PAGE 5
The Scientific Cracksman
by
“Well, well, what do you think of that?” he exclaimed reflectively. “A child could have done that part of the job.”
Just then the lights went off for the night. Craig lighted the oil-lamp, and sat in silence until the electric light plant foreman appeared with; the card-record, which showed a curve practically identical with that of the night before.
A few moments later Professor Fletcher’s machine came up the driveway, and he joined us with a worried and preoccupied look on his face that he could not conceal. “She’s terribly broken up by the suddenness of it all,” he murmured as he sank into an armchair. “The shock has been too much for her. In fact, I hadn’t the heart to tell her anything about the robbery, poor girl.” Then in a moment he asked, “Any more clues yet, Kennedy?”
“Well, nothing of first importance. I have only been trying to reconstruct the story of the robbery so that I can reason out a motive and a few details; then when the real clues come along we won’t have so much ground to cover. The cracksman was certainly clever. He used an electric drill to break the combination and ran it by the electric light current.”
“Whew!” exclaimed the professor, “is that so? He must have been above the average. That’s interesting.”
“By the way, Fletcher,” said Kennedy, “I wish you would introduce me to your fiancee to-morrow. I would like to know her.”
“Gladly,” Fletcher replied, “only you must be careful what you talk about. Remember, the death of uncle has been quite a shock to her–he was her only relative besides myself.”
“I will,” promised Kennedy, “and by the way, she may think it strange that I’m out here at a time like this. Perhaps you had better tell her I’m a nerve specialist or something of that sort–anything not to connect me with the robbery, which you say you haven’t told her about.”
The next morning found Kennedy out bright and early, for he had not had a very good chance to do anything during the night except reconstruct the details. He was now down by the back gate with his camera, where I found him turning it end-down and photographing the road. Together we made a thorough search of the woods and the road about the gate, but could discover absolutely nothing.
After breakfast I improvised a dark room and developed the films, while Craig went down the back lane along the shore “looking for clues,” as he said briefly. Toward noon he returned, and I could see that he was in a brown study. So I said nothing, but handed him the photographs of the road. He took them and laid them down in a long line on the library floor. They seemed to consist of little ridges of dirt on either side of a series of regular round spots, some of the spots very clear and distinct on the sides, others quite obscure in the centre. Now and then where you would expect to see one of the spots, just for the symmetry of the thing, it was missing. As I looked at the line of photographs on the floor I saw that they were a photograph of the track made by the tire of an automobile, and I suddenly recalled what the gardener had said.
Next Craig produced the results of his morning’s work, which consisted of several dozen sheets of white paper, carefully separated into three bundles. These he also laid down in long lines on the floor, each package in a separate line. Then I began to realise what he was doing, and became fascinated in watching him on his hands and knees eagerly scanning the papers and comparing them with the photographs. At last he gathered up two of the sets of papers very decisively and threw them away. Then he shifted the third set a bit, and laid it closely parallel to the photographs.