say, MacNeal, can you imagine what it meant to me, digging a corpse out of a glacier down there on the side of a hill in that devil-ridden country? No, you can’t, and that’s the truth. You’d have to go through it to know. It was hell. I don’t want any more of it in mine. Nor what followed, either.”

“What was that?” I asked when he deliberated.

“You’ll hear,” he answered, and went on: “I got the thing out at last, little chunks of ice clinging to it, and dragged it ashore, if a glacier has a shore. It froze me to look at the thing with those little chunks of ice sticking to the long hair. Once, at Dawson, I’d seen a man pulled out of the Yukon, ice clinging to him. That was different, though; at Dawson there was a crowd to sort of buck a man up. I turned the thing over on its back to see what it looked like in front.”

“Well?” said I.

“You’ve seen apes, MacNeal?”

“This thing looked like that?” I countered, beginning to connect up his first queer questions with what he was telling me. “You don’t mean it, Chris!”

“I’m telling you,” he nodded solemnly. “An ape man, that’s what it was. More man than ape, if you ask me. For instance, the face was flatter than an ape’s, and the forehead and chin were more pronounced. The nose was flat, but it wasn’t an ape’s nose. And the hands and feet were like those of a man. Oh, it was a man, all right. The thing that convinced me, I think, was the knife gripped in its hand.”

“The knife you have there?” I inquired.

“This very knife,” he answered.

“What then, Chris?” I urged him to go on.

“I had a good look at that thing and started for my shack. Yes, MacNeal, I ran, and I’m not ashamed to say so. It scared me. Ugliest thing I ever saw. Eyes wide open, glaring and glinting, and the thick lips parted to show the nastiest set of fangs I ever saw in the mouth of man or beast. Why, I tell you the damned thing looked alive! No wonder I scooted. You would have done the same. Anybody would.

“Back in the shack, I sat down on my bunk to think it over. And it was while I sat there trying to puzzle it out that I remembered that theory about the earth tipping over. That gave me a hint of what I had run up against. Of course, I’d heard about fossils and parts of the skeletons of prehistoric men being found. Had I found, not a fossil or part of a skeleton, but the prehistoric man himself? That knocked the wind out of me. If that were the case my name would go down in history and I would be asked to give lectures before scientific societies and such. Consider it, MacNeal.

“I tell you, I couldn’t quite grasp the thing. It was incredible. There I was in this year of our Lord, with the intact corpse of a man who had lived God only knows how many centuries ago. That body, understand, could well[69] be the key to the mystery of the origin of mankind. It might possibly settle the Darwinian theory forever, one way or the other. It was a pretty serious business for me, don’t you see?

“Well, I decided to preserve the thing until I could get out and make a report of the find. But how to preserve it? Of course if I had left it in the glacier it would have kept indefinitely, like a side of beef in cold storage. I was afraid to put it back in the hole in the glacier and freeze it in again with water I carried from the creek; the creek water might exert some chemical action that would ruin the thing. And if I let it lay where it was the snow would cover it, form a warm blanket, and probably cause it to decompose, then I’d have nothing left but the skeleton. I wanted to save the thing just as I’d found it; maybe the scientists would find a way to embalm it.

“I finally hit on the plan of keeping it in an ice pack. That would turn the trick until the weather took on the job. It hadn’t turned bitter cold yet. I tell you, it was a nasty job keeping that thing iced with chunks I chopped from the glacier, and to make it worse the weather stayed moderate for a couple of weeks. Then, suddenly, the mercury in my little thermometer went down with a rush and it got stinging cold. I carried the thing to the shack and stood it up against the wall outside where it couldn’t be covered with snow, and lashed it there.

“Can you imagine me going to sleep in my bunk in the shack every night after that, with that thing standing against the wall outside not two feet away? Of course you can’t. It frazzled my nerves, and more than once I was tempted to cut a hole in the ice on the creek and chuck the damn thing in where I’d never see it again. But no, I had to save it for the scientists and get my name in history; that idea got to be an obsession with me. I knew well enough that if ever I told people the tale I’m telling you now, without some proof of it, I’d get laughed at.”

“No doubt of it,” I sneered.

“The days went by,” he continued, ignoring my sneer, “and more and more that thing outside kept getting on my nerves. The sun went south, and from one day to another I never saw it. The never-ending night was bad enough, but when you add the northern lights and the howling of the wolves you’ve got a condition that breaks a man if he’s not careful. Furthermore, there was that ugly-looking devil outside to think about.

“I was thinking about that thing constantly, and got so I couldn’t sleep. If I shut my eyes I’d see it, anyhow, and if I went to sleep I’d have a nightmare over it. Now and then I’d go out and stand there in the starlight or the aurora looking at it. It fascinated me, yet the sight of the thing gave me the creeps. Finally I began taking a club or my rifle along when I went to look at it; got afraid the thing would come alive and try to murder me with that knife.

“And that’s the way of things for maybe three months and more. My thoughts all the time on that thing outside.

“Well, that couldn’t go on, you know. One morning I woke up with the worst headache a man ever had. I thought my head would split wide open. My blood was like molten iron flowing through my veins. I knew what it was. Fever. I had thought and worried about that thing outside until it got me, and I was in for a brain-storm. I was as weak as a cat, but managed to build up a good fire and pack my bunk with all the blankets and furs I had and crawl in. I only hoped I wouldn’t freeze to death when the fire went out.

“I no sooner got all set in the bunk than things let go; I went completely off. I can’t say positively what happened for a few days after that. Seems like I remember, though, periods when I was semi-rational. I think once I got up to put more wood on the fire. Another time I saw that thing standing in the doorway grinning at me like the devil it was. I shot at it with my rifle and later found a bullet in the door. My shooting couldn’t have been a delusion, at any rate. But the door was still fastened against the wolves and[70] there were no tracks in the snow outside.”

Bonner paused to light his pipe, and then went on:

“I don’t know exactly how long I was out of my head. I’d wound my watch before I crawled into the bunk the first time, and I half remember I wound it again when I got up to put wood on the fire, and it was pretty well run down. It goes forty hours without winding, yet when my head cleared it had stopped. I must have been off my nut about four days.

“Well, you can lay your bottom dollar I’d had enough of prehistoric men hanging around the shack by that time. Let the scientists be damned; I was determined to get rid of that thing the quickest way possible. The quickest way, I thought, would be to get the corpse warm so it would decompose rapidly, then I’d put it outside where the wolves and ravens would pick the bones clean. The scientists would have to be satisfied with the skeleton.

“So I made a big fire in the fireplace and got the shack good and hot, then went out and brought in the corpse. I got sick at the stomach on that job, but that was the only way. I didn’t have the heart to leave the thing outside and build a fire over it out there. I try to respect the dead, even if the corpse is that of a man who had been dead several thousand years and looked more like an animal than a human being.

“I laid the thing on the floor before the fireplace, then sat down on the bunk to wait. I watched it pretty close, because, being dead so long, I thought when it got warm and started to decompose it would go like butter; I didn’t want the shack to be all smelled up with the stink of it. Probably half an hour went by, then all of a sudden I saw the thing quiver—”

“Your brain-storm returning,” I interposed.

“Wait,” said Bonner sharply. “It quivered; not much, but enough to notice. That sort of got me, then I reasoned that anything thawing out like that would naturally quiver a little. Maybe another fifteen or twenty minutes passed, then one of the legs moved. Jerked, sort of. It startled me. Remember, there I was down there in those hills alone with that thing. I was pretty susceptible to weird influences, understand. Anyhow, the leg moved, and—”

“It sat up and asked for a drink of water.” I could not help putting in. Bonner continued, paying no attention to my sarcasm. He seemed to be talking aloud to himself:

“I watched it like a hawk for some time after that, then as I didn’t see it move any more I stepped outside to get some more wood for the fire and to pull a few good breaths of cold air into my lungs. That shack was like the inside of an oven.

“When I went in again I saw that the damned thing had turned over on its back.

“Turned over on its back, I say. And there was a change in the eyes, too; they had a half-awake sort of look in them; a more alive look, understand. And breathing! Yes, sir, breathing! Why the thing didn’t see me when I came in and shut the door I don’t know, but apparently it didn’t. And, believe me or not, the hand that had held the knife was open and the knife was lying on the floor apart from the body.

“Crazy? I tell you no! I was as sane as I am now. I tell you I saw these things with my own two eyes; saw them just as plain as I see you now. I see you don’t believe me, MacNeal. Oh, well, I don’t blame you; I hardly believe it myself sometimes.”

He uttered a little laugh.

“But there it was, just as I’m telling you. And I was that gone when I saw that the thing had turned over on its back that I dropped the wood I had in my arm. The crash of it on the floor brought the thing to its feet on the jump. You needn’t look at me like that; I tell you it did. I take my oath it did! There it was, crouched like a panther ready for the spring, the eyes of it flashing like fire, its lips pulled back tight across the gums and the yellow fangs showing. Can you see that? No, you can’t.”

[71]

Bonner made an expressive gesture with one hand.

“Remarkable, but the thing hadn’t seen me yet. It was looking at the fire; it was half turned toward me so I could see that. Suddenly it screamed in an outlandish gibberish and leaped to the fireplace and tried to gather in an armful of flames. I take it the thing had never seen fire before; didn’t know what it was; probably imagined it some kind of wild animal. Naturally the only thing it got out of that play was burned arms and hands, and the long hair sizzled and curled. It leaped back with a snarl, spitting that funny gibberish. Talk, I guess it was; it came from way down in the belly and sounded like pigs grunting.

“I tell you, MacNeal, I was fair dazed. But I had the sense left to try to help myself. My rifle was leaning against the bunk and I made a quick dive for it. Then, apparently, the thing saw me for the first time. The way it glared at me with those glittering eyes was a caution. I didn’t stop to argue; I snatched up the rifle, cocked it and made a snap shot. The bullet caught the thing in the left breast and the blood gushed. Of course you don’t believe it. But blood, I tell you, gushed from the breast of a thing that had been frozen in a glacier for thousands of years!

“Well, here it came like a cyclone. I didn’t have time to shoot again. Smell? That thing smelled like carrion; almost strangled me. Maybe you know how the cage of a wild animal stinks if it ain’t cleaned out for a week or two. This thing smelled like that, only worse. I can smell it yet. Lord!”

Bonner wrinkled his nose and shivered.

“But there we were at grips, the thing making those belly noises and smelling like a thousand garbage piles. It had the strength of ten men; I sensed that. It jerked the rifle from me and bent the barrel of it double with a twist of the wrists. The barrel of a thirty-eight caliber Winchester rifle—bent it as easy as you or I would bend a piece of copper wire.

“Then we were at it, fighting like a couple of wild cats all over the shack. I’m no slouch of a man myself, MacNeal, when it comes to a rough-and-tumble; but that thing handled me like a baby. I could see my finish. We threshed about the floor, me fighting like a devil, it fighting like forty devils. We kicked into the fire and out again and scattered live coals all over the place, and the shack took fire.

“I was just about gone when my hand accidentally fell on the handle of the knife the thing had dropped on the floor. I hung on to it and poked away at that thing for all I was worth, driving the blade clean up to the hilt with every punch.”

“That knife?” I broke in.

“This knife,” answered Bonner. “There’s the dried blood on it yet. But I think it was really the bullet that did the work. It must have cut an artery. Anyhow, the blood kept gushing out of the thing’s breast; it got on my hands and made ’em slippery. I knew the thing couldn’t pour out blood like that and keep going; that’s what put the heart in me to keep on fighting. And, as I say, I think it was the bullet that did the work in the long run. A lucky shot, otherwise I wouldn’t be here now.

“I felt the thing sagging and going limp in my hands, and its grip began to relax. I saw my chance and put up a knee and broke the grip and kicked it away. It staggered around a moment or two, clutching its breast with its bloody paws, gnashing its fangs and glaring murder at me; then it crashed down to the floor and fell smack into the flames.

“I saw plain enough there was no chance of saving the shack, so I snatched up what I could lay my hands on in the way of food and clothing and blankets, and tore out. I don’t remember putting the knife in my pocket, but that’s where I found it later. The shack burned down to nothing, and that thing burned with it; probably not a bone of it left. The scientists were out of luck and the mystery of mankind would remain unsolved.

[72]

“I didn’t stop to investigate, of course; my job was to make tracks. I knew about this village and came on. How I got here I don’t know; this is a terrible country to cross afoot in the winter. I’d turned my ten huskies adrift to shift for themselves when I reached the valley where all this happened; I didn’t have the grub to keep them going. I had to walk here.

“And that’s all, MacNeal. You can say what you please; I know what I saw with my own eyes and you can’t change my mind about it. Suspended animation? Yes, for a period covering many centuries. It would be a mighty fine thing if we could picture what happened away back there when this old earth tipped over.

“Perhaps we’d see a man, a man that was half ape, crossing a creek with a knife in his hand on the way to murder an enemy sleeping on the opposite bank. Then suddenly the earth tipped over—climatic conditions in those days were such as to freeze things up in a flash—things are held in the grip of the ice just as the dust and lava held ’em in the days of Pompeii, and—

“Well, who’s to say what happened? Anything was possible. We don’t know the conditions of those days. Anyhow, here I come thousands of years later and dig a man, with a knife in his hand, out of a glacier. I heat his body in order to decompose the flesh. Instead of decomposing; he comes to life and I have to kill him. He’s been hibernating in a glacier for centuries. I don’t know what to think about it.”

Bonner refilled and lighted his pipe, then looked at me questioningly.

“Chris,” I said, “I tell you frankly that I don’t believe a word you have said. You tell me you were out of your head for a few days. That accounts for it. You had the jim-jams and imagined all that, then try to spring it on me as actual fact.”

He looked hurt. He looked at the knife in his hand steadily for several long moments, then thrust it toward me, his eyes boring into mine.

“Then where in hell,” he demanded, “did I get this knife?”

THERE were only five words.

They neither affirmed nor denied what had gone before. But they changed the whole trend of the argument.

The men of the engineering gang were lying around the camp-fire, preparatory to going out on the job. It was cool in the shade of the thick trees, with the damp feel of early morning hanging over everything. Further out, over the river, the sun gave promise of better weather later in the day.

Smoking, waiting for the laggards to clean up their plates, the engineering gang—according to invariable man-custom—had begun experiences, jokes, arguments. Over all hung the pungent smell of strong, fresh coffee, and much frying bacon.

Baldy Jenkins, the eighteen-year-old had started it.

“Wish I had a million dollars,” he remarked.

Red Flannel Mike gave the ball a roll.

“You do not,” he denied stoutly. “Be givin’ you a million—and the Lord hisself only knows what you’d be a-doing wid it.”

“Hell I don’t,” said Baldy. “Bet I could tell you right now how I’d spend every penny of it.”

“Bet you don’t,” broke in another of the gang. “Fellow never does know what he’s goin’ to do till it hits him, square between the eyes.”

“Offer me a million,” insisted Baldy Jenkins.

“Aw, not that way. Take somep’n where two men might act different. You don’t know what you’d do. I don’t. No man does—no more’n that kid over there does.”

His lazy gesture indicated a small, khaki-trousered figure. The eyes of the rest of the gang followed.

At first glance she might have been a lad of ten or eleven years. Closer inspection, however, showed the mop of flaxen hair, bobbed off at the level of her ears, and the tender, little-girl face. She was marching around the camp like an inspector-general of an army, into this, that, everything.

“’Cert she wouldn’t,” affirmed Red Flannel Mike. “Coulter’s kid’s just like you or me. She’d have to be up against it to know—an’ maybe not then.”

“Huh! Even that kid....” Baldy snatched up the gauntlet.

They were off. Hot and royally raged the battle.

The advocates of the unexpected gained ascendancy. Louder and more extravagant grew their claims. No man could predict anything. No man knew what he would do. Put him face to face with any situation, any danger, and he would act differently from the way he thought he would.

It was then that Coulter spoke.

He did not raise his voice. If anything, it was lowered. Hitherto, he had sat, silent, listening to the battle of words, his bandaged left arm swung tightly at his side.

“I don’t know about that,” was all he said.

Sudden quiet fell. There came a restless stirring, then tacit agreement. These men of rougher employment—[74]axmen, chainmen, engineers—centered their gaze upon Coulter’s bandaged left arm.

They knew what he was thinking about. They, too, had seen. They agreed with him that he could have but one possible reaction to one set of circumstances.

All of them were employees, of one branch or the other, of the Consolidated Lumber Company. Coulter was in the legal department. There had arisen a nice question as to the exact ownership of a certain tract. Rather than take chances with the heavy statutory penalties for cutting trees upon another’s land, they had sent a lawyer upon the ground. His work was finished. He was ready—more than ready—to return.

City-bred, city born, Coulter had welcomed the chance to see a Southern swamp. He had read, all his life, of Dixie, the land of the magnolia and cotton, of the mockingbird and the honeysuckle. He had welcomed his mission. He had even brought his daughter, Ruth, along.

That was not at all unnatural, however. Wherever Coulter had gone for the last ten years, there, too, had gone Ruth. They had not been separated longer than a day since the gray dawn that the other Ruth had placed the tiny bundle in his arms and turned her face to the wall.

The child was all that was left of their love save memories. She was Coulter’s sole interest in life.

Coming to this camp, Coulter had clad her in khaki, and turned her loose in the open. It had done her good.

The eyes of the stained figures around the camp-fire followed his gaze. They knew something of what he was thinking. They had heard him, in the midst of his pain, setting his teeth, gasp: “Get—Ruth away—where she—can’t hear!”

That, from a man whom they had to restrain from killing himself to get freedom from the torture, was enough.

Coulter’s ignorance of the South and of the woods had been, perhaps, to blame. He did not know. All that he could remember was that he had been bending over the spring, his left arm resting upon the brink. He had not seen the moccasin until it was too late.

Vividly, even yet, he saw the darkish head and body, the supple, writhing, the swift dart and the flash of pain—and then agony; much agony, deep, soul-biting torture.

THERE was no doctor at the camp. There had been a delay before, stupefied, he thought to let them know he had been bit. And then—more agony; agony piled upon agony.

Not concealing their doubts as to their chances of saving his arm or him, they had slapped the rough tourniquet upon his arm, and had twisted down upon the stick until he moaned, unwillingly, in pain. Then they had dipped one of the big hunting knives into boiling water, and had cut his arm at the bite marks—gashing it across, with great, free-handed strokes, then back again at right angles; squeezing the cuts to make him lose the poisoned blood.

Then they had cauterized the wound. Sick, half afaint, to Coulter it seemed that they were deliberately thinking up additional tortures. The white-hot iron that seared his flesh, tormenting the agonized ends of nerves that already had borne past the breaking point, was the final, exquisite touch of agony.

Coulter was one of those men who bear pain—even a slight pain—with difficulty. Even the sight of blood made him faint. This was horrible beyond anything he had ever dreamed. The physical racking; the feel of the steel blade cutting through his own flesh and sinew, down to the bone, made him bite his lips till they spurted blood, in the effort to keep from screaming aloud.

He had not known they were through. He thought they were preparing additional crucifixion for him.

Red Flannel Mike had slapped the gun from his hands and made him understand, somehow, that it was all over; that they were through. But they watched him the rest of the night.

That was why, as the argument rose around the morning camp-fire, Coulter was very sure that he knew what he would do under one set of circumstances.[75] He knew one experience that nothing on earth could send him through again. All that, and more, was in his tone, as he spoke.

At his words there came a restless stirring around the fire. Those men of the engineering gang had seen something of his experience. They knew what he was thinking. The abrupt ending of their argument showed that they agreed with Coulter.

He saw, and understood; and, seeing, smiled bitterly. They knew only a part of it.

To every man there is his one fear. The bravest man that ever trod the earth had his one especial dread. To some, it is fire; to others, cold steel; others still, the clash of physical contact. But, probe deep enough beneath the skin of any man alive, and you find it.

Snakes were Coulter’s fear.

He could not explain it. He did not know why he, a man city-bred and born, had this obsession. It had been with him since he could remember. As a child, once he had gone into a convulsion of fear over some pictures of snakes in a book.

The old women of the family nodded their heads wisely, and muttered things about a fright to his mother before his birth. Coulter did not know. All that he was certain about was that the thought, even, of the writhing, slippery squirming bodies, made his whole being shudder with revulsion, made tingles of absolute horror go up and down his back.

Yes, the gang agreed with him. Yet they had seen only a part of what he had gone through. They had seen and appreciated only his physical suffering—and that was the least part.

Coulter’s nerves were in ragged shreds. He started and jumped at the slightest sound. His experience had intensified a thousandfold his nervous horror of reptiles.

The woods, the swamp, were full of them. He ran upon them constantly. All the time he was longing for his hour of liberation, when he could return to the city and to freedom.

The unexpected flutter of a thrush, as he walked through the woods, would send his heart into his throat and his pulse to pounding in fear. Night after night he woke, chained hand and foot with dread that a snake had crawled up, in the dark, beside him. All the stories he had ever read of their crawling up into camps and getting into the bedding, came to him, lingered with him, tortured him. He was no more asleep before he would awake, bathed in a cold sweat, afraid to move, afraid to lie still.

All that, subconsciously, was in his words, in his manner, in his whole expression, as he said:

“I don’t know about that.”

THERE came the silence of conviction. Even Red Flannel Mike, most zealous exponent of man’s lack of knowledge of himself, was silenced.

“Somebody said something about the kid.” Baldy, the eighteen-year-old, seized his advantage. “I’ll bet that even she—”

Baldy stopped abruptly. His whole frame stiffened. His eyes were riveted upon little Ruth. One by one, the rest of the gang turned to follow his gaze. Each followed his example.

Ruth’s scream cut the air a moment before Baldy’s gasp of horror:

“My God! The kid’s got a moccasin on her!”

The child was close enough for the group to see clearly. Her head was bent back, straining away from the writhing horror. The sleek head slithered to and fro, darting, threatening, winding here and there about her. She seemed frozen with fear.

Baldy had started forward. He stopped.

“I—get me a gun!” he barked. “Get a gun! Quick!”

The reptile drew back its head. There came an interruption:

White to his lips, staggering upon his feet, Coulter came forward. His face was ghastly pale. His unwilling feet buckled under him, threatening, each moment, to give way and pitch him forward upon his face.

Slowly he edged closer. The slender head poised, watchful. Coulter’s movements[76] were scarcely discernible. Suddenly his well arm shot out, seizing, snatching at that loathsome body.

There was a quick movement of the snake, far too rapid to be anticipated or avoided. The head drove forward. He felt the white hot flash of pain.

The rest was a haze of horror to him. It was rather as if he were a spectator at something concerning someone else. He did not command his body. He knew only, vaguely, what was happening.

There came the feel of a sleek body in his hands, the lash and writhing against his arms of something that fought to break away; then the grinding of his heel upon a head, and the flinging, against him, in death agony.

Everything faded out, then.

HIS RETURN to consciousness was marked by a hazy lightness of memory.

In the bitten arm he could feel, mounting higher and higher, the numbness that had marked the other experience. His heart, too, seemed to be acting queerly—just as it had done before.

Red Flannel Mike’s broad back was bent from him as he mixed at something in a basin. They had carried him to his own tent.

Coulter’s holster was hanging from the tent pole. The numbness crept higher in his arm. Soon would begin the cutting of his flesh, the darting flames of pain....

He could not go through with that again! He could not bear it. Better far to finish with the gun what Mike had stopped before.

Softly he slid the gun from the holster, and raised it for action. His finger pressed upon the trigger.

The weapon was dashed suddenly from his hand.

“What the hell!” roared Mike. “You fool, what’s the matter with you?”

“Give—give me that gun!”

“You’re as bad as Baldy Jenkins. Been in the woods all his life—and mistakes a coach whip for a moccasin, just because both of ’em are darkish.

“That wasn’t any more moccasin than a polar bear.... Yes, ’course he struck you. Any snake ’ll do that—but it ain’t always poison. Your arm ain’t even go’ner be sore.

“Never mind about this gun. I’ll give it back to you—later on.”

[77]

QUARRIER entered the taxi with an uneasy sense of crisis.

He was not imaginative; his digestion was excellent; even at forty, an age when most men nowadays have begun to feel the strain of fierce business competition, Quarrier was almost the man that he had been ten years in the past.

Nerves and Quarrier were strangers; he smoked his after-dinner cigar in a rigorous self-denial that made it his sole dissipation; he was in bed and asleep when other men were comfortably faring forth in search of such diversion as the metropolis had to offer.

But the face of that taxi-driver—he had seen it somewhere before. It was a dark, Italian face, with high cheekbones, and a straight, cruel mouth, like a wedge, between lean cheeks scarred and scabbed with late-healed cicatrices and pocked blue with powder burns.

Not an inviting face. And the taxi was old. Glancing at the cushions, as they had roared past an arc-light at the street corner, Quarrier had thought to see the dingy leather sown thick with stains, broad patches, as if—as if....

But pshaw! As he told himself, he was getting fanciful; perhaps his liver, at last, had played him false. A migraine, doubtless—he’d have a look in on old Peterby in the morning. Peterby was a good, plain old-fashioned practitioner—no nonsense about him....

He had gone to the offices of the Intervale Steel Company on a mission, an important one. As a matter of fact, it was vital—almost a matter of life and death. But he smiled grimly now in the dark recesses of the cab as he reflected that, as it chanced, his last-minute decision had left those documents where they would be beyond the reach of—Hubert Marston, for instance.

He had nothing on his person of any special value; he would be poor picking, indeed, if, as it chanced, that taxi-driver with the face of a bravo might, behind the sinister mask that was his face, be the thug he seemed, hired, perhaps, by the Panther of Peacock Alley.

An extravagant appellation, doubtless, but that was Marston: Suave, sinister, debonair—the social roturier equally with the manipulator. He had acquired the name naturally enough, for most of his operations were carried on in the hotels and clubs.

He had an office hard by the “Alley” and it was from its ornate splendor that he issued, on occasion, gardenia in buttonhole, cane hooked over his arm, dark face with its inscrutable smile flashing upon the habitués with what meaning only he could say. And he did not choose to tell.

And Marston had wanted those documents; they spelled the difference to him between durance and liberty—aye, between life and death....

[78]

For Hubert Marston had made the one slip that, soon or late, the most careful criminal makes: He had, yielding on a sudden to his one rare impulse of hate, commissioned the murder of a man who stood in his way, and—he had paid for it, as he had thought, in good crisp treasury notes, honest as the day, certainly! But the payment had been made at second—or third-hand—that was Marston’s way. And for once it had betrayed him.

For those documents—as he had found out, too late—were counterfeit treasury notes. The go-between had seen to that, paying the hired killer with them, and pocketing the genuine. And Quarrier, himself the watch-dog of those interests that Marston would have despoiled, (he had been retained by them for some time now as their private investigator) had found, first, the disgruntled bravo himself, obtained the spurious notes, together with the man’s confession, traced them backward to the go-between—and now, hard upon the arch-criminal’s heels, he waited only for the morning, and that which would follow.

Quarrier had given the driver a number in the West Eighties, but now, glancing from the window, his eyes narrowed with a sudden, swift concern.

“The devil!” he ejaculated, under his breath. “Now, if I thought—”

But the sentence was never completed. They were in a narrow, unfamiliar street; a street silent, tenantless, as it seemed, save for dark doorways, and here and there a furtive, drifting shadow-shape—the tall fronts of warehouses, with blind eyes to the night, silent, grim.

The echoing roar of the engine beat in a swift clamor against those iron walls—and suddenly, with a sort of click, he remembered where it was he had seen that lupine countenance—the dark face of the driver separated from him by the width of a single pane of glass.

It had been behind glass that he had seen it. A month or so previous, at the invitation of his friend, Gregory Vinson, captain of detectives (with whom he had formerly been associated, prior to his present connection), he had visited headquarters; and it had been there, in the gallery which is given over to rogues, that he had marked that face, its features, even among the many crooks, thugs, strong-arm men, yeggs, hoisters, pennyweighters, housemen, and scratchers. And now he remembered it when it was too late!

His right hand falling upon the butt of a blunt-nosed automatic, with which he was never without, with his left he jerked strongly at the handle of the door. But the door was locked; he could not open it.

Quarrier had been in a tight place more than once; danger he was not unacquainted with; it had been with him in broad daylight, in darkness, grinning at his elbow with dirk or pistol in the highways and byways of Criminopolis. He was a fighter—or he would not have won to the possession of those documents—the documents so greatly desired by Hubert Marston—the evidence of the one false step made by the Master of Chicane, the one slip that was to put him, ere the setting of another sun, where he would be safe.

Now Quarrier, his mouth a grim line, was reaching with the butt of his automatic to break that glass when, with a grinding of brakes the taxi whirled suddenly to a groaning halt.

The door swung open—to the windy[79] night without, and the glimmer of a dark face at the curb.

“Here you are, sir,” Quarrier heard the voice, with, he was certain, a mocking quality in the quasi-deferential cadence. But he could see merely the face, behind it a black well of darkness, velvet black, save for the dim loom of a lofty building just across.

Quarrier did not know how many there might be, lurking there in the blackness, nor did he greatly care. The locked door; the face of the man at the wheel; the unfamiliar street—shanghaied by a land pirate, at the very least! There could be no doubt of it.

But it was no time for hesitation. If he were in the wrong, and it was all a mistake—well, he could afford to pay. But—the face of Marston arose before him, suave, sinister, smiling.... What was it the man had said, on the occasion of their last meeting at the Intervale offices:

“Possession, my dear Quarrier—possession is ten points of the lawless. Remember that!”

Quarrier remembered, and with the remembrance came a swift, sudden anger. But it was an anger that was controlled, as a flame is controlled—though it was none the less deadly.

“Here you are, sir,” repeated the voice, and now there was in it a something more than mockery. There was an edge, a rasp; almost it sounded like a command, an order.

Quarrier grinned then—a mere facial contraction of the lips. Then, muscle and mind and body, in one furious projectile, he launched himself outward through the doorway in a diving tackle.

The white face with its sneering grin was blotted out; there came the spank of a clean-cut blow; a turgid oath. Quarrier, rising from his knees, surveyed the limp figure on the cobbles with a twisted smile; then he turned, peering under his hand down a long tunnel of gloom, where, at the far end, a light showed, like a will-o-the-wisp beckoning him on.

He could not tell where he was. Somewhere in the Forties, he judged—Hell’s Kitchen, probably—although there was a curious lack of the life and movement boiling to full tide in that grim neighborhood of battle, murder, and sudden death.

But as his eyes became accustomed to the stifling dark he found the reason. It was a street of warehouses, public stores; and further on, as he looked, like a ribbon of pale flame against the violet sky, he saw the river.

He bent his steps away from it, walking carefully, picking his way on the uneven flagging. Twice, as he went forward, it seemed to him that he was watched—that eyes gazed at him out of the blackness; and twice he turned his head, swiftly to face the silence and the emptiness of the long, lonely way.

And it seemed, too, that as he went, the whispering echo of his hasty steps went on before him, and behind; he fell to counting them—and suddenly he knew. They were before him—and behind. He was in a trap.

There came a leaping, thunderous rush at his back, and a voice, screaming between the high walls:

“There he is! Now—go get ’im!”

And it was then that Quarrier, reaching for his pistol, discovered that it was gone; lost, doubtless, in that encounter with the taxi-driver. But he braced, spreading his arms wide as a grizzly meets the onslaught of wolves. But the wolves were many, and they came on now, a ravening pack; one, before the rest, looming as a black blot against the starshine, lunged forward with a growling oath.

The rest were yet some little distance away. Quarrier saw the man, or, rather, he sensed the nearness of that leaning shadow, spread-eagled like a bat against the dimness.... Then there came the sudden impact of fist on flesh—a straining heave—and Quarrier, diving under the hurtling figure, straightened, and hurled him outward and away.

The flying figure struck among the rest, head on, to a growling chorus of oaths, imprecations. But still they came on, thrusting, lunging; a gun crashed almost in Quarrier’s face.... There came a voice:

[80]

“No shooting, you fool! Th’ Big Gun says—”

The rest was lost as the pistol clattered to the cobbles. The center of a whirling tangle of fist and foot, to Quarrier it seemed that he fought in a nightmare that would have no end. He had gone to one knee under the impact of a swinging blow, when, from the far distance, there sounded the rolling rattle of a night-stick, with the clangor of the patrol.

Something gripped his ankle—something at once soft and hard. He lunged, full length, as a football player at the last desperate urge of his spent strength. Then he was on his feet, running, side-stepping, circling with the skill and desperate effort of a plunging half-back, stiff-arming the opposition to right and left.

Just ahead, the black maw of an alley, a deeper blot of blackness, loomed. In its heart, like a witch-fire, there swam upward a nebulous, faint glow as from the pit; out of the tail of his eye he saw it: The dim loom of a house, and an open door.

He reached the turn—and a figure uprose before him, even in that darkness brutish, broad, thewed like a grizzly. The great arm rose, once; it fell, like the hammer of Thor.

Quarrier lurched, stiffened, buckling inward at the knees in a loose-jointed, slumping fall.

QUARRIER came to himself, all his faculties at full tide.

It was smothering dark—a darkness not merely of the night but of a prison-house, silent, musty with the stale odor of decay and death. Near at hand, after a moment, he heard a slow, ceaseless dripping, like the beating of a heart, or the slow drip-drip of a life that was running out, drop by single drop.

The fancy seemed logical enough; there seemed nothing of the fantastic in it; Quarrier waited, there in the smothering dark, for the quick knife-thrust that would mean the end—or the deadening impact of the slung-shot.

But, unimaginative as he was, like a man who has but lately undergone the surgeon’s scalpel he feared to move, to feel, even while he assured himself that he was unhurt save for the throbbing in his temples, and the very bruises that he felt upon him, but would not touch.

But there was something else. After a little his hesitant, exploring fingers found it. The length of line bent in a sort of running bowline about his shoulders and arms. And behind him, from a staple in the wall, it hung, sliding like a snake in the thick darkness.

He moved his head, slowly, carefully, like a man testing himself for an invisible hurt. And then—

“Ha!” he breathed, deep in his throat, the shadow of a cry. For, moving an inch further to the right, it would have been a noose, tightening as he moved, strangling him there, choking him out of sound and sense.

Brave as he was, Quarrier shivered, his shoulders twitching with the thought. And it was not cold. Moving with an infinite caution, he ran his exploring fingers along the hempen strands.

Whoever had devised that noose had been a sailor. And only a sailor could undo it.

And there in the dark, trussed as he was, at the mercy of what other peril he knew not. Quarrier permitted himself the ghost of a grin. His hand went up, slowly, carefully, the fingers busy with the rope; there came a tug, and, coiling at his feet like a snake, the noose slid slithering along the stones.

Quarrier was not a praying man, in the ordinary sense, but now he sent heavenward a silent aspiration of gratitude for the impulse which, years previous, had prompted his signing on as a foremast hand in the China seas. And the long hours in the doldrums, below the line, had, as it proved, been anything but wasted.

Now, easing his cramped muscles in a preliminary stretching, he rose gingerly to his feet, moving with the stealth and caution of an Indian. He[81] was free of that constricting rope, but as he moved forward, groping, just ahead there came to him a sudden murmur of voices, low, like the growling of savage beasts. There was that sort of note in it: A fierce, avid mutter, and presently, as he advanced, he made out here and there a word.

“Th’ Big Gun.... You better watch your step.... Mar—”

Quarrier found himself in a sort of corridor, at the far end of which proceeded the voices. It had all been done in the dark, so to speak. The taxi, that driver with the face familiar and yet unfamiliar, the attack, and now this. But time pressed. Why they had not murdered him out of hand he did not pause to consider; he knew only that Marston—and he was certain that it was Marston’s hand that had been in it—would, with a clear field, be at the hiding-place of those documents. Even now, doubtless, he was there.

Quarrier felt mechanically for his pistol; and then his hand dropped hopelessly as he remembered that he was weaponless.

He listened tensely, holding his breath, as the voices receded—or, rather, one of them; he could hear the other following the departing man with his complaints.

Evidently they had left a guard of two. One of them was going; the other left behind, and not especially delighted with his job.

An abrupt turn of the long hallway brought this man suddenly into plain view.

Quarrier blinked in the glare from the single incandescent, flattening himself against the wall; then, with a pantherish pace, he had covered the intervening space in three lunging strides.

The man, a broad fellow with a seamed, lead-colored countenance, turned his head; his mouth opened, his hand going to his pocket with a lightning stab of the blunt, hairy fingers.

But Quarrier had wasted no time. Even as the giant reached for his gun Quarrier’s fist swung in a short arc, and there was power in it. The blow, traveling a scant six inches, crashed full on the point; the thick-set man, his eyes glazing, swayed, slipped, fell in an aimless huddle.

“Well—a knockout!” panted Quarrier, reaching for the pistol.

Marston was the “Big Gun”, of course. Quarrier had never doubted it; but hitherto the President of Intervale Steel had conducted his brokerage business, on the surface at any rate, without resort to open violence. And Intervale Steel—You knew really nothing about it until you took a flyer in it; then, as it might chance, you knew enough and more than enough.

Quarrier, glancing at the unconscious man and pocketing the pistol, departed without more ado; proceeding along the hall, he found, with no further adventure, a narrow door, and the pale stars, winking at him from, he judged, a midnight horizon.

But a glance at his watch told him that it was but nine-thirty; there was yet time to get to the hiding-place of those documents ahead of Marston, if, as he was now convinced, it had been Marston’s thugs who had ambushed him.

Plunging along the shadowy alley, after five minutes’ walk, made at a racing gait, he found a main-traveled avenue and an owl taxi, whose driver, leaning outward, crooked a finger in invitation to this obvious fare, appearing out of the dark.

Quarrier did not hesitate. The fellow might be a gunman or worse; he must take his chance of that.

“Twenty-three Jones!” he called crisply, with the words diving into the cab’s interior; then, his head out of the window, as the taxi turned outward from the curb:

“And drive as if all hell were after you!”

QUARRIER reached his destination without incident, but as he went up the winding stairway of the office building to his private sanctum he was oppressed by an uneasy sense that all[82] was not as it should be. Those elevators—they were seldom out of order. Perhaps....

But, panting a little from his climb, he found his floor, and the door of his private office.

For just a split second he hesitated; then, unlocking the door, he flung it wide and went in.

And then, for the third time that evening, he had another shock: for, almost from the moment of his entry into that sound-proof chamber, he knew that he was not alone.

For a moment, there in the blaze from the electrolier, lighted by the opening of the door, he stood rigid, listening, holding his breath; crouched, bent forward like a sprinter upon his mark.

Quarrier was a big man, and well muscled; in his day he had been an amateur boxer of repute. For a big man, he was quick, well-poised, supple and controlled.

A brain of ice and nerves of steel—that was Quarrier. And at that moment he stood in need of them.

He had heard nothing, felt nothing, seen nobody—and yet he knew, beyond any possibility of doubt, that someone or something was with him there in that sound-proof chamber, thirty stories above the street. And the knowledge—as certain as the fact that he, Quarrier, as yet lived and breathed—the knowledge that he was not alone was not reassuring. It was fantastic, it was incredible—but it was true!

Everything in that private office was in plain sight; shelter there was none for any possible intruder; and yet, by the very positive evidence of his eyes he knew, and his pulses quickened at the thought, that he was not alone.

It had been Quarrier’s fancy to rent the small suite on the top floor of the out-of-the-way office building. He liked the view; the rooms were remote; they suited his purpose; they were private. Anything could happen here, and no one be the wiser: the crash of a heavy .45, for instance, would not penetrate an inch outward beyond those sound-proof walls. And a cry, a shout would be lost there just as a stone is lost, dropped downward into a deep well of silence—and of oblivion.

Now, if Quarrier’s man, Harrison, a soft-footed, super-efficient body-servant, had not kept on his hat; or if, say, he had not had a particularly abundant shock of hair, added to the fact that although an excellent servant, he was somewhat deaf; and if, too, he had not, for once, walked and worked in deviousness—this chronicle would have had a very different ending—for Quarrier, at any rate.

His hand in the pocket of his coat, the fingers curled about the butt of the automatic that he had taken from the guard back there in the cellar, Quarrier, frowning, surveyed the room in a slow, searching appraisal. Those documents—he had to make certain of them.

From left to right, as his gaze went round the chamber, he saw a book-case, a full-length canvas, done in oils, the double windows, a door, locked with a huge, old-fashioned key, leading into a lumber-room just beyond, a small wall safe, his desk—which completed the circle.

The room was in itself a safe. It was like a fort: The windows were protected by sheet-steel aprons similar to the burglar-guards used by bank tellers; the main entrance door, through which Quarrier had entered, and which opened upon the corridor and the elevators, was of steel, with a patent spring combination lock; the other door, leading to the lumber-room, was also of steel, locked, however, with a huge, old-fashioned key, but this latter door had never been in use since Quarrier’s occupancy.

Nothing short of an acetylene blowpipe could have penetrated the walls, the ceiling, the floor, but they were smooth, unmarred by scratch or tell-tale stain.

Now, to understand events as they occurred:

Quarrier was in his private sanctum, his office; it adjoined the lumber-room[83] at the right. And a simple diagram may serve perhaps better than a page of explanation:

The electrolier, blazing from its four nitro lamps, illumined every nook and cranny of that office; shed its blazing effulgence upon Quarrier, standing like a graven image before that wall safe. And as he stood there, for the first time in his well-ordered existence a prey to fear, a face rose out of his consciousness; he heard again the voice of Marston, President of Intervale Steel:

“You have them, my dear Quarrier; keep them—safe.”

Quarrier had never liked Marston; the man was elusive, like an eel; you never saw his hand: it was impossible to guess what moved behind the mask-like marble of his face, expressionless always, cold, contained.

But Quarrier had the “documents,” or, rather, they were there, in that wall safe, in itself a small fort of chrome-nickel steel and manganese against which no mere “can-opener” could have prevailed—no torch, even.

Now, as he operated the combination, he was abruptly sensible of a curious sensation of strain; a shock; the short hairs at the back of his neck prickled suddenly as if at the touch of an invisible, icy finger. And for a moment he could have sworn to a Presence just behind him—a something in ambush grinning at his back—a danger, a real and daunting peril, the greater that it was unmeasured and unknown.

But with his fingers upon that dial, Quarrier half turned as if to depart. He was getting jumpy, his nerves out of hand—too much coffee and too many strong cigars, perhaps. That was it. That kidnapping; it might, after all, have had nothing to do with Marston. The documents were safe—they simply had to be. Unless Marston had been there, and gone; but he would scarcely have had time.

Perhaps, too, Quarrier might have obeyed the impulsion of that turning movement, and in that case, also, this story would never have been written. Quarrier might have done this, but for the moment, practical and sanely balanced as he was, for a split second he had the fancy that if he turned his head he would see—something that was not good, that was not—well—normal.

It was instinctive, elemental, rather than rational, and, getting himself in hand, he would, doubtless, have turned abruptly, leaving the room, if, at that moment, out of the tail of his eye, he had not seen the inescapable evidence of a presence other than his own.

QUARRIER was a large man, and hard-muscled, a dangerous adversary in a rough-and-tumble, a “good man with his hands,” as we have seen; young, and a quick thinker.

In the half of a second it came to him that Marston might have delegated his authority (at second- or third-hand, certainly) to some peterman, some yegg, say, to obtain possession of those documents. But the fellow would have to be a boxman par excellence; that strong-box was the last word in safes, and, Quarrier was certain, the final one.

No ordinary houseman could hope to break into it, and the marauder would have to depend upon a finger sandpapered to the quick, hearing microscopically sensitive, to catch, through that barrier of steel and bronze, the whispering fall of those super-tumblers.

And abruptly following this suggestion, a second and a more daunting thought obtruded: Suppose—just suppose, that their design held no intention[84] of an assault upon the safe; suppose that their plan, the purpose of that nameless, invisible Presence, had included, in the first place, him—Quarrier? In case, after all, he had managed to escape the trap back there in the cellar? Why—they would use him; that was it! They would force him to open the safe. The thing was simple; there was about it, even, a suggestion of sardonic humor, but it was a humor that did not appeal to Quarrier.

Upon the instant he swung round, crouching, his hand reaching for his pocket in a lightning stab, and coming up, level, holding the short-barrelled automatic.

Then his mouth twisted in a mirthless grin as his straining gaze beheld the square room empty under the lights.

A moment he stood, his keen, strong, thoughtful face etched deep with new lines of worry, ears strained against the singing silence, eyes turning from door to door, and from wall to window, a pulse in his temple throbbing jerkily to his hard-held breath. He began the circuit of the room. Walking on tiptoe, he approached the door by which he had entered, thrust into its socket the great bolt. The bolt seemed really unnecessary; the lock in itself, a spring-latch affair, was devised so that it held the stronger for pressure from without.

The snick of steel against steel rang startlingly loud in the speaking stillness; for a moment Quarrier had a curious fancy, a premonition almost, that it was a wasted precaution—that, in effect, he was locking and double locking that door upon an empty room—an empty strong-box. Pistol in hand, however, and starting from the door, he began his round.

The book-case he passed with a cursory examination; nothing there. Next the painting; a portrait of his great-uncle; it held him for a moment; those eyes had always held him; they were “following” eyes; and now for a moment it seemed to Quarrier that they held a warning, a message, a command. But he passed on....

A heavy leather settle was next in order. With a sheepish grimace he stooped, peering under it, straightened, going on to the double windows. That settle had been innocent of guile, but as to the windows—he paused an interval while he thumbed the patent steel catches. These were shut tight, the windows black, glimmering squares against the windy night without.

Throwing off the locks, one after the other, he pushed up the first window, released the steel outer apron, and then, in the very act of leaning outward into the black well beneath, he drew back, with a quick, darting glance over his shoulder as his spine prickled at a sudden, daunting thought.

What was that?

For a heartbeat at his back he thought to hear a rustle, a movement, like the shuffle of a swift, stealthy footfall, on the heavy pile of the Kermanshah rug.

But once more there was nothing—no one.

It was thirty stories to the street beneath, and as he leaned there in the window his imagination upon the instant had swayed out down to the dreadful peril of the sheer, sickening fall.

How simple it would have been for someone behind him—how easy....

He shivered, the sweat beading his forehead in a fine mist of fear. A hand on his ankle—a quick heave—and then a formless blur against the night—the plunge—into nothingness....

Turning to the right, he surveyed the heavy door leading to the lumber-room. He tried the great key, rattling the knob. The door was locked; it was heavy, solid, substantial. A quick frown wrinkled his forehead.

“Absurd!” he muttered, but there was an odd lack of conviction in the word. “Impossible!” he said again. “There’s nobody in the room except myself; there couldn’t be.”

But even as he spoke he knew, beyond the shadow of a doubt, that someone or something had occupied that room but a matter of seconds prior to his entry, and if he, or whatever it was, was not there now, where was this invisible presence?

The presence in the room of another than himself was a physical impossibility[85] unless, indeed, there was, after all, a fourth dimension, into which as a man passes from sunlight into shadow, the intruder had stepped, perhaps now regarding him sardonically from that invisible plane: A living ghost!

Absurd! And yet, there was that other fact—he had seen it: the silent, the voiceless, yet moving witness—the positive and irrefutable proof of a presence other than his own.

THERE, in a locked, bolted, impregnable chamber, unmarked by the least sign of entry—a main door which did not have a key, responding only to a combination known only to himself—a secondary door most obviously locked, and from the inside; windows of thick glass, triple locked with the latest in patent catches—someone or something had entered, passing, as it seemed, through bolts and bars, through walls, through steel and stone and concrete, like a djinn, or a wraith—through the keyhole?

Matter-of-fact as he was, hard-headed and practical, Quarrier was aware for an instant of a flicker of almost superstitious fear. But—rot! In all the space confined by those four walls and ceiling and floor there was not room for concealment even for a—cat, for instance—for nothing human, at any rate. It was beyond him, even as the Thing that had entered was beyond him, though at hand.

Quarrier did not believe in the supernatural with his mind; but, brave as he was by nature and training, in that moment he knew fear. But he preferred, with his intelligence, to credit Marston with it; Marston, so far as morals were considered, might have been almost anything: you saw it in his curious eyes, with their pale irises, the flat, dead color of his skin, like the belly of a snake; in the grim, traplike mouth. Quarrier had never deceived himself as to the President of Intervale Steel. The thing was fantastic, unreal—and yet. It might easily be a trap, and worse. Peril, the more subtile because unknown, was all about him; he felt it, like an emanation. What was it that the psychological sharps would call it? An aura, as of some invisible and deadly presence, seeing, although unseen.

THE ROOM, or office, as has been written, was impregnable to any but an assault in force, the doors invincible save by the shattering crash of high explosive, the windows almost equally so.

Quarrier’s man, Harrison, even, would be unable to enter the room in his employer’s absence; so that, knowing the combination of the safe, he could take nothing from it, or bring anything into it. He left, in the rare intervals that Quarrier suffered his ministrations, always with his master, returning likewise, if he returned at all, in Quarrier’s company.

The recluse had hedged himself about with care. Marston, with his keen, devising brain, would face a pretty problem in the recovery of those documents.

But it was when, on an abrupt inspiration, Quarrier removed the telephone receiver from its hook, that he became certain that it was a trap.

“Give me Schuyler 9000,” he had whispered, his voice hoarse in the blanketing silence. But even with the words he knew that the line was dead, yet it was characteristic of Quarrier that, once satisfied that this was so, he resumed his inventory of the office where he had left off.

He had completed the circuit of the chamber with the exception of the wall safe and the small, flat-topped writing-desk by the door. From his position he could see the desk quite easily; there was nothing and nobody either on or under it. And now, before he twirled the combination, he laid his hand upon the doors, pulling at the handles in a perfunctory testing. And then—

He recoiled, stumbling backward, as the doors swung wide with a jarring clang. Fingers trembling, he jerked forward a drawer—put in his hand. He[86] withdrew it—empty. Confronted with the incredible truth—the thing which he had feared and yet had not believed—he stood, stunned. For the documents had vanished!

Even in the midst of his excitement and dismay, Quarrier permitted himself the ghost of a faint, wintry grin. But a few hours before he had himself bestowed those papers in their particular resting-place, and, observing a precaution to make assurance doubly sure, he had stationed a guard at the street level, men whom he could trust. For, in the morning he had meant to transfer those documents to that repository in the West Eighties from which Marston would never be able to retrieve them, for with their receipt would come the final quietus of the President of Intervale Steel. And that was why Quarrier had called that number, which had not answered.

Now the documents were gone and Marston was safe. But there remained a final thin thread of hope, and it was this:

The building, a new one, stood alone; Quarrier owned it; his enemies had in some obscure fashion obtained that which they sought. And—this being so—they were in the building.

Quarrier’s orders to that guard had not included the stoppage or detention of any seeking ingress. On entering, he had been informed merely that perhaps half a dozen, all told, had possibly preceded him. They had trapped him—perhaps they might even succeed in expunging him from the record together with the evidence, but they—Marston and the rest—some or all of them were in the building; they had to be.

He grinned again, a swift, tigerish grin, as he considered the trifling clue which had betrayed them. But for that he would never have discovered the looting of the safe.

And it was then, as he stood, turned a little from the safe and facing the heavy door giving on the lumber-room, that he straightened, tense, bending to the keyhole.

The door was sound-proof, as were the walls, but abruptly, as a sound heard in dreams, he had heard it: At the keyhole, a sound, or the shadow of a sound, faint and thin, but unmistakable, like the beating of a heart.

And that sound had gone on, faint and thin, as though muffled through layers of cotton wool, persistent, regular—the faint, scarce-audible ticking of a watch.

For a moment, even while he considered and dismissed the thought that they might have planted a time-bomb against that door, Quarrier hesitated. And then, abruptly, he knew: They were in the lumber-room; he had surprised them; doubtless they waited, hidden, for his exit. He had been too quick for them; they had not counted on his escape from that cellar, and if that were so, he, Quarrier, would have something to say as to their getaway.

Silent, his automatic ready, he had opened the door into the corridor with a slow, stealthy caution. Then he was in the corridor, searching the thick-piled shadows, where, at the far end, a light hung between floor and ceiling like a star. A silence held, thick, heavy, mournful, daunting, as he began his advance—a silence burdened with a tide of threat, sinister, whispering, alive.

Just ahead of him was the first of the great batteries of elevators. A pressure upon the call-bell, and in a moment he would have with him men upon whom he could rely, men who would execute his least order without question. And then, remembering, he desisted.

For he found it easy to believe that the same agency which had silenced his telephone might have cut him off here also from communication, but his finger, reaching for the signal, jerked backward, as, out of the corner of his eye, he beheld a lance of light spring suddenly from the crusted transom of the lumber-room door.

Were they coming out?

“Ha!” he breathed, deep in his throat.

He did not pause to consider how many of them there might be, or that his faithful guardians of the gate,[87] thirty stories below, were probably silenced by the same sinister hand.

Silently, his gun held rigid as a rock, he approached the lumber-room door; then, a step away, he paused, with a sharp intake of his breath.

Here, six paces at his left, a narrow corridor led to a fire-alarm box and a window directly overlooking the main entrance and the street. Quarrier, back to the wall, thrust up a groping hand to where, just above his head, a light cluster hung. Three of the bulbs he unscrewed; then, going to the window, opened it, leaned outward, and, with intervals between, dropped them downward into the dark.

Then, pistol in hand, his feet silent upon the concrete flooring of the corridor, he approached the lumber-room door.