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Before my eyes the grinning tenants of the great wall-case rose in reproach; the little, impassive faces in those shallow boxes seemed to look at me and ask why they had been killed. I had let the man go; and he would certainly never come to my shop again. True, I should know him again; but what better chance should I ever have of identifying him?
The thing is an osteological specimen; a mere anatomical abstraction. Now these skeletons of Challoner's were quite different. Walking down the long room and looking into the great wall-case, I was confronted with actual individuals. Number One was Jimmy Archer, who had tried to steal the "blimy teapot."
But it was the look of expertness in things hardly worth the trouble of learning; it was aristocracy's highly-prized air of the dog that leads in the bench show and tails in the field. He was like a firearm polished and incrusted with gems and hanging in a connoisseur's wall-case; Josh was like a battle-tested rifle in the sinewy hands of an Indian in full war-paint.
"The sand of my life ran out with varying speed as it seemed to me in the little barber's shop in Saul Street, Whitechapel. Now would my pulses beat and the current of my blood run swift. Those were the times when I had visitors; and presently a new skeleton or two would make their appearance in the long wall-case.
"I piloted him through to the museum and switched on a single electric lamp which filled the great room with a ghostly twilight. Piragoff looked about him inquisitively and his eye fell on the long wall-case with the dimly-seen, pallid shapes of the company within it. His face blanched suddenly and he stared with wide-open eyes. "'God! he exclaimed, 'what are those things?
Fleming said that you wanted me." "Oh, yes." Rand turned. "Is this the whole thing? What's on the walls, here?" "Yes, sir. There is also a wall-case containing a number of modern pistols and revolvers, and several rifles and shotguns, in the room formerly occupied by Mr. Fleming, but they are not part of the collection, and they are now the personal property of Mrs. Fleming.
It was the long row of human skeletons, each erect and watchful on its little pedestal, that occupied the great wall-case: a silent, motionless company of fleshless sentinels, standing in easy postures with unchanging, mirthless grins and seeming to wait for something. That was what disturbed me.
The shy look and the blush with which she had suggested the introduction were ominous indications, upon which I mused gloomily as we ascended the stairs and passed through the wide doorway. I glanced apprehensively at my companion, and met a quiet, inscrutable smile; and at that moment she halted opposite a wall-case and faced me. "This is my friend," she said.
"He gazed vaguely into the case and murmured that 'they were all very interesting, and again I caught his eye wandering to the great case opposite. I was in the act of reaching out a porcupine with an ankylosed knee-joint, when he plucked up courage to say frankly, 'The fact is, I am principally interested in human skeletons. "I replaced the porcupine and walked across to the great wall-case.
He would come again, and not alone at least, I trusted not alone. For my brief inspection of his hair had convinced me that he was not the unknown man whom I sought; and, though he would make an acceptable addition to the group of specimens in the long wall-case, I was more interested in the companion whom I felt confident he would bring with him.