The Thing in the Fog

“TIENS, ON SUCH A night as this the Devil must congratulate himself!” Jules de Grandin forced his chin still deeper in the upturned collar of his trench-coat, and bent his head against the whorls of chilling mist which eddied upward from the bay in token that autumn was dead and winter come at last.

“Congratulate himself?” I asked in amusement as I felt before me for the curbstone with the ferrule of my stick. “Why?”

“Why? Pardieu, because he sits at ease beside the cozy fires of hell, and does not have to feel his way through this eternally-to-be-execrated fog! If we had but the sense—

“Pardon, Monsieur, one of us is very clumsy, and I do not think that it is I!” he broke off sharply as a big young man, evidently carrying a heavier cargo of ardent spirits than he could safely manage, lurched against him in the smothering mist, then caromed off at an unsteady angle to lose himself once more in the enshrouding fog.

“Dolt!” the little Frenchman muttered peevishly. “If he can not carry liquor he should abstain from it. Me, I have no patience with these—grand Dieu, what is that?”

Somewhere behind us, hidden in the curtains of the thick, gray vapor, there came a muffled exclamation, half of fright, half of anger, the sound of something fighting threshingly with something else, and a growling, snarling noise, as though a savage dog had leapt upon its prey, and, having fleshed its teeth, was worrying it; then: “Help!” The cry was muffled, strangled, but laden with a weight of helpless terror.

“Hold fast, my friend, we come!” de Grandin cried, and, guided by the sounds of struggle, breasted through the fog as if it had been water, brandishing his silver-headed sword-stick before him as a guide and a defense.

A score of quick steps brought us to the conflict. Dim and indistinct as shadows on a moonless night, two forms were struggling on the sidewalk, a large one lying underneath, while over it, snarling savagely, was a thing I took for a police dog which snapped and champed and worried at the other’s throat.

“Help!” called the man again, straining futilely to hold the snarling beast away and turning on his side the better to protect his menaced face and neck.

“Cordieu, a war-dog!” exclaimed the Frenchman. “Stand aside, Friend Trowbridge, he is savage, this one; mad, perhaps, as well.” With a quick, whipping motion he ripped the chilled-steel blade from the barrel of his stick and, point advanced, circled round the struggling man and beast, approaching with a cautious, cat-like step as he sought an opportunity to drive home the sword.

By some uncanny sense the snarling brute divined his purpose, raised its muzzle from its victim’s throat and backed away a step or two, regarding de Grandin with a stare of utter hatred. For a moment I caught the smoldering glare of a pair of fire-red eyes, burning through the fogfolds as incandescent charcoal might burn through a cloth, and:

“A dog? Non, pardieu, it is—” began the little Frenchman, then checked himself abruptly as he lunged out swiftly with his blade, straight for the glaring, fiery eyes which glowered at him through the mist.

The great beast backed away with no apparent haste, yet quickly enough to avoid the needle-point of Jules de Grandin’s blade, and for an instant I beheld a row of gleaming teeth bared savagely beneath the red eyes’ glare; then, with a snarling growl which held more defiance than surrender in its throaty rumble, the brute turned lithely, dodged and made off through the fog, disappearing from sight before the clicking of its nails against the pavement had been lost to hearing.

“Look to him, Friend Trowbridge,” de Grandin ordered, casting a final glance about us in the mist before he put his sword back in its sheath. “Does he survive, or is he killed to death?”

“He’s alive, all right,” I answered as I sank to my knees beside the supine man, “but he’s been considerably chewed up. Bleeding badly. We’d best get him to the office and patch him up before—”

“Wha—what was it?” our mangled patient asked abruptly, rising on his elbow and staring wildly round him. “Did you kill it—did it get away? D’ye think it had hydrophobia?”

“Easy on, son,” I soothed, locking my hands beneath his arms and helping him to rise. “It bit you several times, but you’ll be all right as soon as we can stop the bleeding. Here”—I snatched a handkerchief from the breast pocket of my dinner coat and pressed it into his hand—“hold this against the wound while we’re walking. No use trying to get a taxi tonight, the driver’d never find his way about. I live only a little way from here and we’ll make it nicely if you’ll lean on me. So! That’s it!”

THE YOUNG MAN LEANED heavily upon my shoulder and almost bore me down, for he weighed a good fourteen stone, as we made our way along the vapor-shrouded street.

“I say, I’m sorry I bumped into you, sir,” the youngster apologized as de Grandin took his other arm and eased me somewhat of my burden. “Fact is, I’d taken a trifle too much and was walkin’ on a side hill when I passed you.” He pressed the already-reddened handkerchief closer to his lacerated neck as he continued with a chuckle: “Maybe it’s a good thing I did, at that, for you were within hearing when I called because you’d stopped to cuss me out.”

“You may have right, my friend,” de Grandin answered with a laugh. “A little drunkenness is not to be deplored, and I doubt not you had reason for your drinking—not that one needs a reason, but—”

A sudden shrill, sharp cry for help cut through his words, followed by another call which stopped half uttered on a strangled, agonizing note; then, in a moment, the muffled echo of a shot, another, and, immediately afterward, the shrilling signal of a police whistle.

“Tête bleu, this night is full of action as a pepper-pot is full of spice!” exclaimed de Grandin, turning toward the summons of the whistle. “Can you manage him, Friend Trowbridge? If so I—”

Pounding of heavy boots on the sidewalk straight ahead told us that the officer approached, and a moment later his form, bulking gigantically in the fog, hove into view. “Did anny o’ yez see—” he started, then raised his hand in half-formal salute to the vizor of his cap as he recognized de Grandin.

“I don’t suppose ye saw a dar-rg come runnin’ by this way, sor?” he asked. “I wuz walkin’ up th’ street a moment since, gettin’ ready to report at th’ box, when I heard a felly callin’ for help, an’ what should I see next but th’ biggest, ugliest baste of a dar-rg ye iver clapped yer eyes upon, a-worryin’ at th’ pore lad’s throat. I wus close to it as I’m standin’ to you, sor, pretty near, an’ I shot at it twict, but I’m damned if I didn’t miss both times, slick as a whistle—an’ me holdin’ a pistol expert’s medal from th’ department, too!”

“U’m?” de Grandin murmured. “And the unfortunate man beset by this great beast your bullets failed to hit, what of him?”

“Glory be to God; I plumb forgot ’im!” the policeman confessed. “Ye see, sor, I wuz that overcome wid shame, as th’ felly says, whin I realized I’d missed th’ baste that I run afther it, hopin’ I’d find it agin an’ maybe put a slug into it this time, so—”

“Quite so, one understands,” de Grandin interrupted, “but let us give attention to the man; the beast can wait until we find him, and—mon Dieu! It is as well you did not stay to give him the first aid, my friend, your efforts would have been without avail. His case demands the coroner’s attention.”

He did not understate the facts. Stretched on his back, hands clenched to fists, legs slightly spread, one doubled partly under him, a man lay on the sidewalk; across the white expanse of evening shirt his opened coat displayed there spread a ruddy stickiness, while his starched white-linen collar was already sopping with the blood which oozed from his torn and mangled throat. Both external and anterior jugulars had been ripped away by the savagery which had torn the integument of the neck to shreds, and so deeply had the ragged wound gone that a portion of the hyoid bone had been exposed. A spate of blood had driveled from the mouth, staining lips and chin, and the eyes, forced out between the lids, were globular and fixed and staring, though the film of death had hardly yet had time to set upon them.

“Howly Mither!” cried the officer in horror as he looked upon the body. “Sure, it were a hound from th’ Divil’s own kennels done this, sor!”

“I think that you have right,” de Grandin nodded grimly, “Call the department, if you will be so good. I will stand by the body.” He took a kerchief from his pocket and opened it, preparatory to veiling the poor, mangled face which stared appealingly up at the fog-bound night, but:

“My God, it’s Suffrige!” the young man at my side exclaimed. I left him just before I blundered into you, and—oh, what could have done it?”

“The same thing which almost did as much for you, Monsieur,” the Frenchman answered in a level, toneless voice. “You had a very narrow escape from being even as your friend, I do assure you.”

“You mean that dog—” he stopped, incredulous, eyes fairly starting from his face as he stared in fascination at his friend’s remains.

“The dog, yes, let us call it that,” de Grandin answered.

“But—but—” the other stammered, then, with an incoherent exclamation which was half sigh, half groaning hiccup, slumped heavily against my shoulder and slid unconscious to the ground.

De Grandin shrugged in irritation. “Now we have two of them to watch,” he complained. “Do you recover him as quickly as you can, my friend, while I—” he turned his back to me, dropped his handkerchief upon the dead man’s face and bent to make a closer examination of the wounds in the throat.

I took the handkerchief from my overcoat pocket, ran it lightly over the trunk of a leafless tree which stood beside the curb and wrung the moisture from it on the unconscious man’s face and forehead. Slowly he recovered, gasped feebly, then, with my assistance, got upon his feet, keeping his back resolutely turned to the grisly thing upon the sidewalk. “Can—you—help—me—to—your—office?” he asked slowly, breathing heavily between the words.

I nodded, and we started toward my house, but twice we had to stop; for once he became sick, and I had to hold him while he retched with nausea, and once he nearly fainted again, leaning heavily against the iron balustrade before a house while he drew great gulps of chilly, fog-soaked air into his lungs.

AT LAST WE REACHED my office, and helping him up to the examination table I set to work. His wounds were more extensive than I had at first supposed. A deep cut, more like the raking of some heavy, blunt-pointed claw than a bite, ran down his face from the right temple almost to the angle of the jaw, and two deep parallel scores showed on his throat above the collar. A little deeper, a little more to one side, and they would have nicked the interior jugular. About his hands were several tears, as though they had suffered more from the beast’s teeth than had his face and throat, and as I helped him with his jacket I saw his shirt-front had been slit and a long, raking cut scored down his chest, the animal’s claws having ripped through the stiff, starched linen as easily as though it had been muslin.

The problem of treatment puzzled me. I could not cauterize the wounds with silver nitrate, and iodine would be without efficiency if the dog were rabid. Finally I compromised by dressing the chest and facial wounds with potassium permanganate solution and using an electric hot-point on the hands, applying laudanum immediately as an anodyne.

“And now, young fellow,” I announced as I completed my work, “I think you could do nicely with a tot of brandy. You were drunk enough when you ran into us, heaven knows, but you’re cold sober now, and your nerves have been badly jangled, so—”

“So you would be advised to bring another glass,” de Grandin’s hail sounded from the surgery door. “My nerves have been on edge these many minutes, and in addition I am suffering from an all-consuming thirst, my friend.”

The young man gulped the liquor down in one tremendous swallow, seeing which de Grandin gave a shudder of disgust. Drinking fifty-year-old brandy was a rite with him, and to bolt it as if it had been common bootlegged stuff was grave impropriety, almost sacrilege.

“Doctor, do you think that dog had hydrophobia?” our patient asked half diffidently. “He seemed so savage—”

“Hydrophobia is the illness human beings have when bitten by a rabid dog or other animal, Monsieur,” de Grandin broke in with a smile. “The beast has rabies, the human victim develops hydrophobia. However, if you wish, we can arrange for you to go to Mercy Hospital early in the morning to take the Pasteur treatment; it is effective and protective if you are infected, quite harmless if you are not.”

“Thanks,” replied the youth. “I think we’d better, for—”

“Monsieur,” the Frenchman cut him short again, “is your name Maxwell, by any chance? Since I first saw you I have been puzzled by your face; now I remember, I saw your picture in le Journal this morning.”

“Yes,” said our visitor, “I’m John Maxwell, and, since you saw my picture in the paper, you know that I’m to marry Sarah Leigh on Saturday; so you realize why I’m so anxious to make sure the dog didn’t have hydro—rabies, I mean. I don’t think Sallie’d want a husband she had to muzzle for fear he’d bite her on the ankle when she came to feed him.”

The little Frenchman smiled acknowledgment of the other’s pleasantry, but though his lips drew back in the mechanics of a smile, his little, round, blue eyes were fixed and studious.

“Tell me, Monsieur,” he asked abruptly, “how came this dog to set upon you in the fog tonight?”

Young Maxwell shivered at the recollection. “Hanged if I know,” he answered. “Y’see, the boys gave me a farewell bachelor dinner at the Carteret this evening, and there was the usual amount of speech-making and toast-drinking, and by the time we broke up I was pretty well paralyzed—able to find my way about, but not very steadily, as you know. I said good-night to the bunch at the hotel and started out alone, for I wanted to walk the liquor off. You see”—a flush suffused his blond, good-looking face—“Sallie said she’d wait up for me to telephone her—just like old married folks!—and I didn’t want to talk to her while I was still thick-tongued. Ray Suffrige, the chap who—the one you saw later, sir—decided he’d walk home, too, and started off in the other direction, and the rest of ’em left in taxis.

“I’d walked about four blocks, and was getting so I could navigate pretty well, when I bumped into you, then brought up against the railing of a house. While I was hanging onto it, trying to get steady on my legs again, all of a sudden, out of nowhere, came that big police-dog and jumped on me. It didn’t bark or give any warning till it leaped at me; then it began growling. I flung my hands up, and it fastened on my sleeve, but luckily the cloth was thick enough to keep its teeth from tearing my arm.

“I never saw such a beast. I’ve had a tussle or two with savage dogs before, and they always jumped away and rushed in again each time I beat ’em off, but this thing stood on its hind legs and fought me, like a man. When it shook its teeth loose from my coat-sleeve it clawed at my face and throat with its forepaws—that’s where I got most of my mauling—and kept snapping at me all the time; never backed away or even sank to all-fours once, sir.

“I was still unsteady on my legs, and the brute was heavy as a man; so it wasn’t long before it had me down. Every time it bit at me I managed to get my arms in its way; so it did more damage to my clothes than it did to me with its teeth, but it surely clawed me up to the Queen’s taste, and I was beginning to tire when you came running up. It would have done me as it did poor Suffrige in a little while, I’m sure.”

He paused a moment, then, with a shaking hand, poured out another drink of brandy and tossed it off at a gulp. “I guess I must have been drunk,” he admitted with a shamefaced grin, “for I could have sworn the thing talked to me as it growled.”

“Eh? The Devil!” Jules de Grandin sat forward suddenly, eyes wider and rounder than before, if possible, the needle-points of his tightly waxed wheat-blond mustache twitching like the whiskers of an irritated tomcat. “What is it that you say?”

“Hold on,” the other countered, quick blood mounting to his cheeks. “I didn’t say it; I said it seemed as if its snarls were words.”

“Précisément, exactement, quite so,” returned the Frenchman sharply. “And what was it that he seemed to snarl at you, Monsieur? Quickly, if you please.”

“Well, I was drunk, I admit, but—”

“Ten thousand small blue devils! We bandy words. I have asked you a question; have the courtesy to reply, Monsieur.”

“Well, it sounded—sort of—as if it kept repeating Sallie’s name, like this—” he gave an imitation of a throaty, growling voice: “‘Sarah Leigh, Sarah Leigh—you’ll never marry Sarah Leigh!’

“Ever hear anything so nutty? I reckon I must have had Sallie in my mind, subconsciously, while I was having what I thought was my death-struggle.”

It was very quiet for a moment. John Maxwell looked half sullenly, half defiantly from de Grandin to me. De Grandin sat as though lost in contemplation, his small eyes wide and thoughtful, his hands twisting savagely at the waxed ends of his mustache, the tip of his patent-leather evening shoe beating a devil’s tattoo on the white-tiled floor. At length, abruptly:

“Did you notice any smell, any peculiar odor, when we went to Monsieur Maxwell’s rescue this evening, Friend Trowbridge?” he demanded.

“Why—” I bent my brows and wagged my head in an effort at remembrance. “Why, no, I didn’t—” I stopped, while somewhere from the file-cases of my subconscious memory came a hint of recollection: Soldiers’ Park—a damp and drizzling day—the open air dens of the menagerie. “Wait,” I ordered, closing both eyes tightly while I bade my memory catalogue the vague, elusive scent; then: “Yes, there was an odor I’ve noticed at the zoo in Soldiers’ Park; it was the smell of the damp fur of a fox, or wolf!”

De Grandin beat his small, white hands together softly, as though applauding at a play. “Capital, perfect!” he announced. “I smelt it too, when first we did approach, but our senses play strange tricks on us at times, and I needed the corroboration of your nose’s testimony, if it could be had. Now—” he turned his fixed, unwinking stare upon me as he asked: “Have you ever seen a wolf’s eyes—or a dog’s—at night?”

“Yes, of course,” I answered wonderingly.

“Très bien. And they gleamed with a reflected greenness, something like Madame Pussy’s, only not so bright, n’est-ce-pas?”

“Yes.”

“Très bon. Did you see the eyes of what attacked Monsieur Maxwell this evening? Did you observe them?”

“I should say I did,” I answered, for never would I forget those fiery, glaring orbs. “They were red, red as fire!”

“Oh, excellent Friend Trowbridge; oh, prince of all the recollectors of the world!” de Grandin cried delightedly. “Your memory serves you perfectly, and upholds my observations to the full. Before, I guessed; I said to me, ‘Jules de Grandin, you are generally right, but once in many times you may be wrong. See what Friend Trowbridge has to say.’ And you, parbleu, you said the very thing I needed to confirm me in my diagnosis.

“Monsieur,” he turned to Maxwell with a smile, “you need not fear that you have hydrophobia. No. You were very near to death, a most unpleasant sort of death, but not to death by hydrophobia. Morbleu, that would be an added refinement which we need not take into consideration.”

“Whatever are you talking about?” I asked in sheer amazement. “You ask me if I noticed the smell that beast gave off, and if I saw its eyes, then tell Mr. Maxwell he needn’t fear he’s been inoculated. Of all the hare-brained—”

He turned his shoulder squarely on me and smiled assuringly at Maxwell. “You said that you would call your amoureuse tonight, Monsieur; have you forgotten?” he reminded, then nodded toward the phone.

The young man picked the instrument up, called a number and waited for a moment; then: “John speaking, honey,” he announced as we heard a subdued click sound from the monophone. Another pause, in which the buzzing of indistinguishable words came faintly to us through the quiet room; then Maxwell turned and motioned me to take up the extension ’phone.

“—and please come right away, dear,” I heard a woman’s voice plead as I clapped the instrument against my ear. “No, I can’t tell you over the ’phone, but I must see you right away, Johnny—I must! You’re sure you’re all right? Nothing happened to you?”

“Well,” Maxwell temporized, “I’m in pretty good shape, everything considered. I had a little tussle with a dog, but—”

“A—dog?” Stark, incredulous horror sounded in the woman’s fluttering voice. “What sort of dog?”

“Oh, just a dog, you know; not very big and not very little, sort o’ betwixt and between, and—”

“You’re sure it was a dog? Did it look like a—a police-dog, for instance?”

“Well, now you mention it, it did look something like a police-dog, or collie, or airedale, or something, but—”

“John, dear, don’t try to put me off that way. This is terribly, dreadfully important. Please hurry over—no, don’t come out at night—yes, come at once, but be sure not to come alone. Have you a sword, or some sort of steel or iron weapon you can carry for defense when you come?”

Young Maxwell’s face betrayed bewilderment. “A sword?” he echoed. “What d’ye think I am, dear, a knight of old? No, I haven’t a sword to my name, not even a jack-knife, but—I say, there’s a gentleman I met tonight who has a bully little sword; may I bring him along?”

“Oh, yes, please do, dear; and if you can get some one else, bring him too. I’m terribly afraid to have you venture out tonight, dearest, but I have to see you right away!”

“All right,” the young man answered. “I’ll pop right over, honey.”

As he replaced the instrument, he turned bewilderedly to me. “Wonder what the deuce got into Sally?’ he asked. “She seemed all broken up about something, and I thought she’d faint when I mentioned my set-to with that dog. What’s it mean?”

Jules de Grandin stepped through the doorway connecting surgery with consulting-room, where he had gone to listen to the conversation from the desk extension. His little eyes were serious, his small mouth grimly set. “Monsieur,” he announced gravely, “it means that Mademoiselle Sarah knows more than any of us what this business of the Devil is about. Come, let us go to her without delay.”

As we prepared to leave the house he paused and rummaged in the hall coat closet, emerging in a moment, balancing a pair of blackthorn walking-sticks in his hands.

“What—” I began, but he cut me short.

“These may prove useful,” he announced, handing one to me, the other to John Maxwell. “If what I damn suspect is so, he will not greatly relish a thwack from one of these upon the head. No, the thorn-bush is especially repugnant to him.”

“Humph, I should think it would be particularly repugnant to anyone,” I answered, weighing the knotty bludgeon in my hand. “By the way, who is ‘he’?”

“Mademoiselle Sarah will tell us that,” he answered enigmatically. “Are we ready? Bon, let us be upon our way.”

THE MIST WHICH HAD obscured the night an hour or so before had thinned to a light haze, and a drizzle of rain was commencing as we set out. The Leigh house was less than half a mile from my place, and we made good time as we marched through the damp, cold darkness.

I had known Joel Leigh only through having shared committee appointments with him in the local Republican organization and at the archdeaconry. He had entered the consular service after being retired from active duty with the Marine Corps following a surgeon’s certificate of disability, and at the time of his death two years before had been rated as one of the foremost authorities on Near East commercial conditions. Sarah, his daughter, whom I had never met, was, by all accounts, a charming young woman, equally endowed with brains, beauty and money, and keeping up the family tradition in the big house in Tuscarora Avenue, where she lived with an elderly maiden aunt as duenna.

Leigh’s long residence in the East was evidenced in the furnishings of the long, old-fashioned hall, which was like a royal antechamber in miniature. In the softly diffused light from a brass-shaded Turkish lamp we caught gleaming reflections from heavily carved blackwood furniture and the highlights of a marvelously inlaid Indian screen. A carved table flanked by dragon-chairs stood against the wall, the floor was soft as new-mown turf with rugs from China, Turkey and Kurdistan.

“Mis’ Sarah’s in the library,” announced the Negro butler who answered our summons at the door, and led us through the hall to the big, high-ceilinged room where Sarah Leigh was waiting. Books lined the chamber’s walls from floor to ceiling on three sides; the fourth wall was devoted to a bulging bay-window which overlooked the garden. Before the fire of cedar logs was drawn a deeply padded divan, while flanking it were great armchairs upholstered in red leather. The light which sifted through the meshes of a brazen lamp-shade disclosed a tabouret of Indian mahogany on which a coffee service stood. Before the fire the mistress of the house stood waiting us. She was rather less than average height, but appeared taller because of her fine carriage. Her mannishly close-cropped hair was dark and inclined toward curliness, but as she moved toward us I saw it showed bronze glints in the lamplight. Her eyes were large, expressive, deep hazel, almost brown. But for the look of cynicism, almost hardness, around her mouth, she would have been something more than merely pretty.

Introductions over, Miss Leigh looked from one of us to the other with something like embarrassment in her eyes. “If—” she began, but de Grandin divined her purpose, and broke in:

“Mademoiselle, a short time since, we had the good fortune to rescue Monsieur your fiancé from a dog which I do not think was any dog at all. That same creature, I might add, destroyed a gentleman who had attended Monsieur Maxwell’s dinner within ten minutes of the time we drove it off. Furthermore, Monsieur Maxwell is under the impression that this dog-thing talked to him while it sought to slay him. From what we overheard of your message on the telephone, we think you hold the key to this mystery. You may speak freely in our presence, for I am Jules de Grandin, physician and occultist, and my friend, Doctor Trowbridge, has most commendable discretion.”

The young woman smiled, and the transformation in her taut, strained face was startling. “Thank you,” she replied; “if you’re an occultist you will understand, and neither doubt me nor demand explanations of things I can’t explain.”

She dropped cross-legged to the hearth rug, as naturally as though she were more used to sitting that way than reclining in a chair, and we caught the gleam of a great square garnet on her forefinger as she extended her hand to Maxwell.

“Hold my hand while I’m talking, John,” she bade. “It may be for the last time.” Then, as he made a gesture of dissent, abruptly:

“I can not marry you—or anyone,” she announced.

Maxwell opened his lips to protest, but no sound came. I stared at her in wonder, trying futilely to reconcile the agitation she had shown when telephoning with her present deadly, apathetic calm.

Jules de Grandin yielded to his curiosity. “Why not, Mademoiselle?” he asked. “Who has forbid the banns?”

She shook her head dejectedly and turned a sad-eyed look upon him as she answered: “It’s just the continuation of a story which I thought was a closed chapter in my life.” For a moment she bent forward, nestling her check against young Maxwell’s hand; then:

“It began when Father was attached to the consulate in Smyrna,” she continued. “France and Turkey were both playing for advantage, and Father had to find out what they planned, so he had to hire secret agents. The most successful of them was a young Greek named George Athanasakos, who came from Crete. Why he should have taken such employment was more than we could understand; for he was well educated, apparently a gentleman, and always well supplied with money. He told us he took the work because of his hatred of the Turks, and as he was always successful in getting information, Father didn’t ask questions.

“When his work was finished he continued to call at our house as a guest, and I—I really didn’t love him, I couldn’t have, it was just infatuation, meeting him so far from home, and the water and that wonderful Smyrna moonlight, and—”

“Perfectly, Mademoiselle, one fully understands,” de Grandin supplied softly as she paused, breathless; “and then—”

“Maybe you never succumbed to moonlight and water and strange, romantic poetry and music,” she half whispered, her eyes grown wider at the recollection, “but I was only seventeen, and he was very handsome, and—and he swept me off my feet. He had the softest, most musical voice I’ve ever heard, and the things he said sounded like something written by Byron at his best. One moonlit night when we’d been rowing, he begged me to say I loved him, and—and I did. He held me in his arms and kissed my eyes and lips and throat. It was like being hypnotized and conscious at the same time. Then, just before we said good-night he told me to meet him in an old garden on the outskirts of the city where we sometimes rested when we’d been out riding. The rendezvous was made for midnight, and though I thought it queer that he should want to meet me at that time in such a place—well, girls in love don’t ask questions, you know. At least, I didn’t.

“There was a full moon the next night, and I was fairly breathless with the beauty of it all when I kept the tryst. I thought I’d come too early, for George was nowhere to be seen when I rode up, but as I jumped down from my horse and looked around I saw something moving in the laurels. It was George, and he’d thrown a cape or cloak of some sort of fur across his shoulders. He startled me dreadfully at first; for he looked like some sort of prowling beast with the animal’s head hanging half down across his face, like the beaver of an ancient helmet. It seemed to me, too, that his eyes had taken on a sort of sinister greenish tinge, but when he took me in his arms and kissed me I was reassured.

“Then he told me he was the last of a very ancient clan which had been wiped out warring with the Turks, and that it was a tradition of their blood that the woman they married take a solemn oath before the nuptials could be celebrated. Again I didn’t ask questions. It all seemed so wonderfully romantic,” she added with a pathetic little smile.

“He had another skin cloak in readiness and dropped it over my shoulders, pulling the head well forward above my face, like a hood. Then he built a little fire of dry twigs and threw some incense on it. I knelt above the fire and inhaled the aromatic smoke while he chanted some sort of invocation in a tongue I didn’t recognize, but which sounded harsh and terrible—like the snarling of a savage dog.

“What happened next I don’t remember clearly, for that incense did things to me. The old garden where I knelt seemed to fade away, and in its place appeared a wild and rocky mountain scene where I seemed walking down a winding road. Other people were walking with me, some before, some behind, some beside me, and all were clothed in cloaks of hairy skin like mine. Suddenly, as we went down the mountainside, I began to notice that my companions were dropping to all-fours, like beasts. But somehow it didn’t seem strange to me; for, without realizing it, I was running on my hands and feet, too. Not crawling, you know, but actually running—like a dog. As we neared the mountain’s foot we ran faster and faster; by the time we reached a little clearing in the heavy woods which fringed the rocky hill we were going like the wind, and I felt myself panting, my tongue hanging from my mouth.

“In the clearing other beasts were waiting for us. One great, hairy creature came trotting up to me, and I was terribly frightened at first, for I recognized it as a mountain wolf, but it nuzzled me with its black snout and licked me, and somehow it seemed like a caress—I liked it. Then it started off across the unplowed field, and I ran after it, caught up with it, and ran alongside. We came to a pool and the beast stopped to drink, and I bent over the water too, lapping it up with my tongue. Then I saw our images in the still pond, and almost died of fright, for the thing beside me was a mountain wolf, and I was a she-wolf!

“My astonishment quickly passed, however, and somehow I didn’t seem to mind having been transformed into a beast; for something deep inside me kept urging me on, on to something—I didn’t quite know what.

“When we’d drunk we trotted through a little patch of woodland and suddenly my companion sank to the ground in the underbrush and lay there, red tongue lolling from its mouth, green eyes fixed intently on the narrow, winding path beside which we were resting. I wondered what we waited for, and half rose on my haunches to look, but a low, warning growl from the thing beside me warned that something was approaching. It was a pair of farm laborers, Greek peasants I knew them to be by their dress, and they were talking in low tones and looking fearfully about, as though they feared an ambush. When they came abreast of us the beast beside me sprang—so did I.

“I’ll never forget the squeaking scream the nearer man gave as I leaped upon him, or the hopeless, terrified expression in his eyes as he tried to fight me off. But I bore him down, sank my teeth into his throat and began slowly tearing at his flesh. I could feel the blood from his torn throat welling up in my mouth, and its hot saltiness was sweeter than the most delicious wine. The poor wretch’s struggles became weaker and weaker, and I felt a sort of fierce elation. Then he ceased to fight, and I shook him several times, as a terrier shakes a rat, and when he didn’t move or struggle, I tore at his face and throat and chest till my hairy muzzle was one great smear of blood.

“Then, all at once, it seemed as though a sort of thick, white fog were spreading through the forest, blinding me and shutting out the trees and undergrowth and my companion beasts, even the poor boy whom I had killed, and—there I was kneeling over the embers of the dying fire in the old Smyrna garden, with the clouds of incense dying down to little curly spirals.

“George was standing across the fire from me, laughing, and the first thing I noticed was that his lips were smeared with blood.

“Something hot and salty stung my mouth, and I put my hand up to it. When I brought it down the fingers were red with a thick, sticky liquid.

“I think I must have started to scream; for George jumped over the fire and clapped his hand upon my mouth—ugh, I could taste the blood more than ever, then!—and whispered, ‘Now you are truly mine, Star of the Morning. Together we have ranged the woods in spirit as we shall one day in body, O true mate of a true vrykolakas!’

“Vrykolakas is a Greek word hard to translate into English. Literally it means ‘the restless dead’, but it also means a vampire or a werewolf, and the vrykolakas are the most dreaded of all the host of demons with which Greek peasant-legends swarm.

“I shook myself free from him. ‘Let me go; don’t touch me; I never want to see you again!’ I cried.

“‘Nevertheless, you shall see me again—and again and again—Star of the Sea!’ he answered with a mocking laugh. ‘You belong to me, now, and no one shall take you from me. When I want you I will call, and you will come to me, for’—he looked directly into my eyes, and his own seemed to merge and run together, like two pools of liquid, till they were one great disk of green fire—‘thou shalt have no other mate than me, and he who tries to come between us dies. See, I put my mark upon you!’

“He tore my riding-shirt open and pressed his lips against my side, and next instant I felt a biting sting as his teeth met in my flesh. See—”

With a frantic, wrenching gesture she snatched at the low collar of her red-silk lounging pajamas, tore the fabric asunder and exposed her ivory flesh. Three inches or so below her left axilla, in direct line with the gently swelling bulge of her firm, high breast, was a small whitened cicatrix, and from it grew a little tuft of long, grayish-brown hair, like hairs protruding from a mole, but unlike any body hairs which I had ever seen upon a human being.

“Grand Dieu,” exclaimed de Grandin softly. “Poil de loup!”

“Yes,” she agreed in a thin, hysterical whisper, “it’s wolf’s hair! I know. I cut it off and took it to a biochemist in London, and he assured me it was unquestionably the hair of a wolf. I’ve tried and tried to have the scar removed, but it’s useless. I’ve tried cautery, electrolysis, even surgery, but it disappears for only a little while, then comes again.”

For a moment it was still as death in the big dim-lighted room. The little French-gilt clock upon the mantelpiece ticked softly, quickly, like a heart that palpitates with terror, and the hissing of a burning resined log seemed loud and eery as night-wind whistling round a haunted tower. The girl folded the torn silk of her pajama jacket across her breast and pinned it into place; then, simply, desolately, as one who breaks the news of a dear friend’s death:

“So I can not marry you, you see, John, dear,” she said.

“Why?” asked the young man in a low, fierce voice. “Because that scoundrel drugged you with his devilish incense and made you think you’d turned into a wolf? Because—”

“Because I’d be your murderess if I did so,” she responded quiveringly. “Don’t you remember? He said he’d call me when he wanted me, and anyone who came between him and me would die. He’s come for me, he’s called me, John; it was he who attacked you in the fog tonight. Oh, my dear, my dear, I love you so; but I must give you up. It would be murder if I were to marry you!”

“Nonsense!” began John Maxwell bruskly. “If you think that man can—”

Outside the house, seemingly from underneath the library’s bow-window, there sounded in the rain-drenched night a wail, long-drawn, pulsating, doleful as the cry of an abandoned soul: “O-u-o—o-u-oo—o-u-o—o-u-oo!” it rose and fell, quavered and almost died away, then resurged with increased force. “O-u-o—o-u-o-o—o-u-o—o-u-oo!”

The woman on the hearth rug cowered like a beaten beast, clutching frantically with fear-numbed fingers at the drugget’s pile, half crawling, half writhing toward the brass bars where the cheerful fire burned brightly. “Oh,” she whimpered as the mournful ululation died away, “that’s he; he called me once before today; now he’s come again, and—”

“Mademoiselle, restrain yourself,” de Grandin’s sharp, whip-like order cut through her mounting terror and brought her back to something like normality. “You are with friends,” he added in a softer tone; “three of us are here, and we are a match for any sacré loup-garou that ever killed a sheep or made night hideous with his howling. Parbleu, but I shall say damn yes. Did I not, all single-handed, already put him to flight once tonight? But certainly. Very well, then, let us talk this matter over calmly, for—”

With the suddenness of a discharged pistol a wild, vibrating howl came through the window once again. “O-u-o—o-u-oo—o-u-o!” it rose against the stillness of the night, diminished to a moan, then suddenly crescendoed upward, from a moan to a wail, from a wail to a howl, despairing, pleading, longing as the cry of a damned spirit, fierce and wild as the rally-call of the fiends of hell.

“Sang du diable, must I suffer interruption when I wish to talk? Sang des tous les saints—it is not to be borne!” de Grandin cried furiously, and cleared the distance to the great bay-window in two agile, cat-like leaps.

“Allez!” he ordered sharply, as he flung the casement back and leaned far out into the rainy night. “Be off, before I come down to you. You know me, hein? A little while ago you dodged my steel, but—”

A snarling growl replied, and in the clump of rhododendron plants which fringed the garden we saw the baleful glimmer of a pair of fiery eyes.

“Parbleu, you dare defy me—me?” the little Frenchman cried, and vaulted nimbly from the window, landing sure-footed as a panther on the rain-soaked garden mold, then charging at the lurking horror as though it had been harmless as a kitten,

“Oh, he’ll be killed; no mortal man can stand against a vrykolakas!” cried Sarah Leigh, wringing her slim hands together in an agony of terror. “Oh, God in heaven, spare—”

A fusillade of crackling shots cut through her prayer, and we heard a short, sharp yelp of pain, then the voice of Jules de Grandin hurling imprecations in mingled French and English. A moment later:

“Give me a hand, Friend Trowbridge,” he called from underneath the window. “It was a simple matter to come down, but climbing back is something else again.

“Merci,” he acknowledged as he regained the library and turned his quick, elfin grin on each of us in turn. Dusting his hands against each other, to clear them of the dampness from the windowsill, he felt for his cigarette case, chose a Maryland and tapped it lightly on his finger-nail.

“Tiens, I damn think he will know his master’s voice in future, that one,” he informed us. “I did not quite succeed in killing him to death, unfortunately, but I think that it will be some time before he comes and cries beneath this lady’s window again. Yes. Had the sale poltron but had the courage to stand against me, I should certainly have killed him; but as it was”—he spread his hands and raised his shoulders eloquently—“it is difficult to hit a running shadow, and he offered little better mark in the darkness. I think I wounded him in the left hand, but I can not surely say.”

He paused a moment, then, seeming to remember, turned again to Sarah Leigh with a ceremonious bow. “Pardon, Mademoiselle,” he apologized, “you were saying, when we were so discourteously interrupted—” he smiled at her expectantly.

“Doctor de Grandin,” wondering incredulity was in the girl’s eyes and voice as she looked at him, “you shot him—wounded him?”

“Perfectly, Mademoiselle,” he patted the waxed ends of his mustache with affectionate concern, “my marksmanship was execrable, but at least I hit him. That was something.”

“But in Greece they used to say—I’ve always heard that only silver bullets were effective against a vrykolakas; either silver bullets or a sword of finely tempered steel, so—”

“Ah bah!” he interrupted with a laugh. “What did they know of modern ordnance, those old-time ritualists? Silver bullets were decreed because silver is a harder metal than lead, and the olden guns they used in ancient days were not adapted to shoot balls of iron. The pistols of today shoot slugs encased in cupro-nickel, far harder than the best of iron, and with a striking-force undreamed of in the days when firearms were a new invention. Tiens, had the good Saint George possessed a modern military rifle he could have slain the dragon at his leisure while he stood a mile away. Had Saint Michel had a machine-gun, his victory over Lucifer could have been accomplished in thirty seconds by the watch.”

Having delivered himself of this scandalous opinion, he reseated himself on the divan and smiled at her, for all the world like the family cat which has just breakfasted on the household canary.

“And how was it that this so valiant runner-away-from-Jules-de-Grandin announced himself to you, Mademoiselle?” he asked.

“I was dressing to go out this morning,” she replied, “when the ’phone rang, and when I answered it no one replied to my ‘hello.’ Then, just as I began to think they’d given some one a wrong number, and was about to put the instrument down, there came one of those awful, wailing howls across the wire. No word at all, sir, just that long-drawn, quavering howl, like what you heard a little while ago.

“You can imagine how it frightened me. I’d almost managed to put George from my mind, telling myself that the vision of lycanthropy which I had in Smyrna was some sort of hypnotism, and that there really weren’t such things as werewolves, and even if there were, this was practical America, where I needn’t fear them—then came that dreadful howl, the sort of howl I’d heard—and given!—in my vision in the Smyrna garden, and I knew there are such things as werewolves, and that one of them possessed me, soul and body, and that I’d have to go to him if he demanded it.

“Most of all, though, I thought of John, for if the werewolf were in America he’d surely read the notice of our coming marriage, and the first thing I remembered was his threat to kill anyone who tried to come between us.”

She turned to Maxwell with a pensive smile. “You know how I’ve been worrying you all day, dear,” she asked, “how I begged you not to go out to that dinner tonight, and when you said you must how I made you promise that you’d call me as soon as you got home, but on no account to call me before you were safely back in your apartment?

“I’ve been in a perfect agony of apprehension all evening,” she told us, “and when John called from Doctor Trowbridge’s office I felt as though a great weight had been lifted from my heart.”

“And did you try to trace the call?” the little Frenchman asked.

“Yes, but it had been dialed from a downtown pay station, so it was impossible to find it.”

De Grandin took his chin between his thumb and forefinger and gazed thoughtfully at the tips of his patent-leather evening shoes. “U’m?” he murmured; then: “What does he look like, this so gallant persecutor of women, Mademoiselle? ‘He is handsome,’ you have said, which is of interest, certainly, but not especially instructive. Can you be more specific? Since he is a Greek, one assumes that he is dark, but—”

“No, he’s not,” she interrupted. “His eyes are blue and his hair is rather light, though his beard—he used to wear one, though he may be smooth-shaven now—is quite dark, almost black. Indeed, in certain lights it seems to have an almost bluish tinge.”

“Ah, so? Une barbe bleu?” de Grandin answered sharply. “One might have thought as much. Such beards, ma chère, are the sign-manual of those who traffic with the Devil. Gilles de Retz, the vilest monster who ever cast insult on the human race by wearing human form, was light of hair and blue-black as to beard. It is from him we get the most unpleasant fairy-tale of Bluebeard, though the gentleman who dispatched his wives for showing too much curiosity was a lamb and sucking dove beside the one whose name he bears.

“Very well. Have you a photograph of him, by any happy chance?”

“No; I did have one, but I burned it years ago.”

“A pity, Mademoiselle; our task would be made easier if we had his likeness as a guide. But we shall find him otherwise.”

“How?” asked Maxwell and I in chorus.

“There was a time,” he answered, “when the revelations of a patient to his doctor were considered privileged communications. Since prohibition came to blight your land, however, and the gangster’s gun has written history in blood, the physicians are required to note the names and addresses of those who come to them with gunshot wounds, and this information is collected by the police each day. Now, we know that I have wounded this one. He will undoubtlessly seek medical assistance for his hurt. Voilà, I shall go down to the police headquarters, look upon the records of those treated for injuries from bullets, and by a process of elimination we shall find him. You apprehend?”

“But suppose he doesn’t go to a physician?” young Maxwell interposed.

“In that event we have to find some other way to find him,” de Grandin answered with a smile, “but that is a stream which we shall cross when we have arrived upon its shore. Meantime”—he rose and bowed politely to our hostess—“it is getting late, Mademoiselle, and we have trespassed on your time too long already. We shall convoy Monsieur Maxwell safely home, and see him lock his door, and if you will keep your doors and windows barred, I do not think that you have anything to fear. The gentleman who seems also to be a wolf has his wounded paw to nurse, and that will keep him busy the remainder of the night.”

With a movement of his eyes he bade me leave the room, following closely on my heels and closing the door behind him. “If we must separate them the least which we can do is give them twenty little minutes for good-night,” he murmured as we donned our mackintoshes.

“Twenty minutes?” I expostulated. “Why, he could say good-night to twenty girls in twenty minutes!”

“Oui-da, certainement; or a hundred,” he agreed, “but not to the one girl, my good friend. Ah bah, Friend Trowbridge, did you never love; did you never worship at the small, white feet of some beloved woman? Did you never feel your breath come faster and your blood pound wildly at your temples as you took her in your arms and put your lips against her mouth? If not—grand Dieu des porcs—then you have never lived at all, though you be older than Methuselah!”

RUNNING OUR QUARRY TO earth proved a harder task than we had anticipated. Daylight had scarcely come when de Grandin visited the police, but for all he discovered he might have stayed at home. Only four cases of gunshot wounds had been reported during the preceding night, and two of the injured men were Negroes, a third a voluble but undoubtedly Italian laborer who had quarreled with some fellow countrymen over a card game, while the fourth was a thin-faced, tight-lipped gangster who eyed us saturninely and murmured, “Never mind who done it; I’ll be seein’ ’im,” evidently under the misapprehension that we were emissaries of the police.

The next day and the next produced no more results. Gunshot wounds there were, but none in the hand, where de Grandin declared he had wounded the nocturnal visitant, and though he followed every lead assiduously, in every case he drew a blank.

He was almost beside himself on the fourth day of fruitless search; by evening I was on the point of prescribing triple bromides, for he paced the study restlessly, snapping his fingers, tweaking the waxed ends of his mustache till I made sure he would pull the hairs loose from his lip, and murmuring appalling blasphemies in mingled French and English.

At length, when I thought that I could stand his restless striding no longer, diversion came in the form of a telephone call. He seized the instrument peevishly, but no sooner had he barked a sharp “Allo?” than his whole expression changed and a quick smile ran across his face, like sunshine breaking through a cloud.

“But certainly; of course, assuredly!” he cried delightedly. Then, to me:

“Your hat and coat, Friend Trowbridge, and hurry, pour l’amour d’un têtard—they are marrying!”

“Marrying?” I echoed wonderingly. “Who—”

“Who but Mademoiselle Sarah and Monsieur Jean, parbleu?” he answered with a grin. “Oh, la, la, at last they show some sense, those ones. He had broken her resistance down, and she consents, werewolf or no werewolf. Now we shall surely make the long nose at that sacré singe who howled beneath her window when we called upon her!”

The ceremony was to be performed in the sacristy of St. Barnabas’ Church, for John and Sarah, shocked and saddened by the death of young Fred Suffrige, who was to have been their best man, had recalled the invitations and decided on a private wedding with only her aunt and his mother present in addition to de Grandin and me.

“DEARLY BELOVED, WE ARE gathered together here in the sight of God and in the face of this company to join together this man and this woman in holy matrimony,” began the rector, Doctor Higginbotham, who, despite the informality of the occasion, was attired in all the panoply of a high church priest and accompanied by two gorgeously accoutered and greatly interested choir-boys who served as acolytes. “Into this holy estate these two persons come now to be joined. If any man can show just cause why they should not lawfully be joined together let him now speak, or else hereafter forever hold his peace—”

“Jeez!” exclaimed the choir youth who stood upon the rector’s left, letting fall the censer from his hands and dodging nimbly back, as from a threatened blow.

The interruption fell upon the solemn scene like a bombshell at a funeral, and one and all of us looked at the cowering youngster, whose eyes were fairly bulging from his face and whose ruddy countenance had gone a sickly, pasty gray, so that the thick-strewn freckles started out in contrast, like spots of rouge upon a corpse’s pallid cheeks.

“Why, William—” Doctor Higginbotham began in a shocked voice; but:

Rat, tat-tat! sounded the sudden sharp clatter of knuckles against the window-pane, and for the first time we realized it had been toward this window the boy had looked when his sacrilegious exclamation broke in on the service.

Staring at us through the glass we saw a great, gray wolf! Yet it was not a wolf, for about the lupine jaws and jowls was something hideously reminiscent of a human face, and the greenish, phosphorescent glow of those great, glaring eyes had surely never shone in any face, animal or human. As I looked, breathless, the monster raised its head, and strangling horror gripped my throat with fiery fingers as I saw a human-seeming neck beneath it. Long and grisly-thin it was, corded and sinewed like the desiccated gula of a lich, and, like the face, covered with a coat of gray-brown fur. Then a hand, hair-covered like the throat and face, slim as a woman’s—or a mummy’s!—but terribly misshapen, fingers tipped with blood-red talon-nails, rose up and struck the glass again. My scalp was fairly crawling with sheer terror, and my breath came hot and sulfurous in my throat as I wondered how much longer the frail glass could stand against the impact of those bony, hair-gloved hands.

A strangled scream behind me sounded from Sarah’s aunt, Miss Leigh, and I heard the muffled thud as she toppled to the floor in a dead faint, but I could no more turn my gaze from the horror at the window than the fascinated bird can tear its eyes from the serpent’s numbing stare.

Another sighing exclamation and another thudding impact. John Maxwell’s mother was unconscious on the floor beside Miss Leigh, but still I stood and stared in frozen terror at the thing beyond the window.

Doctor Higginbotham’s teeth were chattering, and his ruddy, plethoric countenance was death-gray as he faced the staring horror, but he held fast to his faith.

“Conjuro te, sceleratissime, abire ad tuum locum”—he began the sonorous Latin exorcism, signing himself with his right hand and advancing his pectoral cross toward the thing at the window with his left—“I exorcise thee, most foul spirit, creature of darkness—”

The corners of the wolf-thing’s devilish eyes contracted in a smile of malevolent amusement, and a rim of scarlet tongue flicked its black muzzle. Doctor Higginbotham’s exorcism, bravely begun, ended on a wheezing, stifled syllable, and he stared in round-eyed fascination, his thick lips, blue with terror, opening and closing, but emitting no sound.

“Sang d’un cochon, not that way, Monsieur—this!” cried Jules de Grandin, and the roar of his revolver split the paralysis of quiet which had gripped the little chapel. A thin, silvery tinkle of glass sounded as the bullet tore through the window, and the grisly face abruptly disappeared, but from somewhere in the outside dark there echoed back a braying howl which seemed to hold a sort of obscene laughter in its quavering notes.

“Sapristi! Have I missed him?” de Grandin asked incredulously. “No matter; he is gone. On with the service, Monsieur le Curé. I do not think we shall be interrupted further.”

“No!” Doctor Higginbotham backed away from Sarah Leigh as though her breath polluted him. “I can perform no marriage until that thing has been explained. Some one here is haunted by a devil—a malign entity from hell which will not heed the exorcism of the Church—and until I’m satisfied concerning it, and that you’re all good Christians, there’ll be no ceremony in this church!”

“Eh bien, Monsieur, who can say what constitutes a good Christian?” de Grandin smiled unpleasantly at Doctor Higginbotham. “Certainly one who lacks in charity as you do can not be competent to judge. Have it as you wish. As soon as we have recovered these fainting ladies we shall leave, and may the Devil grill me on the grates of hell if ever we come back until you have apologized.”

TWO HOURS LATER, AS we sat in the Leigh library, Sarah dried her eyes and faced her lover with an air of final resolution: “You see, my dear, it’s utterly impossible for me to marry you, or anyone,” she said. “That awful thing will dog my steps, and—”

“My poor, sweet girl, I’m more determined than ever to marry you!” John broke in. “If you’re to be haunted by a thing like that, you need me every minute, and—”

“Bravo!” applauded Jules de Grandin. “Well said, mon vieux, but we waste precious time. Come, let us go.”

“Where?” asked John Maxwell, but the little Frenchman only smiled and shrugged his shoulders.

“To Maidstone Crossing, quickly, if you please, my friend,” he whispered when he had led the lovers to my car and seen solicitously to their comfortable seating in the tonneau. “I know a certain justice of the peace there who would marry the Witch of Endor to the Emperor Nero though all the wolves which ever plagued Red Riding-Hood forbade the banns, provided only we supply him with sufficient fee.”

Two hours’ drive brought us to the little hamlet of Maidstone Crossing, and de Grandin’s furious knocking on the door of a small cottage evoked the presence of a lank, lean man attired in a pair of corduroy trousers drawn hastily above the folds of a canton-flannel nightshirt.

A whispered colloquy between the rustic and the slim, elegant little Parisian; then: “O.K., Doc,” the justice of the peace conceded. “Bring ’em in; I’ll marry ’em, an’—hey, Sam’l!” he called up the stairs. “C’mon down, an’ bring yer shotgun. There’s a weddin’ goin’ to be pulled off, an’ they tell me some fresh guys may try to interfere!”

“Sam’l,” a lank, lean youth whose costume duplicated that of his father, descended the stairway grinning, an automatic shotgun cradled in the hollow of his arm. “D’ye expect any real rough stuff?” he asked.

“Seems like they’re apt to try an’ set a dawg on ’em,” his father answered, and the younger man grinned cheerfully.

“Dawgs, is it?” he replied. “Dawgs is my dish. Go on, Pap, do yer stuff. Good luck, folks,” he winked encouragingly at John and Sarah and stepped out on the porch, his gun in readiness.

“Do you take this here woman fer yer lawful, wedded wife?” the justice inquired of John Maxwell, and when the latter answered that he did:

“An’ do you take this here now man to be yer wedded husband?” he asked Sarah.

“I do,” the girl responded in a trembling whisper, and the roaring bellow of a shotgun punctuated the brief pause before the squire concluded:

“Then by virtue of th’ authority vested in me by th’ law an’ constitootion of this state, I do declare ye man an’ wife—an’ whoever says that ye ain’t married lawfully ’s a danged liar,” he added as a sort of afterthought.

“What wuz it that ye shot at, Sam’l?” asked the justice as, enriched by fifty dollars, and grinning appreciatively at the evening’s profitable business, he ushered us from the house.

“Durned if I know, Pap,” the other answered. “Looked kind o’ funny to me. He wuz about a head taller’n me—an’ I’m six foot two,—an’ thin as Job’s turkey-hen, to boot. His clothes looked skintight on ’im, an’ he had on a cap, or sumpin with a peak that stuck out over his face. I first seen ’im comin’ up th’ road, kind o’ lookin’ this way an’ that, like as if he warn’t quite certain o’ his way. Then, all of a suddent, he kind o’ stopped an’ threw his head back, like a dawg sniffin’ th’ air, an’ started to go down on his all-fours, like he wuz goin’ to sneak up on th’ house. So I hauls off an’ lets ’im have a tickle o’ buckshot. Don’t know whether I hit ’im or not, an’ I’ll bet he don’t, neether; he sure didn’t waste no time stoppin’ to find out. Could he run! I’m tellin’ ye, that feller must be in Harrisonville by now, if he kep’ on goin’ like he started!”

TWO DAYS OF FEVERISH activity ensued. Last-minute traveling arrangements had to be made, and passports for “John Maxwell and wife, Harrisonville, New Jersey, U.S.A.,” obtained. De Grandin spent every waking hour with the newly married couple and even insisted on occupying a room in the Leigh house at night; but his precautions seemed unnecessary, for not so much as a whimper sounded under Sarah’s window, and though the little Frenchman searched the garden every morning, there was no trace of unfamiliar footprints, either brute or human, to be found.

“Looks as if Sallie’s Greek boy friend knows when he’s licked and has decided to quit following her about,” John Maxwell grinned as he and Sarah, radiant with happiness, stood upon the deck of the Île de France.

“One hopes so,” de Grandin answered with a smile. “Good luck, mes amis, and may your lune de miel shine as brightly throughout all your lives as it does this night.

“La lune—ha?” he repeated half musingly, half with surprise, as though he just remembered some important thing which had inadvertently slipped his memory. “May I speak a private warning in your ear, Friend Jean?” He drew the bridegroom aside and whispered earnestly a moment.

“Oh, bosh!” the other laughed as they rejoined us. “That’s all behind us, Doctor; you’ll see; we’ll never hear a sound from him. He’s got me to deal with now, not just poor Sarah.”

“Bravely spoken, little cabbage!” the Frenchman applauded. “Bon voyage.” But there was a serious expression on his face as we went down the gangway.

“What was the private warning you gave John?” I asked as we left the French Line piers. “He didn’t seem to take it very seriously.”

“No,” he conceded. “I wish he had. But youth is always brave and reckless in its own conceit. It was about the moon. She has a strange influence on lycanthropy. The werewolf metamorphoses more easily in the full of the moon than at any other time, and those who may have been affected with his virus, though even faintly, are most apt to feel its spell when the moon is at the full. I warned him to be particularly careful of his lady on moonlit nights, and on no account to go anywhere after dark unless he were armed.

“The werewolf is really an inferior demon,” he continued as we boarded the Hoboken ferry. “Just what he is we do not know with certainty, though we know he has existed from the earliest times; for many writers of antiquity mention him. Sometimes he is said to be a magical wolf who has the power to become a man. More often he is said to be a man who can become a wolf at times, sometimes of his own volition, sometimes at stated seasons, even against his will. He has dreadful powers of destructiveness; for the man who is also a wolf is ten times more deadly than the wolf who is only a wolf. He has the wolf’s great strength and savagery, but human cunning with it. At night he quests and kills his prey, which is most often his fellow man, but sometimes sheep or hares, or his ancient enemy, the dog. By day he hides his villainy—and the location of his lair—under human guise.

“However, he has this weakness: Strong and ferocious, cunning and malicious as he is, he can be killed as easily as any natural wolf. A sharp sword will slay him, a well-aimed bullet puts an end to his career; the wood of the thorn-bush and the mountain ash are so repugnant to him that he will slink away if beaten or merely threatened with a switch of either. Weapons efficacious against an ordinary physical foe are potent against him, while charms and exorcisms which would put a true demon to flight are powerless.

“You saw how he mocked at Monsieur Higginbotham in the sacristy the other night, by example. But he did not stop to bandy words with me. Oh, no. He knows that I shoot straight and quick, and he had already felt my lead on one occasion. If young Friend Jean will always go well-armed, he has no need to fear; but if he be taken off his guard—eh bien, we can not always be on hand to rescue him as we did the night when we first met him. No, certainly.”

“But why do you fear for Sarah?” I persisted.

“I hardly know,” he answered. “Perhaps it is that I have what you Americans so drolly call the hunch. Werewolves sometimes become werewolves by the aid of Satan, that they may kill their enemies while in lupine form, or satisfy their natural lust for blood and cruelty while disguised as beasts. Some are transformed as the result of a curse upon themselves or their families, a few are metamorphosed by accident. These are the most unfortunate of all. In certain parts of Europe, notably in Greece, Russia and the Balkan states, the very soil seems cursed with lycanthropic power. There are certain places where, if the unwary traveler lies down to sleep, he is apt to wake up with the curse of werewolfism on him. Certain streams and springs there are which, if drunk from, will render the drinker liable to transformation at the next full moon, and regularly thereafter. You will recall that in the dream, or vision, which Madame Sarah had while in the Smyrna garden so long ago, she beheld herself drinking from a woodland pool? I do not surely know, my friend, I have not even good grounds for suspicion, but something—something which I can not name—tells me that in some way this poor one, who is so wholly innocent, has been branded with the taint of lycanthropy. How it came about I can not say, but—”

My mind had been busily engaged with other problems, and I had listened to his disquisition on lycanthropy with something less than full attention. Now, suddenly aware of the thing which puzzled me, I interrupted:

“Can you explain the form that werewolf—if that’s what it was—took on different occasions? The night we met John Maxwell he was fighting for his life with as true a wolf as any there are in the zoological gardens. O’Brien, the policeman, saw it, too, and shot at it, after it had killed Fred Suffrige. It was a sure-enough wolf when it howled under Sarah’s window and you wounded it; yet when it interrupted the wedding it was an awful combination of wolf and man, or man and wolf, and the thing the justice’s son drove off with his shotgun was the same, according to his description.”

Surprisingly, he did not take offense at my interruption. Instead, he frowned in thoughtful silence at the dashboard lights a moment; then: “Sometimes the werewolf is completely transformed from man to beast,” he answered; “sometimes he is a hideous combination of the two, but always he is a fiend incarnate. My own belief is that this one was only partly transformed when we last saw him because he had not time to wait complete metamorphosis. It is possible he could not change completely, too, because—” he broke off and pointed at the sky significantly.

“Well?” I demanded as he made no further effort to proceed.

“Non, it is not well,” he denied, “but it may be important. Do you observe the moon tonight?”

“Why, yes.”

“What quarter is it in?”

“The last; it’s waning fast.”

“Précisément. As I was saying, it may be that his powers to metamorphose himself were weakened because of the waning of the moon. Remember, if you please, his power for evil is at its height when the moon is at the full, and as it wanes, his powers become less and less. At the darkening of the moon, he is at his weakest, and then is the time for us to strike—if only we could find him. But he will lie well hidden at such times, never fear. He is clever with a devilish cunningness, that one.”

“Oh, you’re fantastic!” I burst out.

“You say so, having seen what you have seen?”

“Well, I’ll admit we’ve seen some things which are mighty hard to explain,” I conceded, “but—”

“But we are arrived at home; Monsieur and Madame Maxwell are safe upon the ocean, and I am vilely thirsty,” he broke in. “Come, let us take a drink and go to bed, my friend.”

WITH MIDWINTER CAME JOHN and Sarah Maxwell, back from their honeymoon in Paris and on the Riviera. A week before their advent, notices in the society columns told of their homecoming, and a week after their return an engraved invitation apprised de Grandin and me that the honor of our presence was requested at a reception in the Leigh mansion, where they had taken residence. “… and please come early and stay late; there are a million things I want to talk about,” Sarah pencilled at the bottom of our card.

Jules de Grandin was more than usually ornate on the night of the reception. His London-tailored evening clothes were knife-sharp in their creases; about his neck hung the insignia of the Legion d’Honneur; a row of miniature medals, including the French and Belgian war crosses, the Médaille Militaire and the Italian Medal of Valor, decorated the left breast of his faultless evening coat; his little, wheat-blond mustache was waxed to needle-sharpness and his sleek blond hair was brilliantined and brushed till it fitted flat upon his shapely little head as a skull-cap of beige satin.

Lights blazed from every window of the house as we drew up beneath the porte-cochère. Inside all was laughter, staccato conversation and the odd, not unpleasant odor rising from the mingling of the hundred or more individual scents affected by the women guests. Summer was still near enough for the men to retain the tan of mountain and seashore on their faces and for a velvet vestige of veneer of painfully acquired sun-tan to show upon the women’s arms and shoulders.

We tendered our congratulations to the homing newlyweds; then de Grandin plucked me by the sleeve. “Come away, my friend,” he whispered in an almost tragic voice. “Come quickly, or these thirsty ones will have drunk up all the punch containing rum and champagne and left us only lemonade!”

The evening passed with pleasant swiftness, and guests began to leave. “Where’s Sallie—seen her?” asked John Maxwell, interrupting a rather Rabelaisian story which de Grandin was retailing with gusto to several appreciative young men in the conservatory. “The Carter-Brooks are leaving, and—”

De Grandin brought his story to a close with the suddenness of a descending theater curtain, and a look of something like consternation shone in his small, round eyes. “She is not here?” he asked sharply. “When did you last see her?”

“Oh,” John answered vaguely, “just a little while ago; we danced the ‘Blue Danube’ together, then she went upstairs for something, and—”

“Quick, swiftly!” de Grandin interrupted. “Pardon, Messieurs,” he bowed to his late audience and, beckoning me, strode toward the stairs.

“I say, what’s the rush—” began John Maxwell, but:

“Every reason under heaven,” the Frenchman broke in shortly. To me: “Did you observe the night outside, Friend Trowbridge?”

“Why, yes,” I answered. “Its a beautiful moonlit night, almost bright as day, and—”

“And there you are, for the love of ten thousand pigs!” he cut in. “Oh, I am the stupid-headed fool, me! Why did I let her from my sight?”

We followed in wondering silence as he climbed the stairs, hurried down the hall toward Sarah’s room and paused before her door. He raised his hand to rap, but the portal swung away, and a girl stood staring at us from the threshold.

“Did it pass you?” she asked, regarding us in wide-eyed wonder.

“Pardon, Mademoiselle?” de Grandin countered. “What is it that you ask?”

“Why, did you see that lovely collie, it—”

“Cher Dieu,” the words were like a groan upon the little Frenchman’s lips as he looked at her in horror. Then, recovering himself: “Proceed, Mademoiselle, it was of a dog you spoke?”

“Yes,” she returned. “I came upstairs to freshen up, and found I’d lost my compact somewhere, so I came to Sallie’s room to get some powder. She’d come up a few moments before, and I was positive I’d find her here, but—” she paused in puzzlement a moment; then: “But when I came in there was no one here. Her dress was lying on the chaiselongue there, as though she’d slipped it off, and by the window, looking out with its paws up on the sill, was the loveliest silver collie.

“I didn’t know you had a dog, John,” she turned to Maxwell. “When did you get it? It’s the loveliest creature, but it seemed to be afraid of me; for when I went to pat it, it slunk away, and before I realized it had bolted through the door, which I’d left open. It ran down the hall.”

“A dog?” John Maxwell answered bewilderedly. “We haven’t any dog, Nell; it must have been—”

“Never mind what it was,” de Grandin interrupted as the girl went down the hall, and as she passed out of hearing he seized us by the elbows and fairly thrust us into Sarah’s room, closing the door quickly behind us.

“What—” began John Maxwell, but the Frenchman motioned him to silence.

“Behold, regard each item carefully; stamp them upon your memories,” he ordered, sweeping the charming chamber with his sharp, stock-taking glance.

A fire burned brightly in the open grate, parchment-shaded lamps diffused soft light. Upon the bed there lay a pair of rose-silk pajamas, with a sheer crêpe negligée beside them. A pair of satin mules were placed toes in upon the bedside rug. Across the chaise-longue was draped, as though discarded in the utmost haste, the white-satin evening gown that Sarah had worn. Upon the floor beside the lounge were crumpled wisps of ivory crêpe de Chine, her bandeau and trunks. Sarah, being wholly modern, had worn no stockings, but her white-and-silver evening sandals lay beside the lingerie, one on its sole, as though she had stepped out of it, the other on its side, gaping emptily, as though kicked from her little pink-and-white foot in panic haste. There was something ominous about that silent room; it was like a body from which the spirit had departed, still beautiful and warm, but lifeless.

“Humph,” Maxwell muttered, “the Devil knows where she’s gone—”

“He knows very, exceedingly well, I have no doubt,” de Grandin interrupted. “But we do not. Now—ah? Ah-ah-ah?” his exclamation rose steadily, thinning to a sharpness like a razor’s cutting-edge. “What have we here?”

Like a hound upon the trail, guided by scent alone, he crossed the room and halted by the dressing-table. Before the mirror stood an uncorked flask of perfume, lovely thing of polished crystal decorated with silver basketwork. From its open neck there rose a thin but penetrating scent, not wholly sweet nor wholly acrid, but a not unpleasant combination of the two, as though musk and flower-scent had each lent it something of their savors.

The little Frenchman put it to his nose, then set it down with a grimace. “Name of an Indian pig, how comes this devil’s brew here?” he asked.

“Oh, that?” Maxwell answered. “Hanged if I know. Some unknown admirer of Sallie’s sent it to her. It came today, all wrapped up like something from a jeweler’s. Rather pleasant-smelling, isn’t it?”

De Grandin looked at him as Torquemada might have looked at one accusing him of loving Martin Luther. “Did you by any chance make use of it, Monsieur?” he asked in an almost soundless whisper.

“I? Good Lord, do I look like the sort of he-thing who’d use perfume?” the other asked.

“Bien, I did but ask to know,” de Grandin answered as he jammed the silver-mounted stopper in the bottle and thrust the flask into his trousers pocket.

“But where the deuce is Sallie?” the young husband persisted. “She’s changed her clothes, that’s certain; but what did she go out for, and if she didn’t go out, where is she?”

“Ah, it may be that she had a sudden feeling of faintness, and decided to go out into the air,” the Frenchman temporized. “Come, Monsieur, the guests are waiting to depart, and you must say adieu. Tell them that your lady is indisposed, make excuses, tell them anything, but get them out all quickly; we have work to do.”

JOHN MAXWELL LIED GALLANTLY, de Grandin and I standing at his side to prevent any officious dowager from mounting the stairs and administering home-made medical assistance. At last, when all were gone, the young man turned to Jules de Grandin, and:

“Now, out with it,” he ordered gruffly. “I can tell by your manner something serious has happened. What is it, man; what is it?”

De Grandin patted him upon the shoulder with a mixture of affection and commiseration in the gesture. “Be brave, mon vieux,” he ordered softly. “It is the worst. He has her in his power; she has gone to join him, for—pitié de Dieu!—she has become like him.”

“Wha—what?” the husband quavered. “You mean she—that Sallie, my Sallie, has become a were—” his voice balked at the final syllable, but de Grandin’s nod confirmed his guess.

“Hélas, you have said it, my poor friend,” he murmured pitifully.

“But how?—when?—I thought surely we’d driven him off—” the young man faltered, then stopped, horror choking the words back in his throat.

“Unfortunately, no,” de Grandin told him. “He was driven off, certainly, but not diverted from his purpose. Attend me.”

From his trousers pocket he produced the vial of perfume, uncorked it and let its scent escape into the room. “You recognize it, hein?” he asked.

“No, I can’t say I do,” Maxwell answered.

“Do you, Friend Trowbridge?”

I shook my head.

“Very well. I do, to my sorrow.”

He turned once more to me. “The night Monsieur and Madame Maxwell sailed upon the Île de France, you may recall I was explaining how the innocent became werewolves at times?” he reminded.

“Yes, and I interrupted to ask about the different shapes that thing assumed,” I nodded.

“You interrupted then,” he agreed soberly, “but you will not interrupt now. Oh, no. You will listen while I talk. I had told you of the haunted dells where travelers may unknowingly become werewolves, of the streams from which the drinker may receive contagion, but you did not wait to hear of les fleurs des loups, did you?”

“Fleurs des loups—wolf-flowers?” I asked.

“Précisément, wolf-flowers. Upon those cursed mountains grows a kind of flower which, plucked and worn at the full of the moon, transforms the wearer into a loup-garou. Yes. One of these flowers, known popularly as the fleur de sang, or blood-flower, because of its red petals, resembles the marguerite, or daisy, in form; the other is a golden yellow, and is much like the snapdragon. But both have the same fell property, both have the same strong, sweet, fascinating scent.

“This, my friends,” he passed the opened flagon underneath our noses, “is a perfume made from the sap of those accursed flowers. It is the highly concentrated venom of their devilishness. One applying it to her person, anointing lips, ears, hair and hands with it, as women wont, would as surely be translated into wolfish form as though she wore the cursed flower whence the perfume comes. Yes.

“That silver collie of which the young girl spoke, Monsieur”—he turned a fixed, but pitying look upon John Maxwell—“she was your wife, transformed into a wolf-thing by the power of this perfume.

“Consider: Can you not see it all? Balked, but not defeated, the vile vrykolakas is left to perfect his revenge while you are on your honeymoon. He knows that you will come again to Harrisonville; he need not follow you. Accordingly, he sends to Europe for the essence of these flowers, prepares a philtre from it, and sends it to Madame Sarah today. Its scent is novel, rather pleasing; women like strange, exotic scents. She uses it. Anon, she feels a queerness. She does not realize that it is the metamorphosis which comes upon her, she only knows that she feels vaguely strange. She goes to her room. Perhaps she puts the perfume on her brow again, as women do when they feel faint; then, pardieu, then there comes the change all quickly, for the moon is full tonight, and the essence of the flowers very potent.

“She doffed her clothes, you think? Mais non, they fell from her! A woman’s raiment does not fit a wolf; it falls off from her altered form, and we find it on the couch and on the floor.

“That other girl comes to the room, and finds poor Madame Sarah, transformed to a wolf, gazing sadly from the window—la pauvre, she knew too well who waited outside in the moonlight for her, and she must go to him! Her friend puts out a hand to pet her, but she shrinks away. She feels she is ‘unclean’, a thing apart, one of ‘that multitudinous herd not yet made fast in hell’—les loups-garous! And so she flies through the open door of her room, flies where? Only le bon Dieu—and the Devil, who is master of all werewolves—knows!”

“But we must find her!” Maxwell wailed. “We’ve got to find her!”

“Where are we to look?” de Grandin spread his hands and raised his shoulders. “The city is wide, and we have no idea where this wolf-man makes his lair. The werewolf travels fast, my friend; they may be miles away by now.”

“I don’t care a damn what you say, I’m going out to look for her!” Maxwell declared as he rose from his seat and strode to the library table, from the drawer of which he took a heavy pistol. “You shot him once and wounded him, so I know he’s vulnerable to bullets, and when I find him—”

“But certainly,” the Frenchman interrupted. “We heartily agree with you, my friend. But let us first go to Doctor Trowbridge’s house where we, too, may secure weapons. Then we shall be delighted to accompany you upon your hunt.”

As we started for my place he whispered in my ear: “Prepare the knock-out drops as soon as we are there, Friend Trowbridge. It would be suicide for him to seek that monster now. He can not hit a barn-side with a pistol, can not even draw it quickly from his pocket. His chances are not one in a million if he meets the wolf, and if we let him go we shall be playing right into the adversary’s hands.”

I nodded agreement as we drove along, and when I’d parked the car, I turned to Maxwell. “Better come in and have a drink before we start,” I invited. “It’s cold tonight, and we may not get back soon.”

“All right,” agreed the unsuspecting youth. “But make it quick, I’m itching to catch sight of that damned fiend. When I meet him he won’t get off as easily as he did in his brush with Doctor de Grandin.”

HASTILY I CONCOCTED A punch of Jamaica rum, hot water, lemon juice and sugar, adding fifteen grains of chloral hydrate to John Maxwell’s, and hoping the sugar and lemon would disguise its taste while the pungent rum would hide its odor. “To our successful quest,” de Grandin proposed, raising his steaming glass and looking questioningly at me for assurance that the young man’s drink was drugged.

Maxwell raised his goblet, but ere he set it to his lips there came a sudden interruption. An oddly whining, whimpering noise it was, accompanied by a scratching at the door, as though a dog were outside in the night and importuning for admission.

“Ah?” de Grandin put his glass down on the hall table and reached beneath his left armpit where the small but deadly Belgian automatic pistol nestled in its shoulder-holster. “Ah-ha? We have a visitor, it seems.” To me he bade:

“Open the door, wide and quickly, Friend Trowbridge; then stand away, for I shall likely shoot with haste, and it is not your estimable self that I desire to kill.”

I followed his instructions, but instead of the gray horror I had expected at the door, I saw a slender canine form with hair so silver-gray that it was almost white, which bent its head and wagged its tail, and fairly fawned upon us as it slipped quickly through the opening then looked at each of us in turn with great, expressive topaz eyes.

“Ah, mon Dieu,” exclaimed the Frenchman, sheathing his weapon and starting forward, “it is Madame Sarah!”

“Sallie?” cried John Maxwell incredulously, and at his voice the beast leaped toward him, rubbed against his knees, then rose upon its hind feet and strove to lick his face.

“Ohé, quel dommage!” de Grandin looked at them with tear-filled eyes; then:

“Your pardon, Madame Sarah, but I do not think you came to us without a reason. Can you lead us to the place where he abides? If so we promise you shall be avenged within the hour.”

The silver wolf dropped to all fours again, and nodded its sleek head in answer to his question; then, as he hesitated, came slowly up to him, took the cuff of his evening coat gently in its teeth and drew him toward the door.

“Bravo, ma chère, lead on, we follow!” he exclaimed; then, as we donned our coats, he thrust a pistol in my hand and cautioned: “Watch well, my friend, she seems all amiable, but wolves are treacherous, man-wolves a thousand times more so; it may be he has sent her to lead us to a trap. Should anything untoward transpire, shoot first and ask your foolish questions afterward. That way you shall increase your chances of dying peacefully in bed.”

THE WHITE BEAST TROTTING before us, we hastened down the quiet, moonlit street. After forty minutes’ rapid walk, we stopped before a small apartment house. As we paused to gaze, the little wolf once more seized Jules de Grandin’s sleeve between her teeth and drew him forward.

It was a little house, only three floors high, and its front was zigzagged with iron fire escapes. No lights burned in any of the flats, and the whole place had in air of vacancy, but our lupine guide led us through the entrance way and down the ground floor hall until we paused before the door of a rear apartment.

De Grandin tried the knob cautiously, found the lock made fast, and after a moment dropped to his knees, drew out a ringful of fine steel instruments and began picking the fastening as methodically as though he were a professional burglar. The lock was “burglar-proof” but its makers had not reckoned with the skill of Jules de Grandin. Before five minutes had elapsed he rose with a pleased exclamation, turned the knob and thrust the door back.

“Hold her, Friend Jean,” he bade John Maxwell, for the wolf was trembling with a nervous quiver, and straining to rush into the apartment. To me he added: “Have your gun ready, good Friend Trowbridge, and keep by me. He shall not take us unawares.”

Shoulder to shoulder we entered the dark doorway of the flat, John Maxwell and the wolf behind us. For a moment we paused while de Grandin felt along the wall, then click; the snapping of a wall-switch sounded, and the dark room blazed with sudden light.

The wolf-man’s human hours were passed in pleasant circumstances. Every item of the room proclaimed it the abode of one whose wealth and tastes were well matched. The walls were hung with light gray paper, the floor was covered with a Persian rug and wide, low chairs upholstered in long-napped mohair invited the visitor to rest. Beneath the arch of a marble mantelpiece a wood fire had been laid, ready for the match, while upon the shelf a tiny French-gilt clock beat off the minutes with sharp, musical clicks. Pictures in profusion lined the walls, a landscape by an apt pupil of Corot, an excellent imitation of Botticelli, and, above the mantel, a single life-sized portrait done in oils.

Every item of the portrait was portrayed with photographic fidelity, and we looked with interest at the subject, a man in early middle life, or late youth, dressed in the uniform of a captain of Greek cavalry. His cloak was thrown back from his braided shoulders, displaying several military decorations, but it was the face which captured the attention instantly, making all the added detail of no consequence. The hair was light, worn rather long, and brushed straight back from a high, wide forehead. The eyes were blue, and touched with an expression of gentle melancholy. The features were markedly Oriental in cast, but neither coarse nor sensual. In vivid contrast to the hair and eyes was the pointed beard upon the chin; for it was black as coal, yet by some quaint combination of the artist’s pigments it seemed to hide blue lights within its sable depths. Looking from the blue-black beard to the sad blue eyes it seemed to me I saw a hint, the merest faint suggestion, of wolfish cruelty in the face.

“It is undoubtlessly he,” de Grandin murmured as he gazed upon the portrait. “He fits poor Madame Sarah’s description to a nicety. But where is he in person? We can not fight his picture; no, of course not.”

Motioning us to wait, he snapped the light off and drew a pocket flashlight from his waistcoat. He tiptoed through the door, exploring the farther room by the beam of his searchlight, then rejoined us with a gesture of negation.

“He is not here,” he announced softly; “but come with me, my friends, I would show you something.”

He led the way to the adjoining chamber, which, in any other dwelling, would have been the bedroom. It was bare, utterly unfurnished, and as he flashed his light around the walls we saw, some three or four feet from the floor, a row of paw-prints, as though a beast had stood upon its hind legs and pressed its forefeet to the walls. And the prints were marked in reddish smears—blood.

“You see?” he asked, as though the answer to his question were apparent. “He has no bed; he needs none, for at night he is a wolf, and sleeps denned down upon the floor. Also, you observe, he has not lacked for provender—le bon Dieu grant it was the blood of animals that stained his claws!”

“But where is he?” asked Maxwell, fingering his pistol.

“S-s-sh!” warned the Frenchman. “I do not think that he is far away. The window, you observe her?”

“Well?”

“Précisément. She is a scant four feet from the ground, and overlooks the alley. Also, though she was once fitted with bars, they have been removed. Also, again, the sash is ready-raised. Is it not all perfect?”

“Perfect? For what?”

“For him, parbleu! For the werewolf’s entrances and exits. He comes running down the alley, leaps agilely through the open window, and voilà, he is here. Or leaps out into the alleyway with a single bound, and goes upon his nightly hunts. He may return at any moment; it is well that we await him here.”

The waiting minutes stretched interminably. The dark room where we crouched was lighted from time to time, then cast again into shadow, as the racing clouds obscured or unveiled the full moon’s visage. At length, when I felt I could no longer stand the strain, a low, harsh growl from our four-footed companion brought us sharply to attention. In another moment we heard the soft patter-patter, scratch-scratch of a long-clawed beast running lightly on the pavement of the alleyway outside, and in a second more a dark form bulked against the window’s opening and something landed upon the floor.

For a moment there was breathless silence; then: “Bon soir, Monsieur Loup-garou,” de Grandin greeted in a pleasant voice. “You have unexpected visitors.

“Do not move,” he added threateningly as a hardly audible growl sounded from the farther corner of the room and we heard the scraping of long nails upon the floor as the wolf-thing gathered for a spring; “there are three of us, and each one is armed. Your reign of terror draws to a close, Monsieur.”

A narrow, dazzling shaft of light shot from his pocket torch, clove through the gloom and picked the crouching wolf-thing’s form out of the darkness. Fangs bared, black lips drawn back in bestial fury, the gaunt, gray thing was backed into the corner, and from its open jaws we saw a thin trickle of slabber mixed with blood. It had been feeding, so much was obvious. “But what had been its food?” I wondered with a shudder.

“It is your shot, Friend Jean,” the little Frenchman spoke. “Take careful aim and do not jerk the pistol when you fire.” He held his flashlight steadily upon the beast, and a second later came the roar of Maxwell’s pistol.

The acrid smoke stung in our nostrils, the reverberation of the detonation almost deafened us, and—a little fleck of plaster fell down from the wall where Maxwell’s bullet was harmlessly embedded.

“Ten thousand stinking camels!” Jules de Grandin cried, but got no further, for with a maddened, murderous growl the wolf-man sprang, his lithe body describing a graceful arc as it hurtled through the air, his cruel, white fangs flashing terribly as he leaped upon John Maxwell and bore him to the floor before he could fire a second shot.

“Nom de Dieu de nom de Dieu de nom de Dieu!” de Grandin swore, playing his flashlight upon the struggling man and brute and leaping forward, seeking for a chance to use his pistol.

But to shoot the wolf would have meant that he must shoot the man, as well; for the furry body lay upon the struggling Maxwell, and as they thrashed and wrestled on the floor it was impossible to tell, at times, in the uncertain light, which one was man and which was beast.

Then came a deep, low growl of pent-up, savage fury, almost an articulate curse, it seemed to me, and like a streak of silver-plated vengeance the little she-wolf leaped upon the gray-brown brute which growled and worried at the young man’s throat.

We saw the white teeth bared, we saw them flesh themselves in the wolf-thing’s shoulder, we saw her loose her hold, and leap back, avoiding the great wolf’s counter-stroke, then close with it again, sinking needle-fangs in the furry ruff about its throat.

The great wolf shook her to and fro, battered her against the walls and floor as a vicious terrier mistreats a luckless rat, but she held on savagely, though we saw her left forepaw go limp and knew the bone was broken.

De Grandin watched his chance, crept closer, closer, till he almost straddled the contending beasts; then, darting forth his hand he put his pistol to the tawny-gray wolf’s ear, squeezed the trigger and leaped back.

A wild, despairing wail went up, the great, gray form seemed suddenly to stiffen, to grow longer, heavier, to shed its fur and thicken in limbs and body-structure. In a moment, as we watched the horrid transformation, we beheld a human form stretched out upon the floor; the body of a handsome man with fair hair and black beard, at the throat of which a slender silver-gray she-wolf was worrying.

“It is over, finished, little brave one,” de Grandin announced, reaching out a hand to stroke the little wolf’s pale fur. “Right nobly have you borne yourself this night; but we have much to do before our work is finished.”

The she-wolf backed away, but the hair upon her shoulders was still bristling, and her topaz eyes were jewel-bright with the light of combat. Once or twice, despite de Grandin’s hand upon her neck, she gave vent to throaty growls and started toward the still form which lay upon the floor in a pool of moonlight, another pool fast gathering beneath its head where de Grandin’s bullet had crashed through its skull and brain.

John Maxwell moved and moaned a tortured moan, and instantly the little wolf was by his side, licking his cheeks with her pink tongue, emitting little pleading whines, almost like the whimpers of a child in pain.

When Maxwell regained consciousness it was pathetic to see the joy the wolf showed as he sat up and feebly put a groping hand against his throat.

“Not dead, my friend, you are not nearly dead, thanks to the bravery of your noble lady,” de Grandin told him with a laugh. Then, to me:

“Do you go home with them, Friend Trowbridge. I must remain to dispose of this”—he prodded the inert form with his foot—“and will be with you shortly.

“Be of good cheer, ma pauvre,” he told the she-wolf, “you shall be soon released from the spell which binds you; I swear it; though never need you be ashamed of what you did this night, whatever form you might have had while doing it.”

JOHN MAXWELL SAT UPON the divan, head in hands, the wolf crouched at his feet, her broken paw dangling pitifully, her topaz eyes intent upon his face. I paced restlessly before the fire. De Grandin had declared he knew how to release her from the spell—but what if he should fail? I shuddered at the thought. What booted it that we had killed the man-wolf if Sarah must be bound in wolfish form henceforth?

“Tiens my friends,” de Grandin announced himself at the library door, “he took a lot of disposing of, that one. First I had to clean the blood from off his bedroom floor, then I must lug his filthy carcass out into the alley and dispose of it as though it had been flung there from a racing motor. Tomorrow I doubt not the papers will make much of the mysterious murder. ‘A gangster put upon the spot by other gangsters,’ they will say. And shall we point out their mistake? I damn think no.”

He paused with a self-satisfied chuckle; then: “Friend Jean, will you be good enough to go and fetch a negligee for Madame Sarah?” he asked. “Hurry, mon vieux, she will have need of it anon.”

As the young man left us: “Quick, my friends,” he ordered. “You, Madame Sarah, lie upon the floor before the fire, thus. Bien.

“Friend Trowbridge, prepare bandages and splints for her poor arm. We can not set it now, but later we must do so. Certainly.

“Now, my little brave one,” he addressed the wolf again, “this will hurt you sorely, but only for a moment.”

Drawing a small flask from his pocket he pulled the cork and poured its contents over her.

“It’s holy water,” he explained as she whined and shivered as the liquid soaked into her fur. “I had to stop to steal it from a church.”

A knife gleamed in the firelight, and he drove the gleaming blade into her head, drew it forth and shook it toward the fire, so that a drop of blood fell hissing in the leaping flames. Twice more he cut her with the knife, and twice more dropped her blood into the fire; then, holding the knife lightly by the handle, he struck her with the flat of the blade between the ears three times in quick succession, crying as he did so: “Sarah Maxwell, I command that you once more assume your native form in the name of the Most Holy Trinity!”

A shudder passed through the wolf’s frame. From nose to tail-tip she trembled, as though she lay in her death agony; then suddenly her outlines seemed to blur. Pale fur gave way to paler flesh, her dainty lupine paws became dainty human hands and feet, her body was no more that of a wolf, but of a soft, sweet woman.

But life seemed to have gone from her. She lay flaccid on the hearth rug, her mouth a little open, eyes closed, no movement of her breast perceptible. I looked at her with growing consternation, but:

“Quickly, my friends, the splints, the bandages!” de Grandin ordered.

I set the broken arm as quickly as I could, and as I finished young John Maxwell rushed into the room.

“Sallie, beloved!” he fell beside his wife’s unconscious form, tears streaming down his face.

“Is she—is she—” he began, but could not force himself to finish, as he looked imploringly at Jules de Grandin.

“Dead?” the little man supplied. “By no means; not at all, my friend. She is alive and healthy. A broken arm mends quickly, and she has youth and stamina. Put on her robe and bear her up to bed. She will do excellently when she has had some sleep.

“But first observe this, if you please,” he added, pointing to her side. Where the cicatrix with its tuft of wolf-hair had marred her skin, there was now only smooth, unspotted flesh. “The curse is wholly lifted,” he declared delightedly. “You need no more regard it, except as an unpleasant memory.”

“John, dear,” we heard the young wife murmur as her husband bore her from the room, “I’ve had such a terrible dream. I dreamed that I’d been turned into a wolf, and—”

“Come quickly, good Friend Trowbridge,” de Grandin plucked me by the arm. “I, too, would dream.”

“Dream? Of what?” I asked him.

“Perchance of youth and love and springtime, and the joys that might have been,” he answered, something like a tremble in his voice. “And then, again, perchance of snakes and toads and elephants, all of most unauthentic color—such things as one may see when he has drunk himself into the blissful state of delirium tremens. I do not surely know that I can drink that much, but may the Devil bake me if I do not try!”