style="font-size:15px;"> “Dreary post this, Constable,” said Cleek, coming abreast of the silent guard.
“Yes, sir, very. But dooty’s dooty—and there you be!” replied Gorham, touching his helmet with his finger; then, as the light from the lamps fell full upon Cleek’s face and let him see that it was no face he had ever seen in this district before, his eyes widened with a puzzled stare which never quite left them even when the entire group had passed on and turned the curve of the Round House wall.
And beyond that curve Cleek came to a sudden halt. Here, a curtainless window cut a square of light in the wall’s dark face and struck a glare on the trunk and the boughs of a lime tree directly opposite, and under that window a trampled flower bed lay, with curious marks deep sunk in the soft, moist surface of it.
Cleek took the lamp from Mrs. Armroyd’s hand, and, bending, looked at them closely. Mr. Nippers had not exaggerated when he said that they were all of twelve inches in length. Nor was he far out when he declared that they looked like the footprints of some creature that was part animal and part bird; for there they were, with three huge clawlike projections in front and a solitary one behind, and so like to the mark which a gigantic bird could have made that one might have said such a creature had made them, only that it was impossible for anything to fly that was possessed of weight sufficient to drive those huge footprints so deeply into the earth as they had been driven, by the mere walking of the Thing. Claws and the marks of scales, Mr. Nippers had asserted; and claws and the marks of scales the prints in the soft earth showed.
“La! la! the horror of them,” exclaimed Mrs. Armroyd, putting up her little hands and averting her face. “It could kill and kill and kill—horses, oxen, anything—an abominable creature like that! What do you figure it to have been, monsieur?—souls of the saints, what?”
“Blest if I know,” said Cleek. “Only, of course, it couldn’t possibly be anything human; so we may put the idea of the old chap having been killed by anything of his kind out of our minds altogether. It is perfectly clear that the creature, whatever it might be, got in through the window there (you see it is open) and killed him before he could call out for help or strike a blow in his own defence.”
“Eh, but window’s six foot up, Mr. Headland, sir,” put in Nippers excitedly; “and howm a thing the weight o’ that goin’ to fly in?”
“Didn’t fly in, my friend,” replied Cleek with an air of lofty superiority. “Use your wits, man. It jumped in—from the tree there. Look here—see!” going to it and tapping certain abrasions upon the trunk. “Here’s where it peeled off the bark in climbing up. Lord, man! why, it’s plain as the nose on your face. Ten to one we shall find the same sort of footprints when we go into the laboratory—damp ones, you know, from the moisture of the earth; and to make sure, in case we do find ’em let’s take the length of the things and see. Got a tape measure with you? No? Oh, well, lend me your handcuffs, if you’ve got a pair with you, and we can manage a measurement with those. Thanks very much. Now, then, let’s see. One, two, three, by Jupiter—three fingers longer than these things, chain and all. That’ll do. Now, then, let’s go in and see about the others. Lead the way, Miss Renfrew, if you will.”
She would, and did. Leading the way back to the covered passage, she opened a door in the side of it—a door designed to let the inventor out into the grounds without going through the house, if he so desired—and conducted them to the laboratory, leaving Constable Gorham to continue his dreary sentry duty outside.
At any time the interior of that huge, stone-walled, steel-lined tube must have been unlovely and depressing to all but the man who laboured in it. But to-night, with that man sitting dead in it, with his face to the open window, a lamp beside him, and stiff hands resting on the pages of a book that lay open on the desk’s flat top, it was doubly so; for, added to its other unpleasant qualities, there was now a disagreeable odour and a curious, eye-smarting, throat-roughening heaviness in the atmosphere which was like to nothing so much as the fumes thrown off by burnt chemicals.
Cleek gave one or two sniffs at the air as he entered, glanced at Mr. Narkom, then walked straightway to the desk and looked into the dead man’s face. Under the marks of the scratches and cuts upon it—marks which would seem to carry out the idea of an animal’s attack—the features were distorted and discoloured, and the hair of beard and moustache was curiously crinkled and discoloured.
Cleek stopped dead short as he saw that face, and his swaggering, flippant, cocksure air of a minute before dropped from him like a discarded mantle.
“Hullo! this doesn’t look quite so promising for the animal theory as it did!” he flung out sharply. “This man has been shot—shot with a shell filled with his own soundless and annihilating devil’s invention, lithamite—and bomb throwing is not a trick of beasts of a lower order than the animal tribe! Look here, Mr. Narkom—see! The lock of the desk has been broken. Shut the door there, Nippers. Let nobody leave the room. There has been murder and robbery here; and the thing that climbed that tree was not an animal nor yet a bird. It was a cut-throat and a thief!”
Naturally enough, this statement produced something in the nature of a panic; Miss Renfrew, indeed, appearing to be on the verge of fainting, and it is not at all unlikely that she would have slipped to the floor but for the close proximity of Mrs. Armroyd.
“That’s right, madame. Get a chair; put her into it. She will need all her strength presently, I promise you. Wait a bit! Better have a doctor, I fancy, and an inquiry into the whereabouts of Mr. Charles Drummond. Mr. Narkom, cut out, will you, and wire this message to that young man’s employer.”
Pens and papers were on the dead man’s desk. Cleek bent over, scratched off some hurried lines, and passed them to the superintendent.
“Sharp’s the word, please; we’ve got ugly business on hand and we must know about that Drummond chap without delay. Miss Renfrew has not been telling the truth to-night! Look at this man. Rigor mortis pronounced. Feel him—muscles like iron, flesh like ice! She says that he spoke to her at a quarter to eight o’clock. I tell you that at a quarter to eight this man had been dead upward of an hour!”
“Good God!” exclaimed Mr. Narkom; but his cry was cut into by a wilder one from Miss Renfrew.
“Oh, no! Oh, no!” she protested, starting up from her seat, only to drop back into it, strengthless, shaking, ghastly pale. “It could not be—it could not. I have told the truth—nothing but the truth. He did speak to me at a quarter to eight—he did, he did! Constable Gorham was there—he heard him; he will tell you the same.”
“Yes, yes, I know you said so, but—will he? He looks a sturdy, straightgoing, honest sort of chap who couldn’t be coaxed or bribed into backing up a lie; so send him in as you go out, Mr. Narkom; we’ll see what he has to say.”
What he had to say when he came in a few moments later was what Miss Renfrew had declared—an exact corroboration of her statement. He had seen a man whom he fancied was Sir Ralph Droger run out of the grounds, and he had suggested to Miss Renfrew that they had better look into the Round House and see if all was right with Mr. Nosworth. They had looked in as she had said; and Mr. Nosworth had called out and asked her what the devil she was coming in and disturbing him for, and it was a quarter to eight o’clock exactly.
“Sure about that, are you?” questioned Cleek.
“Yes, sir, sure as that I’m telling you so this minute.”
“How do you fix the exact time?”
“As we came out of the covered
