The Strange Adventures of Mr. Middleton

The six rushed at the carriage, whereat the rotund gentleman, with an agility not to be looked for in one of his contour and condition, received the foremost with smash, smash – smash, in each eye and on the nose, and the second likewise, when bidding the driver be off, he leaped into the carriage with his comrades. A single bullet whistled after them as they whirled away.

“Rap, rap – rap. I rapped ’em,” said the rotund gentleman. “I always did hate a knocker.”

With your permission I will here interpolate the remark that the further adventures of the eminent surgeon with the mysterious confederacy that sought his life, bore evidence that these depraved and ruffianly men were not without a certain rude artistic temperament as well as a tinge of romance, and a dramatic sense that many who write for the stage might well envy them.

The elation of the doctor over his escape from the toils of the thieves was not of long duration. His breakfast was interrupted by a call to the telephone and over the wires came to his startled ears a hollow “knock, knock – knock; knock, knock – knock.” At his office door down town softly came “tap, tap – tap; tap, tap – tap,” and snatch the door open as hastily as he might, he saw nothing, heard nothing, heard nothing but the electric bells on the floors above and floors below calling for the elevator: “buzz, buzz – buzz; buzz, buzz – buzz.” He walked along State Street at the busy hour of noon and all about him in the throngs was the dull impact of canes upon the pavement, “thud, thud – thud; thud, thud – thud.” As he rode home in the street car at nightfall, back of him in the train at street corner after corner he heard passengers jingle the bell for stopping, “ding, ding – ding; ding, ding – ding.”

Although Dr. McDill was a man of great native resolution and intrepid in the face of known and seen dangers, the horrors of the invisible forces of death everywhere surrounding him so wore at his soul that he returned down town and spent the night at a hotel. On the morrow, he severely condemned himself for this yielding to fear, for on the front steps of his house lay the dead form of his great watch dog, Jacques. There were evidences of a struggle in which the assailants had not been unscathed. Bits of cloth lay about and examining the stains of blood that plentifully blotched the walk, he discovered that some of it was human blood.

“Ah,” he said, in deep self-reproach, “if I had stayed here as I should, I would have been able to fight with poor Jacques and brought low some of my enemies. How easily I could have fired from the upper windows as Jacques made their presence known. It is evident that the noise of the struggle was so great that the fiends were afraid to continue the attack and ran away.”

Philosophers and poets have found a theme for dissertation in the fact that the dog leaves his own kindred to dwell with man and fights them in behalf of his master. It has ever seemed to me that this were but half of the tale, for full many a man loves his dog better than the rest of mankind, and so the devotion of the race of dogs finds return and recompense. Outside his own family, there was no living thing in the city of Chicago which had so dwelt in the affections of Dr. McDill as the dog Jacques. Of the truth of this, he had had but dim realization until now and he was like to burst with sorrow and with hatred of the vile beings who had marked him and his for slaughter. Lifting the stiff form of his humble comrade, for the first time did he observe a poniard thrust in the poor beast’s throat. The blade impaled a piece of paper and upon it was written the word “Knock.”

“Knock!” cried the doctor: “but henceforth it shall be I that knock. Hasten the time when we may meet, malignant knaves. Never again shall I avoid you. Henceforth, I go about my business as before, for it is thus that I may expect the sooner to encounter you.”

An urgent matter would require the doctor’s presence in the municipality of Evanston that night. He could not expect to return before twelve o’clock in the morning and of this informing the cook, who in the temporary reduction of the family carried on the household without the aid of a second girl, he departed northward. It was past the hour of one when he let himself in the front door of his residence. A pleasant savor of various viands saluted his nostrils and in the drawing-room he observed that the chairs and tables had all been thrust against the wall as if to clear the floor for dancing. In the dining-room, the evidence of recent festivity was complete, for the table was covered with the remnants of a sumptuous repast. No words were needed to tell him that Olga Blomgren, the cook, had taken advantage of the foreknowledge of his absence to entertain a wide circle of friends; but here indeed was a mystery. Why had she not set everything in order and removed all traces of the entertainment? He moved toward the kitchen in wonder and – his heart stood still. The beams of the lamp held above his head were shot back by the gleam of blue and white satin, his wife’s favorite ball dress on the kitchen floor. But it was not his wife’s fair hair and snowy shoulders that, rising out of the glistening blue and white, were striped with a glistening red, but the snowy shoulders and fair hair of poor Olga Blomgren. Thus had she paid for her hour of magnificence. Thus had death cut her down because the maid’s form was of the same statuesque beauty as her mistress’s. Tenderly the doctor stooped to lift up the dead girl, stricken in her mistress’s stead. There was a poniard in her throat, and it impaled a piece of paper upon which was written “Knock.”

“Knock, knock – ” the next knock would be upon his own heart.

Whatever design the doctor had held of not appealing to the police for protection against his invisible foes, his affairs had now reached a point where the intervention of the officers of the law could no longer be avoided. Poor Jacques could be consigned to earth without the intervention of priest or police, but the murder of Olga was a matter for official investigation. With that crafty and subtle way the astute sleuths of the Chicago constabulary have of informing the public through the intermediary of the press of all measures projected against evil-doers, of moves to be made, of arrests to be attempted, all citizens were in possession of the fact that owing to the startling plot just brought to light, all gatherings and coteries of men, especially at late hours, were to be watched, investigated, and made to give accounts of themselves. Dr. McDill fumed at the turn affairs had taken. That the confederacy of thieves would abandon their attempts upon his life, was not to be dreamed of. But they would forego the pleasure of witnessing his death in the presence of all assembled together. They would now delegate the attack to a single individual, and in event of his death, he could hope to carry with him but one of his enemies.

Again was Dr. McDill called to the hospital for a night operation. Leaving his driver without, he cautioned him.

“August, I don’t want you to be fooled the way you were before. If any man comes out of the hospital and says I send word for you to drive home without waiting for me, pay no attention to him. Take no orders from anybody but me.”

“All right. They can’t fool me vonce again already.”

But when a cab drove up and let out a tall gentleman in a silk hat, who went into the hospital, and after a little the cab driver, a friendly and talkative person of Irish extraction, offered August a flask full of a beverage also of Irish extraction, August took a drink.

“He told me not to take no orders yet already from nobody but him. But he didn’t say nothin’ about takin’ a drink vonce.”

“Take a drink twice, then, Hans,” said the person of Irish extraction, “already, yet, and by and by, too.”

It was all of four hours later that Dr. McDill stepped out of the hospital door. He paused under the light of the globe over the porch and examining a large bag of water-proof silk, he thrust therein a sponge upon which he poured the contents of a small phial, after which, seeing that a noose of string that closed the mouth of the bag was not entangled, he strode briskly toward his buggy. The side curtains were on and consequently the interior was in a dark shadow. Pausing a moment on the step, as if to arrange his overcoat, he made a quick, dexterous movement toward the person in the carriage and, throwing the bag over his head, pulled the noose. A terrific blow struck the doctor in the breast, but the arm that struck it fell powerless before it could be repeated and the striker lurched forward on the dashboard in the utter limpness of complete insensibility.

“It is not August,” said the doctor, straightening up the hooded figure and taking the reins. “How well was my precaution taken! I believe that was the last knock that any member of that band of diabolical assassins will ever strike.”

In the private laboratory of his own home, the doctor sat facing his captive, whom, after binding hand and foot, he had restored to his senses. The outlaw was the first to break the silence.

“You’ve got me and you think you’ll do me,” said the outlaw, with a succession of oaths and vile epithets it would be needless as well as improper for me to repeat. “But if you harm me, my friends will more than pay you up for it, just as they have everybody that crossed them.”

“Your friends are of a mind to kill me, whatever befall. Sparing or killing you, will in nowise affect their purpose. Whatever may come to-morrow, to-night you must obey my commands.”

“I won’t do a thing you tell me to. I don’t have to, see? My friends will look for you just as soon as I don’t turn up, and it will go hard with you.”

“Just as soon as you do not turn up with the news you have killed me. We’ll see whether you will do what I tell you to.”

“You dassen’t kill me. You’re afraid to kill me. My friends would fix you and the law would get you, if they did not.”

“Your profession relies upon the forbearance and softheartedness of the public. You know that those you rob hesitate to shoot. No such hesitation hampers you. It is part of your stock in trade to keep the public terrorized. You kill all who disobey your orders, for if people began to resist you successfully you must needs go out of business. Did all put aside their repugnance to shed blood and kill your kind as they would wolves, we would have no more of you.”

“You dassen’t kill me, you dassen’t kill me,” cried the robber. It was the snarl of the wild beast, hopelessly held in the toils.

“It is true that I hesitate to kill. I am not proud of this hesitation, for the trend of the best medical and sociological thought is now toward the execution of all degenerates and criminals, that they may not contaminate the race with descendants. However, my office is to save life and I cannot do otherwise. But I am a surgeon, and every day I do things in the effort to save and prolong life that to a layman are repulsive and awful, more revolting to him than the sight of bloodless death itself. From the taking of human life I draw back. But no repugnance, no horror, unsteadies my hand elsewhere. The end of the crimes of your devilish confederacy has come. The law has not restrained you, could not. Your own unparalleled wickedness has delivered you into my hands. Many a man have you brought low, many a family have you desolated. Widows and orphans cry out against you, and not in vain. I shall so knock your gang that never again shall one of you harm even the weakest. You shall all live, but it shall be your prayer, if you black hearts can utter prayer, that you be dead.”

The outlaw’s tongue moved thickly in a mouth that dried suddenly at these solemn words of the doctor. “You can’t do it, you can’t do it, you can’t do it, you duffer – ” and his voice rumbled on in a long string of imprecations.

The doctor seized him and carrying him to the cellar, lay him against the coal bin. Then the captive heard him in a room above engaged upon some sort of carpentry, and whether it was the captive’s imagination, or design of the doctor, or whether unconsciously the doctor’s mind had become possessed, the sounds of the hammer as it drove nails and struck pieces of wood into place echoed in the cellar; “knock, knock – knock; knock, knock – knock.” Soon the stairs groaned under the weight of the doctor carrying some great contrivance, and the outlaw found himself lying stretched out upon some sort of operating chair, his ankles held in a pair of stocks below, his outstretched arms held by the wrists in a pair of stocks above. All was black in the cellar, all but where a single blood red bar of light from the open door of the furnace fell upon the doctor turning at the winch of the bed of torture upon which lay the robber.

Hardly ten turns did he make, for at the first little twinges of pain, premonishing the agonies to come, the caitiff chattered in terror promises to do all the doctor should order, and so was released. Cringing and fawning, the outlaw heard what he was required to do. He was to write a letter. In this, he was to tell of the method of his capture. He was to say he was confined in a second-story room, feet and hands shackled, and that he was also chained to a staple in the floor. (That this all might be true, the doctor took him to a second-story room and so fettered him.) He found himself able to use his hands to write, and, happily, discovered writing material and stamps upon a table. He would write a letter and throw it on the porch below, where perhaps the postman would find it and send it to its destination. He asked help. His friends must come that night. The doctor would be on guard, and who could say he would not call in others? The doors and windows were all well secured, all but a cellar window on the east side. (Of this, the doctor informed him, that he, the doctor, might not be guilty of instigating the writing of anything that was false in any particular.) They must enter by this window. The door leading above stairs from the cellar could be easily forced and the noise thus occasioned could not be heard outside of the house. They must come at two in the morning. Come before another dawn, as the doctor was going to hold him one day before turning him over to the police, hoping the gang would do something to involve themselves in some way they would not if the police were after them with a hue and cry.

The outlaw wrote the letter as ordered, addressed it to Barry O’Toole, and threw it out of the window. It fell beyond the porch, on the ground. But this the doctor remedied by hiring a small boy for ten cents to pick it up and put it in a mail box. After which, the doctor betook himself to the nearest extensive hardware establishment.

At two o’clock the next morning, the beams of a dark lantern shone athwart the darkness of the cellar of Dr. McDill’s residence.

“It’s all right, boys. I can smell escaping gas, but it’s all right. There’s nobody in there. Now for the doctor. We’ll kill him and all who are in there with him, and burn the house,” said a voice behind the lantern, and one after another, eleven burly men dropped into the cellar through the narrow east window high in the wall. As the feet of the last man struck the ground, there was a sound as of a rope jerked by some one in the orifice by which they had just entered, and they heard two succeeding crashes within the cellar, followed by the slam of an iron shutter over the window. There was a sound of a spasmodic rush upon the cellar stairs and a beating upon the door, and then a succession of softer sounds, as of men rolling down stairs, and then silence.

A match was struck upon the outside of the iron shutter. It revealed the face of Dr. McDill, lighting a cigar.

“The gas alone would have been almost sufficient. But when all those bottles of ether and chloroform broke – I had better open the window so it will work off and I can get them out. I will write to my wife to stay away two months longer. Olga is dead and Kate is gone. I’ll discharge August to-morrow, as he deserves. The field is clear.”

One morning, as Hans Olson, cook of the King Olaf Magnus, staunch schooner engaged in the shingle trade between Chicago and the city of Manistee, state of Michigan, on this particular morning lying in the Chicago River – on this morning, as Mr. Olson was pouring overboard some dishwater, preparing the breakfast for the yet sleeping crew, he was horrified to see floating in the current that would eventually carry them past the great city of St. Louis, twelve naked human arms. Despite his horror and alarm at this grewsome array of severed members, he noted that so far as he could observe, they were all left arms, forearms, disjointed at the elbows. Subsequent examination but added to the mystery. It was no trick of medical students intended to set the town agog. They were not dissecting subjects, but limbs lately taken from living bodies, and they were detached with the highest skill known to the art of chirurgery. The town talked and it was a day’s wonder, but the solving of the mystery proving impossible, it was passing into tradition when all were horrified anew to hear that Johannes Klubertanz, a member of the great and honest German-American element, while walking through Lincoln Park early one morning, stumbled over some objects which, upon examination, proved to be twelve human forearms, right forearms!

Again were the wisest baffled in even guessing at this riddle, as they were a third time, when one Prosper B. Shaw came with the story that while rowing down in the drainage canal, he had come upon, floating gently along, dissevered at the knee joint, twelve human legs!

The whole community shuddered at the dark secret hidden in their midst, but at last came the answer, yet not the answer. Of all strange crews that mortal sight has gazed upon, that was the strangest, that dozen men who out of nowhere appeared suddenly in the streets one morning, armless all, all with wooden left legs. Their story you would ask in vain, for just the little chord by which the tongue forms intelligible words was gone. Their babblings came just to the border of articulate speech, but not beyond. Torrents of half-formed words they poured forth, but only half-formed, and to their mouthed jabber the crowd listened without understanding. Did you thrust a pencil in their jaws and bid them write their tale? Gone was some little muscle that grips the jaws and the pencils lolled between teeth that could not nip them. And as for their lips, oh, their mouths, their mouths! Such an example of the chirurgery that has to do with the altering of the human face had never before been witnessed, for nature had never made those faces. One such countenance she might have made in cruel sport, but never twelve, and twelve altogether, as like as peas in a pod, twelve human jack o’lanterns, twelve travesties upon humanity’s front. Howsoever they might once have looked, not even their own mothers could know them now. Around each eye the same wrinkles led away. On each face was a bulbous nose. But the mouths, oh, the mouths! Each was drawn back over the teeth in a perpetual grin, each was upturned at corners which ended well nigh in the middle of the cheek. Here were the victims of the horrors that had made the city shudder, but dumb and unrecognizable. In all the thousands that looked at them, not one could say he had ever seen them before. In all these thousands, there was not one to whom they could speak. There were their stiff faces, frozen into that terrible perpetual grin, so many idols of wood, save for their eyes, and they were the only things that lived in their dead faces.

Such rudimentary human beings it would be hard to conceive, and so after a while it occurred to some one that the same scientific methods that discover and disclose to us the modes of life, the habits, and even thoughts of primitive and rudimentary man, might be devoted to establishing a means of communication with them and unveil the secret the whole world was eager to know. Accordingly, they were taken to the University of Chicago and turned over to the department of anthropology. The learned expounders of this science were not long in devising a simple means of communication. The twelve unfortunates were seated upon a recitation bench and a doctor of philosophy wrote out an alphabet upon the blackboard.

“One rap of your foot will be A,” said the doctor of philosophy. “Two will be B. Two raps, a pause, and one will be C. We will soon learn your story.”

At this moment, the reverberations of a prodigious blow upon the door outside echoed through the room, “bang, bang – bang, bang, bang – bang.”

Unaccountably startled, as if at the hearing of some portent, the professor stood rooted to the spot for a moment, and then was about to leap to the door, when the simulacrums before him sprang to their feet and with a tremendous stamping, smote their wooden legs upon the floor, “stamp, stamp – stamp, stamp, stamp – stamp.”

The professor stared at the twelve mutes. There were their immobile faces, as wooden as their wooden legs, wearing their perpetual grin, but the westering sun shone on their eyes and there he saw an abject, grovelling fear, dreadful to behold, the master passion of twelve souls, slaves to some mysterious will which had just made itself manifest out of the unseen. By what means the will had gained this ascendancy, the terrible disfigurements of their remnants of bodies told only too well, and he who ran could read the utter prostration before the power which in their lives had been the greatest and most terrible in the universe. Again, far off in a distant corridor of the building, slowly rumbled to them: “knock, knock – knock; knock, knock – knock,” and the twelve unfortunates, like so many automatons, gave token of their obedience. They had been warned to keep the secret.

And so was foiled the attempts of the learned anthropologists to hold converse with these rudimentary beings. The alphabet of such elaborate devisings went for naught. Never did the twelve persons in the state of primitive culture get further than the letter C: “knock, knock – knock; knock, knock – knock.”

What Befell Mr. Middleton Because of the Fifth Gift of the Emir

“I am at a loss to understand,” said Mr. Middleton, “why you have entitled the narration you have just related, ‘The Pleasant Adventures of Dr. McDill.’ For to my mind, they seemed anything but pleasant adventures.”

“How so?” asked the emir. “Is it not pleasant to thwart the machinations and defeat the evil intentions of the villains such as composed the confederacy that sought the doctor’s life? Does there not reside in mankind a sense of justice which rejoices at seeing meted out to wrong-doers the deserts of their crimes?”

To which Mr. Middleton replying with a nod of thoughtful assent, after a proper period of rumination upon the words of the emir, that accomplished ruler continued:

“Despite the boasted protection of the law, how often is a man compelled to rely for his protection upon his own prowess, skill or address. There are many occasions when right under the nose of the police, one saves himself by the resort to physical strength, weapons, or the use of a cajoling tongue. Theoretically, Dr. McDill was amply protected by the mantle of the law. In reality, it was man to man as much as if he had met his foes in the Arabian desert, with none but himself and them and the vultures. Do you go armed?”

“No,” replied Mr. Middleton, with a flippant smile; “but I can go pretty fast, and that has heretofore done as well as going armed.”

“Young man,” said the emir, sternly, “a bullet can outstrip your fleetest footsteps. There may never be but one occasion when you will need a weapon, but on that occasion the possession of the means of protection may spell the difference between life and life.”

Hardly had he uttered them, before Mr. Middleton regretted his forward and pert words, for never before had he answered the emir lightly, such was his respect for him as a man of goodly parts and as one set in authority, and such was his gratitude toward him as a benefactor. Stammering forth what was at once an apology and an acknowledgement of the wisdom of what the emir had said, Mr. Middleton began to make preparations to go. But Prince Achmed bade him wait, and saying a few words to Mesrour in the Arabic language, the blackamore brought to him a pair of pistols of a formidable aspect. In sooth, one could hardly tell whether they ought to be called pistols, or culverins. In the shape of the stocks alone could anyone detect that they were pistols. The bore of each was more than an inch in diameter, and the octagonal barrels of thick steel, heavily inlaid with silver, were a foot and a half long. The handles, which were in proportion to the barrels and so long that four hands could grasp them, were so completely covered with an inlay of pearl that no wood was visible. Taking one of them, the emir rammed home a great load of powder, upon which he placed a handful of balls as large as marbles. Having served the second likewise, he handed the pair to Mr. Middleton.