Page:Weird Tales Volume 3 Number 2 (1923-02).djvu/75

74 give, am alive, Arthur, even as you are alive, but our spheres are different. I still love you, and some day you will come to me. As a token of this, I will leave with yon the engagement ring you gave me in the long ago. I will drop it into your hand, as I must not touch you."

She slipped the ring from her finger and gave it to me,

"Farewell, beloved, I must return to my plane."

She wafted me a kiss—and was gone. For a fleeting moment a faintly luminous spiral marked the place where she had been.

HE station agent was a typical native who seemed both surprised and glad at my appearance. After I had bought my ticket, he ejected an inordinate quid of cut-plug and drawled:

"A fellow never knows how many friends he's got until he's daid. That fu'nal this afterroon was the biggest I've ever seen in these parts."

I nodded and inquired the time the train would arrive. He told me I had but a few minutes to wait.

"Great man, was Dr. DeBruce," remarked the station man as I took a seat in the vacant waiting room. "Everybody for miles 'round was at his fu'nal today. Did I see you thar?"

"What's that!" I ejaculated, the ticket falling from my hand.

"Dr. DeBruce's fu'nal today—thought thought have seen you thar," the man repeated, evidently not remarking my astonishment.

I understood—that is, if the realization that one has just finished talking with a man just buried can be classified as understanding of any sort.

It wasn't necessary to ask the man for particulars. Upon discovering I was not at the funeral, he was eager to tell the whole story. At least a hundred carriages and automobiles were there, he said, and hundreds of the physician's friends had come afoot, many from adjoining counties. His narrative drifted to the life DeBruce had led since coming to Clofton.

From the Southerner's drawl I was able to gather that DeBruce had devoted most of his time to caring for the sick and needy in the village and in the mountains, and bad never accepted a penny for his services. About two years before his death, however, his health began to decline; and thereafter he was seldom seen to leave his estate. It was rumored he had locked himself up with his books on science and "spiritism," as the native called it. Two days before my arrival at Clofton, a hillsman, calling at his house for medicine, had found him dead in his library. The coroner had pronounced it paralysis.

The fellow was still talking when the locomotive shrieked in the distance. Five minutes later it was speeding me northward.

ES, maybe it was all a dream—a nightmare superinduced by reminiscences there in the gloomy library. Yet I will swear I was awake through it all, and that it was no hallucination, no phantom of imagery, that related the story of a madman's crime—no incubus, that vision of Elsie.

If it was a dream, where did I get this ring?

Perhaps it is a matter for psycholosists and other delvers into the Unknown to investigate. As for me, Arthur Wrens, I repeat I will have none of it.

Woman Fails To Win Psychic Prize

{{di|T}{{uc|he Rev. Mrs. Josi K. Stewart}}, who tried to win the $2,500 prize offered by the Scientific American for real psychic phenomena, will not get the prize. That was made sufficiently clear today when the investigators for the publication disclosed their official report on the five seances with Mrs. Stewart.

The report accused the Cleveland mystic of trying to deceive the world and it answered Mrs. Stewart's recent request for some cool, scientific gentleman to explain how she got her spirit writings.

The sentence of the subcommittee which investigated Mrs, Stewart's "phenomena" and took evidence at her five seances, was as follows:

"Mrs, Stewart undertook to produce, for the Scientific American investigating committee, independent spirit writings upon cards supplied by the committee. The subcommittee in charge of Mrs. Stewart's sittings finds that she has failed to do this, she has produced writings only on cards brought to the sitting by her and substituted by her for those supplied by the committee.

"The subcommittee therefore rules that Mrs. Stewart has failed to produce any demonstrably genuine psychic phenomena and that her claim to the Scientific American's award and to the committee's further attention stands vacated. "J. Malcolm Bird, "Secretary, Subcommittee."

Mr. Bird added that scientific tests by the subcommittee had disclosed that on the first seance five cards were missing when the Rev. Mrs. Stewart left. He added that the investigators believed Mrs. Stewart took them with her and then obtained white index cards that looked like twins of the ones she took.