“Was it a burglar, sir?” the butler persisted.
Burnside’s mouth opened, but closed again with no words having been uttered. He decided he had better not say what he had seen. Or thought he had seen. The Senator had visions of padded cells if he did.
“I was… cleaning the gun,” he said lamely. “Guess I’ve been working too hard lately. That will be all. You can go to bed.”
The servant left; but as he went, he looked at his employer with a highly understandable glance.
He thought Burnside was crazy. That was the conviction the Senator read in the man’s eyes. Burnside shivered again, and went to his room.
On the night table was a newspaper folded to an inner page. Once more Burnside read the item of interest contained there.
The newspaper item was a short one. It mentioned the fact that Dr. Augustus Fram, the famous psychiatrist, had come to Washington as a one-man lobbyist for a bill he wanted made into law.
Burnside had met Fram several times. He knew the man and knew about the bill he wanted introduced. But now he was not looking at the bill part. He was simply staring at the name, Fram, and the occupation, psychiatrist.
Psychiatrist. That was a person who knew about brains and the odd quirks they sometimes develop. Burnside got his clothes on in record time and went to Fram.
The well-known psychiatrist was in bed. But he answered the ring at his door promptly. He stared out, a tall, distinguished-looking person with a small goatee on a lean jaw, and with a tiny mustache which looked waxed but wasn’t.
“Senator Burnside!” he said, eyebrows going up in well-bred astonishment. “Isn’t it a bit late for calls?”
Then Fram saw the agitation in the Senator’s face. “Come in,” he said at once. “Here. Into my office. Sit down.”
Burnside relaxed in a chair, looked at charts that took the human brain apart and put it together again with neat numbers for every segment. Fram was economically continuing to practice, while he was in the nation’s capital trying to get his bill introduced.
“I’ve been meaning to come to you for several days,” Burnside mumbled. “I’m very worried — about a friend of mine. I’ve put off talking him over with you. But tonight he had another seizure, so I came in a hurry to you.”
“Seizure?” said Fram. “Friend?”
Burnside cleared his throat. The vision of padded cells and large internes dressed in white had never been stronger than it was right now. So he clung to the “friend” pretense.
“This friend of mine,” he said, moistening his lips, “seems to see something that is impossible to be seen. It’s as silly as seeing pink elephants or purple crocodiles. Yet he insists that he has seen the thing, not once but half a dozen times. Tonight was the last time.”
“Yes?” said Fram. He was a good psychiatrist. He didn’t prod; let the patient tell as much as possible.
“What would you say,” said Burnside, sweating, “if you heard that a man had seen a little fellow about three feet high, bright red in color, dressed in cutaway and topper, leading a bright-green dachshund on a leash made of daisies?”
Fram looked hard at him. “I’d say the thing was some advertising stunt. Someone got a dog and painted it—”
“My friend has never seen it in a public place. It has always been when no one else was around but him. The last time, tonight, not half an hour ago, it was in his own living room.”
“Then I’d say your friend was drunk and on the verge of delirium tremens.”
“I… my friend hasn’t touched a drop of liquor in over thirty years.”
Fram walked slowly back and forth in front of Burnside. He stroked his little goatee with his middle finger.
“In that case,” he pronounced at last, “I’d be inclined to say that your friend was — insane. But, of course, we’re very slow to pronounce such a judgment in my profession. I’d like to talk to the man sometime. And soon!”
“I’ll bring him in,” breathed Burnside. He got up. “What would be the treatment recommended for such a case.”
Fram sighed. “The man would have to go to an institution, of course. A private one, where his name would not be known. He would have to retire temporarily from all normal business. And he would have a course of physical treatments that might be rather extreme. But I don’t want to worry you unnecessarily. Bring your friend in and let me examine him. He might be all right.”
But Burnside knew from the doctor’s tone that the friend would not be pronounced all right. He thanked Fram and went to the door. The doctor bowed him out Burnside crossed the sidewalk to his car, and another car drew up behind his.
From it came a man that he knew. The man was Senator Wade, of Nevada.
“Burnside!” exclaimed Wade, who was small and spare and quick-moving. His political enemies described him as being like an angry sparrow.
Wade glanced covertly at the door from which Burnside had just come, then back at the Senator. Burnside looked at the ground.
“What are you doing here at this time of night?” he mumbled.
“Coming to have a word or two with Fram on his pet bill,” said Wade. “You know — the one that would make a sanity test obligatory to all young couples about to marry. Splendid idea. Fram was telling me the other day that about one and a half percent of couples of marriageable age have an insanity history in their families that should prevent them ever from marrying. If we could pass that bill, we might stop the births of a lot of imbeciles. What are you doing here?”
“Oh, I came to see him about his bill, too,” said Burnside hastily. Never would he have admitted to his colleague from Nevada the true reason for his late-night visit to a psychiatrist.
As it happened, Wade had lied, too. He wasn’t going in to talk about a bill making it mandatory for young folks to take a sanity test before getting married. He was going to talk to Fram about a mad, impossible hallucination he had been suffering from recently. He kept thinking he saw a little crimson man leading a bright-green dog — a smiling dog — on a leash made of the braided stems of daisies.
But naturally Wade would never tell Senator Burnside such a thing. Burnside might think what Wade himself was agonizedly beginning to suspect: that he was insane.
Yet Wade was sure he had seen the fantastic thing. In fact, not half an hour ago, he had seen the little red fellow lead the green, smiling dog through his bedroom.
CHAPTER III
Sulphur and Salt
The man was about the most awe-inspiring person it had ever been the fate of the police chief of Washington to look at.
Dressed in gray, he looked more like a gray steel bar than a human being. His face was dead, like something dug out of a cemetery. The muscles were paralyzed so that never, under any circumstances, could they move in an expression. This dead, weird face was as white as snow — as white, in a word, as you’d expect any dead flesh to be.
In the white glacial expanse of the face were set eyes so light-gray as to seem absolutely colorless. They were like deep, slitted holes into which you could peer and get a half glimpse of a world of fog and ice and personal despair.
“You got the cryptogram from Drake?” the chief asked this awesome personage, whom he — and the nation’s underworld — knew as The Avenger.
“Yes,” said The Avenger, whose full name was Richard Henry Benson.
“It must be a tough one to figure out, if even Drake can’t decode it,” said the chief.
“Drake’s idea is that the code is basically a simple one, but incomplete,” said Benson. His voice was quiet, low, but vibrant with power. “I have an idea he is right. Any code can be figured out, particularly by such an expert as Drake, if the message is all there to work on.”