Chapter 22

THE DEAD MAN'S HEAD.

Dr. Jarvis, chief of the staff of St. Agnes' Hospital, was well known as a peculiar man.

He was rich enough to take his leisure, but he worked like a slave. He had an elegant house on St. Nicholas avenue, but he spent all his days and more than half his nights at the hospital.

A rude cot in a little room adjoining his laboratory in the hospital was his bed four nights in seven on the average. His only recreation was found in the care of a little garden in the hospital grounds; and it was the common talk of the younger physicians that Dr. Jarvis enjoyed finding fault with the gardener more than he did cultivating the flowers.

He had a wife and a young, unmarried daughter, whom he loved devotedly, but to whom he gave only a few hours of his time in the course of a week.

A negro named Caesar Augustus Cleary was the doctor's assistant in the laboratory.

The other physicians in the hospital said that Cleary had become so accustomed to Jarvis' ways that, like a Mississippi mule, he had to be cursed before he could be made to understand anything.

Cleary slept in a little closet similar to the doctor's, and on the opposite side of the laboratory. He was asleep there, about twelve o'clock on the night after Nick's visit to Lawrence Deever, when Nick crept softly through the window.

All these rooms were on the ground floor and entrance was easy.

Nick had spent a part of the evening in the garden. He had watched till the light went out in the laboratory and another appeared in the doctor's bed-room. Then he was ready for a search of the premises.

If, in a moment of anger, Dr. Jarvis had struck Patrick Deever and killed him, it was likely that the laboratory would hold some trace of the secret.

The best way to hide a human body is to utterly destroy it. This is no easy task for an ordinary man, but to a scientist, like Dr. Jarvis, it would be comparatively easy.

However, it would take time. Patrick Deever had disappeared on Monday night. Forty-eight hours had elapsed, but yet Nick hoped to find a trace, if the work of destruction had been attempted in the laboratory.

Nick had entered Cleary's room with the purpose of guarding against any interruption from the negro. He found Cleary sleeping heavily; but when Nick left the room and glided into the laboratory, Cleary's sleep was even deeper than it had been before.

An adept in chemistry, Nick knew how to produce a slumber from which no ordinary means could arouse the sleeper. His drug was sure and it left no bad effects.

The laboratory was unlighted, except by the moon, which shone in over the shutters, which covered the lower parts of the windows, preventing observation from without.

The first object which attracted Nick's attention was a corpse which lay upon a stone table in the middle of the room.

Nick had made a hasty search of the laboratory some hours before, while the doctor had been at dinner. He had then seen this corpse, and had assured himself that it was not Patrick Deever's; but he had been unable to do much more before the doctor returned. Therefore, he had made this late visit.

He first examined some instruments which lay near the dissecting-table. They revealed nothing. Then for perhaps half an hour, he searched various parts of the room without result.

Beneath the laboratory was a cellar in which, as Nick knew, were electric apparatus and a furnace which the doctor used for his experiments.

Nick was about to descend into this cellar when a noise in the direction of the doctor's room attracted his attention.

He turned and beheld Dr. Jarvis entering the laboratory.

Realizing the possibility of such an event, Nick had disguised himself as Cleary, yet he wished to avoid being seen if possible.

He got into the darkest corner available and watched.

Dr. Jarvis had on only his night-shirt, a skull-cap and a peculiar red dressing-gown, which he wore whenever he worked in the laboratory or in the garden. This dressing-gown and the queer red skull-cap were so old that nobody about the hospital could remember when they had been new. Cleary once said that he believed they were born and grew up with the doctor.

Without noticing Nick, Dr. Jarvis advanced directly toward the dissecting-table. He had no light, but the moon's rays glanced brightly around the slab.

The doctor drew back the sheet which covered the figure, revealing the head and naked breast.

Then he drew some instruments from a case, and proceeded to sever the head from the body.

This secret action in the dead of night surprised Nick greatly. Could it be that some clever trick had been accomplished? Had the body which Nick had seen been removed, and that of Patrick Deever substituted?

From where he stood Nick could not see the face of the body clearly enough to form a decision. If, however, this was only an ordinary subject for the dissecting-table, why did Dr. Jarvis mutilate it with such caution and at such an hour?

To cut off the head was the work of a very few minutes to the skillful physician.

He soon held it in his hands; and it seemed to Nick that the old physician gazed at it with peculiar attention in the moonlight.

Suddenly Dr. Jarvis turned, and, carrying the head in one hand, holding it by the hair, he advanced toward Nick. In his other hand the doctor held a knife which he had used in his ghastly work.

Nick had little hopes of escaping discovery. Evidently it was the doctor's intention to carry the head into the cellar, and the detective was concealed close by the stairs.

But Nick was not discovered. Dr. Jarvis stalked by, within six feet of him, and looked neither to the right nor to the left.

Still bearing the head, he descended the stairs, and Nick crept after him.

The cellar was perfectly dark except where a faint glow around the little furnace could be perceived. Nick was therefore able to follow the doctor closely.

But suddenly the place was made light. Dr. Jarvis had touched a button in the wall, and a row of electric lights, suspended before the furnace, flashed up.

Nick had barely time to drop flat on the floor behind a row of great glass jars full of clear fluid, the nature of which he could not determine.

These jars were set upon a sort of bench made of stone, rising about two feet from the floor. Between them and the furnace stood the doctor. Nick was on the other side.

It seemed tolerably certain to the detective that Dr. Jarvis would throw the head into the furnace. Nick determined to get a sight of the head at once. He was yet uncertain whether it was Patrick Deever's.

Rising on his hands and knees he peered between two of the jars. The head was not more than a yard from Nick's eyes, but the face was turned away.

By the hair, and the general outline, it might be Deever's. At all hazards Nick must get a sight of it before it was consigned to the furnace in which a fire, supported by peculiar chemical agencies and much hotter than burning coal, raged furiously.

Suddenly, when it seemed as if the doctor was about to raise an arch of fire-brick in order to throw the head into the fire, he turned and dropped the grim object into the jar almost directly above Nick's head.

It was carefully done, though quickly. The head sank without a splash. Only a single drop of the fluid--a drop no bigger than a pin's point--fell upon the back of Nick's hand.

It burned like white, hot iron. It seemed to sink through the hand upon which it fell.

Nick sprang to his feet, not because of the pain of the burning acid, but because he knew that he must instantly obtain a sight of the head or it would be dissolved.

It lay face upward in the jar, but the acid, even in that instant, had done its work.

All semblance to humanity had vanished. As Nick gazed, the head seemed to waver in the midst of the strange fluid, and then, suddenly, Nick saw, in a direct line where it had been, the bottom of the jar.

The head had been dissolved.

Nick raised his eyes to Dr. Jarvis' face.

There stood the doctor, entirely unmoved. He looked directly at Nick but seemed not to see him.

His eyes were fixed, and their expression was peculiar. One less experienced than Nick would have supposed Dr. Jarvis to be insane.

Certainly his conduct as well as his appearance seemed to justify such a conclusion.

But Nick knew better. He recognized at once the peculiar condition in which Dr. Jarvis then was. He had seen the phenomenon before.

"Walking in his sleep," Nick said to himself. "Shall I wake him here? I think not. Let me see what he will do."