ber seventeenth, Michael Salisbury vanished. He must have disappeared in the early morning, for we had been having a lengthy conversation the night before, and neither of us had retired before midnight. His clothes were all in his room, with the exception of his black silk dressing-gown and his slippers.
The first thing I did, when I had ascertained that Michael Salisbury was nowhere about, was to look for the gem. It was gone. As no one but Michael and myself knew the combination and location of that safe, Michael must have taken it. But where could the man have gone in his dressing-gown? For some time I was more than confident that he would turn up sometime during the day.
I don't know what possessed me to go to the ruined chapel that afternoon. But I went, crossing the moor just as the sun began to sink below the horizon. The chapel was an ordinary affair, except that it was antique. Old stone, broken panes of painted glass—the usual thing. Its floor, however, was unusual: it was of earth, and the insidious advance of the water under the earth had made it soggy.
I saw nothing unusual about the structure when I approached it. I made a note of the fact that I would have to hurry to get back to the house before darkness settled over the moor, and began to wonder whether or not Michael would have returned. I entered the chapel, proceeding cautiously over the wet, miry soil. But abruptly I stopped. In the mud before me lay a grayish bubble that contracted and expanded in a sort of rhythmic movement about something that lay in its midst. I bent closer, the better to see what it wag. As I did so, my handkerchief fell from my coat pocket—fell directly into this gray bubble. More quickly than I can tell, the grayish mass had spread over the cloth and devoured it. Again I caught sight of the object in the midst of it.
And in that moment I recognized it. It was that recognition that made me turn and run from the chapel—run haphazardly across the moor. And it was that knowledge that sent me to Liverpool that same night to see whether or not a small brown man, answering to the description of an African pigmy from the Veldt, had taken passage on any outgoing ship. As if in confirmation to my recognition of the thing in the chapel, I found that a man such as the one I sought had taken passage bound for Calais, and I have wired there to have him seized on landing, and searched for the gem I know he has.
But I have some knowledge of these priests; the gem will not be found, yet it is the only thing I could have done. For the thing in the midst of that seething bubble was the gold-rimmed pince-nez that Michael Salisbury had worn when I last saw him.
