Page:Weird Tales Volume 12 Issue 06 (1928-12).djvu/15

 their belts while enjoying a noonday smoke and resting for a space from their gory trade before the entrance of an abattoir.

"Good heavens!" I gasped, turning from the grisly scene with a feeling of physical sickness. "This is terrible, de Grandin! What are we going to do?"

"Barbe et tête de Saint Denis, we do this!" he replied in a furious hissing voice. "Parbleu, shall Jules de Grandin be made a fool of twice in one night? Not if he knows it!"

Seizing a soap-rubber from the tray, he bent forward, and with half a dozen vigorous strokes reduced the picture to a meaningless smear of black and gray smudges.

"And now," he dusted his hands one against the other, as though to cleanse them of something foul, "let us to bed once more, my friend. I think we shall find something interesting to talk of tomorrow."

after breakfast next morning he found an excuse for separating Dunroe O'Shane from the rest of the company. "Will you not have pity on our loneliness, Mademoiselle?" he asked. "Here we lie, imprisoned in this great jail of a house, without so much as a radio program to cheer us through the morning hours. May we not trespass on your kindness and beg that you play for our delectation?"

"I play?" the girl answered with a half-incredulous smile. "Why, Dr. de Grandin, I don't know one note from another. I never played the piano in my life!"

"U'm?" He looked polite doubt as he twisted the ends of his mustache. "It is perhaps that I do not plead our cause fervently enough, Mademoiselle?"

"But truly, I can't play," she persisted

"That's right, Dr. de Grandin," one of the young men chimed in. "Dunroe's a whiz at drawing, but she's absolutely tone-deaf. Can't carry a tune in a basket. I used to go to school with her, and they always used to give her a job passing out programs or selling tickets when the class chorus sang."

De Grandin shot me a quick glance and shook his head wamingly.

"What does it mean?" I asked as soon as we were together once more. "She declares she can’t play, and her friends corroborate her, but"

"But stranger things have happened, and, mordieu, still stranger ones will happen again, or the presentiment which I have is nothing more than the consequences of a too-hearty breakfast!" he broke in with one of his quick, elfin smiles. "Let us play the silly fool, Friend Trowbridge; let us pretend to believe that the moon is composed entirely of green cheese and that mice terrorize the pussy-cat. So doing we shall learn more than if we attempt to appear filled with wisdom which we do not possess."

I know what let's do!" Miss Prettybridge, the lady of the scintillating teeth, whom de Grandin had squired to dinner the previous evening, exclaimed shortly after 10 o'clock that night. "This is such a wonderful, romantic old house—I'm sure it's just full of memories. Let's have a seance!"

"Fine, splendid, capital!" chorused a dozen voices. "Who'll be the medium? Anybody got a ouija board or a planchette table?"

"Order, order, please!" the self-constituted chairwoman rapped peremptorily on a bridge table with her lorgnette. "I know how to do it! We'll go into the dining-room and gather about the table. Then, when we've formed the mystic circle, if there are any spirits about we'll make 'em talk to us by rapping. Come on, everybody!"