“Cheating here under my direction?” Welter now bellowed indignantly. “What are you talking about? Rowan, what is he talking about?” he demanded, boldly, of the dock superintendent; but the cadaverous little man was unable to brazen it out with him.
“You need not have looked at your dock superintendent just then, Mr. Welter, to see if he would stand the racket when the trouble comes, for which you have been paying him enough on the side to keep him in electric motors and marble statuettes. And you cannot try now to disown this crime with the regular president-of-corporation excuse, Mr. Welter, that you never knew of it, that it was all done without your knowledge by a subordinate to make a showing in his department; and do not expect, either, to escape so easily your certain complicity in the murder of Landers, to prevent him from exposing your scheme and—since even the American Commodities Company scarcely dared to have two ‘accidental deaths’ of checkers in the same month—the shanghaiing of Morse later.”
“My complicity in the death of Landers and the disappearance of Morse?” Welter roared.
“I said the murder of Landers,” Trant corrected. “For when Rentland and Dickey tell to-morrow before the grand jury how Landers was about to disclose to the Customs Department the secret of the cheating in weights; how he was made afraid by Rowan, and later was about to tell anyway and was prevented only by a most sudden death, I think murder will be the word brought in the indictment. And I said shanghaiing of Morse, Mr. Welter. When we remembered this morning that Morse had disappeared the night the Elizabethan Age left your docks and you and Rowan were so intensely disgusted at its having had to put into Boston this morning instead of going on straight to Sumatra, we did not have to wait for the chance information this evening that Captain Wilson is a friend of Rowan’s to deduce that the missing checker was put aboard, as confirmed by the Boston harbor police this afternoon, who searched the ship under our instructions.” Trant paused a moment; again fixed the now trembling Welter with his eye, and continued: “I charge your certain complicity in these crimes, along with your certain part in the customs frauds,” the psychologist repeated. “Undoubtedly, it was Rowan who put Morse out of the way upon the Elizabethan Age. Nevertheless, you knew that he was a prisoner upon that ship, a fact which was written down in indelible black and white by my tests of you at the Stuyvesant Institute two hours ago, when I merely mentioned to you ‘a prisoner in the Elizabethan Age.’
“I do not charge that you, personally, were the one who murdered Landers; or even that Rowan himself did; whether his negro did, as I suspect, is a matter now for the courts to decide upon. But that you undoubtedly were aware that he was not killed accidentally in the engine room, but was killed the Wednesday night before and his body hidden under the coffee bags, as I guessed from the fibers of coffee sacking on his clothes, was also registered as mercilessly by the psychological machines when I showed you merely the picture of a pile of coffee sacks.
“And last, Mr. Welter, you deny knowledge of the cheating which has been going on, and was at the bottom of the other crimes. Well, Welter,” the psychologist took from his pocket the bent, twine-wound wire, “here is the ‘innocent’ little thing which was the third means of causing you to register upon the machines such extreme and inexplicable emotion; or rather, Mr. Welter, it is the companion piece to that, for this is not the one I showed you, the one given to Morse to use, which, however, he refused to make use of; but it is the very wire I took to-night from the hole in the post where it bore against the balance beam to cheat the Government. When this is made public to-morrow, and with it is made public, too, and attested by the scientific men who witnessed them, the diagram and explanation of the tests of you two hours ago, do you think that you can deny longer that this was all with your knowledge and direction?”
The big, bull neck of the president swelled, and his hands clenched and reclenched as he stared with gleaming eyes into the face of the young man who thus challenged him.
“You are thinking now, I suppose, Mr. Welter,” Trant replied to his glare, “that such evidence as that directly against you cannot be got before a court. I am not so sure of that. But at least it can go before the public to-morrow morning in the papers, attested by the signatures of the scientific men who witnessed the test. It has been photographed by this time, and the photographic copies are distributed in safe places, to be produced with the original on the day when the Government brings criminal proceedings against you. If I had it here I would show you how complete, how merciless, is the evidence that you knew what was being done. I would show you how at the point marked i on the record your pulse and breathing quickened with alarm under my suggestion; how at the point marked 2 your anxiety and fear increased; and how at 3, when the spring by which this cheating had been carried out was before your eyes, you betrayed yourself uncontrollably, unmistakably. How the volume of blood in your second finger suddenly diminished, as the current was thrown back upon your heart; how your pulse throbbed with terror; how, though unmoved to outward appearance, you caught your breath, and your laboring lungs struggled under the dread that your wrongdoing was discovered and you would be branded—as I trust you will now be branded, Mr. Welter, when the evidence in this case and the testimony of those who witnessed my test are produced before a jury—a deliberate and scheming thief!”
“God damn you!” The three words escaped from Welter’s puffed lips. He put out his arm to push aside the customs officer standing between him and the door. Dickey resisted.
“Let him go if he wants to!” Trant called to the officer. “He can neither escape nor hide. His money holds him under bond!”
The officer stepped aside, and Welter, without another word, went into the hall. But when his face was no longer visible to Trant, the hanging pouches under his eyes grew leaden gray, his fat lips fell apart loosely, his step shuffled; his mask had fallen!
“Besides, we need all the men we have, I think,” said Trant, turning back to the prisoners, “to get these to a safe place. Miss Rowan,” he turned then and put out his hand to steady the terrified and weeping girl, “I warned you that you had probably better not come here to-night. But since you have come and have had pain because of your stepfather’s wrongdoings, I am glad to be able to give you the additional assurance, beyond the fact, which you have heard, that your fiancé was not murdered, but merely put away on board the Elizabethan Age; that he is safe and sound, except for a few bruises, and, moreover, we expect him here any moment now. The police were bringing him down from Boston on the train which arrives at ten.”
He went to the window and watched an instant, as Dickey and Rentland, having telephoned for a patrol, were waiting with their prisoners. Before the patrol wagon appeared, he saw the bobbing lanterns of a lurching cab that turned a corner a block away. As it stopped at the entrance, a police officer in plain clothes leaped out and helped after him a young man wrapped in an overcoat, with one arm in a sling, pale, and with bandaged head. The girl uttered a cry, and sped through the doorway. For a moment the psychologist stood watching the greeting of the lovers. He turned back then to the sullen prisoners.
“But it’s some advance, isn’t it, Rentland,” he asked, “not to have to try such poor devils alone; but, at last, with the man who makes the millions and pays them the pennies—the man higher up?”
VI
THE CHALCHIHUITL STONE
Tramp—tramp—tramp—tramp—tramp! For three nights and two days the footsteps had echoed through the great house almost ceaselessly.
The white-haired woman leaning on a cane, pausing again in the upper hall to listen to them, started, impulsively, for the tenth time that morning toward her son’s door; but, recognizing once more her utter inability to counsel or to comfort, she wiped her tear-filled eyelids and limped painfully back to her own room. The aged negress, again passing the door, pressed convulsively together her bony hands, and sobbed pityingly; she had been the childhood nurse of this man
whose footsteps had so echoed for hours as he paced bedroom, library, hall, museum, study—most frequently of all the little study—in his grief and turmoil of spirit.
Tramp—tramp—tramp—tramp!
She shuffled swiftly down the stairs to the big, luxurious morning room on the floor below, where a dark-eyed girl crouched on the couch listening to his footsteps beating overhead, and listening so strangely, without a sign of the grief of the mother or even the negro nurse, that she seemed rather studying her own absence of feeling with perplexity and doubt.
Tramp—tramp—tramp—tramp!
“Ain’ yo’ sorry for him, Miss Iris?” the negress said.
“Why, Ulame, I—I—” the girl seemed struggling to call up an emotion she did not feel. “I know I ought to feel sorry for him.”
“An’ the papers? Ain’ yo’ sorry, honey, dem papers is gone—buhned up; dem papers he thought so much of—all buhned by somebody?”
“The papers?—the papers, Ulame?” the girl exclaimed in bewilderment at herself. “Oh—oh, I know it must be terrible to him that they are gone; but I—I can’t feel so sorry about them!”
“Yo’ can’t?” The negress stiffened with anger. “An’ he tol’ me, too, this mo’nin, now you won’t marry him next Thursday lak’ yo’ promised—since—since yo’ foun’ dat little green stone! Why is dat—since yo’ foun’ dat little green stone?”
The sincere bewilderment deepened in the girl’s face. “I don’t know why, Ulame—I tell you truly,” she cried, miserably, “I don’t know any reason why that stone—that stone should change me so! Oh, I can’t understand it myself; but I know it is so. Ever since I’ve seen that stone I’ve known it would be wrong to marry him. But I don’t know why!”
“Den I do!” The old negress’s eyes blazed wildly. “It’s a’caze yo’ is voodoo! Yo is voodoo! An’ it’s all my faul’. Oh yas—yas it is!” She rocked. “For yo’se had the ma’k ever since yo’se been a chile; the ma’k of the debbil’s claw! But I nebber tole Marse Richard till too late. But hit’s so! Hit’s so! The debbil’s ma’k is on yo’ left shoulder, and the green stone is de cha’m dat is come to make yo’ break Marse Richard’s heart!”
“Ulame! Oh! Oh!” the girl cried.
“Ulame! Ulame!” a deeper, firm and controlled voice checked them both as the man, whose steps had sounded overhead the moment before, stood in the doorway.
He was a strikingly well-born, good-looking man of thirty-six, strongly set up, muscular, with the body of an athlete surmounted by the broad-browed head of a student. But his skin, indescribably bronzed by the tropic sun during many expeditions to Central America, showed now an underhue of sodden gray; and the thin, red veins which shot his keen, blue eyes, the tenseness of his well-shaped mouth, the pulse visibly beating in his temples, the slight trembling of the usually firm hands, all gave plain evidence of some active grief and long-continued strain; but at the same time bore witness to the self-control which held his emotion in check.
The negress, quieted and rebuked by his words, shuffled out as he entered; and the girl drew herself up quickly to a sitting posture, rearranging her hair with deft pats.
“You must not mind Ulame!” He crossed to her and held her hand steadyingly for an instant. “Or think that I shall ask you anything more except—you have not altered your decision, Iris?” he asked, gently.
The girl shook her head.
“Then I will not even ask that again, my—Iris,” he caught himself. “If you will give me the proper form for recalling our wedding invitations, I will send it at once to Chicago. As to the gifts that have been already received—will you be good enough also to look up the convention under these circumstances?” He caught his breath. “I thought I heard the door bell a moment ago, Iris. Was there some one for me?”
“Yes, Anna went to the door.” The girl motioned to a maid who for five minutes had been hovering about the hall, afraid to go to him with the card she held upon a silver tray.
“Ah! I was expecting him.” He took the card. “Where is he? In the library?”
“Yes, Dr. Pierce.”
He crushed the card in his hand, touched tenderly with his finger tips Iris’s pale cheek, and with the same regular step crossed the hall to the library. A compact figure rose energetically at his coming.
“Mr. Trant?” asked Pierce, carefully closing the door behind him and measuring with forced collectedness his visitor, who seemed slightly surprised. “I need not apologize to you for my note asking you to come to me here in Lake Forest this morning. I understand that with you it is a matter of business. But I thank you for your promptness. I have heard of you from a number of sources as a psychologist who has applied laboratory methods to the solution of—of mysteries—of crimes; not as a police detective, Mr. Trant, but as a—a—”
“Consultant,” the psychologist suggested.
“Yes; a consultant. And I badly need a consultant, Mr. Trant.” Pierce dropped into the nearest chair. “You must pardon me. I am not quite myself this morning. An event—or, rather events—occurred here last Wednesday afternoon which, though I have endeavored to keep my feeling under control, have affected me perhaps even more than I myself was aware; for I noticed your surprise at sight of me, which can only have been occasioned by some strangeness in my appearance which these events have caused.”
“I was surprised,” the psychologist admitted, “but only because I expected to see an older man. When I received your note last evening, Dr. Pierce, I, of course, made some inquiries in regard to you. I found you spoken of as one of the greatest living authorities on Central American antiquities, especially the hieroglyphic writing on the Maya ruins in Yucatan; and as the expeditions connected with your name seemed to cover a period of nearly sixty years, I expected to find you a man of at least eighty.”
“You have confused me with my father, who died in Izabal, Guatemala, in 1895. Our names and our line of work being the same, our reputations are often confused, especially as he never published the results of his work, but left that for me to do. I have not proved a worthy trustee of that bequest, Mr. Trant!” Pierce added, bitterly. He arose in agitation, and began again his mechanical pacing to and fro.
“The events of Wednesday had to do with this trust left you by your father?” the psychologist asked.
“They have destroyed, obliterated, blotted out that trust,” Pierce replied. “All the fruits of my father’s life work and my own, too, absolutely without purpose, meaning, excuse or explanation of any sort! And more than that—and this is the reason I have asked you to advise me, Mr. Trant, instead of putting the matter into the hands of the police—with even less apparent reason and without her being able to give an explanation of any sort, the events of last Wednesday have had such an effect upon my ward, Iris, to whom I was to be married next Thursday, that she is no longer able to think of marrying me. She clearly loves me no longer, though previous to Wednesday no one who knew us could have the slightest question of her affection for me; and indeed, though previously she had been the very spirit and soul of my work, now she seems no longer to care for its continuance in any way, or to be even sorry for the disaster to it.”
He paused in painful agitation. “I must ask your pardon once more,” he apologized. “Before you can comprehend any of this I must explain to you how it happened. My father began his study of the Maya hieroglyphics as long ago as 1851. He had had as a young man a very dear friend named James Clarke, who in 1848 took part in an expedition to Chiapas. On this expedition Clarke became separated from his companions, failed to rejoin them, and was never heard from again. It was in search of him that my father in 1850 first went to Central America; and failing to find Clarke, who was probably dead, he returned with a considerable collection of the Maya hieroglyphs, which had strongly excited his interest. Between 1851 and his death my father made no less than twelve different expeditions to Central America in
search of more hieroglyphs; but in that whole time he did not publish more than a half dozen short articles regarding his discoveries, reserving all for a book which he intended to be a monument to his labors. His passion for perfection prevented him from ever completing that book, and, on his deathbed, he intrusted its completion and publication to me. Two years ago I began preparing it for the stenographer, and last week I had the satisfaction of feeling that my work was nearly finished. The material consisted of a huge mass of papers. They contained chapters written by my father which I am incapable of rewriting; tracings and photographs of the inscriptions which can be duplicated only by years of labor; original documents which are irreplaceable; notes of which I have no other copies. They represented, as you yourself have just said, almost sixty years of continuous labor. Last Wednesday afternoon, while I was absent, the whole mass of these papers was taken from the cabinet where I kept them, and burned—or if not burned, they have completely vanished.”
He stopped short in his walk, turned on Trant a face which had grown suddenly livid, and stretched out his hands.
“They were destroyed, Trant—destroyed! Mysteriously, inexplicably, purposelessly!” his helpless indignation burst from his constraint. “The destruction of papers such as these could not possibly have benefited anyone. They were without value or interest except to scientists; and as to envious or malicious enemies, I have not one, man or woman—least of all a woman!”
“‘Least of all a woman?’” Trant repeated quickly. “Do you mean by that that you have reason to believe a woman did it?”
“Yes; a woman! They all heard her! But—I will tell you everything I can. Last Wednesday afternoon, as I said, I was in Chicago. The two maids who look after the front part of the house were also out; they are sisters and had gone to the funeral of a brother.”
“Leaving what others in the house?” Trant interrupted the rapid current of his speech with a quick gesture.
The Mystery & Suspense Novella Page 32