Page:Weird Tales volume 11 number 02.pdf/58

Rh ? What then? The answer is simple. Me, I believe these three men who seemed but one to her, wore false beards and eyebrows—masks, perhaps—which were smeared with some sort of luminous paint, the better to simulate the popular conception of the Devil and terrify a girl already half insane with terror.

"Very well, let us proceed another step. The big young man who came upon us so suddenly, the man who claimed to know her and would have borne her off had I not argued with him with the heel of the boot — did he, too, not speak with the accent of the German tongue, even as she does? Surely. Beyond doubt, my friend, he was one of the three men with fiery faces who had addressed her a moment before, and who sought to take her from us when he thought we would rescue her.

"Another thing: I have noted the manners and customs of many men in many places, and I know the charms they employ against evil. 'What of that?' you ask. 'This,' I reply: 'Never does the American or Englishman make the sign of the horns to ward off the evil eye. That is distinctly a continental European custom.' Therefore, when I hear the negro nurse made the horns at Mademoiselle Mueller in the park I smell a fish in her story. Wherever that black woman—undoubtlessly herself an American—learned that sign, she did not learn it from an American. An American seeing her make that sign would have understood nothing from it; but Mademoiselle Mueller is no American. She is fresh from Europe, where that sign means something, and she understood what the negress meant when she made the horns at her—as it was intended she should."

"Well," I replied, "what’s your theory, then?"

"Simply this: The child who fled from Mademoiselle Mueller, the negro nurse who made the evil sign at her, the people who passed her in the street and turned away—all had been planted in her path for the purpose of wearing down her resistance, of obtaining her goat, as you Americans say. But listen: They demanded of her only two thousand dollars. Why? Because they thought she could get no more. Yet so elaborate a system as theirs surely would not have been organized for the tiny sum they demanded. No, men do not take elephant guns into the fields to hunt butterflies. This poor girl is but one of many victims these rogues have preyed upon. The Stoeger woman is one of their scouts who happened to fall upon her, but they must have imposed on many other foolish women—men, too, undoubtlessly, and therefore" He paused, his lips parted in an expectant grin, his little eyes gleaming with excitement and elation.

"All right; I’ll bite," I replied. "Therefore"

"Attend me, my friend," he replied irrelevantly; "have you ever been in India?"

"No!"

"Very good. I will tell you things. In that land the natives are much plagued by tigers, is it not so?"

"So I've heard."

"Parfaitement. When the white man comes to rid a community of the striped devil of the jungle, what does he do?"

"Do?"

"But of course! He climbs into a convenient tree and waits, does he not, and beneath the tree, for bait, he tethers a luckless goat, is it not so?"

"Why"

"Very good, my friend. You and I are the hunters. This gang of miscreants are the tigers. The unfortunate Mademoiselle Mueller is"

"Good heavens, man!" I exclaimed, the full purport of his scheme dawning on me. "You don't mean"