The Man Higher Up

Trant substituted for the photograph the bent wire given him by Miss Rowan. Then for the last time he swung to the instrument, and as his eyes caught the wildly vibrating pencils, they flared with triumph.
The Man Higher Up
By Edwin Balmer and William B. MacHarg
Authors of “The Eleventh Hour” and “The Hammering Man”
This excellent detective scientifiction story is the first of a series to appear in AMAZING STORIES. These romances depict the achievement of Luther Trant, psychological detective.
While the results of psychic evidence have not as yet been accepted in our courts, there is no doubt that at a not-distant date such evidence will be given due importance in the conviction of our criminals. The authors of this tale are experts in their science and the series cannot fail to arouse your interest to the highest degree. A second story will appear in an early issue of AMAZING STORIES.
The first real blizzard of the winter had burst upon New York from the Atlantic. For seventy-two hours—as Rentland, chief clerk in the Broadway offices of the American Commodities Company, saw from the record he was making for President Welter—no ship of any of the dozen expected from foreign ports had been able to make the company’s docks in Brooklyn, or indeed, had been reported at Sandy Hook. And for the last five days, during which the Weather Bureau’s storm signals had stayed steadily set, no steamer of the six which had finished unloading at the docks the week before had dared to try for the open sea except one, the Elizabethan Age , which had cleared the Narrows on Monday night.
On land the storm was scarcely less disastrous to the business of the great importing company. Since Tuesday morning Rentland’s reports of the car-and train-load consignments which had left the warehouses daily had been a monotonous page of trains stalled. But until that Friday morning, Welter—the big, bull-necked, thick-lipped master of men and money—had borne all the accumulated trouble of the week with serenity, almost with contempt. Only when the chief clerk added to his report the minor item that the 3,000-ton steamer, Elizabethan Age , which had cleared on Monday night, had been driven into Boston, something suddenly seemed to “break” in the inner office. Rentland heard the president’s secretary telephone to Brooklyn for Rowan, the dock superintendent; he heard Welter’s heavy steps going to and fro in the private office, his hoarse voice raised angrily; and soon afterwards Rowan blustered in. Rentland could no longer overhear the voices. He went back to his own private office and called the station master at the Grand Central Station on the telephone.