Page:Burton Stevenson--The marathon mystery.djvu/239

Rh I leaned back in my chair and watched the smoke from my cigarette circling upwards. I remembered the letter that had been tattooed on the arm of the man killed in suite fourteen. So Tremaine had some cause to hate him—he had helped him, had supplied him with whiskey, with money, through fear and not through friendship. To establish that was to take another step forward.

“Did he have those spells often, Cecily?” I asked, at last.

“Oh, no; sometimes not for months. Then, phut! the zombi would charm him.”

“Charm him?”

“With a little scrap of paper, yes. There would come a letter; doudoux would open it; always in it there would be a little piece of paper. Sometimes it had writing on it, sometimes printing, as though it had been cut from a newspaper. Then, tambou! doudoux‘s face would grow black, he would tear the paper into little, little bits, uttering curses the most terrible, and we would all run!”

Clippings from a newspaper! Here was a coincidence. But I cudgelled my brain vainly—I could form no theory as to why a clipping should cause those fits of rage.

“The last one, though, did not give him a spell,” she added, after a moment… “We were watching the sun set out across the water when Dodol brought the letter to him. This time it was printing and writing both; I got up, ready to flee, for I thought that would be twice as bad; but no. He sat reading it and his eyes glistened; then he sent me running for his hat