Black Cat Weekly #4

THE HAMMERING MAN by Edwin Balmer and William MacHarg-2

“Then you shall have it explained,” Cuthbert Edwards answered. “I called on Miss Silber last Sunday, and it is because of what I learned there that I want Winton to have nothing more to do with her. I went to Miss Silber on Sunday, Mr. Trant, feeling that I had been too hasty on Thursday. I offered her an apology and was reasoning with her when I heard suddenly, in an upper room, the same noises that had so disturbed the quiet of my office on Thursday afternoon!”

“You mean the hammering?” asked Trant.

“Precisely, Mr. Trant; the hammering! If you had heard that sound yourself, you would know that it is a very definite and distinctive blow, given according to some intentional arrangement. I no sooner heard it and saw the uneasiness it again caused in Miss Silber, than I became certain that the same disreputable man who had been to see her at my office was then housed in her very home. I insisted, as she was my son’s promised wife, on searching the house.”

“Did you find him?” Trant inquired sharply.

“No, I did not, Mr. Trant, though I went into every room and opened every closet. I found only what appeared to be the usual inmates of the house—Miss Silber’s father and the woman who keeps house for her.”

“Miss Silber’s father! Has Miss Silber a father?” Trant interrupted.

“He is hardly worth mentioning, Mr. Trant,” the younger Edwards explained. “He must have suffered at some time from a brain trouble that has partly deprived him of his faculties, I believe. Neither he nor the housekeeper, who is not in Eva’s confidence, is likely to be able to help us in this matter.”

“The man may have slipped out of the house unseen,” suggested Trant.

“Quite impossible,” Cuthbert Edwards asserted. “Miss Silber lived in a little house west of Ravenswood. There are very few houses, none within at least a quarter of a mile of her. The ground is flat, and no one could have got away without being seen by me.”

“Your story so far is certainly very peculiar,” the psychologist commented, “and it gains interest with every detail. Are you certain it was not this second interview with your father”—he turned again to the younger man—“that made Miss Silber refuse you?”

“No; it was not. When I got back yesterday and learned from father what had happened, I went out at once to Eva at her home. She had changed utterly; not in her feelings toward me, for I felt certain even then that she loved me—but an influence—the influence of this man—had come between 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 window’s bore Greek, Jewish, or Lithuanian signs—was given up in the basement to a*****e, 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 tonight again, sure,” she said. “Perhaps sooner. But tonight, or to-morrow, he goes away for good. He have paid only till to-morrow.”

“I was right, you see, in saying we had need for haste,” Trant said to young Edwards. “But there is one thing we can try, even though he is not here. Let me have the picture you showed me this morning!”

He took from Winton’s hand the picture of Eva Silber, opened the leather case, and held it so the child could sec. “Do you know that lady?”

“Yes!” The child showed sudden interest. “It is Mr. Meyan’s wife.”

“His wife!” cried young Edwards. “So,” the psychologist said swiftly to the little girl, “you have seen this lady here?”

“She comes last night.” The child had grown suddenly loquacious. “Because she is coming, Mr. Meyan makes trouble that we should get a room ready for her. Already she has sent her things. And we get ready the room next to his. But because she wants still another room, she goes away last night again. Rooms come not so easy here; we have many people. But now we have another, so tonight she is coming again.”

“Does it now seem necessary for us to press this investigation further?” Cuthbert Edwards asked caustically. As he spoke, the sound of measured, heavy blows came to them down the dark stair apparently from the second floor of the building. The elder Edwards cried excitedly and triumphantly: “What is that? Listen! That man—Meyan, if it is Meyan—must be here; for that is the same hammering.”

“This is even better luck than we could have expected!” exclaimed the psychologist; and he slipped past the child and sped swiftly up the stairs, with his companions closely following. At the head of the flight he passed a stunted woman whose marked resemblance to the little girl below established her at once as mother and landlady, and a trembling old man. With the elder Edwards, Trant tore open door after door of the rooms upon that floor, and the floor above, before the woman could prevent him. The rooms were all empty.

“Meyan must have escaped!” said Cuthbert Edwards as they returned, crestfallen, to the second story. “But we have proof at least that the child spoke the truth in saying Miss Silber had been here to see him, for she hardly would have allowed her father to come here without her.”

“Her father—so this is Miss Silber’s father!” Trant swiftly turned to examine with the keenest interest the old man, who shrank back, shivering and shuddering, in a corner. Even in that darkened hall he conveyed to the psychologist an impression of hoary whiteness. His hair and beard were snowy white, the dead pallor of his skin was the unhealthy whiteness of potato shoots that have sprouted in a cellar, and the iris of his eyes had faded until it was almost indistinguishable. Yet there remained something in the man’s appearance which told Trant that he was not really old—that he still should be moving, daring, self-confident, a leader among men, instead of cringing and shrinking thus at the slightest move of these chance visitors.

“Meyan? Is it because you are looking for Meyan that you have made all this disturbance?” the woman broke in. “Then why didn’t you ask? For now he is at the saloon, I think, only across the street.”

“Then we will go there at once,” said Trant. “But I will ask you”—he turned to the elder Edwards—“to wait for us at the motor, for two of us will be enough for my purpose, and more than two may defeat it by alarming Meyan.”

Trant descended the stairs, took his instrument case from the motor, and with young Edwards crossed the street quickly to the saloon.

CHAPTER III

THE CLEVER PENCIL

A dozen idlers leaned against the bar or sat in chairs tilted against the wall. Trant examined these idlers one after another closely. The only man at whom he did not seem to look was one who, as the only red-headed man in the place, must plainly be Meyan. “Red-headed” was the only description they had of him, but meager as it was, with the landlady’s statement that he was in the saloon, Trant resolved to test him.

The psychologist took an envelope from his pocket and wrote rapidly upon the back of it. “I am going to try something,” he whispered, as he flicked the envelope along the bar to Edwards. “It may not succeed, but if I am able to get Meyan into a test, then go into that back room and speak aloud what I have written on the envelope, as if you had just come in with somebody.” Then, as Edwards nodded his comprehension, the psychologist turned easily to the man nearest him at the bar—a pallid Lithuanian sweatshop worker.

“I suppose you can stand a lot of that?” Trant nodded at the glass of pungent whisky. “Still—it has its effect on you. Sends your heart action up—quickens your pulse.”

“What are you?” asked the man, grinning. “Temperance lecturer?”

“Something like that,” the psychologist answered. “At least, I can show you the effect whisky has upon your heart.”

He picked up the instrument case and opened it. The loungers gathered about him, and Trant saw with satisfaction that they thought him an itinerant temperance advocate. They stared curiously at the instrument he had taken from its case.

“It goes on the arm,” he explained. The Lithuanian, with a grin toward his companions, began to turn up his sleeve. “Not you,” Trant said; “you just had a drink.”