Edwin Balmer

“ To-day the enemies are the big, corrupting, thieving corporations like this company; and appreciating that, I am not ashamed to be a spy in their ranks, commissioned by the Government to catch and condemn President Welter, and any other officers involved with him, for systematically stealing from the Government for the past ten years, and for probable connivance in the murder of at least one of those two checkers so that the company might continue to steal. ”

“ I have a problem in which you can be of the very greatest use to me; and the plethysmograph and the pneumograph will serve my purpose as well as any other instruments in the laboratory. For no matter how hardened a man may be, no matter how impossible it may have become to detect his feelings in his face or bearing, he cannot prevent the volume of blood in his hand from decreasing, and his breathing from becoming different, under the influence of emotions of fear or guilt. By the way, professor, is Mr. Welter familiar with these experiments of yours? ”

“ Trant cried, eagerly. “Like this?” He took from his pocket the implement given him by Edith Rowan. “Morse had this in his room, the only thing in a locked drawer.”
“The same thing!” Dickey cried, seizing it. “So Morse had it, too, after he became checker at scale No. 3, where the cheating is, if anywhere. The very thing Landers started to explain to me, and how they cheated the customs with it. I say, we must have it now, Rentland! We need only go to the docks and watch them while they weigh, and see how they use it, and arrest them and then we have them at last, eh, old man?” ”

“ The pencil, as it rises and falls, touching always a sheet of smoked paper traveling over a cylinder on the recording device, traces a line whose rising strokes represent accurately the drawing of air into the chest and whose falling represents its expulsion.
It was clear to Trant that the professor’s rapid explanation, though plain enough to the psychologists already familiar with the device, was only partly understood by the big men. It had not been explained to them that changes in the breathing so slight as to be imperceptible to the eye would be recorded unmistakably by the moving pencil. ”

“ Rentland replied.
“Tell me, Miss Rowan,” said Trant, “this implement—have you by any chance mentioned it to President Welter?”
“Why, no, Mr. Trant.”
“You are sure of that? Excellent! Excellent! Now the queer, quiet little man with the scar on his cheek who came to see Morse; no one could tell you anything about him?”
“No one, Mr. Trant; but yesterday Will’s landlady told me that a man has come to ask for Will every forenoon since he disappeared, and she thinks this may be the man with the scar, though she can’t be sure, for he kept the collar of his overcoat up about his face. ”

“ Trant cut in upon the customs man, “that you can convict and jail perhaps the checker, or a foreman, or maybe even a dock superintendent—as usual. But the men higher up—the big men who are really at the bottom of this business and the only ones worth getting—will you catch them?” ”

“ Trant questioned, with increasing curiosity.
“No; nor the company, nor any other officer in it, Mr. Trant.” Rentland smiled. “Nor even am I, as chief clerk of the American Commodities Company, overtroubling myself about those checkers,” he leaned nearer to Trant, confidentially, “but as a special agent for the United States Treasury Department I am extremely interested in the death of one of these men, and in the disappearance of the other. ”

“ Trant demanded.
“I am not sure it is the man, but the captain of the Elizabethan Age is a friend of father’s named Wilson!”
“I can’t help you then, after all,” said Trant, springing back to his powerful car. He whispered a word to the chauffeur which sent it driving ahead through the drifts at double its former speed, leaving the little electric coupé far behind. Ten minutes later Rentland stopped the motor a block short of a great lighted doorway which suddenly showed in a length of dark, lowering buildings which lay beside the American Commodities Company’s Brooklyn docks. ”

“ No psychologist, knowing how this record was taken, could look at it without feeling absolutely certain that the photograph and spring caused in you such excessive emotion that I am tempted to give it, without further words, the name of ‘intense fright!’ But if we have inadvertently surprised a secret, we have no desire to pry into it further. Is it not so, Mr. Trant?”
At the name President Welter whirled suddenly. “Trant! Is your name Trant?” he demanded. “Well, I’ve heard of you.” His eyes hardened. “A man like you goes just so far, and then—somebody stops him!”
“As they stopped Landers?” ”

“ Only tell me,” he demanded suddenly; “Mr. Welter I have heard is one of the rich men of New York who make it a fad to give largely to universities and other institutions; can you tell me with what ones he may be most closely interested?”
“I have heard,” Rentland replied, “that he is one of the patrons of the Stuyvesant School of Science. It is probably the most fashionably patroned institution in New York; and Welter’s name, I know, figures with it in the newspapers.”
“Nothing could be better!” Trant exclaimed. “Kuno Schmalz has his psychological laboratory there. I see my way now, Rentland ”

“ But the rest of this affair,” he glanced at the quickly collecting crowd, “can best be settled in the office.”
He led the way, the customs men taking their prisoners at pistol point. As they entered the office, Rowan first, a girl’s cry and the answering oath of her stepfather told that the dock superintendent’s daughter had arrived. But she had been almost overtaken by another powerful car; for before Trant could speak with her the outer door of the office opened violently and President Welter, in an automobile coat and cap, entered. ”

“ Yes; everything on which there is a duty when it is taken off the boats has to be weighed, and to do this there are big scales, and for each one a scale house. When a scale is being used there are two men in the scale house. One of these is the Government weigher, who sets the scale to a balance and notes down the weight in a book. The other man, who is an employee of the company, writes the weight also in a book of his own; and he is called the company’s checker. But though there are half a dozen scales, almost everything, when it is possible, is unloaded in front of Scale No. ”

“ Landers had not been ready to come with him, He did not come all that night, and the next day he did not come home.
“Now, Mr. Trant, they are very careful at the warehouses about who goes in and out, because so many valuable things are stored there. On one side the warehouses open on the docks, and at each end they are fenced off so that you cannot go along the docks and get away from them that way; and on the other side they open on the street through great driveway doors, and at every door, as long as it is open, there stands a watchman, who sees everybody that goes in and out. ”

“ He knows nothing. He has bought my time to instruct classes; he has not bought, py chiminey! everything—even the soul Gott gave me!”
“But he would be interested in them?”
“To be sure, he would be interested in them! He would bring in his automobile three or four other fat money-makers, and he would show off before them. ”

“ And for the last five days, during which the Weather Bureau’s storm signals had stayed steadily set, no steamer of the six which had finished unloading at the docks the week before had dared to try for the open sea except one, the Elizabethan Age, which had cleared the Narrows on Monday night.
On land the storm was scarcely less disastrous to the business of the great importing company. Since Tuesday morning Rentland’s reports of the car-and train-load consignments which had left the warehouses daily had been a monotonous page of trains stalled. ”

“ Trant and Rentland stared disappointedly at this strange implement, which the girl handed to the psychologist.
“You have shown this to your stepfather, Miss Rowan, for a possible explanation of why a company checker should be so solicitous about such a thing as this?” asked Trant.
“No,” the girl hesitated. “Will had told me not to say anything; and I told you father did not like Will. He had made up his mind that I was to marry Ed Landers. In most ways father is kind and generous. He’s kept the coupé we came here in for mother and me for two years ”

“ As the chest rises and falls in breathing, the levers press more and less upon the surface of the drum; and this varying pressure on the air inside the drum is transmitted from the drum through an airtight tube to a little pencil which it lowers and raises. ”

“ Just short of the end of the open dock houses, where a string of arc lamps threw their white and flickering light upon the huge, black side of a moored steamer, Rentland turned into a little shed, and the two came suddenly upon Customs Officer Dickey.
“This one next to us,” the little man whispered, eagerly, to Trant, as he grasped his hand, “is the scale house where whatever is being done is done—No. ”

“ Trant laid his hand on the little officer’s arm.
“I am a stranger to you,” he said, “but if you have followed some of the latest criminal cases in Illinois perhaps you know that, using the methods of modern practical psychology, I have been able to get results where old ways have failed. ”