eater sensation.

- - -

But his calm statement got him an instant audience with a slender man
of thirty-five or so, whose hair was prematurely gray at the temples,
and whose eyes were shrewd and far-seeing.

"My name's Thomas Tyler," said the detective. He certainly didn't look
the conventional detective, but Bentley knew instantly that he
_wasn't_ the conventional detective. "I work on the unusual cases. If
you hadn't sent in your name I wouldn't have seen you, which means
that as soon as you leave here you are to forget my name and how I
look."

He motioned Bentley to a seat. Bentley sat back. Suddenly Thomas Tyler
was around his desk and had pushed back the hair from Bentley's
temples. He drew in his breath with a sharp hiss when he saw the white
line which circled Bentley's skull.

"It's not exactly proof," he said, as though he and Bentley had been
in the midst of a discussion of that awful operation Barter had
performed on Bentley, "but I'd take your word for it."

"The story, in the main, was true," said Bentley.

"I thought so. What made you come here?"

"I saw that naked man run across Fifth Avenue from the door of the
Flatiron Building. I saw the officer subdue him, helped him do it in
fact, and saw the man die. Since there was no detective there, I took
the liberty of removing these from the fingers of the dead man."

Bentley gave Tyler the coarse hair, stained with blood. Tyler looked
at it grimly for a moment or two.

"Not human hair," he said, as though talking to himself. "Not like any
I know of. But ... ah, you know what sort of hair, eh? That's what
sent you here!"

"It's the hair of an ape or a gorilla."

"How do you know, for sure?"

"Once," said Bentley grimly, "for several horrible hours ... I was a
giant anthropoid ape."

- - -

Tyler's chair legs crashed solidly to the floor.

"I see," he said. "You think this thing has some connection with your
own experiences. How long ago was that?"

"Slightly over two months."

"You think the same man...?"

"I don't know. But who could want, as a newspaper story I just read
says, to steal the brains of men? What for? It sounds like Barter.
I've never heard of anybody else with such an obsession. I'm putting
two and two together--and fervently hoping they'll add up to seven
instead of four. For if ever in my life I wanted to be wrong it's
now."

Tyler pursed his lips. Bentley saw that his eyes were glinting