Page:The achievements of Luther Trant - Balmer and MacHarg - 1910.djvu/171

Rh associations for these words, and I had suggested none. But note the next.

"Typewriter was the common, the most insistent and recent association for 'Remington' for all—except Ford. It was for him, too, but any typewriter had gained a guilty association in his mind. He was afraid to put it down, so wrote 'rifles.' 'Shift key,' the next word, of course intensified his connection with the crime; so he refused to write naturally, as the others did, either 'typewriter' or 'dollar mark,' and wrote 'trigger' to give an unsuspicious appearance. 'Secret writing' recalled at once the 'symbols' which I had suggested to him, and which, of course, were in his mind anyway; but he wrote 'cable code'—not in itself entirely unnatural for one in a bank. The next word, 'combination,' to everyone in a bank, at all times—particularly if just emphasized—suggests its association, 'safe'; and every single one of the others, who had no guilty connection to conceal, so associated it. Ford went out of his way to write 'monopoly.' And his next association of 'rifle,' again, with 'waste-basket' is perhaps the most interesting of all. As he had been searching the waste-basket for 'scraps' he thought it suspicious to put down that entirely natural association; but scraps recalled to him those scraps bearing 'typewriter' symbols, and, avoiding the word typewriter, he substituted for it his innocent association, 'rifle.'

"The next words on my list were those put in to betray the man who had taken the money—Shaffer. 'Ten thousand,' the amount he had taken, suggested