Read Ebook: The Man Higher Up by Balmer Edwin MacHarg William Paul Frank R Frank Rudolph Illustrator

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Ebook has 140 lines and 12412 words, and 3 pages

Transcriber's note: A few typographical errors have been corrected: they are listed at the end of the text. Volume and page numbers have been incorporated into the text of each page as: v.04 p.0001.

The ancient Celtic Brixia, a town of the Cenomani, became Roman in 225 B.C., when the Cenomani submitted to Rome. Augustus founded a civil colony here in 27 B.C., and he and Tiberius constructed an aqueduct to supply it. In 452 it was plundered by Attila, but was the seat of a duchy in the Lombard period. From 1167 it was one of the most active members of the Lombard League. In 1258 it fell into the hands of Eccelino of Verona, and belonged to the Scaligers until 1421, when it came under the Visconti of Milan, and in 1426 under Venice. Early in the 16th century it was one of the wealthiest cities of Lombardy, but has never recovered from its sack by the French under Gaston de Foix in 1512. It belonged to Venice until 1797, when it came under Austrian dominion; it revolted in 1848, and again in 1849, being the only Lombard town to rally to Charles Albert in the latter year, but was taken after ten days' obstinate street fighting by the Austrians under Haynau.

"I don't know, Mr. Trant. I think it could not have been, for after the verdict of the coroner's jury, which was that Mr. Landers had been killed by some part of the machinery, it was said that the accident must have happened either the evening before, just before the engineer shut off his engines, or the first thing that morning, just after he had started them; for otherwise somebody in the engine room would have seen it."

"But where had Landers been all day Thursday, Miss Rowan, from two o'clock on the second night before, when your father last saw him, until the accident in the engine room?"

"It was supposed he had been drunk. When his body was found, his clothes were covered with fibers from the coffee-sacking, and the jury supposed he had been sleeping off his liquor in the coffee warehouse during Thursday. But I had known Ed Landers for almost three years, and in all that time I never knew him to take even one drink."

"Then it was a very unlikely supposition. You do not believe in that accident, Miss Rowan?" Trant said, brusquely.

The girl grew white as paper. "Oh, Mr. Trant, I don't know! I did believe in it. But since Will--Mr. Morse--has disappeared in exactly the same way, under exactly the same circumstances, and everyone acts about it exactly the same way--"

"You say the circumstances of Morse's disappearance were the same?" Trant pressed quietly when she was able to proceed.

"What did you find in Morse's bureau?" asked Trant.

"I found nothing."

"Nothing?" Trant repeated. "That is impossible, Miss Rowan! Think again! Remember he warned you that what you found might seem trivial and useless."

The girl, a little defiantly, studied for an instant Trant's clear-cut features. Suddenly she arose and ran from the room, but returned quickly with a strange little implement in her hand.

It was merely a bit of wire, straight for perhaps three inches, and then bent in a half circle of five or six inches, the bent portion of the wire being wound carefully with stout twine, thus:

"Except for his clothes and some blank writing paper and envelopes that was absolutely the only thing in the bureau. It was the only thing at all in the only locked drawer."

Trant and Rentland stared disappointedly at this strange implement, which the girl handed to the psychologist.

"You have shown this to your stepfather, Miss Rowan, for a possible explanation of why a company checker should be so solicitous about such a thing as this?" asked Trant.

"No," the girl hesitated. "Will had told me not to say anything; and I told you father did not like Will. He had made up his mind that I was to marry Ed Landers. In most ways father is kind and generous. He's kept the coup? we came here in for mother and me for two years; and you see," she gestured a little proudly about the bedecked and badly furnished rooms, "you see how he gets everything for us. Mr. Landers was most generous, too. He took me to the theaters two or three times every week--always the best seats, too. I didn't want to go, but father made me. I preferred Will, though he wasn't so generous."

Trant's eyes returned, with more intelligent scrutiny, to the mysterious implement in his hand.

"What salary do checkers receive, Rentland?" he asked, in a low tone.

"One hundred and twenty-five dollars a month."

"And her father, the dock superintendent--how much?" Trant's expressive glance now jumping about from one gaudy, extravagant trifle in the room to another, caught a glimpse again of the electric coup? standing in the street, then returned to the tiny bit of wire in his hand.

"Three thousand a year," Rentland replied.

"Tell me, Miss Rowan," said Trant, "this implement--have you by any chance mentioned it to President Welter?"

"Why, no, Mr. Trant."

"You are sure of that? Excellent! Excellent! Now the queer, quiet little man with the scar on his cheek who came to see Morse; no one could tell you anything about him?"

"No one, Mr. Trant; but yesterday Will's landlady told me that a man has come to ask for Will every forenoon since he disappeared, and she thinks this may be the man with the scar, though she can't be sure, for he kept the collar of his overcoat up about his face. She was to telephone me if he came again."

"If he comes this morning," Trant glanced quickly at his watch, "you and I, Rentland, might much better be waiting for him over there."

The psychologist rose, putting the bent, twine-wound bit of wire carefully into his pocket; and a minute later the two men crossed the street to the house, already known to Rentland, where Morse had boarded. The landlady not only allowed them to wait in her little parlor, but waited with them until at the end of an hour she pointed with an eager gesture to a short man in a big ulster who turned sharply up the front steps.

"That's him--see!" she exclaimed.

"That the man with the scar!" cried Rentland. "Well! I know him."

He made for the door, caught at the ulster and pulled the little man into the house by main force.

"Well, Dickey!" the secret agent challenged, as the man faced him in startled recognition. "What are you doing in this case? Trant, this is Inspector Dickey, of the Customs Office," he introduced the officer.

"I'm in the case on my own hook, if I know what case you're talking about," piped Dickey. "Morse, eh? and the American Commodities Company, eh?"

"Exactly," said Rentland, brusquely. "What were you calling to see Landers for?"

"You know about that?" The little man looked up sharply. "Well, six weeks ago Landers came to me and told me he had something to sell; a secret system for beating the customs. But before we got to terms, he began losing his nerve a little; he got it back, however, and was going to tell me when, all at once, he disappeared, and two days later he was dead! That made it hotter for me; so I went after Morse. But Morse denied he knew anything. Then Morse disappeared, too."

"So you got nothing at all out of them?" Rentland interposed.

"Nothing I could use. Landers, one time when he was getting up his nerve, showed me a piece of bent wire--with string around it--in his room, and began telling me something when Rowan called him, and then he shut up."

"A bent wire!" Trant cried, eagerly. "Like this?" He took from his pocket the implement given him by Edith Rowan. "Morse had this in his room, the only thing in a locked drawer."

"The same thing!" Dickey cried, seizing it. "So Morse had it, too, after he became checker at scale No. 3, where the cheating is, if anywhere. The very thing Landers started to explain to me, and how they cheated the customs with it. I say, we must have it now, Rentland! We need only go to the docks and watch them while they weigh, and see how they use it, and arrest them and then we have them at last, eh, old man?" he cried in triumph. "We have them at last!"

"You mean," Trant cut in upon the customs man, "that you can convict and jail perhaps the checker, or a foreman, or maybe even a dock superintendent--as usual. But the men higher up--the big men who are really at the bottom of this business and the only ones worth getting--will you catch them?"

"We must take those we can get," said Dickey sharply.

Trant laid his hand on the little officer's arm.

"I am a stranger to you," he said, "but if you have followed some of the latest criminal cases in Illinois perhaps you know that, using the methods of modern practical psychology, I have been able to get results where old ways have failed. We are front to front now with perhaps the greatest problem of modern criminal catching, to catch, in cases involving a great corporation, not only the little men low down who perform the criminal acts, but the men higher up, who conceive, or connive at the criminal scheme. Rentland, I did not come here to convict merely a dock foreman; but if we are going to reach anyone higher than that, you must not let Inspector Dickey excite suspicion by prying into matters at the docks this afternoon!"

"But what else can we do?" said Rentland, doubtfully.

"Modern practical psychology gives a dozen possible ways for proving the knowledge of the man higher up in this corporation crime," Trant answered, "and I am considering which is the most practicable. Only tell me," he demanded suddenly; "Mr. Welter I have heard is one of the rich men of New York who make it a fad to give largely to universities and other institutions; can you tell me with what ones he may be most closely interested?"

"I have heard," Rentland replied, "that he is one of the patrons of the Stuyvesant School of Science. It is probably the most fashionably patroned institution in New York; and Welter's name, I know, figures with it in the newspapers."

"Nothing could be better!" Trant exclaimed. "Kuno Schmalz has his psychological laboratory there. I see my way now, Rentland; and you will hear from me early in the afternoon. But keep away from the docks!" He turned and left the astonished customs officers abruptly. Half an hour later the young psychologist sent in his card to Professor Schmalz in the laboratory of the Stuyvesant School of Science. The German, broad-faced, spectacled, beaming, himself came to the laboratory door.

"Is it Mr. Trant--the young, apt pupil of my old friend, Dr. Reiland?" he boomed, admiringly. "Ach! luck is good to Reiland! For twenty years I, too, have shown them in the laboratory how fear, guilt, every emotion causes in the body reactions which can be measured. But do they apply it? Pouf! No! it remains to them all impractical, academic, because I have only nincompoops in my classes!"

"Professor Schmalz," said Trant, following him into the laboratory, and glancing from one to another of the delicate instruments with keen interest, "tell me along what line you are now working."

"Ach! I have been for a year now experimenting with the plethysmograph and the pneumograph. I make a taste, I make a smell, or I make a noise to excite feeling in the subject; and I read by the plethysmograph that the volume of blood in the hand decreases under the emotions and that the pulse quickens; and by the pneumograph I read that the breathing is easier or quicker, depending on whether the emotions are pleasant or unpleasant. I have performed this year more than two thousand of those experiments."

"What, he!" cried the stout German. "For why should I tell him about them? He knows nothing. He has bought my time to instruct classes; he has not bought, py chiminey! everything--even the soul Gott gave me!"

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