Flynn’s Weekly Detective Fiction. Vol. 18, No. 3, September 18, 1926
The Garlic Bulbs
by Walter Archer Frost
“It’s only the dangerous criminal who is interesting,” I said, and ruggles did not deny it
Chapter I
A Nervous Visitor
From our excellent breakfast at an adjacent café, Ruggles and I had just returned to our snug little apartment on West Eighty-Sixth Street; and, having got my pipe going well, I forgot for the moment the hazards of our profession and could view life from the standpoint of a reflective bystander.
“It’s only the dangerous criminal who is interesting,” I said. “The others are as harmless as toads.”
“As I’ve told you before,” said Ruggles, “all reptiles are dangerous, in their way. Frogs, toads, and lizards are poisonous. And don’t make the mistake of thinking them stupid! Remember, their secretions often are agreeable in odor and, therefore, disarming: the common toad produces a poison that has the fragrance of vanilla.”
“That sounds clever of the toad,” I said with a smile. “ ‘Magic in Animals: a Popular and Recent Discovery,’ you might call it.”
“One would not call it recent,” Ruggles corrected; “you forget Pliny’s work on natural history, which appeared in the year 77 A.D., and was dedicated to the Roman emperor, Titus. It filled thirty-seven volumes and contains some startlingly interesting passages on medicine, the treatment of maladies, and magic.
“Describing the great cleverness of certain animals, he says that they prepare themselves for combats with poisonous snakes by eating certain herbs: the weasel eats rue; the tortoise and deer use two other plants, while field mice that have been bitten by snakes eat condrion. The hawk tears open the hawkweed and sprinkles its eyes with the juice.”
“People may have believed that in the seventy-seventh year after the birth of Christ,” I said; “but modern science would not admit any such wisdom on the part of animals.”
“I’d hardly say that. For John Burroughs reminds us to-day that we have no means of estimating fully the knowledge, of animals. How does the red squirrel tell so unerringly on which side of the butternut the meat lies? Yet he always gnaws through the shell so as to strike the kernel broadside, the one spot where the meat is most exposed, and thus easily extracts it.”
“Interesting. But rather out of date in this age of radio, for instance.”
“Not out of date at all, Crane,” Ruggles reminded me; “the air was full of talk and music countless ages before man invented wireless broadcasting. Any number of other creatures, which we never hear and never can hear, are busy talking to each other.
“Spiders are constantly making sounds and listening to sounds that are inaudible to us. For some reason, a woman’s ear can catch a higher pitched sound than a man’s: a woman, for instance, can often hear a bat’s high note that a man cannot hear.
“We know that all sound comes to the human ear in the form of vibrations; and our ear is so constructed that it can catch only a range of seven octaves of sound, constituting from thirty to thirty thousand vibrations a second. Now, a bee’s wing normally vibrates about four hundred and forty times a second, making the musical note A. If the bee is tired, it makes the note E, with three hundred and thirty vibrations.
“Oh, yes, Crane, we can hear some things. But when it comes to the question of sight or hearing or the sense of smell, we fall far below the other animals. Some odors attract certain animals; other odors repel them — a fact taken advantage of by people who live in countries where protection is needed from poisonous or otherwise dangerous animals.”
“That’s enough for now, Ruggles,” I remonstrated. “I feel as if a cyclone had struck me.”
“The China Sea,” he replied absently, “is the greatest permanent reservoir of cyclonic circulation — low barometer, heat, and moisture.”
I said nothing. Ruggles’s prodigious mass of stored-up information flattened me. I had been associated with him for something close to ten years. I had known him to spend eight months in a native village in India for the sake of studying the reptiles, with which the adjacent jungles were alive, and the native remedies.
At another time, he had gone thirty degrees south of the equator for the sake of learning, first hand, some of the earlier symptoms of coast fever, so prevalent in that part of South Africa;[1] it was his familiarity with the quality of the cementlike mud of Texas, in the wet season, that enabled him to solve almost instantly a murder mystery which had baffled the best brains of Scotland Yard.
His restless, eager, and photographic brain was a veritable storehouse of information on every subject under the sun. What, in any other man, would have seemed to be only miraculously lucky guesses, in the case of Ruggles were deadly sure deductions, swiftly arrived at by turning on the problem all his accumulated knowledge of crime and criminals and their offensive and defensive methods, from the crude violence of primitive times down to the scientific refinements of modern murder.
It was thus, and thus only, that he could find so readily the solution of the most obscure tangle, produce the key to the most baffling mystery, and lay bare the trail of the most shrewd and resourceful criminal.
The morning was fair and a strong, inviting wind blew in from the river. “Come, Ruggles,” I said, “it’s too fine a morning to work! Let’s walk in the sunshine, so that we can run faster in the night, if we have to!”
Ruggles smiled. “Go out and enjoy yourself; but don’t expect me to come: I’ve got some things left from last night, and those have got to be cleaned up before I can start square with the work of to-day. I’ll walk with you for an hour, after lunch.” He turned to his work.
I was walking north along Riverside Drive in three more minutes, reveling in the beauty of the Hudson, which I verily believe is one of the loveliest rivers in the world. The air was like wine and, though I fell far short of Ruggles in physical strength and vigor, I am what any doctor would call an unusually well man.
What I mean is, I should have enjoyed my walk, but I didn’t; time and again, I found myself wondering whether the uneasiness I felt were nervousness or a warning that I was needed back at our apartment.
The result was that after half an hour of it, I faced back to West Eighty-Sixth Street. As I walked, I felt pretty sure that when I entered our rooms, I should find a new client with Ruggles, some man or woman who had got in a bad hole somehow, or thought she had, or was afraid she might; some innocent person who was being blackmailed, some one who was “wanted” by the police of some place or other, some one who had escaped from arrest, some fugitive from justice or from injustice.
Ruggles and I got about every class and kind. I mean, they came to him when their danger or dread reached the point where they couldn’t stand it another instant.
As I entered our living room and saw the rather short, squatty figure of a man sitting there deep in talk with Ruggles I asked myself whether our visitor was revealing a story of a toad or something really interesting. Then his voice rose;
“Do you ask me if there was anything more?”, he demanded impatiently. “Wasn’t that enough in itself to set any man’s mind working? I tell you, that hand bag, which he said held only books, had a jimmy in it, a folding crowbar, three hammers, some nippers, reamers, drills and a coil of rope!”
“Well,” said Ruggles, soothingly, “I admit that was something. But, well — suppose you go back to the beginning again, if you will, so that my assistant, Mr. Crane, can have the facts from you firsthand. Crane helps me on all my cases.”