Page:Weird Tales volume 30 number 06.djvu/56

706 "The ancient curse has been fulfilled, the wicked one's condition met. A kinsman has shed kinsman's blood upon the property inherited!"

"Why"

Why' be doubled-damned and stewed in Satan's sauce-pan; I tell you it is so!" He swung his arm in an all-comprehensive gesture. "We have at once disposed of everything, my friend. The human villains who would murder you and Madame Pemberton, the working of the ancient curse pronounced so many years ago—all are eliminated!"

He leant above the body of a prostrate Indian, searching through his jacket with careful fingers. "Ah-ha, behold him!" he commanded. "Here is the thing that killed your so unfortunate retainer." He held a length of bamboo stick fitted at the end with something like a tuning-fork to which a rubber bulb was fixed. "Careful!" he warned as I reached out to touch it. "The merest prick of those sharp points is certain death."

Pressing the queer instrument against the wall, he pointed to twin spots of viscid, yellow liquid sticking to the stones. "Cobric acid—concentrated essence of the cobra's venom," he explained. "One drives these points into his victim's body—the sharp steel penetrates through clothing where a snake's fangs might not pierce—and pouf! enough snake-poison goes into the poor bne's veins to cause death in three minutes. Tiens, it is a clever little piece of devilment, n'est-ce-pas?"

"D'ye think we got 'em all?" asked Pemberton.

"Indubitably. Had there been more, they would have been here. Consider: First they set their foul beast on us, believing he will kill some one of us, at least. He does not return, and they are puzzled. Could it be that we disposed of him? They do not know, but they are worried. Anon they hear the strains of Indian music in the house. This are not the way things had been planned by them. There should be no celebration here. They wonder more, and come to see what happens. They observe Madame concluding her so lovely dance; they also see us all unharmed, and are about to use their knives when you forestall them with your pistol."

"But there were two Burmese at the railway station the other day, yet someone threw the knife intended to kill Doctor Trowbridge," objected Pemberton. "That would indicate a third one in reserve"

De Grandin touched the white man's sprawling body with the tip of his small shoe. "There was, my friend, and this is he," he answered shortly. "Your charming cousin, Monsieur Ritter. It was he who hid beside the tracks and hurled the knife when he beheld the mark of Kali. The Burmans knew friend Trowbridge; had it been one of them who lay in ambush he would not have wasted knife or energy in killing the wrong man, but Ritter had no other guide than the skull chalked on the car. Tenez, he threw the knife that killed the poor young man to death."

"How do you account for the fire that broke out just as Mrs. Pemberton had finished dancing?" I asked.

"There is no scientific explanation for it, at least no explanation known to modern chemistry or physics. We must seek deeper—farther—for its reason. Those Hindoo gurus, they know things. They can cast a rope into the air and make it stand so rigidly that one may climb it. They take a little, tiny seed and place it in the earth, and there, before your doubting eyes, it grows and puts forth leaves and flowers. Me, I have seen them take a piece of ordinary wood—my walking-stick, parbleu!—make passes