observations will never be known to posterity, for at that moment Horatio Milsted, looking anything but the urbane host, strode into the drawing room and commanded sharply, “Shut off that infernal music!”
“Hear, hear!” murmured the Professor under his breath.
Young Carmody, a vapid-faced youth in too-fashionably cut dinner clothes, who stood nearest the radio, turned the rheostat, and the lively dance tune expired with a dismal squawk.
“Someone has been tampering with my collection,” Milsted announced in a hard, metallic voice. “Some infernal thief has stolen a priceless relic—the statue of Hanuman. Now, I don’t make any accusations; but I want that curio back. I think I know the thief, and while I’d be justified in turning him over to the police, I’ll give him a chance to return my property without a scandal—if he will. The museum is just beyond the library. I want everyone here—everyone—to step into the library, then go, one at a time, into the museum. There’s only one door, and the windows are barred, so the thief can’t get away. Each of you will be allowed thirty seconds—by himself—in the museum. There’ll be a handkerchief on the table, and if I don’t find the statuette under that handkerchief when the last of you has passed through the museum, why —” he swept the company with another frigid stare—“I shall have to ask you all to wait while I send for the sheriff. Is that clear?”
A wondering, frightened murmur of assent ran round the brightly lighted room, and the host turned on his heel as he shot out, “This way, if you please.”
Rosalie, the Professor’s ward, glanced backward at her guardian as she accompanied her dancing partner and two other couples into the library, and the look in her wide, topaz eyes was a troubled one. She had lived with the Professor nearly a year, now, and knew him as only a woman can know the man she idolizes. The straight-backed little scientist was the soul of honor and propriety, but so immersed in his beloved study of anthropology that theft or murder would scarcely deter him from the acquisition of a relic of scientific value. “What if he should—” she shook her narrow shoulders as one who puts away an unpleasant thought, and stepped across the library threshold.
“I know something terrible will happen,” Miss Milsted wailed softly in the Professor’s ear.
“Nonsense, Madam; control yourself!” Forrester replied sharply, his narrow nostrils quivering with excitement.
The north wind, sweeping furiously across the rolling Maryland hills, hurled a barrage of sleet and snow against the windows, a man coughed with the abrupt sharpness of nervousness, and a woman tittered with embarrassment. The logs in the hall fireplace snapped and crackled; otherwise the house was as silent as a Quaker meeting before the Spirit moves. Two minutes dragged slowly by while the party in the drawing room watched the library door with bated breath. What drama was being enacted behind those unresponsive panels?
“Oh, I know—” the Milsted person began her dismal prophecy once more, then checked her speech with a little squeak like that of an unsuspecting mouse suddenly snared in a trap. Dying with a short flare, like a shred of dried grass touched with a match, the electric lights winked out, and, save for the reflection of the blazing logs in the hall fireplace, the house was hooded in darkness.
“Oh, I knew it—” Miss Milsted asserted, but Professor Forrester strode impatiently across the polished floor toward the closed door of the library.
“Control yourself, Madam,” he snapped. “The wires have been short-circuited by the storm. Here, somebody, bring some candles!” It was characteristic of him that he should assume command in the emergency. The man who had braved sandstorms in the Sahara, glaciers in the Himalayas and natives of Somaliland while tracing the footprints of early civilizations was not to be daunted by imperfect electric power systems. “Fetch some candles,” he repeated sharply; “we can’t—”
Voices rose in angry discord behind the library door. A man’s shout, a woman’s scream, Milsted’s half-uttered curse mingled in sudden, sharp babel, then bang! the wicked, whip-like snap of a pistol shot punctuated the hubbub.
The Professor was first to reach the library. He darted through the door, swinging it shut behind him, stilled the renewed voices with a single, sharp command, and struck a match, kneeling over a long, inert object stretched before the grate of glowing coke beneath the mantelpiece.
“Oh, I know something terrible is going to happen! I know it—” Miss Milsted screamed, clawing futilely at the coat-sleeve of the nearest man.
“Madam, be still!” the Professor’s voice, dry and sharp with suppressed excitement, cut through the gloom as he re-entered the drawing room. “Be quiet; nothing terrible is going to happen. It’s already happened. Mr. Milsted is dead.”
“Dead!” the dreadful word flew from lip to lip about the circle of frightened guests. And, as if the tragic announcement were the cue to a theatrical electrician, the dimmed lights of the big country house suddenly sprang into brightness once more, shedding their sharp, yellow rays on the group of pale, terrified faces and bringing the rouge on lips and cheeks into ghastly prominence as frightened women turned hysterically to equally frightened men for comfort and protection.
“How—” began young Carmody, but the Professor cut him short.
“Call the nearest post of state troopers,” he ordered curtly. “Then get in touch with the sheriff and the county coroner. Everyone stay where he is, please; the authorities will tell us when we may leave.
“Now”—Forrester closed the door against the chattering throng in the drawing room and faced the six people in the library—“just what happened?”
“We had just come in, Uncle Harvey,” Rosalie answered, speaking with slow care, for in times of excitement her English, still only a half-familiar tongue, completely deserted her; “we had just come in here, and Mr. Milsted was deciding which one of us should go into the museum first, when the lights went out. Somehow, just at the same time, that window there”—she pointed to a casement between two ceiling-high bookcases—“blew open, and, it seemed to me, I saw a head at the opening. I’m not sure about that, though. Mr. Carpenter here started across the room to close the window, and I think someone else did, too, though I don’t know who it was, and Mr. Milsted began to swear and ran toward me, then there was a flash and a report, and—”
“And he shot himself,” young Mr. Carpenter supplied, interrupting the girl’s story. “I don’t know why he did it, but we all saw the flash and heard him cry out with a sort of choke, and saw him fall. There was light enough from the fire for us to see that much.”
“But it looked to me as though he were shooting toward the window, not at himself,” Rosalie protested. “I’m sure the flash was directed away from him.”
“Then how do you account for—that?” Carpenter asked almost roughly, pointing dramatically to the figure lying face downward on the handsome Persian rug.
Mr. Milsted lay prone as he had fallen, one arm oddly twisted beneath him, the other extended full length beyond his head, the stock of a German Army automatic grasped convulsively in his hand. His right cheek rested against the nap of the rug, and the Professor, bending down to look into his face, observed a small, round hole, about the caliber of a lead pencil, some two inches or so above the eyebrows and almost in the center of the forehead. The rim of the wound was a little discolored, as though from a bruise, and the center was slightly depressed, forming a shallow cup or crater, while a mass of thick, clotted matter, grayish white mixed with blood, showed within the tiny, deadly circle. One or two drops of blood—no more—had trickled from the wound and lay upon
