collapsible net. “From its brightness, it should be a fall specimen,
and undoubtedly shows the variations on the lower wing which I am
studying. Wait one moment, my friend, and I shall welcome you to the
hospitality of my cyanide jar.”
After a brief flight the insect settled down well toward the centre of
another patch of shrubbery. Having prepared his net, the hunter set
about forcing his way into this patch, but before he was in reach of
his prey the pressure on the close-knit vegetation had disturbed the
sensitive insect and again it rose, this time in alarm. Though barely
an inch across the wings, this species exhibits capacities for flight
greater than that of much larger butterflies. When again it alighted,
the pursuer, panting and perspiring, had been drawn in a semicircular
course, some hundreds of yards inland. This time he did not get near
enough for a trial of his net before the elusive creature was off
again. The third flight was a briefer one. After tentative flutterings,
the _pseudargiolm_ alighted on a marshmallow leaf in a hollow. Taking
profit of his previous failures, Professor Ravenden sat down and got
his breath while waiting for the quarry to lapse into a state of
undisturbed quietude. Thus, it was easy presently for the hunter to net
it and transfer it to the cyanide jar. This done, he realised with a
start of conscience that he had wasted ten minutes, and was a quarter
of a mile off the track of his engagement. With all speed, he pointed
across the knolls toward the beach.
Fog was drifting in from the ocean, giving added incentive to haste.
Wisest it would be, the professor judged, to make for the near point of
the cliff, so that he might have a line to follow should mist blot the
landscape. The beach below was just dimming with the advance of the
first folds of grey when Professor Ravenden reached the brink. The
nearer sands were cut off from his vision by a rise between himself and
the rendezvous. As his eye ranged to the west for the readiest access
to the level, it was caught and held by the outstretched body of Dick
Colton lying upon the hard sand out from the mouth of the ravine where
Serdholm and Haynes had met their death.
For the moment the scientist was stunned into inaction. Suddenly the
body twitched, and there swept over the unhappy entomologist a dreadful
sense of his own negligence and responsibility. Along the heights
paralleling the beach-line he ran at utmost speed, dipped down into a
hollow where, for the time, the prospect was shut off, and surmounted
the slope beyond, which brought him almost above the body, and a little
to the east of the gully. Meantime the fog had been closing down, and
now, as the professor reached the spot, it spread a grey and wavering
mantle between him and what lay below.
Already he had attained the gully’s edge, when there moved out upon the
hard sand a thing so out of all conception, an apparition so monstrous,
that the professor’s net fell from his hand, and a loud cry burst from
him. Through the enveloping medium of the mist, the figure swayed
vaguely, and assumed shapes beyond comprehension. Suddenly it doubled
on itself, contracted to a compact blur, underwent a swift inversion,
and before the scientist’s straining vision there arose a man, dreadful
of aspect indeed, but still a human being, and as such, not beyond
human powers to cope with. The man had been moving toward the body of
Colton when the professor’s shout arrested him. Now he whirled about
and stood facing the height with squinted eyes and bestially gnashing
teeth.
To delay him was the one chance for Colton’s life, if Colton indeed
were not already beyond help.
“If I only could get down the gully!” thought the professor, and
dismissed the thought instantly. Time for any course except the direct
one now was lacking. The one way lay over the cliff.
“Stand where you are!” he shouted in a voice of command, and before the
words were fairly done he was in mid-air, a giddy terror dulling his
brain as he plunged down through the fog. Fortunately—for the bones of
fifty-odd years are brittle—he landed upon a slope of soft sand.
Pitching forward, he threw himself completely over, and carried to his
feet by the impetus, charged down the slope upon the man.
It was the juggler. So much the professor realised as he sped forward.
Mania of murder was written unmistakably on the seamed and malignant
face and in the eyes, as the man turned them on the professor. His
posture was that of a startled beast, alert and alarmed. Beyond him,
near the sprawled body of Colton, a huge knife with an inordinately
broad blade stuck, half upright, in the sand. Toward this the maniac
had started, but turned swiftly with a snarl, and crouched, as the
intrepid scientist ran in upon him.
Exultation, savage and keen, a most unscientific emotion, blazed up in
Professor Ravenden as he noted that his opponent had little the
advantage of him in size and weight. What little there was would be
offset by his own natural wiriness of frame which a rigid habit of life
and out-of-door exercise had kept from the deterioration of age. The
scientist came in, stooping low, and, stooping low, the murderer met
the onset. The two closed. With a sudden, daunting shock the
entomologist realised, as Whalley’s muscles tightened on his, that he
had met the strength of fury. For a moment they strained, Professor
Ravenden striving for a grip which should enable him to break the
other’s foothold. Then with a rabid scream the creature dashed his face
into the professor’s shoulder. Through cloth and flesh sheared the
ravening teeth, until they grated on the shoulder-blade.
Instantly the aspect of the duel changed. For, upon the outrage of that
assault, a fury not less insane than the maniac’s fired the professor,
and he who always had prided himself upon a considered austerity of the
emotions, was roused to the world-old, baresark thirst of murder which
lies somewhere, black and terrible, in the soul of every courageous
man, and, sends him, at the last, straight to the throat of his enemy.
Power flushed through his veins; his muscles distended with the
strength of steel. Driving his fingers deep under the chin, he tore the
hideous, distorted face from his shoulder. His right hand, drawn back
for a blow, twitched upon the cord from which depended his heavy
poison-bottle. Shouting aloud, he swung up the formidable weapon and
brought it down upon the juggler’s head with repeated blows. The man’s
grasp relaxed. Back for a fuller swing Professor Ravenden leaped, and
crushed him to the ground. The thick glass was shattered, and on the
blood-stained sands a little spot of heaven’s blue fluttered in the
breeze, instantly to be trampled under foot.
Suddenly the scientist swayed and lurched forward. An influence as
potent for death as the most murderous weapons of man was abroad,
loosed when the glass shattered. The deadly fumes of the cyanide,
rising from the base of the jar which its owner still held, were doing
their work. With barely sense enough surviving to realise his new
peril, he flung it far from him. A mist fell, like a curtain, somewhere
between his eyes and his brain, befogging the processes of thought.
Heavily he dropped to his hands and knees over the feet of the
senseless juggler, his face toward Colton.
Colton seemed to have risen. This the professor took to be a figment of
his reeling brain. It annoyed him.
“Lie down! Be quiet!” he muttered. “You are dead, and I am going to
kill your murderer!”
Calling up all his will-power, he crawled to the juggler’s head and set
his fingers to the palpitating throat. Another moment and the death of
a fellow-man would have been upon the soul of the scholarly scientist,
when an arm under his chest and an insistent voice in his ear brought
him back to reason.
“In God’s name, Professor, don’t strangle the poor devil!”
The baresark grip relaxed. Professor Ravenden collapsed, rolled over on
his back and looked up stupidly into the white face of Dick Colton.
“Where—where—is my _pseudargiolus?_” he asked plaintively.
“It’s all right, professor; there wasn’t any _pseudargiolus_. Just lie
quiet for a moment.”
Professor Ravenden struggled up to a sitting posture. “Let me rise,” he
cried. “I have lost my specimen of _pseudargiolus_. It fell when the
jar broke.”
He looked about him, and his eyes fell on the juggler.
“The pteranodon?” he queried. The mist was clearing from his brain, and
his mind swung dizzily back to the great speculation.
“What does it all mean?” he groaned.
“There is the pteranodon!” And Colton laughed shakily as he pointed to
the blood-smeared form lying quietly on the sand.
“But those footprints! Those footprints! The fossil marks on the
rocks!”
“Footprints on the rock. Handprints here.”
“Handprints?” repeated the professor. “Tell me slowly, I implore you. I
must confess to an unaccustomed condition of bewilderment.”
“No wonder. The juggler killed his men by knife-play. He lay hidden in
the mouth of the gully, and threw the knife as they came along. After
killing them he had to recover his knife. So he walked out upon his
hands, leaving the marks which have puzzled us so.”
“But why?”
“He is coming to. We’ll ask him.”
In a few minutes “The Wonderful Whalley” was able to sit up and answer
questions. All his rage seemed to have gone, and all his cunning. He
was cowed and weak and indifferent.
“Why did you kill Serdholm?” asked Colton.
“He beat me,” was the reply.
“And what had you against Mr. Haynes?”
“He sink I was murderer; zat I kill ze sailor.”
“And against me?”
“I see you follow ze trail. I sink you find me.”
“So I probably should. I just had seen the resemblance between my
handprint and yours and had jumped forward to examine the next print,
when I was struck.”
“Zat jomp safe you,” said the juggler. “Ze butt of ze knife hit as it
turn or you would be dead.” He spoke in a matter-of-fact way. While
waiting until he should be able to walk, they got a detailed confession
from him. He told with perfect frankness of the killing of Serdholm and
Haynes and the attack on Colton; but he flatly and rather nonchalantly
denied the murder of Petersen the sailor, and the slaying of the sheep.
Coming to the killing of the kite-flier, Colton set a trap for him.
“Why did you club him after you had given him the knife?”
“Who?” said the juggler, his eyes growing wide. “Mr. Ely, the man we
found dead two nights ago with your knife-wound in his back.”
Whalley displayed a pitiable agitation.
“Ze tall, still man, ze man at ze fisher-house? He ees dead?” he cried.
“You ought to know.”
“I sink he was dead,” said the juggler simply. “I hear zat sound up in
ze air.”
Once more he threw his hands upward in that shuddering gesture which
had startled them the night of the wreck.
“Zen I hear him cry like a dead man. A great an’ terreeble cry! I run
to my place an’ hide away.”
“He heard the kites,” said Colton to Professor Ravenden. Then to the
juggler:
“Now, Whalley, what put it into your head to walk out on your hands
after your knife when you killed Mr. Haynes and Serdholm?”
“To make it like ze ozzer tracks,” he replied promptly.
“What other tracks?” cried the two men in a breath.
“Ze tracks of eet I do not know. I see zem; but I do not know. Come, I
show you.”
He got unsteadily to his feet, and, guarded on either side, led them
down the beach toward the Sand Spit station. After walking about a
third of a mile he stopped and cast about him.
“Zere!” he said triumphantly, pointing. Following the instruction, they
made out traces of blood and the prints of a lamb’s hoof. Leading out
to the spot was the dreadful familiar double spoor of talons.
“You did that too,” accused Colton.
For refutation “The Wonderful Whalley” dropped to his knees and laid
his hand over one of the marks. The hand more than completely covered
the prints.
“You zee?” he said triumphantly.
“Whalley, what made that mark there?” said Professor Ravenden.
Again that strange gesture from the juggler and the quick shuddering
in-draw of the shoulders. “Ze death-bird, maybe,” he said.
Nothing more could be gotten from him. They delivered him at the
coast-guard station to be turned over to the authorities. When he was
out of their hands, Professor Ravenden insisted on returning to look
for the remains of his lost specimen, and was relieved at finding one
wing intact. Not until he had carefully folded this in paper did he
turn to Dick Colton with the question:
“What is your opinion of our problem now?”
“I’m at my wit’s end,” said Dick. “Possibly we’ve got on the trail of
another hand-walking knife-thrower.”
“Or the death-bird, the pteranodon,” returned Professor Ravenden
quietly.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
THE LOST CLUE
IN his own way, Professor Ravenden possessed as keen a detective
instinct as Haynes himself. The variation of a shade of a moth’s wing,
the obscurest trait in the life-habit of some unconsidered larva form,
was sufficient to set him to the trail, and sometimes with results
that, to his compeers, seemed little short of marvellous. Science had
been enriched by his acumen, in several notable instances, and
thousands of farmers who had never heard his name owed to him the
immunity of certain crops from the ravages of their most destructive
insect enemy.
In this work the pedantic professor was a true zealot. So much did his
enthusiasm partake of the ardour of the hunt that he had found himself
in the readiest sympathy with Haynes’ sharp and practical capacities.
Now, for the first time, he had seen a problem in his own department
assume an aspect of immediate and tremendous human importance. That his
part in the solution should be worked out with flawless perfection was
become a matter of conscience, a test of honour. Sure as he was of his
ground, he determined to prove to the utmost, the solidity of his
foundation.
“Have you other fences than the one which I know, built of the
cretaceous rock?” he asked Johnston.
“You’ll find some in the farthest lot back, I reckon,” said Johnston.
“Look near the corners of the fence for them slabs.”
“If you have a wheelbarrow,” began the scientist when the other
interrupted him.
“You wasn’t thinking of going up there now, was you?”
The professor assented.
“Alone?” said Johnston. “It’s gettin’ toward dark, too. Hadn’t I better
go with you?”
“I shall be gone but a few moments,” said the professor with some
impatience. “It was my design, in case I found any further imprints to
bring back the rocks in the wheelbarrow for careful inspection.”
“You go in and get your revolver, Professor,” said Johnston, “and I’ll
have Henkle run the barrow up there for ye.”
Henkle was a young Swedish boy, known to possess no English and
suspected of having little more wits. With some difficulty he was made
to understand what was expected of him; so, having had the barrow
handles inserted in his hard young palms, and the professor pointed out
to him he patiently trudged along in the wake of the savant, out across
the hollows.
In a brief time the professor had found indications on half a dozen of
the rocks. Glowing with enthusiasm, he loaded them into the barrow, and
set a homeward pace, that made the sturdy little Swede gasp before he
had covered half the distance.
McDale, the reporter for one of the “yellow” papers, saw them from his
window, coming into the yard.
“A good chance to get something from the professor,” he thought, and
ran down to accost him.
Henkle, the Swede boy, hung about, open-mouthed and staring stupidly.
“Go away. You’re through. Skip!” said McDale, indicating dismissal with
a sweeping gesture.
Unfortunately the sweep of his arm was toward the field whence the pair
had just come with their find. The tired boy uncomplainingly picked up
the handles of his barrow again and trudged away, unnoticed by the
professor, who was now deep in the study of the first rock.
“See,” he cried excitedly to McDale. “This is unquestionably the print
of a smaller specimen than ours; a young pteranodon, doubtless, or
perhaps a lesser sub-species.”
Pretending an absorbed interest, the reporter drew out the
simple-hearted professor, who, showing rock after rock in explanation,
elaborated his theory. McDale, hurrying upstairs to make his notes—he
had been afraid to “pull a pencil” on the scientist, lest he check the
enthusiastic flow of ideas—ran into Eldon Smith.
“Get anything?” asked Smith, in the brief formula of the newspaper
world.
“Sunday stuff, and a corker!” said McDale. “You wouldn’t want it; but
it’s hot stuff for us, with a scare-devil double-page drawing of the
Pteranodaceus Dingbattius, and Professor Ravenden’s photograph as large
as we can get it.”
“Pretty tough on the professor,” said Eldon Smith. “He’s rather a
square old party.”
“Oh, I’m not going to fake him,” protested the other. “And of course I
won’t guy him. That would put a crimp in the story.”
“You know what his reputation will be in the scientific world, after
he’s been made to stand for a wild-eyed nightmare like this,” said the
other.
“Oh, he’ll be down and out,” agreed the dealer in sensations. “But that
ain’t my business. And the cream of it is that he believes in this
gilly-loo bird, as if he’d seen it.”
Eldon Smith jumped to the window and throwing it up with a bang, leaned
out into the darkness. “Did you hear that?” he cried.
McDale was beside him instantly. They stood, rigid, intent, as a faint,
woeful, high-pitched scream of abject terror quivered in the still air.
Instantly the house was alive. Somebody was calling for lanterns.
Another voice was shouting to Professor Ravenden to come back, to wait,
not to venture out into the night without light. The two reporters,
with the Colton brothers, got to the piazza at the same time.
Meantime the shrieks grew louder. They came short and at regular
intervals, with an almost mechanical effect.
“That’s like hysteria,” said Dick Colton. “Can anyone make out just
where it comes from?”
As if in reply, the professor’s precise accents were heard.
“This way. He is here.”
There was a rush of the men. “I have him,” called Professor Ravenden.
Once more the voice was raised, but subsided into a long, sobbing moan.
Then the savant staggered into view, carrying the limp form of the
young Swede.
“He has fainted,” he said. “He was rushing by me, quite unheeding my
call, when I caught him and he fell, as if shot. I trust he is not
injured.”
“Unhurt,” said Dick Colton, “but literally frightened almost to death.”
Henkle came to half an hour later. No explanation could be had of him,
other than a shuddering indication of some overhanging terror. Once he
made a sweeping gesture of the arms, much as had Whalley on the night
of the wreck. The physician gave him a sleeping powder and arranged to
see him early in the morning.
He never saw the boy again. With the first light he was gone, and his
little belongings with him. Afterward they found out that he had walked
to the station, and taken the morning train.
“There’s a possible clue lost,” said Dick Colton to the professor,
“that might have helped us.”
But Professor Ravenden was little concerned. He had discovered a print
which might possibly indicate a rudimentary sixth toe on the pteranodon
and he was absorbed in measurements.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
THE PROFESSOR’S SERMON
FOLLOWING the injunction left by Haynes, they buried him in the
wind-swept knoll behind the Third House. A clergyman who had been sent
for from New York took charge of the services, which were attended by
the score of newspaper men and the little Third House group. A pompous,
precise, and rather important person, was the clergyman; encased within
a shell of prejudice which shut him off from any true estimate of the
man over whose body he was to speak.
In Haynes he was able to see only an agent in a rather disapproved
enterprise, mighty, indeed, but, to his unseeing eye, without the
ideals which he had formulated for himself, and for those upon whom he
imposed his standards. So his address was purely formal; with a note of
the patronising and the exculpatory as if there were something to be
condoned in the life which the reporter had laid down.
At the end there were sneering faces among the newspaper men. Helga
wore an expression of piteous bewilderment; Dick Colton’s teeth were
set hard; and Dolly Ravenden’s dark beauty glowed with suppressed
wrath. To the surprise of all, as the minister closed, Professor
Ravenden got to his feet hesitantly and nervously.
“My friends,” he said, “before we part I wish to add a slight tribute
to what little we may say of the dead. For me to speak to you of his
qualifications of mind and character would be an impertinence. But as a
follower of what we call science I have one word to speak.
“To see the truth, exact and clear, is given to no human. Now and again
are born and matured minds which solve some small portion of the great
problem that we live in. These are the world’s master intellects, the
Darwins, the Linnaeuses, the Cuviers, the Pasteurs. Borrowing their
light, we perhaps may illuminate some tiny crevice, and thus pay our
part of the human debt. That is the task to which the scientist sets
his long and patient efforts.
“And this is achieved how? By an instinct which asserts itself potently
in a certain type of humanity, in the highest type which we know. For
want of a better term, I may call it the truth-vocation. The
truth-seeker may concern himself with the smallest scale of a moth’s
wing; he may devote himself to the study of the human soul in its most
profound recesses; or he may strive with the immediate facts of life.
Lie his field of endeavour where it may, his is the one great calling.
Your friend and my friend who lies dead before us was of that world-old
army. He died under its flag and on the field of honour.
“His part was to seek the truth in the whirling incidents of the
moment. With what complete absorption and self-forgetfulness he gave
himself to the task, you know better than I. Perhaps you do not know,
as I did not until after his death, that he clung to his appointed work
against the ravages of a slow, pain-racked and mortal illness. The
great Master of Destiny whose universe proceeds by immutable laws has
seen no priest of old called to martyrdom, no prophet risen to warn the
nations, no discoverer inspired to enlarge the ken of mankind, with a
truer vocation than the seeker in a lesser field whom we honour here.
“He has gone to his own place. Whether he still seeks or has found, is
not for us. For us is the legacy of a single-minded devotion and a
straightforward nobility of character that cannot but have made and
left its impress wherever exerted.”
How strangely work the influences of sympathy! The reporters who
listened with warming hearts to the simple man of science had come to
Haynes’ funeral primarily as a mark of respect, but secondarily because
of their interest in a remarkable “story.” Whispers of the professor’s
pteranodon theory had passed about. One or two of the men besides
McDale of the “yellow,” had questioned him shrewdly, and had seen that
he would commit himself to that theory. This meant a big sensation. The
practice of journalism tends to dwarf the imagination and to make men
skeptical of all that lies beyond the bounds of the usual. Not one of
the reporters there took the slightest stock in the theory of a
prehistoric monster. Nevertheless, the mere word of a man so eminent in
the scientific world as the entomologist would be enough to “carry the
story,” and make it a tremendous feature. Columns of space were in it.
But it meant also, as every reporter there believed, the downfall of
Professor Ravenden’s repute in a cataract of ridicule. As soon as the
newspaper group re-gathered at Third House, McDale spoke.
“I’m going to do what I never expected to do,” he said. “I’m going to
throw my paper down.”
“On the Ravenden story?” asked Eldon Smith.
McDale nodded gloomily. “It would have been such a screamer!” he said,
shaking his head. “But it goes to the scrap-heap. Not for mine—after
that little sermon.”