takes upstairs to bed, but the—other mass—lay where it had collapsed in the night. The men put handkerchiefs to their noses.
What they finally found inside Edward's oddly-assorted clothes was mostly liquescent horror. There were bones, too—and a crushed-in skull. Some dental work positively identified the skull as Asenath's.
Fate Weaves a Web
By Alfred I. Tooke
Destiny made a tangled snarl out of this man's life when it wove
a net from which there was no escape
I laid the newspaper on Rodney Sanders' desk and pointed to the headline:
Floods hit state. $1,000,000 damage
"Early this year," I said, "you spent several thousand dollars lobbying for certain fat, juicy road-building contracts that would have netted you between half a million and a whole million dollars. When they were practically in the bag for you, you suddenly decided you didn't want them. Why?"
Sanders laughed. He pointed at the newspaper. "Worst floods in seventy years. Every dollar put into those contracts has been lost. The cuts filled in and the fills washed out. Every contractor involved is tottering on the verge of bankruptcy at this moment."
"How did you know things were going to pan out this way?"
Sanders replied "Alleppo!"
"Do you drink it, apply it externally, or eat it with a pinch of salt?" I asked.
"You expect to be nominated for District Attorney next election, don't you?" he countered.
I nodded.
"Fortune-telling in this state carries both fine and jail sentence, doesn't it?" "Correct!"
"Two reasons why you never heard of Alleppo. He's a fortune-teller. But you don't believe in fortune-tellers, do you?"
"Never have, since that time at college when our gang visited a couple. Everything they said about me turned out wrong. They were fakers."
"Alleppo is the real McCoy. Do you know Bill Wendell?"
"I'm his lawyer."
"Well, six months ago, Bill told his family doctor that he was in for an attack of some obscure disease. The only things Bill knew about it were the name of it and that it killed you in a week if it got half a start. His doctor could find no symptoms, but, on Bill's insistence, sent him to a specialist, who found slight but unmistakable symptoms. They caught Bill's case in time. He lost the affected kidney instead of his life."
