The Flying Death by Samuel Hopkins Adams (13 inch ebook reader TXT) 📖

minister closed, Professor Ravenden got to his feet hesitantly and nervously.

“My friends,” he said, “before we part I wish to add a slight tribute to what little we may say of the dead. For me to speak to you of his qualifications of mind and character would be an impertinence. But as a follower of what we call science I have one word to speak.

“To see the truth, exact and clear, is given to no human. Now and again are born and matured minds which solve some small portion of the great problem that we live in. These are the world’s master intellects, the Darwins, the Linn�uses, the Cuviers, the Pasteurs. Borrowing their light, we perhaps may illuminate some tiny crevice, and thus pay our part of the human debt. That is the task to which the scientist sets his long and patient efforts.

“And this is achieved how? By an instinct which asserts itself potently in a certain type of humanity, in the highest type which we know. For want of a better term, I may call it the truth-vocation. The truth-seeker may concern himself with the smallest scale of a moth’s wing; he may devote himself to the study of the human soul in its most profound recesses; or he may strive with the immediate facts of life. Lie his field of endeavour where it may, his is the one great calling. Your friend and my friend who lies dead before us was of that world-old army. He died under its flag and on the field of honour.

“His part was to seek the truth in the whirling incidents of the moment. With what complete absorption and self-forgetfulness he gave himself to the task, you know better than I. Perhaps you do not know, as I did not until after his death, that he clung to his appointed work against the ravages of a slow, pain-racked and mortal illness. The great Master of Destiny whose universe proceeds by immutable laws has seen no priest of old called to martyrdom, no prophet risen to warn the nations, no discoverer inspired to enlarge the ken of mankind, with a truer vocation than the seeker in a lesser field whom we honour here.

“He has gone to his own place. Whether he still seeks or has found, is not for us. For us is the legacy of a single-minded devotion and a straightforward nobility of character that cannot but have made and left its impress wherever exerted.”

How strangely work the influences of sympathy! The reporters who listened with warming hearts to the simple man of science had come to Haynes’ funeral primarily as a mark of respect, but secondarily because of their interest in a remarkable “story.” Whispers of the professor’s pteranodon theory had passed about. One or two of the men besides McDale of the “yellow,” had questioned him shrewdly, and had seen that he would commit himself to that theory. This meant a big sensation. The practice of journalism tends to dwarf the imagination and to make men skeptical of all that lies beyond the bounds of the usual. Not one of the reporters there took the slightest stock in the theory of a prehistoric monster. Nevertheless, the mere word of a man so eminent in the scientific world as the entomologist would be enough to “carry the story,” and make it a tremendous feature. Columns of space were in it. But it meant also, as every reporter there believed, the downfall of Professor Ravenden’s repute in a cataract of ridicule. As soon as the newspaper group re-gathered at Third House, McDale spoke.

“I’m going to do what I never expected to do,” he said. “I’m going to throw my paper down.”

“On the Ravenden story?” asked Eldon Smith.

McDale nodded gloomily. “It would have been such a screamer!” he said, shaking his head. “But it goes to the scrap-heap. Not for mine after that little sermon.”

“I think we’re all agreed, fellows,” said Challoner of the Morning Script, the dean of the gathering. “We all feel alike, I guess, about Professor Ravenden. I’ve heard funeral sermons by the greatest in the country; but nothing that ever came home to me personally. Now, if we print this pteranodon story and back it up with interviews, it’s a big thing; but where does the professor come in? We’ve got to save him from himself. The pteranodon feature has got to be suppressed. Is that understood?”

There was no dissent. In all the days while the reporters stayed about waiting for the “news interest” to peter out of the mystery, not one hint of the professor’s “wild theory” found its way into print.

As time passed with no new developments, the reporters dropped in one by one to say goodbye to Professor Ravenden before they took train for New York. Since then the professor often has had cause to wonder why, whenever he has spoken in public, the newspapers all over the country have treated him with such marked consideration, often overshadowing the utterances of more prominent speakers with his. He does not know how small is the world of journalism and how widely and swiftly travels “inside news.”

Of the newspaper crowd, Eldon Smith was the last to leave. He had a talk with Dick Colton, who rode over to the train with him.

“Are you satisfied that Whalley was the author of all the killings?” asked the reporter.

“No, I’m not,” returned the doctor. “It leaves altogether too much unexplained. I wish I could believe in the professor’s pteranodon.”

“On account of the marks that Whalley showed you?”

“Not that alone. Just consider all the weak points in the theory that Whalley is guilty of all the crimes. First: why should he confess part and not all?”

“That’s not unusual.”

“But have you ever known such a case where the murderer was as frank as Whalley? How are you going to ascribe any part in Petersen’s death to the juggler? He couldn’t have thrown his knife in that blackness.”

“I suppose it must have been done aboard the vessel before the man left in the breeches-buoy.”

“The evidence of the sailors is all against that. However, let it go at that. How about the sheep? Why did he kill that?”

“For food. He was camping somewhere on the knolls, and he had to eat.”

“And he was frightened away before he could make way with the carcass? Well, that’s tenable. Now we come to the unhorsing of my brother. That might have been caused by poor Ely’s kites, as I figure it. They broke away, came zigzagging past and frightened the mare into insanity. Afterward they scared her over the cliff.”

“I don’t think so,” said Eldon Smith. “In fact, it’s impossible.”

“Impossible? How?”

“Dr. Colton, did it ever occur to you to look up the weather records for that night?”

“No.”

“I’ve looked them up. The wind was from the southeast. Your brother was less than a mile from the south shore. Mr. Ely was staying on the Sound shore, northwest of there, and almost directly down the wind. Now, how could the kites travel up wind from Ely to the place where your brother had his alarm?”

Colton shook his head.

“Moreover,” continued the reporter, “the mare when she rushed to destruction ran in the face of the wind. So the loose kites couldn’t have pursued her.”

“That’s true; but I see no reason why Ely mightn’t have walked across the point and flown from the ocean side that evening.”

“Here is what I copied from his calendar diary for that night: ‘Sept. 17th. Temperature notes of no value. Upper currents fluctuant. Flew from hillock 1-4 mile from Sound. Kites moving northward out over the Sound. Furled kites at 9:30.’ (The time of your brother’s experience more than two miles away.) ‘Results unsatisfactory.’ Is that definite enough?”

“Certainly, it seems so.”

“It certainly does. Now, about the aerologist. What was the cause of death?”

“It might have been either the stab-wound or the crushing of the skull.”

“The skull was badly crushed?”

“Yes, and the right arm and shoulder were fractured.”

“From what cause?”

“My reading of it is this: Whalley, crazy with desire to murder, crept up on this poor fellow. Ely heard or saw him coming and fled into the oak patch; but Whalley’s knife-throw cut him down. Then the juggler, in a murderous frenzy, beat his victim with a heavy club.”

“Picked up his body and flung it to the spot where it was found?” suggested the reporter as a conclusion

“What do you mean? No man could throw a body that far.”

“That would be my judgment.”

“No,” mused Dick. “Whalley must have carried the body out and dropped it where it was found.”

“For what conceivable reason.”

“Perhaps some idea that he was hiding it better. Perhaps for no reason at all. Reason plays little part in an insane murderer’s processes.”

“But an insane murderer leave tracks the same as any other man, and unless Haynes was completely fooled there were no such tracks or breakage of the shrubbery around the spot where you found the body, as must have been made by a man breaking his way through, particularly if he were carrying a heavy body.”

“What are you driving at?” asked Colton.

“Well,” said the reporter thoughtfully, “this Ely business seems to me just about the strangest phase of this whole mystery. And it’s the strangest, most incomprehensible features of a problem that most often give you your clue.”

“Have you found one?”

“I’ve been thinking of another possible cause of such fractures as you described. Might not a fall have caused them?”

“Not unless it was from a height. And how could he have fallen from a height?”

“That is what I should like to know,” said Eldon Smith. “The scrub-oak where you found the body is badly smashed down—much more crushed and broken than the mere toppling over of a man would account for.”

Swift light broke in upon Colton. “That is what Haynes was trying to determine when he fell into the oak,” he cried.

“Trust him for that. Did he get down on his hands and knees afterward?”

“Yes,” cried the doctor. “What was he after?”

“He was examining a deep indentation in the ground beneath the shrubbery that just fits a man’s head and shoulders as it would strike were the man falling headlong.”

“Headlong? From the empty air?”

“From the empty air,” assented the other.

“You mean that his kites were a sort of flying-machine?”

“It may be. Or he may have become entangled in the lines and carried up after vainly struggling through the shrubbery.”

“But the wound? Could he have struck on some sharp-pointed stake, and wriggled off in his death convulsions?” mused Colton.

“You’re a physician. Could he?”

“No, no, a thousand times no!”

“Well?”

“It was Whalley,” said Dick Colton reflectively. “Perhaps the kite-flyer fell near him, and in his unreasoning terror Whalley used his knife. And his own fear that he spoke of, of the terror impending over him, may have driven him to the murder.”

“It must be so,” said the reporter. “I see nothing else for it. But I don’t believe it all the same.”

“Well, I don’t know that I do, either, for that matter,” said Colton, as they drew in at the station.