Page:The achievements of Luther Trant - Balmer and MacHarg - 1910.djvu/134

110 was and that probably her son did too. The place was also probably in the vicinity. The automatograph is a device to register the slightest and most involuntary motions. It is a basic psychological fact that there is an inevitable muscular impulse toward any object which arouses emotion. If one spreads a score of playing cards about a table and the subject has a special one in mind, his hand on the automatograph will quickly show a faint impulse toward the card, although the subject is entirely unaware of it. So I knew that if the place where the boy was kept was shown in any of the pictures, I would get a reaction from Mrs. Murray; which I did—with the result, Mr. Eldredge," Trant went to the window and watched the street, expectantly, "that Mr. Raymond Murray is now bringing your son around the corner and—"

But the father had burst from the room and toward the door. Trant heard a cry of joy and the stumble of an almost hysterical woman as Mrs. Eldredge rushed down the stairs after her husband. He turned as Mrs. Murray, taking advantage of the excitement, endeavored to push past him.

"You are leaving the house?" he asked. "But tell me first," he demanded, "how did the boy come to be taken out of the park? Had the boys whom the chauffeur said stopped around his car anything to do with it?"

"They were a class which a kindergarten teacher—a new teacher—had taken to see the animals," the woman answered, coldly.

"Ah! So one of them was left behind—the one