Part 22

“Can’t!” The smile on the problemist’s face was sardonic as he faced the doctor. “Then no murder was ever committed. If a man’s heart didn’t fail he’d keep right on living. What caused Meynerd’s heart to fail is the thing we’ve got to find out. Do you know how Meynerd fell?”

“No, immaterial details----”

“Very material!” The blind man interrupted brusquely. “Every diagnostician should be a detective, and I might mention right here that one of the greatest surgeons and diagnosticians in America is a blind man. You should know that a man standing as Meynerd stood, suddenly stricken with heart-disease, would fall flat on his back. Yet he fell on his knees, his body bent forward so that his forehead touched the ground for an instant before it relaxed.”

“By Jove--I supposed----” the physician sputtered his chagrin. Then his face brightened. “Some caustic, causing a griping in the intestines.”

“Exactly.” The sharpness had gone from the detective’s voice now, and he spoke in his old calm, even tone.

“He drank a toast!” Even as he spoke, the doctor’s foot crunched a bit of the broken glass on the floor.

“You’d have to analyze the rug,” reminded Colton. “And who had the chance?” He looked around inquiringly.

“Wilson poured his drink!” The words came in a gasp from Joslyn.

Wilson sprang to his feet with an oath. “Are you accusing me of killing him?” He snarled the question, but his face was white.

“Meynerd had gulped his drink even before Ching Li Chu entered,” suddenly remembered Captain Richards. “There was only a few drops of the melted ice-water in his glass when he stood before the Seven Devils.”

“There are poisons that act after minutes have passed.” The even, monotonous voice of the Chinese broke in.

“Do you think the poisoner knew to the second when Meynerd’s drunken folly would take the turn it did?” demanded Colton; and each man in the room recognised the menace in his tone.

A gleam flashed to the eyes of the Mongolian for an instant, then vanished. “The instruments of the gods and the devils cannot fail,” he answered, quietly.

“No poison known could be timed like that,” declared Colton, positively.

“Right!” growled Wilson, as he resumed his seat and darted a glance of new-born hatred across the room toward the man who had virtually accused him of the murder.

Again came silence as the blind man stood in the centre of the room, alternately brushing the rug where lay the untouched pieces of the broken high-ball glass, and swishing at his trouser-leg. Across his high, white forehead, and at his eye-corners behind the round, blue glasses, innumerable fine lines deepened as his wonderful brain worked: visualizing each object in the room, every detail in the picture, every action that must have taken place at the instant of hopeless confusion when Meynerd had pitched forward on the floor.

Immovable, the men watched, each tense for the first word or movement to break the suspense. Sydney Thames sat in his chair, with his eyes fixed on the devils of gold. Ever since he had entered the room the thing on the table had held him fascinated. More sinister, more fiendish than ever, without its single eye of pearl, the empty eye socket seemed to glare at him as though it gloated over the repugnant fascination it exerted. Sydney had heard the captain’s story; in his mind’s eye he could picture the toast, the sneers, the fall. _Had_ the devils killed Meynerd?--as the Chinese had said they would. Then his eyes narrowed slightly as they went to the Mongolian, whose impassive face showed nothing of the thoughts behind the bright, slit eyes. He had said that death would follow. He was a Chinese--of a race to whom a life means nothing; a race of mystery. Then his eyes went to the Jap servant who stood against the wall, patiently waiting permission to leave the room; then, at the two scowling men, who carefully avoided each other’s glances as they stared straight ahead of them--at nothing. Wilson had poured the drink. Why had Joslyn been so quick to tell the fact?

Suddenly the swishing taps of the blind man’s cane ceased; the lines across his forehead and at his eye-corners vanished. “There is one way.” He spoke apparently to himself. “Only one way.”

He crossed the room to the couch where the dead man lay, his face covered with a handkerchief. He pulled aside the coat, and unloosed a button of the thin silk shirt. From his vest-pocket he took a small rubber band, and the watching men saw him put it around the middle finger of his right hand, until the black rubber strands were deep sunken in the flesh. Then, gingerly, as though he were testing the heat of a red-hot stove, he opened the shirt, and with the tourniqueted finger gently touched the skin of Meynerd. Slowly, very slowly, the finger moved over the cold flesh of the dead man, then stopped.

“See, doctor!” He held the banded finger aloft. The physician’s ejaculation of amazement was echoed by every other man in the room, but the unemotional Chinese and the well-trained servant. On the tip of the blind man’s finger was a drop of blood!

“And see here!” His fingers, holding the shirt back, exposed an inch or so of the dead man’s skin. Four men bent their heads to see the small smear of red Colton’s finger had left when it had brushed away the single blood-drop.

“I don’t understand.” There was no doubt of the physician’s bewilderment.

Colton pulled the coat back and stood erect. “The most diabolically primitive of all murderous weapons,” he said. “A poisoned dart.”

“But who? How?” gasped the captain.

“That’s what we’ve got to find out,” the blind man said, curtly. With his pocket-knife he carefully cut the strands of the rubber and gently massaged the swollen, blood-congested finger. “A nasty thing to try to locate with delicate finger-tips,” he remarked, casually. “A big chance that the thing hadn’t penetrated its full length, as this one had, and a scratch would have meant another dead man.”

Sydney Thames’s face lost its last vestige of colour as he realized that once again the blind man had toyed with death. A hundred times had Thames seen the problemist--the benefactor who had picked him up on the bank of the English river from which came his only name--take his life in his hands for the sake of solving one of the crime-puzzles he loved; but always before there had been a chance for a fight against men with lesser brains. This time a single scratch of his feeling finger would have killed him instantly, horribly; just as the mocker of the Seven Devils had been killed by the man among them who had coveted the wonderful pearl that had been the eye. And that man----

Joslyn laughed a jerky laugh of nervousness as he turned away and reached out his hand for the glass that had held his absinthe. The ice had melted partially, and there was a half-inch or so of the pale-green liquid showing through the cracked-ice crystals.

“Don’t touch that glass!” The command came, shot-like, from the lips of Colton. He lowered the slim cane that had touched Joslyn’s leg and warned him of the movement.

Joslyn withdrew his hand as if it had suddenly touched fire.

“Why? Wh-y?” he gasped, and his face was pasty white.

“Because I don’t want you to kill yourself!” The blind man’s hand moved to pick up the glass. He held it up and gingerly poked into the ice with his fingers. A grim smile came to his lips, and he dumped the whole thing on the polished top of the mahogany table. Colton’s eight fingers seemed to touch every piece of ice in a single instant, so quickly did they move. Then his fore-finger separated a small pile of curiously-shaped crystals.

“Broken glass!” The exclamation came from the physician.

Colton corroborated him with a nod, and spoke to the still pasty-faced Joslyn. “Some of the smaller particles would surely have gone down your throat.”

Joslyn’s Adam’s apple moved convulsively for a moment. “What is it?” he gulped, finally.

“The broken glass-tube that was used to shoot the poisoned dart; probably not more than two inches long, because of the short distance, and of the thinnest glass, with just this object in view.”

“But how on earth did it get there?” puzzled Captain Richards.

“I’ll bet it wasn’t there five minutes ago!” Wilson cried; and every man in the room remembered Joslyn’s movement toward the glass a few minutes before.

The suave voice of the Chinese cut in. “Might I be informed how one who is blind could know of the glass?” he asked.

“Because the cracked ice made an absolutely perfect hiding-place for fine pieces of broken glass. If dropped on the floor with the bigger, thicker pieces of high-ball glass, the difference would have been immediately noted. I discovered that it had been a frappéd drink when I walked up and down before the table and talked.”

Ching Li Chu rose and bowed gravely toward the golden thing on the table. “Truly, the wisdom of the gods and of the devils is infinite,” he said, in his even voice. “But one man has such a drink. The devils chose him to protect their emissary!”

“Pretty philosophy,” admitted Colton, “made grim by the fact that some one must suffer for being the devils’ tool.” He turned to face the silent Japanese servant, who stood still by the wall. “Tell the steward he can notify the police now, Nesu.”

The sunny Japanese smile that had been missing so long came to the little servitor’s face, and he took a step forward to obey the order.

“What about the pearl?” asked Captain Richards, suddenly. “This man shouldn’t get out until he has been searched. A sixty-five-thousand-dollar gem would tempt ’most any one.”

Colton broke in, amazedly: “Hasn’t the search been made yet?”

“No.” The captain stammered over the monosyllable. “I called you as quickly as I could get to a telephone, after warning every one to stay in the room. I knew you were a member here, and clever at this sort of thing. The police are such asses, you know, and the scandal----”

Again the blind man cut him short. “Because there seemed no possible way by which the jewel could have been stolen--if the stories I heard of the famous Seven Devils, when I was first in China twenty years ago, are true--logically the jewel could be nowhere. Is that it?” he asked.

“Something like that.” The tan on the captain’s cheeks was a deeper tinge than usual.

“The jewel is nowhere.” The Chinese spoke solemnly, earnestly, almost reverently. “The devils have merely hidden it from the sight of mockers. My government will give you one hundred and fifty thousand dollars for the Seven Devils without the True Eye.”

“So that’s it!” The captain’s voice was almost a shout; the tone one of a man who has made a great discovery. “_You_ have it! You killed Meynerd to make me sell, eh?” He advanced a step, threateningly.

“The police will attend to that part!” warned the blind man, curtly. “Search Nesu--or go yourself.”

He turned to the table, and his wonderful fingers, each one an eye that could see things the eye of a normal man could not discern, touched the twisted limbs of one of the Seven Devils.

“Come over nearer the light, Nesu,” ordered Captain Richards, and the serious-faced Japanese followed him around the table.

The attention of the silent men in the room was divided between the search of the Jap and Colton’s examination of the thing on the table. At times the blind man’s fingers moved swiftly over the dull-gold surface; at others they seemed to rest for seconds, unmoving, only to resume their journey, slowly. Each man in the room understood, subconsciously, that those marvellous finger-tips would give to the sightless man a mind-picture as perfect as that their eyes had given them--more perfect, perhaps.

“All right!” There was a growl of chagrin in the captain’s voice, as he finished the search. The little Jap pattered out.

“Didn’t find it, eh?” Colton spoke idly, without raising his head. His right forefinger was gently probing into the empty eye-socket. He put his hand in his vest-pocket for an instant, then felt again where the pearl had been, first with one finger, then another.

“Strange,” they heard him murmur. “Strange.” Then he whirled to face them. “The prongs that held the pearl are unbent and unbroken! They are exactly as they were when they gripped the jewel! Yet it is gone!”

“I want to search you, Ching!” There was no mistaking the threat in Captain Richards’s tone this time.

Calmly, disdainfully, the Mongolian raised his arms and stood ready. Richards explored every thread of his clothing. There was no doubt he had done similar things before; not a pin could have escaped him. He stepped back with a muttered curse of bafflement.

“Go through me, too.” It was a snarl from Joslyn; the snarl of a man whose nerves are raw.

No second invitation was needed. Thornley Colton stood leaning against the table, his back toward the golden devils. He idly swished his cane and apparently watched every move. Wilson was searched--and there was nothing.

“The thief who had brains and nerve enough to commit that theft would certainly know enough not to have the pearl in his clothing,” observed Colton, quietly.

“It’s in the room here, then,” growled the loser of the pearl, pacing the floor. “I’ll tear it apart! That jewel was worth sixty-five thousand!”

“You haven’t searched Meynerd’s clothes yet. Every one in the room had a chance to secrete it there--temporarily,” suggested Colton.

The captain’s face went white, and he shuddered as his eyes went to the body of the man whose death had been caused by the thing of gold he had brought into the room. “I’m not a ghoul,” he choked. “The police can attend to that part of it.”

“I think I hear them coming now; the tread is unmistakable.” The problemist took a firmer grip on his cane with the hand that was not in his pocket. “They can mess things as badly as they want to now; I’ve finished.” He took a step toward the door, then turned to face them--the captain, the physician, who had not spoken for minutes, Joslyn, Wilson, and the silent Chinese. “If you’ll bring the Seven Devils to my house at six-thirty this evening, captain, I will show you the pearl, and handcuff the man who killed Meynerd!” Another step, and he halted again. “All of you must come, for only the guilty one will want to stay away. _All_, especially Ching Li Chu!”

III.

Guided by the touch of Sydney Thames’s sleeve against his, the blind man made his way through the crowd of curious, idle persons, whom the sight of a policeman entering a building always attracts in New York. From the precinct station around the corner had come two uniformed men, and two detectives on the run, to answer the murder-call that had gone out. Colton and his secretary had met them coming up the stairs, and the problemist had given curt nods to their gruff greetings. Nearly every detective in the city knew the blind man; and he knew all of them by the sound of their voices, just as he knew the voices of a thousand other men. A hundred times his abilities had made their efforts look ridiculous, and scores of the city-paid sleuths refused to believe that he was blind. Nor did any one in the morbid crowd that opened before him suspect that the slight touch of cloth against cloth was guiding him in the darkness that had been his since birth.

Leaning back in the soft cushions of the tonneau, Thornley Colton lighted a cigarette and took several deep puffs. The machine had started without orders, as it always did when there was any one around who might hear. For several blocks they went in silence; then Colton leaned forward.

“Osmuhn’s, Fifth Avenue, Michael,” he directed.

“A jewellery shop?” asked Sydney Thames, in surprise.

“Yes. I am going to make sure of every property for the last scene. There can’t be a chance of failure!” There was an ominous ring in his voice.

“You speak as though you knew the murderer and the thief!” cried Thames, in amazement. “I don’t see----”

“You _do_ see!” interrupted the blind man, with unconscious sharpness. “Like the average person, you see too much. To any one with perfect eyes the whole thing is a jumble, for the murder of Meynerd was planned--devilishly planned--to make possible the one minute of hopeless confusion necessary to steal the jewel. The eyes of the men in that room could see but one thing, then--the mocker of the devils. Nothing could have drawn their gaze from Meynerd! That is the one fault of eyes. In great crises they numb every other sense!”

“But if you know the murderer, why not arrest him at once?” asked Sydney, his brain trying to fix upon the one man who could be guilty.

“Because I’m not a policeman. The arrest of the guilty person is always secondary, with me, to the complete solving of a problem. A crime-puzzle is never solved until the guilt of the prisoner is established beyond _all_ question. No, Sydney, I’m not a detective, for a detective arrests, and then tries to fix the guilt. I fix the guilt first. That is the problem in this case!”

“Joslyn and Wilson certainly acted queer,” mused Sydney. “The Chinese, too, seemed strange.” A new thought flashed to his mind. “There is something Oriental about that murder!” he exclaimed, suddenly. “A dart, and a poison which could act like that!”

Colton nodded as he flicked his cigarette into the street. “Devilishly Oriental, Sydney,” he said, quietly.

“Ching Li Chu!” gasped Sydney. “He----”

“Is secretary of a foreign legation, and therefore immune from arrest. Also, I think he could prove absolutely that he was standing in such a position that he could not have shot the poisoned dart at Meynerd!”

The machine swung into the curb before the shop of Osmuhn & Son. Colton alighted and hurried into the shop, followed by Sydney. He knew every step here, for he had learned them in the days when the problem of the Thousand Facets of Fire had interested him.

The elder Osmuhn came forward with a smile of welcome and extended hand. Colton swung his slim stick under his left arm and extended his left hand; the other had been in his pocket since they had left the room in the Wanderers’ Club.

“I want to get an imitation pearl the size of this finger-tip, with small holes drilled in the back at exactly these distances apart.” He drew his right hand from his pocket, and Thames saw that his right index-finger was smudged with ink, and on the middle finger were four dots of black, at equal distances around the finger-tip. “A bit of ink from my fountain pen on the four prongs, then I got the marks, to tell me where the holes had been, when I poked my middle finger into the eye-socket,” he explained to his secretary.

“Come into my office,” requested Osmuhn. “We have some imitation gems that we use merely to show sizes. They wouldn’t fool an expert for a minute.”

“I don’t want them to,” Thornley Colton smiled, faintly. “I only want him to feel the gem.”

“Ah, another of your problems.” Osmuhn pulled open a velvet-lined drawer. “Hold out your finger, please.” He adjusted a small caliper over the tip, and with a smaller one measured the distances between the dots. “How soon do you want it?” he asked, when he had made several cabalistic notes on his small desk pad.

“As soon as possible.”

“In two hours, then.”

Colton nodded and hurried out.

“Police headquarters,” he ordered, when the tonneau-door had clicked shut behind Sydney.

“So soon?” asked the secretary, in wonderment.

“Griffith and Jensen, the two detectives we passed on the stairs, are, perhaps, the most dull-witted in New York. Naturally they’d be on hand in a case like this. The thing will be bungled hopelessly if I let them have their way. After they have been shown the facts I gathered”--a grim smile hovered on his lips for a second--“they’ll have every one in the room under arrest, even Captain Richards. I want them all--_all_--at my house to-night.”

Thames knew the futility of further questions. Colton would do the thing in his own way, and explain when the time came. So they rode in silence to the big building that housed the central departments of the big force.

“While I’m inside, Sydney, call up Shrimp and tell him to get an inch auger and the most powerful pocket tubular flash-light he can buy.”

“An auger and a flash-light?” repeated the secretary.

“More scenery,” explained the blind man, laconically. “If I had been in the room when the murder was committed, my lack of eyes would have enabled me to detect the murderer-thief in the very act. Now I must carefully work on his nerves until I have the confession. And I’ll do it!” Again there was the ominous ring in his voice that Sydney had noticed every time the blind man spoke of the murderer.

With a curt nod of emphasis, Colton turned on his heel and walked briskly into headquarters, unerringly finding his way through the corridors he had travelled many times before.

There was no doubt of The Fee’s delight when Sydney Thames gave him the strange order. “Gee! Anoder case!” came his squeal of joy over the wire. “An’ the arm I got broke in the gilded-glove thing is all right. You bet I’ll get ’em!”

Sydney smiled as he rang off. Nothing pleased the freckle-faced, blue-eyed boy, with the slightly-twisted nose, who had become a member of the Colton household at the conclusion of a particularly baffling murder case, like participation in one of the blind man’s problems. But since the affair of the gilded glove, Colton had been careful to keep the irrepressible youngster out of all harm’s way.

For half-an-hour Sydney sat in the automobile and puzzled over the theft and the murder, the use of the imitation eye, the request for an auger and a flash-light. Then Colton came out of headquarters.

“One more stop,” he said, as the car glided away from the curb. “Five o’clock,” he announced, as his fingers touched the face of the crystalless watch in his pocket. “Just time for the call, a hurried bite, and then the dénouement.” He leaned forward to speak to the driver. “The Waldorf,” was the order he gave.

At the big desk of the famous hotel, Colton’s low-voiced inquiry brought an involuntary ejaculation of amazement from Sydney Thames. The blind man had asked for the Chinese ambassador.

“Not here!” declared the man at the desk with a positiveness that only hotel-clerks can assume when they are lying.

“Tell him I’d like to see him in regard to the Seven Devils of Sin.” Colton’s voice was quiet and even, but there was something in it that commanded respect--and got it.

“I’ll see!” The clerk turned to the house switchboard, and a few minutes later Thames and the blind man were being ushered to the suite of the diplomat. The ambassador, unlike his secretary, who had worn clothes of the latest cut, was dressed in robes rich with embroidery. He looked at them inquiringly as they entered, and the man at his side bowed deeply.

“His excellency bids you welcome,” the interpreter said, in precise English.

“I came to tell you that the eye of the Seven Devils has been stolen, and one of my countrymen murdered to make the theft possible,” Colton said, without preamble or preface.

The interpreter might have been a graven image for all the expression that came to his face. He bowed again, and spoke in Chinese to the ambassador. When the diplomat had answered him, he spoke again to Colton.

“His excellency says that the thing of which you speak is impossible. The devils would not allow it. The eye of the Seven Devils of Sin disappears for a week every hundred years, and has done so for centuries at the Yunling temple.”

“Ah!” There was a note of quiet satisfaction in the problemist’s voice as though sudden light had been thrown on an obscure point. “How did his excellency know where the devils were?” he asked, gravely.