The Ape Who Guards the Balance Read Online Free PDF Page A

sufficient quantity of brandy, cleared his throat.
    “Mrs. Emerson, I came to inform you of a startling piece of news which reached me scarcely an hour ago, and you appear to know all about it. May I ask how you knew?”
    “I hope you don’t suspect me of being a member of the gang,” I said, laughing.
    “Oh—well—no, certainly not. Then how—”
    It is better not to commit oneself before one knows all the facts. I said, “I will be happy to explain, Sir Reginald. But first you had better tell the others precisely what happened this afternoon.”
    Mr. Romer’s butler was the key witness, from whom the police had heard the story. He had not opened the door; in fact, his master had ordered him to lock it. He did not know how the lock had been forced. Caught off guard, he was overpowered by two heavy-set muscular women who had borne him to the ground and bound him hand and foot with ropes they took from their reticules. The other invaders had instantly fanned out into the back regions of the house. Not a word had been spoken; the procedure had been planned with the precision of a military operation.
    Lying helpless on the floor of the hall, he had seen a man wearing a long cloak and slouch hat bound up the stairs. Shortly thereafter another individual, whom he took to be his master, had descended the stairs and gone to the front door. Opening it, he had addressed those without in the words I have reported. It had been his master’s look, his master’s voice, his master’s very garments, but instead of coming to the aid of his unfortunate servant, the soidisant Mr. Romer had gone back up the stairs.
    For the next half hour, only voices and sounds of brisk activity told him of the whereabouts of the invaders. When they reappeared they were carrying luggage of all varieties, including a huge traveling trunk. The bearers were persons dressed in the livery of Mr. Romer’s footmen, but their faces were not the ones of the footmen he knew. They began carrying the baggage out. They were followed by the man who looked like his master, now wearing Mr. Romer’s favorite fur-trimmed overcoat. The woman with him was one of the intruders; she was dressed like a lady, in a long mantle and large flowered hat. Arm in arm they left the house, and the door closed behind them.
    It took the poor man over an hour to free himself. Creeping timidly and stiffly from room to room, he found the other servants locked in the cellar. The footmen were attired only in their undergarments. Mr. Romer, bound to a chair in his library, was in the same embarrassing state of undress. The cabinets which had contained his lordship’s superb collection of Egyptian antiquities were empty.
    “In short,” Sir Reginald concluded, “the individuals who had entered the house assumed the livery of the footmen and carried the trunks, which contained Mr. Romer’s collection, to a waiting carriage. The constable at the gate suspected nothing. He actually helped the driver load the luggage into the carriage. As for the individual whom the butler took to be his master—”
    “He was the man in the slouch hat and the cape,” I said. “I blame myself, Sir Reginald, for not informing Scotland Yard at once. However, I hope you will do me the justice to admit that none of your subordinates would have believed me.”
    “Very possibly not. Am I to take it, Mrs. Emerson, that you recognized this person, at a distance, and despite a disguise that deceived his lordship’s own butler?”
    “Not to say recognized,” I replied. “The modern fashion of beards and mustaches affected by so many gentlemen makes an impostor’s task laughably easy. It was rather an indefinable sense of familiarity in his posture, his gestures—the same sense of familiarity that had struck me when I saw the individual in the velvet cloak and slouch hat. He is a master of disguise, a mimic of exceptional ability—”
    “Amelia,” said Emerson, breathing heavily through his nose,