The achievements of Luther Trant

“Amazing, Trant.”

“More than merely amazing! Face the fact, Dr. Reiland, and it is astounding, incredible, disgraceful, that after five thousand years of civilization, our police and court procedures recognize no higher knowledge of men than the first Pharaoh put into practice in Egypt before the pyramids!”

Young Luther Trant ground his heel impatiently into the hoar frost on the campus walk. His queerly mismated eyes—one more gray than blue, the other more blue than gray—flashed at his older companion earnestly. Then, with the same rebellious impatience, he caught step once more with Reiland, as he went on in his intentness:

“You saw the paper this morning, Dr. Reiland? ‘A man’s body found in Jackson Park’; six suspects seen near the spot have been arrested. ‘The Schlaack’s abduction or murder’; three men under arrest for that since last Wednesday. ‘The Lawton trial progressing’; with the likelihood that young Lawton will be declared innocent; eighteen months he has been in confinement—eighteen months of indelible association with criminals! And then the big one: ‘Sixteen men held as suspected of complicity in the murder of Bronson, the prosecuting attorney.’ Did you ever hear of such a carnival of arrest? And put beside that the fact that for ninety-three out of every one hundred homicides no one is ever punished!”

The old professor turned his ruddy face, glowing with the frosty, early-morning air, patiently and questioningly toward his young companion. For some time Dr. Reiland had noted uneasily the growing restlessness of his brilliant but hotheaded young aid, without being able to tell what it portended.

“Well, Trant,” he asked now, “what is it?”

“Just that, professor! Five thousand years of being civilized,” Trant burst on, “and we still have the ‘third degree’! We still confront a suspect with his crime, hoping he will ‘flush’ or ‘lose color,’ ‘gasp’ or ‘stammer.’ And if in the face of this crude test we find him prepared or hardened so that he can prevent the blood from suffusing his face, or too noticeably leaving it; if he inflates his lungs properly and controls his tongue when he speaks, we are ready to call him innocent. Is it not so, sir?”

“Yes,” the old man nodded, patiently. “It is so, I fear. What then, Trant?”

“What, Dr. Reiland? Why, you and I and every psychologist in every psychological laboratory in this country and abroad have been playing with the answer for years! For years we have been measuring the effect of every thought, impulse and act in the human being. Daily I have been proving, as mere laboratory experiments to astonish a row of staring sophomores, that which—applied in courts and jails—would conclusively prove a man innocent in five minutes, or condemn him as a criminal on the evidence of his own uncontrollable reactions. And more than that, Dr. Reiland! Teach any detective what you have taught to me, and if he has half the persistence in looking for the marks of crime on men that he had in tracing its marks on things, he can clear up half the cases that fill the jail in three days.”

“And the other half within the week, I suppose, Trant?”

The older man smiled at the other’s enthusiasm.

For five years Reiland had seen his young companion almost daily; first as a freshman in the elementary psychology class—a red-haired, energetic country-boy, ill at ease among even the slight restrictions of this fresh-water university. The boy’s eager, active mind had attracted his attention in the beginning; as he watched him change into a man, Trant’s almost startling powers of analysis and comprehension had aroused the old professor’s admiration. The compact, muscular body, which endured without fatigue the great demands Trant made upon it and brought him fresh to recitations from two hours sleep after a night of work; and the tireless eagerness which drove him at a gallop through courses where others plodded, had led Reiland to appoint Trant his assistant just before his graduation. But this energy told Reiland, too, that he could not hope to hold Trant long to the narrow activities of a university; and it was with marked uneasiness that the old professor glanced sideways now while he waited for the younger man to finish what he was saying.

“Dr. Reiland,” Trant went on more soberly, “you have taught me the use of the cardiograph, by which the effect upon the heart of every act and passion can be read as a physician reads the pulse chart of his patient, the pneumograph, which traces the minutest meaning of the breathing; the galvanometer, that wonderful instrument which, though a man hold every feature and muscle passionless as death, will betray him through the sweat glands in the palms of his hands. You have taught me—as a scientific experiment—how a man not seen to stammer or hesitate, in perfect control of his speech and faculties, must surely show through his thought associations, which he cannot know he is betraying, the marks that any important act and every crime must make indelibly upon his mind—”

“Associations?” Dr. Reiland interrupted him less patiently. “That is merely the method of the German doctors—Freud’s method—used by Jung in Zurich to diagnose the causes of adolescent insanity.”

“Precisely.” Trant’s eyes flashed, as he faced the old professor. “Merely the method of the German doctors! The method of Freud and Jung! Do you think that I, with that method, would not have known eighteen months ago that Lawton was innocent? Do you suppose that I could not pick out among those sixteen men the Bronson murderer? If ever such a problem comes to me I shall not take eighteen months to solve it. I will not take a week.”

In spite of himself Dr. Reiland’s lips curled at this arrogant assertion. “It may be so,” he said. “I have seen, Trant, how the work of the German, Swiss and American investigators, and the delicate experiments in the psychological laboratory which make visible and record the secrets of men’s minds, have fired your imagination. It may be that the murderer would be as little, or even less, able to conceal his guilt than the sophomores we test are to hide their knowledge of the sentences we have had previously read to them. But I myself am too old a man to try such new things; and you will not meet here any such problems,” he motioned to the quiet campus with its skeleton trees and white-frosted grass plots. “But why,” he demanded suddenly in a startled tone, “is a delicate girl like Margaret Lawrie running across the campus at seven o’clock on this chilly morning without either hat or jacket?”

The girl who was speeding toward them along an intersecting walk, had plainly caught up as she left her home the first thing handy—a shawl—which she clutched about her shoulders. On her forehead, very white under the mass of her dark hair, in her wide gray eyes and in the tense lines of her straight mouth and rounded chin, Trant read at once the nervous anxiety of a highly-strung woman.

“Professor Reiland,” she demanded, in a quick voice, “do you know where my father is?”

“My dear Margaret,” the old man took her hand, which trembled violently, “you must not excite yourself this way.”

“You do not know!” the girl cried excitedly. “I see it in your face. Dr. Reiland, father did not come home last night! He sent no word.”

Reiland’s face went blank. No one knew better than he how great was the break in Dr. Lawrie’s habits that this fact implied, for the man was his dearest friend. Dr. Lawrie had been treasurer of the university twenty years, and in that time only three events—his marriage, the birth of his daughter, and his wife’s death—had been allowed to interfere with the stern and rigorous routine into which he had welded his lonely life. So Reiland paled, and drew the trembling girl toward him.

“When did you see him last, Miss Lawrie?” Trant asked gently.

“Dr. Reiland, last night he went to his university office to work,” she replied, as though the older man had spoken. “Sunday night. It was very unusual. All day he had acted so strangely. He looked so tired, and he has not come back. I am on my way there now to see—if—I can find him.”

“We will go with you,” Trant said quickly, as the girl helplessly broke off. “Harrison, if he is there so early, can tell us what has called your father away. There is not one chance in a thousand, Miss Lawrie, that anything has happened to him.”

“Trant is right, my dear.” Reiland had recovered himself, and looked up at University Hall in front of them with its fifty windows on the east glimmering like great eyes in the early morning sun. Only, on three of these eyes the lids were closed—the shutters of the treasurer’s office, all saw plainly, were fastened. Trant could not remember that ever before he had seen shutters closed on University Hall. They had stood open until, on many, the hinges had rusted solid. He glanced at Dr. Reiland, who shuddered, but straightened again, stiffly.

“There must be a gas leak,” Trant commented, sniffing, as they entered the empty building. But the white-faced man and girl beside him paid no heed, as they sped down the corridor.

At the door of Dr. Lawrie’s office—the third of the doors with high, ground-glass transoms which opened on both sides into the corridor—the smell of gas grew stronger. Trant stooped to the keyhole and found it plugged with paper. He caught the transom bar, set his foot upon the knob and, drawing himself up, pushed against the transom. It resisted; but he pounded it in, and, as its glass panes fell tinkling, the fumes of illuminating gas burst out and choked him.

“A foot,” he called down to his trembling companions, as he peered into the darkened room. “Some one on the lounge!”

Dropping down, he hurried to a recitation room across the corridor and dragged out a heavy table. Together they drove a corner of this against the lock; it broke, and as the door whirled back on its hinges the fumes of gas poured forth, stifling them and driving them back. Trant rushed in, threw up the three windows, one after the other, and beat open the shutters. As the gray autumn light flooded the room, a shriek from the girl and a choking exclamation from Reiland greeted the figure stretched motionless upon the couch. Trant leaped upon the flat-topped desk under the gas fixtures in the center of the room and turned off the four jets from which the gas was pouring. Darting across the hall, he opened the windows of the room opposite.

As the strong morning breeze eddied through the building, clearing the gas before it, while Reiland with tears streaming from his eyes knelt by the body of his lifelong friend, it lifted from a metal tray upon the desk scores of fragments of charred paper which scattered over the room, over the floor and furniture, over even the couch where the still figure lay, with its white face drawn and contorted.

Reiland arose and touched his old friend’s hand, his voice breaking. “He has been dead for hours. Oh, Lawrie!”

He caught to him the trembling, horrified girl, and she burst into sobs against his shoulder. Then, while the two men stood beside the dead body of him in whose charge had been all finances of this great institution, their eyes met, and in those of Trant was a silent question. Reddening and paling by turns, Reiland answered it, “No, Trant, nothing lies behind this death. Whether it was of purpose or by accident, no secret, no disgrace, drove him to it. That I know.”