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Updated: May 17, 2025
An hour passed, and Gurdon was still sitting there, asking himself whether it would not be better to go to bed and compel sleep to come to him. Impatiently he turned out his light and laid his head resolutely on the pillow. But it was all in vain sleep was out of the question.
Not more than ten minutes had elapsed when, thanks to the use of the telephone, Gurdon had reached the Grand Empire Hotel. In a few hurried words, Venner gave him a brief outline of what had happened. There was no time to lose. "Of course, it is a risk," Venner said, "and I am not altogether sure that I am justified in taking advantage of this little slip on the part of my wife.
"Hang me if I don't get through the ventilator and see what it is." It was no difficult matter for an athlete like Gurdon to push his way through and drop on to the bed on the other side. Then he shook the form of the slumbering lad without reward. The boy seemed to be plunged in a sleep almost like death.
As Gurdon turned him over, he noticed on the other side of the lad's collar the single word "Lift." It began to dawn upon Gurdon exactly what had happened. In large hotels like the Grand Empire there is no fixed period when the lift is suspended, and consequently, it has its attendants night and day. For some reason, this boy had evidently been drugged and carried into the room where he now lay.
Two men had entered the room, and by taking a little risk, Gurdon could see that they were examining the unconscious boy coolly and critically. "I should think about five minutes more would do it," one of them said. "Better carry him out, and shove him in that little sentry box of his.
It was Vesty's hand that had wrung mine. Captain Rafe, after he lost his sons, hardly spoke without drawing his own trembling hand along his piteous face. Tears rolled down his cheeks. Vesty spoke to me so softly, as if her head were turned, or she were wandering in a dream. "When Gurdon had anything that anybody needed, and they asked him for it, he always gave it them.
Then he dropped the box again, and came back to Venner with a look on his face as if he had been handling something more than usually repulsive. "You needn't tell me what it is," Venner said. "I know quite as well as you do. Inside that box is a dried up piece of flesh, some three inches long in other words a mummified human forefinger." Gurdon nodded thoughtfully.
"There," Gurdon said, with a sort of gloomy triumph. "Doesn't that prove it? I suppose that our cripple took alarm and has cleared out of the house." "That's all very well, but it is almost impossible to remove the furniture of a great place like this in the course of a day." "My dear chap, I don't think it has been removed in the course of a day.
Don't you notice a peculiar noise going on? Sounds almost like machinery." Surely enough, from a distant apartment there came a peculiar click and rumble, followed by a whirr of wheels, as if someone was running out a small motor close by. At the same time, the two friends noticed the unmistakable odor of petrol on the atmosphere. "What the dickens can that be?" Gurdon said.
During the last three years the letters had been meagre and far between; and at their meeting a few days ago, Gurdon had noticed a reticence in the manner of his old chum that he had not seen before. He waited now, naturally enough, for the other to give some explanation of his extraordinary statement, but Venner appeared to have forgotten all about Gurdon.
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