Part 4

"But do you think it right? What I may have done, does not justify you. I venture to say you and other young chaps have sat with heels cocked up and pipes in mouth and discussed me and called me a villain for doing what you are trying to do with me."

"I have indeed. But that was in the past and I have changed my views materially. At present, I have the exclusive possession of the ability to secure something you very much want. You offered eight hundred dollars. Intrinsically, the ring is not worth it, but for certain reasons, possession of the ring is worth eight hundred dollars."

"Possession of the ring! Certain reasons!" said Mr. Crecelius, springing to his feet and pacing up and down the room angrily. As Mr. Middleton was cudgelling his brains to find some reason for this outburst of anger, he became cognizant of a small piece of folded paper lying near his feet. He was about to pick it up and hand it to the financier, when he was stayed by the reflection that it might have dropped from his own pocket and examining it, read:

"It's his wife's ring. I wore it along with some of her other things. Ten years ago, he gave it to another woman, and his wife found it out and he had to buy it back. He is afraid his wife will think he gave the ring away a second time. That is why I dared give it to you. Make him give you a thousand.

"The One You Didn't Give Away."

Mr. Middleton put the note in his pocket, and the eminent capitalist having ceased pacing and standing gazing at him, he remarked:

"Certain reasons, such as preventing an altercation with your wife over her suspicions that you had not lost the ring, but had disposed of it as on a former occasion ten years since."

"Young man, you cannot blackmail me. My wife knows all about that. The knowledge of that occurrence is worthless as a piece of blackmail."

"As blackmail, yes; but not worthless as an indication of the extent you desire to regain possession of the ring. Your wife knows of your former escapade and that is gone and past. But the present disappearance of the ring will cause her to think you have repeated the escapade. This knowledge of certain conditions causes me to see that my services in securing and delivering the ring are worth one thousand dollars. Upon the payment of that sum, cash, I hand you the ring."

The distinguished money-king gave Mr. Middleton a very black look and then left the room to return almost immediately with a thousand dollars in bills, which Mr. Middleton counted, placed in his vest pocket, and forthwith delivered the ring. As he did so, yielding to the pride with which the successful outcome of his tilt with the great capitalist inflamed him, he remarked with a condescension which the suavity of his tones could not conceal:

"Had you, sir, employed in this affair the perspicacity you have displayed on so many notable occasions, it would have occurred to you that this ring, being of a common pattern, could be duplicated for seven hundred dollars and so you be saved both money and worry."

A look of admiration overspread the face of the eminent manipulator, and grasping Mr. Middleton's hand with great fervor, he exclaimed:

"A man after my own heart. I am always ready to acknowledge a defeat. You have good stuff in you. I must know you better. You must stay and have a glass of champagne with me. I will get it myself," and he hurried out of the room.

In the state of Wisconsin, from which Mr. Middleton hailed, there is a great deal of the alcoholic beverage, beer, but such champagne as is to be found there is all due to importation, since it is not native to the soil, but is brought in at great expense from France, La Belle France, and New Jersey, La Belle New Jersey. Mr. Middleton had seen, smelled, and tasted beer, but champagne was unknown to him save by hearsay, and his improper curiosity and his readiness to succumb to temptation caused him to linger in the salon of Mr. Crecelius, thereby nearly accomplishing his ruin. Suddenly there was a patter of light steps across the floor, a hand fell lightly on his shoulder and a voice lightly on his ear.

"You made him raving mad when you said what you did. He telephoned the police. Now he has gone for the wine and will try to hold you until they come."

"But he cannot arrest me. I have done nothing," said Mr. Middleton, his heart going pit-a-pat, in spite of the boldness of his words.

"He can make all sorts of trouble for you. Even if you did come out all right in the end, think of the trouble. Come, come quick!"

A soft hand had grasped one of his and he was up and away, following his fair guide up stairs, through the house, and down into the kitchen.

"I have recovered my wits a bit," said Mr. Middleton. "He is so angry that he has no thought but immediate vengeance, and so accordingly telephones the police, and if they were to catch me here, it certainly would be bad. But to-morrow he will be in a mood to appreciate the good sense of the letter I shall send him, calling his attention to the fact that if he arrests me, in the trial there must come out the reason why I demanded one thousand dollars, the story of his domestic indiscretion, and so he will not think of pursuing the matter further."

"It was very kind and very noble of you not to expose me," said the young woman in a voice in which gratitude and sadness were mingled; "and all the admiration and gratitude a woman can feel under such circumstances, I feel toward you. To you I owe my continued good name and even my very freedom. I know that marriage with such as you, is not for such as me. I am going to ask you to give to her who would have all, but expects and deserves nothing, the consolation of a kiss. Whatever happy maiden may be so fortunate as to receive your love, I shall have treasured in memory the golden remembrance that once my preserver bestowed on me the symbol of love."

Mr. Middleton looked down at the girl, supplicating for the favor her sex is wont to deny, and he said to himself that seldom had he seen a more flower-like face. Her lovely lips were already puckered in a rosy pout, her hands raised ready to rest on his shoulders as he should encircle her with his arms, when he noted with a start that her eyes, snapping, alert, and eager, were bent not upon his face, but upon his upper left hand vest pocket, where bulged the one thousand dollars in bills.

"I am more than honored and I shall be ravished with delight to comply. But here, where we stand, we are exposed to view from three sides. If Mr. Crecelius were to look in and see you being kissed by me, whom he so dislikes, in what a bad plight you would be. Not even for the exquisite pleasure of kissing you would I subject you to such a danger. But in the shadow by the outer door, we would not be seen."

As he said these words, Mr. Middleton placed the money in his inside vest pocket, buttoned his vest, buttoned his inner coat, and buttoned his overcoat, moving toward the outer door as he did so, the young woman following him more and more slowly, the light in her eyes dying with each successive buttoning. In fact, she did not enter into the shadow at all, and Mr. Middleton stepped back a bit when he threw his arms about her and pressed her to his bosom. Perfunctorily and coldly did she yield to his embrace, but whatever ardor was lacking on her part, was compensated for by Mr. Middleton, who clasped her with exceeding tightness and showered kisses upon her pouting lips until she pushed him from her, exclaiming with annoyance:

"You've kissed me quite enough, you great big softy."

Mr. Middleton said nothing of these transactions when on the ensuing evening he sat in the presence of the young lady of Englewood, nor did he, when on the evening thereafter he once more sat in the presence of the urbane prince of the tribe of Al-Yam. Having handed him a bowl of delicately flavored sherbet, Achmed began to narrate The Adventure of Nora Sullivan and the Student of Heredity.

_The Adventure of Norah Sullivan and the Student of Heredity._

It was the time of full moon. As the orb of day dropped its red, huge disk below the western horizon, over the opposite side of the world, the moon, even more huge and scarcely less red, rose to irradiate with its mild beams the scenes which the shadows of darkness had not yet touched. Miss Nora Sullivan, a teacher in the public schools of the metropolis, sat upon the front porch of the paternal residence enjoying the loveliness of the vernal prospect and the balm of the air, for it was in the flowery month of June. Although the residence of Timothy Sullivan was well within the limits of the municipality of Chicago, one visiting at that hospitable abode might imagine himself in the country. From no part of the enclosure could you, during the leafy season, see another human habitation. A quarter of a mile down the road to the east, the electric cars for Calumet could be seen flitting by, but except at the intervals of their passing, there was seldom anything to suggest that the location was part of a great city. A quarter of a mile to the west, on the edge of a marsh--a situation well suited to such culture--lived a person engaged in the raising of African geese. As it is probable that you may never have heard of African geese, I will tell you that they are the largest of their tribe and that specimens of them often weigh as high as seventy pounds.

The person engaged in the culture of African geese was Wilhelm Klingenspiel, a man of German ancestry, but born in this country. Miss Sullivan had often heard of him, she had even partaken of the left leg of an African goose, which leg he had given Mr. Sullivan for the Sunday dinner, but she had never seen him. As Wilhelm Klingenspiel was young and single and as no other man of any description lived in the vicinity, it is not strange that Nora, who was also young and single, should sometimes fall to thinking of Mr. Klingenspiel and wonder what manner of man he was.

On this evening so attuned to romantic reveries, when the flowers, the birds, and all nature spoke of love, more than ever did Nora Sullivan's thoughts turn toward the large grove of trees to the westward in the midst of which Wilhelm Klingenspiel had his home and carried on his pleasant and harmless vocation of raising African geese. The evening song of the geese, tempered and sweetened by distance, came to her, accompanied by the most extraordinary booming and racketing of frogs which is to be heard outside of the tropical zone; for not only did Klingenspiel raise the largest geese on this terraqueous globe, but having, as a means of cheapening the cost of their production, devoted himself to the increasing of their natural food, by principles well known to all breeders he had developed a breed of frogs as monstrous among their kind as African geese are among theirs. By these huge batrachians was an extensive marsh inhabited, and battening upon the succulent nutriment thus afforded, the African geese gained a size and flavor which was rapidly making the fortune of Wilhelm Klingenspiel.

Nora had often meditated upon plans for making the acquaintance of Wilhelm, but it was plain that he was either very bashful or so immersed in his pursuits as to be indifferent to the charms of woman, for he had never made an attempt to see Nora in all the six months she had been his neighbor, and she was well worth seeing.

Accordingly, she decided that if she did not wish to indefinitely postpone making the acquaintance of the poulterer, she must take the initiative. Timothy Sullivan was a market gardener. Klingenspiel was not the only man in the neighborhood who grew big things. Mr. Sullivan was experimenting upon some cabbages of unusual size. He had started them in a hothouse during the winter. Later transferred to the garden, they had attained an amplitude such as few if any cabbages had ever attained before. In the pleasant light of the moon, even now was he engaged with the cabbages, pouring something upon them from a watering pot. As she watched her father, it occurred to Nora that she could find no more suitable excuse for visiting Mr. Klingenspiel than in carrying him some present in return for the goose's left leg he had presented her family for a Sunday dinner, and that there was no more appropriate present than one of the great cabbages.

No sooner had her father gone in than, selecting the largest cabbage, she started off with it, putting it in a small push-cart, as it was so large as to be too heavy and inconvenient to carry. It was somewhat late to call, but the evening was so delightful that Wilhelm Klingenspiel could hardly have gone to bed. Proceeding on her way, as the road passed into the swampy land of Klingenspiel's domain, her attention was engaged by the fact that a most singular commotion was taking place among the giant batrachians at some remote place south of the road. Their ordinary calls had increased both in volume and frequency, and at intervals she heard the sound of crashing in the brake and brush, as if some objects of unheard of size were falling into the marsh. Looking in the direction whence the sounds came, she saw indistinct and vague against the night sky, an enormous rounded thing rise in the air and descend, whereupon was borne to her another of the strange crashings. These inexplicable sounds and the inexplicable sight would have frightened Miss Sullivan had she not the resources with which modern science fortifies the mind against credulity and superstition. The round object, she told herself, was some sudden puff of smoke on a railway track far beyond; the crashing was the shunting of cars, which things, coming coincidentally with a battle of the frogs, to an ignorant mind would appear to be a phenomenon in the immediate vicinity. Bearing in mind that this seemingly real, but impossible, phenomenon could only be due to a fortuitous concatenation of actual occurrences, Nora was not disturbed in her mind. Leaving her cart some little distance up the road, in order that she might not be seen in the undignified position of pushing it, she walked into Klingenspiel's front yard, bearing her gift.

The two-story white house of Wilhelm Klingenspiel seemed to be deserted. Despite the genial season, every door was shut, and so was every window, so far as Nora could see, for if any windows were open down stairs, at least the blinds were shut. There were no blinds in the second story. Looking around in no little disappointment, she was astonished to see a row of sheds and fences in rear of the house had been demolished as if struck by a cyclone and that a goodly sized barn had departed from its normal position and with frame intact was lying on its side like a toy barn tipped over by a child. As she was gazing upon this ruinage and striving to conjecture what had caused it, she heard a voice, muffled and strange, yet distinctly audible, saying:

"Ribot is running amuck, Ribot is running amuck," and looking up she beheld, darkly visible against the panes of an upper story window, a human form. As she looked, the form disappeared and presently a person rushed from the front door, hauled her into the house and upstairs, where she found herself still holding her cabbage and observing a short man of a full habit, with a round moon face, illuminated by a large pair of spectacles that sustained themselves with difficulty upon a very snub nose. He was nearly bald, yet nevertheless of a kindly, studious, and astute appearance. One did not need to look twice to see that Wilhelm Klingenspiel was a scholar.

"What--what--what is the matter?" exclaimed Nora.

"Ribot is running amuck."

"Who is Ribot?"

Klingenspiel was about to answer, when the whole air was filled with what one would have called a squeal if it had been one fiftieth part so loud, and over a row of willow bushes across the road leapt an astounding great creature, twice as large as the largest elephant, and Nora began to realize that her scientific deductions regarding the phenomenon in the swamp had been utterly erroneous. The creature was of an oblong build, rounded in contour, and its hide was marked by large blotches of black and rufous yellow upon a ground of white. With extreme swiftness the creature scurried down the road, its legs being so short in proportion to its body and moving with such twinkling rapidity that it seemed to be propelled upon wheels. The appearance of this strange monster and the appalling character of its squealing, caused Nora to tremble like a leaf, but the animal having departed, a laudable curiosity made her forget her fears, and she asked:

"What is it?"

"That was Ribot."

"Who and what is Ribot?"

"Ribot was a celebrated French scientist, an authority on the subject of heredity. You doubtless know something of the subject, how certain traits appear in families generation after generation. Accidental traits, if repeated for two or three generations, often become inherent traits. To show you to what a strange extent this is true, I will call your attention to the case of the ducal house of Bethune in France, where three successive generations having had the left hand cut off at the wrist in battle, the next three generations were born without a left hand."

The erudite dissertation of Wilhelm Klingenspiel was here interrupted by the reappearance of the mottled monster, who, with a scream that filled the blue vault of heaven, rushed into the yard and paused before a mighty oak, whose sturdy trunk had stood rooted in that soil before the city of Chicago existed, before the United States was born, when Cahokia was the capital of Illinois and the flag of France waved over the great West. The flash of terrible white teeth showed in the moonlight as the monster gnawed at the base of the tree a few times and with a crash its leafy length lay upon the ground. Contemplating for a brief space the ruin it had wrought, the monster emitted another of its appalling screams and was off once more on its erratic, aimless course.

"What in the world is this awful creature?" cried Nora.

"The subject of heredity," resumed Klingenspiel, "is one of vast importance, and although its principles are well understood, man has hitherto not touched the possibilities that can be accomplished. The span of a man's life is so short that in selecting and breeding choice strains of animals, an individual can see only a comparatively small number of generations succeed each other. Suppose some one family had for two hundred years carried on continuous experiments in breeding any race of animals. What remarkable results would have been attained! Behold what remarkable results are attained in raising varieties of plants, where the swiftness of succeeding generations enables man to accomplish what he seeks in a very short time. Observing the difficulties that confront the animal breeder and wishing to see in my own lifetime certain results that might ordinarily be expected only in a duration of several lifetimes, I sought an animal which came to maturity rapidly, whose generations succeeded each rapidly. At the same time, I wanted an animal comparatively highly organized, a mammal, not a reptile."

At this point, his instructive discourse was interrupted by the reappearance of the monster, which charged into the yard with its nose to the ground, following some scent, sniffing so loudly that the sound was plainly audible despite the closed window. After having hastened about the yard for a few moments it was off up the road to the eastward, still with nose to the ground, until coming to the push cart left at the roadside by Nora, it examined it carefully and then with a sudden access of unaccountable rage, fell upon it and demolished it, beating and chewing it into bits.

Whatever celerity this terrible beast had exhibited before, was now completely eclipsed, as with nose to the ground, it rushed back to the yard, straight to the house, and rearing on its hinder quarters, placed its forelegs on the porch roof, which gave way beneath the ponderous weight. Not disconcerted by the removal of this support, the monster continued to maintain its sitting posture, looking in the window at the terrified persons beyond, snapping and gnashing its huge jaws in a manner terrible to hear and still more terrible to contemplate. Nora was partially reassured by observing that the animal's head was too wide to go through the window, but the hopes thus raised were dashed by Klingenspiel moaning:

"He'll gnaw right through the house, he'll chew right through the roof. He'll get in. He has smelled that big cabbage and he'll get in."

"In that case," remarked Nora, with decision, "I'll not wait for him to come in to get the cabbage, but throw it out to him," and raising the window, thrust out the cabbage, which having caught with a deftness unexpected in a creature of its bulk, the beast retired a short space and proceeded to eat with every appearance of enjoyment.

"In Paris, a few years ago," resumed Klingenspiel, "one of the learned faculty that lend a well deserved renown to the medical department of that ancient institution, the University of Paris, discovered an elixir which used during the period of human growth--and even after--causes the stature to increase. By depositing an increased supply of the matter necessary to the formation of bones, the frame increases and the fleshy covering grows with it. You have doubtless read of this in the papers, as I have seen it mentioned there recently myself----"

"I beg your pardon," interrupted Nora, "but I must know what that monster is. Please do not keep me in suspense any longer."

"Allow me to develop my discourse in its natural sequence," said Klingenspiel. "I learned of this elixir at the time its originator first formulated it and as we were friends, I secured from him the formula----"

"What is that animal?" cried Nora, seizing Klingenspiel's ear with a dexterity born of long experience in educational work, and lifting him slowly toward a position upon the points of his toes.

"A guinea pig, a guinea pig, a guinea pig," howled the student of heredity.