Decidedly Odd — Reading Notes

CHAPTER I. ADVERTISED IN CIPHER.

One rainy morning in April, Luther Trant sat alone in his office. On his wrist as he bent closely over a heap of typewritten pages spread before him on his desk, a small instrument in continual motion ticked like a watch. It was for him an hour of idleness; he was reading fiction. And, with his passion for making visible and recording the workings of the mind, he was taking a permanent record of his feelings as he read.

The instrument strapped on Trant’s arm was called a sphygmograph. It carried a small steel rod which pressed tightly on his wrist artery. This rod, rising and falling with each rush of the blood wave through the artery, transmitted its motion to a system of small levers. These levers operated a pencil point, which touched the surface of a revolving drum. Trant had adjusted around this drum a strip of smoked paper, the pencil point traced on its sooty surface, and a continuous wavy line which rose and fell with each beat of the psychologist’s pulse.

As the interest of the story gripped Trant, this wavy line grew flatter, with elevations farther apart. When the interest flagged, his pulse returned to its normal heat and the line became regular in its undulations. At an exciting incident, the elevations swelled to greater height. And the psychologist was noting with satisfaction how the continual variations of the line gave definite record of the story’s sustained power, when he was interrupted by the sharp ring of his telephone.

An excited, choleric voice came over the wire:

“Mr. Trant? ... This is Cuthbert Edwards, of Cuthbert Edwards & Co., Michigan Avenue. You have received a communication from my son Winton this morning? Is he there now? ... No? Then he will reach your office in a very few minutes. I want nothing done in the matter! You understand! I will reach your office myself as soon as possible--probably within fifteen minutes--and explain.”

The sentence ended with a bump, as Cuthbert Edwards slammed his receiver back upon its hook. The psychologist, who would have recognized the name--even if not forewarned by the communication he had received that morning--as the conservative head of one of the oldest and most “exclusive” families of New England Puritan extraction, detached the sphygmograph from his wrist and drew toward him and reread the fantastic advertisement that had come to him inclosed in Winton Edwards’ letter. Apparently it had been cut from the classified columns of one of the big dailies:

Eva: The seventeenth of the tenth! Since you and your own are safe, do you become insensible that others now again wait in your place? And those that swing in the wind! Have you forgot? If you remember and are true, communicate. And you can help save them all! N. M. 15, 45, 11, 31; 7, 13, 32, 45; 13, 36.

The letter, to the first page of which the advertisement had been pinned, was dated the same day he had received it, postmarked three o’clock that morning, and written in the scrawling hand of a young man under strong emotion:

Dear Sir: Before coming to consult you, I send for your consideration the advertisement you will find inclosed. This advertisement is the one tangible piece of evidence of the amazing and inexplicable influence possessed by the “hammering man” over my fiancee, Miss Eva Silber. This influence has forced her to refuse to marry me, to tell me that I must think of her only as if she were dead.

This advertisement appeared first on last Monday morning in the classified columns of three Chicago papers published in English, and in the German _S----_. On Tuesday, it appeared in the same morning papers and in four evening papers and the German _A----_. It was submitted to each newspaper by mail, with no address or information other than the text as here printed, with three dollars in currency inclosed in each case to pay for its insertion. For Heaven’s sake help me, Mr. Trant! I will call on you this morning, as soon as I think you are at your office. WINTON EDWARDS.

The psychologist had hardly finished this letter, when rapid footsteps in the corridor outside stopped at his office door. Never had there been a more striking entrance into Trant’s office than that of the young man who now burst in--disheveled, wet with the rain, his eyes red for want of sleep.

“She has left me, Mr. Trant!” he cried, with no prelude. “She has gone!”