undaunted. "Mark my words, Lizzie," she said, "they've lost a chimpanzee or a gorilla from the Zoological Garden—not that they'll acknowledge it. You remember when the lion got loose and ate a colored woman out the Ralston road, and how the papers denied everything until they found the beast dead of indigestion in a cellar? But that is what has happened."
Well, I thought it likely enough myself, and Tish called up Charlie Sands, who is on a newspaper and is another of Tish's nephews.
Lizzie and I," said Tish over the 'phone, have reason to believe that there is a great ape—a-p-e—ape! Monkey, monkey—yes. A large monkey loose, and we want you to trace it."
There was a long pause. Tish said afterward that Charlie claimed to have fainted at the other end of the wire, and to have had to be restored with whisky and soda. However, which is more to the point, he promised to find out for us what he could, and Tish hung up the receiver.
"He'll do it, too, Lizzie," she said, "although he spoke to me gently, as if he thought my reason had entirely gone. But, as he said, it won't hurt to scare up the Zoo people anyhow. They're very casual about their animals."
Now, two things were discovered that afternoon, neither of them to be explained by anything we knew. The first one was that Tommy Andrews and Mr. Harrison, the superintendent, making a careful examination of the roof, found a spattering of dried blood leading from the broken skylight to the ridge pole, where it ceased abruptly. The second one was made by Aggie and myself.
About three o'clock that afternoon Aggie got into her clothes and insisted on coming into Tish's room, which was inconvenient, Tish expecting the message from Charlie Sands at any moment. Aggie was nervous, but her head was clearer. She'd been thinking things over, and she knew now that what had happened the night before had been a message from the roofer.
"Then the least said about it the better!" Tish snapped. "If he hasn't any better sense than to materialize his foot, and you a woman of your years and respectability, he'd better go back where he came from."
For heaven's sake, Tish," Aggie pleaded, looking over her shoulder. "He may be listening to us now!"
"I don't care if he is," said Tish recklessly. "If he'd materialize a will, now, leaving you that house in Groveton! But a foot!"
"I'm not so sure it was a foot," Aggie said restlessly. "I've been thinking, Tish—he was a large man, you know. It may have been a hand."
Now at that moment the telephone bell rang, and Tish signaled to me to take Aggie out at once. I got up and took her by the arm.
"I'll walk up and down the corridor with you, Aggie," I said. "You need exercise."
"I don't care to walk," she objected, trying to sit down. "See who is at the telephone, Tish. I expect my laundress is through washing and wants her money."
"I'd like you to see the hospital," I said desperately as the 'phone rang again. "The—the guinea-pigs, Aggie." Miss Lewis had told me about them.
Now, Aggie loves a guinea-pig. It's a queer taste, but she says they neither bark like dogs nor scratch like cats, and they have a nice way of wiggling their noses.
"Guinea-pigs!" she said in an ecstasy. "Where?"
"In the laboratory," said I, and led her out of the room.
She put on all her wraps and Miss Lewis took us to the laboratory, which is a small brick building set off by itself in the hospital yard, with Aggie cooing in anticipation and wanting to send out and buy a cabbage for them. Doctor Grim, who was the surgical interne, met us as we were crossing the yard, and volunteered to let us in.
"You know," he said, feeling in his pocket for the keys, "they're not attractive as some guinea-pigs and rabbits I have known under happier circumstances. They scratch a good bit—some think it's fleas; some say it's germs."
"Germs?" Aggie asked, puzzled.
"Oh, yes," he said, opening the door and leading the way into a narrow hall. "Some of them have been inoculated with several different kinds of germs. That's why we keep this place so well locked up, for fear the germs may escape. You know,"—he unlocked the second door and threw it open, "you know, suppose you were walking up the street and met a solid phalanx of say sixteen billion typhoid germs, or measles! It would be horrible, wouldn't it?"
He stepped into the room and looked about him.
"Come in," he said. "It's a little close. We had a tear-up among the resident staff, and nobody has been here to-day. Hello!"
He threw open the shutters, and a broad shaft of gray daylight lighted the room. Aggie gave a cry of dismay. The doors of the small cages around the walls were all open, and in the center, a pathetic heap of little brown-and-white and black-and-white bodies, lay the guinea-pigs.
Doctor Grim picked one up and examined it closely.
"I'm damned!" he said, and put it down. "Throats cut, every one of them! And where are the rabbits?"
Aggie sat down and began to blubber, but Miss Lewis scolded her soundly. "There'll be plenty more where they came from," she said sharply. "What does concern us is—how would anybody or anything get in here with both doors and all the windows locked, and not a chimney."
Aggie wiped her eyes and got up.
"You laughed at me last night, Miss Lewis," she said with dignity, "but I wish to remind you that to the fourth dimension there are no locks, no bars, no doors or walls."
"When they invent that," said Miss Lewis, opening the door to let us out, "they'll have to invent something like these X-ray-proof screens, or a woman won't dare to change her clothes."
"And what's more," said Aggie, turning in the doorway, "the hand that slew those innocent little creatures is the one I touched last night!"
"Hand!" cried Miss Lewis. "It was a foot then."
But Aggie was holding her shoulder over her face and hurrying across the yard. At the far side she threw back a contemptuous sneeze.
Tish's commission to Charlie Sands had an unexpected result. She was almost bursting with it when I got back.
"Listen," she said while Aggie got her spray, "doesn't this bear out what IVe been saying right along? The Zoo people say positively that none of their animals has escaped. But they took such an interest in his inquiry that Charlie grew suspicious and bribed a keeper. He sent this up by messenger from the office:
" 'Dear and revered spinster aunt,' " she read—"the young rascal! 'I couldn't tell you this over the 'phone, for it's our exclusive property, and will be published to-morrow morning, with photographs of the late deceased, etc. Hero, the biggest ape in captivity, pining for his keeper, Wesley Barker, who has been away, committed suicide in his cage last night by hanging himself with a roller towel. He was found dead when the assistant keeper unlocked the cage at six o'clock this morning. Nobody knows how he got the roller towel. Charlie.'
" 'P. S.—I've got the roller towel, a fine long one and marked S. P. T. Do you think the letters stand for Suicidal Purpose Towel?' "
Tish looked at me triumphantly over her reading-glasses.
"You see, Lizzie, what a little logical thinking will do. If it hadn't been for me, you and Aggie would have gone to your graves expecting
