The Thinking Machine Collected Stories Part 225

"Oh, isn't that delightful?" beamed Dollie.

"In view of everything and your broken promise to me-the promise not to see Herbert again-I think it wisest," he continued.

"Perhaps it is," she mused.

"Why did you see him?" he demanded.

"I consented to see him, only to bid him good-by," replied Dollie demurely, "and to make perfectly clear to him my position in this matter."

Oh, woman! Perfidious, insincere, loyal, charming woman! All the tangled skeins of life are the work of your dainty fingers. All the sins and sorrows are your doing!

Mr. Meredith rubbed his chin thoughtfully.

"You may take it as my wish-my order even," he said as he cleared his throat-for giving orders to Dollie was a dangerous experiment, "that you must not attempt to communicate in any way with Mr. Herbert again-by letter or otherwise."

"Yes, papa."

Mr. Meredith was somewhat surprised at the ease with which he got away with this. Had he been blessed with a little more wisdom in the ways of women he would have been suspicious.

"You really do not love him, anyway," he ventured at last. "It was only a girlish infatuation."

"I told him yesterday just what I thought of him," she replied truthfully enough.

And thus the interview ended.

It was about noon that day when Hutchinson Hatch called on d.i.c.k Herbert.

"Well, what did you find out?" he inquired.

"Really, old man," said d.i.c.k kindly, "I have decided that there is nothing I can say to you about the matter. It's a private affair, after all."

"Yes, I know that you know about that, but the police don't know it," commented the reporter grimly.

"The police!" d.i.c.k smiled.

"Did you see her?" Hatch asked.

"Yes, I saw her-and her father, too."

Hatch saw the one door by which he had hoped to solve the riddle closing on him.

"Was Miss Meredith the girl in the automobile?" he asked bluntly.

"Really, I won't answer that."

"Are you the man who stole the gold plate?"

"I won't answer that, either," replied d.i.c.k smilingly. "Now, look here, Hatch, you're a good fellow. I like you. It is your business to find out things, but, in this particular affair, I'm going to make it my business to keep you from finding out things. I'll risk the police end of it." He went over and shook hands with the reporter cordially. "Believe me, if I told you the absolute truth-all of it-you couldn't print it unless-unless I was arrested, and I don't intend that that shall happen."

Hatch went away.

That night the Randolph gold plate was stolen for the second time. Thirty-six hours later Detective Mallory arrested Richard Herbert with the stolen plate in his possession. d.i.c.k burst out laughing when the detective walked in on him.

PART III.

The Thinking Machine

Chapter I.

Professor Augustus S. F. X. Van Dusen, Ph. D., LL. D., F. R. S., M. D., etc., etc., was the Court of Last Appeal in the sciences. He was five feet two inches tall, weighed 107 pounds, that being slightly above normal, and wore a number eight hat. Bushy, yellow hair straggled down about his ears and partially framed a clean-shaven, wizened face in which were combined the paradoxical qualities of extreme aggressiveness and childish petulance. The mouth drooped a little at the corners, being otherwise a straight line; the eyes were mere slits of blue, squinting eternally through thick spectacles. His brow rose straight up, domelike, majestic even, and added a whimsical grotesqueness to his appearance.

The Professor's idea of light literature, for rare moments of recreation, was page after page of encyclopaedic discussion on "ologies" and "isms" with lots of figures in 'em. Sometimes he wrote these discussions himself, and frequently held them up to annihilation. His usual speaking tone was one of deep annoyance, and he had an unwavering glare that went straight through one. He was the son of the son of the son of an eminent German scientist, the logical production of a house that had borne a distinguished name in the sciences for generations.

Thirty-five of his fifty years had been devoted to logic, study, a.n.a.lysis of cause and effect, mental, material, and psychological. By his personal efforts he had mercilessly flattened out and readjusted at least two of the exact sciences and had added immeasurably to the world's sum of knowledge in others. Once he had held the chair of philosophy in a great university, but casually one day he promulgated a thesis that knocked the faculty's eye out, and he was invited to vacate. It was a dozen years later that that university had openly resorted to influence and diplomacy to induce him to accept its LL. D.

For years foreign and American inst.i.tutions, educational, scientific, and otherwise, crowded degrees upon him. He didn't care. He started fires with the elaborately formal notifications of these unsought honours and turned again to his work in the small laboratory which was a part of his modest home. There he lived, practically a recluse, his simple wants being attended to by one aged servant, Martha.

This, then, was The Thinking Machine. This last t.i.tle, The Thinking Machine, perhaps more expressive of the real man than a yard of honorary initials, was coined by Hutchinson Hatch at the time of the scientist's defeat of a chess champion after a single morning's instruction in the game. The Thinking Machine had a.s.serted that logic was inevitable, and that game had proven his a.s.sertion. Afterward there had grown up a strange sort of friendship between the crabbed scientist and the reporter. Hatch, to the scientist, represented the great, whirling outside world; to the reporter the scientist was merely a brain-a marvellously keen, penetrating, infallible guide through material muddles far removed from the delicately precise labours of the laboratory.

Now The Thinking Machine sat in a huge chair in his reception-room with long, slender fingers pressed tip to tip and squint eyes turned upward. Hatch was talking, had been talking for more than an hour with infrequent interruptions. In that time he had laid bare the facts as he and the police knew them from the incidents of the masked ball at Seven Oaks to the return of Dollie Meredith.

"Now, Mr. Hatch," asked The Thinking Machine, "just what is known of this second theft of the gold plate?"

"It's simple enough," explained the reporter. "It was plain burglary. Some person entered the Randolph house on Monday night by cutting out a pane of gla.s.s and unfastening a window-latch. Whoever it was took the plate and escaped. That's all anyone knows of it."

"Left no clew, of course?"

"No, so far as has been found."

"I presume that, on its return by express, Mr. Randolph ordered the plate placed in the small room as before?"

"Yes."

"He's a fool."

"Yes."

"Please go on."

"Now the police absolutely decline to say as yet just what evidence they have against Herbert beyond the finding of the plate in his possession," the reporter resumed, "though, of course, that's enough and to spare. They will not say, either, how they first came to connect him with the affair. Detective Mallory doesn't--"

"When and where was Mr. Herbert arrested?"

"Yesterday, Tuesday, afternoon in his rooms. Fourteen pieces of the gold plate were on the table."

The Thinking Machine dropped his eyes a moment to squint at the reporter.

"Only eleven pieces of the plate were first stolen, you said?"