“Nothing is impossible, Mr. Hatch,” stormed The Thinking Machine suddenly. “Don’t say that. It annoys me exceedingly.”

  Hatch shrugged his shoulders, and was silent. Again minute after minute passed, and the scientist sat motionless, staring now at a plan of Peter Ordway’s apartment he had found in a newspaper, the while his keen brain dissected the known facts.

  “After all,” he announced, at last, “there’s only one vital question: Why Peter Ordway’s deadly fear of water?”

  The reporter shook his head blankly. He was never surprised any more at The Thinking Machine’s manner of approaching a problem. Never by any chance did he take hold of it as any one else would have.

  “Some personal eccentricity, perhaps,” Hatch suggested hopefully. “Some people are afraid of cats, others of—”

  “Go to Peter Ordway’s place,” The Thinking Machine interrupted tartly, “and find if it has been necessary to replace a broken windowpane anywhere in the building since Mr. Ordway’s death.”

  “You mean, perhaps, that Mr. X, as you call him, may have escaped—” the newspaper man began.

  “Also find out if there was a curtain hanging over or near the door where Mr. X must have gone out.”

  “Right!”

  “We’ll assume that the room where Ordway died has been gone over inch by inch in the search for a stray shot,” the scientist continued. “Let’s go farther. If Ordway fired, it was probably toward the door where Mr. X entered. If Mr. X left the door open behind him, the shot may have gone into the private hall beyond, and may be buried in the door immediately opposite.” He indicated on the plan as he talked. “This second door opens into a rear hall. If both doors chanced to be open—”

  Hatch came to his feet with blazing eyes. He understood. It was a possibility no one had considered. Ordway’s shot, if he had fired one, might have lodged a hundred feet away.

  “Then if we find a bullet mark—” he questioned tensely.

  “Walpole will not go to the electric chair.”

  “And if we don’t?”

  “We will look farther,” said The Thinking Machine. “We will look for a wounded man of perhaps sixty years, who is now, or has been, a sailor; who is either clean-shaven or else has a close-cropped beard, probably dyed—a man who may have a false key to the Ordway apartment—the man who wrote this note to the governor.”

  “You believe, then,” Hatch demanded, “that Walpole is innocent?”

  “I believe nothing of the sort,” snapped the scientist. “He’s probably guilty. If we find no bullet mark, I’m merely saying what sort of man we must look for.”

  “But—but how do you know so much about him—what he looks like?” asked the reporter, in bewilderment.

  “How do I know?” repeated the crabbed little scientist. “How do I know that two and two make four, not sometimes, but all the time? By adding the units together. Logic, that’s all—logic, logic!”

  While Hatch was scrutinizing the shabby walls of the old building where Peter Ordway had lived his miserly life, The Thinking Machine called on Doctor Anderson, who had been Peter Ordway’s physician for a score of years. Doctor Anderson couldn’t explain the old millionaire’s aversion to water, but perhaps if the scientist went farther back in his inquiries there was an old man, John Page, still living who had been Ordway’s classmate in school. Doctor Anderson knew of him because he had once treated him at Peter Ordway’s request. So The Thinking Machine came to discuss this curious trait of character with John Page. What the scientist learned didn’t appear, but whatever it was it sent him to the public library, where he spent several hours pulling over the files of old newspapers.

  All his enthusiasm gone, Hatch returned to report.

  “Nothing,” he said. “No trace of a bullet.”

  “Any windowpanes changed or broken?”

  “Not one.”

  “There were curtains, of course, over the door through which Mr. X entered Ordway’s room.” It was not a question.

  “There were. They’re there yet.”

  “In that case,” and The Thinking Machine raised his squinting eyes to the ceiling, “our sailorman was wounded.”

  “There is a sailorman, then?” Hatch questioned eagerly.

  “I’m sure I don’t know,” was the astonishing reply. “If there is, he answers generally the description I gave. His name is Ben Holderby. His age is not sixty; it’s fifty-eight.”

  The newspaper man took a long breath of amazement. Surely here was the logical faculty lifted to the nth power! The Thinking Machine was describing, naming, and giving the age of a man whose existence he didn’t even venture to assert—a man who never had been in existence so far as the reporter knew! Hatch fanned himself weakly with his hat.

  “Odd situation, isn’t it?” asked The Thinking Machine. “It only proves that logic is inexorable—that it can only fail when the units fail; and no unit has failed yet. Meantime, I shall leave you to find Holderby. Begin with the sailors’ lodging houses, and don’t scare him off. I can add nothing to the description except that he is probably using another name.”

  Followed a feverish two days for Hatch—a hurried, nightmarish effort to find a man who might or might not exist, in order to prevent a legal murder. With half a dozen other clever men from his office, he finally achieved the impossible.

  “I’ve found him!” he announced triumphantly over the telephone to The Thinking Machine. “He’s stopping at Werner’s, in the North End, under the name of Benjamin Goode. He is clean-shaven, his hair and brows are dyed black, and he is wounded in the left arm.”

  “Thanks,” said The Thinking Machine simply. “Bring Detective Mallory, of the bureau of criminal investigation, and come here tomorrow at noon prepared to spend the day. You might go by and inform the governor, if you like, that Walpole will not be electrocuted Friday.”

  Detective Mallory came at Hatch’s request—came with a mouthful of questions into the laboratory, where The Thinking Machine was at work.

  “What’s it all about?” he demanded.

  “Precisely at five o-clock this afternoon a man will try to murder me,” the scientist informed him placidly, without lifting his eyes. “I’d like to have you here to prevent it.”

  Mallory was much given to outbursts of amazement; he humored himself now:

  “Who is the man? What’s he going to try to kill you for? Why not arrest him now?”

  “His name is Benjamin Holderby,” The Thinking Machine answered the questions in order. “He’ll try to kill me because I shall accuse him of murder. If he should be arrested now, he wouldn’t talk. If I told you whom he murdered, you wouldn’t believe it.”

  Detective Mallory stared without comprehension.

  “If he isn’t to try to kill you until five o’clock,” he asked, “why send for me at noon?”

  “Because he may know you, and if he watched and saw you enter he wouldn’t come. At half past four you and Mr. Hatch will step into the adjoining room. When Holderby enters, he will face me. Come behind him, but don’t lift a finger until he threatens me. If you have to shoot—kill! He’ll be dangerous until he’s dead.”

  It was just two minutes of five o’clock when the bell rang, and Martha ushered Benjamin Holderby into the laboratory. He was past middle age, powerful, with deep-bronzed face and the keen eyes of the sea. His hair and brows were dyed—badly dyed; his left arm hung limply. He found The Thinking Machine alone.

  “I got your letter, sir,” he said respectfully. “If it’s a yacht, I’m willing to ship as master; but I’m too old to do much—”

  “Sit down, please,” the little scientist invited courteously, dropping into a chair as he spoke. “There are one or two questions I should like to ask. First”—the petulant blue eyes were raised toward the ceiling; the slender fingers came together precisely, tip to tip—“first: Why did you kill Peter Ordway?”

  Fell an instant’s amazed silence. Benjamin Holderby’s muscles flexed, the ruddy face was contorted suddenly with hideous anger, the sinewy right hand closed until great knots appeared in the tendons. Possibly The Thinking Machine had never been nearer death than in that moment when the sailorman towered above him—’twas giant and weakling. The tiger was about to spring. Then, suddenly as it had come, anger passed from Holderby’s face; came instead curiosity, bewilderment, perplexity.

  The silence was broken by the sinister click of a revolver. Holderby turned his head slowly, to face Detective Mallory, stared at him oddly, then drew his own revolver, and passed it over, butt foremost.

  No word had been spoken. Not once had The Thinking Machine lowered his eyes.

  “I killed Peter Ordway,” Holderby explained distinctly, “for good and sufficient reasons.”

  “So you wrote the governor,” the scientist observed. “Your motive was born thirty-two years ago?”

  “Yes.” The sailor seemed merely astonished.

  “On a raft at sea?”

  “Yes.”

  “There was murder done on that raft?”

  “Yes.”

  “Instigated by Peter Ordway, who offered you—”

  “One million dollars—yes.”

  “So Peter Ordway is the second man you have killed?”

  “Yes.”

  With mouth agape, Hutchinson Hatch listened greedily; he had—they had—saved Walpole! Mallory’s mind was a chaos. What sort of tommyrot was this? This man confessing to a murder for which Walpole was to be electrocuted! His line of thought was broken by the petulant voice of The Thinking Machine.

  “Sit down, Mr. Holderby,” he was saying, “and tell us precisely what happened on that raft.”

  ’Twas a dramatic story Benjamin Holderby told—a tragedy tale of the sea—a tale of starvation and thirst torture and madness, and ceaseless battling for life—of crime and greed and the power of money even in that awful moment when death seemed the portion of all. The tale began with the foundering of the steamship Neptune, Liverpool to Boston, ninety-one passengers and crew, some thirty-two years ago. In mid-ocean she was smashed to bits by a gale, and went down. Of those aboard only nine persons reached shore alive.

  Holderby told the story simply:

  “God knows how many of us went through that storm; it raged for days. There were ten of us on our raft when the ship settled, and by dusk of the second day there were only six—one woman, and one child, and four men. The waves would simply smash over us, and when we came to daylight again there was some one missing. There was little enough food and water aboard, anyway, so the people dropping off that way was really what saved—what saved two of us at the end. Peter Ordway was one, and I was the other.

  “The first five days were bad enough—short rations, little or no water, no sleep, and all that; but what came after was hell! At the end of that fifth day there were only five of us—Ordway and me, the woman and child, and another man. I don’t know whether I went to sleep or was just unconscious; anyway, when I came to there were only the three of us left. I asked Ordway where the woman and child was. He said they were washed off while I was asleep.

  “‘And a good thing,’ he says.

  “‘Why?’ I says.

  “‘Too many mouths to feed,’ he says. ‘And still too many.’ He meant the other man. ‘I’ve been looking at the rations and the water,’ he says. ‘There’s enough to keep three people alive three days, but if there were only two people—me and you, for instance?’ he says.

  “‘You mean throw him off?’ I says.

  “‘You’re a sailor,’ says he. ‘If you go, we all go. But we may not be picked up for days. We may starve or die of thirst first. If there were only two of us, we’d have a better chance. I’m worth millions of dollars,’ he says. ‘If you’ll get rid of this other fellow, and we ever come out alive, I’ll give you one million dollars!’ I didn’t say anything. ‘If there were only two of us,’ says he, ‘we would increase our chances of being saved one-third. One million dollars!’ says he. ‘One million dollars!’

  “I expect I was mad with hunger and thirst and sleeplessness and exhaustion. Perhaps he was, too. I know that, regardless of the money he offered, his argument appealed to me. Peter Ordway was a coward; he didn’t have the nerve; so an hour later I threw the man overboard, with Peter Ordway looking on.

  “Days passed somehow—God knows—and when I came to I had been picked up by a sailing vessel. I was in an asylum for months. When I came out, I asked Ordway for money. He threatened to have me arrested for murder. I pestered him a lot, I guess, for a little later I found myself shanghaied, on the high seas. I didn’t come back for thirty years or so. I had almost forgotten the thing until I happened to see Peter Ordway’s name in a paper. Then I wrote the slips and mailed them to him. He knew what they meant, and set a detective after me. Then I began hating him all over again, worse than ever. Finally I thought I’d go to his house and make a holdup of it—one million dollars! I don’t think I intended to kill him; I thought he’d give me money. I didn’t know there was any one with him. I talked to him, and he shot me. I killed him.”

  Fell a long silence. The Thinking Machine broke it:

  “You entered the apartment with a skeleton key?”

  “Yes.”

  “And after the shot was fired, you started out, but dodged behind the curtain at the door when you heard Mr. Pingree and Mrs. Robinson coming in?”

  “Yes.”

  Suddenly Hatch understood why The Thinking Machine had asked him to ascertain if there were curtains at that door. It was quite possible that in the excitement Mr. Pingree and Mrs. Robinson would not have noticed that the man who killed Peter Ordway actually passed them in the doorway.

  “I think,” said The Thinking Machine, “that that is all. You understand, Mr. Mallory, that this confession is to be presented to the governor immediately, in order to save Walpole’s life?” He turned to Holderby. “You don’t want an innocent man to die for this crime?”

  “Certainly not,” was the reply. “That’s why I wrote to the governor. Walpole’s story was true. I was in court, and heard it.” He glanced at Mallory curiously. “Now, if necessary, I’m willing to go to the chair.”

  “It won’t be necessary,” The Thinking Machine pointed out. “You didn’t go to Peter Ordway’s place to kill him—you went there for money you thought he owed you—he fired at you—you shot him. It’s hardly self-defense, but it was not premeditated murder.”

  Detective Mallory whistled. It was the only satisfactory vent for the tangled mental condition which had befallen him. Shortly he went off with Holderby to the governor’s office; and an hour later Walpole, deeply astonished, walked out of the death cell—a free man.

  Meanwhile Hutchinson Hatch had some questions to ask of The Thinking Machine.

  “Logic, logic, Mr. Hatch!” the scientist answered, in that perpetual tone of irritation. “As an experiment, we assumed the truth of Walpole’s story. Very well. Peter Ordway was afraid of water. Connect that with the one word ‘raft’ or ‘craft’ in Walpole’s statement of what the intruder had said. Connect that with his description of that man—‘ruddy, like a seaman.’ Add them up, as you would a sum in arithmetic. You begin to get a glimmer of cause and effect, don’t you? Peter Ordway was afraid of the water because of some tragedy there in which he had played a part. That was a tentative surmise. Walpole’s description of the intruder said white hair and flowing white beard. It is a common failing of men who disguise themselves to go to the other extreme. I went to the other extreme in conjecturing Holderby’s appearance—clean-shaven or else close-cropped beard and hair—dyed. Since no bullet mark was found in the building—remember, we are assuming Walpole’s statement to be true—the man Ordway shot at carried the bullet away with him. Ergo, a seaman with a pistol wound. Seamen, as a rule, stop at the sailors’ lodging houses. That’s all.”

  “But—but you knew Holderby’s name—his age!” the reporter stammered.

  “I learned them in my effort to account for Ordway’s fear of water,” was the reply. “An old friend, John Page, whom I found through Doctor Anderson, informed me that he had seen some account in a newspaper thirty-two years before, at the time of the wreck of the Neptune, of Peter Ordway’s rescue from a raft at sea. He and one other man were picked up. The old newspaper files in the libraries gave me Holderby’s name as the other survivor, together with his age. You found Holderby. I wrote to him that I was about to put a yacht in commission, and he had been recommended to me—that is, Benjamin Goode had been recommended. He came in answer to the advertisement. You saw everything else that happened.”

  “And the so-called ‘one million dollar’ slips?”

  “Had no bearing on the case until Holderby wrote to the governor,” said The Thinking Machine. “In that note he confessed the killing; ergo I began to see that the ‘One million dollar’ slips probably indicated some enormous reward Ordway had offered Holderby. Walpole’s statement, too, covers this point. What happened on the raft at sea? I didn’t know. I followed an instinct, and guessed.” The distinguished scientist arose. “And now,” he said, “begone about your business. I must go to work.”

  Hatch started out, but turned at the door. “Why,” he asked, “were you so anxious to know if any windowpane in the Ordway house had been replaced or was broken?”

  “Because,” the scientist didn’t lift his head, “because a bullet might have smashed one, if it was not to be found in the woodwork. If it smashed one, our unknown Mr. X was not wounded.”

  Upon his own statement, Benjamin Holderby was sentenced to ten years in prison; at the end of three months he was transferred to an asylum after an examination by alienists.

  PROBLEM OF THE VANISHING MAN

  There was a feverish restlessness in the merciless gray eyes, an unpleasant frown on his brow, as Charles Duer Carroll paused on the curb in front of a tall down town office building and stared moodily across the busy street into nothingness. Carroll was a remarkable looking young man in many ways. He was young—only thirty—and physically every line of his body expressed power, sturdiness rather than youth, force rather than grace. He was blessed too with an indomitable, uncompromising jaw, the jaw of a fighting man. The chin was square, the lips thin, avaricious perhaps, the nose slightly hooked, the cheek bones high. In general his appearance was that of a keenly alert man who is never surprised; who chooses his way and pursues it aggressively without haste, without mercy, and without mistakes.

 

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