The Flying Death - Samuel Hopkins Adams (story reading .txt) 📗

Stanley Richard Colton, M. D., heaved his powerful form to and fro in his bed and cursed the day he had come to Montauk Point, which chanced to be the day just ended. All the world had been open to him, and his father’s yacht to bear him to whatsoever corner thereof he might elect, in search of that which, once forfeited, no mere millions may buy back, the knack of peaceful sleep. But his wise old family physician had prescribed the tip-end of Long Island.

“Go down there to that suburban wilderness, Dick,” he had said, “and devote yourself to filling your lungs with the narcotic ocean air. Practise feeding, breathing and loafing, and forget that you’ve ever practised medicine.”

Too much medicine was what ailed Dick Colton. Not that he had been taking it. On the contrary he had been administering it to others. Amid the unbounded amazement of his friends, who couldn’t see why the heir of the great Colton interests should want to devote his energies otherwhere, he had insisted on graduating from medical school, and, with a fashionable practice fairly yearning for him, had entered upon the grimy and malodorous duties of a dispensary among the tenement-folk. There, because the chances of birth had given him a good intelligence which his own efforts had kept brightened and sharpened, because Providence had equipped him with a comely and powerful body, which his own manner of life had kept attuned to strength and vigour, and because Heaven had blessed him with the heart and the face of a boy, whereof his own fineness and enthusiasm had kept the one untainted and the other defiant of care and lines, he had become a power in the slums. It was only by eternal vigilance that he had kept himself from being elected an alderman from one of the worst districts in New York.

There came a week of terrible heat when the tenements vented forth their half-naked sufferers nightly upon the smoking asphalt, and the Angel of Death smote his daily hundreds with a sword of flame. Dick Colton fought for the lives of his people, and was already at the limit of endurance when Fate, employing as its dismayed instrument a contractor with liberal views on the subject of dynamite, reduced the dispensary outfit in one fell shock to a mass of shattered glass and a mephitic compound of tinctures, extracts and powders. Only one thing was to be done, and the young physician did it. He stocked up again, attending to all details himself, using his own money and his own energy freely, and proving to his own satisfaction that strong coffee and wet towels about the head would enable a man to live and toil on four hours’ sleep a night.

When, at length, a two days’ rain had drenched the fevered city to coolness, Dick Colton drew a deep breath and said: “Now I’ll go to sleep and sleep for a week.”

But the drugs which for so many weary days had filled his entire attention declined now to be evicted from his thoughts. Disposing themselves in neatly labelled bottles, all of a size, they marched in monotonous and nauseating files before his closed eyes, each individual of the passing show introducing itself by some outrageous and incredible title utterly unknown to the art and practice of pharmacy. To think upon sheep jumping in undulatory procession over a stone wall, so the wisdom of our forebears tell us, is to invite slumber. To contemplate misnamed medicine bottles interminably hurdling the bridge of one’s nose, operates otherwise. From the family doctor Colton had carried his vision to Montauk Point with him.

Now, on this cool September midnight he rose, struck a light, and found himself facing two neat, little, beribboned perfume jars, representing the decorative ideas of little Mrs. Johnston, the hostess of Third House. It was too much. Resentment at this shabby practical joke of Fate rose in his soul. Seizing the pair of bottles, he hurled them mightily, one after the other, into outer darkness. The crash of the second upon the stone wall surrounding the little hotel was rather startlingly followed by an exclamation.

“I beg your pardon,” cried Colton, rather abashed. “Hope I didn’t hit you.”

“You did not—with the second missile,” said the voice dryly.

“It was very stupid of me. The fact is,” Colton continued, groping for an excuse, “I heard some kind of a noise outside and I thought it was a cat.”

“Where did you hear it?” interrupted the voice rather sharply. “Did it seem to be on the ground, or in mid-air?”

Colton’s frazzled nerves jumped all together, and in different directions. “Have I been sent to a private lunatic asylum?” he inquired of himself.

“Lest my manner of inquiry may seem strange to you,” continued the voice, “I may state that I am Professor Ravenden, formerly connected with the National Museum at Washington, D. C., and that your remark as to an unrecognised noise may have an important bearing upon certain phenomena in which I am scientifically interested.”

Dick Colton groaned in spirit. “Here I’ve told a polite and innocent lie to this mysterious pedant,” he said to himself, “and of course I get caught at it.” He leaned out of the window, when a broad, spreading flare of lightning from the south showed, on the lawn beneath him, the figure of a slight, compactly built man of fifty-odd, dressed with rigorous neatness in Norfolk jacket and knickerbockers, and carrying a broken lantern and a butterfly net. His thin, prim and tanned face was as indicative of character as his precise and meticulous mode of speech.

“Did I break your lantern?” asked the young doctor contritely.

“As I do not carry my lantern in the small of my back, you did not, sir,” returned the professor with an asperity which reminded Colton that he had put considerable muscle into his throw. “A loose rock which turned under my foot upset me,” he continued, “and the glass of my lantern was broken in the fall. The rising gale prevented my relighting it. Your opportune light, I may add, alone enabled me to locate the house.”

“Perhaps my unintended rudeness may be pardoned because of my involuntary service, then,” said Colton, with the courtesy which was natural to him.

There was a moment’s pause. Then, “If I may venture to impose upon your kindness,” said the man on the lawn, “will you put on some clothes and join me here? It is a matter of considerable possible importance—scientifically.”

“Anything to avoid monotony,” said the other, rather grimly. “I’m here for excitement, apparently.”

Worming his way into a sweater, trousers and shoes, he went downstairs and joined his new acquaintance on the veranda.

“My name is Colton, Dr. Stanley Colton,” he said. “What is it you want me for?”

“I wish the testimony of your younger eyes and ears,” said the other. “Would you object to a walk of a third of a mile?”

“Not at all,” returned the other, becoming interested. “Shall I see if I can rustle up a lantern?”

“No,” said the professor thoughtfully. “I think it would be better not. Yes; decidedly we are better without a light. Come.”

He led the way, swiftly and sure-footedly, though it was pitch-dark except when the lightning lent its swift radiance.

“I was out in search of a rare species of Catocala—a moth of this locality—when I heard the—the curious sound to which I hope to call your attention,” he paused to explain.

He hurried on in silence, Colton following in puzzled expectation. At the top of a mound they stopped, and were almost swept off their feet by a furious gust of wind which died down, only to be succeeded by a second, hardly less violent. In a glare of lightning that spread across the south, Colton saw the fretted waters of a little lake below them.

“We’re going to get that storm, I think,” he said.

No reply came from his companion. In silence they stood, for perhaps ten or fifteen minutes. Then the wind dropped temporarily. Colton was wondering whether courtesy to the peculiar individual who had haled him forth on this errand of darkness was going to cost him a wetting, when the wind dropped and the night fell silent.

“There! Did you hear it?” the professor exclaimed suddenly.

Colton had heard, and now he heard again, a strange sound, from overhead and seeming to come from a considerable distance; faintly harsh, and strident, with a metallic sonance.

“Almost overhead and to the west, was it not?” pursued the other. “Watch there for the lightning hash.”

The lightning came, in one of those broad, sheet-like flickers that seem to irradiate the world for countable seconds. Professor Ravenden’s arm shot out.

“Did you see?” he cried.

Darkness fell as the query was completed. “I saw nothing,” replied Colton. “Did you? What did you see?”

A clap of wind blew away the reply, if there was any. This time the wind rose steadily. They waited another quarter of an hour, the gale blowing without pause.

“This is profitless,” said Professor Ravenden, at length. “We had best go home.”

Thankful for the respite, the younger man rose from the little depression where he had crouched for shelter from the wind. With a thrill of surprised delight, he realised that he was healthily sleepy. The quick, hard walk, the unwonted exercise, and the soft, fresh sweetness of the air, had produced an anodyne effect. But was the air so sweet? Colton turned and sniffed up wind.

“Do you smell anything peculiar?” he asked his companion.

“Unfortunately I am troubled with a catarrh which deadens my sense of smell,” replied the scientist.

“There’s a peculiar reek in the air. I caught it with that last shift of wind. It’s like something I’ve come across before. There!”

“Can you not describe it?”

“Why, it’s—it’s a sickish, acid sort of odour,” said Colton hesitantly. “Where have I—Oh, well, it’s probably a dead animal up to windward.”

As they reached the house, he turned to the other.

“What was it you thought you saw?” he asked bluntly. “What are you looking for?”

“I am not satisfied that I saw anything,” answered Professor Ravenden evasively. “Imagination is a powerful factor, when the eye must accomplish its search in the instantaneous revelation of a lightning flash. As for what I am seeking, you heard as much as I. I thank you for your help, and, if you will pardon me, I will bid you good-night here, as I wish to make a few notes before retiring.”

Leaving the professor busied by candle light at the desk in the main room, Dick Colton cautiously tiptoed up the stairs. At the top he stopped dead. From an open door at the end of the hall issued a shaft of light. In the soft glow stood a girl. Her face was toward Colton. Her eyes met his, but unseeingly, for he was in the shadow, and her vision was dazzled by the light she had just made. Her face was softly hushed with sleep and her dark eyes were liquid under the heavy lids. She was dressed in some filmy, fluffy garment, the like of which Colton did not know existed. Nor had he realised that such creatures as this girl who had so suddenly