Page:Amazing Stories Volume 01 Number 11.djvu/69
Another of the scientific detective stories by the well-known authors, Edwin Balmer and William B. MacHarg. Herein Luther Trant makes a scientific excursion into our innermost psychology. Of the entire human race, no one is less easily ruffled than a Chinaman. He has nerves of steel and a will of similar quality. But nevertheless even such a constitution can betray itself if the correct scientific instruments are applied to it.
It was the third Sunday in March. A roaring storm of mingled rain and snow, driven by a riotous wind—wild even for the Great Lakes in winter—surged through the streets of Chicago all day; a little after ten o'clock at night the temperature fell rapidly and the rain and snow changed suddenly to sleet. At twenty minutes past the hour, the slush that filled the streets began to freeze. Mr. Luther Trant, hastening on foot back to his rooms at his club, observed that the soft mess underfoot had become coated with tough, rubbery ice, through which the heels of his shoes crunched at every step while his toes left almost no mark.
Trant had been taking the day "off," away from both his office and his club; but fifteen minutes before, he had called up the club for the first time that day and had learned that a woman had been inquiring for him at frequent intervals during the day over the telephone, and that a special delivery letter which she had sent had been awaiting him since six o'clock. The psychologist was therefore hastening homeward, suddenly stricken with a sense of guilt and dereliction.
As he hurried down Michigan Avenue, he was considering the wonderful change in his affairs that had taken place so quickly. Six months ago he had been a callow assistant in a psychological laboratory. The very professor whom he had served had smiled when he had declared his belief in his power to apply the necromancy of the new psychology to the detection of crime. But the delicate instruments of the laboratory—the chronoscopes, kymographs, plethysmographs, which made visible and recorded unerringly, unfalteringly, the most secret emotions of the heart and the hidden workings of the brain; the experimental investigations of Freud and Jung, of the German and French scientists, of Münsterberg and others in America—had fired him with a belief in them and in himself. In the face of misunderstanding and derision he had tried to trace the criminal, not by the world-old method of the marks the evil-doer had left on things, but by the evidences which the crime had left on the mind of the criminal himself. And so well had he succeeded that now not even a Sunday was free from appeal to him for help in trouble. As he entered the club, the doorman addressed him hurriedly:
"She called again, Mr. Trant, at nine o'clock. She wanted to know if you had received the note, and said you were to have it as soon as you came in."
Trant took the letter—a plain, coarse envelope, with the red two-cent and the blue special delivery stamps stuck askew above an uneven line of great, unsteady characters. Within it, ten lines spread this wild appeal across the paper:
If Mr. Trant will do—for some one unknown to him—the greatest possible service—to save perhaps a life—a life! I beg him to come to—Ashland Avenue between seven and nine o'clock to-night! Eleven! For God's sake come—between seven and nine! Later will be too late. Eleven! I tell you it may be worse than useless to come after eleven! So for God's sake—if you are human—help me! You will be expected.
W. Newberry.
The psychologist glanced at his watch. It was already twenty-five minutes to eleven! And then he paused a full minute to scrutinize the hand-writing, a shade of perplexity on his face.
The hand—identical in note and envelope—was that of a man!
"You're sure it was a woman's voice on the 'phone?" he asked, quickly.
"Yes, sir, a lady."
Trant picked up the telephone on the desk; "Halloo! Is this the West End Police Station? This is Mr. Trant. Can you send a plain-clothes man and a patrolman at once to—Ashland Avenue? No; I don't know what the trouble is, but I understand it is a matter of life and death; I want to have help at hand if I need it. You are sending Detective Siler? Because he knows the house? Oh, there has been trouble there before? I see. Tell him to hurry. I will try and get there myself before eleven."
Trant hurried into a waiting taxicab. The streets were all but empty, and into the stiffening ice the chains on the tires of the driving wheels bit sharply; so it still lacked ten minutes of the hour when he jumped out at his destination. The vacant street, and the one dim light on the first floor of the house told him the police had not yet arrived.
The porticoed front and the battered fountain, which rose obscurely from the ice-crusted sod of the narrow lawn, showed that the structure had formerly been a pretentious one. In the rear, as well as Trant could see in the indistinct glare of the street lamps, there was a long one-storied addition.
As the psychologist rang the bell and was admitted, he saw at once that he had not been mistaken in believing that the cab which had passed his motor only an instant before had come from the same house; for the mild-eyed, white-haired little man who opened the door almost before the bell had stopped ringing had not yet taken off his overcoat. Behind him, in the dim light of a shaded lamp, an equally placid, white-haired little woman was laying off her wraps; and their gentle faces were so completely at variance with the wild terror of the note which Trant now held between his fingers in his pocket, that he hesitated before he asked his question:
"Is W. Newberry here?"
"I am the Reverend Wesley Newberry," the old man answered. "I am no longer in the active ser-