Page:Weird Tales Volume 7 Number 5 (1926-05).djvu/43

Rh With the ejaculation he dodged suddenly downward, almost falling to the floor in his haste to avoid the flashing, white object which dashed at his face.

Nor was his dodge a split-second too soon. Like the lid of a boiling kettle, the top of the shoe box had lifted, and the slender, quiescent hand which lay within had leaped through the opening, risen throat-high in the air and hurtled across the intervening space like a quarrel from a crossbow. With delicate, firm-muscled fingers outspread, it swooped through the air like a pouncing hawk, missed de Grandin’s throat by the barest fraction of a second—and fastened itself, snapping like a strong-springed steel-trap, in the puffy flesh sagging over the collar of Willis Richards' dress shirt.

"Ah—ulp!" gasped, or, rather, croaked, the startled financier, falling backward in his chair and tearing futilely at the eldritch thing which sank its long, pointed nails into his purple skin. "Ah—God, it’s choking me!"

Costello was at his side, striving with all his force to pry those white, slender fingers open. He might as well have tried to wrench apart the clasp of a chrome-steel handcuff.

"Non, non," de Grandin shouted, "not that way, Sergeant. It is useless!"

Leaping across the room he jerked open the door of my instrument case, seized an autopsy knife and dashed his shoulder against the burly detective, almost sending him sprawling. Next instant, with the speed and precision of an expert surgeon, he was dissecting away the deadly white fingers fastened in Richards' dewlap.

"C'est complet," he announced matter-of-factly as he finished his grisly task. "A restorative, if you please, Friend Trowbridge, and an antiseptic dressing for the wounds from the nails. He will not suffer un- necessarily."

Wheeling, he seized the receiver from my desk telephone and called authoritatively: "Allo, allo, the jail, if you please, Mademoiselle Central!"

There was a brief parley, finally he received his connection, then: "Allo, Monsieur le Geôlier, can you tell me of Professor Mysterio, please? How is he; what does he do?"

A pause: "Ah, do you say so? I thought as much. Many thanks, Monsieur."

He turned to us, a look of satisfaction on his face. "My friends," he announced solemnly, "Professor Mysterio is no more. Two minutes ago the authorities at the city prison heard him call out distinctly in a loud voice, 'Katie, kill the Frenchman; I command you. Kill him!' When they rushed to his cell to discover the cause for his cries they were but in time to see him dash himself from his bed, having first bound his waist-belt firmly to his throat and the top of his barred door. The fall broke his neck. He died before they could cut him down.

"Eh bien," he shook himself like a spaniel emerging from a pond, " 'twas a lucky thing for me I saw that box top begin to lift and had the sense to dodge those dead fingers. None of you would have thought of the knife, I fear, before the thing had strangled my life away. As it is, I acted none too soon for Monsieur Richards' good."

Still red in the face, but regaining his self-possession under my ministrations, Willis Richards sat up in his chair. "If you’ll give me my property, I’ll be getting out of this hell-house," he announced gruffly, reaching for the jewels and bonds de Grandin had placed on the desk.

"Assuredly, Monsieur," de Grandin agreed. "But first you will comply with the law, n’est-ce-pas? You have offered a reward of five thousand