Part 23

For several minutes the two Chinese talked. Colton stood in the middle of the floor, idly switching his trouser-leg with his slim stick, apparently paying no attention to the two Chinese. But Sydney Thames knew that the keen ears of the blind man were taking in every word; for he knew that the problemist understood the language perfectly! What were the two Mongolians talking about? Why the discussion before such a simple question could be answered?

Then the interpreter spoke. “The gods decreed that his excellency should know the exact place and the hour at which it would be ready,” he said, solemnly. “The devils stirred to anger the people of Chingtu against the white rogue who so cleverly outwitted the Yunling mountain men. But the gods found him, after months had passed, so the anger of the devils might be appeased and the people made content.”

“Thank you.”

Sydney Thames thought he detected a dryness in the words, but the look on the blind man’s face as he left the room augured ill for some one.

“I can’t see how apparently intelligent men can believe such rot!” declared Sydney, impatiently.

“The undeviating view-point, Sydney, the undeviating view-point. That religion has been ingrained for centuries and tens of centuries. No Western knowledge can ever change it.” A peculiar smile came to his lips. “They never consider the incongruity of the gods helping them find devils--no more than they would consider a human life beside that thing of gold we left on the table at the club.”

Thames tried to read the expression on the blind man’s face; but there was no expression. Was the Chinese the murderer? Then what could the problemist do alone? What had been the object of those apparently irrelevant questions? And why had Colton pretended he knew no Chinese.

“One thing more, Sydney.” The problemist stopped beside the operator’s desk at the telephone-booths. “Call up the club and tell the president that I’ll contribute enough to have that upper hall re-decorated. Tell him that the workmen will be there to-night. It’s about time it was fixed.”

Sydney asked no questions this time. He merely obeyed the order. During the hurried, silent meal that followed, he was all at sixes and sevens, and his brain fairly reeled as the questions raced, shuttlelike, through his mind. The Chinese had known the exact hour the thing would be unpacked at the Wanderers’ Club. The secretary had virtually threatened Meynerd with death. Yet Colton had said Ching Li Chu had not been in a position to shoot the poisoned dart. Who had been in the right position, and how did the blind man know? He had not asked the positions of the men. There were Wilson and Joslyn. What of them? He remembered stories he had heard of the men. Joslyn was an absinthe-drinker, supposed to have an independent income. But what was the source of that income? Sydney had never heard. Wilson was noted for his temper--but the crime was not that of a man with temper. It was cold-blooded, devilish.

“Six o’clock.” Colton paid his check and hurried down the winding aisle of tables, his brain unconsciously counting the steps it had registered when he entered. “Get me a paper, Sydney,” he asked, when they were on the side-walk once more.

Sydney hailed a boy and bought one. At the first sight of the black headlines he gasped aloud.

“They’ve arrested Nesu!” he cried. “The two detectives took him to headquarters!”

He saw again the quiet little Jap; the one man he had never suspected! Colton had said that the murder was devilishly Oriental; he had said that the Chinese had not committed it. The Japanese was the guilty one! He must have been standing at the side of the table opposite Meynerd, for Sydney had seen the cotton tufts he had dropped. And the police had beaten the blind man; they had gotten ahead of the problemist who had scorned them so often. Sydney could see them laughing up their sleeves at the man he loved.

“It’s a shame, Thorn!” he choked.

“It is,” admitted Colton, quietly. “But better a live prisoner than a dead freeman. I asked the chief to arrest Nesu, for he would have been the next victim of the poisoned dart!”

“The next----” began Sydney, dully; but Colton did not let him finish.

“Yes, but we haven’t time to discuss it now. Run up to Osmuhn’s, and get the fake pearl. I’ll take the car, and you can come home in the subway. There’s a little job Shrimp and I have to do.”

Once more Thames silently did as he was told, and when he got back to the old-fashioned, brownstone house in the upper eighties, he found the blind man carefully studying two deep scratches in the polished top of the library table.

“All right, Shrimp,” called Colton, without raising his head.

Thames looked around, but could see no sign of the boy; he was not in the hall, nor in the music-room. He opened his lips for the question, then the electric front-door bell tinkled its announcement.

“The jewel! Quick!” Sydney Thames thrust the imitation pearl into Colton’s hand. For a second the blind man rubbed it between his flexible fingers. With a nod of satisfaction he dropped it carelessly into his lower vest-pocket, and was sitting on the table, feet dangling, smoking a cigarette, when the servant entered to announce the four men.

Captain Richards came first, and in his arms, held as carefully as though it were fragile glass, was the Seven Devils. He grunted in relief as he set it down on the table and mopped his sweat-beaded forehead. Ching Li Chu, who had been at his heels, remained standing, straight and rigid, beside the thing of gold on the table. Joslyn, who could not seem to keep his twitching fingers still, flopped into a chair without even a grunt of greeting. Wilson seemed strangely cool, and calmly chewed an unlighted cigar as he shook hands with the blind man and his secretary.

“No trouble getting us all here together,” he grinned. “Not one of us has dared leave the other’s sight all afternoon. Sat like bumps on a log glaring at each other, and trying to figure which of us was a murderer.”

“For God’s sake, get it over with!” Joslyn licked his dry lips with his tongue, and his voice was shaky. “The police were going to arrest all of us until their brains got untangled, and they took the right one. What d’ye want us here for, anyway?” he demanded.

“To show you the eye of the Seven Devils,” Colton said, quietly. He moved the golden image along the table, and carefully placed it in the centre, facing the five chairs that were drawn up against the wall. The blind man was very careful of the placing, and his secretary knew that he was putting it exactly over the scratches. Why?

“I told you not to drink so much absinthe this afternoon, Joslyn,” put in the captain, impatiently. “Your nerves are all gone.” He spoke to the problemist. “Are you really going to find the eye?” he asked, and there was a note of disbelief in his voice that Sydney Thames instantly resented.

A nod was Colton’s only answer.

Richards shook his head doubtfully. “Where that infernal Jap could have hidden the thing is beyond me. We literally tore the room to pieces, and picked the cotton apart, tuft by tuft.” His voice changed suddenly. “Did you find it?” he demanded.

The blind man straightened up. “Take seats,” he invited, for he had apparently not even heard the question. “You, too, Ching; the devils won’t get away.”

“The ambassador said that I must guard them,” replied the Chinese, simply.

“I expected he would,” declared Colton. “I saw him for a few minutes this afternoon.”

“You did!” The exclamation came from Captain Richards.

“Yes. I’d like to speak to you a few minutes in private, if the others will excuse us?” he turned to them, apologetically.

“Long as you like,” granted Wilson, lightly.

“Have it over with!” snarled Joslyn.

Colton put his hand on the captain’s shoulder and drew him to a far corner of the room. For several minutes they conversed in earnest whispers. The blind man’s back was toward the seated men, but they could see him making gestures of emphasis with the hand that was not resting on the captain’s arm.

The captain nodded emphatically, and they returned to the others. His face was grave, unreadable, but Sydney Thames saw a look of satisfaction gleaming in his eyes. So the blind man had convinced him that the pearl would be recovered!

They were all seated now, even the Chinese. Colton leaned against the table beside the seven golden devils, and faced them. His finger-tips felt of his crystalless watch.

“Ten minutes of seven,” he said. “At seven o’clock the jewel will be returned. Seven has been a mystic number for centuries.”

Wilson laughed shortly. “You’re worse than the Chinese, Colton,” he accused.

“Rot!” growled Joslyn.

“You know that seven is the number sacred to our devils?” asked the Chinese, gravely.

An inclination of the blind man’s head was his only answer. Silence came. The minutes slowly ticked past. As time went the men again felt the sinister influence of the thing of gold before them; just as the blind man had intended they should. Joslyn could not keep his twitching hands still. Wilson bit through his cigar and muttered a curse as it fell to the floor. Even Captain Richards nervously tapped his vest-front with his fingers. Sydney Thames shifted uncomfortably. What was going to happen? Was this merely another of the irrelevant, apparently senseless things?--like the others of the afternoon.

Colton’s voice, low, solemn, broke the stillness. “The murderer of Meynerd can never receive his full punishment on this earth. He has murdered thousands!” Every man straightened in his chair. “For years he has lived on the blood of innocent women and children, and for years I have waited this opportunity. Thank God it has come!”

From the lower hall came the first stroke of seven. The blind man stood facing them, hands resting lightly on the table at his sides. The mellow note of the second stroke came. Unconsciously each man’s muscles tightened for something--they knew not what. Week-long seconds passed before the gong sounded the third time. Still the blind man did not move. He stood there as rigid as the hideous, eyeless thing of gold beside him.

“Do not move!”

With the snapped-out order came darkness, black, impenetrable. An indrawn breath sounded hissingly, sucked in through tight, clenched teeth.

Again the clock sounded. From over their head, behind them, came a single shaft of soft, white light. In the small circle of brightness the face of the Seven Devils leered at them. And over the squat, wide-nostriled nose the single eye of pearl, perfect, flawless, gleamed with its spark-red heart!

An animal-like snarl broke the silence. Sydney Thames felt the sweeping rush of a body past his chair; heard body meet body in struggle. He knew one was the blind man. The other----

He made a move to rise and snap on the lights.

Some subtle fifth sense of the blind man seemed to tell him the very thought in his secretary’s mind.

“Stay where you are!” came his command. “Don’t touch the lights!”

Came a crash of a falling body.

The blind man’s voice cut the blackness. “You would, eh!” He followed in with a half-dozen words in Chinese. In the tone was some terrible accusation, and they seemed to goad the other to madness.

“Your devilish Oriental poisons will never kill another!” There was not even a catch in the blind man’s breath; but the men who could not move a muscle heard the sobbing gasps of the other. Suddenly came silence. Then two sharp clicks of snapped handcuffs.

And as though the clicks had been a signal, the lights came, and with them the voice of Thornley Colton, quietly triumphant:

“The murder of Ralph Meynerd will at last bring you the death you have deserved so long, _Captain Richards_! Yes, the pearl you have been assuring yourself you still had in your pocket is an imitation. I took the real eye from you while we were talking in the corner. My fingers might make me a successful pickpocket.”

He turned to face the doorway, and there the dazed Sydney Thames saw the wide-eyed Fee. Behind him were two stalwart detectives.

“The prisoner I promised your chief,” Colton said, shortly.

They came forward and jerked the cursing man to his feet. “One minute!” commanded Colton. He faced the Chinese. “The Seven Devils was stolen from your temple. It is yours. Take it.”

“Damn you!” shrieked Richards. “You----”

For a silent second Colton’s eyes seemed to stare at him, then his eyes dropped.

“Take it to its true owners,” repeated Colton. “But first, see!” He went to the golden thing on the table. One hand, held cuplike, under the eye. A finger touched the toe of one of the figures. The eye dropped to his hand! “The true secret of the image,” he said, quietly. “The prongs, by some method of a forgotten genius, open by the pressure of one of the toes. That is how it was stolen in the instant you could see nothing but the dead man before you!”

IV.

An alcohol-soaked bandage around his eyes to ease the splitting headache the loss of four hours of sleep in the afternoon had caused, Thornley Colton sat in the darkened music-room. Hours before, the hand-cuffed Captain Richards had been led away, cursing, raving, blaspheming. The table in the library where had been the wonderful Seven Devils of Sin, was empty now, but in a room at the Waldorf four sleepless Chinese guarded the sacred thing with their lives; praying alternately to it and to their gods in thanks. Under the waters of the Pacific had already sped the news that the True Eye would again look from the altar of the Yunling monastery. The Chinese ambassador had come personally to thank Colton. He had promised the blind man honours, decorations, and Thornley Colton had smiled them aside.

“A curious crime; that of committing a murder to steal the thing he already owned?” The blind man repeated the question Sydney Thames had asked minutes before. “Yes, it was a curious crime, Sydney. But Richards knew that he was dealing with a curious people; he had dealt with them for thirty years. He understood perfectly that a Chinese who knew the legend regarding the impossibility of theft would not deviate a hair’s breadth from his century-old ideas. The devils would not let it be done; therefore it could not be done. The disappearance of the eye--coupled with the century vanishings which, of course, the captain knew all about--would only make the Chinese more anxious to get the image. It would prove to his peculiar mind that the devils had not lost their powers in the years they had been gone. You heard him raise the price. You saw Richards’s clever acting then; though he must have known that Ching couldn’t be found guilty of the murder. He would have seen to it that at the time of the killing the Chinese was in the wrong position to shoot the dart. He was wise enough to know that police suspicion would be immediately directed toward the Mongolian, but it was no part of his game to have him arrested. The others could have sworn Ching could not have committed the crime.

“The reason for it all is very simple--money. Richards, temple-looter for years, knew that this was his last game. No collector would have given him more than a hundred thousand, and that would have included the eye. He could not have substituted a gem that would deceive an expert. And by murdering in such a way as to make the Chinese think it was the work of the devils, he could have sold the image to the Chinese government for two hundred thousand _without the eye_! They would have staked their lives on the pearl re-appearing in some supernatural manner the minute the thing was restored to the monastery. And by killing Meynerd, Richards would gain the eye; an extra sixty-five thousand dollars. That was the price of the boy’s life. It was Richards, too, who sold the jade god that caused the Boxer trouble; that cost the lives of a thousand innocent women and children, and lives of ten thousand men to net him twenty-five thousand dollars!”

“He did that?” gasped Sydney, horror in his tone.

“Yes. He stole it and laid the blame on a white missionary to save his own worthless hide. That caused the first massacre. How he aroused the people of Chingtu over the Seven Devils I don’t know, but he had been in China long enough to learn all of the underground methods. He must have stayed there months to get the people in a proper spirit to make the government willing to go to any lengths to prevent an insurrection. Then he picked New York for the final scene. He joined the Wanderers’ years ago, and no one knew that his money came from the loot of temples and the blood of massacred women and children. I did, but I could do nothing but wait.

“See how carefully he picked his audience. Meynerd, drunken kid, could be depended upon to mock the serious Chinese. Joslyn, whose nerves were shattered by absinthe, would surely act suspiciously because of his very nervousness. Then Wilson to add fuel. And the Chinese! The scene was laid just as he has probably laid dozens of others.

“How he learned the secret of the devils’ eye I don’t know, nor care. Perhaps he learned it accidentally. Perhaps he picked it up in some obscure corner of the kingdom during his years of wandering. But he never thought that my supersensitive finger-tips would discover it, though his bringing of Nesu to the window was done so that he could get into a position where he could watch me. But I had found the thing in an instant, and while he watched I carefully kept away from it. The minute my finger felt the unbent prongs I knew they must have opened, and the toes would be the most ingenious place for the manipulator of them.

“It was he who notified the Chinese ambassador the exact hour he would unpack the image. I wanted to make sure of that, so I went to the Waldorf. I knew the thing was important enough to bring the diplomat all the way from Washington, though I knew, too, as Richards did, that a secretary would make the first visit.”

“How do you know that Richards told them?” asked Sydney. “Was he the ‘gods’ they spoke of?”

“The discussion between the ambassador and the interpreter before they answered my question told me that. While they spoke of the gods they mentioned a note sent the night before from New York. Of course, I was careful to conceal the fact that I understood Chinese, because I knew they would never tell any one of that. To them it was a decree of the gods; and a state secret.”

“And Richards deliberately killed Meynerd to make the one necessary minute of confusion?” put in Sydney.

“It didn’t matter whether it was Meynerd or not. But luck was with him; luck and the working out of the chance on which he had invited Meynerd as one of the party. The poisoned dart, in its short glass-tube, was in his handkerchief. I also took that from the pocket of his frock-coat when we talked in the library, and in it were fine glass particles. He hadn’t even thought it necessary to get rid of the thing. A simple crushing of the tube in his handkerchief when a breath had sent the dart on its journey of death, the dropping of the pieces into Joslyn’s drink, where eyes would never have seen them, was the work of an instant. Of course, if Joslyn hadn’t had the frappéd drink Richards needed as a hiding-place, the captain would have ordered one for himself. But there was one break in the programme. The Jap saw the theft of the jewel.”

“How did you know that?”

Colton smiled grimly. “The keyboard of silence again. When I shook hands my index-finger on the Jap’s wrist told me that his heart was pounding like a trip hammer. A mere death would never have excited an Oriental like that. For a time I suspected that he had shot the poisoned dart, and the captain had stolen the jewel. But the glass in the ice instead of the cotton, and the captain’s gentle manner toward him, proved that they were not working together. If they had been accomplices Richards would have acted harshly to avert suspicion. He was trying to convince the Jap that silence would mean a share of the theft. But I knew Richards wasn’t the kind to divide, or pay blackmail. The poisoned dart was too easy. There wasn’t a chance to end the Jap’s life in the room, for I knew the captain would have hardly dared bring two darts and tubes. There was always a possibility of his being searched by the police. At the first opportunity outside, though, puff! A dead Japanese who would tell no tales. Therefore I had the police arrest Nesu because Captain Richards probably had another one of his devilish darts somewhere around the club.”

“But the pearl?” demanded Sydney. “Why didn’t you search Richards before we left that room?”

“Do you think he would have taken such pains to hide the broken tube and then have kept the pearl?” asked Colton, dryly. “He hid the gem in a previously picked-out place when he left the room to call me on the telephone. Suppose I had arrested him; suppose we had torn the club apart and found the jewel. Would Captain Richards have gone to the chair for murder? Not with an American jury, and the mass of other suspicious things that would make more than a ‘reasonable doubt’ of his guilt.

“So I arranged to-night’s affair for a dénouement. I knew his nerves weren’t steel, for he had shown that when I told him to search the body of the man he had killed. That was a little too much even for him. Then I got the ‘eye’ while I pretended to tell him of a plan I had to make Joslyn confess. I substituted the fake pearl that would feel just the same in the darkness, because the whole thing depended on his having no premature suspicion. My announcement that workmen would be on hand to re-decorate the upper hall of the club, the place he must have chosen because of its nearness, forced him to take the pearl from its hiding-place to-night. He had to bring it here because I timed the thing so that he would have no chance to find another hiding-place. During the afternoon he probably saw to it that Joslyn kept on drinking absinthe, though Wilson’s drinks only seemed to straighten out his nerves.

“It was simple, very simple, but I have waited years for the opportunity; ever since I heard the true story of the Boxer uprising from the lips of a dying coolie who had helped to steal the jade god. I knew my chance would come some day, and the cocksure attitude I always took when Captain Richards was around, I knew would make Captain Richards welcome the opportunity to amuse himself by watching me try to solve a puzzle. That Chinese sentence I used there in the darkness told him for the first time that I knew all about him, and he realized then that I had been waiting for the chance his egotism had brought me.”

Sydney Thames’s lips curved in a superior smile. “And the Chinese can only see it as the working-out of the gods’ decree,” he murmured.

The blind man leaned back in his chair and blew a thoughtful smoke ring toward the ceiling. When he spoke his voice was low, almost reverent. “A half-century ago the thing was stolen by a young priest who did not know the secret that had been carefully guarded by the highest priests for centuries. Fifty years later it passes into the hand of a white man, and is brought thousands of miles to New York. A man is killed, another is in a prison-cell, and the devils are returned by one who is blind. The working of the gods? I wonder, Sydney, I wonder.”

THE END.

Transcriber’s Notes

This file uses _underscores_ to indicate italic text. New original cover art included with this ebook is granted to the public domain.

Spelling, hyphenation, and italicisation of words like “dénouement” and “finger-tip” are inconsistent between the different stories in the printed source text and have not been standardised.

The following changes and corrections have been made: