“Then last night.”
“It was early this morning, Mr. Trant, but still very dark—a little before five o’clock. It was so damp, you know, that I had not opened the window in my bedroom, which is close to the bed; but had opened the windows of my dressing-room, and so left the door between open. It had been closed and locked before. So when I awoke, I could see directly into my dressing-room.”
“Clearly?”
“Of course not at all clearly. But my writing-desk is directly opposite my bedroom door; and in a sort of silhouette against my shaded desk light, which he was using, I could see his figure—a very vague, monstrous looking figure, Mr. Trant. Its lower part seemed plain enough; but the upper part was a formless blotch. I confess at first that enough of my girl’s fear for ghosts came to me to make me see him as a headless man, until I remembered how Howard had seen and described him—with a coat wrapped round his head. As soon as I was sure of this, I pressed the bell-button again and this time screamed, too, and switched on my light. But he slammed the door between us and escaped. He went through another window he had forced on the lower floor with a queer sort of dagger-knife which he had broken and left on the sill. And as soon as Howard saw this, he knew it was the same man, for it was then he ordered me not to interfere. He made off after him, and when he came back, he told me he was sure it was the same man.”
“This time, too, the man at your desk seemed rummaging for your correspondence with Mr. Axton?”
“It seemed so, Mr. Trant.”
“But his letters were all merely personal—like these letters you have given me?”
“Yes.”
“Amazing!” Trant leaped to his feet, with eyes flashing now with unrestrained fire, and took two or three rapid turns up and down the office. “If I am to believe the obvious inference from these letters, Miss Waldron—coupled with what you have told me—I have not yet come across a case, an attempt at crime more careful, more cold-blooded and, withall, more surprising!”
“A crime—an attempt at crime, Mr. Trant?” cried the white and startled girl. “So there was cause for my belief that something serious underlay these mysterious appearances?”
“Cause?” Trant swung to face her. “Yes, Miss Waldron—criminal cause, a crime so skillfully carried on, so assisted by unexpected circumstance that you—that the very people against whom it is aimed have not so much as suspected its existence.”
“Then you think Howard honestly believes the man still means nothing?”
“The man never meant ‘nothing,’ Miss Waldron; but it was only at first the plot was aimed against Howard Axton,” Trant replied. “Now it is aimed solely at you!”
The girl grew paler.
“How can you say that so surely, Mr. Trant?” Caryl demanded, “without investigation?”
“These letters are quite enough evidence for what I say, Mr. Caryl,” Trant returned. “Would you have come to me unless you had known that my training in the methods of psychology enabled me to see causes and motives in such a case as this which others, untrained, can not see?
“You have nothing more to tell me which might be of assistance?” he faced the girl again, but turned back at once to Caryl. “Let me tell you then, Mr. Caryl, that I am about to make a very thorough investigation of this for you. Meanwhile, I repeat: a definite, daring crime was planned first, I believe, against Howard Axton and Miss Waldron; but now—I am practically certain—it is aimed against Miss Waldron alone. But there cannot be in it the slightest danger of intentional personal hurt to her. So neither of you need be uneasy while I am taking time to obtain full proof—”
“But, Mr. Trant,” the girl interrupted, “are you not going to tell me—you must tell me—what the criminal secret is that these letters have revealed to you?”
“You must wait, Miss Waldron,” the psychologist answered kindly, with his hand on the doorknob, as though anxious for the interview to end. “What I could tell you now would only terrify you and leave you perplexed how to act while you were waiting to hear from me. No; leave the letters, if you will, and the page from the Illustrated News,” he said suddenly, as the girl began gathering up her papers. “There is only one thing more. You said you expected an interruption here from Howard Axton, Mr. Caryl. Is there still a good chance of his coming here or—must I go to see him?”
“Miss Waldron telephoned to me, in his presence, to take her to see you. Afterwards she left the house without his knowledge. As soon as he finds she has gone, he will look up your address, and I think you may expect him.”
“Very good. Then I must set to work at once!” He shook hands with both of them hurriedly and almost forcing them out his door, closed it behind them, and strode back to his desk. He picked up immediately the second of the four letters which the girl had given him, read it through again, and crossed the corridor to the opposite office, which was that of a public stenographer.
“Make a careful copy of that,” he directed, “and bring it to me as soon as it is finished.”
A quarter of an hour later, when the copy had been brought him, he compared it carefully with the original. He put the copy in a drawer of the desk and was apparently waiting with the four originals before him when he heard a knock on his door and, opening it, found that his visitor was again young Caryl.
“Miss Waldron did not wish to return home at once; she has gone to see a friend. So I came back,” he explained, “thinking you might make a fuller statement of your suspicions to me than you would in Miss Waldron’s presence.”
“Fuller in what respect, Mr. Caryl?”
The young man reddened.
“I must tell you—though you already may have guessed—that before Miss Waldron inherited the estate and came to believe it her duty to do as she has done, there had been an—understanding between us, Mr. Trant. She still has no friend to look to as she looks to me. So, if you mean that you have discovered through those letters—though God knows how you can have done it—anything in Axton which shows him unfit to marry her, you must tell me!”
“As far as Axton’s past goes,” Trant replied, “his letters show him a man of high type—moral, if I may make a guess, above the average. There is a most pleasing frankness about him. As to making any further explanation than I have done—but good Lord! what’s that?”
The door of the office had been dashed loudly open, and its still trembling frame was filled by a tall, very angry young man in automobile costume, whose highly colored, aristocratic looking features Trant recognized immediately from the print in the page of the Illustrated London News.
“Ah, Mr. Caryl here too?—the village busybody!” the newcomer sneered, with a slight accent which showed his English education. “You are insufferably mixing yourself in my affairs,” he continued, as Caryl, with an effort, controlled himself and made no answer. “Keep out of them! That is my advice—take it! Does a woman have to order you off the premises before you can understand that you are not wanted? As for you,” he swung toward Trant, “you are Trant, I suppose!”
“Yes, that is my name, Mr. Axton,” replied the psychologist, leaning against his desk.
The other advanced a step and raised a threatening finger. “Then that advice is meant for you, too. I want no police, no detectives, no outsider of any sort interfering in this matter. Make no mistake; it will be the worse for anyone who pushes himself in! I came here at once to take the case out of your hands, as soon as I found Miss Waldron had come here. This is strictly my affair—keep out of it!”
“You mean, Mr. Axton, that you prefer to investigate it personally?” the psychologist inquired.
“Exactly—investigate and punish!”
“But you cannot blame Miss Waldron for feeling great anxiety even on your account, as your personal risk in making such an investigation will be so immensely greater than anyone’s else would be.”
“My risk?”
Axton halted. “I had not thought of it in that light,” he said reflectively.
“You are too courageous—foolishly courageous, Mr. Axton.”
“Do you mind if I sit down? Thank you. You think, Mr. Trant, that an investigation such as you suggest, would satisfy Miss Waldron—make her easier in her mind, I mean?”
“I think so, certainly.”
“And it would not necessarily entail calling in the police? You must appreciate how I shrink from publicity—another story concerning the Axton family exploited in the daily papers!”
“I had no intention of consulting the police, or of calling them in, at least until I was ready to make the arrest.”
“I must confess, Mr. Trant,” said Axton easily, “that I find you a very different man from what I had expected. I imagined an uneducated, somewhat brutal, perhaps talkative fellow; but I find you, if I may say so, a gentleman. Yes, I am tempted to let you continue your investigation—on the lines you have suggested.”
“I shall ask your help.”
“I will help you as much as is in my power.”
“Then let me begin, Mr. Axton, with a question—pardon me if I open a window, for the room is rather warm—I want to know whether you can supplement these letters, which so far are the only real evidence against the man, by any further description of him,” and Trant, who had thrown open the window beside him, undisturbed by the roar that filled the office from the traffic-laden street below, took the letters from his pocket and opened them one by one, clumsily, upon the desk.
“I am afraid I cannot add anything to them, Mr. Trant.”
“We must get on then with what we have here,” the psychologist hitched his chair near to the window to get a better light on the paper in his hand, and his cuff knocked one of the other letters off the desk onto the windowsill. He turned, hastily but clumsily, and touched, but could not grasp it before it slipped from the sill out into the air. He sprang to his feet with an exclamation of dismay, and dashed from the room. Axton and Caryl, rushing to the window, watched the paper, driven by a strong breeze, flutter down the street until lost to sight among wagons; and a minute later saw Trant appear below them, bareheaded and excited, darting in and out among vehicles at the spot where the paper had disappeared; but it had been carried away upon some muddy wagon-wheel or reduced to tatters, for he returned after fifteen minutes’ search disheartened, vexed and empty handed.
“It was the letter describing the second visit,” he exclaimed disgustedly as he opened the door. “It was most essential, for it contained the most minute description of the man of all. I do not see how I can manage well, now, without it.”
“Why should you?” Caryl said in surprise at the evident stupidity of the psychologist. “Surely, Mr. Axton, if he can not add any other details, can at least repeat those he had already given.”
“Of course!” Trant recollected. “If you would be so good, Mr. Axton, I will have a stenographer take down the statement to give you the least trouble.”
“I will gladly do that,” Axton agreed; and, when the psychologist had summoned the stenographer, he dictated without hesitation the following letter:
“The second time that I saw the man was at Calcutta, in the Great Eastern Hotel. He was the same man I had seen at Cairo—shoeless and turbaned; at least I believed then that it was a turban, but I saw later, at Cape Town, that it was his short brown coat wrapped round his head and tied by the sleeves under his chin. We had at the Great Eastern two whitewashed communicating rooms opening off a narrow, dirty corridor, along whose whitewashed walls at a height of some two feet from the floor ran a greasy smudge gathered from the heads and shoulders of the dark-skinned, white-robed native servants who spent the nights sleeping or sitting in front of their masters’ doors. Though Lawler and I each had a servant also outside his door, I dragged a trunk against mine after closing it—a useless precaution, as it proved, as Lawler put no trunk against his—and though I see now that I must have been moved by some foresight of danger, I went to sleep afterward quite peacefully. I awakened somewhat later in a cold and shuddering fright, oppressed by the sense of some presence in my room—started up in bed and looked about. My trunk was still against the door as I had left it; and besides this, I saw at first only the furniture of the room, which stood as when I had gone to sleep—two rather heavy and much scratched mahogany English chairs, a mahogany dresser with swinging mirror, and the spindle-legged, four-post canopy bed on which I lay. But presently, I saw more. He was there—a dark shadow against the whitewashed wall beside the flat-topped window marked his position, as he crouched beside my writing desk and held the papers in a bar of white moonlight to look at them. For an instant, the sight held me motionless, and suddenly becoming aware that he was seen, he leaped to his feet—a short, broad-shouldered, bulky man—sped across the blue and white straw matting into Lawler’s room and drove the door to behind him. I followed, forcing the door open with my shoulder, saw Lawler just leaping out of bed in his pajamas, and tore open Lawler’s corridor door, through which the man had vanished. He was not in the corridor, though I inspected it carefully, and Lawler, though he had been awakened by the man’s passage, had not seen him. Lawler’s servant, pretty well dazed with sleep, told me in blank and open-mouthed amazement at my question, that he had not seen him pass; and the other white-draped Hindoos, gathering about me from the doors in front of which they had been asleep, made the same statement. None of these Hindoos resembled in the least the man I had seen, for I looked them over carefully one by one with this in mind. When I made a light in my room in order to examine it thoroughly, I found nothing had been touched except the writing desk, and even from that nothing had been taken, although the papers had been disturbed. The whole affair was as mysterious and inexplicable as the man’s first appearance had been, or as his subsequent appearance proved; for though I carefully questioned the hotel employes in the morning I could not learn that any such man had entered or gone out from the hotel.”
“That is very satisfactory indeed;” Trant’s gratification was evident in his tone, as Axton finished. “It will quite take the place of the letter that was lost. There is only one thing more—so far as I know now—in which you may be of present help to me, Mr. Axton. Besides your friend Lawler, who was drowned in the wreck of the Gladstone, and the man Beasley—who, Miss Waldron tells me, is in a London hospital—there were only two men in Cape Town with you who had been in Cairo and Calcutta at the same time you were. You do not happen to know what has become of that German freight agent, Schultz?”
“I have not the least idea, Mr. Trant.”
“Or Walcott, the American patent medicine man?”
“I know no more of him than of the other. Whether either of them is in Chicago now, is precisely what I would like to know myself, Mr. Trant; and I hope you will be able to find out for me.”
“I will do my best to locate them. By the way, Mr. Axton, you have no objection to my setting a watch over your family home, provided I employ a man who has no connection with the police?”
“With that condition I think it would be a very good idea,” Axton assented. He waited to see whether Trant had anything more to ask him; then, with a look of partially veiled hostility at Caryl, he went out. The other followed, but stopped at the door.
“We—that is, Miss Waldron—will hear from you, Mr. Trant?” he asked with sudden distrust—“I mean, you will report to her, as well as to Mr. Axton?”
“Certainly ; but I hardly expect to have anything for yo
u for two or three days.”
The psychologist smiled, as he shut the door behind Caryl. He dropped into the chair at his desk and wrote rapidly a series of telegrams, which he addressed to the chiefs of police of a dozen foreign and American cities. Then, more slowly, he wrote a message to the Seric Medicine Company, of New York, and another to the Nord Deutscher Lloyd.
The first two days, of the three Trant had specified to Caryl, passed with no other event than the installing of a burly watchman at the Axton home. On the third night this watchman reported to Miss Waldron that he had seen and driven off, without being able to catch, a man who was trying to force a lower window; and the next morning—within half an hour of the arrival of the Overland Limited from San Francisco—Trant called up the Axton home on the telephone with the news that he thought he had at last positive proof of the mysterious man’s identity. At least, he had with him a man whom he wanted Mr. Axton to see. Axton replied that he would be very glad to see the man, if Trant would make an appointment. In three quarters of an hour at the Axton home, Trant answered; and forty minutes later, having first telephoned young Caryl, Trant with his watchman, escorting a stranger who was broad-shouldered, weasel-eyed, of peculiarly alert and guarded manner, reached the Axton doorstep. Caryl had so perfectly timed his arrival, under Trant’s instructions, that he joined them before the bell was answered.
The Mystery & Suspense Novella Page 42
