"Pardieu"—he strode back and forth across my office with a step which was half ran, half jig—"this Jules de Grandin, never is the task imposed too great for him!"
"What in the world’s the matter with you?" I demanded as I rang up the Richards house.
"Non, non," he replied, lighting a cigarette, then flinging it away unpuffed. "Ask me no questions, good friend, I do beseech you. Wait, only wait till those others come, then you shall hear Jules de Grandin speak. Morbleu, but he shall speak a great mouthful!"
The Richards limousine, impressive in size, like its owner, and, like its owner, heavily upholstered, was panting before my door in half an hour, and Kinnan drove up in his modest sedan almost as soon. Sergeant Costello, looking mystified, but concealing his wonder with the inborn reticence of a professional policeman, came into the office close on Kinnan’s heels.
"What’s all this nonsense, Trowbridge?" Richards demanded testily as he sank into a chair. "Couldn’t you have come over to my house, instead of dragging me out at this hour o’ night?"
"Tut, tut, Monsieur," de Grandin cut him short, running the admonitions so close together that they sounded like the exhaust of a miniature motorboat. "Tut, tut, Monsieur, is it not worth coming out into the cold to recover these?" From a brown-paper parcel before him he produced a purple velvet case which he snapped open with a dramatic gesture, disclosing an array of scintillating gems.
"These, I take it," he announced, "were once the property of Madame, your wife?"
"Great Scott!" gasped Richards, reaching out his hands for the jewels, "why, you got ’em!"
"But of course," de Grandin agreed, deftly withdrawing the stones from Richards’ reach and restoring them to their paper bag. "Also, Monsieur, I have these." From another parcel he drew a sheaf of Liberty bonds, ruffling through them as a gambler might count his cards. "You said twenty thousand dollars’ worth, I believe? Trés bien, there are just twenty one-thousand dollar certificates here, according to my count.
"Monsieur Kinnan," he bowed to our other visitor, "permit that I restore to you the cup of Monsieur le Marquis Lafayette." The Lafayette cup was duly extracted from another package and handed to its owner.
"And now," de Grandin lifted an oblong pasteboard box of the sort used for shoes and held it toward us as a prestidigitator might hold the hat from which he is about to extract a rabbit, "I will ask you to give me closest attention. Regardez, s'il vous plait. Is this not what you gentlemen saw last night?"
As he lifted the box lid we beheld, lying on a bed of crumpled tissue paper, what appeared to be the perfectly modeled reproduction of a beautiful feminine hand and wrist. The thumb and fingers, tipped with long, almond-shaped nails, were exquisitely slender and graceful, and the narrow palm, where it showed above the curling digits, was pink and soft-looking as the under side of a La France rose petal. Only the smear of collodion across the severed wrist told us we gazed on something which once pulsated with life instead of a marvelously exact reproduction.
"Is this not what you gentlemen saw last night?" de Grandin repeated, glancing from the lovely hand to Richards and Kinnan in turn.
Each nodded a mute confirmation, but forebore to speak, as though the sight of the eery, lifeless thing before him had placed a seal of silence on his lips.
