Page:Weird Tales Volume 6 Number 3 (1925-09).djvu/68

Rh ter just the day before she died? Well, sir, the very night the poor lamb went away I went a-tiptoe into her room to kiss her good-night, and she was lying in bed, staring at me with her big blue eyes like a little child lost in the woods. "Did you put my comb on the bed, daddy?" she asked as I came into the room.

Comb, child? What comb?" I asked, curious to know what she meant.

My big comb, there," she says, and points to the foot of the bed where, lying on the folded comfort, was the big Spanish tortoise-shell comb her Uncle Timothy, who was a sea captain in the Lamport and Holt service, had brought her from Barcelona for a gift on her fifteenth birthday. She always kept the trinket in a blue velvet case on her dressing table, and most of the time the case was locked, for you never can tell when a servant will pick up a piece of bric-a-brac like that and make off with it.

It was in the case this morning, I’m sure," she told me, "for Miss Jarvis, the nurse, was admiring it then; but just now I chanced to look at the foot of the bed, and there it was, shining in the electric light more beautifully than I’d ever seen it glisten before."

It must have got put there by mistake, child," I told her as I picked the thing up and restored it to its case; but there was a feeling of dread running through me as I spoke, for I recalled the message I’d had.

That very morning the angel came for her, doctor. You yourself remember how we called you from your bed past midnight, and how her little white soul had gone to heaven before you could get here?'

Yes; I remember, Pat,' I anasweredanswered [sic] soothingly, 'but what has all this to do with your getting well?'

Just this, doctor,' he replied earnestly. 'Mary Ann’s room has been left untouched, save for the necessary cleaning, since the day we took her from it, and the comb has always lain in its velvet case on her dressing table, exactly as I put it the night she died. Last night, sir, as I was lying here, trying to sleep, and not able to for the way my thoughts kept turning on Mary Ann, I felt a soft thump on the foot of my bed, as though a cat had leaped up there. Dr. Applegate, sir, it was my daughter’s comb lying there, though the Holy Mother herself only knows how it came down a flight of stairs and through two closed doors to get there.

I’ve had the sign, doctor. You mean well, and your medicine’s as good as any; but there’s nothing you can do. ’Tis a priest I need to doctor my sinful soul, not a medical man to patch my body up, sir.'

H’m, where is this comb?' I asked.

Upstairs, in Mary Ann’s room,' he answered.

Well, then, Patrick,' I told him, 'here’s where we play a Yankee trick on this old-country goblin of yours. I’m going to take that comb home with me, and lock it in my office safe, and if "Itself" comes snooping around my place I’ll give him a dose of medicine that’ll send him back to Ireland by the non-stop route.'

"He grinned wanly at my suggestion as he answered, 'All right, doctor, do as you please, but it’s no use. I’ve had the sign and nothing earthly can help me now.'

an hour later I left the O’Loughlin house, the blue velvet case containing the carved tortoise-shell comb under my arm. I locked the thing securely in my wall safe, attended to my office calls, ate dinner and went to the club for a rubber of bridge.

"It must have been just past midnight when I got back to the house, for the policeman on our beat was putting in his call at the patrol box