The Case of the Pool of Blood in the Pastors Study | Page 2

looking on
himself as merely an humble member of the Department, and the
comedy of his acting under "official orders" when the Department is in
reality following out his directions.

JOE MULLER: DETECTIVE

THE CASE OF THE POOL OF BLOOD IN THE PASTOR'S STUDY
by Grace Isabel Colbron and Augusta Groner

I
The sun rose slowly over the great bulk of the Carpathian mountains
lying along the horizon, weird giant shapes in the early morning mist. It
was still very quiet in the village. A cock crowed here and there, and
swallows flew chirping close to the ground, darting swiftly about
preparing for their higher flight. Janci the shepherd, apparently the only
human being already up, stood beside the brook at the point where the
old bridge spans the streamlet, still turbulent from the mountain floods.
Janci was cutting willows to make his Margit a new basket.
Once the shepherd raised his head from his work, for he thought he
heard a loud laugh somewhere in the near distance. But all seemed
silent and he turned back to his willows. The beauty of the landscape
about him was much too familiar a thing that he should have felt or
seen its charm. The violet hue of the distant woods, the red gleaming of

the heather-strewn moor, with its patches of swamp from which the
slow mist arose, the pretty little village with its handsome old church
and attractive rectory--Janci had known it so long that he never stopped
to realise how very charming, in its gentle melancholy, it all was.
Also, Janci did not know that this little village of his home had once
been a flourishing city, and that an invasion of the Turks had razed it to
the ground leaving, as by a miracle, only the church to tell of former
glories.
The sun rose higher and higher. And now the village awoke to its daily
life. Voices of cattle and noises of poultry were heard about the houses,
and men and women began their accustomed round of tasks. Janci
found that he had gathered enough willow twigs by this time. He tied
them in a loose bundle and started on his homeward way.
His path led through wide-stretching fields and vineyards past a little
hill, some distance from the village, on which stood a large house. It
was not a pleasant house to look at, not a house one would care to live
in, even if one did not know its use, for it looked bare and repellant,
covered with its ugly yellow paint, and with all the windows secured
with heavy iron bars. The trees that surrounded it were tall and
thick-foliaged, casting an added gloom over the forbidding appearance
of the house. At the foot of the hill was a high iron fence, cutting off
what lay behind it from all the rest of the world. For this ugly yellow
house enclosed in its walls a goodly sum of hopeless human misery and
misfortune. It was an insane asylum.
For twenty years now, the asylum had stood on its hill, a source of
superstitious terror to the villagers, but at the same time a source of
added income. It meant money for them, for it afforded a constant and
ever-open market for their farm products and the output of their home
industry. But every now and then a scream or a harsh laugh would ring
out from behind those barred windows, and those in the village who
could hear, would shiver and cross themselves. Shepherd Janci had
little fear of the big house. His little hut cowered close by the high iron
gates, and he had a personal acquaintance with most of the patients,
with all of the attendants, and most of all, with the kind elderly

physician who was the head of the establishment. Janci knew them all,
and had a kind word equally for all. But otherwise he was a silent man,
living much within himself.
When the shepherd reached his little home, his wife came to meet him
with a call to breakfast. As they sat down at the table a shadow moved
past the little window. Janci looked up. "Who was that?" asked Margit,
looking up from her folded hands. She had just finished her murmured
prayer.
"Pastor's Liska," replied Janci indifferently, beginning his meal. (Liska
was the local abbreviation for Elizabeth.)'
"In such a hurry?" thought the shepherd's wife. Her curiosity would not
let her rest. "I hope His Reverence isn't ill again," she remarked after a
while. Janci did not hear her, for he was very busy picking a fly out of
his milk cup.
"Do you think Liska was going for the old man?" began Margit again
after a few minutes.
The "old man" was the name