Page:Amazing Stories Volume 01 Number 12.djvu/45

Rh crowd cried, suddenly, pointing. “Try it on him.”

Two enthusiasts at once broke from the group and rushed eagerly to Meyan. He had continued, inattentive through all, to read his newspaper; but now he laid it down. Trant and young Edwards, as he rose and slouched half curiously toward them, could see plainly for the first time his strongly boned, coarsely powerful face, and heavy-lidded eyes, and the grossly muscular strength of his bigframed body.

“Pah! your watered whisky!” he jeered in a strangely thick and heavy voice, when the test had been explained to him. “I am used to stronger drinks!”

He grinned derisively in the surrounding faces, kicked a chair up to the table and sat down. Trant glanced toward Edwards, and Edwards moved silently back from the group and disappeared unnoticed through the partition door. Then the psychologist swiftly adjusted the sphygmograph upon the out-stretched arm and watched intently an instant until the stylus point had caught up the strong and even pulse which set it rising and falling in perfect rhythm. As he turned to the bar for the whisky, the rear door slammed and the voice Trant was expecting spoke:

“Yes; it was at Warsaw the police took him. He was taken without warning and from his friend's house. What next? The prisons are full, but they keep on filling them; the graveyards will be full next!”

OOK! look!” cried the Lithuanian beside Trant at the table. “He bragged about watered whisky, but just the sight of it makes his heart beat bigger and stronger!”

Trant bent eagerly over the smoked paper, watching the stronger, slower pulse beat which the record showed.

“Yes; before he takes the whisky his pulse is strengthened,” Trant answered; “for that is how the pulse acts when a man is pleased and exults!”

He waited now, almost inattentively, while Meyan drank the whisky and the others grew silent in defeat as the giant's pulse, true to his boast, showed almost no variation under the fiery liquor.

“Pah, such child-foolishness!” Meyan, with steady hand, set the glass back on the table. Then, as Trant unclasped the straps around his arm, he rose, yawned in their faces, and lounged out of the place.

The psychologist turned to meet young Edwards as he hurried in, and together they went out to join the father at the motor.

“We can do nothing sooner than to-night,” Trant said, shortly, an expression of keen anxiety on his face. “I must learn more about this man, but my inquiries must be conducted alone. If you will meet me here again at seven o'clock to-night, say at the pawn-broker's shop we passed upon the corner, I hope to be able to solve the mystery of the ‘hammering man,’ and the influence he is undoubtedly exerting on Miss Silber. I may say,” he added after a moment, “that I would not attach too much weight to the child's statement that Miss Silber is Meyan's wife. It is understood, then, that you will meet me here to-night as I have suggested.”

He nodded to his clients, and ran to catch a passing trolley car.

Promptly at seven o'clock in accordance with Trant's directions, young Winton Edwards and his father entered the pawnshop and started negotiations for a loan. Almost immediately after they arrived there, Trant joined them, still carrying in his hand his instrument case. The boy and his father closed their negotiations and went out with Trant into the street. They saw then, to their surprise, that the psychologist was not alone. Two men were awaiting them, each of whom carried a case like Trant's. The elder of the two, a man between fifty and sixty years old, met young Edwards' stare with a benignant glance of his pale blue eyes through an immense pair of gold spectacles. The other was young, pale, broad-browed, with an intelligent face, and his gaze was fixed in a look of dreamy contemplation. They were dressed as mechanics, but their general appearance was not that of workmen.

The door of Meyan's lodging house was opened to them by the landlady. She led the way to the second floor, but paused to show a room to Trant.

“That is Meyan's room,” Trant explained. “We will wait for him over here.” He followed the woman into a small and stuffy bed-room on the other side of the hall. “We had better not speak while we are waiting and—we had better wait in the dark.”

In the strange, stuffy, darkened little room the five sat in silence. Footsteps passed often in the street outside, and twice some one went through the hall. A half hour they waited thus. Then a heavier footstep warned them of Meyan coming. A moment later, the front door opened again and admitted—as Trant felt from the effect of the first tone which reached the boy waiting at his side Eva Silber. Trant quickly prevented him from going out. It was only after several minutes that he turned on the light and motioned to the two strangers who had come with him. They immediately rose and left the room.

“I am going to submit you both to a very trying ordeal,” Trant said to his clients, in a tone so low it could not reach the hallway, “and it will require great self-control on your part. Within five, or I hope at most ten, minutes, I am going to show you into Meyan's room where you will find, among other persons, Meyan himself and Miss Silber. I want you to promise that neither of you will attempt to question or to speak to Miss Silber until I give you leave. Otherwise I cannot allow you to go in there, and I have my own reasons for wanting you to be present.”

“If it is essential, Mr. Trant—” the elder Edwards said. Trant looked to the boy, who nodded.

“Thank you,” said the psychologist; and he went out and closed the door upon them.

Fully a quarter of an hour had passed, in spite of Trant's promise to summon them in ten minutes, before the psychologist again opened the door and ushered them into the room they already knew as Meyan's.

The long table in the center of the room had been