Black Cat Weekly #4

THE HAMMERING MAN by Edwin Balmer and William MacHarg-4

“There he found a man apparently freezing to death, and fed and warmed him,” said the girl; “and when the fellow was able to tell his pitiful tale, father boldly encouraged him, told him of the organization of protest he was forming, and asked him to join. Little by little father told him all he had done and all his plans. At nightfall father said farewell and turned to the door, where he found himself facing a spy, who held a pistol at his head. In the fight that followed, father was able only to wound the other upon the chest with the blunt knife they had used to cut their food, before the spy called a second confederate down from the loft, and father was overcome.

“On the information of these police spies, without trial of any sort—father’s friends could discover only that the name of his betrayer was Valerian Urth—father was sentenced to solitary confinement in an underground cell for life. And my mother—because she sent food and fagots to a supposed convict—was exiled to Siberia! Ten years ago, her sister, who took me, received word that she died on the convict island of Sakhalin; but my father”—she gasped for breath—“lived, at least!”

She stopped as suddenly as she had begun. Trant, who had stooped to watch his records more closely when the name of the police spy was mentioned, still kept his gaze steadfastly upon his instruments. Suddenly he motioned to the girl to complete her narrative.

“Some years ago.” she said, “when I was eighteen, I left my mother’s sister and went back to my father’s friends, such of them as were still free,” she continued. “Many who had worked with him for the organization had been caught or betrayed. But others and more had come in their places; and they had work for me. I might move about with less suspicion than a man. So I helped prepare for the strikes which at last so terrified the czar that on the thirtieth of October he issued his manifesto to free those in prison. I had helped to free my father with the rest. I took him to Hungary and left him with friends while I came here. Now, do you not understand why I am going back?” She turned in pitiful appeal to young Edwards. “It is because there is work again in Russia for me to do.”

She checked herself again and turned to Trant to see if he would force her still to proceed. But he was facing intently, as if fascinated, the strange hammering man and his two stranger companions; yet he was not watching their faces or their figures at all. His eyes followed the little pencil points which, before each of the three, continually traced their lines of record. Then he took quickly from his pocket a folded paper, yellow with age, worn, creased, and pierced with pin marks. In the sight of all he unfolded it swiftly upon the table before the three, refolded it, and put it back into his pocket. And though at sight of it no face changed among the three, even Trant’s clients could see how one line now suddenly grew flat, with low elevations, irregular and far apart, as the pencil point seemed almost to stop its motion over the smoked paper of the man in the middle, Meyan.

“That is all,” said Trant, in a tone of assured triumph, as he unstrapped the sphygmographs from their wrists. “You can speak now, Mr. Edwards.”

“Eva!” cried Winton Edwards, in wild appeal. “You are not married to this man?”

“Married? No!” the girl exclaimed in horror. “Until last Thursday, when he came to the office, I never saw him. But he has come to call me for the cause which must be to me higher and holier than love. I must leave my love for the cause of Russia. I must go and nurse our soldiers on the battlefield. I have been promised a full pardon if I will do so.”

Meyan now, with a heavy slouch of his muscular body, left his two companions at the table and moved up beside the girl. “Have any more of you anything to say to her before she goes back with me to Russia?”

“To her? No,” Trant replied. “But to you—and to these gentlemen”—he motioned to the two who had sat at the table with Meyan—“I have to announce the result of my test, for which they are waiting. This elder gentleman is Ivan Munikov, who was forced to leave Russia eight years ago because his pamphlet on ‘Inalienable Rights’ had incurred the displeasure of the police. This younger man is Dmitri Vasili, who was exiled to Siberia for political offenses at thirteen years of age, but escaped to America. They both are members of the Russian revolutionary organization in Chicago.”

“But the test—the test!” cried Vasili. “The test”—the psychologist turned sternly to face Meyan—“has shown as conclusively and irrefutably as I could hope that this man is not the revolutionist he claims to be, but is, as we suspected might be the case, an agent of the Russian secret police. And not only that! It has shown just as truly, though this fact was at first wholly unsuspected by me, that he—this agent of police who would have betrayed the daughter now and taken her back to Russia to be punished for her share in the previous agitation—is the same agent who, twenty years ago, betrayed the father, Herman Silber, into imprisonment! True name from false I do not know; but this man, who calls himself Meyan now, called himself then Valerian Urth!”

“Valerian Urth!” Eva Silber cried, staggering back into Winton Edwards’ arms.

But Meyan made a disdainful gesture with his huge, fat hands. “Bah! You would try to prove such things by your foolish test?”

“Then you will not refuse, of course,” Trant demanded sternly, “to show us if there is a knife scar on your chest?”

Even as Meyan would have repeated his denial, Vasili and Munikov leaped from the rear of the room and tore his shirt from his breast. The psychologist rubbed and beat the skin, and the blood rose to the surface, revealing the thin line of an almost invisible and time-effaced scar.

“Our case is proved, I think!” The psychologist turned from the two who stared with hate at the cringing spy, and again faced his clients.

He unlocked the door, and handed the key to Munikov; then, picking up his instrument cases and record sheets, with Miss Silber and his clients he left the room and entered the landlady’s sitting room.

CHAPTER V

AN INTRUSION OF SCIENCE

“When I received Mr. Edwards’ letter this morning,” Trant said, in answer to the questions that showered upon him, “it was clear to me at once that the advertisement he inclosed depended for its appeal on reminding Eva Silber of some event of prime importance to herself, but also, from the wording employed, of popular or national significance as well. You further told me that October 30th was a special holiday with Miss Silber. That, I found, to be the date of the czar’s manifesto of freedom and declaration of amnesty to political prisoners. At once it flashed upon me: Eva Silber was a Russian. The difference between the seventeenth given in the advertisements and the thirtieth—thirteen days—is just the present difference between the old-style calendar used in Russia and ours.

“Before going to the Crerar Library, then, it was clear that we had to do with a Russian revolutionary intrigue,” he went on. “At the library I obtained the key to the cipher and translated the advertisement, obtaining the name of Meyan and his address, and also the name and address of Dmitri Vasili, a well-known revolutionary writer. To my surprise, Vasili knew nothing of any revolutionist named Meyan. It was inconceivable that a revolutionary emissary should come to Chicago and he not know of it. It became necessary to find Meyan immediately.

“My first direct clue was the hammering that we heard in this house. It was too much to suppose that in two separate instances this hammering should be heard, and in each case Eva’s father he present and no other discoverable agent, and that still he should have nothing to do with it. Obviously, it must have been Herman Silber who did the hammering at Eva’s home and here in this house. It was obvious, too, that Herman Silber was the ‘your own’ of the advertisement.

“To test Meyan, whom we found in the saloon, was not difficult,” said Trant. “I arranged to have him overhear some one speaking of an arrest at Warsaw, which would at once suggest itself as a hotbed of Russian revolutionists to either a revolutionist or a police agent; but the idea would certainly give positive and very opposite reactions if the man were a true revolutionist or if he were a spy. Meyan’s pulse so strengthened and slowed—as under a pleasurable stimulus—that I felt I had received confirmation of my suspicions, though I had not then the information which would enable me to expose the man. To secure this I sought out Dmitri Vasili. He introduced me to Munikov, who had been a friend of Silber before his imprisonment and between them I got the history of Herman Silber and his daughter.

“I explained to Munikov and Vasili that the methods of the psychological laboratory would be as efficacious in picking out a spy among true men as I have many times proved them to be in convicting the criminal.

“Every emotion reacts upon the pulse, which strengthens in joy and weakens in sorrow, changes with anger and with despair; and as every slightest variation it undergoes can be detected and registered by the sphygmograph—I felt certain that if I could test the three men together by having Miss Silber tell her father’s story aloud, I could determine conclusively by comparison of the records of the two true revolutionists with that of Meyan, whether his sympathies were really with the revolutionist party. I arranged with Munikov and Vasili to come here with me tonight, and, after Meyan had arrived, they left us here and went to him as representatives of the revolutionary movement to ask his credentials.

“When he could furnish none,” Trant went on, “they proposed, and in fact forced him, into this test. It is a dangerous thing to endeavor to pass oneself off as a revolutionist, and it was safer for him to submit to a test than to have his mission frustrated by incurring not only suspicion, but possibly death. Completely ignorant of the pitiless powers of psychological methods, and confiding in his steely nerves, which undoubtedly have carried him through many less searching ordeals, he agreed. You saw how perfectly he was able to control his face and every movement of his body while the test went on. But you can see here”—Trant spread out his strips of smoked paper—“on these records, which I shall preserve by passing them through a bath of varnish, how useless that self-control was, since the sphygmograph recorded by its moving pencil the hidden feelings of his heart.

“As I lay these side by side, you can see how consistently at each point in the story Munikov and Vasili experienced the same feelings; but Meyan had feelings which were different. I did not dream, of course, when I started the test that I would discover in Meyan the same man who had betrayed Herman Silber. It was only when at her first mention of Valerian Urth I obtained from Meyan this startling and remarkable record,” he pointed to a place where the line suddenly had grown almost straight and flat, “that I realized that if the man before me was not himself Urth, he at least had some close and, under the circumstances, oppressive connection with him.

“Eva Silber still had the note that had been sent to summon her father on the errand of mercy which had caused his imprisonment. She gave it to me before you entered the room. I was certain that of all men in the world there was but one who could recognize or feel any emotion at sight of that yellowed and time-worn paper; and that man was Valerian Urth, who had used it to betray Herman Silber.

“I showed it to Meyan, and obtained this really amazing reaction which ends his record.” The psychologist pointed to the record. “It assured me that Meyan and Urth were one.”

“This is amazing, Mr. Trant,” Cuthbert Edwards said. “But you have left unexplained the most perplexing feature of all—the hammering!”

“To communicate with one another from their solitary cells, Russian prisoners long ago devised a code of spelling letters by knocking upon the wall—a code widely spread and known by every revolutionist. It is extremely simple; the letters of the alphabet”—Trant took from his pocket a slip of paper—“are arranged in this manner.”

He set down rapidly the alphabet, omitting two letters, arranged in four lines, thus:

a

b

c

d

e

f

g

h

i

k

l

m

n

o

p

r

s

t

u

v

w

x

y

z

“A letter is made,” the psychologist explained, “but giving first the proper number of knocks for the line, a short pause, then knocks for the number of the letter in the line. For instance, e is one knock and then five; y is four knocks and then five.

“By means of this code I translated the figures in the advertisement and obtained Meyan’s name and address. I suppose he used it not only in the advertisement, but at the office, because his long experience had taught him that Herman Silber, as many another man condemned to the horrors of a Russian prison for a term of years, had probably lost the power of speech, and continued to communicate, in freedom, by the means he had used for so many years in prison.”

“Wonderful, Mr. Trant, wonderful!” exclaimed Cuthbert Edwards. “I only regret that we can do nothing to Meyan; for there is no law, I think, by which he can be punished.”

The psychologist’s face darkened. “Vengeance is not ours,” he answered simply. “But I have given the key of Meyan’s room to Munikov!”

The elder Edwards, clearing his throat, moved over to Eva and put his arm about her as though to protect her. “Since you must see that you cannot go back to Russia, my dear,” he said awkwardly, “will you not let me welcome you now into your place in my home?”

And as the son sprang swiftly forward and caught his father’s hand, Trant took up his instrument cases under his arm, and went out alone into the warm April night.