The Brain Jungle by Edward Mott Woolley
Short Stories, April, 1916
The Brain Jungle
by Edward Mott Woolley
A wealthy woman murdered in her carriage, a sister of charity drowned as if by accident, children poisoned by some mysterious agent, such was the situation when Felix Hazard was called into the crime area of a hitherto reposeful New England town FTER the fifth unaccountable murder
in getting the widow’s jewels. Evidently
in Litchfield the city council met in
something happened to alarm him, for he
A secret session and voted to retain made his escape and left the brooch and the Felix Hazard, whose reputation for detecting
rings untouched. Yet so rapidly and fiendishly
well-nigh inscrutable crimes was unsurpassed.
was the crime perpetrated that the victim
Accordingly the Mayor went down to New
seems to have made scarcely a struggle—”
York without informing even the Chief of
Hazard interrupted with a gesture. You
Police of Litchfield, and called at the office of remember that he took little interest in
the Hazard Detective Agency. Here, after a
ordinary crimes with commonplace motives.
wait of two hours in an anteroom, he was
Nor did he waste time discussing them. The
shown into the little private den of the world was full of sordid deeds of violence, wizard—the room so profusely decorated with
and his lightning-like imagination had a habit
skulls and other relics of crime. Hazard was
of jumping to fantastic possibilities. If he
there, seated at a flat-topped desk in a haze of found no range for such flights of involved
blue tobacco smoke, with some red and green
fancy, he invariably dropped a case at the
diagrams before him.
start. So now, without any change in his
“Our city of Litchfield,” said the immobile countenance, he raised his hand and Mayor, after formalities, “has until recently
observed:
been unusually free from serious crime. On
“You speak of the Asylum of the
the first day of June the Litchfield Daily Times Innocents. An orphan asylum, I take it!”
printed an editorial boasting that two years
“One that shelters a hundred homeless
had elapsed since a homicide had been children,” answered the Mayor. “An committed in our city. But that very evening,
institution founded by Mrs. Blauvelt herself.”
sir, an atrocious murder was done, the victim
“Very good!” said Hazard. “Proceed to
being one of our most noble women, Mrs.
the second crime.”
Agatha Blauvelt, a wealthy widow, who was
“The second crime,” returned the
waylaid in her electric runabout just after dark visitor, taken aback by the other’s
and strangled to death. She was driving the car brusqueness, bears no relation to the first, but herself, and was alone, having just visited the is a separate mystery. If you will permit me, I Asylum of the Innocents, a mile out of town.
should like to narrate the details of the first She had long been the chief patroness of this
murder before proceeding——”
institution, to which she had contributed large
“The details can wait,” broke in
sums of money. The apparent motive was
Hazard. “I have an appointment in ten
robbery, though the murderer did not succeed
minutes.”
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The Mayor, who had seated himself at
escaped without being seen. Circumstances
the opposite side of the table, looked at the
pointed strongly to a certain young man for
detective in amazement. He could not whom the minister had refused to perform a comprehend the rapid action of Hazard’s agile
marriage ceremony, on the ground of the
mind, and he was inclined to resent the applicant’s ill health. This young man was ungracious reception accorded him. He had
arrested——”
some hot words on his lips, but they died
“And discharged for lack of evidence,
away as he found the strange eyes of the other
I take it!” said Hazard, gazing out of the
fastened upon him. There was something window over the scenes of Broadway far singularly uncanny in Hazard’s unusually below.
large and rounded orbs when they chose to
“The grand jury did not feel justified,
frame an illuminated interrogation mark.
owing to an alibi——” the Mayor began, but
“Very well!” said the Mayor, curtly.
Hazard said quietly:
“If our time is so unceremoniously short, I
“Alibis are inconvenient nuisances in
shall endeavor to be brief. The second crime
the detection of crime. However, I think we
may possibly have been an accident, but such
need not concern ourselves in that way just
theory is even more unexplainable than that of
now. What was the reputation of the reverend
murder. Two days after the death of the gentleman? A subject for scandal?”
Widow Blauvelt, a small boy named
“On the contrary,” the Mayor assured
Donaldson died in great agony after eating
him, “no breath of such suspicion had ever
some candy buttercups bought at a local been whispered against him. A more godly confectioner’s—a store patronized largely by
man never lived!”
school children. Other persons were affected,
“Ah!” muttered Hazard, with more
but recovered. A postmortem showed show of interest than he had hitherto betrayed.
strychnine in large quantities, and the “And the fourth crime was——?”
confectioner was arrested. He proved that his
The Mayor’s lips curled a little, but
goods were purchased of reputable already he was getting into the rapid swing of manufacturers, who, in turn, demonstrated that
this man who sat opposite.
no strychnine was used for any purpose in
“We are going pretty fast,” he said,
their plants. Where it came from is a mystery
“but if you cannot grant me more than a
that our police detectives have not solved——
minute to narrate each of these mysteries I
—”
shall have to be lively indeed. The fourth
“Quite likely!” remarked Hazard, crime was the cowardly murder of a young caustically. “The third crime?”
girl, without a clew or a motive remaining.
With the question mark again burning
She was stabbed to death on the steps of her
into his brain, the Mayor smothered his anger.
own home by a man who sprang out of the
“The third crime,” he retorted, “had
darkness, dealt the blow, and fled forthwith.
nothing to do either with the first or second,
The crime seems to have had not the vestige
but was an assassination committed, of purpose.”
apparently, for revenge. One of our
“Which of itself opens a wide and
clergymen,
the Reverend Dr. Mathewson, was
amazing field for speculation,” answered
shot down while entering the rear door of his
Hazard, getting up. “In two minutes I must be
church just before the hour for evening in my automobile, so I ask you to proceed at service. The murderer had concealed himself
once to the fifth mystery, as you call it.”
in the back vestibule, which was dark, and he
“I do not follow you,” acknowledged
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3
the Mayor. “But the fifth murder was this: On
fading away!”
the seventh of July the Mother Superior of the
“You have already stabbed at
Good Shepherd Home For the Aged was something in this case?” demanded the Mayor, missed from the’ institution, and on the breathlessly. “You have seen something—in following day her body was found in the river
the dark?”
below town. A post-mortem showed that she
“A mere deduction.” Hazard put on his
died from drowning, but at no point near hat and offered his hand to his caller in adieu.
Litchfield is the stream more than three feet
“A mere grotesque fancy, perhaps—who can
deep. It runs through a corner of the Good
say? It must be worked out before it is talked
Shepherd grounds, and the Mother Superior
about. ‘Silence— silence always!’ is the motto
was in the habit of going down to its banks, in under which we operate here. The
a heavy grove, for meditation and prayer. Here
imagination, my dear sir, is a wonderful thing.
the police found evidences of a struggle but
It can jump to any height and explore the most
nothing was discovered that threw the inaccessible mental absurdities; but if it is a slightest light on the crime. There is no doubt good healthy imagination it will return to earth that she was seized and held under water until
just as quickly when it finds nothing up there
life was extinct. Why? It may have been for
to seize upon. My men will visit you shortly in revenge, but for what? So far as known, the
Litchfield. I merely repeat to you: ‘Silence!’
Mother Superior had not an enemy in the
Good day, sir!”
world. There are those in Litchfield who
incline toward the theory of suicide, on the
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supposition that the woes of mankind, to
which she had been ministering for forty A MONTH subsequent to the Mayor’s visit to years, had unbalanced her mind. But this the metropolis, Delos Nast, one of the theory appears preposterous. She never operatives of the Hazard Detective Agency, exhibited any evidence of dementia, unless
returned to New York from a visit to
you call sadness insanity and consider pity a
Litchfield, where other secret agents of
sign of a weakened intellect.”
Hazard were at work. On the night of his
“It may be that pity is one of the signs return he and his chief spent six hours in close we are looking for,” said Hazard, communion in the skull room, high above enigmatically, as he drew on his gloves.
Broadway. To both these criminal pathologists
“How
so?”
the night was pretty much the same as the day,
The other shrugged his shoulders. so that dawn frequently came while they Stepping to the wall, he took a stiletto from
conducted their mental clinics. Hazard and
among the relics that hung there. Closing his
Nast usually worked on the hypothesis that a
eyes, he made a few passes with it in front of
study of mental processes afforded the best
him, so that the Mayor stepped back hurriedly.
path to crime solution.
“I merely stab in the dark,” observed
On the table between them there now
Hazard, tossing the dagger on to his desk and
reposed the tabulated results of some elaborate smiling grimly. “When I shut my eyes I “sales researches” conducted in Litchfield and sometimes see things that may or may not
vicinity: in other words, long lists of names
exist in reality. It is the things one sees in the that were classified ostensibly into such
dark that makes the good detective. He may
groups as the clever sales manager lays out
stab and hit nothing, but if the thing he sees is when he analyzes a district preparatory to a
really there—Ah! mysteries have a habit of
selling campaign. Outwardly, this research
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had been conducted in behalf of the Electrical
example of the inscrutable workings of the
Outfitting Company of New York, and it human intellect under abnormal and unhappy constituted quite a valuable assembly of facts
conditions. It is your privilege and mine, Nast, as to the buying power of Litchfield, to reach continually a little beyond the known individually and collectively. But of course
realms of mental science. We are explorers in
the sales information was not destined to be
that most mysterious of all countries, the
used; as a blind, it covered some Brain Jungle. But we must not forget that extraordinarily interesting facts about a group however elusive are the paths that run through
of persons in Litchfield.
the jungles up in that land, they follow
Nast now gathered up a big bunch of
convolutions that have been mapped. Thus we
the papers, and, tying them with a string, laid draw on what we already know, and, by
them aside.
analogy, adduce suppositions.”
“These,” he said, “are the final
He opened the volume and let the
eliminations. The solution of the Litchfield
pages run loosely through his fingers—pages
mysteries does not lie among them, if your
that held within their confines many of the
theory is correct, sir.” Then, gathering up the weirdest mysteries of time. Then he closed the
remaining papers, he tapped the uppermost
book sharply.
one with his forefinger. “Somewhere here,” he
“We are working along the right line!”
added, “lies the key.”
he said. “Every deduction tells me so. We will
“It is your hypothesis as much as set the trap soon—and catch in it perhaps an mine,” returned Hazard, speaking from his
arch-fiend.”
customary halo of blue smoke. “It was your
Then, with a sudden change of tone, he
work on the Wabusson case that suggested the
went on:
thought to me.”
“How many names remain, after the
Nast looked across at his chief, with
eliminations?”
affectionate eyes. Hazard was his god—an
“Six,”
said
Nast.
idol before whom he bowed. However,
Hazard took the list and studied it
dissimilar in some respects, the two men were
long, pondering the closely written notations
in accord mentally; and however cold and curt
Nast had made opposite the names. He studied
Hazard could be with outsiders, he did not fail and pondered so long that Trinity chimes rang
in sympathetic consideration for his favorite
two o’clock, and then three, before he put
pupil—this keen young man whose down the list and t
hrew away the remains of imagination could take flights almost as high
his fifth cigar.
as his own.
“Our move is to concentrate rather
“Yes,” Nast returned; “it is my strongly on Abbot Abburton,” he said.
hypothe sir, yet sometimes, I confess, I
“1 had already reached the same
question its reasonableness. For the sake of its conclusion,” answered Nast.
picturesqueness, at least, I should like to
accept it unequivocally. It would add some
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interesting material to forensic medicine.”
Hazard reached over to a bookcase and
Two evenings later, at the dinner hour, Delos
took down a ponderous volume.
Nast moved cautiously along in the shadow of
“And yet,” he said, “it would be in
an eight-foot brick wall that surrounded the
tune with what you already find here in this
spacious grounds of The Turrets, as the home
book. It would simply furnish another of Abbot Abburton in Litchfield was called.
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5
Reaching a spot especially favored by the
Nose” because of his aquiline features. Older
deep gloom of the trees, he sprang lightly up
persons spoke of him sometimes as “Dante.”
and caught the top ledge with his fingers. Nast He might indeed have been a model for Dore
was rather small but abnormally athletic, so
had he lived earlier. In youth, his sepulchral
that in a few seconds he had swung himself
face had been relieved by the geniality of his
over and disappeared in the darkness inside.
smile, and his wit had overshadowed his
The Abburton home was on a lonely
Dantean physical atmosphere; but now there
hill in the outskirts of the most exclusive was no smile, and wit and he were strangers.
residential part of Litchfield. It was a
It was here, then, that Delos Nast