Vampire Books Online / The Man Who Cast No Shadow

"A low, hopeless moan, like the wailing of a frozen wind through an ice-cave, wafted up from the depths of the grave."

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"BUT no, my friend," Jules de Grandin shook his sleek, blond head decidedly and grinned across the breakfast table at me, "we will go to this so kind Madame Norman's tea, of a certainty. Yes."

"But hang it all," I replied, giving Mrs. Norman's note an irritable shove with my coffee spoon, "I don't want to go to a confounded tea-party! I'm too old and too sensible to dress up in a tall hat and a long coat

and listen to the vaporings of a flock of silly flappers. I——"

"Mordieu, hear the savage!" de Grandin chuckled delightedly. "Always does he find excuses for not giving pleasure to others, and always does he frame those excuses to make him more important in his own eyes. Enough of this, Friend Trowbridge; let us go to the kind Madame Norman's party. Always there is something of interest to be seen if one but knows where to look for it."

"H'm, maybe," I replied grudgingly, "but you've better sight than I

think you have if you can find anything worth seeing at an afternoon reception."

THE reception was in full blast when we arrived at the Norman mansion in Tunlaw Avenue that afternoon. The air was heavy with the commingled odors of half a hundred different perfumes and the scent of hot-poured jasmine tea, while the clatter of cup on saucer, of shook the buzzing conversation filled the wide hall and dining room. In the long double parlors the rugs had been rolled back and young men in frock coats glided over the polished parquetry in company with girls in provocatively short skirts to the belching melody of a saxophone and the drumming rhythm of a piano.

"Pardieu," de Grandin murmured as he viewed the dancers a moment, "your American youth take their pleasures with seriousness, Friend Trowbridge. Behold their faces. Never a smile, never a laugh. They might be recruits on the parade for all the joy they show—ah!" He broke off abruptly, gazing with startled, almost horrified, eyes after a couple whirling in the maze of a foxtrot near the far end of the room. "Nom d'un fromage," he murmured softly to himself, "this matter will bear investigating, I think!"

"Eh, what's that?" I asked, piloting him toward our hostess.

"Nothing; nothing, I do assure you," he answered as we greeted Mrs. Norman and passed toward the dining room. But I noticed his round, blue eyes ranged over our company as we drank our tea and exchanged amiable nothings with a pair of elderly ladies.

"Pardon," de Grandin bowed stiffly from his hips to his conversational partner and turned toward the rear drawing room, "there is a gentlemen here I desire to meet, if you do not

mind—that tall, distinguished one, with the young girl in pink."

"Oh, I guess you mean Count Czerny," a young man laden with an ice in one hand and a glass of non-Volstead punch in the other paused on his way from the dining room. "He's a rare bird, all right. I knew him back in '13 when the Balkan Allies were polishing off the Turks. Queer-lookin' duck, ain't he? First-rate fighter, though. They say, I saw him lead a bayonet charge right into the Turkish lines one day, and when he'd shot his pistol empty he went at the enemy with his teeth! Yes, sir, he grabbed a Turk with both hands and bit his throat out, hanged if he didn't."

"Czerny," de Grandin repeated musingly. "He is a Pole, perhaps?"

His informant laughed a bit shamefacedly. "Can't say," he confessed. "The Serbs weren't asking embarrassing questions about volunteers' nationalities those days, and it wasn't considered healthful for any of us to do, either. I got the impression he was a Hungarian refugee from Austrian vengeance; but that's only hearsay. Come along, I'll introduce you, if you wish."

The Frenchman was a bare five feet four inches tall, slender as a girl, and, like a girl, possessed of almost laughably small hands and feet. His light hair and fair skin, coupled with his trimly waxed diminutive mustache and large, somewhat misleading blue eyes, gave him a curiously misleading appearance of mildness. His companion was at least six feet tall, swarthy-skinned and black-haired, with bristling black mustaches and fierce, slate-gray eyes set beneath beetling black brows. His large nose was like the predatory beak of some

bird of prey, and the tilt of his long, pointed jaw bore out the uncompromising ferocity of the rest of his visage. Across his left cheek, extending upward over the temple and into his hair, was a knife- or saber-scar, a great, livid white cicatrix that had the steel in his scalp, and shining like silver inlaid in oxnyx against the blue-black of his smoothly pomaded locks.

What they said was, of course, beyond reach of my ears, but I saw de Grandin's quick, almost smile flicker across his keen face more than once, to be answered by a slow, languorous smile on the other's dark countenance.

At length the count bowed formally to my friend and whirled away with a wisp of a girl, while de Grandin returned to me. At the door he paused a moment, inclining his shoulders in a salute as a couple of debutantes brushed past him. Something—I know not what—drew my attention to the tall foreigner a moment, and a sudden chill rippled up my spine at what I saw. Above the georgette-clad shoulder of his dancing partner the count's slate-gray eyes were fixed on de Grandin's trim back, and in them I read all the cold, passionless fury with which a caged tiger regards its keeper as he passes the bars.

"What on earth did you say to that fellow?" I asked as the little Frenchman rejoined me. He looked as if he would like to murder you."

"Ha!" he gave a questioning, single-syllabled laugh. "Did he so? Obey the noble Washington's injunction, and avoid foreign entanglements, Friend Trowbridge; it is better so, I think."

IT MUST have been some two weeks later that I chanced to remark to de Grandin, "I saw your friend, Count Czerny, in New York yesterday—"

"Indeed?" he answered with what seemed like more than necessary interest. "And how did he impress you at the time?"

"Oh, I just happened to pass him on Fifth Avenue," I replied. "I'd been up to see an acquaintance in Fifty-ninth Street and was turning

meet that gentleman, after all. I may not have the good Madame Norman introduce you."

More puzzled than ever, I followed him to our hostess and waited while he requested her to present me to the count.

In a lull in the dancing she complied with his request, and the foreigner acknowledged the introduction with a brief handeclasp and an almost churlish nod, then turned his back on us to continue an animated conversation with the large-eyed young woman in an abbreviated party frock.

"And did you shake his hand?" de Grandin asked as we descended the Normans' steps to my waiting car.

"Yes, of course," I replied.

"Ah? Tell me, my friend, did you notice anything—ah—peculiar, in his grip?"

"H'm." I wrinkled my brow a moment in concentrated thought. "Yes, I believe I did."

"So? What was it?"

"Hanged if I can say, exactly," I admitted. "It seemed—this sounds absurd, I know—but it seemed as though his hand had two backs—no palm at all—if that means anything to you."

"It means very much, my friend; it means a very great deal," he answered with such a solemn nod that I burst into a fit of laughter. "Believe me, it means much more than you suspect."

into the avenue when I saw him driving away from the Plaza. He seemed to be in company with some ladies."

"No doubt," de Grandin responded dryly. "Did you notice him particularly?"

"Can't say that I did, especially," I answered, "but it seems to me he looked older than the day we met him at Mrs. Norman's."

"Yes?" the Frenchman leaned forward eagerly. "Older, do you say? Parbleu, this is of interest; I suspected as much!"

"Why——" I began, but he turned away with an impatient shrug. "Pah!" he exclaimed petulantly. "Friend Trowbridge, I fear Jules de Grandin is a fool, he entertains all sorts of strange notions."

I had known the little Frenchman long enough to realize that he was as full of moods as a prima donna, but his erratic, unrelated remarks were getting on my nerves. "See here, de Grandin," I began testily, "what's all this nonsense——"

The sudden shrill clatter of my office telephone bell cut me short. "Dr. Trowbridge," an agitated voice asked over the wire, "can you come right over, please? This is Mrs. Norman speaking." "Yes, of course," I answered, reaching for my medicine case; "what is it—who's ill?"

"It's—it's Guy Eckhart, he's been taken with a fainting fit. We just don't seem to be able to rouse him."

"Very well," I promised, "Dr. de Grandin and I will be right over."

"Come on, de Grandin," I called as I shoved my hat down over my ears and shrugged into my overcoat, "one of Mrs. Norman's house guests has been taken ill; I told her we were coming."

"Mais oui," he agreed, hurrying into his outdoors clothes. "Is it a man or a woman, this sick one?"

"It's a man," I replied, "Guy Eckhart."

"A man," he echoed incredulously. "A man, do you say? No, no, my friend, that is not likely."

"Likely or not," I rejoined sharply, "Mrs. Norman says he's been seized with a fainting fit, and I give the lady credit for knowing what she's talking about."

"Eh bien," he drummed nervously on the cushions of the automobile seat, "perhaps Jules de Grandin really is a fool. After all, it is not impossible."

"It certainly isn't," I agreed fervently to myself as I set the car in motion.

YOUNG Eckhart had recovered consciousness when we arrived, but looked like a man just emerging from a lingering fever. Attempts to get a statement from him met with no response, for he replied slowly, almost incoherently, and seemed to have no idea concerning the cause of his illness.

Mrs. Norman was little more specific. "My son Ferdinand found him lying on the floor of his bath with the shower going and the window wide open, just before dinner," she explained. "He was totally unconscious, and remained so till just a few minutes ago."

"Ha, is it so?" de Grandin murmured half heedlessly, as he made a rapid inspection of the patient. "Friend Trowbridge," he called me to the window, "what do you make of these objective symptoms: a soft, frequent pulse, a fluttering heart, suffused eyes, a hot, dry skin and flushed cheeks?"

"Sounds like an arterial hemorrhage," I answered promptly, "but there's been no trace of blood on the boy's floor, nor any evidence of a stab wound or cut. Sure you've checked the signs over?"

"Absolutely," he replied with a vigorous double nod. Then to the

young man: "Now, mon enfant, we shall inspect you, if you please."

Quickly he examined the boy's face, scalp, throat, wrists and calves, finding no evidence of even a pinprick, let alone a wound capable of causing syncope.

"Mon Dieu, this is strange," he muttered, "yet surety this has the queerness of the devil! Perhaps the bleeding is internal, but—ah, regardez vous, Friend Trowbridge!"

He had turned down the collar of the youngster's pajama jacket, more in petulant despair of finding anything tangible, but the livid spot to which he pointed seemed the key to our mystery's outer door. Against the smooth, white flesh of the young man's left breast there showed a red, angry patch, such as might have resulted from a vacuum cup being held some time against the skin, and in the center of the discoloration was a double row of tiny punctures, searce an inch apart, like needle-pricks, arranged in horizontal divergent arcs, like a pair of parentheses laid sidewise.

"You see?" he asked simply, as though the queer, blood-infused spot explained everything.

"But he couldn't have bled much through that," I protested. "Why, the man seems almost drained dry, and these wounds wouldn't have yielded more than a cubic centimeter of blood at most."

He nodded gravely. "Blood is not entirely colloidal, my friend," he responded. "It will penetrate the tissues to some extent, especially if suction is applied outward."

"But it would have required a powerful suction——" I replied, when his rejoinder cut me short:

"Ha, you have said it, my friend. Suction. Powerful suction!"

"But what could have sucked a man's blood like this?" I was in a near-stupor of mystification.

"What, indeed?" he replied gravely. "That is for us to find out. Meantime, we are here as physicians. A quarter-grain morphine injection is indicated here, I think. You will administer the dose; I have no license in America."

WHEN I returned from my round of afternoon calls next day I found de Grandin seated on my front steps in close conference with Indian John.

Indian John was a town character of doubtful lineage who performed odd jobs of snow shoveling, furnace tending and grass cutting, according to season, and interspersed his manual labors with brief incursions into the mercantile field when he peddled fresh vegetables from door to door. He also peddled neighborhood gossip and retailed local lore to all who would listen, his claim to being a hundred years old giving him the standing of an indisputable authority in all matters antedating living memory.

"Pardieu, but you have told me much, mon vieux," de Grandin declared as I came up the porch steps. He handed the old rascal a handful of silver and rose to accompany me into the house.

"Friend Trowbridge," he accused as we finished dinner that night, "you had not told me that this town grew up on the site of an early Swedish settlement."

"Never knew you wanted to know," I defended with a grin.

"You know the ancient Swedish church, perhaps," he persisted.

"Oh, that's old Christ Church," I answered. "It's down in the east end of town; don't suppose it has a hundred communicants today. Our population has made some big changes, but the shoulders were no mince since the days when the Dutch and Swedes fought for possession of New Jersey."

"You will drive me to that church, right away, immediately?" he demanded eagerly.

"I guess so," I agreed. "What's the matter now; Indian John been telling you a lot of fairy-tales?"

"Parbleu," he replied, regarding me with one of his steady, unwinking stares. "Not all fairy-tales are pleasant, you know. Do you recall those of Chaperon Rouge—how do you say it, Red Riding Hood?—and Bluebeard?"

"Huh!" I scoffed; "they're both as true as any of John's stories, I'll bet."

"Undoubtedly," he agreed with a quick nod. "The story of Bluebeard, for instance, is unfortunately a very true tale indeed. But come, let us hasten; I would see that church to-night, if I may."

CHRIST CHURCH, the old Swedish place of worship, was a combined demonstration of how firmly adze-hewn pine and walnut can resist the ravage of time and how nearly two hundred years of weather can demolish any structure erected by man. Its rough-painted walls and short, firm-based spire shone ghostly and pallid in the early spring moonlight, and the old and weathered, moss-grown tombstones which staggered up from its unkempt burying ground were like soiled white chicks seeking shelter from a soiled white hen.

Dismounting from the car at the wicket gate of the churchyard, we made our way over the level graves, I in a maze of wonderment, de Grandin with an eagerness almost childish. Once he stopped, throwing the beam from his electric torch on some monument of an early settler, bent to decipher the worn inscription, then turned away with a sigh of disappointment.

I paused to light a cigar, but dropped my half-burned match in astonishment as my companion gave

went to a cry of excited pleasure. "Triomphe!" he exclaimed delightedly. "Come and behold, Friend Trowbridge. Thus far your lying friend, the Indian man, has told the truth. Regardez!"

He was standing beside an old, weather-gray tombstone of white marble, perhaps, but appearing more like brown sandstone under the ray of his flashlight. Across its upper end was deeply cut the one word:

SARAH

while below the name appeared a verse of half-obliterated doggerel:

Let nonne diffame her deathlesse Sleepe Above this Tombe while garlike grope For if thee wake much woe will beate Pragfe Falther, Sonne & Holie Goaft.

"Did you bring me out here to study the orthographical eccentricities of the early settlers?" I demanded.

"Ah bah!" he returned. "Let us consult the ecclesiastique. He, perhaps, will ask us no fool's questions."

"No, you'll do that," I answered tartly as we knocked at the rectory door.

"Pardon, Monsieur," de Grandin apologized as the white-haired old minister appeared in answer to our summons, "we do not wish to disturb you thus, but there is a matter of great import on which we would consult you. I would that you tell us what you can, if anything, concerning a certain grave in your churchyard labeled 'Sarah, if you please."

"Why"—the elderly clerie was plainly puzzled—"I don't think there is anything I can tell you about it, sir. There is some mention in the early parish records, I believe, of a woman believed to have been a member of one of the older families, but it seems the poor creature was more sinned against than sinning. Several children in the neighborhood

died mysteriously—some epidemic the ignorant physicians didn't understand, no doubt—and Sarah, whatever the poor woman's surname may have been, was accused of killing them by witchcraft. At any rate, one of the bereft mothers took vengeance, I understand, by coming one night and strangling poor Sarah with a nose-well-rope. The witchcraft belief must have been quite prevalent, too, for there is some nonsense verse on the tombstone which seems to mention 'sleep' and an allusion to her waking from it; also some mention of wild garlic being planted about her."

He laughed somewhat ruefully. "I wish they didn't say all that," he added, "for, do you know, there are garlic shoots growing about that grave to this very day. Old Christian, our sexton, declares that he can't get rid of it, no matter how much he grubs it up. It spreads to the surrounding lawn," he added sadly.

"Cordieu!" de Grandin gasped. "This is of the importance, sir!"

The old man smiled gently at the little Frenchman's imperious tone. "It's an odd thing," he commented, "there was another gentleman asking about that same tomb a few weeks ago; a—pardon the expression—a foreigner. You say?"

"So?" de Grandin's little, waxed mustache twitched like the whiskers of a nervous tom-cat. "A foreigner, do you say! A tall, rawboned, flesh-less looking person, with a white scar on his face and a white streak in his hair?"

"I wouldn't be quite so severe in my description," the other answered with a smile. "He certainly was a thin gentleman, and I believe he had a scar on his face, too, though I can't be certain of that, he was so very wrinkled. No, his hair was entirely white, there was no white streak in it, sir. In fact, I should have said he was very advanced in age, judging from his hair and face and the man-

ner in which he walked. He seemed very weak and feeble. It was really quite pitiable."

"Sacré nom d'un fromage vert!" de Grandin almost snarled. "Pitiable, do you say, Monsieur? Pardiable, it is damnable, nothing less!"

He bowed to the clergyman and snatched suddenly at my arm. "Come, Friend Trowbridge, come away," he cried. "We must go to Madame Norman's at once, right away, immediately."

WHAT'S behind all this mystery?" I demanded as we left the parsonage door.

He elevated his slender shoulders in an eloquent shrug. "I only wish I knew," he replied. "Someone is working the devil's business, of that I am sure; but what the game is, what the next move will be, only the good God can tell, my friend."

I turned the car through Tunlaw Street to effect a short-cut, and as we drove past an Italian green grocery at Dean an' Tunlaw Street, "Stop a moment, Friend Trowbridge," he asked, "I would make a purchase at this shop."

"We desire some fresh garlic," he informed the proprietor as we entered the fragrant store, "a considerable amount, if you have it."

The Italian spread his hands in a deprecating gesture. "We have it not, Signor," he declared. "It was yesterday we sold the last of our supply." His little black eyes snapped happily at the memory of an unexpected bargain.

"Eh, what is this?" de Grandin demanded. "How do you say you sold your supply? How did that?"

"I know not," the other replied. "Yesterday morning a rich gentleman came to my shop in an automobile, and called me from my store. To him I show the garlic I had in stock—at my own price, Signor, and at once. I was to deliver it to his

address in Rupleysville the same day."

"Ah?" de Grandin's face assumed the expression of a cross-word fiend as he begins to see the solution of his puzzle. "And this liberal purchaser, what did he look like?"

The Italian showed his white, even teeth in a wide grin. "It was funny," he confessed. "He did not look like one of our people, nor like one who would eat much garlic. He was old, very old and thin, with a much-wrinkled face and white hair, he——"

"Nom d'un chat!" the Frenchman burst into a flood of torrential Italian.

The shopkeeper listened at first with suspicion, then incredulity, finally in abject terror. "No, Signor; santissima Madonna, you do make the joke!"

"Do I so!" de Grandin replied. "Wait and see, foolish one."

"Santo Dio forbid!" The other crossed himself piously, then bent his thumb across his palm, circling it with his second and third fingers and extending the fore and little fingers in the form of a pair of horns.

The Frenchman turned toward the waiting car with a grunt of inarticulate disgust.

"What now?" I asked as we got under way once more; "what did that man mean by the sign of the evil eye, de Grandin?"

"Later, my friend; I will tell you later," he answered. "You would but laugh if I told you what I suspect. He is of the Latin blood, and can Indian John tell you no more; he is the old baron's man, and I doubt not he did this deed for pure malice and deviltry."

DE TROWBRIDGE—de Grandin met us in the hall; "you must have heard my prayers; I've been 'phoning your office for the last hour, and they said

you were out and couldn't be reached."

"Tell me, Monsieur," de Grandin cried as he thrust the hostelry's door open with his foot and brandished his slender ebony cane before the astonished proprietor's eyes, "tell me of un vieillard—an old, old man with snow-white hair and an evil face, who has lately come to this so detestable place. I would know where to find him, right away, immediately, at once!"

"Say," the boniface demanded truculently, "where d'ye git that stuff? Who are you to be askin' questions?"

"That'll do"—Costello shouldered his way past de Grandin and displayed his badge—"you answer this gentleman's questions, an' answer 'em quick an' accurate, or I'll run you in, see?"

The innkeeper's defiant attitude melted before the detective's show of authority like frost before the sunrise. "Guess you must mean Mr. Zerny," he replied sulkily. "He come here about a month ago an' rented the Hazelton house, down th' road about a mile. Comes up to town for provisions every day or two, and stops here sometimes for a meal." He halted abruptly, his face suffused with a dull flush.

"Yeah?" Costello replied. "Go on an' say it; we all know what he stops here for, an' we all know what 'Rudy' stabbed the air two inches before the man's face with a blunt forefinger—"I don't know whether this Zerny felly's got a tellyphome or not, but if he has, you just lay off tellin' him we're coming, an' if anyone's tipped him th' office when we git to his place I'm comin' back here and plaster more padlocks on this place o' yours than Sousa's got men on his blouse. Savvy?"

"Come away, Sergent; come away, Friend Trowbridge," de Grandin besought almost tearfully. "'Bandy not

at the mouth when I drew up before the local apology for a hotel.

"Down the road we raced in the direction indicated by the hotelkeeper, till the picket fence and broken shutters of the Hazelton house showed among a rank copse of second-growth pines at the bend of the highway.

The shrewd wind of early spring was moaning and soughing among the black boughs of the pine trees as we made our way toward the house, and, though it was bright with sunshine on the road, there was chill and shadow about us as we climbed the sagging steps of the old building's ruined porch and paused breathlessly before the paintless front door.

"Shall I knock?" Costello asked dubiously, involuntarily sinking his voice to a whisper.

"But no," de Grandin answered in a low voice, "what we have to do here must be done quietly, my friends."

He leaned forward and tried the doorknob with a light, tentative touch. The door gave under his hand, swinging inward on protesting hinges, and we tiptoed into a dark, dust-carpeted hall. A shaft of sunlight, struggling through a chink in one of the window shutters, showed innumerable dust-motes idly laying in the air, and laid a bright oval of light against the warped floor.

"Huh, empty as a pork-butcher's in Jerusalem," Costello commented disgustedly, looking about the unfurnished rooms, but de Grandin seized him by the elbow with one hand and pointed toward the floor with the ferrule of his slender ebony walking stick.

"Empty, perhaps," he conceded in a low, vibrant whisper, "but not recently, mon ami." Where the sunbeam splashed on the uneven floor there showed distinctly the mark of a booted foot, two marks—a trail of

them leading toward the rear of the house.

"Right y'are," the detective agreed. "Someone's left his track here, an' no mistake."

"Ha!" de Grandin bent forward till it seemed the tip of his mustache would impinge on the tracks. "Gentlemen," he rose and pointed forward into the gloom with a dramatic flourish of his cane, "they are here! Let us go!"

Through the gloomy hall we followed the trail by the aid of Costello's flashlight, stepping carefully to avoid creaking boards as much as possible. At length the marks stopped at a door in the center of what had formerly been the kitchen. A disturbance in the dust told where the walker had doubled on his tracks in a short circle, and a ringbolt in the floor gave notice that we stood above a trap-door of some sort.

"Careful, Friend Costello," de Grandin warned, "have ready your flashlight when I fling back the trap. Beady, mon ami? Maintenant!"

He bent, seized the rusty ringbolt and heaved the trap-door back so violently that it flew back with a thundering crash on the floor beyond.

The cavern had originally been a cellar for the storage of food, it seemed, and was brick-walled and earth-floored, without window or ventilation opening of any sort. A smell of decay assailed our nostrils as we leaned forward, but further impressions were blotted out by the sight directly beneath us.

White as a figure of carved alabaster, a girl lay in sharp reverse silhouette against the darkness of the cavern floor, her ankles crossed and firmly lashed to a stake in the earth, one hand doubled behind her back to the position of a wrestler's hammerlock grip, and made firm to a peg in the floor, while the left arm was extend-

ed straight outward, its wrist pinnioned to another stake. Her luxuriant fair hair had been knotted together at the ends, then staked to the ground, so that her head was drawn far back, exposing her rounded throat to the dim light, and on the earth beneath her left breast and beside her throat stood two porcelain bowls.

Crouched over her was the relie of a man, an old, old, hideously wrinkled and withered man, with an unkempt mat of rich-brown hair and beard. In one hand he held a long, gleaming, double-edged dirk while with the other he caressed the girl's smooth throat with gloating strokes of his skeleton fingers.

"Bonjour, Monsieur le Vampire!" Jules de Grandin greeted nonchalantly, leaping to the earth beside the pinioned girl and waving his walking stick airily. "By the horns of the devil, but you have led us a merry chase, Baron Lajos Czuczron of Transylvania!"

The crouching creature emitted a bellow of fury and leaped toward de Grandin, brandishing his knife.

The Frenchman gave ground with a quick, backward step, whipped his slender cane in both hands near the top. Next instant he had ripped the lower part of the stick away, displaying a fine, three-edged blade set in the cane's handle, and swung his point in the old monster's breast. "Thought you'd not expect this, old friend? The centuries have been long, now vieux; but the reckoning has come at last. Say,

now, will you die by the steel, or by starvation?"

The aged monster fairly champed his gleaming teeth in fury. His eyes seemed larger, rounder, to gleam like the eyes of a dog in the firelight, as he launched himself toward the little Frenchman.

"Sa-ha!" the Frenchman sank backward on one foot, then straightened suddenly forward, stiffening his sword arm and charging his point directly into the charging beast-man's distended, red mouth. A scream of mingled rage and pain filled the cavern with deafening shrillness, and the monster half turned, as though on an invisible pivot, clawed with horrid impotences at the wire-fine blade of de Grandin's rapier, then sank slowly to the earth, his death cry stilled to a sickening gurgle as his throat filled with blood.

"Fini!" de Grandin commented laconically, drawing out his handkerchief and wiping his blade with meticulous care, then cutting the unconscious girl's bonds with his pocket-knife. "Drop down your overcoat, Friend Trowbridge," he added, "that we may cover the poor child's nudity until we can piece out a wardrobe for her."

"Now, then"—as he raised her to her feet he raised to Costello and I extended into the pit—"if we clothe her in the motor rug, your jacket, Sergent, and Friend Trowbridge's vest and shoes, she will be safe from the chill. Parbleu, I have seen women refugees from the Boche who could not boast so complete a toilette!"

WITH Esther Norman, hastily clothed in her patchwork assortment of garments, wedged in the front seat between de Grandin and me, we began our triumphant journey home.

"An' would ye mind tellin' me how ye knew where to look for th'

young lady, de Grandin, sor?" Detective Sergeant Costello asked respectfully, leaning forward from the rumble seat of the car.

"Wait, wait, my friend," de Grandin replied with a smile, "when our duties are all performed I shall tell you such a tale as shall make your two eyes pop outward like a snail's. First, however, you must go with us to restore this pauvre enfant to her mother's arms; then to the headquarters to report the death of that sale bete. Friend Trowbridge shall stay with him as long as he deems necessary, and I shall remain with him to help. Then, this evening—with your consent, Friend Trowbridge—you will dine with us, Sergent, and I will tell everything, in total. Death of my life, what a tale it is! Parbleu, but you shall call me a liar many times before it is finished!"

JULES DE GRANDIN placed his demitasse on the tabouret and refilled his liqueur glass. "My friends," he began, turning his quick, elfsh smile first on Costello, then on me, "I have promised you a remarkable tale. Very well, then, to begin."

He flicked a wholly imaginary fleck of dust from his dinner jacket sleeve and crossed his slender, womanishly small feet on the hearth rug.

"Do you recall, Friend Trowbridge, the tea given by the good Madame Norman? Yes? Perhaps, then, you will recall how at the entrance of the ballroom I stopped with a look of astonishment on my face. Very good. At that moment I saw the thing that made me disbelieve the evidence of my own two eyes. As the gentleman we later met as Count Czerny danced

past a mirror on the wall I beheld— parbleu! what do you suppose?—the reflection only of his dancing partner! It was as if the man had been non-existent, and the young lady had danced past the mirror by herself.

"Now, such a thing was not likely, I admit; you, Sergent, and you, too, Friend Trowbridge, will say it was not impossible, but in certain circumstances it is possible for that which we can see with our eyes to cast no shadow in a mirror. Let that point wait a moment; we have other evidence to examine first.

"When the young man told us of the count's prowess in battle, of his incomparable ferocity, I began to believe that which I had at first disbelieved, and when he told us the count was a Hungarian, I began to believe more than ever.

"I met the count, as you will remember, and I took his hand in mine. Parbleu, it was like a hand with no palm—it had hairs on both sides of it! You know, Friend Trowbridge, that among other histories I have received from the Sureté Générale—what you call the Police Headquarters of Paris—is not like your English and American Bureau—there is a matter however seemingly absurd, which come to that office are carefully noted down for future reference. Among other histories I have received one concerning a man of that of one Baron Lajos Czuczron of Transylvania, whose actions had once been watched by our secret agents.

"This man was rich and favored beyond the common run of Hungarian petty nobles, but he was far from beloved by his peasantry. He was known as cruel, wicked and implacable, and no one kind word to say for him.

"Half the countryside suspected him of being a loup-garou, or werewolf, the others credited a local legend that a woman of his family had once in the olden time been demon to husband and that he was the offspring of that unholy union. According to the story, the progeny of this wicked woman lived like an ordinary man the first hundred years, then died on the stroke of the century unless his vitality was renewed by drinking the blood of a slaughtered virgin!

"Absurd? Possibly. An English intelligence office would have said 'bally nonsense' if one of its agents had sent in such a report. An American bureau would have labeled the report as being the sauce-of-the-apple; but consider this fact: in six hundred years there was no single record of a Baron Czuczron having died. Barons grew old—old to the point of death—but always there came along a new baron, a man in the prime of life, to take the old baron's place, nor could any say when the old baron had died or where his body had been laid.

"Now, I had been told that a man under a curse—the werewolf, the vampire or some other evil shape who lives more than his allotted time by virtue of wickedness—can not cast a shadow in a mirror, and that those accursed ones have hair in the palms of their hands. Eh bien, and here was this foreknowledge, I engaged the Count Czerny in conversation concerning Transylvania. Parbleu, the fellow denied all knowledge of the country.

He denied it with more force than was necessary. "You are no Monsieur le Comte,' I tell him, but I say it to myself. Even yet, however, I do not think what I think later.

"Then came the case of the young Eckhart—we saw the blood marks on his body. I think to me, 'if, perhaps, a vampire—a member of that accursed tribe who leave their graves at night and seek the blood of the living—were here, that would account for this young man's condition. But where would such a being come from? It is not likely.

"Then I meet that old man, the one you can call Indian John. He tells me much of the history of this town in the early days, and he tells me something more. He tells of a man, an old, old man who has paid much money to go to a certain grave—the grave of a reputed witch—in the old cemetery and dig from about it a growth of wild garlic. Garlic, I know, de Grandin has told him, can be planted on his grave he can not pass it.

"I ask myself, 'Who would want such things done?' I have no answer; only, I know, if a vampire have been confined to that grave by planted garlic, then liberated when that garlic is taken away, it would account for the young Eckhart's mysterious sickness.

"'Tiens, Friend Trowbridge—I visit that grave, and on its tombstone we read a verse which makes me believe the tenant of that grave may be a vampire. Also, I go to the minister of the church and learn that another man, an old, old man, have also inquired about that strange grave. 'Who have done this?' I ask myself; and the answer he gives says that another man, an old, old man, have also inquired about that strange grave. 'Who have done this?' I ask myself; but I ask another man about the strange grave. Who is this old man? I ask myself; and the answer was simple enough."

"As we rush to the Norman house I stop at a certain Italian green grocer's and ask for fresh garlic we can use it to protect the young Eckhart if it really is a vampire which is troubling him. Parbleu, some man, an old man, old, old man have what your available supply of garlic. 'Cordieu,' I tell me, 'this old man, he constantly crosses our trail! Also he is a very great nuisance.'

"The Italian tell me the garlic was sold to a Rupleysville man and I have an idea where this interfering old man may abide. But at that moment I have greater need to see our friend Eckhart than to ask further questions of the Italian. I tell the shopkeeper, I tell the shopkeeper, that his garlic customer has the evil eye. Parbleu, Monsieur Garlic-Buyer, you will have no more dealings with that Italian! He knows who he looks.

"When we arrive at the Norman house we find young Eckhart in great trouble, and a black serving maid tells of a strange-looking woman who bit him. Also we find tooth-marks on his breast. 'The vampire-woman, Sarah, is in very truth, at large,' I tell me, and so I hasten to the cemetery to make her fast to her grave with a wooden stake, for once staked to the ground, the vampire can no longer roam. 'Friend Trowbridge,' he said as we saw blood on the stake driven into the grave years ago, 'is it not so, mon ami?' I nodded assent, and he took up his narve;

"Why this old man should wish to liberate the vampire-woman, I know not; certain it is, one of that grisly guild, or one closely associated with it, as this 'Count Czerny' undoubtedly is—he can tell the vampire and baron are one and the same and that they both dwell at Rupleysville. Voilà, we go to Rupleysville, and we arrive there not one minute too soon. N'est-ce-pas, mes amis?"

"Sure," Costello agreed, rising and holding out his hand in farewell, "you've got th' goods, doe. No mistake about it."

To me, as I helped him with his coat, he said, "An' he only had one shot o' licker all evenin'! Gosh, doe, if one drink could fix me up like that I wouldn't care how much prohibition we had!"

"However that may be, Friend Trowbridge tells me he may have seen the count, and the count seems to have aged greatly. The man who visited the clergyman and the man who bought the garlic was also much older than the count when we knew him—he seems to be nearing the end of his century,' I tell me; 'now look out for devilment, Jules de Grandin. Certainly, it is sure to come.'

"And then, my Sergent, come you with your tale to Mademoiselle Norman's disappearance, and I, too, think perhaps she has run away from home voluntarily, of her own free will, until you say the Italian shopkeeper, who accosted her as one who has the evil eye. Now what man, save the one who bought the garlic and who lives at Rupleysville, would that Italian accuse of one who has the evil eye? Parbleu, has he not already told you the same man once bought his garlic? But yes. The case is complete.

"The girl has disappeared, an old man has accosted her; an old, old man has accosted her; a strong enough to become a policeman; the count is nearing his century mark when he must die like other men unless he can secure the blood of a virgin to revivify him. I am confident, my friends, that the count and baron are one and the same and that they both dwell at Rupleysville. Voilà, we go to Rupleysville, and we arrive there not one minute too soon. N'est-ce-pas, mes amis?"

"Sure," Costello agreed, rising and holding out his hand in farewell, "you've got th' goods, doe. No mistake about it."

To me, as I helped him with his coat, he said, "An' he only had one shot o' licker all evenin'! Gosh, doe, if one drink could fix me up like that I wouldn't care how much prohibition we had!"