Word: mattoon
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...Anesthetist of Mattoon, Ill. (pop. 17,500) is a tall, thin man who wears a black skullcap, and carries an instrument not unlike a Flit gun. He moves through the night as nimbly and secretly as a cat, squirting a sweetish gas through bedroom windows. His victims cough, awaken with burning throats, and find themselves successively afflicted with: 1) nausea, 2) a temporary paralysis, and 3) a desire to describe their experiences in minutest detail. This latter result often enables them to overcome their symptoms with startling dispatch...
None of them has seen the Mad Anesthetist at his work, nor heard his hollow laugh. But last week citizens of Mattoon were watching for him, any and every midnight...
...once obvious to Mattoon's housewives that the anesthetist had baited Mrs. Cordes' porch with a cloth soaked in the same substance he squirted through windows. After that the number of his victims increased. Mattoon's ten policemen, who had been ignoring the archcriminal, now sallied forth at night, seeking they knew not what and not finding it. Chicago newsmen swept joyfully down upon Mattoon and wired leering accounts of The Gas Fiend, The Thin Man of Mattoon, The Mad Phantom and The Screwball Chemist...
...Illinois Criminal Investigation Laboratory sent an investigator named Richard T. Piper to Mattoon to get the pink cloth from Mrs. Cordes' porch. The laboratory could find no indications of gas or other chemicals upon it. Piper sat up all night reading chemistry books and announced the next day that the anesthetist was probably using chloropicrin, a heavy, colorless liquid made by chlorinating picric acid...
...week's end Mattoon was gripped by semi-hysteria. Authorities were poring over records of patients released from Illinois insane asylums, seeking a clue to the Mad Anesthetist's identity; five state police cars arrived to help. Private automobiles full of vigilantes armed with shotguns rolled slowly along the streets at night. Other citizens were taking pistols and shotguns to bed, and sleeping behind closed windows. Mattoon's police commissioner, as alarmed by this display of armament as by the depredations of the Anesthetist, pleaded with the vigilantes to disband...