stuff and slip off into a meditative stupor in his library. But there were other eyes and ears about the place, and when that bastard found out about our sin he drugged me with something—whether it was the Blue Evil I do not know. I woke to find myself secured to a table in one of his infernal laboratories. And I remained awake. No drugs or sedatives after that. There he conducted a little piece of theater involving surgical instruments.”
At these words the gambler’s body seemed to quiver in the warm air, while Lloyd’s thoughts flashed back to his rabbit Phineas. His father was wrong about him never thinking of Phineas. St. Ives spat into the river.
“But then why did he give you this?” Lloyd asked, pointing to the hand.
“Another of his hideous experiments.” St. Ives chuckled. “How the nerve connections work I have no idea. But this is not the metal addition that it may appear. I feel the hand. It is a part of me, or I a part of it. There are other extensions and accessories that I carry, but the hand itself I cannot remove. I will die with it attached to me. Yet it will not die. And that is perhaps why he enabled me so—as an expression of his power and ingenuity. The rest he did to me was not enough. He wanted a constant, visible, and necessary reminder always before me. To make me forever dependent on his technics. Who knows? Perhaps, for all the agony he inflicted, I may have been lucky not to have been turned more fully into one of his gadgets. I might well be a mannequin whole, and not just in hand.”
“I don’t understand,” Lloyd murmured.
“He was far, far ahead of his time, was Mr. Rutherford. His toy caravels were ingenious, but he was capable of many other feats. Oh, yes! He had designed and built a mechanical manservant. A sort of butler named Zadoc. What it was powered by I do not know, he would not reveal it—but it was not steam. A very handsome but ghastly porcelain face. Gave Celeste nightmares. But he was working on much more complex contraptions still.”
“And what … happened … to him?” the boy whispered.
“I set a booby trap in his laboratory,” the gambler replied with a vengeful, melancholy laugh.
“His body was never found. But pieces of another’s were. My sweet Celeste. I believe she thought that I was trapped in the fire and was trying … to save me.”
St. Ives’s silver prosthesis flashed in the moonlight.
“I was questioned by the authorities, but I knew enough of his ways to make it look like an accident. And what an accident!”
“But what … became of Rutherford?” Lloyd asked.
“Ah! That is the question,” the gambler said, nodding. “Well, you see, he was not a well-liked man. Almost everything he did he did in secret. He was a hard employer and a recluse who rarely ventured off the estate, and he seemed to have no close friends or immediate kin—other than my poor darling. The neighbor folk all feared him. There were stories about children in the vicinity who had gone missing. Who can say? But the members of the local constabulary were willing to take the path of least resistance. They came to believe that perhaps he had perished in the explosion, too—blown to bits, as I had hoped he would be.”
“But you think differently?” Lloyd asked.
“I am certain in my soul that he is still alive!” St. Ives ejaculated. “His will left his estate to some distant relative in Louisiana—probably himself under another name. His business interests were absorbed by a consortium called the Behemoth Innovation Company, and the estate was systematically denuded of all its objets and apparatus.”
“Did you investigate?” Lloyd asked meekly.
“Can you imagine me not doing so?” the gambler exclaimed, and then he drew his voice back down low. “The so-called relative now lives abroad, and I have not been able to find a trace of any news about him in any of the foreign papers—I even hired a London detective. Not a skerrick of a clue. As to the consortium, they have offices registered in several cities but there is no information about any of their directors. They are but shadows, as near as I can tell. And that is why I ride the riverboats, or one of the reasons—to one day learn something of his whereabouts. He would have a new name, and perhaps a new-looking face.