“Mr. Francis,” he said, “I cannot talk to you. I can say nothing. I shall come to you at once. I am on the point of starting. Your news has overwhelmed me.”
He laid down the receiver. He looked around him like a man in a nightmare.
“The taxicab is still waiting, sir,” Craig reminded him.
“That is most fortunate,” the Professor pronounced. “I remember now that I had no change with which to pay him. I must go back. Look after my brother. And, Craig, telephone at once to Mr. Sanford Quest. Ask him to meet me at the museum in twenty minutes. Tell him that nothing must stand in the way. Do you hear?”
The man hesitated. There was protest in his face.
“Mr. Sanford Quest, sir?” he muttered, as he followed his master down the hall.
“The great criminologist,” the Professor explained eagerly. “Certainly! Why do you hesitate?”
“I was wondering, sir,” Craig began.
The Professor waved his servant on one side.
“Do as you are told,” he ordered. “Do as you are told, Craig. You others—you do not realise. You cannot understand what this means. Tell the taxi man to drive to the museum. I am overcome.”
The taxicab man drove off, glad enough to have a return fare. In about half-an-hour’s time the Professor strode up the steps of the museum and hurried into the office. There was a little crowd of officials there whom the curator at once dismissed. He rose slowly to his feet. His manner was grave but bewildered.
“Professor,” he said, “we will waste no time in words. Look here.”
He threw open the door of an anteroom behind his office. The apartment was unfurnished except for one or two chairs. In the middle of the uncarpeted floor was a long wooden box from which the lid had just been pried.
“Yesterday, as you know from my note,” the curator proceeded, “I was away. I gave orders that your case should be placed here and I myself should enjoy the distinction of opening it. An hour ago I commenced the task. That is what I found.”
The Professor gazed blankly at the empty box.
“Nothing left except the smell,” a voice from the open doorway remarked.
They glanced around. Quest was standing there, and behind him Lenora. The Professor welcomed them eagerly.
“This is Mr. Quest, the great criminologist,” he explained to the curator. “Come in, Mr. Quest. Let me introduce you to Mr. Francis, the curator of the museum. Ask him what questions you will. Mr. Quest, you have the opportunity of earning the undying gratitude of a brother scientist. If my skeleton cannot be recovered, the work of years is undone.”
Quest strolled thoughtfully around the room, glancing out of each of the windows in turn. He kept close to the wall, and when he had finished he drew out a magnifying-glass from his pocket and made a brief examination of the box. Then he asked a few questions of the curator, pointed out one of the windows to Lenora and whispered a few directions to her. She at once produced what seemed to be a foot-rule from the bag which she was carrying, and hurried into the garden.
“A little invention of my own for measuring foot-prints,” Quest explained. “Not much use here, I am afraid.”
“What do you think of the affair so far, Mr. Quest?” the Professor asked eagerly.
The criminologist shook his head.
“Incomprehensible,” he confessed. “Can you think, by-the-bye, of any other motive for the theft besides scientific jealousy?”
“There could be no other,” the Professor declared sadly, “and it is, alas! too prevalent. I have had to suffer from it all my life.”
Quest stood over the box for a moment or two and looked once more out of the window. Presently Lenora returned. She carried in her hand a small object, which she brought silently to Quest. He glanced at it in perplexity. The Professor peered over his shoulder.
“It is the little finger!” he cried,—“the little finger of my ape!”
Quest held it away from him critically.
“From which hand?” he asked.
“The right hand.”
Quest examined the fastenings of the window before which he had paused during his previous examination. He turned away with a shrug of the shoulders.
“See you later, Mr. Ashleigh,” he concluded laconically. “Nothing more to be done at present.”
The Professor followed him to the door.
“Mr. Quest,” he said, his voice broken with emotion, “it is the work of my lifetime of which I am being robbed. You will use your best efforts, you will spare no expense? I am rich. Your fee you shall name yourself.”
“I shall do my best,” Quest promised, “to find the skeleton. Come, Lenora. Good morning, gentlemen!”
With his new assistant, Quest walked slowly from the museum and turned towards his home.
“Make anything of this, Lenora?” he asked her.
She smiled.
“Of course not,” she answered. “It looks as though the skeleton had been taken away through that window.”
Quest nodded.
“Marvellous!” he murmured.
“You are making fun of me,” she protested.
“Not I! But you see, my young friend, the point is this. Who in their senses would want to steal an anthropoid skeleton except a scientific man, and if a scientific man stole it out of sheer jealousy, why in thunder couldn’t he be content with just mutilating it, which would have destroyed its value just as well—What’s that?”
He stopped short. A newsboy thrust the paper at them. Quest glanced at the headlines. Lenora clutched at his arm. Together they read in great black type—
ESCAPE OF CONVICTED PRISONER!
MACDOUGAL, ON HIS WAY TO PRISON,
GRAPPLES WITH SHERIFF AND JUMPS
FROM TRAIN! STILL AT LARGE
THOUGH SEARCHED FOR BY
POSSE OF POLICE
2.
The windows of Mrs. Rheinholdt’s town house were ablaze with light. A crimson drugget stretched down the steps to the curbstone. A long row of automobiles stood waiting. Through the wide-flung doors was visible a pleasant impression of flowers and light and luxury. In the nearer of the two large reception rooms Mrs. Rheinholdt herself, a woman dark, handsome, and in the prime of life, was standing receiving her guests. By her side was her son, whose twenty-first birthday was being celebrated.
“I wonder whether that professor of yours will come,” she remarked, as the stream of incoming guests slackened for a moment. “I’d love to have him here, if it were only for a moment. Every one’s talking about him and his work in South America.”
“He hates receptions,” the boy replied, “but he promised he’d come. I never thought, when he used to drill science into us at the lectures, that he was going to be such a tremendous big pot.”
Mrs. Rheinholdt’s plump fingers toyed for a moment complacently with the diamonds which hung from her neck.
“You can never tell, in a world like this,” she murmured. “That’s why I make a point of being civil to everybody. Your laundry woman may become a multimillionaire, or your singing master a Caruso, and then, just while their month’s on, every one is crazy to meet them. It’s the Professor’s month just now.”
“Here