form broke---- I had better open the window
so it will work off and I can get them out. I will write to my wife to
stay away two months longer. Olga is dead and Kate is gone. I'll
discharge August to-morrow, as he deserves. The field is clear."

One morning, as Hans Olson, cook of the King Olaf Magnus, staunch
schooner engaged in the shingle trade between Chicago and the city of
Manistee, state of Michigan, on this particular morning lying in the
Chicago River--on this morning, as Mr. Olson was pouring overboard
some dishwater, preparing the breakfast for the yet sleeping crew, he
was horrified to see floating in the current that would eventually
carry them past the great city of St. Louis, twelve naked human arms.
Despite his horror and alarm at this grewsome array of severed
members, he noted that so far as he could observe, they were all left
arms, forearms, disjointed at the elbows. Subsequent examination but
added to the mystery. It was no trick of medical students intended to
set the town agog. They were not dissecting subjects, but limbs lately
taken from living bodies, and they were detached with the highest
skill known to the art of chirurgery. The town talked and it was a
day's wonder, but the solving of the mystery proving impossible, it
was passing into tradition when all were horrified anew to hear that
Johannes Klubertanz, a member of the great and honest German-American
element, while walking through Lincoln Park early one morning,
stumbled over some objects which, upon examination, proved to be
twelve human forearms, _right forearms_!

Again were the wisest baffled in even guessing at this riddle, as they
were a third time, when one Prosper B. Shaw came with the story that
while rowing down in the drainage canal, he had come upon, floating
gently along, dissevered at the knee joint, _twelve human legs_!

The whole community shuddered at the dark secret hidden in their
midst, but at last came the answer, yet not the answer. Of all strange
crews that mortal sight has gazed upon, that was the strangest, that
dozen men who out of nowhere appeared suddenly in the streets one
morning, armless all, all with wooden left legs. Their story you would
ask in vain, for just the little chord by which the tongue forms
intelligible words was gone. Their babblings came just to the border
of articulate speech, but not beyond. Torrents of half-formed words
they poured forth, but only half-formed, and to their mouthed jab