The Monkey God | Page 6

You can make
out the heel- and toe- prints of his shoes, and here you can see where
the sand and gravel has been spread out in a film over the metal where
the snow melted from his boots. It's a glacial silt-deposit in miniature.
That dates his visit. It didn't start snowing till nearly six o'clock this
afternoon, and the ground was frozen hard as bed-rock up to an hour or
so before the storm began. The temperature rose several
degrees--enough to thaw the very top of the ground--before the snow
commenced, and for the first half-hour or so the flakes were wet. This
sleet has been coming down only the last hour, maybe a little less. So I
say somebody walked through the snow just after it began, got a scum
of sand on his shoes and hid in this case without stopping to wipe his
boots. He could stand here and see everything going on in the room
through the slits in the cabinet door."
Dr. Nesbit smiled ironically as he shook his head. "You may be able to
take a piece of skull and build a man from it, or reconstruct a dinosaur

from a splint of thigh-bone, Professor Forrester," he conceded, "but I'm
not ready to admit you've reconstructed a case of burglary and murder
here."
"Then look at this," the Professor urged, leading the way back to the
library and indicating the wall beneath the window. "This is the
window that everybody agrees opened mysteriously just as the lights
went out. Now, here on the baseboard, if you'll look closely, you'll find
exactly such sand stains as are on the cabinet floor. And here--" he
indicated the faint smudges on the wall-- "are the foot marks where
somebody took a running start, braced his feet first against the board,
then the wall, and with his hands holding the window sill, swarmed up
and yanked the casement open. And here--" he pointed triumphantly to
the sill-- "are other marks, not much more than dabs of sand, I'll grant
you, but still marks, where the fellow rested his feet on the sill before
he started to leap to the ground outside."
"But you're assuming too much," Nesbit objected. "These marks might
easily have been made some other way. I know my house is forever
getting all sorts of spots and splotches on it, no matter how hard my
wife scrubs and dusts."
Forrester snorted in disgust. "Can't you use your eyes at all?" he
demanded. "Look at this, and this, and this--" he thrust the envelopes in
which his specimens were stored under the coroner's nose--"the sand in
each of those envelopes is identical. If the cabinet was stained with
yellow sand, and the wall with red and the window sill with black or
gray smut, I'd agree with you; but all the stains are made by the same
material. I tell you, whoever hid in that cabinet ran from the museum to
the library and made his escape through the window when the lights
went out! See here, let's prove it. Call everybody who was present
when Milsted died and ask them, separately, if they can remember
whether or not the library door opened about the same time the
confusion preceding the shooting began."
DR. NESBIT stepped to the door and summoned the six witnesses to
the tragedy, admitting them one at a time and asking each the question
suggested by the Professor. Rosalie and three others recalled there had

been a faint squeak "as though a door was being opened carefully"
before Milsted had appeared to go berserker. One of the others thought
the museum door had opened a little--"blown by a draft," she
assumed--while the sixth witness remembered nothing of the sort.
"That's the best proof in the world that the door did open," the
Professor insisted. "If every one of them had agreed it did, we might
have assumed your question suggested their answers-- human memory
is a tricky thing, at best--and that they thought they recalled something
which actually didn't happen; but diverse testimony in such a case is its
own best proof."
"'Saul, Saul, almost thou persuadest me,'" Coroner Nesbit protested
with a laugh. "Seriously, though, Professor, you've got me thinking. I
still believe this is a suicide, but everything you've suggested could
have happened just as you say-- maybe."
"'Maybe' be hanged!" the Professor blazed! "It did, I tell you!"
"But what about Herman, or whatever its name was, that led to the
tragedy?" Nesbit asked, half of himself, half of the professor. "As I
understand it, Milsted claimed someone had stolen some sort of
heathen idol from his museum and was throwing a
catch-the-low-down-cuss party when he was--when he shot himself."
"I was coming to that," Forrester answered. "When Mr.