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THE LIVING GHOST · The Jailer of Souls

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  Chapter six of The Jailer of Souls by Hamilton Craigie. This libery was recording
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  is in the public domain. Read by yoganand The Jailer of Souls, Chapter
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  six, The Living Ghost. Anister had heard nothing from Rooke other than that
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  he had been again invited to a further session of the club for that evening.
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  Alone in his room on the morning following his adventure on Rooke's office,
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  his eye had been caught and held by a news item printed on an inside
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  page of the Durango County Gazette. He had nearly passed it over, but
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  now the lines leaped out at him as if they had been blazoned across the
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  paper. In a double column spread. Travis Anister still strangely missing retired capitalist
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  con since January foul play feared, and separated from it by the width of
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  a single column. He read retired banker disappears. New Bold Humiston a suicide
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  friend's fear for safety. But it was at a third item, tucked away
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  in an obscure corner, that Anisters stifled a quick word in his throat.
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  New Bold Humeston had been a friend of his father's. It was an odd
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  coincidence, to say the least of it. And the story went on to
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  say that three other men, all nationally known, had so to speak,
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  between sons, disappeared as completely as if the earth had opened and swallowed them.
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  And that third news item, irrelevant as it might have been, told
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  of an incident owed and unusual enough. It had happened in Palos Verde,
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  distant from Drybone, a long twenty miles of hazardous mountain trail. A man
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  had come in rags and tatus. At first they had taught him a desert
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  rat, a prospector light headed from starvation, for his incoherent babble had proclaimed
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  him no less a personage than Rodman acts Worthy, prominent banker of Mahave,
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  the Sheriff of Palos Verde. On the off chance adwired Mohave, and the
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  word had come back that Axworthy had been missing, they were sending a man.
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  With the arrival of this man, however, the mystery deepened, for
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  it appeared that the derelict was indeed Axeworthy, and yet not Axworthy at all.
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  For whereas the true Axworthy had had a high aquiline nose and a wide,
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  generous mouth, the derelict was not nursed, swarthy. Where the banker
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  had been fair, he was simply another man. But there had been this
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  about it. On the banker's left forearm, underneath there had been a curious
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  birthmark. The derelict had spoken of it, but upon examination the arms showed
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  smooth and bare. They investigated from Mahave had been obviously skeptical, until abruptly
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  the ragged claimant had taken from his pocket a curious removable bridge. A dentist
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  in Mahave who made it, he said, could identify it. It fitted
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  perfectly. This looked like proof, but the thing was obviously impossible. And
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  then as Axworthy was being taken back to Mahave, he went suddenly stark,
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  staring, crazy, repeating over and over with reference to the bridge, It's
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  the one thing. They didn't get, the one thing. And there the
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  matter rested, save that upon arrival in Mohave the bridge was found to be
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  missing. The emissary from Mohave seemed to remember a dark faced stranger who had
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  been seated opposite them in the train, but that was all. The man
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  had jostled against this charge upon alighting. The last proof, if indeed it
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  might be called a proof, was gone. Anister frowned thoughtfully. He smiled
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  upon that canceled check in his pocket, and he was remembering one other thing,
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  and that was the Squire paper, which he had found among his father's
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  effects. For on it had been a name, or rather too, the
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  name of Hamilton Drooke, and of another unknown to Anister. And as to
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  that axe worthy case, it was common knowledge that lunatics, for instance,
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  entertained frequently the delusion that they were people of importance. There was nothing new
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  in that. Somehow, it seemed to him that he held in his hands
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  the pieces of a jigsaw puss that, even if put together, made but
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  a patchwork of motives and design, which, yet, if he could but
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  find the key, would be as clear as crystal. That paper found in
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  his father's office. The interview with Childers at Washington, the long trip westward,
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  the warning message on the train, the big man with the ice blue
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  eye and the square jaw a fighter, the attack in the hotel, the
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  meeting with Rouke, and the meeting with the gul, the finding of that
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  canceled check, and last the matter of those queerly related news items just under
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  his hand. These made a patent to be ungraveled only by the warp and
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  woof of fate, and the chance meeting with the bearded stranger at the corner
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  of the street. Consider how he would Ernest's men kept turning backward to that
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  meeting. And those eyes that were like the eyes of a damned soul,
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  malignant cold in their abyssmal cold, cruelty of discarnate, evil, discarnate,
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  that was it that would express it. For the man, as he requed
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  called him, seemed somehow less than human. There had been about him an
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  aura, an emanation that was like a tide rising from the depths, from
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  darkness unto darkness. Anester was scarcely superstitious, but he was again conscious of
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  that icy chill. He shivered, as a man is said to shiver when,
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  according to an ancient superstition, someone is said to be walking over his
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  grave. He rose, walking to the window to peer outward into the sun
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  washed street. The coil was tightening, he felt it, and he was
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  but one man against many, And knowing what he knew, or suspecting what
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  he suspected, it seemed to him all at once that sunlight had flattened to
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  a heatless flaming of pale radiance. There seemed a menace in it, even
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  as there seemed a menace in the very air, awaiting attention, like a
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  fine wire drawn and singing at a pitch too low for sound. Abruptly he
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  heard a sound. It was like a scratching of a rat in the wainscot,
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  faint and thin. His toe was locked now looking at it. The
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  knob turned slowly, stealthily, He could see it turning. Then faint but
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  unmistakable, came and knocked the end of Chapter six