“Tip could have substituted an exposed film for the unused ones, so that we developed the animals. He could have taken the film to the zoo and got the kangaroo, maybe with an ape. We can check,” he insisted. “He could have transferred the first culture meant for the rats to the place behind Doctor Ryder’s racks.”
“For that matter, Grover could of did any of them. He could have as much cupola as me.”
“Cupola?” broke in Roger.
“He means ‘cupidity’,” remarked Grover, “thinking about the Eye.”
“Buthesays he found it. Admits it. And Mr. Clark vows he had blundered, and threw away the good gem,” persisted Roger, sure of his incriminating clues. “Who says the gem was left in India? Who had the sense to pull fuses, to stop our devices? Who else but somebody trained by you, Grover——”
“Well,youwas trained, too,” cried Potts, angry.
“The gas is expelled by now,” Grover had not lost his cold, serious expression. “There is desperate need for action, more than for recrimination. Let’s go in.”
They sat in the office. Roger recounted the clever warning with his watch charm on its big chain, given by Doctor Ryder, and all the mystifying, or incriminating conversations and occurrences, including a fuller account of his experience in the dark-room.
“I suppose the poor mice are gassed,” he muttered, finally.
But Grover was not listening.
“Tip,” he stood up, “help me push this desk aside.”
Potts did as bidden.
“No shot was fired in here,” Grover snapped. “When Astrovox was later assaulted. What happened, Roger? Don’t you know? Andyouexploded a torpedo to call attention to a certain place and away from some other?”
Roger was all at sea for a moment.
“Astrovox was leaving. The other fellow didn’t know that.” Grover had caught some clue or hint, somewhere. He was as active, as alive, as if he had never been a cold, precise, restrained scientist.
“Some one wanted us all to run here. As he produced the summons, Astrovox ran in. The man realized that he was recognized. Poor Astrovox! Well, he will recover. And—see there!”
He pointed to a brown, scorched spot under the far edge of the desk as it had been before.
“A foot, on an explosive, such as your torpedo, Roger. Evidence out of sight. Evidently had no time, later, to remove the burn, but did remove the exploded detonating cap. Rubbed his shoe over it. See the scorch? Test and you will get something like a gunpowder reaction. Maybe you can scrape up dust that would test out with the nitric acid to show the stains of explosive gases.”
Of a sudden he straightened up.
“The acid test!”
Roger, and Potts, gaping, had no way of following the swift deductions which the Mystery Wizard, on the trail at last, made.
“Roger—no, Potts, you do it—run out and bring a taxi. Roger, you go up and watch in the stock-room, but keep out of range of any missile sent through the skylight.”
He began writing as Tip rushed out and Roger obeyed. On his way, as Potts came racing back, Roger heard, “Go to that address. Bring every shoe you can dig up. And get what’s written below, on your way back.”
He locked the door after the man departed. Roger heard the alarms being re-set. Then his older cousin joined him.
“What told you?” Roger knew that the Mystery Wizard was, at last, living up to his name.
“Claws-on-glass. Think. That was one big error. You have told me the truth.”
Roger was baffled. He saw nothing that he had said which linked up with the queer, sizzly, scrapey, frying and clicking sound.
Grover, with the upper floor extension plugged in, made call after call. “Grover Brown, calling Chief of Police—hello—that you? Chief, we’re going to have a round-up at the lab.” The usual calm was nil-minus. “Will you?—Glad if you come with the men—I will ask you not to let the men be seen—Wait at corners, across the street—Watch the skylight of our roof for a blue signal—Yes, then come in a hurry—Good-bye.”
To Roger’s stupefaction he repeated almost the same instructions to the men from Tibet, adding, “And—I promise to return to you the genuine Eye of Om—Good-bye.”
“But what told you, Grover?”
Grover glanced at his wrist-watch.
“The one clue that no one else could furnish.”
He stood erect, alert, his eyes glinting.
“We’ve got work to do. Let’s get going!”
“Blue glow,” Roger gasped. “Areyougoing to have fireworks too?”
“No. You will adjust the big sun-lamp so it sends rays upward. Put the blue filter from the star-reader’s plant beds on it. It is only fair that part of his equipment should help catch and round up the one who struck him.”
Roger, with nothing but thoughts to occupy him, went to prepare the signal. He could hear Grover making calls. To a police Bureau. To his staff men. To Falcon’s patrol agency.
To Roger it appeared to be as dense a mystery as ever; but to his brilliant cousin something had torn aside the fog.
He tried to fathom that evasive clue. He went over his ideas. Claws on glass? No! Then what, besides? Something he should recognize in the light of what he knew. Something that the miscreant had imagined him bright enough to have guessed, perhaps.
It escaped him, eluded his every attempt to read that riddle.
Only a short time was he allowed to concentrate.
There were hookups to be made. A chair in the store-room was to be wired down two legs, positive and negative wiring, a plate of metal as thin as possible was to be found and put on the seat, with small clamps to hold it in place under a thin covering cloth. It was to be left where it stood, but two wires must be taken from a wall outlet, led to small, flat disks like microphone diaphragms, tacked onto the floor at a place Grover designated.
With that done and the wires fixed in a plug-in to fit the outlet, Roger left the circuit disconnected as ordered, and busied himself leading wires from the sun-lamp, with its blue cover-glass, to the stock-room shelves where they must be so set that a can of film, shifted and dropped over them by hand, would complete the circuit, act as a switch to light up the sun-lamp.
Grover came up, inspected, and pronounced the work well done.
“Now, get a nitric acid test-bath ready, in a big container—and have some wax melted and ready for the test for exploded gases.”
“Whose hands did we overlook?”
“No hands. Feet.” Grover answered, alertly, and with a smile—mystery-solving seemed to transform him from a staid, self-contained scientist into an eager, boyish experimenter.
“Shoes?”
“Exactly.”
“His?”
“Right.”
“Then—whose?”
“If you are too dull to have read your own sound clues, Ear Detective, far be it from me to dull your wits by telling. Think!”
Presently Millman, Zendt, Ellison, Hope and several other staff men, in pairs or alone, arrived. They were eager, excited as they questioned. Grover, picking Roger’s list of clues out of his file, presented it and suggested that what he had learned they could learn, while Roger recounted his own experiences up to date.
That was done; and they pored over his list. Grover, getting a lot of amusement out of their guesses, chuckled to himself; but his younger cousin felt that he was watching them to see when the guilty one would crack and admit that he was cornered.
Who, besides, could be guilty? Doctor Ryder was in hospital; so was Astrovox. So, in jail, Toby Smith was out of the night’s excitement.
To his amazement, a police car, arriving, brought an officer who brought in the last captive he had been thinking about—Toby.
The men seemed to have found no light in Roger’s list.
Roger, who had heard their sane, or wild surmises, suddenly sat up.
Some brain cell, stimulated by the continual stress of cogitation, spoke its concealed message.
“I know—Grover—how dumb I’ve been.”
He scribbled a name on a slip from the office desk.
Grover nodded.
“You should have seen—heard the right answer long ago.”
“I left it for the Mystery Wizard, so he could keep up his reputation,” grinned Roger.
The Tibetans walked past, identifying their presence, but went on down the street. Grover, watchful, looking out of the window, made a signal that he had noticed them, and then suggested that they all go up to the stock room.
There, in the silence, with no light except that in the monitor-panel which Roger had set up to show which entrance was used when they could expect callers, they sat around, puzzling and trying to make Grover speak, although any one of them could have been suspicious of any other, the way they talked. A light announced the arrival of a visitor, but Grover did not move. Potts, he knew, was coming; and his inference was the right one.
Potts, with a bagful of shoes, came in and dropped his find beside Grover’s chair.
“Take this chair, old fellow,” Grover was very grave and had an air of trying to make up to his handy man for Roger’s mistrust; but Roger knew that the chair moved over so casually had been most carefully set on two small disks, not charged yet—but how easily so made active agents for trapping the sitter!
“Now we must be patient,” Grover stated, arranging the nitric-acid bath, paraffin heater and other apparatus on a table. “I shall test some shoes, presently, and I expect them to verify my judgment. In the dark, though, I shall give the miscreant one chance to secure his Eye of Om before I denounce him.”
Someone, in the dark, shifted his feet, Roger imagined, uneasily.
“You don’t mean to say you left it there!” It was Toby who made the gasping admission in his sudden excitement.
Heknew it was there!
“Still where, for all your seeming denseness, you worked out its place,” agreed Grover. “If you care to, you might apologize to Roger for telling the millionaire collector thathehad it. Of course it was to avert all suspicion from yourself.”
“Aw—”
He did not have time to complete his denial or blustering cry.
A light in the tell-tale went out. The main door was opening.
“Nervy,” commented Grover.
A strange, heavy thudding, or thumping, accompanied by something as much like the drag of a heavy rope as any other sound, told Roger that some weird development was coming. Could it be—really, a kangaroo?
And why, then, was there a strange chattering and jumping sound?
What would they see?
Those sounds grew louder. The stairway shook. Low growls or words of command sounded.
Some animal, approaching. Or animals! No man—Roger was sure.
Whatever was in the laboratory, it was coming straight up to the second floor. Roger, crouched beside the floor outlet to await a signal to plug in and electrify that chair, wondered why Grover did not move the film can, make contact and light the signal lamp to summon the police and the Tibetans.
Instead, Grover spoke, low and meaningly.
“The first man who gets up is the guilty one!”
Zendt, who had started to rise, sank back abruptly. Ellison and Millman stayed as they were, half bent forward.
“Guilty nothing!” Toby spoke in a rasping voice. “Think I’ll sit here and let something attack me?”
“You heard me,” snapped Grover.
Roger knew that it would be a question of seconds only; and they would then see the approaching creature.
There in the dark it was a tense moment, and a nerve racking one.
Louder, thudding on the floor, with a strange dragging sound at the end of each pause, came the approach.
“Roger—that bag.”
“The shoes, Grover?” in dismay. What was the matter with Grover?
“Quickly. That bag.”
Roger lifted it, and Grover, snatching it, opened the paper sack, dragged out a bulky object, just discernible in the dim light they had from the tell-tale panel.
Roger gasped.
“Boxing gloves!”
“Lights!” snapped Grover; and as Potts, lifting an arm, snapped on the wall switch just above the place his chair occupied, Roger saw his cousin pulling on the padded mitten-like objects.
Whether the rest knew or not, that told Roger what to expect, if not the whole situation. A kangaroo. A boxing kangaroo. The one he had photographed when he had questioned its attendant who had said no pet or trained animal had left the stable.
In the next room something stopped, and there came, not loudly, a low command.
There was an interval of suspense. What, Roger wondered, was the condition in that partitioned place adjoining their waiting room?
After a momentary wait, and more seemingly guttural commands, the thumping was resumed; and the animal, in short hops, came to the entrance door.
There it paused as if dazzled or surprised at the light or by the crowd.
Behind it, in the other, darker room, shown by their own light, Roger saw a hairy, man-like creature, either chimpanzee or some other large mammal it seemed to be. The kangaroo’s keeper, he assumed.
Just as in the under-exposed film, where the ghostly ape and its Australian companion had seemed to dance, the kangaroo hopped in, while the ape, grimacing and beating its chest, danced in behind it.
Straight at Grover leaped the kangaroo. It wore boxing gloves!
Roger, crouched, tense and frightened, saw his cousin, with a typical boxer’s stance, prepare to carry the coming battle to his astonishingly expert antagonist.
In that room, while the company shrank back, against walls, pushing their chairs out in front of them, leaving a clear space, the animal and the man closed in as fast and as bizarre a contest as Roger had ever viewed. Not clumsily, but with lightning-quick jabs of its short forearms the beast lunged, taking blows without a sound.
Grover, clever through gym training, fast on his feet, evaded the fairly clumsy leaps and lunges. At every chance he got in a blow.
If, as Roger inferred, the ape was indeed the trainer, the bulky creature bore out the idea. Grover had to watch the skipping, leaping hairy thing that tried to get around and catch him; and also, as far as Roger could discern his cousin’s tactics, Grover seemed to be so handling his leaps and side-wise ducking that the ape would be mostly near to Potts who sat, tense, but still, in that chair; and Roger, crouched by the wall outlet, wondered if he, the handy man, meant to take part and if Grover had foreseen it.
“No you don’t!” Grover seemed to be talking to the kangaroo, but of course it was the ape he really meant to have hear, Roger knew.
“You keep far from the cabinet. What if it is ... och—oh! Missed me, old fellow ... even if it is unlocked.”
As though telling a story as he dodged and ducked, Grover always talked as he maneuvered, his breath well conserved by his ease of action.
“So therewasa scientific student who turned to jewel theft! ... he did want to get rich quickly ... he was clever ... made a specialty of locating ... prized gems.... Through a jeweler named Clark, he ... he got into contact with those ... who would pay well ... got the gems ... used the jewelry place as a clearing house....”
In that fashion he began outlining a solution.
“Heard of the Eye of Om, didn’t he?... Went to Tibet, taking Toby ... didn’t dare make a stab for it, though....”
Grover jumped back so that the monkey missed grabbing him.
“Got through Clark a man ... who would pay fabulous price for that Eye. And ... worked out plan to have it so cleverly stolenfor himthat he would never be suspected by Tibetans or other gem thieves ... oh, you would, eh?...” as the ape made a lunge and Roger, avoiding it, had to drop to his haunches to avoid the boxing kangaroo’s leap and stroke, “Would, eh?... try to get to that cabinet.... Like to paw the Eye of the Buddha, eh, would you?” as the ape started to take a part by coming up to grasp him from behind. Roger was about to shout, but he saw that Grover, like an eel, slipped aside. He did not strike at the ape.
“The gem robber knew he would be suspected if he ... took the Eye ... returned to America ... made an elaborate plan ... would use science ... chose our lab....”
Grover, his cousin saw, as did the rest, kept maneuvering so as to keep the lunging paws approaching as he backed around. For some unseen purpose he seemed to be manipulating his actions so that he could get the ape and the kangaroo into some desired relationship or position.
Roger, still at his place, not daring to desert his post, saw the ape back toward Potts.
Instantly, as though by some previous order, Potts snapped his body out of the chair, and with his arms, catching the thing that walked upright like a man around its torso, he dragged its shaggy body backward off the huge feet and flung it into the chair.
“Plug in!”
Still dancing backward from the leaping kangaroo, Grover shouted. Roger, checking the tremble and shake of his excited hands, swiftly drove home the prepared plug and at the same instant from the thus electrified chair rose a sheer animal howl of pain and fright and fury.
Still alert, Grover had a moment to catch his breath.
As if startled, the kangaroo paused. On haunches, its forepaws were hanging down over its pouch—it was a female with the pouch to carry its young!—while from the chair came the most ferocious grunts and screeches. The trainer, thought Roger, was an actor in spite of his surprise. He maintained the animal voice well.
As if prepared for the situation, Potts dragged from a pocket some light, strong electric wire, and with gloves of rubber which Roger had seen him getting ready, he managed to get the wire around the beast, or rather, as Roger put it to himself, the man in the animal hide.
“You can cut the plug out, now, Roger.”
Grover, with a wary eye on the still quiet kangaroo, which had not moved, spoke the command. Roger obeyed.
Released from the shocking cycles of current, the thing in the chair growled and struggled against the bonds which Potts had cleverly wound to prevent use of arms or legs. So powerful, though, was the beast, that it once upset the chair and had to be righted, growling and using guttural imprecations or shouts of hatred.
“To go on with my story,” Grover calmly confronted the quiet kangaroo, “the man chose our laboratory as the base of his plans. He came here. To start his operations, he watched his chance one night, and hid in our large refrigerating unit, that is in the spare-stores room, since we used it to test chilling processes for food shipments.
“Being unsuspected, he had been able to make certain preparations. First, he put the culture intended to inoculate some white rats, into our chemical section, half-hidden, but purposely left where it could throw suspicion on a certain person. Then, when the rats had been inoculated, but with a harmless drug that made them sleep, he was ready for his next step.”
To Roger’s surprise, everyone had been so amazed and so startled by this calm recital aimed, apparently, at a dumb brute that sat back with drooping, glove-shrouded forepaws and listened!—or was too baffled by the capture of the trainer to continue the battle—the staff had settled in the chairs again.
“This mysterious, clever criminal,” Grover coolly proceeded to tell the animal his theories and deductions. “This former student of various biological, chemical and related subjects, bribed an animal trainer who had a vaudeville animal act, to let the animal used in the act come here. He wanted it to be caught if any plan failed, so he could disappear but the animal could not tell on him.”
He bent forward, and quietly removed the laced ham-like gloves from the beast’s relaxed paws, and it seemed not to resent the act, but let the free forearms hang loosely across its stomach, and pouch.
“Borrowing the white rats from the act, this miscreant prevented them from being inoculated by exchanging labels on the culture, later recovering the labels as the bottles emptied were thrown to the fire. The labels, on the real culture again, were put where they would seem to clear someone by incriminating him through circumstantial position in the racks. Really, though, they had a different purpose.”
He startled all but Roger.
“The appearance was that the man whose rack they occupied was being persecuted. In reality, he did it himself, to make me suspect every other staff man.”
“Not Doctor Ryder!” Millman gasped.
“You have named the culprit.”
“But he’s poisoned, in the hospital——”
Grover went right on, ignoring Ellison’s shout.
“He confused us by ‘stealing’ the rats, and in other ways, because he wanted us to think of every possibility but the real one.”
“And that was?——” prompted Hope.
“He wanted us to help him take a false imitation of the Eye of Om to a Tibetan temple, replace it for the true one, which he could then sell for a great sum. In other words, what we thought we were doing, helping restore the true jewel, was exactly the reverse!
“We innocently helped remove the True Eye of Om!”
While the beast shackled in the chair kept up its hoarse growls and struggles, Grover outlined, for the benefit—it seemed—of a kangaroo—or the one in the chair—his deductions.
“Was that clever? You know it was. To plan to steal a sacred gem under the pretext of replacing a fake one with the true Eye.”
Roger had not guessed that, nor, by the exclamations, had the rest of the group—or most of them.
“The mystery of the white rats, supposed to be deadly menaces because we thought they were inoculated with germs of a spinal malady, got our attention turned to every possible idea but the real one.
“To add to our consternation, give a ghostly touch with the animal ‘spooks’ on a film, this clever thief made a record of what he recalled about the Tibetan Buddha’s ‘Voice of Doom.’ Like most criminals, he overshot his mark, adding the grind of rocks, when in truth there was no such grind. The sound was caused by wind, always howling across the Himalayas, coming through a wind-tunnel cut in rock from the base of a cliff to the lamasery temple on its crest.
“He made a record, with moans, cries and groans, and added the effect of the rock closing, from his imagination of what would be right.”
That record he had managed to slip onto their own recorder-reproducer machine, with a hookup which Roger knew all about, Grover went on. The weird manifestation had startled them, while watching for the man, one night. With a Balsa-wood speaker hidden flat on a dusty shelf, he had caused a spooky voice to draw them up where the prepared film, in a can carefully re-sealed, was handy to be taken and, later, developed, to complicate mysteries further with the spooky animals, he added.
“That was all for the reason that he had to bring in Tibet, logically,” went on Grover, “he had to prepare us for the fact that he was in danger from the Tibetan vengeance. Of course, by this time, the staff knows, as we do, who I refer to.”
Of course, Roger decided. The others nodded. Who, but the guilty man he accused, could be meant? He had said the man was menaced.
“Doctor Ryder was the only one who claimed he was threatened,” said Millman, “and I suspected Roger of playing jokes!”
“Well, I suspected you when you came to my room,” retorted the youthful listener.
“And I did not know whom to suspect,” Grover took up his story. “Clues pointed this way and that. Appearances are easily falsified and I tried to dig past them to truth—only, I lacked the right hint, and never dreamed that a gem was to be stolen under the pretext of restoring it! That was easily planned, for once the gem had been seen, perhaps photographed with a watch-camera or some small photographic device, a man like Clark, working with him for a share of the profit from various gem sales, could reproduce in imitation the green jewel.”
Toby, he inferred—and the youth eagerly attested the truth of the inference—had been paid well, being a former helper at the Clark store on Fifth Avenue, but out of work—had been paid to sell the supposedly “real” Eye, its facsimile, for an absurd amount, as he had accepted a movie camera.
“I fell into the lure,” Grover hurried along, “because, for a time, the Tibetan Voice of Doom manifestation, and the robbery of our safe, confused me. It was easy to do that last by de-fusing our cellar switch-boxes, a point I had never thought of. Scientists, like criminals—or average people—trip up often enough on some minor point in a plan.”
Because the radio would allow him to be in touch, and for the sake of the travel, adventure and scientific aid Roger would get and give, his older cousin confessed that he had been glad to see Roger help the supposed replacement of a sacred relic.
“Clark was brought in cleverly by use of a record. It was the same one that had been used for the Voice here, and when the needle was dropped onto the unused part, it made a thump that was one of the sounds of a series of clues which puzzled Roger and me, because theappearancewas that it was all one recording.
“The trip to Tibet went off as scheduled. Roger, really a sort of ‘bait’ because of his youth, was, as hoped, taken up to the lamasery as a sort of curiosity—a young American well up in scientific methods and operations. Innocently he played the thief’s plans, and still the very apparatus that he insisted on taking there made the lamas suspicious, especially one of their wiser men who had been out of their country, who understood English, and who had read Roger’s memoranda of radio talks to and from lamasery and camp.
“With Tibetan vindictiveness, they let him hear the Voice of Doom, probably operated by a concealed priest in the hollow image, and then consigned him, and Potts, to the tunnel. By sheer wit and scientific knowledge Roger found that he was in a sort of whistling tube, operated when the rock door was opened, by wind. He worked out, with Tip’s wise help, the secret, and they escaped.
“Clark, when Roger got to camp, took the supposed Eye and with Roger watching and unsuspicious, actually replaced the true Eye with the false one he and Ryder had brought along. He had another, and to make Roger think he was genuinely through with the stone, so as to be clear if any Tibetan revenge developed, he threw away one more imitation. Potts, worried about the levers having been wedged which he considered an error of judgment, went back to repair it.”
So interested were the men in following the developing solution that they had forgotten how bizarre was this relation of a mystery and its unveiling—to a beast.
The animal seemed fascinated, or cowed, or subdued in some way. Perhaps, thought Roger, the plight of the hidden keeper made it tame.
Grover drew his theories into shape.
“Naturally, with the real gem, Clark and Ryder made all speed to radio the prepared airplane. It met them. In Bombay, as he had no desire to be further involved, Potts discarded the false gem he had picked up.”
Then, proceeding on pure deduction, Grover felt that the Tibetans had discovered their real loss, had discerned that Roger and Tip had solved the intricate tunnel secret and had escaped. To write, with Roger’s discarded note book as a guide, in a semblance of his writing, was easy. The letter had come by fast mail steamers and had further confused him.
“Then the thief, with the gem in his fellow-worker’s possession, encountered difficulties,” went on Grover; “the man who had been intending to buy the jewel probably became frightened, afraid of the danger that the stone might bring around him. So many priceless jewels carry curses, or bring disaster, that he must have gotten ‘cold feet’ and a new buyer had to be sought. The gem, also, had to be secured, in case the Tibetans actually put into action their vengeful methods.
“Toby was working here. Ryder thought it a clever plan to have this former aide help him, and so he concealed the gem and had it innocently delivered here, but Toby, not as dumb as he was considered, suspected the truth, discovered the hidden gem, and on his own hook offered to sell it to a buyer he had known at Clark’s store.
“That made it necessary for Ryder to recover the gem quickly from the concealment no longer unsuspected here. He tried to get people away from upstairs, by detonating with his foot a torpedo under our office desk; but Astrovox, our scientific star-student, had been about to go home, frightened by some foolish combination of star-positions and a manifestation planned to scare him away. He walked in before Ryder could hide, recognized him—and the desperate man struck him.
“Soon thereafter he realized that in a list of some fifteen sounds made by Roger there lay the actual clue that incriminated him and no one else!”
“What was it?” asked Ellison anxiously or eagerly, Roger told himself.
“What Roger thought was claws-on-glass. His very first sound-clue. With that on a list, and in the clever head of the stock-room clerk, Ryder had two things to do quickly. He must get the gem, and he must either find a way to throw suspicion elsewhere or get Roger out of the way.”
Roger realized why many attempts had been made, like the one in the dark-room.
“I warned Roger. Ryder, when Toby—who knew where the gem was—telephoned him that he had left explosives out in the open—Ryder tried to use that as a way to lure Roger here to open up, because we had so arranged things that actually no one could even enter and not be caught—he was deadly afraid of being electrocuted too soon.
“But Roger is still safe, the gem is available, and so—as you well know, there is no more mystery, except this:
“How do you think you are going to get the Eye of Om—now?”
Roger stared at his cousin. Saying that. To a beast!
With his mocking smile Grover walked over to their safety cabinets, unlocked and threw one wide open.
Roger, with Potts, sidled over near the door, to block the beast if it had been taught to snatch anything in its paws and hop away.
“No need,” Grover laughed, “with its partner, the ape, bound. There is no way to get out of that hide.” He gestured toward the cabinet. “There it is, just as you hid it, the True Eye, in a can supposed to contain medicating compounds to use on the rats. Clever, just as was entry into Roger’s room, with the ‘Fire’ record, by that often-used idea of the pulled fuse. I have wondered why you did nothing to him. Or did Millman come along too soon and scare you off?”
He paused, and they all stared. Could Grover have miscalculated, Roger wondered, in implying that the kangaroo was the impersonator? He had assumed it was the ape.
The beast, on its haunches and flatly extended tail, reached two clawed paws upward, caught one of the round cans from the front row, and dropping it in the loose pouch, in the skin, turned and started hopping toward the door, its claws upraised.
Grover, as it moved toward the chair occupied by the ape, deftly caught its tail and swung an end around a chair leg.
“Shall I turn on the current?” he chuckled.
The animal became quiet, stopped.
Once only he tried to escape and when Potts made a move to obstruct the way Grover calmly waved him back.
“But he’s got the can, Grover!” Roger also stepped forward.
Grover actually grinned at them.
“Let him go,” Grover waved back Potts and Roger as the thing began to hop toward them and they made preparations to try to stop it.
“The Doctor,” went on Grover as the animal paused an instant, “to get Toby where his word would not be trusted, to remove him from the laboratory before he could take away the gem he knew about, planned his own poisoning this morning. He sent Toby for a drink, and by swallowing some quick-acting sedative, perhaps strong codein, or another of the poppy derivatives, he seemed to be poisoned. To make it appear like strychnine or some other—wait! I’ll venture to assert that in the other room Roger will find the shell of some pit such as you crack in a peach and extract a tiny kernel. Those inner kernels of a peach pit, chewed up, would leave on his breath just the same odor as a very dangerous poison which I shan’t name.”
Later that was verified. Roger found the cracked peach pit.
“It was easy to ‘recover’ and come here tonight,” Grover ended.
He stood, looking with a mocking smile at the crouched beast and the bound animal. The latter, quiet for a moment, growled deeply.
“The ape, trained at a certain point, to unfasten the kangaroo-skin so that Doctor Ryder can wriggle out of it, can’t help,” he remarked. “Oh, yes,” to Millman’s question, “the ape is genuine, a well trained animal. The kangaroo—shall we help him?”
He walked over, and with a quick motion pointing out the laced arrangement of eyelets under an armpit—or forepaw—he dragged the lacing apart.
Revealed, it was seen by all that Doctor Ryder actually was in the skin, crouched down as the size of the animal compelled him to be so that he could barely get his forearms into the front paws.
The head, too small to hold his own cranium, was fixed almost in one position by supports, and eye-holes were cut lower in the skin, well concealed by the way the skin of the chest was sewed and the animal hair arranged.
“He rented it from the animal trainer, who sometimes put it on, and played the part of his own animal in the act if the kangaroo became too fractious or when it was ill in our varied climate as they travelled from theatre to theatre.”
Cramped, scowling, Doctor Ryder emerged.
“Very cleverly worked out,” he growled. “Yes, it is all true. I did plan to have your laboratory staff help me steal the Eye, just the way you have it worked out. And if it had not been for Roger, almost at the beginning thinking of developing a sound-film I had neglected to put out of commission, you might not have found out.”
“Probably we never would,” Grover agreed, and as bluecoats came tramping up the stairs, with a man who went at once to his animal, and with soothing words quieted it, released and removed it, the Tibetan lama and his cohorts came in.
“But whatwasthe sound-clue?” asked Millman, “the fire-cry on a record supposed to be unused? I got that, you know. But it meant only a prank of Roger’s to me.”
“Neither that, which revealed how the Balsa-wood was connected up, nor the Voice of Doom, made by Ryder, here, but not traceable to him alone; nor the click as he switched on the motor; nor the clicks as his trained thief’s fingers manipulated our safe; nor the rest.”
“Well, whatdidthe sound that Roger described as claws on glass really signify that linked up Ryder and not any of us?” asked Zendt.
The pseudo-physician, scowling, was twirling his watch-charm with nervous fingers as he watched the Tibetans who scowled at him.
“He is showing you,” Grover remarked.
“Don’t you see?” Roger turned to Millman. “I got the right idea only just tonight.”
“The watch-chain? But——”
“You, Mr. Millman, and Mr. Ellison, were on the ground floor when the man came down because he had seen the rich man arrive in his car, and knew Toby had played false to him,” Grover stated.
“Think,” Roger hinted, “he twitched and twirled that charm so it flicked light from the gold, the way a heliograph does.”
“That, when Roger told me, connected him with the first sound-clue of the scratching, hissing, clicking sound at first claimed to be a snake, then supposed to be his kangaroo.”
“Don’t you see,” interposed Tip, who was improving, by leaving out the big words, “he had to bend over to get the rats out of the trap on top of the cage. He brought the ape to unlace his disguise. And his watch chain and charm scraped and rattled and slid on the cage, and our sound-camera film got the sound from the microphone inside the cage.”
“Of course—and no one else wears a chain and charm,” agreed Zendt, “we all have wrist-watches.”
“Well, what’s the use of holding me for all this?” growled the man by the skin. He picked it up.
“I’ll just return this—go on and arrest me if you have any charge you can support with evidence that a clever lawyer can’t break down,” snarled the man.
“A sound record, through your own Balsa-wood device, and down to our recorder, will do the trick,” Grover smiled. “Made by you, just now, when you admitted all my previously recorded accusations.”
“All right. I’m licked. Good night, all.”
He turned as if to give himself up to a policeman.
“He’s got the Eye, in with that compound!” cried Roger, as Toby pointed at the pouch in the Kangaroo skin.
“Oh, no he hasn’t,” Grover actually chuckled in triumph, “in the same way that he substituted the prepared can of film for a blank strip when he handed Roger the can to load the magazine—so his animal ghosts would seem to appear on an unexposed film when developed, I substituted a can of oxygen, hydrogen, nitrogen and a trace of ozone, perhaps, and a few other gases——”
“Air?” gasped Ryder, shaking the can taken from the skin.
“A free sample of air that is no longer contaminated by the gas Roger so cleverly used to drive you out—a ruse that enabled me to get here before you could return in disguise.”
The man was defeated.
He was allowed to remain only long enough to make Grover’s triumph complete by sending Roger to the cabinet to take down the can just behind the place from which he had removed his false one.
Therefrom, the Tibetans were glad to receive, as they forgot all animosity toward Roger, the true Eye of Om.
For his attempts on Roger’s safety and his act toward Astrovox, Ryder stayed behind bars a long time.
The Ear Detective, more favored than ever because he had been the means of listing sound-clues, one of which had completely linked Ryder into his crime, was busy.
Astrovox, well recovered from his blow on the temple, was going to “shoot” the stars as they crossed over the lens of his telescope and Roger was getting a sound-film into a camera.