Weird Tales/Volume 11/Issue 2/Mephistopheles and Company, Ltd.
"Nearer and nearer the fiery thing floated."
"MESSIEURS les Americains, dead on the field of honor, I salute you!” Jules de Grandin drew himself rigidly to attention and raised his cupped hand to his right temple in a smart military salute before the Victory Monument in our city park.
The act was so typical of the little Frenchman that I could not forbear a smile as I glanced covertly at him. Ten thousand times a day friends and neighbors—even relatives—of the gold-starred names on the honor roll of that monument passed through the park, yet of all the passers-by Jules de Grandin was the only one who habitually rendered military honors to the cenotaph each time his steps led past it.
His sharp little blue eyes caught the flicker of my smile as we turned from the memorial, and the heat lightning flash of resentment rose in them. "Ha, do you laugh at my face, Friend Trowbridge?" he demanded sharply. "Cordieu, I tell you, it would be well for your country if more persons paid honor to the brave lads who watered the fields of France with their blood that Freedom might survive! So busy you are in this peaceful land that you have no time to remember the wounds and blood and broken bodies which bought that peace; no time to remember how the sale boche
"Misère de Dieu, what have we here?" One of his white, womanish hands grasped me so sharply by the arm that I winced under the pressure. His free hand pointed dramatically down the curving, shrub-bordered path before us.
"Eh?" I demanded. "What the deuce?” I swallowed the remainder of my question, as my gaze followed the line of his pointing
A young woman in evening dress, tear-stains on her cheeks and stark, abject terror in her eyes, was running stumblingly toward us.
"Lieber Gott!" she cried in a horrified whisper, shrill and thin-edged as a scream, then struggled for breath in a paroxysm of sobs and glanced frightenedly behind her. "Ach, lieber Himmel!"
"Favoris d'un rat," murmured de Grandin wonderingly, "a woman of the boche?
"Enschuldige mich, Fraulein," he began, making a wry face, as though the German words were quinine on his tongue, "bitte"
The result of his salutation was as forceful as it was unexpected. Throwing her hands before her eyes, as though to shut out a vision too terrible for mortal sight, the girl uttered a terrified, despairing shriek, swerved sharply away and dashed past him with a bound like that of a rabbit startled by a hound. Half a dozen fear-spurred steps farther down the path her knees seemed to melt under her, she wavered uncertainly a moment, then collapsed to the pavement with a pitiful little moan, huddled in a lovely heap of disordered dark hair and disarranged costume, shuddered tremblingly, then lay still.
"Pardonnez-moi, Mademoiselle"—de Grandin flung the girl's native tongue aside—"you seem in trouble. Is there anything ?" He felt her wrists for a feebly fluttering pulse, then laid a tentative hand on her breast. "Morbleu, Trowbridge, my friend," he exclaimed, "she has fainted unconscious! Assist me, we must take her home for treatment. I think"
"Exguse me, zur," a thick-toned voice cut through his words as a big young man in dinner clothes emerged from behind a clump of shrubs with the suddenness of a Jack-in-the-box popping from its case, "exguse me, zur, but I know the young lady, und I zhall be ver-ee gladt her to dake home if you will so kind be as to call me a cab. I"
"Ha, do you say so?" The little Frenchman dropped the swooning girl's wrist and bounded to his feet, glaring up into the other's face with a fierce, unwinking stare. "Perhaps, then, Monsieur, you can tell us why Mademoiselle is running through the park at this hour of night, and why she becomes unconscious on our hands. N'est-ce-pas?"
The stranger drew himself up with an air of sudden hauteur. "I am not obliged to you exblanations make," he began. "I dell you I know the young lady, und vill"
"Nom d'un chat, this is too much!" de Grandin blazed. "I make no doubt you know her entirely too well for her comfort, Monsieur, and that you should demand that we turn her over to you — parbleu, it is the insult to our intelligence; it is "
"Look out, de Grandin!" I cried, springing forward to intercept the sudden thrust the other aimed at my friend’s face with a queer-looking, shining instrument. My move was split-second too late, but my warning shout came in time. Even as I called, the little Frenchman wrenched himself back as though preparing to turn a reversed handspring, both his feet flew upward, and his assailant collapsed to the grass with an agonized grunt as de Grandin’s right heel caught him a devastating blow left in the solar plexus.
"Trowbridge, mon vieux," he remarked matter-of-factly as he regarded his fallen foeman, "behold the advantage of la savate. At hand-grips I should have been as nothing against this miscreant. In the foot-boxing"—he paused, and his little round eyes shone with a momentary flash of amusement—"there he lies. Come, let us convey Mademoiselle to your office. I doubt not she can tell us something of much interest."
Together we assisted the still fainting girl to the cross street and signaled a passing taxicab. As the vehicle started toward my house I demanded: "Why in the world did you knock that fellow out, de Grandin? He really might have been afriend of this young lady's, and"
"The good God protect us from such friends," the little Frenchman cut in. "Attend me, if you please. As we turned away from the monument in the park I did first see this woman. She was running in a zigzag course, like a hare seeking to elude the pack, and I greatly wondered at her antics. All Americans are a little mad, I think, but"—he gave a short chuckle—"there is usually method behind their madness. That a young lady of fashionable appearance should run thus through the public park at a quarter to midnight seemed to be beyond the bounds of reason, but what I saw next gave me to think violently. Before she had gone a dozen steps, a man appeared from behind a patch of bushes and took off his hat to her, speaking words which seemed to cause her fright. She turned and ran toward the other side of the park, and another man arose from behind a bench, removed his hat and said something, whereat she flung up her hands and turned again, running toward us, and going faster with each step. A moment before I invited your attention to her, a third man—morbleu, it was the same one I later caressed with my heel!—addressed her. It was immediately afterward, as she came toward us with a great fear upon her, that I called your attention."
"H'm," I muttered, "he-flirts?"
"Non," he negatived. "I do not think they were making the—how do you say it? mash?—on her. No, it was something more serious, my friend. Listen: I did behold the faces of the men who accosted her, and each face was as it had been aflame with fire!"
"Wha—what?" I shot back. "Aflame with—whatever are you talking about?"
"I tell you no more than what I saw," he returned equably. "Each man’s face glowed with a light like that of a long-dead carcass which shines and stinks in the swamps at night. Also, my friend, I did perceive that each man reached out and touched her with a wand like that with which the so detestable rogue would have struck me, had I not spoiled his plan with my boot."
"My dear chap, you're surely dreaming!" I scoffed. "Men with fiery faces accosting young women in the public park, and touching them with magic wands! This is the State of New Jersey in the Twentieth Century, not Bagdad in the days of the Calif Haroun!"
"U'm," he returned noncommittally. The flame of his match flared lambently as he set a cigarette alight. "Perhaps, my friend. Let us see what the young lady has to say when we have restored her to consciousness. Pardieu, I shall be greatly surprized if we are not astounded at her story!"
2
{{di|A}|fl="} little ether, if you please, Friend Trowbridge," de Grandin ordered when we had carried the swooning girl into my surgery and laid her on the examination table. "Her heart action is very slow, and the ether will stimulate"
A deep-drawn, shuddering moan from our patient interrupted him. "Ach, lieber Himmel!" she exclaimed feebly, throwing out her arms with a convulsive movement as her lids fluttered a moment before unveiling a pair of cornflower-blue eyes. "Oh, God of Heaven, I am lost—destroyed—hopelessly damned! Have mercy, Mary!" Her lovely eyes, wide and shining with terror, gazed wildly about the room a moment, came to rest on de Grandin as he bent over her, and closed in sharp nictitation. "Ach" she began again hysterically, but the Frenchman broke in, speaking slowly and mouthing the German words as though they had been morsels of overheated food on his tongue.
"Fräulein, you are with friends. We found you in trouble in the park a short time ago, and when you fainted we brought you here. If you will tell us where you live, or where you wish to go, we shall be very glad"
"Ach, ja, ja, take me"—the girl burst out wildly—"take me away; take me where he can not get me. Almighty God, what do I say? How can I, the hopelessly damned, escape him, either in life or death? Oh, wo me; wo me!" She knit her slender, nervous fingers together with a wringing, hopeless movement, turning her face to the wall and weeping bitterly.
De Grandin regarded her speculatively a moment, twisting first one, then the other end of his little blond mustache. "I think you would best be securing the restorative, Friend Trowbridge," he remarked; "she seems in great distress.
"Now, Mademoiselle," he held the tumbler of chilled water and ether to the sobbing girl's lips and patted her shoulder reassuringly, "you will have the kindness to drink this and compose yourself. Undoubtlessly you have had many troubles, but here you are safe"
"Safe, safe?" she echoed with a hysterical laugh. "I safe? There is no safety for me—no spot on earth or in hell where he can not find me, and since heaven is forever barred against me, how can I find safety anywhere?"
"Morbleu, Mademoiselle, I fear you distress yourself needlessly," the Frenchman exclaimed. "Who is this so mysterious 'he' who pursues you?"
"Mephistopheles!" So softly did she breathe the name that we could scarcely recognize the syllables.
"Eh? What is it you say?" de Grandin demanded.
"Mephistopheles—the Devil—Satan! I am possessed by him, sold and bound to him irrevocably through time and all eternity. Oh, miserable me! Alas, that ever I was born!"
She sobbed hysterically a moment, then regarded him with wide, piteous eyes. "You don’t believe me," she wailed. "No one believes me, they think I'm crazy, but"
"Mademoiselle," de Grandin interrupted, speaking with the sharp, incisive enunciation of a physician addressing a patient who refuses to control her nerves, "we have not said so. Only fools refuse to believe that which they do not understand, and Jules de Grandin is no fool. I have said it. If there is anything you would have us know, speak on, for we listen." He drew a chair up to the couch where the girl lay, and leaned toward her. "Proceed, Mademoiselle."
"My name is Mueller, Bertha Mueller," the girl answered, dabbing at her eyes with a wisp of lace and cambric. "I am from Vienna. A year ago I came here to accept a post as instructress to the children of Herr Andreas Hopfer, who represents the Deutsche-Botofabrik Verein."
"U'm," de Grandin commented.
"This new country was so strange to me," she continued, growing calmer with her recital; "nowhere, outside the house of my employer and a few of his friends, could I find anyone who spoke my mother tongue. I was lonesome. For comfort I used to sit in the park and watch the pigeons while I thought of Vienna—the old Vienna of the empire, not the poverty-stricken city of the mongrel republic. An old lady, a beautiful, white-haired lady, came to sit on a bench near mine. She seemed sad and thoughtful, too, and one day when she addressed me, my heart nearly burst with joy. She was a Frau Stoeger, and like me she came from Vienna; like me, she had lost her nearest ones in the war our envious foes forced upon us."
De Grandin twisted fiercely at the waxed ends of his little mustache and something very like a snort of contempt escaped him, but he controlled himself with a visible effort and nodded for her to proceed.
"One afternoon, when I had told her how my noble brothers died gloriously at the Piave," the girl went on, "she suggested that we go to a spiritualistic friend of hers and see if it were possible for us to converse with the beloved dead. I shrank from the suggestion at first, for Holy Church frowns on such attempts to pierce the veil heaven hangs between us and the blessed ones who sleep in the Lord, but she finally persuaded me, and we went to see the medium."
"Ah?" de Grandin nodded understandingly. "I suppose this Madame Medium told you most remarkable things?"
"Nein, mein Herr," the girl negatived eagerly. "That she did not. Me she would have no intercourse with. 'Out of my sight and out of my house!' she cried the moment I entered the room where she sat. 'Begone, accursed woman, you are possessed of devils!' she told me, and moaned and screamed until I had left the building."
"Parbleu, this is of the strange unusualness!" de Grandin muttered. "Proceed, Mademoiselle, I listen."
"Frau Stoeger was almost as embarrassed as I at the strange reception," the girl replied, "but she told me not to lose hope. Too late she confided that when she first went to the medium's she, too, was bidden to depart because a minor imp had fastened on her; yet she went to a learned man who could cast out devils and had the spirit exorcised without trouble or expense, for the Herr Doktor Martulus will take no fees for his work. Now she is one of the most intimate members of the circle over which Laila, the Medium, presides."
"Yes? And then?" the Frenchman prompted.
"That very night we drove into the country and met the professor. He listened sympathetically to my case and gave me a little box of pills which I was to take. I followed his directions to the letter, but the pills made me very sick, so I stopped them.
"Next time I met Frau Stoeger she questioned me concerning the medicine, and when she learned it had made me ill, she said it was a very evil sign, and begged me with tears to go for another consultation.
"The moment Professor Martulus saw me he seemed greatly alarmed and called a council of his associates, telling them he was certain I was possessed by one of the major fiends, since the medicine he had given me had never before failed to drive the lesser demons from their victims. But they all assured me there was no need to fear, since Belial, Mammon and even dread Milchim could be thrown from their possession by their spells. Only one demon was proof against them, and that one was Mephistopheles, the Fiend of Fiends, Satan’s other self. If he claimed me for his own, my case was well-nigh hopeless.
"They took me to an inner chamber where the mystic rites began, and by their magic they sought the name of the fiend possessing me. All efforts were vain, and no response came to their questions until, in fear and trembling, the professor called upon the archfiend himself.
"The dreadful name had hardly passed his lips before the whole building shook with a terrible explosion, blinding flames shot to the ceiling, and I was half smothered by the fumes of sulfur and brimstone. Something hit me on the head, and I lost consciousness. The next thing I knew I was being rushed back to town in a speeding automobile with Frau Stoeger. When I tried to snuggle up to her for comfort, she drew away from me and bade me never touch her, or even look at her again. I was marked by the Devil for his own, and even my breath or glance brought misfortune to those they touched.
"My good, kind sir"—she regarded de Grandin with a stedfast, pleading stare, like a child striving desperately to convince a skeptical adult of the truth of a preposterous story—"I did not then believe. Much talk I had heard of devils in my childhood, for my nurse was a Hungarian woman, a peasant of the old Magyar stock, and as full of stories of vampires, demons and hobgoblins as a chestnut shell is of prickles, but never had I thought the tales of devils were more than fairy-lore. Alas! I was soon to learn the Devil is as real today as when he bought Faustus' soul from him.
"The very next day as I went for my regular walk in the park a little child—a pretty little girl playing with her colored nurse by the goldfish fountain—ran to me with out-stretched arms, and as I stooped to clasp her to my bosom she halted, looked at me in terror, then ran screaming to her nurse, crying out that the Devil stood behind me and reached over my shoulder for her. The negro nurse took one look at me, then made the sign of the evil eye, thus." She bent her thumb transversely across the palm of her hand, encircling it with the second and third fingers, permitting the fore- and little fingers to stand out like a pair of horns, and thrust them toward us. "And as the woman made the sign," the girl sobbed, "she bade me begone to hell, where Satan, my master, awaited me; then hurried from the square with the little girl."
De Grandin pinched his little, pointed chin between a thoughtful thumb and forefinger. "More than a thousand damns!" he exclaimed softly. "There is the monkey’s business here, of a surety. Proceed, Mademoiselle."
"I became a marked woman," she obeyed. "People turned to stare at me in the street, and all made the sign of the horns at me. Once, as I hurried through the park after sunset, I saw the Devil grinning at me from behind a bunch of rhododendrons!"
"Finally, I was ready to sell my soul for a moment’s peace. Then, by chance, I met Frau Stoeger again in the park. She blessed herself at sight of me, but did not run away, and when I spoke to her, she listened. I begged her on my bended knees to take me to Professor Martulus once more to see if he could break Satan's hold from off my wretched soul.
"That night I went to see the professor once more, and he told me there was one chance in a thousand of my regaining my freedom, but only at the cost of the most terrible sacrifice of humiliation and suffering. When he told me what I should have to do—oh, do not ask me to repeat it!—I was so horrified that I fainted, but there was no help for it. Either I must go through the ordeal he proposed or be forever devil-ridden. At last they said I might hire a substitute, but that I must pay her two thousand dollars. Where was I, a poor governess, almost a beggar, to obtain such a sum? It might as well have been a million!
"Frau Stoeger suggested that I borrow it from my employer. He is wealthy, and she knew I had the combination to his safe and access to a book of signed checks which he keeps in his library desk. When I refused she laughed and said, 'You'll be glad to do worse things than forge a check or steal some paltry jewelry before you're free, my dear.'
"That was a week ago. Since then my life has been an earthly hell. Everywhere I have seen reminders of my dreadful fate. Children scream at sight of me, women cross the street to avoid me, men turn and sneer as I pass by. Tonight I attended a party at my employer's house, though I felt little enough like dancing. Finally, when I knew I must be alone or go mad, I went for a walk in the park.
"Mein Herr—believe me; oh, please believe what I say!—as I entered the square the Devil stepped from behind a patch of bushes and raised his hat to me, saying, 'When are you coming to dwell in hell with me!' As he finished speaking he stretched out his hand and touched me, and it burned like a white-hot iron!
"I was terrified at the apparition, but thought my nerves had played a trick on me, so I began to run. Fifty feet farther on, the Devil rose up again, doffed his hat as before, and asked me the same question. And again he touched me with his fiery claw. I screamed and ran like a frightened cat from a pursuing hound, and just before I met you the Devil appeared to me a third time, asked me the same question, and added, 'I have put my mark on you three times tonight, so all who see you shall know you for mine.' At that I went quite mad, mein Herr, and ran as I had never run before. When you stepped forward with your offer of help, I thought you were the fiend accosting me for a fourth time, and I must have fainted, for I know nothing more until I found myself here."
"And how did the Devil appear, Mademoiselle?" asked de Grandin, edging slightly forward on his chair, his slender hands twitching with excitement.
"Very like a man, mein Herr. His body was like that of a man in evening dress, but his face was the face of the foul fiend and the horns which grew from his brows and the beard and mustache on his face were all aglow with the fires of hell. When he spoke, he spoke in German."
"I doubt it not!" de Grandin acquiesced, sotto voce, then aloud: "And you say he touched you with his claw? Where?"
"Here!" the girl returned in a stifled whisper, laying a trembling hand on one bare shoulder. "Here and here and here!" In quick succession her pointed finger touched her shoulder, her upper arm and the white half-moon of her bosom where the top of her bodice curved below her slender throat.
"Sang d'un poisson!—one thousand pale blue roosters!" de Grandin exclaimed between gasps of incredulity. At each place the girl indicated on her white skin there showed, red and angry, the seared, scorched soreness of a newly made burn; the crude design of a countenance of incomparable evil — a horned, bearded face, surmounted by the device of an inverted passion-cross.
Jules de Grandin regarded the brands on the girl's tender flesh with a wondering, speculative gaze, his lips pursed in a soundless whistle beneath the uprearing ends of his waxed mustache; his little, round blue eyes seemed to snap and sparkle with flashes of light.
At length: "Name of an old and very immoral cockroach, this is abominable!" he flared. "Who and where is this medium of spirits?"
"They call her Laila the Seeress," the girl replied with a shudder. "Her atelier is in Tecumseh Street; she"
"Très bien," de Grandin broke in, "you will return to her and tell her"
"I couldn't—I couldn't!" the denial was a wail of mingled terror and repulsion.
"Nevertheless, Mademoiselle," de Grandin continued as though she had not interrupted, "you will go to her tomorrow afternoon and tell her you have decided to hire a substitute to undergo the ordeal for you.
"Parbleu, but you will," he insisted as she made a half-frantic gesture of dissent. "You will visit her tomorrow, and Dr. Trowbridge and I will go with you. We shall pose as new-found friends who have agreed to finance your employment of an agent, and you shall suffer no harm, for we shall be with you. Meantime"—he consulted the tiny gold watch strapped to his wrist—"it grows late. Come; Dr. Trowbridge and I will take you to Monsieur Hopfer's house and see you safely within doors."
"But," she protested, snatching at his jacket sleeve as a drowning person might clutch a rope, "but, mein Herr, what of the Devil? I am afraid. Suppose he"
A tiny network of wrinkles deepened suddenly about the outer corners of de Grandin's small, round eyes. From the side pocket of his dinner coat he produced a long-barreled French army revolver and patted its walnut stock affectionately.
"Mademoiselle," he assured her, "should Monsieur le Diable manifest himself to us, I think we have here the fire necessary to fight him. Come—allons—let us go."
"Just what is your idea of mixing up in this nonsense?" I demanded somewhat coolly as we drove home from returning Fraulein Mueller to her employer's house. "This looks like a plain case of hysteria to me, and what you expect to accomplish is more than I"
"Indeed?" he answered sarcastically. "The brands on Mademoiselle Mueller's flesh, they, too, were perhaps marks of hysteria?"
"Well," I temporized, "I can’t exactly account for them, but"
"But you are like all other good, kind souls who see no farther than the points of their noses and declare all outside that distance to be nonexistent," he interrupted with a grin. "Non, non, Trowbridge, my friend, I fear you are unable to recognize the beans, even when the sack has been opened for you. Consider, mon ami, think, cogitate and reflect on what we have witnessed this night. Recall the details of the young lady's story, if you please.
"Does not her experience point to a great, a marvelously organized criminal band as plainly as a road map indicates the motorist's route? I think yes. Alone and friendless in a strange city, she meets a woman who claims to come from her own country—after she has been told first what that country is. Is that only happen-so? I think no. The girl must have let slip the information that she has access to her master's safe and checkbook, and so she was deemed fitting prey for this criminal gang. Does not every step of her path of misfortune mark the trail these wicked ones followed to bring her to a state of desperation where she would be ready to commit larceny?
"What of the supposed demon who accosted her in the park tonight? She thought he was one, but I saw three men rise up from behind shrubbery and address her. I, too, saw their faces shine with fire, but it was not the fire of flame, as she believed. Mais non, did I not say it was like the light given off by rotting carcasses? What then? The answer is simple. Me, I believe these three men who seemed but one to her, wore false beards and eyebrows—masks, perhaps—which were smeared with some sort of luminous paint, the better to simulate the popular conception of the Devil and terrify a girl already half insane with terror.
"Very well, let us proceed another step. The big young man who came upon us so suddenly, the man who claimed to know her and would have borne her off had I not argued with him with the heel of the boot — did he, too, not speak with the accent of the German tongue, even as she does? Surely. Beyond doubt, my friend, he was one of the three men with fiery faces who had addressed her a moment before, and who sought to take her from us when he thought we would rescue her.
"Another thing: I have noted the manners and customs of many men in many places, and I know the charms they employ against evil. 'What of that?' you ask. 'This,' I reply: 'Never does the American or Englishman make the sign of the horns to ward off the evil eye. That is distinctly a continental European custom.' Therefore, when I hear the negro nurse made the horns at Mademoiselle Mueller in the park I smell a fish in her story. Wherever that black woman—undoubtlessly herself an American—learned that sign, she did not learn it from an American. An American seeing her make that sign would have understood nothing from it; but Mademoiselle Mueller is no American. She is fresh from Europe, where that sign means something, and she understood what the negress meant when she made the horns at her—as it was intended she should."
"Well," I replied, "what’s your theory, then?"
"Simply this: The child who fled from Mademoiselle Mueller, the negro nurse who made the evil sign at her, the people who passed her in the street and turned away—all had been planted in her path for the purpose of wearing down her resistance, of obtaining her goat, as you Americans say. But listen: They demanded of her only two thousand dollars. Why? Because they thought she could get no more. Yet so elaborate a system as theirs surely would not have been organized for the tiny sum they demanded. No, men do not take elephant guns into the fields to hunt butterflies. This poor girl is but one of many victims these rogues have preyed upon. The Stoeger woman is one of their scouts who happened to fall upon her, but they must have imposed on many other foolish women—men, too, undoubtlessly, and therefore" He paused, his lips parted in an expectant grin, his little eyes gleaming with excitement and elation.
"All right; I’ll bite," I replied. "Therefore"
"Attend me, my friend," he replied irrelevantly; "have you ever been in India?"
"No!"
"Very good. I will tell you things. In that land the natives are much plagued by tigers, is it not so?"
"So I've heard."
"Parfaitement. When the white man comes to rid a community of the striped devil of the jungle, what does he do?"
"Do?"
"But of course! He climbs into a convenient tree and waits, does he not, and beneath the tree, for bait, he tethers a luckless goat, is it not so?"
"Why"
"Very good, my friend. You and I are the hunters. This gang of miscreants are the tigers. The unfortunate Mademoiselle Mueller is"
"Good heavens, man!" I exclaimed, the full purport of his scheme dawning on me. "You don't mean"
"But certainly," he nodded with perfect aplomb, "she is the goat who lures the tigers within range of our guns."
His small, even teeth came together with a sharp, decided click. "Come, my friend," he bade as we drew up before my house, "let us to bed. We shall have need of a good night's sleep, for tomorrow—parbleu, I damn think we shall have much good sport before we take the pelts from off these two-legged tigers!"
3
A negro dwarf, whose excessively ugly features were rendered still less prepossessing by deep smallpox pits, opened the stained-glass-and-walnut door of the big house in Tecumseh Street where we called with Fraulein Mueller about 4 o'clock the following afternoon.
"Have you an appointment with the Sibyl?" he asked arrogantly as he ushered us into the rug-strewn hall and paused before a heavily curtained doorway.
"La, la," de Grandin murmured wonderingly, "is she then a dentist or physician that one must arrange beforehand to consult her? We have no appointment, my friend; nevertheless, you will inform her that we desire to see her, and without unnecessary delay."
The undersized servitor blinked in amazement. Callers on Madame Laïla were wont to arrive in humble mien, apparently, and the little Frenchman's high-handed manner was a distinct novelty.
"Perhaps the Seeress will consent to see you, even though it's usual to arrange for a sitting beforehand," he replied in a slightly more cordial tone, presenting de Grandin with a pencil and pad of paper. "Kindly write your name on this tablet," he requested, then, as the Frenchman complied: "Tear the sheet off and put it in your pocket. It is not necessary for the Sibyl to see it in order to know your name; we only ask that you write it as a guaranty of good faith. Await me here; I will see if you can be admitted."
We had not long to wait, for the attendant returned almost before the curtains through which he had vanished had ceased to sway, and bowed formally to us. "The Sibyl will see you, Dr. de Grandin," he announced, holding the draperies aside.
I gave a slight start as my companion was addressed by name, for I had seen him stow the folded sheet of paper on which he had scribbled his signature in his waistcoat pocket.
"Laïla the Seeress sees all and knows all," the black dwarf informed me, as though reading my mind. "There are no secrets from her. This way, if you please."
The room we entered was hung with unrelieved black and lighted only by a lamp with three burners suspended from the ceiling by a bronze chain. Slightly beyond the center of the apartment sat a young woman garbed in a long, loose robe of some clinging black stuff with a headdress resembling a nun's wimple of the same sable hue. Her face denoted she was about twenty-five or twenty-six years old, though, contrary to the usual feminine custom, she appeared anxious to seem older. Her long, excessively thin arms were bare, as were her neck and feet, and the contrast of her pale flesh and black draperies in the room was an eery one. About her waist was a wide belt of shining black leather clasped with a garnet fastening which flashed fitfully in the chamber's half-light. In one hand she held a three-foot wand tipped with an ivory hand with outspread fingers, and she was seated on a sort of three-legged stool roughly resembling an ancient Greek tripod. From a brazen censer standing on the floor before her emanated penetrating, acrid odors, while the charcoal fire in the incense pot glowed and sank to dullness alternately as though blown upon by a bellows, though no instrument from which a draft could come was visible.
"What seek ye here, oh man?" she demanded in a hollow, sepulchral voice, fixing her deep-set eyes on de Grandin.
The little Frenchman bowed with continental courtesy. "Madame," he explained, "we have learned this unfortunate young lady's plight and have determined to aid her. The sum of two thousand dollars is required in order to save her the pain and humiliation of a most terrifying ordeal, and this sum we are prepared to advance, provided, of course, you can offer proper guaranty"
"Thy money perish with thee!" rejoined the Seeress furiously, half rising from her tripod; then, as though relenting: "Stay, power over the spirits have I none, but I can direct thee to one whose power is infinite.
"Woman," her glowing, cavernous orbs bored into the frightened blue eyes of the little Austrian girl, "if thou wouldst be freed from the demon who dominates thee, be at this house at precisely 7 o'clock this evening. Come alone and bring the money with thee, and—perhaps—Martulus the Mighty will consent to have thee exorcised by proxy. I can promise thee naught, but what I can do, I will. Wilt thou come?"
"Ach, ja, ja!" Fraulein Mueller sobbed hysterically, clutching at the Sibyl's black raiment. But the Seeress had risen from her stool and stalked majestically from the room, leaving us bewildered and alone.
"Mort d'une sèche," de Grandin chuckled as we re-entered my study and regarded each other across the table, "but the entertainment they furnish at Madame Laïla's is worthy of the Odeon! Behold how they assault the superstitions of the caller at the very front door with their trick of name-reading. Parbleu, but it is droll!"
"It seemed mysterious enough to me," I admitted. "Do you know how it was done?"
"Tiens, my friend, am I a little, wondering boy to be mystified by the trickery of a fire-eater?" he returned with a grin. "But certainly, it was the simplest of tricks. The top sheet of the tablet whereon I wrote my name was almost as thin as tissue paper and the pencil was so hard I had to bear down heavily in order to leave any mark at all. The second sheet of paper was coated with a thin layer of wax, and when the colored man took the tablet inside with him they simply dusted lampblack over it, then blew it off and read what I had written where the blacking remained in the pencil's impression in the wax. It is very simple."
"Well!" I exclaimed in astonishment. "What made the charcoal brazier glow and subside"
"Enough!" he interrupted. "We have more to do than explain the cheap wonders of a cheap fortune-teller's establishment this afternoon, my friend. Do you go for a walk, a nap or a game of solitaire. Me, I have much to do between now and 7 o'clock. Be sure to have your car ready and waiting at the corner of Tecumseh and Irvine Streets at fifty minutes after 6, if you please. I go to perform important duties." And, lighting a cigarette, he picked up his hat and cane and set off for the corner pharmacy humming a snatch of sentimental tune:
Le souvenir, présent céleste,
Ombre des biens que l'on n'a plus,
Est encore un plaisir qui reste,
Après tou ceux qu'on a perdus."
4
From the shelter of a convenient areaway de Grandin and I watched the door of Laïla's house as the city hall clock boomed out the hour of 7.
Falteringly, plainly in a state bordering on collapse, but more afraid of turning back than of unknown dangers before her, Fraulein Mueller mounted the mansion's wide stone steps and rang the doorbell timidly.
As soon as the black dwarf had admitted her, de Grandin leaped up the area steps and hastened across the street to the big, black limousine parked before Laïla's door. For a moment he fumbled about the car's gas tank, then sped back to where I waited and riveted his gaze on the portal through which Fraulein Mueller had vanished.
We had not long to wait. Almost before the Frenchman had regained his ambush, the big door swung open and Laïla and the little Austrian girl emerged, descended the curving stairs and entered the waiting limousine. There was a buzzing, irritable hum of the self-starter, the spiteful swish of the powerful motor going into action; then, with a low, steady hum, the car glided from the curb and shot down the street with surprizing speed.
"Quick, Friend Trowbridge," de Grandin urged, seizing me by the hand and dragging me to the street, "to your car. Haste! We must follow them!"
I gazed after the fleeing motor and shook my head. "Not a chance," I declared. "They're doing better than thirty miles an hour now, and gathering speed all the time. We'd never be able to keep their trail with my little rattletrap."
"My friend," he replied, piloting me across the street and fairly shoving me into my car, "Jules de Grandin is no fool. Think you he slept away his time this afternoon? Regardez-vous!" With a dramatic gesture he pointed to the roadway before us.
I blinked my eyes in astonishment, then grinned in appreciation of his strategy. In the wake of the speeding limousine there shone a faint but unmistakable trail of luminous dots against the cement pavement. Now I understood what he had been doing at the other car's tail during the interval between Fraulein Mueller's entrance and Laïla's exit. Firmly attached to the limousine's gas tank was a small can of luminous paint, a small hole pierced in its bottom permitting its telltale contents to leak out, a drop at a time, at intervals which spattered the roadway with glowing trail-markers every thirty or forty feet.
Through the city, over country roads, up hill and down, over viaducts, across stretches of low-lying marshes, through wide, wooded areas and between long, undulating stretches of fields ripe for harvesting, the chase continued. The mileage dial on my dashboard registered forty-five, sixty, sixty-five miles before the car ahead swerved sharply from the highway, shot down a private lane, and entered the high, iron-grilled gateway of a walled estate.
"Eh bien," remarked de Grandin, "here we are, of a surety, but where is it we are?" Parking our ear behind a convenient copse of second-growth pines, we stole forward to reconnoiter the enemy's position. Our progress was barred by the tall iron gates which had been securely locked behind our quarry. Through the grillework of the barrier we could descry tall evergreens bowing and whispering with cemeterylike somberness on each side of a wide, curving driveway, and between their ranks we caught momentary glimpses of the ivy-covered walls and white porch pillars of a large Colonial-type residence.
De Grandin gave the gate-handle a tentative shake, confirming our suspicion that it was firmly secured. "It would be wiser not to attempt scaling these bars, Friend Trowbridge," he decided after an inspection of the iron uprights composing the grille; "the visibility would be too high, and I have no wish to stop, or even to impede, a bullet. Let us see what opportunities the walls afford." We drew back from the entrance and walked softly along the strip of grass bordering the wall's base, seeking a favorable location for swarming up.
"Why not here?" the Frenchman suggested, halting at a spot where the ivy grew thicker than elsewhere. "I will go first, do you keep a sharp lookout to the rear." Pulling his jacket sleeves upward with a quick, nervous jerk, he laid hold of the clinging vines, braced his feet against the bricks and prepared to swing himself upward, then paused abruptly, casting a hasty glance over his shoulder.
"Quick, Friend Trowbridge, to cover!" he urged, suiting action to his warning and dragging me to the shelter of a near-by bush. "We are observed!"
Hand on pistol, he crouched alertly while the light, barely audible step of someone advancing through the thicket sounded nearer and nearer on the carpet of early fall leaves lying on the ground about the tree-roots.
"Dieu de Dieu!" he exclaimed with a noiseless chuckle as the stranger emerged from the thicket. "A pussy!" A big, black-and-white tom-cat, returning from an evening's hunting or love-making, strode forth from the undergrowth, tail waving proudly in air, inquisitive green eyes looking now here, now there. The creature paused a moment at the wall's base, gathered itself for a spring, then leaped upward with feline grace, catching the clustering ivy strands with gripping, claw-spiked feet, and lifted itself daintily to the wall-top, poising momentarily before making the downward jump to the yard beyond.
De Grandin stepped from his hiding-place and prepared to follow the cat's lead, but started back with an exclamation of dismay as the brute suddenly emitted an ear-piercing yowl of fear and agony, rose like a bouncing ball, every hair on its body stiffly erect, then catapulted like a hurled missile to the earth at our feet, where it lay twitching and quivering.
"Sacré sang d'un païen!" the Frenchman murmured, creeping forward and examining the rigid feline by the light of his electric torch. It was stone-dead, yet nowhere was there sign or trace of any wound or violence. "U'm," he commented, reaching out a tentative hand to stroke the dead animal's fur, then: "Par la barbe d'un petit bonhomme!" The hair was still bristling from the creature's hide, and as the Frenchman's fingers slipped over it a sharp, crackling sound, accompanied by tiny sparkling flashes, followed them.
"Ah? I wonder? Probably it is," he declared. Turning on his heel he hastened to the place where our car lay hidden, rummaged under the seat a moment, and dragged out the rubber storm-curtains. "Mordieu, my friend," he informed me with one of his elfish grins as he dragged the curtains through the underbrush, "never could I work one of those tops of the one man, but I think me these curtains come in handy for this, if for nothing else."
Once more bracing his feet against the wall, he drew himself up by the strong ivy, hung a moment by one hand while with the other he tossed the rubberized cloth across the top of the wall, then hoisted himself slowly, taking care to let his fingers come in contact with nothing not covered by the auto curtains.
"Up, Friend Trowbridge!" he extended his hand to me and drew me beside him, but: "Have a care, keep upon the curtains, for your life!" he commanded as I gained the wall's top, then played the beam of his pocket flash along the bricks beside us. Running along the wall-top were four parallel wires, each supported at intervals of twenty feet or so by little porcelain insulators. But for the warning we received when the cat was killed, and de Grandin's fore-thought in fetching the rubber curtains, we should surely have been electrocuted the moment we scaled the wall, for the wires were so spaced that contact with at least one of them could not possibly be avoided by anyone attempting to scramble across the
Taking advantage of the ample shelter afforded by the great trees, we stole across the wide lawn and brought up at the house without incident. Nowhere was there any trace of occupancy, for all the windows were darkened, and, save for the night wind soughing through the towering evergreens, the place lay wrapped in graveyard silence. By a side door we found the big black ear which had brought Laïla and Fräulein Mueller. Working rapidly, de Grandin unfastened the twisted wires with which the can of luminous paint was attached to the gas tank and tossed the nearly empty tin into an adjacent flower bed. This done, he considered the big machine speculatively a moment, then grinned like a mischievous boy about to perpetrate a prank. "Why not, pour l'amour de Dieu?" he demanded with a chuckle as he drew a wicked-looking case knife from his pocket and made four or five incisions in each of the vehicle's balloon tires close to the rims. As the air fled hissing from the punctured tubes he turned away with a satisfied laugh. "Nom d'un canard, but they shall blaspheme most horribly when they discover what I have done," he assured me as we continued our circuit of the house.
The tenants evidently placed implicit faith in their electrified wall, for there seemed no attempt to bar ingress, once the intruder had managed to pass the silent sentries on the wall-top. An unlatched window at the front of the building invited us to push our explorations farther, and a moment later we had let ourselves in, and, guided by cautious flashes from de Grandin's pocket light, were creeping down a wide central hall.
"Now, my friend," de Grandin whispered, "I wonder much which way leads to—s-s-sh!" he paused abruptly as a quick, nervous step sounded at the hall's farther end.
There was no time to reconnoiter the position, for the beam of our flashlight would surely betray our presence. Some four paces back we had passed a doorway, and, shutting off his light, de Grandin wheeled in his tracks, grasped my arm and dragged me toward it with all speed.
Fortunately the lock was unfastened and the knob turned soundlessly in his hand. Grasping his revolver, he took a deep breath, motioned me to silence, swung the door back and stepped softly into the room.
5
Darkness, black and impenetrable as a curtain of sable velvet, closed about us as we crossed the threshold. Dared we flash our light? Was there anyone hidden behind that veil of gloom, ready to pounce on us the moment we disclosed our position? We rested a moment, silently debating our next move, when:
"Doctor—Dr. Martulus"—a weak feminine voice quavered from the room's farther end—"I'll sign the paper. I'll go through the ordeal, only, for pity's sake, let me out. Don't let him visit me again. Oh, o-o-o-oh, I'll go insane if he comes again. Truly, I will!"
"Eh, what is this?" de Grandin demanded sharply, taking a hasty step forward in the dark, then pressing the switch of his flashlight. "Cordieu—pardonnez-moi, Madame!" He shut the light off abruptly, but in its momentary beam we had beheld a sight which brought a gasp of astonishment to our lips. Tethered to the wall by a heavy chain and metal collar locked round her scrawny neck, nude save for a pair of broken felt house-slippers and a tattered and much soiled chemise, thin to the point of emaciation, a woman crouched sobbing and whimpering on the floor. She was no longer young, and almost certainly she had never been lovely, but her voice, for all its burden of misery and terror, was low-pitched and cultured, and her pronunciation that of a person of refinement.
"Your pardon, Madame!" de Grandin repeated, taking another step toward the wretched captive. "We did not know you were here. We"
"Who are you?"
"Eh?"
"Aren't—aren't you Dr. Martulus? Oh, if you aren't, please, please take me away from this dreadful place! They’ve chained me to the wall here like a mad dog, and”
"Pardon me, Madame," de Grandin interrupted, "but who are you?"
"Amelia Mytinger."
"Teeth of the Devil! Not the Mademoiselle Mytinger who disappeared from her home a month ago, and"
"Yes; I am she. A woman called Laïla the Seeress brought me here one night—I don't know how long ago it was. She told me I was possessed of a devil, and Dr. Martulus could cure me—I'd been suffering terribly from rheumatism and the doctors hadn't been able to help me much—and she said it was an evil spirit which plagued me. When they got me here they told me it was Mephistopheles himself who possessed me, and that I'd have to undergo a terrible ordeal by fire if I were ever to be rid of him. I could have hired a substitute, but she wanted ten thousand dollars, and I refused to pay it. I told them I'd undergo the ordeal myself, and they said I must sign a paper releasing them from all legal liability for possible injury I might suffer before they'd permit me to do it. When they brought the paper they wouldn't let me read it or even see any part of it except the space reserved for my signature, so"
"Ah, ha," de Grandin muttered aside to me, "do you, too, not begin to sniff the odor of deceased fish in this business, Friend Trowbridge?"
"But they wouldn't let me go," the woman hurried on, ignoring his comment. "They said I was possessed of a devil and would bring terrible misfortune to everyone I met, so they took away my clothes and chained me here in this terrible place. I've never seen anyone from that night to this except Dr. Martulus, who comes once a day to feed me and ask if I've changed my mind about signing the paper, and"
"'And'," de Grandin quoted irritably, "and what, if you please, Mademoiselle?"
"And the Devil!"
"Queue d'un sacre singe! The which?" he demanded.
"The Devil, I tell you. I never believed in a personal Devil before, but I do, now. Every night he comes to torture me. I see his horrible face shining through the dark and feel his awful claw touch me, and it burns like a white-hot iron. Oh, I'll go mad, if I haven't done so already!" She gasped laboringly for breath, then, as if a thought had suddenly struck her: "You mentioned my having disappeared—I didn't tell anybody I was going to Laïla's that night, I was ashamed to have it known I'd consulted a fortune-teller—but you said I'd been missed. Do the police know about me? Are you from headquarters, by any chance. Will you save me? Oh, please, please take me away. I'm wealthy, I'll pay you anything you ask if only"
"One moment, Mademoiselle," de Grandin cut off her torrential speech. "I desire to think."
He remained immersed in thought a moment, then murmured softly, as though meditating aloud: "Parbleu, I see it all, now! As usual, Jules de Grandin was right. This is a gigantic conspiracy—a sort of Mephistopheles and Company, Limited. Yes, pardieu, limited only by these villains' capacity to invent devilish tricks to defraud defenseless women. Mordieu, this is infamous, this is monstrous, this must not be permitted! Me, I shall"
His voice shut off abruptly, like a suddenly tuned-out radio, for a sharp click sounded from the doorway and something faintly luminous was shining face-high through the dark.
Nearer, nearer the fiery thing floated, and we were able to make out the lineaments of a long, thin, evil face; a face with spiked beard and pointed mustaches, with uprearing pointed eyebrows and crooked goat's horns growing from its forehead. That was all—no body, no neck—just the leering, demoniacal face floating forward through the blackness, its hideous, fire-outlined eyes gleaming with diabolical amusement as it neared the whimpering, cowering woman in the corner.
"O-o-o-h!" wailed the terrified spinster as she cringed against the wall and the grinning, Satanic face bent above her.
"Ugh!" A short, surprized grunt answered her outcry, and the fiery face dropped downward through the dark like a burnt-out rocket falling
"Behold Satan's assistant, mon ami," de Grandin commanded, a note of fierce elation in his whisper as he switched the beam of his pocket flash on the prostrate form at our feet.
A tall, broad-shouldered man, his face made up in imitation of the popular conception of the Devil, lay sprawled on the floor within the circle of the flashlight's glow. A long gash, bleeding freely, told where the blue steel barrel of de Grandin's heavy service revolver had struck as the Frenchman lashed the weapon downward through the dark with unerring aim and devastating force.
"Eh bien, my friend, we have met again, it seems," de Grandin remarked as he snatched away the makeup from the fellow's face and surveyed his features in the electric light. I started with surprize as I gazed into the unconscious one's countenance. He was the man who had demanded he be allowed to take Fräulein Mueller from us when we rescued her in the park.
As the flashlight switched off momentarily, the mock devil's beard and mustache became alive with glowing, smoking fire. Instantly I realized de Grandin's surmise had been correct. Phosphorus, or some kind of luminous paint, had been employed to make the faces of the men accosting the little Austrian girl glow as though aflame when they met her in the dark, and the same device had been used here to torture Miss Mytinger.
A further explanation lay at our feet, too, for beside the unconscious man's hand we found a queer-looking instrument. A moment's examination proved it to be something like an oversized flashlight, only, instead of a lamp, its tip was fitted with a metal plate on which the design of a devil's face surmounted by a reversed crucifix was soldered. As de Grandin pressed the switch actuating the contrivance we saw the design suddenly glow red-hot. To all intents the filing was a branding-iron which would burn its device on the flesh of anyone with whom it came in contact The mystery of Fräulein Mueller's disfigurement was solved. This, too, explained what Miss Mytinger meant when she spoke of Satan's "awful claw which burned like a white-hot iron" touching her during the diabolical visitations.
"Bête—cochon!" de Grandin muttered, turning the man over with a none too gentle foot. "Let us see what we can find upon his so filthy carcass." A hasty examination of the fellow's pockets disclosed a shortbladed dirk knife, a neat, business-like blackjack and a bunch of small keys. One of these fitted the lock of Miss Mytinger's iron collar, and de Grandin forthwith transferred the fetter from her neck to that of her late tormentor.
"Let us go," he admonished, as he stowed the loot from his fallen foeman's pockets in his own. "Thus far the luck has been with us, but he who tries heaven's patience too far ofttimes comes to grief." Stepping carefully, we crept from the darkened room into the dimly lighted hall.
6
"Have the care, Friend Trowbridge," de Grandin warned as we started cautiously down the corridor, "a loose board may betray us, for—ha?"
Not fifteen feet ahead of us a door swung suddenly open and the menacing figure of a tall, black-bearded man stepped toward us. He was clad in a flame-colored robe on which was printed in black the figure of a prancing devil. A sort of diadem from which curving horns rose above his forehead gave his lean, cadaverous countenance a look of supernatural evil, and the wicked, sneering smile on his bony features completed the unpleasant picture.
Miss Mytinger gave a high-pitched squeal of terror. "Dr. Martulus!" she cried. "Oh, we're lost; he'll never let us go!"
De Grandin faced the other defiantly, his teeth bared in a grimace which was more a snarl than a grin. "We take this lady from out your damned, execrable house, Monsieur le Diable," he announced truculently. "Have the goodness to stand aside, or"
"Nelzyá!" the other retorted, raising a small Mauser automatic from the folds of his red robe.
"Ha! 'It can not be done,' do you say?" the Frenchman inquired sarcastically, and let drive with his heavy revolver, firing from the hip.
Too late he discovered his error. A crash of tinkling, shivering glass sounded, and the vision of the man in red dissolved before our eyes like a scene on a motion-picture screen when the film is melted in an over-heated projector. A full-length mirror had been moved into the hall since we came through, and the man we had supposed before us was really at our back. De Grandin had been parleying with the fellow's reflection and—irony of ironies!—fired pointblank into the mirror, smashing it into a hundred fragments, but injuring his opponent not at all.
Like the echo of de Grandin's shot sounded the spiteful, whiplike report of the other's weapon. Jules de Grandin clapped his left hand to his right shoulder and dropped like an overturned sack of meal to the polished floor.
Two more figures joined the red-robed man. One of them burst into a roar of laughter. "Ach, dot vas a goot vun!" he chuckled. "He vas daking der lady from der house oudt, vas he? Now, berhabs, ve dake her back und gift her some more dime to dink ofer vedder she vill der baber sign or not. No?"
"No!—Nom d'un porc—NO!" de Grandin echoed, rolling over and rising on his elbow. The chuckling German swayed drunkenly in his tracks a moment, then crashed face downward to the floor, and his red-robed companion fell across him in a heap of crumpled crimson draperies a split-second later as de Grandin's revolver bellowed a second time. The third man turned with a squeal of dismay and leaped half-way through the open door, then stumbled over nothing and slid forward on his face as a soft-nosed bullet cut his spinal cord in two six inches below his collar.
"See to Mademoiselle Mytinger, Friend Trowbridge!" de Grandin flung over his shoulder as, pistol in hand, he charged toward the doorway where his late antagonists lay. "Take her outside, I will join you anon!"
"Where are you going?” I objected. The thought of being separated in this uncanny house terrified me.
"Outside—cornes et peau du diable!—outside with you!" he shouted in answer. "Me, I go to find Mademoiselle Mueller and a certain souvenir."
7
The big front door was barred and double-locked. I swung to the right, traversed the room through which we had entered and hoisted the unlatched window a few inches higher. "This way, please," I told Miss Mytinger, pointing to the opening, "it's only a few feet to the ground."
She clambered over the sill and dropped to the soft turf below, and, after a futile look around for my friend, I lowered myself beside her.
"Quick, Friend Trowbridge," de Grandin's sharp whisper commanded even as my feet touched the grass. "This way—they come!"
His warning was none too early. Even as he grasped my arm and swung me into the shadow of a towering cedar, six men charged around the comer of the house, weapons in their hands and looks of fierce malignancy on their faces.
"Sa-ha!" de Grandin raised his revolver and fired, and the foremost of our assailants clapped his hand to his side, whirled half-way round, like a piroutting ballet-dancer, reeled suddenly to the left and slumped to the ground in an awkward heap. The man immediately behind stumbled over the fallen one's legs and fell forward with a guttural curse. De Grandin pressed the trigger again, but only a harmless click responded. The cylinder was empty, and five armed men faced us across a stretch of turf less than twenty feet wide.
Half turning, the Frenchman hurled his empty weapon with terrific force into the face of the nearest ruffian, who dropped with a scream, blood spurting from his nose and mouth, and grasped my elbow again. "This way, my friend!" he cried, seizing the Mytinger woman's arm with his free hand and rushing across the shaded lawn toward the narrow beach where the waters of Barnegat Bay lapped softly against the sand.
"Where's Fräulein Mueller?" I panted, striving to keep pace with
"Yonder!" he answered, and as he spoke a dark form detached itself from the shadow of a towering tree and joined us in flight.
Shouts and shots echoed among the evergreens behind us, but the short start we secured when the second man fell under the impact of de Grandin's hurled weapon enabled us to keep our lead, and, dodging among the shadows, we made steadily and swiftly toward the water.
"It's no use," Miss Mytinger informed us as the cool edges of the little wavelets moistened our feet and we swung toward the south, intent on rounding the edge of the walls surrounding the grounds on the landward side and doubling back to my car. "It's no use. The beach is full of quicksand. I heard them talking about it the night I came here. One of their cows wandered down to eat the sea-grass and was sucked under before they could save her."
"On, my friend!" de Grandin answered through clenched teeth, for the strain was beginning to tell on him. "Better to perish in the quicksands than fall prey to those assassins."
We dashed along the waterline, heading for the beach beyond the wall, and a chorus of triumphant shouts followed us. Our pursuers had noted our course and made certain we rushed to our doom.
"Parbleu, what a chase!" de Grandin laughed pantingly, suddenly dropping to the sands and unfastening the lacings of his shoes.
"Yes, and it's not over yet," I reminded him. "They'll be on us in a moment. What's the idea—going paddling?"
"Observe me, my friend," he replied as he drew off his pale mauve socks and took shoes and stockings in hand, running barefoot ahead of us across the sands. "Follow where I lead." He advanced along the beach with long, swinging strides like those of a Canadian voyageur sweeping over a winter drift on his snow-shoes. "Jules de Grandin has been in many places," he flung back over his shoulder, "and one of them was the coast of Japan, where quicksands are thick as pickpockets at a fair. There it was I learned the ways of quicksand from the peasant fishermen. Like all other sand it looks, nor does it quake or tremble until it has its victim fast in its hold, but always it is colder than the sands about it, and the knowing one walking barefoot on the beach can feel its death-chilled borders before it is too late to draw back.
"Careful—to the right, my friends!" Gracefully, sliding one foot behind the other, like a dancer crossing a stage, he swerved inward from the water's edge, finally pausing a moment to feel the ground before him with a tentative toe. "Très bon—proceed. The quicksands reach no farther here," he announced, stepping forward with a confident stride.
Following his careful lead we proceeded the better part of a hundred yards when a sudden outcry behind us made me look round apprehensively. Infuriated by the sight of our escape, and assuming that because we had not perished the beach was safe for them, four of our enemies were rushing pellmell after us, the starlight glinting evilly on the weapons brandished over their heads.
"Hurry, de Grandin!" I urged. "They'll be up with us in a moment!"
"Will they, indeed?" he replied with cool indifference, seating himself on the soft sand and beginning to don his socks and shoes in a leisurely manner. "When they reach us, my friend, I shall be ready for them, I assure you."
"But," I remonstrated, "but—good Lord, man!—here they come!"
"Yes?" he answered, lighting a cigarette. "If you will trouble to look round, I think you will say 'there they go'."
Looking down the beach I saw the four pursuers hurrying forward, running four abreast, like a squad of soldiers going into action.
Suddenly the man to the left stumbled awkwardly, like a person descending a flight of stairs and coming to the end before he was aware of it. He faltered, raised his forward foot, as though feeling for support where there was none, and grasped the man next him.
The second man staggered drunkenly in the frenzied hold of his companion, floundered bewilderedly a moment—all four of them were doing a clumsy, grotesque dance, reeling from side to side, swaying back and forth, raising their arms spasmodically as though grasping at non-existent ropes dangling before them. But oddly, they seemed shrinking in stature, growing shorter and shorter, like inflated manikins from which the air is slowly escaping. They were melting, melting like bits of grease thrown into a heated frying-pan.
I shuddered in spite of myself. Even though they were conscienceless minions of a conscienceless master, stealers and torturers of defenseless women, I could not repress a feeling of nausea as the last of the four heads sank like a corkless bottle flung into a stream. A jet of sandy spray shot up from the level beach, a hand, opening and closing in a paroxysm of terror and despair, rose above the rippling sands, then all was still. The pale stars blinked unconcernedly down upon the bare stretch of smooth, unruffled beach and lapping, whispering water.
"Tiens, my friends," de Grandin flung away his cigarette and rose; "that appears to be that. Come, let us go."
"I can understand your wanting to rescue Fräulein Mueller, de Grandin," I remarked as we started on our homeward journey with the two women snugly stowed in the rear seat of my car, "but what was that remark you made about getting a souvenir when you left me in the hall?"
The little Frenchman's small white teeth gleamed under the line of his sharply waxed mustache as an elfish smile spread across his face. "Friend Trowbridge," he confided, "I have visited many interesting places in your so interesting country, but never yet have I lodged in a jail, nor am I wishful to do so. Think you I risked good money when I entrusted Mademoiselle Mueller to those villains' care? Not I. I did procure two thousand dollars in counterfeit bills with which she was to pay the wretches, and faithfully did I promise to return those notes to the police museum when I should have finished with them. It was to make good that promise that I left you in the hall."
"And Fräulein Mueller—had they released her when you found her?" I asked.
He suppressed a yawn. "Not quite," he returned. "They had her bound in a chair, and the lady called Laïla was standing guard over her with a wicked-looking knife when I entered. My friend, I greatly dislike manhandling a woman, but ladies who wish not to be mauled should not attempt to stick knives in Jules de Grandin. I fear I was forced to be less than entirely gentlemanly before I succeeded in releasing Mademoiselle Mueller and binding Laïla in the chair in her place. Eh bien, I tied her no tighter than was necessary to keep her in place until the police call for her."
"And?"
"More speed and less conversation, if you please, my friend," he interrupted. "Your house is yet a long distance away, and there is nothing to drink this side of your so adorable cellar. Come, as you Americans say, stand hard upon the gas."
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