The Jacques Futrelle Megapack. Jacques Futrelle

me, was that the letter was written under coercion. Men who are being murdered don’t write cipher letters as intricate as that; and men who are committing suicide have no obvious reasons for writing such letters. The line ‘I dare not speak’ was silly. Pomeroy Stockton was not a prisoner. If he had feared a conspiracy to kill him why shouldn’t he speak?

      “All these things were in my mind when I asked you to see Stockton. I was particularly anxious to hear what he had to say as to the family Bible. And yet I may say I knew that page seven had been torn out of the book and was then in Miss Devan’s possession.

      “I may say, too, that I knew that the secret vault was empty. Whatever these two things contained, supposing she wrote the cipher, had been removed or she would not have called attention to them in this cipher. I had an idea that she might have written it from the mere fact that it was she who first called my attention to the possibility of a cipher.

      “Assuming then that the cipher was a forgery, that she wrote it, that it directly accused John Stockton, that she brought it to me, I had fairly conclusive proof that if Pomery Stockton had been murdered she had had a hand in it. John Stockton’s motive in trying to suppress the fact of a suicide, as he thought it, was perfectly clear. It was, as he said, to avoid disgrace. Such things are done frequently.

      “From the moment you told him of the possibility of murder, he suspected Miss Devan. Why? Because, above all, she had the opportunity, because she wanted the bulk of the estate, because there was some animosity against John Stockton.

      “This now proves to have been a broken-off love affair. John Stockton broke it off. He himself had loved Miss Devan. She had refused him. Later, when he broke off the love affair, she hated him.

      “Her plan for revenge was almost diabolical. It was intended to give her full revenge and the estate at the same time. She hoped, she knew, that I would read that cipher. She planned that it would send John Stockton to the electric chair.”

      “Horrible!” commented Hatch with a little shudder.

      “It was a fear that this plan might go wrong that induced her to try to kill Stockton by shooting him. The cellar was dark, but she forgot that ninety-nine revolvers out of a hundred leave slight powder stains on the hand of the person who fires them. Stockton said that she did not shoot him, because of that inexplicable loyalty which some men show to a woman they love or have loved.

      “Stockton made his secret visit to the house that night to get what was in that vault without her knowledge. He knew of its existence. His father had probably told him. The thing that appeared on page seven of the family Bible was in all probability the copper hardening process he was perfecting. I should think it had been written there in invisible ink. John Stockton knew this was there. His father told him. If his father told it, Miss Devan probably overheard it. She knew it, too.

      “Now the actual circumstances of the death. The girl must have had and used a key to the work room. After John Stockton left the house that Monday night she entered that room. She found his father dead of heart disease. The autopsy proved this.

      “Then the whole scheme was clear to her. She forged that cipher letter—as Pomeroy Stockton’s secretary she probably knew the handwriting better than anyone else in the world—placed it in his pocket, and the rest of it you know.”

      “But the Bible in John Stockton’s room?” asked Hatch.

      “Was placed there by Miss Devan,” replied The Thinking Machine. “It was a part of the general scheme to hopelessly implicate Stockton. She is a clever woman. She showed that when she produced the fountain pen, having carefully filled it with blue instead of black ink.”

      “What was in the locked vault?”

      “That I can only conjecture. It is not impossible that the inventor had only part of the formula he so closely guarded written on the Bible leaf and the other part of it in that vault, together with other valuable documents.

      “I may add that the letters which John Stockton had were not forged. They were written without Miss Devan’s knowledge. There was a vast difference in the handwriting of the cipher letter which she wrote and those others which the father wrote.

      “Of course it is obvious that the missing will is now, or was, in Miss Devan’s possession. How she got it, I don’t know. With that out of the way and this cipher unravelled apparently proving the son’s guilt, at least half, possibly all, of the estate would have gone to her.”

      Hatch lighted a cigarette thoughtfully and was silent for a moment.

      “What will be the end of it all?” he asked. “Of course, I understand that John Stockton will recover.”

      “The result will be that the world will lose a great scientific achievement—the secret of hardening copper, which Pomeroy Stockton had rediscovered. I think it safe to say that Miss Devan has burned every scrap of this.”

      “But what will become of her?”

      “She knows nothing of this. I believe she will disappear before Stockton recovers. He wouldn’t prosecute anyway. Remember he loved her once.”

      John Stockton was convalescent two weeks later, when a nurse in the City Hospital placed an envelope in his hands. He opened it and a little cloud of ashes filtered through his fingers onto the bed clothing. He sank back on his pillow, weeping.