A faint grating noise echoed through the lofty Burton Room. Bristol slipped past me in the semi-gloom, and gently opened the communicating door a few inches.

A-tiptoe, I joined him, and craning across his shoulder saw a strange and wonderful thing.

The newly glazed east window again was shattered with a booming crash! The yellow blind was thrust aside. A long something reached out toward the broken case. There was a sort of fumbling sound, and paralyzed with the wonder of it--for the window, remember, was thirty feet from the ground--I stood frozen to my post.

Not so Bristol. As the weird tentacle (or more exactly it reminded me of a gigantic crab's claw) touched the case, the Inspector leapt forward. A white beam from his electric torch cut through to the broken cabinet.

The thing was withdrawn ... and with it went the slipper of the Prophet.

"Raise the blinds!" cried Bristol. "Mr. Cavanagh! Mr. Mostyn!

We must not let them give us the slip!"

I got up the blind of the nearer window as Bristol raised the other.

Not a living thing was in sight from either!

Mostyn was beside me, his hand resting on my shoulder. I noted how he trembled. Bristol turned and looked back at us. The light from his pocket torch flashed upon the curator's face; and I have never seen such an expression of horrified amazement as that which it wore. Faintly, I could hear the constable racing up the steps from the hall.

Ideas of the supernatural came to us all, I know; when, with a scuffling sound not unlike that of a rat in a ceiling, something moved above us!

"d.a.m.n my thick head!" roared Bristol, furiously. "He's on the roof!

It's flat as a floor and there's enough ivy alongside the water-spout on your house adjoining, Mr. Mostyn, to afford foothold to an invading army!"

He plunged off toward the open door, and I heard him racing down the a.s.syrian Room.

"He had a short rope ladder fixed from the gutter!" he cried back at us. "Graham! Graham!" (the constable on duty in the hall)--"Get the front door open! Get..." His voice died away as he leapt down the stairs.

From the direction of Orpington Square came a horrid, choking scream. It rose hideously; it fell, rose again--and died.

The thief escaped. We saw the traces upon the ivy where he had hastened down. Bristol ascended by the same route, and found where the ladder-hooks had twice been attached to the gutterway. Constable Graham, who was first actually to leave the building, declared that he heard the whirr of a re-started motor lower down Great Orchard Street.

Bristol's theory, later to be dreadfully substantiated, was that the thief had broken the gla.s.s and reached into the case with an arrangement similar to that employed for pruning trees, having a clutch at the end, worked with a cord.

"Ha.s.san has been too clever for us!" said the inspector. "But--what in G.o.d's name did that awful screaming mean?"

I had a theory, but I did not advance it then.

It was not until nearly dawn that my theory, and Bristol's, regarding the clutch arrangement, both were confirmed. For close under the railings which abut on Orpington Square, in a pool of blood we found just such an instrument as Bristol had described.

And still clutching it was a pallid and ghastly shrunken hand that had been severed from above the wrist!

"Merciful G.o.d!" whispered the inspector--"look at the opal ring on the finger! Look at the bandage where he cut himself on the broken window-gla.s.s that first night, when Mr. Mostyn disturbed him.

It wasn't the Hashishin who stole the thing.... It's Earl Dexter's hand!"

No one spoke for a moment. Then--

"Which of them has--" began Mostyn huskily.

"The slipper of the Prophet?" interrupted Bristol. "I wonder if we shall ever know?"

CHAPTER XV

A SHRIVELLED HAND

Around a large square table in a room at New Scotland Yard stood a group of men, all of whom looked more or less continuously at something that lay upon the polished deal. One of the party, none other than the Commissioner himself, had just finished speaking, and in silence now we stood about the gruesome object which had furnished him with the text of his very terse address.

I knew myself privileged in being admitted to such a conference at the C.I.D. headquarters and owed my admission partly to Inspector Bristol, and partly to the fact that under the will of the late Professor Deeping I was concerned in the uncanny business we were met to discuss.

Novelty has a charm for every one; and to find oneself immersed in a maelstrom of Eastern devilry, with a group of scientific murderers in pursuit of a holy Moslem relic, and unexpectedly to be made a trustee of that dangerous curiosity, makes a certain appeal to the adventurous. But to read of such things and to partic.i.p.ate in them are widely different matters. The slipper of the Prophet and the dreadful crimes connected with it, the mutilations, murders, the uncanny mysteries which made up its history, were filling my world with horror.

Now, in silence we stood around that table at New Scotland Yard and watched, as though we expected it to move, the ghastly "clue"

which lay there. It was a shrivelled human hand, and about the thumb and forefinger there still dryly hung a fragment of lint which had bandaged a jagged wound. On one of the shrunken fingers was a ring set with a large opal.

Inspector Bristol broke the oppressive silence.

"You see, sir," he said, addressing the Commissioner, "this marks a new complication in the case. Up to this week although, unfortunately, we had made next to no progress, the thing was straightforward enough. A band of Eastern murderers, working along lines quite novel to Europe, were concealed somewhere in London.

We knew that much. They murdered Professor Deeping, but failed to recover the slipper. They mutilated everyone who touched it mysteriously. The best men in the department, working night and day, failed to effect a single arrest. In spite of the mysterious activity of Ha.s.san of Aleppo the slipper was safely lodged in the British Antiquarian Museum."

The Commissioner nodded thoughtfully.

"There is no doubt," continued Bristol, "that the Hashishin were watching the Museum. Mr. Cavanagh, here"--he nodded in my direction--"saw Ha.s.san himself lurking in the neighbourhood. We took every precaution, observed the greatest secrecy; but in spite of it all a constable who touched the accursed thing lost his right hand. Then the slipper was taken."

He stopped, and all eyes again were turned to the table.

"The Yard," resumed Bristol slowly, "had information that Earl Dexter, the cleverest crook in America, was in England. He was seen in the Museum, and the night following the slipper was stolen.

Then outside the place I found--that!"

He pointed to the severed hand. No one spoke for a moment. Then--

"The new problem," said the Commissioner, "is this: who took the slipper, Dexter or Ha.s.san of Aleppo?"

"That's it, sir," agreed Bristol. "Dexter had two pa.s.sages booked in the Oceanic: but he didn't sail with her, and--that's his hand!"

"You say he has not been traced?" asked the Commissioner.

"No doctor known to the Medical a.s.sociation," replied Bristol, "is attending him! He's not in any of the hospitals. He has completely vanished. The conclusion is obvious!"

"The evident deduction," I said, "is that Dexter stole the slipper from the Museum--G.o.d knows with what purpose--and that Ha.s.san of Aleppo recovered it from him."

"You think we shall next hear of Earl Dexter from the river police?"

suggested Bristol.

"Personally," replied the Commissioner, "I agree with Mr. Cavanagh.

I think Dexter is dead, and it is very probable that Ha.s.san and Company are already homeward bound with the slipper of the Prophet."

With all my heart I hoped that he might be right, but an intuition was with me crying that he was wrong, that many b.l.o.o.d.y deeds would be, ere the sacred slipper should return to the East.