A Short, Strange Tale Is
WHEN THE DEAD
RETURN
WITHOUT a doubt it is very disconcerting to meet a dead man, particularly if he chances to have been your husband.
In the circumstance it is no wonder that Marian screamed.
As it was midday and on Broadway, the scream attracted a good deal of attention and, with one exception, everyone in the vicinity rushed toward Marian, who was charming enough to merit the fullest sympathy. The one exception walked quickly round the corner of John Street and vanished. He had a reason for doing this. He was a dead man.
Normally Marian might have thought there had been some mistake regarding her late husband's demise. But this was hardly possible. He had died in bed and in her presence. Furthermore, the medical man, Dr. Henry Delware, who had also been present, could doubtless swear that the dead man had shuffled off his mortal coil.
Marian was twenty-two when she became a widow. It was a year later when she screamed on Broadway, and by that time she was no longer Mrs. Creed, relict of the late Mark Creed.
She had become Mrs. James Turner.
That was one reason why her scream had such a stricken note. It becomes really embarrassing to encounter a dead husband when one has no further use for him.
What made the matter more disconcerting, and argued against the chance of delusion or of the dead man's having a double, was the fact that the newspapers had recently contained a number of circumstantial accounts of dead people having been seen. There was a veritable epidemic of apparitions.
A psychic committee had formed itself to collate and record the evidence and had investigated such incidents as that of Arthur Johnson, age twenty-four, who had died suddenly in a public city park. Some six months later he had been seen by both his mother and sister near their residence, and when they had tried to speak to him he had fled and boarded a street-car post-haste.
Then there was Mrs. Turnley, seen by her son leaving her favorite seat in a well-known New York picture palace. He had tried to trace her in the crowd but had failed. That was four months after her death.
Strangest of all, however, was the case of Felix Malheur, the French chef, who had been fatally stabbed in the neck by Henri Marzot, a malicious deed for which Marzot went to the electric chair.
Some seven months had elapsed when a man, convincingly identified as Malheur, and having a scar on his neck exactly similar to the fatal wound, was arrested for vagrancy. He swore that he was not Malheur,
