The Mystery & Suspense Novella

by Fletcher Flora

  “Just so, Captain Crowley,” said Trant brusquely, “but we’ll let Mr. Sheppard make his charge or not make it, just as he sees fit, after we get through with the little test we’re going to carry out. And I am greatly mistaken, if, after we are through, he will bring any such charge as you have suggested. But come in, Captain; I am glad that you are here. The test I am going to make may seem so trivial to these gentlemen that I am glad to have a practical man like yourself here who has seen more in such a test as the one I am going to make now, than can appear on the surface.”

  “‘More than appears on the surface’ is the word, Mr. Trant,” the captain cried impulsively. “Mr. Sheppard, it’s myself has told you about Mr. Trant before; and I’ll back anything he does to the limit, since I see him catch the Bronson murderer, as I just told you, by a one-cell battery that would not ring a door bell.”

  “I shall ask you to bear that in mind, if you will, Mr. Sheppard and Mr. Chapin,” the psychologist smiled slightly as he looked about the room, and then crossed over to the mantel and took from it five of the six small stone steins with silver tops which stood there. “Particularly as I have not here even the regular apparatus for the test, but must rather improvise. If I had you in my offices or in the psychological laboratory fitted with that regular apparatus I could prove in an instant which of you, if any, was the one who shot these four cartridges to kill Neal Sheppard, and discarded this fifth,” he touched again the shells on the table. “But, as I said, I hope we can manage here.”

  “Which of us?” Chapin echoed. “So you’re going to try me, too?” He raised a plump fist and shook it angrily under Trant’s nose. “You think I did it?”

  “I didn’t say so, Mr. Chapin,” Trant replied pacificatingly. “I said there were excellent chances that Mr. Tyler was not the one who did the shooting; so if that is so, it must have been done by one of the other men who carried Sheppard-Tyler rifles. I thought of you merely as one of those; and as the test I am about to try upon Mr. Tyler would be as simple and efficient a test to determine your connection—or lack of connection—with this shooting, I shall ask you to take it after Mr. Tyler, if necessary.”

  He raised the tops of the steins, as he spoke, peered into them to see they were empty; then put into his pocket the good shell which he had taken from the belt the Indian had given him, and picked up the five little covered cups again.

  “As I have a stop second hand to my watch, Mr. Sheppard,” he continued,” all I need now is some shot—ordinary bird shot, or small shot of any size.”

  “Shot?” Sheppard stared at the steins crazily, but catching Captain Crowley’s equally uncomprehending but admiringly confident eyes, he nodded, “of course. You will find all the shot you can want in the gun cabinet in the corner.”

  Trant crossed to the cabinet and opened the drawer. He returned in less than a minute, as they stood exchanging curious glances, and placed five steins in a row on the table before him.

  “Please take up the middle one now, Mr. Tyler,” he requested, as he took out his watch. “Thank you. Now the one to the right of it; and tell me, is it the same weight as the other, or heavier, or lighter?”

  “The same weight or lighter—perhaps a little lighter,” Tyler answered readily. “But what of it? What is this?” he asked curiously.

  “Take up the middle stein again.” Trant, disregarding his question, glanced at the time interval on his watch; “the first stein you picked up, Mr. Tyler; and then take up the remaining three in any order, and tell me, as quickly as you can, whether they seem the same weight, lighter or heavier to you. Thank you,” he acknowledged noncommittally again, as Tyler acquiesced, his wonder at so extraordinary a test increasing.

  The psychologist glanced over the list of answers he had noted on a slip of paper with the time taken for each. Then he gathered up the five steins without comment and redistributed them on the table.

  “It looks bright for you, Mr. Tyler,” he commented calmly; “but I will ask you to go over the steins again; “and a second, and then a third time, he made Tyler take up all five steins in turn and tell him whether each seemed the same weight, lighter or heavier than the first he handled.

  “What’s all this tomfoolery with steins got to do with who shot Neal Sheppard?” Chapin blurted out contemptuously. But when he turned for concurrence to Stephen Sheppard, he found the old sportsman’s anxious gaze again fixed on the intent face of the police captain who once before, by his own admission, had seen Trant pick a murderer by incomprehensible work, and his own contempt as well gave place to apprehensive wonder at what might lurk behind this apparently childish experiment.

  “You ask what this means, Mr. Chapin?” Trant looked up as he finished his notes. “It has made me certain that Mr. Tyler, at least, is guiltless of the crime of which he has been suspected. As to who shot Neal Sheppard, if you will kindly take up those steins just as you have seen him do, perhaps I can tell you.”

  For the fraction of an instant Chapin halted; then, as under direct gaze of the psychologist, he reached out to pick up the first stein in the test, whose very seeming triviality made it the more incomprehensible to him, the sweat broke out on the backs of his hands; but he answered stoutly:

  “That’s heavier; the same; this lighter; and this the same again.”

  And again: “The same; heavier; lighter; the same! Now, what’s the answer?”

  “That my feeling which you forced upon me to make me choose you—I admit it—for the role you were so willing to assign to Tyler, Mr. Chapin, would probably have made me waste valuable time, if I had not been able to correct it, scientifically, as easily as I confirmed my other feeling in Tyler’s favor. For there can be no question now that you had no more to do with the shooting of Neal Sheppard than he had. I must make still another test to determine the man who fired these shots.”

  “You mean you want to try me?” Sheppard demanded, uneasy and astounded.

  “I would rather test the other man first, Mr. Sheppard; the fourth man who was in the woods with you,” Trant corrected calmly.

  “Findlay?”

  The psychologist, as he looked around, saw in the faces of Sheppard, Chapin, and young Tyler alike, indignant astonishment.

  “You don’t know Findlay, Mr. Trant,” Sheppard said roughly, losing confidence again in spite of Crowley; “or you would understand that he is the last man among us who could be suspected. Enoch is a regular hermit—what they call a ‘recluse’! Only once a year are we able to get him to tear himself away from his musty old house and his collections of coins, and then only for old sake’s sake, to go to the north woods with us. Your crazy test with the steins has led you a long way off the track if you think it’s Findlay.”

  “It has led me inevitably to the conclusion that, if it was one of you four men, it was either Findlay or yourself, Mr. Sheppard,” Trant asserted firmly. “You yourself know best whether it is necessary to test him.”

  Sheppard stared at the obstinate young psychologist for a full minute. “At least,” he said finally with the same roughness, “we can keep young Jim still in custody.” He looked at the police officer, who nodded. Then he went to the house telephone on the wall, spoke shortly into it, and turned:

  “I’ll take you to Findlay, Trant. I’ve called the motor.”

  Five minutes later the little party in the trophy-room broke up—Tyler, under the watch of Captain Crowley, going to the police station, but as yet without charge against him; Chapin going about his own business; Trant and his client speeding swiftly down the boulevard in the big motor.

  “You want to stop at your office, I suppose,” Sheppard asked, “for you haven’t brought the steins you used in your test with us?”

  “Yes—but no,” Trant suddenly recollected; “you have mentioned once or twice that Findlay is a collector of coins—a numismatist.”

  “The craziest in Chicago.”

&
nbsp; “Then if you’ll drop me for a minute at Swift and Walton’s curio shop in Randolph Street that will be enough.”

  Sheppard glanced at his young adviser wonderingly; and looked more wonderingly still when Trant came out from the curio shop jingling a handful of silver coins, which he showed quietly.

  “They’re silver florins of one of the early Swiss states,” he exclaimed; “borrowed of Swift and Walton, by means of a deposit, and guaranteed to make a collector sit up and take notice. They’ll get me an interview with Mr. Findlay, I hope, without the need of an introduction. So if you will point out the house to me and let me out a block or so from it, I will go in first.”

  “And what do you want me to do?” asked Sheppard, startled.

  “Come in a few minutes later; meet him as you would naturally. Your brother’s body has been found; tell him about it. You suspect young Tyler; tell him that also. Maybe he can help you. You need not recognize me until I see I want you; but my work, I trust, will be done before you get there.”

  “Enoch Findlay help me?” queried Sheppard in perplexity. “You mean help me to trace Neal’s murderer. But it is you who said because, against all reason, you suspect Enoch, Mr. Trant, that we have come here! For there’s the house,” he pointed. And Trant, not making any answer, leaped out as the car was slowing, and left him.

  The big old Michigan avenue dwelling, Trant saw at a glance, was in disrepair; but from inattention, the psychologist guessed, not from lack of money. The maid who opened the door was a slattern. The hall, with its mingled aroma of dust and cooking, spoke eloquently of the indifference of the house’s chief occupant; and the musty front room, with its coin cases and curios, was as unlike the great light and airy “den” where Stephen Sheppard hung his guns and skins and antlers, as the man whom Trant rose to greet was unlike his friend, the hale and ruddy old sportsman.

  As Trant looked over this man, whose great height—six feet four or five inches—was reduced at least three inches by the studious stoop of his shoulders; as he took note of his worn and careless clothing and his feet forced into bulging slippers; as he saw the parchment skin, and met the eyes, so light in color that the iris could scarcely be detected from the whites, like the unpainted eyes of a statue, he appreciated the surprise that Findlay’s former partners, Sheppard and Chapin, had experienced at the suggestion that this might be the murderer.

  “I shall ask only a little of your time, Mr. Findlay,” Trant put his hand into his pocket for his coins, as though the proffered hand of the other had been extended for them. “I have come to ask your estimate, as an expert, upon a few coins which I have recently picked up. I have been informed that you can better advise me as to their value than any other collector in Chicago. My coins seem to be of the early Swiss states.”

  “Early Swiss coins are almost as rare as Swiss ships in the present day, sir.” Findlay took the round bits of silver with the collector’s intense absorption, which made him forget that he had not even asked his visitor’s name. “And these are exceptionally rare and interesting pieces. I have never seen but one other of these which I am fortunate enough to possess. They are all the same, I see,” he sifted them swiftly one after the other into his palm. “But—what’s this—what’s this?” he cried with sudden disappointment as he took the top ones up separately for more individual examination. “I hope you have not paid too great a price for these.” He went to one of his cases and, opening it, took out an exact duplicate of Trant’s coin. “For see!” he weighed the two accurately in his fingers; “this first one of yours compares most favorably with this specimen of mine, which is unquestionably genuine. But this—this—this and this; ah, yes; and this, too”—he sorted over the others swiftly and picked out five—“are certainly lighter and I’m afraid they are counterfeit. But where are my scales?”

  “Lighter?” Trant repeated, in apparent bewilderment.

  “The correct coin, you see,” the collector replied, tossing his own silver pieces into his scales, “should be over 400 grains—almost an ounce. But these,” he placed the ten pieces one after the other on the balance, too absorbed to notice the ringing of the door bell, “the five I feared for, are quite light—twenty grains at least, you see?” He reweighed them once more, carefully.

  “That is certainly most interesting.” Trant grimly looked up at the expert as though trying to deny a disappointment. “But it is quite worth having the five coins light, to witness the facility with which an expert like yourself can pick them out, unerringly, without fail—barely twenty grains difference in four hundred.”

  He looked up, still betraying only astonishment. But Findlay’s face, after the first flush of his collector’s absorption, had suddenly grown less cordial.

  “I did not get your name, sir,” he started; then turned, at the opening of the door behind him, to face Stephen Sheppard.

  “Findlay!” the sportsman cried, scarcely waiting for the servant who had admitted him to vanish, and not appearing to notice Trant at all. “They’ve found Neal’s body! In Bowton’s mining shack—murdered, Enoch, murdered! We’ll have young Jim Tyler up for it! Unless,” he hesitated, and looked at Trant, and added, as though the compelling glance of the psychologist constrained him to it, “unless you know something that will help him, Enoch!”

  “Hush, Steve! Hush!” the coin collector fell back upon the chair, beside his desk, with an anxious glance at the psychologist. “I have a man here.” He gathered himself together. “And what is it possible that I could tell to save young Jim?”

  “You might tell why, Mr. Findlay,” Trant said sharply, nerving himself for the coming struggle, “for I know already how you shot Neal Sheppard yourself!”

  But no struggle came.

  “What—you?” Findlay burst from his pale lips; then caught the recognition of this stranger in Sheppard’s face and fell back—trapped.

  He clasped his hands convulsively together and stretched them out before him on the desk. In his cheek something beat and beat with ceaseless pulse.

  “Murdered, Steve?” the latent fire seemed fanned in Findlay at last. “But first”—he seemed to check something short on his lips—“who are you? And why,” he turned to Trant, “why did you come to me with those coins? I mean—how much do you know?”

  “I am retained by Mr. Sheppard in this case,” Trant replied, “and only turned coin collector to prove how you picked out those shells with which you shot Neal Sheppard. And I know enough more to know that you could not have murdered him in any right sense, and enough to assure you that, if you tell how you shot him to save young Tyler, you can count on me for competent confirmation that it was not murder.”

  But the tall, gaunt man, bent in his chair, seemed scarcely to hear the psychologist’s words or even to be conscious, longer, of his presence. When he lifted his eyes, they gave no sign as they swept by Trant’s figure. Findlay saw only his old partner and friend.

  “But you shot him, Enoch? How and why?”

  “How?” the Adam’s apple worked in Findlay’s throat, and the words seemed wrenched from his lips as though their weight were a burden too heavy for him longer to bear. “How, Steve? I shot him as he shot Len, my brother, thirty years ago!”

  “Then it was Neal that shot Len and—and started the murder among us?” the old sportsman in his turn sought tremblingly for a seat. “For all these years I have known in my heart that it was done by Neal; but, Enoch, you didn’t shoot him now because he shot Len—thirty years ago!”

  “No, not because he shot Len; but because he made me kill—made me murder old Jim Tyler for it! Now do you understand? Neal shot Len, my brother; and for that, perhaps I should not have shot Neal when, at last, I found it out thirty years later. But for that murder he did himself, he made me murder poor old Jim Tyler, my best friend! So I shot him as he made me shoot Jim Tyler. It was both or none! Neal would be alive to-day, if Jim was!”

 
“Neal shot Len and made you shoot old Jim Tyler for it?”

  “Yes; I shot him, Steve! I shot old Jim—old Jim, who was the truest friend to me of you all! I shot old Jim, whose bed I’d shared—and for these thirty years old Jim has never left me. There are men like that, Steve, who do a thing in haste, and then can’t forget. For I’m one of them. I was no kind of a man for a murderer, Steve; I was no man for the business we were in. Len led me—led me where I ought never to have gone, for I hadn’t nerve like he and you and Neal had! Then Len was shot, and Neal came to me and told me old Jim had done it. I was wild, Steve—wild, for I’d had a difference with Jim and I knew Jim had had a difference with Len—over me. So I believed it! But I had no gun. I never carried one, you know. Neal gave me one and told me to go and shoot him, or Jim’d shoot me, too. And I shot old Jim—shot him in the back; that’s the kind of man I was—no nerve. I couldn’t face him when I did it. But I’ve faced him often enough since, God knows! By night and by day; by foul weather or by fair weather; for old Jim and I have got up and gone to bed together ever since—thirty years. And it’s made me what I am—you see, I never had the nerve. I told you!”

  “But Neal, Enoch? How did you come to shoot Neal two weeks ago—how did all that make you?” Sheppard urged excitedly.

  “I’m telling you! Those two weeks ago—two weeks ago to-day, young Jim came up into the woods red hot; for he had the papers he showed you showing Neal had cheated him out of money. He met Chapin and me, too, and told us and showed us the papers. There was one paper there that didn’t mean anything to young Jim or to you or to Chapin, or to anyone else that didn’t know old Jim intimately—old Jim had his own way of putting things—but it meant a lot to me. For all these years I’ve been telling you about—all these years I’ve been carrying old Jim with me, getting up and lying down with him, and whenever he came to me, I’d been saying to him, ‘I know, Jim, I killed you; but it was justice; you killed my brother! But that paper made me know different. It made me know it wasn’t old Jim that killed Len, Steve; it was Neal—and Jim knew it; and that was why Neal set me on Jim and made me kill him; because Jim knew it! That was like Neal, wasn’t it, Steve? Never do anything straight, Neal wouldn’t, when he could do it crooked! He wanted to get rid of old Jim—he owed him money and was afraid of him now, for Jim knew he’d killed Len—and he saw a safe way to make me do it. So then at last I knew why old Jim had never left me, but had been following me all these years—always with me; and I never let on to Chapin. I just went to look for Neal. ‘This time,’ said I to myself, ‘it’s justice!’ And—I found him sitting on a log, with his gun behind him, a little drunk—for he always carried a flask with him, you know—and whistling. I couldn’t face him any more than I could Jim, and I came up behind him. Three times I took a bead on Neal’s back, and three times I couldn’t pull the trigger—for he never stopped whistling, and I knew if I shot him then I’d hear that whistling all my life—and the third time he turned and saw me. He must have seen the whole thing on my face; I can’t keep anything. But he had nerve, Neal did. ‘Oh,’ he says, ‘it’s Enoch Findlay, the murderer, shooting in the back as usual.’ ‘I’m what you made me,’ says I, ‘but you’ll never make any difference to another man!’ ‘Give me a chance,’ says Neal. ‘Don’t shoot me sitting!’ Neal had nerve, I tell you—I never had any; but that time for once in my life, I got it. ‘Get up,’ says I, ‘and take your gun; you’ll have as fair a chance as I will.’ But that wasn’t quite true. I never had Neal’s nerve—I didn’t have it even then. But I’ve always been a better shot than him; I’ve never drunk; and he hasn’t been steady for years. So I knew I still had the advantage; and Neal knew it, too; but he doesn’t let on.