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So he walked out upon his hands, leaving the marks which have puzzled us so.”

“But why?”

“He is coming to. We’ll ask him.”

In a few minutes “The Wonderful Whalley” was able to sit up and answer questions. All his rage seemed to have gone, and all his cunning. He was cowed and weak and indifferent.

“Why did you kill Serdholm?” asked Colton.

“He beat me,” was the reply.

“And what had you against Mr. Haynes?”

“He sink I was murderer; zat I kill ze sailor.”

“And against me?”

“I see you follow ze trail. I sink you find me.”

“So I probably should. I just had seen the resemblance between my handprint and yours and had jumped forward to examine the next print, when I was struck.”

“Zat jomp safe you,” said the juggler. “Ze butt of ze knife hit as it turn or you would be dead.”

He spoke in a matter-of-fact way. While waiting until he should be able to walk, they got a detailed confession from him. He told with perfect frankness of the killing of Serdholm and Haynes and the attack on Colton; but he flatly and rather nonchalantly denied the murder of Petersen the sailor, and the slaying of the sheep.

Coming to the killing of the kite-filer, Colton set a trap for him. “Why did you club him after you had given him the knife?”

“Who?” said the juggler, his eyes growing wide.

“Mr. Ely, the man we found dead two nights ago with your knife-wound in his back.”

Whalley displayed a pitiable agitation.

“Ze tall, still man, ze man at ze fisher-house? He ees dead? ” he cried.

“You ought to know.”

“I sink he was dead,” said the juggler simply. “I hear zat sound up in ze air.”

Once more he threw his hands upward in that shuddering gesture which had startled them the night of the wreck.

“Zen I hear him cry like a dead man. A great an’ terreeble cry! I run to my place an’ hide away.”

“He heard the kites,” said Colton to Professor Ravenden. Then to the juggler:

“Now, Whalley, what put it into your head to walk out on your hands after your knife when you killed Mr. Haynes and Serdholm?”

“To make it like ze ozzer tracks,” he replied promptly.

“What other tracks?” cried the two men in a breath.

“Ze tracks of eet. I do not know. I see zem; but I do not know. Come, I show you.”

He got unsteadily to his feet, and, guarded on either side, led them down the beach toward the Sand Spit station. After walking about a third of a mile he stopped and cast about him.

“Zere!” he said triumphantly, pointing.

Following the instruction, they made out traces of blood and the prints of a lamb’s hoof. Leading out to the spot was the dreadful familiar double spoor of talons.

“You did that too,” accused Colton.

For refutation “The Wonderful Whalley” dropped to his knees and laid his hand over one of the marks. The hand more than completely covered the prints.

“You zee?” he said triumphantly.

“Whalley, what made that mark there?” said Professor Ravenden.

Again that strange gesture from the juggler and the quick shuddering in-draw of the shoulders.

“Ze death-bird, maybe,” he said.

Nothing more could be gotten from him. They delivered him at the coastguard station to be turned over to the authorities. When he was out of their hands, Professor Ravenden insisted on returning to look for the remains of his lost specimen, and was relieved at finding one wing intact. Not until he had carefully folded this in paper did he turn to Dick Colton with the question:

“What is your opinion of our problem now?”

“I’m at my wit’s end,” said Dick. “Possibly we’ve got on the trail of another hand-walking knife-thrower.”

“Or the death-bird, the pteranodon,” returned Professor Ravenden quietly.

Chapter Sixteen The Lost Clue

In his own way, Professor Ravenden possessed as keen a detective instinct as Haynes himself.

The variation of a shade of a moth’s wing, the obscurest trait in the life-habit of some unconsidered larva form, was sufficient to set him to the trail, and sometimes with results that, to his compeers, seemed little short of marvellous. Science had been enriched by his acumen, in several notable instances, and thousands of farmers who had never heard his name owed to him the immunity of certain crops from the ravages of their most destructive insect enemy.

In this work the pedantic professor was a true zealot. So much did his enthusiasm partake of the ardour of the hunt that he had found himself in the readiest sympathy with Haynes’ sharp and practical capacities. Now, for the first time, he had seen a problem in his own department assume an aspect of immediate and tremendous human importance. That his part in the solution should be worked out with flawless perfection was become a matter of conscience, a test of honour. Sure as he was of his ground, he determined to prove to the utmost, the solidity of his foundation.

“Have you other fences than the one which I know, built of the cretaceous rock?” he asked Johnston.

“You’ll find some in the farthest lot back, I reckon,” said Johnston. “Look near the corners of the fence for them slabs.”

“If you have a wheelbarrow,” began the scientist when the other interrupted him.

“You wasn’t thinking of going up there now, was you?”

The professor assented.

“Alone?” said Johnston. “It’s gettin’ toward dark, too. Hadn’t I better go with you?”

“I shall be gone but a few moments,” said the professor with some impatience. “It was my design, in case I found any further imprints to bring back the rocks in the wheelbarrow for careful inspection.”

“You go in and get your revolver, Professor,” said Johnston, “and I’ll have Henkle run the barrow up there for ye.”

Henkle was a young Swedish boy, known to possess no English and suspected of having little more wits. With some difficulty he was made to understand what was expected of him; so, having had the barrow handles inserted in his hard young palms, and the professor pointed out to him he patiently trudged along in the wake of the savant, out across the hollows.

In a brief time the professor had found indications on half a dozen of the rocks. Glowing with enthusiasm, he loaded them into the barrow, and set a homeward pace, that made the sturdy little Swede gasp before he had covered half the distance.

McDale, the reporter for one of the “yellow” papers, saw them from his window, coming into the yard.

“A good chance to get something from the professor,” he thought, and ran down to accost him.

Henkle, the Swede boy, hung about, open-mouthed and staring stupidly.

“Go away. You’re through. Skip!” said McDale, indicating dismissal with a sweeping gesture.

Unfortunately the sweep of his arm was toward the field whence the pair had just come with their find. The tired boy uncomplainingly picked up the handles of his barrow again and trudged away, unnoticed by the professor, who was now deep in the study of the first rock.

“See,” he cried excitedly to McDale. “This is unquestionabIy the print of a smaller specimen than ours; a young pteranodon, doubtless, or perhaps a lesser sub-species.”

Pretending an absorbed interest, the reporter drew out the simple-hearted professor, who, showing rock after rock in explanation, elaborated his theory. McDale, hurrying upstairs to make his notes—he had been afraid to “pull a pencil” on the scientist, lest he check the enthusiastic flow of ideas—ran into Eldon Smith.

“Get anything?” asked Smith, in the brief formula of the newspaper world.

“Sunday stuff, and a corker!” said McDale. “You wouldn’t want it; but it’s hot stuff for us, with a scare-devil double-page drawing of the Pteranodaceus Dingbattius, and Professor Ravenden’s photograph as large as we can get it.”

“Pretty tough on the professor,” said Eldon Smith. “He’s rather a square old party.”

“Oh, I’m not going to fake him,” protested the other. “And of course I won’t guy him. That would put a crimp in the story.”

“You know what his reputation will be in the scientific world, after he’s been made to stand for a wild-eyed nightmare like this?” said the other.

“Oh, he’ll be down and out,” agreed the dealer in sensations. “But that ain’t my business. And the cream of it is that he believes in this gilly-loo bird, as if he’d seen it.”

Eldon Smith jumped to the window and throwing it up with a bang, leaned out into the darkness.

“Did you hear that?” he cried.

McDale was beside him instantly. They stood, rigid, intent, as a faint, woeful, high-pitched scream of abject terror quivered in the still air.

Instantly the house was alive. Somebody was calling for lanterns. Another voice was shouting to Professor Ravenden to come back, to wait, not to venture out into the night without light. The two reporters, with the Colton brothers, got to the piazza at the same time.

Meantime the shrieks grew louder. They came short and at regular intervals, with an almost mechanical effect.

“That’s like hysteria,” said Dick Colton. “Can anyone make out just where it comes from?”

As if in reply, the professor’s precise accents were heard.

“This way. He is here.”

There was a rush of the men. “I have him,” called Professor Ravenden.

Once more the voice was raised, but subsided into a long, sobbing moan. Then the savant staggered into view, carrying the limp form of the young Swede.

“He has fainted,” he said. “He was rushing by me, quite unheeding my call, when I caught him and he fell, as if shot. I trust he is not injured.”

“Unhurt,” said Dick Colton, “but literally frightened almost to death.”

Henkle came to half an hour later. No explanation could be had of him, other than a shuddering indication of some overhanging terror. Once he made a sweeping gesture of the arms, much as had Whalley on the night of the wreck. The physician gave him a sleeping powder and arranged to see him early in the morning.

He never saw the boy again. With the first light he was gone, and his little belongings with him. Afterward they found out that he had walked to the station, and taken the morning train.

“There’s a possible clue lost,” said Dick Colton to the professor, “that might have helped us.”

But Professor Ravenden was little concerned. He had discovered a print which might possibly indicate a rudimentary sixth toe on the pteranodon and he was absorbed in measurements.

Chapter Seventeen The Professor’s Sermon

Following the injunction left by Haynes, they buried him in the wind-swept knoll behind Third House. A clergyman who had been sent for from New York took charge of the services, which were attended by the score of newspaper men and the little Third House group. A pompous, precise, and rather important person, was the clergyman; encased within a shell of prejudice which shut him off from any true estimate of the man over whose body he was to speak.

In Haynes he was able to see only an agent in a rather disapproved enterprise, mighty, indeed, but, to his unseeing eye, without the ideals which he had formulated for himself, and for those upon whom he imposed his standards. So his address was purely formal; with a note of the patronising and the exculpatory as if there were something to be condoned in the life which the reporter had laid down.

At the end there were sneering faces among the newspaper men. Helga wore an expression of piteous bewilderment; Dick Colton’s teeth were set hard; and Dolly Ravenden’s dark beauty glowed with suppressed wrath. To the surprise of all, as the

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