The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Long Arm, by Franz Habl

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Title: The Long Arm

Author: Franz Habl

Release Date: May 30, 2010 [EBook #32610]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

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The Long Arm

By FRANZ HABL[1]

[Transcriber Note: This etext was produced from Weird Tales October
1937. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S.
copyright on this publication was renewed.]

[Sidenote: _Creeping, writhing, insidiously crawling and groping, the
long arm reached out in its ghastly errand of death_]

I had been out of Germany for thirty-five years, drawn hither and
thither by various glittering of will-of-the-wisps. When I returned to
my native country, I was as poor in pocket as when I left, and much
poorer in illusions.

The Berlin insurance company which I had represented with such mediocre
success in Switzerland, Austria and Belgium agreed to let me sell for
them at home, and by a curious coincidence there was an opening in the
quaint old Bavarian city in which I had been born and bred.

I will pass over the strangely mingled feelings with which I rode in a
Twentieth Century railroad train past the thousand-year-old walls of one
of the most curious ancient cities in Europe, a town moreover whose
every winding narrow street and sharp-gabled building had been the
companion of my infancy and childhood. No one seemed to know me, and I
recognized no one. For several days I made no attempt to sell life
insurance, but wandered in a dream, the bewildered ghost of my former
self, about the spots which I had known in happier days.

One dull rainy afternoon I took refuge from the weather in a dingy
little coffee-house in which, at the age of fourteen or fifteen, I along
with certain boon companions, had learned the gentle art of billiards.
It seemed as if every article of furniture was just as I had walked away
from them, well toward half a century before. It was raining outside,
and I sat alon