The Thrill Book Sampler Page 7

  “Think it’s Doctor Yeager?” asked Maginnis ironically.

  “It may be,” was the startling and unexpected reply of the ambulance surgeon. “Wait till I’ve finished my examination. Here’s something around the neck, held by a thin silver chain. I wonder—— Yes, here’s a clasp.”

  He took the chain from around the spinal bones where in life there had been a neck, and held up to the lamp, in the hollow of his hand, a flat, bronze disk of irregular shape. On it were some strange characters that showed plainly through the green corrosive surface of the medal.

  “It’s an ancient Brahminical amulet, dating from the time of Genghis Khan or thereabouts,” pronounced Griffiths, after a minute examination. “I know Doctor Yeager used to wear something of this kind around his neck under his clothing. I remember seeing it when he was operated upon at a clinic in the hospital about a year ago.”

  “Sure, I rec’llect,” interrupted Maginnis. “Something th’ matter wid his head, wasn’t it?”

  “Yes, there was a trepanning operation, and— ” Doctor Griffith had lifted the skull, which came away in his hand from the rotting spinal column, and at the same time the mandarin cap fell off. “By Jove! Look here, Maginnis—and Callery. Get this!

  See this hole at the back? Here’s where the round piece of bone was cut out. You can see the teeth marks of the trepan if you look close. I wish I could tell when this was done by looking at it. But I can’t. But it is in exactly the same place as the operation on Doctor Yeager’s head. Could it be possible that–”

  Doctor Paul Griffith did not finish his thought aloud, but, putting the chain and amulet on a table near the bed, he replaced the skull at the top of the spine, and, looking at it critically with his head on one side, remarked: “That seems to fit all right. He looks quite himself again. Now I’ll see how these bones were all arranged so well without being articulated. Without any ligaments, it is queer they hang together.”

  He worked in silence for ten minutes. Then, looking up as Terry Maginnis came into the room after he and Callery had searched the house and telephoned Lieutenant Craig, he said: “I can’t tell anything about it. If that Hindu valet of his were here——”

  “Well, he isn’t,” declared Terry disgustedly. “Sorra wan of him or any wan else is about the place. There ain’t a sowl here, barrin’ our three selves.”

  “The only thing is to hold a regular inquest,” interrupted Griffiths in a brisk tone. “Take care of that amulet and chain, Terry. Good night!”

  “You stay here an’ watch this thing on th’ bed don’t git away, Cal,” said Maginnis, when they were alone: “I’m goin’ to th’ station to repoort to the loot. It’s a quare thing—a mighty quare thing.”

  II.

  WHEN a real tempest is raging down the Hudson, with fiercely driving rain and spiteful squalls, then look out for a bad night on the wooded heights of upper Manhattan. It was on such a night—chilly, misty, black, and full of eerie sounds as the wind whistled through the trees or shook the creaky old slatted sun blinds of the ancient houses still numerous in that historic region—that Doctor Paul Griffiths, now a full-fledged M. D., with a practice of his own, stood by the side of the large, open fireplace in his newly furnished library, looking down at his former classmate, Murray Plange, who sat in a morris chair and puffed thoughtfully at a long-stemmed hubble-bubble.

  “I tell you, Murray,” Griffiths was saying, “I never was satisfied with the perfunctory finding of that coroner’s jury in the Yeager matter. The fact was that neither the coroner nor the police could make anything of it, and they took the easiest way out. They buried the skeleton in the grave in a corner of the grounds from whence it had obviously been taken, and laid it all to somebody or other who wanted to play a grim joke. Bah! That’s nonsense!”

  Murray Plange, pulling luxuriously at his pipe, expelled a mouthful of the water-cooled smoke and grunted.

  “Well, go on, Murray,” blurted put Griffiths. “Say it. I can see you have a suggestion. What do you think?”

  “I haven’t come to any conclusion yet,” answered the tall, lean, bronzed man in the chair, stretching his feet toward the blaze of the hickory logs on the hearth. “But didn’t the police try to find Doctor Yeager?”

  “Of course they did,” was the impatient reply. “They set all the ordinary police machinery in motion, and would have made some arrests if they could have found anybody to pinch. But Doctor Yeager had lived absolutely alone except for his Indian valet, Chundah, and Chundah vanished on that night, too.”

  “They went away together, eh?”

  “No one knows,” said Griffiths. “They were not seen to come away from the house, either singly or otherwise. That is not strange, for the house is very lonely, and there are several ways to approach or leave it–by water, as well as land. Old Theophilus Yeager, grandfather of the last one, built the place when there were no street cars or railroads or any other public means of getting about in this neighborhood—it’s only a mile from here—and it was a natural thing for him to make a boat landing at the foot of the cliff, with rough steps leading down to the water. The old fellow was a great hand for having all conveniences. He even had his own private cemetery, in which he was interred according to strict injunctions in his will. He is the only person who was buried there, however. The second Theophilus Yeager died and was buried at sea, and the third one has vanished, as you know.”

  “And all this about the last Yeager was three months ago,” observed Murray thoughtfully. “I suppose the police have stopped thinking about the case?”

  “Well, yes—actively, I should say. But of course they have the records and would get busy if anything new turned up. Otherwise, it will have to go into the list of criminal mysteries never solved, of which New York, like all other large cities the world over, has its share. I’ve sometimes thought it must have been the work of a crazy man.”

  “I don’t,” exclaimed Murray Plange crisply. “But go on. Was anything stolen from the house?” “Nothing,” replied Doctor Griffiths. “Moreover, there was no confusion indicating a struggle. It seemed as if Doctor Theophilus Yeager might have dug up the bones of his grandfather himself, arranged them in his own bed, and then departed on some mysterious journey. That’s why I say it may have been the work of a crazy man. It is quite possible for a person to go insane on the instant, and this Yeager was a curious sort of chap, always delving into mysticism and uncanny possibilities, and it might have turned his brain. I was present at the trepanning operation—— By the way, I have the skull. Lieutenant Craig, of the police, was a friend of mine— he’s captain of the same precinct now—and he helped me to get it just before they closed the casket. Like to see it?” Murray looked at him sharply. “You speak as if it were Doctor Yeager’s skull, Paul. What has the trepanning operation on his head to do with the hole in the old skull you found with the rest of the skeleton on that bed?”

  Griffiths laughed as he went to a glass cabinet and unlocked it. He brought out a white skull in one hand and something that he did not at once show in the other. “I did not mean that, of course, Murray,” he said. “But it happens that a similar operation had been performed on the owner of this headpiece, whoever he was. That was one reason I wanted to have it. Look!”

  “Curious coincidence,” observed Murray Plange, smoking calmly, without offering to touch the ghastly thing, although the doctor extended it. “Put it on the table, won’t you? What’s that in your other hand?”

  “Not so curious, from a medical point of view,” declared Griffiths. “The brain trouble may have been hereditary. As to what I have here, you can see for yourself,” he added, as he held up a thin chain of tarnished silver, with an irregularly shaped bronze medal dangling from it. “You’ve been in India. What do you make of this?”

  Murray Plange took the medal, glanced at it cursorily, and then put down his pipe and bent closer to study the characters, nearly obliterated by time, which covered it on both sides, “Where did you get thi
s,” he asked without looking up.

  “It was around the neck of the skeleton,” answered Griffiths. “I took the liberty of appropriating that, too, when the police decided it would not help them to find the people who had put the skeleton there. I could see for myself that it had the name of Genghis Khan, with some hieroglyphics I could not read, on one side, and some small writing, in what looked like Sanskrit, on the other. I could not decipher it, even if I knew the meaning of the words, anyhow. But –”

  Murray Plange got up from the chair to look at the medal in the shaded light of the reading lamp on the table. Then he turned to Griffiths: “This is an amulet, given by a Brahmin priest, which preserves its wearer from punishment for all evil deeds of which he may be guilty——” He paused, and a strange light came into the clear gray eyes beneath their heavy pent of black brown. “Except one.”

  “You mean——”

  “I mean,” answered Murray impressively, “that the wearer of this amulet, if he were killed, must have desecrated the temple of Vishnu, the Sun God, in one of the many ways in which it can be done, especially by a white man. That, and that only, would account for his being put violently to death while he wore this protecting emblem.”

  “Always presuming that he was killed by some fanatical Hindu, a follower of Brahma, eh?” smiled Griffiths.

  “Great heavens, man!” burst out Plange. “Do you doubt that? Of course it was done by an East Indian. I had made up my mind to that as soon as you began to tell me about the way the skeleton was found, with all the larger bones, at least, in their places. And many of the smaller ones, too, for that matter, where it was possible to make them stay after being assembled. I spent six months in northern India, in the very shadow of the Himalayas, and although the natives never trusted me entirely—they are always suspicious of white men—I had an opportunity to see more of their religious observances than falls to the lot of the average traveler. Of course being American helped a lot. If I’d been English, I guess I’d never have come out of that region alive. Back in the hills they are not so loyal to the British flag as they are in Cawnpore, Calcutta, and Bombay. It was then I learned about these amulets. You can see that the sacred language of the Indo-Aryans, Sanskrit, is used on this one, and that the name of Genghis Khan is added, making it seem as if that jolly old potentate indorsed what is written. Nothing slow about those Brahminical priests, let me tell you.”

  “But all that doesn’t explain whose skeleton this was?” objected the doctor. “The police thought the old grave of the original Yeager, who died a quarter of a century ago, had been opened, but were not sure. But even so, assuming that the bones belonged to the old man, how do you connect that skeleton with the disappearance of his grandson, who we know was alive within three months?”

  “Are you sure the skeleton did not belong to the grandson?” asked Murray in a curious, tense tone. “This hole in the skull is just where, at the clinic, you saw the trepan go in. How do you know his grandfather had a similar operation?”

  “By this skull,” answered Griffiths with an impatient shrug. “Here’s the hole. You are not asking me to believe that our Doctor Yeager could have been killed and all the flesh stripped from his bones between the time that the police lieutenant was called up by the dead man and the moment when the two policemen found the skeleton?”

  Murray Plange smiled wearily as he placed the amulet and chain on the table and looked at the skull, still in the doctor’s hand. “My dear Paul,” he said, “in the first place we don’t know when Doctor Yeager was killed. It might have been a week before the lieutenant was called up on the phone. Of course, I don’t suppose it was the dead man who did it. You’ve said that the voice was not clear, and that it came in jerks, which would make it still easier to disguise it. These Indians are clever. They can imitate anything. And, by George, they can do anything. If you’ve ever seen the Indian fakirs——”

  “I haven’t,” interjected Griffiths. “But I’ve read about them.”

  “I’ve seen them,” went on Murray. “Among things I have seen them do is to take the flesh off the bones of a living man, showing a skeleton, right in the open, in broad daylight, and put it on again. Mind you, I saw that.”

  “Imagination — hypnotism!” explained Griffiths with a contemptuous grin.

  “Perhaps,” conceded Murray Plange. “But it didn’t seem so. Well, as I was saying, we don’t know when Doctor Yeager was killed, or whether he was killed at all. We only know that he vanished that night and that a skeleton, dressed in his pajamas, lay on his bed. Also that there is a hole in the skull such as you had seen made by surgeons in the hospital some months previously,

  and that there are other small scraps of evidence which indicate that this was his skull in life and that the bones on the bed were his.”

  “How could they be?” ridiculed Doctor Griffiths.

  “Let me see that,” requested Murray, nodding toward the skull. “No, I don’t care to handle it. Put it on the table. Have you a magnifying glass—a strong one?”

  “Certainly,” replied Doctor Griffiths, going to the cabinet from whence he had taken the skull, and where an imposing array of glittering surgical instruments and other clinical paraphernalia showed in the light of the lamp and fire. “Here’s one. It’s very powerful. I need good glasses in my profession.”

  Murray Plange took the magnifier without comment and held it over the skull. Then he placed a finger gingerly on the gray-white frontal bone and examined his finger tip through the glass.

  “The East Indians have a process by which they remove all the flesh from a corpse in about two hours,” he said half musingly. “They use some strong corrosive which is their own secret, and afterward apply another substance that dries the bones and removes all traces of the first process— except that they can’t prevent this fine powder forming on the surface. See!” He held the glass in front of his finger, and Griffiths nodded, “Now,” went on Murray, “here’s a theory. It may be all wrong, but I give it for what it may be worth. You see, this powder——”

  He stopped and looked at the door of the room leading to the rear part of the house. It was of ground glass halfway down, and silhouetted dimly on this semitransparent window was the figure of a tall man wearing a large turban. “Who’s out there?” he demanded in the sharp tones of a man whose nerves are on edge. “Looks like some one in Indian dress.”

  “It’s my man,” answered Griffiths coolly. “A mighty useful fellow. Acts as chauffeur, does most of the housework that the maid finds too heavy, and has an expert knowledge of chemistry. He and I have had many pleasant hours in my laboratory. Name’s Lunga Sen, speaks excellent English, and is a high-caste Hindu. He prepares and eats his meals apart from the rest of us, and I dare say he goes through his devotions in his own way in his room on the top floor. Aside from that, he’s as matter-of-fact as you or I. Want to see him?”

  Before Murray Plange could answer, the telephone on the table rang clamorously, and Paul Griffiths, picking up the instrument with the celerity of a young doctor who is after all the patients he can get, placed the receiver to his ear and sent forth a well-modulated “Hello!” A moment’s pause, and he replied to something from the other end: “Yes, this is Doctor Griffiths speaking.... What? Overview Lodge? Doctor Theophilus Yeager’s old home? Why, I thought the house had been empty for three months.... You— you are—— ... What do you say?” hurriedly, “You are Doctor—— Say it again! ... Wait! Wait!”

  The awful expression of horror on his usually placid face made Murray Plange wonder just what Doctor Griffiths had heard over the wire, but he had to wait till the doctor had called in vain three or four times, and at last, after jiggling the hook without result, had banged the receiver into its place and turned to his friend with a blanched face and quivering lips.

  “Murray,” he stammered in hollow tones, “it was, I think, Doctor Yeager speaking, and he said ‘Come quickly. By the time you get here I shall be dead.’”

  �
��Good God!” exclaimed Murray Plange “Why, those were the very words of the telephone into the police station from Overview Lodge on that night three months ago, weren’t they?”

  “The same—in effect, at least,” answered Griffiths, pressing an electric bell button at the side of his table to summon Lunga Sen to bring out his automobile. “Coming with me, Murray?”

  “You couldn’t keep me away,” was the emphatic response.

  III.

  LUNGA Sen sat stonily at the steering wheel. He had not taken time to put on the long leather coat and chauffeur’s cap he usually wore in the car and his voluminous white turban shone in the blackness of the road almost like another headlight. The rain had stopped and the wind gone down, but it was one of the darkest nights Lunga Sen ever had seen in New York. There was not even a solitary star in the heavens to break the mystic, velvetlike blackness.

  “Drive carefully on this road, Lunga Sen,” warned Griffiths from the rear seat, which he shared, with Murray Plange. “There are holes and big stones in the way. But we’re nearly there. The next wide gateway. You can drive right into the grounds.”

  There was no reply, but Griffiths knew the taciturn Lunga Sen always did as he was told so long as he was silent. When he took the trouble to speak it was usually to make some objection, for, as a high-caste Hindu, he had somewhat inflated ideas of his own dignity and was inclined to be independent on occasion. With calm skill he slowed down the car to turn into the gateway. Then he jammed on the brake and threw off the power in one swift movement, as out of the deep shadows suddenly appeared two men, who stood full in his path. In the strong light of the car lamps it could be seen that one was in police uniform, while the other wore a civilian business suit, with a broad-brimmed soft hat pulled down over his eyes.

  Griffiths recognized them at once. “Hello, captain!” he hailed. “Did you get a telephone call, too?” “I sure did, doc,” replied a gruff voice, unmistakably that of Hugh Craig, who had been a police lieutenant three months before, but who since had been made a captain, in charge of the same precinct. “It was the same nutty spiel from somebody who said he’d be dead when we got here that came to the station that night my men found the skeleton in bed. I have Maginnis with me. He’s the man who found it. How is it you are here, doc?”