Part 7

At Murray Street a deeper inclination of the head was the honour paid a business friend in a passing automobile. At Park Place the blue machine skirted ahead of the traffic block where the huge Woolworth Building mounted skyward. A taxi darted in front of it, tried to cut in ahead; then stopped. Villers’s chauffeur cursed under his breath as he swerved toward the curb. The wheels of the smooth-running car struck the thin end of a building girder, ran over it with a great jolt that jarred the car body down on its springs. A fat traffic cop hurried across the street just as the stalled taxi came to life and scurried down Broadway. The blue car had never even paused; the incident was closed.

The chauffeur bent lower over his wheel so that his muttered oaths would not reach the silent man behind him, for he knew that his job hung on the hair of his employer’s morning humour. John T. Villers’s one rule, whether it be for trusted clerks or chauffeurs, was smoothness; he did not like jolts.

The next traffic cop, who had sworn sympathetically when he saw that jar, let his jaw drop and his salute become a gesture of surprise. The lone man in the tonneau was lying back in the cushions, his eyes closed, the fingers of the hand that had been on the door relaxed.

“’Tis a tired man he is this mornin’,” muttered the traffic man in sympathy.

The car swung into Wall Street, stopped before the world-known banking house of Villers. Instantly the chauffeur was down, his hand pulled open the door. But the machine that never relaxed was sleeping. Wonderment came to the face of the driver; then fear. He laid a hand lightly on the shoulder of his employer. The breathing man did not stir. The fear on the chauffeur’s face deepened. Mr. Villers must be sick!

He obeyed the first instinct, and looked wildly around. Relief chased some of the fear away when he saw the approaching private watchman, who had been stationed before the Villers’s house for years.

“Mr. Villers is sick!” he cried.

The watchman brushed him aside, and stared at the bloodless face with the closed, blue-veined lids.

“He must ’a’ fainted!” gasped the watchman; and he, too, looked wildly around for help.

“Can I be of any assistance?” Both jumped nervously as the stout, full-bearded man with the black satchel spoke. “I am a doctair.” He enunciated the words slowly, distinctly, with a pause after each.

“Mr. Villers has fainted.” They chorused it, huge relief in their voices, and stepped back instantly.

The bearded man stepped to the car, ripped open the unconscious man’s coat and vest, and placed his hand over the beating heart professionally.

“Heart trouble. Seerious,” he told them slowly, as if the words caused him trouble. “Tell them inside.” Both started. He called the watchman back. “Spread the robe on the side-walk.” The watchman’s clumsy fingers fumbled with the robe as the physician put his ear to the financier’s chest, muttered an angry ejaculation, and fumbled with the black bag at his feet.

“It’s ready, sir.” Then the watchman swore under his breath at the crowding men and boys who had apparently sprung from the very side-walk.

The big man paid not the slightest attention. He lifted the slight form of the man of millions and laid it gently on the robe-covered stones. “He must go to a hospital,” he announced with precise distinctness. “I will call the ambu-lance.”

The crowd parted, he hurried through.

Inside the banker’s office the chauffeur blurted the news to the multi-millionaire’s private secretary, utterly unmindful of the two strangers who were with him.

“Fainted?” echoed the secretary blankly.

“Fainted?” repeated the red-cheeked, black-haired stranger.

“Men like Villers don’t faint. Where is he?” The chauffeur stared at the deep-chested, striking-looking man with the wavy white hair, fine as silk, and the strong, lean face, whose extreme paleness was accentuated by the great blue circles of the smoked tortoise-shell library glasses that rested lightly on the nose with its delicate, sensitive nostrils. “Show me where he is, Sydney.” The cleft chin was set at an ominous angle, his slim stick, apparently of heavy ebony, dangled idly between the tapering fingers of his right hand.

“Can’t you see the crowd running?” The shock had made the chauffeur forget that he was only a chauffeur; he jerked his head toward the door he had opened so unceremoniously.

“I am blind.” The white-haired man said it simply, quietly.

“Come, Thorn.” His apple-cheeked secretary led the way from the office, the blind man at his heels. Villers’s private secretary and the chauffeur followed dumbly after.

There were now two policemen to keep the surging crowd from the still body of the master of millions on the cold side-walk. The outer ranks parted for the apple-cheeked man, the blind one followed him to the centre. One of the policemen mopped his brow in relief as they entered the small circle.

“It looks like heart trouble, Mr. Colton,” he murmured nervously.

“Think so, Thompson?” The end of the slim stick touched a knee of the prostrate man lightly. Thornley Colton knelt and picked up a lax arm. His fingers felt the pulse.

“That’s what the doctor said it was.” The watchman licked his dry lips. “He ought to be back by now.”

“Doctor?” snapped the kneeling man, without looking up.

“He laid him there t’ call th’ ambulance.” Once more the watchman wet his lips.

“Who is Mr. Villers’s physician?” The blind man’s finger-tips were lightly brushing the coat-lining.

“Doctor Clayton.” The private secretary answered.

“Get him. Quick!” The tone of the voice sent a bareheaded clerk who had followed them on the jump to obey.

“Is it a serious heart attack?” stammered the still-dazed private secretary.

“Heart attack? _No!_” The blind man spoke sharply, crisply. “This is a morphine stupor!”

“Morphine?” gasped the dazed secretary incredulously.

“Yes!” The word was jerked out, a slim fore-finger and thumb raised an eyelid of the prostrate man. “See the contracted pupils? Pin-points!”

“But how----Thank Heaven, Mr. MacLaren!” The secretary’s voice changed from helpless amazement to joyous relief as the square-shouldered, square-chinned man with the iron-gray hair pushed his way though the crowd.

“My God! What does this mean?” cried the new comer.

The blind man rose, picked up his stick, and brushed his trousers knees.

“It means robbery--now,” he said grimly. “It will probably mean murder in a few hours!”

Dreyfus MacLaren, the one man in all the world who enjoyed the full confidence of John T. Villers, paced the floor of his office with nervous strides, halting at every turn, ears strained to catch the faintest sounds from the inner room, where the doctor worked over the unconscious money machine. On the street outside, stretching from the sub-treasury steps to the dingy buildings where the sugar brokers buy and sell, the crowd still waited, whispered. In the outer room of the financier’s office came the low-voiced hum of half a hundred newspaper men, tensely waiting a word from that inner room. At the end of his small office MacLaren swung around to face the blind problemist, who rolled the thin, hollow stick he always carried between his tapering white fingers.

“My God, Mr. Colton!” he broke out. “It couldn’t have happened!”

“It did,” answered the blind man mildly.

“But he was in an open automobile; a thousand persons saw him; he answered the salutes of, perhaps, fifty policemen along Broadway. No one was near him; no one could have got near enough to render him unconscious with morphine.”

“The fact that he is still in a morphine stupor is the best answer to that.” Thornley Colton’s voice was still mild, even gentle.

“You say that the man who lifted him out of the car did not inject the stuff?”

“Yes. The bounding pulse my fingers felt told me immediately that it had been in the system at least ten minutes. The bounding pulse, as it is called, is peculiar to morphia. I have made a special study of pulse beats.” The blind man did not add that the pulse, to him, was the Keyboard of Silence that told many secrets of the heart to the supersensitive finger-tips that always rested on the wrist when he shook hands.

“Then that puts it right up to the chauffeur, whom the police arrested,” admitted MacLaren. “But I can’t see how he did it,” he added.

Sydney Thames, silent in a corner chair, also shook his head.

“He didn’t!” snapped Colton. “If the police were forced to use brains instead of feet to hold their jobs, there wouldn’t be so many fool mistakes made. They should have arrested the automobile,” he finished seriously.

Before the surprised expression on MacLaren’s face could be put into words the inner door opened, and the grave-faced doctor stood before them.

“Has Mr. Villers’s family been notified?” he asked.

“He won’t die!” There was utter disbelief in MacLaren’s tone.

“He will die,” amended the physician quietly. “His nerve has been keeping his worn-out body going for years; such an overdose of morphine could not but be fatal. I have tried to arouse him, but heroic methods would only result in an instant stopping of his heart. He will sleep for, perhaps, an hour more; then he will quietly stop breathing.”

“My God, doctor! That is murder!” MacLaren’s great body dropped limply into a chair, his face was white. He had refused to believe, before, that the master of millions could die. It was impossible. The wonderful machine could not stop. Now it was silent, useless.

The doctor was speaking: “There is no doubt that a heavy dose of morphia is responsible; every symptom points to it unmistakably, but”--the physician stroked his Vandyke perplexedly--“I have been unable to find the spot on his body where the hypodermic needle entered. I have minutely examined the chest, the abdomen, the arms, thighs, even the face. It is puzzling, very.”

“Mr. Villers is still lying on his back?” The question was put casually by the blind man, whom the physician had not even noticed.

“Certainly!” The doctor answered as one answers a foolish question.

“If you will turn him gently on his side for a moment you will probably find the broken point of the hypodermic needle under his shoulder-blade.”

“His back--why----” The physician darted through the inner door.

The doctor’s going left them silent. MacLaren’s square shoulders were hunched forward, his eyes fixed steadily on the closed door. Sydney Thames, in the big leather chair in the corner, was tense, rigid. A hundred times he had heard the blind man, whom he loved, make a statement of this kind. Never had he known him to be wrong; but always did he fear that Thornley Colton would make some terrible mistake in his sureness of himself. And the sightless problemist smoked his cigarette calmly, the great, blue circles of eyes fixed on the ceiling above him. The door opened; the doctor faced them.

“The needle had broken under the right shoulder-blade--as you said.” Doctor Clayton’s keen eyes bored the blind man with a look of half-suspicion.

The words seemed to arouse MacLaren; he realized their significance. “How--did--you--know--that?” Each separate word was a gasp. “And blind!” The tone of his voice was a demand for explanation.

“I knew it because of my blindness,” explained the problemist quietly. “We of the darkness must learn to visualize, mentally, what your eyes accept unconsciously. We learn to see with our brains, you see without them. My whole life has been spent in this development of mental visualization. I can instantly picture, in my brain, a scene that has been given me in pieces by my four other senses. And that mental picture often goes back to events that lead up to, and make, the scene.”

“Do you mean that you can _imagine_ who administered the morphine?” asked MacLaren incredulously.

“Not at all!” There was just a shade of impatience in the tone. “I have no clairvoyant powers. I haven’t the remotest idea of the guilty persons’ identity--yet. But I knew Mr. Villers; I knew his habits, just as every man in New York, and Europe, too, who reads the papers, knows them. He has probably been given more columns of newspaper space than any other man who ever lived. Everything he did was machine-like, never changing; as sure as the sun and moon. I know how he sits in an automobile; I know the attention he attracts. You do, too, but you accepted them merely as something too obvious for the brain--as merely a routine report of the eyes. So, when I felt the unmistakable morphia pulse, an instant’s thought told me the only possible way it could have been administered. The trained mind doesn’t have to take up time with the consideration of innumerable possibilities; it is trained to the instant elimination of impossibilities. The back was the only place it could have been injected.”

“How? By whom?” They chorused it eagerly.

“By the innocent tool of a master mind: Mr. Villers’s automobile.”

“The automobile! What do you mean?” Incredulity, amazement were in the voices of the excited men.

“During the excitement attending the carrying of Mr. Villers to his office my fingers were examining the cushions of the tonneau. The upholstery had been cut in the crease formed by the two tuft buttons, about where a man’s back would come. A specially made hypodermic was inserted, and the cut sewed. Of course, the crease concealed the stitches. No one ever used the car but Villers, and every one knows how he sits in the machine. You heard the statement of the chauffeur before the police arrested him. The jolt caused by the girder and the stalled taxi in front of the Woolworth Building were all that was needed. If that had not succeeded, the taxi would have swung in front and caused a collision. Then the ‘doctor’ would have gotten right on the job there, as he did here, when the taxi hurried on ahead to be on hand here. The breaking of the hypo needle was almost a certainty. It only required the barest fraction of an instant for the stuff to enter the body, and the broken needle would at once destroy the instrument and make its presence for some time unsuspected by any one sitting in the car.”

“How fiendish,” murmured Doctor Clayton, and the words seemed puerile.

MacLaren shook his head, as if to clear the cobwebs from his usually alert brain; then he leaped to his feet, totally unmindful of the dying man in the next room.

“Colton, he _can’t_ die! The quarter-billion Chinese loan must be put through to-day. The new German bond bid is being held open for us till midnight. Another twenty-four hours’ delay means that we lose both. He had all the data, the papers! They were----”

“Stolen,” finished Thornley Colton quietly. “That was the object of the game--as I told you outside.”

“I never thought of them!” In MacLaren’s voice was the strong man’s contrition for an unpardonable oversight. His teeth snapped together with the squaring of his jaw as he paced the room before the silent blind man and the red-cheeked, black-haired Sydney Thames. Behind the closed door they could hear the hum of the doctor’s voice, as he tried vainly to call up the Villers’s up-town house; though a hundred thousand black-typed extras were on the street telling of the racing special train that was bringing the family to the city and the dying man.

MacLaren made a circuit of the office before he stopped in front of the blind man, who idly twirled his cane. The sudden stopping of the machine that he had thought could not stop had unnerved him completely, driven every other thought from his mind. But theft was something he understood. It meant money. MacLaren, too, was a money machine.

“The loss of those papers means millions!” He was calm now, with the calm of deadly earnestness. “More than that! The stealing of those data Mr. Villers had means that the United States will be frozen out of both the Chinese and German loans. You know how we had to fight for the chance! Ours is the only American banking house that could handle them. All the figures were prepared by Mr. Villers, and you know his invariable rule to hold things like this until his last minute of grace. Those papers must be recovered before midnight! Even the murder--there seems to be no doubt that it will be murder--pales into insignificance beside this, and”--there was a curious catch in his voice--“God knows I loved John T. Villers. But the loss of that Chinese loan means that the United States won’t have a say in the new republic; that American interests will be crowded out by the powers who control China financially. Every last detail was in those papers he was to have ready to-day. Think of the German loan!” He was pacing the floor again, talking as he walked. One money machine had stopped; another must take its place. “The loss of those papers means a loss of at least ten millions to us, and American interests in China and Germany will lose a hundred millions in the next ten years!”

“Midnight,” murmured Thornley Colton, as a sensitive finger-tip touched the crystalless watch in his pocket. “And it’s now one-fifteen.”

“Less than eleven hours!” MacLaren fairly jumped to the telephone on his desk. “The police must have inducements to hustle!” One hand lifted the receiver; then he swung round. “_You!_” It was almost an accusation as he hurled it at the blind problemist. “You solved that code-book theft for us a year ago. I’d forgotten! There isn’t a minute to lose!”

“A man is dying in the next room,” reminded Thornley Colton quietly.

MacLaren wet his dry lips. “I know.” His voice was lower, calmer. “But think what it means. The hugeness of it! A theft of a hundred millions!” It wasn’t lack of human feeling in MacLaren. He was a money machine, doing what the man in the next room would wish done.

The blind man nodded understandingly. “I came in this morning to see Mr. Villers regarding his cheque for our Home for Blind Children. We haven’t received it this year.”

“If you can recover those papers I will give you my personal cheque for a hundred thousand!”

“I never accept fees,” corrected Colton. “The solving of mysteries is my recreation. But if you will continue Mr. Villers’s contributions to the home----” His expressive lips finished the sentence without words.

“Yes! Ten times the amount.” MacLaren was half out of his chair, staring at the blind man.

“Thank you. That home means a lot to me.” The blind man spoke reverently. “Sydney and I will look into the case after lunch; I am hungry.”

“Hungry? My God!” MacLaren fell back weakly into the chair. “Don’t you realize that you have less than eleven hours? Don’t you understand that every minute of delay may be fatal?”

“Oh, no,” replied the problemist easily. “It will be at least several hours before the man who has the papers finishes his elaborate precautions for putting the police off his trail. There is no sense in hurrying after a man who is dodging and doubling to avoid possible pursuit. When he is convinced that his trail has been covered he will resume his normal way. The chased hare can wear out a hundred dogs that follow his devious windings, and when they are worn out he returns to the bosom of his family, contented and serene. That’s where the ferret gets him.”

For a full minute MacLaren stared, as if the blind man had presented a problem in Euclid which he could not understand. Then he brushed his sweat-beaded forehead with a trembling hand. “But the police didn’t waste an instant,” he protested. “There are two hundred detectives working now. They’ve got a minute description of the man.” He stopped suddenly. “You weren’t even present when they questioned the chauffeur and the watchman!”

“The senseless bulldozing of the police always makes me lose my temper,” confessed Thornley Colton. “I spoke to the chauffeur for ten minutes before the detectives arrived. Afterward I preferred to sit here, where I could smoke a cigarette and use the telephone.”

“But the police learned that the man who lifted Mr. Villers from the car was stout, with a full brown beard, and dressed in light gray,” persisted MacLaren.

“And in this office, alone with my cigarette, I learned that he was slim and smooth-shaven,” smiled Thornley Colton, as he rose. “But those are minor details. He had the nail of his right index finger broken, and wore a curious thumb ring. Also, he did not actually place the hypodermic in the tonneau cushions. That was done by a small, slightly built man, and a very beautiful woman who is left-handed.”

“Without eyes----” began MacLaren gaspingly.

“With my ten eyes.” Thornley Colton held out his two hands, with their tapering hypersensitive fingers.

Broadway was a pandemonium of newsboys’ shouts; Wall Street a murmur of low-voiced speculation; newspaper offices a buzz of humming activity. John T. Villers was dead--murdered. London whispered it solemnly, Paris gesticulated over it, Berlin gutturaled the news phlegmatically, Tokyo took it with characteristic lack of characteristics. Men in tin-roofed cable offices on the coast of Africa caught the telegraph clicks with news eagerness instead of curses. The wireless aerials of a thousand ships filched the story from the air. The man who had builded the American empire of money was dead. Would the empire crumble? Would the world-power of money return to the seats of the mighty on the other side of the ocean, where it had been before the money machine had demanded a hand-grasp on the golden sceptre the jealous hands of Europe had wielded so long? The money machines of Paris, London, Berlin awaited the answer that would be in the Chinese loan, the German loan--the answer that was in the pocket of a murderer!

And in the quiet dining-room of the old Astor House Thornley Colton complained to the waiter of the lack of crust shortening in the apple-pie he was eating. It was three o’clock.

Across the table Sydney Thames chewed his cigar nervously and tried to keep his mind on the “latest” extra he held in his hands. He had read the life story of John T. Villers, printed under the great black word: “DEAD!” It was the story of the poor boy who came to the city, the story of machine-like habits, of putting through vast deals only when he had taken the last possible hour to consider every point, until he became known in Europe and America as “Last-Minute” Villers.

He read of Johnson, Villers’s personal chauffeur, who slept alone with his wife and three small children in the big private garage that was now empty because the dozen other Villers machines and their drivers had gone to Bar Harbour with Mrs. Villers and the two sons. He read of Johnson’s five years of service, of his exemplary habits, his nights spent at home with his family; even of his taking his wife and two larger children to the theatre the night before, while the baby was cared for by a neighbour. Even the police admitted that he was innocent, but police-like, they still held him.

The story of finding the curious hypodermic, surrounded by a strong spring to hold it in place, caused Sydney to laugh nervously. The police had not discovered it until reporters, who had interviewed MacLaren after Thornley Colton had left, told them of it. Now the search was on for the taxi which had caused the Villers machine to run over the girder. And there was no clue! The three traffic policemen who had seen the whole thing had neither number nor idea of the machine. It was red; so were a thousand others. An expert had said that the hypodermic of death had been made abroad, possibly in Germany. And that was all.

But the papers revelled in the details; they gave inch-typed prominence to the announcement that MacLaren had offered a huge reward for certain papers stolen from the unconscious Villers. It was a big story; the biggest story of the most daring crime New York had ever known.