How long they huddled there none of them could say. But after eons they became conscious of…something in the room. They had not actually heard a physical sound. A negation of sound, and yet it was louder than thunder. Something, some one, in the center of the room…

  They almost gasped. A weird, snivelling, moaning cry, barely audible, accompanied by mysterious scratchy sounds like the scraping of ice, came to their ears.

  The nervous officer behind Ellery lost control of himself. He uttered a fearful squeal.

  “You damned fool!” shouted Ellery, and instantly fired. He fired again, and again, trying to trace the intruder’s invisible career in the room. The place became sulphurous with stink; they coughed in the smoke. Then there was one long gurgling shriek like nothing human. Ellery darted like lightning to the switch and snapped it on.

  The room was empty. But a trail of fresh copious blood led raggedly to the open window, and the shade was still flapping. Benson cursed and vaulted through, followed by his man.

  Simultaneously the door clattered open and staring eyes glared in. Cap’n Hosey, Jenny, Isaac….“Come in, come in,” said Ellery wearily. “There’s a badly wounded murderer in the woods now, and it’s only a question of time. He can’t get away.” He sank into the nearest chair and fumbled for a cigaret, his eyes shadowed with strain.

  “But who—What—”

  Ellery waved a listless hand. “It was simple enough. But queer; damnably queer. I can’t recall a queerer case.”

  “You know who—” began Jenny in a breathless voice.

  “Certainly. And what I don’t know I can piece together. But there’s something to be done before I…” He rose. “Jenny, do you think you can withstand another shock?”

  She blanched. “What do you mean, Mr. Queen?”

  “I daresay you can. Cap’n Hosey, lend a hand, please. He went to one of Barker’s sample trunks and extracted a couple of chisels and an ax. Cap’n Hosey glared at the unknown. “Come, come, Captain, there’s no danger now, Jerk that rug away. I’m going to show you something.” Ellery handed him a chisel when the old man had complied. “Pry up the nails holding these floor-boards together. Might’s well do a neat job; there’s no sense in ruining your floor utterly.” He went to work with the second chisel at the opposite end of the board. They labored in silence for some time with chisels and ax, and finally loosened the boards.

  “Stand back,” said Ellery quietly, and he stooped and began to remove them one by one….Jenny uttered an involuntary shriek and buried her face against her father’s broad chest.

  Beneath the floor, on the stony earth supporting the cabin, lay a horrible, shapeless, vaguely human mass, whitish in hue. Bones protruded here and there.

  “You see lying here,” croaked Ellery, “the remains of John Gillette, the jewel-thief.”

  “G-Gillette!” stuttered Cap’n Hosey, glaring into the hole.

  “Murdered,” sighed Ellery, “by your friend Barker three months ago.”

  He took a long scarf from one of the tables and flung it over the gap in the floor. “You see,” he murmured in the stupefied silence, “when Gillette came here that night in July and asked for a cabin, while you all thought he looked vaguely familiar, Barker actually recognized him from having seen his photograph in the papers, no doubt. Barker himself was occupying a cabin that night. He knew Gillette had the Cormorant diamond. When everything was quiet he managed to get into this place and murdered Gillette. Since he carried all the hardware his heart could desire, plus quicklime, he pried up the boards under this rug, deposited Gillette’s body there, poured the lime over it to destroy the flesh quickly and prevent the discovery of the body from an odor of putrefaction, nailed down the boards again….There’s more to it, of course. It all fitted nicely once I had deduced the identity of the murderer. It had to be.”

  “But,” gulped Cap’n Hosey in a sick voice, “how’d ye know, Mr. Queen? An’ who—”

  “There were several pointers. Then I found something which clinched my vaguely glimpsed theory. I’ll start from the clincher to make it more easily digestible.” Ellery reached for the back-flung rug and pulled it out so that the curiously worn area was visible. “You see that? Nowhere on the rug except at this precise spot does such a strangely worn area appear. And mark, too, that it was on this precise spot that Barker was attacked and killed, since nowhere except closely about this spot was the rug wrinkled and scuffed; indicating that this must have been the vortex of a short struggle….Any idea what might have caused such a peculiar wearing away of your rug, Captain?”

  “Well,” mumbled the old man, “it looks kinda scratchy, like as if—”

  Benson’s voice came from beyond the open window. It held a note of supreme disbelief. “We got him, Mr. Queen. He died out in the woods.”

  They flocked to the window. Below, on the cold earth, revealed in the harsh glare of Benson’s flash, lay a huge male police dog. His coat was rough and dirty and matted with burrs, and on his head was the cicatrix of a terrible wound, as if he had long before been struck violently over the head. His body was punctured in two places by fresh bullet-holes from Ellery’s revolver; but the blood on the snarling muzzle was already dry.

  “You see,” said Ellery wearily, a little later, “it struck me at once that the worn spot looked scratchy—that is, as if it had been scratched at and thus rubbed away. The scratchy nature of the erosion suggested an animal; probably a dog, for of all domesticated animals the dog is the most inveterate scratcher. In other words, a dog had visited this room at various times during the summer nights and scratched away on the rug at this spot.”

  “But how could you be sure?” protested Jenny.

  “Not by that alone. But there were confirmations. The sounds, for example, of your ‘ghost.’ From the way you described them they might easily have been canine sounds; in fact, you yourself said they were ‘inhuman.’ I believe you said ‘moans, mutters, whimpers, slithery noises, patters, scrapings.’ Moans and mutters and whimpers—surely a dog in pain or grief, if you’re on the track of a dog already? Slithery noises, patters—a dog prowling about. Scrapings—a dog scratching…in this case, at the rug. I felt it was significant.” He sighed. “Then there was the matter of the occasions your ghost selected for his visitations to the cabin. As far as any one could tell, he never came when the cabin was unoccupied. And yet that is when you would expect a marauder to come. Why did he come only when some one was in the cabin? Well, Isaac told me that in empty cabins the windows are kept closed—not locked, merely closed. But a human marauder wouldn’t be stopped by a closed window; wouldn’t be stopped, when it comes to that, even by a locked window. Again the suggestion of an animal, you see. He was able to get in only when one of the windows was open; he could get in therefore only at such times as the cabin was occupied and its occupants left the living-room window open.”

  “By Godfrey!” muttered Cap’n Hosey.

  “There were other confirmations, too. There had been evidence of one police dog in this case, a female. It had come here with Gillette. Yet when the Chicago detectives burst into the cabin and found Gillette apparently gone (which was what Barker relied on), they found indirect evidence—had they realized it—not of one dog but of two. For there was the heavy double chain. Why a double chain? Wouldn’t one heavy chain be enough for even the most powerful dog? So there was another confirmation of an extra dog, a live dog—confirmation that Gillette really had had two all the time, although no one knew of the existence of the second; that when Miss Jenny tried to peer into Gillette’s car in the garage there was still another dog behind the one that tried to bite her hand; that Gillette, fearing the dogs would betray him, then took them both into his, cabin and chained them there. They were helpless while Barker murdered the thief. He must have battered the heads of the two dogs—perhaps with this very iron poker—thinking he was killing them both. Any barks or growls they may have uttered were quite swallowed up in the noise of the rain and thunder that night, as were the sounds of Barker’s hammering down the boards afterward. Barker then must have dragged the two dogs’ bodies out into the woods, reasoning that it would be assumed Gillette had killed them. But the male was not dead, only badly stunned—you saw the terrible scar on his head, which is what permitted me to reconstruct Barker’s activity against the animals. The male recovered and slunk off. You see, the double chain, the storm that night, the wound—they tell a remarkably clear story.”

  “But why—” began Heiman, who had crept into the cabin a moment before.

  Ellery shrugged. “There are lots of whys. Incidentally, the wound itself on Barker’s throat confirmed my theory of a dog—a ragged slashing above the jugular. That’s a dog’s method of killing. But why, I asked myself, had the dog remained invisibly in the neighborhood, as he must have—prowling the woods, wild, wolfish, existing on small game or refuse? Why had he persisted in returning to this cabin and scratching on the rug—of all things? There could be only one answer. Something he loved was below that rug, at that exact spot. Not the female dog, probably his mate—she was dead and had been taken away. Then his master. But his master was Gillette. Was it possible, then, that Gillette had not made his escape, but was under the floor? It was the only answer; and if he was under the floor he was dead. After that it was easy. Barker wanted this cabin tonight badly. He went to the rug, stooped over to lift it. The dog was watching, sprang through the window….”

  “You mean to say,” gasped Cap’n Hosey, “he reco’nized Barker?”

  Ellery smiled wanly. “Who knows? I don’t give dogs credit for human intelligence, although they do startling enough things at times. If he did, then he must have lain paralyzed from Barker’s blow on the night of Gillette’s murder, but still conscious enough to witness Barker’s burial of the body under the floor of the cabin. Either that, or it was merely that an alien hand was desecrating his master’s grave. In any event, I knew Barker must have murdered Gillette; the juxtaposition of his sample trunks with its contents and the use of quicklime on the body was too significant.”

  “But why did Barker come back, Mr. Queen?” whispered Jenny. “That was stupid—ghoulish.” She shivered.

  “The answer to that, I fancy,” murmured Ellery, “is simplicity itself. I have a notion—” They were in the alcove. He went out into the living room where Benson and his men were squatting over the hole in the floor, raking in the mess below with hammers and chisels. “Well, Benson?”

  “Got it, by Christopher!” roared Benson, leaping to his feet and dropping a hammer. “You were dead right. Mr. Queen!” In his hand there was an enormous raw diamond.

  “I thought so,” murmured Ellery. “If Barker deliberately came back it could only have been for one reason, since the body was well buried and Gillette was considered to be alive. That was—the loot. But he must have taken what he thought to be the loot when he murdered Gillette. Therefore he had been fooled—Gillette, the lapidary, had cleverly made a paste replica of the diamond before he skipped, and it was the replica that Barker had stolen. When he discovered his error after leaving here in July it was too late. So he had to wait until his next sales trip to New Bedford and dig back under the floor. That was why he was crouched over that spot on the rug when the dog jumped him.”

  There was a little silence. Then Jenny said softly: “I think y—it’s perfectly wonderful, Mr. Queen.” She patted her hair.

  Ellery shuffled to the door. “Wonderful? There’s only one wonderful thing about this case, aside from the unorthodox identity of the murderer, my dear. Some day I shall write a monograph on the phenomenon of coincidence.”

  “What’s that?” demanded Jenny.

  He opened the door and sniffed the crisp morning air, its invigorating fillip of salt, with grateful nostrils. The first streaks of dawn were visible in the cold black sky. “The name,” he chuckled, “of the inn.”

  The Adventure of THE GLASS-DOMED CLOCK

  OF ALL THE HUNDREDS of criminal cases in the solution of which Mr. Ellery Queen participated by virtue of his self-imposed authority as son of the famous Inspector Queen of the New York Detective Bureau, he has steadfastly maintained that none offered a simpler diagnosis than the case which he has designated as “The Adventure of the Glass-Domed Clock.” “So simple,” he likes to say—sincerely!—“that a sophomore student in high school with the most elementary knowledge of algebraic mathematics would find it as easy to solve as the merest equation.” He has been asked, as a result of such remarks, what a poor untutored first-grade detective on the regular police force—whose training in algebra might be something less than elementary—could be expected to make of such a “simple” case. His invariably serious response has been: “Amendment accepted. The resolution now reads: Anybody with common sense could have solved that crime. It’s as basic as five minus four leaves one.”

  This was a little cruel, when it is noted that among those who had opportunity—and certainly wishfulness—to solve the crime was Mr. Ellery Queen’s own father, the Inspector, certainly not the most stupid of criminal investigators. But then Mr. Ellery Queen, for all his mental prowess, is sometimes prone to confuse his definitions: viz., his uncanny capacity for strict logic is far from the average citizen’s common sense. Certainly one would not be inclined to term elementary a problem in which such components as the following figured: a pure purple amethyst, a somewhat bedraggled expatriate from Czarist Russia, a silver loving-cup, a poker game, five birthday encomiums, and of course that peculiarly ugly relic of early Americana catalogued as “the glass-domed clock”—among others! On the surface the thing seems too utterly fantastic, a maniac’s howling nightmare. Anybody with Ellery’s cherished “common sense” would have said so. Yet when he arranged those weird elements in their proper order and pointed out the “obvious” answer to the riddle—with that almost monastic intellectual innocence of his, as if everybody possessed his genius for piercing the veil of complexities!—Inspector Queen, good Sergeant Velie, and the others figuratively rubbed their eyes, the thing was so clear.

  It began, as murders do, with a corpse. From the first the eeriness of the whole business struck those who stood about in the faintly musked atmosphere of Martin Orr’s curio shop and stared down at the shambles’ that had been Martin Orr. Inspector Queen, for one, refused to credit the evidence of his old senses; and it was not the gory nature of the crime that gave him pause, for he was as familiar with scenes of carnage as a butcher and blood no longer made him squeamish. That Martin Orr, the celebrated little Fifth Avenue curio dealer whose establishment was a treasure-house of authentic rarities, had had his shiny little bald head bashed to red ruin—this was an indifferent if practical detail; the bludgeon, a heavy paperweight spattered with blood but wiped clean of fingerprints, lay not far from the body; so that much was clear. No, it was not the assault on Orr that opened their eyes, but what Orr had apparently done, as he lay gasping out his life on the cold cement floor of his shop, after the assault.

  The reconstruction of events after Orr’s assailant had fled the shop, leaving the curio dealer for dead, seemed perfectly legible: having been struck down in the main chamber of his establishment, toward the rear, Martin Orr had dragged his broken body six feet along a counter—the red trail told the story plainly—had by super-human effort raised himself to a case of precious and semi-precious stones, had smashed the thin glass with a feeble fist, had groped about among the gem-trays, grasped a large unset amethyst, fallen back to the floor with the stone tightly clutched in his left hand, had then crawled on a tangent five feet past a table of antique clocks to a stone pedestal, raised himself again, and deliberately dragged off the pedestal the object it supported—an old clock with a glass dome over it—so that the clock fell to the floor by his side, shattering its fragile case into a thousand pieces. And there Martin Orr had died, in his left fist the amethyst, his bleeding right hand resting on the clock as if in benediction. By some miracle the clock’s machinery had not been injured by the fall; it had been one of Martin Orr’s fetishes to keep all his magnificent timepieces running; and to the bewildered ears of the little knot of men surrounding Martin Orr’s corpse that gray Sunday morning came the pleasant tick-tick-tick of the no longer glass-domed clock.

  Weird? It was insane!

  “There ought to be a law against it,” growled Sergeant Velie.

  Dr. Samuel Prouty, Assistant Medical Examiner of New York County, rose from his examination of the body and prodded Martin Orr’s dead buttocks—the curio dealer was lying face down—with his foot.

  “Now here’s an old coot,” he said grumpily, “sixty if he’s a day, with more real stamina than many a youngster. Marvelous powers of resistance! He took a fearful beating about the head and shoulders, his assailant left him for dead, and the old monkey clung to life long enough to make a tour about the place! Many a younger man would have died in his tracks.”

  “Your professional admiration leaves me cold,” said Ellery. He had been awakened out of a pleasantly warm bed not a half-hour before to find Djuna, the Queens’ gypsy boy-of-all-work, shaking him. The Inspector had already gone, leaving word for Ellery, if he should be so minded, to follow. Ellery was always so minded when his nose sniffed crime, but he had not had breakfast and he was thoroughly out of temper. So his taxicab had rushed through Fifth Avenue to Martin Orr’s shop, and he had found the Inspector and Sergeant Velie already on the fluttered scene interrogating a grief-stunned old woman—Martin Orr’s aged widow—and a badly frightened Slavic giant who introduced himself in garbled English as the “ex-Duke Paul.” The ex-Duke Paul, it developed, had been one of Nicholas Romanov’s innumerable cousins caught in the whirlpool of the Russian revolution who had managed to flee the homeland and was eking out a none too fastidious living in New York as a sort of social curiosity. This was in 1926, when royal Russian expatriates were still something of a novelty in the land of democracy. As Ellery pointed out much later, this was not only 1926, but precisely Sunday, March the seventh, 1926, although at the time it seemed ridiculous to consider the specific date of any importance whatever.