The others dared not move a muscle. The ghost at the door broke the silence with a subterranean chuckle that sent a chilled spark down their spines.

  “Oh, that deceit should dwell in such a gorgeous palace!” said Harley Longstreet.

  In the splendid voice of Mr. Drury Lane.

  Scene 12

  THE WEEHAWKEN-NEWBURGH LOCAL

  WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 14, 12:18 A.M.

  An odd journey… History, the unimaginative jade, repeated herself. The same locale, the same black night, the same time, the same clack and clatter of iron wheels.

  Eighteen minutes past midnight found the police party which Mr. Drury Lane had mustered seated in one of the rear cars of the Weehawken-Newburgh local train, clanking along between the Weehawken terminus and North Bergen. Aside from Lane, Thumm, Bruno, and the accompanying squad there were few people in the coach.

  Lane sat swathed in a bundling topcoat, a wide-brimmed felt hat pulled over his face, so that his features were concealed. He sat beside Inspector Thumm by the window, his head turned to the pane, speaking to no one and apparently either asleep or absorbed in some mental problem. Neither the District Attorney, sitting opposite, nor the Inspector said a word; both men were very nervous. The tension had transmitted itself to the detectives sitting about them; they talked little and sat like ramrods. They seemed to be waiting for an active climax of whose very nature they were in ignorance.

  Thumm was restless. He glanced at Lane’s averted head, sighed, and got to his feet. He tramped heavily out of the car. Almost at once he returned with an excitement-flushed face. He sat down and leaned forward, whispering to Bruno. “Something queer… Just spotted Ahearn and Imperiale in the forward car. Think I ought to tell Lane?”

  Bruno searched the muffled head of Lane. He shrugged. “I guess we’d better let him handle everything. He seems to know what he’s doing.”

  The train shuddered to a stop. Bruno looked out of the window; they had arrived, he saw, at the North Bergen station. Thumm consulted his watch - the time was exactly 12:20. In the misty light of the station a few passengers could be discerned getting on the train. Lanterns swung, the doors banged shut, the train trundled on again.

  A few moments later the conductor appeared at the forward end of the coach and began to collect the punch tickets. When he reached the police party he grinned in recognition; Thumm nodded sourly and paid for the fare of the party in cash. The conductor took from his outside breast pocket a number of standard cash-fare duplex tickets, placed them neatly together, punched them at two places and, ripping the tickets in half, handed Thumm one set, depositing the duplicate set in another pocket…

  Mr. Drury Lane, the somnolent, or the thoughtful, chose this instant to spring startlingly into life. He rose, whipped off the concealing hat and coat, and turned squarely about to face the conductor. The man stared blankly. Lane plunged his hand into one of the patch-pockets of his sack-coat, produced a silver case and, snapping it open, took out a pair of eyeglasses. He did not put them on, merely regarded the conductor with a reflective, curious preoccupation. The face - strong, pouchy, dissipated - seemed to enthrall the conductor.

  It affected him strangely. His hand had stopped in mid-air, holding his ticket-punch. He took in the details of this grim figure confronting him, at first uncomprehendingly, then with a rush of terrified intelligence. His mouth popped open, his tall burly figure sagged, the winy coloring of his face vanished in a flood of dead-white. Out of his mouth came a choked sound, a single word: “Longstreet… And as he stood there, petrified, physically incapable of nervous activity, the artificial lips of Harley Longstreet smiled and his right hand, dropping the silver case and the eyeglasses, in an effortless movement went again into his pocket and came out clutching something dull and metallic… A pounce forward, a tiny click, and the conductor tore his eyes away from that smiling face to look down stupidly, dazedly at the pair of handcuffs on his wrists.

  Whereupon Mr. Drury Lane smiled again, this time down at the bleak unbelieving faces of Inspector Thumm and District Attorney Bruno, who had watched the brief tableau in unbreathing silence, powerless to move. Fine lines appeared on the foreheads of both men; they looked from Lane to the conductor, who was cowering now, moistening his lips with a trembling tongue, leaning against the back of the seat - broken, ashamed, pathetically unable to believe the evidence of his eyes as he stared at the manacles on his wrists.

  And Mr. Drury Lane said calmly to Inspector Thumm: “Did you bring the inking-pad as I requested, Inspector?”

  And Thumm without a word took a tin-covered inking-pad from his pocket and a tablet of white paper.

  “Please take this man’s fingerprints, Inspector.”

  And Thumm struggled to his feet. Still unbelievingly, he complied… Lane stood by the side of the stricken conductor, who like him leaned against a seat; and while Thumm grasped the man’s nerveless hand and proceeded to press it on the pad, Lane picked up from his seat the discarded topcoat, searched one of the pockets, and brought forth the manila envelope he had received on Monday. As Thumm applied the conductor’s slack fingers to the paper, Lane took from the envelope the Uruguayan telephotographic prints and studied them with a chuckle.

  “Finished, Inspector?”

  Thumm handed Lane the wet impression of the conductor’s fingerprints. Lane held the paper side by side with the photographic prints, cocking his head critically at the whorls. Then he returned the wet impression to the Inspector, together with the photograph.

  “What would you say, Inspector? You’ve compared thousands of these, no doubt.”

  Thumm scanned them carefully. “They look the same to me,” he muttered.

  “Identical, of course.”

  Bruno faltered to his feet. “Mr. Lane, who - what-?”

  Lane grasped the arm of the manacled man in a not unfriendly manner. “Mr. Bruno, Inspector Thumm, allow me to introduce one of God’s most unfortunate children, Mr. Martin Stopes-”

  “But-”

  “- alias,” continued Lane, “Conductor Edward Thompson of the West Shore Railroad-”

  “But-”

  “- alias an unknown gentleman on the ferry boat-”

  “But I don’t see-”

  “- alias,” concluded Lane in an amiable way, “Conductor Charles Wood.”

  “Charles Woodl” spluttered Thumm and Bruno together. They turned to stare at the cowering figure of their prisoner. Bruno whispered: “But Charles Wood is dead!“

  “Dead to you, Mr. Bruno, and dead to you, Inspector Thumm. But to me,” said Mr. Drury Lane, “very much alive.”

  Behind the Scenes

  THE EXPLANATION - THE HAMLET

  WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 14, 4 P.M.

  And as it was in the beginning, there was the Hudson River far below, and a white sail, and a waddling steamboat. As it had done five weeks before, the automobile wound up the road rising steadily with its burden of Inspector Thumm and District Attorney Bruno toward the fragile beauty of The Hamlet, set in its forest of russet like a delicately colored castle out of a fairy-tale.

  Five weeks 1

  Far above, the cloud-framed turrets, the ramparts, the battlements, the needlepoint of the church-spire… And then the quaint little bridge and the thatched hut and the ruddy little old man pointing to his swinging wooden sign… The creaky old gate, the bridge, the gravel road ever winding upward, the oak forest now red-brown, the stone wall of the castle grounds…

  They crossed the drawbridge and were met at the oak portals by Falstaff. Into that manorial hall out of past ages, under seasoned old ceiling-beams, by knights in armor and the massive pegged furniture of Elizabethan England. Under the incredible masks and the gargantuan candelabra, and there was the bald bewhiskered little Quacey…

  In the pleasant warmth of Mr. Drury Lane’s private apartments, toes toasting at the fire, the two men relaxed. Lane was in a velveteen jacket, and he looked very handsome and youthful in the reflection of the flinging flames. Quacey squeaked gibberish into a little microphonic instrument in the wall and soon Falstaff appeared in the rosy flesh, beaming over a trayful of glasses filled with some aromatic concoction of liqueurs; and there were canapés that disappeared under the shameless forays of Inspector Thumm.

  “I suppose,” remarked Mr. Drury Lane when they sat, replete and comfortable, before the fire and Falstaff had returned to his culinary caverns, “I suppose you gentlemen seek the explanation of the verbal acrobatics in which I have, I fear inconsiderately, been indulging during the past weeks. It can’t be another murder so soon!”

  Bruno murmured: “Hardly, although you may be sure, from what I’ve seen in the past thirty-six hours, that I shouldn’t hesitate to consult you about one if there were one to consult you about. A little involved, but you get my point. Mr. Lane, both the Inspector and I are eternally grateful for - I’ll be damned if I know how to express it.”

  “To put it another way,” said Thumm with a grumpy smile, “you’ve saved our jobs.”

  “Fudge, foam, and fiddlesticks.” Lane dismissed the subject with a gentle wave of his hand. “The papers have informed me that Stopes has confessed. Somewhere, somehow, one of them got wind of my part in the affair, and I have been besieged all day by utterly implacable reporters… Has anything interesting come out of Stopes’s confession?”

  “Interesting to us,” said Bruno, “but I suppose - although I’ll be hanged if I know how - I suppose you know the substance of his confession.”

  “On the contrary.” Lane smiled. “There are a number of items in connection with Mr. Martin Stopes on which I am completely at sea.”

  Both men shook their heads. Lane did not explain; he urged Bruno to relate the story told by the prisoner. When Bruno began from the beginning - the obscure and enthusiastic young geologist in Uruguay in 1912 - Lane did not comment. He seemed curious about certain details, however, and by adroit questioning elicited information which his conversation with Juan Ajos, the Uruguayan consul, had not brought out.

  He learned that it had been Martin Stopes himself who in 1912 had discovered the manganese mine, while he and his partner Crockett were prospecting in the wild interior. Because the two men were penniless and needed capital to work the mine, they had taken in as additional partners on smaller percentages two other prospectors - Longstreet and DeWitt, introduced to young Stopes by Crockett. Stopes in his confession made it painfully clear that the crime he had been accused of subsequently - the murder of his wife by machete - was committed by Crockett. Crockett had attacked Stopes’s wife one night in a drunken lust, while Stopes was at the nearby mine; and when she resisted, he had killed her. Longstreet, the ring-leader, had seized the opportunity and concocted the plan whereby the three were to accuse Stopes of the murder; and, since no one knew that the mine legally belonged to Stopes, they took over the mine themselves - it had been unregistered. Crockett was pliable at this time; he was shaken by his crime and accepted the plan eagerly. DeWitt, Stopes said, was a man of softer fiber; but he was dominated by Longstreet and forced by threats to join the conspiracy.

  The shock of his wife’s death, the realization of his partners’ perfidy had unbalanced the young geologist. It was not until after his conviction and imprisonment that he regained his normal faculties; and then he realized that he was helpless. From that moment, then, his thoughts, the thrust of his ambitions and aspirations, were diverted into a bitter desire for revenge. He had been willing, he confessed, to spend the rest of his life in executing an escape and killing the three scoundrels. By the time of his escape he had aged considerably; the rigors of close confinement had taken toll of his features, although his body was as strong as ever. He felt reasonably certain that when the time for vengeance came, he would not be recognized by his intended victims.

  “These things, however,” concluded Bruno, “aren’t nearly so important to us now, Mr. Lane, as the - to me, at least - almost supernatural way in which you solved the case. Just how in the world did you arrive at such an uncanny solution?”

  “Supernatural?” Lane shook his head. “I do not believe in miracles, and certainly I have never performed any. What success I was able to achieve in these fascinating investigations was the direct issue, in a manner of speaking of straight thinking out of observation.

  “I might begin by a generalization. For example, of the three murders with which we were confronted, the simplest was the first. You’re surprised? But the circumstances attending Longstreet’s curious demise permitted of incredibly damning logic. You will recall that I came to know of these circumstances in an ordinarily unsatisfactory way - by hearsay. Not having been on the scene of the crime, I deliberated under the handicap of no personal observation. I will say, however” - and he inclined gravely toward the Inspector - “that Thumm’s account was so straightforward and detailed that I was able to visualize the component elements of the drama as clearly as if I had been present myself.”

  Drury Lane’s eyes were brilliant. “In the street-car murder one inference was indisputable; it stood out at once, and I cannot to this moment comprehend how its self-evidence escaped the intelligence of both of you. Namely, that the nature of the weapon was such as to make it apparent that it could not be handled with the bare hand without the handler pricking himself with the poisoned needles with fatal results to himself. You, Inspector, were zealously careful to keep from picking up the needled cork - so much so that you used a pair of pincers and later sealed the cork in a glass bottle. You showed the weapon to me, and I saw at once that the murderer must have used some sort of protective covering for his hands and fingers both in transporting the weapon to the car and then in manipulating it during the operation of slipping it into Longstreet’s pocket. I say, I saw this at once; actually, even if I had not seen the cork, you had described it so accurately that I could not miss the obvious point.

  “The natural question then arose: What is the common form of protective covering for the hand? And the natural answer was: A glove, of course. How did this satisfy the murderer’s requirements? Well, a glove would suit his purpose practically - it has a tough texture, affording complete protection especially if it is made of leather; and being an accepted article of clothing it is more inconspicuous than a hand-covering of an unusual nature. In a well- planned crime we have no reason to believe that a murderer would manufacture a strange protective covering when an ordinary glove would fulfill his needs even better; and what is more to the point, would, if seen or found, remain relatively inconspicuous and non-suspicious. The only article which might serve as a glove and yet not be manufactured or suspicious, would be a handkerchief; but a handkerchief wrapped around a hand would be clumsy, conspicuous and, more important, would not afford certain protection against the poisoned needles. It also occurred to me that the murderer might have employed the same method as did Inspector Thumm - that is, manipulated the needled cork with pincers. But a little thought convinced me that such a method, while it would have kept the murderer’s own skin from the poison pricks, would on the other hand have entailed a delicacy of manipulation too uncertain in the light of the circumstances - a jammed street-car, very little freedom of manual movement, and what was necessarily a strictly limited period of time in which to work.

  “I felt certain, then, that when the murderer slipped the needled cork into Longstreet’s pocket, he must have worn a glove.”

  Thumm and Bruno looked at each other; Lane closed his eyes and proceeded in a low unaccented tone. “Now we knew that the cork was dropped in the pocket after Longstreet boarded the car. This was brought out by testimony. We also knew that from the moment Longstreet boarded the car, the doors and windows remained shut, with two exceptions which I shall discuss in a moment. It was indisputable, too, that the murderer must have been one of the occupants of the car later examined by the Inspector; since from the time Longstreet and his party got on the car no one left with one exception, and this person left by Sergeant Duffy’s own order and returned.

  “We also knew from a thorough search of all the occupants of the car, including the conductor and motorman, that no glove was found on the persons of the occupants in the car or in the rooms in which these people were later questioned at the carbarn; and you will remember that when they went from the car to these rooms it was through cordons of police and detectives, who found nothing over this route when it was subsequently searched. Please recall, Inspector, that I specifically asked you at the termination of your recital whether gloves, among other things, had been found; and you replied in the negative.

  “In other words: Although the murderer was still in the street-car, there was the peculiar situation of an object which must have been used in the commission of the crime, not being found after the commission of the crime. It could not have been thrown out of a window; no window was open from a period even prior to the boarding of the Longstreet party. It could not have been thrown through a door, because Duffy himself opened and closed the doors on the only occasions when they were used after the crime and noted nothing of this nature, or he would have mentioned it. The glove could not have been destroyed or mutilated, or some remains would have been found and reported. Even had it been passed to an accomplice, or secretly to an innocent person, it would have been found; since the accomplice could have disposed of it no better than the murderer, or it would have been discovered on the innocent party’s person during the search later.

  “How, then, did this ghostly glove disappear?” Drury Lane sipped contentedly from a mug of steaming coffee, which Falstaff had served to his master and guests a moment before. “I was mentally titillated, I assure you, gentlemen. Speaking of miracles, Mr. Bruno, I was confronted with one then; but being something of a skeptic, I proceeded to explain away this vanishment by mortal means. For I had eliminated all but one means of disposal; the last remaining means, by the old logical law, must therefore have been the medium of disappearance. If the glove could not have been thrown out of the car, and yet it left the car, it could have left only on the person of someone who himself left the car. But only one person left the car! That was the conductor, Charles Wood, sent by Sergeant Duffy to summon Officer Morrow and notify headquarters of the tragedy. When Officer Sittenfield, who had run up from his Ninth Avenue traffic post, was admitted, he was let in by Duffy, and he did not leave the car. Neither did Officer Morrow when he finally arrived at Conductor Wood’s behest. In other words, while two personalities, both policemen, boarded the car after the murder, no one but Charles Wood left the car after the murder. That he returned was of course irrelevant to the progress of the argument.