“But good heavens, man, if this keeps up there won’t be one of us to tell the tale!” cried Pemberton as we completed ministering to Appleby’s remains. “Twice they almost got me with their knives; they almost murdered Doctor Trowbridge; they’ve done for Annie and poor Appleby—”
“Exactement,” de Grandin nodded. “But this will not keep up. Tonight, this very evening, we shall call their promontory—non, I mean their bluff. The coincidences of your kinsmen’s deaths by fire, those might have been attributed to Hindoo curses; myself, I think they are; but these deliberate murders and attempts at murder are purely human doings. Your cousin, Monsieur Ritter—”
“Not an earthly!” Pemberton smiled grimly. “Did you ever see a British Indian jail? Not quite as easy to walk out of ’em as it is from an American prison—”
“Notwithstanding which, Monsieur”—the little Frenchman smiled sarcastically—“this Monsieur Ritter is at large, and probably within a gun-shot of us now. When I was in the village this forenoon I cabled the police at Bombay. The answer came within three hours:
John Ritter, serving a life term, escaped four months ago. His whereabouts unknown.
“You see? His jail-break almost coincided with the passing of your kinsman in America. He knew about the family curse, undoubtlessly, and determined to make profit by it. But he was practical, that one. Mais oui. He did not intend to wait the working of a curse which might be real or only fanciful. Not he, by blue! He bought the service of a crew of Burman cutthroats, and they came with all their bag of villain’s tricks—their knives, their subtle poisons, even a hyena! That it was your servants and not you who met their deaths is not attributable to any kindness on his part, but merely to good fortune. Your turns will come, unless—”
“Unless we hook it while we have the chance!”
“Unless you do exactly as I say,” de Grandin finished without notice of the interruption. “In five minutes it will be ten o’clock. I suggest we seek our rooms, but not to sleep. You, Monsieur, and you, Madame, will see that both your doors and windows are securely fastened. Meantime, Doctor Trowbridge and I will repair to our chamber and—eh bien, I think we shall see things!”
DESPITE DE GRANDIN’S ADMONITION, I fell fast asleep. How long I’d slept I do not know, nor do I recall what wakened me. There was no perceptible sound, but suddenly I was sitting bolt-upright, staring fascinated at our window’s shadowed oblong. “Lucky thing we put those locks on,” I reassured myself; “almost anything might—”
The words died on my tongue, and a prickling sensation traced my spine. What it was I did not know, but every sense seemed warning me of dreadful danger.
“De Grandin!” I whispered hoarsely. “De Grandin—”
I reached across the bed to waken him. My hand encountered nothing but the blanket. I was in that tomb-black room with nothing but my fears for company.
Slowly, scarcely faster than the hand that marks the minutes on the clock, the window-sash swung back. The heavy lock we’d stapled on was gone or broken. I heard the creak of rusty hinges, caught the faint rasp of a bar against the outer sill, and my breath went hot and sulfurous in my throat as a shadow scarcely darker than the outside night obscured the casement.
It was like some giant dog—a mastiff or great Dane—but taller, heavier, with a mane of unkempt hair about its neck. Pointed ears cocked forward, great eyes gleaming palely phosphorescent, it pressed against the slowly yielding window-frame. And now I caught the silhouette of its hog-snouted head against the window, saw its parted, sneering lips, smelled the retching stench that emanated from it, and went sick with horror. The thing was a hyena, a grave-robber, offal-eater, most loathsome of all animals.
Slowly, inch by cautious inch, it crept into the room, fangs bared in a snarl that held the horrible suggestion of a sneer. “Help, de Grandin—help!” I shrieked, leaping from the bed and dragging tangled blankets with me as a shield.
The hyena sprang. With a cry that was half growl, half obscene parody of a human chuckle, it launched itself through the intervening gloom, and next instant I was smothered underneath its weight as it worried savagely at the protecting blanket.
“Sa-ha, Monsieur l’Hyène, you seek a meal? Take this!” Close above me Jules de Grandin swung a heavy kukri knife as though it were a headsman’s ax, striking through the wiry mane, driving deep into the brute’s thick neck, almost decapitating it.
“Get up, my friend; arise,” he ordered as he hauled me from beneath the bedclothes, already soaking with the foul beast’s blood. “Me, I have squatted none too patiently behind the bed, waiting for the advent of that one. Morbleu, I thought that he would never come!”
“How’d you know about it—” I began, but he cut me short with a soft chuckle.
“The laughter in the bush that night, the small dog’s ravished grave, finally the tracks you found today. They made the case complete. I made elaborate show of opening our window, and they must have found the others fastened; so they determined to send their pet before them to prepare the way. He was savage, that one, but so am I, by blue! Come, let us tell our host and hostess of our visitor.”
THE NEXT DAY WAS a busy one. Sheriff’s deputies and coroner’s assistants came in almost ceaseless streams, questioning endlessly, making notes of everything, surveying the thicket where Appleby was killed and the kitchen where old Annie met her fate. At last the dreary routine ended, the mortician took away the bodies, and the Pembertons faced us solemn-eyed across the dinner table.
“I’m for chucking the whole rotten business,” our host declared. “They’ve got two of us—”
“And we have one of them,” supplied de Grandin. “Anon we shall have—”
“We’re cutting out of here tomorrow,” broke in Pemberton. “I’ll go to selling cotton in the city, managing estates or clerking in a shop before I’ll subject Avis to this peril one more day.”
“C’est l’enfantillage!” declared de Grandin. “When success is almost in your hand you would retreat? Fi donc, Monsieur!”
“Fi donc or otherwise, we’re going in the morning,” Pemberton replied determinedly.
“Very well, let it be as you desire. Meantime, have you still the urge to dance, Madame?”
Avis Pemberton glanced up from her teacup with something like a guilty look. “More than ever,” she returned so low that we could scarcely catch her words.
“Très bien. Since this will be our last night in the house, permit that we enjoy your artistry.”
Her preparations were made quickly. We cleared a space in the big drawing-room, rolling back the rugs to bare the polished umber tiles of which the floor was made. Upon a chair she set a small hand-gramophone, needle ready poised, then hurried to her room to don her costume.
“Écoutez, s’il vous plaît,” de Grandin begged, tiptoeing from the drawing-room, returning in a moment with the water-filled beer bottle which he had brought from the village, the kukri knife with which he killed the hyena, and a pair of automatic pistols. One of these he pressed on me, the other on our host. “Have watchfulness, my friends,” he bade in a low whisper. “When the music for the dance commences it is likely to attract an uninvited audience. Should anyone appear at either window, I beg you to shoot first and make inquiries afterward.”
“Hadn’t we better close the blinds?” I asked. “Because if we’re likely to be watched—”
“Mais non,” he negatived. “See, there is no light here save that the central lamp casts down, and that will shine directly on Madame. We shall be in shadow, but anyone who seeks to peer in through the window will be visible against the moonlight. You comprehend?”
“I’d like to have a final go at ’em,” our host replied. “Even if I got only one, it’d help to even things for Appleby and Annie.”
“I quite agree,” de Grandin nodded. “Now—s-s-sh; silence. Madame comes!”
The chiming clink of ankle bells announced her advent, and as she crossed the threshold with a slow, sensuous wa
lk, hips rolling, feet flat to floor, one set directly before the other, I leant forward in amazement. Never had I thought that change of costume could so change a personality. Yet there it was. In tweeds and Shetlands Avis Pemberton was British as a sunrise over Surrey, or a Christmas pageant Columbine; this sleekly black-haired figure rippling past us with the grace of softly flowing water was a daughter of the gods, a temple deva-dasi, the mystery and allure and unfathomable riddle of the East incarnate. Her bodice was of saffron silk, sheer as net. Cut with short shoulder-sleeves and rounded neck it terminated just below her small, firm breasts and was edged with imitation emeralds and small opals which kindled into witch-fires in the lamplight’s glow. From breast to waist her slim, firm form was bare, slender as an adolescent boy’s, yet full enough to keep her ribs from showing in white lines against the creamy skin. A smalt-blue cincture had been tightly bound about her slender waist, emphasizing gently swelling hips and supporting a full, many-pleated skirt of cinnabar-red silken gauze. Across her smoothly parted blue-black hair was thrown a sari of deep blue with silver edging, falling down across one shoulder and caught coquettishly within the curve of a bent elbow. Silver bracelets hung with little hawk-bells bound her wrists; heavy bands of hammered silver with a fringe of silver tassels that flowed rippling to the floor and almost hid her feet were ringed about each ankle. Between her startlingly black brows there burned the bright vermilion of a caste mark.
Pemberton pressed the lever of the gramophone and a flood of liquid music flowed into the room. Deep, plaintive chords came from the guitar, the viols wept and crooned by turns, and the drums beat out an amatory rhythm. She paused a moment in the swing-lamp’s golden disk of light, feet close together, knees straight, arms raised above her head, wrists interlaced, the right hand facing left, the left turned to the right, and each pressed to the other, palm to palm and finger against finger. The music quickened and she moved her feet in a swift, shuffling step, setting ankle bells a-chime, swaying like a palm tree in the rising breeze. She took the folds of her full skirt between joined thumbs and forefingers, daintily, as one might take a pinch of snuff, spread the gleaming, many-pleated tissue out fanwise, and advanced with a slow, gliding step. Her head bent sidewise, now toward this sleek shoulder, now toward that; then slowly it sank back, her long eyes almost closed, like those of one who falls into a swoon of unsupportable delight; her red lips parted, fell apart as though they had gone flaccid with satiety after ecstasy. Then she dropped forward in a deep salaam, head bent submissively, both hands upraised with thumbs and forefingers together.
I was about to beat my hands together in applause when de Grandin’s grip upon my elbow halted me. “Les flammes, mon ami, regardez-vous—les flammes!” he whispered.
Across the vitric umber tiles that made the floor, a line of flame was rising, flickering and dancing, wavering, flaunting, advancing steadily, and I could smell the spicy-sweet aroma of burnt sandalwood. “It is the flame from that old, cheated funeral pyre,” he breathed. “The vengeance-flame that burned the old one to a crisp while he lay in a fireproof room; the flame that set this house afire eight times; the flame of evil genius that pursues this family. See how easily I conquer it!”
With an agile leap he crossed the room, raised the bottle he had brought and spilled a splash of water on the crackling, leaping fire-tongues. It was as if a picture drawn in chalks were wiped away, or an image on a motion picture screen obliterated as the light behind the film dies; for everywhere the drops of water fell, the flames died into blackness with a sullen, scolding hiss. Back and forth across the line of fire he hurried, throwing water on the fluttering, dazzling flares till all were dead and cold.
“The window, mes amis, look to the window! Shoot if you see faces!” he ordered as he fought the dying fire.
Both Pemberton and I looked up as he called out, and I felt a sudden tightening in my throat as my eyes came level with the window. Framed in the panes were three faces, two malignant, brown and scowling, one a sun-burned white, but no less savage. The dark men I remembered instantly. It was they who stood beside the train the day the knife was thrown to kill the man who shared the seat with me. But the frowning, cursing white man was a stranger.
Even as I looked I saw one of the brown men draw his hand back and caught the glimmer of a poised knife blade. I raised my pistol and squeezed hard upon the trigger, but the mechanism jammed, and I realized the knifeman had me at his mercy.
But Pemberton’s small weapon answered to his pressure, and the stream of bullets crashed against the glass, sent it shattering in fragments, and bored straight through the scowling countenances, making little sharp-edged pits in them like those a stream of sprinkled water makes when turned upon damp clay, except that where these little pockmarks showed there spread a smear of crimson.
There was something almost comic in the look of pained surprise the faces showed as the storm of bullets swept across them. Almost, it seemed to me, they voiced a protest at an unexpected trick; as though they’d come to witness an amusing spectacle, only to discover that the joke was turned on them, and they had no relish for the rôle of victim.
“YES, IT’S RITTER, ALL right,” Pemberton pronounced as we turned the bodies over in the light of an electric torch. “Of course, he was a filthy rotter and all that, but—hang it all, it’s tough to know you have a kinsman’s blood upon your hands, even if—”
“Parbleu; tu parles, mon ami!—you’ve said it!” cried de Grandin in delight. “The ancient curse has been fulfilled, the wicked one’s condition met. A kinsman has shed kinsman’s blood upon the property inherited!”
“Why—”
“‘Why’ be doubled-damned stewed in Satan’s sauce-pan; I tell you it is so!” He swung his arm in an all-comprehensive gesture. “We have at once disposed of everything, my friend. The human villains who would murder you and Madame Pemberton, the working of the ancient curse pronounced so many years ago—all are eliminated!”
He leant above the body of a prostrate Indian, searching through his jacket with careful fingers. “Ah-ha, behold him!” he commanded. “Here is the thing that killed your so unfortunate retainer.” He held a length of bamboo stick fitted at the end with something like a tuning-fork to which a rubber bulb was fixed. “Careful!” he warned as I reached out to touch it. “The merest prick of those sharp points is certain death.”
Pressing the queer instrument against the wall, he pointed to twin spots of viscid, yellow liquid sticking to the stones. “Cobric acid—concentrated essence of the cobra’s venom,” he explained. “One drives these points into his victim’s body—the sharp steel penetrates through clothing where a snake’s fangs might not pierce—and pouf! enough snake-poison goes into the poor one’s veins to cause death in three minutes. Tiens, it is a clever little piece of devilment n’est-ce-pas.”
“D’ye think we got em all?” asked Pemberton.
“Indubitably. Had there been more, they would have been here. Consider: First they set their foul beast on us, believing he will kill some one of us, at least. He does not return, and they are puzzled. Could it be that we disposed of him? They do not know, but they are worried. Anon they hear the strains of Indian music in the house. This are not the way things had been planned by them. There should be no celebration here. They wonder more, and come to see what happens. They observe Madame concluding her so lovely dance; they also see us all unharmed, and are about to use their knives when you forestall them with your pistol.”
“But there were two Burmese at the railway station the other day, yet someone threw the knife intended to kill Doctor Trowbridge,” objected Pemberton. “That would indicate a third one in reserve—”
De Grandin touched the white man’s sprawling body with the tip of his small shoe. “There was, my friend, and this is he,” he answered shortly. “Your charming cousin, Monsieur Ritter. It was he who hid beside the tracks and hurled the knife when he beheld the mark of Kali. The Burmans knew friend Trowbridge; had it been one of th
em who lay in ambush he would not have wasted knife or energy in killing the wrong man, but Ritter had no other guide than the skull chalked on the car. Tenez, he threw the knife that killed the poor young man to death.”
“How do you account for the fire that broke out just as Mrs. Pemberton had finished dancing?” I asked.
“There is no scientific explanation for it, at least no explanation known to modern chemistry or physics. We must seek deeper—farther—for its reason. Those Hindoo gurus, they know things. They can cast a rope into the air and make it stand so rigidly that one may climb it. They take a little, tiny seed and place it in the earth, and there, before your doubting eyes, it grows and puts forth leaves and flowers. Me, I have seen them take a piece of ordinary wood—my walking-stick, parbleu!—make passes over it, and make it burst in flames. Now, if their ordinary showmen can do things like that, how much more able are their true adepts to bring forth fire at will, or on the happening of specific things? The rescue of the Hindoo girl Sarastai left the funeral pyre without a victim, and so the old priests placed a curse on her and hers, decreeing fire should take its toll of all her husband’s family till kinsman had shed kinsman’s blood. That was the fire that followed every generation of the Pembertons. This fire burned this house again, and yet again, burned one when he lay in safety in a fireproof room—even set a motorcar afire to kill the late proprietor of the estate.
“Tonight conditions were ideal. The sacred music of the temple sounded from the gramophone, Madame Avis danced in Hindoo costume; danced an old, old dance, perhaps the very dance Sarastai used to dance. Our thoughts were tuned to India—indeed, there is no doubt the urge which prompted Madame Pemberton to dance a Hindoo dance in Hindoo costume came directly from the thought-waves set in motion by those old priests in the days of long ago. The very stones of this old house are saturated in malignant thought-waves—thoughts of vengeance—and Madame Avis was caught up in them and forced along the pathway toward destruction. All was prepared, conditions were ideal, the victims waited ready for the flames. Only one thing that old priest forgot to foresee.
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