Page:Library of the World's Best Mystery and Detective Stories Vol.5 (1907).djvu/252

 the case with our skeleton. "Damned odd coincidence, isn't it?" he remarked to me.

Our merry mood had vanished and we took our way, quiet and depressed, through the old avenues toward our home. For the first time in its existence possibly, our venerable "barracks," as we called the dormitory, saw its occupants returning home from an evening's bout just as the night watchman intoned his eleven o'clock verse.

"Just eleven," exclaimed Sölling. "It's too early to go to bed, and too late to go anywhere else. We'll go up to your room, little Simsen, and see if we can't have some sort of a lesson this evening. You have your colored plates and we'll try to get along with them. It's a nuisance that we should have lost those arms just this evening."

"The Doctor can have all the arms and legs he wants," grinned Hans, who came out of the doorway just in time to hear Sölling's last word.

"What do you mean, Hans?" asked Sölling in astonishment.

"It'll be easy enough to get them," said Hans. "They've torn down the planking around the Holy Trinity churchyard, and dug up the earth to build a new wall. I saw it myself, as I came past the church. Lord, what a lot of bones they've dug out there! There's arms and legs and heads, many more than the Doctor could possibly need."

"Much good that does us," answered Sölling. "They shut the gates at seven o'clock and it's after eleven already."

"Oh, yes, they shut them," grinned Hans again. "But there's another way to get in. If you go through the gate of the porcelain factory and over the courtyard, and through the mill in the fourth courtyard that leads out into Spring Street, there you will see where the planking is torn down, and you can get into the churchyard easily."

"Hans, you're a genius!" exclaimed Sölling in delight. "Here, Simsen, you know that factory inside and out, you're so friendly with that fellow Outzen who lives there. Run along to him and let him give you the key of the mill.