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HomeMy WebLinkAboutZurich Herald, 1933-05-04, Page 2c •.Murder.. at Bridge B ANNE AUSTIN. HAPTER XLVIII. "That would be impossible, Miles! Your wife is already dead;" Then came the slow, terrible words, "Tracey Arthur ,Miles, I arrest you for the murder of your wife, known as Juan- ita Leigh Selim, and for the murder of Dexter Sprague. And it is my duty bo warm you that anything . you say may be used against yon!" Tracey Miles lifted his ashen face and s Beed at the detective blankly. "All—over—isn't it? May I-have— a drink?" Tracey poured himself a drink from the dec,n_ler and raised the glass to his lips. "I have—nothing—to say!" the murderer gasped thickly, then fell heavily to the floor. It was three-quarters of an hour later. District Attorney Sanderson. Capt. Strawn and Dundee were alone in. the %se where Nita "Selim" had been murdered and where her husband had confessed his crimes by commit- ting suicide. "I should have known," Dundee ad- mitted, "that Miles would not have f:•.iled to provide against the possibil- ity of discovery." "I'm glad he did," Sanderson said curtly. "Captain Strawn and I are still in the dark as to exactly how Miles managed his wife's murder. You have not told us how you knew it was Miles—" • "Because I had very little actual proof. It was not until I was fooling with a set of anagrams that I saw it." "Saw what?" Straws demanded. "That Selim is simply Miles spelled 1 • kward," Dundee explained. "Miles used an assumed name at the party at which he met Nita Leigh. Even the first name, `Mat,' by which she knew •- him, was only his initials re- versed." "Simple—but clever," Sanderson commented. "Just as all of Miles' schemes were. But let me show you how he killed his wife." Dundee strode to the big bronze lamp and began unscrewing the big, jewel -studded bowl. Wedged, at a downward -slanting angle, inside the howl, which was 12 inches in diameter, was Judge Marshall's snub-nosed -automrnatic and silencer, the end -of the silencer projecting slightly from the bole whose jewel. was missing. a!ehere's a blank cartridge in the --ran -crow; of course... See the electro- magnet strapped to the gun butt? He god it from the bell Sprague had in- stalled from here to Lydia's bedroom. The magnet was connected with the electric wire in one of the two lamp sockets, as you_ see it now, and the long cord of the lamp was connected with the wire of the bell in the dining room --so connected that when anyone stepped on the two little metal plates (hider the dining room rug, the kit- chen bell would ring and the gun would be fired simultaneously." "But what a chance Miles took on the bullet not hitting her in a fatal spot!" Sanderson commenter'. "No. Ile would onry fire the gun if • Nita was seated before her dressing tale. As an experienced marksman he could calculate the path of the bul- let to a nicety. Miles, standing at the sideboard, listened until the first faint notes of Juanita fold hini that Nita was powdering her .lace, and he could he sure she was sitting dawn to the task. Of course, if she had been Wounded only, living to tell not only how the shot was fired but who had ltiative to kill her, Miles would have committed suicide then." "What if Nita had not asked him to mix the cocktails or had not gone to powder her face?" Strawn asked. "The whole party was going to dine and dance at.the Country Club. Miles would have ,escorted her homey as he had dune on Monday night, and would then have made his opportunity. But X• musttell you that on Saturday Enurntng, according to the telephone e operator in Miles' office, Nita rang him to say she must see him as soon es possible, her unexpressed intention. being .to tell him that she was not going to bother him again. He told her he. would be right out, but Nita said she and Lydia were going into Hamilton: and would nest be back until 2.30—the time the bridge game • was hedu%ed to begin. But Miles came cm out, baying previously stolen the gun and silencer and having studied the house*" "How did ie get in?" Sauelerson wanted to know. "Judge Marshall had lent hint a key 3 February, when Miles wanted to show the house to an engaged young r..an in his offices, and Miles never re- turned it... Well, when Miles ar- rived he found Ralph Hammond here, and had to leave, waiting at a safe (::stance until the .coast was clear about one o'clock. But evert so he had more than an hour to do his care- fully planned job." "But you were wrong about the secre' shelf!" Strawn gloated. "No. It as the absence of finger- prints there that kept me on the right track. Miles had searched the shelf for the marriage certificate which he could not know Nita had already burned." "How was Sprague killed?" Sander- son interrupted impatiently. Dundee reached into the tool chest and brought out a narrow, deep draw- er. "First I must tell you that Miles g the gun out of the lamp Saturday night, sneaking in while I was talking with Lydia in. the basement. A little later he came back noisily nough to offer ....yak a job as nurse in his home. Withoutt question he assured himself that she knew nothing, or she would have gone the ,oay of Nita and Spra- gue.... Now as to Sprague. Despite my warnings, Sprague attempted to carry on the blackmail scheme. Per- haps Miles put him off for a day or two, but on Wednesday afternoon he made an appointment with Sprague, telling him that, if he would come to his home that evening, and manage to leave the bridge gai'e while he was dummy, he would find the money in a drawer of the cabinet that stood in the trophy room between the two win- dows... This drawer:." "But—how?" Sanderson frowned. "Very simple! When Speague pull- ed open this drawer, which was just at the height of his stomach, he re- ceived a bullet in his heart.. .. See these four little holes? ... A vise was screwed into the bottom of the drawer so that it gripped the gun with its silencer at an upward angle. A piece of string. was tied t., the trig- ger and fastened somehow to the underside of the drawer, so that when Sprague pulled the drawer open the string as drawn taut and the trigger palled. Practically the same mechan- ism by which he tried to murder me. The kick of the gun jerked the drawer shut. All Mies had to do when he was pretending to look for Sprague was to turn off the trophy room light; by a button in the hall." "Then he had the rest of the night to remove the gun!" "Yes. Sometime during the night, after Flora was asleep with a seda- tive, he removed the gun and the vise, but he could not remove the holes the screws had made. His next concern was to make the murder jibe com- pletely with Captain Strawn's theory of a gunman who had trailed his quarry to the Miles home and shot him through the window. The window was already open, but the screen must be raised, too, and Sprague's finger- prints had to be on the nickel catches by which the curtain screen is raised or lowered. Of course Sprague had not touched the screen—" "Do you mean to say he lugged the corpse to the window and lifted it up so that he could press the stiff fingers upon, the nickel catches?" "No." Dundee answered. "That was not necessary. He simply remov- ed the curtain screen and carried it to where Spraj'ue's right hand lay, palm upward, on the floor, and press- ed the thumb and forefinger against the nickel catches. But the finger- prints thus made were .reversed—as I discovered when I examined the prints in Carraway's office today. Miles could not turn the stiff hand over without bruising the dead flesh; con- sequently the print of the forefinger was on the catch where the thumb print would normally have been." "Well—" Sanderson drew a deep breath. e "He was a cleverer man than any of us 'suspected, and it is a pity that Nita dict not fear him as she feared Sprague's vengeance when she made her will." * "Hello! What are you doing back here?" Dundee exclaimed ;n anrprise when, upon returning to the living room, the three men found Penny Grain. "Dad wants a private word with you," Penny explained, her brown eyes glowing with happiness. "He's un the front porch. . And you ought to see Mother! She looks like a 20 - year -old bride!" When Dundee joined him on the Swayze-Cree Lake Gold Syndicate _ J SUITS 210, McKINNON BUILDING, TORONTO, CAN, Telephone Waverley 2422 CAPITALIZATION: 3,500 UNITS AT $10 EACH This Syndicate was formed to acquire and develop a group of twelve claims on Cree Lake, in Swayze 'Township. ,Main vein ten to fifteen feet wide, with assay of $7 in gold per tom Full information, including engineer's report, on. request. — +• - Japanese contender for 'north- • south golf honors at Pinehurst, N.C. Pumitaka Konoye, son of the Japanese prince, is entered in the amateur championship. He at- • tends school in New Jersey. porch, Roger Crain's handsome face flushed painfully, but there was hap- piness in his brown eyes, too. "Serena Hart asked me to thank you for giving her Penny's message to pass on to me. I'm sure you've' guessed a lot, but what you probably don't know is that Serena used the securities I had sent to -ter for *safe keeping, to play the market with. She wouldn't let ne torch a penny of the money until she had turned it into enough to clear up all my debts in Hamilton.... Then," and he sighed slightly, "she sent me home... Not that I'm sorry. I'm going to try to make Margaret and Penny happy—' "Through?" Penny called from the doorway, and her red lips were so adorably rounded over the word that Bonnie Dundee forgot Tracey Miles and his ingenious schemes. There was room for nothing in his mind but an ingenious scheme of. his own—a plan to get her alone so that he could kiss that soft, provocative mouth... (The End.). Bonnie Lesley ,O saw ye bonnie Lesley .As she geed o'er the border? She's gone, like Alexander, To spread her ,conquests farther To see her is to love her, And love but her forever; For Nature made her what she is, And never made anther! The Powers aboou will tent thee; Misfortune sha'na steer thee; Thou'rt like themselves sea lovely, That ill they'll ne'er let near thee. Rturn again, fair Lesley, Return to Caledonie! That we may brag we 'hoe a lass There's nane again sae bonnie. —Robert Burns. "Poems". "So he no longer argues that women haven't the mentality of men?" "No; that argument won't hold Pince so many women he meets make a monkey of him•at bridge. Men Buying Powder Puffs Cosmetic Manufacturer Says Chicago.—Adam is taking tothe powder puff. That is ou the authority of B. G. Breslauer of New York, a cos- metic manufacturer exhibiting at the 10th annual raid -west beauty trade show here, and it came out in discus- sing which—Adam or Eve—spent the more in representing a good face to the public. And the answer to that, summarized by Breslauer, was: In- cluding his shaving creams, hair tonics, pomades, razors, tooth paste, powder, hand and face lotions, Adam spends as much as Eve does for her face powder, rouge, lipstick, °reams and lotions. Cosmetics Sold across the retail Counter this last year were estimated by Breslauer at between $16,000,000 and $20,000,000. That's an increase of 5 per cent, over the previous year—thanks, Bres- lauer said, in part to Adam's discovery of his wife or sister's creams lotions, and face powders. Men, he said, are now powdering their noses—and no doubt rising pow- der puffs—with feminine face powder as ;well as talcum after shaving. Flying Up Where Humans Don't Belong ORANGE PEKOE "Humans don't belong up hero." Thi was the thought that came to Apoll Soucek, navy pilot, six or eight mile above the city of Washington, whit be was climbing toward a new world' record for height, writes 'Lauren D Lyman in the N.Y. Times Magazine Ile was above the path of the highes birds. No creature dependent on its own natural endowment could breath and live in that thin, fiercely cold air lie was above all semblance of clouds Pressing in upon hint, through the edges .of electrically heated goggles, through the fur lining of his leathern, hoodlike helmet, along the seams and Joints of his thick flying suit and sheepskin boots, cane the cold—pun- ishing; persistent, resistless cold. It attacked the machine as well as the man. It congealed the grease around the friction parts of the con- trol surfaces. It bit into frame and wing and whirling propeller, doing strange things to steel and magnesium alloy, setting up mysterious changes —molecular, deep -buried, incalculable stirrings in the heart of the metal— which cut short the span of its life and increased the hazard against the life of the man controlling the ma- chine as he advanced into this undis- covered realm of the air. The cold -85 degrees below zero— combined with the thinning air to at- tack the mghty engine. It drove through the heat. The engine faltered, coughing for life up there in the thin air, which grew thnner with each foot of climb. The wings gripped and slipped' in this rarefied medium. The plane fell off on one side, out of balance, and went down into a spin. The pilot, sluggish in mind and body, put his freezing lips to the oxygen tube, gain- ed a glimmer of reason and strength, righted the plane and started back again, to recover the height he had lost and perhaps add a few more feet. No—"humans don't belong up here." Yet into that same unknown region, that fringe between the warm blan- ket of air about the life -bearing earth and the much -talked -of stratosphere, which really commences a little less than ten miles above the surface, the British Everest expedjtion now flies, There is something about this busie ness of flying high that attracts and ,holds the interest of aviators. Like other explorers they seek to push out a little further into the unknown. Something hidden. Go and find it. . • . Lost, and waiting for you. Go! It is perhaps the same urge that drives the small boy to the topmost slender branch of the tallest tree in his neighborhood, that forces archi- tects and builders to create Empire State Buildings and Eiffel Towers and, after all, the very same urge that start- ed men flying in the first place. The wonder of it all is that after a man has attempted such a flight he is eager to make another, no matter what happen- ed on his first. The Swiss scientist, :Auguste Pic - card, twice entered the stratosphere by balloon in his studies of the elusive cosmic ray. Piccard used a sealed aluminum alloy sphere for a cabin, and, with air prurifiers and a supply of oxygen, was protected from both cold and thin air. Yet when the gas valve of his balloon refused duty at 50,000 feet above the earth and there was no way for him to force a descent but to await the night and its cooling temperatures—which would contract the bag—he and his companion learn- ed the dangers of venturing beyond the beaten path. For long minutes the two men watched their altometer, sta- tionary, as their air supply dwindled. Finally the big gas bag began to set- tle and they landed safely. if uncom- fortably, on a glacier in the Tyrol. Yet a year later Piccard again went into the air—to 53,600 feet, 1,900 feet above his previous record. This time danger did not come close until just before he landed. The clumsy metal ball missed the Adriatic Sea by a few yards. The Swiss scientist made a re- port on this second flight in which he summed' up the areonautics part in three,words: "Everything went well," The preparations for altitude flights are all alike. Care is exercised to see that the engine is as perfect as ma- chinery ban be. Altitude instruments, cl y u , techometers—for counting the engine revolutions—thermometers, oil gauges, are thoroughly tested, and every strut and wire is gone over with microscopic thoroughness. The pilot carefully studies weather reports. A day is chosen when prospects for fair weather for miles around are of the best. Mechanics start the motor; and the pilot, wearing fur -lined gar- ments from head to foot, as well as a face mask and electrically heated gog- gles, climbs stiffly in, a parachute strapped to his back. For many .min- utes he listens to the engine, his train- ed ear ready to catch the least uneven- ness in the drumming note of the ex- hausts. Then he nods ' to the me- chanics, who pull away the chocks in front of his wheels. He guns the mo- tor, waves to the ground crew and in a fraction of a seoond is in the air. He climbs a: ,half mile In the first minute. At a mile he is still climbing and climbing fast. His fiyng suit is oppressively warm even though the air is much colder than on the grorntd.Ile is flying in great circles now, keeping close to the aitport while he can, , watching his drift in the sharper winds of the upper levels. 5 0 • e s t e A .glance at the 011 temperature, an. BLEND' "Fresh from the Gardens' other at the "tach." The engine is per- forming nobly. At 10,000 feet the pilot tests the oxygen, takes a tiny sip from the tube already chill in the colder air. It like a cocktail. He feels like singing and decides to let the oxygen alone until later. Now he switches on his supercharger': The air is thinning and the motor, gulping in great quan- tities through the hungry carburetor, needs all it can get, As the fins of this tiny air turbine, whirling at the rate of 20,000 revolutions to the minute, scoop in and compress the air the mo- tor responds and the climb quickens. Now the clouds are all below—white, cottony masses reflecting the sun with a blinding light. Now and then one of them catches the shadow of the plane and rings it in rainbow colors. Dimly, the flier sees the earth; brown fields and green blend in the -distance and become blue and purple. As the aviator climbs • the earth, in- stead of being flat as it appears -at first, becomes a great saucer, then a bowl, its sides keeping steadily on a level with the plane. Twenty thousand feet and a little oxygen, He finds himself intent on engine speed and sound, intent on rate of climb and his gasoline supply. Through the clouds he sees the Iand, and, fixing a point,..he roughly gauges his drift. That is all he has to tell him about the winds. He hums some song of hangar or ward room. He wishes for a smoke, 9 though not very much. Nothing mat- ters particularly. Everything is all !( right. Then, gradually, it becomes an FREE IMAM.. M.M..O.Y11*. France and Russia Arrange Exchange of Army Observers Paris.—Military observers are to be exchanged by France and Russia ai the next step in the program of zap= prochement between the two countries: This is in keepir.• with a concilia-d tion movement with the Soviets which he French have been pressing since nationalism began to show strength hi Germany and Central Europe reacted unfavorably to German demands foo revision of the Versailles treaty. A military alliance, however, is not envisaged, the Foreign Office anir nounced. Two French army officers, Colone Edmond Mendras and Major A. Si' mon, will go to Moscow as military attaches and two Russians will b: aka tached to the Soviet Embassy iY Paris. Thirteen of Britain's diplomatic re presentatives in other countries ar! Scots. Expecting lark!? Send for booklet "Baby's Welfare" FREE! effort just to hold the stick and rud- der. Time for more oxygen. His mind clears; will and ambition return. Now 30,000 feet. The pointer moves around volutions drop a trifle. The pilot plays the dial more slowly. The engine re - with his mixture, gives :t all his throt- tle, touches the spark and alfast lifts his body, seeking to help his gallant craft on. Failure in judgment, numbed though it may be, means death; and failure of inanimate material brings the shadow of death close about the explorer. Drops of Scotch Scotebnen who are angry at the many jokes being cracked "at their expense" will be infuriated by "Scotch," described as "a volume of the best Scotch jokes" just issued in England. There are nearly three hun- dred prime examples fra' Aberdeen and elsewhere: They do say that -a Seotchman mar- ried a half-witted girl because she was 50 per cent. off. It was a MacTavish who sent his spats to the cobbler's to be soled and. heeled. Sandy was feeling ill—very i1I. He staggered off to find a doctor. At last a sign caught his eye—"J. M. Farrell, M.D." And below it was the legend: "First visit, one guinea. Subsequent visits, 10c 6d." Into the office went Sandy, and with outstretched hand moaned: "Well, well, Dr. Farrell—Here I am again." "Why are you late this morning, MeNab?" "I squeezed the toothpaste too hard, and it took ane half an hour to get it back in the tube." And every Scotch father insists that his son sow his wild oats in the back yard, where they'll do some good, "Give ' nae a threepence -worth of morphine," commanded the Scatchnian of the drug clerk. "What do you want it foe?" asked the clerk, with proper caution. on. "Tuppence!" was the instant reply. "Your wife needs a change," said the doctor, "Salt air will eure her," The next time the physician called he found Sandy sitting by the bedside fanning his wife with a herring. Don't forget the Scotsman who called up his sweetheart to find out what night she was free. It was .a Scotch philanthropist who was so modest that he'woulcht't allow his name to appear in any way when he made a donation -not even on the cheque. An Englishman, an Irishman, a Frenchman,. and a Scotsman were standing at the,bar, The Englishman stood a whisky -and -soda around, the Frenchman stood a quart of cham- pagne, the Irishman stood a bottle of brandy, and the Scotsman stood six feet three. We do not know of how much a man is capable if be has the will, and to what point he will raise himself if he feels tree. ---J. von Muller. to new mothers -- expectant mothers—S4 pages on—• Care before baby conies. • Layette. Baby's bath, sleep, bowels, weight. . • Latest findings on feeding. Write The Borden Co., Limited, House. Toronto. Names Tardier 2i a Address STOPS There seems to be no safer way to end a headache—and there certainly is no safer way—than to take two tablets of Aspirin. You've heard doctors say that Aspirin is sale. If you've tried it, you know it's effective. You could take these tablets every day in the year without any ill effects. And every time you take them, you get the desired relief. Stick to Aspirin. It's safe. It gets results. Quick relief from headaches. colds, or other discomfort. ASPIRIN Trade -mark Reg. ISSUE No. 17—'33