Amazing Stories, Vol. 2, No. 1 — page 48: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

I was coming to see him—even before I heard from Joslyn. What was the cause?” “The room was filled with gas.” “ Asphyxiation!” i “An accident?” the woman asked, leaning for- ward. Even as she whitened with the horror of this news, Trant found himself wondering at her beauty. Every feature was so perfect, so flawless, and her manner so sweet and full of charm that, at his first close sight of her, Trant found himself excusing and approving Branower’s marriage. She was an unknown American girl, whom Branower had met in Paris and had brought back to reign socially over this proud university suburb where his father’s friends and associates had had to ac- cept her and—criticise. “Dr. Lawrie asphyxiated,” she repeated, ‘“‘acci- dentally, Mr. Trant?” “We—hope so, Mrs. Branower.” “There is no clew to the perpetrator?” “Why, if it was an accident, Mrs. Branower, there was no perpetrator.” “Cora!” Branower ejaculated. “How silly of me!’ She flushed prettily. “But Dr. Lawrie’s lovely daughter; what a shock to her !!”” Branower touched Trant upon the arm. After his first personal shock, he had become at once a trustee—the trustee of the University whose Treas- urer lay dead in his office just as his accounts were to be submitted to the Board. He dismissed his wife hurriedly. ‘Now, Trant, let us go up.” President Joslyn met Branower’s grasp mechan- ically and acquainted the president of the trustees, almost curtly, with the facts as he had found them. “Short one hundred thousand dollars, Joslyn? It is suicide?” the president of the trustees was re- volting at the charge. “T ean see no other solution,” the President re- plied, “though Mr. Trant “And I might have saved this!” The trustee’s face had grown white as he looked down at the man on the couch. “Oh, Lawrie, why did I put you off to the last moment?” He turned, fumbling in his pocket for a letter. “He sent this Saturday,” he confessed, pitifully. “TI should have come to him at once, but I could not suspect this.” Joslyn read the letter through with a look of growing conviction. It was in the clear hand of the dead treasurer. “This settles all,” he said, decidedly, and he reread it aloud: DEAR BRANOWER: I pray you, as you have pity for a man with sixty years of probity behind him facing dishonor and disgrace, to come to me at the earliest possible hour. Do not, I pray, delay later than Monday, I implore you. JAMES LAWRIE. R. REILAND buried his face in his hands, and Joslyn turned to Trant. On the young man’s face was a look of deep perplexity. “When did you get that, Mr. Branower?” Trant asked, finally. sane, wrote it Saturday morning. It was Gcliveted rie xs Re as Pid Pa a af d 1 oe ~ eS. i COST ee ay cat us “ z= fw ? $ ee os tap eee Seek ag oe Me F, ome fae + + sh aia ap ~ * . x : ’ a fe ome aS Sree ee ae . SA De late ai Pe f= ce Se >? f = oe ath gland ites wees oF <9” r THE MAN IN THE ROOM asl ey “5 -~ ~ A fn a SS ie mi +2 3 ~ = 4 _s eA i 4 “ ey et . bs \auab.* S oe Ease : enc ert : ai ae lg) f * eS rb ae tere a * Mer Pe * <a weed p Py = xe RA ae tee a —— xs “ : . rad : - _ ~ ~ ’ a ne ae 47 ing with my wife. I did not get it until I returned late Sunday afternoon.” “Then you could not have come much sooner.” “No; yet I might have done something if I had suspected that behind this letter was hidden not merely disgrace, but suicide.” “Disgrace, perhaps, but not. suicide, Mr. Bran- ower!” Trant interrupted curtly. “What?” “Took at his face. It is white and drawn. If asphyxiated, it would be blue, swollen. Before the gas was turned on he was dead—struck dead-——” “Struck dead? By whom?” “By the man in this room last night! By the man who burned those notes, plugged the keyhole, turned on the gas, arranged the rest of these the- atricals, and went away to leave Dr. Lawrie a thief and a suicide to—protect himself! Two men had access to the university funds, handled these notes! One lies before us; and the man in this room last night, I should say, was the other—” he glanced at the clock—“the man who at the hour of nine has not yet appeared at his office!” “Harrison?” cried Joslyn and Reiland together. “Yes, Harrison,” Trant answered, stoutly. “I certainly prefer him for the man in the room last night.” “Harrison?” Branower repeated, contemptuously. “Tmpossible !” “How impossible?” Trant asked, defiantly. “Because Harrison, Mr. Trant,” the president of ~ the trustees rejoined, “was struck senseless at Elgin in an automobile accident Saturday noon. He has been in the Elgin hospital, scarcely con- scious, ever since.” “How did you learn that, Mr. Branower?” “T have helped many young men to positions here. Harrison was one. Because of that, I suppose, he filled in my name on the ‘whom to notify’ line of a personal identification card he carried. The hos- pital doctors notified me just as I was leaving home in my car. I saw him at the Elgin Hospital that afternoon.” Young Trant stared into the steady eyes of the president of the trustees. “Then Harrison could not have been the man in the room last night. Do you realize what that implies?” he asked, whiten- ing. “I preferred, I said, to fix him as Harrison. That would keep both Dr. Lawrie from being the thief and any close personal intimate of his from being the man who struck him dead here last night. But with Harrison not here, the Treasurer himself must have been conscious of this crime,” he struck the canceled note in his hand, “and been concealing it for—that close friend of his who came here with him. You see how very terribly it simplifies our problem? It was some one close enough to Lawrie to cause him to conceal the thing as long as he could, and some one intimate enough to know of the Treasurer’s tinkering habits, so that, even in great haste, he could think at once of the gas nip- pers in Lawrie’s private tool drawer. “Gentlemen,” the young assistant tensely added, “‘I must ask you which of you three was the one in this room with Dr. Lawrie last night?” “What!” The word in three different cadences com uSHoek ‘S Hee n oaks < Pe a = ae eee acts