“Now why,” quoth Val, “should this be thus?” He addressed the walls of his comfortable bedroom and paused for reply.
“You don’t know, is that it?” he asked again. “Well, that makes it unanimous. I ask you,” he remarked to himself, “why should the best looking girl in all the world sell a ten thousand dollar bill for the sum of two dollars and thirteen (count ’em) cents?” He paused again for reply. There was none.
“Now we just simply have got to find that girl. We have business with her. Those eyes . . . ”
It was one of the most singular things he had ever known, he reflected. Of course, the girl had no idea the money was in the book—yet why was it there and who had put it there? Evidently she needed money badly. Well, here it was; a large stack of it. And he, Val, had but to search her out and place it in her hand . . . that hand, he had noticed it . . . white and small and . . . that is, place it in her hand, at the same time placing himself on a basis of intimacy with her by the mere fact of his having returned all that money to her.
Although ten thousand dollars was no great sum of money to Valentine Morley, still he could appreciate the fact that, if you needed it, it was a tremendous item. He smiled gratefully—it was a trick of the Fates, he decided. Had it not been for that promise of the government to pay anybody who held it ten thousand dollars, he would hardly have been able to dig up a sufficient reason for calling on the girl, always supposing he was fortunate enough to be able to locate her.
Here was his reason and his excuse, thrust right into his hands by the gods themselves. Could anything be more simple? Could anything have happened more fortuitously?
“It could not,” he decided. “And now to see if there are any more.”
A careful search, however, failed to reveal anything else. For a long time he lay there, reviewing the events of the day, and making a plan of campaign. It ought not to be hard to round up all the Pomeroys in New York.
And then there was always old Mat Masterson, the bookseller. He had a bundle of books from the same source—perhaps they held some indication of the erstwhile owner. He would go there the first thing in the morning and look them over. That settled, he extinguished his lamp and sleepily settled himself for slumber. A shaft of yellow moonlight struck through the darkness into his room, touching everything in its strait-ruled path with a wan and sickly gold, deepening the shadows in the corners and under the furniture. He closed his eyes and slept.
His sleep was troubled by dreams, peopled with the ghosts conjured up out of the cobwebs of his imagination. A bloodcurdling, ghostly dance was done around his bed by Eddie Hughes, but not the Eddie Hughes of New York—it was Eddie Hughes as he had known him in France where they had fought side by side. An Eddie Hughes in tin helmet, waving a Springfield with a bloody bayonet attached, the crimson stream pouring from vicious cuts in his face and body, his eyes sightless, blinded hideously by the mustard gas. Val tried to arise in his dream and found he could not—it was as though his limbs no longer refused to obey the commands of his brain. There seemed to be no feeling in them. He felt legless and armless.
Eddie Hughes gave way, finally, to a glorious girl with copper hair, arising out of a pile of books in front of his bed. She advanced to him and placed a cool hand on his brow . . . she smiled. He tried to rise. He could not. She walked back to the books, gliding in an unreal, unnatural fashion and as he looked he saw that it was not the girl at all.
It was a man, a large man, with his back turned. He was bent among the books, clumsily putting them into a pile. The moonlight, which had been absent for a few moments, it seemed to Val, stabbed through the gloom of the chamber again, striking fair upon the person of Val’s dream and as Val looked he felt himself, even in his dream, turning cold all over, the gooseflesh pricking up over his body and the blood seeming to turn to ice in his veins.
The reason his dream-visitor was having trouble with the books was because—Val tried to arise and could not!—because he had no hands.
Where his hands should have been were two formless, pale white stumps.
Val knew he was dreaming, the way you sometimes do know even during the course of a dream, yet for some reason or other, he could hardly say why, he was stricken with a terror that had its inception in nothing of this earth. The sight of that great hulk of an apparition stooping in the weak moonlight, groping among the books on the floor with those two ghastly stumps affected him as nothing this side of France had ever gripped him. He tried to shout and could emit no word. His tongue was glued to the roof of his mouth. He could not feel his limbs—he had no command over them—it was as if he were a disembodied spirit.
Then he slept again, dreamlessly and heavily.
When he awoke the sun was high and the air in the room seemed stifling. He had a bad taste in his mouth, which shouldn’t have been there as he had behaved himself meticulously the night before, and there was a suggestion of headache. There was a peculiar smell in the air—he could scarcely classify it. It was something of the hospital. He remembered his dream and smiled.
The door opened and Eddie, who had heard him creaking out of bed, entered.
“Good morning, sir,” he said, and stopped to sniff the air.
“Good morning, Eddie. Do you smell it too.”
“Yes sir. It’s chloroform, sir,” replied Eddie. “Did you leave the airshaft window in the living room open, sir?”
“No, why?”
“I found it open this morning, sir,” replied Eddie impassively.
“That’s strange,” reflected Val. “And chloroform . . .” He leaped up suddenly. “Why, there was somebody here then, Eddie. That was no dream!”
“No sir. It was no dream, sir.”
“Why, I must have been chloroformed—that’s why I feel like this. And⸺” he stared with wide open eyes at the spot where the books had lain.
They were gone.