The Monkey God | Page 3

the fire for us to see that much."
"But it looked to me as though he were shooting toward the window,
not at himself," Rosalie protested. "I'm sure the flash was directed away
from him."
"Then how do you account for--that?" Carpenter asked almost roughly,
pointing dramatically to the figure lying face downward on the
handsome Persian rug.
Mr. Milsted lay prone as he had fallen, one arm oddly twisted beneath
him, the other extended full length beyond his head, the stock of a
German Army automatic grasped convulsively in his hand. His right
cheek rested against the nap of the rug, and the Professor, bending
down to look into his face, observed a small, round hole, about the
calibre of a lead pencil, some two inches or so above the eyebrows and
almost in the center of the forehead. The rim of the wound was a little
discolored, as though from a bruise, and the center was slightly
depressed, forming a shallow cup or; crater, while a mass of thick,
clotted matter, grayish white mixed with blood, showed within the tiny,
deadly circle. One or two drops of blood--no more--had trickled from
the wound and lay upon the carpet.
"U'm?" Forrester rose slowly from his contemplation and pinched his
narrow chin between the thumb and forefinger of his right hand. "How
do you account for it? That's the question." Thrusting his hand into his
jacket pocket, he drew out a short-stemmed briar pipe, stuffed it to
overflowing with long cut tobacco and began puffing furiously. "I don't
think we'll accomplish much huddled in here," he suggested. "Suppose
you join the others. The officers should be here any moment, now."
As the door closed behind the others, Professor Forrester wheeled and
stepped quickly into the museum. It was a small, square room entered
by a single door of heavy, iron-bound oak, and lighted by a single small,
heavily barred window. About its sides were ranged the tall
glass-fronted specimen cases, all strongly fastened with Yale locks,

while a small, compact safe and two tall, sheet-steel cabinets stood
against the wall directly beneath the window. In the center, under the
ceiling electrolier, was a table of polished mahogany on which lay a
handkerchief covering two small objects. The Professor lifted the cloth,
disclosing a small brass inkwell and stamp box.
"Milsted certainly intended giving the guilty man every chance," he
commented softly to himself. "No one coming in here could say
whether the handkerchief had covered two or three things before, and
the fact that the cloth was already resting on two other things would
partially disguise the fact that the idol had been returned. Yes, he was
pretty decent about it, poor chap."
Replacing the square linen, he stared speculatively about the room.
"Now, let's see," he murmured. "The Hanuman statue couldn't have
been much bigger than this inkwell or stamp box, smaller, perhaps.
Anyone could have carried it easily in his pocket. H'm; very
interesting."
STROLLING over to the safe, he bent forward and examined it, even
testing its lock tentatively, first taking the precaution to cover the knob
with his handkerchief, lest his fingerprints show on the polished metal.
The lock was fastened, and he next turned his attention to the upright
metal cabinets. They were nearly six feet high by eighteen inches wide
and about two feet deep. One was filled with a miscellaneous
assortment of papers, old letters and kindred junk, while the other was
empty, even its shelves having been removed, leaving a space available
for storage about as large as the interior of an upended mummy case.
Again the Professor stooped, examining the cabinet's interior carefully.
"Umpf," he inquired of the empty room, "what's this?" On the smoothly
painted floor of the case were four crescent-shaped ridges of sand and
fine gravel, paired off in two sets of two each, their concave sides
facing, and about seven inches distant from each other. Taking an
envelope from his pocket the Professor carefully scooped part of the
sand into it, then closed the cabinet door and returned to the library.
Approaching the window, which had blown open as the lights went out,

he examined its white- enameled sill closely, collected a few grains of
sand from it, and bent down to observe the wall and baseboard
immediately under it.
His search was rewarded, for, so faint as to be scarcely noticeable, but
perceptible to one who knew what he looked for, was a tiny,
dirty-yellow stain on the white baseboard, and two more, one about two
feet below and ten to eleven inches to the left of the other, against the
gray wall paper.
Mentally the Professor blessed his untidy habit of using his pockets for
correspondence files as he brushed specimens of these stains into two
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