The Man Who Fell Through the Earth

Perhaps the strangeness of it all blunted my efficiency. I had always flattered myself that I was at my best in an emergency, but all previous emergencies in which I had found myself were trivial and unimportant compared with this.

I felt as if I had been at a moving picture show. I had seen, as on the screen, a man shot, perhaps killed, and now all the actors had vanished as completely as they do when the movie is over.

Then, for I am not entirely devoid of conscience, it occurred to me that I had a duty, – that it was incumbent upon me to report to somebody. I thought of the police, but was it right to call them when I had so vague a report to make? What could I tell them? That I had seen shadows fighting? Heard a woman scream? Smelled smoke? Heard the report of a pistol? A whimsical thought came that the report of the pistol was the only definite report I could swear to!

Yet the whole scene was definite enough to me.

I had seen two men fighting, – shadows, to be sure, but shadows of real men. I had heard their voices raised in dissension of some sort, I had seen a scuffle and had heard a shot, of which I had afterward smelled the smoke, and, – most incriminating of all, – I had heard a woman’s scream. A scream, too, of terror, as for her life!

And then, I had immediately entered these rooms, and I had found them empty of all human presence, but with the smoke still hanging low, to prove my observations had been real, and no figment of my imagination.

I believed I had latent detective ability. Well, surely here was a chance to exercise it!

What more bewildering mystery could be desired than to witness a shooting, and, breaking in upon the scene, to find no victim, no criminal, and no weapon!

I hunted for the pistol, but found no more trace of that than of the hand that had fired it.

My brain felt queer; I said to myself, over and over, “a fight, a shot, a scream! No victim, no criminal, no weapon!”

I looked out in the hall again. I had already looked out two or three times, but I had seen no one. However, I didn’t suppose the villain and his victim had gone down by the elevator or by the stairway.

But where were they? And where was the woman who had screamed?

Perhaps it was she who had been shot. Why did I assume that Mr. Gately was the victim? Could not he have been the criminal?

The thought of Amos Gately in the rôle of murderer was a little too absurd! Still, the whole situation was absurd.

For me, Tom Brice, to be involved in this baffling mystery was the height of all that was incredible!

And yet, was I involved? I had only to walk out and go home to be out of it all. No one had seen me and no one could know I had been there.

And then something sinister overcame me. A kind of cold dread of the whole affair; an uncanny feeling that I was drawn into a fearful web of circumstances from which I could not honorably escape, if, indeed, I could escape at all. The three Gately rooms, though lighted, felt dark and eerie. I glanced out of a window. The sky was almost black and scattering snowflakes were falling. I realized, too, that though the place was lighted, the fixtures were those great alabaster bowls, and, as they hung from the ceiling, they seemed to give out a ghostly radiance that emphasized the strange silence.

For, in my increasingly nervous state, the silence was intensified and it seemed the silence of death, – not the mere quiet of an empty room.

I pulled myself together, for I had not lost all sense of my duty. I must do something, I told myself, sternly, – but what?

My hand crept toward the telephone that lay, turned over on its side, on Mr. Gately’s desk.

But I drew back quickly, not so much because of a disinclination to touch the thing that had perhaps figured in a tragedy but because of a dim instinct of leaving everything untouched as a possible clew.

Clew! The very word helped restore my equilibrium. There had been a crime of some sort, – at least, there had been a shooting, and I had been an eye-witness, even if my eyes had seen only shadows.

My rôle, then, was an important one. My duty was to tell what I had seen and render any assistance I could. But I wouldn’t use that telephone. It must be out of order, anyway, or the operator downstairs would be looking after it. I would go back to my own office and call up somebody. As I crossed the hall, I was still debating whether that somebody would better be the police or the bank people downstairs. The latter, I decided, for it was their place to look after their president, not mine.

I found Norah putting on her hat. The sight of her shrewd gray eyes and intelligent face caused an outburst of confidence, and I told her the whole story as fast as I could rattle it out.

“Oh, Mr. Brice,” she exclaimed, her eyes wide with excitement, “let me go over there! May I?”

“Wait a minute, Norah: I think I ought to speak to the bank people. I think I’ll telephone down and ask if Mr. Gately is down there. You know it may not have been Mr. Gately at all, whose shadow I saw – ”

“Ooh, yes, it was! You couldn’t mistake his head, and, too, who else would be in there? Please, Mr. Brice, wait just a minute before you telephone, – let me take one look round, – you don’t want to make a – to look foolish, you know.”

She had so nearly warned me against making a fool of myself, that I took the hint, and I followed her across the hall.

She went in quickly at the door of room number one. One glance around it and she said, “This is the first office, you see: callers come here, the secretary or stenographer takes their names and all that, and shows them into Mr. Gately’s office.”

As Norah spoke she went on to the second room. Oblivious to its grandeur and luxury, she gave swift, darting glances here and there and said positively: “Of course, it was Mr. Gately who was shot, and by a woman too!”

“The woman who screamed?”

“No: more likely not. I expect the woman who screamed was his stenographer. I know her, – at least, I’ve seen her. A little doll-faced jig, who belongs about third from the end, in the chorus! Be sure she’d scream at the pistol shot, but the lady who fired the shot wouldn’t.”

“But I saw the scrimmage and it was a man who shot.”

“Are you sure? That thick, clouded glass blurs a shadow beyond recognition.”

“What makes you think it was a woman, then?”

“This,” and Norah pointed to a hatpin that lay on the big desk.

It was a fine-looking pin, with a big head, but when I was about to pick it up Norah dissuaded me.

“Don’t touch it,” she warned; “you know, Mr. Brice, we’ve really no right here and we simply must not touch anything.”

“But, Norah,” I began, my common sense and good judgment having returned to me with the advent of human companionship, “I don’t want to do anything wrong. If we’ve no right here, for Heaven’s sake, let’s get out!”

“Yes, in a minute, but let me think what you ought to do. And, oh, do let me take a minute to look round!”

“No, girl; this is no time to satisfy your curiosity or, to enjoy a sight of these – ”

“Oh, I don’t mean that! But I want to see if there isn’t some clew or some bit of evidence to the whole thing. It is too weird! too impossible that three people should have disappeared into nothingness! Where are they?”

Norah looked in the same closets I had explored; she drew aside window draperies and portières, she hastily glanced under desks and tables, not so much, I felt sure, in expectation of finding anyone, as with a general idea of searching the place thoroughly.

She scrutinized the desk fittings of the stenographer.

“Everything of the best,” she commented, “but very little real work done up here. I fancy these offices of Mr. Gately’s are more for private conferences and personal appointments than any real business matters.”

“Which would account for the lady’s hatpin,” I observed.

“Yes; but how did they get out? You looked out in the hall, at once, you say?”

“Yes; I came quickly through these three rooms, and then looked out into the hall at once, and there was no elevator in sight nor could I see anyone on the stairs.”

“Well, there’s not much to be seen here. I suppose you’d better call up the bank people. Though if they thought there was anything queer they’d be up here by this time.”

I left Norah in Mr. Gately’s rooms while I went back to my own office and called up the Puritan Trust Company.