The Thrill Book Sampler Read online

  I stood rooted to the spot, torn by conflicting emotions. She was a woman, an elderly woman, and I should have gone to her assistance. She was a woman—but perhaps her hands had been stained in the blood of my dearest friend! I stood coldly aloof, awaiting events.

  It was her husband who lifted her from the ground, shooting a vindictive glance at me as he bent over her. I could see that he had been suffering mentally; yet I felt nothing but fierce pleasure at the sight. He was a murderer, and it was meet that he should experience mental torture until such time as he suffered the legal punishment that was his just due.

  He carried the limp form into the house and laid her down on a horsehair sofa in the front room. I followed him. The chill of that room penetrated my bones with a horrid suggestion of what had taken place there so short a time ago. He turned upon me with a sudden bracing of his shoulders and a tossing back of his head that reminded me against my will of a gallant stag driven at bay.

  “Well, what do you want?” he asked, with such hopelessness in his tones that I could have felt pity for him in his plight had I not steeled my heart for what I had to do.

  “I want to ask you a few more questions about the—the manner of my friend’s death,” I replied tensely, bending a piercing gaze upon him.

  He took an involuntary step backward against the sofa where lay the unconscious partner of his guilt. The movement displaced a crudely decorated sofa pillow, one of two propped against either arm of the sofa. It slipped, and would have gone to the floor had he not thrown himself upon it with a desperate effort that seemed out of all proportion to the trifling incident.

  “Well,” he shot at me, but in an agitated manner, “what is it you want to know?”

  He remained before the sofa, his attitude that of one who hides a secret or protects something helpless. Flashing through my mind came the subconscious memory of a glint of white under the pillow. With a quick movement I sprang to the sofa, and although the farmer flung himself simultaneously against me he was too late. I pulled the cushion away with determined hand and disclosed—Jack Lindsay’s Panama hat!

  IV.

  I LOOKED at Grimstead with stern accusation.He regarded me with horror written large upon his weather-beaten countenance. His eyes were stricken; his shoulders, so courageously braced back a moment since in an assumption of innocence, sank in and stooped over. He was the very picture of confounded guilt.

  Stepping to the door, I hallooed to the constable, who clambered out, secured the horse, and came hurrying up the path. Wordlessly I pointed to the hanging head of the guilty man and to the Panama hat, crushed up against the arm of the sofa. The officer stood with dropped jaw and straining eyes.

  From the sofa came the moaning cry of the woman. “Tell them the truth, Pete! Oh, I told you it would have been better to have told it in the beginning! Such things are always found out.”

  The constable looked horror-stricken at me, and I looked triumphantly back at him. I had located the murderer when no one had so much as suspected a murder; I had vindicated my poor friend from the charge of suicide, under which his noble spirit had been unable to rest in peace.

  The woman’s voice went on weakly. “He came in here to get something to eat,” she wailed. “We gave him his lunch. When he got up to go he put his hands suddenly to his heart, opened his mouth as if he were going to speak, and then fell right down on the floor. He was dead! Oh, believe it or not, he was dead! We didn’t lay a hand on him. But he was dead, in our house, and we were afraid. We are poor. We were afraid of what people might think, because that very morning Pete plowed up the bag of coins he had lost thirty years ago. We wouldn’t dare spend it. We were afraid we’d be accused of killing and robbing!” Her voice rose in a shrieking crescendo of agony: “Oh, believe it or not, it is true—every word I’m telling you is God’s own truth!”

  Her husband threw himself down beside her,

  hiding his face in his toil-worn hands.

  “What did you do then?” I managed to ask, my head whirling.

  Grimstead lifted a defiant face. “I don’t suppose you will believe us,” he said shortly and without bitterness, “but what my wife says is quite true. After he dropped and we found he was dead, we talked it over. We were afraid of what people might think. We decided to carry his body away to a distance and say he had left here for a walk and had never returned. I wish now,” he added dejectedly, “that we had come out with the truth in the beginning. I suppose it looks worse for us now than it would’ve looked then.”

  The constable’s eyes questioned me appealingly.

  I touched the Panama hat. “And this?” I questioned.

  “It fell off when we were carrying him away,” said Grimstead dully. “We found it on the path when we came back, and we didn’t dare go out there with it, so we hid it here.”

  “Why didn’t you burn it?” queried the constable, astonished that this incriminating evidence should have been left in such a conspicuous hiding place.

  Grimstead shrugged his shoulders. “We weren’t guilty of anything. Why should we burn it? We never thought anyone would come looking here. We’d have given it up with the other things, only it might have looked queer if we’d had his hat.”

  He looked directly at my companion then. “Well, why don’t you arrest me?” he demanded.

  Again the constable and I exchanged glances. By common consent we stepped out of the chilling atmosphere of the room into the soft light of summer afternoon.

  “I must tell you,” said the constable, “that I remember hearing, when I was a young fellow, that Pete Grimstead had the money ready to pay off the mortgage on his farm and lost it somewhere as he was plowing his fields. Hunt as he might, he could never lay hands on it again. There’s never been anything against the Grimsteads, in all the time I can remember, except that they are poor and hard working, and that isn’t really a crime. Of course, sir, if you feel that you want to go further in the matter,” his voice died away, and his eyes questioned mine.

  I thought hard and fast. Perhaps, after all, my poor friend’s spirit had come to me not to bring murderers to justice, but merely to vindicate his own reputation, he who had always intended to fight it out to the end, he who had determined to become famous before death cut short his career. As I came to this conclusion I felt a lightness of heart that convinced me I had arrived at the correct significance of Jack’s manifestation.

  At the expression on my face the man drew a long sigh of relief.

  “I’m glad you aren’t going to pile up troubles for them.” He jerked his thumb toward the house. “I’m sure the story is just as they told it. Did your friend ever mention his having any heart trouble, now?”

  Into my mind flashed Doctor Wilmott’s words. “If he lives to be forty he will be a famous man,” he had said.

  As I recollected more or less distinctly, there had been a faint accentuation upon the word “lives.”

  “I believe they’ve told us the truth,” I said heartily, meeting the other man’s eyes frankly. “The only thing I want now is to have the record of suicide cleared up positively once and for all. I’m sure it can be done without implicating those poor unhappy people further.”

  The constable stepped to the door. “Better give me that hat,” he suggested, his cheerful, matter -of-fact voice affecting both the stricken man and his wife with sudden hope. “I’m sure you don’t want to be reminded of the affair any longer,” and he put out his hand for the Panama, which he passed on to me. Then he stretched out his right hand wordlessly to Grimstead.

  The farmer took it wonderingly, his expression incredulous. So much had he suffered from his own fears for weeks that he could hardly believe the matter entirely cleared up. Not so Mrs. Grimstead. With happy tears streaming down her cheeks, she said brokenly: “God bless you both for believing us!”

  The records in town were changed when the constable returned, so that my unfortunate friend was no longer charged with suicide; his death was entered as heart fai
lure. But no mention was made of the Grimsteads. The story they had given in the beginning stood in the records as true; only the constable, the coroner, and myself knew the real facts.

  Upon my return to my home city I satisfied myself that Doctor Wilmott had indeed accented the word “lives”; he had examined Jack, and had told him that only with the utmost care could he expect to live longer than five or six years and that even this time might be cut short without a moment’s notice.

  As for the haunted landscape, it hangs on the walls of my room, one of the best examples of my dead friend’s masterly art. There seems to be nothing mysterious about it now, for although I have often sat late, smoking, watching the half-closed shutters of the house, never again have I seen light streaming from the windows upon the pathway before the door.

  WHY is it, I wonder, that there must always be a rift in the lute, a fly in the ointment, a gnat in the ice-cream soda?

  Take Betty and me, for example. If I might be allowed to borrow a term from our Spiritualist friends, I would say that never were husband and wife more thoroughly en rapport than Betty and I. When I call down from the bathroom and ask her where in blazes her what-d’ye-call -it is she knows perfectly well that I’m inquiring of the whereabouts of her Crême Shalimah, with which I desire to anoint my newly shaven face. When Betty calls up from the living room and asks me to throw my thing-a-bob down to her I know, as well as if she had told me, that she wishes my pocketknife for the purpose of retipping the pencil from which she had just chewed the point. This far all is well with Betty and me.

  But the high gods, who are ever greenly jealous of human happiness, took an underhand method of revenge when they afflicted Betty and me with diverse tastes in things artistic. I have a partiality for etchings, pastels, and aquarelles—clean Western art—and everything savoring of the East, from teakwood to tea, is detestable to me. Betty dotes upon Oriental embroideries, bronzes, and carvings—and thereby hangs this tale.

  One bright afternoon last autumn, when the florists were beginning to display chrysanthemums in their windows, and the September haze hung over the hills in the country, Betty took me for a walk down the Avenue. Her cooing amiability ought to have warned me that she was hatching up some dire plot against my peace and happiness, but what married man can fathom the depths of his wife’s depravity? So, before I had time to rush madly to the nearest police station and demand protection, I found myself gently but firmly piloted through the yawning portal of a certain little shop where a soft-spoken, coffee-colored descendant of the Forty Thieves exchanges lacquered metal, embossed chinaware, and kindred junk for real money, and beheld my life partner standing rapt in mute admiration before the most horrible concoction of carven stone that ever offended the eyes of civilized man.

  In a very general way the thing resembled a human being. That is to say, it possessed the number of pectoral and pelvic limbs customarily enjoyed by man, and there the likeness stopped.

  Beneath a brow as shallow as an ape’s, and as sloping as a mansard roof, the creature’s agate eyes stared forth from above its bloated cheeks with a look of unutterable hate and fury. To right and left of its knoblike nose great tusks of shining ivory protruded from the painted lips, which writhed and twisted in a snarl of rage, and the talon hands it brandished above its head were armed with claws like those of some giant vulture. It was like a vision from a nightmare, a fiend from Dante’s Inferno and a djin from some Eastern horror tale rolled into one, and my wife stood there and looked at it as she had looked at me in the days of our honeymoon! “Isn’t he per-fect-ly adorable?” breathed Betty ecstatically.

  I regarded the hideous thing with a look of deepest loathing. “Now I know what the hymn means by ‘the heathen in his blindness,’” I commented as I turned my back squarely upon it.

  “Ye-es, sair,” volunteered the Mocha and Java-colored bandit who owned the shop, “eet ees a var-y rare piece of carving; eet ees the great god Fo, the ruler of the air. I var-y much doubt that there is another like it in the world.”

  “I hope you’re right,” I assured him. Then to Betty: “If you’re through admiring that monument to delirium tremens, we’ll be going.” And heedless of the thousand dollars’ worth of bric-a-brac which my flouncing coattails menaced I marched from the store, followed by a thoroughly indignant Betty.

  We walked the next sixty yards in stony silence; Betty in a white heat of fury which set her quivering from the backbone out; I in that not altogether unpleasant state of mind experienced while devising “cutting” remarks.

  I had composed the introduction to a beautiful little lecture by the time we had reached the corner, and was about to settle down to three hundred yards or so of enjoyable monologue when the opening words died on my tongue. Betty was crying, right on the Avenue, and at four o’clock in the afternoon!

  “I t-think you’re perfectly horrid,” she sobbed, as the big, pearly tears began to chase each other down her trembling cheeks. “You know how I w-wanted that lovely statuette, and you wouldn’t let me g-get it or anything, and I don’t believe you love me anymore, and—” The sentence ended in a wail, and, unlike Lot’s wife, who turned back and congealed into salt crystal, my wife looked despairingly back at the shop we had just quit and nearly dissolved in salt water.

  “Damn!” I muttered under my breath as a brightly painted woman cast a glance of commiseration at Betty, and her escort glared at me as if he would have liked to wring my neck. Aloud I said: “For the love of Michelangelo Casey, stop crying and we’ll go back and get the awful thing; but if we go to the poorhouse trying to pay for it, Betty Haig, don’t say I didn’t give you fair warning.”

  Betty’s tears evaporated before she could bring the absurd little dab of lace she calls her handkerchief into play. She pinioned my arm in both of hers and snuggled her cheek against my shoulder. “I just knew you’d buy it for me, Phil, old dear,” she gurgled. Of course she did. The world’s greatest clairvoyants could take lessons from Betty when it comes to reading my mind.

  Between the living room and dining room of our house is a narrow, nondescript sort of room which the real-estate agent called a reception hall and Betty calls her fernery. In it she keeps a wide variety of potted ferns, palms, and flowering plants, over which a man can stumble and break a leg with the minimum expenditure of time and effort. From one end of this little room the stairs which lead to our sleeping apartments curve upward; at the other extremity is a small stained-glass window letting out of a little bay. Against this window Betty set up the petrified horror from the Orient, where its evil sneer greeted me each morning as I descended to breakfast and its misshapen shadow fell across me every evening as I went in to dinner.

  For the first few days after the loathsome object was installed in its alcove I merely favored it with a disgusted frown as I passed; but my passive dislike hardened into an active detestation before it had been there three days.

  It was Chang’s encounter with the thing which made me realize how violent my hate for it was.

  Chang was Betty’s Siamese cat, and a more courageous grimalkin never walked the back fence by moonlight or gave battle to a wandering cur. I have seen him take on two rivals for his ladylove’s favor at once and put them both to ignominious flight; I have seen him charge full tilt against a bull terrier twice his weight and send him yelping off under a veritable barrage of saber-clawed blows and feline billingsgate; yet before the Eastern image all his valor melted into nothingness.

  I had paused before the statue one morning to pay it my profane respects, when Chang, who was very fond of me, came marching from the dining room to take his usual morning’s ear-rubbing constitutional around my ankles. Halfway round my legs he came face to face with the image’s leering mask, and stopped dead still in his tracks. The hairs of his tail and along his spine began to rise, his small ears flattened against his head, his mouth slowly opened in a noiseless “spit,” and his legs bent under him till the white fur on his underside touched the floor. For a lo
ng moment he regarded the statue with the fierce, silent glare which only an angry cat can give; then from the nethermost pit of his stomach came a low, rumbling growl, the defiant war cry of a cat about to close with a stronger foe. Slowly, as if stalking a bird, he crept, belly low to earth, toward the image’s base; then, with his black nose almost against the stone, he paused, looking up at its malignant face, and suddenly, as though shot from a crossbow, turned and bolted, yowling, up the stairs. I had never seen Chang turn tail on anything, living or dead, and the sight of his abject terror almost unnerved me. Why such a valiant warrior should fly from a piece of carved stone was more than I could understand. But Chang was wise; he, too, came from the East, and he knew.

  Next morning we found Chang lying dead at the creature’s stone feet, an ugly wound gaping from the blue-gray fur of his breast, and on the statue’s twisted lips and on its gleaming ivory tusks was a dull, brick-red stain, the stain that drying blood leaves.

  Betty wept inconsolably at the loss of her little pet, but she refused to blame the image for it. “Poor Chang hated it so he dashed himself against its face and was killed when he struck its teeth,” she explained between sobs.

  I picked up Chang’s little corpse and stroked its stiff gray fur gently. “He died like the knightly gentleman he was, defending his home against barbarian invasion,” I said, shaking my fist at the hideous face grinning into mine. “If you’ll listen to me, dear, you’ll have the beastly thing thrown out before it does more damage.”

  “Indeed we won’t!” Betty answered. “I’m sorry for poor Chang, but I won’t have my lovely idol thrown away just because he committed suicide.” Then she added with mock seriousness: “You’d better be careful how you call my image a ‘beastly thing,’ Phil; who knows but it has the power of injuring its enemies?”

  Lightly spoken as the words were, they sent a quick chill through me; for they voiced a thought which had been vaguely gathering in my subconscious mind. “It will be a bad day for one of us if that stone thing and I ever run foul of each other,” I promised truculently as I bore Chang’s body away.