The Golden Age of Pulp Fiction MEGAPACK ™, Vol. 1: George Allan England. George Allan England

them up with developing powder and then studied them attentively under his best glass, he could make little of them.

      “I’ve got to have something more defi­nite than those,” said he, and instituted a painstaking search. After a few min­utes, during which Scanlon and Levitsky partly drowned their chagrin in certain strong waters, T. Ashley exclaimed, “Ah!”

      “Got a lead, have you?” demanded Scanlon.

      T. Ashley’s only answer was: “Have you got a keyhole saw, a hammer, and a chisel?”

      “I can get ’em for you,” said Levitsky. “What’s de idea?”

      “Get them, then.”

      When they had been brought from janitorial regions, T. Ashley cut a section from the varnished window sill. This he wrapped in clean paper.

      “That’s all I need,” said he. “Let’s get back to the office, now.”

      Together, T. Ashley and Scanlon re­turned to town, leaving the Big Boss’s henchman under injunctions of strictest secrecy.

      V.

      “This is positively the most amazing thing I was ever confronted with!” ex­claimed the investigator, after he had subjected the piece of window sill to exhaustive comparison with his microphotographs.

      “What d’you mean, most amazin’ thing?” demanded Scanlon, chewing on an extinct cigar. He spoke a little thickly now, by reason of Levitsky’s good cheer.

      “Our old friend, Blau—Dutch Pete—is back on the job again.”

      “No!”

      “Fact. Prints don’t lie.”

      “You mean—that dead man’s prints are on that piece o’ sill?”

      “That’s exactly what I mean!”

      Silence followed. From below, on Albermarle Avenue, rose the confused but cheerful rumble of the city’s traffic, the hymn of life; but in the office some­thing cold and numbing seemed to weigh and settle—the spirit of death that would not die.

      All at once Scanlon, now completely sobered, exclaimed: “Le’ me have a look at them prints!”

      “Oh, you wouldn’t know! All prints look alike to the untrained man. But to the expert every whorl, volute, and ridge is as distinctive under the glass as a human face—more so, because even the best man now and then is fooled by a chance resemblance. Even the Bertillon itself now and then goes wrong. But no two prints, from in­fancy to old age, are ever alike—and they never change. I have here,” T. Ashley added, tapping the piece of window sill with a metal probe, “excellent prints of the fore and middle fingers of the Levitsky burglar’s right hand.”

      “And they’re the same as on the glass I took from the boss’s?”

      “Absolutely.”

      “Well, I will be darned!”

      “It looks as if we’d both be darned,” said T. Ashley cynically. “Your job and my reputation are both at stake, and—barring an admission that spirit­ualists and all that ilk are right—we seem to have come to the end of our tether.”

      Again he applied his lens to a set of microphotographs of the prints left on the smooth-varnished Levitsky window sill, and fell to studying them intently. For a moment he made no sign, but all at once his attention tautened. He bent closer, adjusting the glass.

      “H’m!”

      “What’s up, now?” asked Scanlon, forgetting even to chew on the extinct cigar.

      “Oh, you wouldn’t understand.”

      “Well, le’ me look, anyhow. I guess the boss is payin’ enough for this job, so I’m entitled to at least a flash!”

      “By all means,” admitted T. Ashley, giving place to Scanlon.

      “Some map!” commented Scanlon. “Looks like a plan o’ Bos­ton, or some place. Who’d ever think a man ever had all them lines on the ends o’ his fingers?”

      “Nobody, except an intelligent per­son,” replied the investigator with caus­tic emphasis. “And by the way, you know, apes have just the same kind of lines, too, thus proving our relationship with our backward cousins.”

      “Can the deep stuff!” said Scanlon. “All I’m interested in, now, is these here lines belongin’ to Dutch Pete. So a dead man made them prints, did he?”

      “He did, unless the whole modern science of fingerprinting is fallible.”

      “Come again?”

      “I mean, unless it can make mistakes, which it never has been known to do, yet. That’s its whole value, its absolute accuracy. And what it says, now, is that the prints left in both robberies were produced by a man who went to the electric chair—and was killed there—the seventeenth of last February.”

      “Well, I am hanged!”

      “So you’ve already said, and I think it quite likely. Seen enough, have you?”

      “Yep.” And Scanlon left the instru­ment. “Looks like we was up against the cushion, hard, an’ no way to bounce.”

      T. Ashley rubbed his chin, saying nothing. His thoughts, however, were: “There’s no such thing as an inexpli­cable phenomenon. Facts leave traces, and traces can’t lie. At the bottom of every ‘hopeless’ problem there’s some simple, obvious explanation. So then, all I’ve got to do is—”

      “Don’t strain yourself with thinkin’ too much,” Scanlon interrupted his cogi­tation with sarcasm. He reached for his hat. “When you figger it out how a dead one can blow back an’ go to work as a boxman, let me know.”

      “I’ll let you know, all right. And meantime, warn your fat friend, Levitsky, to keep quiet.”

      “No danger of his belchin’. He’ll be mum as the boss himself. But the quicker you get some goods to show, the better. The boss ain’t noted much for patience.”

      “He may have to acquire one virtue, at least,” remarked T. Ashley. “Good-day!”

      Alone, the investigator resumed his study through the lens. For a long time he sat there, examining the newly dis­covered factor which, at first glimpse, had caused him to give utterance to that “H’m!” of slight wonder.

      After a while he got up, went to his bookcase, and brought back to his desk a heavy volume in French—Henri de Brissac’s Traité de la Peau, Humaine et Animale.

      He spent an hour over this monu­mental work on human and animal skins, carefully examining the colored plates and here or there dipping into the text.

      At last he put up the book, lighted a cigar, and locked his office door. From now on, till such time as pleased him, T. Ashley had become invisible, inac­cessible.

      He lay down on his broad couch in the laboratory office, smoked, studied the ceiling, pondered. At last, after two cigars had become lamentable butts, he reached for the phone, called Warden Hotchkiss at the Prestonville peniten­tiary, and by long distance made an ap­pointment for next morning. “Dutch Pete,” said he to himself, after he had hung up the receiver again, “I rather think I’ll have to find out a little more about you!”

      VI.

      Two days later T. Ashley called on Doctor Holden K. Dilling­ham, at the doctor’s office in the Monadnock Build­ing, on Franchot Street. The doctor, T. Ashley noted, was smallish, trim, shaven, going a bit bald, and possessed of keen blue eyes, a trifle prominent, also a chin that promised: “What I undertake, I do.”

      “Well, sir?” asked Dillingham when he was alone with his caller—a new patient, doubtless, thought he.

      “I believe you’re the physician who has been interested in getting the new orthopedic hospital