The Red Hand | Page 7

at her with disfavour, shook his head in reply to her
thick-voiced demand for a drink. The woman glared at him,
transformed in a moment to a fury, with bloodshot eyes, and poured
forth a torrent of execration, a stream of blasphemies and early English
phraseology.
"Get out of this," said the man; "shut up and be off, or I'll send for the
police."
"Police, you----" bawled the woman "I'll ----well, give you something

to fetch the police for!" and with a rapid dive into her bag she pulled
out some object which she hurled furiously at the barman's head.
The man ducked down, and the missile flew over his head and smashed
a bottle to fragments, while the woman with a peal of horrible laughter
rushed to the door, and they could hear her steps pattering fast over the
wet stones.
The barman looked ruefully about him.
"Not much good going after her," he said, "and I'm afraid what she's
left won't pay for that bottle of whisky." He fumbled amongst the
fragments of broken glass, and drew out something dark, a kind of
square stone it seemed, which he held up.
"Valuable cur'osity," he said, "any gent like to bid?"
The habitues had scarcely turned from their pots and glasses during
these exciting incidents; they gazed a moment, fishily, when the bottle
smashed, and that was all, and the mumble of the confidential was
resumed and the jangle of the quarrelsome, and the shy and solitary
sucked in their lips and relished again the rank flavour of the spirit.
Dyson looked quickly at what the barman held before him.
"Would you mind letting me see it?" he said; "it's a queer-looking old
thing, isn't it?"
It was a small black tablet, apparently of stone, about four inches long
by two and a half broad, and as Dyson took it he felt rather than saw
that he touched the secular with his flesh. There was some kind of
carving on the surface, and, most conspicuous, a sign that made
Dyson's heart leap.
"I don't mind taking it," he said quietly. "Would two shillings be
enough?"
"Say half a dollar," said the man, and the bargain was concluded.

Dyson drained his pot of beer, finding it delicious, and lit his pipe, and
went out deliberately soon after. When he reached his apartment he
locked the door, and placed the tablet on his desk, and then fixed
himself in his chair, as resolute as an army in its trenches before a
beleaguered city. The tablet was full under the light of the shaded
candle, and scrutinizing it closely, Dyson saw first the sign of the hand
with the thumb protruding between the fingers; it was cut finely and
firmly on the dully black surface of the stone, and the thumb pointed
downward to what was beneath.
"It is mere ornament," said Dyson to himself, "perhaps symbolical
ornament, but surely not an inscription, or the signs of any words ever
spoken." The hand pointed at a series of fantastic figures, spirals and
whorls of the finest, most delicate lines, spaced at intervals over the
remaining surface of the tablet. The marks were as intricate and seemed
almost as much without design as the pattern of a thumb impressed
upon a pane of glass.
"Is it some natural marking?" thought Dyson; "there have been queer
designs, likenesses of beasts and flowers, in stones with which man's
hand had nothing to do"; and he bent over the stone with a magnifier,
only to be convinced that no hazard of nature could have delineated
these varied labyrinths of line. The whorls were of different sizes; some
were less than the twelfth of an inch in diameter, and the largest was a
little smaller than a sixpence, and under the glass the regularity and
accuracy of the cutting were evident, and in the smaller spirals the lines
were graduated at intervals of a hundredth of an inch. The whole thing
had a marvellous and fantastic look, and gazing at the mystic whorls
beneath the hand, Dyson became subdued with an impression of vast
and far-off ages, and of a living being that had touched the stone with
enigmas before the hills were formed, when the hard rocks still boiled
with fervent heat.
"The 'black heaven' is found again," he said, "but the meaning of the
stars is likely to be obscure for everlasting so far as I am concerned."
London stilled without, and a chill breath came into the room as Dyson
sat gazing at the tablet shining duskily under the candle-light; and at

last as he closed the desk over the ancient stone, all his wonder at the
case of Sir Thomas Vivian increased tenfold, and he thought of the
well-dressed prosperous gentleman lying dead mystically beneath the