Police!!! | Page 4

face and figure would have ornamented any light-opera stage. I never looked at her but I thought so; and her cuffs and apron merely accentuated the delusion. Such ankles are seldom seen when the curtain rises after the overture. Odd that frivolous thoughts could flit through an intellect dedicated only to science!
The man, Grue, had not stirred from his survey of the Atlantic Ocean. He had a somewhat disturbing capacity for remaining motionless--like a stealthy and predatory bird which depends on immobility for aggressive and defensive existence.
The sea-wind fluttered his cotton shirt and trousers and the tattered brim of his straw hat. And always I felt as though he were watching me out of the back of his ratty head, through the ravelled straw brim that sagged over his neck.
The pretty waitress had now chewed the end of her pencil to a satisfactory pulp, and she was writing again in her diary, very intently, so that my cautious touch on her arm seemed to startle her.
Meeting her inquiring eyes I said in a low voice:
"I am not sure why, but I don't seem to care very much for that man, Grue. Do you?"
She glanced at the water's edge, where Grue stood, immovable, his back still turned to us.
"I never liked him," she said under her breath.
"Why?" I asked cautiously.
She merely shrugged her shoulders. She did it gracefully.
I said:
"Have you any particular reason for disliking him?"
"He's dirty."
"He looks dirty, yet every day he goes into the sea and swims about. He ought to be clean enough."
She thought for a moment, then:
"He seems, somehow, to be fundamentally unclean--I don't mean that he doesn't wash himself. But there are certain sorts of animals and birds and other creatures from which one instinctively shrinks--not, perhaps, because they are materially unclean--"
"I understand," I said. After a silence I added: "Well, there's no chance now of sending him back, even if I were inclined to do so. He appears to be familiar with these latitudes. I don't suppose we could find a better man for our purpose. Do you?"
"No. He was a sponge fisher once, I believe."
"Did he tell you so?"
"No. But yesterday, when you took the boat and cruised to the south, I sat writing here and keeping up the fire. And I saw Grue climbing about among the mangroves over the water in a most uncanny way; and two snake-birds sat watching him, and they never moved.
"He didn't seem to see them; his back was toward them. And then, all at once, he leaped backward at them where they sat on a mangrove, and he got one of them by the neck--"
[Illustration: "Climbing about among the mangroves above the water."]
"What!"
The girl nodded.
"By the neck," she repeated, "and down they went into the water. And what do you suppose happened?"
"I can't imagine," said I with a grimace.
"Well, Grue went under, still clutching the squirming, flapping bird; and he stayed under."
"Stayed under the water?"
"Yes, longer than any sponge diver I ever heard of. And I was becoming frightened when the bloody bubbles and feathers began to come up--"
"What was he doing under water?"
"He must have been tearing the bird to pieces. Oh, it was quite unpleasant, I assure you, Mr. Smith. And when he came up and looked at me out of those very vitreous eyes he resembled something horridly amphibious.... And I felt rather sick and dizzy."
"He's got to stop that sort of thing!" I said angrily. "Snake-birds are harmless and I won't have him killing them in that barbarous fashion. I've warned him already to let birds alone. I don't know how he catches them or why he kills them. But he seems to have a mania for doing it--"
I was interrupted by Grue's soft and rather pleasant voice from the water's edge, announcing a sail on the horizon. He did not turn when speaking.
The next moment I made out the sail and focussed my glasses on it.
"It's Professor Kemper," I announced presently.
"I'm so glad," remarked Evelyn Grey.
I don't know why it should have suddenly occurred to me, apropos of nothing, that Billy Kemper was unusually handsome. Or why I should have turned and looked at the pretty waitress--except that she was, perhaps, worth gazing upon from a purely non-scientific point of view. In fact, to a man not entirely absorbed in scientific research and not passionately and irrevocably wedded to his profession, her violet-blue eyes and rather sweet mouth might have proved disturbing.
As I was thinking about this she looked up at me and smiled.
"It's a good thing," I thought to myself, "that I am irrevocably wedded to my profession." And I gazed fixedly across the Atlantic Ocean.
* * * * *
There was scarcely sufficient breeze of a steady character to bring Kemper to Sting-ray Key; but he got out his sweeps when