The Monkey God | Page 4

questions."
THE wind was howling like a thousand banshees with ulcerated teeth, lashing the tall, somber cedars, which lined the Milsted driveway, till they bent almost double before its force, and hurling sheets of mingled snow and sleet against the house walls and window panes. The entire north wall of the Milsted mansion was encrusted with storm-castings as the Professor, muffled to the eyes in his motoring coat and with his fur cap pulled well over his ears, forced his way through the tempest to the spot beneath the library window.
"No chance of finding anything here," he admitted reluctantly as he threw the beam of his electric torch against the ice-covered clapboards. "Any traces are as dead as the dodo. You couldn't track an elephant through this storm. I might as well get back to --ah?" He broke his soliloquy short with a sharp, interrogative exclamation as his foot came in contact with some tiny object imbedded in the half-frozen snow.
Dropping to his knees, he played his electric light over the glacial mass at his feet, dug his fingers through the sleet-crust and exhumed a tiny, glistening object about an inch and a half in length and surprisingly heavy for its size. No need to speculate on the nature of his discovery. The little golden statue, representing a squatting monkey, and exquisitely executed in gold, the face ornamented with rubies, told him at a glance what it was. Hanuman, the Monkey God, was found.
The flashlight's ray disclosed something else. About the spot where the Professor had stumbled over the jewel somebody else had been clawing furiously, for the half-obliterated marks of frantic fingers were plainly visible in the snow. Only desperate haste, biting cold and unrelieved darkness had prevented the other from finding the statuette which the Professor had come upon accidentally.
"Hum," Forrester remarked as he shut off his flashlight and rose, "this is interesting; mighty interesting. Would be worth while trying to find any tracks?"
Two minutes' attempt convinced him it would not. Sheltered from the full fury of the storm by the house, the snow where the monkey's statue had been lost retained the ridges made by the questing fingers which missed what the Professor found; but three feet distant the drifting flakes and lashing sleet obliterated Forrester's own tracks almost as soon as he made them. To seek any person who had passed that way, even a few minutes before, was as bootless an undertaking as attempting to trace a ship across the Atlantic by her wake. "No go," he admitted, after wrestling with the gale for ten yards or so; "better get in and thaw out."
"Find anything?" demanded young Carpenter as the Professor relieved himself of cap and ulster and held his hands to the hall fire, flexing and stretching his fingers to restore circulation.
"Umpf," responded the Professor, bending closer to the blaze and disdaining a glance at his questioner.
"Nut!" muttered Carpenter to the young woman beside him. "Darndest nut I ever saw, racing around in this storm looking for God-knows-what. Reckon the old fool expects to find out why Milsted shot himself?"
If the Professor heard Mr. Carpenter's uncomplimentary remarks he gave no sign of resentment. Turning from the fire as soon as the younger man had withdrawn, he hurried to the library, and with only the corpse of his late host for company, fell to comparing the bits of earth he had salvaged from the steel cabinet, the window sill and the library walls and baseboard.
"HELLO, Professor Forrester; what are you doing here?" queried a sharp-featured young man as he entered the library and put a portmanteau down on the table. "Lookin' for traces of the Pyramid-builders?"
Forrester regarded the newcomer sharply through the lenses of his neat, rimless pince-nez. "I don't believe I--" he began, but the other interrupted with a laugh.
"Of course, you don't," he agreed. "I didn't expect you would. I'm Nesbit--Lambert Nesbit, B. S., in '20, and M. D., in '24. Never had any of your classes, but used to see you on the campus and on the platform at commencements."
"Oh!" the Professor responded. "And you're--"
"Yep, I'm the coroner. Practice wasn't goin' any too good when I got out, for I just missed the flu epidemic and folks wouldn't get sick to accommodate me, so I busted into politics and got myself elected to this job. They tell me outside you've been keepin' the nest warm for me."
"I've made a few--er--observations," Forrester admitted. "Have you questioned anybody?"
"I'll say I have," the coroner retorted with a twinkle in his eye. "Got two state troopers to ride herd on 'em, and put 'em through their paces in great shape. Gosh, they're one scared crowd! Everybody agrees Milsted shot himself, but if I asked any one of 'em, 'Why did you kill him?' I'll bet a dollar