Page:Weird Tales Volume 10 Issue 03 (1927-09).djvu/71

 formation that no one had visited the sleeping apartment after we left, as there had been no occasion for anyone connected with the home to do so. Yet on the floor beside the dog there lay a ragged square of white linen, such as might have been ripped from a night-robe or a suit of pajamas, reduced almost to a pulp by the savage brute's worrying, and—when Superintendent Gervaise entered the office to greet us, he was wearing his right arm in a sling.

"You are injured, Monsieur?" de Grandin asked with mock solicitude, noting the superintendent's bandaged hand with dancing eyes.

"Yes," the other replied, coughing apologetically, "yes, sir. I—I cut myself rather badly last night on a pane of broken glass in my quarters. The window must have been broken by a shutter being blown against it, and"

"Quite so," the Frenchman agreed amiably. "They bite terrifically, these broken window-panes, is it not so?"

"Bite?" Gervaise echoed, regarding the other with a surprized, somewhat frightened expression. "I hardly understand you—oh, yes, I see," he smiled rather feebly. "You mean cut."

"Monsieur," de Grandin assured him solemnly as he rase to leave, "I did mean exactly what I said; no more, and certainly no less."

"Now what?" I queried as we left the office and the gaping superintendent behind us.

"Non, non," he responded irritably. "I know not what to think, my friend. One thing, he points this way, another, he points elsewhere. Me, I am like a mariner in the midst of a fog. Go you to the car, Friend Trowbridge, and chaperone our so estimable ally. I shall pay a visit to the laundry, meantime."

None too pleased with my assignment, I re-entered my car and made myself as agreeable as possible to the dog, devoutly hoping that the hearty breakfast de Grandin had provided him had taken the edge off his appetite. I had no wish to have him stay his hunger on one of my limbs. The animal proved docile enough, however, and besides opening his mouth once or twice in prodigious yawns which gave me an unpleasantly close view of his excellent dentition, did nothing to cause me alarm.

When de Grandin returned he was fuming with impatience and anger. "Sacré nom d'un grillon!" he swore. "It is beyond me. Undoubtlessly this Monsieur Gervaise is a liar, it was surely no glass which caused the wound in his arm last night; yet there is no suit of torn pajamas belonging to him in the laundry."

"Perhaps he didn't send them to be washed," I ventured with a grin. "If I'd been somewhere I was not supposed to be last night and found someone had posted a man-eating dog in my path, I'd not be in a hurry to send my torn clothing to the laundry where it might betray me."

"Tiens, you reason excellently, my friend," he complimented, "but can you explain how it is that there is no torn night-clothing of Monsieur Gervaise at the washrooms today, yet two ladies' night-robes—one of Mère Martin's, one of Mademoiselle Bosworth's—display exactly such rents as might have been made by having this bit of cloth torn from them?" He exhibited the relic we had found beside the dog that morning and stared gloomily at it.

"H'm, it looks as if you hadn't any facts which will stand the acid test just yet," I replied flippantly; but the seriousness with which he received my commonplace rejoinder startled me.

"Morbleu, the acid test, do you say?" he exclaimed. "Dieu de Dieu de Dieu de Dieu, it may easily be so! Why did I not think of it before?