The Thinking Machine Collected Stories Part 19

"Frankly I will say that I could see no possible explanation of the affair until the day you and I were talking to Mrs. Blake and I stood looking out of the library window. Then it all flashed on me instantly. I went out and satisfied myself. When I returned to the library I was satisfied in all reason that Baby Blake was dead; I had had such an idea before. I was firmly convinced the child was dead when I put those advertis.e.m.e.nts in the newspapers. But there was still a chance that he was not.

"Several seemingly unanswerable questions faced me when I found the end of the baby's footprints in the snow. I instantly saw that if the baby had made those tracks it had been lifted suddenly from the ground, but by what? From where? How had it been taken away? The balloon I could not consider seriously, although as I say it offered a possible solution. An eagle? I could not consider that seriously. Eagles are rare; eagles powerful enough to lift a baby weighing thirty pounds are extremely rare, practically unknown save in the far West; certainly I never heard of one doing such a thing as this. Therefore I pa.s.sed the eagle by as an improbability.

"I satisfied myself that there were no other footsteps save the baby's in the yard. Then-what? It occurred to me that someone standing on the little box might have reached over and lifted the child out of its tracks. But it was too far away, I thought, and if someone did stand there and lift the child that someone could not have leaped from that box over the stone wall, which was approximately a hundred feet away in all directions.

"I saw the stone ten feet away. Could a man stand on the box and leap to the stone? Generally, no. And from the stone, where could he have gone? Obviously nowhere. I considered this matter not minutes, but hours and days, and no light came to me. I was convinced, though, that the box was the starting point if the baby had made the tracks. I was now fairly certain that the baby did make the tracks. He wanted to get out in the snow, was left alone, opened the front door and wandered out.

"Then it all occurred to me in a new light. What living animal could have stood on the box and lifted the child clear four feet away, then leaped from there to the stone, and from the stone where? The clothes line is eight feet or so from the stone. It is a pretty st.u.r.dy rope and capable of bearing a considerable weight, supported as it is."

He stopped and turned his eyes toward Hatch, who listened eagerly.

"Do you see it now?" he asked.

The reporter shook his head, bewildered.

"The thing that lifted Baby Blake from the snow stood on the box, leaped from there to the stone, from there to the clothes line, along which it climbed to the end. From the wooden support at the end it is a clear distance of fifteen feet to the nearest thing-the swing. This thing made that leap, climbed the swing rope, disappeared into the trees, moving through the branches freely from one tree to another, and dropped to the ground nearly a block away."

"A monkey?" suggested Hatch.

"An orang-outang," nodded The Thinking Machine.

"An orang-outang?" gasped Hatch, and he shuddered a little. "I see now why you were positive the child was dead."

"An orang-outang is the only living thing within the knowledge of man which could have done all these things-therefore an orang-outang did them," said the other emphatically. "Remember a full-sized orang-outang is nearly as tall as a man, has a reach relatively a third longer than a very tall man would have, and a strength which is enormous. It could have made the leaps and probably would have made them rather than step in the snow. They despise snow, being from the tropics themselves, and will not step in it unless they are compelled to. The leap of fifteen feet to the swing rope from the clothes line would have been comparatively easy, even with a child in its arms.

"Where could it have come from? I don't know. Possibly escaped from a ship, because sailors have strange pets; might have gotten away from a menagerie somewhere, or a circus. I only knew that an orang-outang was the actual abductor. The difficulties of a man climbing the fire escape where the baby was found were nothing to an orang-outang. There it would have merely been a leap up of five feet."

The Thinking Machine stopped as if he had finished. Hatch respected this silence for a moment, but he had questions yet to be answered.

"Who wrote the kidnapping letters demanding money?" was the first.

"You found him-Charles Gates," was the reply.

"And the letter written after the abduction demanding twenty-five thousand dollars?"

"Was written by him, of course-but this was a bluff. This poor deluded fool imagined that someone would actually go out and toss $25,000 on a trash-heap where he could find it, and then he could escape. That was his purpose. He knew nothing of the whereabouts of the baby. He beat his wife when he found, instead of money, I had put some good advice in the newspaper bundle for him."

"But the stocking in his room, and your question to Miss Barton?"

"This man did write a letter threatening kidnapping before the baby disappeared. It was perfectly possible that after the kidnapping he stole the little stocking and two or three other things from the laundry, for Miss Barton noticed they were missing, or got someone to do so for him. And, the baby being gone, he was intending to send these to the mother, one at a time, I imagine, to make her believe he had the child. That is transparent. I asked Miss Barton the question about giving them to Gates to see if she did-her manner would have told me. I instantly saw she did not-had never even heard of him, as a matter of fact. I also dropped that remark about there being $25,000 in the package to see what effect it would have on her."

"And the facts you had about the baby's fortune going to relatives of Mrs. Blake in the event of the baby's death?"

"I got from her, by a casual question as to the succession of the estate. There was still a possibility that the baby was in their hands despite the manner of its disappearance. As it transpired they had nothing whatever to do with it. The advertis.e.m.e.nt I put in the paper was a palpable trick-but it had the desired effect. It touched a guilty conscience. The guilty conscience feared it was trapped and acted accordingly."

"It seems perfectly incomprehensible that the baby should have come out of it alive," mused Hatch. "I had always imagined orang-outangs to be extremely ferocious."

"Read up on them a bit, Mr. Hatch," said The Thinking Machine. "You will find they are of strangely contradictory and mischievous natures. Where this child was permitted to escape safely others might have been torn limb from limb."

There was silence for a time. Hatch considered the matter all explained, until suddenly the picture book occurred to him.

"You 'phoned to me to see the picture book and tell you what's in it," he said. "Why?"

"Suppose there was a picture of a monkey in it," rejoined the other. "I merely wanted to know if the baby would know a monkey, in other words an orang-outang, if it saw one. Why? Because if the baby knew one it would not necessarily be afraid of one in the flesh, and would not of necessity cry out when the orang-outang picked it up. As a matter of fact no one heard it scream when taken away."

"Oh, I see," said Hatch. "There was a picture of a monkey in the book. I told you." He took out the book and looked at it. "Here," and he extended it to the scientist who glanced at it casually, and nodded.

"If you want to prove this just as I have told it," said The Thinking Machine, "go to the Blake home to-morrow, put your finger on that picture and show it to Baby Blake. He will prove it."

It came to pa.s.s that Hatch did this very thing.

"Pitty monkey," said Baby Blake. "Doe, doe."

"He means he wants to go," Miss Barton exclaimed to Hatch.

Hatch was satisfied.

Two days later the Boston American carried a dispatch from a village near Lynn stating that a semi-tame orang-outang had been killed by a policeman. It had belonged to a sailor, from whose vessel it had escaped more than two weeks before.

______________________.

MYSTERY OF THE FATAL CIPHER.

For the third time Professor Augustus S. F. X. Van Dusen-so-called The Thinking Machine-read the letter. It was spread out in front of him on the table, and his blue eyes were narrowed to mere slits as he studied it through his heavy eyegla.s.ses. The young woman who had placed the letter in his hands, Miss Elizabeth Devan, sat waiting patiently on the sofa in the little reception room of The Thinking Machine's house. Her blue eyes were opened wide and she stared as if fascinated at this man who had become so potent a factor in the solution of intangible mysteries.

Here is the letter:

To those Concerned:

Tired of it all I seek the end, and am content. Ambition now is dead; the grave yawns greedily at my feet, and with the labor of my own hands lost I greet death of my own will, by my own act.

To my son I leave all, and you who maligned me, you who discouraged me, you may read this and know I punish you thus. It's for him, my son, to forgive.

I dared in life and dare dead your everlasting anger, not alone that you didn't speak but that you cherished secret, and my ears are locked forever against you. My vault is my resting place.

On the brightest and dearest page of life I wrote (7) my love for him. Family ties, binding as the Bible itself, bade me give all to my son.

Good-bye. I die.

Pomeroy Stockton

"Under just what circ.u.mstances did this letter come into your possession, Miss Devan?" The Thinking Machine asked. "Tell me the full story; omit nothing."

The scientist sank back into his chair with his enormous yellow head pillowed comfortably against the cushion and his long, steady fingers pressed tip to tip. He didn't even look at his pretty visitor. She had come to ask for information; he was willing to give it, because it offered another of those abstract problems which he always found interesting. In his own field-the sciences-his fame was worldwide. This concentration of a brain which had achieved so much on more material things was perhaps a sort of relaxation.