The Vengeance of India

ALL day the March wind had been muttering and growling like a peevish giant with the toothache. As darkness fell it began to raise its voice; by 9 o'clock it was shrieking and screaming like a billion banshees suffering with cholera morbus. I huddled over the coke fire burning in my study grate and tried to concentrate on my book, to forget the wailing of the wind and the misfortunes of the day, but made very poor work of it.

Mingling with the wind's skirling there suddenly sounded the raucous bellow of an automobile siren, followed, a moment later, by a hammering and clattering at the front door as if whoever stood outside would beat the panels in by main force.

"If ye plaze, sor," Nora, my maid of all work, announced, poking her nose around the half-opened study door, "there's a gintilman ter see ye—an Eyetalian man, I think he is." Nora disapproves strongly of "furriners" in general and Italians in particular, and when they come, as they frequently do, to summon me from the house on a stormy night, her disapproval is hidden neither from my callers nor me.

Tonight, however, I greeted the interruption with something like relief. Action of any sort, even traveling a dozen miles to set an Italian laborer's broken limb without much hope of compensation, would provide a welcome distraction from the pall of gloom which enveloped me. "Bring him in," I ordered.

"Parbleu!" exclaimed a voice behind her. "He is already in! Did you think, my friend, that I would travel all this way on such a night to have your servant debate entrance with me!"

I leaped from my chair with a whoop of delight and seized both my visitor's slender hands in mine. "De Grandin!" I exclaimed delightedly. "Jules de Grandin! What in the world are you doing here? I thought you'd be in your laboratory at the Sorbonne by now."

"But no," he denied, handing his sopping cap and raincoat to Nora and seating himself across the fire from me, "there is little rest for the wicked in this world, my friend, and for Jules de Grandin there is none at all. Hardly had we finished with that villainous Goonong Besar than I was dispatched, post-haste, to Brazil, and when my work was finished there I must needs be called to tell of my experiments before your association of physicians in New York. Eh bien, but I fear me I shall not see my peaceful laboratory for some time, my friend."

"Oh, so you were in Brazil?" I answered thoughtfully.

"Trowbridge, my friend!" he put out both hands impulsively. "The mention of that country distresses you. Tell me, can I be of help?"

"H'm, I'm afraid not," I replied sadly. "It's an odd coincidence, your coming from there today, though. You see, a patient of mine, a Brazilian lady, died today, and I've no more idea what killed her than an African Bushman has about the nebular hypothesis."

"Oh, la, la!" he chuckled. "Friend Trowbridge, to see you is worth traveling twice around the world. Forty years a physician, and he worries over a faulty diagnosis! My dear fellow, do you not know the only truthful certificate a physician ever gives for the cause of death is when he writes down 'unknown'?"

"I suppose so," I agreed, "but this case is out of the ordinary, de Grandin. These people, the Drigos, have lived here only a few weeks, and virtually nothing is known of them, except that they seem to have plenty of money. This morning, about 11 o'clock, I was called to attend their only child, a daughter about eighteen years of age, and found her in a sort of stupor. Not a faint, nor yet a condition of profound depression, simply sleepy, like any young woman who was up late the previous night. There was no history of unusual activity on her part; she had gone to bed at her usual hour the night before, and was apparently in good health within an hour of the time I was called. I could see no reason for my services, to tell you the truth, for her condition did not appear at all serious, yet, before I could reassure her parents and leave the house, she went to sleep and slept her life away. Died in what appeared a healthy, natural sleep in less than ten minutes!"

"A-a-ah?" he answered on a rising note. "You interest me, my friend. It is, perhaps, some new, acute form of sleeping sickness, we have here. Come, can you make some excuse to go to the people's house? I would make inquiries from them. Perchance we shall learn something for the benefit of science."

I was about to demur when the tinkle of my telephone cut in. "Dr. Trowbridge," called the party at the other end, "this is Johnston, the undertaker, speaking. Can you come over to Drigo's to sign the death certificate, or shall I bring it to your house tomorrow? I can't get any information from these folks. They don't even know what she died of."

"Neither do I," I muttered to myself, but aloud I said, "Why, yes, Mr. Johnston, I'll come right over. There's a friend of mine, another doctor, here; I'll bring him along."

"Good enough," he responded. "If I have to argue with these dagoes much longer I'll need you and your friend, too, to patch up my nerves."

Robed in a gown of priceless old lace, a white net mantilla drawn over her smoothly parted black hair, Ramalha Drigo lay at rest in an elaborate open-couch casket of mahogany, her slender, oleander-white hands piously crossed upon her virginal bosom, a rosary of carved ebony, terminating in a silver crucifix, intertwined in her waxen fingers.

"Bon Dieu," de Grandin breathed as he bent over the girl's composed oval face, "she was beautiful, this poor one! Hélas that she should die thus early!"

I murmured an assent as I took the form Mr. Johnston proffered me and wrote "unknown" in the space reserved for cause of death and "about one-half hour" in the place allotted for duration of last illness.

"Gosh, Doc, he's a queer one, that foreign friend of yours," the undertaker commented, attracting my attention with a nudge and nodding toward de Grandin. The little Frenchman was bending over the casket, his blond, waxed mustache twitching like the whiskers of an alert tom-cat, his slender, womanish hands patting the girl's arms and breast questingly, as though they sought the clue to her mysterious death beneath the folds of her robe.

"He's queer, all right," I agreed, "but I've never seen him do anything without good reason. Why—"

A faltering step in the hall cut short my remark as Mr. Drigo entered the parlor. "Good evening, Dr. Trowbridge," he greeted with a courteous bow. "Dr. de Grandin"—as I presented the Frenchman—"I am honored to make your acquaintance."

De Grandin nodded an absent-minded acknowledgment of the courtesy and turned away, addressing Mr. Johnston in a whisper. "You are an embalmer, my friend?" he asked, almost eagerly, it seemed to me.

"Yes," answered the other, wonderingly. "I've had a license to practise for ten years."

"And it is customary that you embalm the dead in this country, yes?" de Grandin insisted.

"Yes, sir; but sometimes—"

"And when embalmment is not made, it is the exception, rather than the rule?"

"Decidedly, but—"

"You would embalm as a matter of course, unless expressly ordered to the contrary, then?"

"Yes," Johnston admitted.

"Ah, then, was it Monsieur Drigo who forbade that you embalm his daughter?"

The undertaker started as though pricked with a needle. "How did you know?" he demanded.

The ghost of one of his impish smiles flickered across de Grandin's face, to be replaced instantly with a look more suited to the occasion. "In France, my friend," he confided, "the science of embalming, as practised in America, is still a rarity. But in Paris we have a young man, a Canadian, who preserves the dead even as you do here, and from him I have learn many things. I have, for example, learned that you inject the preserving fluids in either the brachial, the carotid, the axillary or the femoral artery. Très bien, if you have embalmed this poor child here, you have used one of those arteries, ''n'est-ce-pas?'' The chances are that an American embalmer would not utilize the femoral artery to embalm a woman's body, so I feel to see if you have bandaged the arm or breast of that poor dead child where you have inserted your fluid-tube in one of those other arteries. I find no bandage; I feel her cheeks, they are firm as life; therefore, I decide embalmment have not been done, and, knowing your custom here, I ask to know who have ordered the contrary. Voilà, it are not magic which make me know; but the ordinary sense of the horse."

He linked his arm in mine. "Come, Friend Trowbridge," he announced, "there is no more we can do here.

Let us leave this sad house to its sorrow. Tomorrow, or the next, day, perhaps, you will have more of these so mysterious cases, and we can study them together. Meanwhile, let us leave what we can not help."

The three of us, Johnston, de Grandin and I, were about to pass from the house when the Frenchman paused, gazing intently at a life-sized half-length portrait in oils hanging on the hall wall. "Monsieur Drigo," he asked, "forgive my unseemly curiosity, but that gentleman, who was he?"

Something like terror appeared in the othe'’s face as he answered, "My grandfather, sir."

"Ah, but Monsieur," de Grandin objected, "that gentleman, he wears the British uniform, is it not so?"

"Yes," Drigo replied. "My mother's father was a British officer, her mother was a Portuguese lady."

"Thank you," de Grandin replied with a bow as he followed me through the front door.

They buried Ramalha Drigo in the little graveyard of the Catholic chapel the following day. It was a dreary ceremony, no one but the old priest, the Drigo family, de Grandin and I were in attendance, and the wailing March wind seemed echoing our own somber thoughts as it soughed through the branches of the leafless Lombardy poplars.

"It is old, that cemetery?" de Grandin hazarded as we drove from the church to my house following the brief committal service.

"Very old," I assented. "St. Benedict's is one of the earliest Roman Catholic parishes in New Jersey, and the cemetery is one of the few in this neighborhood dating back to Colonial days."

"And have you noticed any strange colored men in, the neighborhood lately?" he asked irrelevantly.

"Strange colored men?" I echoed. "What in the world are you driving at, de Grandin? First you ask me if the cemetery is old, then you go off at a tangent, and want to know if there are any strange negroes in the neighborhood. You—"

"Tell me, my friend," he interrupted, "how did the poor dead lady spend her time? Did she walk much in the country, or go from home much in the night?"

"For heaven's sake!" I looked at him in wonderment, and almost ran the car into the roadside ditch. "Have you lost your senses completely, or are you trying to see how foolish you can be? I never heard such rambling questions!"

"Nor have you ever heard that the longest way round is usually the shortest way home, apparently," he added. "Believe me, my friend, I do not ask aimless questions. But no, that is not my method. Come, if you will set me down I shall walk through the village and attempt to collect some information. My regards to your amiable cook, if you please, and request that she will prepare some of her so excellent apple pie for dinner. I shall be home by meal time, never fear."

He was as good as his word. It lacked twenty minutes of the dinner hour when he hurried into the house, his cheeks reddened from brisk walking in the chilly March air. But something in his mannor, his nervously quick movements, his air of suppressed excitement, told me he was on the track of some fresh mystery.

"Well, what is it?" I asked as we adjourned to the library after dinner. "Have you heard anything of the strange colored men you were so anxious about this afternoon?" I could not forbear a malicious grin as I reminded him of his senseless question.

"But of course," he returned evenly as he lighted a French cigarette and blew a cloud of acrid smoke toward the ceiling. ‘‘Am I not Jules de Grandin, and does not Jules de Grandin get the information he seeks? At all times? Most certainly.”

He laughed outright at the amazed look with which I greeted his egotis tical sally. “La, la, Friend Trow bridge,” he exclaimed, “you are so droll! Always you Americans and Englishwould have the world believe you have yourselves in perfect con trol, yet I can play upon you as a harpist plays Upon his strings. When will you learn that my honest, wellmerited self-respect is not empty boastfulness?”

He cast aside his bantering manner and leaned forward very suddenly. “What do you know of St. Benedict’s cemetery?” he demanded.

“Eh, St. Benedict’s-?” I coun tered, at a loss to answer.

“Precisely, exactly,” he affirmed. “Do you, for example, know that the entire ground near the old chapel is underlaid with ancient tombs— vaulted, brick-lined passageways?”

"No,” I replied. “Never heard such a thing.”

“Ah, so?” he answered sarcastically. “All your life you have lived here, yet you know naught of this curiosity. Truly, I have said not half enough in praise of Jules de Grandin, I fear. And, since you know nothing of the tombs, I take it you did not know that when the Drigo family became affiliated with St. Benedict’s congregation they bought the freehold to a pew, and, along with it, the license to bury their dead in one of the old tombs. Eh, you did not know that?”

“Of course not,” I returned. “I’m a physician, not a detective, de Grandin. WTiy should I pry into my patients’ private affairs?”

“TJ’m, why, indeed?” he replied. Then, with an abrupt change of sub ject: “HavC yOu heard Beinhaner’s new hypothesis concerning catabol ism? No?” And with that he launched on a long oil'd highly tech nical explanation of the Austrian’s theory of destructive metabolism, nor could all my efforts diag him back to a single word concerning his dis coveries of the afternoon.

“pKErrv bad business; down to th’ graveyard, ain’t 1 It; Doc?” asked the postman as I passed him on my way to my morning calls the follow ing day.

“What’s that?” I asked, startled. “What’s happened?”

He shilled with the conscious su periority of one who has interesting gossip to retail. “That Drigo girl” —he jerked an indicative thumb in the general direction of- the Drigo home,—“th’ one that died th’ other day. : Some grave robbers musta dug her up last night, ’cause th’ sexton of St. Benedict’s found her veil layin’ on th’ ground this mornin'. They’re goin’ to open her grave this afternoon to see if her body’s still there, I hear. ’Tain’t likely they’ll find nothin’, though; them body-snatchers don’t usually leave nothin’ layin’ around when they get through.”

“Good heavens I” I exclaimed. “Grave robbery?”

“Yep; that’s what they say.”

I hurried on my way,, my thoughts racing faster than the wheels of my motor. It was all too likely. Gossip of the mysterious cause of the girl’s death was bound to have got about, and her lovely body would have proved an irresistibly attractive bait for some anatomist with a passion for morbid research. At my first stop I called the house an<f told de Grandin.

“CorcUeuf Is it so?” he shouted in answer: “I have w,on my bet, then!”

“You—what?” I replied incredu-

‘ * Last night, when T had learned what I had learned,-1'wagered with myself that .she would not remain grave-bound,, he replied. “Now I have won. This .afternoon I go to wit ness the exhumation; but: it is little more than a waste of. time. She will not be there. On that X bet myself ten francs.”

“What the devil—’ I began, but a sharp Click told me he : had hung up. Three -minutes later, when I re established communication with the office, Nora told me that the “furrin gintilman ’ ’ ihad “ gone down th’ road as if th’ Little Good- Paypul wuz aftther ’im.”

By 4 o’clock that afternoon the entire village was buzzing with, the gruesome news of the rifling of Ramalha Drigo’s grave. Father Lamphier, the aged parish priest of St. Benedict’s, wrung ;his hands in an agony of vicarious suffering for the girl’s distracted parents; Arthur Lesterton, the county prosecutor, vowed legal vengeance on the miscreants; Duffey, the police chief, gave an interview to h reporter .from our one and only evening paper declaring that the police had several suspects under surveillance and expected to make an early arrest. Indignation was at fever heat; everybody made endless impracticable suggestions, nobody did anything. In all the town there seemed only .two calm people: Ricardo Drigo, Ramalha’s father; and Jules de Grandin,

Drigo thanked me: courteously when I expressed sympathy for his mis fortune, and said quietly, “It is fate. Doctor. It can not be escaped.” l)e Grandin podded: his head sapiently once or twice, and,said nothing at all. But the glitter of his little blue eyes and the occasional nervous twitching of his slender-white hands, told me he was seething inwardly.

We ate dinner in silence, I with no appetite at all, .de Grandin with a gusto which, seemed, to m e, in the cir cumstances, hardly decent.

Each of us took a book in the li brary after dinner, and several hours passed in gloomy quiet.

Suddenly: “The time approaches, Trowbridge, my friend,” de Grandin exclaimed, shutting his book with a snap and rising from his chair.

“Eh?” I answered wonderingly.

“We go; we observe; perhaps we find the answer to this sacre riddle tonight,” he replied.

“Go? Observe?” I echoed stupid ly.

‘ ‘ But certainly. Have I been going hither and elsewhere all this time to sit idly by when the opportunity, to act has come? Your coat, my friend, and your hat! We go to that St. Benedict’s cemetery. Right away, at once, immediately. This night, per haps, I show you that which you have never seen before.”

S t. benedict’s churchyard lay stark and ghastly in the night-light as I parked my car beside the dilapi dated fence separating the little God’s Acre from t^fe road. Discolored tombstones reared themselves from the dead winter grass like bones long dried upon some ancient battle field, patches of hoar-frost showed leprous against the sod, and, mingling with the moaning of the night wind in the poplar boughs, the shrill, eery cry of a screech-owl came to us like the lament of an earth-bound spirit.

“Have a care, my friend,” de Grandin warned in a low breath as he clambered over the fence and made hi* way between the graves, “the ground is treacherous here. One false step, and pouf! your leg is broken against some of these memen toes of mortality.”

I followed him as quickly as I could till his upraised hand signaled a halt. “It is here we shall see what we shall see, if,-indeed, we see it at all,” he promised, sinking to the moss at the foot of a great pine tree. “Observe that monument yonder? Bien, it is to it we must give our particular at tention this night.”

I recognized the gravestone he in dicated as standing in the Drigos’ burial plot. It was one of the ceme tery’s oldest monuments, a low, table like box of stone consisting of a flat horizontal slab about the size of a grave’s ground dimensions, supported by four upright pieces of marble, the name and vital dates of the family which first owned the plot being en graved on the tomb’s top. I recalled having heard the grave space orig inally belonged to the Bouvier family, but the last of the line had gone to his eternal rest long before I was born

Fixing my eyes steadily on the old monument, I wondered what my com panion meant by his assertion, won dered again, and turned to look over my shoulder toward the road where the clatter of a passing vehicle sound ed on the macadam.

Somewhere in the town a tower clock began telling midnight. Bong, bong, bong, the sixteen-note chime sounded the full hour, followed by the deep resonant boom of the bell as it began its twelve strokes. One—

“Regardez!” de Grandin's slim fingers bit into my arm as he hissed the command. A shiver, not due to the raw March air, raced up my spine and through my scalp, raising the short hairs above my greatcoat collar as a current of electricity might have done.

Beyond the Bouvier tomb, like a column of mist, too strong to be dissipated by the wind, yet almost too impalpable to be seen, a slender white form was rising, taking shape—coming toward us.

‘‘Good God!” I cried in a choking voice, shrinking against de Grandin with the involuntary, unreasoning fear of the living for the dead. “What is it?”

“But—” he shook off my restrain ing clutch as an adult might brush aside a child in time of emergency. “Attendez, mon ami!” With a cat like leap he cleared the intervening graves and planted himself squarely in the path of the advancing wraith. Click! His pocket electric flash shot a beam of dazzling light straight into the specter’s face. I went sick with horror as I recognized the drawn fea tures and staring, death-glazed eyes of-

“Ramalha Drigo, look at me,—I command it!” De Grandin’s voice sounded shrill and rasping with the intensity of purpose which v/as be hind it. Coming abreast of him, I saw his little blue eyes were fairly starting from his face as he bent an unwinking stare on the dead face before him. The waxed ends of his small, blond mustache started up ward, like the horns of an inverted crescent, as his lips drew themselves about his words. “Look—at—me— Ramalha Drigo,—I—command—it!”

Something like a tremor passed through the dead girl’s flaccid cheeka For an instant her film-coated eyes flickered with a look of lifelike in telligence. Then the faee went limp with the flaccidity of death once more, the lids half dropped before the staring eyes, and her whole body crumpled like a wax figure suddenly exposed to a blast of heat.

“Catch her, Trowbridge, my friend!” de Grandin ordered excited ly. “Bear her to her father’s house and put her to bed. I come as soon as possible; meautime I have work to do.”

Thrusting the flashlight into his pocket he jerked out a small whistle and blew three quick, shrilling blasts “A moi, sergent; a moi, mes enfwnts!” he called as the whistle fell clinking and bouncing to the gravestone be neath his feet.

As I carried the light, crumpled body of Ramalha Drigo toward the cemetery gate I heard the crash of booted feet against the graveyard shrubs mingling with hoarsely shout ed commands and the savage, eager baying of police dogs straining at the leash. A hulking shape brushed past me at a run, and I made out the form of a state trooper rushing toward de Grandin, swinging a riot stick as he

Something cold as clay touched my face. It was one of Ramalha’s little hands lying against my cheek as her arm had bent between her body and my shoulder when I caught her as she fell. Shifting her weight to one arm I took the poor dead hand in my free hand and lowered it to her side, then froze like a statue in my tracks. Faint, so faint it could scarcely be recognized, but perceptible, neverthe-

“Good Lord!” I almost shouted to the unheeding night. “Merciful heaven, the child is alive!”

Rushing as I had not rushed since my cub days as an ambulance sur geon, I carried her to my waiting car, bundled the motor rug about her and drove to her father’s house at a pace which took account of no speed limit save my engine’s greatest capacity.

Kicking at the door, I roused the Drigo family from their beds, carried the senseless girl upstairs and placed her between woolen blankets with every available water-bottle and hotpack in the house at her feet and

Ten, fifteen minutes I watched be side her, administering a hypodermic injection of strychnin each five min utes. Gradually, like the shadow of the dawn breaking against a winter horizon, the faint flush of circulating blood appeared in her pallid lips and cheeks.

Standing at my elbow, Ricardo Drigo watched first apathetically, then wonderingly, finally in a fever of incredulous hope and fear. As a faint respiration fluttered the girl’s breast, he fell to his knees beside the bed, burying his face in his hands and sobbing aloud in hysterical joy. “Oh, Lord of heaven,” he prayed be tween sobs, “reward, I beseech you, this Dr. de Grandin, for surely he is not as other men!”

‘‘Tiens, my friend, you do speak truth!” agreed a complacent voice from the doorway behind us. “Of a certainty Jules de Grandin is a very remarkable fellow, but if you seek some necromancer, you would better look elsewhere. This de Grandin, he is a scientist; no more. Cordieu! Is that not enough?”

“JpAR la barbe d’un corbeau, MonIT sieur, but this port is exquisite! ’ ’ de Grandin assured Drigo three hours later as he passed his tumbler across the table for replenishment. “And these so divine cigars”—he raised both hands in mute admiration,— “parbleu, I could smoke three of them at once and mourn because my mouth would not accommodate a fourth!

“But I see our good friend Trow bridge grows restless. He would have •the whole story, from the beginning. Very well, then, to begin:

“As I told Friend Trowbridge, I had but come from Rio when I ar rived in New York the other day. While I was in that so superb city of Brazil I became acquainted with more than one delegado of police, and from them I heard many strange things. For example”—he fixed his penetrat ing gaze on Drigo for a moment— “I heard the mystery of a Portuguese gentleman who came to Brazil from East Africa and took a beautiful house in the Praia Botafogo, only to relinquish it before his furniture was fairly settled in it. Before this gentleman lived in Africa he had dwelt in India. He was bom there, in fact.

“Why he left that so beautiful city of Rio the police did not know; but they had a story from one of their detectives that that gentleman came suddenly face to face with a Hindoo sailor from one of the ships in the harbor while he and his daughter were shopping in the Ouvidor. The Hindoo, it was said, had but looked at the daughter and laughed in the father’s face; but it was enough. He departed from Rio next day, that gentleman; both he and his family and all his servants. To the United States he went, though none knew to what part, or why.

“Eh bien, it was one of the fragments of mystery which we of the Service de Sûreté do constantly encounter—a little incident of life without beginning or end, without ancestry or posterity. Never mind, I stored it in my brain for future reference. Sooner or later all things we remember come to have a use, n’est-ce-pas?

“When next I see my dear friend Trowbridge he is looking very long in the face. One of his patients, a Brazilian lady, have died that very day, and he can not account for her death. But his story sounds interesting, and I think, perhaps-maybe, I find out something of some new disease, so I ask him to let me investigate. "

“ When we come to the house where this dead lady lay I am struck with— with something about her look, and I remember most American dead are embalmed almost instantly for their burial. I touch her face, it has not the hardness of flesh preserved with formaldehyde. Then I feel for the wounds where the embalmer would have cut; but I find none. One thing more I find. While her face were cold, it were not cold as the surround ing air. ‘How does this come’ asks 'Jules de Grandin of Jules de Grandin; but answer there was none at all.

“As my dear Trowbridge and I leave that house of death I see the portrait of a gentleman who much resembled our host, but who wore a uniform such as the British army once wore. Yet not quite. There was a difference there, but what it was I can not say then.

“I ask Monsieur Drigo who the painted gentleman was, and he say, ‘He are my grandfather.’

“That night I do much thinking; finally I believe I have the thread of this mystery in my hands. I put to gether my knowledge and this is what I get: "

“The uniform that painted gentle man wore are not of the British army, hut of the British India Company. So. Now, he was a man in early mid dle life, this painted gentleman who wear the insignia of an artilleryman on his uniform, and, judging by his grandson’s apparent age, he should have lived about the time of the American Civil War. Very good, what was happening in India, where this painted gentleman lived, then? I think some more; then, ‘Ah,’ Jules de Grandin tell Jules de Grandin, ‘Jules de Grandin, you are one great stupid head; it was in 1857 that the Sepoy troops revolted against the English in India.’

“Yes? And what then? For once in history those English did act with sense. They meted to those Indian rebels with such measure as the reb els gave to them. For the atrocities of Nana Sahib they took logical ven geance by tying those rebels to the mouths of cannon and—pouf! it was soon over when the cannoneers fired their guns.

“So far, so good. What then? Those Indians are a vengeful race. They harbor hatred through many generations. This much I know. Something else I know, too. In India they sometimes, for money, will hypnotize a man—or, perchance, a woman—and bury him, to all appearances dead, in the earth for so long a time that corn planted above his grave will take root and grow several inches high. I have seen that with 1 my own two eyes. Also I remember how one Colonel Ainsworth, an English gentleman who commanded some of the cannon from which those mutineers were blown to death, had apparently died in his English home in 1875, but came to life in the family vault ten days later.

"Almost he went crazy from that experience, though he was at length rescued. Two years later ho suffered the same terrible fate. He was buried for dead, and came back to life again. And each time, before he had his seeming death, he had encountered a Hindoo in the road. At last he could stand the strain no more; but shot himself really dead rather than face the terror of a third living burial."

"Now, the people who wrote down the strange ease of Colonel Ainsworth did but note that he had met Hindoos before he seemingly died; but, apparently, they attached no importance to these meetings. I do otherwise; for when I search my memory I find that of the officers who commanded the British guns at the Sepoys’ executions, nearly all died violent or sudden deaths. How do we know how many of them were buried alive, but not rescued as Colonel Ainsworth was? Eh? Also I remember from the records that many of the descendants of those officers had died mysteriously or suddenly, sometimes both.

“ ‘Morbleu,’ I tell myself, ‘Jules de Grandin, I think maybe-perhaps we have discover something!’

“I bet with myself, therefore, that this poor dead lady, will not rest easy in her grave. Dead she may be, cher Trowbridge has so certified; but if she were not first dead in fact—the Brazilians do not believe in embalming their dead, and the embalmer’s instruments not therefore have made certain that she is dead altogether. Very well, then; wait and see.

"Next day my friend Trowbridge tell me her grave was robbed. I go to watch them open it, and find the tombs in that cemetery are old passages underground. She is not in her grave, I see that; but she might be somewhere in the cemetery, nevertheless. I learn, by asking what my friend Trowbridge would call silly questions, that the grave space where this lady was buried once belonged to a family called Bouvier. Old Mon sieur Bouvier, who live and die many years ago, had a morbid fear of being buried alive, so he had a special tomb constructed in such manner that if he come to life underground he can slide back a panel of stone as you would open a door, and walk home to his family, This old tomb is still standing above the spot where this unfortunate dead lady have been buried. ‘Maybe,’ I tell myself, ‘maybe something have happen in that cemetery while no one was watching. ’

“Already I have made inquiries and find that two strange negroes have been in town since some days before this poor lady died. But though they lived in the negro quarter they had nothing to do with the other colored people. Query: were they negroes or were they not negroes, and if not, what were they? Hindoo, per haps? I think yea.

"What then? The girl’s mantilla has been found above ground; her body has not been found below. Perhaps they play cat-and-mouse with her, sending her forth from her grave at night like a very vampire, perhaps to injure her father or others whom she had loved in life. I decide I will watch. "

“I seek out that Monsieur Lesterton, who is the juge d’instruction — how do you say? county prosecutor? —and tell him all.

“He is a lawyer in a million, that one. Instead of saying, ‘Talk to the Marines about it,’ he nod his head and tell me X. may have as many gen darmes as X wish to help- me with my and tell me I may have as many gendarmes as I wish to help me with my work. “Tonight I go with Friend Trowbridge and watch beside that old Monsieur Bouvier’s tomb. Presently that poor girl who is bound fast in the death which is not death comes forth, walking over her own grave. “Jules de Grandin is no fool. He, too, can hypnotize, and what a man can do he can undo, likewise, if he be clever. I order her to wake up. I flash my light in her eyes and I bring her to consciousness, then to natural sleep, as she was before the Hindoos’ power make her appear dead. I turn her over to Friend Trowbridge to make all well while I and the gendarmes search for those men who are the masters of death. “We find them hidden in an old tomb, far underground. One of them I have the felicity of killing when he would resist arrest. The other is shot by a trooper when he would fly, but ere his life ran out with his blood he tells me he and his companion have followed Monsieur Drigo from India to Africa and from Africa to America. Two days before she ‘died’ Mademoiselle Ramalha is met by these men as she walks in the country. They hypnotize her and order her to ‘die’ in forty-eight hours—to die and be buried, then come forth from her grave each night at midnight and visit her father’s house. Voilà, that fellow, he too, died; but not before I had the truth.”

“But how did you make him confess, de Grandin?” I asked. “Surely his conscience did not trouble him, and if he knew he was dying he had nothing to fear from you.”

“Eh, did he not?” de Grandin answered with an elfish grin. “Ah, but he did! The pig is unclean to those people. If they do but so much as touch a pore they do lose their caste. I did promise that fellow that if he did not tell me all, and tell the truth, right away, immediately, at once, I would see he was buried in the same coffin with a pig’s carcass and that his grave should be wet with the blood of a slaughtered swine every full moon. Pardieu, you should have seen him make haste to tell me all before he died!”

He turned toward Drigo: “Mademoiselle Ramalha has little to fear in the future, Monsieur,” he promised. “The agents of vengeance have failed, and I do not think they will make another attempt upon her.”

“Meanwhile, Friend Trowbridge, the morning breaks and the shadows flee away. Let us bid Monsieur Drigo good-night and hasten home.”

“Cordieu!” he chuckled as we climbed into my waiting motor, “had I stayed beside Monsieur Drigo’s wine a half-hour longer I should not have been able to leave at all. As it is, Trowbridge, my friend, I see two of you sitting beside me!”