Page:Amazing Stories Volume 01 Number 12.djvu/41

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UTHER TRANT, on the rainy morning of April 13th, sat alone in his office. On his wrist, as he bent closely over a heap of typewritten pages spread before him on his desk, a small instrument in continual motion ticked like a watch. It was for him an hour of idleness; he was reading fiction. And with his passion for making visible and recording the workings of the mind, he was taking a permanent record of his feelings as he read.

The instrument strapped on Trant's arm was called a sphygmograph. It carried a small steel rod which pressed tightly on his wrist artery. This rod, rising and falling with each rush of the blood wave through the artery, transmitted its motion to a system of small levers. These levers operated a stylus point, which touched the surface of a revolving drum. And as Trant had adjusted around this drum a strip of smoked paper, the stylus point traced on its sooty surface a continuous wavy line which rose and fell with each beat of the psychologist's pulse.

As the interest of the story gripped Trant, this wavy line grew flatter, with elevations farther apart. When the interest flagged, his pulse returned to its normal beat and the line became regular in its undulations. At an exciting incident, the elevations swelled to greater height. And the psychologist was noting with satisfaction how the continual variations of the line gave definite record of the story's sustained power, when he was interrupted by the sharp ring of his telephone.

An excited, choleric voice came over the wire:

"Mr. Trant? This is Cuthbert Edwards, of Cuthbert Edwards & Co., Michigan Avenue. You have received a communication from my son Winton this morning? Is he there now?  No? Then he will reach your office in a very few moments. I want nothing whatever done in the matter! You understand! I will reach your office myself as soon as possible—probably within fifteen minutes—and explain!"

The sentence ended with a bump, as Cuthbert Edwards slammed his receiver back upon its hook. The psychologist, who would have recognized the name—even if not forewarned by the communication he had received that morning—as the conservative head of one of the oldest and most “exclusive” Chicago families of New England Puritan extraction, detached the sphygmograph from his wrist and drew toward him and reread the fantastic advertisement that had come to him inclosed in Winton Edwards' letter. Apparently it had been cut from the classified columns of one of the big dailies.

Eva: The 17th of the 10th, 1905! Since you and your own are safe, do you become insensible that others now again wait in your place? And those that swing in the wind! Have you forgot? If you remember and are true, communicate. And you can help save them all! N. M. 15, 45, 11, 31; 7; 13, 32, 45; 13, 36.

The letter, to the first page of which the advertisement had been pinned, was dated "Chicago, April 13th," the same day he had received it, postmarked three o'clock that morning, and written in the scrawling hand of a young man under strong emotion.

Dear Sir: Before coming to consult you, I send for your consideration the advertisement you will find inclosed. This advertisement is the one tangible piece of evidence of the amazing and inexplicable influence possessed by the “hammering man” over my fiancée, Miss Eva Silber. This influence has forced her to refuse to marry me to tell me that I must think of her only as if she were dead.

This advertisement appeared first on last Monday morning in the classified columns of three Chicago papers published in English, and in the German S. On Tuesday, it appeared in the same morning papers and in four evening papers and the German A]]. It was submitted to each newspaper by mail, with no address or information other than the text as here printed, with three dollars in currency inclosed in each case to pay for its insertion. For God's sake help me, Mr. Trant! I will call on you this morning, as soon as I think you are at your office.

The psychologist had hardly finished this letter, when rapid footsteps in the corridor outside stopped at his office door. Never had there been a more striking entrance into Trant's office than that of the young man who now burst in—disheveled, wet with the rain, his eyes red for want of sleep.

"She has left me, Mr. Trant!" he cried, with no prelude. "She has gone!"

As he sank dazedly into a chair, he pulled from his pocket a small leather case and handed it to the psychologist. Within was the photograph of a remarkably handsome girl in her early twenties—a girl sobered by some unusual experience, as showed most plainly in the poise of her little round head wrapped with its braid of lustrous hair, and the shadow that lurked in the steadfast eyes, though they were smiling and the full lips were smiling, too.

"You are, I presume, Mr. Winton Edwards," said Trant, picking up the letter on his desk. "Now, if you have come to me for help, Mr. Edwards, you must first give me all the information of the case that you have."

"That is Eva Silber," young Edwards replied. "Miss Silber had been employed by us a little over a year. She came to us in answer to an advertisement. She gave us no information in regard to herself when she came, and she has given none