Devil’s Rosary

THE AMBULANCE-GONG INSISTENCE OF my night bell brought me up standing from a stuporlike sleep, and as I switched the vestibule light on and unbarred the door, “Are you the doctor?” asked a breathless voice. A disheveled youth half fell through the doorway and clawed my sleeve desperately. “Quick quick, Doctor! It’s my uncle, Colonel Evans. He’s dying. I think he tried to kill himself—”

“All right,” I agreed, turning to sprint upstairs. “What sort of wound has he?—or was it poison?”

I took the last four steps at a bound, snatched some clothes from the bedside chair and charged down again, pulling on my garments like a fireman answering a night alarm. “Now, which way—” I began, but:

“Tiens,” a querulous voice broke in as Jules de Grandin came downstairs, seeming to miss half the treads in his haste, “Let him tell us where to go as we go there, my old one! It is that we should make the haste. A cut throat does not wait patiently.”

“This is Dr. de Grandin,” I told the young man. “He will be of great assistance—”

“Mais oui,” the little Frenchman agreed, “and the Trump of Judgment will serve excellently as an alarm clock if we delay our going long enough. Make haste, my friend!”

“Down two blocks and over one,” our caller directed as we got under way, “376 Albion Road. My uncle went to bed about ten o’clock, according to the servants, and none of them heard him moving about since. I got home just a few minutes ago, and found him lying in the bathroom when I went to wash my teeth. He lay beside the tub with a razor in his hand, and blood was all over the place. It was awful!”

“Undoubtlessly,” de Grandin murmured from his place on the rear seat. “What did you do then, young Monsieur?”

“Snatched a roll of gauze from the medicine cabinet and staunched the wound as well as I could, then called Dockery the gardener to hold it in place while I raced round to see you. I remembered seeing your sign sometime before.”

We drew up to the Evans house as he concluded his recital, and rushed through the door and up the stairs together. “In there,” our companion directed, pointing to a door from which there gushed a stream of light into the darkened hall.

A man in bathrobe and slippers knelt above a recumbent form stretched full-length on the white tiles of the bathroom. One glance at the supine figure and both de Grandin and I turned away, I with a deprecating shake of my head, the Frenchman with a fatalistic shrug.

“He has no need of us, that poor one,” he informed the young man. “Ten minutes ago, perhaps yes; now”—another shrug—“the undertaker and the clergyman, perhaps the police—”

“Do you say so?” de Grandin interrupted sharply. “Trowbridge, my friend, consider this, if you please.” Deftly he raised the dead man’s thin white beard and pointed to the deeply incised slash across the throat. “Does that mean nothing?”

“Perfectly. Wipe your pince-nez before you look a second time, and tell me that you see the cut runs diagonally from right to left.”

“But Monsieur the deceased was right-handed—look how the razor lies beneath his right hand. Now, if you will raise your hand to your own throat and draw the index finger across it as if it were a knife, you will note the course is slightly out of horizontal—somewhat diagonal—slanting downward from left to right. Is it not so?”

“Très bien. When one is bent on suicide he screws his courage to the sticking point, then, if he has chosen a cut throat as means of exit, he usually stands before a mirror, cuts deeply and quickly with his knife, and makes a downward-slanting slash. But as he sees the blood and feels the pain his resolution weakens, and the gash becomes more and more shallow. At the end it trails away to little more than a skin-scratch. It is not so in this case; at its end the wound is deeper than at the beginning.

“Again, this poor one would almost certainly have stood before the mirror to do away with himself. Had he done so he would have fallen crosswise of the room, perhaps; more likely not. One with a severed throat does not die quickly. He thrashes about like a fowl recently decapitated, and writes the story of his struggle plainly on his surroundings. What have we here? Do you—does anyone—think it likely that a man would slit his gullet, then lie down peacefully to bleed his life away, as this one appears to have done? Non, non; it is not en caractère!

“Consider further”—he pointed with dramatic suddenness to the dead man’s bald head—“if we desire further proof, observe him!”

Plainly marked there was a welt of bruised flesh on the hairless scalp, the mark of some blunt instrument.

“He might have struck his head as he fell,” I hazarded, and he grinned in derision.

“Ah bah, I tell you he was stunned unconscious by some miscreant, then dragged or carried to this room and slaughtered like a pole-axed beef. Without the telltale mark of the butcher’s bludgeon there is ground for suspicion in the quietude of his position, in the neat manner the razor lies beneath his hand instead of being firmly grasped or flung away, but with this bruise before us there is but one answer. He has been done to death; he has been butchered; he was murdered.”

“WILL YE BE SEEIN’ Sergeant Costello?” Nora McGinnis appeared like a phantom at the drawing room door as de Grandin and I were having coffee next evening after dinner. “He says—”

“Invite him to come in and say it for himself, ma petite,” Jules de Grandin answered with a smile of welcome at the big red-headed man who loomed behind the trim figure of my household factotum. “Is it about the Evans killing you would talk with us?” he added as the detective accepted a cigar and demi-tasse.

“There’s two of ’em, now, sir,” Costello answered gloomily. “Mulligan, who pounds a beat in th’ Eighth Ward, just ’phoned in there’s a murder dressed up like a suicide at th’ Rangers’ Club in Fremont Street.”

“Pardieu, another?” asked de Grandin. “How do you know the latest one is not true suicide?”

“Well, sir, here’s th’ pitch: When th’ feller from th’ club comes runnin’ out to say that Mr. Wolkof’s shot himself, Mulligan goes in and takes a look around. He finds him layin’ on his back with a little hole in his forehead an’ th’ back blown out o’ his head, an’, bein’ th’ wise lad, he adds up two an’ two and makes it come out four. He’d used a Colt .45, this Wolkof feller, an’ it was layin’ half-way in his hand, restin’ on his half-closed fingers, ye might say. That didn’t look too kosher. A feller who’s been shot through the forehead is more likely to freeze tight to th’ gun than otherwise. Certain’y he don’t just hold it easy-like. Besides, it was an old fashioned black-powder gun, sir, what they call a low-velocity weapon, and if it had been fired close against the dead man’s forehead it should ’a’ left a good-sized smudge o’ powder-stain. There wasn’t any.”

“One commends the excellent Mulligan for his reasoning,” de Grandin commented. “He found this Monsieur Wolkof lying on his back with a hole drilled through his head, no powder-brand upon his brow where the projectile entered, and the presumably suicidal weapon lying loosely in his hand. One thing more: It may not be conclusive, but it would be helpful to know if there were any powder-stains upon the dead man’s pistol-hand.”

“As far’s I know there weren’t, sir,” answered Costello. “Mulligan said he took partic’lar notice of his hands, too. But ye’re yet to hear th’ cream o’ th’ joke. Th’ pistol was in Mr. Wolkof’s open right hand, an’ all th’ club attendants swear he was left-handed—writin’, feedin’ himself an’ shavin’ with his left hand exclusively. Now, I ask ye, Dr. de Grandin, would a man all steamed up to blow his brains out be takin’ th’ trouble to break a lifetime habit of left-handedness when he’s so much more important things to think about? It seems to me that—”

“Ye’re wanted on th’ ’phone, Sergeant,” announced Nora from the doorway. “Will ye be takin’ it in here, or usin’ th’ hall instrument?”

“Hullo? Costello speakin’,” he challenged. “If its’ about th’ Wolkof case, I’m goin’ right over—glory be to God! No! Och, th’ murderin’ blackguard!

“Gentlemen,” he faced us, fury in his ruddy face and blazing blue eyes, “it’s another one. A little girl, this time. They’ve kilt a tiny, wee baby while we sat here like three damn’ fools and talked! They’ve took her body to th’ morgue—”

“Then, nom d’un charneau, why are we remaining here?” de Grandin interrupted. “Come, mes amis, it is to hasten. Let us go all quickly!”

WITH MY HORN TOOTING almost continuously, and Costello waving aside crossing policemen, we rushed to the city mortuary. Parnell, the coroner’s physician, fussed over a tray of instruments, Coroner Martin bustled about in a perfect fever of eagerness to begin his official duties; two plainclothes men conferred in muted whispers in the outer office.

Death in the raw is never pretty, as doctors, soldiers and embalmers know only too well. When it is accompanied by violence it wears a still less lovely aspect, and when the victim is a child the sight is almost heart-breaking. Bruised and battered almost beyond human semblance, her baby-fine hair matted with mixed blood and cerebral matter, little Hazel Clark lay before us, the queer, unnatural angle of her right wrist denoting a Colles’ fracture; a subclavicular dislocation of the left shoulder was apparent by the projection of the bone beneath the clavicle, and the vault of her small skull had been literally beaten in. She was completely “broken” as ever medieval malefactor was when bound upon the wheel of torture for the ministrations of the executioner.

For a moment de Grandin bent above the battered little corpse, viewing it intently with the skilled, knowing eye of a pathologist, then, so lightly that they scarcely displaced a hair of her head, his fingers moved quickly over her, pausing now and again to prod gently, then sweeping onward in their investigative course. “Tiens, he was a gorilla for strength, that one,” he announced, “and a veritable gorilla for savagery, as well. What is there to tell me of the case, mes amis?” he called to the plainclothes men.

Such meager data as they had they gave him quickly. She was three and a half years old, the idol of her lately widowed father, and had neither brothers nor sisters. That afternoon her father had given her a quarter as reward for having gone a whole week without meriting a scolding, and shortly after dinner she had set out for the corner drug store to purchase an ice cream cone with part of her righteously acquired wealth. Attendants at the pharmacy remembered she had left the place immediately and set out for home; a neighbor had seen her proceeding up the street, the cone grasped tightly in her hand as she sampled it with ecstatic little licks. Two minutes later, from a spot where the privet hedge of a vacant house shadowed the pavement, residents of the block had heard a scream, but squealing children were no novelty in the neighborhood, and the cry was not repeated. It was not till her father came looking for her that they recalled it.

From the drug store Mr. Clark traced Hazel’s homeward course, and was passing the deserted house when he noticed a stain on the sidewalk. A lighted match showed the discoloration was a spot of blood some four inches across, and with panic premonition tearing at his heart he pushed through the hedge to unmowed lawn of the vacant residence. Match after match he struck while he called “Hazel! Hazel!” but there was no response, and he saw nothing till he was about to return to the street. Then, in a weed-choked rosebed, almost hidden by the foliage, he saw the gleam of her pink pinafore. His cries aroused the neighborhood, and the police were notified.

House-to-house inquiry by detectives finally elicited the information that a “short, stoop-shouldered man” had been seen walking hurriedly away a moment after the child’s scream was heard. Further description of the suspect was unavailable.

“Pardieu,” de Grandin stroked his small mustache thoughtfully as the plainclothes men concluded, “it seems we have to search the haystack for an almost microscopic needle, n’est-ce-pas? There are considerable numbers of small men with stooping shoulders. The task will be a hard one.”

“Hard, hell!” one of the detectives rejoined in disgust. “We got no more chance o’ findin’ that bird than a pig has o’ wearin’ vest-pockets.”

“Do you say so?” the Frenchman demanded, fixing an uncompromising cat-stare on the speaker. “Alors, my friend, prepare to meet a fully tailored porker before you are greatly older. Have you forgotten in the excitement that I am in the case?”

“Sergeant, sir,” a uniformed patrolman hurried into the mortuary, “they found th’ weapon used on th’ Clark girl. It’s a winder-sash weight. They’re testin’ it for fingerprints at headquarters now.”

“Yes, sir. Th’ killer must ’a’ handled it after he dragged her body into th’ bushes, for there’s marks o’ bloody fingers on it plain as day.”

“O.K., I’ll be right up,” Costello replied. “Take over, Jacobs,” he ordered one of the plainclothes men. “I’ll call ye if they find out anything, Dr. de Grandin. So long!”

The Sergeant delayed his report, and next morning after dinner the Frenchman suggested, “Would it not be well to interview the girl’s father? I should appreciate it if you will accompany and introduce me.”

“He’s in the drawing room,” the maid told us as we knocked gently on the Clark door. “He’s been there ever since they brought her home, sir. Just sitting beside her and—” she broke off as her throat filled with sobs. “If you could take his mind off of his trouble it would be a Godsend. If he’d only cry, or sumpin—”

“Grief is a hot, consuming fire, Madame,” the little Frenchman whispered, “and only tears can quell it. The dry-eyed mourner is the one most likely to collapse.”

Coroner Martin had done his work as a mortician with consummate artistry. Under his deft hands all signs of the brutality that struck the child down had been effaced. Clothed in a short light-pink dress she lay peacefully in her casket, one soft pink cheek against the tufted silken pillow sewn with artificial forget-me-nots, a little bisque doll, dressed in a frock the exact duplicate of her own, resting in the crook of her left elbow. Beside the casket, a smile sadder than any grimace of woe on his thin, ascetic features, sat Mortimer Clark.

As we tiptoed into the darkened room we heard him murmur, “Time for shut-eye town, daughter. Daddy’ll tell you a story.” For a moment he looked expectantly into the still childish face on the pillow before him, as if waiting an answer. The little gilt clock on the mantel ticked with a sort of whispering haste, far down the block a neighbor’s dog howled dismally; a light breeze bustled through the opened windows, fluttering the white-scrim curtains and setting the orange flames of the tall candles at the casket’s head and foot to flickering.

It was weird, this stricken man’s vigil beside his dead, it was ghastly to hear him addressing her as if she could hear and reply. As the story of the old woman and her pig progressed I felt a kind of terrified tension about my heart. “… the cat began to kill the rat, the rat began to gnaw the rope, the rope began to hang the butcher—”

“Grand Dieu,” de Grandin whispered as he plucked me by he elbow, “let us not look at it, Friend Trowbridge—it is a profanation for our eyes to see, our ears to hear what goes on here. Sang de Saint Pierre, I, Jules de Grandin swear that I shall find the one who caused this thing to be, and when I find him, though he take refuge beneath the very throne of God, I’ll drag him forth and cast him screaming into hell. God do so to me, and more also, if I do not!” Tears were coursing down his cheeks, and he let them flow unabashed.

“You don’t want to talk to him, then?” I whispered as we neared the front door.

“I do not, neither do I wish to tell indecent stories to the priest as he elevates the Host. The one would be no greater sacrilege than the other, but—ah?” he broke off, staring at a small framed parchment hanging on the wall. “Tell me, my friend,” he demanded, “what is it that you see there?”

“Why, it’s a certificate of membership in the Rangers’ Club. Clark was in the Army Air Force, and—”

“Très bien,” he broke in. “Thank you. Our ideas sometimes lead us to see what we wish when in reality it is not there; that is why I sought the testimony of disinterested eyes.”

“What in the world has Clark’s membership in the Rangers got to do with—”

“Zut!” he waved me to silence. “I think, I cogitate, I concentrate, my old one. Monsieur Evans—Monsieur Wolkof, now Monsieur Clark—all are members of that club. C’est très étrange. Me, I shall interview the steward of that club, my friend. Perhaps his words may throw more light on these so despicable doings than all the clumsy, well-meant investigations of our friend Costello. Come, let us go away. Tomorrow will do as well as today, for the miscreant who fancies himself secure is in no hurry to decamp, despite the nonsense talked of the guilty who flee when no man pursueth.”

WE FOUND COSTELLO WAITING for us when we reached home. A very worried-looking Costello he was, too. “We’ve checked th’ fingerprints on th’ sash-weight, sir,” he announced almost truculently.

“Bon,” the Frenchman replied carelessly. “Is it that they are of someone you can identify?”

“I’ll say they are,” the sergeant returned shortly. “They’re Gyp Carson’s—th’ meanest killer th’ force ever had to deal with.”

“Ah,” de Grandin shook off his air of preoccupation with visible effort, “it is for you to find this Monsieur Gyp, my friend. You have perhaps some inkling of his present whereabouts?”

The sergeant’s laugh was almost an hysterical cackle. “That we have, sir, that we have! They burnt—you know, electrocuted—him last month in Trenton for th’ murder of a milk-wagon driver durin’ a hold-up. By rights he should be in Mount Olivet Cemetery this minute, an’ by th’ same token he should ’a’ been there when the little Clark girl was kilt last night.”

“A-a-ah?” de Grandin twisted his wheat-blond mustache furiously. “It seems this case contains the possibilities, my friend. Tomorrow morning, if you please, we shall go to the cemetery and investigate the grave of Monsieur Gyp. Perhaps we shall find something there. If we find nothing we shall have found the most valuable information we can have.”

“If we find nothing—” the big Irishman looked at him in bewilderment. “All right, sir. I’ve seen some funny things since I been runnin’ round with you, but if you’re tellin’ me—”

“Tenez, my friend, I tell you nothing; nothing at all. I too seek information. Let us wait until the morning, then see what testimony pick and shovel will give.”

A SUPERINTENDENT AND TWO WORKMEN waited for us at the grave when we arrived at the cemetery next morning. The grave lay in the newer, less expensive portion of the burying ground where perpetual care was not so conscientiously maintained as in the better sections. Scrub grass fought for a foothold in the clayey soil, and the mound had already begun to fall in. Incongruously, a monument bearing the effigy of a weeping angel leaned over the grave-head, while a footstone with the inscription OUR DARLING guarded its lower end.

The superintendent glanced over Costello’s papers, stowed them in an inner pocket and nodded to the Polish laborers. “Git goin’,” he ordered tersely, “an’ make it snappy.”

The diggers’ picks and spades bored deep and deeper in the hard-packed, sun-baked earth. At last the hollow sound of steel on wood warned us their quest was drawing to a close. A pair of strong web straps was let down and made fast to the rough chestnut box in which the casket rested, and the men strained at the thongs to bring their weird freight to the surface. Two pick-handles were laid across the violated grave and on them the box rested. With a wrench the superintendent undid the screws that held the clay-stained lid in place and laid it aside. Within we saw the casket, a cheap, square-ended affair covered with shoddy grey broadcloth, the tinny imitation-silver name plate and crucifix on its lid already showing a dull brown-blue discoloration.

“Maintenant!” murmured de Grandin breathlessly as the superintendent began unlatching the fastenings that held the upper portion of the casket lid. Then, as the last catch snapped back and the cover came away:

“For th’ love o’ God!” Costello’s amazed antiphon sounded at my elbow.

The cheap sateen pillow of the casket showed a depression like the pillow of a bed recently vacated, and the poorly made upholstery of its bottom displayed a wide furrow, as though flattened by some weight imposed on it for a considerable time, but sign or trace of human body there was none. The case was empty as it left the factory.

“Glory be to God!” Costello muttered hoarsely, staring at the empty casket as though loath to believe his own eyes. “An’ this is broad daylight,” he added in a kind of wondering afterthought.

“Précisément,” de Grandin’s acid answer came back like a whipcrack. “This is diagnostic, my friend. Had we found something here it might have meant one thing or another. Here we find nothing; nothing at all. What does it mean?”

“I know what it means!” the look of superstitious fear on Costello’s broad red face gave way to one of furious anger. “It means there’s been some monkey-business goin’ on—who had this burying?” he turned savagely on the superintendent.

“Donally,” the other returned, “but don’t blame me for it. I just work here.”

“Huh, Donally, eh? We’ll see what Mr. Donally has to say about this, an’ he’d better have plenty to say, too, if he don’t want to collect himself from th’ corners o’ a four-acre lot.”

Donally Funeral Parlors were new but by no means prosperous looking. Situated in a small side street in the poor section of town, their only pretension to elegance was the brightly-gleaming gold sign on their window:

JOSEPH DONALLY

Funeral Director & Embalmer

Sexton St. Rose’s R.C. Church

“See here, young feller me lad,” Costello began without preliminary as he stamped unceremoniously into the small, dark room that constituted Mr. Donally’s office and reception foyer, “come clean, an’ come clean in a hurry. Was Gyp Carson dead when you had his funeral?”

“If he wasn’t we sure played one awful dirty trick on him,” the mortician replied. “What’d ye think would happen to you if they set you in that piece o’ furniture down at Trenton an’ turned the juice on? What d’ye mean, ‘was he dead’?”

“I mean just what I say, wise guy. I’ve just come from Mount Olivet an’ looked into his coffin, an’ if there’s hide or hair of a corpse in it I’ll eat it, so I will!”

“You sure will, an’ all beat up, too, if you don’t spill th’ low-down. Come clean, now, or do I have to sock ye in th’ jaw an’ lock ye up in th’ bargain?”

“Whatcher tryin’ to put over?” Mr. Donally demanded. “Think I faked up a stall funeral? Look’t here, if you don’t believe me.” From a pigeon hole of his desk he produced a sheaf of papers, thumbed through them, and handed Costello a packet fastened with a rubber band.

Everything was in order. The death certificate, signed by the prison physician, showed the cause of death as cardiac arrest by fibrillar contraction induced by three shocks of an alternating current of electricity of 7½ amperes at a pressure of 2,000 volts.

“I didn’t have much time,” Donally volunteered. “The prison doctors had made a full post, an’ his old woman was one o’ them old-fashioned folks that don’t believe in embalmin’, so there was nothin’ to do but rush him to th’ graveyard an’ plant him. Not so bad for me, though, at that. I sold ’em a casket an’ burial suit an’ twenty-five limousines for th’ funeral, an’ got a cut on th’ monument, too.”

De Grandin eyed him speculatively. “Have you any reason to believe attempts at resuscitation were made?” he asked.

“Huh? Resuscitate that? Didn’t I just tell you they’d made a full autopsy on him at the prison? Didn’t miss a damn thing, either. You might as well to try resuscitatin’ a lump o’ hamburger as bring back a feller which had had that done to him.”

“Now we don’t know no more than we did an hour ago,” the sergeant supplied. “I might ’a’ thought this guy was in cahoots with Gyp’s folks, but th’ prison records show he was dead, an’ th’ doctors down at Trenton don’t certify nobody’s dead if there’s a flicker o’ eyelash left in him. Looks as if we’ve got to find some gink with a fad for grave-robbin’, don’t it, Dr. de Grandin?

“But say”—a sudden gleam of inspiration overspread his face, “suppose someone had dug him up an’ taken an impression of his fingerprints, then had rubber gloves made with th’ prints on th’ outside o’ th’ fingers? Wouldn’t it be a horse on th’ force for him to go around murderin’ people, an’ leave his weapons lyin’ round promiscuous-like, so’s we’d be sure to find what we thought was his prints, only to discover they’d been made by a gunman who’d been burnt a month or more before?”

“Tiens, my friend, your supposition has at least the foundation of reason beneath it,” de Grandin conceded. “Do you make search for one who might have done the thing you suspect. Me, I have certain searching of my own to do. Anon we shall confer, and together we shall surely lay this so vile miscreant by the heels.”

“AH, BUT IT HAS been a lovely day,” he assured me with twinkling eyes as he contemplated the glowing end of his cigar that evening after dinner. “Yes, pardieu, an exceedingly lovely day! This morning when I went from that Monsieur Donally’s shop my head whirled like that of an unaccustomed voyager stricken by sea-sickness. Only miserable uncertainty confronted me on every side. Now”—he blew a cone of fragrant smoke from his lips and watched it spiral slowly toward the ceiling—“now I know much, and that I do not actually know I damn surmise. I think I see the end of this so tortuous trail, Friend Trowbridge.”

“How? Cordieu, I shall tell you! When Friend Costello told us of the murder of Monsieur Wolkof—that second murder which was made to appear suicide—and mentioned he met death at the Ranger’s Club, I suddenly recalled that Colonel Evans, whose death we had so recently deplored, was also a member of that club. It struck me at the time there might be something more than mere coincidence in it; but when that pitiful Monsieur Clark also proved to be a member, nom d’un asperge, coincidence ceased to be coincidence and became moral certainty.

“‘Now,’ I ask me, ‘what lies behind this business of the monkey? Is it not strange two members of the Rangers’ Club should have been slain so near together, and in such similar circumstances, and a third should have been visited with a calamity worse than death?’

“‘You have said it, mon garçon,’ I tell me. ‘It is indubitably as you say. Come, let us interview the steward of that club, and see what he shall say.’

“Nom d’un pipe, what did he not tell? From him I learn much more than he said. I learn, by example, that Messieurs Evans, Wolkof and Clark had long been friends; that they had all been members of the club’s grievance committee; that they were called on some five years ago to recommend expulsion of a Monsieur Wallagin—mon Dieu, what a name!

“‘So far, so fine,’ I tell me. ‘But what of this Monsieur-with-the-Funny-Name? Who and what is he, and what has he done to be flung out of the club?’

“I made careful inquiry and found much. He has been an explorer of considerable note and has written some monographs which showed he understood the use of his eyes. Hélas, he knew also how to use wits, as many of his fellow members learned to their sorrow when they played cards with him. Furthermore, he had a most unpleasant stock of stories which he gloried to tell—stories of his doings in the far places which did not recommend him to the company of self-respecting gentlemen. And so he was removed from the club’s rolls, and vowed he would get level with Messieurs Evans, Clark and Wolkof if it took him fifty years to do so.

“Five years have passed since then, and Monsieur Wallagin seems to have prospered exceedingly. He has a large house in the suburbs where no one but himself and one servant—always a Chinese—lives, but the neighbors tell strange stories of the parties he holds, parties at which pretty ladies in strange attire appear, and once or twice strange-looking men as well.

“Eh bien, why should this rouse my suspicions? I do not know, unless it be that my nose scents the odor of the rodent farther than the average. At any rate, out to the house of Monsieur Wallagin I go, and at its gate I wait like a tramp in the hope of charity.

“My vigil is not unrewarded. But no. Before I have stood there an hour I behold one forcibly ejected from the house by a gross person who reminds me most unpleasantly of a pig. It is a small and elderly Chinese man, and he has suffered greatly in his amour propre. I join him in his walk to town, and sympathize with him in his misfortune.

“My friend”—his earnestness seemed out of all proportion to the simple statement—“he had been forcibly dismissed for putting salt in the food which he cooked for Monsieur Wallagin’s guests.”

“One wonders why, indeed, Friend Trowbridge. Consider, if you please. Monsieur Wallagin has several guests, and feeds them thin gruel made of wheat or barley, and bread in which no salt is used. Nothing more. He personally tastes of it before it is presented to them, that he may make sure it is unsalted.”

“Perhaps they’re on some sort of special diet,” I hazarded as he waited for my comment. “They’re not obliged to stay and eat unseasoned food, are they?”

“I do not know,” he answered soberly. “I greatly fear they are, but we shall know before so very long. If what I damn suspect is true we shall see devilment beside which the worst produced by ancient Rome was mild. If I am wrong—alors, it is that I am wrong. I think I hear the good Costello coming; let us go with him.”

Evening had brought little surcease from the heat, and perspiration streamed down Costello’s face and mine as we drove toward Morrisdale, but de Grandin seemed in a chill of excitement, his little round blue eyes were alight with dancing elf-fires, his small white teeth fairly chattering with nervous excitation as he leant across the back of the seat, urging me to greater speed.

The house near which we parked was a massive stone affair, standing back from the road in a jungle of greenery, and seemed to me principally remarkable for the fact that it had neither front nor rear porches, but rose sheer-walled as a prison from its foundations.

Led by the Frenchman we made cautious way to the house, creeping to the only window showing a gleam of light and fastening our eyes to the narrow crack beneath its not-quite-drawn blind.

“Monsieur Wallagin acquired a new cook this afternoon,” de Grandin whispered. “I made it my especial business to see him and bribe him heavily to smuggle a tiny bit of beef into the soup he prepares for tonight. If he has been faithful in his treachery we may see something, if not—pah, my friends, what is it we have here?”

We looked into a room which must have been several degrees hotter than the stoke-hole of a steamer, for the window was shut tightly and a great log fire blazed on the wide hearth of the fireplace almost opposite our point of vantage. Its walls were smooth-dressed stone, the floor was paved with tile. Lolling on a sort of divan made of heaped up cushions sat the master of the house, a monstrous bulk of a man with enormous paunch, great fat-upholstered shoulders between which perched a hairless head like an owl’s in its feathers, and eyes as cold and grey as twin inlays of burnished agate.

About his shoulders draped a robe of Paisley pattern, belted at the loins but open to the waist, displaying his obese abdomen as he squatted like an evil parody of Mi-lei-Fo, China’s Laughing Buddha.

As we fixed our eyes to the gap under the curtain he beat his hands together, and as at a signal the door at the room’s farther end swung open to admit a file of women. All three were young and comely, and each a perfect foil for the others. First came a tall and statuesque brunette with flowing unbound black hair, sharp-hewn patrician features and a majesty of carriage like a youthful queen’s. The second was a petite blonde, fairylike in form and elfin in face, and behind her was a red-haired girl, plumply rounded as a little pullet. Last of all there came an undersized, stoop-shouldered man who bore what seemed an earthen vessel like a New England bean-pot and two short lengths of willow sticks.

“Jeeze!” breathed Costello. “Lookit him, Dr. de Grandin; ’tis Gyp Carson himself!”

“Silence!” the Frenchman whispered fiercely. “Observe, my friends; did I not say we should see something? Regardez-vous!”

At a signal from the seated man the women ranged themselves before him, arms uplifted, heads bent submissively, and the undersized man dropped down tailor-fashion in a corner of the room, nursing the clay pot between his crossed knees and poising his sticks over it.

The obese master of the revels struck his hands together again, and at their impact the man on the floor began to beat a rataplan upon his crock.

The women started a slow rigadoon, sliding their bare feet sidewise, stopping to stamp out a grotesque rhythm, then pirouetting languidly and taking up the sliding, sidling step again. Their arms were stretched straight out, as if they had been crucified against the air, and as they danced they shook and twitched their shoulders with a motion reminiscent of the Negroid shimmy of the early 1920s. Each wore a shift of silken netlike fabric that covered her from shoulder to instep, sleeveless and unbelted, and as they danced the garments clung in rippling, half-revealing, half-concealing folds about them.

They moved with a peculiar lack of verve, like marionettes actuated by unseen strings, sleep-walkers, or persons in hypnosis; only the drummer seemed to take an interest in his task. His hands shook as he plied his drumsticks, his shoulders jerked and twitched and writhed hysterically, and though his eyes were closed and his face masklike, it seemed instinct with avid longing, with prurient expectancy.

“Las aisselles—their axillae, Friend Trowbridge, observe them with care, if you please!” de Grandin breathed in my ear.

Sudden recognition came to me. With the raising of their hands in the performance of the dance the women exposed their armpits, and under each left arm I saw the mark of a deep wound, bloodless despite its depth, and closed with the familiar “baseball stitch.”

No surgeon leaves a wound like that, it was the mark of the embalmer’s bistoury made in cutting through the superficial tissue to raise the axillary artery for his injection.

“Good God!” I choked. The languidness of their movements … their pallor … their closed eyes … their fixed, unsmiling faces … now the unmistakable stigmata of embalming process! These were no living women, they were—

De Grandin’s fingers clutched my elbow fiercely. “Observe, my friend,” he ordered softly. “Now we shall see if my plan carried or miscarried.”

Shuffling into the room, as unconcerned as if he served coffee after a formal meal, came a Chinese bearing a tray on which were four small soup bowls and a plate of dry bread. He set the tray on the floor before the fat man and turned away, paying no attention to the dancing figures and the drummer squatting in the corner.

An indolent motion of the master’s hand and the slaves fell on their provender like famished beasts at feeding time, drinking greedily from the coarse china bowls, wolfing down the unbuttered bread almost unchewed.

Such a look of dawning realization as spread over the four countenances as they drained the broth I have seen sometimes when half-conscious patients were revived with powerful restoratives. The man was first to show it, surging from his crouching position and turning his closed eyes this way and that, like a caged thing seeking escape from its prison. But before he could do more than wheel drunkenly in his tracks realization seemed to strike the women, too. There was a swirl of fluttering draperies, the soft thud of soft feet on the tiled floor of the room, and all rushed pell-mell to the door.

The sharp clutch of de Grandin’s hand roused me. “Quick, Friend Trowbridge,” he commanded. “To the cemetery; to the cemetery with all haste! Nom d’un sale charneau, we have yet to see the end of this!”

“N’importe,” he returned. “At Shadow Lawn or Mount Olivet we shall see that which will make us call ourselves three shameless liars!”

Mount Olivet was nearest of the three municipalities of the dead adjacent to Harrisonville, and toward it we made top speed. The driveway gates had closed at sunset, but the small gates each side the main entrance were still unlatched, and we raced through them and to the humble tomb we had seen violated that morning.

“Say, Dr. de Grandin,” panted Costello as he strove to keep pace with the agile little Frenchman, “just what’s th’ big idea? I know ye’ve some good reason, but—”

Shuffling drunkenly, stumbling over mounded tops of sodded graves, a slouching figure came careening toward us, veered off as it neared the Carson grave and dropped to its knees beside it. A moment later it was scrabbling at the clay and gravel which had been disturbed by the grave-diggers that morning, seeking desperately to burrow its way into the sepulcher.

“Me God!” Costello breathed as he rose unsteadily. I could see the tiny globules of fear-sweat standing on his forehead, but his inbred sense of duty overmastered his fright. “Gyp Carson, I arrest you—” he laid a hand on the burrowing creature’s shoulder, and it was as if he touched a soap bubble. There was a frightened mouselike squeak, then a despairing groan, and the figure under his hand collapsed in a crumpled heap. When de Grandin and I reached them the pale, drawn face of a corpse grinned at us sardonically in the beam of Costello’s flashlight.

“Dr.—de—Grandin, Dr.—Trowbridge—for th’ love o’ God give me a drink o’ sumpin!” begged the big Irishman, clutching the diminutive Frenchman’s shoulder as a frightened child might clutch its mother’s skirts.

“Courage, my old one,” de Grandin patted the detective’s hand, “we have work before us tonight, remember. Tomorrow they will bury this poor one. The law has had its will of him; now let his body rest in peace. Tonight—sacré nom, the dead must tend the dead; it is with the living we have business. En avant to Wallagin’s, Friend Trowbridge!”

“YOUR SOLUTION OF THE case was sane,” he told Costello as we set out for the house we’d left a little while before, “but there are times when very sanity proves the falseness of a conclusion. That someone had unearthed the body of Gyp Carson to copy his fingerprints seemed most reasonable, but today I obtained information which led me up another road. A most unpleasant road, parbleu! I have already told you something of the history of the Wallagin person; how he was dismissed from the Rangers’ Club, and how he vowed a horrid vengeance on those voting his expulsion. That was of interest. I sought still further. I found that he resided long in Haiti, and that there he mingled with the Culte de Morts. We laugh at such things here, but in Haiti, that dark stepdaughter of mysterious Africa’s dark mysteries, they are no laughing matter. No. In Port-au-Prince and in the backlands of the jungle they will tell you of the zombie—who is neither ghost nor yet a living person resurrected, but only the spiritless corpse ravished from its grave, endowed with pseudo-life by black magic and made to serve the whim of the magician who has animated it. Sometimes wicked persons steal a corpse to make it commit crime while they stay far from the scene, thus furnishing themselves unbreakable alibis. More often they rob graves to secure slaves who labor ceaselessly for them at no wages at all. Yes, it is so; with my own eyes I have seen it.

“But there are certain limits which no sorcery can transcend. The poor dead zombie must be fed, for if he is not he cannot serve his so execrable master. But he must be fed only certain things. If he taste salt or meat, though but the tiniest soupçon of either be concealed in a great quantity of food, he at once realizes he is dead, and goes back to his grave, nor can the strongest magic of his owner stay him from returning for one little second. Furthermore, when he goes back he is dead forever after. He cannot be raised from the grave a second time, for Death which has been cheated for so long asserts itself, and the putrefaction which was stayed during the zombie’s period of servitude takes place all quickly, so the zombie dead six months, if it returns to its grave and so much as touches its hand to the earth, becomes at once like any other six-months-dead corpse—a mass of putrescence pleasant neither to the eye nor nose, but preferable to the dead-alive thing it was a moment before.

“Consider then: The steward of the Rangers’ Club related dreadful tales this Monsieur Wallagin had told all boastfully—how he had learned to be a zombie-maker, a corpse-master, in Haiti; how the mysteries of Papa Nebo, Gouédé Mazacca and Gouédé Oussou, those dread oracles of the dead, were opened books to him.

“‘Ah-ha, Monsieur Wallagin,’ I say, ‘I damn suspect you have been up to business of the monkey here in this so pleasant State of New Jersey. You have, it seems, brought here the mysteries of Haiti, and with them you wreak vengeance on those you hate, n’est-ce-pas?’

“Thereafter I go to his house, meet the little discharged Chinese man, and talk with him. For why was he discharged with violence? Because, by blue, he had put salt in the soup of the guests whom Monsieur Wallagin entertains.

“‘Four guests he has, you say?’ I remark. ‘I had not heard he had so many.’

“‘Nom d’un nom, yes,’ the excellent Chinois tells me. ‘There are one man and three so lovely women in that house, and all seem walking in their sleep. At night he has the women dance while the man makes music with the drum. Sometimes he sends the man out, but what to do I do not know. At night, also, he feeds them bread and soup with neither salt nor meat, food not fit for a mangy dog to lap.’

“‘Oh, excellent old man of China, oh, paragon of all Celestials,’ I reply, ‘behold, I give you money. Now, come with me and we shall hire another cook for your late master, and we shall bribe him well to smuggle meat into the soup he makes for those strange guests. Salt the monster might detect when he tastes the soup before it are served, but a little, tiny bit of beef-meat, non. Nevertheless, it will serve excellently for my purposes.’

“Voilà, my friends, there is the explanation of tonight’s so dreadful scenes.”

“But what are we to do?” I asked. “You can’t arrest this Wallagin. No court on earth would try him on such charges as you make.”

“Och, Dr. de Grandin, are you kiddin’? What would we do if we saw a poison snake on th’ sidewalk, an’ us with a jolly bit o’ blackthorn in our hands?”

“Précisément, I think we understand each other perfectly, mon vieux.” He thrust his slender, womanishly small hand out and lost it in the depths of the detective’s great fist.

“Would you be good enough to wait for us here, Friend Trowbridge?” he asked as we came to a halt before the house. “There is a trifle of unfinished business to attend to and—the night is fine, the view exquisite. I think that you would greatly enjoy it for a little while, my old and rare friend.”

IT MIGHT HAVE BEEN a quarter-hour later when they rejoined me. “What—” I began, but the perfectly expressionless expression on de Grandin’s face arrested my question.

“Hélas, my friend, it was unfortunate,” he told me. “The good Costello was about to arrest him, and he turned to flee. Straight up the long, steep stairs he fled, and at the topmost one, parbleu, he missed his footing and came tumbling down! I greatly fear—indeed, I know his neck was broken in the fall. Is it not so, mon sergent?” he turned to Costello for confirmation. “Did he not fall downstairs?”