Detective and mystery stories; New York (N.Y.) -- Fiction; Science fiction; Trant, Luther (Fictitious character) -- Fiction
“You need not have looked at your dock superintendent just then, Mr.
Welter, to see if he would stand the racket when the trouble comes,
for which you have been paying him enough on the side to keep him in
electric motors and marble statuettes. And you cannot try now to
disown this crime with the regular president-of-corporation excuse,
Mr. Welter, that you never knew of it, that it was all done without
your knowledge by a subordinate to make a showing in his department;
and do not expect, either, to escape so easily your certain complicity
in the murder of Landers, to prevent him from exposing your scheme and
since—even the American Commodities Company scarcely dared to have two
‘accidental deaths’ of checkers in the same month—the shanghaiing of
Morse later.”
“My complicity in the death of Landers and the disappearance of
Morse?” Welter roared.
“I said the murder of Landers,” Trant corrected. “For when Rentland
and Dickey tell to-morrow before the grand jury how Landers was about
to disclose to the Customs Department the secret of the cheating in
weights; how he was made afraid by Rowan, and later was about to tell
anyway and was prevented only by a most sudden death, I think murder
will be the word brought in the indictment. And I said shanghaiing of
Morse, Mr. Welter. When we remembered this morning that Morse had
disappeared the night the _Elizabethan Age_ left your docks and you
and Rowan were so intensely disgusted at its having had to put into
Boston this morning instead of going on straight to Sumatra, we did
not have to wait for the chance information this evening that Captain
Wilson is a friend of Rowan’s to deduce that the missing checker was
put aboard, as confirmed by the Boston harbor police this afternoon,
who searched the ship under our instructions.” Trant paused a moment;
again fixed the now trembling Welter with his eye, and continued: “I
charge your certain complicity in these crimes, along with your
certain part in the customs frauds,” the psychologist repeated.
“Undoubtedly, it was Rowan who put Morse out of the way upon the
_Elizabethan Age_. Nevertheless, you knew that he was a prisoner upon
that ship, a fact which was written down in indelible black and white
by my tests of you at the Stuyvesant Institute two hours ago, when I
merely mentioned to you ‘a prisoner in the _Elizabethan Age_.’
“I do not charge that you, personally, were the one who murdered
Landers; or even that Rowan himself did; whether his negro did, as I
suspect, is a matter now for the courts to decide upon. But that you
undoubtedly were aware that he was not killed accidentally in the
engine room, but was killed the Wednesday night before and his body
hidden under the coffee bags, as I guessed from the fibres of coffee
sacking on his clothes, was also registered as mercilessly by the
psychological machines when I showed you merely the picture of a pile
of coffee sacks.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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