Deweese shook his head slowly.
"I have said that I do not know," was his emphatic reply, "and I do not. How could I, when I did not see it? It was large, powerful and ferocious, but whether it was an animal of some kind, or a demon out of hell, I do not know."
"Perhaps your ears served you better than your eyes?" said Strange. "Did you hear the Thing when it leaped upon you?"
"I did," replied Deweese, with a shudder. "At almost the very instant that it attacked me I heard it whisper."
"Eh, bien, Monsieur," cried Peret, "and what did it say to you?"
"It did not say anything intelligible," was Deweese's disappointing reply. "It just whispered."
Strange and Peret looked at each other in silence. The Frenchman shrugged his shoulders, and exhaled a cloud of cigarette smoke. Strange took a hitch in his trousers, and his face became stern.
"All right," he said curtly to Deweese. "Stick around till the coroner comes. I want to question you and this other man further, a little later on."
He gave an order to O'Shane, who was standing a little distance away with his eyes glued on the front of Berjet's house, then turned to Peret.
"I'm going in." he growled, and drew his revolver.
The Frenchman threw his cigarette on the pavement, drew his own automatic, and, opening the front gate, ran across the little yard. Followed by Strange and Deweese, who asked and obtained permission to accompany them, Peret buttoned his coat around his frail body, got a firm grip on the window ledge and, with the agility of a monkey, climbed through the broken sash of the window through which Berjet had projected himself.
The room in which the detectives found themselves had evidently been the scientist's sitting room. It was simply but comfortably furnished and was quite masculine in character. The walls were lined with well-filled book shelves, and in the center of the room was a large table, littered with a miscellany of papers, pamphlets, pipes, burnt matches and tobacco ashes. On the carpeted floor near the table lay an open book, the leaves of which were rumpled and torn, Except for this, the room was in perfect order.
"No signs of gas anywhere," said Strange, audibly sniffing the air. "The asphyxiation theory of Dr. Sprague's is a dud, in my opinion."
Peret, who had begun to make an inspection of the room, did not reply. Strange continued his investigation while Deweese stood near the window looking on.
The result of Peret's examination, which, while brief, was more or less thorough, annoyed and confounded him. The detective sergeant also appeared to be puzzled. The Frenchman was the first to give expression to his thoughts.
"The three doors and the four windows in this room, sergeant, are locked on the inside," he remarked, as Strange paused for a moment to look at him with questioning eyes. "The key to that door on the far side of the room, and which I am sure is the door of a closet, is missing, but the other keys are in the locks. The windows, moreover, are, as you have no doubt observed, fastened with a form of mechanism that could not possibly have been sprung from the outside. Yet Berjet said he was attacked by ten assassins!"
"The point that you are trying to make, I take it," Strange grunted, "is that the broken window is the only means of egress from the room."
"Your penetration is remarkable," snapped Peret, who always became irritated when baffled.
"It's the devil's own work." commented Deweese, who had been watch
