The loud rat-tat-tat of a cane had shaken Trant’s door and cracked its
ground glass from corner to corner, and the door was flung open to admit
a determined little man, whose carefully groomed pink-and-whiteness was
accentuated by his anger.
“Winton, go home!” The elder Edwards glared sternly at his son, and then
about the office. “Mr. Trant--you are Mr. Trant, I suppose--I want you to
have nothing to do with this matter. I prefer to let the whole affair
drop where it is.”
“I reserve the right, Mr. Edwards,” the psychologist said, rising, “to
take up or drop cases only as I myself see fit. I have heard nothing
yet in your son’s story to explain why you do not want the case
investigated.”
“Then you shall have it explained,” Cuthbert Edwards answered. “I called
on Miss Silber last Sunday, and it is because of what I learned there
that I want Winton to have nothing more to do with her. I went to Miss
Silber on Sunday, Mr. Trant, feeling that I had been too hasty on
Thursday. I offered her an apology and was reasoning with her when I
heard suddenly, in an upper room, the same noises that had so disturbed
the quiet of my office on Thursday afternoon!”
“You mean the hammering?” asked Trant.
“Precisely, Mr. Trant; the hammering! If you had heard that sound
yourself, you would know that it is a very definite and distinctive
blow, given according to some intentional arrangement. I no sooner heard
it and saw the uneasiness it again caused in Miss Silber, than I became
certain that the same disreputable man who had been to see her at my
office was then housed in her very home. I insisted, as she was my son’s
promised wife, on searching the house.”
“Did you find him?” Trant inquired sharply.
“No, I did not, Mr. Trant, though I went into every room and opened
every closet. I found only what appeared to be the usual inmates of the
house--Miss Silber’s father and the woman who keeps house for her.”
“Miss Silber’s father! Has Miss Silber a father?” Trant interrupted.
“He is hardly worth mentioning, Mr. Trant,” the younger Edwards
explained. “He must have suffered at some time from a brain trouble that
has partly deprived him of his faculties, I believe. Neither he nor the
housekeeper, who is not in Eva’s confidence, is likely to be able to
help us in this matter.”
“The man may have slipped out of the house unseen,” suggested Trant.
“Quite impossible,” Cuthbert Edwards asserted. “Miss Silber lived in a
little house west of Ravenswood. There are very few houses, none within
at least a quarter of a mile of her. The ground is flat, and no one
could have got away without being seen by me.”
“Your story so far is certainly very peculiar,” the psychologist
commented, “and it gains interest with every detail. Are you certain it
was not this second interview with your father”--he turned again to the
younger man--“that made Miss Silber refuse you?”
“No; it was not. When I got back yesterday and learned from father what
had happened, I went out at once to Eva at her home. She had changed
utterly; not in her feelings toward me, for I felt certain even then
that she loved me--but an influence--the influence of this man--had come
between us. She told me there was no longer any chance of her marrying.
She refused the explanation she had promised to make to me. She told me
to go away and forget her, or--as I wrote you--to think of her as dead.
“You can imagine my feelings,” he went on. “I could not sleep last night
after I had left her. As I was wandering about the house, I saw the
evening paper lying spread out on the library table and my eye caught
her name in it. It was in the advertisement that I sent you, Mr. Trant.
Late as it was, I called up the newspaper offices and learned the facts
regarding its insertion. At daybreak I motored out to see Eva. The house
was empty. I went round it in the mud and rain, peering in at the
windows. Even the housekeeper was no longer there, and the neighbors
could tell me nothing of the time or manner of their leaving; nor has
any word come from her to the office.”
“That is all, then,” the psychologist said thoughtfully. “‘The
seventeenth of the tenth’” he reread the beginning of the advertisement.
“That is, of course, a date, the seventeenth of the tenth month, and it
is put there to recall to Miss Silber some event of which it would be
sure to remind her. I suppose you know of no private significance this
date might have for her, or you would have mentioned it.”
“None on the seventeenth; no, Mr. Trant,” young Edwards replied. “If it
were only the thirtieth I might help you; for I know that on that date
Eva celebrates some sort of anniversary at home.”
Trant opened a bulky almanac lying on his desk, and as he glanced
swiftly down the page his eyes flashed suddenly with comprehension.
“You are correct, I think, as to the influence of the hammering man on
her movements,” the psychologist said. “But as to her connection with
the man and her reasons, that is another matter. But of that I cannot
say till I have had half an hour to myself at the Crerar Library.”
“The library, Mr. Trant?” cried young Edwards, in surprise.
“Yes; and, as speed is certainly essential, I hope you still have your
motor below.”
As young Edwards nodded, the psychologist seized his hat and gloves and
his instrument case, and preceded the others from the office. Half an
hour later he descended from the library to rejoin the Edwardses waiting
in the motor.
“The man who inserted that advertisement--the hammering man, I believe,
of whom we are in search,” he announced briefly, “is named N. Meyan, and
he is lodging, or at least can be addressed at No. 7 Coy Court. The case
has suddenly developed far darker and more villainous aspects even than
I feared. Please order the chauffeur to go there as rapidly as
possible.”
Coy Court, at which, twenty minutes later, he bade young Edwards stop
the motor, proved to be one of those short, intersecting streets that
start from the crowded thoroughfare of Halstead Street, run a squalid
block or two east or west, and stop short against the sooty wall of a
foundry or machine shop. No. 7, the third house on the left--like many of
its neighbors, whose window’s bore Greek, Jewish, or Lithuanian
signs--was given up in the basement to a store, but the upper floors were
plainly devoted to lodgings.
The door was opened by a little girl of eight. “Does N. Meyan live
here?” the psychologist asked. “And is he in?” Then, as the child nodded
to the first inquiry and shook her head at the second: “When will he be
back?”
“He comes to-night again, sure,” she said. “Perhaps sooner. But
to-night, or to-morrow, he goes away for good. He have paid only till
to-morrow.”
“I was right, you see, in saying we had need for haste,” Trant said to
young Edwards. “But there is one thing we can try, even though he is not
here. Let me have the picture you showed me this morning!”
He took from Winton’s hand the picture of Eva Silber, opened the leather
case, and held it so the child could sec. “Do you know that lady?”
“Yes!” The child showed sudden interest. “It is Mr. Meyan’s wife.”
“His wife!” cried young Edwards. “So,” the psychologist said swiftly to
the little girl, “you have seen this lady here?”
“She comes last night.” The child had grown suddenly loquacious.
“Because she is coming, Mr. Meyan makes trouble that we should get a
room ready for her. Already she has sent her things. And we get ready
the room next to his. But because she wants still another room, she goes
away last night again. Rooms come not so easy here; we have many people.
But now we have another, so to-night she is coming again.”
“Does it now seem necessary for us to press this investigation further?”
Cuthbert Edwards asked caustically. As he spoke, the sound of measured,
heavy blows came to them down the dark stair apparently from the second
floor of the building. The elder Edwards cried excitedly and
triumphantly: “What is that? Listen! That man--Meyan, if it is Meyan--must
be here; for that is the same hammering.”
“This is even better luck than we could have expected!” exclaimed the
psychologist; and he slipped past the child and sped swiftly up the
stairs, with his companions closely following. At the head of the flight
he passed a stunted woman whose marked resemblance to the little girl
below established her at once as mother and landlady, and a trembling
old man. With the elder Edwards, Trant tore open door after door of the
rooms upon that floor, and the floor above, before the woman could
prevent him. The rooms were all empty.
“Meyan must have escaped!” said Cuthbert Edwards as they returned,
crestfallen, to the second story. “But we have proof at least that the
child spoke the truth in saying Miss Silber had been here to see him,
for she hardly would have allowed her father to come here without her.”
“Her father--so this is Miss Silber’s father!” Trant swiftly turned to
examine with the keenest interest the old man, who shrank back,
shivering and shuddering, in a corner. Even in that darkened hall he
conveyed to the psychologist an impression of hoary whiteness. His hair
and beard were snowy white, the dead pallor of his skin was the
unhealthy whiteness of potato shoots that have sprouted in a cellar, and
the iris of his eyes had faded until it was almost indistinguishable.
Yet there remained something in the man’s appearance which told Trant
that he was not really old--that he still should be moving, daring,
self-confident, a leader among men, instead of cringing and shrinking
thus at the slightest move of these chance visitors.
“Meyan? Is it because you are looking for Meyan that you have made all
this disturbance?” the woman broke in. “Then why didn’t you ask? For now
he is at the saloon, I think, only across the street.”
“Then we will go there at once,” said Trant. “But I will ask you”--he
turned to the elder Edwards--“to wait for us at the motor, for two of us
will be enough for my purpose, and more than two may defeat it by
alarming Meyan.”
Trant descended the stairs, took his instrument case from the motor, and
with young Edwards crossed the street quickly to the saloon.