nk.

"Weems!" Sharp and frightened the friend's voice sounded. And all on the
roof garden heard it. For all were now silent, staring with gradually
more terrified eyes at Weems.

The friend passed his hand slowly, haltingly before Weems' staring eyes.
And those eyes did not blink.

"Weems--for God's sake--what's the matter with you?"

The friend was trembling now, with growing horror on his face as he
sensed something here beyond his power to comprehend. Hardly knowing
what he was doing, following only an instinct of fear at the unnatural
attitude, he put his hand on Weems' half-raised arm and lowered it to
the table. The arm went down like a mechanical thing. The champagne
glass touched the table.

A woman at the next table screamed and got to her feet with a rasp of
her chair that sounded like a thin shriek of fear. For Weems' arm, when
it was released, went slowly up again to the same position it had
assumed when the man suddenly ceased becoming an animate being, and
became a thing like a statue clad in dinner clothes with a glass in its
hand.

"_Weems!_" yelled the friend.

And then the orchestra began to play, loudly, with metallic
cheerfulness, as the head waiter sensed bizarre tragedy and moved to
conceal it as such matters are always concealed at such occasions.

Weems sat on, eyes wide, hand half raised to lips. He continued to hold
that posture when four men carried him to the elevators and down to the
hotel doctor's suite. He was still holding it when they sat him down in
an easy chair, bent forward a bit as though a table were still before
him, eyes staring, hand half raised to drink. The champagne glass was
empty now, with its contents spotting his clothes and the roof garden
carpets, spilled when the four had borne him from the table. But it was
still clenched in his rigid hand, and no effort to get it from his oddly
set fingers was successful....

* * * * *

The festivities of the much-heralded opening night went on all over the
new-born town of Blue Bay. On the roof garden were several hundred
people who were still neglecting talk, drinking and dancing while their
startled minds reviewed the strange thing they had seen; but aside from
their number, the celebrants were having a careless good time, with no
thought of danger in their minds.

However, there was no sign of gayety in the tower office suite atop the
mammoth Blue Bay Hotel and just two floors beneath