“The letters you wrote were intercepted?” he suggested at last.
“No,” exclaimed Grayson flatly. “Those letters were sent direct to the brokers by a dozen different methods, and every one of them had been delivered by five minutes of ten o’clock, when ‘Change begins business. The last one left me at ten minutes of ten.”
“Dear me! Dear me!” The Thinking Machine rose and paced the length of the room.
“You don’t give me credit for the extraordinary precautions I have taken, particularly in this last P., Q. & X. deal,” Grayson continued. “I left positively nothing undone to insure absolute secrecy. And Miss Winthrop, I know, is innocent of any connection with the affair. The private detectives suspected her at first, as you do, and she was watched in and out of my office for weeks. When she was not under my eyes, she was under the eyes of men to whom I had promised an extravagant sum of money if they found the leak. She didn’t know it then, and doesn’t know it now. I am heartily ashamed of it all, because the investigation proved her absolute loyalty to me. On this last day she was directly under my eyes for two hours; and she didn’t make one movement that I didn’t note, because the thing meant millions to me. That proved beyond all question that it was no fault of hers. What could I do?”
The Thinking Machine didn’t say. He paused at a window, and for minute after minute stood motionless there, with eyes narrowed to mere slits.
“I was on the point of discharging Miss Winthrop,” the financier went on, “but her innocence was so thoroughly proved to me by this last affair that it would have been unjust, and so—”
Suddenly the scientist turned upon his visitor. “Do you talk in your sleep?” he demanded.
“No,” was the prompt reply. “I had thought of that too. It is beyond all ordinary things, Professor. Yet there is a leak that is costing me millions.”
“It comes down to this, Mr. Grayson,” The Thinking Machine informed him crabbedly. “If only you and Miss Winthrop knew those plans, and no one else, and they did leak, and were not deduced from other things, then either you or she permitted them to leak, intentionally or unintentionally. That is as pure logic as two and two make four; there is no need to argue it.”
“Well, of course, I didn’t,” said Grayson.
“Then Miss Winthrop did,” declared The Thinking Machine finally, positively; “unless we credit the opposition, as you call it, with telepathic gifts hitherto unheard of. By the way, you have referred to the other side only as the opposition. Do the same men, the same clique, appear against you all the time, or is it only one man?”
“It’s a clique,” explained the financier, “with millions back of it, headed by Ralph Matthews, a young man to whom I give credit for being the prime factor against me.” His lips were set sternly.
“Why?” demanded the scientist.
“Because every time he sees me he grins,” was the reply. Grayson seemed suddenly discomfited.
The Thinking Machine went to a desk, addressed an envelope, folded a sheet of paper, placed it inside, then sealed it. At length he turned back to his visitor. “Is Miss Winthrop at your office now?”
“Yes.”
“Let us go there, then.”
A few minutes later the eminent financier ushered the eminent scientist into his private office on the Street. The only person there was a young woman—a woman of twenty-six or-seven, perhaps—who turned, saw Grayson, and resumed reading. The financier motioned to a seat. Instead of sitting, however, The Thinking Machine went straight to Miss Winthrop and extended a sealed envelop to her.
“Mr. Ralph Matthews asked me to hand you this,” he said.
The young woman glanced up into his face frankly, yet with a certain timidity, took the envelope, and turned it curiously in her hand.
“Mr. Ralph Matthews,” she repeated, as if the name was a strange one. “I don’t think I know him.”
The Thinking Machine stood staring at her aggressively, as she opened the envelope and drew out the sheet of paper. There was no expression save surprise—bewilderment, rather—to be read on her face.
“Why, it’s a blank sheet!” she remarked, puzzled.
The scientist turned suddenly toward Grayson, who had witnessed the incident with frank astonishment in his eyes. “Your telephone a moment, please,” he requested.
“Certainly; here,” replied Grayson.
“This will do,” remarked the scientist.
He leaned forward over the desk where Miss Winthrop sat, still gazing at him in a sort of bewilderment, picked up the receiver, and held it to his ear. A few moments later he was talking to Hutchinson Hatch, reporter.
“I merely wanted to ask you to meet me at my apartment in an hour,” said the scientist. “It is very important.”
That was all. He hung up the receiver, paused for a moment to admire an exquisitely wrought silver box—a “vanity” box—on Miss Winthrop’s desk, beside the telephone, then took a seat beside Grayson and began to discourse almost pleasantly upon the prevailing meteorological conditions. Grayson merely stared; Miss Winthrop continued her reading.
* * * *
Professor Augustus S. F. X. Van Dusen, distinguished scientist, and Hutchinson Hatch, newspaper reporter, were poking round among the chimney pots and other obstructions on the roof of a skyscraper. Far below them the slumber-enshrouded city was spread out like a panorama, streets dotted brilliantly with lights, and roofs hazily visible through mists of night. Above, the infinite blackness hung like a veil, with starpoints breaking through here and there.
“Here are the wires,” Hatch said at last, and he stooped.
The Thinking Machine knelt on the roof beside him, and for several minutes they remained thus in the darkness, with only the glow of a flashlight to indicate their presence. Finally, The Thinking Machine rose.
“That’s the wire you want, Mr. Hatch,” he said. “I’ll leave the rest of it to you.”
“Are you sure?” asked the reporter.
“I am always sure,” was the tart response.
Hatch opened a small handsatchel and removed several queerly wrought tools. These he spread on the roof beside him; then, kneeling again, began his work. For half an hour he labored in the gloom, with only the flashlight to aid him, and then he rose.
“It’s all right,” he said.
The Thinking Machine examined the work that had been done, grunted his satisfaction, and together they went to the skylight, leaving a thin, insulated wire behind them, stringing along to mark their path. They passed down through the roof and into the darkness of the hall of the upper story. Here the light was extinguished. From far below came the faint echo of a man’s footsteps as the watchman passed through the silent, deserted building.
“Be careful!” warned The Thinking Machine.
They went along the hall to a room in the rear, and still the wire trailed behind. At the last door they stopped. The Thinking Machine fumbled with some keys, then opened the way. Here an electric light was on. The room was bare of furniture, the only sign of recent occupancy being a telephone instrument on the wall.
Here The Thinking Machine stopped and stared at the spool of wire which he had permitted to wind off as he walked, and his thin face expressed doubt.
“It wouldn’t be safe,” he said at last, “to leave the wire exposed as we have left it. True, this floor is not occupied; but someone might pass this way and disturb it. You take the spool, go back to the roof, winding the wire as you go, then swing the spool down to me over the side of the building, so that I can bring it in through the window.