Chapter III: Part 3

"Your theory sounds reasonable," said the stranger; "and yet who knows? That inscription certainly is Hebrew. At least, it is neither English nor German. When one has studied psychic phenomena as long as I have, he comes to a point where he is very chary of saying what is not credible. Do I not, time and again, materialize the dead, calling from the winds, the waters, and the earth the dispersed particles of the corporeal frame to reclothe for a little time the spiritual essence? Could not the great Solomon do as much? Is it not possible that that great moral ensamplar, guide, saint, and prophet has imprisoned in that bottle some one of the Pre-Adamite demons? I am not afraid to open the bottle, on the contrary, would be glad to do so. I am a clairvoyant and trance-medium, with materialization as a specialty. My name is Jefferson P. Smitz. Here is my card. I have a seance to-morrow night. Bring your bottle then, and I will open it. The price of admission is," he said, with a glance of tentative scrutiny, "one dollar," at which information Mr. Middleton, looking unresponsive, uninterested, not to say sulky, he continued: "but as you will bring such an important and interesting contribution to the subject of inquiry for the evening, we will make the admission for you only fifty cents, fifty cents."

On the following evening, Mr. Middleton and his bottle sat among a circle of some thirty persons who were gathered in the gloomy, lofty-ceiled parlor of Mr. Smitz. Before forming the circle, Mr. Smitz had addressed the company in a few well-chosen words, saying that a like purpose had brought all there that night, that as votaries of science and devotees of truth and persons of culture and refinement, mutual acquaintance could not but be pleasant as well as helpful, enabling those who sat together while witnessing the astounding and edifying phenomena they were soon to behold, to discuss these phenomena with reciprocal benefit--in view of all this, he hoped everybody would consider themselves introduced to everybody else.

Mr. Middleton, quickly inspecting the assemblage, whom he doubtless with great injustice denominated a crowd of sober dubs and solemn stiffs, so maneuvered that when all had drawn their chairs into a circle, a man deaf in the right ear sat at his left, while at his right sat a tall young lady, who though slightly pale was of an interesting appearance, notwithstanding. The somewhat tragic cast of her large and classic features was intensified by a pair of great mournful eyes and a wistful mouth, the whole framed in luxuriant masses of black hair, and altogether she was a girl whom one would give a second and third glance anywhere.

It developing in their very first exchange of remarks that she had never been present at a seance and that she could not look forward to what they were about to witness without great trepidation, Mr. Middleton offered to afford her every moral support and such physical protection as one mortal can assure another when facing the unknown powers of another world. At the extinguishment of the gas, he took her left hand, and finding it give a faint tremor, he took the other and was pleased to note that, so far as her hands gave evidence, thereupon her fears were quite allayed.

A breeze, chill and dank as the breath of a tomb, blew upon the company, and from the deep darkness into which they all stared with straining, unseeing eyes, came the solemn sound of Mr. Smitz, speaking hurriedly in somber tones in some sonorous unknown tongue, and low rustlings and whirrs and soft footfalls and faint rattlings that grew stronger, louder, each moment, swelling up into the stamp of a mailed heel and the clangor of arms as Mr. Smitz scratched a match and the light of a gas jet glanced upon helmet, corslet, shield, and greaves of a brazen-armored Greek warrior, standing in the middle of the circle, alive, in full corporeal presence!

"Leonidas, hero of Thermopylae!" shouted Mr. Smitz, and then continued at a conversational pitch, "if any of you wish to speak to him in his own language, you have full permission to do so."

Those present lacking either the desire to accost the dread presence, or a command of the ancient Greek, after a bit Mr. Smitz turned off the gas and the noises that had heralded the visitant's appearance began in reverse order, and at their cease, the gas being turned on again, there was the circle quite bare of any evidence that a Greek warrior in full panoply had but now stood there.

At these prodigies, the young lady trembled, but you could have applied all sorts of surgical devices for measuring nerve reaction to Mr. Middleton from the crown of his head to where his parallel feet held between them the copper bottle, and not have detected a tremor.

Mr. Smitz was reaching up to extinguish the gas once more, when a big, athletic blonde man, whose appearance and garb proclaimed him an Englishman, interrupted him.

"I am going to request you to materialize the spirit with whom I wish to converse, the next time. I have to catch a train at eleven and there are a number of things I would like to do before that. Yesterday, you promised me that you would materialize him first thing."

"Yesterday," said Mr. Smitz with a slight hauteur, "I could not look forward and see that I was to have such a large and cultivated gathering. You cannot, sir, ask to have your own mere personal business, for business it is with you, take precedence of the scientific quests of all these other ladies and gentlemen. I have planned to materialize men of many nations, with whom all may converse if they please; Confucius, the great Chinese; Caesar, the great Roman; Mohammed, the great Turk; Powhattan, the great Indian, and others. Your business must wait."

"My friends," said the Englishman, appealing to the assemblage, "I throw myself upon your good nature. My grandfather was the owner of a small estate in Ireland. In a rebellion, the Irish burned every building on the place and it has since been deserted. He had buried a sum of money before he fled during the rebellion and we have a chart telling where it was buried. But the chart referred to buildings and trees that were subsequently utterly destroyed. We have no marks to guide us. I am sadly in need of money. My grandfather's ghost could tell me where the treasure is. I shall suffer financial detriment if I do not catch the train at eleven and must attend to several matters before that. You have heard my case. May I not ask you all to grant me the indulgence of having my affair disposed of now?"

Mr. Middleton and several others were about to endorse the justice of the Englishman's request, when Mr. Smitz hastily forestalled them by saying that all should be heard from and turning to four personages who sat together at a point where the line of chairs of the circle passed before a large and mysterious cabinet set in the corner of the wall, and asking their opinion, they all four in one voice began to object to any alteration of the program of the evening, adverting somewhat to the Boer War, the oppressions in Ireland, and to the Revolution and the War of 1812. When they had done, there was no one who cared to say a word for the Englishman or an Englishman, and Mr. Smitz announced that Confucius would be the next materialization and that all might address him in his native tongue. Of this permission, a small red-head gentleman, whose demeanor advertised him to be in a somewhat advanced state of intoxication, availed himself and remarked slowly:

"Hello, John. Washee, washee? Sabe how washee? Wlanter be Melican man?"

To this the great sage vouchsafed no reply save a contemptuous stare, and the red-headed gentleman observed that doubtless the Chinese language had changed a good deal in two thousand years. All languages did.

From out the darkness under whose cover the Chinaman was modestly divesting himself of his body, came the voice of Mr. Smitz, rich, unctuous, saying:

"The next visitant will be from that great race we all admire so much, the noble race which has done so much to build up this country, which in every field of American endeavor has been a guiding star to us all. It gives me great pleasure to tell you that our next visitant from the world beyond is that great soldier, statesman, and patriot, King Brian Boru."

"Who the devil wants to see that or any other paddy?" exclaimed the voice of the Englishman, choleric, savage. "Let me out of this blarsted, cheating hole. Who wants to see one of that race of quarrelsome, thieving, wretched rapscallions?"

Whack! Smash! Bang! Crash! The assemblage was thrown into a pitiable state of terror by a most extraordinary combat and tumult taking place somewhere in the circle. The remonstrances of Mr. Smitz and the oaths of the Englishman rose against the general din of the expostulations of the men and cries of the women. Match after match was struck by the men, only to be blown out by some mysterious agency, after giving momentary glimpses of the Englishman astride of a man on the floor, pummelling him lustily, while Mr. Smitz pulled at the Englishman's shoulders. At length the noise died away, the sound of some one remonstrating, "let me at him oncet, let me at the spalpeen, he got me foul," coming back from some remote region of the atmosphere, as under the compelling force of the will of the great Smitz, the bodily envelope of the Irish hero was dissipated and his soul went back to the beyond.

Then did a match reach the gas without being blown out. Beneath the chandelier stood Mr. Smitz and the four personages who had sat before the cabinet and had views on the Boer War.

"What an awful, sacrilegious thing you have done," exclaimed Mr. Smitz. "You have struck the dead."

"He hit me first."

"Your remarks about the Irish angered him. He could not restrain himself."

"Well, he couldn't whip me. Next time you materialize him, he'll show a black eye. Let me out of here, you cheat, you imposter, you and your pals, or I'll fix you as I did Brian Boru."

Though the company did not take the Englishman's view, they were all anxious to go. They were quite unstrung by what had occurred, this combat between the living and the dead. They looked with horrified awe at the spot where it had taken place. There stood the living combatant, still full of the fire of battle. Him whom he had fought was gone on the winds to the voiceless abodes of the departed, a breath, a shadow, a sudden chill on the cheek and nothing more. For a brief space resuming his old fleshly habitude, with it had come the cholers and hatreds of the flesh and once more he avenged his country's wrongs.

"Say," said the Englishman, with a malign look on his face, as he paused in the door, "if you've got that mick patched up any down in the kitchen, I'll give him another chance, if he wishes. Tell him to pick a smaller man next time."

To this, Mr. Smitz made no reply, but flashed a look that would have frozen any one less insolent and truculent than the Englishman.

All this time Mr. Middleton had been very agreeably employed in a corner of the room, for the young lady in an access of terror had thrown herself into his arms and there she had remained during the whole affrighting performance. To forerun any possible apprehension that he was going to extricate himself and leave her, he held her with considerable firmness, whispering encouragement into her ear the while. Preparing to accompany her home, he had almost left the room before he bethought him of the copper bottle, which he had abandoned when springing up to get the young lady out of the circle and away from danger. He soon found it lying against the wall, whither it had rolled or been kicked during the melee.

The young lady continuing to be in a somewhat prostrated state after her late experience, on the way home Mr. Middleton supported her by his right arm about her waist, while she found further stay by resting her left arm across his shoulders, she being a tall young lady. Their remaining hands met in a clasp of cheer and encouragement on his part, of trusting dependence on hers. Arriving at her door in this fashion, it was but natural for Mr. Middleton--who was a very natural young man--to clasp her in a good-night embrace, but upon essaying to put the touch of completion to these joys which a kiss would give, she drew away her head, saying:

"Why, how dare you, sir! I never met you before. Why, I haven't even been formally introduced to you."

Mr. Middleton humbly pleading for the salute, she continued to express her surprise that he should prefer such a request upon no acquaintance at all, that he should even faintly expect her to grant it, and so on, all the while leaning languishing upon his breast with all her weight. Whereupon Mr. Middleton lost patience and with incisive sarcasm he began:

"One would think that you who refuse this kiss were not the girl who stands here within my arms, my lips saying this into her ears, her cheek almost touching mine. Doubtless it is some one else. Pray tell me, what great difference is there between kissing a stranger and hugging him."

At these brutal, downright words, leaving the poor young thing nothing to say, no little pretence even to herself that she had guarded the proprieties, had comported herself circumspectly, leaving her with not even a little rag of a claim that she had conducted herself with seemly decorum, she sprang from him and began to cry. Whatever the cause, Mr. Middleton could not look upon feminine unhappiness with composure and here where he was himself responsible, he was indeed smitten with keen remorse and hastening to comfort her, gathered her into his arms and there he was abasing and condemning himself and telling her what a dear, nice girl she was--and kissing away her tears.

"Let me give you a piece of advice," he said, fifteen minutes later, as he was about to release her and depart. "It is not best ever to let a man hug you. Never," he said, pausing to imprint a lingering kiss upon the girl's yielding lips, "never let a man kiss you again until that moment when you shall become his affianced wife."

Mr. Middleton departed in that serene state of mind which the consciousness of virtue bestows, for he had given the young woman valuable advice that would doubtless be of advantage to her in the future and he reflected upon this in much satisfaction as he fared away with the eyes of the young woman watching him from where she looked out of the parlor window.

Reaching into his right coat pocket to transfer the copper bottle to the opposite pocket, in order that his coat might not be pulled out of shape, as he grasped the neck, one of his fingers went right into the mouth! The seal of Solomon was gone! A less resolute and quick-witted person might have been alarmed, but reasoning that the seal must have been knocked off during the fight at Mr. Smitz's and nothing had happened since, he boldly examined the bottle. He could see a white substance as he looked into it, and by the aid of a stick he fished out a wad of wool tightly stuffed in the neck. A metallic chinking followed the removal of the wadding and set his heart thumping rapidly. He looked up and down the street. No one in sight. He tilted the bottle up to the light of a street lamp and saw a yellow gleam. He shook it and into his hands flowed a stream of gold sequins! He could not sufficiently admire the ruse of Prince Houssein. Money on the first messenger there had been none.

In a center more given to numismatics, or had he been willing to wait and sell the coins gradually, Mr. Middleton might have secured more than he did for the gold pieces, all coined at Bagdad in the early caliphates and very valuable. But he disposed of them in a lump to a French gentleman on La Salle Street for fourteen hundred and twenty-five dollars.

Calling on the young lady of Englewood within the next few days, he made no reference to these events, though she asked him several times during the evening what he had been doing lately. He did, however, hint at having profited by a certain fortunate "deal," as he called it, but not a word did he say concerning the mournful girl or anything remotely connected with her.

Hesitating to hurt the emir's feelings by exposing the obtuseness of his ancestor Noureddin and the foolish superstition of his descendants ever since, Mr. Middleton said nothing of these transactions when once more he sat in the presence of the urbane and accomplished prince of the tribe of Al-Yam. Having handed him a bowl of delicately flavored sherbet, the emir began the narration of The Pleasant Adventures of Dr. McDill.

_The Pleasant Adventures of Dr. McDill._

It was twelve o'clock on a blustery winter night and Dr. James McDill was where a married man of forty ought to be at such an hour in that season, sleeping soundly by the side of his beloved wife. But his wife was not sleeping. At the stroke of the hour, she had suddenly awoke from refreshing slumber and become aware of sounds as of persons moving softly about the room, and after a little, seeing against the windows faintly illuminated by a distant street light, two dark figures, she perceived her ears had not deceived her. Shaking her husband unavailingly for a considerable time, in her terror she finally cast discretion to the winds and shouted:

"Burglars, Jim, burglars!"

Hardly had these words ceased, when the electric lights were turned on and Dr. McDill sat up in bed to find himself staring into the muzzles of three revolvers, held by two masked men, who stood looking over the footboard. Bidding them move at their peril, the man with two revolvers remained to guard the doctor and his wife, while the other began to ransack the room. As he did so, he carried on an easy, if not eloquent, dissertation upon the rights of man and the iniquitous conditions which made it necessary for the poor and oppressed to obtain by force, if they obtained at all, any share in the privileges and riches of the wealthy. As he discoursed, at times carried away by his theme, he gave over his search and paused to enforce his points with earnest gestures. This caused the other robber some disquietude and he cursed his compatriot and the doctor and his wife with a use of epithets that will not bear repeating and which showed him to be none other than a low ruffian. At last all the treasure in the room being taken and the doctor being forced to accompany them and disclose the repository of other valuables, the robbers took their departure.

Some weeks after this, two persons suspected of being responsible for certain robberies were taken into custody and the doctor called into court to identify them if possible.

"I noticed," said he, "that the shorter of the two masked men was prone to gesticulation and that he had a fashion of holding his arms close to his body, as if tied at the elbows, and with hands fully open, fingers apart, thumbs extended, and palms upward, waving his forearms----"

At this juncture, the smile on the face of the defendant's counsel, occasioned by thus putting his client upon his guard, was dispelled by an angry exclamation from the person in question, and denying with some loquacity and even more vociferation that he ever made such a gesture, at the close of his statement, behold, he made the gesture!

By the doctor's testimony was a chain of incriminating evidence established that led to a sentence of ten years' imprisonment being imposed upon the robbers. When he had heard the sentence, he of the gestures turned fiercely toward the doctor and cried:

"You'll be killed for this, like other dogs before you for the same cause. If you're not killed before I am discharged or escape, I'll kill you. But I am only one of many, a tried band who avenge;" and hereupon he smote the rail in front of him, "Knock, knock--knock; knock, knock--knock." And from several parts of the silent room came answers, faint, but distinct, two quick taps, a pause, and a third, then all repeated. "Tap, tap--tap; tap, tap--tap."

The evidence of confederates, the quick response to the appeal of their comrade, the taps that came from everywhere and nowhere, manifestation of the desperate men surrounding him, might well have daunted the soul of any man. Three sentences had been pronounced that day, a term of years upon Jerry McGuire and Barry O'Toole, but death upon James McDill. You may depend upon it that the doctor was none the more reassured when on the morrow he learned that McGuire and O'Toole had escaped. With their anger and resentment yet hot within them, these men would doubtless at once set about to encompass his destruction, and he knew that when once one of these societies had decreed the death of a person who balked or incensed them, every endeavor was used to put the decree into effect. But, after a little, he took courage from the very fact that was most threatening. If these men, these desperate and despicable scoundrels, could escape from the barriers of stone and steel and the guardians that surrounded them, why might not he fight for his life and win in the struggle which both reason and instinct told him was inevitable?

That those he loved most might not be involved in the perils he felt certain he was about to encounter and that his resolution and his movements might not be hampered by their presence and their fears, he found means to persuade his wife to take the children for a visit to their grandfather, and setting his affairs in order and providing himself with two revolvers, a bowie knife, and an Italian stiletto, he even began to look forward to the approaching struggle with something of that pleasure which man experiences in the anticipation of any contest; and there is indeed a certain keen zest in playing the game where one's stake is one's life.

On the evening of the day of his wife's departure, he was called to assist in an operation at a hospital with which he had once been connected, and unexpected complications arising, it was not until two in the morning that he started away. His man and carriage, that he had ordered to await him, had gone. The night was mild and it must have been weariness or restiveness, that had caused the departure. Although some distance lay between the hospital and his home, he started afoot. Not a soul was to been seen in the street, which, thanks to the light of the moon late rising in its last quarter, lay visible to his sight. As he passed an alleyway, shortly after leaving the hospital, his attention was attracted by the sound of snores, and he discovered a man whose features were well shrouded in the upturned collar of an ulster, seated with his back against a house wall, asleep. The man stirred uneasily as he bent over him, but thinking it best not to disturb him, the doctor passed on. As he did so, he became conscious that the snores had ceased, and looking back, he beheld the man walk drowsily across the sidewalk and finally stand gazing in the direction of the hospital. The doctor began to hasten his steps, but ever and anon glancing back, and presently he saw the man was now looking after him, that he leaned to the right and leaned to the left, and stooped down in his scrutinizing. Suddenly the man reached forward with a cane, smote the sidewalk, "rap, rap--rap; rap, rap--rap," and taken up on either side of the way, louder and louder as it came up the street toward the now fleeing doctor, from sequestered nooks between buildings, ran the fateful, hurrying volley of "rap, rap--rap; rap, rap--rap." The last raps came right behind the doctor's heels at the mouth of an alley he was clearing at a bound, and glancing back, he saw a succession of men hurrying silently after him at all speed. He was encumbered with a long ulster, while his pursuers, if they had worn overcoats, had now cast them aside. The man just behind, apparently did not wish to close in alone, preferring to allow others to catch up and assist him, and at the second block the doctor could hear two pairs of heels behind him and a third pair just beyond. The pursuers were gaining. Though he would have to pause to do it, he must throw off his overcoat. At the third corner, he tore at the long garment, it swung under his feet, and he pitched headlong----. He heard a cry of savage joy and a rush of feet, a sudden great soft whirr, and he arose to see an automobile halted between him and his pursuers. A gentleman of a rotund person, clothed in correct evening dress and whose speech was of a thickness to indicate recent indulgence in intoxicating liquors, alighted from the carriage.

"I do not believe thish ish the place. No, thish ish not the place I told you to come to, driver. I'm glad it isn't anyway, as I'm afraid we're too drunk to sing a serenade. Here's another man as's drunk, too. So drunk he fell down on hisself. Couldn't leave him here. Never go back on a man as is drunk. Get in brother. Take you home with us. Get in."

It is needless to say that Dr. McDill responded to his invitation with the greatest alacrity and gratitude. For the first time did the rotund gentleman become aware that there were other persons present. Some four of the doctor's pursuers had now gathered at the curb of the crossing and the rest were coming thither, though with no great haste, for they were gentry to whom caution was second nature and it was by no means certain what the arrival of the automobile might portend. The four at the curb, deterred from retreat by that sense of shame which is not entirely absent even in the lowest and most depraved, were now insistently giving their rap to incite their comrades to hasten. The rotund gentleman walked around to that side of the carriage and gazed at them with some degree of interest and curiosity. "Rap, rap--rap; rap, rap--rap," went the sticks of the four and down the street came answering raps and soon the four were joined by two more.

"Don't let him go now, we've almost got him. We'd had him, if Red hadn't gone to sleep and let him get by. Come on, come on."

The six rushed at the carriage, whereat the rotund gentleman, with an agility not to be looked for in one of his contour and condition, received the foremost with smash, smash--smash, in each eye and on the nose, and the second likewise, when bidding the driver be off, he leaped into the carriage with his comrades. A single bullet whistled after them as they whirled away.

"Rap, rap--rap. I rapped 'em," said the rotund gentleman. "I always did hate a knocker."

With your permission I will here interpolate the remark that the further adventures of the eminent surgeon with the mysterious confederacy that sought his life, bore evidence that these depraved and ruffianly men were not without a certain rude artistic temperament as well as a tinge of romance, and a dramatic sense that many who write for the stage might well envy them.

The elation of the doctor over his escape from the toils of the thieves was not of long duration. His breakfast was interrupted by a call to the telephone and over the wires came to his startled ears a hollow "knock, knock--knock; knock, knock--knock." At his office door down town softly came "tap, tap--tap; tap, tap--tap," and snatch the door open as hastily as he might, he saw nothing, heard nothing, heard nothing but the electric bells on the floors above and floors below calling for the elevator: "buzz, buzz--buzz; buzz, buzz--buzz." He walked along State Street at the busy hour of noon and all about him in the throngs was the dull impact of canes upon the pavement, "thud, thud--thud; thud, thud--thud." As he rode home in the street car at nightfall, back of him in the train at street corner after corner he heard passengers jingle the bell for stopping, "ding, ding--ding; ding, ding--ding."

Although Dr. McDill was a man of great native resolution and intrepid in the face of known and seen dangers, the horrors of the invisible forces of death everywhere surrounding him so wore at his soul that he returned down town and spent the night at a hotel. On the morrow, he severely condemned himself for this yielding to fear, for on the front steps of his house lay the dead form of his great watch dog, Jacques. There were evidences of a struggle in which the assailants had not been unscathed. Bits of cloth lay about and examining the stains of blood that plentifully blotched the walk, he discovered that some of it was human blood.

"Ah," he said, in deep self-reproach, "if I had stayed here as I should, I would have been able to fight with poor Jacques and brought low some of my enemies. How easily I could have fired from the upper windows as Jacques made their presence known. It is evident that the noise of the struggle was so great that the fiends were afraid to continue the attack and ran away."

Philosophers and poets have found a theme for dissertation in the fact that the dog leaves his own kindred to dwell with man and fights them in behalf of his master. It has ever seemed to me that this were but half of the tale, for full many a man loves his dog better than the rest of mankind, and so the devotion of the race of dogs finds return and recompense. Outside his own family, there was no living thing in the city of Chicago which had so dwelt in the affections of Dr. McDill as the dog Jacques. Of the truth of this, he had had but dim realization until now and he was like to burst with sorrow and with hatred of the vile beings who had marked him and his for slaughter. Lifting the stiff form of his humble comrade, for the first time did he observe a poniard thrust in the poor beast's throat. The blade impaled a piece of paper and upon it was written the word "Knock."

"Knock!" cried the doctor: "but henceforth it shall be I that knock. Hasten the time when we may meet, malignant knaves. Never again shall I avoid you. Henceforth, I go about my business as before, for it is thus that I may expect the sooner to encounter you."

An urgent matter would require the doctor's presence in the municipality of Evanston that night. He could not expect to return before twelve o'clock in the morning and of this informing the cook, who in the temporary reduction of the family carried on the household without the aid of a second girl, he departed northward. It was past the hour of one when he let himself in the front door of his residence. A pleasant savor of various viands saluted his nostrils and in the drawing-room he observed that the chairs and tables had all been thrust against the wall as if to clear the floor for dancing. In the dining-room, the evidence of recent festivity was complete, for the table was covered with the remnants of a sumptuous repast. No words were needed to tell him that Olga Blomgren, the cook, had taken advantage of the foreknowledge of his absence to entertain a wide circle of friends; but here indeed was a mystery. Why had she not set everything in order and removed all traces of the entertainment? He moved toward the kitchen in wonder and--his heart stood still. The beams of the lamp held above his head were shot back by the gleam of blue and white satin, his wife's favorite ball dress on the kitchen floor. But it was not his wife's fair hair and snowy shoulders that, rising out of the glistening blue and white, were striped with a glistening red, but the snowy shoulders and fair hair of poor Olga Blomgren. Thus had she paid for her hour of magnificence. Thus had death cut her down because the maid's form was of the same statuesque beauty as her mistress's. Tenderly the doctor stooped to lift up the dead girl, stricken in her mistress's stead. There was a poniard in her throat, and it impaled a piece of paper upon which was written "Knock."

"Knock, knock--" the next knock would be upon his own heart.

Whatever design the doctor had held of not appealing to the police for protection against his invisible foes, his affairs had now reached a point where the intervention of the officers of the law could no longer be avoided. Poor Jacques could be consigned to earth without the intervention of priest or police, but the murder of Olga was a matter for official investigation. With that crafty and subtle way the astute sleuths of the Chicago constabulary have of informing the public through the intermediary of the press of all measures projected against evil-doers, of moves to be made, of arrests to be attempted, all citizens were in possession of the fact that owing to the startling plot just brought to light, all gatherings and coteries of men, especially at late hours, were to be watched, investigated, and made to give accounts of themselves. Dr. McDill fumed at the turn affairs had taken. That the confederacy of thieves would abandon their attempts upon his life, was not to be dreamed of. But they would forego the pleasure of witnessing his death in the presence of all assembled together. They would now delegate the attack to a single individual, and in event of his death, he could hope to carry with him but one of his enemies.

Again was Dr. McDill called to the hospital for a night operation. Leaving his driver without, he cautioned him.

"August, I don't want you to be fooled the way you were before. If any man comes out of the hospital and says I send word for you to drive home without waiting for me, pay no attention to him. Take no orders from anybody but me."

"All right. They can't fool me vonce again already."

But when a cab drove up and let out a tall gentleman in a silk hat, who went into the hospital, and after a little the cab driver, a friendly and talkative person of Irish extraction, offered August a flask full of a beverage also of Irish extraction, August took a drink.

"He told me not to take no orders yet already from nobody but him. But he didn't say nothin' about takin' a drink vonce."

"Take a drink twice, then, Hans," said the person of Irish extraction, "already, yet, and by and by, too."

It was all of four hours later that Dr. McDill stepped out of the hospital door. He paused under the light of the globe over the porch and examining a large bag of water-proof silk, he thrust therein a sponge upon which he poured the contents of a small phial, after which, seeing that a noose of string that closed the mouth of the bag was not entangled, he strode briskly toward his buggy. The side curtains were on and consequently the interior was in a dark shadow. Pausing a moment on the step, as if to arrange his overcoat, he made a quick, dexterous movement toward the person in the carriage and, throwing the bag over his head, pulled the noose. A terrific blow struck the doctor in the breast, but the arm that struck it fell powerless before it could be repeated and the striker lurched forward on the dashboard in the utter limpness of complete insensibility.

"It is not August," said the doctor, straightening up the hooded figure and taking the reins. "How well was my precaution taken! I believe that was the last knock that any member of that band of diabolical assassins will ever strike."

In the private laboratory of his own home, the doctor sat facing his captive, whom, after binding hand and foot, he had restored to his senses. The outlaw was the first to break the silence.

"You've got me and you think you'll do me," said the outlaw, with a succession of oaths and vile epithets it would be needless as well as improper for me to repeat. "But if you harm me, my friends will more than pay you up for it, just as they have everybody that crossed them."

"Your friends are of a mind to kill me, whatever befall. Sparing or killing you, will in nowise affect their purpose. Whatever may come to-morrow, to-night you must obey my commands."

"I won't do a thing you tell me to. I don't have to, see? My friends will look for you just as soon as I don't turn up, and it will go hard with you."

"Just as soon as you do not turn up with the news you have killed me. We'll see whether you will do what I tell you to."

"You dassen't kill me. You're afraid to kill me. My friends would fix you and the law would get you, if they did not."

"Your profession relies upon the forbearance and softheartedness of the public. You know that those you rob hesitate to shoot. No such hesitation hampers you. It is part of your stock in trade to keep the public terrorized. You kill all who disobey your orders, for if people began to resist you successfully you must needs go out of business. Did all put aside their repugnance to shed blood and kill your kind as they would wolves, we would have no more of you."

"You dassen't kill me, you dassen't kill me," cried the robber. It was the snarl of the wild beast, hopelessly held in the toils.

"It is true that I hesitate to kill. I am not proud of this hesitation, for the trend of the best medical and sociological thought is now toward the execution of all degenerates and criminals, that they may not contaminate the race with descendants. However, my office is to save life and I cannot do otherwise. But I am a surgeon, and every day I do things in the effort to save and prolong life that to a layman are repulsive and awful, more revolting to him than the sight of bloodless death itself. From the taking of human life I draw back. But no repugnance, no horror, unsteadies my hand elsewhere. The end of the crimes of your devilish confederacy has come. The law has not restrained you, could not. Your own unparalleled wickedness has delivered you into my hands. Many a man have you brought low, many a family have you desolated. Widows and orphans cry out against you, and not in vain. I shall so knock your gang that never again shall one of you harm even the weakest. You shall all live, but it shall be your prayer, if you black hearts can utter prayer, that you be dead."

The outlaw's tongue moved thickly in a mouth that dried suddenly at these solemn words of the doctor. "You can't do it, you can't do it, you can't do it, you duffer----" and his voice rumbled on in a long string of imprecations.

The doctor seized him and carrying him to the cellar, lay him against the coal bin. Then the captive heard him in a room above engaged upon some sort of carpentry, and whether it was the captive's imagination, or design of the doctor, or whether unconsciously the doctor's mind had become possessed, the sounds of the hammer as it drove nails and struck pieces of wood into place echoed in the cellar; "knock, knock--knock; knock, knock--knock." Soon the stairs groaned under the weight of the doctor carrying some great contrivance, and the outlaw found himself lying stretched out upon some sort of operating chair, his ankles held in a pair of stocks below, his outstretched arms held by the wrists in a pair of stocks above. All was black in the cellar, all but where a single blood red bar of light from the open door of the furnace fell upon the doctor turning at the winch of the bed of torture upon which lay the robber.

Hardly ten turns did he make, for at the first little twinges of pain, premonishing the agonies to come, the caitiff chattered in terror promises to do all the doctor should order, and so was released. Cringing and fawning, the outlaw heard what he was required to do. He was to write a letter. In this, he was to tell of the method of his capture. He was to say he was confined in a second-story room, feet and hands shackled, and that he was also chained to a staple in the floor. (That this all might be true, the doctor took him to a second-story room and so fettered him.) He found himself able to use his hands to write, and, happily, discovered writing material and stamps upon a table. He would write a letter and throw it on the porch below, where perhaps the postman would find it and send it to its destination. He asked help. His friends must come that night. The doctor would be on guard, and who could say he would not call in others? The doors and windows were all well secured, all but a cellar window on the east side. (Of this, the doctor informed him, that he, the doctor, might not be guilty of instigating the writing of anything that was false in any particular.) They must enter by this window. The door leading above stairs from the cellar could be easily forced and the noise thus occasioned could not be heard outside of the house. They must come at two in the morning. Come before another dawn, as the doctor was going to hold him one day before turning him over to the police, hoping the gang would do something to involve themselves in some way they would not if the police were after them with a hue and cry.

The outlaw wrote the letter as ordered, addressed it to Barry O'Toole, and threw it out of the window. It fell beyond the porch, on the ground. But this the doctor remedied by hiring a small boy for ten cents to pick it up and put it in a mail box. After which, the doctor betook himself to the nearest extensive hardware establishment.

At two o'clock the next morning, the beams of a dark lantern shone athwart the darkness of the cellar of Dr. McDill's residence.

"It's all right, boys. I can smell escaping gas, but it's all right. There's nobody in there. Now for the doctor. We'll kill him and all who are in there with him, and burn the house," said a voice behind the lantern, and one after another, eleven burly men dropped into the cellar through the narrow east window high in the wall. As the feet of the last man struck the ground, there was a sound as of a rope jerked by some one in the orifice by which they had just entered, and they heard two succeeding crashes within the cellar, followed by the slam of an iron shutter over the window. There was a sound of a spasmodic rush upon the cellar stairs and a beating upon the door, and then a succession of softer sounds, as of men rolling down stairs, and then silence.

A match was struck upon the outside of the iron shutter. It revealed the face of Dr. McDill, lighting a cigar.

"The gas alone would have been almost sufficient. But when all those bottles of ether and chloroform broke---- I had better open the window so it will work off and I can get them out. I will write to my wife to stay away two months longer. Olga is dead and Kate is gone. I'll discharge August to-morrow, as he deserves. The field is clear."

One morning, as Hans Olson, cook of the King Olaf Magnus, staunch schooner engaged in the shingle trade between Chicago and the city of Manistee, state of Michigan, on this particular morning lying in the Chicago River--on this morning, as Mr. Olson was pouring overboard some dishwater, preparing the breakfast for the yet sleeping crew, he was horrified to see floating in the current that would eventually carry them past the great city of St. Louis, twelve naked human arms. Despite his horror and alarm at this grewsome array of severed members, he noted that so far as he could observe, they were all left arms, forearms, disjointed at the elbows. Subsequent examination but added to the mystery. It was no trick of medical students intended to set the town agog. They were not dissecting subjects, but limbs lately taken from living bodies, and they were detached with the highest skill known to the art of chirurgery. The town talked and it was a day's wonder, but the solving of the mystery proving impossible, it was passing into tradition when all were horrified anew to hear that Johannes Klubertanz, a member of the great and honest German-American element, while walking through Lincoln Park early one morning, stumbled over some objects which, upon examination, proved to be twelve human forearms, _right forearms_!

Again were the wisest baffled in even guessing at this riddle, as they were a third time, when one Prosper B. Shaw came with the story that while rowing down in the drainage canal, he had come upon, floating gently along, dissevered at the knee joint, _twelve human legs_!

The whole community shuddered at the dark secret hidden in their midst, but at last came the answer, yet not the answer. Of all strange crews that mortal sight has gazed upon, that was the strangest, that dozen men who out of nowhere appeared suddenly in the streets one morning, armless all, all with wooden left legs. Their story you would ask in vain, for just the little chord by which the tongue forms intelligible words was gone. Their babblings came just to the border of articulate speech, but not beyond. Torrents of half-formed words they poured forth, but only half-formed, and to their mouthed jabber the crowd listened without understanding. Did you thrust a pencil in their jaws and bid them write their tale? Gone was some little muscle that grips the jaws and the pencils lolled between teeth that could not nip them. And as for their lips, oh, their mouths, their mouths! Such an example of the chirurgery that has to do with the altering of the human face had never before been witnessed, for nature had never made those faces. One such countenance she might have made in cruel sport, but never twelve, and twelve altogether, as like as peas in a pod, twelve human jack o'lanterns, twelve travesties upon humanity's front. Howsoever they might once have looked, not even their own mothers could know them now. Around each eye the same wrinkles led away. On each face was a bulbous nose. But the mouths, oh, the mouths! Each was drawn back over the teeth in a perpetual grin, each was upturned at corners which ended well nigh in the middle of the cheek. Here were the victims of the horrors that had made the city shudder, but dumb and unrecognizable. In all the thousands that looked at them, not one could say he had ever seen them before. In all these thousands, there was not one to whom they could speak. There were their stiff faces, frozen into that terrible perpetual grin, so many idols of wood, save for their eyes, and they were the only things that lived in their dead faces.

Such rudimentary human beings it would be hard to conceive, and so after a while it occurred to some one that the same scientific methods that discover and disclose to us the modes of life, the habits, and even thoughts of primitive and rudimentary man, might be devoted to establishing a means of communication with them and unveil the secret the whole world was eager to know. Accordingly, they were taken to the University of Chicago and turned over to the department of anthropology. The learned expounders of this science were not long in devising a simple means of communication. The twelve unfortunates were seated upon a recitation bench and a doctor of philosophy wrote out an alphabet upon the blackboard.

"One rap of your foot will be A," said the doctor of philosophy. "Two will be B. Two raps, a pause, and one will be C. We will soon learn your story."

At this moment, the reverberations of a prodigious blow upon the door outside echoed through the room, "bang, bang--bang, bang, bang--bang."

Unaccountably startled, as if at the hearing of some portent, the professor stood rooted to the spot for a moment, and then was about to leap to the door, when the simulacrums before him sprang to their feet and with a tremendous stamping, smote their wooden legs upon the floor, "stamp, stamp--stamp, stamp, stamp--stamp."

The professor stared at the twelve mutes. There were their immobile faces, as wooden as their wooden legs, wearing their perpetual grin, but the westering sun shone on their eyes and there he saw an abject, grovelling fear, dreadful to behold, the master passion of twelve souls, slaves to some mysterious will which had just made itself manifest out of the unseen. By what means the will had gained this ascendancy, the terrible disfigurements of their remnants of bodies told only too well, and he who ran could read the utter prostration before the power which in their lives had been the greatest and most terrible in the universe. Again, far off in a distant corridor of the building, slowly rumbled to them: "knock, knock--knock; knock, knock--knock," and the twelve unfortunates, like so many automatons, gave token of their obedience. They had been warned to keep the secret.

And so was foiled the attempts of the learned anthropologists to hold converse with these rudimentary beings. The alphabet of such elaborate devisings went for naught. Never did the twelve persons in the state of primitive culture get further than the letter C: "knock, knock--knock; knock, knock--knock."

_What Befell Mr. Middleton Because of the Fifth Gift of the Emir._

"I am at a loss to understand," said Mr. Middleton, "why you have entitled the narration you have just related, 'The Pleasant Adventures of Dr. McDill.' For to my mind, they seemed anything but pleasant adventures."

"How so?" asked the emir. "Is it not pleasant to thwart the machinations and defeat the evil intentions of the villains such as composed the confederacy that sought the doctor's life? Does there not reside in mankind a sense of justice which rejoices at seeing meted out to wrong-doers the deserts of their crimes?"

To which Mr. Middleton replying with a nod of thoughtful assent, after a proper period of rumination upon the words of the emir, that accomplished ruler continued:

"Despite the boasted protection of the law, how often is a man compelled to rely for his protection upon his own prowess, skill or address. There are many occasions when right under the nose of the police, one saves himself by the resort to physical strength, weapons, or the use of a cajoling tongue. Theoretically, Dr. McDill was amply protected by the mantle of the law. In reality, it was man to man as much as if he had met his foes in the Arabian desert, with none but himself and them and the vultures. Do you go armed?"

"No," replied Mr. Middleton, with a flippant smile; "but I can go pretty fast, and that has heretofore done as well as going armed."

"Young man," said the emir, sternly, "a bullet can outstrip your fleetest footsteps. There may never be but one occasion when you will need a weapon, but on that occasion the possession of the means of protection may spell the difference between life and life."