The Mystery & Suspense Novella

by Fletcher Flora

  It was clear to Trant that the professor’s rapid explanation, though plain enough to the psychologists already familiar with the device, was only partly understood by the big men. It had not been explained to them that changes in the breathing so slight as to be imperceptible to the eye would be recorded unmistakably by the moving pencil.

  Professor Schmalz turned to the second instrument. This was a plethysmograph, designed to measure the increase or decrease of the size of one finger of a person under examination as the blood supply to that finger becomes greater or less. It consists primarily of a small cylinder so constructed that it can be fitted over the finger and made air-tight. Increase or decrease of the size of the finger then increases or decreases the air pressure inside the cylinder. These changes in the air pressure are transmitted through an air-tight tube to a delicate piston which moves a pencil and makes a line upon the record sheet just under that made by the pneumograph. The upward or downward trend of this line shows the increase or decrease of the blood supply, while the smaller vibrations up and down record the pulse beat in the finger.

  There was still a third pencil touching the record sheet above the other two and wired electrically to a key like that of a telegraph instrument fastened to the table. When this key was in its normal position this pencil made simply a straight line upon the sheet; but instantly when the key was pressed down, the line broke downward also.

  This third instrument was used merely to record on the sheet, by the change in the line, the point at which the object that aroused sensation or emotion was displayed to the person undergoing examination. The instant’s silence which followed Schmalz’s rapid explanation was broken by one of Welter’s companions with the query:

  “Well, what’s the use of all this stuff, anyway?”

  “Ach!” said Schmalz, bluntly, “it is interesting, curious! I will show you.”

  “Will one of you gentlemen,” said Trant, quickly, “permit us to make use of him in the demonstration?”

  “Try it, Jim,” Welter laughed, noisily.

  “Not I,” said the other. “This is your circus.”

  “Yes, indeed it’s mine. And I’m not afraid of it. Schmalz, do your worst!” He dropped laughing into the chair the professor set for him, and at Schmalz’s direction unbuttoned his vest. The professor hung the pneumograph around his neck and fastened it tightly about the big chest. He laid Welter’s forearm in a rest suspended from the ceiling, and attached the cylinder to the second ringer of the plump hand. In the meantime Trant had quickly set the pencils to bear upon the record sheet and had started the cylinder on which the sheet traveled under them.

  “You see, I have prepared for you.” Schmalz lifted a napkin from a tray holding several little dishes. He took from one of these a bit of caviar and laid it upon Welter’s tongue. At the same instant Trant pushed down the key. The pencils showed a slight commotion, and the spectators stared at this record sheet:

  “Ah!” exclaimed Schmalz, “you do not like caviar.”

  “How do you know that?” demanded Welter. “The instruments show that at the unpleasant taste you breathe less freely—not so deep. Your finger, as under strong sensation or emotion, grows smaller, and your pulse beats more rapidly.”

  “By the Lord! Welter, what do you think of that?” cried one of his companions; “your finger gets smaller when you taste caviar!”

  It was a joke to them. Boisterously laughing, they tried Welter with other food upon the tray; they lighted for him one of the black cigars of which he was most fond, and watched the trembling pencils write the record of his pleasure at the taste and smell. Through it all Trant waited, alert, watchful, biding the time to carry out his plan. It came when, having exhausted the articles at hand, they paused to find some other means to carry on the amusement. The young psychologist leaned forward suddenly.

  “It is no great ordeal after all, is it, Mr. Welter?” he said. “Modern psychology does not put its subjects to torture like”—he halted, meaningly—“a prisoner in the Elizabethan Age!”

  Dr. Annerly, bending over the record sheet, uttered a startled exclamation. Trant, glancing keenly at him, straightened triumphantly. But the young psychologist did not pause. He took quickly from his pocket a photograph, showing merely a heap of empty coffee sacks piled carelessly to a height of some two feet along the inner wall of a shed, and laid it in front of the subject. Welter’s face did not alter; but again the pencils shuddered over the moving paper, and the watchers stared with astonishment. Rapidly removing the photograph, Trant substituted for it the bent wire given him by Miss Rowan. Then for the last time he swung to the instrument, and as his eyes caught the wildly vibrating pencils, they flared with triumph.

  President Welter rose abruptly, but not too hurriedly. “That’s about enough of this tomfoolery,” he said, with perfect self-possession. His jaw had imperceptibly squared to the watchful determination of the prize fighter driven into his corner.

  His cheek still held the ruddy glow of health; but the wine flush had disappeared from it, and he was perfectly sober.

  Trant tore the strip of paper from the instrument, and numbered the last three reactions 1, 2, 3.

  “Amazing!” said Dr. Annerly. “Mr. Welter, I am curious to know what associations you have with that photograph and bent wire, the sight of which aroused in you such strong emotion.”

  By immense self-control, the president of the American Commodities Company met his eyes fairly. “None,” he answered.

  “Impossible! No psychologist, knowing how this record was taken, could look at it without feeling absolutely certain that the photograph and spring caused in you such excessive emotion that I am tempted to give it, without further words, the name of ‘intense fright!’ But if we have inadvertently surprised a secret, we have no desire to pry into it further. Is it not so, Mr. Trant?”

  At the name President Welter whirled suddenly. “Trant! Is your name Trant?” he demanded. “Well, I’ve heard of you.” His eyes hardened. “A man like you goes just so far, and then—somebody stops him!”

  “As they stopped Landers?” Trant inquired.

  “Come, we’ve seen enough, I guess,” said President Welter, including for one instant in his now frankly menacing gaze both Trant and Professor Schmalz; he turned to the door, closely followed by his companions. And a moment later the quick explosions of his automobile were heard. At the sound, Trant seized suddenly a large envelope, dropped into it the photograph and wire he had just used, sealed, signed, and dated it, signed and dated also the record from the instruments, and hurriedly handed all to Dr. Annerly.

  “Doctor, I trust this to you,” he cried, excitedly. “It will be best to have them attested by all three of you. If possible get the record photograph to-night, and distribute the photographs in safe places. Above all, do not let the record itself out of your hands until I come for it. It is important—extremely important! As for me, I have not a moment to lose!”

  The young psychologist sped down the stone steps of the laboratory three at a time, ran at top speed to the nearest street corner, turned it and leaped into a waiting automobile. “The American Commodities Company’s docks in Brooklyn,” he shouted, “and never mind the speed limits!”

  Rentland and the chauffeur, awaiting him in the machine, galvanized at his coming.

  “Hot work?” the customs agent asked.

  “It may be very hot; but we have the start of him,” Trant replied as the car shot ahead. “Welter himself is coming to the docks to-night, I think, by the look of him! He left just before me, but must drop his friends first. He suspects, now, that we know; but he cannot be aware that we know that they are unloading to-night. He probably counts on our waiting to catch them at the cheating to-morrow morning. So he’s going over to-night himself, if I size him up right, to order it stopped and remove all traces before we can prove anything. Is Dickey waiting?”

 
“When you give the word he is to take us in and catch them at it. If Welter himself comes, as you think, it will not change the plan?” Rentland replied.

  “Not at all,” said Trant, “for I have him already. He will deny everything, of course, but it’s too late now!”

  The big car, with unchecked speed, swung down Broadway, slowed after a twenty-minutes’ run to cross the Brooklyn Bridge, and, turning to the left, plunged once more at high speed into the narrower and less well-kept thoroughfares of the Brooklyn water front. Two minutes later it overtook a little electric coupe, bobbing excitedly down the sloping street. As they passed it, Trant caught sight of the illuminated number hanging at its rear, and shouted suddenly to the chauffeur, who brought the big motor to a stop a hundred feet beyond. The psychologist, leaping down, ran into the road before the little car.

  “Miss Rowan,” he cried to its single occupant, as it came to a stop. “Why are you coming over here at this time to-night?”

  “Oh, it’s you, Mr. Trant!” She opened the door, showing relief in the recognition. “Oh, I’m so worried. I’m on my way to see father; for a telegram just came to him from Boston; mother opened it, and told me to take it to him at once, as it was most important. She wouldn’t tell me what it was about, but it excited her a great deal. Oh, I’m so afraid it must be about Will and that was why she wouldn’t tell me.”

  “From Boston?” Trant pressed quickly. Having her confidence, the girl nervously read the telegram aloud by the light of the coupe’s side lamps. It read:

  Police have taken your friend out of our hands; look out for trouble. Wilson.

  “Who is Wilson?” Trant demanded.

  “I am not sure it is the man, but the captain of the Elizabethan Age is a friend of father’s named Wilson!”

  “I can’t help you then, after all,” said Trant, springing back to his powerful car. He whispered a word to the chauffeur which sent it driving ahead through the drifts at double its former speed, leaving the little electric coupe far behind. Ten minutes later Rentland stopped the motor a block short of a great lighted doorway which suddenly showed in a length of dark, lowering buildings which lay beside the American Commodities Company’s Brooklyn docks.

  “Now,” the secret agent volunteered, “it is up to me to find Dickey’s ladder!”

  He guided Trant down a narrow, dark court which brought them face to face with a blank wall; against this wall a light ladder had been recently placed. Ascending it, they came into the dock inclosure. Descending again by a dozen rickety, disused steps, they reached a darker, covered teamway and hurried along it to the docks. Just short of the end of the open dock houses, where a string of arc lamps threw their white and flickering light upon the huge, black side of a moored steamer, Rentland turned into a little shed, and the two came suddenly upon Customs Officer Dickey.

  “This one next to us,” the little man whispered, eagerly, to Trant, as he grasped his hand, “is the scale house where whatever is being done is done—No. 3.”

  In and out of the yawning gangways of the steamer before them struggling lines of sweating men were wheeling trucks loaded with bales of tobacco. Trant looked first to the left, where the bales disappeared into the tobacco warehouse; then to the right, where, close at hand, each truck-load stopped momentarily on a scale platform in front of the low shed which bore the number Dickey indicated in a large white figure.

  “Who’s that?” asked Trant, as a small figure, hardly five feet tall, cadaverous, beetle-browed, with cold, malignant, red-lidded eyes passed directly under the arc light nearest them.

  “Rowan, the dock superintendent!” Dickey whispered.

  “I knew he was small,” Trant returned with surprise, “but I thought surely he must have some fist to be the terror of these dock laborers.”

  “Wait!” Rentland, behind them, motioned. A bloated, menacing figure had suddenly swung clear of the group of dock laborers—a roustabout, goaded to desperation, with a fist raised against his puny superior. But before the blow had fallen another fist, huge and black, struck the man over Rowan’s shoulder with a hammer. He fell, and the dock superintendent passed on without a backward glance, the giant negro who had struck the blow following in his footsteps like a dog.

  “The black,” Rentland explained, “is Rowan’s bodyguard. He needs him.”

  “I see,” Trant replied. “And for Miss Rowan’s sake I am glad it was that way,” he added, enigmatically.

  Dickey had quietly opened a door on the opposite side of the shed; the three slipped quickly through it and stepped unobserved around the corner of the coffee warehouse to a long, dark, and narrow space. On one side of them was the rear wall of scale house No. 3, and on the other the engine room where Landers’s body had been found. The single window in the rear of No. 3 scale house had been whitewashed to prevent anyone from looking in from that side; but in spots the whitewash had fallen off in flakes. Trant put his eye to one of these clear spots in the glass and looked in.

  The scale table, supported on heavy posts, extended across almost the whole front of the house, behind a low, wide window, which permitted those seated at the table to see all that occurred on the docks. Toward the right end of the table sat the Government weigher; toward the left end, and separated from him by almost the whole length of the table, sat the company checker. They were the only persons in the scale house. Trant, after his first rapid survey of the scene, fixed his eye upon the man who had taken the place which Landers had held for three years, and Morse for a few days afterwards—the company checker. A truck-load of tobacco bales was wheeled on to the scales in front of the house.

  “Watch his left knee,” Trant whispered quickly into Dickey’s ear at the pane beside him, as the balance was being made upon the beam before them. As he spoke, the Government weigher adjusted the balance and they saw the left leg of the company checker pressed hard against the post which protected the scale rod at his end. Both men in the scale house then read aloud the weight and each entered it in the book on the table in front of him. A second truckful was wheeled on to the scale; and again, just as the Government weigher fixed his balances, the company checker, so inconspicuously as to make the act undiscoverable by anyone not looking for that precise move, repeated the operation. With the next truck they saw it again. The psychologist turned to the others. Rentland, too, had been watching through the pane and nodded his satisfaction.

  Immediately Trant dashed open the door of the scale house, and threw himself bodily upon the checker. The man resisted; they struggled. While the customs men protected him, Trant, wrenching something from the post beside the checker’s left knee, rose with a cry of triumph. Then the psychologist, warned by a cry from Rentland, leaped quickly to one side to avoid a blow from the giant negro. His quickness saved him; still the blow, glancing along his cheek, hurled him from his feet. He rose immediately, blood flowing from a superficial cut upon his forehead where it had struck the scale-house wall. He saw Rentland covering the negro with a revolver, and the two other customs men arresting, at pistol point, the malignant little dock superintendent, the checker, and the others who had crowded into the scale house.

  “You see!” Trant exhibited to the customs officers a bit of bent wire, wound with string, precisely like that the girl had given him that morning and he had used in his test of Welter the hour before. “It was almost exactly as we knew it must be! This spring was stuck through a hole in the protecting post so that it prevented the balance beam from rising properly when bales were put on the platform. A little pressure just at that point takes many pounds from each bale weighed. The checker had only to move his knee, in a way we would never have noticed if we were not watching for it, to work the scheme by which they have been cheating for ten years! But the rest of this affair,” he glanced at the quickly collecting crowd, “can best be settled in the office.”

  He led the way, the customs men taking their prisoners at pist
ol point. As they entered the office, Rowan first, a girl’s cry and the answering oath of her father told Trant that the dock superintendent’s daughter had arrived. But she had been almost overtaken by another powerful car; for before Trant could speak with her the outer door of the office opened violently and President Welter, in an automobile coat and cap, entered.

  “Ah! Mr. Welter, you got here quickly,” said Trant, meeting calmly his outraged astonishment at the scene. “But a little too late.”

  “What is the matter here?” Welter governed his voice commandingly. “And what has brought you here, from your phrenology?” he demanded, contemptuously, of Trant.

  “The hope of catching red-handed, as we have just caught them, your company checker and your dock superintendent defrauding the Government,” Trant returned, “before you could get here to stop them and remove evidences.”

  “What raving idiocy is this?” Welter replied, still with excellent moderation. “I came here to sign some necessary papers—for ships clearing, and you—”

  “I say we have caught your men red-handed,” Trant repeated, “at the methods used, with your certain knowledge and under your direction, Mr. Welter, to steal systematically from the United States Government for—probably the last ten years. We have uncovered the means by which your company checker at scale No. 3, which, because of its position, probably weighs more cargoes than all the other scales together, has been lessening the apparent weights upon which you pay duties.”