The Continental Classics, Volume XVIII., Mystery Tales: Including Stories by Feodor Mikhailovitch Dostoyevsky, Jörgen Wilhelm; Bergsöe and Bernhard Severin IngemannVarious
General
The Continental Classics, Volume XVIII., Mystery Tales: Including Stories by Feodor Mikhailovitch Dostoyevsky, Jörgen Wilhelm; Bergsöe and Bernhard Severin Ingemann
Various
Detective and mystery stories
We all followed him and discovered that a pair of run-away horses had
thrown a carriage against a tree, hurling the driver from his box,
under the wheels. His right arm had been broken near the shoulder. In
the twinkling of an eye the hall of festivities was transformed into
an emergency hospital. Sölling shook his head as he examined the
injury, and ordered the transport of the patient to the city hospital.
It was his belief that the arm would have to be amputated, cut off at
the shoulder joint, just as had been the case with our skeleton.
"Damned odd coincidence, isn't it?" he remarked to me.
Our merry mood had vanished and we took our way, quiet and depressed,
through the old avenues toward our home. For the first time in its
existence possibly, our venerable "barracks," as we called the
dormitory, saw its occupants returning home from an evening's bout
just as the night watchman intoned his eleven o'clock verse.
"Just eleven," exclaimed Sölling. "It's too early to go to bed, and
too late to go anywhere else. We'll go up to your room, little Simsen,
and see if we can't have some sort of a lesson this evening. You have
your colored plates and we'll try to get along with them. It's a
nuisance that we should have lost those arms just this evening."
"The Doctor can have all the arms and legs he wants," grinned Hans,
who came out of the doorway just in time to hear Sölling's last word.
"What do you mean, Hans?" asked Sölling in astonishment.
"It'll be easy enough to get them," said Hans. "They've torn down the
planking around the Holy Trinity churchyard, and dug up the earth to
build a new wall. I saw it myself, as I came past the church. Lord,
what a lot of bones they've dug out there! There's arms and legs and
heads, many more than the Doctor could possibly need."
"Much good that does us," answered Sölling. "They shut the gates at
seven o'clock and it's after eleven already."
"Oh, yes, they shut them," grinned Hans again. "But there's another
way to get in. If you go through the gate of the porcelain factory and
over the courtyard, and through the mill in the fourth courtyard that
leads out into Spring Street, there you will see where the planking is
torn down and you can get into the churchyard easily."
"Hans, you're a genius!" exclaimed Sölling in delight. "Here, Simsen,
you know that factory inside and out, you're so friendly with that
fellow Outzen who lives there. Run along to him and let him give you
the key of the mill. It will be easy to find an arm that isn't too
much decayed. Hurry along, now; the rest of us will wait for you
upstairs."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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