The Thrill Book Sampler
Page 8
“The same telephone message came to me,” replied Griffiths. “The voice was jerky, but it sounded something like Doctor Yeager’s. There’s a light up in his room, I see. I didn’t know any one was living in this house since he and his man—that East Indian guy— vanished on the same night.”
“There hasn’t been any one here till now,” broke in Maginnis. “Faith it ain’t no longer agone than lasht night thot I tuk th’ throuble to walk all ‘round th’ primises, thrying th’ dures an’ sich loike, for me own satisfaction. Not thot I wanted to be doin’ it nayther, f’r I’m not seekin’ th’ society av no man phwat passes off in th’ quare way this same Yeager––”
The pushing open of the house door by Craig cut off Maginnis’ long-winded exposition, and a minute later all four—Craig, Griffiths, Murray Plange, and Maginnis—were in the library. All except Plange had been in this same room three months before, and they noticed that the table and swivel chair looked just as they had then. The manuscript, with its half-written word at the end, was gone, but the shaded lamp, alight, was there, and in a general way there was nothing to indicate that thirteen weeks had elapsed since they had passed through to find the grisly remains of mortality stretched upon the bed in that other room.
“There’s the telephone,” remarked Captain Craig fatuously as he pointed to the instrument on the table. “But who used it? I could have sworn it was Yeager. Well,” he continued, in what he meant to be a careless tone, “I guess we’d better take a look into this other room. Want to open the door, doc? You’ll have to pull the portiere aside first.”
Doctor Paul Griffiths knew the reputation of Captain Craig for bravery, so he only smiled as he walked over to the doorway and reached for one of the heavy portieres. But he did not get a chance to move it, after all. Lunga Sen, who, unnoticed, had followed them up to this room, stepped in front of the young man, snatched the portiere out of the way, and flung the door beyond wide open.
Doctor Griffiths was the first to enter the bedroom, however. He swept past the tall Hindu, and after one glance at the bed uttered an ejaculation of horrified amazement and fell back for the others all to see.
Stretched out on the bed, in a suit of bright-blue pajamas that might have been the identical garments worn by the skeleton three months ago, and with a mandarin’s cap of blue perched on one side of his head, was Doctor Theophilus Yeager, stone dead, with a long-bladed, jewel-hilted dagger of Oriental design plugged into his left breast. Griffiths seized the handle of the weapon, and with some difficulty—for the blade had gone completely through the dead man’s heart and the point was imbedded in one of the ribs—drew it out. He hardly noticed that Lunga Sen had taken the dagger from him, for he was bending over the body to determine, if possible, how long Yeager had been dead.
“Not more than ten minutes, I should say,” was his verdict when he had assured himself that no life remained, and after he had felt the back of the neck. “It’s still warm. He must have died instantly. The dagger did not go through the pajamas, and——”
“Ah!” cried Captain Craig, stepping forward. “That looks as if he were killed before they were put on him.”
“I should say that was the way of it,” replied Doctor Griffiths coolly, as he fumbled inside the garment. “The coat was pulled open a little and the dagger forced in between the two sides in such a narrow opening that it would have been practically impossible for a hard blow, such as this was, to have been delivered while it was on. If it had been,
the murderer could hardly have avoided making some kind of mark on the silk.”
“You’re sure it is Theophilus Yeager, doc?” asked Craig. “No mistake about the identity, is there?”
“I don’t think so,” replied Griffiths. “But you knew him in life. Look and tell me what you think.”
“It’s Doctor Yeager all right,” replied Craig, staring at the set, unruffled dead face. “He doesn’t look like a man that died a violent death, either. But that’s nothing. He probably got it so quick that he didn’t have time to know he was attacked.”
“Niver knowed he was hurted, I’d say,” added Terry Maginnis. “As for it’s bein’ Doctor Yeager, why, I’ll shwear to that. I’d know him anywhere, dead or alive. Thot is,” he added cautiously, “so long as he has flesh on his bones. All skeletons look alike to me, av coorse.”
“The dagger ought to help us find the person who did it,” went on Captain Craig. “Where is it, Terry?” he asked, looking about.
“Lunga Sen had it in his hand the last I saw of it,” said Griffiths over his shoulder, for he was still examining the body. “There’s no amulet around his neck, Murray,” he continued in a lower tone to Plange.
“Why should there be?” asked Plange.
“I don’t know,” was Griffiths’ slow reply as he straightened and looked steadily into his friend’s eyes. “But somehow I couldn’t help thinking that the amulet we found three months ago on the skeleton might—that is—you see——”
“There would not be anything of the kind here. The amulet you showed me at your house to-night is the only one in the possession of the Yeager family, you may be sure of that. Such things are not thrown around lightly by the Brahmin priesthood,” declared Murray in a tone of conviction.
“But don’t you think there is any connection between the disappearance and subsequent murder of this Doctor Yeager and the skeleton we found here three months ago?” asked Griffiths, rearranging the blue coat of the pajamas on the dead man’s breast where he had been searching for the amulet. “This affair now is as strange as the finding of those bones, it seems to me.”
“Say, where the deuce did that cheese knife go?” spluttered Captain Craig, who, with Maginnis, had been looking about the bed for the dagger. “If that guy in the white turban is doing any monkey business with it, he’ll find himself under arrest the first thing he knows. Terry, go down and see whether he——”
He was interrupted by a great scuffling and banging in the adjoining library, accompanied by ejaculations in a strange tongue, followed by a heavy thump, as if somebody had fallen to the floor.
Griffiths was first through the doorway, with Murray Plange by his side and the two police officers close behind. What they saw was Lunga Sen, holding the long-missing Chundah by the throat with his left hand, while with his right hand he flourished the jeweled dagger that had killed Doctor Theophilus Yeager. At his feet lay another man in the same sort of white Indian raiment, except that his turban had fallen off, allowing his long black hair to trail over the rug.
“Look out there, Terry!” bawled Captain Craig. “Get that knife!”
Terry Maginnis was too far back to get it, but Doctor Griffiths, with the activity and readiness of a skilled football player, leaped headlong at Lunga Sen and snatched the knife away just as it came within a few inches of Chundah’s breast.
“Good work, doc!” shouted Craig, his sturdy arm going around Chundah’s neck and pulling him away, while Murray secured Lunga Sen, “Look after that guy on the floor. What’s wrong with him?”
It was Murray Plange who answered. Dropping to one knee by the side of the still form, he pulled aside part of the white robe and showed a rapidly widening stain of dark red over the chest. “Stabbed through the heart, captain,” he said solemnly. “Look!” He pointed to the dead man’s forehead, on which three white lines had been made with some sort of indelible pigment. “He’s a Brahmin high priest.”
“Baboo Keshub Chundah Sen!” said Lunga Sen stonily. “I know him. He was here to avenge Vishnu, the high god. He finished his work. Then he used the dagger on himself. The vengeance of Vishnu was complete. He killed the man who insulted the god in Benares, who was the grandfather of this man on the bed. Three generations have died for it. The second Yeager was killed at sea. The third was obliged to wait till the holy moon was in the sky, which came to-night.”
“What kind of jargon is this, Lunga Sen?” demanded Griffiths angrily. “What are you talking about?”
“But the skeleton we found lying on this same bed three months ago, after Doctor Yeager had telephoned the police station that he was about to die—how do you account for that, Murray?”
“If the sahib will listen, I think I can clear that up,” broke in Lunga Sen. “Baboo Keshub Chunda Sen bound me to secrecy in the name of Vishnu of the Ten Avatars. But Baboo Keshub Chundah Sen is dead, and I may speak. Know, then, that there was a secretary whose name I do not know who was in the service of Doctor Yeager, the grandfather of this one,” he pointed to the bed, but immediately brought his hands back to his side as before, “and this secretary was killed by mistake by the avengers who believed him to be the doctor, violator of the temple at Benares.”
“Can’t you get along a little faster, Lunga Sen?” urged Griffiths. “Do you mean that the skeleton we found on that bed was the secretary’s?”
“Suffering Mike!” interposed Captain Craig excitedly. “Why, that would be Morrison! I worked on that case. He disappeared when old Doctor Yeager was killed, and it was thought that the secretary might have killed Yeager. I was just on the force then I wasn’t much more than a kid, but I was big and husky, and they took me on. Go on, Lunga, or whatever it is. Let her loose!”
“The secretary was stabbed by one of the avengers. But when Baboo Keshub Chundah Sen came in to see that the work was well done he knew there had been a mistake. So he had the body taken down into the old cellar, where no one ever went, for the walls were crumbling in. A hole was dug by four of the avengers he had brought with him to America in case there might be an attempt to interfere with the holy work——”
“Holy work!” shouted Craig indignantly. “I always knew there was something wrong with these Indians snooping around up here. But go on.” “The hole was dug and the body was laid there, anointed with something that would soon remove the flesh, except at the hinges of the joints,” went on Lunga Sen coolly. “Afterward,
when Doctor Yeager, the grandsire, came back to his house, he suffered the death as it had been written, and was buried in the corner of his own grounds, where the grave is to-day. It is the will of Vishnu that always a condemned man shall be warned in some way what is to be his fate, and Baboo Keshub Chundah Sen, when he found that the moon was not in the sacred quarter at the time that he and the avengers came to kill this present Yeager, three months ago, had the secretary’s skeleton brought up from the old cellar, carried on a stretcher blanket, and laid it on Doctor Yeager’s bed, dressed in the doctor’s own night raiment. Then the doctor’s amulet, which came down to him from his grandfather, was put on the neek of the skeleton, and Yeager was taken away until a fitting time should arrive for his punishment.”
“You mean to-night, Lunga Sen?” asked Murray Plange gravely.
Lunga Sen raised his eyebrows and spread out his hands, palms upward, for an instant.
“You see!” was all he said, nodding toward the bed. “According to the commands in the holy writings, it is always a skeleton that is used as a warning. The laws of the god are immutable, except when the execution must be carried out at sea, as was the case with the father of this third and last Yeager. That is all. I have told what I know.”
“It is, eh?” cried Captain Craig indignantly. “Well, if this Baboo Catchup, or whatever his name is, has croaked himself, by the Lord, we’ve got you, Lunger! Get that fellow, Maginnis!”
In a flash Terry Maginnis had seized Lunga Sen’s long brown hands and clapped handcuffs about his wrists, the Indian submitting in dignified silence.
“You don’t think Lunga Sen had anything to do with it, do you, captain?” asked Griffiths. “I should be sorry to think so, for he has always seemed to be seven-eighths American. Besides, he is hardly old enough to have taken part in killing and burying that secretary. This dead man, Baboo Keshub, is over seventy, I should say, and even Chundah must be nearly fifty.”
“That’s right,” agreed Craig. “I’m taking him, too. Get the bracelets on him, Terry. Here!” holding out a pair of handcuffs from his own pocket. “Use mine. I’m going to break up this whole Indian game as sure as I’m a policeman. I wouldn’t trust Lunger any more than I would Chundah or any of the others in the gang. I’ll take them into my back room, and if they don’t come across with the truth, why——”
It was not necessary for him to finish. The sinister meaning was all too plain. But neither Lunga Sen nor Chundah betrayed emotion. Both were standing with their hands crossed flatly on their breasts. The handcuffs just allowed them to take that attitude.
“Well, I hope you’re right—that Lunga Sen is innocent,” declared Murray with a shrug. “But that fellow, Chundah, seems to be in bad. It looks as if Baboo Keshub has had him working for Doctor Yeager just so he could play the spy and arrange matters easily for Vishnu’s orders to be carried out. Where has Chundah been for three months, and where did he keep Doctor Yeager all that time, out of sight?”
“We’ll get that,” put in Captain Craig grimly. “He’ll tell when I get to questioning him. They all do. To me it looks like the chair for him. He was the fellow who telephoned to-night to me and Doc Griffiths, I’ll bet.” He turned sharply on Chundah. “Where have you been keeping yourself since that night you faded out of here, Chundah? And who killed this Doctor Yeager?”
But Chundah, his handcuffed hands still crossed on his bosom, merely bowed his head in silence.
I.
I HAD always regarded Brasset as acurious kind of human duck, a strange mixture of somnolence and brain, but it wasn’t until his death that I really believed him a trifle mad. The newspapers at the time chronicled the passing of Professor Henry Layterman Brasset, with the usual accompanying stuff from their “morgues,” and ample tribute was paid to his splendid research work in the Congo. He was tireless and energetic and original. He labored in many fields. In fact, to this man the world owes the famous Brasset rubber compound for tires, a preparation that has saved the United States government thousands of dollars in equipment maintenance. And when he died there was much sincere sorrow in the scientific world.
The medical certificate stated that death was “from natural causes,” the press agreed with the doctors, the public believed what they were told, and so the world knew nothing to the contrary. But there were two men who were in a position to prove at the time that the professor’s death was distinctly unnatural; one was Taylor, who will be remembered as the brilliant editor of The Meteor— the other is myself.
For ten years a strict silence has been kept by us about the truth of the Brasset tragedy, but I think, and Taylor thinks with me, that the time has come to present the facts. It may possibly do some ethical good, and now that Brasset has become almost a myth no harm can result from lifting the curtain.
I am writing of events that took place in the fall of 1906. We had been dining together— Brasset and Taylor and I—and I was in particularly fine fettle, owing to the unexpected acceptance of a set of articles I had ground out on India. In addition, Taylor had commissioned me—I was the gayest of free lances in those days—to write up some special matter on rubber, which commodity was then all the rage. Hence this dinner with Brasset. During the dessert the talk ranged over a dozen varied topics, and later on I recalled the circumstances which led to becoming acquainted with the professor.
I first met Brasset at Nice, when he was on the eve of being swindled in a particularly complete style by the fascinating Nelly Forsyth, and I had the satisfaction of spoiling little Nelly’s pretty game once and for all. Brasset seemed profoundly grateful about this, though it wasn
’t really much to bother over, and thereafter we were good friends. Nelly, by the way—but that’s another tale.
The next time I ran across the academic chappie was in London, at the Albert Hall, where I was covering the annual meeting of the Royal Geographical Society. This was some three years after the Nice episode—the professor was wont to say, in his dry way, after the Nice un-Nice episode—and I must confess I had partially forgotten all about Nelly. But the thin, metallic tones snapping from the platform brought back a good deal.
His address was quite the most interesting event in a most uninteresting program, and he told his audience—which was composed of six parts professor and two parts nondescript and the press—a few things concerning rubber, its preparations, its values, its uses, where it comes from, and what is done with it, and talked so learnedly that we all felt quite expert on the subject as a consequence.
“You are the gentleman I met at Nice?” he said, when I went up to him at the conclusion of the meeting “Under—well, rather distressing circumstances. Am I right?” I told him he was, and congratulated him on his excellent memory.
Well, on this particular night, when we were at dinner at the Savoy, over our cigars, Professor Brasset suddenly switched the current of conversation from Lloyd George to spiders, and on this peculiar topic he waxed discursive. He said he had been devoted to spiders all his life. “They give me more delight than perhaps you imagine.” We stared. He rambled out about African spiders and English domestic spiders and spiders from the Andalusian fastnesses; he told us about spiders that feed on small sparrows and spiders that will eat man’s flesh, if they can get it.