but found nothing. Finally, she and Miss Durand went up-stairs again, to find that Johnson had been dead for some time. Bates, the convalescent, had seen them go and saw them return. He had, however, been detected a day or so before by Miss Durand selling cocaine to a colored man in one of the wards, and later, under Miss Durand's eye, he said she had been absent ten minutes. As a matter of fact, it had been fifty.
Linda Smith went back to her room at once. She knew she and Miss Blake would be called to attend to Johnson in the mortuary, and she waited for the summons. The ghastly trick of hanging the poor old body to the chandelier followed in due course.
Thinking Barker still dead, it had been as great a shock to Ruth Blake as to the others. It was not until the next morning that Linda Smith told her Barker was still alive, and somewhere in the building. There was only one comfort: Linda had put the bundle of clothing on the roof, and it had disappeared.
The other things followed in quick succession. Miss Blake, half frenzied, conceived the idea of putting food heavily doped with morphia, on the roof, along the fire-escape, anywhere that the maniac might find it. She hardly knew what she hoped to do by this: she was in an abnormal frame of mind by this time: ill, sleepless and unable to eat. The food disappeared, but if the morphia had any effect, it was in daylight, when he probably slept, hidden away under the roof or in the linen closet
The following night, she searched the fifth, or mortuary floor, carrying a candle. She had suspected, from the night before, that Barker was hiding in the linen closet, and Linda Smith got the key. The plan had been that Miss Smith should go with her, but she was given a special case that night, and Miss Blake, courageously enough, went alone.
Barker was in the closet, and when she opened the door he seized her arm in a murderous grip that left it blue and swollen. She tried speaking to him, and releasing his hold, he darted out through the closet window and leaped to the fire-escape. Miss Blake pluckily followed him to the roof, but he had disappeared. As Miss Lizzie has told, I followed Miss Blake. Just before I reached her, she cried out and flung her brass candlestick at something behind me. The next instant I was grasped from behind and thrown head first through the skylight.
I did not know I had been bitten in the shoulder. I thought I had been stabbed, until Jacobs and I together cauterized the wound that night in the laboratory. Probably during the time we were there, the door being unlocked. Barker entered and hid in the building. Miss Blake was there at the same time, having watched Jacobs and myself enter, and being fearful of further harm. She did not see anything of Barker, however, and went back to the roof, where she sat huddled until dawn, waiting for Barker to appear again. But he did not come, and at daylight, shaking with cold, she went back to her room. There she had a chill, followed by violent fever and delirium, and there I believe Linda Smith came, bringing a surgical knife stained with blood, that she had found on the roof, and which Miss Lewis subsequently found in Miss Blake's room.
The condition of the two girls by that time was pitiable. Miss Blake, younger and more nervous, had entirely succumbed: Miss Smith, sleepless and unable to eat, was still making a fight to cover the whole thing and to drive Barker away from the building. They could not discover where he hid in the daytime, but at night evidences of his ape-like mischief were everywhere apparent. He swung by his feet from the pipe-molding of the walls, squatted on the foot-board of the bed in private room thirty-six, making hideous grimaces—a story which caused the nurse in charge to mark 'delirious' on the record of a perfectly rational woman—leaped at giddy heights about the fire-escape and the roof, and alarmed Miss Aggie into her story of a ghostly; foot. The man's strength was almost superhuman.
Johnson died on Tuesday night, and it was on Wednesday night that I was thrown through the skylight Toward dawn of Thursday morning. Barker went to the Zoo, distant about a mile from the hospital. By that time he had donned Johnson's trousers, but remained in his bare feet Access to the monkey house proved easy. The assistant keeper, sleeping in a small room just inside the entrance, was not aroused until too late. The key to Hero's cage hung over his bed, it being his habit to go in to see the ape several times during the night. On that night, he opened the cage at one o'clock, and spoke to the ape, who had been sulky all day. He locked the door and went back to bed, hanging the key up again on its nail. It was still there in the morning at six o'clock, but the ape was dead. In spite of his tremendous strength and length of arm, he had been literally crushed to death, and then hung to the top of the cage by a roller towel which did not belong to the Zoo.
The police were put on the case, and had already arrested the assistant keeper, who had been heard to say that either the ape would get him or he would get the ape.
On Wednesday night, Briggs, who had been most unpopular with Barker, met his death in an almost similar manner, his ribs being crushed in. In this case, however. Barker's ingenuity utilized the useless brown coat, the two towels being gone. Previous to that time, he had rocked the elevator in impish mischief, or possibly wrath. It was this incident which caused my Aunt Letitia to suspect a space under the roof at the top of the elevator shaft, as a hiding place.
The result of her courageous investigation is well known: mounted on top of the cage, she was taken to the upper position of the shaft, and there found what she had been looking for, an unboarded spot behind the elevator wheel. She was disappointed, however, in finding the space too dark for inspection, and in hearing or seeing nothing suspicious.
Being a courageous woman and convinced that what she sought was there in the cavelike recess, my Aunt Letitia threw her slipper with all the strength she could summon, and was answered by a growl.
My wife has just read this and confirms most of it. She suggests, however, that I have omitted our theory of how Briggs was murdered without discovery, while Jacobs was in the hall nearby and I myself guarded the only other means of exit, the fire-escape.
Barker probably took refuge in the linen closet, arriving at the mortuary floor ahead of the slow progress of the cage, by scurrying up the cable. He hid in the closet, and by throwing the coat over Briggs and squeezing him in his muscular arms, he prevented any outcry. Immediately after, he locked himself in the closet again, where he smoked Briggs' pipe, perhaps in itself the object of the attack.
On the alarm being raised. Hicks and I came in through the window, and Jacobs through the door. This left the fire-escape and the roof unwatched, and he climbed out the window of the linen closet, swinging himself easily to the fire-escape.
"The rest of the story we know. Barker was found, exhausted and half starving, and was promptly put in a padded cell, where, a week later, he died, probably from an infection, having cut his left foot badly, possibly with the very knife that killed the laboratory guinea-pigs. The injured foot, which he had crudely bandaged, probably explains why only prints of a right foot were discovered. With the removal of suspense Miss Blake recovered, and is now with me, enjoying the lilies and onion fields of Bermuda. My Aunt Letitia is at Mount Clemens, taking a series of baths and—I am informed by Miss Lizzie—carrying on what she believes is a clandestine correspondence with the Wright brothers. Miss Aggie's hay fever left with the first frost. I am sorry to say that Miss Linda Smith has never been heard from."
Three Pirates of Penzance
Chapter I.
A Cigarette Case, a Shoe, and a Menu Card
It was three o'clock in the morning when we got back to the lake, and
