The Mermaid of Druid Lake, and Other StoriesBump, Charles Weathers
Science
The Mermaid of Druid Lake, and Other Stories
Bump, Charles Weathers
Fiction; Short stories
"For, you see, it was this way," he explained to the reporters who
stopped him outside. "The young woman seems to have a steady beau every
evening, for whom she likes to do a bit of fixin' up and primping. And
after supper she makes her way to her room, which is in the front of the
top floor, and there she combs and rearranges her hair and puts on
gew-gaws and trimmings. And in these long summer days, when the sun has
left the square, it is still comin' into those high windows."
"But what has she to do with the Ghost?" asked one irrepressible.
"I was a-comin' to that, youngster," retorted the man in blue; "but if
ye're overanxious, it may satisfy yer to know she was the Pink Ghost.
Leastwise, the sun's reflection was the ghost and she was the movin'
figure that made the shadow do such queer antics. She had a bureau in
the back of her room so fixed that when the rays of the dying sun come
into the window on the north they are reflected in the bureau glass and
pass out of the south window and across the square to that there
brownstone front where you all saw the Ghost. Every time she raised her
arms to her hair or made any other movement in dressing before the
mirror she butt into the reflection and caused your Pink Ghost to do
stunts."
"And you say there won't be any more Pink Ghost?"
"Not unless the young woman gets careless and leaves up that south
blind. For she sort o' has an idea tonight that the whole of this end of
town has been watching her get ready to meet her beau."
_The Vanished Mummy_
In the detective headquarters in the Courthouse they have mistakenly
built up a very high notion of my sleuth qualities. Personally I have
always felt that such help as I have been able to render them in two or
three different cases was most largely due to luck, and only in a small
degree to the exercise of logic and common sense in making deductions of
subsequently proven importance from apparently trivial facts.
Nevertheless, the good fortune that attended me in those cases fixed my
reputation with them as the Sherlock Holmes of Baltimore, while the
generosity with which I permitted them to take all the glory of solving
the mysteries made me solid and caused them to consult me the more
frequently in hours of perplexity. At the same time, I confess it, the
love of the game made me eager to be in it and I not only installed a
'phone in my apartment in the Arundel, but I was always careful, in
absenting myself from my office or my flat, to leave word where I would
most likely be found during the next few hours. In this way the puzzled
Vidocqs were usually able to reach me when my help was needed.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
Reviews
Reviews
No reviews yet
Be the first to share your thoughts on this work.
Join the Discussion
Join the discussion
Sign in to leave a comment or review.
Sign InorCreate an account