DR. NALE HARGRAVE tossed his spotless grey hat expertly across the six feet of space between him and the coat tree, humming the while a currently popular tune whose only words he could remember were “Feemo fimo fujo, the flumy fwam to fwojo.” His eyes rested self-congratulatingly on the hat after it came to a […]
Stone Barrington woke earlier than he should have and was, for a moment, disoriented. Sunlight was streaming through a two-inch gap in the drawn curtains of the room, and he never slept with curtains drawn. Except in England. He sat up in bed. He was, indeed, in England, in the house called Windward Hall that […]
“There you are!” Judson Taylor, the eccentric physics prof, pulled a metallic object out of his pocket and laid it on the table between us. The object was a solid chunk of some kind of metal, judging from its bright silver color, about the size and shape of a pocket knife. I looked at it […]
“HEY, Gordon!” Gordon Marlow, Ph.D., straightened up and turned in the direction of the voice, the garden trowel dangling in his dirt-stained white canvas glove. His wide mouth broke into a smile that revealed even white teeth. It was Harold Harper, an undergraduate student, who had called. “Hop over the fence and come in,” Gordon […]
The man with the pith helmet had his back toward me. Hunched forward, he was screaming at the girl in the lens of his camera. “Don’t just stand there, Dotty! Move! Do something! Back up toward that column with inscriptions on it… .” The girl was tall and longlegged with ideal body proportions, her features […]
I WAS in the midst of the fourth draft of my doctorate thesis when Aunt Matilda’s telegram came. It could not have come at a worse time. The deadline for my thesis was four days away and there was a minimum of five days of hard work to do on it yet. I was working […]
Jan ran tirelessly, his long clean limbs carrying him at express train speed across the uneven terrain. The small deer was beginning to show evidences of tiring. Its foam-flecked mouth was open, the swollen tongue protruding over the teeth. The ten or more miles of the chase had proven Jan’s superior strength. The deer rounded […]
“You never met Selwyn, did you?” “No, sir.” “Never heard anything definite about his trouble?” insisted Gerard. “Oh, yes, sir!” replied young Erroll, “I’ve heard a good deal about it. Everybody has, you know.” “Well, I don’t know,” retorted Austin Gerard irritably, “what ‘everybody’ has heard, but I suppose it’s the usual garbled version made […]
He was thirty-three, agreeable to look at, equipped with as much culture and intelligence as is tolerated east of Fifth Avenue and west of Madison. He had a couple of elaborate rooms at the Lenox Club, a larger income than seemed to be good for him, and no profession. It follows that he was a […]
Only when the Nan-yang Maru sailed from Yuen-San did her terrible sense of foreboding begin to subside. For four years, waking and sleeping, the awful subconsciousness of supreme evil had never left her. But now, as the Korean shore, receding into darkness, grew dimmer and dimmer, fear subsided and grew vague as the half-forgotten memory […]
“The bullet entered here,” said Max Fortin, and he placed his middle finger over a smooth hole exactly in the centre of the forehead. I sat down upon a mound of dry seaweed and unslung my fowling piece. The little chemist cautiously felt the edges of the shot-hole, first with his middle finger, then with […]
We drew bridle at the cross-roads; he stretched his legs in his stirrups, raised his arms, yawned, and dropped his huge hands upon either thigh with a resounding slap. “Well, good-bye,” he said, gravely, but made no movement to leave me. “Do we part here?” I asked, sorry to quit my chance acquaintance of the […]
“Ne raillons pas les fous; leur folie dure plus longtemps que la nôtre… . Voila toute la différence.” Toward the end of the year 1920 the Government of the United States had practically completed the programme, adopted during the last months of President Winthrop’s administration. The country was apparently tranquil. Everybody knows how the Tariff […]
“Gentlemen, find yourformation.” The pace pilot’s voice crackles over the radio, but John Flynn can barely hear it. The retired Navy lieutenant can barely hear anything. Including his own thoughts. He’s strapped inside a T-2 Buckeye warbird, hurtling through the air at more than two hundred miles per hour. Its four-ton steel-alloy fuselage is rattling […]
In Which a Young Man Arrives at His Last Ditch and a Young Girl Jumps Over It Utterly unequipped for anything except to ornament his environment, the crash in Steel stunned him. Dazed but polite, he remained a passive observer of the sale which followed and which apparently realized sufficient to satisfy every creditor, but […]
As the wind veered and grew cooler a ribbon of haze appeared above the Gulf-stream. Young Hamil, resting on his oars, gazed absently into the creeping mist. Under it the ocean sparkled with subdued brilliancy; through it, shoreward, green palms and palmettos turned silvery; and, as the fog spread, the sea-pier, the vast white hotel, […]
The speed of the train slackened; a broad tidal river flashed into sight below the trestle, spreading away on either hand through yellowing level meadows. And now, above the roaring undertone of the cars, from far ahead floated back the treble bell-notes of the locomotive; there came a gritting vibration of brakes; slowly, more slowly […]
Not the dark companion of Sirius, brightest of all stars—not our own chill and spectral planet rushing toward Vega in the constellation of Lyra—presided at the birth of millions born to corroborate a bloody horoscope. But a Dark Star, speeding unseen through space, known to the ancients, by them called Erlik, after the Prince of […]
All day Sunday they had raised the devil from attic to cellar; Mrs. Farren was in tears, Howker desperate. Not one out of the fifteen servants considered necessary to embellish the Seagrave establishment could do anything with them after Kathleen Severn’s sudden departure the week before. When the telegram announcing her mother’s sudden illness summoned […]
There was a long, brisk, decisive ring at the door. He continued working. After an interval the bell rang again, briefly, as though the light touch on the electric button had lost its assurance. “Somebody’s confidence has departed,” he thought to himself, busy with a lead-weighted string and a stick of soft charcoal wrapped in […]
