The Mystery Megapack

her son’s use in his flight. However, the money is still buried; she dare not try to recover it, for fear that secret-service agents will shadow her and the government confiscate it, and she won’t tell where it was buried. The clipping which gave me the inspiration for this very profitable adventure of ours—”
    He paused and reached into his pocket. The Early Bird accepted the scrap of paper and read:
    ***
    SEEK BLINDHOUSE
    CHAUFFEUR WHO DROVE
    $200,000 TREASURE CAR
    _____
    Congressional Inquiry Reveals Name of
    Man Who Can Lead Way
    to Buried Wealth.
    ***
    “I gotcha, boss!” exclaimed The Early Bird. “George Bascom slipped Whitecotton a yarn about bein’ the missin’ chauffeur.”
    “As a finishing touch,” continued Mr. Clackworthy, “I’ve given the old miser something to puzzle about. At the spot where he will dig, there is planted an iron chest containing—a hundred dollars in pennies. And that’s your money, by the way, James.”
    “But,” said The Early Bird with an apprehensive shudder, “that bird is gonna be some wild—if he don’t drop dead on the spot. What if he starts investigatin’ an’ find’s that fake chemical company—”
    “Checkmate!” exclaimed Mr. Clackworthy. “The only way he can get us convicted, my dear James, is to plead guilty himself to a conspiracy against the government. We have got him, as they say, going and coming.”

THE MONKEY GOD, by Seabury Quinn
    Professor Harvey Forrester was having a beastly time. He had confided as much to himself more than once in the past twenty-four hours, and each passing minute confirmed the truth of it.
    The Professor did not dance, and the younger members of the company fox-trotted from breakfast to luncheon, from luncheon to dinner and from dinner to bedtime. The Professor did not care for music, except classical compositions or the simple folk songs of primitive peoples, and the Milsted house was filled with the cacophonies of jazz from radio and phonograph all day and three-quarters of the night. The Professor despised bridge as a moronic substitute for intelligent conversation, and the older members of the company played for a cent a point from dinner till midnight with the avidity of professional gamblers.
    The Professor was having a beastly time.
    But old Horatio Milsted, in honor of whose son the house party was given, possessed one of the finest collections of oriental curios in the country, wherefore Forrester had accepted the invitation tendered him and Rosalie Osterhaut, his ward; for he greatly desired to examine a certain statuette of Hanuman, the Monkey God, which was the supreme jewel in the collection that Milsted had inherited from a sea-roving (and none too scrupulous) grandsire.
    Two days—forty-eight interminable hours of fox trotting, syncopated music and card-ruffling—the Professor had endured, and as yet had not caught sight of the little monkey god’s effigy. Each time he broached the subject to Milsted his host put him off with some excuse. The house party would break up the following morning, and meantime the Professor cooled his back against the wall of the Milsted drawing room while his anger rose hot and seething within him.
    “Oh, Professor Forrester,” whispered Arabella Milsted, the host’s unmarried sister, in the irritatingly high, thin voice possessed by so many short, fat women, “you look so romantically aloof standing there all by yourself. Tell me, don’t you ever unbend, even for a teeny, tinsy moment?” She looked archly at him above the serrated edge of her black fan and simpered with bovine coquettishness.
    “Do you know,” she went on in a more confidential whisper, her little, pale-blue eyes growing circular with sudden seriousness, “I have a presentiment—a premonition—that something terrible is going to happen?”
    “Umpf?” growled Forrester noncommittally, gazing first at the obese damsel, then across the crowded dance floor in an effort to descry an exit. “Umpf!”
    “Yes—” Miss Milsted, who would never again see forty, but dressed in a manner becoming to twenty, and talked chiefly in Italics, replied—“oh, yes ; I’m very psychic, you know. Poor dear Mamma used to say—”
    Poor dear Mamma’s profound observations will never be known to posterity, for at that moment Horatio Milsted, looking anything but the urbane host, strode into the drawing room and commanded sharply, “Shut off that infernal music!”
    “Hear, hear!” murmured the