The Fatal Kiss Mystery

by Rufus King

  “The gardener and his assistant, sir—Miss Duveen’s chauffeur, who isn’t here just now. He is—”

  “Just list the ones on hand.”

  “The gardener and his assistant, sir. The chef and the houseman. The houseman took a little jaunt down to—”

  “Get the gardener, his assistant, the chef, two coils of rope, and then all of you join me out front.”

  “The gardener, sir—”

  “Make it snappy. Every minute is of value.”

  “Very good, sir.”

  The trooper felt the press of lost hope, unacknowledged in his heart. He would make an effort—the very best effort that any man could make—to save the little handful of human beings trapped in that treacherous valley by the terrible flames. But time, wind, and land itself were against him.

  Whatever their speed to the ridge-top at the valley’s end, the flames would have seared its depths before lines could be lowered to the prisoners below. The fact did not deter his intention or his energy one whit. Only too well he knew, from his own experiences with service in war and with the later more subtle menaces, of peace, that when man’s last effort had failed, some special Power had a curious habit of jumping in and offering one final reprieve.

  It was on this reprieve that he counted.

  There were, as he knew, a stream and a waterfall in the valley. There were pools in the stream; depths beneath which one could plunge and hold one’s breath while the fire blazed its lazy heat across the surface. But when one did—when one had to come up for breath—

  He shut his mind’s eye resolutely upon the disagreeable picture. What happened when one did come up for breath was not his job. It was the job of that special Power who controlled laws extraterrestrial, as he did his small but earnest bit to control the observances of laws on earth.

  But it was his job to get down into that valley as soon as the smoulder in the fire’s red train would permit.

  If there then had been a reprieve, he would carry on—litters—physical aid—helping them out, those who were left—even if only one were left—one he, or one she were left…

  The gardener, who was eighty-five years old and shaken with a species of palsy, he discarded from their rolls, in conjunction with a clothes line. The assistant was a husky local lad and was recruited at once. The chef, in spite of his two hundred and fifty-odd pounds and his total incomprehension of the English language, was herded in, too.

  The five of them, along with two coils of serviceable rope, set out.

  “Now, the plan,” said the trooper, “is this. As soon as the flames…”

  CHAPTER XXII

  TOUCHING DELICATELY UPON A LOVERS’ MEETING AND, LESS DELICATELY, UPON ITS VICE VERSA

  The flames, while we are so fortuitously upon the subject, were doing nicely.

  The wind had indeed shifted, with a disreputable show of diabolism, into the worst possible quarter of the compass, and it was rolling the vast sheet of fire smack down the valley and toward the laboratory.

  The heat inside was becoming unendurable. Inasmuch as closets, at best, are reputed to be stuffy, the Lord alone knows what it must have been like for Thyrus in his.

  Ramier once more stood at the helm. That, of course, is merely a figure of speech. What he really was standing at was the keyboard of his transmitters.

  “Drusilla,” he called, “I shall again count ten.”

  Personally, I should have changed the number, being superstitious about such things, and would not have cared to risk tampering with fate—or whoever controls numerology—to the extent of perhaps producing another Greek. But, as I learned upon inquiry, this possibility did not occur to Ramier at all, as he has very few superstitions, if any.

  “One,” he began, “two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine—ready?—ten!”

  Then he pressed the keys.

  A figure began to materialize.

  It wore a skirt, which Billy examined with considerable suspicion. The figure was surrounded by an anthelion—that faint glory, or series of diffraction rings that appear about the shadows of an object cast by a low-hung sun upon a bank of fog. It became real.

  It became Drusilla.

  “Darling!” cried Ramier, with feeling.

  “My dear—my dear,” sobbed Drusilla, as they fell into each other’s arms.

  And the flames, as was their wont, came on and on.

  “If you knew” said Drusilla, “what I’ve been through!”

  “My fault,” murmured Ramier brokenly, “my fault!”

  “But you didn’t know, dear—you don’t know yet—”

  “To have you again, my own!”

  “Pet—”

  “Precious—”

  “Break!” said Billy peremptorily, though not without a tear, a happy tear, of his own. “Snap into it, old man, and get the others back. We have about two shakes of a short lamb’s tail left.”

  Even this estimate was drawing it a shade too fine. Not more than five or six hundred yards separated the laboratory from the fire. They could clearly hear its crackles, its roars, and its vicious hisses.

  “Mr. Duveen,” called Ramier, “please take your stand.” Then he counted: “One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, six—damn!—one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine—ten!”

  Again he pressed the keys.

  They waited.

  At the end of seven interminable seconds they saw, gesturing vigorously about of its own accord in air, an unlighted cigar.

  “Oh, hurry—hurry!” implored Drusilla, as the roar of the fire struck terror into her heart.

  Ramier, pale, breathing heavily, looked at the cigar and looked at his keys.

  “Quick, man—quick!” said Billy.

  Ramier turned to him. “Get Drusilla and Anna out of this,” he commanded. “Rush for the falls! I’ll follow after you with the rest.”

  But not a budge could Billy get out of either of the two ladies. It was a perfect specimen of a Never!-I-stay-with-you party. Drusilla wouldn’t leave Ramier, Anna wouldn’t leave Drusilla, and Billy felt a bit sheepish about leaving and standing underneath the waterfall by himself.

  So they wasted eleven more priceless seconds in saying, “Never—never—where you are I are!” and in watching the significantly gesturing cigar that still floated in air.

  “Shoot in more juice,” suggested Billy.

  Ramier was on the very point of doing so.

  He pressed the keys again.

  “Aha!” cried Duveen, bouncing into solidity with a rush. “And now, you young limb of an acrolith, which, for your better understanding, is a statue with a stone head and stone feet and with a trunk of draped wood, give me a light for this damned cigar!”

  “Papa,” began Drusilla, as coldly as the temperature of the room would permit, “control yourself.”

  Duveen at once suffered an attack of angina vocal chordis.

  I am uncertain as to whether or not that is the correct medical term, but I do know that angina is the word applied to any disease that is characterized by suffocation.

  “If you will be so good as to step to one side,” Ramier said to Duveen, “I will get back Mr. Wilkins.”

  “I—I—”

  “If you keep standing where you are,” warned Ramier severely, “you may find yourself back again where you were.”

  Duveen, with a look in his eyes that sprang from his heart, even though it was not one of love, moved a nimble step or two away.

  “Wait,” he muttered, “—just wait!”

  “And now, Mr. Wilkins,” said Ramier, “we are ready for you.”

  Ten.

  Press.

  Wilkins.

  “Young man,” were Mr. Wilkins’s first solid words, “I am going to send you up for twenty years.”

  Human nature, of which Duveen and Wilkins only possessed so much, could not longer endure the strain, and the two of them were preparing to launch a joint attack upon Ramier when Billy stopped them.

&nb
sp; He dragged them, protesting, to the door and flung it open, in order to convince them of the need for haste.

  Someone screamed.

  A tongue of flame had leaped across the threshold.

  “Fire!” said Duveen, in the manner of a man who instantly recognizes an emergency and wants to know what someone is going to do about it.

  “Shut the door!” shouted Ramier.

  Billy did so.

  “I hope you see, young man, what your tomfoolery has gotten us into,” said Mr. Wilkins, very much shaken, and mentally adding another ten years to the stretch he proposed for his client.

  “Stuff!” announced Drusilla warmly. “You haven’t the vision to grasp the importance of what he has accomplished. What if we are burned alive? Look at what he has done.”

  “That’s just what I am looking at,” insisted Mr. Wilkins sternly.

  “Fire!” repeated Duveen, as he swept a commanding gesture toward the washstand where stood a pitcher that presumably contained water. “Throw that pitcher of water upon the walls. We must keep our heads.”

  Anna, who had always been secretly impressed by Duveen and very much in awe of his lightest word, seized the pitcher and obeyed him literally.

  “Arrarrgh!” shouted Duveen, as he picked a bit of porcelain from his left ear. “Now you’ve gone and done it. Get buckets and form a line!”

  “Oh, do keep still, Papa!” begged his daughter. “We haven’t any buckets, and even if we had, there isn’t any water.”

  “I refuse,” said Duveen, “to be burned alive. There must be some way out.”

  Need I state that the fire was already licking against the outer wall of the laboratory? The windows had been closed, and their panes were scarlet with flame. It really did seem as if there was nothing left for them to do but to face their fate calmly and unafraid—like five good Americans, one ex-Lithuanian, and one Greek.

  There was no way out.

  “Mr. Duveen,” said Ramier impressively, “in this, our last moment on earth, I want to ask your pardon and forgiveness for what I have done.”

  “By all means—by all means,” muttered Duveen distractedly. He was still looking for a bucket.

  “I particularly want you to give your blessing to Drusilla and me,” continued Ramier. “We are engaged to be married.”

  “Yes, yes,” agreed Duveen. “Aha!” He had found a bucket.

  Anna, in the extremity of their situation, proved undoubtedly to have been the most practical person present.

  She prayed. There were no trimmings to her prayer. She just told her God that she wanted Him to put out that there fire.

  It has remained a moot question whether Anna’s prayer or Billy’s pickax did the trick. Perhaps it is only just, in our materialistic age, to split fifty-fifty between the two.

  Billy’s pickax undoubtedly did a good deal toward loosening the stones of the stream’s diverting wall, and thus opening up a considerable number of fissures and cracks.

  And Anna’s prayer may very comfortably be allowed the credit for causing the wall to crumple completely and permit, as it did, in the more than proverbial nick—one might almost be tempted to say nick Carter—of time, the full sweep of the stream to swing back into its original channel and pour a great curtain of rushing water straight down upon the blazing roof and front of the laboratory.

  The roar and hiss of the steam, as the water struck the flames, were tremendous, and for a shocking moment no one knew what was happening. But in the twinkle of an eye the fire was out and

  They

  Were

  SAVED.

  CHAPTER XXIII

  A HAPPY ENDING

  I am told by the same eminent authority who holds such rigid views on the proper narrative form for employing the use of the first person singular, that a writer, having shot his bolt, should pounce—with no further monkey business or ramifications—upon all outlying threads of his tale, tie them at once into their respective knots, and say adieu.

  Billy insists that the fire, with its late-’nineties waterfall finale, with Drusilla and Ramier in each other’s arms, and with Duveen and Mr. Wilkins in his arms—to prevent them from flying with their own arms at Ramier—and with Anna in nobody’s arms, although trying to capture a freehold on some portion of her beloved Miss Drusilla, is my bolt and that the curtain should drop upon it with a swift descent.

  Perhaps that is the modern way, and perhaps people nowadays prefer to leave their tales in a dazzle. I do not know. To such I can only advise that they let the preceding chapter serve them as this chronicle’s end.

  But to those who are of my own generation, and who have been wont to travel with their heroes and their heroines a few steps farther through the haven that was always theirs after the storm, and out a mile or so upon the broad, fair, peaceful highway whose termination is an honored, happy grave—to those I write these few remaining words.

  The roof began to leak.

  Here, there, everywhere—as is the time-honored custom with roofs—it began to leak. And the wet, sickish smell of just-extinguished wood hung thickly in the air.

  For a moment there was the customary reaction one always feels at the time of an escape from some catastrophe—a sense of mutual congratulation and of loving-kindness.

  “Well, well,” said Duveen, with a to-think-that-I-am-still-alive look on his face, “that was a narrow squeak.”

  “That isn’t rain,” said Mr. Wilkins, his practical and keenly perceptive nature again uppermost and firmly in hand. “It looks much too unseparated for rain. It looks like a waterfall.”

  “It is a waterfall,” said Billy.

  “Nonsense,” said Mr. Wilkins. “It’s another of the mechanical dewdabs you’ve got this place loaded up with. And I might suggest, seeing that it has served its purpose and extinguished the fire, that you go and turn it off.”

  “Fat chance!” said Billy. “I had enough trouble, I can tell you, in turning it on. The best thing we can do is to get out of this place before the roof collapses.”

  They had reached the door before they remembered Thyrus.

  Drusilla shuddered when the suggestion was offered that they would have to release him. The cause for her shudder was Thyrus’s treatment during the hours when she had been with him in the invisible state.

  Thyrus had been very polite at first and, what with his politeness and his amazingly good looks, Drusilla had been charmed. But it seems that Thyrus was a fast worker, in spite of his age.

  He had at once fallen desperately in love with her.

  Having been in the invisible state for so many thousands of years, he was quite practiced in the art of moving speedily and conveniently around, whereas Drusilla, and party, were forced to learn to walk all over again. They were like children who are just being taught.

  It was no trouble at all for Thyrus to pick up and park Mr. Wilkins and Duveen wherever he liked, and thus, having singled her out, keep Drusilla alone and incapable of escaping from his wooing.

  Her coldness and her repulses had been sufficient to drive him into a frenzy of jealousy and anger. It was while in this petulant mood that he had given the wrong directions to Ramier, with the full intention that the lot of them should be blown to Kingdom Come and let the rest of the world go bang.

  Thyrus’s next plan was to get himself restored to solidity, kill Ramier, and then return to invisibility again where, with Ramier out of the way, he hoped to induce Drusilla to listen to reason. He figured that he would have lots of time in which to do it.

  Ramier kept changing from hot to cold while he listened to a brief resume of this plot from Drusilla’s lips. It was not exactly with the kindest feelings in the world that he strode to the cupboard door and, having gotten the key from Billy, unlocked and pulled it open. The cupboard was empty. On the floor was a small heap of dust, and beside it lay a mean, wicked-looking, razor-edged, big Greek knife.

  The dust was Thyrus.

  One must presume that he committed suicide and t
hat his body, with life extinct, returned to the dust of the ages.

  It was Drusilla who insisted upon a further, and dangerous, delay. She reverently scooped up the dust and put it in a large jar with the intention of later—and as she did—giving it a proper burial. Villain though he was, she reasoned, woman-like, he was somebody’s mother, or the other way around, and in spite of his failings—which were really nothing less flattering than a violent crush on her—he had had a winning way.

  Let that be his epitaph.

  “And now, young man,” said Duveen, after the extemporaneous obsequies were over, “where shall I find an umbrella?”

  “Papa,” said Drusilla, reverently snapping shut the patented catch on the jar’s lid, “if you ask for a single more thing I shall screech. You couldn’t use an umbrella in that waterfall even if you had one.”

  “I refuse,” said Duveen finally, “to walk through all of that water without protection of some nature. You know very well that my constitution lays itself open to catching colds in summer.”

  “This roof,” said Billy pointedly, “is about to crack. If you all don’t want to get pinned in under here and drowned, beat it and beat it quick!”

  It was excellent advice. Ramier grabbed Drusilla, Duveen and Mr. Wilkins grabbed each other, and Billy grabbed as much of Anna as he could.

  “It is evident,” said the trooper as he and Oscar—who alone had succeeded in making the descent by rope with him—stared at the smooth surface of the waterfall, “that there either never was a shack here at all, or else that it is built closer to the center of the valley than to this end of it.” Oscar, who felt faintish, sat upon a boulder. The excessive heat it contained made him rise again with startling swiftness.

  “God’s struth!” he said, walking about.

  They decided to pick their way along the cooler places toward the mouth of the valley.