Page:Weird Tales v01n01 (1923-03).djvu/145

114 eccentric Dr. Calgroni could work in, unmolested.

I saw the peculiar doctor one morning as I was leaving the small post office. It was just after train time, and many of the villagers were loitering about the place, among them a young man named Jason Murdock.

Murdock was of that type one always hears of in a small community—the village "devil." He came of a good family, and had plenty of money and all that: but had succeeded, despite rich heritage-blood, in igniting more fire and brimstone than all five of the village preachers had in their imagination conceived. He was coarsely good-looking, and big and husky.

Aristocratic hoodlum though he was, all rather secretly admired the fellow, probably because he injected "pep" into the lazy old town.

I beheld Jason Murdock pointing to a shriveled-up figure of a little man, stooped of shoulder.

"There he goes—that Dr. Can-groan-ee, who's movin' into the Thornsdale place. I wonder if there's any good liquor in his cellar? That old Thornsdale dump has a good wine cellar."

Dr. Calgroni paid not the slightest attention to Jason's insolent babble, but walked hurriedly along, his clean-shaven, dried-up countenance turning neither to the right nor left.

"Who is that man?" I asked the postmaster, who had now come to the door for air.

"I dunno, excepting his mail is addressed Dr.—I'll have to spell it—C-A-L-G-R-O-N-I—and it is mostly foreign, out of Vienna, forwarded here from New York."

"Sort of a man of mystery, eh?" I hazarded.

"I should say he's sort of a fool for rentin' that old Thornsdale rat-trap, for God-knows-what, that's stood vacant these ten years."

I nodded and left in the direction taken by the doctor.

Here was an element of mystery; for I alone, of all the villagers, knew that this eminent surgeon's presence in Belleville boded ill.

SOON caught sight of the doctor.

For a man of his age and physique, his gait was exceedingly fast—as though propelled by a nervous dynamo.

Stretching my legs, I kept a safe distance between him and myself, until he swung open the tall wooden gate and quickly vanished through the wilderness of tall bushes and low trees into the Thornsdale house. I halted safe from observation and lighted my pipe.

Leaning against a tree there, I ran over in my mind the odd significance of that remarkable article I had recently read in the staid and ever-authentic Surgical Monthly.

This Dr. Calgroni, it appeared, had stated to the interviewer that he was here from Austria on a vacation—and to feel out the opinions of American surgeons anent his new theory. One Herr von Meine, a noted surgeon of Vienna, he added with some asperity, had scoffed at the absurdity and unorthodox idea of the unprecedented theory advanced by him, and had declared that his, Calgroni's, operation was extremely impossible, not to say foolish—that it would never be a success.

Dr. Calgroni claimed that he could prolong a human life indefinitely by the insertion of a live thighthyroid [sic] gland from a young quadrumanous mammal, such as the Pithecoid.

Much discussion and argument had been provoked throughout the entire medical world by the famous doctor's The Extraordinary Experiment of Dr. [sic] theory, and consensus was that he was an impracticable theorist gone mad.

And now here was Dr. Calgroni, living in the quiet little town of Belleville, where none was aware of his sensational hypothesis, renting this immense old ramshackle place, and his remarkable intent known to no one but himself.

I had taken a seat on a tree stump, in front of the gate, which had a ring stapled to it, used in former days as a hitching post. Time hung heavily upon me in Belleville, but this new element of mystery promised some possible interest and excitement.

Having sat there until my pipe was empty and cold, I was aroused by the