About three o'clock that afternoon Aggie got into her clothes and insisted on coming into Tish's room, which was inconvenient, Tish expecting the message from Charlie Sands at any moment. Aggie was nervous, but her head was clearer. She'd been thinking things over, and she knew now that what had happened the night before had been a message from the roofer.
"Then the least said about it the better!" Tish snapped. "If he hasn't any better sense than to materialize his foot, and you a woman of your years and respectability, he'd better go back where he came from."
For heaven's sake, Tish," Aggie pleaded, looking over her shoulder. "He may be listening to us now!"
"I don't care if he is," said Tish recklessly. "If he'd materialize a will, now, leaving you that house in Groveton! But a foot!"
"I'm not so sure it was a foot," Aggie said restlessly. "I've been thinking, Tish—he was a large man, you know. It may have been a hand."
Now at that moment the telephone bell rang, and Tish signaled to me to take Aggie out at once. I got up and took her by the arm.
"I'll walk up and down the corridor with you, Aggie," I said. "You need exercise."
"I don't care to walk," she objected, trying to sit down. "See who is at the telephone, Tish. I expect my laundress is through washing and wants her money."
"I'd like you to see the hospital," I said desperately as the 'phone rang again. "The—the guinea-pigs, Aggie." Miss Lewis had told me about them.
Now, Aggie loves a guinea-pig. It's a queer taste, but she says they neither bark like dogs nor scratch like cats, and they have a nice way of wiggling their noses.
"Guinea-pigs!" she said in an ecstasy. "Where?"
"In the laboratory," said I, and led her out of the room.
She put on all her wraps and Miss Lewis took us to the laboratory, which is a small brick building set off by itself in the hospital yard, with Aggie cooing in anticipation and wanting to send out and buy a cabbage for them. Doctor Grim, who was the surgical interne, met us as we were crossing the yard, and volunteered to let us in.
"You know," he said, feeling in his pocket for the keys, "they're not attractive as some guinea-pigs and rabbits I have known under happier circumstances. They scratch a good bit—some think it's fleas; some say it's germs."
"Germs?" Aggie asked, puzzled.
"Oh, yes," he said, opening the door and leading the way into a narrow hall. "Some of them have been inoculated with several different kinds of germs. That's why we keep this place so well locked up, for fear the germs may escape. You know,"—he unlocked the second door and threw it open, "you know, suppose you were walking up the street and met a solid phalanx of say sixteen billion typhoid germs, or measles! It would be horrible, wouldn't it?"
He stepped into the room and looked about him.
"Come in," he said. "It's a little close. We had a tear-up among the resident staff, and nobody has been here to-day. Hello!"
He threw open the shutters, and a broad shaft of gray daylight lighted the room. Aggie gave a cry of dismay. The doors of the small cages around the walls were all open, and in the center, a pathetic heap of little brown-and-white and black-and-white bodies, lay the guinea-pigs.
Doctor Grim picked one up and examined it closely.
"I'm damned!" he said, and put it down. "Throats cut, every one of them! And where are the rabbits?"
Aggie sat down and began to blubber, but Miss Lewis scolded her soundly. "There'll be plenty more where they came from," she said sharply. "What does concern us is—how would anybody or anything get in here with both doors and all the windows locked, and not a chimney."
Aggie wiped her eyes and got up.
"You laughed at me last night, Miss Lewis," she said with dignity, "but I wish to remind you that to the fourth dimension there are no locks, no bars, no doors or walls."
"When they invent that," said Miss Lewis, opening the door to let us out, "they'll have to invent something like these X-ray-proof screens, or a woman won't dare to change her clothes."
"And what's more," said Aggie, turning in the doorway, "the hand that slew those innocent little creatures is the one I touched last night!"
"Hand!" cried Miss Lewis. "It was a foot then."
But Aggie was holding her shoulder over her face and hurrying across the yard. At the far side she threw back a contemptuous sneeze.
Tish's commission to Charlie Sands had an unexpected result. She was almost bursting with it when I got back.
"Listen," she said while Aggie got her spray, "doesn't this bear out what IVe been saying right along? The Zoo people say positively that none of their animals has escaped. But they took such an interest in his inquiry that Charlie grew suspicious and bribed a keeper. He sent this up by messenger from the office:
" 'Dear and revered spinster aunt,' " she read—"the young rascal! 'I couldn't tell you this over the 'phone, for it's our exclusive property, and will be published to-morrow morning, with photographs of the late deceased, etc. Hero, the biggest ape in captivity, pining for his keeper, Wesley Barker, who has been away, committed suicide in his cage last night by hanging himself with a roller towel. He was found dead when the assistant keeper unlocked the cage at six o'clock this morning. Nobody knows how he got the roller towel. Charlie.'
" 'P. S.—I've got the roller towel, a fine long one and marked S. P. T. Do you think the letters stand for Suicidal Purpose Towel?' "
Tish looked at me triumphantly over her reading-glasses.
"You see, Lizzie, what a little logical thinking will do. If it hadn't been for me, you and Aggie would have gone to your graves expecting to be able to come back at any time and hang from chandeliers or do any of the ridiculous buffoonery that seems to be expected of returned spirits. We search for a ghost and we find a gorilla."
She meant ape, of course, but the other was alliterative.
"I'm not quite clear about it yet, Tish," I said, with my head in a whirl. "If his cage was locked, and the keepers say he hadn't been free, and if Miss Blake—"
"If! If r said Tish impatiently. "I haven't had time to figure it all out, of course. But mark my words, Lizzie, the mystery is solved. We shall sleep to-night."
But, as a matter of fact, we never even went to bed.
Chapter XI.
If It Had Not Been for Love
It is curious to think that if Tish had been able to finish her story to Tommy Andrews that evening, and to have given him Charlie's letter to read, the thing that occurred that night could scarcely have happened. For with Tommy knowing what he did, he could have put two and two together and have gone about things in a different way. Aggie, of course, is a fatalist, and believes it would have happened anyhow.
In the first place, Tish felt so sure that everything was cleared up that she told Aggie the whole story, ending with the suicide at the Zoo. Aggie sat with her mouth open, and didn't speak except to sneeze until Tish was through. Then she surprised us.
"Maybe you are right, Tish." she said. "I know I hope so. I don't know much about gorillas, but I guess they're mostly hairy, aren't they?"
"Mostly," said Tish grimly. "I haven't heard of any Mexican hairless ones."
"Well, the hand by my bed—you needn't sneer, Tish; you can call it a foot if you prefer foot—"
"Listen to the woman!" cried Tish. "I haven't called it anything."
"The