Page:The Popular Magazine v72 n1 (1924-04-20).djvu/93



ITTLE Mr. Salaman Chayne gently put the goldfinch which, perched on his right forefinger, had been pecking busily at a small spray of groundsel proffered by his left hand, upon the edge of a near-by nesting box, and with the air of one who has made a sudden decision turned and left the “bird room” into which he and his partner, Kotman Dass, had transformed the top floor of their joint residence, No. 10 Green Square.

It was the morning after the wasplike Salaman quite unexpectedly had found himself a witness of the suicide of Sir James Argrath. The tragic death of the ruined financier had provided dramatic corroboration of the truth of the statements, evolved from certain obscure but effective processes of thought, by that remarkable man and, as he himself had put it, “notable coward,” Mr. Kotman Dass.

This mountainous person, whose physical shortcomings, due to an astounding excess of avoirdupois, were, in a sense, more than counterbalanced by an amazing brain which, though working obscurely, never seemed to work wrongly or to fail to solve any puzzle upon which it fixed itself, had been requested by his fierce though diminutive partner to consider one or two small points which Salaman had observed in the relations between his cousin Sir James Argrath and his beautiful wife, Creuse Argrath.

This Kotman Dass had done—arriving along his customary tortuous, darkly intricate and wholly unorthodox channels of thought, at the conclusion that Lady Argrath was a drug addict securing her supplies of what probably was some strange, possibly new, drug from a person who controlled and operated a huge organization for its illegal supply and distribution. In return the woman, her affection for her husband killed, her moral fiber sapped, had disclosed certain secrets of her husband, a financier, to the drugmaster.

All of which Salaman Chayne, a man of no marked intellect but extraordinary courage, at first had received with angry derision, contempt and menace—even going so