Foaming at the mouth, Will sank limply to the floor. From the hue of the blood, ebbing from the side of his neck, I saw at a glance that he was done for--Mimmie’s claws had severed his jugular vein.
Among the men who had helped me thrust the poor fellow out of Mimmie’s reach, was the sheriff of the county.
“What does this mean?” he demanded, grasping my shoulders.
“Follow me!” I cried.
A crowd of excited men, headed by the sheriff and myself, made for the Thornsdale place. The light still dimly illuminated the hall through the open door.
“I’ll go in first, sheriff,” I offered. “Have your men surround the place.”
I stole into the hall. A terrible stench greeted me. I found it came from a door opening out into the hall. A feeble light burned within. About me stood several boxes, with the sides torn open, and excelsior hanging and strewn about them.
Before me, completely assembled in every detail, stood what the boxes had contained--an operating table and all its many surgical accessories. Out of a long box in the corner sprawled the hairy limbs of the fast-decaying Horace, the male gorilla.
Taking a small oil lamp from the stand, I turned to examine the dead body; and I noticed a paper, which fell to the floor. A quick look at the side of the beast’s head revealed a great gash, rottening at the edges, through which, it was evident, the brain had been removed.
I hastily recalled Dr. Calgroni’s theories. Could it be--
My eyes chanced to drop to the floor. Holding forth the lamp, I saw there was handwriting on the bit of paper.
I picked it up and read the note, which, even at the last stand, Calgroni had directed to _me_, Von Meine, chief disparager of his wild theories:
“_Herr Von Meine, of Vienna, you said I could not do it. You berated me for my endeavors to alleviate the distress of the insane and feeble-minded. Yet I know now that I have accomplished it, without killing the subject as you claimed would be the result of such an operation. That’s why I followed you here, to show you! It was successful, Von Meine. I could tell by the way his eyes looked into mine, when he finally came to. But I could see the brain I had substituted for Will’s atrophied one was too vigorous--that expression didn’t belong to Simple Will. I am fleeing before he gains his strength. I admit my fear; for after this operation the former half-wit will be a dangerous customer, with the too vigorous and ferocious brain of the Gorilla Horace in his head!_”
Ten Pallbearers For This Mammoth Woman
When Mrs. Martha Carmas, of Middle Village, Queensboro, New York, died of elephantiasis, ten men were required to carry her body from the hospital to Lutz Church for funeral services. She weighed 710 pounds. A special coffin of immense size was made for the body. Mrs. Carmas was only thirty-three years of age, and, until she contracted the dreadful elephantiasis, she was not unusually heavy.
Woman Starves Herself To Feed Cats
In a mean neighborhood in New York City dwelt Mary Bosanti, the “Cat Woman.” The neighbors gave her that name because of her excessive love for cats. All the cats in that part of town seemed to be attracted to her house. Every day she went to the corner grocery and bought six quarts of milk, which she carried back to her room. Twenty or more cats always tagged at her heels, and when she spoke to them in a lowered tone they seemed to know what she said. They obeyed her every command. Then, one morning, a neighbor heard groans issuing from the “Cat Woman’s” room and called the other tenants of the house. They broke the door in--and found the “Cat Woman” starving, surrounded by a great swarm of cats and more than 200 empty milk bottles.
_Here’s a “Creepy” Tale That Ends In a Shuddering, Breath-taking Way_
_The_ Return _of_ Paul Slavsky
_By_ Capt. George Warburton Lewis
_Author of_ “Trailing the Jungle Man,” “Wine of the Wilderness,” Etc.
From Petrograd came Paul Slavsky, with what his Nihilist associates might have styled a clean record and no bungled jobs, but what Larry Brandon classified as a criminal record _de luxe_.
It was natural that such a record should bring about Slavsky’s early acquaintance with Inspector Brandon, of the Central Office and it followed, as day follows dawn, that the Terrorist should become the object of the shrewdest surveillance the Chief Inspector could design.
Whether Paul Slavsky actually discovered, or merely suspected, that he was being shadowed, matters little. A notation on an old blotter shows that he boldly attempted to pave the way for future criminal enterprises by calling at the Central Office in the role of a persecuted citizen, who had journeyed here from his native land to escape the hell which he declared the Russian Secret Police had made his life.
It took three months of intensive investigation to convince Larry Brandon that Slavsky was all the Secret Police had painted him and more, and that the Terrorist had not emigrated to America with even the remotest intention of reforming. It took the detective three months more to satisfy himself beyond all doubt that Slavsky had, marvelously enough, established an active branch of his old order and was undoubtedly spreading the doctrine of Gorgias and Fichte under the very noses of the Central Office experts. However, the evidence necessary to a conviction was lacking, so nothing could be done.
A little later the men of the same nationality as the Nihilist, whom Brandon had used to great advantage on the case, began, one by one, to drop quietly out of existence. This was not only mysterious--it was uncanny. Finally the decomposed bodies of some of these operatives were found and unmistakably identified.
In each instance _the head had been completely severed from the trunk_.
Recollecting that the Terrorist order, to which Paul Slavsky had belonged, had signalized its outrages by decapitating its victims, Brandon was enabled to initiate definite plans which, in due course, culminated in his running his man to earth.
But Paul Slavsky never beheld the fatal Chair nor served time. He chose the other route. He had elected to live in rebellion against man’s orderly institutions, and in this same unreasoning revolt he resolved to die. Like most of his ilk, the Terrorist in physical combat was a hard man, and he really fought a great fight, but he fought it with a master craftsman in the conquering of such as he, and inevitably he lost, with many of Larry Brandon’s bullets in his great body and only life enough left in him to greet--and almost at once to take final leave of--his favorite sister, Olga, who had arrived in Europe a little late as it transpired, to join her brother in his sinister calling.
Olga Slavsky, years younger than her lamented brother, was as pretty a little specimen of dark-eyed femininity as ever enchanted fastidious masculine eye. Yet so is the tigress beautiful.
Still, that is not quite the idea I wish to convey. If you can think of a woman in repose being as beautiful as a tigress and, in smoldering hate and loathing as repulsive, as hideous as a preying vampire, then you will get nearer my meaning. Olga, like her brother, was a staunch exponent of the Terrorist doctrine.
What Brandon expected soon came to pass. The strange girl, whom men called beautiful and women envied, was promptly elected to her brother’s place in what was known in the underworld of unlawful secret orders as the “League.” In this way she immediately crossed swords with the man who had ended the career of her brother Paul, and ere long she became aware, through members of the League detailed as spies, that still another noted criminologist, Joe Seagraves, was unpleasantly hot on her trail.
But Olga was undaunted. For daring and ingenuity, she by far eclipsed her cunning and resourceful brother, who had blazed the path of her iconoclastic pilgrimage.
Since little could thus far be proved against Olga, Seagraves believed that it might be better to declare a sort of armistice and, if possible, gradually win her over to the side of law and order. To this end, he openly called and laid his ideas before her. She frankly flouted his implied interest in her well-being, but showed a spirit of compromise by offering the crime specialist a cigarette.
In such a mood Olga became a docile and purring tiger kitten, only one never quite forgot her claws. She was highly superstitious, Seagraves discovered; but then her whole character was so anomalous and so replete with unexpectedly outcropping traits and wildly illogical beliefs that it was almost to be expected she would believe in ghosts.
She clung tenaciously to the belief, so Brandon told Seagraves, that some day Paul would _return_ and end the life of the man who--the Terrorist had told his sister shortly before his death--had done him to death.
“Do you still believe, Olga, that Paul is going to come back one day and carry Brandon away with him into the Unknown?” asked Seagraves.