Thwaite came dashing back. Without any sign of any qualm he searched Rivvin and tossed me two or three bundles of greenbacks.
He stood up.
He laughed.
“Curiosity,” he said, “will be the death of me.” Then he stripped the clothing from the dead monster, kneeling by it.
The beast-hair stopped at the shirt collar. Below that the skin was human, as was the shape, the shape of a forty-year-old man, strong and vigorous and well-made, only dwarfed to the smallness of a child.
Across the hairy breast was tatooed in blue,
“HENGIST EVERSLEIGH.”
“Hell,” said Thwaite.
He stood up and went to the fatal door. Inside he found the electric button. The room was small and lined with cases of little drawers, tier on tier, rows of brass knobs on mahogany.
Thwaite opened one.
It was velvet lined and grooved like a jeweler's tray and contained rings, the settings apparently emeralds.
Thwaite dumped them into one of the empty bags he had taken from Rivvin's corpse. The next case was of similar drawers of rings set with rubies. The first of these Thwaite dumped in with the emeralds.
But then he flew round the room pulling out drawers and slamming them shut, until he came upon trays of unset diamonds. These he emptied into his sack to the last of them, then diamond rings on them, other jewelry set with diamonds, then rubies and emeralds till the sack was full.
He tied its neck, had me open a second sack and was dumping drawer after drawer into that when suddenly he stopped.
His nose worked, worked horridly like that of the dead monster.
I thought he was going crazy and was beginning to laugh nervously, was on the verge of hysterics when he said:
“Smell! Try what you smell.” I sniffed. “I smell smoke,” I said.
“So do I,” he agreed. “This place is afire.”
“And we locked in!” I exclaimed.
“Locked in?” he sneered. “Bosh. I broke open the front door the instant I was sure they were dead. Come! Drop that empty bag. This is no time for haggling.”
We had to step between the two corpses. Rivvin was horridly dead. The colors had all faded from the snout. The muzzle was all mouse-color.
When we had hold of the bag of coin, Thwaite turned off the electric lights and we struggled out with that and the bag of jewels, and went out into the hallway full of smoke.
“We can carry only these,” Thwaite warned me. “We'll have to leave the rest.” I shouldered the bag of coin, and followed him down the steps, across a gravel road, and, oh the relief of treading turf and feeling the fog all about me.
At the wall Thwaite turned and looked back. “No chance to try for those other bags,” he said. In fact the red glow was visible at that distance and was fast becoming a glare. I heard shouts.
We got the bags over the wall and reached the car. Thwaite cranked up at once and we were off.
How we went I could not guess, nor in what directions, nor even how long. Ours was the only vehicle on the roads we darted along.
When the dawn light was near enough for me to see Thwaite stopped the car. He turned to me.
“Get out!” he said.
“What?” I asked.
He shoved his pistol muzzle in my face. “You've fifty thousand dollars in bank bills in your pockets,” he said. “It's a half a mile down that road to a railway station. Do you understand English? Get out!”
I got out.
The car shot forward into the morning fog and was gone.
He was silent a long time.
“What did you do then?” I asked. “Headed for New York,” he said, “and got on a drunk. When I came round I had barely eleven thousand dollars. I headed for Cook's office and bargained for a ten thousand dollar tour of the world, the most places and the longest time they'd give for the money; the whole cost on them. I not to need a cent after I started.”
“What date was that?” I asked.
He meditated and gave me some approximate indications rather rambling and roundabout. “What did you do after you left Cook's?” I asked.
“I put a hundred dollars in a savings bank,” he said. “Bought a lot of clothes and things and started.
“I kept pretty sober all round the world because the only way to get full was by being treated and I had no cash to treat back with.
“When I landed in New York I thought I was all right for life. But no sooner did I have my hundred and odd dollars in my pockets than I got full again. I don't seem able to keep sober.”
“Are you sober now?” I asked. “Sure,” he asserted.
He seemed to shed his cosmopolitan vocabulary the moment he came back to everyday matters.
“Let's see you write what I tell you on this,” I suggested, handing him a fountain-pen and a torn envelope, turned inside out.
Word by word after my dictation he wrote. “Until you hear from me again
Yours truly,
No Name.
I took the paper from him and studied the handwriting. “How long were you on that spree?” I asked.
“Which?” he twinkled.
“Before you came to and had but eleven thousand dollars left,” I explained. “I don't know,” he said, “I didn't know anything I had been doing.”
“I can tell you one thing you did,” I said.
“What?” he queried.
“You put four packets, each of one hundred hundred-dollar bills, in a thin manila clasp- envelope, directed it to a New York lawyer and mailed the envelope to him with no letter in it, only a half sheet of dirty paper with nothing on it except: 'Keep this for me until I ask for it,' and the signature you have just written.”
“Honest?” he enunciated incredulously. “Fact!” I said.
“Then you believe what I've told you,” he exclaimed joyfully. “Not a bit I don't,” I asseverated.
“How's that?” he asked.
“If you were drunk enough,” I explained, “to risk forty thousand dollars in that crazy way, you were drunk enough to dream all the complicated nightmare you have spun out to me.
“If I did,” he argued, “how did I get the fifty thousand odd dollars?”
“I'm willing to suppose you got it with no more dishonesty on your part,” I told him, “than if you had come by it as you described.”
“It makes me mad you won't believe me,” he said. “I don't,” I finished.
He gloomed in silence. Presently he said: “I can stand looking at him now,” and led the way to the cage where the big blue-nosed mandril chattered his inarticulate bestialities and scratched himself intermittently.
He stared at the brute. “And you don't believe me?” he regretted.
“No, I don't,” I repeated, “and I'm not going to. The thing's incredible.”
“Couldn't there be a mongrel, a hybrid?” he suggested.
“Put that out of your head,” I told him, “the whole thing's incredible.”
“Suppose she'd seen a critter like this,” he persisted, “just at the wrong time?”
“Bosh!” I said. “Old wives' tales! Superstition! Impossibility!”
“His head,” he declared, “was just like that.” He shuddered.
“Somebody put drops in some of your drink,” I suggested. “Anyhow, let's talk about something else. Come and have lunch with me.”
Over the lunch I asked him:
“What city did you like best of all you saw?”
“Paris for mine,” he grinned, “Paris forever.”