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There was no impossibility there, no doubt even, or the peradventure of one. There was only the ineluctable truth. The aproned man disclosed it. His thumbless hand had held the book. From his mouth, in which there was a pipe, had come the benediction. He was Dr. Grantly. That was the ineluctable truth, the truth which already perhaps she had intercepted in the land of Beauty and Horror.
Withells, and that was the way he shook hands, "exactly as if he had no thumbs. If he's so afraid of touching one as all that comes to, why doesn't he let it alone?" Yet the apparently thumbless hands were constantly occupied in bearing gifts of all kinds to his friends.
An ardent devotee had deposited a copper coin in her extended, thumbless hand, whilst another had fixed a row of candle stumps at her feet. There was nothing visible in this brilliantly lighted room of the sober modes to which the eye of late had become so accustomed. Silken doublets of bright and even garish colors stood out in bold contrast against the gray monotone of the walls and hangings.
The flame, faintly blue, mounted and, with it, a curl of smoke. But it was not Cassy or, more exactly, it was not her objective self, that saw it. It was her subjective self that registered and afterward reproduced that momentary and entirely commonplace incident. What the objective Cassy saw was not the flame or the smoke or the pipe, but the hand that held the match. It was thumbless.
He did not want to read. He did not want to drink. There were several things that he did not want. In particular he did not want to be alone. He rang, ordered out a car and went sailing in town, to a brown-stone front where you could lose as much money as you liked and not in solitude either. On the way, the thought of the damned and thumbless Benny accompanied him.
The mariner called up his two friends, who proved thumbless like himself. "Nick Johnson, and Ned his brother, both of Plymouth town. Master Timothy Jeffreys, henchman to Sir Walter Raleigh, and Master Morgan, friend." Hand-clasps went round. Jeffreys peeped into the purse that hung at his girdle. "Here is the price of a few flagons of sack, friends. Have you a fancy for any particular tavern?"
"And that's the yarn of the Black Dogs and the Thumbless Hand." "I think," said I, "that you did no harm in telling Bolter's young woman." "I never thought of it when I told her, or of her interest in the kennel; but, by George, she soon broke off her engagement." "Did you know Manning, the Pakeha Maori, the fellow who wrote Old New Zealand?" "No, what about him?"
Out from the sparkling mist stretched two hands, enormously long, six-fingered, thumbless, a faint tracery of golden scales upon their white backs, utterly unhuman and still in some strange way beautiful, radiating power and all womanly!
The center Warlockian spread out her four-fingered thumbless hands above the scattered needles. "What is read, is read." Again a formula. He caught a chorus of answer from the others. "What is read, is read. To the dreamer the dream. Let the dream be known for what it is, and there is life. Let the dream encompass the dreamer falsely, and all is lost."
Later on in the day he held solemn service, and after this all the hauntings and ghost-walkings at Froda ceased, while Thurid recovered from her sickness and became well again. Spiritualistic Floating Hands. Hands in Haunted Houses. Jerome Cardan's Tale. "The Cold Hand." The Beach-comber's Tale. "The Black Dogs and the Thumbless Hand."
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