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 their 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 him 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 because 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 make 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,
for 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 to 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.”