The Haunted Bell | Page 9

atoms, infinitesimal parts of
some far greater scheme. What greater scheme? There is the end of
imagination! There the mind stops!"
The immensity of the conception made Hatch gasp a little. He sat silent
for a long time, awed, oppressed. Never before in his life had he felt of
so little consequence.
"Now, Mr. Hatch, as to this little problem that is annoying you,"
continued The Thinking Machine, and the matter-of-fact tone was a
great relief. "What I have said has had, of course, no bearing on it,
except in so far as it demonstrates that imagination is necessary to solve
a problem, that all material problems may be solved, and that, in
meeting them, logic is the lever. It is a fixed quantity; its simplest rules
have enabled me to solve petty affairs for you in the past, so--"
The reporter came to himself with a start. Then he laid before this
master brain the circumstances which cast so strange a mystery about

the death by violence of Johann Wagner, junk-dealer, in the home of
Franklin Phillips, millionaire. But his information was only from the
time the police came into the affair. Mr. Phillips, Doctor Perdue and Mr.
Matsumi alone knew of the ringing of the bell.
"The blood-spot on one of the bells," Hatch told the scientist in
conclusion, "may be the mark of a hand, but its significance doesn't
appear. Just now the police are working on two queer points which they
developed. First, Detective Mallory recognized the dead man as 'Old
Dutch' Wagner, long suspected of conducting a 'fence'--that is,
receiving and disposing of stolen goods; and second, one of the
servants in the Phillips' household, Giles Francis, has disappeared. He
hasn't been seen since eleven o'clock on the night before the body was
found, and then he was in bed sound asleep. Every article of his
clothing, except a pair of shoes, trousers, and pajamas, was left
behind."
The Thinking Machine turned away from the laboratory table and sank
into a chair. For a long time he sat with his enormous yellow head
thrown back and his slender, white fingers pressed tip to tip.
"If Wagner was shot through the heart," he said at last, "we know that
death was instantaneous; therefore he could not have made the
blood-mark on the bell." It seemed to be a statement of fact. "But why
should there be such a mark on the bell?"
"Detective Mallory thinks that--" began the reporter.
"Oh, never mind what he thinks!" interrupted the other testily. "What
time was the body found?"
"About half-past nine yesterday morning."
"Anything stolen?"
"Nothing. The body was simply there, the window open and the door
locked, and there was the blood-mark on the bell."

There was a pause. Cobwebby lines appeared on the broad forehead of
the scientist and the squint eyes narrowed down to mere slits. Hatch
was watching him curiously.
"What does Mr. Phillips say about it?" asked The Thinking Machine.
He was still staring upward and his thin lips were drawn into a straight
line.
"He is ill, just how ill we don't know," responded the newspaper man.
"Doctor Perdue has, so far, not permitted the police to question him."
The scientist lowered his eyes quickly.
"What's the matter with him?" he demanded.
"I don't know. Doctor Perdue has declined to make any statement."
Half an hour later The Thinking Machine and Hatch called at the
Phillips' house. They met Doctor Perdue coming out. His face was
grave and preoccupied; his professional air of jocundity was wholly
absent. He shook hands with The Thinking Machine, whom he had met
years before beside an operating-table, and reëntered the house with
him. Together the three went to the little room--the scene of the
tragedy.
The Japanese gong still swung over the desk. The crabbed little
scientist went straight to it, and for five minutes devoted his undivided
attention to a study of the splotch on the fifth bell. From the expression
of his face Hatch could gather nothing. What the scientist saw might or
might not have been illuminating. Was the splotch the mark of a hand?
If it were, Hatch argued, it offered no clew, as the intricate lines of the
flesh were smeared together, obliterated.
Next The Thinking Machine critically glanced about him, and finally
threw open the window facing east. For a long time he stood silently
squinting out; and, save for the minute lines in his forehead, there was
no indication whatever of his mental workings. The little room was on
the second floor and jutted out at right angles across a narrow alley

which ran beneath them to the kitchen in the back. The dead-wall of the
next building was only four feet from the Phillips' wall, and was
without windows, so it was