"Then O'Hara drops back against the wall and starts laughing like he'd gone nutty. 'Claim on me!' he gasps out. 'Claim on me, is it? The claim that he had is the claim he collected! And I think,' he says, 'there's one demon will be making no more claims of any man!'
"I tell you just what he says," the detective added rather apologetically, "because right then--I guess I was pretty excited myself--but just then it seemed like he'd done something big--not ordinary big--but tremendous--like--like--saving a country or--oh, some darn dangerous thing that everybody ought to pin medals on him for."
MacClellan paused
"Well?" said the chief, with suspicious calmness.
"Then we got out, that's all. There were some other things I was going to tell you, but I'll be hanged if I will when you look that way! You ought to know me well enough --"
"Wait a minute. Think it over, Mac. Never mind this statue-gorilla business. We'll be quite open-minded about that. But--could a dozen or so ferocious--ah--golliwogs such as you describe have been turned loose last night, and no one--absolutely no one have sent in a complaint to this office since?"
"I didn't say turned loose," retorted MacClellan gloomily.
"Oh! Not turned loose. Adopted as pets, perhaps, by the neighbors?"
"Chief, I'm done. I knew how it would be, but I'm a conscientious man--you ought to know that --"
"You haven't answered my question."
* * * * *
"All right. When we went out there was a heap of nasty, purplish jelly on the stairs, and some more in a room on the first floor, and some more clear outside the house. A lot of people saw it besides me. Forester saw it, for one. If you don't believe me, ask him --"
"Oh, I do believe you, Mac. I do. But it's the golliwogs I'm interested in. Where are they?"
"All right. I'll tell the rest, then. The fire flared up like I said, and that passage was no place to stop and chin in. O'Hara and me and these two girls--who sure are plucky ones--we carried out the wounded between us. Funny. That was a regular reunion down there in the middle of the fire, but nobody had time to be sentimental then.
"I told you already that this Mr. Biornson claims to be the father of the girl everybody round Undine had thought was Miss Reed and crazy. She ain't crazy; only, brought up some place in Mexico where there seem to have been a lot of queer white people, and her mother was one of 'em.
"You can get all that straight from Biornson, if you want to.
"And he says afterward--when he came to--that once he tried to kill O'Hara down in Mex, and here he finds him rescuing this kidnaped girl of his--or she rescuing him, it seems to be a toss-up which--and O'Hara says he don't care a whoop what happened fifteen years ago, just so he gets old Biornson for a father-in-law now, and --"
"A very romantic situation," cut in the chief, "but aren't we again straying from our golliwogs? Leave marrying to the minister, Mac, and trot out your animiles."
"Hang it all, you make it so darn hard--I'll tell you in a minute. We got out of the house, and just in the nick of time, too. As we jumped down the steps there was a flare of flame licked after us that singed the back of my coat. That wing of the house had got so hot from the rest of the place that it must have exploded into flame of itself--spontaneous combustion, you understand--like the trees do in a forest fire.
"We get away from there quick, believe me, and then it strikes me as funny that there ain't any string of fire engines around, nor anybody at all but us. I starts cussing Forester, but five minutes later he's with us with bells on and pretty near every soul in Undine at his heels. He says he ain't been gone over twelve or fifteen minutes. He was right, too, but it had seemed more like fifteen hours to me--straight.
"Of course, they couldn't do much with the fire, even when the department got there. Besides the start it had, a water-main had busted, and they couldn't get any water till they hitched up hose clear into Undine.
"Well, O'Hara was all messed up, and his shoulder in awful shape, and Mr. Rhodes with a busted leg, and poor old Biornson so shaken up he couldn't walk. There was a doctor came over from Undine with the crowd, and he fixed 'em up temporary, and having three cars handy it was no trouble to get 'em home. I says hospital, but they were all set on going to Rhodes' place, so of course the doctor and me gave in.
"I wanted answers to a few questions, so I went along, and just as we pulled out they got the water on the fire at last, but O'Hara says to me, 'They'd best let her burn out, and at that the ruins of it should assay fifty-fifty pure gold and devilishness. I wish joy to him that gets it.'
"I says, 'I'm proud to have known you, Mr. O'Hara, but I wouldn't want any gold that came out of that cellar.' And he says, 'You're a man after my own heart, MacClellan, or you'd never have been in at the finish like you was. It wasn't gold that drew you,' he says, 'and I know fear didn't drive you, and as the same may be said of all of us I'm thinking Mr. Kennedy was mistaken. For a man to judge the whole world by himself is a dangerous matter. But,' he says, 'the black god was another matter entirely.' And then he goes on to tell me all that had happened to him before we arrived. It was like this --"
"MacClellan," snapped the chief, "are you or are you not intending to answer my question? What became of the animals you say escaped ahead of you from the cellar?"
The stolid detective clenched his teeth despairingly, but dared evade no longer.
"When Biornson came to," he muttered, "after we got him out, he--well, he says those heaps of jelly we passed on the stirs and round were the--were the golliwogs, as you call 'em. O'Hara, he'd talked to the fellow that was killed--one of the two fellows--Kennedy alias Reed--and claims they'd been turning common harmless rabbits and cats and such into jelly life that, and then making 'em over into these regular hellions of brutes.
"And Biornson figured that when O'Hara choked the life out of Nakrok-Nakokyotle, or some darned name they teed the statue by, the beasts all slumped back into jelly again. I tell you, I don't say anything's true but just what I saw with my eyes --"
"Exactly. And now I no longer blame you, Mac, for darkly concealing the golliwogs' sad fate. So you go home and go to bed."
CHAPTER XXXIII
As One Triumphant
Table of Contents
And here rightfully the story ends, with the end of what was either a very singular biological experiment, or the most extraordinary and sinister invasion by which the race of man was ever threatened.
The rest is all surmise--conjecture--the muddling work of many divergent minds.
The burning of the old Jerrard place, together with what was later found in its ruins and the strange story of the fire's survivors, caused considerable excitement at the time and started some controversies of which the ripples have not yet quite subsided.
The unpleasant heaps of purplish jelly outside the house had rotted clean away by morning, and had been absorbed by the earth past analyzing. It seemed probable to the world at large that the jelly--if it had ever existed--had no connection with the beasts--admitting that they had existed--and that the latter had perished in the fire and been utterly consumed, even to their--equally problematical--bones.
The fact that two alleged human corpses had also vanished could not, however, be explained in this manner. O'Hara testified that the bodies of both Marcazuma, alias Marco, and Archer Kennedy, alias Chester T. Reed, had sunk in the flood, one having ,been already lifeless and the other perishing beneath the fury of his own handiwork.
It stands to reason that bodies immersed in mud or muddy water would be safe from incineration. A number of other things were found in said mud, but no bodies. Ergo, Mr. O'Hara was mistaken. No bodies had ever been there.
By part of his own testimony he had spent at least a portion of his evening's captivity in a dreamy and semiconscious condition. No doubt this accounted for much that was--well, slightly incredible in the Irish gentleman's testimony. The lady from Mexico, too, was no doubt pardonably mistaken. In moments of excitement delusion is easy.
The Irish gentleman, for instance, believed that he had broken Marco's neck twenty-four hours previous to the fire. No doctor was present. He merely assumed that the man was dead on the strength of his own unprofessional judgment. What more likely than that, O'Hara's back turned, Marco rose and walked away?
And Kennedy, in all probability, escaped from the burning house alive and comparatively uninjured. Quite likely master and man were now in hiding together, and it was recommended that the police bestir themselves and rout them out.
Svend Biornson, however, disagreed with the world, though he confided his opinion to none but sympathetic ears. He based it on the fact that every one of the jars, boxes, and other golden vessels dug out of the mud were found open. Even he declined to surmise what force had opened them and thus destroyed every particle of their diabolical contents.
But for a time, at least, the flooded cellar must have been highly charged with the stuff. He knew for a certainty that, exposed to air or impurities, it lost power quickly. The men who dug in those ruins were safe enough, but to Biornson it was not strange at all that no bodies were found there. They were present, but dissolved as utterly as though the mire had been a kind of temporary quick-lime.
There being no corpus delicti, Colin was spared a trial for manslaughter, justifiable or otherwise, and it cannot be truthfully said that he was sorry. He and his Dusk Lady were really very much in love, and it is a pity to be wasting time in jail or law courts when one wishes to be on one's honeymoon.
As it was, the investigation was tiresome enough. It ended at last in clouds of doubt, with a few bright spots of definite decision. A burst water-main was found to have caused the flood. That, together with the weakening nature of the building's reconstruction, had brought on its sudden collapse. And the insurance people, after deep pondering, set down the fire as resulting from "faulty insulation and crossed wires," a favorite explanation for otherwise inexplicable conflagrations.
As to the golden temple vessels, the state fell heir to them in lack of any other claimant. They may be seen today in a certain national museum, though their value is considered dubious. Authenticity as Aztec relics has never been properly established, and their gold was found to be a thin coat laid over solid-copper.
* * * * *
Besides them stands an object of still more dubious value--a black stone, in fact, shapeless, yet with an odd suggestion of having once possessed a shape--as if the marble of same old, wicked idol had been melted in a hotter flame than science has ever fanned to being. But there is nothing terrible about it now. It is just a black stone. Of course, it may be that MacClellan's first surmise was correct, and that Genghis Khan, magnified and distorted by excited imaginations, was the antagonist conquered for a second time by Colin. Certainly the pseudo-ape had crouched on the dais, and when it grew too hot beneath the fallen d�bris, such a brute could have leaped the intervening twelve feet of water as it had leaped the forest glades from tree to tree!
At the time, Colin himself believed otherwise. To him the whole matter seemed simple enough then. A demon had claimed him; he had conquered the demon in a satisfactorily personal manner, and as to fire out of nothing, flood that wrought swift miracles, and whirlwind that lent the strength of a Titan with its breath, why, he had never denied that under the Almighty were powers of good to aid a man as well as of evil to crush him.
Having met nothing to shake his faith in either his universe or his God, he remained a good Catholic, and the Dusk Lady was duly baptized into that church, loving her lord too well to quarrel with his religion.
But though he is sure of her love today as he was then, he is not so sure of the nature of that last battle. After meeting the thousand and one contemptuous arguments hurled at their heads, he and his companions became at last sure of nothing about it except that he strangled something and flung it into some kind of a fire.
And so, of the most somber actor in a very strange drama, little remains but a shapeless stone and an uncertain memory, and that ever growing more dreamlike as it recedes into the past.
But on that night of nights it was not like a dream at all. It was clear--"clear and bright like"--as had been the sight of Tlapallan to Colin. And when those six first emerged from the burning Fortress of Fear they had no more doubt of their adventure's sinister nature or of its reality than they had a few moments later of the last strange sight of all, though that was more glorious than sinister. It was a vision all shared, from MacClellan, starting on an angry mission in search of Forester, to Biornson, just opening his eyes, safe, and with his daughter's arms about him.
They were among the trees then, some distance from the house. Rhodes lay groaning with the pain of his broken leg, and Cliona had his head in her lap. Colin, very sick and dizzy, with a mangled shoulder and various other wounds, was leaning against a tree and wondering how a man could have the strength of ten one minute and be weak as a kitten the next.
And then it was that MacClellan stopped in his tracks with a sharp cry of amazement. The others looked where he pointed.
Above the Fortress of Fear the fumes roared high. In a lull of the gale fire crested it with a fuming tongue of scarlet. And as that fiery tongue soared skyward, a vast, diaphanous form plunged through the lashing tree branches--plunged through and up--and up--and flung itself on the flame that bent roaring before it!
A vast, impetuous, shouting form, of turbulent plumes and a face of undying youth. Quetzalcoatl, Lord of the Air--the Wind--the victorious Wind!
Ah, that pure and violent one, gently, patient and fiercely intolerant, breath of the wild, sweet places, enemy to all foul vapors and morbid vileness! Great deeds he chants of, and hope, and the courage that is not only of the flesh.
"A heathen god, but a stanch friend," muttered Colin. "I'd be less than a friend myself if I did not admit that I like him!"
Bending, the flame streamed out like a banner--as a trailing banner of scarlet plumes it followed the shouting one.
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