The haunting hand
came in a quick-running monotone, almost without punctuation. The
substance of her story was this:
Her acquaintance with Murchison had developed during several weeks.
One day he told her to expect him that night at ten o’clock, with a
customer. She had things ready when they arrived. She had turned back
the carpet and opened the trapdoor with an ax. Murchison brought with
him a fat man whom she had never seen. An argument took place between
the two men. The fat man, it seemed, had no idea of buying the radium.
He wanted only to rent it for a week, and he offered Murchison five
hundred dollars. Murchison objected and ended by getting very “sore,”
as Stella expressed it. He told his customer that the deal was off.
Then Stella took a hand in the fray. She was dead broke at the time
and had counted on the commission promised her by Murchison. She took
the part of the strange man, with the result that a real scrap
started. Murchison, although elderly, was strong and wiry, and a match
for the fat man, whose muscles were soft. But between the two of
them--Stella and the stranger--Murchison was kept busy, and Stella
managed to grab the little tube of radium out of his hand. At that
point of her narrative, she moved her gaze from the bedrail to
Margot’s intensely interested eyes.
“The old fool went crazy mad when I did that. He was a sort of a nut,
anyway. The next I knew, he’d got ahold of the fire ax and chopped at
me. I went down on the floor. The blade nicked me at the elbow joint
and went clean through. I started to scream, but somebody put his hand
over my mouth and I fainted. I came to in a private hospital. Never
found out who took me there, but somebody paid the bills and kept me
there till I got well. That’s all I know for sure.”
No one spoke for a brief instant, then Hart said judiciously:
“One or the other of those two crooks must have known something about
putting a tourniquet above the elbow, or you’d have bled to death
through the artery.”
“Of course it must have been one of them who took you to the hospital.
Have you any suspicion at all which of them it was--although it
doesn’t really matter,” Margot added quickly.
“I’d take a bet it wasn’t the old fellow. He was so sore at me I guess
he’d have liked to stick me down that hole along with my arm. Then
too, I don’t believe he’d have dared go to a place like a hospital.
The other guy wasn’t a real crook, or I miss my guess.”
“Did you realize when Murchison chopped off your arm, that the radium
was clasped in that hand?” Margot asked her.
“Well--s’pose I did, if I thought of anythin’ but the pain and the
bleedin’. But when I got my head clear, in the hospital, I figured
they’d be too scared to check up on that. I figured they’d throw the
arm and the ax into the hole, and put back the carpet so’s to hide the
bloodstains.”
“And figuring that way, you broke in here by way of the roof, to get
the radium?” Hart spoke rapidly, then turned to Margot with a slight
inclination of his head. “Excuse me, Miss Anstruther, but my curiosity
got the better of me.”
“It really doesn’t matter who asks the questions, Mr. Hart, or rather
who asks them _first_,” she added with a smile.
“What did you suppose I’d come for?” Stella threw Hart a glance of
amused scorn. “Me health maybe, or maybe me arm? _Sure_, I come for
the seventy-five-thousand-dollar goods. Couldn’t pass up a little
thing like that,” she said with a twisted smile. “There was a good
chance the old devil’d beaten me to it, but it was worth a try.”
Hart asked her if she knew the present whereabouts of Murchison. She
said she didn’t. Then Margot asked her to describe the customer who
had started all the trouble.
“Well,” said Stella, doubtfully, “I can’t just remember what he looked
like, except he was fat--too fat. I hate fat men.” Her gamin sense of
humor made her throw a quick glance from man to man, and add, with a
boyish grin: “Guess I aint steppin’ on anybody’s toes in this room.”
Margot smiled to note the unconscious preening of Hart, who was the
thinnest man of them all. Then she asked Stella if that was positively
all she could remember and to tell them of the events leading up to
and following the dramatic incident of the fight over the radium.
“I’ve told you all I know, s’help me God!”
The thin, worn face of the girl, and her tragic eyes, carried
conviction as no words could have done. Again there came a silence
which Hart waited for Margot to break, but she only stared with dark,
thoughtful eyes, straight before her. Then Hart said respectfully:
“You’ve done a fine piece of work, Miss Anstruther. The rest of this
case should be plain sailing.”
“You think so?” she said gently. “How about the lights on the floor
and the hand that put them out?”
“That seems clear to me,” Hart said confidently. “The radium shone
through the floor and the carpet. You explained to us, you remember,
that radium rays can pierce through anything. I take it that these
rays also revealed an outline of the dead arm--a sort of mirage in the
dark, which, naturally, seemed to you and to Boyle, to extinguish the
flame.”
Margot turned quickly to Gene. “Do you see it that way, Gene?”
“Yes,” he said with conviction. “That part of the mystery was cleared
up, so far as I was concerned, while we were looking at that queer
picture to-night--Stoner’s picture. I took for granted that was what
you wanted me to deduce from it.”
“I’m sorry, Gene, but that _wasn’t_ what I wanted you to get from that
picture. I rather hoped you’d get something else out of it.”
“I did,” he said eagerly, “or rather I _do_, looking back at it in the
light of what’s been thrown on the mystery here, to-night.”
“Righto! We’ll take that up later.” She gave him a warning look, then
turned to Hart.
“It sounds convincing, the way you put it, Mr. Hart, but I’ll have to
tell you that radium cannot project a mirage. Its rays are invisible
to the naked eye, except with the aid of a special apparatus. The hand
and the lights had nothing whatever to do with radium.”
“Holy Mother Mary!” Boyle, indifferent to the stares of his audience
and callous to their amused grins, crossed himself for the third time.
“Then it was a ghost, after all, Miss?”
“That all depends on just what you mean by a ‘ghost’.” Margot’s smile
at Boyle was enigmatic, as she intended it to be, not only to poor
Boyle but to every other person in the room.
CHAPTER XIII.
WILL-O’-THE-WISP
The love of drama which lay back of Margot’s histrionic talent, and
which had always made her create situations out of material from which
the unimaginative could weave nothing, now made her eyes shine with
the sheer delight of the artist who first creates and then interprets.
The scientist was in the background for the moment; only the actress
stood smiling and looking from one mystified face to another.
Gene’s puzzled frown changed suddenly to a smile of encouragement and
understanding. He caught her mood and threw it back to her, with a
humorous sympathy that quickened a tenderness for him which flashed in
her eyes and curled the corners of her mouth. It was rather thrilling
to have such an absorbed audience, inclusive of Gene with his adoring
belief in her powers of analysis, and cleverness in general.
“If it won’t bore any of you,” she began, her smile broadening at
their eager denials, “I’ll tell you just what my process of deduction
has been in this case, up to this point. Mr. Hart, what puzzles you
most of all?”
“The matter of the lights on the carpet,” he said quickly.
“Isn’t that funny,” she said, her smile solely for Hart. “That’s just
where I was going to begin my explanation. Well--first of all, the
flame _I_ saw was my own match, of course. But the one Boyle saw was
of a very different character--a most singular character, in fact.
Moreover, if there had been witnesses here at favorable moments, both
before and after, I believe they would have seen it too.”
“Sure, it was just like me own poor luck. I’ll be thinking, that it
was meself was seein’ the quare lights!” Boyle was far too engrossed
with his subject to be conscious of Hart’s glance of disapproval.
“That _was_ a question of luck, you’re right.” Margot smiled at Boyle.
“It was the merest chance that others didn’t see the same thing. Have
any of you ever heard of what is called in Latin the _ignis fatuus_?”
Gene nodded his head, and Hart said: “You mean what’s commonly called
the will-o’-the-wisp?”
“Glory be!” It was Boyle again, irrepressible and oblivious of his
superior’s scowl. “It’s what you’ll be seein’ in graveyards of a dark
night!”
“Some call it a ‘corpse-candle,’” contributed Quinlan, not to be
outshone by his comrade. “There’s many in the auld country that’s seen
it, I’m tellin’ you, Miss.”
“Surely,” agreed Margot. “Millions of people in all quarters of the
world believe in it, and many have seen the thing called
will-o’-the-wisp, but not necessarily in graveyards. I saw it once
myself. I was riding a horse through a dark patch of woods, and the
weird thing came out from the underbrush and shot across the road
right in front of my horse. He shied horribly and almost threw me.”
“What did it look like, Margot?” Gene was trying vainly to make his
own deductions.
“Like nothing I’d ever seen before. It was like a small, live thing,
made of fire, or charged with electricity. It rolled and danced its
way along, keeping close to the ground. The encyclopedias admit that
dead animal and vegetable matter exhales a phosphorescent glow under
certain conditions. They are not sure that it ever seeps up from a
coffin, through several feet of tightly-packed earth, but they don’t
deny the possibility.”
“Anything’s possible, I suppose,” muttered Hart. “I’m just coming to
that conclusion. Well, go on, Miss Anstruther. You’ve certainly got me
guessing.”
“A great French writer once said that ‘he who pronounces a thing
impossible, commits an imprudence,’ so you’re playing safe, Mr. Hart,”
she said with a laugh. “Of course, all great mysteries raise the
question, ‘Can such things be?’ I fully believe that, within the
bounds of physical law, unproved and amazing phenomena may occur. And
I believe that the light that flickered on this floor--the one Boyle
saw--was a will-o’-the-wisp, from the severed arm of Stella Ball.”
Everyone stared at her, and Boyle heaved a great sigh of relief. It
was as if her explanation had dispelled the shadow of the
supernatural, which was all that concerned or interested him. Then
Quinlan, as superstitious as Boyle, but with a quicker mind, or a more
practical one, asked a question which Margot had expected to come from
Hart.
“What about the hand that doused the flame, Miss?”
“Oh, that’s quite simple. It was the hand of a person very much alive
and, I believe, dangerous.”
“Came to that conclusion myself,” said Hart. Well, well, she thought,
for the third time, Hart wasn’t at all a fool. Then he asked her
sharply: “Whose hand? Have you got that far?”
“Sure, if she could tell you that, Chief, the Mayor ought to make her
Police Commissioner!” Quinlan’s sarcasm was heavy, but it amused
Margot.
“The hand,” she began solemnly, “was the hand of the man Murchison,
who stole the radium in the first place, and who is, in my opinion,
the only major criminal in the whole affair.”
“Sure, it was the old devil,” Stella agreed eagerly. “Just like the
old crook to come snoopin’ round. He couldn’t bear to lose it. But how
the hell did he get in here without your seein’ him?”
No one objected to the girl’s swearing. It seemed rather to give vent
to the general sentiment.
“Yes, how?” Hart was frowning again. “You don’t mean you think he was
in the room while you were in bed, and while Boyle was watching later?