Part 20

“You say,” the latter remarked as they passed me, “that you want ‘Horace’ delivered at once?”

“Yes,” replied the doctor concisely.

“All right. Hank, call the gang, unload the cage and put Horace in that red single cage. Dr. Calgroni has relieved us of him!”

At this, Simple Will approached the surgeon and touched his sleeve.

“You buy hairy animal-man?” he mumbled.

The doctor laid his blue-veined and thin old hand upon Will’s broad shoulder.

“Yes, Will, and I’m going to give you a job--a job as his valet!” The show men exchanged winks, and from the car rolled an empty, iron-barred cage. Will’s expressionless features twisted into what on his idiot countenance registered pleasure.

Dr. Calgroni beckoned to the man whom I had seen deliver the strange-appearing boxes that first afternoon.

“Got your team?”

The fellow nodded.

A scene of bustle had sprung up about me. An excited and larger crowd of villagers had assembled.

The big cage containing Mimmie and Horace was lowered to the track side. They were two of the finest animals of their type I have ever looked upon.

Horace was transferred to the single cage and its strong door doubly padlocked upon him. The mule team drew up with the wagon.

“Here, Will,” said the doctor to the half-wit, “climb into the wagon. We’re going before we get wet.” The doctor appeared highly elated.

Simple Will, who had stood by as if in a stupor, swung his heavy body up behind the gorilla’s cage.

No sooner had the wagon drawn out of sight than the heavens seemed to loosen in wrath. Rain fell in torrents, driving the spectators in a wild rush for shelter. As I reached the hotel, the water dripping from my drenched garments, the storm increased its fury. All that day it rained--and the next.

As I lay on my bed that night and listened to the roar of wind and rain beating upon the roof and window panes, my mind kept drifting to the inmates of Thornsdale place--the queer doctor, Simple Will and his ward, Horace, the gigantic gorilla.

_III._

It was three days later that I learned Dr. Calgroni had wired to New York, and on the next morning an exceptionally well-dressed stranger, whose goatee, bearing and satchel smacked of a medical man, stepped off the train.

Espying me, he asked:

“Will you kindly direct me to the Thornsdale place?”

I told him the best way to reach Dr. Calgroni’s without wading in mud, and he departed, with a brief “Thank You.”

The next night I saw the stranger, ashen of face and decidedly inwardly shaken, hurriedly purchase a ticket and leave on the 9:45 train for New York.

Immediately I sought the telegraph dispatcher.

“You are aware of the queer actions of Dr. Calgroni--”

“I should say! He’s a nut.”

“I can’t say as to that, but to whom did he send the message the other night?”

“You won’t let it out I tipped you off?”

I solemnly held up my right hand.

“Well,” in a whisper, “he wired a hospital for their best surgical man.”

So the assistant had gone back, frightened. And why?

Several weeks later Barber’s World-famous 3-Ring Show gave a return exhibition at Belleville. That night I wandered toward the Thornsdale place.

Again the clouds had banked for a storm, fitful rays of the moon now and then shifting through, only to be absorbed in mist.

Drawing around in front of the old homestead, looming dark behind the gloom-shadowed trees, I seated myself on the stump hitching-post. I was glad that in my coat pocket nestled a neat automatic. Why I lingered there in front of the quiet old place I do not know. Not a light glimmered in the house; not a noise issued from its muffled depths.

Then to my ears came a shriek and to my startled gaze a light flared in the house. I could dimly see that a figure appeared at its open door. It looked behind it for an instant, then madly bolted toward me.

Upon the wet gravel came the tread of rapidly-moving feet, and the gate in front of me swung abruptly back. In the hazy reflected light, I got one look at Dr. Calgroni who, hat and raincoat in his hands, the muscles of his face quivering, his face deathly pale, emerged and turned, running madly toward town.

I drew back, automatic in hand, waiting for whatever might follow the doctor. Nothing happened. Obeying an impulse, I took out after the fleeing surgeon. Over soggy soil I followed him, around corners, down Main Street to the depot. I got there in time to see him swing on the platform of the rear coach of the 9:45 train, bound for New York.

Throbbing with excitement, scarce knowing what I was doing, I made my way back toward the Thornsdale place. Several blocks away, I caught a glimpse of a broad-shouldered, thick-set disheveled figure in breech-clout, running--or, rather, prancing and hopping--toward the circus grounds. The automatic in my hand, I followed.

A block from the circus grounds, under the street lamp, I saw a figure on horseback that I recognized as Jason Murdock, evidently bound for home.

Then, snarling, the Thing I had seen hopped out from behind a tree trunk, on all fours. Gaining its hind feet, it made a flying leap at Jason, knocking him from his horse. On the ground they rolled, the powerful Jason helpless in the Thing’s clutch. Its fingers closed chokingly about the man’s throat.

I tried to shoot, only to find my gun jammed; tried to shout, and could not.

At that instant the brass band struck up “There’ll Be A Hot Time In The Old Town Tonight!” As the quick, dancing strains smote the night air, the Thing suddenly ceased in the act of strangling Jason, looking attentively up. There seemed to be a responsive, obedient look on its horrible countenance. I could see its wild-eyes and bearded face--God! _It was Simple Will!_

Bounding first on all fours, then half-upright on his feet, the crazed idiot was making for the show grounds just as the clouds broke in a downpour. To the rear of the big tent bounded Will, as the crowd scattered for home.

As if familiar with his surrounding, he made for a side-show tent in front of which sputtered a gas torch. The crowd, fleeing in the rain, had in the confusion failed to see the half-wit and myself on the mad run. But several men were following me, as Will tore aside the entrance flaps.

Inside, poorly-lighted though it was, I could plainly see the cage of Mimmie, the female-gorilla. Her trainer turned at the noise of our entrance, and hastily reached for his knife-pointed pole--but too late. Uttering a cry, piercing and antagonistic, Will flung himself at Mimmie’s cage, who, with an answering cry of battle, reached both her long hairy arms through her cage, clawing and tearing at the fiercely struggling man on the outside.

The trainer rushed in with his prong, thrusting it at Mimmie. For an instant she drew back; then several of us quickly pulled Will, bleeding profusely, back from the enraged animal, who again lurched forward as though recognizing in Will the reincarnation of her mate, Horace.

Foaming at the mouth, Will sank limply to the floor. From the hue of the blood, ebbing from the side of his neck, I saw at a glance that he was done for--Mimmie’s claws had severed his jugular vein.

Among the men who had helped me thrust the poor fellow out of Mimmie’s reach, was the sheriff of the county.

“What does this mean?” he demanded, grasping my shoulders.

“Follow me!” I cried.

A crowd of excited men, headed by the sheriff and myself, made for the Thornsdale place. The light still dimly illuminated the hall through the open door.

“I’ll go in first, sheriff,” I offered. “Have your men surround the place.”

I stole into the hall. A terrible stench greeted me. I found it came from a door opening out into the hall. A feeble light burned within. About me stood several boxes, with the sides torn open, and excelsior hanging and strewn about them.

Before me, completely assembled in every detail, stood what the boxes had contained--an operating table and all its many surgical accessories. Out of a long box in the corner sprawled the hairy limbs of the fast-decaying Horace, the male gorilla.

Taking a small oil lamp from the stand, I turned to examine the dead body; and I noticed a paper, which fell to the floor. A quick look at the side of the beast’s head revealed a great gash, rottening at the edges, through which, it was evident, the brain had been removed.

I hastily recalled Dr. Calgroni’s theories. Could it be--

My eyes chanced to drop to the floor. Holding forth the lamp, I saw there was handwriting on the bit of paper.

I picked it up and read the note, which, even at the last stand, Calgroni had directed to _me_, Von Meine, chief disparager of his wild theories:

“_Herr Von Meine, of Vienna, you said I could not do it. You berated me for my endeavors to alleviate the distress of the insane and feeble-minded. Yet I know now that I have accomplished it, without killing the subject as you claimed would be the result of such an operation. That’s why I followed you here, to show you! It was successful, Von Meine. I could tell by the way his eyes looked into mine, when he finally came to. But I could see the brain I had substituted for Will’s atrophied one was too vigorous--that expression didn’t belong to Simple Will. I am fleeing before he gains his strength. I admit my fear; for after this operation the former half-wit will be a dangerous customer, with the too vigorous and ferocious brain of the Gorilla Horace in his head!_”

Ten Pallbearers For This Mammoth Woman

When Mrs. Martha Carmas, of Middle Village, Queensboro, New York, died of elephantiasis, ten men were required to carry her body from the hospital to Lutz Church for funeral services. She weighed 710 pounds. A special coffin of immense size was made for the body. Mrs. Carmas was only thirty-three years of age, and, until she contracted the dreadful elephantiasis, she was not unusually heavy.

Woman Starves Herself To Feed Cats

In a mean neighborhood in New York City dwelt Mary Bosanti, the “Cat Woman.” The neighbors gave her that name because of her excessive love for cats. All the cats in that part of town seemed to be attracted to her house. Every day she went to the corner grocery and bought six quarts of milk, which she carried back to her room. Twenty or more cats always tagged at her heels, and when she spoke to them in a lowered tone they seemed to know what she said. They obeyed her every command. Then, one morning, a neighbor heard groans issuing from the “Cat Woman’s” room and called the other tenants of the house. They broke the door in--and found the “Cat Woman” starving, surrounded by a great swarm of cats and more than 200 empty milk bottles.

_Here’s a “Creepy” Tale That Ends In a Shuddering, Breath-taking Way_

_The_ Return _of_ Paul Slavsky

_By_ Capt. George Warburton Lewis

_Author of_ “Trailing the Jungle Man,” “Wine of the Wilderness,” Etc.

From Petrograd came Paul Slavsky, with what his Nihilist associates might have styled a clean record and no bungled jobs, but what Larry Brandon classified as a criminal record _de luxe_.

It was natural that such a record should bring about Slavsky’s early acquaintance with Inspector Brandon, of the Central Office and it followed, as day follows dawn, that the Terrorist should become the object of the shrewdest surveillance the Chief Inspector could design.

Whether Paul Slavsky actually discovered, or merely suspected, that he was being shadowed, matters little. A notation on an old blotter shows that he boldly attempted to pave the way for future criminal enterprises by calling at the Central Office in the role of a persecuted citizen, who had journeyed here from his native land to escape the hell which he declared the Russian Secret Police had made his life.

It took three months of intensive investigation to convince Larry Brandon that Slavsky was all the Secret Police had painted him and more, and that the Terrorist had not emigrated to America with even the remotest intention of reforming. It took the detective three months more to satisfy himself beyond all doubt that Slavsky had, marvelously enough, established an active branch of his old order and was undoubtedly spreading the doctrine of Gorgias and Fichte under the very noses of the Central Office experts. However, the evidence necessary to a conviction was lacking, so nothing could be done.

A little later the men of the same nationality as the Nihilist, whom Brandon had used to great advantage on the case, began, one by one, to drop quietly out of existence. This was not only mysterious--it was uncanny. Finally the decomposed bodies of some of these operatives were found and unmistakably identified.

In each instance _the head had been completely severed from the trunk_.

Recollecting that the Terrorist order, to which Paul Slavsky had belonged, had signalized its outrages by decapitating its victims, Brandon was enabled to initiate definite plans which, in due course, culminated in his running his man to earth.

But Paul Slavsky never beheld the fatal Chair nor served time. He chose the other route. He had elected to live in rebellion against man’s orderly institutions, and in this same unreasoning revolt he resolved to die. Like most of his ilk, the Terrorist in physical combat was a hard man, and he really fought a great fight, but he fought it with a master craftsman in the conquering of such as he, and inevitably he lost, with many of Larry Brandon’s bullets in his great body and only life enough left in him to greet--and almost at once to take final leave of--his favorite sister, Olga, who had arrived in Europe a little late as it transpired, to join her brother in his sinister calling.

Olga Slavsky, years younger than her lamented brother, was as pretty a little specimen of dark-eyed femininity as ever enchanted fastidious masculine eye. Yet so is the tigress beautiful.

Still, that is not quite the idea I wish to convey. If you can think of a woman in repose being as beautiful as a tigress and, in smoldering hate and loathing as repulsive, as hideous as a preying vampire, then you will get nearer my meaning. Olga, like her brother, was a staunch exponent of the Terrorist doctrine.

What Brandon expected soon came to pass. The strange girl, whom men called beautiful and women envied, was promptly elected to her brother’s place in what was known in the underworld of unlawful secret orders as the “League.” In this way she immediately crossed swords with the man who had ended the career of her brother Paul, and ere long she became aware, through members of the League detailed as spies, that still another noted criminologist, Joe Seagraves, was unpleasantly hot on her trail.

But Olga was undaunted. For daring and ingenuity, she by far eclipsed her cunning and resourceful brother, who had blazed the path of her iconoclastic pilgrimage.

Since little could thus far be proved against Olga, Seagraves believed that it might be better to declare a sort of armistice and, if possible, gradually win her over to the side of law and order. To this end, he openly called and laid his ideas before her. She frankly flouted his implied interest in her well-being, but showed a spirit of compromise by offering the crime specialist a cigarette.

In such a mood Olga became a docile and purring tiger kitten, only one never quite forgot her claws. She was highly superstitious, Seagraves discovered; but then her whole character was so anomalous and so replete with unexpectedly outcropping traits and wildly illogical beliefs that it was almost to be expected she would believe in ghosts.

She clung tenaciously to the belief, so Brandon told Seagraves, that some day Paul would _return_ and end the life of the man who--the Terrorist had told his sister shortly before his death--had done him to death.

“Do you still believe, Olga, that Paul is going to come back one day and carry Brandon away with him into the Unknown?” asked Seagraves.

Olga’s dark eyes grew suddenly darker as she slowly removed a cigarette from between her too red lips.

“Not only is he coming,” she answered, “but he is coming _soon_. Only night before last I talk with him. I tell him hurry. You see his spirit cannot rest until his murder is--ah, my very bad English!--avenge’.”

“You’re a very foolish woman, Olga,” admonished Seagraves. “If you refuse to listen to my warning you’re going to find yourself in lots of trouble. I want you to understand that.”

Then the drowsing tigress put out her claws.

“You threaten me!” she fairly hissed, tossing away her cigarette and rising. “I am a free woman. You are, after all, like my own people. You would make slaves of all who cannot buy their freedom of--of thought and action.”

She glanced about queerly before she concluded:

“Don’t interest yourself too far. You may be great, but remember--I am no longer to be despised. You have waited too long. Should I choose, for example, I could have shot you where you sit.”

Joe Seagraves leaped out of his chair, an automatic in his experienced hand and menacing the mysterious woman steadily.

But already the allegorical vampire, which the detective had seen reflected in Olga’s piercing eyes and heard in her studied but crisp and stinging words, had spread its skinny wings and flown. Olga was laughing in such sincere, or well-feigned, mockery at his alarm that the dignified detective momentarily felt abashed.

He put his weapon away, nevertheless, only after a searching glance about the very ordinary little room in which the extraordinary woman had received him. He recalled that the last victim of Olga’s brother, mutilated, headless and repellent, had been found in this same neighborhood, if not in this same house.

“Please--_please_ forgive me,” the strange girl was pleading. “You see, I forgot that you are not like--like Brandon. For him there is no forgiveness. He must perish. But we--you and I--why must we be enemies?”

“There’s but one reason, Olga,” replied Seagraves seriously, “and that is a strong one. It is simply the nature of our respective callings.”

“Then I can only be sorry,” she said in a low voice. “Still, my principles are more--what word?--more sacred than your friendship.”

As the woman paused, Seagraves could have taken an oath that he caught the sound of whispering voices through a door standing slightly ajar not three paces from his elbow. Of a sudden, he stepped forward and flung the door wide with a resounding _bang_.

A gray-walled room, quite empty, was all that rewarded his examination. He turned and found Olga smiling again.

“Did you surprise them?” she inquired sweetly.

“Surprise whom?” demanded the detective.

“The rats,” she said ingenuously, still smiling.

“I’ve seen but one rat here,” murmured Seagraves in an impersonal tone: “I see it now. It has wings that fold up like an umbrella. It is called a vampire.”

Olga smiled on placidly, even after Joe Seagraves had closed the door on her and was gone.

* * * * *

In the language of the man who knotted the noose, Olga, as her kind are certain to do, came at last to the end of her rope.

Conspiracy, blackmail and extortion were at last brought home to her; and it chanced that the same eminent crime expert who had hurried the career of her brother to an inglorious finish was likewise destined to be the instrument of fate in the undoing of Olga.

In time the pursuit narrowed down to the end of a most imperfect day for both quarry and hunters. Then all night, as Brandon and Seagraves gradually drew their web closer and ever closer about the elusive Terrorist, she tricked them at every angle and turn with the cunning of a fox, and it was not until three sleepless days and nights that the two renowned sleuths effected her capture more than five hundred miles distant from the field of her long-continued operations.

“She’ll be as slippery as an eel,” Brandon warned Seagraves, when they were ready to start back with their prisoner. “I’ll never consent to any Pullman for _her_, even though we ignore the law and handcuff her to the seat. One of us is going to have to keep his eyes on her constantly.”

“Only one of us could sleep at a time, anyhow,” said Seagraves; “and surely we can stand it one more night, don’t you think? Suppose we both sit it out with her.”

They at length did decide to “sit it out” with their prisoner, and with that understanding they took her aboard the train.

At the moment of entering the train, a telegram was handed to Brandon, and as soon as the three were comfortably seated in their section the inspector read it with lips compressed and eyes oddly squinted. Then he handed the message to Seagraves, who read:

“Police record Olga Slavsky arrived. Wanted in three countries for complicity in murder nine counts. Escaped Russian Secret Police three times. At present fugitive from justice. Keep close watch on her. Renfrow, Chief Inspector.”

Seagraves returned the telegram to Brandon, winking an eye disparagingly and smiling at what the Chief Inspector had evidently considered a necessary precaution.

The afternoon waned. Early evening found the train three-quarters of an hour behind time. If this kept up they would not arrive before two in the morning.

Olga sat besides Seagraves facing Brandon.

“I would give much for a cigarette,” she announced out of a long silence at ten o’clock, addressing herself to Seagraves.

“This isn’t a smoker,” observed the crime specialist, glancing around, “but there are only two other passengers in the car. Try it.”

He offered her his box, and she took one and lighted it. Filling her lungs with the comforting smoke, she exhaled it in a great cloud and, after a meditative pause, murmured:

“At last I am to see poor Paul.”

She looked Seagraves steadily in the eye and added in a queer tone that she felt her brother was very near tonight.

It was a mixed train, and the day coaches appeared to have much the better of the sleepers as to occupancy. Seagraves noted casually that, besides themselves, their car boasted but two other passengers, and though they might have been snugly asleep in their respective berths, they had apparently elected to sit out the short run, evidently preferring reclining to rising and dressing at 1:30 or 2 o’clock A. M.

“Do you see the man sitting all alone in the last seat with the handkerchief over his face, to keep the light out of his eyes?” Olga’s ruminant voice finally broke in upon the monotonous _clackety-clack_ of wheels upon rail-joints.

“Yes--what about him?” asked Seagraves.

“Nothing, only he--he looks like Paul,” she answered in a guarded voice, as though she feared Brandon, cat-napping now, might overhear her strange language.

“Olga!” ridiculed the detective, “get a grip on yourself.”

Having thus counseled the prisoner, Seagraves was thoughtful for a long space; then he looked over at Olga, saw an odd, uneasy expression on her pretty face and quickly said:

“Here--have another cigarette, Olga. Burn ’em up!”

* * * * *

At midnight the conductor passed through the car.

“We’ll make the city a little before two o’clock,” he said in answer to a sleepy-voiced interrogation from Brandon, who seemed to have banished sleep and was blinking about the car.

“What--we all alone?” he asked Seagraves. Then he caught sight of the two lonely passengers at the far end of the car. “No; two others,” he murmured, answering his own question.

He was turning his gaze away from the man with the handkerchief over his face when something, Seagraves noted, drew his eyes inquiringly back to the sleeper’s hunched figure. The movement caused Seagraves to follow Brandon’s scrutiny. He marked the fact that the handkerchief had fallen from their fellow-passenger’s face, and--was it because of Olga’s suggestion, or was it merely a silly midnight fancy?--he assuredly seemed to trace a certain vague resemblance between the solitary sleeper and the notorious Paul Slavsky, long ago dead.

The idea brought with it a queer, though distinct, sense of unpleasantness. The booming voice of Brandon, breaking in upon his wholly disagreeable train of thought, was highly reassuring.

“Huh!” laughed the Inspector, “I thought I recognized that chap.”

At a quarter to one, Seagraves shook Brandon out of a doze and said, “Keep the lady company for a few minutes. I’m going into the smoker.”

“All right, Joe,” drawled Brandon opening his slightly reddened eyes and seeming to be perfectly wide awake.

Seagraves disappeared into the smoking-room, returning some ten or fifteen minutes later. To his surprise he noted that Brandon, evidently not caring to take a chance on Olga’s diving out of the open window, had handcuffed her fast to the seat and had once more fallen asleep. Olga herself appeared a trifle more cheerful. She even smiled, though somewhat wearily, as Seagraves resumed his seat beside her.

“I told you it would be Paul,” the woman whispered to Seagraves, as though determined to share no part of her secret with the despised Brandon. “See,” she insisted, growing almost jubilant, “it is my brother Paul--come back to me at last!”

“For God’s sake, Olga,” cried Seagraves disgustedly, “stop that foolishness. It gets on my nerves.”

Stillness then for several minutes.

Of a sudden Seagraves felt cold. He turned up his coat collar and, somehow rather depressed, sat looking across at the muffled figure of Brandon who, also evidently having felt the night chill, had wound a great muffler about his neck and pulled his ample Stetson low over his face. Seagraves reflected that this would be a fitting case with which to crown a long list of his old friend’s successes. Tomorrow he would congratulate him.

A long wild shriek from the locomotive startled Seagraves like an unexpected blow.

“Ha!” he said, “I must be developing nerves after all these years. Anyhow, we’re getting in.”

Then he raised his eyes and saw that the man, who, he had imagined, resembled Paul Slavsky, had disappeared. So had the only other passenger who had occupied a seat near him. It struck Seagraves as singular.

Another long wail from the locomotive blent dissonantly with the dreary _clackety-clack, clackety-clack_ of the car-wheels, and at the same instant the vestibule door was smashed open. Through it came stumbling, covered with blood, clothing torn to tatters, the identical man who had resembled Paul Slavsky.