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

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      “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 for children started out in the Sheridan Boulevard district?” asked T. Ashley.

      “Why, yes. In fact,” added the doc­tor, “I’m chairman of the organization board.”

      “I might,” said T. Ashley, “have a contribution to make to that enterprise, under certain circumstances.”

      “That’s good news,” said Dillingham. “We can certainly use a little help. This town’s in crying need of such an insti­tution.”

      “So I understand. Too bad the city wouldn’t meet the board’s proposition as stated some time ago in the papers.”

      “You mean our offer to put up one hundred thousand dollars, if the city would contribute fifty thousand dollars, and make it a semi-public institution?”

      “Exactly. But what else can anybody expect,” asked T. Ashley, “with men like Hanrahan and Levitsky pulling the puppet strings and working for their own pockets instead of the public wel­fare?”

      “What else, indeed?”

      “Men like that can always be counted on to block any forward-looking move. They’re not merely content with throw­ing sticks in the wheel of progress, but they rob the taxpayers right and left.”

      “Correct,” agreed the doctor.

      “By the way,” said T. Ashley, chang­ing the subject, “what do you think of this?”

      He drew from his inside coat pocket a sheet of paper and spread it on the doctor’s desk. Dillingham put on his glasses, looked at it a moment, and then, with the slightest suggestion of a frown, replied: “I don’t quite understand you. Are you asking for my opinion of this rather highly magnified fingerprint?”

      T. Ashley bent forward, pointing with the tip of a pencil. “What do you make of that?” asked he.

      “Of what?”

      “This mark, here, a little to the left of the middle of the print.”

      “It—well, it looks like a scar, to me.”

      “Yes, so it does—superficially. Have you no other opinion, doctor?”

      “I don’t understand you,” said Dill­ingham. “Are you here to talk hospi­tal or fingerprints?”

      “A little of both, maybe.”

      “I mean, is this a professional or a nonprofessional call?”

      “Oh, highly professional on both sides, I assure you!”

      “You’re talking in riddles, I must say,” said the doctor. “Well, I’m used to riddles. I get lots of them in my practice. Every doctor does.”

      “But few,” declared T. Ashley, “solve their riddles with the proverbial ‘neat­ness and dispatch’ that characterize you. Let us now return to the matter of this fingerprint. Would you say, doctor, that this mark—here, on the print—was made by a scar?”

      “Looks like it,” said the doctor. His fingers began to drum a bit nervously on his chair arm, but quickly stopped.

      “Ah, but look closer.”

      “Well, then?”

      “Study the print with a magnifying glass, if you have one handy.”

      The doctor, seeming altogether mys­tified, opened a drawer of his desk, took out a glass, and examined the print.

      “That mark certainly looks like a scar to me,” he declared.

      “In a scar, however,” objected T. Ashley, “the edges would be smoothly healed. Here, you see, they are rough. And, moreover, there are several marks—in the scar itself—that look like tiny, wandering chains. Concatenated mark­ings, to be technical.”

      “Well, what of it?” demanded Dillingham. He seemed a bit impatient.

      “As a physician, you know that scar tissue presents no such markings.”

      “True enough. But what in the world are you driving at, Mr. Ashley? This is all very puzzling, I must say.” The doctor frowned. “First you talk hos­pital, and speak of a donation. Then you catechize me about fingerprints, and now—well, what are you coming at, anyhow?”

      “At the obvious conclusion that this mark, here on this fingerprint, was not produced by a scar at all, but by another kind of skin altogether from human skin.”

      “I don’t seem to follow you,” said the doctor, laying down his magnifying glass.

      “To state it still more plainly,” ex­pounded T. Ashley, “when the original fingerprint was made, from which this microphotograph was taken, there was another piece of skin—a nonhuman skin—under the skin that made the print.”

      “Oh, a graft, perhaps?” said Dillingham, as if an idea had occurred to him.

      “No—though this whole matter is connected with one, to pardon a collo­quialism. There are no signs of growths, adhesions, or anything of that kind. In fact, both skins from which this print was made were dead skins.”

      “Dead?”

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