Bat wing

“ It was ‘Bat Wing!’
“My doubts were dispersed. This was a meeting-place of Devil-worshippers, or devotees of the cult of Voodoo! One man only could I see clearly so as to remember him, a big negro employed upon one of my estates. He seemed to be a sort of high priest or president of the orgies. Attached to his arms were giant imitations of bat wings which he moved grotesquely as if in flight. There were many women in the throng, which numbered fully I should think a hundred people. ”

“ It seemed to me that life at Cray’s Folly was quite agreeable, and such was my mood that the shadowy Bat Wing menace found no place in it save as the chimera of a sick man’s imagination. One thing only troubled me: the identity of the woman who had been with Colonel Menendez on the previous night.
However, such unconscious sun worshippers are we all that in the glory of that summer morning I realized that life was good, and I resolutely put behind me the dark suspicions of the night. ”

“ Now, standing at the window, looking down into that old-world garden, he was “sensing” the atmosphere keenly, seeking for the note of danger. It was sheer intuition, perhaps, but whilst he could never rely upon its answering his summons, once active it never misled him.
“You think some real menace overhangs Colonel Menendez?”
“I am sure of it.” He stared into my face. “There is something very, very strange about this bat wing business.” ”

“ This quest of Bat Wing is like the quest of heaven, Knox. A hundred open doors invite us, each one promising to lead to the light, and if we enter where do they lead?—to mystification. For instance, Colonel Menendez has broadly hinted that he looks upon Colin Camber as an enemy. Judging from your reception at the Guest House to-day, such an enmity, and a deadly enmity, actually exists. ”

“ The bat, with zig-zag course, flits hither and thither, up and down, back and forth, untiring of wing, appearing and disappearing, darting its head out this way and that, and each time catching an insect in flight, which it immediately crushes and gobbles up, sending it to its doom down a throat that opens wide from ear to ear. ”

“ Before the dim shadows began to lift, the bats and owls had returned usually, but the bat family did not retire again behind their cobweb curtain; instead they hung themselves by their wing-claws head downward from the beam, folding their wings closely over their beady eyes, and thus they would sleep all day. ”

“ Perhaps it is true that in the great crises of life the inner eye becomes momentarily opened.
With intense curiosity I awaited the Colonel’s next words, but, a cigarette held nervously between his fingers, he stood staring at Harley, and it was the latter who broke that peculiar silence which had fallen upon us.
“The wing of a bat,” he murmured, then touched it gingerly. “Of what kind of bat, Colonel Menendez? Surely not a British species?”
“But emphatically not a British species,” replied the Spaniard. “Yet even so the matter would be strange.” ”

“ THE BAT'S WING.—An examination of the bat's wing shows that the pectoral bone is very small and thin, thus proving that when the entire wing support is thrown upon the primary bone it must be large enough to enable it to carry out its functions. It is certainly not so made because it is a necessary shape which best adapts it for flying. ”

“ Bat herself, and if you could only have peeped beneath one of her wings you might have seen the dearest little mite of a bat, with eyes of jet, clinging close to its mother's breast as she folded it tenderly beneath her wing. There the helpless little creature stayed, close to its mother, until it became older and stronger, for among all the tiny, fur-bearing animals there is no little mother more considerate of her young than the bat. ”

“ In the bat and bird the wings do not vibrate with the same rapidity as in the insect, and this is accounted for by the circumstance, that in them the muscles do not act exclusively at the root of the wing. In the bat and bird the muscles run along the wing towards the tip for the purpose of flexing or folding the wing prior to the up stroke, and for opening out and expanding it prior to the down stroke. ”

“ This membrane is extended from the fingers to the sides of the body, then passes back to the hind legs, and covers them up to the ankles, and so round enclosing the little tail. Thus the bat has an enormous spread of wing for its size. The long forefinger of the hand extends to the tip of the wing, and the middle finger runs close to it, making this part of the wing strong. When the bat closes its wings the bony frame shuts together like the wires of an umbrella, and the skin hangs in folds as the covering of the umbrella hangs in folds between the closed wires. ”

“ Wings, real wings, perfectly adapted to flying, are the bat’s most striking feature. How can a mammal, an animal whose general structure is that of a dog or a cat for example, possess the flying-apparatus of a bird? How can two organs so entirely different be combined? In the bat’s wing, my children, we find an admirable example of the infinite resources at the command of the Creator, who, without adding to or subtracting from the fundamental plan, has adapted the same organs to the most widely different functions. ”

“ Often enough my memory has recaptured that moment in Paul Harley’s office, when Harley, myself, and the tall Spaniard stood looking down at the bat wing lying upon the blotting pad.
My brilliant friend at times displayed a sort of prescience, of which I may have occasion to speak later, but I, together with the rest of pur-blind humanity, am commonly immune from the prophetic instinct. ”

“ Might I ask, Mr. Harley, why you mention this matter? The other things are serious, but why you should mention the trick of some mischievous boy at a time like this I can’t imagine.”
“No,” said Harley, wearily, “it does sound absurd, Inspector; I quite appreciate the fact. But, you see, Colonel Menendez regarded it as the most significant episode of them all.”
“What! The bat wing nailed on the door?”
“The bat wing, decidedly. He believed it to be the token of a negro secret society which had determined upon his death, hence my enquiries regarding coloured men in the neighbourhood. ”

“ I thus found myself at the time when all these legal processes terminated engaged to marry a girl as wealthy as she was beautiful. Therefore, except for the many grim memories which it had left with me, nothing but personal good fortune resulted from my sojourn at Cray’s Folly, beneath the shadow of that Bat Wing which had had no existence outside the cunning imagination of Colonel Juan Menendez. ”

“ The Wing at all times thoroughly under control.—The wing is moveable in all parts, and can be wielded intelligently even to its extremity; a circumstance which enables the insect, bat, and bird to rise upon the air and tread it as a master—to subjugate it in fact. The wing, no doubt, abstracts an upward and onward recoil from the air, but in doing this it exercises a selective and controlling power; it seizes one current, evades another, and creates a third; it feels and paws the air as a quadruped would feel and paw a treacherous yielding surface. ”

“ Rowing towards the roof of your house, as if it used first one wing, then the other, its flight, while swift and powerful, is stiff and mechanical, unlike the swallow's, and its entire aspect suggests a bat. The nighthawk and whippoorwill are its relatives, and it resembles them not a little, especially in its nocturnal habits. ”

“ He reseated himself, whilst Harley regarded him silently, then:
“‘The evil that men do lives after them,’” he murmured. He rested his chin upon his hand. “A bat wing,” he continued, musingly, “a bat wing was nailed to Menendez’s door.” He stared across at Harley. “Am I to believe, sir, that this was the clue which led you to the Guest House?” ”

“ The flight of a Bat differs from that of all other animals in being dependent upon a modification of the bones of the fore limb, which, without interfering with the animal's movements as a quadruped, secures an extension of the wing which is not inferior in area to that which the bird obtains by elongation of the bones of the arm and fore-arm and its feathers. The distinctive peculiarity of the Bat's wing is in the circumstance that four of the digits of the hand have their bones prolonged to a length which is often equal to the combined length of the arm and fore-arm. ”

“ If the insect was not very strong the head was withdrawn at once and the unfortunate devoured, but a big insect gave trouble, and it might be a second or more before a firm enough grip was secured. The whole movement was quick, and at first we did not realise that it was a normal habit, but there is little doubt that it is what the bat does when on the wing. A moth seized by the wing alone would give trouble in the air, and might easily escape, but if at once thrust into this living net its struggles could be mastered, and the bat could shift its jaws to the body of its prey. ”

“ The lemurs, flying squirrels, and a few other animals have extensions of the skin mantle-wise along the body and legs, to bear them up for a little in the air, as they make long leaps; but they do not really fly. The bat, on the contrary, has good wings, and flies. The bat reminds us a little of that winged reptile which was in the ancient world long before men appeared on the earth. That was a reptile with a large, skin-like wing; a bat is a mammal with two skin-covered wings. ”

“ It is not a wing intended merely for flight, but one which, while it raises the animal, is capable of receiving a new sensation, or sensations, in that exquisite degree, so as almost to constitute a new sense. On the fine web of the Bat's wing nerves are distributed, which enable it to avoid objects in its flight during the night, when both eyes and ears fail. ”

“ The wing of the bat bears a considerable resemblance to that of the insect, inasmuch as it consists of a delicate, semi-transparent, continuous membrane, supported in divers directions, particularly towards its anterior margin, by a system of osseous stays or stretchers which confer upon it the degree of rigidity requisite for flight. It is, as a rule, deeply concave on its under or ventral surface, and in this respect resembles the wing of the heavy-bodied birds. ”

“ The unholy rites of Voodoo are a closed book to the Western nations. I have opened that book, Mr. Harley. The powers of the Obeah man, and especially of the arch-magician known and dreaded by every negro as ‘Bat Wing,’ are familiar to me. Since I was alone at the time that the shot was fired, and for some few minutes afterward, and since the Tudor garden of Cray’s Folly is within easy range of the Guest House, to fail to place me under arrest would be an act of sheer stupidity. ”

“ Defective as the wing of a bat must appear when compared with that of a bird, it is nevertheless of such assistance in flight, that it makes journeys possible which seem out of all proportion to the size of the animal. ”

“ When we find the fossil form of one of the first flying creatures, we see that the huge wings were made of parchment-like skin, stretched upon the arm and fourth finger, which extended in claws in front of the membrane. If we examine that curious flying mammal, the bat, we shall see a similar construction, one finger of the [Pg 141] bat’s fore-leg extending beyond the wing into a hooked claw, by which it can hang itself up for rest, or upon which it can walk, going on all fours, in a clumsy fashion. ”

“ But the apparatus of the bat is not a wing at all, but only a developed hand. Let the reader spread his hand as wide as he can, and he will see that between each finger, and especially between the forefinger and the thumb, the skin forms a kind of webbing, something of the same kind as that on the feet of ducks and other aquatic birds. ”

“ Perhaps the males gather food for the females. [8]
Perhaps the most important fact, from a practical point of view, is that of the power of the mother-bats to carry such a weight of young in addition to their own. Yet, so far as I know, all estimates of the extent of wing and size of muscle, which would be necessary to enable a man to fly, have been based upon the idea that the only flying mammal is a fair standard. [9]
These estimates should be corrected so as to conform to the fact that a bat can fly with nearly double its ordinary weight. ”

“ You will admit that he is a clever man, brilliantly clever. Keep this fact in mind. Remember his studies, and he does not deny that they have included Voodoo. Remember his enquiries into the significance of Bat Wing. Remember, as we now learn definitely from Mrs. Camber’s evidence, that he was in Cuba at the same time as the late Colonel Menendez, and once, at least, actually in the same hotel in the United States. Consider the rifle found under the floor of the hut ”

“ In bats four of the five bones similar to those of our palm are greatly elongated, as are also the corresponding fingers, and they together constitute the four ribs on which is stretched the membrane of the wing, just as silk is stretched on the ribs of an umbrella. Thus it is at the sacrifice of what might have been a hand that the wing is formed. Therefore the scientists call all mammals of like structure with the bat ‘chiropters,’ meaning hand-winged creatures, from two Greek words signifying hand and wing. ”

“ But why did he bring me to Cray’s Folly?”
“Don’t you understand, Harley?” I cried, excitedly. “He really feared for his life, since he knew that Camber had discovered the intrigue.”
Paul Harley heaved a long sigh.
“I must congratulate you, Knox,” he said, gravely, “upon a really splendid contribution to my case. In several particulars I find myself nearer to the truth. But the definite establishment or shattering of your theory rests upon one thing.”
“What’s that?” I asked. “You are surely not thinking of the bat wing nailed upon the door?” ”