THE EIGHTH PROBLEM THE EYE OF THE SEVEN DEVILS

I.

A jarring incongruity in the room of tapestries, silken-shaded lights, and furnishings of mahogany, the rough wooden box, with its dirty, scarred sides, scratched the top of the polished table in a hundred places without arousing even a murmur of protest from the four men who watched every movement of the little Japanese servant as he carefully pried the holding nails from the cover boards. A chorused “Ah!” came from four pairs of lips as the servant laid the chisel down and lifted the last board.

“Careful, Nesu,” warned the frock-coated man with the white moustache and sun-tanned cheeks.

The dissipated-looking youth, with the Egyptian cigarette dangling loosely from his lower lip, rose to get a better view of the interior. “’Nough cotton stuffing there to fill a barrel, captain,” he grinned, vacuously.

“Yes,” nodded the white-moustached captain. “Nearly ten pounds, and the Devils are bound into place with nearly twenty yards of silk strips. A man takes a little care with a thing that’s cost him forty thousand, Meynerd.”

The Japanese servant pulled out a huge handful of cotton, and placed it on a spread newspaper as 302another of the group spoke. “Is it really worth that, captain?” he asked.

“Three times that, Joslyn. Forty thousand is only what I paid the hunchback outcast priest in the Yunling mountain monastery in Sze Chuen. He had had it hidden for nearly fifty years. The eye alone is worth sixty-five thousand, if it’s worth a cent. The forty thousand I paid will buy the priest all the prayers he needs for the next hundred years; and they’ll be the best prayers money can buy, at that.” He smiled, grimly. “I needed a few of those same prayers on several occasions myself,” he went on. “Especially on that three-hundred-mile journey through the Yunlings to Chingtu. I have an idea the priest wanted to steal a march on the prayers, and threw out a hint that the ‘white dogs’ had found the pearl-eyed Seven Devils of Sin. During the half century that had passed since he stole it, of course, it has been ‘lost.’”

“Why didn’t he return it instead of getting forty thousand dollars to buy prayer papers to burn for his soul?” asked Wilson, the fourth member of the group, taking his eyes from the busy-fingered Jap.

“Because he was a Chinese,” explained Captain Richards. “He stole the thing when he had just entered the monastery, for a white man who bribed him—that’s a long story in itself. The briber was killed the day of the theft. The young priest was suspected, and tortured until he became a hunchback and outcast, but no confession could be gotten. In the years the blame has been laid on the white man’s devil, who stole the Chinese devils and took them to his home, when the white master was killed. The peculiar kink of the Chinese mind would not let the thief confess or return the devils. He couldn’t see where the mere restitution would 303expiate his sin. The only way he could figure was to wait until some one came with enough money to pray him into heaven for a hundred years after he had gone. Peculiar cusses, the Chinese.”

He rose at the last word, and the others rose with him. The Japanese was unwinding yard after yard of two-inch silken strips.

“Ah!” It was more than an exclamation: it was a three-man-power cry of amazement, wonder, and surprise as the captain lifted the thing from the box and set it gently on the table.

“Great guns!” gasped the dissipated-looking youth, backing away a step and stopping with a sheepish grin.

“The Seven Golden Devils of Sin with the single eye!” announced the captain, with a flourish.

The men stared at the most curious-looking object they had ever seen. At first glance it seemed merely a spidery collection of arms and legs; then seven figures stood out, separately and distinctly, grouped closely together. In the centre stood the shortest; around him, in every conceivable position, were six others. Their bodies were grotesquely deformed, their backs misshapen, their limbs twisted; and the genius who had fashioned the thing of his dull, hand-hammered gold in the centuries gone, had given to the bodies and limbs the distortion of horrible agony.

But it was the head; the single head that surmounted the seven bodies, which held their attention. The face was hideous; but in the very hideousness the gold worker had put cunning, power, strength. The thick lips leered a smile of satanic triumph; the cheek bones were high, oblique. And above the squat, wide-nostriled nose was a single eye! It was a pearl, perfect, flawless: milk-white against the red-yellow gold.

304As they stared there seemed to come into the single eye of pearl a glow of red, as though the heart of the great jewel were a spark of fire that shone through the lustred surface. It was a trick of the lights, perhaps, or the reflected colour of the overhanging brow, but to the men who watched, it seemed that the eye held all the malevolence and cruelty of the Pit itself.

“The devilish thing gives a man the creeps!” growled Meynerd; and his hand shook a bit as he took the cigarette from his lips.

Joslyn laughed jerkily, for the spell of the thing was on him, too.

“Better cut out a few of those high balls, Mey,” he taunted.

A flush of resentment mounted the youth’s cheeks; but the captain forestalled his angry reply.

“Those figures represent the seven sins, each one enough to keep a Chinese from his heaven. The one in the centre, though the shortest and most horribly deformed of all, has the biggest and strongest body. That is Deceit, the most powerful of devils. The Mongolian reasons that none of the other devils can enter the heart of man unless deceit has entered first.”

“Excellent philosophy, that,” commented Wilson.

“That is why the head rests on the centre figure and the bodies of the others are bent forward to meet it,” continued the captain. “Notice, too, that though the limbs are terribly twisted, and the bodies scarred to symbolize the awful punishment the gods have inflicted on the wicked seducers of men’s hearts, the head is perfect, showing that the devils can still think with their one head, and plan traps for the unwary. And the eye”—his face lighted with the enthusiasm of the collector—“the wonderful eye that is all-seeing, alert to catch the 305first sign of weakening in the lowest coolie in the kingdom. That, gentlemen, is the thing I worked years to get; the thing that nearly cost me my life a dozen times—the Eye of the Seven Devils! The most wonderful pearl in the world; the pearl with a heart of fire!”

“Funny the thief priest didn’t pry out the eye and sell it to buy his prayers, without risking getting rid of the whole thing,” put in Joslyn.

“That’s the wonder of the thing!” exclaimed the captain. “By some method that no one has ever been able to fathom, the maker of the thing set the stone in such a way that it can’t be taken out without cutting the whole thing to pieces. The pearl appears merely pasted in its socket, but the microscope can see, in the space around it, that the jewel is gripped in four prongs that fit into tiny holes bored in the back of the pearl. The space around it is so narrow that no instrument of strength, sufficient to cut or break the prongs, can be inserted. And if it could, the very act would cause the gem to chip, and, perhaps, split. That is the way the maker made theft impossible!”

“Wouldn’t mind having the pearl,” growled Meynerd, “but I’d throw the rest of it in a sewer.”

The tanned cheeks of Captain Richards went a dull red with anger, and his moustache bristled; but Wilson cut in to prevent an open break.

“Let’s have a little drink.”

The servant, who had stuffed the last silk strip into the empty case, straightened up.

“High ball,” grunted Meynerd.

“Another absinthe drip,” added Joslyn.

“Bourbon,” ordered Wilson, and the captain nodded.

Silence followed the going of the servant. The captain took out his watch, glanced at it, chewed 306his cigar almost nervously, and lounged back in the chair he had taken beside Joslyn. The eyes of the others wandered around the room, but always returned to the twisted bodies of the seven devils of the single eye. The thing of hand-wrought metal on the table seemed to exert an uncanny influence over men who had never known superstition. As the silent seconds passed there came a tension in the mood of all. Each found himself continually catching the other’s eye, only to glance hastily and sheepishly away. And the twisted devil mouth leered at them; in the smouldering fire of the devil eye seemed infinite scorn.

The return of the servant with the tray of drinks made each one sit up eagerly. The Japanese went to the captain first and held out a card.

“Hustle the high ball,” growled Meynerd. The Jap hurried over. Meynerd’s unsteady hands had spilled a third of the liquor before Wilson took the small carafe from his shaking hands and poured the remainder over the ice. The youth growled monosyllabic thanks. Captain Richards whistled as Meynerd tossed his drink off at a gulp.

“Going to leave us, captain?” asked Joslyn, poking his straws farther down in the cracked ice of the absinthe.

Captain Richards looked up from the card he held between his thumb and forefinger. “Puzzling thing,” he prefaced. “Here’s the card of Ching Li Chu.” His eyes went again to the pasteboard as he read: “Secretary to the ambassador at Washington of the Imperial Chinese Republic.”

“What does he want?” asked Wilson. “That?” He jerked his head toward the table.

“How on earth―⁠―” Sudden decision cleared the look of puzzlement from the captain’s brow. “Send him in, Nesu,” he ordered.

307“Chink devils, chink secretaries,” grinned Meynerd. The liquor had pulled his nerves together again, and his lips curved in contempt when he caught Joslyn stealing a covert glance toward the table, as the door opened.

The man who entered, unquestionably a Mongolian, had a lean, intelligent face. The eyes, but slightly aslant, looked straight before him, giving no sign that they even saw the seated men, but stared fixedly at the table and its thing of gold. In the centre of the room the Chinese stopped and made a deep obeisance, once, twice, thrice. A low laugh of contempt came from Meynerd’s lips, but the Chinese paid no heed. He walked to the table, and for several silent seconds gazed steadily into the eye of the pearl. With another deep bow he turned, his eyes searching each face.

“Captain Richards?” His voice was low, mellow, with no trace of accent.

“I am he!” The captain rose from his seat and bowed.

“So my information was correct; it is the Seven Devils with the True Eye.” Again the Chinese bowed toward the figures. Once more Meynerd laughed sneeringly. This time the Mongolian turned toward him inquiringly.

“You do not mock me,” he rebuked, mildly. “Your mockery is of the Seven Devils. I would be careful, were I you.”

“Bah!” Meynerd set down his empty glass. “I didn’t know you fellows worshipped devils, and little gold devils on a table, at that.”

“Nor do we.” Still that mild, even voice. “We worship our gods; but we are careful not to incur the wrath of our devils. The gods may forgive the ignorant mocker; the devils slay. That I believe, and I am no coolie, but a man educated in your own universities.”

308“Drunken kid!” muttered the captain, his fingers moving along the table-edge as he leaned against it. “You wanted to see me on business?” he asked the Chinese.

“Yes. I wish to pay you one hundred thousand dollars for the golden Seven Devils of Sin!” The amazement this announcement caused showed plainly on each man’s face. The Chinese went on: “The new republic seeks to unite its people, but throughout the province of Chingtu it is known that the lost Seven Devils has been taken from the country. They demand that the new government see that it is returned if they are to believe that government’s power. Our failure will mean a costly and bloody war, for the Yunling mountain men are fighters who know every inch of its vast slopes.”

“So my six months of devious routes and constant guarding amounted to nothing.” The captain’s lips smiled grimly, but there was a light in his eyes that had not been there before. “I suppose the priest is being honoured for having been told by the gods that the white dog had stolen the thing.”

“Prayer papers have been burning this last five months for the hunchback,” said the Chinese, quietly.

“Um.” The smile left the captain’s lips. He shook his head. “I will not sell,” he declared, and there was finality in his voice.

It seemed a full minute before any one spoke. The noiseless Jap servant industriously picked up small tufts of cotton that had fallen to the rug back of the table. Joslyn set his glass, with its green-tinged cracked ice on the table, clinkingly, and the captain’s eyes left the Mongolian’s face as the noise attracted them. Meynerd’s lips still 309grinned contemptuously as he spun the piece of ice around in his empty high-ball glass.

“The devils can only bring sorrow to you.” The voice of the Chinese was deep, full of sincerity. “Perhaps death, for in your country there will be mockers, and, as I told your friend, the devils slay those who mock them.” His deep eyes rested on Meynerd. The face of the youth went red for an instant; then the sneer came back.

“Like to see ’em kill me!” he said, boastfully. “A chink knife in back might, but no pigeon-toed gang of devils with one eye could!”

“Do not speak that way!” There was stern reproof in the tone of the Chinese. “You may know the things of the West, but there are things of the East that you do not know!”

“Is that so!” Meynerd shook off the restraining hand of Wilson and stood up. The face of the captain went white with rage, and his hands fumbled with the handkerchief he had been in the act of lifting to his brow.

“Be a gentleman!” he snapped.

Meynerd paid no heed. “Here’s to you devils!” he laughed, sneeringly. “Long may you wave—in a glass case!”

“The mockers kotow before they die!” The words came rapidly, almost hissingly, from the lips of the Chinese.

“Here’s to crime!” Meynerd stood in front of the golden devils and drained the last drops of his drink. A gasp came from the Japanese as he backed away a step, his hand full of cotton tufts he had picked up from the floor. Captain Richards crushed the handkerchief in his hand as he brushed his lips. Every eye in the room was on the gently swaying man with the glass to his lips.

Suddenly Meynerd’s face went livid; the glass 310fell to the floor. Slowly his knees bent. For a second he seemed to kneel before the leering face of gold. His body fell forward. His forehead touched the ground. Then the limbs straightened convulsively, and he lay still.

The seated men jumped to their feet, with exclamations of horror. The Chinese, face impassive, leaned over and touched the pulse of the man on the floor. Then he looked up into the faces of the three white-faced men who bent over him.

“He is dead,” said the Mongolian, quietly. “The devils have slain.”

Mechanically, involuntarily, they turned toward the hideous thing on the table. As one the startled cry came from three pairs of lips:

“The Eye! The Eye!”

The twisted, thick lips of gold still leered at them, but where the eye of pearl had been, only an empty socket seemed to stare down at the dead man on the floor.

II.

“Pawn to king five and checkmate.” Thornley Colton took a final puff of his cigarette, and dropped it in the ash tray beside the chessboard.

Sydney Thames, the apple cheeked, black-haired secretary to the blind problemist, laughed ruefully. “I almost believe that you could beat me with pawns alone, Thorn,” he declared, looking over the pieces on the board.

“Your whole game is attack,” Colton observed. “You forget all about defence. Another?”

Thames merely nodded, and silently rearranged the pieces on the board. “Three and pawn again?” he asked.

“Yes, if you―⁠―” The ringing telephone-bell 311on the desk broke in, and Sydney rose to answer it. He returned almost on the run.

“It’s Captain Richards, at the Wanderers’ Club,” he began, breathlessly. “He wants you at once. He said something about a murder, and the eye of some seven devils of sin, as near as I could understand.”

Thornley Colton’s mobile face, whose paleness was strikingly accentuated by the great blue circles of the tortoise-rimmed library glasses that shielded his sightless eyes from all glares, lighted up with interest. “Is he still on the wire?” He rose as he asked the question.

Thames shook his head. “He blurted out the message and rang right off. He seemed positive you’d come.”

A faint smile came to Thornley Colton’s lips. “I guess he knew that a single breath from the Orient would interest me.” He touched the call-button on the desk that would summon the big black automobile instantly, at any hour of the day or night. “I hadn’t any idea Captain Richards had returned. I haven’t seen him for years.” The smile left his face. “My fingers have been itching to see those wonderful Seven Devils I’ve heard so much about.”

“Your interest in things Chinese is beyond me,” confessed Sydney, as he followed the blind man out of the room and down the stairs.

“You were in college the last four years I spent in China, Sydney.” Colton spoke as the chauffeur closed the tonneau-door of the touring car, and threw in the gears. “The lure of the East has never gotten out of my veins. To a man who can see, China must be wonderful. To me it is marvellous. Old, satiated of every human emotion before we discovered emotion; a view-point as 312incomprehensible as the hereafter itself; a character that cannot be visualized—why, Sydney, to men of eyes, the lure of China is the lure of a beautiful picture. To me it is the lure of the unattainable.”

“Something like the mystery of woman?” asked Sydney Thames, seriously.

“Not at all.” The slim cane waved an impatient gesture over the side of the car. “The so-called mystery of woman is her constantly shifting view-point dependent on outside influences; the mystery of the Chinese is his undeviating view-point.”

“Too deep for me,” laughed Thames; then he swung open the door as the car stopped before the great Gothic door-way of the Wanderers’ Club.

The mantle of tragedy hung heavily over the luxurious, exclusive interior of the famous club as they entered. In the main lounging-room a small group of members talked in hushed whispers, and their nervous starts at each sound belied the reputations most of them had gained as travellers in countries where danger lurked constantly. The servitors, usually alert, swift to receive and execute an order, moved with lagging footsteps. Thornley Colton recognised the atmosphere of uneasiness immediately, and a cynical smile flashed across his thin lips as he understood the cause. The Wanderers, rich seekers of excitement and danger in foreign countries, hard-headed, with nerves of steel when face to face with violent death, had fallen under the spell of the uncanny, the supernatural.

The chief steward, from his vantage-point at the head of the stairs, spied them and hurried down.

“It’s—they’re upstairs, sir.” A scared note was in his voice. “The physician has just this minute arrived. The police haven’t been told. Captain Richards thought maybe―⁠― It’s terrible, sir.”

313“Very, Peters,” nodded Colton, absently, as he followed the man up the broad staircase, and to himself he muttered, “Lucky the police haven’t had a chance to bungle it. Very, very lucky.”

The instant they opened the door Captain Richards bounded across the floor to meet them. “Thank God you came, Mr. Colton!” he cried, shaking the hand of the blind man with more than heartiness.

“Who was it?” asked Colton.

“Meynerd. The doctor’s trying to find the cause of death now.” He nodded his head toward the broad leather couch against the wall, with its grim occupant, and the physician bending over it.

Colton asked a dozen crisp, terse questions. The answers he got told him the whole story. The captain introduced him to every one in the room, and Colton shook their hands, even to the obsequious Japanese servant, who stood patiently awaiting orders, near the wall.

The doctor finished his examination and straightened up. “Heart-failure,” he announced. “Brought on by alcoholic excesses, I should judge, and probably superinduced by excitement.”

“Strange that the hand of God should have descended at the exact moment chosen by a thief to steal the pearl,” remarked Colton quietly.

“You don’t think it’s murder?” There was a queer chokiness in Captain Richards’s voice.

“Yes!” Colton shot out the word as he stood in the centre of the room, turning his head slowly, as though his sightless eyes were trying to surprise some expression of guilt on the white faces of the men. Wilson’s hands gripped his chair-arms so tightly that the knuckles cracked. Joslyn stretched an arm toward the glass, with its green-tinged ice on the table, but withdrew it quickly, to let his 314hands fall on his knees. The Japanese servant’s foot shifted nervously over a small wad of cotton that had fallen from his hands, minutes before. Only the Chinese was unmoved.

“Neither the gods nor the devils murder,” he said. “They kill.”

The blind man nodded toward him, slowly. “True,” he answered, and his voice was serious. “But when the killing is done by human instruments, the law calls it murder.”

“You are of the West,” shrugged the Mongolian.

“But the whole thing is impossible!” There seemed almost a whine of incredulous protest in Captain Richards’s voice.

“Does the impossible happen?” Colton’s voice was sharp, curt. “No! But the improbable does! A hundred times a day! Every time a perfect match fails to strike an improbable thing has happened. Because that thing on the table hypnotized your eyes into waking the superstition that is the mental appendix handed down through the thousand centuries, you say that it is impossible. What is impossible? Meynerd’s death? The fact that he was killed? My statement that he was murdered? Or do you mean that each one of you is so wise that no one could have deceived you? Yet the eye is gone! And even if the devils had killed Meynerd, would they have stolen their own eye?”

Each crisp sentence fairly sizzled as he shot it out. The hand that held his slim, hollow cane, that gave its messages to his super-sensitive finger-tips, waved up and down for emphasis, touching blindly the table, the golden devils, and some part of each man’s body as he paced back and forth across the floor.

315“A man can’t give another man heart-failure to kill him,” declared the physician, pompously.

“Can’t!” The smile on the problemist’s face was sardonic as he faced the doctor. “Then no murder was ever committed. If a man’s heart didn’t fail he’d keep right on living. What caused Meynerd’s heart to fail is the thing we’ve got to find out. Do you know how Meynerd fell?”

“No, immaterial details―⁠―”

“Very material!” The blind man interrupted brusquely. “Every diagnostician should be a detective, and I might mention right here that one of the greatest surgeons and diagnosticians in America is a blind man. You should know that a man standing as Meynerd stood, suddenly stricken with heart-disease, would fall flat on his back. Yet he fell on his knees, his body bent forward so that his forehead touched the ground for an instant before it relaxed.”

“By Jove—I supposed―⁠―” the physician sputtered his chagrin. Then his face brightened. “Some caustic, causing a griping in the intestines.”

“Exactly.” The sharpness had gone from the detective’s voice now, and he spoke in his old calm, even tone.

“He drank a toast!” Even as he spoke, the doctor’s foot crunched a bit of the broken glass on the floor.

“You’d have to analyze the rug,” reminded Colton. “And who had the chance?” He looked around inquiringly.

“Wilson poured his drink!” The words came in a gasp from Joslyn.

Wilson sprang to his feet with an oath. “Are you accusing me of killing him?” He snarled the question, but his face was white.

“Meynerd had gulped his drink even before 316Ching Li Chu entered,” suddenly remembered Captain Richards. “There was only a few drops of the melted ice-water in his glass when he stood before the Seven Devils.”

“There are poisons that act after minutes have passed.” The even, monotonous voice of the Chinese broke in.

“Do you think the poisoner knew to the second when Meynerd’s drunken folly would take the turn it did?” demanded Colton; and each man in the room recognised the menace in his tone.

A gleam flashed to the eyes of the Mongolian for an instant, then vanished. “The instruments of the gods and the devils cannot fail,” he answered, quietly.

“No poison known could be timed like that,” declared Colton, positively.

“Right!” growled Wilson, as he resumed his seat and darted a glance of new-born hatred across the room toward the man who had virtually accused him of the murder.

Again came silence as the blind man stood in the centre of the room, alternately brushing the rug where lay the untouched pieces of the broken high-ball glass, and swishing at his trouser-leg. Across his high, white forehead, and at his eye-corners behind the round, blue glasses, innumerable fine lines deepened as his wonderful brain worked: visualizing each object in the room, every detail in the picture, every action that must have taken place at the instant of hopeless confusion when Meynerd had pitched forward on the floor.

Immovable, the men watched, each tense for the first word or movement to break the suspense. Sydney Thames sat in his chair, with his eyes fixed on the devils of gold. Ever since he had entered the room the thing on the table had held him 317fascinated. More sinister, more fiendish than ever, without its single eye of pearl, the empty eye socket seemed to glare at him as though it gloated over the repugnant fascination it exerted. Sydney had heard the captain’s story; in his mind’s eye he could picture the toast, the sneers, the fall. Had the devils killed Meynerd?—as the Chinese had said they would. Then his eyes narrowed slightly as they went to the Mongolian, whose impassive face showed nothing of the thoughts behind the bright, slit eyes. He had said that death would follow. He was a Chinese—of a race to whom a life means nothing; a race of mystery. Then his eyes went to the Jap servant who stood against the wall, patiently waiting permission to leave the room; then, at the two scowling men, who carefully avoided each other’s glances as they stared straight ahead of them—at nothing. Wilson had poured the drink. Why had Joslyn been so quick to tell the fact?

Suddenly the swishing taps of the blind man’s cane ceased; the lines across his forehead and at his eye-corners vanished. “There is one way.” He spoke apparently to himself. “Only one way.”

He crossed the room to the couch where the dead man lay, his face covered with a handkerchief. He pulled aside the coat, and unloosed a button of the thin silk shirt. From his vest-pocket he took a small rubber band, and the watching men saw him put it around the middle finger of his right hand, until the black rubber strands were deep sunken in the flesh. Then, gingerly, as though he were testing the heat of a red-hot stove, he opened the shirt, and with the tourniqueted finger gently touched the skin of Meynerd. Slowly, very slowly, the finger moved over the cold flesh of the dead man, then stopped.

318“See, doctor!” He held the banded finger aloft. The physician’s ejaculation of amazement was echoed by every other man in the room, but the unemotional Chinese and the well-trained servant. On the tip of the blind man’s finger was a drop of blood!

“And see here!” His fingers, holding the shirt back, exposed an inch or so of the dead man’s skin. Four men bent their heads to see the small smear of red Colton’s finger had left when it had brushed away the single blood-drop.

“I don’t understand.” There was no doubt of the physician’s bewilderment.

Colton pulled the coat back and stood erect. “The most diabolically primitive of all murderous weapons,” he said. “A poisoned dart.”

“But who? How?” gasped the captain.

“That’s what we’ve got to find out,” the blind man said, curtly. With his pocket-knife he carefully cut the strands of the rubber and gently massaged the swollen, blood-congested finger. “A nasty thing to try to locate with delicate finger-tips,” he remarked, casually. “A big chance that the thing hadn’t penetrated its full length, as this one had, and a scratch would have meant another dead man.”

Sydney Thames’s face lost its last vestige of colour as he realized that once again the blind man had toyed with death. A hundred times had Thames seen the problemist—the benefactor who had picked him up on the bank of the English river from which came his only name—take his life in his hands for the sake of solving one of the crime-puzzles he loved; but always before there had been a chance for a fight against men with lesser brains. This time a single scratch of his feeling finger would have killed him instantly, horribly; just as the mocker of the Seven Devils had been killed by the 319man among them who had coveted the wonderful pearl that had been the eye. And that man―⁠―

Joslyn laughed a jerky laugh of nervousness as he turned away and reached out his hand for the glass that had held his absinthe. The ice had melted partially, and there was a half-inch or so of the pale-green liquid showing through the cracked-ice crystals.

“Don’t touch that glass!” The command came, shot-like, from the lips of Colton. He lowered the slim cane that had touched Joslyn’s leg and warned him of the movement.

Joslyn withdrew his hand as if it had suddenly touched fire.

“Why? Wh-y?” he gasped, and his face was pasty white.

“Because I don’t want you to kill yourself!” The blind man’s hand moved to pick up the glass. He held it up and gingerly poked into the ice with his fingers. A grim smile came to his lips, and he dumped the whole thing on the polished top of the mahogany table. Colton’s eight fingers seemed to touch every piece of ice in a single instant, so quickly did they move. Then his fore-finger separated a small pile of curiously-shaped crystals.

“Broken glass!” The exclamation came from the physician.

Colton corroborated him with a nod, and spoke to the still pasty-faced Joslyn. “Some of the smaller particles would surely have gone down your throat.”

Joslyn’s Adam’s apple moved convulsively for a moment. “What is it?” he gulped, finally.

“The broken glass-tube that was used to shoot the poisoned dart; probably not more than two inches long, because of the short distance, and of the thinnest glass, with just this object in view.”

320“But how on earth did it get there?” puzzled Captain Richards.

“I’ll bet it wasn’t there five minutes ago!” Wilson cried; and every man in the room remembered Joslyn’s movement toward the glass a few minutes before.

The suave voice of the Chinese cut in. “Might I be informed how one who is blind could know of the glass?” he asked.

“Because the cracked ice made an absolutely perfect hiding-place for fine pieces of broken glass. If dropped on the floor with the bigger, thicker pieces of high-ball glass, the difference would have been immediately noted. I discovered that it had been a frappéd drink when I walked up and down before the table and talked.”

Ching Li Chu rose and bowed gravely toward the golden thing on the table. “Truly, the wisdom of the gods and of the devils is infinite,” he said, in his even voice. “But one man has such a drink. The devils chose him to protect their emissary!”

“Pretty philosophy,” admitted Colton, “made grim by the fact that some one must suffer for being the devils’ tool.” He turned to face the silent Japanese servant, who stood still by the wall. “Tell the steward he can notify the police now, Nesu.”

The sunny Japanese smile that had been missing so long came to the little servitor’s face, and he took a step forward to obey the order.

“What about the pearl?” asked Captain Richards, suddenly. “This man shouldn’t get out until he has been searched. A sixty-five-thousand-dollar gem would tempt ’most any one.”

Colton broke in, amazedly: “Hasn’t the search been made yet?”

“No.” The captain stammered over the 321monosyllable. “I called you as quickly as I could get to a telephone, after warning every one to stay in the room. I knew you were a member here, and clever at this sort of thing. The police are such asses, you know, and the scandal―⁠―”

Again the blind man cut him short. “Because there seemed no possible way by which the jewel could have been stolen—if the stories I heard of the famous Seven Devils, when I was first in China twenty years ago, are true—logically the jewel could be nowhere. Is that it?” he asked.

“Something like that.” The tan on the captain’s cheeks was a deeper tinge than usual.

“The jewel is nowhere.” The Chinese spoke solemnly, earnestly, almost reverently. “The devils have merely hidden it from the sight of mockers. My government will give you one hundred and fifty thousand dollars for the Seven Devils without the True Eye.”

“So that’s it!” The captain’s voice was almost a shout; the tone one of a man who has made a great discovery. “You have it! You killed Meynerd to make me sell, eh?” He advanced a step, threateningly.

“The police will attend to that part!” warned the blind man, curtly. “Search Nesu—or go yourself.”

He turned to the table, and his wonderful fingers, each one an eye that could see things the eye of a normal man could not discern, touched the twisted limbs of one of the Seven Devils.

“Come over nearer the light, Nesu,” ordered Captain Richards, and the serious-faced Japanese followed him around the table.

The attention of the silent men in the room was divided between the search of the Jap and Colton’s examination of the thing on the table. At times 322the blind man’s fingers moved swiftly over the dull-gold surface; at others they seemed to rest for seconds, unmoving, only to resume their journey, slowly. Each man in the room understood, subconsciously, that those marvellous finger-tips would give to the sightless man a mind-picture as perfect as that their eyes had given them—more perfect, perhaps.

“All right!” There was a growl of chagrin in the captain’s voice, as he finished the search. The little Jap pattered out.

“Didn’t find it, eh?” Colton spoke idly, without raising his head. His right forefinger was gently probing into the empty eye-socket. He put his hand in his vest-pocket for an instant, then felt again where the pearl had been, first with one finger, then another.

“Strange,” they heard him murmur. “Strange.” Then he whirled to face them. “The prongs that held the pearl are unbent and unbroken! They are exactly as they were when they gripped the jewel! Yet it is gone!”

“I want to search you, Ching!” There was no mistaking the threat in Captain Richards’s tone this time.

Calmly, disdainfully, the Mongolian raised his arms and stood ready. Richards explored every thread of his clothing. There was no doubt he had done similar things before; not a pin could have escaped him. He stepped back with a muttered curse of bafflement.

“Go through me, too.” It was a snarl from Joslyn; the snarl of a man whose nerves are raw.

No second invitation was needed. Thornley Colton stood leaning against the table, his back toward the golden devils. He idly swished his 323cane and apparently watched every move. Wilson was searched—and there was nothing.

“The thief who had brains and nerve enough to commit that theft would certainly know enough not to have the pearl in his clothing,” observed Colton, quietly.

“It’s in the room here, then,” growled the loser of the pearl, pacing the floor. “I’ll tear it apart! That jewel was worth sixty-five thousand!”

“You haven’t searched Meynerd’s clothes yet. Every one in the room had a chance to secrete it there—temporarily,” suggested Colton.

The captain’s face went white, and he shuddered as his eyes went to the body of the man whose death had been caused by the thing of gold he had brought into the room. “I’m not a ghoul,” he choked. “The police can attend to that part of it.”

“I think I hear them coming now; the tread is unmistakable.” The problemist took a firmer grip on his cane with the hand that was not in his pocket. “They can mess things as badly as they want to now; I’ve finished.” He took a step toward the door, then turned to face them—the captain, the physician, who had not spoken for minutes, Joslyn, Wilson, and the silent Chinese. “If you’ll bring the Seven Devils to my house at six-thirty this evening, captain, I will show you the pearl, and handcuff the man who killed Meynerd!” Another step, and he halted again. “All of you must come, for only the guilty one will want to stay away. All, especially Ching Li Chu!”

III.

Guided by the touch of Sydney Thames’s sleeve against his, the blind man made his way through the crowd of curious, idle persons, whom the sight 324of a policeman entering a building always attracts in New York. From the precinct station around the corner had come two uniformed men, and two detectives on the run, to answer the murder-call that had gone out. Colton and his secretary had met them coming up the stairs, and the problemist had given curt nods to their gruff greetings. Nearly every detective in the city knew the blind man; and he knew all of them by the sound of their voices, just as he knew the voices of a thousand other men. A hundred times his abilities had made their efforts look ridiculous, and scores of the city-paid sleuths refused to believe that he was blind. Nor did any one in the morbid crowd that opened before him suspect that the slight touch of cloth against cloth was guiding him in the darkness that had been his since birth.

Leaning back in the soft cushions of the tonneau, Thornley Colton lighted a cigarette and took several deep puffs. The machine had started without orders, as it always did when there was any one around who might hear. For several blocks they went in silence; then Colton leaned forward.

“Osmuhn’s, Fifth Avenue, Michael,” he directed.

“A jewellery shop?” asked Sydney Thames, in surprise.

“Yes. I am going to make sure of every property for the last scene. There can’t be a chance of failure!” There was an ominous ring in his voice.

“You speak as though you knew the murderer and the thief!” cried Thames, in amazement. “I don’t see―⁠―”

“You do see!” interrupted the blind man, with unconscious sharpness. “Like the average person, you see too much. To any one with perfect eyes the whole thing is a jumble, for the murder of 325Meynerd was planned—devilishly planned—to make possible the one minute of hopeless confusion necessary to steal the jewel. The eyes of the men in that room could see but one thing, then—the mocker of the devils. Nothing could have drawn their gaze from Meynerd! That is the one fault of eyes. In great crises they numb every other sense!”

“But if you know the murderer, why not arrest him at once?” asked Sydney, his brain trying to fix upon the one man who could be guilty.

“Because I’m not a policeman. The arrest of the guilty person is always secondary, with me, to the complete solving of a problem. A crime-puzzle is never solved until the guilt of the prisoner is established beyond all question. No, Sydney, I’m not a detective, for a detective arrests, and then tries to fix the guilt. I fix the guilt first. That is the problem in this case!”

“Joslyn and Wilson certainly acted queer,” mused Sydney. “The Chinese, too, seemed strange.” A new thought flashed to his mind. “There is something Oriental about that murder!” he exclaimed, suddenly. “A dart, and a poison which could act like that!”

Colton nodded as he flicked his cigarette into the street. “Devilishly Oriental, Sydney,” he said, quietly.

“Ching Li Chu!” gasped Sydney. “He―⁠―”

“Is secretary of a foreign legation, and therefore immune from arrest. Also, I think he could prove absolutely that he was standing in such a position that he could not have shot the poisoned dart at Meynerd!”

The machine swung into the curb before the shop of Osmuhn & Son. Colton alighted and hurried into the shop, followed by Sydney. He knew every 326step here, for he had learned them in the days when the problem of the Thousand Facets of Fire had interested him.

The elder Osmuhn came forward with a smile of welcome and extended hand. Colton swung his slim stick under his left arm and extended his left hand; the other had been in his pocket since they had left the room in the Wanderers’ Club.

“I want to get an imitation pearl the size of this finger-tip, with small holes drilled in the back at exactly these distances apart.” He drew his right hand from his pocket, and Thames saw that his right index-finger was smudged with ink, and on the middle finger were four dots of black, at equal distances around the finger-tip. “A bit of ink from my fountain pen on the four prongs, then I got the marks, to tell me where the holes had been, when I poked my middle finger into the eye-socket,” he explained to his secretary.

“Come into my office,” requested Osmuhn. “We have some imitation gems that we use merely to show sizes. They wouldn’t fool an expert for a minute.”

“I don’t want them to,” Thornley Colton smiled, faintly. “I only want him to feel the gem.”

“Ah, another of your problems.” Osmuhn pulled open a velvet-lined drawer. “Hold out your finger, please.” He adjusted a small caliper over the tip, and with a smaller one measured the distances between the dots. “How soon do you want it?” he asked, when he had made several cabalistic notes on his small desk pad.

“As soon as possible.”

“In two hours, then.”

Colton nodded and hurried out.

“Police headquarters,” he ordered, when the tonneau-door had clicked shut behind Sydney.

327“So soon?” asked the secretary, in wonderment.

“Griffith and Jensen, the two detectives we passed on the stairs, are, perhaps, the most dull-witted in New York. Naturally they’d be on hand in a case like this. The thing will be bungled hopelessly if I let them have their way. After they have been shown the facts I gathered”—a grim smile hovered on his lips for a second—“they’ll have every one in the room under arrest, even Captain Richards. I want them all—all—at my house to-night.”

Thames knew the futility of further questions. Colton would do the thing in his own way, and explain when the time came. So they rode in silence to the big building that housed the central departments of the big force.

“While I’m inside, Sydney, call up Shrimp and tell him to get an inch auger and the most powerful pocket tubular flash-light he can buy.”

“An auger and a flash-light?” repeated the secretary.

“More scenery,” explained the blind man, laconically. “If I had been in the room when the murder was committed, my lack of eyes would have enabled me to detect the murderer-thief in the very act. Now I must carefully work on his nerves until I have the confession. And I’ll do it!” Again there was the ominous ring in his voice that Sydney had noticed every time the blind man spoke of the murderer.

With a curt nod of emphasis, Colton turned on his heel and walked briskly into headquarters, unerringly finding his way through the corridors he had travelled many times before.

There was no doubt of The Fee’s delight when Sydney Thames gave him the strange order. “Gee! 328Anoder case!” came his squeal of joy over the wire. “An’ the arm I got broke in the gilded-glove thing is all right. You bet I’ll get ’em!”

Sydney smiled as he rang off. Nothing pleased the freckle-faced, blue-eyed boy, with the slightly-twisted nose, who had become a member of the Colton household at the conclusion of a particularly baffling murder case, like participation in one of the blind man’s problems. But since the affair of the gilded glove, Colton had been careful to keep the irrepressible youngster out of all harm’s way.

For half-an-hour Sydney sat in the automobile and puzzled over the theft and the murder, the use of the imitation eye, the request for an auger and a flash-light. Then Colton came out of headquarters.

“One more stop,” he said, as the car glided away from the curb. “Five o’clock,” he announced, as his fingers touched the face of the crystalless watch in his pocket. “Just time for the call, a hurried bite, and then the dénouement.” He leaned forward to speak to the driver. “The Waldorf,” was the order he gave.

At the big desk of the famous hotel, Colton’s low-voiced inquiry brought an involuntary ejaculation of amazement from Sydney Thames. The blind man had asked for the Chinese ambassador.

“Not here!” declared the man at the desk with a positiveness that only hotel-clerks can assume when they are lying.

“Tell him I’d like to see him in regard to the Seven Devils of Sin.” Colton’s voice was quiet and even, but there was something in it that commanded respect—and got it.

“I’ll see!” The clerk turned to the house switchboard, and a few minutes later Thames and the blind man were being ushered to the suite of 329the diplomat. The ambassador, unlike his secretary, who had worn clothes of the latest cut, was dressed in robes rich with embroidery. He looked at them inquiringly as they entered, and the man at his side bowed deeply.

“His excellency bids you welcome,” the interpreter said, in precise English.

“I came to tell you that the eye of the Seven Devils has been stolen, and one of my countrymen murdered to make the theft possible,” Colton said, without preamble or preface.

The interpreter might have been a graven image for all the expression that came to his face. He bowed again, and spoke in Chinese to the ambassador. When the diplomat had answered him, he spoke again to Colton.

“His excellency says that the thing of which you speak is impossible. The devils would not allow it. The eye of the Seven Devils of Sin disappears for a week every hundred years, and has done so for centuries at the Yunling temple.”

“Ah!” There was a note of quiet satisfaction in the problemist’s voice as though sudden light had been thrown on an obscure point. “How did his excellency know where the devils were?” he asked, gravely.

For several minutes the two Chinese talked. Colton stood in the middle of the floor, idly switching his trouser-leg with his slim stick, apparently paying no attention to the two Chinese. But Sydney Thames knew that the keen ears of the blind man were taking in every word; for he knew that the problemist understood the language perfectly! What were the two Mongolians talking about? Why the discussion before such a simple question could be answered?

Then the interpreter spoke. “The gods decreed 330that his excellency should know the exact place and the hour at which it would be ready,” he said, solemnly. “The devils stirred to anger the people of Chingtu against the white rogue who so cleverly outwitted the Yunling mountain men. But the gods found him, after months had passed, so the anger of the devils might be appeased and the people made content.”

“Thank you.”

Sydney Thames thought he detected a dryness in the words, but the look on the blind man’s face as he left the room augured ill for some one.

“I can’t see how apparently intelligent men can believe such rot!” declared Sydney, impatiently.

“The undeviating view-point, Sydney, the undeviating view-point. That religion has been ingrained for centuries and tens of centuries. No Western knowledge can ever change it.” A peculiar smile came to his lips. “They never consider the incongruity of the gods helping them find devils—no more than they would consider a human life beside that thing of gold we left on the table at the club.”

Thames tried to read the expression on the blind man’s face; but there was no expression. Was the Chinese the murderer? Then what could the problemist do alone? What had been the object of those apparently irrelevant questions? And why had Colton pretended he knew no Chinese.

“One thing more, Sydney.” The problemist stopped beside the operator’s desk at the telephone-booths. “Call up the club and tell the president that I’ll contribute enough to have that upper hall re-decorated. Tell him that the workmen will be there to-night. It’s about time it was fixed.”

Sydney asked no questions this time. He 331merely obeyed the order. During the hurried, silent meal that followed, he was all at sixes and sevens, and his brain fairly reeled as the questions raced, shuttlelike, through his mind. The Chinese had known the exact hour the thing would be unpacked at the Wanderers’ Club. The secretary had virtually threatened Meynerd with death. Yet Colton had said Ching Li Chu had not been in a position to shoot the poisoned dart. Who had been in the right position, and how did the blind man know? He had not asked the positions of the men. There were Wilson and Joslyn. What of them? He remembered stories he had heard of the men. Joslyn was an absinthe-drinker, supposed to have an independent income. But what was the source of that income? Sydney had never heard. Wilson was noted for his temper—but the crime was not that of a man with temper. It was cold-blooded, devilish.

“Six o’clock.” Colton paid his check and hurried down the winding aisle of tables, his brain unconsciously counting the steps it had registered when he entered. “Get me a paper, Sydney,” he asked, when they were on the side-walk once more.

Sydney hailed a boy and bought one. At the first sight of the black headlines he gasped aloud.

“They’ve arrested Nesu!” he cried. “The two detectives took him to headquarters!”

He saw again the quiet little Jap; the one man he had never suspected! Colton had said that the murder was devilishly Oriental; he had said that the Chinese had not committed it. The Japanese was the guilty one! He must have been standing at the side of the table opposite Meynerd, for Sydney had seen the cotton tufts he had dropped. And the police had beaten the blind man; they had gotten ahead of the problemist who had scorned 332them so often. Sydney could see them laughing up their sleeves at the man he loved.

“It’s a shame, Thorn!” he choked.

“It is,” admitted Colton, quietly. “But better a live prisoner than a dead freeman. I asked the chief to arrest Nesu, for he would have been the next victim of the poisoned dart!”

“The next―⁠―” began Sydney, dully; but Colton did not let him finish.

“Yes, but we haven’t time to discuss it now. Run up to Osmuhn’s, and get the fake pearl. I’ll take the car, and you can come home in the subway. There’s a little job Shrimp and I have to do.”

Once more Thames silently did as he was told, and when he got back to the old-fashioned, brownstone house in the upper eighties, he found the blind man carefully studying two deep scratches in the polished top of the library table.

“All right, Shrimp,” called Colton, without raising his head.

Thames looked around, but could see no sign of the boy; he was not in the hall, nor in the music-room. He opened his lips for the question, then the electric front-door bell tinkled its announcement.

“The jewel! Quick!” Sydney Thames thrust the imitation pearl into Colton’s hand. For a second the blind man rubbed it between his flexible fingers. With a nod of satisfaction he dropped it carelessly into his lower vest-pocket, and was sitting on the table, feet dangling, smoking a cigarette, when the servant entered to announce the four men.

Captain Richards came first, and in his arms, held as carefully as though it were fragile glass, was the Seven Devils. He grunted in relief as he set it down on the table and mopped his sweat-beaded 333forehead. Ching Li Chu, who had been at his heels, remained standing, straight and rigid, beside the thing of gold on the table. Joslyn, who could not seem to keep his twitching fingers still, flopped into a chair without even a grunt of greeting. Wilson seemed strangely cool, and calmly chewed an unlighted cigar as he shook hands with the blind man and his secretary.

“No trouble getting us all here together,” he grinned. “Not one of us has dared leave the other’s sight all afternoon. Sat like bumps on a log glaring at each other, and trying to figure which of us was a murderer.”

“For God’s sake, get it over with!” Joslyn licked his dry lips with his tongue, and his voice was shaky. “The police were going to arrest all of us until their brains got untangled, and they took the right one. What d’ye want us here for, anyway?” he demanded.

“To show you the eye of the Seven Devils,” Colton said, quietly. He moved the golden image along the table, and carefully placed it in the centre, facing the five chairs that were drawn up against the wall. The blind man was very careful of the placing, and his secretary knew that he was putting it exactly over the scratches. Why?

“I told you not to drink so much absinthe this afternoon, Joslyn,” put in the captain, impatiently. “Your nerves are all gone.” He spoke to the problemist. “Are you really going to find the eye?” he asked, and there was a note of disbelief in his voice that Sydney Thames instantly resented.

A nod was Colton’s only answer.

Richards shook his head doubtfully. “Where that infernal Jap could have hidden the thing is beyond me. We literally tore the room to pieces, 334and picked the cotton apart, tuft by tuft.” His voice changed suddenly. “Did you find it?” he demanded.

The blind man straightened up. “Take seats,” he invited, for he had apparently not even heard the question. “You, too, Ching; the devils won’t get away.”

“The ambassador said that I must guard them,” replied the Chinese, simply.

“I expected he would,” declared Colton. “I saw him for a few minutes this afternoon.”

“You did!” The exclamation came from Captain Richards.

“Yes. I’d like to speak to you a few minutes in private, if the others will excuse us?” he turned to them, apologetically.

“Long as you like,” granted Wilson, lightly.

“Have it over with!” snarled Joslyn.

Colton put his hand on the captain’s shoulder and drew him to a far corner of the room. For several minutes they conversed in earnest whispers. The blind man’s back was toward the seated men, but they could see him making gestures of emphasis with the hand that was not resting on the captain’s arm.

The captain nodded emphatically, and they returned to the others. His face was grave, unreadable, but Sydney Thames saw a look of satisfaction gleaming in his eyes. So the blind man had convinced him that the pearl would be recovered!

They were all seated now, even the Chinese. Colton leaned against the table beside the seven golden devils, and faced them. His finger-tips felt of his crystalless watch.

“Ten minutes of seven,” he said. “At seven o’clock the jewel will be returned. Seven has been a mystic number for centuries.”

335Wilson laughed shortly. “You’re worse than the Chinese, Colton,” he accused.

“Rot!” growled Joslyn.

“You know that seven is the number sacred to our devils?” asked the Chinese, gravely.

An inclination of the blind man’s head was his only answer. Silence came. The minutes slowly ticked past. As time went the men again felt the sinister influence of the thing of gold before them; just as the blind man had intended they should. Joslyn could not keep his twitching hands still. Wilson bit through his cigar and muttered a curse as it fell to the floor. Even Captain Richards nervously tapped his vest-front with his fingers. Sydney Thames shifted uncomfortably. What was going to happen? Was this merely another of the irrelevant, apparently senseless things?—like the others of the afternoon.

Colton’s voice, low, solemn, broke the stillness. “The murderer of Meynerd can never receive his full punishment on this earth. He has murdered thousands!” Every man straightened in his chair. “For years he has lived on the blood of innocent women and children, and for years I have waited this opportunity. Thank God it has come!”

From the lower hall came the first stroke of seven. The blind man stood facing them, hands resting lightly on the table at his sides. The mellow note of the second stroke came. Unconsciously each man’s muscles tightened for something—they knew not what. Week-long seconds passed before the gong sounded the third time. Still the blind man did not move. He stood there as rigid as the hideous, eyeless thing of gold beside him.

“Do not move!”

With the snapped-out order came darkness, black, impenetrable. An indrawn breath sounded 336hissingly, sucked in through tight, clenched teeth.

Again the clock sounded. From over their head, behind them, came a single shaft of soft, white light. In the small circle of brightness the face of the Seven Devils leered at them. And over the squat, wide-nostriled nose the single eye of pearl, perfect, flawless, gleamed with its spark-red heart!

An animal-like snarl broke the silence. Sydney Thames felt the sweeping rush of a body past his chair; heard body meet body in struggle. He knew one was the blind man. The other―⁠―

He made a move to rise and snap on the lights.

Some subtle fifth sense of the blind man seemed to tell him the very thought in his secretary’s mind.

“Stay where you are!” came his command. “Don’t touch the lights!”

Came a crash of a falling body.

The blind man’s voice cut the blackness. “You would, eh!” He followed in with a half-dozen words in Chinese. In the tone was some terrible accusation, and they seemed to goad the other to madness.

“Your devilish Oriental poisons will never kill another!” There was not even a catch in the blind man’s breath; but the men who could not move a muscle heard the sobbing gasps of the other. Suddenly came silence. Then two sharp clicks of snapped handcuffs.

And as though the clicks had been a signal, the lights came, and with them the voice of Thornley Colton, quietly triumphant:

“The murder of Ralph Meynerd will at last bring you the death you have deserved so long, Captain Richards! Yes, the pearl you have been assuring yourself you still had in your pocket is an imitation. I took the real eye from you while we were talking 337in the corner. My fingers might make me a successful pickpocket.”

He turned to face the doorway, and there the dazed Sydney Thames saw the wide-eyed Fee. Behind him were two stalwart detectives.

“The prisoner I promised your chief,” Colton said, shortly.

They came forward and jerked the cursing man to his feet. “One minute!” commanded Colton. He faced the Chinese. “The Seven Devils was stolen from your temple. It is yours. Take it.”

“Damn you!” shrieked Richards. “You―⁠―”

For a silent second Colton’s eyes seemed to stare at him, then his eyes dropped.

“Take it to its true owners,” repeated Colton. “But first, see!” He went to the golden thing on the table. One hand, held cuplike, under the eye. A finger touched the toe of one of the figures. The eye dropped to his hand! “The true secret of the image,” he said, quietly. “The prongs, by some method of a forgotten genius, open by the pressure of one of the toes. That is how it was stolen in the instant you could see nothing but the dead man before you!”

IV.

An alcohol-soaked bandage around his eyes to ease the splitting headache the loss of four hours of sleep in the afternoon had caused, Thornley Colton sat in the darkened music-room. Hours before, the hand-cuffed Captain Richards had been led away, cursing, raving, blaspheming. The table in the library where had been the wonderful Seven Devils of Sin, was empty now, but in a room at the Waldorf four sleepless Chinese guarded the sacred thing with their lives; praying alternately to it and to 338their gods in thanks. Under the waters of the Pacific had already sped the news that the True Eye would again look from the altar of the Yunling monastery. The Chinese ambassador had come personally to thank Colton. He had promised the blind man honours, decorations, and Thornley Colton had smiled them aside.

“A curious crime; that of committing a murder to steal the thing he already owned?” The blind man repeated the question Sydney Thames had asked minutes before. “Yes, it was a curious crime, Sydney. But Richards knew that he was dealing with a curious people; he had dealt with them for thirty years. He understood perfectly that a Chinese who knew the legend regarding the impossibility of theft would not deviate a hair’s breadth from his century-old ideas. The devils would not let it be done; therefore it could not be done. The disappearance of the eye—coupled with the century vanishings which, of course, the captain knew all about—would only make the Chinese more anxious to get the image. It would prove to his peculiar mind that the devils had not lost their powers in the years they had been gone. You heard him raise the price. You saw Richards’s clever acting then; though he must have known that Ching couldn’t be found guilty of the murder. He would have seen to it that at the time of the killing the Chinese was in the wrong position to shoot the dart. He was wise enough to know that police suspicion would be immediately directed toward the Mongolian, but it was no part of his game to have him arrested. The others could have sworn Ching could not have committed the crime.

“The reason for it all is very simple—money. Richards, temple-looter for years, knew that this was his last game. No collector would have given 339him more than a hundred thousand, and that would have included the eye. He could not have substituted a gem that would deceive an expert. And by murdering in such a way as to make the Chinese think it was the work of the devils, he could have sold the image to the Chinese government for two hundred thousand without the eye! They would have staked their lives on the pearl re-appearing in some supernatural manner the minute the thing was restored to the monastery. And by killing Meynerd, Richards would gain the eye; an extra sixty-five thousand dollars. That was the price of the boy’s life. It was Richards, too, who sold the jade god that caused the Boxer trouble; that cost the lives of a thousand innocent women and children, and lives of ten thousand men to net him twenty-five thousand dollars!”

“He did that?” gasped Sydney, horror in his tone.

“Yes. He stole it and laid the blame on a white missionary to save his own worthless hide. That caused the first massacre. How he aroused the people of Chingtu over the Seven Devils I don’t know, but he had been in China long enough to learn all of the underground methods. He must have stayed there months to get the people in a proper spirit to make the government willing to go to any lengths to prevent an insurrection. Then he picked New York for the final scene. He joined the Wanderers’ years ago, and no one knew that his money came from the loot of temples and the blood of massacred women and children. I did, but I could do nothing but wait.

“See how carefully he picked his audience. Meynerd, drunken kid, could be depended upon to mock the serious Chinese. Joslyn, whose nerves were shattered by absinthe, would surely act suspiciously 340because of his very nervousness. Then Wilson to add fuel. And the Chinese! The scene was laid just as he has probably laid dozens of others.

“How he learned the secret of the devils’ eye I don’t know, nor care. Perhaps he learned it accidentally. Perhaps he picked it up in some obscure corner of the kingdom during his years of wandering. But he never thought that my supersensitive finger-tips would discover it, though his bringing of Nesu to the window was done so that he could get into a position where he could watch me. But I had found the thing in an instant, and while he watched I carefully kept away from it. The minute my finger felt the unbent prongs I knew they must have opened, and the toes would be the most ingenious place for the manipulator of them.

“It was he who notified the Chinese ambassador the exact hour he would unpack the image. I wanted to make sure of that, so I went to the Waldorf. I knew the thing was important enough to bring the diplomat all the way from Washington, though I knew, too, as Richards did, that a secretary would make the first visit.”

“How do you know that Richards told them?” asked Sydney. “Was he the ‘gods’ they spoke of?”

“The discussion between the ambassador and the interpreter before they answered my question told me that. While they spoke of the gods they mentioned a note sent the night before from New York. Of course, I was careful to conceal the fact that I understood Chinese, because I knew they would never tell any one of that. To them it was a decree of the gods; and a state secret.”

“And Richards deliberately killed Meynerd to 341make the one necessary minute of confusion?” put in Sydney.

“It didn’t matter whether it was Meynerd or not. But luck was with him; luck and the working out of the chance on which he had invited Meynerd as one of the party. The poisoned dart, in its short glass-tube, was in his handkerchief. I also took that from the pocket of his frock-coat when we talked in the library, and in it were fine glass particles. He hadn’t even thought it necessary to get rid of the thing. A simple crushing of the tube in his handkerchief when a breath had sent the dart on its journey of death, the dropping of the pieces into Joslyn’s drink, where eyes would never have seen them, was the work of an instant. Of course, if Joslyn hadn’t had the frappéd drink Richards needed as a hiding-place, the captain would have ordered one for himself. But there was one break in the programme. The Jap saw the theft of the jewel.”

“How did you know that?”

Colton smiled grimly. “The keyboard of silence again. When I shook hands my index-finger on the Jap’s wrist told me that his heart was pounding like a trip hammer. A mere death would never have excited an Oriental like that. For a time I suspected that he had shot the poisoned dart, and the captain had stolen the jewel. But the glass in the ice instead of the cotton, and the captain’s gentle manner toward him, proved that they were not working together. If they had been accomplices Richards would have acted harshly to avert suspicion. He was trying to convince the Jap that silence would mean a share of the theft. But I knew Richards wasn’t the kind to divide, or pay blackmail. The poisoned dart was too easy. There wasn’t a chance to end the Jap’s life in the room, 342for I knew the captain would have hardly dared bring two darts and tubes. There was always a possibility of his being searched by the police. At the first opportunity outside, though, puff! A dead Japanese who would tell no tales. Therefore I had the police arrest Nesu because Captain Richards probably had another one of his devilish darts somewhere around the club.”

“But the pearl?” demanded Sydney. “Why didn’t you search Richards before we left that room?”

“Do you think he would have taken such pains to hide the broken tube and then have kept the pearl?” asked Colton, dryly. “He hid the gem in a previously picked-out place when he left the room to call me on the telephone. Suppose I had arrested him; suppose we had torn the club apart and found the jewel. Would Captain Richards have gone to the chair for murder? Not with an American jury, and the mass of other suspicious things that would make more than a ‘reasonable doubt’ of his guilt.

“So I arranged to-night’s affair for a dénouement. I knew his nerves weren’t steel, for he had shown that when I told him to search the body of the man he had killed. That was a little too much even for him. Then I got the ‘eye’ while I pretended to tell him of a plan I had to make Joslyn confess. I substituted the fake pearl that would feel just the same in the darkness, because the whole thing depended on his having no premature suspicion. My announcement that workmen would be on hand to re-decorate the upper hall of the club, the place he must have chosen because of its nearness, forced him to take the pearl from its hiding-place to-night. He had to bring it here because I timed the thing so that he would have no chance 343to find another hiding-place. During the afternoon he probably saw to it that Joslyn kept on drinking absinthe, though Wilson’s drinks only seemed to straighten out his nerves.

“It was simple, very simple, but I have waited years for the opportunity; ever since I heard the true story of the Boxer uprising from the lips of a dying coolie who had helped to steal the jade god. I knew my chance would come some day, and the cocksure attitude I always took when Captain Richards was around, I knew would make Captain Richards welcome the opportunity to amuse himself by watching me try to solve a puzzle. That Chinese sentence I used there in the darkness told him for the first time that I knew all about him, and he realized then that I had been waiting for the chance his egotism had brought me.”

Sydney Thames’s lips curved in a superior smile. “And the Chinese can only see it as the working-out of the gods’ decree,” he murmured.

The blind man leaned back in his chair and blew a thoughtful smoke ring toward the ceiling. When he spoke his voice was low, almost reverent. “A half-century ago the thing was stolen by a young priest who did not know the secret that had been carefully guarded by the highest priests for centuries. Fifty years later it passes into the hand of a white man, and is brought thousands of miles to New York. A man is killed, another is in a prison-cell, and the devils are returned by one who is blind. The working of the gods? I wonder, Sydney, I wonder.”

THE END.

Transcriber’s Notes

New original cover art included with this ebook is granted to the public domain.

Spelling, hyphenation, and italicisation of words like “dénouement” and “finger-tip” are inconsistent between the different stories in the printed source text and have not been standardised.

The following changes and corrections have been made:

p. 159: Replaced “Thomas” with “Thames” in phrase “Thames could feel the tenseness of the men’s bodies.”

p. 159: Added comma after “servant” in phrase “He skated straight at the Hindu servant, struck him, and bowled him over.”

p. 213: Added period after phrase “He shook his head.”

p. 231: Replaced “it” with “its” in phrase “in which the gilt glove found at the woman’s throat had been carried to prevent its handling.”

p. 285: Replaced closing single with double quotation mark after phrase “Shrimp and I are going to catch the boat for Brazil at five o’clock!”

p. 312: Replaced closing single with double quotation mark after phrase “To me it is the lure of the unattainable.”

p. 159: Replaced “its” with “it” in phrase “the law calls it murder.”

p. 324: Removed stray apostrophe before phrase “I don’t see―⁠―.”