a blind alley leading out of Hammond Street, Roxbury—which section shelters most of Boston's negro population of close to twenty thousand—some dozen or fifteen dusky folk, that night, were gathered together in a house that reeked of fetid air, gaslight, sweat, tobacco smoke, and the peculiar aroma of the African.
“I tell you 'twas the skull that done it!” Andrew Todd was affirming. “I drove old man Lockwood an' that there perfessor all the way to Charleston, South Ca'lina, and I knows what I knows!”
“An' what do you know?” demanded a greasy mulatto buck, sitting fatly with his hands on his hips, and a cigar gripped in his projecting teeth. “Some folks knows a whole lot as ain't so!”
“You callin' me a liar, are you?” retorted Andrew, his drug-narrowed eyes ugly, his face hard-set. “If you are—”
“There now, Andy!” cut in Irene Jackson, Lockwood's maid, anxious to keep her “steady” out of a broil that might finish in the Roxbury police court—for Andrew carried a razor and brass knuckles. “Don't you get fussin' and scrappin' none to-night! I won't have it!”
“Let Mr. Todd tell what he saw an' what he knows,” directed another, with an air of authority.
A saffron-hued man this was, thin, wiry, and furtive—a man whom we have not seen since the night in Charleston when Lockwood found his daughter. This saffron personage spoke with a marked English accent, which was not surprising in view of the fact that he was, as he often boasted, “a British objeck—yes, sah, from Kingston, Jamaica!”
Now he sat leaning forward, his forearm on his lean thigh, while the rest of the group turned eager and respectful looks on him. Like Veazie, he called himself a professor—a professor of hypnotism and allied sciences. “Professor Cromwell Jeffries St. Clair, the world-renowned mystic marvel,” his hand-bills always stated.
When Professor St. Clair could get engagements, he gave demonstrations in low-grade museums and theaters, or at summer resort parks. Just at present the sun of his glory was diminished, in the abeyance of almost total eclipse. A cataleptic subject of his—a white man—whom he had billed to sleep for a week in a drug store window at Altoona, Pennsylvania, had failed to wake up; and the professor had vanished, to escape a charge of manslaughter. His prestige among “the race,” however, had been only enhanced by this slight contretemps. For a colored man to have put a white one so thoroughly asleep that only Gabriel's trump could ever waken him—was not this something of a spectacular achievement?
“Let the gen'leman tell what he pussonally observed and had cognization of,” repeated Professor St. Clair. “He mentioned something of this to me in Charleston, and I vouch for the accuracy of the results. The authenticity of the psychic and hyponotic phenomenar as demonstrified by spirit controls in the form of imanimate objecks are indis-putably authenticized. Just what did you observe, Mr. Todd?”
“I see that there skull on a table in a hotel room down to Oxford, No'th Ca'lina—that's what!” declared Andrew, swollen with importance by this scientific backing. “I peek under a window shade, an' I see it. I see old Lockwood settin' like here, on this side; an' Perfessor Veazie settin' like there, on that side; an' the perfessor with his eyes shut, talkin' to the skull—yes, sir!”
“Just like I see it, too,” affirmed Irene, “up to the big house on Beacon Street!”
“Yes, sir,” continued Andrew, blowing cigarette smoke, “an' I see that there skull answerin' him!”
“Answerin'?” quavered a spectacled gentleman, whose profession was that of tonsorial artist.
A communal shudder ran through the group, and for a moment smoldering silence fell. Hag-ridden with dark superstitions that no centuries of education could eradicate, they stared at Andrew. From an obscure corner some one murmured:
“Oh, Lawd, come by here!”
“Answerin'—yes, sir!” the chauffeur affirmed. “I hear a queer voice comin' from it, an'—”
“What the voice elucidate,” queried Professor St. Clair, “by way of warnin' or information?”
“It tell the old man how he's goin' find his daughter down to Cha'leston—an', what's more, he find her! Now, what you make o' that?”
“He find her, ladies an' gen'lemen,” Professor St. Clair corroborated. “It's a fack; an' if that ain't the gen-uine psychological phenomenar, what is?”
There was another brief silence, broken only by a low crooning from the corner where one had called upon the Lord.