Professor Augustus Van Dusen: 49 Detective Mysteries in One Edition. Jacques Futrelle
one of the nearby houses. If so, which house? Who did she know in this street? He turned the problem over in his mind several times, and then he was convinced that she had hurried away in waiting cab. That emotion which had begun as curiosity was now a raging, turbulent torrent.
On the following morning Mrs. van Safford came down to breakfast at fifteen minutes of eight. She seemed a little tired, and there was a trace of tears about her eyes. Baxter looked at her curiously.
“Has Mr. van Safford been down yet?” she asked.
“No, Madam,” he replied.
“Did he come in at all last night?”
“Yes, Madam. About half past two, I let him in. He had forgotten his key.”
Now as a matter of fact at that particular moment Mr. van Safford was standing just around the corner, four doors down, waiting for his wife. Just what he intended to do when she appeared was not quite clear in his mind, but the affair had gone to a point where he felt that he must do something. So he waited impatiently, and smoked innumerable cigars. Two hours passed. He glanced around the corner. No one in sight. He strolled back to the house, and met Baxter in the hall.
“Has Mrs. van Safford come down?” he asked of the servant.
“Yes, sir,” was the reply. “She went out more than an hour ago.”
Martha opened the door.
“Please, sir,” she said, “there’s a young gentleman having a fit in the reception room.”
Professor Augustus S. F. X. Van Dusen—The Thinking Machine—turned away from his laboratory table and squinted at her aggressively. Her eyes were distended with nervous excitement, and her wrinkled hands twisted the apron she wore.
“Having a fit?” snapped the scientist.
“Yes, sir,” she gasped.
“Dear me! Dear me! How annoying!” expostulated the man of achievement, petulantly. “Just what sort of a fit is it—epileptic, apoplectic, or merely a fit of laughter?”
“Lord, sir, I don’t know,” Martha confessed helplessly. “He’s just a-walking and a-talking and a-pulling his hair, sir.”
“What name?”
“I—I forgot to ask, sir,” apologized the aged servant, “it surprised me so to see a gentleman a-wiggling like that. He said, though he’d been to Police Headquarters and Detective Mallory sent him.”
The eminent logician dried his hands and started for the reception room. At the door he paused and peered in. With no knowledge of just what style of fit his visitor had chosen to have he felt the necessity of this caution. What he saw was not alarming—merely a good-looking young man pacing back and forth across the room with quick, savage stride. His eyes were blazing, and his face was flushed with anger. It was Mr. van Safford.
At sight of the diminutive figure of The Thinking Machine, topped by the enormous yellow head, the young man paused and his anger-distorted features relaxed into something closely approaching surprise.
“Well?” demanded The Thinking Machine, querulously.
“I beg your pardon,” said Mr. van Safford with a slight start. “I—I had expected to find a—a—rather a different sort of person.”
“Yes, I know,” said The Thinking Machine grumpily. “A man with a black moustache and big feet. Sit down.”
Mr. van Safford sat down rather suddenly. It never occurred to anyone to do other than obey when the crabbed little scientist spoke. Then, with an incoherence which was thoroughly convincing, Mr. van Safford laid before The Thinking Machine in detail those singular happenings which had so disturbed him. The Thinking Machine leaned back in his chair, with finger tips pressed together, and listened to the end.
“My mental condition—my suffering—was such,” explained Mr. van Safford in conclusion, “that when I proved to my own satisfaction that she had twice misrepresented the facts to me, wilfully, I—I could have strangled her.”
“That would have been a nice thing to do,” remarked the scientist crustily. “You believe, then, that there may be another—”
“Don’t say it,” burst out the young man passionately. He arose. His face was dead white. “Don’t say it,” he repeated, menacingly.
The Thinking Machine was silent a moment, then glanced up in the blazing eyes and cleared his throat.
“She never did such a thing before?” he asked.
“No, never.”
“Does she—did she—ever speculate?”
Mr. van Safford sat down again.
“Never,” he responded, positively. “She wouldn’t know one stock from another.”
“Has her own bank account?”
“Yes—nearly four hundred thousand dollars. This was her father’s gift at our wedding. It was deposited in her name, and has remained so. My own income is more than enough for our uses.”
“You are rich, then?”
“My father left me nearly two million dollars,” was the reply. “But this all doesn’t matter. What I want—”
“Wait a minute,” interrupted The Thinking Machine testily. There was a long pause. “You have never quarrelled seriously?”
“Never one cross word,” was the reply.
“Remarkable,” commented The Thinking Machine ambiguously. “How long have you been married?”
“Two years—last June.”
“Most remarkable,” supplemented the scientist. Mr. van Safford stared. “How old are you?”
“Thirty.”
“How long have you been thirty?”
“Six months—since last May.”
There was a long pause. Mr. van Safford plainly did not see the trend of the questioning.
“How old is your wife?” demanded the scientist.
“Twenty-two, in January.”
“She has never had any mental trouble of any sort?”
“No, no.”
“Have you any brothers or sisters?”
“No.”
“Has she?”
“No.”
The Thinking Machine shot out the questions crustily and Mr. van Safford answered briefly. There was another pause, and the young man arose and paced back and forth with nervous energy. From time to time he glanced inquiringly at the pale, wizened face of the scientist. Several thin lines had appeared in the domelike brow, and he was apparently oblivious of the other’s presence.
“It’s a most intangible, elusive affair,” he commented at last, and the wrinkles deepened. “It is, I may say, a problem without a given quantity. Perfectly extraordinary.”
Mr. van Safford seemed a little relieved to find some one express his own thoughts so accurately.
“You don’t believe, of course,” continued the scientist, “that there is anything criminal in-”
“Certainly not!” the young man exploded, violently.
“Yet, the moment we pursue this to a logical conclusion,” pursued the other, “we are more than likely to uncover something which is, to put it mildly, not pleasant.”
Mr. van Safford’s face was perfectly white; his hands were clenched desperately. Then the loyalty to the woman he loved flooded his heart.
“It’s nothing of that