Page:Top-Notch Magazine, May 1 1915 (IA tn 1915 05 01).pdf/85

 us. She told me there was no longer any chance of her marrying. She refused the explanation she had promised to make to me. She told me to go away and forget her, or—as I wrote you—to think of her as dead.

"You can imagine my feelings," he went on. "I could not sleep last night after I had left her. As I was wandering about the house, I saw the evening paper lying spread out on the library table and my eye caught her name in it. It was in the advertisement that I sent you, Mr. Trant. Late as it was, I called up the newspaper offices and learned the facts regarding its insertion. At daybreak I motored out to see Eva. The house was empty. I went round it in the mud and rain, peering in at the windows. Even the housekeeper was no longer there, and the neighbors could tell me nothing of the time or manner of their leaving; nor has any word come from her to the office."

"That is all, then," the psychologist said thoughtfully. "'The seventeenth of the tenth,'" he reread the beginning of the advertisement. "That is, of course, a date, the seventeenth of the tenth month, and it is put there to recall to Miss Silber some event of which it would be sure to remind her. I suppose you know of no private significance this date might have for her, or you would have mentioned it."

"None on the seventeenth; no, Mr. Trant," young Edwards replied. "If it were only the thirtieth I might help you; for I know that on that date Eva celebrates some sort of anniversary at home."

Trant opened a bulky almanac lying on his desk, and as he glanced swiftly down the page his eyes flashed suddenly with comprehension.

"You are correct, I think, as to the influence of the hammering man on her movements," the psychologist said. "But as to her connection with the man and her reasons, that is another matter. But of that I cannot say till I have had half an hour to myself at the Crerar Library."

"The library, Mr. Trant?" cried young Edwards, in surprise. "Yes; and, as speed is certainly essential, I hope you still have your motor below."

As young Edwards nodded, the psychologist seized his hat and gloves and his instrument case, and preceded the others from the office. Half an hour later he descended from the library to rejoin the Edwardses waiting in the motor.

"The man who inserted that advertisement—the hammering man, I believe, of whom we are in search," he announced briefly, "is named N. Meyan, and he is lodging, or at least can be addressed at No. 7 Coy Court. The case has suddenly developed far darker and more villainous aspects even than I feared. Please order the chauffeur to go there as rapidly as possible."

Coy Court, at which, twenty minutes later, he bade young Edwards stop the motor, proved to be one of those short, intersecting streets that start from the crowded thoroughfare of Halstead Street, run a squalid block or two east or west, and stop short against the sooty wall of a foundry or machine shop. No. 7, the third house on the left—like many of its neighbors, whose windows bore Greek, Jewish, or Lithuanian signs—was given up in the basement to a store, but the upper floors were plainly devoted to lodgings.

The door was opened by a little girl of eight. "Does N. Meyan live here?" the psychologist asked. "And is he in?" Then, as the child, nodded to the first inquiry and shook her head at the second: "When will he be back?"

"He comes to-night again, sure," she said. "Perhaps sooner. But to-night, or to-morrow, he goes away for good. He have paid only till to-morrow."