The Face and the Mask, Robert Barr [best color ereader TXT] 📗
- Author: Robert Barr
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“Good God!” I cried, aghast, “what is this?”
“It is the pistol,” said Kombs quietly.
It was!!
Journalistic London will not soon forget the sensation that was caused by the record of the investigations of Sherlaw Kombs, as printed at length in the next day’s Evening Blade. Would that my story ended here. Alas! Kombs contemptuously turned over the pistol to Scotland Yard. The meddlesome officials, actuated, as I always hold, by jealousy, found the name of the seller upon it. They investigated. The seller testified that it had never been in the possession of Mr. Kipson, as far as he knew. It was sold to a man whose description tallied with that of a criminal long watched by the police. He was arrested, and turned Queen’s evidence in the hope of hanging his pal. It seemed that Mr. Kipson, who was a gloomy, taciturn man, and usually came home in a compartment by himself, thus escaping observation, had been murdered in the lane leading to his house. After robbing him, the miscreants turned their thoughts towards the disposal of the body—a subject that always occupies a first-class criminal mind before the deed is done. They agreed to place it on the line, and have it mangled by the Scotch Express, then nearly due. Before they got the body half- way up the embankment the express came along and stopped. The guard got out and walked along the other side to speak with the engineer. The thought of putting the body into an empty first-class carriage instantly occurred to the murderers. They opened the door with the deceased’s key. It is supposed that the pistol dropped when they were hoisting the body in the carriage.
The Queen’s evidence dodge didn’t work, and Scotland Yard ignobly insulted my friend Sherlaw Kombs by sending him a pass to see the villains hanged.
DEATH COMETH SOON OR LATE.
It was Alick Robbins who named the invalid the Living Skeleton, and probably remorse for having thus given him a title so descriptively accurate, caused him to make friends with the Living Skeleton, a man who seemed to have no friends.
Robbins never forgot their first conversation. It happened in this way. It was the habit of the Living Skeleton to leave his hotel every morning promptly at ten o’clock, if the sun was shining, and to shuffle rather than walk down the gravel street to the avenue of palms. There, picking out a seat on which the sun shone, the Living Skeleton would sit down and seem to wait patiently for someone who never came. He wore a shawl around his neck and a soft cloth cap on his skull. Every bone in his face stood out against the skin, for there seemed to be no flesh, and his clothes hung as loosely upon him as they would have upon a skeleton. It required no second glance at the Living Skeleton to know that the remainder of his life was numbered by days or hours, and not by weeks or months. He didn’t seem to have energy enough even to read, and so it was that Robbins sat down one day on the bench beside him, and said sympathetically:—
“I hope you are feeling better to-day.”
The Skeleton turned towards him, laughed a low, noiseless, mirthless laugh for a moment, and then said, in a hollow, far-away voice that had no lungs behind it: “I am done with feeling either better or worse.”
“Oh, I trust it is not so bad as that,” said Robbins; “the climate is doing you good down here, is it not?”
Again the Skeleton laughed silently, and Robbins began to feel uneasy. The Skeleton’s eyes were large and bright, and they fastened themselves upon Robbins in a way that increased that gentleman’s uneasiness, and made him think that perhaps the Skeleton knew he had so named him.
“I have no more interest in climate,” said the Skeleton. “I merely seem to live because I have been in the habit of living for some years; I presume that is it, because my lungs are entirely gone. Why I can talk or why I can breathe is a mystery to me. You are perfectly certain you can hear me?”
“Oh, I hear you quite distinctly,” said Robbins.
“Well, if it wasn’t that people tell me that they can hear me, I wouldn’t believe I was really speaking, because, you see, I have nothing to speak with. Isn’t it Shakespeare who says something about when the brains are out the man is dead? Well, I have seen some men who make me think Shakespeare was wrong in his diagnosis, but it is generally supposed that when the lungs are gone a man is dead. To tell the truth, I am dead, practically. You know the old American story about the man who walked around to save funeral expenses; well, it isn’t quite that way with me, but I can appreciate how the man felt. Still I take a keen interest in life, although you might not think so. You see, I haven’t much time left; I am going to die at eight o’clock on the 30th of April. Eight o’clock at night, not in the morning, just after table d’hôte.”
“You are going to what!” cried Robbins in astonishment.
“I’m going to die that day. You see I have got things to such a fine point, that I can die any time I want to. I could die right here, now, if I wished. If you have any mortal interest in the matter I’ll do it, and show you what I say is true. I don’t mind much, you know, although I had fixed April the 30th as the limit. It wouldn’t matter a bit for me to go off now, if it would be of any interest to you.”
“I beg you,” said Robbins, very much alarmed, “not to try any experiments on my account. I am quite willing to believe anything you say about the matter—of course you ought to know.”
“Yes, I do know.” answered the Living Skeleton sadly. “Of course I have had
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