The Thinking Machine Collected Stories Part 100

"Well, our acquaintance was rather brief," replied Miss Bellingdame. "I met him abroad, and at his at his suggestion came directly over with him. Now that everything has happened, I hardly know just what I shall do next."

The telegraph sounder clicked sharply, and distinctly.

"And when were you to have been married?" interrupted the scientist gently.

Miss Bellingdame was listening intently. "Married?" she repeated absently. "Oh, yes, we were to have been married, to be sure."

Hatch strove vainly to read the expression which was creeping into her face. She was leaning forward, gripping the arms of the chair in which she sat with wide, staring, frightened eyes, and every instant her face grew whiter. Suddenly she arose.

"Really you must pardon me," she gasped hurriedly. "I am ill!"

She turned quickly and almost ran out of the room. The Thinking Machine walked out and into the arms of Detective Mallory in the lobby.

"Are your men placed?" demanded the scientist abruptly.

"Yes," was the complacent answer. "Did it work?"

"It worked," replied The Thinking Machine enigmatically. "Come on. Let us go to headquarters."

The Thinking Machine's conjecture was faulty only in one point, and that was his surmise that the message which had been sent at night from the Ura.n.u.s after the murder had been to counteract the message which Ingraham was sending when he was killed. Instead, Miss Bellingdame, herself an operator, had picked up the wireless station ash.o.r.e and ordered a motor boat out to meet her and take her off. Every other statement was correct as he had stated it.

"And simple," he told Hatch and Captain Deihl. "Mr. Hatch, to whom I telephoned while you, Captain, were with me, was able to find the interrupted message at sea; in fact, it had been relayed in to the station here for information. It stated that Miss Florence Hogarth, wanted for poisoning in England, and for whom there was a reward of one thousand pounds, was aboard the Ura.n.u.s as Miss Bellingdame, and that instead of having dark hair her hair was straw blond, as the result of a little peroxide. You see, therefore, the logic of the units was correct. It is always so. She went to pieces when she read the sounder at the hotel, which was a prearranged affair in the hands of a Continental operator. The message I sent was a dummy."

Subsequent developments proved that instead of being engaged to the murdered operator, Miss Bellingdame, or Miss Hogarth, had never seen him until she came aboard the Ura.n.u.s. It never appeared just how Ingraham had discovered her ident.i.ty.

_________________________.

MYSTERY OF THE GOLDEN DAGGER.

I.

"All animals have the same appet.i.tes and the same pa.s.sions. The reasoning faculty is the one thing which lifts man above what we are pleased to call the lower animals. Logic is the essence of the reasoning faculty. Therefore logic is that power which enables the mind of man to reconstruct from one fact a series of incidents leading to a given result. One result may be as surely traced back to its causes as the specialist may reconstruct a skeleton from a fraction of bone."

Thus clearly, pointedly Professor Augustus S. F. X. Van Dusen had once explained to Hutchinson Hatch, reporter, the a.n.a.lytical power by which he had solved some of the most perplexing mysteries that had ever come to the attention of either the police or the press. It was a text from which sermons might be preached. No one knew this better than Hatch.

Professor Van Dusen is the foremost logician of his time. His name has been honored at home and abroad until now it embraces as honorary initials nearly all those letters which had not been included in it in the first place. The Thinking Machine! This phrase applied once in a newspaper to the scientist had clung tenaciously. It was the name by which he was known to the world at large.

In a dozen ways he had proved his right to it. Hatch remembered vividly the scientist's mysterious disappearance from a prison cell once; then there had been the famous automobile mystery, and more lately the strange chain of circ.u.mstances whose history has been written as "The Scarlet Thread." This little text, as given above, was one afternoon, when Hatch had casually called on The Thinking Machine. It transpired that a few hours later he had returned to lay before the logician still another mystery.

On his return to his office Hatch had been dispatched in a rush on a murder story. In following up the threads of this he had learned every fact the police had, had written his story, and then presented himself at the Beacon Hill home of The Thinking Machine. It was then 11 o'clock at night. The Thinking Machine had received him, and the facts, in substance, were laid before him as follows:

A man who had given the name of Charles Wilkes called at the real estate office of Henry Holmes & Co., on Washington Street on October 14, just thirty-two days prior to the beginning of the story, as Hatch recited it. He was a man of possibly thirty years, stalwart, good-looking and clean-cut in appearance. There had been nothing about him to attract particular attention. He had said that he was eastern agent for a big manufacturing concern, and travelled a great deal.

"I want a six or seven room house in Cambridge," he had explained. "Something quiet, where I won't have too many neighbors. My wife is extremely nervous, and I want to get a couple of blocks from the street cars. If you have a house, say in the middle of a big lot somewhere in the outskirts of Cambridge, I think that will do."

"What price?" a clerk had asked.

"Anywhere from $45 to $60," he replied.

It just happened that Henry Holmes & Co. had such a house. An office man went with Mr. Wilkes to see it. Mr. Wilkes was pleased and paid the first month's rent of $60 to the man who had accompanied him.

"I won't go back to the office with you," he said. "Everything is all right. I'll have my stuff moved out in a couple of days and let your collector come for next month's rent when it is due."

Mr. Wilkes was a very pleasant man; the clerk had found him so and was gratified at the transaction, which gave his firm such a desirable tenant. He did not ask for Mr. Wilkes' address, nor did he think to ask any questions as to where the household goods were at the moment. In the light of subsequent events this lack of caution temporarily hid, at least for a time, it seemed, the key which would have solved a mystery.

The month pa.s.sed and in the office of Holmes & Co. the matter had been forgotten until the rent came due. Then a collector, Willard Clements, the regular Cambridge collector for the firm went to the Cambridge house. He found the front door locked. The shutters were still over the windows. There was no indication that anyone at all had either occupied the house or used it. That was an impression to be gathered by a casual outside inspection. Clements had gone around the house; the back door stood wide open.

Clements went inside the house and must have remained there for half an hour. When he came out his face was white, his lips quivered, and the madness of terror was in his eyes. He ran staggeringly around the house and down the walk to the street. A few minutes later he rushed into a police station and there poured out a babbling, incoherent story. The usually placid face of the officer in charge was overspread with surprise as he listened.

Three men were detailed to visit the house and investigate Clements' story. Two of these men went with Clements through the back door, which still stood open, and the third, Detective Fahey, began an examination of the premises. Entering through the back door, the kitchen lay to his left. There was nothing to show that it had been occupied for many months. A hurried glance satisfied him, and he pa.s.sed into the main body of the house. This consisted of a parlor, a dining room and a bedroom. Here, too, he found nothing. The dust lay thick over floors, mantels and window sills.

From the hall, stairs led to three sleeping rooms above. Under these stairs a short flight lead to the cellar. The door stood open, and a damp, chilly breath came up. Utter darkness lay below. The detective shrugged his shoulders and turned to go upstairs where the other men were.

He found them in the smallest of the three rooms, bending over a bed. Clements stood at the door, which had been broken in, still with the pallor of death on his face and his hands working nervously.

"Find anything?" asked the detective briskly.

"My G.o.d, no," gasped Clements. "I wouldn't go back in that room for a million dollars."

The detective laughed and pa.s.sed in.

"What is it?" he asked.

"A girl," was the reply.

"What happened to her?"

"Stabbed," was the laconic answer.

The other two men stood aside and the detective looked down at the body. It was that of a girl possibly twenty or twenty-two years old. She had been pretty, but the hand of death had obliterated many traces of it now. Her hair, of a rich, ruddy gold, mercifully veiled somewhat the ravages of death; her hands lay outstretched on the white of the bed.

She was dressed for the street. Her hat still clung to her hair, fastened by a long, black-headed pin. Her clothing, of dark brown, was good but not rich. A m.u.f.f lay beside her and her coat was open.

It was not necessary for Detective Fahey to ask the immediate cause of death. A stab wound in the breast showed that.

"Where's the knife?" he asked.

"Didn't find any."

"Any other wounds?"

"Can't tell until the medical examiner arrives. She's just as we found her."