Argosy All-Story Weekly, February 12, 1927 — page 103: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

THE MARK OF his own mind; but I was more baffled than ever. I visited the cabin of Pythagoras Awls on Zopot’s Bayou, a wretched hovel on stilts on the edge of a swamp. I reached it by a rickety board walk, something lke a pier, leading across a great expanse of swamp grass and evil-smelling mud. In the cabin I found a chest full of Negro charms, bear claws, bones, marked cards, and a secret book in a ridiculously cum- bersome code with drawings of the zodiac, devils, and skeletons. I found nothing in the way of a hypo- dermic needle. But there was one discov- ery I made which I knew would interest Dr. Zobel. It was a box. In it there were two sluggish cottonmouths. CHAPTER XIII. A GASP IN THE NIGHT. WILL now describe what happened to us that night. I returned from Zopot’s Bayou, arriving at the manse at about sunset. Cronk had already returned, bringing with him his camera. He was fired with enthusiasm over the task he had set for himself for that night. I reported to him and to Dr. Zobel concerning my discovery of the moccasins in Pythagoras Awls’s most wretched dwell- ing place. The announcement baffled the doctor, be- cause it had the tendency to cast a certain doubt on his theory of a hypodermic needle causing the black dots on the two victims, the judge and Deputy Marteau. Cronk, on the other hand, was not at all baffled. He concurred in the superstition that the devil had taken the form of a serpent to cause these deaths. And the fact that Pythagoras Awls, the devil’s disciple, had two of these snakes in his pos- session only served to bolster up Cronk’s implicit faith in the existence of the super- natural forces that were beleaguering us. I must state hurriedly just what was going on in the house at the time Cronk and I and Dr. Zobel set up the camera for the paseo of ace fool spirit photo- THE MOCCASIN. 97 a room in the adobe house across the patio, where in old times the racing horses were kept. The mozo, now allowed all the freedom he wanted, had retired to his room at the top of the house. The octoroon woman had likewise retired, an hour or so after dinner. Miss Shirley was in her room, after spending a long time in earnest discussion with the doctor. He told us that she was getting more and more apprehensive. The death of Deputy ‘Marteau, instead of al- laying her feelings, as it most surely did at first, was now assuming a more sinister import. It is scarcely necessary for me to say that the doctor and Cronk and I myself ‘were very much of Shirley’s way of think- ang. And all three of us resolved to re- double our efforts to untangle the mystery for her sake. The matter of fixing the camera for the spirit photographs was simple enough. Cronk assured us that this stuff spiritualists call “ectoplasm ” is luminous enough to affect a photographic film. All that we needed to do, he said, was to leave the lens open and facing a point where we might expect the materialization of the spirit to appear. We chose the judge’s bedchamber on the second story as the probable scene in which he would stage his entrance; for it was there that on the night before we had: heard the rappings. The door to the judge’s room was lecked, and, respecting Shirley’s wishes, we left it so. It had been locked, she said, since the day of his death, and nothing had been molested in the room. There was another door in the back, opening to the back hall- way and staircase; but this had been kept locked also. We could see no particular necessity of entering the room, for there was a transom above the door which would serve our pur- pose. In fact, Cronk pointed out that the farther away we set the camera from the room, the more chance there was of our success, for the lens, needless to say, would take in that much more scope. ee seca ment. the sxaesgen Se <2 ee a Pye % r ; : , a ‘re VOR is wi th / Waid : TSS pee