Page:The achievements of Luther Trant - Balmer and MacHarg - 1910.djvu/347

Rh your servant Beasley, the German Schultz, and the American Walcott. Through the Seric Medicine Company I have positively located Walcott; he is now in Australia. The Nord Deutscher Lloyd has given me equally positive assurance regarding Schultz. Schultz is now in Bremen. Miss Waldron has accounted for Beasley, and the Charing Cross Hospital corroborates her; Beasley is in London. There remains, therefore, the inevitable conclusion that either there was some other man following Mr. Axton—some man whom Mr. Axton did not see—or else that the man who so pried into Mr. Axton's correspondence abroad and into your letters, Miss Waldron, this last week here in Chicago, was—Lawler; and this I believe to have been the case."

"Lawler?" the girl and Caryl echoed in amazement, while Axton stared at the psychologist with increasing surprise and wonder. "Lawler?"

"Oh! I see," Axton all at once smiled contemptuously. "You believe in ghosts, Trant—you think it is Lawler's ghost that Miss Waldron saw!"

"I did not say Lawler's ghost," Trant replied a little testily. "I said Lawler's self, in flesh and blood. I am trying to make it plain to you," Trant took from his pocket the letters the girl had given him four days before and indicated the one describing the wreck, "that I believe the man whose death you so minutely and carefully describe here in this letter as Lawler, was not Lawler at all!"

"You mean to say that I didn't know Lawler?" Axton laughed loudly—"Lawler, who had been my companion in sixteen thousand miles of travel?"