Page:The achievements of Luther Trant - Balmer and MacHarg - 1910.djvu/264

234 He rang for his man, then, to order his motor and to tell him to bring coffee and rolls to his room, which he gulped down while he dressed. Fifteen minutes later he jumped onto the front seat of his car, displacing the chauffeur, and himself drove the car rapidly down town.

A crisp, sharp breeze blew in upon them from the lake, scattering dry, rare flakes of snow. It was a clear, perfect day for the first of December in Chicago. But Stephen Sheppard was oblivious to it. In the northern woods beyond the Canada boundary line the breeze would be sharper and cleaner that day and smell less of the streets and—it was the very height of his hunting season for big game in those woods! Up there he would still have been shooting, but as the papers had put it, "the woods had taken their toll" again this year, and his brother's life had been part of that toll.

"Neal Sheppard's Body Found in the Woods!" He read the headlines in the paper which the boy thrust into his face, and he slowed the car at the Rush Street bridge. "Victim of Stray Shot Being Brought to Chicago." Well! That was the way it was known! Stephen Sheppard released his brake, with a jerk; crossed the bridge and, eight minutes later, brought up the car with a sharper shock before the First National Bank Building.

He had never met the man he had come to see—had heard of him only through startling successes in the psychological detection of crime with which this comparative youth, fresh from the laboratory of a university and using methods new to the criminals and