The amazing adventures of Letitia Carberry

[Illustration]

_The_ AMAZING ADVENTURES OF LETITIA CARBERRY

_By_ MARY ROBERTS RINEHART

_Author of_ WHEN A MAN MARRIES THE CIRCULAR STAIRCASE THE MAN IN LOWER TEN THE WINDOW AT THE WHITE CAT, ETC.

Illustrations By Howard Chandler Christy

Indianapolis The Bobbs-Merrill Company Publishers

Copyright 1911 The Bobbs-Merrill Company

Press Of Braunworth & Co. Bookbinders And Printers Brooklyn, N. Y.

The Amazing Adventures Of Letitia Carberry

The Amazing Adventures Of Letitia Carberry

Part One

Chapter I

What Happened To Johnson

Strictly speaking, this is Tish’s story, but Tish is unable to write it, being laid up, as you probably know from the newspapers. But we all three felt that a record of the affair ought to be kept while it was fresh in our minds, although goodness knows we’re not likely to forget any of it. A good many people wondered, when the story came out, how Tish had come to be mixed up with it at all, but as Tish herself says, it was very simple. The people at the hospital had become demoralized, and some firm hand had to take hold. Besides, Tish was a member of the Ladies’ Committee, and felt responsible.

Tish says the first thing she knew about it was a piercing scream, just outside her room. This was followed by a number of short, sharp cries, feminine, and steps running past her bedroom door. Now, as Tish also remarks with truth, one hears a variety of strange sounds in a hospital at night, and at first she thought it was the woman across the hall, who had had her appendix removed that afternoon, and who had been very unpleasant as a neighbor all evening. But when the noise kept up, and only died away to be followed by somebody crying hysterically down the hall, Tish was roused. She sat up in bed and threw her small traveling clock at Miss Lewis.

(Miss Lewis was Tish’s nurse, a splendid woman, but a heavy sleeper. She slept on a cot in the room, and until Tish learned that it did not hurt the clock to throw it, she had been obliged to ring for one of the night nurses to come in and waken her. So now she threw the clock.)

Miss Lewis picked the clock from off her chest and sat up, yawning, to look at it.

“Twenty minutes after one, Miss Carberry,” she said. “Would you like some buttermilk?”

Now Tish was not really ill. She was taking a rest cure last autumn while her apartment was being painted and papered, and while she recovered from a twisted knee. She’d bought a second-hand automobile some months before, and learned to run it herself, and the knee was the result of her being thrown out over the steering wheel and ten feet beyond the potato wagon she had collided with. Although, as Tish says, it is a strange thing that her _knee_ was twisted, when she brought up standing on her head in three inches of muddy water and a family of tadpoles.

Both Aggie and I went to see her daily, the three of us being old friends, although not related, and she was always glad to see us, although she grew sarcastic when Aggie casually remarked that except for the meeting of the anti-vivisection society, we might also have been flung over the potato wagon. Well--

“Would you like some buttermilk?” asked Miss Lewis again, beginning to draw on her kimono. Tish says that provoked her and she reached for the clock again, but of course Miss Lewis had it in her hand.

“No,” she snapped. “Go out in the hall and see what has happened.”

Miss Lewis yawned again and groped around in the half light for her slippers. It was more than Tish could stand. She hopped out of bed in her bare feet and limped to the door.

The hall was almost dark and across it the woman with the appendix--or with_out_--was groaning. But half way along, where the night nurse has her desk and keeps her papers and where the annunciator for the patients’ bells is fastened to the wall, Tish saw a group of five or six nurses, gathered about somebody in a chair. One of them came running past with a glass of something, and the crowd opened to admit the girl and the glass and closed again. Miss Lewis came and looked over Tish’s shoulder.

“Gee!” she said, and ran down the hall with her slippers flapping and her braid switching from side to side. Just then the woman across gave another groan, and it being dark and the scream still echoing in her ears, Tish reached inside the door for her cane and hobbled out in her nightgown.

The girl in the chair, she said, was as white as milk, and her lips were blue. She was half-lying, with her head against the back of the chair, and a violent shudder now and then was the only sign of life about her. One of the other nurses was stroking her hands and talking to her in a soothing tone.

“Now listen, Miss Blake,” she said. “It _couldn’t_ be. We all have these queer feelings here. It’s the nervous strain and loss of sleep. I’ll never forget the first time _I_ had to do it.”

“Nor I,” said another girl, “I went with you. Do you remember? It was that dwarf that died in J. We’d forgotten something, and you had to go and leave me alone.”

“Hush!” another nurse broke in, and Miss Blake began to shudder again. “If we had some hot coffee for her--will you drink some coffee if we make it, Miss Blake?”

The girl in the chair shook her head and Miss Lewis dragged one of the nurses from the group and whispered to her. Tish heard part of the answer.

“Went up with Linda Smith and as usual Linda forgot something--she’s been over-working; went to raise the window for fresh air--she says she heard a sound, but didn’t notice it--when she turned around”--then more whispering that Tish couldn’t catch.

“_No!_” Miss Lewis said, and looked queer herself. “Then, if it’s true, _it_ is still--?”

[Illustration]

“Yes.”

Miss Blake sat up just then and tried to wipe her blue lips with her handkerchief, but her hands shook so that one of the nurses did it for her. She mopped the girl’s pallid forehead, too, and put her arm over her shoulders protectingly.

“You’re going off duty, girl,” she said. “About all the hard work in the place has been falling to you lately, and if we don’t take care we will be minus the class flower.”

Tish says the girl tried to smile at that and was very pretty. I can answer for her looks myself, having seen her often enough later. She had soft, wavy, black hair and Irish-blue eyes, and she was rather small. Partly for that and partly because she was so young, we fell into the way of calling her the Little Nurse. But to go back to Tish’s story.

“You’re sure you didn’t doze off?” one of the girls asked, pressing forward. But the Little Nurse shook her head.

“Asleep! There?” she said, in a low voice. “Could you?”

“What enrages me,” Miss Lewis burst out, glaring at the group through her glasses, “is _why_ Linda Smith left her there alone.”

“She forgot something,” said Miss Blake.

“She usually forgets something!” Miss Lewis began. “When she dies, Linda’ll forget--”

“Hush!” somebody whispered. “Here she is.”

Miss Smith came quickly along the hall, her arms full of bundles. She stopped when she saw the group and ran her eye over it.

“Well!” she said, “what is it? Fudge?”

One of the girls detached herself from the group and started for her. Miss Smith was a tall, raw-boned woman, with short, curly hair and a rugged but good-natured face, and Tish says she stood smiling at them.

“I suppose you know,” she said. “The spiritualist from K has ‘passed over.’ Didn’t want to go, poor old man. Said he had three wives waiting in the spirit world.”

The other girl came up to her then and caught her by the elbow and whispered to her. Tish was standing in the shadow, leaning on her cane, and she didn’t know from Adam what was the matter, but she was covered with goose flesh.

“Nonsense!” said Miss Linda Smith suddenly. “She’s been dozing.”

Miss Blake got up and steadied herself by the back of the chair, looking across at the other woman.

“I’m afraid not, Miss Smith,” she said. “You--remember when--when the orderlies carried up poor old--Johnson. They--laid him on the table in the mortuary, didn’t they?”

“Yes,” said Miss Smith, half smiling. “They usually do. They don’t generally throw ’em out the window.”

Miss Blake clutched the chair tighter, Tish says, and her lips trembled.

“I want you to come with me and see,” she said. “We--covered the body with a sheet, didn’t we?”

“Yes,” Miss Smith stopped smiling.

“And then you left, and I was alone. I--I tried not to mind. I haven’t been here very long. But I was afraid, after a minute or two, that I was--getting faint. I--seemed to feel eyes on me.”

Some of the girls nodded as if they understood.

“So I went to the window and threw it up to get air. Then I thought I heard something moving behind me. I--I felt it, like the eyes, rather than heard it. And--I didn’t look around at once; I couldn’t. It was so far from the rest of the house, and--I was alone with _it_. And when I turned--” She stopped and moistened her lips with her tongue, and her face was ghastly--“_it_ was gone, Miss Smith. Gone!”

Now Tish isn’t easy to frighten, but at that moment the appendix woman gave a deep groan and she says her heart jumped once or twice and turned over in her chest. The nurses were all standing huddled together in a little group, and one of them kept looking over her shoulder.

“Gone!” said Miss Smith, and sat down in a chair suddenly, as if her legs had given way. “Wha--what have you done?”

“Sent for Jacobs, the night watchman,” one of the nurses explained. “Doctor Grimm and Doctor Sands are in the operating room--a night case, and the medical internes had a row with Mr. Harrison and left last night. We’ll be in nice shape if G ward gets busy.”

“What’s G ward?” Tish asked, edging over to Miss Lewis.

“G ward,” said Miss Lewis coolly, “G ward is where the stork drops that part of the population that has only half the legal number of parents. You’ll have to go back to bed, Miss Carberry.”

“I’ll do nothing of the sort,” said Tish, and glared at her.

Tish told us the rest of the story the next morning, sitting propped up in bed with Aggie on one side and me on the other. We’d brought her some creamed sweetbreads, but she was so excited she could not eat. The change in her was horrible; she had passed through a crisis, and she showed it.

“You’d better let us take you home, Tish,” Aggie pleaded, when Tish had finished. “This is no place for a nervous woman.”

Tish took a mouthful of the sweetbread and made a face over it.

“Heavens,” she said, “it’s easy seen salt’s cheap. No, I am not going home. I shall stay to see the end of this if it’s the end of me.”

“Listen, Tish,” Aggie said miserably. “Hasn’t my advice always been good? Didn’t I beg you on my bended knees not to buy that automobile? Didn’t both Lizzie and I protest with tears against the motor-boat, and you’ll carry _that_ scar till your dying day. And now--now it’s spirits, Tish. Don’t tell me it wasn’t.”

“Where’s that Lewis woman?” was all Tish would say. “Speaking of spirits reminds me I haven’t been rubbed with alcohol yet.”

But I’d better tell Tish’s story in her own words:

“Once for all, before I begin, Aggie,” she ordered--Tish is a masterful woman--“you open the collar of your waist and put a pillow behind you. I’m not going to be broken in on in the middle of this by your fainting away. Faint if you want, but get ready beforehand. Lewis is not usually around when she’s wanted.”

“I don’t want to hear it if it’s as bad as that,” Aggie protested, opening the neck of her waist. “Lizzie, reach me that pillow.”

“I don’t know that _I_ want to hear it myself, Tish,” I said. “You’d better do as Aggie says and come home. You’re a wreck this morning, and I’ve telephoned for Tommy Andrews.”

Tommy is Tish’s doctor, the son of her cousin, Eliza Peabody Andrews, a nice enough boy, but frivolous. He is on the visiting staff at the hospital, and makes rounds once a day, I believe, with an attentive interne at his elbow and the prettiest nurse he can find carrying the order book.

Tish set the sweetbread on the bedside table with a bang and looked at me for an instant over her glasses.

“Don’t be a fool, Lizzie,” she said. “Do you think Tommy Andrews can make me do anything I don’t want to? Do you think the entire connection could move me one foot if I didn’t want to go?”

“You can’t spend another night here,” I put in, somewhat feebly.

“Can’t I?” she said grimly. “Not only I can, and will, but you and Aggie are going to take turns here with me, night and night about, until this is cleared up. Mark my words, last night was not the end.”

She turned over on her side then, and proceeded to have her back rubbed with alcohol. And while Miss Lewis rubbed, she told us the story.

“Miss Lewis wanted me to go back to bed,” she said, when she had reached that point, “but I refused to go. (You needn’t take the skin off, Miss Lewis.) I stood there in my gown, and I watched them making up their minds to go to the mortuary. That’s up a narrow flight of stairs from this end of the hall, not far from this very room. Nobody was anxious to lead off, but Miss Blake seemed determined to go back and prove she hadn’t been asleep, and at last they moved off huddled in a group and left me there. (You haven’t got a spite against my right shoulder, have you?) Miss Lewis followed them.”

“I didn’t,” said Miss Lewis sourly. Tish turned and looked up at her over her shoulder.

“You looked as if you were going to, and you know it,” she asserted. “And don’t interrupt me. Miss Lewis followed, and seeing I was going to be left alone, and feeling somewhat creepy along the back, I followed her.”

“Really--!” Miss Lewis began.

“We went up the staircase, and if you and Aggie go out and look, you’ll see how it leads. There’s a hall up there, with a few private rooms along one side, and a small ward across. The mortuary is up a flight of about eight steps, at the far end.

“The hall was dark, and all the light came from the mortuary. The door was open, and it seemed bright and cheerful enough. I was feeling pretty sure the black-haired girl had dozed and had a dream, when I saw Miss Smith, who was in the lead, stoop and pick something up, and hold it out to the other nurses.

“‘That’s queer!’ she said, and her eyes were fairly starting out of her head.

“‘What is it?’ said I, limping forward.

“The nurses were staring at the thing she held.

“‘It’s impossible,’ she muttered, ‘but--that’s the bandage I tied Johnson’s hands together with!’ Miss Lewis, will you let Miss Pilkington sniff that alcohol for a moment?”

“Fiddle!” Aggie protested feebly. “I’m not at all upset.” Then she put her head back on her pillow and fainted, as Tish had arranged, with decency and order.

Well, to go on, it seemed that Tish began to lose her courage about that time, and when one of the braver nurses came running back, after a hasty look, and said that Miss Blake was right, and there was no body in the mortuary, there was almost a stampede. And then it was, I believe, that heavy steps were heard on the staircase, and it proved to be Jacobs, the night watchman.

Now, Tish was in her nightgown, and I fancy, although she never confessed it, that she fell into some sort of a panic and darted into one of the empty rooms. She herself says Miss Lewis pushed her in, out of sight, and closed the door, but Miss Lewis indignantly denies this.

“I stood inside the door, in the darkness,” Tish said. “The night watchman was just outside, and I could hear everything that was said, plainly. He didn’t believe the body was gone, and said so. I heard him go toward the mortuary door, and the young women followed him. I could feel a chair just beside me, and my knee was jumping again, so I sat down.

“That was when I saw I’d stepped into an occupied room. There was a man in his night clothes standing not ten feet away, in the middle of the room, and I jumped up in a hurry.

“‘Good heavens!’ I said, ‘I didn’t know there was anybody here! You’ll have to excuse me.’”

Tish is an extraordinary woman. She was apparently quite cool, but I happened to glance at Miss Lewis, and she was pouring a small stream of alcohol into the lap of Aggie’s black broadcloth tailor-made. She was a pasty yellow-white.

“The man didn’t say anything, although I could see him moving,” Tish went on, “I thought he was rude. I got the door open and stepped into the hall, almost into the arms of the Blake girl.

“‘Well, were you right?’ I asked her.

“She nodded.

“‘Absolutely gone, without a trace!’ she said with a catch in her voice.

“‘Maybe he wasn’t dead,’ I suggested. ‘There’s a lot of catalepsy around just now.’

“‘He was dead,’ she insisted. ‘Quite dead. He’s been dying for a week.’

“Well, what with the watchman and lights moving around, I wasn’t so nervous as I had been, and I was pretty much interested.

“‘There’s one thing sure, my dear,’ I said, ‘he won’t go far in that state. I’ll just hobble down and get my wrapper on and we’ll have a search. I stepped into that room in my nightgown and I daresay the man in there nearly died himself--of the shock.’

“‘The man in _there_!’ she said. ‘Why, all these rooms are empty, Miss Carberry!’

“We stood staring at each other.

“‘There’s a man in there,’ I repeated. ‘He stood up and stared at me when I went in.’

“She got very white, but she walked right over to the door and pushed it open. I saw her throw up her hands, and the next minute she had fallen flat on her face in the doorway, and the night watchman was running toward us with a lighted candle.”

Tish leaned over and took a drink of water.

“This bed’s full of crumbs, Miss Lewis,” she grumbled. “It’s queer to me that the only part of this hospital toast that is crisp is the part I get in the bed!”

“For heaven’s sake, Tish,” I said impatiently, “I suppose she didn’t faint because there were crumbs in your bed!”

“No,” Tish said, hitching herself over to the other side of the mattress. “She fainted because the body of the missing spiritualist was hanging by its neck to the chandelier, fastened up with a roller towel.”

“Dead?” Aggie asked, opening her eyes for the first time.

“Still dead,” Tish replied grimly.

Chapter II

The Little Nurse

Aggie was really frightfully upset. Aggie is rather emotional at any time, and although she herself is a Methodist, her mother’s only sister had been a believer in Spiritualism. (They dug her up ten years after she died, to make room for somebody else, and Aggie’s mother said her hair had grown to be fully ten feet long, and was curly, whereas in life it had always been straight. We may sneer at Spiritualism all we want, but things like that are hard to account for.)

Well, of course, Aggie declared that no human hand had strung poor old Johnson to the chandelier by a roller towel around his neck, and although Tish ridiculed the idea, she had to admit that the fourth dimension had never been accounted for, and that table levitation was an accepted fact, and even known to the ancients.

We sat there gloomily enough while Miss Lewis fixed Tish’s hair and massaged her knee. In the middle of the massage Tommy Andrews came in, whistling.

“Morning, Aunt Tish,” he said. “Morning, Miss Aggie, morning, Miss Lizzie. How’s the knee? Looks as handsome as ever.”

“She’s been walking on it,” said Miss Lewis sourly, and giving the knee an extra jab.

Tommy gave Tish a ferocious frown over his glasses.

“Humph!” he said. “I told you to keep off it! Miss Lewis, if she is obstreperous again, just tie her down with a half-dozen roller towels.”

“Roller towels!” Tish ejaculated. “Why, it was a roller towel that--that--”

“So you said,” Aggie said somberly, and we stared at each other, we hardly knew why.

Tish told Tommy the whole story as he strapped her knee with adhesive plaster. He hadn’t heard it, and he was as much puzzled as we were. It was Aggie who remarked afterward how his face changed when Tish mentioned Miss Blake.

“Blake!” he said, glancing up quickly, “not the little nurse with the dark hair?”

“Yes,” Tish said.

“Damn!” said Tommy. “To have left her alone, like that!” And to Miss Lewis: “Is she ill to-day?”

“She’s in bed, but she’s not sleeping,” said Miss Lewis, with more feeling than I’d have expected. “I was going to ask you if you would see her, Doctor. Since the shake-up yesterday, we have no medical internes, and the surgical side is full up.”

“She--she didn’t ask for me!” said Tommy, with his brown eyes kindling. But Miss Lewis shook her head.

“She’s hardly spoken at all. She just lies there with her eyes wide open and her face white, watching the door. An hour ago one of the nurses pushed it open quietly, for fear she was asleep. Miss Blake lay and watched it moving, and when Linda--Miss Smith went in, she fainted again.”

Tommy took a turn up and down the room. “She’s had a profound shock,” he said. “I’m not afraid of it, unless--” He stopped at the window and stood looking out.

“Unless what?” said Tish, but he didn’t answer. Instead, he stalked over and rang the bell.

“I’ll have the hall nurse relieve you, Miss Lewis,” he said. “We can’t leave my aunt alone, and somebody must see to Miss Blake. There’s some natural explanation for what happened last night, and we must find it and tell her.”

Aggie began to tell about the aunt with the hair, but before she had even buried her, the door opened and Miss Blake herself came in.

“Did you ring?” she asked. She was dead white, lips and all, with deep circles around her eyes, but her step was brisk and her voice cheerful. As Tish said, if you could only have heard her and not seen her, nobody would have believed what had happened.

Tommy gave her one look, and hauled a chair forward.

“Sit down,” he ordered. “You are not fit to be on duty.”

“Thank you, but--I am all right again,” she said, hesitating.

“Please sit down,” said Tommy, with a note in his voice which I never heard him use to Tish. And she took the chair, glancing around at all three of us and then at him.

“Miss Blake,” he said, “I have decided to become your medical adviser!”

“Thanks very much!” she said, with the ghost of a smile.

“On one condition,” he went off, polishing his glasses very hard with his handkerchief. “You will have to obey orders.”

“That’s the first lesson in the training school,” she assented, the smile deepening. “Always obey the doctor’s orders.”

“Stuff!” said Tommy sternly. “If I order you to bed this minute, you’ll not go! The trouble is, Aunt Tish and Honorary Aunts Lizzie and Aggie,” he said, addressing us each in turn, “the trouble is that in a hospital medicine is a drug on the market. It’s too accessible. So are doctors. They’re always on tap, like city water, plentiful and free and therefore subject, like the said water, to the scorn and contumely of the beneficiaries.”

“Indeed, Doctor,” Miss Blake began, but he interrupted her.

“Now, Miss Blake,” he said, “at your earnest solicitation I am about to undertake your case, and the first condition is--”

“Obedience?” She shot a glance at him from under her long, dark lashes, and Aggie raised her eyebrows across the bed at me.

“Exactly,” he said. “The three aunts, actual and honorary, are witnesses. You have promised obedience. The first condition is--you are to leave the hospital immediately and go to a place I know just out of town, a nice place, with a dog and kittens--no, Aunt Tish, _not_ a cat and kittens, a--”

But Miss Blake stood up suddenly, she was paler than before.

“Not _that_!” she said almost wildly.

Tommy came over and put his hand on her shoulder. “We can dispose of the animals,” he said gently. “Can’t you see yourself, little girl, that you are about at the end of your string? Quiet nights, sleep, fresh milk--you won’t know yourself in a week.”

“I can not go,” she said, and stood looking straight ahead with such misery in her face that Aggie’s eyes filled up.

“You can take your vacation,” Tommy persisted, gently. “I’ll take you out myself in my machine.”

“I don’t want to go, Doctor; I--I can’t be spared just now. _Don’t_ send me away! Don’t!”

She began to cry, wildly, hysterically, with her shoulders quivering and her whole body tense. I was considerably upset, and Tommy looked dumbfounded. After all, it was Miss Lewis who knew what to do. She is a large woman, and she simply took the little nurse into her arms and petted her into quiet. Finally, she coaxed her into the hall, and as the door closed behind them, the four of us sat silent.

Aggie was sniveling, and wiping her eyes, and Tish turned on her in a rage.

“What in the name of sense are you bleating about?” she demanded.

“The child’s in trouble,” said Aggie. “I--I never _could_ see anybody cry, and you know it, Tish.”

“I know something else, too,” said Tish grimly, sliding her feet out of bed carefully and reaching for her cane. “That young woman knows more than she’s telling, Tommy Andrews. We’re not through with this yet.”

Now Tommy will always have his joke with Tish, and they differ on a good many subjects, politics, for one thing, and religion, Tommy not believing very much in a future existence, and maintaining that no medical man ought to--it made them more saving of life in this. But he has a great respect for Tish’s opinion.

“You may be right,” he said. “There must be some reason--, but whatever it is--it’s not to her discredit. I’ll swear to that.”

“Listen to the boy!” Tish sneered, picking up the traveling clock and putting it back on the bedside table again. “That’s what a pretty face will do. Suppose it had been Lewis, who stood there, crying into a starched apron and saying she couldn’t leave--don’t, don’t ask her?”

“Why should she leave when she has _you_, dear Aunt Letitia?” asked Tommy, and Tish reached for the clock again.

Well, we talked the thing over, but we couldn’t come to any conclusion. There didn’t seem to be any matter of doubt that Johnson, having died peaceably and in order, had been carried to the mortuary and laid on the table, there to await the final preparations for burial. And the fact was incontestable that shortly after, the said Johnson, as Tommy put it, was hanging by the neck to the chandelier in a room fifty feet away and down eight steps. We all agreed up to that point. As Tommy said, the question then became simply, did he do it himself or was it done for him?

Aggie was confident that he had done it himself.

“Why not?” she demanded. “Isn’t it the constant endeavor of the people who have--passed over, to come back and prove their continued existence on a spirit plane? Shall I ever forget that the third night after Mr. Wiggins died--” Aggie was once engaged to a roofer, who ‘passed over’ by falling off a roof--“can I ever forget that a light like a flame of a candle rose in one corner of the bedroom, crossed the ceiling and disappeared in my sewing basket, where I kept Mr. Wiggins’ photograph? Why should not Mr. Johnson, before deserting the earth plane for the spirit world, have come back and _proved_ his continued existence? Why?”

Tommy lighted a cigarette and puffed at it. “Well,” he said, “I should call it indecent of him if he did, and bad taste, too. Maybe he didn’t think much of his body, but it had lasted pretty well and carried him around a good many years. And to have his spirit cast off its outer garment and hang it to a chandelier--it was heartless! Heartless!”

Chapter III

Another Roller Towel

Now Tish is a peculiar woman. Once she starts a thing, whether it is house-cleaning or learning to roller skate, she keeps right on at it. She learned to skate backwards, you may remember, although she nearly died learning, and lay once twenty minutes insensible on the back of her head. And as Tish acknowledged later, she had made up her mind to find out _who_ or _what_ had hung Johnson by the neck to the chandelier.

So after Tommy had gone, she got into her roller chair and asked me to ring for Miss Lewis.

“What time do you go to your lunch?” she asked her sharply, when she came.

“I don’t eat lunch,” said Miss Lewis.

“Why?”

“It’s making me stout. Besides, there’s never anything fit to eat.”

“Humph!” said Tish, “I guess the meals provided in this training school are above the average. I myself engaged the housekeeper. You’d better have lunch to-day.”

“But--”

“At twelve o’clock,” said Tish firmly. “Any nurse who takes care of me eats three meals a day.”

Miss Lewis stood in the doorway, with her cap over one ear, and stared at Tish, and Tish glared back.

“I prefer not,” she said defiantly, giving her apron belt a twitch.

“At twelve o’clock!” Tish repeated, and then Miss Lewis gave it up.

“Very well,” she said unpleasantly. “Does it make any difference _what_ I eat?”

“None whatever. And now send me the Smith woman,” said Tish calmly. “And shut the door. There’s a draught.”

Miss Lewis slammed out. And whatever reason Tish had for wanting to get rid of her at noon, she deigned no explanation. In ten minutes Miss Smith knocked at the door and came in. She looked tired, but cheerful.

“Do you want me, Miss Carberry?” she asked.

“If you are not busy,” said Tish in her pleasantest manner. “Sit down, Miss Smith. Lizzie, Aggie, this is the Miss Smith I told you about. You will pardon the curiosity of three old women, won’t you, Miss Smith, and answer a question or two about last night?”

“Certainly.” She looked surprised, and I fancied amused.

“In the first place,” Tish asked, getting a pencil and sheet of letter paper from the table, “has any investigation been begun?”

“I think not,” said Miss Smith. “There are always queer goings-on in a hospital, and besides, there has been a stir-up in the management, and things are at sixes and sevens. Two internes left last night, and the superintendent is pretty busy this morning.”

“Indeed,” said Tish, and wrote something down. “Where is the--er--body now?”

“It went to the anatomical board this morning. He had no relatives and no money. If he isn’t claimed in a certain time, he’ll be sent to the college dissecting room.”

Aggie shuddered.

“And now, Miss Smith,” said Tish, leaning back in her roller chair, “would you mind telling me _exactly_ what happened last night?”

“Not at all!” said Miss Smith, smiling. “We have a rule here that when a patient dies in one of the wards at night, the day nurses for that ward go with the body to the mortuary and prepare it for burial. The night nurse, having charge of several wards, can not easily leave. I am in charge of K ward, and Miss Blake is my assistant.”

“She’s not in K ward to-day,” said Tish.

“No, she is relieving the hall nurse here for her off duty. Miss Blake is not well, and this is lighter.”

“One moment,” said Tish, “what is the K ward’s night nurse’s name?”

“Miss Durand.”

“What time did Mr. Johnson die?”

“Shortly after midnight. It was marked twelve-ten on the record.”

“And you were called at once?”

“I--think not,” Miss Smith said slowly. “It was nearly one o’clock.”

“Is that customary?” Tish demanded.

“Not usually,” said Miss Smith, “but it is not extraordinary, either. The night nurse may have been giving a fever bath, or something else she could not leave.”

“You are very indulgent to the curiosity of three old women,” Tish said with her pleasantest smile. “Will you be amiable a little longer, and tell us what happened in the mortuary?”

“Well, really, _nothing_ happened to me. Doctor Grimm had seen Johnson and pronounced him dead; he had been called from the operating room to do it, although Johnson was a medical case. The night orderlies, Briggs and Marshall, took the body to the mortuary and waited with it until Miss Blake and I arrived.”

“Briggs and Marshall,” Tish put down.

“The lights were on, and Briggs was smoking. We had a few words over that, because the orderlies are not allowed to smoke on duty, and tobacco makes my head ache.”

Tish leaned forward in her chair and looked at Miss Smith.

“Do you often have words with the orderlies, Miss Smith?”

Miss Smith smiled cheerfully.

“Quite often,” she said. “They’re such a stupid lot.”

“You don’t think it possible that these men may have retaliated by playing a practical joke on you?”

Miss Smith considered.

“No,” she said, “I don’t. When I found the linen closet up there locked and went down-stairs for sheets, they were both at work in the wards. Anyhow, they might be willing to play a ghastly trick on _me_, but I don’t think they would try to frighten Miss Blake. She’s very well liked.”

“And after you went for the sheets?”

“That’s all I know, Miss Carberry. The rest you heard Miss Blake tell.”

“Are you sure,” Aggie broke in suddenly, leaning forward, “are you sure, Miss Smith, that he didn’t do it himself?”

Miss Smith stared. “Why, he was dead, Miss Pilkington,” she said. “He’d been sick for months, and if he was alive as I am this minute, he couldn’t hang himself by the neck, the way he was hanging, with nothing to stand on near, or any chair kicked away. The center of the room was clear when we found him, and the nearest thing was the foot of the bed, a good eight feet away.”

“He was a--Spiritualist, I think?”

“Yes--yes, indeed,” Miss Smith laughed. “It would have made you creepy to hear him, lying there carrying on whole conversations with nobody near, and raps on his bed until the nurses balked at changing the sheets!”

Aggie shivered. “Gracious!” she said, “I hope they don’t send him back here for the dissecting room. I shan’t be easy until he is safely buried.”

“Oh, you needn’t worry about that,” Miss Smith said cheerfully, getting up to go. “We wouldn’t be likely to get _all_ of him anyhow.”

Well, as Tish said, she hadn’t learned much she hadn’t known before, except that Johnson had been left in the ward fifty minutes after he died, instead of ten. But although the people in the hospital seemed disposed to let the affair alone after sending the body away, and to get back to its business, which, as Miss Smith said, is full of curious things anyhow, Tish, as I say, having taken hold, was not going to let go.

Promptly at noon by the traveling clock, Miss Lewis having taken herself off, Tish lifted herself out of her wheel chair and reached for her cane.

“You can stay here, Aggie,” she said, “and if Lewis comes back, I’m seeing Lizzie to the elevator.”

“She won’t believe a word of it,” Aggie objected.

“Then think up something she will believe. Lizzie is coming with me.”

I wasn’t surprised when Tish turned to the left, in the corridor, and hobbled to the foot of a flight of stairs. She stopped there and turned.

“We’re going up to see that room in daylight, Lizzie,” she said, “but I want you to read this first. You’re a practical woman, and if any of your family ever grew a head of hair after they died, at least you don’t brag about it.”

She took a page of the morning paper, folded small, from the sleeve of her dressing-gown, and pointed to a paragraph.

“Amos Johnson, once a well-known local medium, died last night at the Dunkirk hospital, after a long illness. Johnson was sixty-seven years of age, and had lived in retirement and poverty since the murder of his wife some years ago, a crime for which he was tried and exonerated. The woman’s body was found in the parlor of the Johnson home, hanging to a chandelier by a roller towel knotted about the neck.”

Tish was watching me.

“Well, what do you make of that, Lizzie?” she asked.

“Coincidence,” I said, with affected calmness. “Many a man’s hung his wife to something when he got tired of her, and when you come to think of it, a roller towel is usually handy.”

We didn’t look at each other.

Chapter IV

The Footprint On The Wall

Well, Tish and I examined the room, and I must say at first sight it was disappointing. It was an ordinary hospital room, with two windows, and a bureau between them, a washstand, a single brass bed, set high and not made up, the pillows being piled in the center of the mattress and all covered with a sheet, and two chairs, a straight one and a rocker. Except that the heavy chandelier was bent somewhat from the perpendicular, there was no sign of what had happened there.

Tish sat down in the rocker and looked thoughtfully about the room.

“Under ordinary circumstances,” she said, “if you hang a broadcloth skirt on a chandelier to brush it, you’ll have the whole business and half the ceiling about your head in a minute. And yet, look at that, hardly bent!”

The room had evidently not been disturbed since Johnson had been found there. The straight chair had been drawn beneath the chandelier, and Tish pointed out the scratches made by the feet of whoever had cut down the body. Over the back of the chair still hung the roller towel, twisted into a grisly rope.

Tish picked it up and examined it.

“Pretty extravagant of material, aren’t they?” she said. “No Ladies’ Aid that I ever saw would put more than two yards of twelve-cent stuff in a roller towel. Look at the weight of that, and the length!”

“There’s something on it,” I said, and we looked together. What we found were only three letters, stamped in blue ink.

“S. P. T.?” said Tish. “What in creation is S. P. T.?”

She sat down with the towel in her hand, and we puzzled over it together.

“It’s the initials of the sewing circle that sent it in,” I asserted. “That S. stands for Society.”

“I’ve got it,” said Tish. “Society for the Prevention of Tetanus.”

“That doesn’t help much,” I said. “We could find out by asking; I daresay the nurses know.”

But Tish wouldn’t hear of it. She said the towel was the only clue we had, and she wasn’t going to give it to a hospital full of people who didn’t seem to care whether their corpses walked around at night or not.

She rolled up the towel under her arm, and in the doorway she turned to take a final survey of the room.

“Well,” she said, “we haven’t examined the dust with the microscope, but I think it’s been worth while. It would be curious, Lizzie, if his murdered wife’s initials were S. P. T.”

“They couldn’t be,” I said. “Her last name was Johnson, wasn’t it?”

But Tish wasn’t looking at me. She was staring intently at the wall over the head of the bed, and I followed her eyes.

The wall was gray, a dull gray below, and a frieze of paler gray above. The dividing line between the two colors was not a picture molding--the room had no pictures--but a narrow iron pipe, perhaps an inch in thickness, and painted the color of the frieze. Why a pipe, I never asked, but I fancy its roundness, its lack of angles and lines, had been thought, like the gray walls, to be restful to the eyes.

Directly over the head of the bed, the pipe-molding was loosened from the wall, as if by a powerful wrench, and sagged at least four inches.

“Look at that!” said Tish, pointing her cane. “Lizzie, I want you to help me up on the bureau.”

“I’ll do nothing of the sort, Tish,” I snapped. “You ought to be ashamed with that leg.”

But she had pulled out the lowest drawer and was standing on it by that time, and there wasn’t anything for it but to help her up. She caught hold of the pipe-molding between the windows, and jerked at it.

“I thought so,” she said. “It doesn’t give a hair’s breadth! Lizzie, no picture ever pulled that molding down like that.”

Well, it was curious, when you think about it. It’s easy enough to read Mr. Conan Doyle’s stories, knowing that no matter how puzzling the different clues seem to be, Mr. Doyle knows exactly what made them, and at the right time he’ll let you into his secret, and you’ll wonder why you never thought of the right explanation at the time. But it is different to have to work them out yourself, and to save my life I couldn’t see anything to that bended pipe but a bended pipe.

Tish’s next move was to crawl upon the bed, and that time I helped her willingly. She stood for quite a while, gazing at the pipe, with her nostrils twitching, steadying herself with one hand against the wall to put on her glasses with the other.

“Humph!” she said. “I can’t quite make it out. There are prints against the wall just underneath, but it doesn’t seem to be a hand.”

I got up beside her and we both looked. It was a hand, and it wasn’t. It seemed like a long hand with short fingers. Tish leaned down and rubbed her hand on the headboard of the bed, which was dusty, as she expected, and then pressed its imprint against the wall beside the other. They were alike, and they were different, and suddenly it came to me, and it made me dizzy.

“I know what it is now, Tish,” I said as calmly as I could. “That’s the mark of a foot!”

Tish nodded. She’d seen it almost as soon as I had.

“A foot,” she repeated gravely, and we climbed off the bed in a hurry and went out into the hall.

Tish had left her cane in her excitement, and she refused to go back for it alone. I went with her, finally, and we stood at the bottom of the bed and looked at the foot, with its toes pointed up toward the ceiling, and Tish’s hand beside it.

“You know, Lizzie,” she said, clutching my arm, “if there _were_ a fourth dimension, we could walk up walls easily.”

And we went down to her room again.

It was careless of us to forget Tish’s hand-print on the wall, for when things got worse, and they discovered the two marks, somebody suggested that no two hands make exactly the same print, and they had an expert take an impression of it. As Tish said, she expected to be discovered every time she had her pulse counted, and the strain was awful. They might have accused _her_, you know, of carrying off old Johnson and stringing him up, for they reached a state when they suspected everybody.

Chapter V

When Aggie Screamed

Now Aggie has hay fever, and the slightest excitement, any time in the year, starts her off. So when we heard her sneezing as we went down the stairs, we were not surprised to find Tommy Andrews in front of her with an order book on his knee, and Aggie trying to hold a glass thermometer in her mouth.

“I can’t,” she was protesting around the thermometer. “Justh try sneething yourthelf with a--a--choo.”

Her teeth came down on it just then with a snap and her face grew agonized.

“There!” she said. “What did I tell you?” And pulled the thermometer out minus an end.

“Where’s the rest?” Tommy demanded.

“I--I swallowed it!”

Tommy jumped up and looked frightened.

“Great heavens, it’s glass!” he said. “What in thunder--why, there it is in your lap!”

“I swallowed the inside,” Aggie said stiffly. “I should think that’s bad enough. It’s poison, isn’t it?”

Tommy laughed. “It won’t hurt you,” he said. “It’s only quicksilver.”

But Aggie was only partly reassured. “I daresay I’ll be coated inside like the back of a mirror,” she snapped. “Between being frightened to death until I’m in a fever, and then swallowing the contents of a thermometer, and having it expand with the heat of my body, and maybe blow up, I feel as though I’m on the border of the spirit land myself.”

In spite of Tommy’s reassurances, she refused to be comforted, and sat the rest of the afternoon waiting for something to happen. She ate no luncheon, and she absolutely refused to go home. Aggie is like most soft-mannered people, trying to make her do something she doesn’t want is like pounding a pillow. It seems to give way, and the next minute it’s back where it was at first, and you can pound till your hands ache. So when she said she was going to stay at the hospital until she felt sure the mercury wasn’t going to blow up or poison her, we had to yield.

We got the room next to Tish’s and put her to bed, and she lay there alternately sneezing and sleeping the rest of the day. I went out during the afternoon and brought a nightgown for her and one for myself, and the mentholated cotton wool for her nose. The walk did me good, and by the time I got back I was ready to sneer at footprints that go up a wall and Johnson hanging to a chandelier.

As I left the elevator at Tish’s door, I met Miss Linda Smith and stopped her. “Is there anything new?” I asked.

“Nothing, except that Miss Blake has been sent back to bed,” she said. “She’s a nervous little thing anyhow, and she has not been here very long. When she has had almost three years, as I have, she’ll learn to let each day take care of itself--not to worry about yesterday or expect anything of to-morrow.”

“And how about to-day?” I asked, smiling at the contradiction of her pessimistic speech and her cheerful face.

“And to work like the deuce to-day,” she said, and went smiling down the hall.

I had brought in some pink roses, and when I’d put Aggie’s nightgown on her and the wool in her nose, I had Miss Lewis take me to Miss Blake’s room.

It was close at hand. If you know the Dunkirk Hospital, you know that the nurses’ dormitory is directly beside the main building, and connected with it by doors on every floor. One of these doors was at the end of Tish’s corridor, and Miss Blake’s room was the first on the other side.

Miss Lewis knocked and tried the door, but it was bolted.

“Who’s there?” asked a startled voice, quite close, as if its owner had been standing just inside.

“Miss Lewis, dear.”

“Just a moment.”

She opened the door almost immediately and admitted us. She had on only her nightgown and slippers, and her hair was down in a thick braid. I have reached the time of life when I brush most of my hair by holding one end of it in my teeth, so I always notice hair.

“You’re up,” said Miss Lewis accusingly.

“Only to be sure the door was fastened,” she protested, and got into her single bed again obediently.

“Now don’t be silly!” Miss Lewis said. “Why should you lock that door in the middle of the afternoon? I thought you were the girl who rescued the kitten from the ridge pole of the roof!”

“That was different,” said Miss Blake, and shut her eyes.

“I don’t want to disturb you,” I said. “Only--my friend and I felt sorry that she caused you such a shock last night. And I want you to have these flowers.”

She seemed much pleased and Miss Lewis put them on the table by the bed, beside another bouquet already there, a huge bunch of violets and lilies of the valley. Violets and lilies of the valley are Tommy’s favorite combination!

“Doctor Andrews been here this afternoon?” Miss Lewis asked, looking up from arranging the roses.

“Once--twice,” said the little nurse, with heightened color.

“I see,” said Miss Lewis. “And the husband of thirty-six telephoning all over the city for him.”

“The husband of thirty-six!” I repeated, astounded. They both laughed, and Miss Blake looked for a moment almost gay.

“He is not a Mormon,” she said. “It’s a case of ‘container for the thing contained.’ Thirty-six is a room.”

I think the laugh did the little nurse good, but when we left, a few minutes later, Miss Lewis halted me a few steps from the door. We heard her cross the room quickly and the bolt of the door slip into place.

“Queer, isn’t it?” asked Miss Lewis. And I thought it was.

Tommy Andrews came back late that night to see Aggie, but she had stopped sneezing and dropped into a doze. He beckoned me out into the hall.

“How is she?” he asked. “Having been quick-silvered inside, I daresay she’s been reflecting! Never mind, Miss Lizzie--I couldn’t help that.”

“Tish wants to see you, Tommy,” I said. “She--we found something this afternoon and I don’t mind saying we are puzzled.”

“More mystery?” he asked, raising his eyebrows. “Don’t tell me somebody else has shed his fleshy garment and hung it up--”

“Please _don’t_,” I said, looking over my shoulder nervously. The hall was almost dark.

“Look here,” Tommy suggested in a whisper, “I’ll make a bargain with you. I’ll go in and listen to Aunt Tish without levity--I give you my word, no frivolity--if you’ll come over and play propriety while I see Miss Blake.”

Seeing me eye him, he went on guiltily: “She’s--sick, you know, and I’ve been there two or three times to-day already. If it gets out among the nurses--_please_, dear, good Aunt Lizzie!”

Now, I’m not his aunt. For that matter, I’m a good ten years younger than Tish, but he’s a handsome young rascal, and when a woman gets too old to be influenced by good looks, it’s because she’s gone blind with age, so I agreed on one condition.

“Yes, if you’ll see Tish first,” I said, and he agreed.

That was how we happened to be in Tish’s room when Aggie screamed. Tish had just got to the footprint-on-the-wall part of her story, and even Tommy was looking rather queer, when Aggie sneezed. Then almost immediately she shrieked and the three of us were on our feet and starting for the door before she stopped. As we reached the hall, a nurse was running toward us, and the stillness in Aggie’s room was horrible.

It was dark. Which was strange, for I’d left the night light on at Aggie’s request. Tommy pushed into the room first.

“Where’s the light switch?” he demanded. “Are you there, Miss Aggie?”

There was no answer, but in the darkness every one heard a peculiar rustling sound, such as might be made by rubbing a hand over a piece of stiff silk. It was the nurse who found the switch almost instantly, and I think we expected nothing less than Aggie hanging by her neck to the chandelier. But she was lying quietly in bed, in a dead faint.

When she came to, she muttered something about a dead foot and fainted again. By eleven o’clock she seemed pretty much herself once more and even smiled sheepishly when Tommy suggested that it had been the fault of the thermometer. She thought herself that she had dreamed it, and Tish and I let her think so. But both of us had seen the same thing.

Just over the head of Aggie’s bed the pipe-molding was wrenched loose and pulled down out of line!

Chapter VI

Candle And Skylight

Tish sent Miss Lewis in to sit with Aggie, and the three of us, including Tommy, met in Tish’s room. She had brought her alcohol teakettle with her, and she insisted on making a cup of tea all around before we talked things over.

“Besides,” she remarked, measuring out the tea, “it’s about a quarter of twelve now, and we may need a little tea-courage by midnight.”

“If that’s the way you feel,” Tommy said, from the bed, holding his empty cup ready for the tea. “I can get something from the medicine cupboard outside that has tea knocked out in the first round.”

“Not whiskey, Tommy!” Tish said with the teapot in the air.

“Certainly _not_! _Spiritus frumenti_,” Tommy said with dignity, and Tish was reassured. But I knew what he meant, my great uncle having conducted a country pharmacy and done a large business among the farmers in that very remedy.

When we’d had our tea and some salted wafers, Tish drew up a chair and faced Tommy and myself.

“Now,” she said, “what did Aggie see?”

“Personally,” Tommy remarked, balancing his teaspoon across the bridge of his nose, and holding his head far back to do it, “personally, I’m glad she only saw--or felt--a foot. It proves her really remarkable quality of mind. The ordinary woman, in a stew like that, would have seen an entire corpse, not to mention smelling sulphur.”

Tish took the spoon off his nose and gave him a smart slap on the ear.

“Thomas!” she said, “you will either be serious or go home. Do you remember what we told you about the room up-stairs, a _foot_-mark on the wall not three feet from the ceiling?”

Tommy nodded, with both hands covering his ears.

“Do you realize,” Tish went on, “that _that_ room is directly over the one Aggie is occupying?”

“Hadn’t thought of it,” said Tommy. “Is it?”

“Yes. Tommy Andrews, Aggie may or may not have dreamed of that ice-cold foot, but one thing she did _not_ dream; Lizzie and I both saw it. The pipe-molding over Aggie’s bed is pulled loose from the wall and bent down.”

Tommy stared at us both. Then he whistled.

“No!” he said, and fell into a deep study, with his hands in his heavy thatch of hair. After a minute he got off the bed and sauntered toward the door.

“I’ll just wander in and have a look at it,” he said, and disappeared.

It was Tish’s suggestion that we put the light out and sit in the dark. Probably Tommy’s nearness gave us courage. As Tish said, in five minutes it would be midnight, and almost anything might happen under the circumstances.

“And as honest investigators,” she said, “we owe it to the world and to science to put ourselves _en rapport_. These things _never_ happen in the light.”

We could hear Tommy speaking in a low tone to Miss Lewis, but soon that stopped, although he did not come back. Even with the door open, a dimly-outlined rectangle, I wasn’t any too comfortable. Tish sat without moving. Once she leaned over and touched my elbow.

“I’ve got a tingle in both legs to the knee,” she whispered. “Do you feel anything?”

“Nothing but the slat across the back of this chair,” I replied, and we sat silent again. I must have dozed almost immediately, for when I roused, the traveling clock was striking midnight, and Tish was shaking my arm.

“What’s that light?” she quavered.

I looked toward the hall, and sure enough the outline of the door was a pale and quavering yellow.

“The door frame is moving!” gasped Tish.

“Fiddle!” I snapped, wide awake. “Somebody’s out there with a moving light. Where’s Tommy?”

“He hasn’t come back. Lizzie, go and look out. I can’t find my cane.”

“Go yourself!” I said sourly.

Well, we went together, finally, tiptoeing to the door and peering out. The light was gone; only a faint gleam remained, and that came down the staircase to the upper floor.

“Damnation!” said Tommy’s voice, just at our elbow. And with that he darted along the hall and up the stairs, after the light.

Now Tish is essentially a woman of action. She’s only timid when she can’t do anything. And now she hobbled across to the foot of the stairs, with me at her heels.

“That was no earthly light, Lizzie!” she said in a subdued tone. “Do you remember what Aggie said, about the light when Mr. Wiggins died?”

I’d been thinking about it myself that very moment.

“I’d feel better with some sort of weapon, Tish,” I protested, as we started up, but Tish only looked at me in the darkness and shook her head. I knew perfectly well what she meant: that no earthly weapon would be of any avail. Considering what we thought, I think that we got up the staircase at all is very creditable.

The light was there, coming from one of the empty rooms, and streaming out into the dark hall. There was somebody moving in the room. We heard a window closing, and then the footsteps coming toward the door. The next moment the light itself came into the hall. It was a candle, and Miss Blake was carrying it!

I made out Tommy’s figure flattened in a doorway, and then the light disappeared again as Miss Blake went into the next room, the one where Johnson had been found. She was there a long time, and once we heard her exclaim something and the light from the doorway wavered, as if the candle had almost gone out.

She went into each private room, then into the ward, and finally there remained only the mortuary. Tish clutched my arm. Would this bit of a girl, in her long white wrapper, her childish braid, her small bare feet thrust into bedroom slippers, would she dare that grisly place?

She did not keep us in doubt long. She went directly to the foot of the mortuary steps and stood, her candle held high, looking up. Then she began to mount them, slowly, as if every atom of her will were required to urge her frightened muscles. Tommy stirred uneasily in his doorway.

The large double doors to the mortuary stood partly open. She pushed them back quietly and hesitated, candle still high. Then she went in, and by the paling light we knew she had gone to the far end of the room. Tommy came out from the doorway and tiptoed down the hall. We could see his outline against the gleam.

The stillness was terrible. We could hear her moving around that awful place, could hear, even at that distance, the soft swish of her negligée on the floor. And then, without any warning, she spoke. It was uncanny beyond description, although we heard nothing she said.

“My God!” said Tish, forgetting herself.

There was a sound immediately after. Tish said it was a thud, as if a chair had been upset, but I insisted that it sounded more like a window thrown up with terrific force. The light went out immediately, and we heard footsteps running away from us.

“Tommy!” Tish called. But nobody answered. We were left there alone in the darkness, shivering with fright.

I am very shaky about what happened next. I remember Tish fumbling for her cane, and saying she was going to follow Tommy, and my holding her back and telling her not to be a fool--that the boy was safe enough. And I remember seeing a light behind us and the old night watchman coming up the staircase with his electric flash, and trying to tell him something was wrong in the mortuary.

And then, as my voice gave way, we heard a shout overhead, and immediately the crash of broken glass and a thud into the hall just ahead of us. The watchman pushed us aside and ran.

Tommy was lying unconscious on the floor with the pieces of a broken skylight all around him.

[Illustration]

Chapter VII

Insinuations And Recriminations

Miss Lewis had heard the crash and came running, with the hall nurse from the floor below. Tish was sitting on the floor among the pieces of glass, with Tommy’s head on her knee, crying over him, when they got there. He opened his eyes just then, and lay staring up at the hole in the skylight above, as if he was puzzled. Then he turned his head and saw who was holding him, and made an effort to sit up.

“You--needn’t look so tragic, Aunt Tish,” he said. “I’m--I’m all right,” and fell back on her lap again.

Miss Lewis got down and began to feel him for broken bones.

“Skull’s whole, thank goodness!” she muttered. “Can you move your legs, Doctor?”

Tommy lifted them in turn, making grimaces of pain. Then he lifted his right arm. It fell as if he couldn’t support its weight.

“I’ve bruised my shoulder,” he said, and lay back with his eyes closed.

“Get his coat off,” ordered Miss Lewis, and I knelt to help her. But Tommy resisted.

“I’m all right,” he said crossly. “I’ll look after it later myself.”

“Tommy!” said Tish. “Let them take your coat off.”

“I won’t have it off,” he insisted, and when she persisted he was almost vicious.

Miss Lewis sat back on her heels and shook her head at me.

“He’s a little dazed,” she said. “How in the world did it happen?”

“I was walking on the roof,” said Tommy more agreeably, “and I stepped on the skylight by mistake. It was dark underneath. It was a darn fool thing to do!”

The hall nurse and Miss Lewis exchanged glances, and the hall nurse looked at me and smiled.

“He is still dazed,” she said, smiling. “How could he step on the skylight? It has a four-foot fence around it!”

We waited for him to explain further, but he let it go at that, and lay for a little while with his mouth shut hard and a queer thoughtful look on his face. He roused pretty soon, however, and grunted as if his shoulder pained him. Then he made Tish get up, and after a minute or so he sat up himself. He sat there gazing at the skylight, and a few drops of rain came down through the opening. Tish and I shivered. We were only partly dressed.

He saw it and was on his feet at once, pretty much himself.

“Now don’t let’s have any fuss about this, please,” he said, addressing us all. “I forgot the skylight. That’s all. I’m not hurt, Aunt Tish, and you and Miss Lizzie must go to bed this instant.”

“What are _you_ going to do?” Tish demanded sharply. “Going up on the roof again?”

“I’ll be down pretty soon,” he evaded. “Jacobs and I will just straighten this mess a bit.”

I caught a look of intelligence between the two of them, and Jacobs spoke up.

“If the doctor’ll lend a hand--”

“Tommy,” Tish said suddenly, “the shoulder of your coat is soaked with blood!”

Tommy put his hand up and felt it.

“I’ve got a scratch somewhere up there,” he said coolly. “It isn’t going to be touched until the two ladies in negligée and curl papers are safe in bed with hot-water bottles at their feet. Miss Lewis, Miss Carberry is using her knee again!”

“I’d use a switch if I had one,” said Tish, almost with tears in her eyes. But Tommy has the same will that she has herself, and we were down-stairs between blankets, I on the couch in Tish’s room and Tish in bed, with our feet against hot-water bottles, and drinking cups of hot milk, almost before we knew it.

But Tommy and the watchman did not clean up the broken glass in the upper hall. Whatever they did, that glass was still there the next morning, and none of us disturbed the general belief that it had been broken by the hail-storm that came just before dawn.

I was so hoarse the next morning that I could hardly speak, and Tish kept me on her couch. Her knee was stiff again, too. Including Aggie, although she had slept through the skylight incident, we were pretty well used up, and Tish would not let us go home. It was just as well. She should hardly have faced the events of the next two days without us.

Aggie had her breakfast in bed, but Tish and I had Briggs, the orderly who carried in our trays, set out a table for us, and were really very snug. Tish was as cross as two sticks until she’d had her tea, when she grew more companionable.

“I want to ask you something, Lizzie,” she said as she poured her second cup. “How, when we saw Tommy go into the mortuary, as plain as day, could he fall down from the roof?”

“Well,” I said, buttering my toast, “you know about the what-you-call-’ems in India. They send up a rope into the sky and then a boy up the rope, and after he has disappeared they give the rope a jerk and he falls, apparently from nowhere. It’s some sort of optical illusion.”

“Don’t be a fool,” Tish observed sharply. “I’ve been thinking it over in bed. There must be a fire-escape there somewhere.”

“Oh!” I hadn’t thought of a fire-escape.

“Now, then,” said Tish, “suppose there is a fire-escape, and the Blake girl went up by it to the roof, and Tommy followed her. Which is what happened, Lizzie. I’m nobody’s fool; I’ve got eyes in my head. If that young woman had jumped off the window sill, Tommy Andrews would have jumped too. Now, then, _why_ did the Blake girl go to the roof?”

“Maybe she wanted air,” I suggested. Tish waved her napkin at me.

“Air!” she snapped. “When you want air, do you generally climb a fire-escape to a roof, when there’s a staircase up to it, and entice young men to fall down through skylights and break their shoulders? Lizzie,”--she leaned over--“Lizzie, that young vixen pushed him through that skylight and I can prove it!”

“No!”

“Yes.” She got up and, going to the cupboard, lifted down her best hat.

“Look here!” she said, and took from its crown a brass candlestick, the base bent almost double.

“I was sitting on that when I held Tommy’s head last night. It came down with the skylight,” she said. “That’s the candlestick the Blake girl was carrying. What do you make of it?”

I was speechless. Tish unlocked the lower bureau drawer and put the candlestick in it, beside the roller towel marked S. P. T. and something else, which I learned later was the bandage Linda Smith had found in the upper hall, and identified as the one that had tied Johnson’s hands.

“Now,” she said, locking the drawer again, “I’m going to have a little chat with Miss Blake. It’s my belief that she let old Johnson die from neglect, or gave him poison by mistake. And now he’s haunting her--or she’s haunting him, which is what it looks like.”

But we had no chat with Miss Blake that day. The day nurse, taking her a tray of breakfast, found her delirious in bed, with a raging fever. Miss Lewis went over to see her.

“She’s been preparing for this for some time,” she said when she came back. “She was queer yesterday--you remember, Miss Lizzie--and last night she did a funny thing. She got the night nurse to give her a bottle of morphine--enough to kill a horse. And I found it under her pillow this morning, almost half of it gone!”

“Great heavens!” Tish said. “Why, the girl’s a potential murderess!”

Miss Lewis turned, with a pillow in her arms. “Not a bit of it,” she said. “There’s something queer about this place lately, and I don’t care who hears me say it. But folks will have to make insinuations against Ruth Blake over my dead body!”

She glared at Tish, and Tish at her.

“I have reasons to doubt that Miss Blake is all you think her,” said Tish stiffly. But Miss Lewis came and stood over her unpleasantly.

“I’m not for making any trouble, Miss Carberry,” she said, “but this house was calm enough until two days ago, and Ruth Blake has been here six months, and what’s more, I notice one thing. The most of the excitement has been around where you are. Maybe you’re psychic, as they call it, and don’t know it. Maybe it’s--something else. But it wasn’t Miss Blake who first saw Johnson hanging by his neck, and it wasn’t Miss Blake the skylight all but fell on, and it wasn’t Miss Blake’s nephew that fell through the skylight, and it wasn’t in the room of Miss Blake’s best friend next door that a death-cold foot--”

But Tish put her fingers in her ears and fled to Aggie.

Nevertheless, Miss Lewis had set me to thinking.

Chapter VIII

Overheard In The Dormitory

Aggie’s hay fever was bad that morning, and she stayed in bed. Tish and I went in and sat with her after breakfast, and she was very disagreeable.

“I shall certaidly tell Tobby whad I thig of hib,” she grumbled. “I told hib I could dot hold that therbobeter. _That_ is what gave be that dreab. If it _was_ a dreab!”

“Certainly it was a dream,” said Tish.

“I’b dot so sure!” Aggie retorted.

Well, relieved of the hay fever, Aggie’s story was something like this:

She had been asleep, and was dreaming she had turned into a thermometer herself, and as she got hotter, having too many blankets on, she said she felt herself expanding until her head touched something that she thought was the head of the bed. But she said in her dream she kept on expanding, and she was just saying to Tommy Andrews, in a fury, that if it grew any hotter she’d burst, when something gave way at the head of the bed with a sort of tearing sound, and she wakened. She said it was a full minute before she was certain she _wasn’t_ a thermometer and hadn’t expanded right up through the top. Then she reached up to turn over her pillow, and just beside her was a dead foot. She had thought she was still dreaming and had actually caught hold of it. But it disappeared under her fingers, dissolved, as you might say, and there was no body. Aggie was positive about that. It was then she sat up and screamed.

Well, we kept the knowledge of what had happened to Tommy from her, and left her sitting up in bed using a nasal spray. Tish was wonderfully better after breakfast, and we walked up and down the corridor, she without the cane and hardly a limp.

It was Tish who suggested that we go into the nurses’ dormitory and ask how Miss Blake was, and after we had located Miss Lewis, gossiping with the day nurse in a corner, we slipped in. Patients are forbidden in the dormitory.

The door to Miss Blake’s room was closed, but somebody was inside, talking. Tish and I waited outside, and we could hardly help hearing what was said. It was a woman’s voice, familiar enough, but I couldn’t place it.

“You must stay in bed, Ruth,” she was pleading. “Oh, my dear, how can I forgive myself!”

“Let me up!” Ruth Blake’s voice, insistent and querulous. “They are hanging him up by the neck--” her voice died away in a groan.

The other woman broke into frightened sobbing, and Tish put her hand on the knob. But I held her back.

“I have killed her!” said the voice. “Always thinking of myself! Ruth! Listen to me!”

“Through the skylight!” babbled Ruth. “I tell you, he is dead!”

“Ruth!” begged the voice, and more sobbing, growing gradually quieter. Then silence, as if the sick girl had dropped asleep.

Tish and I slipped away, and back through the connecting door to our room. Once there, by common mute consent we left the door into the corridor open and took up such positions as enabled us to watch the people who passed along the hall. Ten minutes brought nobody. Then we heard the door open, and brisk steps coming along the hall.

“Well,” said Miss Linda Smith, in her cheerful way, “well, how’s the knee this morning, Miss Carberry?”

“Better,” Tish replied genially.

“That’s fine,” said Miss Smith and hurried along, humming a bit of a song. Tish and I looked at each other. In spite of the cheerfulness, of the eyes bathed in cold water and carefully powdered, it was Miss Smith’s voice we had heard in the Blake girl’s room.

But when we got to talking it over we couldn’t see that what we had heard had really any importance. Miss Smith had left the girl alone in the mortuary, and was reproaching herself for having done it. That was all. But as Tish said, what did she mean by saying she was always thinking of herself? It was hardly, as Tish pointed out, an act of supreme selfishness to go down and get an armful of sheets to cover a corpse!

Tommy came in at eleven o’clock, freshly shaved and linened, and apparently as well as ever. He had been over to see Miss Blake first, but found her sleeping, which he considered a good sign. I noticed that he kept his right hand in his pocket, and did not use the arm at all. He said the shoulder was stiff, naturally, and that he must have been sleep-walking himself to get over that fence and through the skylight the way he had.

“Sleep-walking!” said Tish sharply. “Do you think that that girl was sleep-walking?”

“I certainly do,” said Tommy.

“Then you’re a fool,” said Tish. “If she _was_ sleep-walking, so was the burglar who took my disciple spoons last fall. Sleep-walking!”

“I wish you--”

“You’re wishing me bad luck if you feel the way you look!” said Tish shrewdly. “Now, Tommy, I’m going to get to the bottom of all this, and so are you. It will take twice the amount of effort separated as united. Don’t try any evasions with me--half a truth is worse than a good lie. Now--out with it. What really happened on the roof last night?”

“I wish I knew!” said Tommy, and looked at us gravely. “You saw what there was to see up-stairs. I happened to see Miss Blake going up the stairs with the candle, and I noticed something strange in her expression. I followed her and you followed me. She went into each room and then to the mortuary. That’s proof, isn’t it, that she was sleep-walking? I’ve worried over it all night, and I’m sure of it. Anyhow, why would she take a candle, when there is electric light everywhere? I tell you, the shock of the night before was on the girl’s mind while she slept.”

Tish had got out her sheet of letter paper.

“Well?” she said, putting something down.

“I saw her go into the mortuary, and I heard her talking; I couldn’t make out what she said. Then there was a crash, and I ran. When I got there one of the stained-glass windows was wide open, and she was climbing up the fire-escape outside. The candle had gone out. Aunt Tish, that fire-escape up there is the merest skeleton, and it is five high stories from the ground. Awake, she couldn’t have done it.”

“Humph!” said Tish. “It isn’t hard at night, when you can’t see how far it is to the ground.” Then, seeing that Tommy was looking sulky, she added: “Still, you may be right.”

“Up to that point,” said Tommy, “I’m perfectly clear. I was out on the escape by the time she got to the roof, and I lost her there. I saw her again, however, when I climbed on the roof, and went toward her. I’ve heard a lot about the danger of waking sleep-walkers suddenly, and I spoke to her quietly. I said ‘Miss Blake.’”

“Yes?”

“Well,” he confessed, “that’s about all I remember. Or no, it isn’t. The girl was asleep, and not responsible. She turned like a flash when I spoke, and cried out, and--I think she threw her brass candlestick at me! Then--I seemed to be falling forward--and when I knew anything again I was in the hall below.”

“Having fainted over a four-foot fence!” Tish observed sharply. “Tommy, that won’t do.”

“I give you my word, Aunt Tish,” he said, “I haven’t any idea _how_ I got over that fence and through that skylight.”

“I have!” Tish said, and put away her note-paper. We both stared at her and Tommy even smiled.

“Exactly,” he said. “I’ve thought of that, but how do you account for the fact that not a patient left his ward or private room last night? That every servant and nurse was in his proper place? Jacobs and I took pains to find that out. And that I’ve got as pretty a bite in my right shoulder as you would care to see?”

“Bite!” Tish exclaimed, and reached feebly for the note-paper.

“Bite!” I repeated. “Then it must be an animal--!”

“Who knows?” Tommy said quietly. “Jacobs and I got it cauterized. I don’t want the internes to get hold of the story--they’re apt to talk to the nurses. I hardly know what to do next. Since Mr. Harrison had the trouble last night with the two medical men, he is too busy holding down his job to have much time for anything else. If there is to be anything done, I rather think it’s up to me.”

“It’s up to _us_!” said Tish firmly.

Chapter IX

Orderly Briggs And Disorderly Bates

After all, it was my suggestion that we bring in Briggs, the orderly, and ask him about the night Johnson’s body was moved. Tish acknowledges this, and if she does not realize how much poor Briggs helped us in unraveling the mystery, I am not one to remind her. But Briggs was on night duty, and went to bed after carrying the breakfast trays on our floor.

Tish, however, having approved of my idea, had appropriated it as her own--which is a way most self-willed people have, and she insisted that Tommy send for him.

He came about twelve o’clock, looking rather surly, and presenting a general appearance of having his coat and trousers on over his night shirt.

“Come in, Briggs,” said Tommy, when he knocked. “Sorry to wake you, old man.”

“I wasn’t sleeping,” he replied sourly. “The noise in the place is enough to waken the dead.”

“Perhaps,” said Tish, “perhaps that’s what ailed Johnson!”

Briggs turned quickly and looked at her. He was a tall man, with a heavy black mustache and powerful stooped shoulders. He had one drooping eyelid, that gave him an unpleasant appearance. Whether it was consciousness of this, or shiftiness, which was Tish’s theory, he never looked directly at one. As Tish said, his gaze seemed to stop at your collar, but if you averted your eyes you were sure to have the feeling that he’d darted a stealthy glance at you and got away with it before you could catch him.

“No,” he said, after a moment, “nothing will waken Johnson but the trumpet on the last day.”

“Do you know, Briggs,” Tish said coolly, “I have my own little theory about that night? You don’t like Miss Smith, and you and Marshall prepared a little surprise for her. Shame on you, Briggs.”

He positively looked straight at her. It was so surprising that it presented him in a new light with a sort of aureole of outraged virtue.

“No, _mam_,” he said. “You’re right, I don’t get along with Miss Smith, but as for playing a trick of that sort--!” He took his handkerchief out and wiped his forehead. “I wouldn’t have done it on anybody,” he said, “and as for Johnson--” he glanced at Tommy, half ashamed--“I tell you, the things I’ve seen about that man’s bed would make me respect him, dead or living. Raps on the foot-board, and his bedside stand with two legs in the air, beating time like a drum. No, _mam_, if you think I did that, you think I’m a braver man than I am.”

“Humph!” said Tish, and put down “Raps and bedside stand. Johnson.”

“Suppose,” Tommy suggested, “now that you are here, you tell us exactly what happened the night Johnson died.”

“He died at ten minutes after twelve on Tuesday night, sir. I was staying by a delirious patient in the next ward, Doctor. Miss Durand, the night nurse, was busy and asked me to watch him. It wasn’t until an hour after he died that I was notified to take Johnson’s body to the mortuary. I called Marshall from the floor below, and we took the body up on the elevator. Jacobs runs the elevator after midnight, it being not used except for emergency, night operations, ambulance cases coming in, or a death.

“We put the body on the receiving table, and Marshall uncovered the face. Maybe we were both nervous, having talked many a time during his sickness with the old man, and him saying he’d come back and bring us some sign from the spirit world, after he’d ‘passed over.’ Anyhow, Marshall uncovered his face and looked at him, and he said, ‘Johnson, now’s your time to make good. Here _you_ are and here _we_ are. Come over with the sign!’”

Briggs looked at Tommy and Tommy nodded.

“Sign,” wrote Tish. “Then what happened, Briggs?” Neither of us would have been a bit surprised if he had said the dead man moved a foot, or that unseen hands pulled the pipe-molding loose and bent it down before their very eyes. But Briggs shook his head.

“Nothing--then,” he said, “but when I heard about what happened later, I had a talk with Marshall. I don’t believe in fooling with things you don’t know anything about.”

“Briggs,” Tommy said suddenly, “you say the body lay in the ward almost an hour before removal. Why was that?”

“Because,” Briggs replied significantly, “there was no nurse in that ward when he died, or for nearly an hour after. The ward was in charge of a convalescent typhoid named Bates.”

“Why was that?” Tommy demanded. But Briggs only shrugged his shoulders, with his good eye fixed about four inches below Tommy’s chin.

When he got no answer, “Bring Bates here,” Tommy said sharply, and during the interval until the two men appeared he walked somberly up and down, his face thoughtful.

Bates was hardly prepossessing. He shuffled in in a pair of carpet-slippers much too large, a pair of faded trousers, and a garment that was evidently his nightshirt with the tail tucked in. But Bates was shrewd if unshaven, as we found out.

“Bates,” said Tommy, “you are a patient in K ward?”

“Yes, sir.”

“You helped to look after Johnson, the man who died night before last?”

“Sometimes--when the nurses were busy.”

“Have you heard anything about--of what happened after his death?”

Bates smiled.

“There’s been a good bit of talk going around, sir,” he said. “He’d got the ward worked up some--talking about coming back after he’d chipped in. One of the men claims to have seen him looking in the window near his bed last night, and there’s a story about his corpse being found hanging--but that’s ridiculous, sir.”

“It’s true, Bates.”

Bates’ jaw dropped. “Oh, no, sir. Surely not!” he said, and changed color.

“Now, Bates,” Tommy said, “we are men of sense, you and I. We know Johnson didn’t do it himself, don’t we?”

“Yes, sir.” Not as convinced as he might have been.

“Then it was done for him.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Presumably by somebody in this house.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Bates, was any one missing from your ward during either last night or the night before, that you know of?”

Bates thought. “No, sir,” he said. “I don’t sleep much; that’s my trouble, insomnia. I can hear a kitten stir in my ward--not, of course, that we’re liable to kittens, sir. Night before last I was up and dressed all night, wandering around, and last night, as you know, I sat up with that railroad case. The boy was out of his head.”

“Then, either night, no patient could have stolen out from K ward into the house and been absent for any length of time without your knowing it?”

“It’s hardly possible,” Bates said. “Mr. Briggs or I would know for sure, sir.”

“Do you help in the other wards on the men’s floor?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Are there any delirious patients?”

“None able to stand or walk about.”

“I see,” Tommy said thoughtfully. “And now, Bates, is it correct that Miss Durand, the night nurse, left her ward for fifty minutes, knowing that Johnson was dying?”

“Fifty-five minutes, sir.” Bates’ shrewd eyes said more than his words.

“It was, possibly, for night supper?”

“That’s at two o’clock.” Bates knew a good bit about the hospital, and enjoyed showing his knowledge.

“You have no idea _why_ she left?”

“No, sir. Miss Smith came to the door, and they went away together. Miss Smith looked upset and nervous, as if she’d been crying--if you’ll excuse my saying so, sir.”

“Did you notice in which direction they went?”

“They went down-stairs. When they came back Miss Smith was looking more cheerful, and she had a bundle in her hand.”

“What sort of a bundle?”

“Darkish. It might have been clothing. Miss Durand was frightened when she found Johnson had died, and she asked me not to say she had been away.”

“Thanks, Bates. You’d better go back now,” said Tommy, “and Bates, if you hear or see anything that strikes you as curious, let me know, will you?”

Bates promised and flapped out, with Briggs behind him. Tommy called Briggs back. “Briggs,” he said, “I have asked the superintendent to let me put on a few guards to-night. This thing has gone beyond a joke. Mr. Harrison will give us the scrubbers, Frank, from the elevator and two assistants from the laundry. The internes have volunteered, also, that makes eleven; with you and myself, thirteen.”

“Thirteen!” said Briggs. “Would you mind making it fourteen, Doctor?”

Tommy looked surprised.

“Briggs!” he said. “Surely you--” Then he took a good look at Briggs’ pasty face and nodded. “All right,” he said. “We can have Hicks from the ambulance. And just a word,” he said, as Briggs made for the door. “We are not talking, Briggs. Most of these men are watching for a thief. Do you understand? And I’d be glad to have your help in placing them where they’ll do the most good.”

Chapter X

An Ape And Some Guinea-Pigs

Miss Lewis came in a few minutes after Briggs had gone, and, closing the door behind her, looked at Tommy.

“Miss Blake is conscious,” she said. “Temperature only ninety-nine, pulse a hundred and forty.”

“Good!” Tommy said heartily. It was evident to us all how relieved he was. “But I don’t like the pulse.” He was brushing his hair back with Tish’s brush. “She’s had a terrific shock of some sort.”

“Yes, sir,” said Miss Lewis, still with her back to the door.

Tommy leaned over and kissed Tish’s cheek. He was delighted at the mere prospect of seeing the Little Nurse, and showed it. “Now, try to be good until I come back, both of you,” he said. “All right, Miss Lewis, we’ll have a look at our patient in the dormitory.”

Miss Lewis looked flushed and uncomfortable.

“I’m sorry, Doctor,” she said. “Miss--Miss Blake doesn’t--she has asked for Doctor Willson instead.”

“What!” said Tommy, and turned a dark red.

“She’s asked for Doctor Willson,” repeated Miss Lewis. “There’s no mistake. I’ve been coaxing her for ten minutes.”

“She’s still delirious,” Tish snapped. “And it is not necessary to coax people to retain my nephew’s professional services, Miss Lewis.”

“Why, that’s all right,” Tommy said with affected cheerfulness. “Willson’s a fine chap--she couldn’t do better.”

“Fiddle!” Tish was angry. “Who is Willson, anyhow?”

“Big fellow, dark eyes--very distinguished looking man,” said Tommy humbly. Tommy is handsome, if being straight and slim and young count for anything, but I daresay one could hardly call him distinguished. Tish and I differ about this. “Good gracious, Aunt Tish, the girl ought to have the privilege of selecting her own medical adviser.”

“Humph!”

“Suppose you go back to the dormitory, Miss Lewis,” Tommy said, “and say to Miss--Miss Blake that she’s made a wise choice, and I’ll send Willson to her as soon as he comes in. And ask her if she will let me see her for a moment, not professionally.”

Miss Lewis looked doubtful, but she went. When she came back, in five minutes, she was evidently irritated, and her cap was more than ever on one ear.

“She’s sitting on the side of the bed, half dressed,” she grumbled, “and she says she won’t see anybody.”

“Then she doesn’t want--Willson?” asked Tommy, looking relieved.

“No. Says she’s all right, and if people don’t stop bothering her she is going out somewhere in the country where they have a dog and kittens! That’s what she said! Not _cat_ and kittens--”

“Sensible girl,” said Tommy, happy again. “She--hasn’t changed her mind about seeing me?”

“No, nor about locking the door. And what’s more--” She stopped and glanced at Tommy. “I’d like to speak to you a moment in the hall, Doctor.”

“What sort of shilly-shallying is that?” demanded Tish. “Can’t you speak to him here?”

“I can _not_,” said Miss Lewis, glaring back at Tish, her thumbs inside her apron belt. “It isn’t considered shilly-shallying in this hospital for a nurse to make a report to a doctor, and if you’ll read the rules on that door--”

“I’ll speak to you in the hall,” said Tommy. “Miss Lewis is right, Aunt Tish. If it’s in line with what we’ve been discussing, I’ll tell you.”

But Tish isn’t a woman to take chances. Afterward, she justified her looking through the keyhole on the plea that she was making a scientific theory to fit the case, and if it were not for keyholes many a murderer would have gone unhung to his grave. At the time, however, I was rather horrified.

She had plenty of time to tell me what she saw, as it happened, for Tommy did not come back until late in the afternoon, after the guinea-pig incident.

Tish says that when she’d got them in focus, as you may say, Miss Lewis was pulling something out of her sleeve. It was a knife, Tish says, with a short, thin blade that looked as sharp as a razor.

“One of the knives from the operating room, Doctor,” Miss Lewis said. “I thought I’d better not let the old ladies see it.”

I daresay that was when I saw Tish’s back stiffen.

“Great Scott!” said Tommy.

“I found it on the floor under her bed,” Miss Lewis went on. “She didn’t see me pick it up.”

Tommy was staring at the blade.

“It’s been used,” he said. “Look at this!”

“Exactly,” said Miss Lewis. “It’s from the operating room, Doctor, and they don’t put away their knives in that condition.”

“What do you mean by that?” Tommy demanded sharply. But Miss Lewis only looked at him.

“I don’t mean anything against Ruth Blake, if that’s what you are indignant about,” she said. “But I’m glad I found that knife. There’s enough talk, Doctor.”

They moved down the hall then, so that was all Tish heard. But she added, “Knife, blood-stained,” to her sheet of paper.

Aggie being half drowsy and altogether sulky, we took a little time to go over the notes Tish had made, and they pointed as many different ways as a porcupine--Johnson, with his raps and his talk about coming back, taken from the mortuary and hung by his neck with a roller towel marked S. P. T.; the coincidence of Johnson’s wife murdered a few years before and hung up the same way; Miss Blake wandering around at night with a brass candlestick and a blood-stained knife from the operating room, and Tommy Andrews falling or being pushed through a skylight and coming out of the excitement with a _bite_ instead of a fracture! And then there were smaller things, though strange enough--the twisted pipe-molding and the footprints on the wall up-stairs in the room where Johnson’s body was found; the loosened molding in Aggie’s room and her story about the foot; the fact that Johnson was left to die in the care of a convalescent typhoid and the ward left alone for fifty-five minutes; Linda Smith and her speech to Miss Blake, not to mention the darkish bundle.

It was Tish who advanced the gigantic ape theory. She’d been reading _The Murders in the Rue Morgue_, and some of the clues seemed to fit, especially Tommy’s shoulder. The loosened molding helped out the theory, and as Tish said, also the stringing up of Johnson’s body, which, if you left out the supernatural, had apparently been done by something tremendously strong, but without intelligence.

Well, the more we thought of it the more certain we felt. The footprint part of it, too, we considered corroborative evidence, until we got the encyclopedia and learned that the great apes have the equivalent of four hands, and not a foot at all.

But Tish was undaunted. “Mark my words, Lizzie,” she said, “they’ve lost a chimpanzee or a gorilla from the Zoological Garden--not that they’ll acknowledge it. You remember when the lion got loose and ate a colored woman out the Ralston road, and how the papers denied everything until they found the beast dead of indigestion in a cellar? But that is what has happened.”

Well, I thought it likely enough myself, and Tish called up Charlie Sands, who is on a newspaper and is another of Tish’s nephews.

“Lizzie and I,” said Tish over the ’phone, “have reason to believe that there is a great ape--a-p-e--ape! Monkey, _monkey_--yes. A large monkey loose, and we want you to trace it.”

There was a long pause. Tish said afterward that Charlie claimed to have fainted at the other end of the wire, and to have had to be restored with whisky and soda. However, which is more to the point, he promised to find out for us what he could, and Tish hung up the receiver.

“He’ll do it, too, Lizzie,” she said, “although he spoke to me gently, as if he thought my reason had entirely gone. But, as he said, it won’t hurt to scare up the Zoo people anyhow. They’re very casual about their animals.”

Now, two things were discovered that afternoon, neither of them to be explained by anything we knew. The first one was that Tommy Andrews and Mr. Harrison, the superintendent, making a careful examination of the roof, found a spattering of dried blood leading from the broken skylight to the ridge pole, where it ceased abruptly. The second one was made by Aggie and myself.

About three o’clock that afternoon Aggie got into her clothes and insisted on coming into Tish’s room, which was inconvenient, Tish expecting the message from Charlie Sands at any moment. Aggie was nervous, but her head was clearer. She’d been thinking things over, and she knew now that what had happened the night before had been a message from the roofer.

“Then the least said about it the better!” Tish snapped. “If he hasn’t any better sense than to materialize his foot, and you a woman of your years and respectability, he’d better go back where he came from.”

“For heaven’s sake, Tish,” Aggie pleaded, looking over her shoulder. “He may be listening to us now!”

“I don’t care if he is,” said Tish recklessly. “If he’d materialize a will, now, leaving you that house in Groveton! But a foot!”

“I’m not so sure it _was_ a foot,” Aggie said restlessly. “I’ve been thinking, Tish--he was a large man, you know. It may have been a hand.”

Now at that moment the telephone bell rang, and Tish signaled to me to take Aggie out at once. I got up and took her by the arm.

“I’ll walk up and down the corridor with you, Aggie,” I said. “You need exercise.”

“I don’t care to walk,” she objected, trying to sit down. “See who is at the telephone, Tish. I expect my laundress is through washing and wants her money.”

“I’d like you to see the hospital,” I said desperately as the ’phone rang again. “The--the guinea-pigs, Aggie.” Miss Lewis had told me about them.

Now, Aggie loves a guinea-pig. It’s a queer taste, but she says they neither bark like dogs nor scratch like cats, and they _have_ a nice way of wiggling their noses.

“Guinea-pigs!” she said in an ecstasy. “Where?”

“In the laboratory,” said I, and led her out of the room.

She put on all her wraps and Miss Lewis took us to the laboratory, which is a small brick building set off by itself in the hospital yard, with Aggie cooing in anticipation and wanting to send out and buy a cabbage for them. Doctor Grimm, who was the surgical interne, met us as we were crossing the yard, and volunteered to let us in.

“You know,” he said, feeling in his pocket for the keys, “they’re not as attractive as some guinea-pigs and rabbits I have known under happier circumstances. They scratch a good bit--some think it’s fleas; some say it’s germs.”

“Germs?” Aggie asked, puzzled.

“Oh, yes,” he said, opening the door and leading the way into a narrow hall. “Some of them have been inoculated with several different kinds of germs. That’s why we keep this place so well locked up, for fear the germs may escape. You know,”--he unlocked the second door and threw it open, “you know, suppose you were walking up the street and met a solid phalanx of say sixteen billion typhoid germs, or measles! It would be horrible, wouldn’t it?”

He stepped into the room and looked about him.

“Come in,” he said. “It’s a little close. We had a tear-up among the resident staff, and nobody has been here to-day. Hello!”

He threw open the shutters, and a broad shaft of gray daylight lighted the room. Aggie gave a cry of dismay. The doors of the small cages around the walls were all open, and in the center, a pathetic heap of little brown-and-white and black-and-white bodies, lay the guinea-pigs.

Doctor Grimm picked one up and examined it closely.

“I’m damned!” he said, and put it down. “Throats cut, every one of them! And where are the rabbits?”

Aggie sat down and began to blubber, but Miss Lewis scolded her soundly. “There’ll be plenty more where they came from,” she said sharply. “What _does_ concern us is--how would anybody or anything get in here with both doors and all the windows locked, and not a chimney.”

Aggie wiped her eyes and got up.

“You laughed at me last night, Miss Lewis,” she said with dignity, “but I wish to remind you that to the fourth dimension there are no locks, no bars, no doors or walls.”

“When they invent that,” said Miss Lewis, opening the door to let us out, “they’ll have to invent something like these X-ray-proof screens, or a woman won’t dare to change her clothes.”

“And what’s more,” said Aggie, turning in the doorway, “the hand that slew those innocent little creatures is the one I touched last night!”

“Hand!” cried Miss Lewis. “It was a _foot_ then.”

But Aggie was holding her shoulder over her face and hurrying across the yard. At the far side she threw back a contemptuous sneeze.

* * * * *

Tish’s commission to Charlie Sands had an unexpected result. She was almost bursting with it when I got back.

“Listen,” she said while Aggie got her spray, “doesn’t this bear out what I’ve been saying right along? The Zoo people say positively that none of their animals has escaped. But they took such an interest in his inquiry that Charlie grew suspicious and bribed a keeper. He sent this up by messenger from the office:

“‘Dear and revered spinster aunt,’” she read--“the young rascal! ‘I couldn’t tell you this over the ’phone, for it’s our exclusive property, and will be published to-morrow morning, with photographs of the late deceased, etc. Hero, the biggest ape in captivity, pining for his keeper, Wesley Barker, who has been away, committed suicide in his cage last night by hanging himself with a roller towel. He was found dead when the assistant keeper unlocked the cage at six o’clock this morning. Nobody knows how he got the roller towel. Charlie.’

“‘P. S.--I’ve got the roller towel, a fine long one and marked S. P. T. Do you think the letters stand for Suicidal Purpose Towel?’”

Tish looked at me triumphantly over her reading-glasses.

“You see, Lizzie, what a little logical thinking will do. If it hadn’t been for me, you and Aggie would have gone to your graves expecting to be able to come back at any time and hang from chandeliers or do any of the ridiculous buffoonery that seems to be expected of returned spirits. We search for a ghost and we find a gorilla.”

She meant ape, of course, but the other was alliterative.

“I’m not quite clear about it yet, Tish,” I said, with my head in a whirl. “If his cage was locked, and the keepers say he hadn’t been free, and if Miss Blake--”

“If! If!” said Tish impatiently. “I haven’t had time to figure it all out, of course. But mark my words, Lizzie, the mystery is solved. We shall sleep to-night.”

But, as a matter of fact, we never even went to bed.

Chapter XI

If It Had Not Been For Love

It is curious to think that if Tish had been able to finish her story to Tommy Andrews that evening, and to have given him Charlie’s letter to read, the thing that occurred that night could scarcely have happened. For with Tommy knowing what he did, he could have put two and two together and have gone about things in a different way. Aggie, of course, is a fatalist, and believes it would have happened anyhow.

In the first place, Tish felt so sure that everything was cleared up that she told Aggie the whole story, ending with the suicide at the Zoo. Aggie sat with her mouth open, and didn’t speak except to sneeze until Tish was through. Then she surprised us.

“Maybe you are right, Tish,” she said. “I know I hope so. I don’t know much about gorillas, but I guess they’re mostly hairy, aren’t they?”

“Mostly,” said Tish grimly. “I haven’t heard of any Mexican hairless ones.”

“Well, the hand by my bed--you needn’t sneer, Tish; you can call it a foot if you prefer foot--”

“Listen to the woman!” cried Tish. “_I_ haven’t called it anything.”

“The hand--or foot--was _not_ hairy!” said Aggie, and stuck to it. She is that kind. Tish says she has a small mind, but I think there are some large minds that can only hold one idea at a time.

Well, we told the whole thing again to Tommy, who had heard about the guinea-pigs from Doctor Grimm, and who listened gravely, and Tish was just getting out Charlie’s letter to read to him, when Miss Lewis came in.

“Drat that woman!” Tish muttered. “She’s never around when she’s wanted, and always butting in when she isn’t. Well, what is it?”

“Miss Blake is better, Doctor,” she said. “She is sitting up, dressed, and--she’s leaving her door unlocked. That’s a good sign.”

“Thanks, very much,” said Tommy, looking conscious.

“It’s supper hour now,” remarked Miss Lewis. “If, when I come back, you would care to go over to the dormitory--”

“I suppose she hasn’t asked for me?”

“No. But she asked if you were in the house.”

“Thanks,” said Tommy again. “When you come back, then. Ah--thanks, very much.”

Miss Lewis left and Tish spread out Charlie’s letter. “Dear and revered spinster aunt,” she began. But Tommy was looking at his watch.

“How long does she usually take for supper?” he asked. “Excuse me for interrupting, Aunt Tish.”

“About an hour,” said Tish grimly. “She says she’s been ordered to chew her food thoroughly. ‘Dear and revered--’”

“You know,” said Tommy, “she may get tired and go to sleep, or something like that.”

“Not while she’s eating,” said Tish.

“I mean Miss Blake. I--I think I’ll just run over for a moment _now_, if you don’t mind.”

“Not alone!” Tish got up and reached for her cane, but Tommy pushed her back in her chair.

“No, indeed, dear Aunt Tish,” he said. “You must not use that knee. Nor Miss Aggie either--”

“Aggie has no intention of using my knee,” said Tish crossly. Tommy was sending me messages with his eyes. I’m notoriously weak as to love affairs.

“I’ll go,” I volunteered, obeying Tommy’s signals, and go I did, leaving Tish clutching her cane with one hand and the letter with the other! Aggie was, as usual, oblivious and quite calm.

It was my suggestion that I play propriety from just outside the door. Tommy went in, and I heard a rustle from the window, as if she had turned to look at him.

“I--my aunt is just outside,” he began, hesitating. I am not his aunt, as I have said.

“Won’t you ask her in?” She had a low, sweet voice.

“Certainly, if you wish,” he said, and made no move to do it. “You dismissed me to-day,” he accused her.

“I didn’t need a doctor.”

“I need not have come professionally. I am here now only--well, because I couldn’t stay away.”

She said nothing to that, as far as I could hear.

“I came also,” he said, “to ask you not to stay here alone to-night.”

“What do you mean?” she asked sharply.

“Only that you might do the same thing again to-night--walk in your sleep, you know.”

I heard her chair move, as if she had turned abruptly and faced him.

“Why do you say that?” she demanded. “You _know_ I was not asleep last night.”

“I assure you--” he began, clearly startled. “I--really thought--”

“Please!” she said, and there was another silence. Then I realized she was crying softly.

“Don’t do that!” pleaded Tommy. “Don’t!”

“I thought you were killed!” she said, in a smothered tone. “All the rest of the night I sat and wanted to die. I thought I had killed you!”

“Where did you sit?” asked Tommy gently.

“It doesn’t matter, does it?”

“Very much--to me.”

“I was--here,” she said, after a hesitation.

“You were _not_ here,” said Tommy. “Between _that_ and morning, I was here four times. Where were you?”

[Illustration]

“I was safe,” she said. “Why do you question me so?”

“Because,” he said gently, “I was in the laboratory at two o’clock this morning. Jacobs helped me with a--wound on my shoulder. I had looked everywhere for you and failed to find you. I thought I heard somebody moving across the hall, and we made a casual search. We found nothing, nobody. But during the fifteen minutes that that door was unlocked, somebody entered the building, and cut the throats of eleven guinea-pigs, piling them in the center of the room. And--on the floor underneath them I picked up this afternoon a small pink rosette, apparently off the toe of a woman’s bedroom slipper.”

“Ah!” she said, as if she found it suddenly hard to breathe. And then she burst out unexpectedly. “After all, was it so terrible? They--they were only guinea-pigs!”

“Yes,” said Tommy gravely, “they were only guinea-pigs.”

He came out the next moment and went back along the hall into the hospital, having quite forgotten me. His chin was sunk on his breast, and he walked heavily. He was as bewildered as I had been. We saw him only once again that evening, and then only for a minute. He was preparing to station his guards through the house, much to Tish’s disgust.

“It’s idiotic,” she confided to Aggie and me that night as Aggie was getting ready for bed. “Isn’t the creature dead? Do they expect it to come back from the spirit world and do a materializing seance for them while they wait?”

“That’s all very well, Tish,” said Aggie, turning on all the lights and getting into bed, “but that hand was not hairy.”

“Foot, you mean,” said Tish. “If that is a footprint on the wall of that room up-stairs, it was a foot you touched last night.”

At nine o’clock that night Tommy had a talk with Miss Durand, the night nurse of K ward. She denied being out of the ward between twelve-ten and one o’clock, and characterized Bates’ whole story as a fabrication.

“He’s always making trouble, Doctor,” she told Tommy. “He brings in tobacco and morphine and sells it to the men, and you take his word against mine!”

And Tommy said that Bates, with Miss Durand’s outraged eyes on him, reduced the time of her absence to ten minutes, and might have gone further if Tommy hadn’t turned away in disgust.

Chapter XII

The Carbolic Case And A Brown Coat

Tommy was very gloomy that night. He went about placing guards, with his mouth set in a grim line and his eyes hard. A few of the nurses knew what was going on, but with the exception of the three of us, none of the patients had been told.

To Tish’s assurance that the trouble was over, that the death of Hero, the ape, meant the end of the disturbance, Tommy turned a tolerant smile and a deaf ear. I would have given a good bit to have had Tish’s conviction, but no theory that was based on Hero at the Zoo could possibly involve Miss Blake. And Tommy and I knew that Miss Blake was involved.

I had not told Tish the particulars of Tommy’s visit to the girl’s room, or about the rosette he had confronted her with. To be candid, Tish was disagreeable about my having gone with Tommy, and only relaxed when, at supper time, a package came from Charlie Sands, and proved to contain the very towel with which the giant ape had been killed.

“Thought you might like it,” Charlie wrote. “I snitched it while the keeper’s back was turned. Gruesome, but interesting, isn’t it? The beast was almost human, and as far as I know this may be the towel with which he performed his final ablutions--or do apes ablute?”

Tish laid it solemnly out on the bed and, going to the dresser drawer, brought out the one that had, as you may say, suspended Johnson. They were absolutely alike, even to the position of the S. P. T. which distinguished them both.

Tommy came into Aggie’s room about eleven o’clock and sat, as usual, on the foot of the bed. He had lost his customary air of good-natured raillery, and looked tired.

“I’ve placed them all,” he said. “Counting myself, there are fourteen of us, and I don’t think a germ could escape from any of the wards without my knowing it.”

“How about the private rooms?” I asked. “There’s as apt to be mischief done by pay patients as by charities.”

“You’re right, there. Well, every corridor is under secret surveillance. The doors into the nurses’ dormitory are being watched on every floor, and we have a man on the roof.”

“Humph!” said Aggie, from the bed. “You’d do better to have a barrel of holy water. Things that dissolve under your fingers, just as the clock strikes midnight--it _was_ midnight, Tish. The clock in the hall is five minutes fast by my watch.”

“Fiddlesticks!” Tish said tartly. “Then the sun’s too fast; you’d better have it regulated. No, Tommy, it would have been more to the point if you’d taken all these precautions last night. You are too late.”

“I hope so,” Tommy observed and got off the bed. “I’ll come around now and then and keep you posted.” He started toward the door and stopped, looking at me. “You haven’t seen--Miss Blake? She has not come from the dormitory?”

“No.”

He looked relieved at that and went out, and for an hour we saw nothing of him.

A little before midnight Miss Lewis brought in on a tray three glasses of buttermilk and some crackers.

“I knew none of you were sleeping,” she said. “This will do you good. I don’t mind saying _my_ nerves are all twittering. This house is enough to set you crazy. If you go around a corner unexpectedly, you come across a figure ducking into a doorway. A nurse from L ward just fell across one of the moppers squatting in a corner by the pantry and threw a bowl of chicken broth at him, thinking it was Johnson himself.”

“They might as well calm themselves,” Tish observed, sipping her buttermilk. “Nothing will happen.”

“Then why don’t you take off your clothes and go to bed?” Aggie asked, but Tish scornfully refused to answer.

“I’m not expecting anything myself,” observed Miss Lewis, straightening her cap at the mirror. “These things have a way of petering out--and yet, on the other hand, things in a hospital usually go in threes. If we have one burned case, we’ll get two more. Shot cases will come in threes every time, and as for suicides! Well, I’ve seen three carbolic acids every time I’ve seen one. And that reminds me,” she said, turning from the mirror and with a dive thrusting a foot-rest under Tish’s leg, “a carbolic case has just piped out in one of the wards. There are things I’d rather do than go up and lay it out.”

And at that instant the hall nurse appeared in the doorway and spoke to her.

“Miss Lewis,” she said, “you are to go to the mortuary with that case. Miss Grimes is having an attack of hysteria.”

Miss Lewis turned and surveyed us through her spectacles. “Can you beat that?” she demanded. “Wouldn’t a self-respecting mongrel pup rebel at a life like this?” She jerked her head--and her cap fell over her ear with the facility of long practice. “All right,” she said to the nurse, “I’m coming, but--” she turned in the doorway and waved her hand to us. “If I am found strung up with an S. P. T.,” she said, “I’ll not hang alone, believe _me_.”

An S. P. T.! We all three stared at each other, and Tish tried to call her back. But she had gone. Could it be, we wondered, that Miss Lewis knew the meaning of the three letters? And if she did--!

At five minutes of midnight Tommy stopped in to see us.

“Nothing yet,” he said. “Heaven knows, I hope there won’t be anything at all, but there’s an uneasy feeling in the house--I’ve had to make a few changes. The man on the roof refused to stay.”

“Naturally,” Tish observed, with the lofty air she’d had all evening. “If the wind blew he would declare he heard groans.”

“Exactly what he _did_ say,” replied Tommy. “Says he heard groans and felt eyes looking at him. But we had the roof searched, and found nothing. I put Hicks, the ambulance man, there instead. He hasn’t any nerves.”

“I beg your pardon, Doctor,” said the hall nurse, from the doorway. “But--Hicks wants to see you.”

“Just for a moment,” a voice came from behind the nurse. “I’ll go back up there, Doctor, if I’ve got to kick myself up, but--”

“Well?”

“Doctor, as sure as I’m a living man, something is singing on the roof.”

“Singing!” said Tommy.

“Half singing, half chanting. I--I’m going back, Doctor. Nothing ain’t ever scared me yet. But--it’s singing ‘Nearer, my God, to Thee’--not the words. Just the tune.”

“Did anybody else hear it?”

“They heard something in the mortuary. They said it didn’t sound exactly like singing. But I heard it as plain as I hear you, sir. It--it’s horrible.”

“Are the nurses still there?”

“No, sir. Miss Lewis was sent to take Miss Grimes’ place, but she insisted on having her night supper first. Mr. Briggs is in the mortuary with the--you know, until she comes.”

“I’ll go up with you to the roof,” said Tommy, and went at once.

Aggie had been getting white around the lips during the whole scene, and when Hicks said “Nearer, my God, to Thee,” she almost keeled over against her pillows. The moment Tommy had gone, she burst into tears, declaring that something awful was going to happen, that being the tune they had sung at the roofer’s funeral.

Tish, however, was stonily calm, although I could see she was shaken. She had got out her Irish lace, and sat making picots as if her life depended on it.

“I don’t for the life of me see what you are bleating about,” she snapped. “If you argue from hearing that tune that _he’s_ coming back to-night, there will be more ghosts walking than this hospital can hold. It’s been sung at a good many funerals. And another thing, if he was as good as you think he was, he’s sitting around with a harp, learning celestial melodies, not coming back to string up innocent corpses with roller towels, and break skylights. It’s only the bad ones that aren’t satisfied where they are and come back.”

It is hard to say just why that line of reasoning made Aggie dry her tears, but it did, and she sat up and finished her buttermilk.

[Illustration]

It was when I was reaching her the crackers that I heard a creak, and knew that somebody had stealthily opened the door into the nurses’ dormitory. Tish heard it, too, and put down her crocheting.

All our lights were on, while the hall was dark. This time we saw no candlelight, but we each felt who it was. I stepped to the door and looked out.

Miss Blake, fully dressed, was on the narrow staircase to the floor above, and at the top somebody with an electric flash was barring the way.

“Sorry, Miss,” said Jacobs, the night watchman. “We have orders not to let anybody pass here to-night.”

“But I must!” she pleaded. “I can’t endure the suspense another moment, Jacobs! Where is Doctor Andrews?”

“On the roof, Miss Blake.”

“Oh, no, not on the roof!” she cried. “Let me pass. I _must_ pass.”

“Sorry,” he said, not moving. “My orders--”

Suddenly, from somewhere overhead came a woman’s scream, a shrill note of horror that left my ears aching, my heart beating madly. It rose and fell and then rose again, and the silence that followed was the silence of paralysis.

Immediately after, there was the sound of scurrying feet. Tish and I never knew afterward how we got up the stairs, or were almost the first on the scene.

The hall was dark, as on the floor below, but from the mortuary a bright light streamed down the short, wide flight of steps that served as its approach.

On one side of the receiving table Tommy was standing. On the other, Miss Lewis stood, as if frozen, with one hand turning down the covering sheet. But the body on the table was not wrapped in a shroud. It was the figure of a tall man fully dressed, and with the head and shoulders tightly wrapped in what looked like a brown coat.

Tish gripped my arm, shaking so she could scarcely speak. “Johnson!” she said. “Oh, my God, Lizzie, it’s Johnson!”

But it was not. When they had untied the sleeves, tightly knotted about the neck, Tommy himself gave a cry of horror.

It was Briggs, the orderly, dead about ten minutes, and with his ribs crushed in like a broken barrel.

The “carbolic case” was lying in placid peace under the table, its bandaged hands folded, its jaw relaxed, its half-shut eyes looking calmly up at the horror overhead.

Tish and I put Miss Lewis to bed that night and Tish sat with her until morning. It was dawn when Tommy came in. They had found nothing--except one curious fact:

The brown coat that had covered poor Briggs’ head had belonged to Johnson. The pockets were full of his private papers.

Chapter XIII

Jacobs’ Elevator

As I have said, Tommy came in about dawn. Miss Lewis had dropped into an uneasy sleep, and Tish was dozing in the chair beside her; Aggie was stretched out on the couch, with a cubeb cigarette burning in a saucer beside her, and was resurrecting her mother’s sister again when he came in. He beckoned me out into the hall after he had told us about the coat.

“Miss Blake is ill again,” he said. “The second shock, after the first, you know.”

“Not seriously, Tommy?” I asked, putting my hand on his arm.

“I don’t know,” he said miserably. “People don’t go from one fainting attack into another without--I guess you’ve seen how it is, Miss Lizzie. I--it would kill me if any harm came to her!”

“No harm is coming to her,” I reassured him. “If the strain has had this effect on Miss Lewis, who has about the same nervous system as a cow, of course it would go hard with a finely organized girl like Miss Blake. And--don’t be foolish, Tommy. No finding of surgical knives in that girl’s room, or of rosettes where they don’t happen to belong, is going to make her guilty of anything wrong. If she’s in trouble, it’s not of her own making.”

He fairly put his arm around me and hugged me, to the horror of a passing nurse.

“Blessed are the spinsters!” he cried, “for they are the salt of the earth! Do you really think that?”

“I do,” I said firmly. “And shame on you, Tommy Andrews, for having thought anything else. I shall stay with her for an hour or two.”

“If you will,” he said gratefully, and we started toward the dormitory.

On the way over, Tommy told me more clearly what had happened. The body of the “carbolic case” had been taken to the mortuary by Jacobs and Briggs, Marshall, the other night orderly, having refused to go. On the way up, Jacobs, who was running the elevator, complained that it was out of order. It was an old-fashioned lift, moving always very slowly, and built on the familiar cable and wheel principle. Twice during the ascent the cage stopped entirely.

Near the top floor the cage began to vibrate wildly and Briggs had been obliged to steady the wheeled table containing the corpse.

Jacobs, who had told Tommy the story, said that both he and Briggs were alarmed, fearing that one of the cables had broken; while he worked with the lever in the cage, Briggs looked up apprehensively through the metal grill in the center of the cage. The car was still shaking from side to side, and refused to obey the lever. Jacobs turned to Briggs and threw up his hands.

“It’s stuck!” he said. “Either it’s going to drop, when it gets ready, or--”

He said Briggs wasn’t listening, but was standing looking up at the grill with his face blue-white. Jacobs looked up, too, but he was a second too late. He had a sense of something white moving just out of his range of vision, and then the car ceased vibrating.

Briggs was still staring up and the car was moving again as if nothing had happened to it. At the mortuary floor he had touched Briggs on the arm, and he shivered and helped him wheel the table out of the cage. Then Briggs asked him to lower the cage until he could see the top, but there was nothing there. After that they took the body to the mortuary.

“What did Briggs think he saw?” I asked nervously, holding to Tommy’s arm. The hall was dark.

“It’s rather fantastic,” Tommy said, “but--he declared there was a bare foot planted directly on the grill of the cage.”

“A foot!” I gasped.

“A foot,” said Tommy soberly. “And I’m going to tell you what I wouldn’t care to tell Aunt Tish or Miss Aggie. I’ve been on top of the cage myself, just now, with a candle. There are innumerable footprints in the dust, distinct marks of a naked foot. But it is always the right foot!”

I shivered. “Tommy!” I quavered. “The mark on the wall where Johnson was found was--the print of a _naked right_ foot.”

“I know,” he replied, and fell to thinking. “Well,” he said, after a moment, “I’d better go on. Jacobs moved the cage down, but there was nothing on it, or in the shaft over their heads. It ends just above that floor, and as the doors to the shaft were all locked, if anything had been above the cage, it could hardly have got away. Briggs himself said that he thought it was an optical illusion, and was apparently not nervous when Jacobs went down to get Miss Lewis. He was gone some time, Miss Lewis, as I have said, having insisted on being fortified with food before she went up.”

Finally, as we knew, he had got Miss Lewis and they went back to the mortuary. Briggs was sitting there quietly, with his pipe lighted and a newspaper on his knee. But he was neither reading nor smoking and Jacobs said he was staring overhead, with a queer expression on his face, as if he were listening to something.

He started to say something to Jacobs, but Jacobs signaled him to be cautious and pointed to Miss Lewis. Briggs had nodded and resumed his pipe. Everything was quiet and peaceful, Jacobs insisted. Tommy and Hicks had appeared sometime before and had gone up the stairs to the roof. The man who had been sent to guard that corridor, one of the laundry men, was dozing in a chair half way down. Jacobs, not being needed in the mortuary, went down to him and roused him by shaking. He and the laundry man were talking when Miss Lewis came down to the empty ward across from them, and turning on the lights, went in search of something she needed.

Jacobs was positive there had not been a sound from the mortuary, except that a gust of air from its open windows had swept along the hall, and the glass-topped doors slammed shut. There had been no outcry, no struggle. When Miss Lewis went back briskly, and opened the doors, she found Briggs apparently gone, and the sheeted figure on the table as before.

It was only when she turned down the sheet that she discovered the truth--the body of the murdered orderly on the table and the corpse not to be seen. It was then she screamed.

“We have sent for the police,” Tommy finished. “We didn’t want any publicity, but now it has to come. It’s beyond us. The strange thing is,” he said, “at the time it happened, every corridor, every ward, every possible means of access to the mortuary was guarded.”

“Yes, and with the one nearest it sound asleep!” I commented scornfully. “And goodness knows how many of the others!”

“Jacobs was in the upper hall,” he contended, “and whoever was asleep beforehand, none of them was asleep after Miss Lewis shrieked, Miss Lizzie. There are only two means of access to the mortuary, one is the fire-escape and the other the steps. Jacobs was just beyond the steps all the time, and Hicks and I were on the roof near the fire-escape. Nobody left by those two exits. That’s positive.”

“There is another door in the mortuary,” I said. “What is that?”

“Mortuary linen closet,” said Tommy. “Always kept locked, and still locked.”

“You haven’t examined it?”

“The linen room woman carries the key, and she is away over night.”

“Nobody was missing in the house?”

“We made a tally immediately, with the guards all watching every door and window. Two internes and I made the count ourselves, not a soul was missing.”

“He was--strangled?”

“No. That’s one of the queerest things about it. He had been _squeezed_--his chest is caved in, and I think the autopsy will show that a point of one of the ribs entered the heart. Death was almost instantaneous.”

“And the brown coat?” I asked. “How did it get there?”

“God knows,” said Tommy, and rapped at Miss Blake’s door.

Chapter XIV

Bag And Baggage

Tish stared at me the next morning when I told her the story Tommy had told me, and laid the key of the mortuary linen closet on her breakfast tray.

“The Blake girl is still out of her head,” I finished up, “and I found the key, as I tell you, on her dresser, labeled as you see it. I don’t want you to show it to Tommy, Tish.”

“Tommy!” said Tish scornfully, and pushed away her breakfast untasted. “I tell you, Lizzie, if _I_ had had charge of things last night, that poor wretch would have carried in this tray this morning, with the tea slopped over everything as usual. Tommy is a nice boy, but he’s stupid.”

“But I don’t understand,” said Aggie from the bed. “If you think, Tish Carberry, that finding the key to a linen closet is going to prove anything against that pretty little nurse, I’ll tell Tommy about it myself.”

“Exactly,” said Tish, coldly. “And if you do, I wash my hands of the whole affair. As far as I’m concerned in that case, she can go under suspicion the rest of her life.”

“Suspicion of what?” Aggie demanded tartly. “She didn’t kill Briggs, I suppose. Even if she could have broken his ribs, as Tish says, and she’s a perfectly respectable girl--you can see _that_ in her face--she was right on the stairs here when it happened, wasn’t she?”

Tish got up and put the key of the linen closet in the lower bureau drawer.

“Don’t be any more of a fool than you can help, Aggie,” she said, and shut the drawer. “I _don’t_ think Miss Blake killed Briggs, or got up on the wall and made a footprint a foot and a half long near the ceiling, or hung Johnson by the neck to a chandelier. And if my nephew chooses to be so head over ears in love with the young woman that he’s no more capable of logical thought than a guinea-pig, _I_ shall look into the thing myself.”

“Guinea-pig,” said Aggie. “Now then, that’s another thing, Tish. The rabbits--”

“Lizzie,” Tish said, snubbing her completely. “Will you see if Miss Durand is off duty yet? I want to talk to her. Lewis won’t be back from breakfast for an hour. She can’t Fletcherize and tell that story at the same time.”

The hall nurse promised me to find Miss Durand and send her to Tish’s room, and started at once in the search for her. She turned to say, over her shoulder and with bated breath, that detectives were in the building now, that Tommy was with them, and that there was a story that they’d found some curious prints on the wall in the room where Johnson’s body had hung.

“A foot, and just beside it a woman’s hand,” she said. “I hear they are going to take impressions of all the hands in the hospital to-day!”

I carried this to Tish, and she affected indifference. But she was visibly uneasy and at different times I caught her staring fixedly at her palm.

At eight o’clock Miss Durand came in looking tired and white, Tish asked her to sit down and offered her a little port wine, but she refused.

“No, thanks,” she said. “I’m off to bed soon, and if I can only sleep--I didn’t sleep much yesterday.”

“Too noisy, I daresay,” said Tish. “Poor Briggs complained of the same thing in this very room yesterday.”

“Oh, it wasn’t the noise. I--I got to thinking.” She tried to smile. “There have been so many strange things happening!”

“I should think so,” said Aggie. “That poor Miss Blake! Do you think--”

Tish fixed her with a cold eye, and Aggie’s voice trailed off to nothing. She looked frightened.

“Miss Durand,” said Tish, suddenly hitching her chair forward, “I should like you to tell me why you left Johnson to die alone and why you absented yourself from your ward for fifty minutes.”

Miss Durand turned even paler, and got up. “I didn’t understand that you--”

“Sit down,” said Tish. “I guess you know I’m chairman of the Ladies’ Committee here, and you’d better tell me than tell the police. I don’t start with the belief that half the hospital’s guilty and the other half accessories to the crime, and that’s what the police will do, according to my experience.”

“You may ask Bates--” she began.

“So I may,” said Tish cheerfully. “And if you are around he’ll say you were away a scant ten minutes and if he’s alone, he’ll swear to an hour or more.”

“It was less than an hour, I’d swear to that anywhere,” said Miss Durand. “It couldn’t have taken so long!”

“What couldn’t have taken so long?” Tish demanded.

Miss Durand looked around at the three of us and seemed to be thinking.

“What do you mean by saying I’d better tell you than tell the police?” she asked.

“Just this,” Tish said briskly getting out her sheet of note-paper. “I flatter myself I can see as far through a stone wall as most people, especially if there’s a crack to look through. I’ve been looking at this particular stone wall off and on since four o’clock this morning, and--well, I think I begin to see daylight.”

“Humph!” said Aggie. “Then the least I can say, Tish--”

“Now, Miss Durand,” Tish began, biting a point on her pencil, “we’ll get at this systematically. Did Briggs have any enemies in K Ward?”

“He wasn’t popular. I guess old Johnson hated him about the most.”

“Ah!” said Tish, and put that down. “Did you know Johnson was dying when you left the ward?”

“He’d been dying for twenty-four hours and had been unconscious for six,” she defended herself. “Nobody can tell when that sort will make a clean get-away.”

“Good gracious!” Aggie ejaculated, and even Tish looked shocked. Miss Durand was clearly not in Miss Blake’s class: seen in the morning light, her face looked hard as well as tired.

“I see,” said Tish, and put down “clean get-away.” “Now, Miss Durand, why had Linda Smith been crying when she came to you at midnight that night?”

“She said she had had some words with the head nurse. She had missed a lecture that evening.”

“Why did she miss the lecture?”

“I don’t know.”

“Don’t know or won’t tell?” asked Tish, over her note-paper.

“Don’t know,” snapped Miss Durand, and for all I didn’t like her, I thought she was telling the truth.

“Now, Miss Durand,” Tish observed, sitting back and fixing her lame leg on its hassock, “I’d be glad to hear why Miss Linda Smith took you away from your ward that night, and where you went.”

“She had forgotten to attend to something, and she came back to fix it.”

“What?”

Miss Durand stared at Tish and Tish leaned back, with her pencil stuck through the knob of her hair, and stared at Miss Durand. As I have said somewhere else, Tish is a masterful woman, and Miss Durand felt it.

“She had forgotten to turn in Johnson’s clothes,” she said. “That is always done after a death: the clothes are held in the office for the friends to get. We went to the basement clothes room.”

“But Johnson was not dead!”

“The chances were he would die that night. The clothes should have been ready in case relatives had wished to remove the body at once.”

“The trip to the clothes room would take about ten minutes, I daresay,” Tish said dryly. “Why didn’t she go alone?”

“I--I hardly know. She was nervous and upset. You see, her three years is almost up, and she and the superintendent are on bad terms. She has always said that he would make use of any small mistake she made, to keep her from getting her diploma.”

“When would she get it, everything going well?”

“Next week.”

“Very good,” said Tish, and put something down. “Now then, what happened in the clothes room?”

“I didn’t go in.”

“Where were you?”

“The morning milk cans were being delivered. I went to the other end of the basement, past the engine room, and got a glass of milk. I was thirsty.”

“I see. And that took forty minutes?”

“No,” said Miss Durand. “When I got back to the clothes room, I couldn’t find Miss Smith. The cellar man, sitting on the stairs, said she had not gone up. I was worried, and we both searched for her. We couldn’t find her.”

“But you did find her. You went back to K ward together.”

“I didn’t find her,” said Miss Durand. “When I came back to the stairs, she was sitting there, with a bundle in her lap. She was white. The cellar man asked her if she felt sick.”

“How did she explain her absence?”

“She didn’t,” said Miss Durand with her curious smile. “She’s a very queer woman, Miss Smith is.”

“Humph!” Tish said, and put down a line or two. “Well, I reckon the next thing to do is to see Miss Smith. She looks pleasant enough, but you can’t tell by looking at a toad how far it can hop.”

Miss Durand got up and prepared to go. She still wore her curious smile.

“I think it has hopped a good ways, Miss Carberry,” she said. “Linda Smith has gone, bag and baggage, nobody knows where!”

Chapter XV

To The Zoo

Aggie being better, and having declared that no power on earth would make her spend another night in the place, we planned to leave about noon that day. But Tish’s astonishing conduct drove all idea of going from our minds.

In the first place, Miss Lewis came in from breakfast looking a little bit better, and insisted on giving Tish’s knee its massage, as usual. But Tish was sitting poring over the notes she had made, and wouldn’t even so much as look up.

“Get away,” she snarled, with her pencil in her teeth. “There’s nothing wrong with my knee.”

Miss Lewis looked at me.

“There was something wrong with it yesterday,” she said, with her thumbs tucked inside her belt and her spectacles flashing. “It’s got cured pretty quick, I think.”

“I don’t employ you to think,” said Tish, hopping past her and opening the lower bureau drawer.

“You needn’t employ me at all.”

“That’s a fact,” Tish said. “It hadn’t occurred to me. You go in and take care of Miss Pilkington to-day, Miss Lewis. There’s nothing pleases her like being taken care of.”

“There’s nothing the matter with Miss Pilkington, either,” snapped Miss Lewis, but Tish was getting down on her knees by the drawer, groaning as she did it, and she only threw an absent reply over her shoulder. “Oh, well,” she said, “you know what I mean. I didn’t mean to offend you. You’re a good nurse, but I’ve got something else on hand. Give Miss Pilkington a bath and put talcum on; she’ll take to it like a baby.”

Miss Lewis opened her mouth to refuse, thought better of it, and went to Aggie’s room. Tish drew a long sigh.

“Thank heaven!” she said. “They’ll keep each other busy for the rest of the day.”

Which they did. Aggie emerged from her room when Tish and I, breathless and dirty, got back late that morning. She was powdered and manicured, curled and French-puffed, and she knew the history of every private case on the floor; name, age, family scandal and operation. She was primed to talk, but by that time Tish and I had no time to stop. Things were approaching a climax.

Well, Miss Lewis and Aggie off our hands, Tish emptied the lower drawer and spread its contents on the floor in front of her. First of all, she laid out the two roller towels, with the S. P. T. showing. Then followed the brown tweed coat, secured by a dollar to Jacobs, the small surgeon’s knife, the dented brass candlestick, the bandage Linda Smith had picked up in the upper hall, the linen room key, and Charlie Sands’ letter about Hero at the Zoo. Then with the sheet of note-paper in her hand, she began to play a sort of checkers with the different things. The two S. P. T. towels she put together and using this combination as a king, she proceeded to jump the other articles, one by one, moving them around aimlessly in the intervals and consulting her notes.

At the end of the game, as well as I could make out, the king had it. At least, the two towels seemed to have Charlie Sands’ letter checkmated in a corner, and the other articles lay in a humiliated heap on Tish’s lap.

“Well,” I said, “I see the towels win, although I think you cheated once.”

Tish stuffed the notes into the bosom of her dress and tumbled the other things back in the drawer. Then she got up, making horrible faces as she straightened her knee.

“I’m sorry it’s raining, Lizzie,” she said. “We’ll have to go out.”

“Where!” I asked sarcastically. “To the matinée?”

“To the Zoo,” she replied, and hauling down her bonnet from the cupboard, stuck it on her head. “Shall we need a taxicab?”

“Probably, if you intend to go out in your nightgown,” I said coldly.

But if I expected Tish to be confused, I was disappointed. With her bonnet still on, she put on her shoes and stockings, her black broadcloth skirt, a lamb’s wool vest and her long fur coat. It wasn’t until she was finished that she remembered her nightgown underneath everything.

“It’s a little long, isn’t it?” she said, when she’d started for the door, with six inches of white trailing all around her. “Pin it up, Lizzie; that’s a good girl.”

“I’ll do nothing of the sort,” I said. “If you want to make a goose of yourself with a knee that you are forbidden to step on, and maybe a taxicab accident with you fixed like that underneath, I’m not going to be a party to it.”

“Very well!” said Tish, and getting a pair of scissors, she was about to cut off eight inches of her best French gown, when I weakened and got the safety pins. It was plain, Tish was in no mood to stop at trifles. I made her as respectable as possible, at least on the surface, and by that time, seeing she was determined to go, I got ready and went with her.

Now, a patient can’t leave a hospital without a card being sent down, signed by the interne and countersigned by the superintendent, and brought back by the elevator boy for the signatures of his family, his friends and the police bureau, or something almost as complicated. But not knowing anything of this, Tish and I went down in the elevator, past the door-man and out the front door, called a taxicab and drove away with perfect ease and calmness.

We went to the Zoo. That is generally known now, although that Tish went in her nightgown is here for the first time set forth. But what we did at the Zoo I do not know exactly. I might as well have been back with Aggie, being bathed and talcumed. Tish let me pay the taxicab, pointed to a chair in the ante-room, and spent twenty minutes in the private office of the superintendent.

I was rather bitter about it. In the first place, I don’t like Zoos, and in the second place, after I had been there ten minutes, a man in uniform came in and examined all the corners of the room and turned over every chair. When he came to the one I was in, he said, “Excuse me, ma’am, but you haven’t noticed a small green snake with red and yellow markings anywhere around here, have you?”

I was frozen in my chair.

“No,” I replied as calmly as I possibly could, “unless I absent-mindedly put him in my hand-bag!”

“Oh, I didn’t mean that, lady,” he hastened to explain, “I meant--he may be curled on the rungs of your chair.”

I got up at that almost instantaneously and he turned the chair over. “Not here,” he said, disappointed. “Little devil, this is the third time this week!”

“Is he--is he poisonous?” I asked.

“Well,” he said thoughtfully, “personally, I shouldn’t care to sit down on him in the dark.”

He went out and closed the door, and when Tish came back, she declares I was standing in the middle of the room with my skirts held up, and turning slowly around in a circle.

There was a glitter in Tish’s eye that I had never seen there before, as we drove back to the hospital. I attempted to explain a little of how I felt at being left in a place like that, where at any moment something might break loose for the third time that week, and why I was turning around, but she told me tartly not to bother her.

We returned to the hospital in silence, and I paid for the taxicab. It was not until we were back in Tish’s room, and had put her into her chair and got a hot-water bottle under her knee, which had gone on a strike about that time and refused to bend at all, that I spoke.

“Well?” I asked.

“Well--what?”

“Have they lost anything? Any animals?”

“No,” said Tish calmly. “I knew that before I went there. Aggie, what day was it the two medical internes left?”

“This is Friday,” I said. “It was Tuesday evening, Tish.”

“I thought so,” she observed. “Now reach me my notes, Lizzie, and go call Bates.”

Chapter XVI

Tommy Tells Why

Bates came unwillingly. His shrewd face was pale and twitching, and he insisted on knowing why he was wanted.

“I can not tell you, because I do not know, Mr. Bates,” I said. “Miss Carberry wants to speak to you. That is all.”

“I haven’t time,” he said. “I’m helping out in the wards to-day. One of the day orderlies has to take Mr. Briggs’ place to-night, and he has gone to bed to get some sleep.”

But I got him to go finally, and we went together along the hall, his carpet-slippers flapping loosely as he walked, his shirt open at the throat and showing his lean brown neck. I thought to myself uneasily that the man looked like, at least, a potential criminal himself. But just as we reached Tish’s door Tommy came out.

I sent Bates in, for Tommy had put his hand on my arm.

“What has she been up to?” he asked, as the door closed. “She’s sitting in there in a kimono, with her foot on a stool, and she’s got her bonnet on.”

“We’ve been out,” I said tartly. “Or she’s been out. I only went along. We went to the Zoo, Tommy, and she left me to sit on snakes with green and red markings--”

“What!”

“Well, it only happened that I didn’t. And she’s got hold of something: I never saw her in such a state.”

“The Zoo!” cried Tommy and whistled. Then he smiled. “I see,” he said; “_The Murders in the Rue Morgue_, eh? Well, what happened?”

“I haven’t any idea. She’s got some sort of a scent, and she’s got her nose to the ground and running like mad. If she’s interfered with to-day, she’ll bite.”

“I see,” said Tommy again thoughtfully. “Well, good luck to her.”

“How is Miss Blake?”

He lowered his voice. “She’s conscious, but don’t tell Aunt Tish, please. She wants to ask her some questions, and I don’t want her disturbed. She’s very weak.” He looked down at a little case he had in his hand, and then at me. “I’m going to give her a hypodermic,” he said, “and the nurse is doing something else. Would you mind coming over with me?”

Well, of course, I’d wanted to hear what Tish asked Bates, but as I’ve admitted before, I’m a good bit of a fool where there’s a love affair on hand, and I’m fond of Tommy.

“All right,” I said, and we went. I thought I heard Tish’s voice raised angrily as we left the door, but the next moment there was only the quiet hum of Bates speaking.

The little nurse was lying in bed with her eyes closed. She looked white, but her lips had more color than the day before. She opened her eyes as we came in, and put out her hand to me.

“You’re very good,” she said. “You see I am better.” Tommy beamed.

“And just in time!” said I. “One more fainting fit, and Doctor Tommy Andrews would have been tied up in a strait-jacket.”

She colored a little and looked at him.

“I’ve been telling her,” said Tommy, catching my eye, “about Miss Lewis and the mouse last night. A girl with a set of lungs like that is lost in a hospital. She ought to be in a garage blowing up auto tires.”

“And--everything was quiet last night?”

“Not a sound--except the aforesaid yell. Never knew the house quieter.” He reached over and caught her wrist. “Nerves as tight as a string!” he said. “You’re going to have a hypodermic and relax a bit.”

“Since you _will_ be my medical adviser--” she said, half shyly, and held out her right arm.

Tommy fixed the hypodermic and came over to the bed. “Ready!” he said, but instead of the right arm, he leaned across and drew up the short white sleeve of the left. She made a quick movement, but was too late.

“Good heavens!” Tommy said, and we both stared. The arm was covered with bruises from elbow to shoulder!

* * * * *

Tommy walked back with me to Tish’s room, but at first he said nothing, and neither did I. The girl had offered no explanation, and he had asked none. The poor little arm had been too pathetic.

Just before we reached Tish’s door, however, he stopped.

“The sheer brutality of it!” he said. “She’s only a bit of a girl, and she’s been through something horrible. But I’m not going to ask her about it, and I won’t have her questioned by anybody else. If I’m satisfied, it’s nobody else’s affair.”

“Listen to the egoist!” said I. “And why is it your affair only?”

“Because I’m going to marry her, if she’ll have me,” he said hotly. “And after I have her, and can protect her, I’m going to kill whoever put those finger-prints on her arm.”

“Finger-prints!” I cried.

“Yes, finger-prints,” he said, and opened the door.

Bates had gone, and Aggie and Tish were together. Tish still wore her bonnet, and she had a crimson spot on each cheek.

“Tommy,” she said, the moment we entered. “I’ve sent for the linen woman, and I want you to stay by. As soon as I’ve seen her, we’re going to the Blake girl’s room.”

“Oh, no; you’re not,” said Tommy calmly. “You’ll go there over my dead body.”

“That wouldn’t be much of an obstacle!”

“She’s very ill. I won’t have her disturbed,” said Tommy, and set his jaw. They both have the Carberry jaw. Tish made an impatient movement. “Oh, well, I can manage without her. Is the top of the elevator flat?” she added.

“The center is, I believe,” Tommy was doubtful. “What on earth--”

“Never mind!” said Tish grandly, and the linen woman knocked.

“Mrs. Jenkins?” asked Tish.

“Yes’m,” said Mrs. Jenkins. She was a tall woman, in black, with a white apron and a thimble as badges of office.

“I wanted to ask you for the key to the mortuary linen closet, Mrs. Jenkins,” said Tish.

Mrs. Jenkins fidgeted, and glanced at Tommy.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I--haven’t got it just now.”

“Indeed!” Tish raised her eyebrows. “Aren’t you responsible for that closet? I have a particular reason for asking.”

Mrs. Jenkins turned to Tommy. “Since you’re here, Doctor Andrews,” she said, “I suppose it’s all right, but we don’t give the keys to any of the closets to patients usually.”

“Since you haven’t got it, that needn’t disturb you,” Tish said sharply. “If you wish a reason, however, I’m a member of the Ladies’ Committee of this hospital, and as I am undertaking a special inquiry into things that have happened here lately, _I want that key_.”

Mrs. Jenkins looked dazed. She had never seen a female detective, I daresay, and to see one sitting before her in a kimono over a nightgown, with a black bonnet with jet bugles over one ear, and her foot out on a stool, clearly bewildered her.

“I’m sorry,” she said respectfully, when she’d recovered, “but the key that usually hangs in the mortuary is lost, and I gave Miss Linda Smith the other one.”

“Hah!” cried Tish. “When?”

“Yesterday, I think. I’m not sure.”

“Thank you very much, Mrs. Jenkins. I’ll not keep you any longer.” And as the linen woman went out, Tish got up and reached for her cane.

“Now then, Tommy,” she said, “I’ll trouble you to take Lizzie and Aggie somewhere and keep them, so I can think. Take them out and get them some soda water.”

“Soda water! Perhaps you would like me to go back to the Zoo,” I observed with biting sarcasm. But it was lost on Tish.

“I shouldn’t advise it,” she said. “It’s raining again. Just get out--go anywhere, so you go. And come back in an hour.”

“I’ve half a mind--” Aggie began nastily.

“Why, so you have!” said Tish. “Shut the door behind you.” And as Aggie, who was the last, slammed out, we heard Tish opening the lower bureau drawer.

Chapter XVII

On The Roof And Elsewhere

We came back in an hour to find Tish waiting with her bonnet still on, and in a more agreeable frame of mind. She asked Tommy and me to go around the hospital with her, but refused to take Aggie, who retired sulking to her room. Tish rolled up the S. P. T. towels and led the way herself, a strange gleam in her eye. Considering what she had in mind, it was a courageous thing she was doing, but I don’t mind admitting now that there were moments that day when I thought she had lost her reason.

She led the way to the mortuary first, with her bundle under her arm, and Tommy and I trailing at her heels, like two bewildered lambs after a wild-eyed sheep. Seen in daylight, there was nothing horrible about the mortuary. There were no bodies there, and the daylight came in in churchly fashion through the two large stained-glass windows in the end. Indeed, the room looked like a small chapel, being finished in dark wood, with pale walls, chairs in a row around the edge of the floor, and only the row of tables in the center instead of pews, to spoil its ecclesiastical appearance.

At the far end, to the left, and near the windows, was the door to the linen closet. Tish gave the room only a casual glance, and stalked across to the linen closet. She hesitated a moment and grasped her stick closely. Then she inserted the key she had carried up with her, and slowly turned it.

The door flew open immediately and I took a hasty step back. But it had been pushed only by the draft of air from a small window at the side, which was open, and except for piles of neatly folded linen, the closet was empty. Tish looked slightly disappointed, but not discouraged. She went in and stuck her head out through the open window, looking in every direction.

“Exactly,” she said and prepared to close and lock the closet again. But she waited to close the small window first, and when she turned, Tommy had stooped over something lying on the floor just inside the door.

“Look!” he said, holding it out on his palm. “Briggs’ old pipe, with the stem gone! The one he was smoking when--!”

If he expected Tish to be impressed he was disappointed.

“There’s nothing astonishing about that!” she said calmly, and proceeding to climb out one of the stained-glass windows on to the fire-escape--although it was the fifth floor and Tish had always declared she’d rather burn up than put a foot on one of the things--she ran nimbly up and over the cornice to the roof.

It was a very ordinary roof. One part was flat, and evidently used occasionally as a breathing spot. There were benches around and a flower pot or two, and directly in the center was a four-foot iron fence, enclosing a skylight. Two men at work there showed where Tommy had gone through, and when I glanced at him he was staring at it with a rueful smile.

“When you remember,” he said, “that I weigh a hundred and seventy pounds, and that I went over that fence head first, it makes you wonder what grudge old Johnson had against me. _I_ was decent enough to him, if Briggs wasn’t.”

“Do you mean that--that Briggs was _cruel_ to him?” I asked Tommy.

“With a refined form of cruelty, yes. The sort that lets an old man go without sugar in his tea, and won’t hear him begging for ice-water.”

“Then I’m glad he’s dead,” I snapped, “and if I’d been Johnson, I’d have--”

Tish had wandered across the roof, and was standing on a part of it about two feet higher than the rest, looking at a second and smaller skylight.

“What’s this, Tommy?” she called.

“Elevator, I think,” said Tommy, and we went over. Tish was looking around her with speculative eyes.

“I guess this is about right,” she said. “I miss my guess, unless--Tommy, get down with your ear to the roof and see if you hear anything.”

“It’s dirty,” said Tommy.

“I guess you’ll wash without spoiling,” Tish snapped. “It ain’t a Carberry trait to be afraid of dirt. Get down.”

Tommy pulled up his trousers legs and got down gingerly, and I followed suit. I daresay we looked queer, both kneeling, and each with an eager ear to the tin. The two men at the other skylight stared at us over the railing nervously.

We didn’t hear anything, and Tish looked disappointed. But she didn’t stop her half hop, half run, over the roof. At the end of fifteen minutes she was back at the top of the fire-escape, ready to descend. But going down was different from going up, and I guess we were both relieved when Tommy said there was a staircase.

When we got to the bottom, I was clear out of breath, and even Tommy was panting. But Tish hadn’t turned a hair. Some sort of inward excitement was stimulating her like a fever, and knowing Tish, I felt she would cave in like a pricked balloon when it was over.

The next thing she demanded was to be put on the top of the elevator cage. But Tommy absolutely balked at that and Tish seemed to realize herself that it wouldn’t do.

“I’ll go for you,” Tommy said. “I’m willing to sacrifice myself for you any time, Aunt Tish, but you can see for yourself that a self-respecting woman in her prime can’t ride on top of an elevator without causing comment. It isn’t being done in our set this winter, Aunt Tish.”

Tish gave in, or pretended to, and we went back to her room. Aggie was there, dressed but sulky, and we had tea all around and tried to talk about indifferent things. We told Agg