Robert Welles Ritchie

“ As he drew back the plunger Crump’s eyes followed the flow of the viscid stuff up into the glass barrel of the instrument. Almost before he was prepared for it, Flack had pinched a roll of flesh in Crump’s arm, and he felt the stab of a sharp point. He grunted.
“You now have in your veins something over three millions of active bacilli,” the Phantom was saying in a voice dry as the rustling of dead leaves. “In an hour—perhaps two—the phenomenon of symptoms makes itself to appear; a temperature rising, headache, perhaps unpleasant visions. But be undisturbed. ”

“ Of the scores who followed the big man through the doors, but one, aside from the newsboy, noted the incident of the protective handkerchief—that one a man in whom perception of unconsidered things was developed to a passion, and to professional acuteness passing the ordinary. The fine, dark eyes of Gaspard Detournelles—hard drawn, they were, under downward-pointing brows a little like a fox’s—viewed all the world of men as a covert wherein fat game might be flushed at the least expected moment. ”

“ Crump had stepped out of his front door and out of the world as completely as if by some magic the force of gravity had been cut from under his feet and he had soared into stellar space to become a two-hundred-and-fifty-pound comet. ”

“ We do not take you into this room, my dear M’sieu Crump, for a simple reason. It is our desire to protect our patients as greatly as possible against outside contamination during the period of incubation. We ourselves and the nurse go in only when absolutely necessary, and then only after complete sterilization. The sterilizer you will see in the corner, M’sieu Crump”—he pointed to a vapor engine similar to the one in the reception room below—“that makes of this room a veritable germ desert. No spirilla live in its atmosphere.” ”

“ The door closed behind Crump. He was alone in the strangest room he had ever seen. Bare it was to the limit of monkishness, and more than monastic the severity of the few pieces of furniture therein. Walls were shining white, reflecting dazzlingly the cold light from the incandescent cluster depending from the ceiling. Instead of the property sofa, center table, and leather—backed chairs of the usual physician’s consultation room, here were only a settee and two chairs, all of steel even to the thin mesh webbed across seat and back——steel painted an uncompromising and ultra-sterilized white. ”

“ Detournelles hailed, with a gesture of the hands essentially Gallic. “How well met in this so-strange country, where men know not the first principles of bacteriological defense—and die so miserably by the tens of thousands. You are the first——” He left the sentence pregnant because unfinished.
Crump was delighted. His native pugnacity and denial of convention carried him at a bound over all the reserve of this courteous stranger who made the battle against the unseen myriads of the air one of scientific management instead of the hit-or-miss provision Crump had seized upon. ”

“ What he saw was sufficiently impressive: a bare, white—walled room such as the one they had just quitted and made dazzling by the cold light of incandescents. On an iron cot, against the far wall opposite the panel, lay the passive form of a man, head bandaged in white. A hooded figure in white gaberdine was just turning away from the cot as Crump looked through the glass. She saw the faces at the panel, and nodded brightly. It was “Mamselle Nan,” the pretty nurse who had admitted the visitor at the front door. ”

“ It was the first deputy head waiter himself who bent a slavish ear to take the great man’s order; another menial, whose touring car could not have been less than a twin six, brought the silver splendor of casseroled meat and mushrooms sous cloche. The rolls, so Detournelles noted, were each incased in oiled-paper pajamas, though no such delicacy was practiced at other tables. The waiter did not menace the cleanliness of the cutlery by removing it from the tray with his own hands, but held the server so that the diner himself could lift knife, fork, and spoon collection to the damask. ”

“ Behind him hovered Detournelles and Nan Madden, the pretty nurse, both similarly garbed in grave cerements. The woman held a metal tray, from which came the limpid glow of lights on some liquid in a glass receiver and the sharp sheen of metal instruments. Flack turned to the tray, dipped gauze in the liquid, and thoroughly sponged a surface of several square inches on Crump’s arm. Then he straightened up, lifted a silver-and-glass hypodermic needle from the tray, and, holding it up to the cluster of incandescents in the ceiling, observed it with a critical, professional air. ”

“ Edgerton Miles, following a telegram received from Boylan late that afternoon, was waiting the detective’s arrival at the Pennsylvania Station at eight o’clock that night. With him was a Doctor Throop, the Crump family physician. This provision was also on Boylan’s orders.
“A taxi!” was Boylan’s command when they had met outside the train gate. “It may be a question of minutes to save a man’s reason.” No more could Miles draw from the chubby little man in the dark beside him during all the mad ride up to the residence section off the park. ”

“ The director of the Institut Bacteriologique listened with warm courtesy to the financier’s recital of his many precautions. But he was evasive under direct questioning concerning his own system of defense against the ever-present germ, particularly as to the mission of the Parisian institute over which he had charge. “Some day,” he vouched tantalizingly, as they rose to go; “some day perhaps we can interest you in our system of permanent self-sterilization, which covers every point of defense except against the zymogenic bacteria. ”

“ The most valued member of Raoul-Flack’s interesting company of international crooks finds a rich field for his endeavors in the person of a millionaire whose life was one long battle with germs.
THE big man with the mink—lined overcoat snowplowed his way through the corridors of the Assurance Building, choked with the noon rush for the downtown, hasty-stoking restaurants. His shoulders, wide, competent, aggressive, clove a way for him with little respect for the comfort of others making for the wide battery of doors at the Broadway exit. ”

“ He makes the second maid wash Titbits—that’s my Persian—once a day in B. O. And every servant in the house must wear rubber gloves except in their sleep.”
When she had taken her leave, Miles rejoined Boylan, his face all broken into humorous wrinkles.
“Germs in the germea!” he boomed. “That’s what’s the matter with friend Crump, and it seems to have sort o’ struck in on his lady’s wifely affection, as it were. But, seriously, Crump is the shrewdest trader south of Maiden Lane and balanced like a top except on this one subject of the little wigglers in the air and water and food. ”

“ Yes, yes; when we have finished our little déjeuner we will have to arrange for the visions. They are most important.”
V.
Some time—Crump did not know when, nor care, for his headache was raging—the three bulbs of light on the ceiling flicked out. The room was sooty black; not a ray of light anywhere. In the dark the whisper of the sterilizing engine grew slowly to the roar of a freight train; that clock overhead was a pile driver, smashing on metal-capped timbers. But time ceased with the dying of the light ”