The Face and the Doctor

RGL e-Book Cover 2019^©

Serialised in Detective Fiction Weekly, 22 and 29 May 1937

First e-book edition: Roy Glashan's Library, 2019^©
Version Date: 2019-07-17
Produced by Matthias Kaether and Roy Glashan

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Detective Fiction Weekly, 22 May 1937, with first part of "The Face and the Doctor"

CHAPTER I. [UNTITLED]
CHAPTER II. A LIST OF CLUES
CHAPTER III. STRANGE IMPRISONMENT
CHAPTER IV. A LONG SLEEP
CHAPTER V. OLD FRIENDS MEET AGAIN
CHAPTER VI. [UNTITLED]
CHAPTER VII. THE CHILL OF DEATH
CHAPTER VIII. KATE DOES HER PART
CHAPTER IX. A DOCTOR'S HUMAN SCULPTURE

At last Muir was looking at the man he was hunting.

CHAPTER I. — [UNTITLED]

WHEN Muir came up to the bar, a Third Avenue elevated train was going by like thunder in a tin heaven and he had to pitch his voice as though he were talking into a high wind in order to ask for a Scotch-and-soda, but by the time he could wrap his long fingers around the glass there was sufficient quiet for him to ask: "Has Everett Franklin been here?"

"Middle-sized, a good pair of shoulders, and as handsome as Hollywood," said Muir. "Looks five years younger than I."

The bartender scanned again the huge, scholarly forehead of Muir and the face half-ugly with pain that was not of the body. He looked forty, though in the morning of the day no doubt he seemed five years younger.

"It's the reporter that you're askin' about," said the bartender. "He's been and gone."

Muir glanced at the clock on the wall and it was, in fact, a quarter past eleven. Other questions rose in his eyes, but he kept them silent and drew the letter from his pocket again. He read it very slowly, deliberately.

You remember when we were riding up-town in the taxi the other day, and I pointed to a house and said I was going to raise a scandal out of that place that would put a bad smell all through New York? Well, tonight is the night for me to do a little looking into the business, and it may be a job that will need your pick-lock, your flashlight, and even that big automatic you like to harness under your left arm.

The fact is that you haven't had much fun since you were the boy aviator in '18, playing tag with the enemy over the Western Front, but tonight I may be able to show you enough action to quiet your nerves, for a week or so, and you'll be able to sleep every night through instead of going the rounds like a silly ass and lapping up all the liquor in New York.

I know you're only four days back from Central America and you may have meant it when you said that you wanted to rest a bit, but if I know the old Peter Angus Muir, he'll be on the job with me tonight.

When I say scandal, I don't mean any dirty man- woman business because I know that's not up your street. I mean another kind of dynamite that may blow New York wide apart. Till eleven, I'll be at O'Doyle's Saloon, on Third Avenue, near Fifty- ninth.

Adieu to the greatest detective outside of books from the greatest reporter that ever covered crime. And I mean it!

Muir, refolding the letter, drank half the scotch-and-soda slowly, without taking the glass from his lips. More than ever he could curse, now, that restless habit which kept him roaming the city and which on this night had caused him to miss the telephone call of Franklin at his apartment, for he felt that some great venture lay ahead, and that he might be left hopelessly in the rearward of the event.

He lighted a cigarette and looked into the smoke with the eyes of a crystal-gazer, trying to step back to the hour when he had ridden up-town with Franklin four days before. He could remember first, and most clearly, the grinning face of that malevolent reporter as he had hooked his thumb over his shoulder and said: "One of those houses right there on the corner—I'm going to raise a worse smoke than murder, I think, out of it. The police are going to hate my heart all over again."

It had been on the East Side, somewhere. Not Fifth, because there had been houses on each side of the street; not Park because the avenue had not been so wide. Not Third because there was no double file of ugly pillars for the elevated. It was Madison or Lexington, then.

MUIR paid for his drink and took a taxi across to Lexington and then up-town, driving slowly. Instead of peering earnestly at every corner, he relaxed in the left side of the seat as he had done when he was with Franklin and kept his eyes forward as in consideration, letting the street-corners drift casually through the widest angle of his vision. They were north of Seventy-second Street when a ghostly finger tapped at his forehead.

He got out at the next corner, paid the taxi, and went back. On the northern side of the block below, three houses of identical aspect, long and narrow as the faces of three fools, rose cheek to cheek. Now that he confronted them, all recollection of having seen them before departed from him, but he would not deny the authority of that electric touch which he had felt as the taxi passed this corner.

He went to the south west street corner and viewed the houses aslant, as he must have done when Franklin called his attention to them. Still nothing returned from his memory, so he came closer to examine them at first hand. The one nearest Lexington was alight from the first floor to the sixth and highest story; music. Young voices crowding together in laughter, told him of the party which was going forward.

It did not have the look of a place where Franklin might have need of a pick-lock, a flashlight, and a gun. The adjoining house carried a "For Rent" sign, so he went past it to the third place where the front windows were equally filled by empty blackness. His confidence in the trail he was following had diminished almost to nothing, but he wandered up onto the porch of the house and took from his inner coat an electric torch hardly larger than a fountain pen. It cast a thin, sharp ray with which he ran rapid pencil strokes of light about the porch.

He saw the doorplate of "Dr. David J. Russo;" he saw the folds of the thick satin drape which hung inside the door-glass; and on the cement floor of the porch lay a cigarette butt that had been stepped on by a foot which afterward twisted over it and left paper and tobacco as an ugly spot, well-ground into the cement. Few men put out their cigarette butts with such care, but Everett Franklin had that ugly habit.

Muir turned from the house and walked straight across the street, where he lounged in the thick shadow between two houses. Franklin had been at the third house before him, and not more than twenty-five minutes ago.

He had come, according to his letter, prepared to go to great lengths to enter the building, and therefore the chances were large that he was in the house at the present moment; for every successful reporter has to have a good deal of the bulldog about him and Franklin had the patience of a hunting beast.

A paved footway ran down the left side of the house but not a glimmer of light came from the windows on that side. If Franklin was inside, he was at work with one of those flashlights of which he had spoken.

If that were the case, it would probably be foolish or even a little dangerous to try to enter the place while the investigation was going on. There came to the eye of Muir a picture of shadowy hands running through the papers of a desk, while an electric torch set them flashing.

A GIRL walked down the farther side of the street and the eye of Muir commenced to follow her because her steps were not checked and stilted by high heels; she moved with the rhythmic lightness of an athletic boy, with a good, free swing. When she reached the house Muir was watching, she turned and ran up the steps, and for some reason he looked up at the bright December stars and laughed, silently.

He could even hear the click of the key in the lock, he thought, as he strained his ears; then the door opened and she went inside. The door glass was illumined only a moment later; then the shades of the double window to the side glowed faintly.

Muir forced himself to wait two minutes; then he crossed the street and rang the house-bell.

He heard a step come into the hall. The door was pulled open by the brisk hand of someone in a hurry, and he saw the girl before him with the fox-fur loosened about her throat. The cold of the winter night was rosy in her face and twinkling in her eyes. She had the glow and the air, if not the exact features, of beauty.

"He isn't in," she said, "and I'm afraid that he won't be in tomorrow, either. I'm sorry."

"Hardly," she answered, and then, looking farther into him: "Are you in pain? Is it something acute?"

She glanced instinctively down at a wrist-watch. Then: "Will you come in? I can make a note and perhaps the doctor can get in touch with you later?"

Crossing the hall, he photographed on the sensitive plate of his memory the details of the hat-rack at the side, the two straight-backed chairs which flanked the mirror farther down the hall, and the stairs climbing into shadow. The girl showed him into an office with a small mahogany desk set at an angle in a corner, three framed diplomas on the wall, two shelves of books, a coal fireplace, a rather good Persian rug with a pine-tree pattern on the floor, and above the mantelpiece the large photograph of a narrow-bearded, professorial face, a sensitive face with a great slope of forehead and penetrating eyes; the moustaches and beard left the expression of the mouth somewhat indecipherable. But what Muir used his eyes on chiefly were the ranges of books. He picked the word "diet" out of half a dozen titles.

The girl was sitting behind the desk, now, pulling the glove from her right hand, then pulling a note-book in front of her.

He did not hesitate. The name Peter Angus Muir was not known in many quarters. In 1918, when he came back from the front, the newspapers had made a good deal of the seventeen year old boy who perjured his way into the air force and shot down eight planes, but that was nearly two decades ago and people had forgotten the Great War.

He had another reputation which was almost entirely confined to a small scope in the New York police department for certain bits of voluntary detective work which he had done and it was this reputation which he was trying to keep in shadow as he gave the name: "Oliver Croft."

"The Centenary Club," he answered, for the club knew what to do with communications addressed to "Oliver Croft."

"For the last day or two," he said, "I've had a subnormal temperature, a heaviness in the knees, disinclination to stir about, and something rather misty about the old brain. Living in something of a fog—that sounds a bit on the liverish side, doesn't it?"

He saw that he would have to add something more to justify this midnight call at a doctor's office.

She made the notations swiftly. A huge tiger cat came into the room on silent feet, turned its yellow eyes on Muir, and then leaped onto the desk. It sat down facing the girl, with its long tail wrapped around its fore-paws. As she finished writing, she put out her hand and scratched the cat across the forehead. The sound of its purring began like a distant buzz-saw.

She read his face from right to left and then from left to right. She did not smile.

"A fellow down in Nicaragua, just before I flew back. Craig, or Krank, or some such name, I think."

"You don't look well," she remarked, "but did you come here partly because you're in pain and partly because you wanted something to do?"

"Partly," he admitted. "Twelve o'clock hasn't come, and that's not so very late for a doctor to be awake in his home."

"Doesn't he? The fact is that I was up in this part of the city and suddenly remembered his name and that my in-sides seemed to need some tinkering. Did you ever want to kill some time in the middle of the night?"

"From the moment the sun goes down, in fact?" asked Muir. "Will you have a cigarette?"

She hesitated over the offer, and then smiled as she took the cigarette. Muir lighted their smokes.

"I'm only going to take a bit of your time, and I'd as soon take it standing," he answered. "I know you're about to leave."

"You have a forward look in your eyes," said Muir, "that tells me you have some place to go. You people with places to go—you have all the luck."

"They don't have to look at their watches for me to know that they're going to leave me."

"Ah, but they do. Can't put a value on a thing you can have any time you want it. Oliver Croft is a glut on the market."

"No, not a glut on the market," she said. "I don't think he puts himself on the market at all."

"No," she decided more firmly. "He keeps away from his friends because humanity disgusts him a little; and then all at once the corners of the room fill up with shadows and he has to go somewhere, anywhere, quickly. Isn't that it?"

"Not at all. I guess by the professional way you have of picking up a man and sifting him through your fingers. Do you ever have trouble wasting time? But of course not."

"If you ever do, ring the Centenary Club and ask for poor Oliver Croft. But I know how they're standing in line. A pretty girl in the upper brackets. Whenever I see one of you, there's a procession of ghosts filing away behind your shoulders; all the poor devils who have looked at you and wished that your smiling were not such a confounded generalization. Do you mind me saying that?"

"You know I don't mind it," she answered. "It's the manly way of doing the thing, I suppose."

"I don't want the minutes," said Muir. "You've seen too much already. Will you tell the doctor about me?" he added when he was at the door.

He walked with a brisk step down the pavement past the three houses, turned, and came back with a silent footfall into the side-path that ran past the doctor's place. Inside he could hear the voice of the girl, for one of the office windows was slightly ajar. She was saying: "Is this Greenwood 510?... Mr. Baldwin told me to telephone and that you'd let me know how to get out to your place... yes, Mr. Philip Baldwin... how shall I know the car?... I'm five feet seven, have blonde hair, and will be wearing a fox- fur and a gray overcoat. I'll carry a small pigskin suitcase... I'll repeat it. A blue convertible. I simply ask if the driver can take me to Mr. Baldwin? Thank you. Good-by."

The receiver clicked. A moment later the lights snapped off, then the front door closed heavily and quick footfalls went down the street toward Lexington Avenue. When the sound of them died out, Muir went back to the front porch of the house with a little steel pick-lock in his fingers.

WHEN at last the door was open and he made the first quick step into the dark of the hall, he tripped over something soft and movable and had to bring his left foot down with a stamp to keep from falling. The ray from his torchlight caught the tiger cat which was racing towards the stairs with its body twisting to the side because the hind-legs went too fast for the front feet.

Muir switched off the light and swung the door softly and slowly shut, with his head bowed to listen. For tripping over the cat might have warned any other people in the house that a stranger had entered.

As he paused, he could hear the soft, rushing noises of the city. The groan of iron on iron no longer troubles the ear of New York, now that street cars are being banished from the town and the predominant night-sounds are the swishings of well-treaded tires and the whine of accelerating motors. Muir pushed from his mind these outer noises and tried to leave his ears purged of them to listen to smaller and more intimate sounds inside the house, like the fall and small echo of a footstep, or a creaking of floorboards, no matter how soft, or the dim murmur of a voice, or the dull thump of a shutting door.

In fact, he heard nothing at all, but from that moment forward he felt like a man besieged by danger and muffled every move that he made. As he moved from room to room, searching, he kept the thin sword-point of the torchlight pointing again and again at the doors which might open noiselessly upon him. He wished more than once for a light sufficiently strong to flood each chamber, no matter how dimly, but he knew that such a light would be strong enough to illumine windows and perhaps flash telltale warnings to eyes outside the building.

He began his work in the office, running rapidly through the drawers of the desk, where he found two items that caused him pause. One was a case of shimmering surgical instruments; another was a newspaper item which described the return to practice and New York of Dr. David J. Russo, the eminent young dietitian who for the last three years had been at work in the Orient.

Dr. Russo was quoted as saying: "Just as in medicine there are few specifics, so in diet there are few foods which are either banned or indicated, except in the case of definite disease. The dietitian walks in a general darkness; we lack a definite science."

The room behind the office was a small laboratory, fitted with the utmost compactness and neat arrangement, with Bunsen burners and other standard equipment, and long ranges of labeled bottles in glass cupboards.

He gave hardly a flash of the light to the multiple, glimmering face of science, but went on into a little room behind the laboratory. It might have been used for a bedroom because of the small cot in it.

The flashlight picked up on the point of its bright pencil the ashes of a pack of miniature cards which lay in a corner of a smoking-tray. In a corner of the room was the top part of a tiny pagoda, made of a bright red composition; the sort of toy that one can pick up in a five-and-ten-cent store.

In the bathroom adjoining there was nothing of note except a mirror which had been struck a heavy blow in the center, so that the glass was broken away around a circular aperture in the middle, while a thousand fracture-lines ran out to the square frame.

A door on the right opened on what seemed to be a waiting- room, to judge by the comfortable chairs and the file of magazines which covered a center table. On the wall were three or four big photographs of the upper Himalayas. He recognized the tremendous outlines of the more famous peaks.

The tiger cat was there before him. He expected it to scamper away when he appeared, but instead, it did not even wince from the passing ray of the torch. He put the bright spot on it again, curiously, and saw that the cat was stalking, its belly almost touching the floor as it stole forward and its tail crooking at odd angles from side to side. But the direction of that hunting trail led only toward the blank face of the wall!

MUIR sat on his heels to watch. Even the continued brightness of the spot light on it did not disturb the striped cat, for it seemed to be drawn on by a horrible fascination, like a bird towards a snake's eyes. The repugnance it felt caused the hair to stand on its back, and it put down each foot gingerly, with its body sloping back, ready to whirl and flee at any instant, and yet it continued to stalk until it had come to the very edge of the wall. There it extended a fore-paw, and ran its unsheathed, upturned claws along the bottom of the wall; then it whirled and raced from the room.

Even the blood of Muir was chilled by that strange pantomime. A moment later, running the meager knife-edge of the light across the wall, he discovered something that gave a little more earthly sense to the actions of the cat, for he found the almost imperceptible outline of a door, set flush in the wall to keep from disturbing the pattern of the landscape paper. Now that his attention was drawn to it, he had no difficulty in finding the little drop-handle with which a latch turned, and he opened the door upon a small closet. On the floor inside was huddled the body of Everett Franklin with his dead eyes looking into the face of his friend and his upturned face cross-hatched with lines of blood.

The faintest noise of sighing air behind him made Muir whip around. His spotlight found a door closing at the side of the room. Natural fear stopped him for an instant like a fist in the face; then he raced for the door with a long automatic in his right hand and the flashlight in the other.

As he turned the latch and flung the door open, he slipped to the side, offering only his head and shoulders as he flashed the light into the interior. It was a mere vestibule for a flight of servants' stairs that ran at a sharp angle up the back of the house and above him he heard not the pounding, but the whisper and faintly creaking pressure of footfalls fleeing up the steps.

He followed eagerly, with the hunting animal alive and alert in him, and pictures of dead Everett Franklin flicking through his mind; bright, swift glimpses of Franklin rousing the dangerous streets of Singapore; Franklin with heels and ice-pick dug in on the edge of a Tibetan crevasse; Franklin on a rollicking Western mustang. Grief had no chance to overtake Muir as he swung around the corners of the stairway to the floor above, and the floor above that behind the stealthy sounds of flight. There he ran down a narrow hallway toward an open door and plunged through it to the room beyond.

The flashlight showed him a white-painted iron bed, a cheap bit of matting on the floor, a holiday poster on the wall.

The opposite door was locked, and as he came to a pause, listening intently for the noise of the running feet, he heard the door behind him shut, and the turn of the key in the lock. Downstairs ran the fugitive footfall, swiftly fading out of his ken.

Rage and disappointment locked his jaws together. He was groaning softly as he set to work with the pick-lock, but a state of confused passion was not the way to try to read the mind of even the simplest lock. It left him in a cold sweat, but he brushed the storm out of his mind and with half-closed eyes set to his work. There could not have been a more ordinary house- lock, but it was complicated by rust. It might have been only five wretched minutes that he spent on his knees, laboring, but it seemed to Muir a half-hour before he had the door open.

He went down the stairs without haste, and as one who knew that the vital moment was irretrievably gone from him. The closet door, as he had expected, was now closed, but the body of Everett Franklin was no longer inside. There was not even a bloodstain on the floor, which had been carefully washed and was rapidly drying, now, in the warmth of steam heat.

He found light-switches and turned them on through the lower part of the house. Then he telephoned the police.

CHAPTER II. — A LIST OF CLUES

THE next morning, John Tory, Inspector of Detectives, arrived at eight o'clock at the apartment of Peter Angus Muir and had the door opened for him by a big man with a pair of beautifully groomed moustaches and a great bald dome of a head.

"Mr. Muir will be very sorry," said the guardian of the door. "He is not called until eleven in the morning."

The door began to close, slowly, in the face of the man of the law. Suddenly he pointed a finger.

The edge of the door cut the face and large figure of Hawley in two as he answered: "Yes, sir."

"You've heard Muir speak of me, then. You've probably heard him speak of me? I'm John Tory."

"Mr. Muir speaks of you constantly. Come in, sir. I beg your pardon," said Hawley.

The sense of crowded New York left the inspector, the moment the door closed behind him, and he found himself in the spaciousness-of a large reception hall with a hunting scene running across a great green tapestry on the opposite wall. The air had not been parched to lifelessness by steam heat and the room seemed to be warmed entirely by a fire of big logs that burned in a corner fireplace beneath a hood of carved Italian marble.

"Have you had breakfast, sir?" asked Hawley. "And is there anything I can do personally to make you comfortable? The fact is that Mr. Muir is in the country."

"Exactly, sir," said the unblushing Hawley, "but I presume he may be in the country now. He is not at home."

"I've been around them with him," said Tory, "and I know you've been around after him. In one night I've been from Mulberry Street to Harlem, and across the Triborough and George Washington Bridge, and from a cellar dive to a penthouse in the middle of the sky. I've followed him till my knees sagged; and I've had my brain whirling although I've drunk only one whiskey to his two all evening long. Is he out on a bender like that?"

Hawley took a breath and regarded the inspector with a whimsical eye that seemed to struggle with a desire to speak from the soul.

At last he exclaimed: "Sir, he's always out—except for brief spells in the library and the laboratory. More in the laboratory by far."

"Tell me this, Hawley. How can he stow away so much alcohol in that long, scrawny body of his?"

"I can give you an explanation which he once offered to me, sir," said Hawley. "We were in Egypt at the time, in the company of some English residents and the English who live in tropical countries, as you no doubt know, sir, are really very wonderful with their whiskey."

"However," said Hawley, "on this evening they failed to stay with Mr. Muir. They failed signally, I may say, sir, at about three-thirty in the morning, and Mr. Muir came home at about six in the morning with an Arab horse thief."

"You must be aware, sir, that after midnight Mr. Muir is in the habit of finding very interesting companions."

"The Arab, sir," said Hawley, "showed his international culture by drinking whiskey with Mr. Muir, but at about eight o'clock he fell asleep in his chair. I had not been able to follow the conversation, because it was entirely in Arabic, and now Mr. Muir turned to me and said: 'The rest of the world resists alcohol, Hawley, and because they resist, the alcohol breaks them,' were the words Mr. Muir used, 'but I go to it with my arms open, like a friend, and the infernal stuff passes me by with a mere pat on the head.'"

"Nobody knows him as well as you do," said Tory, "now tell me if nothing but another World War would fill up his time and set him at peace with life again?"

"Nothing else, sir," said Hawley, solemnly. He turned a bit to the side, as though anxious to escape from the subject of the conversation. "As for the laboratory, sir, it would be sure to interest you—and at about nine o'clock Mr. Muir is fairly sure to return."

TORY went willingly into the laboratory. It was a room as big and as lofty as the entrance hall. There was a large sink, drain- board and table for experiments at one end of the apartment with a blacksmith's forge adjoining.

The walls were lined with cupboards which Hawley prepared to open with a bunch of keys but the attention of the inspector fastened upon a large table which was covered and piled deep at the corners with locks of every size, from great padlocks to little devices no larger than a woman's wrist-watch. All the locks on the right half of the table rested upon individual sheets of paper covered with penciled notations.

"A long time ago," said Hawley, "Mr. Muir heard about Houdini in Sing Sing and decided to look into the question of safety devices."

"I believe it is true," said Hawley, "that Houdini offered himself to be locked with the utmost security in the strongest cell in Sing Sing, with his clothes in another cell, and wagered that he would walk out free and fully dressed within fifteen minutes. As a matter of fact, they loaded him, naked, with complicated chains and irons secured by the most difficult locks they could find. His clothes were placed in another strong cell.

"In five minutes and a half, Houdini walked out of the first cell with the irons gone from him; in eight and a fraction minutes he was fully clothed and ready to leave the prison. This story intrigued Mr. Muir and he has been studying locks, off and on, ever since. Those on the left of the table he has not come to yet. Those on the right he has solved and made notations in short hand and with diagrams on the papers beneath them. Ah, Mr. Muir has returned—with a friend!"

For here a powerful tenor voice, thickened a bit by fatigue and vocal cords loosened by wine, broke into a hearty Neapolitan ballad.

THEY found the two in the entrance hall, Muir already equipped with a highball and curled into a deep chair while a fat Italian in a ruff-neck sweater and tattered clothes, teetered back and forth and sang to the flames in the fireplace, waving a fiasco of red wine to keep time with his music. His knees began to bend before he had finished the lyric. Muir watched him curiously, his own face dead-white, but his eyes as clear as ever.

"Much better than you," said the inspector, bending back his bulldog neck and peering up into the face of his friend. "You look like the devil, Peter."

The door of the room slammed. The Italian tenor rose dimly from a distant part of the apartment.

"I need a few minutes of sleep," said Muir, "and I'll be as right as rain. Will you have a drink?"

"No. You should have called me last night. You shouldn't have let those foolish fellows of mine walk over you roughshod, that way. They're good men, all of them, but they simply didn't know you. When I told the sergeant that you were the Peter Angus Muir, he turned inside out."

"That must have been an ugly sight," said Muir. "However, there was no great purpose in waking you up in the middle of the night and as for the way they slanged me, why, talk doesn't break the skin. I gave them the clues I had."

"Thank heavens Willett had enough sense to write them down," said Tory, pulling a notebook out of his pocket. "The ashes of a pack of miniature cards; the top tip of a toy pagoda, red in color; a smashed mirror in a bathroom; marks of scrubbing on the floor of a downstairs closet; the picture of the doctor; a clipping that tells he has been in the Orient; and a case of surgical instruments. It doesn't make a great deal of sense to me, just reading the list off. Are you going to do some high- power deduction with this list as a basis, Peter?"

"My dear old fellow, deduction is almost entirely rot," said Muir. "It's in books, not in the facts of detective work, as a rule."

"Peter, you know what you can always have from me. Every card in the pack that I can deal to you."

"Tell me what you've found out about the doctor," said Muir, "and I'll let it go at that."

CHAPTER III. — STRANGE IMPRISONMENT

WHEN the inspector left, he had given Muir an extended picture of Doctor Russo. The dietitian had been a brilliant student and could have taken his choice of almost any field of medicine when he finished his interneship. He could have been surgeon or diagnostician under the best auspices. He had practiced for some time with the greatest success, but finally went to the Orient to pursue the study of certain obscure diseases of the skin. His return to New York was recent and rather unheralded, because he had been away long enough to be forgotten. He was thirty-seven years old, and he still was missing from his office.

Muir pulled off his shoes and coat and lay flat on his back on a bedroom floor for twenty minutes; he roused and lay a somewhat similar time face down. After that, he bathed, and coming back into his dressing room found Hawley there placing on a table a choice of guns in arm-pit holsters and a selection of small flashlights. For wearing, he had put out a heavy gray tweed and a pair of thick-soled shoes.

"Nicaragua turned out to be a dull place for you, sir," said the valet, "and I daresay you must find recreation and rest, now."

"It is rest for a hunting dog to follow a trail, sir. I beg your pardon," said Hawley.

"Is that it?" sighed Muir. "But isn't a man a fool who baits a trap with his own danger?"

HE slept on the train for Greenwood, Westchester County, and got out at the station before noon. In the middle of the big street, between parallel white lines ruled aslant, were parked a score of automobiles besides the machines which nosed the concrete station platform. What Muir picked out was a blue convertible with a weather-stained top.

Before he went to it, he looked over the brown winter hills of Greenwood, and the gray trees which rolled like storm-clouds across them. The brightness of the sky could not bring cheer to that landscape, and he had a strange, cold feeling in his heart that the hills were drawing closer to see the last of him. He had to rally himself by the use of his powers of logic, for after all he was not on the actual trail of murder but on what was probably a most innocent by-path.

When he recalled the well-tubbed, outdoor, free-swinging look of Katherine Edwards, his spirits rose again. But he could not banish entirely a slight numbness and mist in the brain that had been growing in him during the last few days, since the airplane brought him back from Central America.

As for the girl, he told himself that he had for her a more intellectual than emotional interest, for he had made romance a stranger in his life. And if he followed her by the most slender clue, he made sure that it was not her beauty that led him, but merely his abiding passion for crime-solution. And she was the only approach to the trail, an almost intangible approach, to be sure.

It was his certainty of her innocence that had kept him from speaking about her to Tory or to the homicide squad the night before, and even now she brought to him a sense of refreshment as profound as long sleep.

He went over to the convertible and found behind the wheel a man in a canvas coat with a turned down collar lined with lamb's wool; his head hung down in sleep and he roused from it gradually, coming back to full consciousness with a rhythmical jerking that got his head erect at last.

He had a pale, thin face and when he spoke he looked straight ahead as though he was accustomed to keeping his eye on the road at all costs.

THE car was a four-year-old model, but the motor was tuned up to a hair-trigger fineness. It started at a touch, and softened its whine as the driver ran through the gears to high. He drove like one to whom an inch is as good as a mile, sliding through a tangle of cars to gain the open road. The village dropped behind; and with the gathered speed of the automobile the brown-faced hills began to flow across the sky.

"No?" said the driver, and found the remark enough for his digestion during at least a mile of the road.

"I do," said the driver, and pulled in at a gas station with a sudden soft, strong pressure of hydraulic brakes.

"Five gallons," he said to the attendant, and then to Muir, as he got out of the car: "Be a minute."

He disappeared into the station and Muir, turning sidewise on the seat, half-closed his eyes in order to focus all his nerve- power on concentrated listening. In this manner, though dimly, he heard the stream of gasoline from the hose plump into the tank, not with a sharp tinny resonance as into an almost empty receptacle but with a full, dull sound as into a tank already nearly brimming.

When he had satisfied himself about this, he faced front again, only watching from the corner of his eyes as the pale driver came out of the station; but it was not the sort of a face that, could be read easily, needing close study and some familiarity before thoughts would be apparent on that cold surface.

It was reasonably certain that the fellow had telephoned ahead about his passenger who had not known Mr. Baldwin a long time and who said that three real friends were enough.

That trust which Muir had been investing in the clean beauty of Katherine Edwards vanished at once. A thunderhead which was growing out of the west, trailing its obscure shadow over the hills and melting them into the sky, seemed to Muir to represent the darkening of his mind as he approached the end of his journey. Even as his eye watched the coming of the storm, so his spirit felt the approach of the danger. Perhaps he should have, brought Hawley, that steady, brainless hand.

The car swerved up a slope of gravel and stopped in front of an old shingle building. Muir filled his eye with it as he climbed out of the car. Time had taken the building by the roof- tree and shaken it. There were no straight lines remaining. The roof humped in one direction, the porch-roof sagged in another, and the side-walls leaned inward for greater security. For a generation at least no care had been given the old tavern; even the yellow paint on the porch pillars and balustrades was rain- rusted to a dingy brown.

"You go in there, through the bar," said the man, and let his colorless eyes rest once on Muir's face.

THE bar-room contained, as the law requires of liquor vendors, a number of tables covered with cloths checkered red and white—and a scattering of salt and pepper shakers helped the legal illusion. But something stiff in the wrinkles of the tablecloths showed how seldom they were disturbed, and the worn floorboards in front of the bar told where the chief trade lingered in Stowett's Tavern. Muir paused there and asked for a beer. A pair of country fellows in complete suits of brown overalls studied him with a dim interest in the mirror.

It seemed to him that the bartender's ivory ruler made a sudden jerk as it carved the foam from the top of the glass.

And as he spoke, he remembered the green, clear eyes of Katherine Edwards and her direct manner of speech, like the conversational way of a man. If she had in fact come to a place like this, it was a stain upon the memory of her. The two ideas no more went together than a princess goes in rags and squalor. It was then for the first time that a doubt of her grew up strongly in his mind, for he remembered that crime draws a dirty hand over high and low.

In the meantime he studied the bartender, who was serving another pair of beers to the farm laborers before he left with Muir's message. His knowledge of bars and barmen was long an intimate and somewhere in his past he thought he could recall Jeff's face when the features had not been so engrossed in red flesh. For a long moment he looked inward until the picture of the other place grew clear.

It had been a somewhat shady resort owned by Shannon, the politician, who was still one of the powers behind the thrones of New York. Lightly the mind of Muir linked bartender, Shannon, and this unknown Philip Baldwin together, in a tentative chain.

Jeff being gone, Muir drifted his eyes about the room. A picture of the old thoroughbred, Bendigo, hung on one wall, and a large head of McChesney faced it from the opposite side. Above the big, round-bellied stove was a colored sketch of a coach and four "on the road to Nyack. Mr. Vincent St. John, whip."

The bartender returned. He had a red face solidly supported by great jowls. The hairs on his head were white and few but they made up somewhat by their vigor, standing up almost on end. He had found Mr. Baldwin, he said, and the gentleman would come down to the bar.

The two farmhands left, but came bolting back into the barroom again a moment later, driven by a downpour of rain that made the old tavern shudder from head to foot; and through the broken light of a window a fine rain-dust entered the air of the room. With the natives entered a third fellow, low and squat and heavy- shouldered as a mastiff. In a few years he would have only the soggy weight of a draft horse, but now youth and hard exercise lightened him. He stood silently by the stove, sunning his back in the warmth, and from the peak of his corduroy cap water dripped unheeded down his cheek.

In the mirror, as he sipped his beer, Muir saw the bulldog nod without unlocking his jaws to answer.

The rain had darkened the place thoroughly before a big fellow inches above six feet entered the bar from the interior of the tavern. He had a dished nose and a scar in front of his left ear pulled his features slightly awry, particularly when he talked. He had the bulk of a wrestler above the hips and the taper look of a runner below them. He seemed to appreciate the magnificence of his body and set it off with a double-breasted brown suit that fitted him a shade too snugly.

He wore a small red flower in his buttonhole and his blond hair was given luster by some ointment. He carried a certain delectable fragrance into the room and coming straight up to Muir gave him his hand and a slightly twisting smile. His voice was so soft and the pitch of it so low that only a fine resonance kept his words from obscurity.

"With pleasure," said Philip Baldwin. "A beer, Jeff, if you please... dark day, Mr. Croft, isn't it?... December ought to be white; there's no drama in black mud and brown grass."

HE picked up his glass from the bar, but in the act of raising it and nodding acknowledgment to Muir, he turned suddenly and set his back to the edge of the bar almost as though a twinge of physical pain had disturbed him. Whether it were a thought or actually a touch of suffering, his face darkened in spite of the air of courtesy with which he masked it. It seemed to Muir that the scar must be somewhat new and perhaps that accounted for a slight stiffness of the face muscles which gave a hint of the look of a paralytic.

"The driver of the car didn't approve of me," said Muir, with an air of cheerful frankness. "He stopped on the road and telephoned."

"Only held us up a moment," said Muir, "and after all why have a man unless he's careful, eh?"

"Perhaps," agreed Baldwin, and though he lifted his eyes no higher than the long, thin hands of Muir, the latter had a distinct impression that he was being searched to the soul.

He led the way toward a corner and heard the voice of Baldwin exclaim behind him, not loudly but with a sharper ring: "What's the matter with that dog, Jeff?"

Muir turned and saw a big German shepherd with one side of its face swollen and the black, ragged mark of a cut across the puff of one jowl.

"That Schneider dog, that Airedale of theirs," said Jeff. "He got a tooth into Max yesterday. That's all. Max made him run, though, and howl while he was running."

"I hate it," said Baldwin, gloomily, as he waited for Muir to take a chair and then sat down opposite, "I hate to see a poor beast suffer. They can't talk. That's the devil of it. They can't talk. They can't tell you where it hurts, and it makes me sick to see them done in."

He pursed his mouth with distaste and took a quick swallow of the beer. He was so moved that the highlight on his flat-faced emerald ring trembled a little.

"I try not to guess at things," said the soft voice of Baldwin. "Will you have a cigarette? The guessing is what does the harm, because no matter how wrong it may be, the guess stays in one's mind."

"Well, yes. Even blood—I'm afraid that I'll have to give you only a few moments, Mr. Croft."

"You know why I'm here, don't you?" asked Muir. "I mean, you wouldn't have to guess more than twice?"

"In other words," said Muir, feeling his way delicately forward, "a man either can come because he wants to, or because he's sent."

"Oh, of course," said Philip Baldwin. "I know you're not out here for your own pleasure."

"Ah, does one?" remarked Baldwin, with that slight ring of the voice which Muir had noted before. "But suppose you tell me the whole thing, straight out."

"Very well," murmured Baldwin, and submitted with a barely audible sigh. "But I wonder what's gained, finally, by dodging through so many fences?"

"I know. He doesn't change," agreed Baldwin. "I sometimes want to damn him and leave him damned."

Muir felt the eyes of Baldwin following him as he left the table carrying his empty glass. He had made very slight progress indeed, except that he had found weight in the name of Shannon. He had gathered that there was something a trifle strange in the background of Baldwin, but he had gone a single full step on the trail, no matter where it was leading. Dr. David J. Russo, now wanted for murder, seemed certainly as far from Greenwood as he was from his house in New York. And an unusual sense of self doubt was beginning to trouble Muir: He could not tell whether he had come into the country on the trail of the suspected murderer, or whether he was merely hoping, rather blindly, that he might find Katherine Edwards again.

He needed also to escape for a moment from the pressure which the examining eyes and the mere physical bigness of Baldwin exerted upon him.

That was why he had started for the bar to get a fresh beer. And on the way toward it something else occurred to his mind and made him swerve toward the outer door.

The big young fellow at the stove instantly left his place and found something of interest to stare at through the glass door- panes.

"That ain't where brightness would do any good," snapped Steve, and continued to stare out the door. "The big rains come from the east."

Muir went on to the bar, slowly, for he needed more time than ever to think out his problem. It was considerably more complicated now, since he was sure that Steve was posted to keep him from bolting suddenly away. Perhaps Baldwin himself had not placed him under strict guard, but a very sensitive and accurate instinct told him that they were making him a prisoner in the house.

CHAPTER IV. — A LONG SLEEP

THE bartender, filling the glass of beer, kept his eyes down, with one wrinkle of a frown in the middle of his forehead; Muir carried the drink back to his corner table and sat down again. And as he approached, he noted that the whole upper face of Baldwin possessed a still and perfect beauty as far down as the eyes; below that point the torment began.

"You can't tell me whether or not Shannon sent you out," said the soft, gentle voice of Baldwin. "What can you tell me, Mr. Croft?"

"Why not get hold of Shannon on the phone?" asked Muir, taking another step in the dark.

"You surely know that I can't do that," answered Baldwin, with the first real touch of impatience. "But just what are you doing out here, Mr. Croft? Couldn't Shannon give you a letter of introduction?"

"The fact is," said Muir, "that I'm to establish contact and simply hold on until another man arrives."

"You know how it is when there is more than one set of brains at work on a thing?" suggested Muir.

"I know; I know," nodded Baldwin. He looked at Muir as though he were comparing him with a picture in his mind. "Weren't you with the Lott and Cornish Sand and Gravel people, five or six years ago?" he asked.

"Frankly," he said, "I don't like this very well. It's no pleasure for me to be treated like a child who mustn't be allowed to hear the real truth."

"Yes," admitted Baldwin, grudgingly. "Yes, I can understand it in a way. The fact is that you're not going to tell me anything. You're simply here to—feast your eyes on me. Is that it?"

"I hope you're satisfied, then," he said. "I hope that the rest of them will be satisfied, too. And may they be damned," he added in the softest of whispers. "May they all be damned!"

"I'll tell them to give you a room upstairs," said Baldwin. He added, bitterly: "There may be a rat or two.... But the four- legged kind don't matter. The two-legged rats are the ones that eat the soul out of a man, Mr. Croft.... Jerry, fix up Mr. Croft with a room."

"You can understand my being busy," he said, dryly. "Not as busy as I once was, but pretty well employed. You'll excuse me for the time being, Mr. Croft."

"Certainly," said Muir, and remained at the table to finish his beer. He needed to add up his gains from Baldwin's conversation and he found that the results were quite nebulous. Some sort of a criminal or extra-legal background was suggested, certainly, but at the end what remained most vividly in the mind of Muir was the remark about "two-legged rats."

THE bartender appeared, grunting: "Follow me up!" and turned to lead the way; and as Muir rose from the table he was aware of the eyes of Steve, turning their brunt sidelong upon him. He had again the impression that this was jail, and that yonder was the jailer.

Jeff led him on through a pair of frowzy parlors. From door to door cigarette ashes had been trodden into the worn carpets and outlined a path clearly. There was a dank, heavy atmosphere of cookery and unaired humanity, and a clutter of chairs and old sofas upholstered in frayed velvet.

In the second parlor, a door at the left was closing slowly, softly as he passed through to a winding stairway that rose out of the corner of the room. As he climbed the stairs, Muir felt a slight draft of air and, glancing back, saw that the same door was open again. He could feel rather than see what stood beyond the threshold.

The worn heels of Jeff guided him up that dim stairway to the floor above and then down the hall to the second door on the left, where he paused and produced a jingling of big keys. He unlocked the door and pushed it open with a moan and shudder of rusted hinges. Muir looked in on a dingy room with an old four- poster bed covered with a spread which seemed to have been laundered gray instead of white. He walked in, saying: "This will do."

He stood a moment on the threshold with his small eyes worrying at the face of Muir. Then he shrugged his shoulders, closed the door, and disappeared. His footfall creaked away down the hall, down the stairs. And a moment later Muir heard deep laughter from the floor below.

He went to the window. A big tree just outside bent down its branches glistering with rain and overlaid the rain-misted landscape with the black pattern of its trunk and boughs. Through the window the dull light that entered the room came as a stain more than an illumination. It was not middle-afternoon, and yet lamplight would have brightened the place.

Muir threw himself down on the bed, turned on his side, and closed his eyes. The fatigue of the night before, the poison of weariness which had been accumulating strangely in his brain during the past few days, now was pressing down on all his nerves with a steady weight.

He reviewed certain alternatives. It might be that the highly irritated Philip Baldwin would actually get in touch with Shannon, whoever that might be; and it might be that Shannon in a word could reveal "Mr. Croft" as an impostor. What would follow then, Muir could use a fine spread of imagination to foresee.

He had a feeling that Jim, the chauffeur, and Jerry, the bartender, and Steve, the fighting mastiff, were linked together under the absolute authority of big Philip Baldwin. They might be no more than family servants whom Baldwin had taken with him into a temporary exile, but Muir felt in them something more sinister.

HE determined to sleep for a half hour, and tried to set his subconscious mind like an alarm clock for that space of time. Then, quickly, in a quick numbness of fatigue, slumber rolled over him and submerged him, and he carried down with him into darkness the sharp-bearded face of Doctor David J. Russo, wanted for murder, and Katherine Edwards with her green, clear, steady eyes.

That subconscious brain of his for once was not honest. When he wakened, the light that came through the window was as pale as early dawn and his brain whirled for a moment in the effort to place himself in time and space. The musty smell of the tavern was what brought him to the proper identity, at last.

He sat up. Voices rumbled from the barroom, dimly, like machinery at work in the bowels of a ship. The day's end had come, and perhaps he had wasted a vital share of his time. He realized this with a sinking heart and above all with a sense of weakness, as though his own nature had betrayed him. Something was undoubtedly wrong; a brittle weakness in his knees told him that, as he stood up; and he had to make a sort of physical effort to clear his mind.

He had exploring to do and he required silence for it; therefore he did not cross the center of the floor where his weight would act with a greater leverage upon the boards, but he moved close to the wall, putting down his feet gingerly and keeping his weight as much as possible distributed on both legs.

So he managed to come without a single creak of the floor to the door. He turned the knob of it with the same gingerly care—and found it locked!

He could remember, distinctly, that when he first entered the room a key had been left on the inside of the door. It was gone, now, and therefore that door had been opened while he slept. It might be that deft hands had run through his clothes at the same time; but when he touched his pockets with rapid fingers he found everything in place.

The locking of the door changed everything. It was equivalent to a declaration of war, silently delivered, and all sense of weariness left Muir at once.

He would have confessed to fear out of the honesty of his mind, but for many years all real happiness had had in it the sharp ecstasy of danger intermingled. He was happy now as he leaned over the lock and began to read its mind with the sliver of steel which he drew from his coat. It was a simple matter for him to turn the heavy bolt. It required merely the brain of a child and strength in the fingertips before he was opening the door softly.

The key was on the farther side, half engaged, and he removed it to the inside as a matter of course. He found the hallway drowned in shadow as thick as sea-water. Only the doorknobs up and down its length glistened dimly.

HE tried the one opposite him. It was unlocked and gave on a damp odor of decay. The finger of the electric torchlight touched a high-stacked mass of furniture, old chairs turned upside down on tables and couches, with red rust stains on the bottom linings. Up the hall, the next room was locked, but he needed only a moment's work to open it. He stepped inside and found the last of the day looking into the room only as far as the center table; the rest of the furniture was as obscurely in shadow as the background of a Rembrandt.

His flashlight spotted a large book on the stand beside the bed. He stepped to that and found a Blackstone's Commentaries, with marginal notes scribbled thickly into the margins by one handwriting, but of different ages. For a dozen years the reader must have been writing his observations at the sides of the pages.

Muir turned from that to a closet door which stood somewhat ajar and as he pulled it farther open he saw a serried mass of neckties showering down like a rainbow from an inside bracket of the door.

A dozen suits hung within, all newly tailored, most of them with double-breasted coats, and by the width of the shoulders and the natty lines, he could be sure that he was in the room of Philip Baldwin.

While he scanned the rest of the room with the light, his fingers were automatically dipping into coat pockets, but he found them all empty, and in the entire chamber nothing of the slightest importance.

He returned to the door, listened to make sure that the hall was empty, and continued his investigations. He tried the next door on left, across the hall, and finding it unlocked he pushed cautiously into the dim, twilight atmosphere, where the darkness was hastened by the crowding branches of a tree near the window.

As he closed the door, he half-shut his eyes and took a deep breath, for mingling with the musty odor of the old house he detected a thin scent of fragrance that called him back to some memory, near or far. A moment later he had placed it, for Katherine Edwards had used a touch of just such a perfume.

Curiosity made him cut the dimness with the edge of his torchlight, left and right. It gleamed on the false marble front of the fireplace, it flashed with brilliance from a mirror on the wall, and in between it cut across the bed, the table, the open suitcase on a chair. He made a step toward the latter before another instinct halted and turned him back to the door. He had his hand on the knob when footfalls entered the hall, one light and quick, one soft but weighty. A light in the hall snapped on and etched in the door with a broken line of radiance from which Muir backed away across the room. Pie was in the middle of it when the voices of Katherine Edwards and Philip Baldwin paused at the door.

CHAPTER V. — OLD FRIENDS MEET AGAIN

THE corner wall stopped the retreat of Muir. He could not help a glance towards the window, but since he knew there was no time to clamber through this, he resigned himself suddenly and sat down in a chair near the head of the bed.

There he remained, relaxing with folded arms and crossed legs as the door pushed open and showed the girl entering, with the huge shadow of Philip Baldwin flooding over her. He came a step after her, half shutting the door behind him. The sharp tang and purity of the outdoors passed through the room. On the shoulders of Baldwin's overcoat the raindrops, entangled in the upper fuzz of the tweed, shone brilliantly, but since the hall light was at some distance, the angle at which it entered the doorway embraced Baldwin alone and left the rest of the room in an accentuated darkness.

"I ought to wait, but I can't wait," said Baldwin. "I've got to know it now! Kate, do you still care about me?"

"Ah, of course I do," she said. He kept a nervously doubled fist against his breast and she put up a caressing hand against it as she spoke. "No—it's not any good," said Baldwin. "When you look at me, you're changed, Kate. I remember everything too well, you see."

"There you're fighting yourself," said the soft, gentle voice of Baldwin. "You're whipping yourself forward, dear, but the soul doesn't respond. Tell me. Isn't that the truth?"

She shook her head. "I won't let it be the truth," she told him, "Do you think where I've given my word — I mean, when I've ever loved—"

"Hush!" said Baldwin. "The truth is that you can't look at me. Isn't that the actual truth?"

"Do you think that we can build it into a great, beautiful life together?" asked Baldwin. "Do you still want time before you tell me, definitely?"

"A little time, my dear," said the girl. "Does that wound you? Does it hurt you? I'll want to kill myself if it has!"

He lifted his big head, and by the light from the hall, all that Muir could see clearly was the noble, polished forehead.

He closed the door. The thick blackness swept over the room for from the sky came only a sooty grayness that entered through the window no more than a step. Then a switch by the door snapped on and threw a dazzle into the eyes of Muir from the naked unshaded globe that hung from the center of the ceiling.

He saw the outcry swell in her throat, but she set her teeth over it with a swift, fine self-control.

"Pathos, I mean," he repeated, standing up. "There was just a dash of Pathos in Baldwin's farewell. Or what would you say?"

"Do you know that I'm only half a breath from a scream?" she panted, staring at him.

"You'd better get off those wet clothes or you'll be only half a breath from a bad cold," suggested Muir.

Her hands began to unbutton her coat. They stopped that rapid work as she exclaimed: "It hypnotizes me to see you so perfectly calm; as though we'd been talking here ever since tea. What on earth are you doing here?"

"LET'S talk about big Mr. Baldwin," said Muir. "I'll lend you an idea that ought to be useful. That clever fellow wanted you to think that he was resigning himself to a deep agony of the spirit. But as a matter of fact he was simply playing a clever hand of cards and taking a trick; and now he's planning the next shuffle and the next deal, which may have all sorts of surprises for you. One way or another he intends to have you, don't you think?"

"It wasn't sickness at all that brought you to the doctor's office last night," she told him. "You have something in your mind; and I don't want to be a silly little fool and make trouble for you, but hadn't you better explain?"

"If you called Mr. Baldwin with those great big hands of his, there would be trouble, I suppose," nodded Muir.

"I don't want to call him," she answered. "I don't want to do anything melodramatic. But you know I can't take this for granted, after all."

"Tell me, honestly," said he. "After the first surprise—are you in the least degree shocked or alarmed or in fear on account of me?"

"But you're guessing at another logical reason that would bring me here?" asked Muir.

"However," said Muir, "I'm here for a tremendously romantic reason. I want to perform a rescue."

"All the danger that's under the roof of the tavern; and there's plenty of it, I have an idea."

"Doctor..." she began, and stopped suddenly. "I simply came out for a bit of country air," she concluded. "The doctor told me I should."

"I'm not surprised," he went on, with ironical sympathy. "Last night I noticed how worn you were, and how bad your color was. But the doctor... did you expect to find him here?"

SHE started, and then lifting her head, slowly, she looked at him with new eyes, enthralled by some totally unexpected danger, as it seemed. "What do you mean by that?"

"I mean an entirely simple question," he said. "You came here because it was said the doctor wanted you. When you arrived, you asked about him. He was not in. He continues to be out. Isn't that the truth?"

Muir went on: "The doctor was out, I suppose? When you asked for him, he would be back presently? Perhaps he was out on a call. Didn't the story go something like that?" She said nothing.

A shaft of light from another window beneath it showed the slant of the hillside in the rear of the tavern, the loom and lift of a great tree trunk in the distance and a few shrubs with ragged leaves on the tips of the branches nearer to hand. From the downpour of rain, which was slackening now to nothing, little runlets of brown water trickled down the bank. Muir eyed it automatically for an instant before he turned toward the girl again.

"I think I see a nurse," said Muir, "but where is the sick person she is taking care of?"

"There is..." she began, but stopped again and even glanced rather apprehensively toward the door.

She slipped down into a chair and, with her head raised high and her eyes studying the opposite wall and her hands folded in her lap, she remained impassive for a moment.

"Yes," she answered gravely. "It helps—it helps to take the horrible, sick fear out of me."

"And in the meantime," said Muir, "that noble friend of yours, Philip Baldwin, has a chance to show his nobility and give you a glimpse of his suffering soul. That's one convenience in having you out here, isn't it?"

HE drew up another chair beside hers and facing her. As he sat down, he saw that she was swallowing with a hard effort, fighting back a panic that kept growing the more she looked into her mind. Muir took her hand and said nothing.

"Will you tell me this?" she asked at last. "Will you tell me what brought you here?"

"Chiefly you," said Muir. Half-frowning, she looked at him steadily. He ran a hand quickly over his face.

"I know," he said. "It's bad. Full of long nights and short days, and all that. But the truth is still what I say. It's chiefly you that brought me here. On a rather blind trail. After I left you last night, I listened under the office windows and heard you telephoning into the country. So I came out here pretending to want to see Mr. Baldwin and I've seen him. He's a bit suspicious but he's not quite sure that I'm a fakir. If he were sure, I think he'd wring my neck. What do you think?"

She put up a hand to her throat and looked at him with eyes made blank because of what they saw inwardly.

"You can't talk about him," nodded Muir. "There was a time when he meant most of the world to you. Isn't that true?"

He said, faintly smiling: "Because I had a premonition that I'd find you there, of course. Is it bothering you to have me talk like a silly ass at the very moment when you're beginning to be afraid?"

She smiled at him, with the fear gone from her eyes and only a slightly amused human consideration left in them.

"Now you want to know why I was at the doctor's office? Because I was following a friend who was there before me. Everett Franklin."

"HE was an old friend," said Muir. "I'd run across him in a dozen different parts of the world when he was hunting news and I was hunting —other things. He had one of those beautiful faces that you never find outside of Hollywood. He couldn't grow older. He was one of those bright little boys who always have the answer. There was no more fear in him then there is in a ferret, and he was always going into dark holes and bringing out the truth, sometimes with the blood still fresh on it. One part of me loved him. Do you understand?"

"He was dead," said Muir, keeping firm hold on her with his eyes. "I found him in the closet of that room with the landscape wallpaper."

"He had been stabbed to death," said Muir, still holding her eyes strongly. "And the murderer wasn't satisfied with that. He'd leaned and slashed him across the face—crisscross slashes—a lot of them, over and over again. With something as sharp as a scalpel."

The strength went out of her, suddenly. Her head dropped to the back of the chair. Her eyes closed. By the blue gray of her lips she seemed to have fainted, but Muir saw the faint pulsation of the artery at the base of her throat.

He stood up and went to the window, to lift the sash of it so that fresh air could blow in; and as he did this he saw the figure of a man pass up the bank at the rear of the tavern, a tall, alert, sure-footed fellow in a raincoat and a slouch hat with a heavy pack strapped behind his shoulders.

Through the thin mist of the rain, the light from the lower window played upon him clearly enough, striking upward to follow him as he reached the brush.

Then, as one does after climbing over an obstacle, he turned and looked back down the bank which he had just passed. Muir saw the face of his quarry, that same face which Inspector Tory so eagerly desired to trace, with the pointed beard giving it an old-fashioned professional neatness. As Muir watched, Doctor David J. Russo turned again and stepped out of the misty light into darkness, leaving the brush trembling behind him and a few of the dead leaves slowly adrift down the bank.

* * * * *

PETER MUIR, undercover agent, has at last caught up with his quarry. But he is a virtual prisoner in that country tavern, and is thwarted from stalking the murderer of his closest friend. Yet Muir is a man of great resourcefulness, and you will thoroughly enjoy watching him try to extricate himself from the strange predicament in which he finds himself.

The concluding installment of "The Face and the Doctor" by Max Brand comes to you in next week's DETECTIVE FICTION WEEKLY.

Detective Fiction Weekly, 29 May 1937, with second part of "The Face and the Doctor"

A scandal big enough to rock New York! And Pete Muir was
just the man to get the lowdown on the upper underworld.

"Just turn your back to me and keep your hands up," Muir directed.

PART II

WHAT HAS HAPPENED—

PETER ANGUS MUIR, ace private investigator, was looking forward to meeting his old crony and fellow-adventurer, Everett Franklin, at O'Doyle's saloon on Third Avenue, New York City. But long after the appointed hour, Franklin does not appear—so Muir on a hunch and on information which Franklin had mentioned previously, calls at the offices of Dr. David J. Russo, a young dietitian and surgeon, eminent for his researches in the Orient. Muir believes that Franklin may have called there earlier in the evening.

At Dr. Russo's office, Muir, introducing himself as Oliver Croft, meets a nurse, Katherine Edwards. Both suspicious of each other's identity, they parry in conversation for a time, and Muir leaves. But he returns shortly after, forces his way in the office, and discovers in one of the doctor's closets the corpse of his friend, Franklin—his face horribly mutilated.

Having overheard the nurse phone a Greenwood number to inquire about one Philip Baldwin, Muir decides to follow the trail of Dr. Russo to Stowett's Tavern, situated in suburban Westchester. There Muir meets Baldwin, and after taking lodging in the Tavern, he senses that he is virtually a prisoner. At nightfall he suddenly sees Dr. Russo outside the Tavern heading for the hills.

CHAPTER VI. — [UNTITLED]

LEANING from the window, Muir looked down and saw no edges on which toes and fingertips could get a grip for climbing, but at the side a strong iron drainage pipe from the eaves above ran to the ground.

He turned back to Katherine Edwards and found her just lifting her head, though the deadly grayness was still in her face. Muir dropped on his knees beside the chair and took both her hands.

"I have to go out," he said to her. "And you must stay here. Perhaps I won't be long. Are you afraid?"

"You are," said Muir. "You're frightened to death, but you'll be safe, here. Do you believe me when I say that I'll come back?"

"Before I go, can you tell me, quickly, whatever you knew about Doctor Russo and Baldwin?"

She looked up at the ceiling. Speech struggled for an instant with a restraint of the spirit. "I can't," she admitted.

"I must go," said Muir. "God knows that I wish to stay with you, but I can't. Be specially kind to Baldwin. Say anything that you think he wants you to say. And wait for me. I'll be back."

When he got to the window and slipped through it, he saw her standing by her chair, still so unsteadied that she had to keep a strong hold on the back of it with one hand, but the other she kissed to him with a sudden smile.

Then his hands were on the pipe, and he walked down it, foot and hand, like a sailor. He had to pass into an uncomfortable brilliance of light from the lower window, before he reached the ground, and shrinking aside from it, he peered through the window into the interior of a naked room which held neither stove nor table, but only a pair of chairs.

It had something else for the eye of Muir, however, for against the opposite wall, standing rigidly straight with his arms folded high on his chest, was Philip Baldwin, contemplating whatever fate lay before him with an unfaltering eye. He did not move during the seconds Muir gazed at him; he gave an impression of continuing immobility, as though he were apt to remain there for an indefinite time.

Muir, stepping back again from the window-side, climbed the bank beyond the verge of the widening shaft of light. He reached the brush, passed through it, wound among the trees beyond, and so came into the open of the hillside. It climbed slowly, receding in a broad sweep on which he passed with good speed. He was over the edge of the rise and the tavern had disappeared from his view, before he ventured to use the flashlight to find the trail.

The footsteps, in fact, he did not discover, but he came on a path that crawled in a wavering line over the hilltop and into the next hollow. Along this he stepped rapidly, keeping his eyes fixed on the ground, the more quickly to adapt them to seeing by this dim light.

For in the sky above him the rain clouds were clearing so that there was hardly more than a fine mist adrift between the earth and the stars. The rainfall had stopped and through gaps in the curtain overhead tangles of stars, that seemed to blow back against the sweep of the clouds, appeared and were lost. A half moon that was sailing in the zenith was sometimes an obscure blur behind the mist, and again a flashing moment of silver that showed Muir more clearly the landscape before him.

It was typical of the Westchester countryside. A lucky chance has placed near the ugly concrete mountains of Manhattan that broken, charming sweep of hills and small horizons, all charmingly confused so that the moment one is out of the sight of roofs, there seems to be nothing but complete wilderness.

THE path swerved a bit toward the right, going through the hollow, and in an open stretch Muir saw, when the moon came out again through the clouds, a figure leading him, a tall, spare fellow with a pack behind his shoulders.

Muir quickened his pace, but he would not draw too close because he hoped that the figure in front might lead him to something more than a mere capture. He merely kept inside that distance at which moonlight became dangerously bright—in case the doctor turned and looked back—and the shadowy verge in which he barely could make out Russo through the clouded dimness of the stars.

He came to a branching of the path and found that Russo had taken the right-hand turning that pointed suddenly into a hill whose side had been gouged away so that the next burst of moonshine showed huge strata of rain-polished rock tipped in a syncline that had been laid bare in a perpendicular cliff. It was a quarry, he could guess, and a moment later he was on an abandoned road now overgrown with weeds and grass and even with small shrubs, but whose surface remained trampled hard by the trucks which had rolled over it.

A thick cloud abolished the moon from the sky, unluckily, at this moment, but as Muir began to stumble, dim flashes commenced ahead of him, and then the wide, pale, steady glow of a flashlight as Russo turned from the old road into the floor of the deserted quarry and its litter of stone heaps.

Right up to the face of the cliff the light continued and remained there for a moment, occasionally throwing wild glances up the overhanging face of the rock, for here a whole section of the piled strata was breaking away from the main mass of the stone, and a wide fissure promised, one day, a fall that would cover the entire floor of the quarry with a litter.

The flashlight, having delayed for a moment under the cliff, now turned and came back toward Muir; so that he had to slip behind one of the scattered boulders for protection. As a matter of fact the footsteps of the doctor came straight toward him. The flashlight threw its broad cone directly on the rock so that he could not tell on which side Russo might pass, but waited, gun in hand, in case he should be seen.

A veering of light at the last moment gave him his cue and he stepped to the left behind the great stone as the footfalls came by. He heard the swishing of the long raincoat around the legs of Russo, then the steps and the light went by, and he 'could see how the doctor was leaning to support the weight of the heavy pack which he carried. Among the farther stones the flashlight now disappeared and left Muir in a quandary for an instant.

If he delayed here, he might very well lose the trail of the doctor completely, but he had an unquenchable desire to see what had delayed Russo under the edge of the cliff; therefore he continued deeper into the quarry. He even ventured, now, to use occasional flashes of his own light, though if the doctor looked back he might see those small gleams of the torch against the lower face of the cliff.

MUIR found the tracks of Russo to guide him, at last, to the verge of a little pool that filled an accidental hollow at the base of the cliff. Now, glancing up, the angle at which the upper rock leaned out seemed a momentary peril, but he could find nothing else of the slightest interest except the dark water of the pool. Into that, therefore, he turned the penetrating ray of his pocket light.

The stained water turned the ray after it had penetrated only a short distance, showing yellow streaks of obscurity, the stains drawn from dead leaves that had blown into the pool. One paler bit beneath the surface he took to be the gleam of a white stone. He leaned closer, steadying the ray on that faintly visible object until he made out the blur of a face, and then the features and the half-open eyes of Everett Franklin.

A gust of wind, the next moment, sent a thousand small ripples over the pool and blotted out the face of the dead man.

Muir turned and went rapidly back through the quarry to pick up the trail of Russo if he could. When he came to the edge of the quarry, he climbed up on one of the largest of the fallen boulders and scanned everything that lay before him, eagerly, but with patience, for a single glint of disappearing light, anywhere within the range of his vision, would undoubtedly be Russo and give him the trail again.

There was not a single eye of light, not a ray to be seen except for one steady gleam at the left, a mile away, from what was undoubtedly the window of a house. His eyes began to ache from the intensity with which he probed the night. Then the moon slid out through a wide gap in the upper clouds and showed him the whole face of the land.

But there was no sign of a moving figure. Any of a hundred groups and groves of trees might be covering the man with the pack, of course, and so Muir continued to sweep the whole field with his eyes until the moon like a sailing ship struck another storm of clouds, threw up a great white bow wave, and then sank from sight behind the mists again.

The whole brilliance of excitement left Muir then, and there remained to him only that bulldog persistence which an old hunter must possess, whether his quarry be human or less noble. He returned at a run, uphill and down, to the place where the trail had forked right and left.

There he studied the ground with his flashlight to find footmarks if he could, but the entire surface, at that point, was either hard rock or heavily compacted roughage of broken stone which took no imprints. As he sat on his heels, studying the place, it occurred to him that Russo might well have seen, from a distance, the glimmer of the second light in the quarry; and perhaps he was back there at the tavern with that huge, immobile figure of the thinker, Philip Baldwin. The night-journey would be put off to another day.

It might be best, in any case, now that the trail was lost, to get to the nearest telephone and summon the police. The body, at least, had been found, and a thousand things might flow from that. Or did Russo plan, during the night, to set off a small charge of blasting powder that might make the great rock above the pool lean outwards and then bury the dead under ten thousand tons of broken debris?

The strange numbness of mind that had troubled Muir more than once during the last few days had returned on him again; it was - like a sort of suspended dizziness, or again it was like penetrating fingers of cold that pierced his temples and joined together in his brain. He got up, shaking his head and massaging his temples with the palms of his hands. Then he took the left branch of the trail, blindly, and went up it at a dog-trot.

HE could maintain that gait for hours, as a rule. He had learned it by watching the negro carriers in Africa, where the black boys will take even a sixty pound head-load forward at a sort of swinging, shambling run for miles at a time. Ordinarily he was tireless at that gait, but his knees were made of cork on this night, and in a few moments he had to stop.

He went on again, after that, with a grim pinching of the lips, for he knew that whatever lay ahead of him on this night, he would be terribly handicapped for carrying it through.

The footpath now angled steeply up a rough hill where the footing was so bad that he risked using the flashlight again and again to find the way among the rocks, but it was when his foot slipped and his thumb automatically snapped on the light that its random shaft found in the darkness a staggering little shack at the right of the trail.

He paused there to take breath again and look about him. From this height the countryside was no longer a wilderness, for single lights scattered everywhere, and little bright groupings that marked the big estates, while whole fleets crowded together to make the villages and crossroad towns.

A cloud as black as thunder had submerged the moon again, and when he played the light along the hard rocks of the trail again, he realized that he was following a hopeless mission. No footprints would appear among those stones, there was no sign of surface soil.

He found the shack again with his torch. It was composed of corrugated iron, and box-boards, and saplings, and tin oil cans hammered out flat and still holding the bright dint of the hammers, here and there, like the sparkle of mica in a rock. It was more like a tramp's shack in the far West than anything he ever had seen in the East before.

One hearty blast of wind would have seemed strong enough to shoulder it to the ground, and yet it carried unmistakable signs of years of weathering. Above the sagging roof, a weak little chimney stood up, with a twisted elbow turn in the middle of it.

Muir had taken the light from it when he heard the unmistakable noise of a man coughing. The rising wind muffled the sound, but nevertheless he made sure that it came from the shack, so he went carefully toward it. The wall that faced him was entirely blank, but when he turned the corner he saw the rectangle of a door faintly sketched in by rifts of light that soaked through the cracks.

At that door he paused for a moment, listening to the sounds of someone astir inside. After that he fumbled, found a latch, and pressed it slowly down. When he jerked the door open, he looked in with the big automatic ready in his right hand and the pocket light in the left.

There was no need of illumination from the outside, however, for on the central pole that held up the roof tree of the shack hung a lantern that gave a mild light to the interior and shone on the bearded face of Doctor Russo.

CHAPTER VII. — THE CHILL OF DEATH

THE doctor already had spread out his knapsack, which was a folding affair that contained many sections, and at this moment he was touching a match to the fuel he had put in a little stove, flimsy with rust, that stood in a corner of the room. When he saw the gun of Muir and the man behind it, he lifted his hands above his head, silently, and then got with difficulty from his knees to his feet.

"Just turn your back to me and keep your hands up," directed Muir. "Up a little higher, please."

"Certainly," said the doctor, and turning with the quick obedience of a soldier, he stretched his arms higher above his head, so that the sleeves of his raincoat slipped down over his narrow, hairy wrists.

Muir gave the room a first glance. It was more like a stable than a house. For a floor there was merely broken rock that had been tamped down to a fairly smooth surface like that of a new gravel road; a pair of hand-made stools, a bench of the same manufacture, the stove, and a little army cot in a corner made up the greater part of the furnishing though a few odds and ends of garments hung from nails along the walls.

It was as desolate a habitation as one could find. The look of it reminded Muir of grim Yorkshire moors. And mild as the wind was that blew over the Westchester hills, it moaned through the chinks of those flimsy tin walls like a great winter storm.

"Unbuckle it and drop it to the floor," commanded Muir, and laid the muzzle of his gun in the hollow of the doctor's back.

"As you please," said Russo, with his perfect calm, and a moment later he had dropped the weapon, in a holster of new leather, to the floor at his feet.

He found a bulky wallet in an inside coat pocket and removed it. He took the pocket knife, also, and found it to be one of those ponderous, useful boy-scout affairs, with a blade big and sharp enough for murder. He found and left a cigarette lighter, and a few unimportant odds and ends.

"That's all, I think," he told Russo. "Sit down on that stool, if you will. I'll take this other one... I'm putting the gun across my knees and I'll have to tell you that I won't hesitate to use it if a pinch comes."

He found inside it two letters and a closely compacted sheaf of bills. He took out the stack of money, and holding it close to his ear flicked it rapidly under his thumb, counting by tens. There were two thousand dollars in twenties and three thousand in fifties. The sum of five thousand was exactly even. In addition the wallet contained a few crumpled one-dollar bills.

The letters were unaddressed and typewritten, the signature in both cases being a sprawling sort of monogram in which letters could hardly be distinguished.

"Dear Bert," read the first letter. "This is the doctor. Treat him well and do what you can for him to help him on his way. He'll tell you the details. I think a tramp freighter, but use your own best discretion. He wants to travel decidedly incognito."

The second letter was addressed to "Dear Garrison" and read: "You've often wanted to clear off the old scores and get a debt out of your mind. If you still feel that way, you can go as far as you want with my friend the doctor, and I'll appreciate it as though you were acting for me. He'll tell you what he wants."

Muir refolded the letters, restored them to the wallet, and pushed the wallet into his coat pocket.

The doctor drew a deep inhalation from his cigarette and seemed about to speak as he lifted his head, but he merely blew forth a long, thin stream of the smoke.

"It's to be silence, is it?" asked Muir. "I'm afraid so," said Russo, shrugging his thin shoulders.

UP the open draft of the stove the flame was roaring so fast that the chimney trembled with a small note of singing. Muir arranged the draft, dropped from the heap at hand another chunk into the fire, and closed down the stove again. After that he turned to Russo and said: "I've just been over at the quarry looking into the pool. There's a face in it that's been badly damaged, doctor. Do you know anything about it?"

"You know, Russo," said Muir, "I can turn you over to the police and they have ways of extracting information that don't break the skin but are apt to break the heart under it."

"Stand up and take that flashlight of yours," directed Muir. "We're going down to the village just over the hill. The state police can be called from there in a few moments."

The doctor, in silence, rose, buttoned up his raincoat, placed his hat on his head, and lifted the flashlight.

"You'll keep playing the light on the trail," said Muir. "I'll follow behind you, closely. You won't try to run?"

"I understand perfectly," said the doctor. "The dead man was a friend of yours?" he added, in the mildest of conversational tones.

"I'll tell you his history while we're on the way," said Muir. "But I'm in a hurry, just now. You first, doctor."

The doctor, accordingly, went first through the door, and Muir followed him into the wet of the open night.

"To the left, and take the path again, right on over the hill," said Muir. "You see that patch of lights down there? That's our destination."

"About Everett Franklin," said Muir, "I could tell you a good many stories... but..."

A sudden chattering of his teeth stopped his talk. That numbness which had been in his brain like a danger asleep, now roused and poured a wave of chilling cold through his mind, through his body, until it struck the pit of his stomach and shook him as a parent shakes a child.

His legs turned into a sodden weight and there was no strength to swing them because at the vital center of strength lay that freezing stone which spread its cold upward through his heart and downward to his feet.

HE could imagine heat strong enough to strike through the entire body at once, the sort of heat that streams from the surface of stars a thousand fold brighter than our sun, but he could not imagine cold that was able to penetrate the whole blood stream with ice in a single instant. Yet that was how the blow struck him and dropped him to his knees.

The gun shuddered out of his hand and rattled away among the stones, yet all the strength of his body and his will was focused in that right hand. He reached after the automatic, and his shuddering grasp fell on the foot of the doctor, but when he tried to trip up Russo his fingers jerked away from their hold.

Whatever he saw now was in series of flickering images like an early motion picture, for the powerful vibration jerked his head in a violent tremor that would not end. In those intermittent flashes, therefore, he saw Russo's spotlight find the revolver and the lean hand of the doctor picking up the weapon.

He found himself pushed over on his back, by Russo. The vague silhouette of the doctor was high above him, against the sky, but the gun hung inside the cone of the flashlight. Even that immediate danger of death could not clear the brain of Muir from the dreadful yearning for warmth. He wanted scalding water to wash down his throat and thaw the ice that was forming inside his body. He wanted to walk into the glare of a furnace to restore life to his flesh.

With half his mind he was aware that Russo had dipped into his coat-pocket and removed the fat wallet, but even that was dream- like and of no importance. Far greater in significance was the disappearance of the light, the clicking of the feet of the doctor on the rocks as he withdrew, and then no sound whatever except the swish of the wind through the trees.

That paroxysm abated suddenly. Even when it had diminished, he was able only to gain his hands and knees and crawl, with the sense that the wind was blowing the dreadful cold into him again, pouring like a river of ice straight through his body; but he was led on by a heavenly vision of the stove in the shack. If he could build up a fire that turned the stove red hot, and then embrace it with his arms and press the heat into the pit of his body....

The full power of the chill swept back on him again and laid him helplessly on the ground. He began to roll, twist, and squirm toward the shack, though his shuddering eye made him see it now here and now there.

He had no explanation except that they might have poisoned his beer at the tavern. But at last he had gained the door of the shack and was reaching for the latch. His hand would not hold it. When he stretched up his arm, the cold stabbed him with a thousand icy daggers and crumpled him in a ball again. An idiocy had entered that good right hand, for it would not obey his will.

CHAPTER VIII. — KATE DOES HER PART

IT seemed to Muir that the entire night flowed over him by slow hours and hours but that the morning would not come to give eyes to his misery. Then the door thrust open and he was aware of long legs striding past him, of the radiance of the lantern, split into a thousand shuddering beams by the rapid vibration of his head,- and then of the face of the doctor bending above him, and the hands that drew him into the shack.

But no warmth was there. He stretched out his trembling hands and could not find the least amelioration of the terrible cold. By slow degrees, taking hours as it seemed for every move, the doctor with a frightful deliberation freshened the fire.

Coals still were shining in the interior of it like bright golden promises of life to Muir; and now with the roaring draft the stove began to tremble and the chimney to sing its song. Russo dragged the army cot to the side of the stove and lifted the weight of Muir to it.

He had seemed like a cold-eyed devil, before; but now he was an incarnation of mercy. He had yellow tablets in his hand and he was putting them on the tongue of Muir. He was pouring whiskey from a flask and holding it at the lips of the sick man. Half of that divine liquor was wasted by the unsteady lips of Muir before the tablets were washed down.

But even with the stove red hot and the whiskey inside him there was only a gradual amelioration of the cold that froze his very soul.

As the vital warmth began again, increasing in him like a window-light toward which he was traveling slowly, his mind steadied first from that mortal shuddering, and he studied the face of the doctor. There was much to see in it, as Russo sat huddled on a stool beside the bench fighting out a struggle between the brain and the heart.

Once he stood up suddenly with a desperate grimness in his mouth and eyes and the gun pointing from his hand; again he sank back and covered his face from the idea that had come to him, pulling away his hands by degrees until his troubled eyes were fixed upon Muir again.

He sat closer to the cot, finally, and Muir felt cold, steady fingers taking his pulse.

"Blackwater fever," he heard the doctor saying, "and a hundred per cent form of it. But the quinine will stop it. The way brakes stop an automobile. I'm laying them out in doses. You have enough in you now to give the fever a check. In half an hour you'll take this batch... these on the edge of the bench, do you see? And half an hour after that, the next lot. An absolute specific, and you can have faith in it. You have nothing but a marvelously heightened form of malaria, my friend. Go a little sparingly with the whiskey.... Good-by and good luck to you."

It was like thawing ice in freezing water, the cold departed from him so slowly; and then heat swept over him like a wall of fire; and after that the cold struck back through his sweating skin at his vitals.

It was not more than six in the evening when the chill of the fever struck him down; by eleven he was sitting up on the cot with his head ringing violently, but the numbness totally gone from it. He could rise. He could stand. He could turn his eyes about the room to reform the picture of it; and it was then that he discovered his automatic hanging by the trigger-guard from a nail on the center-pole.

He pushed open the door of the shack and found outside a transformed world without a breath of wind blowing through it, so that the light of the westering moon was able to freeze the ground steadily.

MUIR had no strength. By the time he had taken twenty steps, the thought of the warm stove and the cot lay like the hope of heaven behind him and he had a childish feeling that if he turned his head once to glance back, he would be unable to resist the desire to return.

And he felt with insistence, like a vocal pulse along his blood with every stroke of his heart, that he must return to Katherine Edwards; for the picture of Philip Baldwin leaning above her in the doorway grew into a fantastic figure of evil in his imagination. He dared not think what he could accomplish after he had reached the tavern.

Long before this they must have missed him from his room and on his return they would have a definite way to receive him; but conscience had a whip to flog him forward.

In his hands there was no strength and his knees sagged. He had no intelligence in his feet. They seemed to find out stones for him to stumble over. On the steep of the slope he was down half a dozen times, once to roll headlong in the mud; and where he came to the sharp rise of ground beyond, he took the more difficult places patiently, on hands and knees.

From the first glimpse of the tavern lights on the hilltop to the moment he was beside it seemed a long and bitter hour. He came down through the trees staggering, at last, with the weight of the automatic as crushing as a heavy knapsack; and he felt that only the burning pains in his hands and knees, lacerated many times by his falls along the trail, kept his consciousness alive.

Beyond the cluttering of little popular priced cars which had pulled up near the bar door he saw a big low-lying automobile with two yards of hood nosing out in front of it. He marked that car specially with his eye before he stepped up to the bar-window and looked inside. Jeff presided in sweating haste, serving long rows of beer to the laborers who had come in from the farms and dairies of the neighborhood. Baldwin, naturally, was not there.

He was in a small room at the back of the tavern, one of the two dingy parlors through which Muir had passed that afternoon, with its damaged upholstery and stale odors of cookery. He sat at the center table with Katherine Edwards opposite him, and with both gesturing, extended hands he was making a strong appeal.

The second window was left partly ajar, but even through this Muir could make out only snatches of the conversation, for in the barroom the country boys were raising a fine racket of laughter and stamping. But there was enough to fill the eye of Muir, and even more than the faces of the girl and Baldwin, he stared at a little miniature toy, one of those tiny dolls with a weighted base which can be made to rock with extended arms through the most fantastic motions of a buck-and-wing.

Baldwin, even as he pleaded with the girl, still with an automatic touch from time to time kept the odd little toy in motion, so that it was bowing, pirouetting, spinning, side- swaying continually. Its movements seemed to enchant Muir as he watched.

Even the table was presently too much distance for big Philip Baldwin, and he came with his chair around the corner of it, sitting down with his back to Muir and the window. He had his arm around the girl, now, and Muir could see her face, rather pale but still smiling.

In a sudden lull of the barroom noise, he made out, dimly, that soft and eloquent voice as Baldwin said: "... and why not now, Kate? I've made the arrangements, and we can be married tonight and on the ship in the morning. I want to take you South, Kate, where we can get the cold and the ugliness of the winter out of our souls. And in the spring we'll come back. We'll come back from Egypt and Sicily. The New York game will be ready to open out, then. Tell me you'll go, my dear?"

He leaned back from her to study her face as she answered and so was able to see the same picture that Muir had from the window—a white, sick-horror that shrank the very pupils of her eyes.

BALDWIN got slowly up from his chair, so that Muir could not see the girl any longer. An uproar in the barroom dimmed the deep voice of Baldwin, also, but he could see how one of the man's large hands held the crossed wrists of Kate, and shook them with a recurrent pulse of anger.

Unsteadily Muir got around to the back door of the tavern, helping himself with his hands against the wall. It was unlocked. He passed into the kitchen with a fumbling step. From a side pantry a woman's voice sang out: "Is that you, Eddie?"

He went on over the linoleum from which the decorative design had been worn away; the path on it between the stove and the sink actually sank as deep as the under-lining. He was through the doorway into the hall as the shrill voice called again: "Eddie! You boiled again, you beast?"

Around the angle of the hall would be the door to the rear parlor. He took out his automatic. It burned against his torn hand. Then he took the elbow-turn of the hall so quickly that he almost collided with the chauffeur, that pale, silent, forward- looking fellow-named Jim.

He was as silent as ever, now. He merely reached for Muir's gun with his left and with his right hand reached inside his coat for his own weapon. Muir hit him with the heavy barrel of the gun across the head. There was force enough in the blow to make the steel barrel ring.-

It dropped Jim to his knees with one hand fumbling before him through the dark of his mind and the other hand slowly dragging out his revolver.

Then he pushed open the parlor door and stepped through with his automatic showing him the way.

He heard Baldwin saying: "What did it, Kate? What turned you suddenly, like this? I'm going to have it out of you, so you might as well tell me now."

"You know, my dear, that it's my profession to detect the lies and the liars," said Baldwin. "And this lie of yours is registered with all of the usual signs. You're not doing it well, so tell me the truth. Something has happened that turns me into a beast in your eyes —as though I were a common thief— or a murderer?"

He tried the last word tentatively, drawing his head back to watch her face more carefully.

"That's it, my friend," said Muir, as he locked the door behind him. "Murder is the idea, Baldwin. Or whatever your real name is."

"And whatever your real face was," said Muir, "the one you're wearing now is good enough for you, old fellow. Kate, get those window-shades down and then sit down at that telephone."

Baldwin, slowly turning from the wall, studied his man with penetrating eyes. The shudder had not left Muir. He had to support himself against the wall, but his right hand and the gun were steady.

"Has she been stalling you along all evening till now?" asked Muir. "Has she been using up your time ever since you found I was gone and you wanted to make your getaway, fast? Ah, Kate, you've done a fine bit of work for us all! But she couldn't stand for it, in the end. She couldn't stand it, Baldwin, when the murderer put his hands on her...."

"Back up and give yourself room," called Muir. "The police are coming on the run, Jim, and they won't want you, if they don't find you here. Call the operator, Kate, and ask for the police in a hurry."

CHAPTER IX. — A DOCTOR'S HUMAN SCULPTURE

INSPECTOR TORY, as he walked up and down through the huge, tapestried bedroom, kept one hand for his cigar and one for gestures.

"He broke down as soon as he was recognized," said Tory. "But how did you know he was not what he looked to be? I never would have known Magistrate William Cheney with a map like that. I never would have guessed 'Beautiful Bill' to be that dish-nosed fellow. A hundred and thirty-five thousand dollars was all we know that he lined his pockets with. There may have been half a million more. He lived up twenty graft streets. Peter, can you imagine the most handsome crook in New York allowing his face to be wrenched out of shape by a doctor?"

Peter Angus Muir did not look up from his bed tray on which he was causing a gay little figure dressed like an Italian peasant in gala costume to whirl and bow and dance on its weighted pedestal.

"There was the cleverest part of it," said Muir. "A face- lifting operation leaves definite scars, but a big scar in plain view on the side of the face— one wouldn't be apt to consider that the deliberate result of a doctor's work.... They have poor Russo now, you say?"

"They nabbed him in Virginia— Norfolk—and he confessed. I have the verbatim copy in my pocket. There's nothing but pure daylight on this case, now, if you'll be big-minded and tell me how you arrived at your results."

"I want to settle the doctor, first. You can admit him to State's evidence and get him out of trouble, can't you?"

"What the devil do you mean by that?" asked Tory, sitting down suddenly on the foot of the bed.

"You can't start drinking this early in the morning," said the inspector in his dry manner.

"Imagine a man like Russo," said Muir, "with the electric chair shining right in his eye, and the law holding him by the nape of the neck—imagine him when a disease knocks the law flat as a pancake at his feet. He sees his danger knocked down. He's free. The man of the law will die not owing to his fault but from the natural process of the disease, and exposure to a December night.

"But Russo is a real doctor, you see. So real that the practice of a dietitian didn't satisfy him at all. He had to give up his big practice in New York and run off to the Orient to track down some obscure disease or other. He had to keep his hand in as a surgeon, too. He had to be everything. Medicine and surgery is his life.

"There he sees me knocked out as helpless as a child and his way free and clear to escape, but he can't let go of me. He wastes terribly useful time in getting to the village drugstore and buying quinine, because that professional eye of his had probed my case to the root at a glance. Not so easy, old fellow. Blackwater fever isn't seen in this part of the world, and my fit might have looked like epilepsy or anything, for all I know. But that clear old eye saw the truth and the specific remedy. Once he saw what to do, he had to do it, even if it cost him his own life...."

"Damned magnificent," murmured Tory. "But a fellow who does a face-lifting operation on a criminal..."

"He didn't know that big Baldwin —Cheney, I mean—was a criminal. He only knew that his favorite nurse had brought in the case of a man she said had been ruined by a mere social mistake. As a matter of fact, she's talked the whole thing over with me. She was so fond of Cheney that he easily bamboozled her. He convinced her that he'd done nothing. He was merely a scapegoat.

"The doctor looks into the case. He looks into the man's mind. And he sees evil there. Handsome Bill wants a new face. The doctor gives him one. But what a face! A picture of evil, eh? Imagine a doctor who uses flesh and blood the way a sculptor uses marble?

"He made the thing he saw—the evil in the soul of William Cheney. And when the bandages were off and Cheney saw himself, he smashed hell out of the mirror that showed him his new face. He was so sensitive about faces that he was upset when he saw a cut on the face of a dog. It's a good story, isn't it, old son?"

HE lifted the Scotch and soda and took a long pull at it. "I want the doctor given a clean pair of hands, or you get no testimony out of me," he said.

"We don't need it," said the Inspector, grinning. "Not since Cheney has confessed."

"You're going to give the doctor a clean bill of health," said Muir. "Not for Peter Angus Muir but for the sake of medicine and the health of the world. You hear?"

"Very well, Peter. I'll wangle it," agreed Tory. "Will you stop playing with that damned doll and put your mind on this case for me?"

"We have a tight case all around, as a matter of fact," said Tory, "but there's one other person we'd like to talk to. There was a nurse in charge at the doctor's office and I'd like to get hold of her. But she's disappeared, also."

His voice trailed away, for the door had opened and a nurse in the crisp blue-white of a freshly laundered uniform entered. Inspector Tory, forgetting his words, looked from the bit of lace on her bright hair to the green of her eyes which dwelt upon Muir in a way that stripped the years suddenly from Tory and left him a mere boy again with a boy's mind that looks up at womanhood and finds divinity in it.

"I want you to meet Inspector Tory, occasionally a friend of mine," said Muir. "This is Katherine Edwards. The police had an idea that they wanted to talk to you, Kate. But Tory changed their mind for them, didn't you, John?"

"Between you and me, John, you'll agree that facts rarely count for much," suggested Muir. "Only selected facts are the ones that tell. And that's why the police have lost interest in Kate. Isn't that true?"

"I'll make it true!" he said, and his heart kept on swelling as she smiled at him.

Muir took her hand in his long, thin fingers and smiled up at her in a way that startled the inspector to the heart.

"Five minutes more and it will all be talked out," said Muir. "And then I'm going to rest—forever!"

Muir smiled, grew absent-minded, and then answered: "We were talking about this dancing doll, weren't we?"

"I was begging you to take your hands off the infernal thing and put your mind on the case," said Tory.

"When I saw Baldwin—Cheney, I mean to say—playing with this miniature toy while he talked to Kate—then the picture was complete. I knew who had been living at the doctor's offices, who had had the miniature pack of cards, the miniature broken toy that I saw a fragment of. I knew who had smashed the mirror when he saw his face in it, too.

"Already I'd seen Baldwin at the tavern turn his back suddenly to a mirror behind the bar. The broken mirror, the scar on the face, and that ugly face which didn't match the beautiful forehead and eyes at all. You see how the idea grew in me, don't you? But all like a mist, all nebulous until I saw this little toy that Baldwin's damned fingers were dancing on the table while he talked to the girl." His voice trailed away.

"I am," said Muir. "You'll have to save her from me. Ideal beauty doesn't exist, but it can be suggested. And it's an odd thing that I never paid the slightest attention to green eyes, before. Go away and leave me, will you? I'm going to sleep all day. I wouldn't get up if Gabriel's horn was blowing."

"There's one part that needs explaining I can't give," said Muir. "Why didn't Baldwin—Cheney, I mean— recognize me at the tavern, if he was the man who locked me in the room upstairs?"

"It isn't long. He'd performed the operation, and installed his healing patient as a pseudo-laboratory assistant. One day Everett Franklin came in with a real case of dyspepsia and heard Cheney speak in the next room, and bounced right out of his chair, saying he thought he recognized the voice. The doctor was badly frightened. He knew, by this time, that he'd been bamboozled into working on a criminal.

"But if the voice were known, he was sure that the face would not be, so he opened the door and introduced Franklin to Philip Baldwin, and the thing seemed to go off like a charm. But Franklin came back to the house later. A suspicion must have stuck in his mind. He remembered that voice, still, and of course he remembered the missing magistrate, that brilliant young fellow Cheney who had skipped away with so much dough. At any rate. Franklin came back, found Cheney, and taxed him with his real name. Cheney killed him on the spot and then—"

"And then," said Muir, "with the hate and envy of a man who had once been 'Handsome Bill,' he leaned over and slashed the face of poor Everett to shreds—the damned rat!"

"He'll burn for it," said the inspector. "But when Cheney had done his work, he simply called in the doctor and pointed out that Russo himself would be more suspect than he for a murder with a scalpel in the doctor's own office. The thing to do was for them both to combine in getting rid of the body. The doctor could do nothing but obey.

"He went for his automobile, and while he was away Cheney telephoned to the girl he loved—to Katherine Edwards—and said the doctor was going to the country on a case and needed her. He didn't suspect that she would be in lack of something that would bring her back to the office before she went into the country.

"And the place he directed her to the place he took the doctor, was his own hide-out, where he'd been lying low before he went into the city to have that facial operation. A place where everybody had been a bit corrupted by easy money, you see."

"I do see," said Muir. "He was going to make his last play for her. Not knowing that the doctor's sculpturing in living flesh had shown her too much of the truth about Cheney."

"After the girl, then you appeared," said the inspector. "And of course, Cheney in the dark of the house was on tenterhooks. He opened the door to have a glimpse of you—opened it only a crack. But when he did that, you were after him in a flash. He only had an impression of a tall man quick on his feet—and ran up the stairs with you behind him—dodged into a corner —let you run past—locked you in a blind alley, so to speak—and come down the stairs to find the doctor and his car at hand. They put the body in the car and went out to Greenwood and the Tavern. There's that part of the story clear enough."

"I'd like to go on," said Muir. "But you can see for yourself that I'm under orders. This will have to be the end, John."

MAX BRAND
[FREDERICK FAUST]

THE FACE AND THE DOCTOR

Serialised in Detective Fiction Weekly, 22 and 29 May 1937

First e-book edition: Roy Glashan's Library, 2019^©
Version Date: 2019-07-17
Produced by Matthias Kaether and Roy Glashan

Click here for more books by this author

TABLE OF CONTENTS

CHAPTER I. — [UNTITLED]

CHAPTER II. — A LIST OF CLUES

CHAPTER III. — STRANGE IMPRISONMENT

CHAPTER IV. — A LONG SLEEP

CHAPTER V. — OLD FRIENDS MEET AGAIN

* * * * *

PART II

WHAT HAS HAPPENED—

CHAPTER VI. — [UNTITLED]

CHAPTER VII. — THE CHILL OF DEATH

CHAPTER VIII. — KATE DOES HER PART

CHAPTER IX. — A DOCTOR'S HUMAN SCULPTURE

THE END

MAX BRAND [FREDERICK FAUST]

THE FACE AND THE DOCTOR

Serialised in Detective Fiction Weekly, 22 and 29 May 1937 First e-book edition: Roy Glashan's Library, 2019© Version Date: 2019-07-17 Produced by Matthias Kaether and Roy Glashan Click here for more books by this author

TABLE OF CONTENTS

CHAPTER I. — [UNTITLED]

CHAPTER II. — A LIST OF CLUES

CHAPTER III. — STRANGE IMPRISONMENT

CHAPTER IV. — A LONG SLEEP

CHAPTER V. — OLD FRIENDS MEET AGAIN

* * * * *

PART II

WHAT HAS HAPPENED—

CHAPTER VI. — [UNTITLED]

CHAPTER VII. — THE CHILL OF DEATH

CHAPTER VIII. — KATE DOES HER PART

CHAPTER IX. — A DOCTOR'S HUMAN SCULPTURE

THE END

MAX BRAND
[FREDERICK FAUST]

Serialised in Detective Fiction Weekly, 22 and 29 May 1937

First e-book edition: Roy Glashan's Library, 2019^©
Version Date: 2019-07-17
Produced by Matthias Kaether and Roy Glashan

Click here for more books by this author