Part 21

“Can you ever forgive me, Thorn?” he asked, speaking for the first time. He had not even raised his eyes to the face of the man he had renounced that morning. Ever since Dryden Nelson had been brought back to his home, and the wireless message from the revenue cutter had opened the jail-door for the girl, his thoughts had been torturing him.

“I must forgive myself first,” the blind man said quietly. “It hurt me more than anything else to talk to you like that. But a man’s life hung in the balance. I could not tell you, for I knew you would tell the girl rather than see her suffer a minute.” One of his rare smiles lighted up his face. “Let’s make it a burned paper, more completely burned than the charred fragment I found in the Frenchman’s house; the part of a note one of the outside men sent to the master counterfeiter. For on that my fingers read three words: Joe, cage, _Carracas_. That finished the case--my case.” And his sightless eyes seemed to look at them with understanding and joy.

THE EIGHTH PROBLEM

THE EYE OF THE SEVEN DEVILS

I.

A jarring incongruity in the room of tapestries, silken-shaded lights, and furnishings of mahogany, the rough wooden box, with its dirty, scarred sides, scratched the top of the polished table in a hundred places without arousing even a murmur of protest from the four men who watched every movement of the little Japanese servant as he carefully pried the holding nails from the cover boards. A chorused “Ah!” came from four pairs of lips as the servant laid the chisel down and lifted the last board.

“Careful, Nesu,” warned the frock-coated man with the white moustache and sun-tanned cheeks.

The dissipated-looking youth, with the Egyptian cigarette dangling loosely from his lower lip, rose to get a better view of the interior. “’Nough cotton stuffing there to fill a barrel, captain,” he grinned, vacuously.

“Yes,” nodded the white-moustached captain. “Nearly ten pounds, and the Devils are bound into place with nearly twenty yards of silk strips. A man takes a little care with a thing that’s cost him forty thousand, Meynerd.”

The Japanese servant pulled out a huge handful of cotton, and placed it on a spread newspaper as another of the group spoke. “Is it really worth that, captain?” he asked.

“Three times that, Joslyn. Forty thousand is only what I paid the hunchback outcast priest in the Yunling mountain monastery in Sze Chuen. He had had it hidden for nearly fifty years. The eye alone is worth sixty-five thousand, if it’s worth a cent. The forty thousand I paid will buy the priest all the prayers he needs for the next hundred years; and they’ll be the best prayers money can buy, at that.” He smiled, grimly. “I needed a few of those same prayers on several occasions myself,” he went on. “Especially on that three-hundred-mile journey through the Yunlings to Chingtu. I have an idea the priest wanted to steal a march on the prayers, and threw out a hint that the ‘white dogs’ had found the pearl-eyed Seven Devils of Sin. During the half century that had passed since he stole it, of course, it has been ‘lost.’”

“Why didn’t he return it instead of getting forty thousand dollars to buy prayer papers to burn for his soul?” asked Wilson, the fourth member of the group, taking his eyes from the busy-fingered Jap.

“Because he was a Chinese,” explained Captain Richards. “He stole the thing when he had just entered the monastery, for a white man who bribed him--that’s a long story in itself. The briber was killed the day of the theft. The young priest was suspected, and tortured until he became a hunchback and outcast, but no confession could be gotten. In the years the blame has been laid on the white man’s devil, who stole the Chinese devils and took them to his home, when the white master was killed. The peculiar kink of the Chinese mind would not let the thief confess or return the devils. He couldn’t see where the mere restitution would expiate his sin. The only way he could figure was to wait until some one came with enough money to pray him into heaven for a hundred years after he had gone. Peculiar cusses, the Chinese.”

He rose at the last word, and the others rose with him. The Japanese was unwinding yard after yard of two-inch silken strips.

“Ah!” It was more than an exclamation: it was a three-man-power cry of amazement, wonder, and surprise as the captain lifted the thing from the box and set it gently on the table.

“Great guns!” gasped the dissipated-looking youth, backing away a step and stopping with a sheepish grin.

“The Seven Golden Devils of Sin with the single eye!” announced the captain, with a flourish.

The men stared at the most curious-looking object they had ever seen. At first glance it seemed merely a spidery collection of arms and legs; then seven figures stood out, separately and distinctly, grouped closely together. In the centre stood the shortest; around him, in every conceivable position, were six others. Their bodies were grotesquely deformed, their backs misshapen, their limbs twisted; and the genius who had fashioned the thing of his dull, hand-hammered gold in the centuries gone, had given to the bodies and limbs the distortion of horrible agony.

But it was the head; the single head that surmounted the seven bodies, which held their attention. The face was hideous; but in the very hideousness the gold worker had put cunning, power, strength. The thick lips leered a smile of satanic triumph; the cheek bones were high, oblique. And above the squat, wide-nostriled nose was a single eye! It was a pearl, perfect, flawless: milk-white against the red-yellow gold.

As they stared there seemed to come into the single eye of pearl a glow of red, as though the heart of the great jewel were a spark of fire that shone through the lustred surface. It was a trick of the lights, perhaps, or the reflected colour of the overhanging brow, but to the men who watched, it seemed that the eye held all the malevolence and cruelty of the Pit itself.

“The devilish thing gives a man the creeps!” growled Meynerd; and his hand shook a bit as he took the cigarette from his lips.

Joslyn laughed jerkily, for the spell of the thing was on him, too.

“Better cut out a few of those high balls, Mey,” he taunted.

A flush of resentment mounted the youth’s cheeks; but the captain forestalled his angry reply.

“Those figures represent the seven sins, each one enough to keep a Chinese from his heaven. The one in the centre, though the shortest and most horribly deformed of all, has the biggest and strongest body. That is Deceit, the most powerful of devils. The Mongolian reasons that none of the other devils can enter the heart of man unless deceit has entered first.”

“Excellent philosophy, that,” commented Wilson.

“That is why the head rests on the centre figure and the bodies of the others are bent forward to meet it,” continued the captain. “Notice, too, that though the limbs are terribly twisted, and the bodies scarred to symbolize the awful punishment the gods have inflicted on the wicked seducers of men’s hearts, the head is perfect, showing that the devils can still think with their one head, and plan traps for the unwary. And the eye”--his face lighted with the enthusiasm of the collector--“the wonderful eye that is all-seeing, alert to catch the first sign of weakening in the lowest coolie in the kingdom. That, gentlemen, is the thing I worked years to get; the thing that nearly cost me my life a dozen times--the Eye of the Seven Devils! The most wonderful pearl in the world; the pearl with a heart of fire!”

“Funny the thief priest didn’t pry out the eye and sell it to buy his prayers, without risking getting rid of the whole thing,” put in Joslyn.

“That’s the wonder of the thing!” exclaimed the captain. “By some method that no one has ever been able to fathom, the maker of the thing set the stone in such a way that it can’t be taken out without cutting the whole thing to pieces. The pearl appears merely pasted in its socket, but the microscope can see, in the space around it, that the jewel is gripped in four prongs that fit into tiny holes bored in the back of the pearl. The space around it is so narrow that no instrument of strength, sufficient to cut or break the prongs, can be inserted. And if it could, the very act would cause the gem to chip, and, perhaps, split. That is the way the maker made theft impossible!”

“Wouldn’t mind having the pearl,” growled Meynerd, “but I’d throw the rest of it in a sewer.”

The tanned cheeks of Captain Richards went a dull red with anger, and his moustache bristled; but Wilson cut in to prevent an open break.

“Let’s have a little drink.”

The servant, who had stuffed the last silk strip into the empty case, straightened up.

“High ball,” grunted Meynerd.

“Another absinthe drip,” added Joslyn.

“Bourbon,” ordered Wilson, and the captain nodded.

Silence followed the going of the servant. The captain took out his watch, glanced at it, chewed his cigar almost nervously, and lounged back in the chair he had taken beside Joslyn. The eyes of the others wandered around the room, but always returned to the twisted bodies of the seven devils of the single eye. The thing of hand-wrought metal on the table seemed to exert an uncanny influence over men who had never known superstition. As the silent seconds passed there came a tension in the mood of all. Each found himself continually catching the other’s eye, only to glance hastily and sheepishly away. And the twisted devil mouth leered at them; in the smouldering fire of the devil eye seemed infinite scorn.

The return of the servant with the tray of drinks made each one sit up eagerly. The Japanese went to the captain first and held out a card.

“Hustle the high ball,” growled Meynerd. The Jap hurried over. Meynerd’s unsteady hands had spilled a third of the liquor before Wilson took the small carafe from his shaking hands and poured the remainder over the ice. The youth growled monosyllabic thanks. Captain Richards whistled as Meynerd tossed his drink off at a gulp.

“Going to leave us, captain?” asked Joslyn, poking his straws farther down in the cracked ice of the absinthe.

Captain Richards looked up from the card he held between his thumb and forefinger. “Puzzling thing,” he prefaced. “Here’s the card of Ching Li Chu.” His eyes went again to the pasteboard as he read: “Secretary to the ambassador at Washington of the Imperial Chinese Republic.”

“What does he want?” asked Wilson. “That?” He jerked his head toward the table.

“How on earth----” Sudden decision cleared the look of puzzlement from the captain’s brow. “Send him in, Nesu,” he ordered.

“Chink devils, chink secretaries,” grinned Meynerd. The liquor had pulled his nerves together again, and his lips curved in contempt when he caught Joslyn stealing a covert glance toward the table, as the door opened.

The man who entered, unquestionably a Mongolian, had a lean, intelligent face. The eyes, but slightly aslant, looked straight before him, giving no sign that they even saw the seated men, but stared fixedly at the table and its thing of gold. In the centre of the room the Chinese stopped and made a deep obeisance, once, twice, thrice. A low laugh of contempt came from Meynerd’s lips, but the Chinese paid no heed. He walked to the table, and for several silent seconds gazed steadily into the eye of the pearl. With another deep bow he turned, his eyes searching each face.

“Captain Richards?” His voice was low, mellow, with no trace of accent.

“I am he!” The captain rose from his seat and bowed.

“So my information was correct; it is the Seven Devils with the True Eye.” Again the Chinese bowed toward the figures. Once more Meynerd laughed sneeringly. This time the Mongolian turned toward him inquiringly.

“You do not mock me,” he rebuked, mildly. “Your mockery is of the Seven Devils. I would be careful, were I you.”

“Bah!” Meynerd set down his empty glass. “I didn’t know you fellows worshipped devils, and little gold devils on a table, at that.”

“Nor do we.” Still that mild, even voice. “We worship our gods; but we are careful not to incur the wrath of our devils. The gods may forgive the ignorant mocker; the devils slay. That I believe, and I am no coolie, but a man educated in your own universities.”

“Drunken kid!” muttered the captain, his fingers moving along the table-edge as he leaned against it. “You wanted to see me on business?” he asked the Chinese.

“Yes. I wish to pay you one hundred thousand dollars for the golden Seven Devils of Sin!” The amazement this announcement caused showed plainly on each man’s face. The Chinese went on: “The new republic seeks to unite its people, but throughout the province of Chingtu it is known that the lost Seven Devils has been taken from the country. They demand that the new government see that it is returned if they are to believe that government’s power. Our failure will mean a costly and bloody war, for the Yunling mountain men are fighters who know every inch of its vast slopes.”

“So my six months of devious routes and constant guarding amounted to nothing.” The captain’s lips smiled grimly, but there was a light in his eyes that had not been there before. “I suppose the priest is being honoured for having been told by the gods that the white dog had stolen the thing.”

“Prayer papers have been burning this last five months for the hunchback,” said the Chinese, quietly.

“Um.” The smile left the captain’s lips. He shook his head. “I will not sell,” he declared, and there was finality in his voice.

It seemed a full minute before any one spoke. The noiseless Jap servant industriously picked up small tufts of cotton that had fallen to the rug back of the table. Joslyn set his glass, with its green-tinged cracked ice on the table, clinkingly, and the captain’s eyes left the Mongolian’s face as the noise attracted them. Meynerd’s lips still grinned contemptuously as he spun the piece of ice around in his empty high-ball glass.

“The devils can only bring sorrow to you.” The voice of the Chinese was deep, full of sincerity. “Perhaps death, for in your country there will be mockers, and, as I told your friend, the devils slay those who mock them.” His deep eyes rested on Meynerd. The face of the youth went red for an instant; then the sneer came back.

“Like to see ’em kill me!” he said, boastfully. “A chink knife in back might, but no pigeon-toed gang of devils with one eye could!”

“Do not speak that way!” There was stern reproof in the tone of the Chinese. “You may know the things of the West, but there are things of the East that you do not know!”

“Is that so!” Meynerd shook off the restraining hand of Wilson and stood up. The face of the captain went white with rage, and his hands fumbled with the handkerchief he had been in the act of lifting to his brow.

“Be a gentleman!” he snapped.

Meynerd paid no heed. “Here’s to you devils!” he laughed, sneeringly. “Long may you wave--in a glass case!”

“The mockers kotow before they die!” The words came rapidly, almost hissingly, from the lips of the Chinese.

“Here’s to crime!” Meynerd stood in front of the golden devils and drained the last drops of his drink. A gasp came from the Japanese as he backed away a step, his hand full of cotton tufts he had picked up from the floor. Captain Richards crushed the handkerchief in his hand as he brushed his lips. Every eye in the room was on the gently swaying man with the glass to his lips.

Suddenly Meynerd’s face went livid; the glass fell to the floor. Slowly his knees bent. For a second he seemed to kneel before the leering face of gold. His body fell forward. His forehead touched the ground. Then the limbs straightened convulsively, and he lay still.

The seated men jumped to their feet, with exclamations of horror. The Chinese, face impassive, leaned over and touched the pulse of the man on the floor. Then he looked up into the faces of the three white-faced men who bent over him.

“He is dead,” said the Mongolian, quietly. “The devils have slain.”

Mechanically, involuntarily, they turned toward the hideous thing on the table. As one the startled cry came from three pairs of lips:

“_The Eye! The Eye!_”

The twisted, thick lips of gold still leered at them, but where the eye of pearl had been, only an empty socket seemed to stare down at the dead man on the floor.

II.

“Pawn to king five and checkmate.” Thornley Colton took a final puff of his cigarette, and dropped it in the ash tray beside the chessboard.

Sydney Thames, the apple cheeked, black-haired secretary to the blind problemist, laughed ruefully. “I almost believe that you could beat me with pawns alone, Thorn,” he declared, looking over the pieces on the board.

“Your whole game is attack,” Colton observed. “You forget all about defence. Another?”

Thames merely nodded, and silently rearranged the pieces on the board. “Three and pawn again?” he asked.

“Yes, if you----” The ringing telephone-bell on the desk broke in, and Sydney rose to answer it. He returned almost on the run.

“It’s Captain Richards, at the Wanderers’ Club,” he began, breathlessly. “He wants you at once. He said something about a murder, and the eye of some seven devils of sin, as near as I could understand.”

Thornley Colton’s mobile face, whose paleness was strikingly accentuated by the great blue circles of the tortoise-rimmed library glasses that shielded his sightless eyes from all glares, lighted up with interest. “Is he still on the wire?” He rose as he asked the question.

Thames shook his head. “He blurted out the message and rang right off. He seemed positive you’d come.”

A faint smile came to Thornley Colton’s lips. “I guess he knew that a single breath from the Orient would interest me.” He touched the call-button on the desk that would summon the big black automobile instantly, at any hour of the day or night. “I hadn’t any idea Captain Richards had returned. I haven’t seen him for years.” The smile left his face. “My fingers have been itching to see those wonderful Seven Devils I’ve heard so much about.”

“Your interest in things Chinese is beyond me,” confessed Sydney, as he followed the blind man out of the room and down the stairs.

“You were in college the last four years I spent in China, Sydney.” Colton spoke as the chauffeur closed the tonneau-door of the touring car, and threw in the gears. “The lure of the East has never gotten out of my veins. To a man who can see, China must be wonderful. To me it is marvellous. Old, satiated of every human emotion before we discovered emotion; a view-point as incomprehensible as the hereafter itself; a character that cannot be visualized--why, Sydney, to men of eyes, the lure of China is the lure of a beautiful picture. To me it is the lure of the unattainable.”

“Something like the mystery of woman?” asked Sydney Thames, seriously.

“Not at all.” The slim cane waved an impatient gesture over the side of the car. “The so-called mystery of woman is her constantly shifting view-point dependent on outside influences; the mystery of the Chinese is his undeviating view-point.”

“Too deep for me,” laughed Thames; then he swung open the door as the car stopped before the great Gothic door-way of the Wanderers’ Club.

The mantle of tragedy hung heavily over the luxurious, exclusive interior of the famous club as they entered. In the main lounging-room a small group of members talked in hushed whispers, and their nervous starts at each sound belied the reputations most of them had gained as travellers in countries where danger lurked constantly. The servitors, usually alert, swift to receive and execute an order, moved with lagging footsteps. Thornley Colton recognised the atmosphere of uneasiness immediately, and a cynical smile flashed across his thin lips as he understood the cause. The Wanderers, rich seekers of excitement and danger in foreign countries, hard-headed, with nerves of steel when face to face with violent death, had fallen under the spell of the uncanny, the supernatural.

The chief steward, from his vantage-point at the head of the stairs, spied them and hurried down.

“It’s--they’re upstairs, sir.” A scared note was in his voice. “The physician has just this minute arrived. The police haven’t been told. Captain Richards thought maybe---- It’s terrible, sir.”

“Very, Peters,” nodded Colton, absently, as he followed the man up the broad staircase, and to himself he muttered, “Lucky the police haven’t had a chance to bungle it. Very, very lucky.”

The instant they opened the door Captain Richards bounded across the floor to meet them. “Thank God you came, Mr. Colton!” he cried, shaking the hand of the blind man with more than heartiness.

“Who was it?” asked Colton.

“Meynerd. The doctor’s trying to find the cause of death now.” He nodded his head toward the broad leather couch against the wall, with its grim occupant, and the physician bending over it.

Colton asked a dozen crisp, terse questions. The answers he got told him the whole story. The captain introduced him to every one in the room, and Colton shook their hands, even to the obsequious Japanese servant, who stood patiently awaiting orders, near the wall.

The doctor finished his examination and straightened up. “Heart-failure,” he announced. “Brought on by alcoholic excesses, I should judge, and probably superinduced by excitement.”

“Strange that the hand of God should have descended at the exact moment chosen by a thief to steal the pearl,” remarked Colton quietly.

“You don’t think it’s murder?” There was a queer chokiness in Captain Richards’s voice.

“_Yes!_” Colton shot out the word as he stood in the centre of the room, turning his head slowly, as though his sightless eyes were trying to surprise some expression of guilt on the white faces of the men. Wilson’s hands gripped his chair-arms so tightly that the knuckles cracked. Joslyn stretched an arm toward the glass, with its green-tinged ice on the table, but withdrew it quickly, to let his hands fall on his knees. The Japanese servant’s foot shifted nervously over a small wad of cotton that had fallen from his hands, minutes before. Only the Chinese was unmoved.

“Neither the gods nor the devils murder,” he said. “They kill.”

The blind man nodded toward him, slowly. “True,” he answered, and his voice was serious. “But when the killing is done by human instruments, the law calls it murder.”

“You are of the West,” shrugged the Mongolian.

“But the whole thing is impossible!” There seemed almost a whine of incredulous protest in Captain Richards’s voice.

“Does the impossible happen?” Colton’s voice was sharp, curt. “No! But the improbable does! A hundred times a day! Every time a perfect match fails to strike an improbable thing has happened. Because that thing on the table hypnotized your eyes into waking the superstition that is the mental appendix handed down through the thousand centuries, you say that _it_ is impossible. What is impossible? Meynerd’s death? The fact that he was killed? My statement that he was murdered? Or do you mean that each one of you is so wise that no one could have deceived you? Yet the eye is gone! And even if the devils had killed Meynerd, would they have stolen their own eye?”

Each crisp sentence fairly sizzled as he shot it out. The hand that held his slim, hollow cane, that gave its messages to his super-sensitive finger-tips, waved up and down for emphasis, touching blindly the table, the golden devils, and some part of each man’s body as he paced back and forth across the floor.

“A man can’t give another man heart-failure to kill him,” declared the physician, pompously.