you once carried it. I tore out the coat pocket in which I found the cigars and subjected it to the test. At some time there had been corrosive sublimate, in the form of powder or crystals, in the pocket, and in some manner, perhaps because of an imperfection in the package, a minute quantity was loose in your pocket.
“Here was an answer to every question, and more; here was how the cigars were poisoned, and, in combination with the tailor’s tag inside your pocket, a short history of your life. Briefly it was like this: Once you had corrosive sublimate in your pocket. For what purpose? First thought—to rid your home of insects. Second thought—if you were boarding, married or unmarried, the task of getting rid of the insects would have been left to the servant; and this would possibly have been the case if you had been living at home. So I assumed for the instant that you were keeping house, and if keeping house, you were married—you bought the poison for use in your own house.
“Now, without an effort, naturally, I had you married, and keeping house. Then what? The tailor’s tag, with your name, and the date your clothing was made—one year and three months ago. It is winter clothing. If you had worn it since the poison was loose in your pocket the thing that happened to you tonight would have happened to you before; but it never happened before, therefore I assume that you had the poison early last spring, when insects began to be troublesome, and immediately after that you laid away the suit until this winter. I know you are wearing the suit for the first time this winter, because, again, this thing has not happened before, and because, too, of the faint odor of moth balls. A band of crape on your hat, the picture of a young woman in your watch, and the fact that you are now living at your club, as your bill for last month shows, establish beyond doubt that you are a widower.”
“It’s perfectly miraculous!” I exclaimed.
“Logic, logic, logic,” snapped the irritable little scientist. “You are a lawyer, you ought to know the correlation of facts; you ought to know that two and two make four, not sometimes but all the time.”
THE FIRST PROBLEM
That strange, seemingly inexplicable chain of circumstances which had to do with the mysterious disappearance of a famous actress, Irene Wallack, from her dressing room in a Springfield theater in the course of a performance, while the echo of tumultuous appreciation still rang in her ears, was perhaps the first problem which was not purely scientific that The Thinking Machine was ever asked to solve. The scientist’s aid was enlisted in this case by Hutchinson Hatch, reporter.
“But I am a scientist, a logician,” The Thinking Machine had protested. “I know nothing whatever of crime.”
“No one knows that a crime has been committed,” the reporter hastened to say.
“There is something far beyond the ordinary in this affair. A woman has disappeared, evaporated into thin air in the hearing, almost in sight, of her friends. The police can make nothing of it. It is a problem for a greater mind than theirs.”
Professor Van Dusen waved the newspaper man to a seat and himself sank back into a great cushioned chair in which his diminutive figure seemed even more childlike than it really was.
“Tell me the story,” he said petulantly, “All of it.”
The enormous yellow head rested against the chair back, the blue eyes squinted steadily upward, the slender fingers were pressed tip to tip. The Thinking Machine was in a receptive mood. Hatch was triumphant; he had had only a vague hope that he could interest this man in an affair which was as bizarre as it was incomprehensible.
“Miss Wallack is thirty years old and beautiful,” the reporter began. “As an actress she has won high recognition not only in this country but in England. You may have read something of her in the daily papers, and if—”
“I never read the papers,” the other interrupted curtly. “Go on.”
“She is unmarried, and as far as anyone knows, had no immediate intention of changing her condition,” Hatch resumed, staring curiously at the thin face of the scientist. “I presume she had admirers—most beautiful women of the stage have—but she is one whose life has been perfectly clean, whose record is an open book. I tell you this because it might have a bearing on your conclusion as to a possible reason for her disappearance.
“Now the actual circumstances of that disappearance. Miss Wallack has been playing in Shakespearean repertoire. Last week she was in Springfield. On Saturday night, which concluded her engagement there, she appeared as Rosalind in ‘As You Like It.’ The house was crowded. She played the first two acts amid great enthusiasm, and this despite the fact that she was suffering intensely from headache to which she was subject at times. After the second act she returned to her dressing room and just before the curtain went up for the third the stage manager called her. She replied that she would be out immediately. There seems no possible shadow of doubt that it was her voice.
“Rosalind does not appear in the third act until the curtain has been up for six minutes. When Miss Wallack’s cue came she did not answer it. The stage manager rushed to her door and again called her. There was no answer. Then, fearing that she might have fainted, he went in. She was not there. A hurried search was made without result, and the stage manager finally was compelled to announce to the audience that the sudden illness of the star would make it impossible to finish the performance.
“The curtain was lowered and the search resumed. Every nook and corner back of the footlights was gone over. The stage doorkeeper, William Meegan, had seen no one go out. He and a policeman had been standing at the stage door talking for at least twenty minutes. It is therefore conclusive that Miss Wallack did not leave by that exit. The only other way it was possible to leave the stage was over the footlights. Of course she didn’t go that way. Yet no trace of her has been found. Where is she?”
“The windows?” asked The Thinking Machine.
“The stage is below the street level,” explained Hatch. “The window of her dressing room, Room A, is small and barred with iron. It opens into an air shaft that goes straight up for ten feet, and that is covered with an iron grating fixed in the granite. The other windows on the stage are not only inaccessible but are also barred with iron. She could not have approached either of these windows without being seen by other members of the company or the stage hands.”
“Under the stage?” suggested the scientist.
“Nothing,” the reporter went on. “It is a large cemented basement which was vacant. It was searched, because there was of course a chance that Miss Wallack might have become temporarily unbalanced and wandered down there. There was even a search made of the flies—that is the galleries over the stage where the men who work the drop curtains are stationed.”
There was silence for a long time. The Thinking Machine twiddled his fingers and continued to stare upward. He had not looked at the reporter. He broke the silence after a time. “How was Miss Wallack dressed at the time of her disappearance?”
“In doublet and hose—that is, tights,” the newspaper man responded. “She wears that costume from the second act until practically the end of the play.”
“Was all her street clothing in her room?”
“Yes, everything, spread across an unopened trunk of costumes. It was all as if she had left the room to answer her cue—all in order even to an open box of chocolate-cream candy on her table.”
“No sign of a struggle, nor any noise heard?”
“No.”
“Nor
