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2017 OK Publishing
ISBN 978-80-272-3353-3
musaicumbooks@okpublishing.info
2017 OK Publishing
ISBN 978-80-272-3353-3
It was absolutely impossible. Twenty-five chess masters from the world at large, foregathered in Boston for the annual championships, unanimously declared it impossible, and unanimity on any given point is an unusual mental condition for chess masters. Not one would concede for an instant that it was within the range of human achievement. Some grew red in the face as they argued it, others smiled loftily and were silent; still others dismissed the matter in a word as wholly absurd.
A casual remark by the distinguished scientist and logician, Professor Augustus S. F. X. Van Dusen, provoked the discussion. He had, in the past, aroused bitter disputes by some chance remark; in fact had been once a sort of controversial centre of the sciences. It had been due to his modest announcement of a startling and unorthodox hypothesis that he had been invited to vacate the chair of Philosophy in a great university. Later that university had felt honoured when he accepted its degree of LL. D.
For a score of years, educational and scientific institutions of the world had amused themselves by crowding degrees upon him. He had initials that stood for things he couldn’t pronounce; degrees from France, England, Russia, Germany, Italy, Sweden and Spain. These were expressed recognition of the fact that his was the foremost brain in the sciences. The imprint of his crabbed personality lay heavily on half a dozen of its branches. Finally there came a time when argument was respectfully silent in the face of one of his conclusions.
The remark which had arrayed the chess masters of the world into so formidable and unanimous a dissent was made by Professor Van Dusen in the presence of three other gentlemen of note. One of these, Dr. Charles Elbert, happened to be a chess enthusiast.
“Chess is a shameless perversion of the functions of the brain,” was Professor Van Dusen’s declaration in his perpetually irritated voice. “It is a sheer waste of effort, greater because it is possibly the most difficult of all fixed abstract problems. Of course logic will solve it. Logic will solve any problem—not most of them but any problem. A thorough understanding of its rules would enable anyone to defeat your greatest chess players. It would be inevitable, just as inevitable as that two and two make four, not some times but all the time. I don’t know chess because I never do useless things, but I could take a few hours of competent instruction and defeat a man who has devoted his life to it. His mind is cramped; bound down to the logic of chess. Mine is not; mine employs logic in its widest scope.”
Dr. Elbert shook his head vigorously. “It is impossible,” he asserted.
“Nothing is impossible,” snapped the scientist. “The human mind can do anything. It is all we have to lift us above the brute creation. For Heaven’s sake leave us that.”
The aggressive tone, the uncompromising egotism brought a flush to Dr. Elbert’s face. Professor Van Dusen affected many persons that way, particularly those fellow savants who, themselves men of distinction, had ideas of their own.
“Do you know the purposes of chess? Its countless combinations?” asked Dr. Elbert.
“No,” was the crabbed reply. “I know nothing whatever of the game beyond the general purpose which, I understand to be, to move certain pieces in certain directions to stop an opponent from moving his King. Is that correct?”
“Yes,” said Dr. Elbert slowly, “but I never heard it stated just that way before.”
“Then, if that is correct, I maintain that the true logician can defeat the chess expert by the pure mechanical rules of logic. I’ll take a few hours some time, acquaint myself with the moves of the pieces, and defeat you to convince you.”
Professor Van Dusen glared savagely into the eyes of Dr. Elbert.
“Not me,” said Dr. Elbert. “You say anyone—you for instance, might defeat the greatest chess player. Would you be willing to meet the greatest chess player after you ‘acquaint’ yourself with the game?”
“Certainly,” said the scientist. “I have frequently found it necessary to make a fool of myself to convince people. I’ll do it again.”
This, then, was the acrimonious beginning of the discussion which aroused chess masters and brought open dissent from eminent men who had not dared for years to dispute any assertion by the distinguished Professor Van Dusen. It was arranged that at the conclusion of the championships Professor Van Dusen should meet the winner. This happened to be Tschaikowsky, the Russian, who had been champion for half a dozen years.
After this expected result of the tournament Hillsbury, a noted American master, spent a morning with Professor Van Dusen in the latter’s modest apartments on Beacon Hill. He left there with a sadly puzzled face; that afternoon Professor Van Dusen met the Russian champion. The newspapers had said a great deal about the affair and hundreds were present to witness the game.
There was a little murmur of astonishment when Professor Van Dusen appeared. He was slight, almost childlike in body, and his thin shoulders seemed to droop beneath the weight of his enormous head. He wore a number eight hat. His brow rose straight and domelike and a heavy shock of long, yellow hair gave him almost a grotesque appearance. The eyes were narrow slits of blue squinting eternally through thick spectacles; the face was small, clean shaven, drawn and white with the pallor of the student. His lips made a perfectly straight line. His hands were remarkable for their whiteness, their flexibility, and for the length of the slender fingers. One glance showed that physical development had never entered into the schedule of the scientist’s fifty years of life.
The Russian smiled as he sat down at the chess table. He felt that he was humouring a crank. The other masters were grouped near by, curiously expectant. Professor Van Dusen began the game, opening with a Queen’s gambit. At his fifth move, made without the slightest hesitation, the smile left the Russian’s face. At the tenth, the masters grew intensely eager. The Russian champion was playing for honour now. Professor Van Dusen’s fourteenth move was King’s castle to Queen’s four.
“Check,” he announced.
After a long study of the board the Russian protected his King with a Knight. Professor Van Dusen noted the play then leaned back in his chair with finger tips pressed together. His eyes left the board and dreamily studied the ceiling. For at least ten minutes there was no sound, no movement, then:
“Mate in fifteen moves,” he said quietly.
There was a quick gasp of astonishment. It took the practised eyes of the masters several minutes to verify the announcement. But the Russian champion saw and leaned back in his chair a little white and dazed. He was not astonished; he was helplessly floundering in a maze of incomprehensible things. Suddenly he arose and grasped the slender hand of his conqueror.
“You have never played chess before?” he asked.
“Never.”
“Mon Dieu! You are not a man; you are a brain—a machine—a thinking machine.”
“It’s a child’s game,” said the scientist abruptly. There was no note of exultation in his voice; it was still the irritable, impersonal tone which was habitual.
This, then, was Professor Augustus S. F. X. Van Dusen, Ph. D., LL. D., F. R. S., M. D., etc., etc., etc. This is how he came to be known to the world at large as The Thinking Machine. The Russian’s phrase had been applied to the scientist as a title by a newspaper reporter, Hutchinson Hatch. It had stuck.
It was once my good fortune to meet in person Professor Augustus S. F. X. Van Dusen, Ph. D., LL. D., F. R. S., M. D., etc. The meeting came about through a singular happening, which was as mystifying as it was dangerous to me—he saved my life in fact; and in process of hauling me back from eternity—the edge of that appalling mist which separates life and death—I had full opportunity of witnessing the workings of that marvelously keen, cold brain which has made him the most distinguished scientist and logician of his day. It was sometime afterward, however, that Professor Van Dusen was identified in my mind with The Thinking Machine.
I had dined at the Hotel Teutonic, taken a cigar from my pocket, lighted it, and started for a stroll across Boston Common. It was after eight o’clock on one of those clear, nippy evenings of winter. I was near the center of the Common on one of the many little by paths which lead toward Beacon Hill when I became conscious of an acute pain in my chest, a sudden fluttering of my heart, and a constriction in my throat. The lights in the distance began to waver and grow dim, and perspiration broke out all over me from an inward, gnawing agony which grew more intense each moment. I felt myself reeling, my cigar dropped from my fingers, and I clutched at a seat to steady myself. There was no one near me. I tried to call, then everything grew dark, and I sank down on the ground. My last recollection was of a figure approaching me; the last words I heard were a petulant, irritable “Dear me!” then I was lost to consciousness.
When I recovered consciousness I lay on a couch in a strange room. My eyes wandered weakly about and lingered with a certain childish interest on half a dozen spots which reflected glitteringly the light of an electric bulb set high up on one side. These bright spots, I came to realize after a moment, were metal parts of various instruments of a laboratory. For a time I lay helpless, listless, with trembling pulse and eardrums thumping, then I heard steps approaching, and some one bent over and peered into my face.
It was a man, but such a man as I had never seen before. A great shock of straw yellow hair tumbled about a broad, high forehead, a small, wrinkled, querulous face—the face of an aged child—a pair of watery blue eyes squinting aggressively through thick spectacles, and a thin lipped mouth as straight as the mark of a surgeon’s knife, save for the drooping corners. My impression then was that it was some sort of hallucination, the distorted vagary of a disordered brain, but gradually my vision cleared and the grip of slender fingers on my pulse made me realize the actuality of the—the apparition.
“How do you feel?” The thin lips had opened just enough to let out the question, the tone was curt and belligerent, and the voice rasped unpleasantly. At the same time the squint eyes were focused on mine with a steady, piercing glare that made me uneasy. I tried to answer, but my tongue refused to move. The gaze continued for an instant, then the man—The Thinking Machine—turned away and prepared a particularly vile smelling concoction, which he poured into me. Then I was lost again.
After a time—it might have been minutes or hours—I felt again the hand on my pulse, and again The Thinking Machine favored me with a glare. An hour later I was sitting up on the couch, with unclouded brain, and a heartbeat which was nearly normal. It was then I learned why Professor Van Dusen, an eminent man of the sciences, had been dubbed The Thinking Machine; I understood first hand how material muddles were so unfailingly dissipated by unadulterated, infallible logic.
Remember that I had gone into that room an inanimate thing, inert, unconscious, mentally and physically dead to all practical intents—beyond the point where I might have babbled any elucidating fact. And remember, too, please, that I didn’t know—had not the faintest idea—what had happened to me, beyond the fact that I had fallen unconscious. The Thinking Machine didn’t ask questions, yet he supplied all the missing details, together with a host of personal, intimate things of which he could personally have had no knowledge. In other words, I was an abstruse problem, and he solved me. With head tilted back against the cushion of the chair—and such a head!—with eyes unwaveringly turned upward, and finger tips pressed idly together, he sat there, a strange, grotesque little figure in the midst of his laboratory apparatus. Not for a moment did he display the slightest interest in me, personally; it was all as if I had been written down on a slate, to be wiped off when I was solved.
“Did this ever happen to you before?” he asked abruptly.
“No,” I replied. “What was it?”
“You were poisoned,” he said. “The poison was a deadly one—corrosive sublimate, or bichlorid or mercury. The shock was very severe; but you will be all right in-”
“Poisoned!” I exclaimed, aghast. “Who poisoned me? Why?”
“You poisoned yourself,” he replied testily. “It was your own carelessness. Nine out of ten persons handle poison as if it was candy, and you are like all the rest.”
“But I couldn’t have poisoned myself,” I protested. “Why, I have had no occasion to handle poisons—not for—I don’t know how long.”
“I do know,” he said. “It was nearly a year ago when you handled this; but corrosive sublimate is always dangerous.”
The tone irritated me, the impassive arrogance of the little man inflamed my reeling brain, and I am not sure that I did not shake my finger in his face. “If I was poisoned,” I declared with some heat, “it was not my fault. Somebody gave it to me; somebody tried to—”
“You poisoned yourself,” said The Thinking Machine again impatiently. “You talk like a child.”
“How do you know I poisoned myself? How do you know I ever handled a poison? And how do you know it was a year ago, if I did?”
The Thinking Machine regarded me coldly for an instant, and then those strange eyes of his wandered upward again. “I know those things,” he said, “just as I know your name, address, and profession from cards I found in your pockets; just as I know you smoke, from half a dozen cigars on you; just as I know that you are wearing those clothes for the first time this winter; just as I know you lost your wife within a few months; that you kept house then; and that your house was infested with insects. I know just as I know everything else—by the rules of inevitable logic.”
My head was whirling. I stared at him in blank astonishment. “But how do you know those things?” I insisted in bewilderment.
“The average person of today,” replied the scientist, “knows nothing unless it is written down and thrust under his nose. I happen to be a physician. I saw you fall, and went to you, my first thought being of heart trouble. Your pulse showed it was not that, and it was obviously not apoplexy. Now, there was no visible reason why you should have collapsed like that. There had been no shot; there was no wound; therefore, poison. An examination confirmed this first hypothesis; your symptoms showed that the poison was bichlorid of mercury. I put you in a cab and brought you here. From the fact that you were not dead then I knew that your system had absorbed only a minute quantity of poison—a quantity so small that it demonstrated instantly that there had been no suicidal intent, and indicated, too, that no one else had administered it. If this was true, I knew—I didn’t guess, I knew—that the poisoning was accidental. How accidental?
“My first surmise, naturally, was that the poison had been absorbed through the mouth. I searched your pockets. The only thing I found that you would put into your mouth were the cigars. Were they poisoned? A test showed they were, all of them. With intent to kill? No. Not enough poison was used. Was the poison a part of the gum used to bind the cigar? Possible, of course, but not probable. Then what?” He lowered his eyes and squinted at me suddenly, aggressively. I shook my head, and, as an afterthought, closed my gaping mouth.
“Perhaps you carried corrosive sublimate in your pocket. I didn’t find any; but perhaps you once carried it. I tore out the coat pocket in which I found the cigars and subjected it to the test. At sometime there had been corrosive sublimate, in the form of powder or crystals, in the pocket, and in some manner, perhaps because of an imperfection in the package, a minute quantity was loose in your pocket.
“Here was an answer to every question, and more; here was how the cigars were poisoned, and, in combination with the tailor’s tag inside your pocket, a short history of your life. Briefly it was like this: Once you had corrosive sublimate in your pocket. For what purpose? First thought—to rid your home of insects. Second thought—if you were boarding, married or unmarried, the task of getting rid of the insects would have been left to the servant; and this would possibly have been the case if you had been living at home. So I assumed for the instant that you were keeping house, and if keeping house, you were married—you bought the poison for use in your own house.
“Now, without an effort, naturally, I had you married, and keeping house. Then what? The tailor’s tag, with your name, and the date your clothing was made—one year and three months ago. It is winter clothing. If you had worn it since the poison was loose in your pocket the thing that happened to you tonight would have happened to you before; but it never happened before, therefore I assume that you had the poison early last spring, when insects began to be troublesome, and immediately after that you laid away the suit until this winter. I know you are wearing the suit for the first time this winter, because, again, this thing has not happened before, and because, too, of the faint odor of moth balls. A band of crape on your hat, the picture of a young woman in your watch, and the fact that you are now living at your club, as your bill for last month shows, establish beyond doubt that you are a widower.”
“It’s perfectly miraculous!” I exclaimed.
“Logic, logic, logic,” snapped the irritable little scientist. “You are a lawyer, you ought to know the correlation of facts; you ought to know that two and two make four, not sometimes but all the time.”
It was just midnight. Somewhere near the center of a cloud of tobacco smoke, which hovered over one corner of the long editorial room, Hutchinson Hatch, reporter, was writing. The rapid click-click of his type writer went on and on, broken only when he laid aside one sheet to put in another. The finished pages were seized upon one at a time by an office boy and rushed off to the city editor. That astute person glanced at them for information and sent them on to the copy desk, whence they were shot down into that noisy, chaotic wilderness, the composing room.
The story was what the phlegmatic head of the copy desk, speaking in the vernacular, would have called a “beaut.” It was about the kidnapping that afternoon of Walter Francis, the four-yearold son of a wealthy young broker, Stanley Francis. An alternative to the abduction had been proposed in the form of a gift to certain persons, identity unknown, of fifty thousand dollars. Francis, not unnaturally, objected to the bestowal of so vast a sum upon anyone. So he told the police, and while they were making up their minds the child was stolen. It happened in the usual way—closed carriage, and all that sort of thing.
Hatch was telling the story graphically, as he could tell a story when there was one to be told. He glanced at the clock, jerked out another sheet of copy, and the office boy scuttled away with it.
“How much more?” called the city editor.
“Just a paragraph,” Hatch answered.
His type writer clicked on merrily for a couple of minutes and then stopped. The last sheet of copy was taken away, and he rose and stretched his legs.
“Some guy wants yer at the ‘phone,” an office boy told him.
“Who is it?” asked Hatch.
“Search me,” replied the boy. “Talks like he’d been eatin’ pickles.”
Hatch went into the booth indicated. The man at the other end was Professor Augustus S. F.
X. Van Dusen. The reporter instantly recognized the crabbed, perpetually irritated voice of the noted scientist, The Thinking Machine.
“That you, Mr. Hatch?” came over the wire.
“Yes.”
“Can you do something for me immediately?” he queried. “It is very important.”
“Certainly.”
“Now listen closely,” directed The Thinking Machine. “Take a car from Park-sq., the one that goes toward Worcester through Brookline. About two miles beyond Brookline is Randall’s Crossing. Get off there and go to your right until you come to a small white house. In front of this house, a little to the left and across an open field, is a large tree. It stands just in the edge of a dense wood. It might be better to approach it through the wood, so as not to attract attention. Do you follow me?”
“Yes,” Hatch replied. His imagination was leading him a chase. “Go to this tree now, immediately, tonight,” continued The Thinking Machine. “You will find a small hole in it near the level of your eye. Feel in that hole, and see what is there—no matter what it is—then return to Brookline and telephone me. It is of the greatest importance.”
The reporter was thoughtful for a moment; it sounded like a page from a Dumas romance.
“What’s it all about?” he asked curiously.
“Will you go?” came the counter question.
“Yes, certainly.”
“Good-by.”
Hatch heard a click as the receiver was hung up at the other end. He shrugged his shoulders, said “Good-night” to the city editor, and went out. An hour later he was at Randall’s Crossing. The night was dark—so dark that the road was barely visible. The car whirled on, and as its lights were swallowed up Hatch set out to find the white house. He came upon it at last, and, turning, faced across an open field toward the wood. Far away over there outlined vaguely against the distant glow of the city, was a tall tree.
Having fixed its location, the reporter moved along for a hundred yards or more to where the wood ran down to the road. Here he climbed a fence and stumbled on through the dark, doing sundry injuries to his shins. After a disagreeable ten minutes he reached the tree.
With a small electric flash light he found the hole. It was only a little larger than his hand, a place where decay had eaten its way into the tree trunk. For just a moment he hesitated about putting his hand into it—he didn’t know what might be there. Then, with a grim smile, he obeyed orders.
He felt nothing save crumblings of decayed wood, and finally dragged out a handful, only to spill it on the ground. That couldn’t be what was meant. For the second time he thrust in his hand, and after a deal of grabbing about produced—a piece of string. It was just a plain, ordinary, common piece of string—white string. He stared at it and smiled.
“I wonder what Van Dusen will make of that?” he asked himself.
Again his hand was thrust into the hole. But that was all—the piece of string. Then came another thought, and with that due regard for detail which made him a good reporter he went looking around the big tree for a possible second opening of some sort. He found none.
About three quarters of an hour later he stepped into an all-night drug store in Brookline and ‘phoned to The Thinking Machine. There was an instant response to his ring.
“Well, well, what did you find?” came the query.
“Nothing to interest you, I imagine,” replied the reporter grimly. “Just a piece of string.”
“Good, good!” exclaimed The Thinking Machine. “What does it look like?”
“Well,” replied the newspaper man judicially, “it’s just a piece of white string—cotton, I imagine—about six inches long.”
“Any knots in it?”
“Wait till I see.”
He was reaching into his pocket to take it out, when the startled voice of The Thinking Machine came over the line.
“Didn’t you leave it there?” it demanded.
“No; I have it in my pocket.”
“Dear me!” exclaimed the scientist irritably. “That’s bad. Well, has it any knots in it?” he asked with marked resignation.
Hatch felt that he had committed the unpardonable sin. “Yes,” he replied after an examination. “It has two knots in it—just plain knots—about two inches apart.”
“Single or double knots?”
“Single knots.”
“Excellent! Now, Mr. Hatch, listen. Untie one of those knots—it doesn’t matter which one—and carefully smooth out the string. Then take it and put it back where you found it. ‘Phone me as soon after that as you can.”
“Now, tonight?”
“Now, immediately.”
“But—but—” began the astonished reporter.
“It is a matter of the utmost consequence,” the irritated voice assured him. “You should not have taken the string. I told you merely to see what was there. But as you have brought it away you must put it back as soon as possible. Believe me, it is of the highest importance. And don’t forget to ‘phone me.”
The sharp, commanding tone stirred the reporter to new action and interest. A car was just going past the door, outward bound. He raced for it and got aboard. Once settled, he untied one of the knots, straightened out the string, and fell to wondering what sort of fool’s errand he was on.
“Randall’s Crossing!” called the conductor at last.
Hatch left the car and retraced his tortuous way along the road and through the wood to the tall tree, found the hole, and had just thrust in his hand to replace the string when he heard a woman’s voice directly behind him, almost in his ear. It was a calm, placid, convincing sort of voice. It said:
“Hands up!”
Hatch was a rational human being with ambitions and hopes for the future; therefore his hands went up without hesitation. “I knew something would happen,” he told himself.
He turned to see the woman. In the darkness he could only dimly trace a tall, slender figure. Steadily poised just a couple of dozen inches from his nose was a revolver. He could see that without any difficulty. It glinted a little, even in the gloom, and made itself conspicuous.
“Well,” asked the reporter at last, as he stood reaching upward, “it’s your move.”
“Who are you?” asked the woman. Her voice was steady and rather pleasant.
The reporter considered the question in the light of all he didn’t know. He felt it wouldn’t be a sensible thing to say just who he was. Somewhere at the end of this thing The Thinking Machine was working on a problem; he was presumably helping in a modest, unobtrusive sort of way; therefore he would be cautious.
“My name is Williams,” he said promptly. “Jim Williams,” he added circumstantially.
“What are you doing here?”
Another subject for thought. That was a question he couldn’t answer; he didn’t know what he was doing there; he was wondering himself. He could only hazard a guess, and he did that with trepidation.
“I came from him,” he said with deep meaning.
“Who?” demanded the woman suspiciously.
“It would be useless to name him,” replied the reporter.
“Yes, yes, of course,” the woman mused. “I understand.”
There was a little pause. Hatch was still watching the revolver. He had a lively interest in it. It had not moved a hair’s breath since he first looked at it; hanging up there in the night it fairly stared him out of countenance.
“And the string?” asked the woman at last.
Now the reporter felt that he was in the mire. The woman herself relieved this new embarrassment.
“Is it in the tree?” she went on.
“Yes.”
“How many knots are in it?”
“One.”
“One?” she repeated eagerly. “Put your hand in there and hand me the string. No tricks, now!”
Hatch complied with a certain deprecatory manner which he intended should convey to her the impression that there would be no tricks. As she took the string her fingers brushed against his. They were smooth and delicate. He knew that even in the dark.
“And what did he say?” she went on.
Having gone this far without falling into anything, the reporter was willing to plunge—felt that he had to, as a matter of fact.
“He said yes,” he murmured without shifting his eyes from the revolver.
“Yes?” the woman repeated again eagerly. “Are you sure?”
“Yes,” said the reporter again. The thought flashed through his mind that he was tangling up somebody’s affairs sadly—he didn’t know whose. Anyhow, it was a matter of no consequence to him, as long as that revolver stared at him that way.
“Where is it?” asked the woman.
Then the earth slipped out from under him. “I don’t know,” he replied weakly.
“Didn’t he give it to you?”
“Oh, no. He—he wouldn’t trust me with it.”
“How can I get it, then?”
“Oh, he’ll fix it all right,” Hatch assured her soothingly. “I think he said something about tomorrow night.”
“Where?”
“Here.”
“Thank God!” the woman gasped suddenly. Her tone betrayed deep emotion; but it wasn’t so deep that she lowered the revolver.
There was a long pause. Hatch was figuring possibilities. How to get possession of the revolver seemed the imminent problem. His hands were still in the air, and there was nothing to indicate that they were not to remain there indefinitely. The woman finally broke the silence.
“Are you armed?”
“Oh, no.”
“Truthfully?”
“Truthfully.”
“You may lower your hands,” she said, as if satisfied; “then go on ahead of me straight across the field to the road. Turn to your left there. Don’t look back under any circumstances. I shall be behind you with this revolver pointing at your head. If you attempt to escape or make any outcry I shall shoot. Do you believe me?”
The reporter considered it for a moment. “I’m firmly convinced of it,” he said at last.
They stumbled on to the road, and there Hatch turned as directed. Walking along in the shadows with the tread of small feet behind him he first contemplated a dash for liberty; but that would mean giving up the adventure, whatever it was. He had no fear for his personal safety as long as he obeyed orders, and he intended to do that implicitly. And besides, The Thinking Machine had his slender finger in the pie somewhere. Hatch knew that, and knowing it was a source of deep gratification.
Just now he was taking things at face value, hoping that with their arrival at whatever place they were bound for he would be further enlightened. Once he thought he heard the woman sobbing, and started to look back. Then he remembered her warning, and thought better of it. Had he looked back he would have seen her stumbling along, weeping, with the revolver dangling limply at her side.
At last, a mile or more farther on, they began to arrive somewhere. A house sat back some distance from the road.
“Go in there!” commanded his captor.
He turned in at the gate, and five minutes later stood in a comfortably furnished room on the ground floor of a small house. A dim light was burning. The woman turned it up. Then almost defiantly she threw aside her veil and hat and stood before him. Hatch gasped. She was pretty—bewilderingly pretty—and young and graceful and all that a young woman should be. Her cheeks were flushed.
“You know me, I suppose?” she exclaimed.
“Oh yes, certainly,” Hatch assured her.
And saying that, he knew he had never seen her before.
“I suppose you thought it perfectly horrid of me to keep you with your hands up like that all the time; but I was dreadfully frightened,” the woman went on, and she smiled a little uncertainly. “But there wasn’t anything else to do.”
“It was the only thing,” Hatch agreed.
“Now I’m going to ask you to write and tell him just what happened,” she resumed. “And tell him, too, that the other matter must be arranged immediately. I’ll see that your letter is delivered. Sit here!”
She picked up the revolver from the table beside her and placed a chair in position. Hatch walked to the table and sat down. Pen and ink lay before him. He knew now he was trapped. He couldn’t write a letter to that vague “him” of whom he had talked so glibly, about that still more vague “it”—whatever that might be. He sat dumbly staring at the paper.
“Well?” she demanded suspiciously.
“I—I can’t write it,” he confessed suddenly.
She stared at him coldly for a moment as if she had suspected just that, and he in turn stared at the revolver with a new and vital interest. He felt the tension, but saw no way to relieve it.
“You are an imposter!” she blurted out at last. “A detective?”
Hatch didn’t deny it. She backed away toward a bell call near the door, watching him closely, and rang vigorously several times. After a little pause the door opened, and two men, evidently servants, entered.
“Take this gentleman to the rear room up stairs,” she commanded without giving them a glance, “and lock him up. Keep him under close guard. If he attempts to escape, stop him! That’s all.”
Here was another page from a Dumas romance. The reporter started to explain; but there was a merciless gleam, danger even, in the woman’s eyes, and he submitted to orders. So, he was led up stairs a captive, and one of the men took a place on guard inside the room.
The dawn was creeping on when Hatch fell asleep. It was about ten o’clock when he awoke, and the sun was high. His guard, wide eyed and alert, still sat beside the door. For several minutes the reporter lay still, seeking vainly some sort of explanation of what was happening. Then, cheerfully:
“Good-morning.”
The guard merely glared at him.
“May I inquire your name?” the reporter asked.
There was no answer.
“Or the lady’s name?”
No answer.
“Or why I am where I am?”
Still no answer.
“What would you do,” Hatch went on casually, “if I should try to get out of here?”
The guard handled his revolver carelessly. The reporter was satisfied. “He is not deaf, that’s certain,” he told himself.
He spent the remainder of the morning yawning and wondering what The Thinking Machine was about; also he had a few casual reflections as to the mental state of his city editor at his failure to appear and follow up the kidnapping story. He finally dismissed all these ideas with a shrug of his shoulders, and sat down to wait for whatever was coming.
It was in the early afternoon that he heard laughter in the next room. First there was a woman’s voice, then the shrill cackle of a child. Finally he distinguished some words.
“You ticky!” exclaimed the child, and again there was the laugh.
The reporter understood “you ticky,” coupled with the subsequent peal, to be a sort of abbreviated English for “you tickle.” After awhile the merriment died away and he heard the child’s insistent demand for something else.
“You be hossie.”
“No, no,” the woman expostulated.
“Yes, you be hossie.”
“No, let Morris be hossie.”
“No, no. You be hossie.”
That was all. Evidently some one was “hossie,” because there was a sound of romping; but finally even that died away. Hatch yawned away another hour or so under the constant eye of his guard, and then began to grow restless. He turned on the guard savagely.
“Isn’t anything ever going to happen?” he demanded.
The guard didn’t say.
“You’ll never convict yourself on your own statement,” Hatch burst out again in disgust.
He stretched out on a couch, bored by the sameness which had characterized the last few hours of his adventure. His attention was attracted by some movement at the door, and he looked up. His guard heard, too, and with revolver in hand went to the door, carefully unlocking it. After a few hurriedly whispered words he left the room, and Hatch was meditating an instant rush for a window, when the woman entered. She had the revolver now. She was deathly white and gripped the weapon menacingly. She did not lock the door—only closed it—but with her own person and the attention compelling revolver she blocked the way.
“What is it now?” asked Hatch wearily.
“You must not speak or call, or make the slightest sound,” she whispered tensely. “If you do, I’ll kill you. Do you understand?”
Hatch confessed by a nod that he understood. He also imagined that he understood this sudden change in guard, and the warning. It was because some one was about to enter or had entered the house. His conjecture was partially confirmed instantly by a distant rapping on a door.
“Not a sound, now!” whispered the woman.
From somewhere below he heard the sound of steps as one of the servants answered the knock. After a short wait he heard two voices mumbling. Suddenly one was raised clearly.
“Why, Worcester can’t be that far,” it protested irritably.
Hatch knew. It was The Thinking Machine. The woman noted a change in his manner and drew back the hammer of the revolver. The reporter saw the idea. He didn’t dare call. That would be suicide. Perhaps he could attract attention, though; drop a key, for instance. The sound might reach The Thinking Machine and be interpreted aright. One hand was in a pocket, and slowly he was drawing out a key. He would risk it. Maybe—
Then came a new sound. It was the patter of small feet. The guarded door was pushed open and a tousle-headed child, a boy, ran in.
“Mama, mama!” he called loudly. He ran to the woman and clutched at her skirts.
“Oh, my baby! what have you done?” she asked piteously. “We are lost, lost!”
“Me ‘faid,” the child went on.
With the door—his avenue of possible escape—open, Hatch did not drop the key. Instead, he gazed at the woman, then down at the child. From below he again heard The Thinking Machine.
“How far is the car track, then?”
The servant answered something. There was a sound of steps, and the front door closed. Hatch knew that The Thinking Machine had come and gone; yet he was strangely calm about it, quite himself, despite the fact that a nervous finger still lay on the trigger of the pistol.
From his refuge behind his mother’s skirts the boy peered around at Hatch shyly. The reporter gazed, gazed, all eyes, and then was convinced. The boy was Walter Francis, the kidnapped boy whose pictures were being published in every newspaper of a dozen cities. Here was a story—the story—the superlative story.
“Mrs. Francis, if you wouldn’t mind letting down that hammer—” he suggested modestly. “I assure you I contemplate no harm, and you—you are very nervous.”
“You know me, then?” she asked.
“Only because the child there, Walter, called you mama.”
Mrs. Francis lowered the revolver hammer so recklessly that Hatch involuntarily dodged. And then came a scene, a scene with tears in it, and all those things which stir men, even reporters. Finally the woman dropped the revolver on the floor and swept the boy up in her arms with a gesture of infinite tenderness. He cuddled there, content. At that moment Hatch could have walked out the door, but instead he sat down. He was just beginning to get interested.
“They sha’n’t take you!” sobbed the mother.
“There is no immediate danger,” the reporter assured her. “The man who came here for that purpose has gone. Meanwhile, if you will tell me the facts, perhaps—perhaps I may be able to be of some assistance.”
Mrs. Francis looked at him, startled. “Help me?”
“If you will explain, perhaps I can do something,” said Hatch again.
Somewhere back in a remote recess of his brain he was remembering. And as it became clearer he was surprised that he had not remembered sooner. It was a story of marital infelicity, and its principals were Stanley Francis and his wife—this bewilderingly pretty young woman before him. It had been only eight or nine months back.
Technically she had deserted Stanley Francis. There had been some violent scene and she left their home and little son. Soon afterward she went to Europe. It had been rumored that divorce proceedings would follow, or at least a legal separation, but nothing had ever come of the rumors. All this Mrs. Francis told to Hatch in little incoherent bursts, punctuated with sobs and tears.
“He struck me, he struck me!” she declared with a flush of anger and shame, “and I went then on impulse. I was desperate. Later, even before I went to Europe, I knew the legal status of the affair; but the thought of my boy lingered, and I resolved to come back and get him—abduct him, if necessary. I did that, and I will keep him if I have to kill the one who opposes me.”
Hatch saw the mother instinct here, that tigerish ferocity of love which stops at nothing.
“I conceived the plan of demanding fifty thousand dollars of my husband under threat of abduction,” Mrs. Francis went on. “My purpose was to make it appear that the plot was that of professional—what would you call it?—kidnappers. But I did not send the letter demanding this until I had perfected all my plans and knew I could get the boy. I wanted my husband to think it was the work of others, at least until we were safe in Europe, because even then I imagined there would be a long legal fight.
“After I stole the boy and he recognized me, I wanted him as my own, absolutely safe from legal action by his father. Then I wrote to Mr. Francis, telling him I had Walter, and asking that in pity to me he legally give me the boy by a document of some sort. In that letter I told how he might signify his willingness to do this; but of course I would not give my address. I placed a string, the one you saw, in that tree after having tied two knots in it. It was a silly, romantic means of communication he and I used years ago in my girlhood when we both lived near here. If he agreed that I should have the child, he was to come or send some one last night and unties one of the two knots.”
Then, to Hatch, the intricacies passed away. He understood clearly. Instead of going to the police with the second letter from his wife, Francis had gone to The Thinking Machine. The Thinking Machine sent the reporter to untie the knot, which was an answer of “Yes” to Mrs. Francis’s request for the child. Then she would have written giving her address, and there would have been a clue to the child’s whereabouts. It was all perfectly clear now.
“Did you specifically mention a string in your letter?” he asked.
“No. I merely stated that I would expect his answer in that place, and would leave something there by which he could signify ‘Yes’ or ‘No,’ as he did years ago. The string was one of the odd little ideas of my girlhood. Two knots meant ‘No’; one knot meant ‘Yes’; and if the string was found by anyone else it meant nothing.”
This, then, was why The Thinking Machine did not tell him at first that he would find a string and instruct him to untie one of the knots in it. The scientist had seen that it might have been one of the other tokens of the old romantic days.
“When I met you there,” Mrs. Francis resumed. “I believed you were an imposter—I don’t know why, I just believed it—yet your answers were in a way correct. For fear you were not what you seemed—that you were a detective—I brought you here to keep you until I got the child’s release. You know the rest.”
The reporter picked up the revolver and whirled it in his fingers. The action, apparently, did not disturb Mrs. Francis.
“Why did you remain here so long after you got the child?” asked Hatch.
“I believed it was safer than in a city,” she answered frankly. “The steamer on which I planned to sail for Europe with my boy leaves tomorrow. I had intended going to New York tonight to catch it; but now—”
The reporter glanced down at the child. He had fallen asleep in his mother’s arms. His tiny hand clung to her. The picture was a pretty one. Hatch made up his mind.
“Well, you’d better pack up,” he said. “I’ll go with you to New York and do all I can.”
It was on the New York-bound train several hours later that Hatch turned to Mrs. Francis with an odd smile.
“Why didn’t you load that revolver?” he asked.
“Because I was horribly afraid some one would get hurt with it,” she replied laughingly.
She was gay with that gentle happiness of possession which blesses woman for the agonies of motherhood, and glanced from time to time at the berth across the aisle where her baby was asleep. Looking upon it all, Hatch was content. He didn’t know his exact position in law; but that didn’t matter, after all.
Hutchinson Hatch’s exclusive story of the escape to Europe of Mrs. Francis and her boy was remarkably complete; but all the facts were not in it. It was a week or so later that he detailed them to The Thinking Machine.
“I knew it,” said the scientist at the end. “Francis came to me, and I interested myself in the case, practically knowing every fact from his statement. When you heard me speak in the house where you were a prisoner I was there merely to convince myself that the mother did have the baby. I heard it call her and went away satisfied. I knew you were there, too, because you had failed to ‘phone me the second time as I expected, and I knew intuitively what you would do when you got the real facts about Mrs. Francis and her baby. I went away so that the field might be clear for you to act. Francis himself is a detestable puppy. I told him so.”
And that was all that was ever said about it.