“I have,” Anthony Trent admitted; “I know the histories of most of the great criminals and their crimes. The police do too, but I know more than they. I make a study of the man as well as his crime. I find vanity at the root of many failures.”
“Cherchez la femme,” Mr. Lund insisted.
“Not that sort of vanity,” Anthony Trent corrected. “I mean the sheer love to boast about one’s abilities when other men are boasting of theirs. There was a man called Paul Vierick, by profession a second story man. He was short, stout and a great consumer of beer and in his idle hours fond of bowling. He was staying in Stony Creek, Connecticut, one summer, when a tennis ball was hit up high and lodged in a gutter pipe on the roof. Vierick told the young man who had hit it there how to get it. It was so dangerous looking a climb that the lad refused. Some of the guests suggested in fun that Vierick should try. They made him mad. He thought they were laughing at his two hundred pound look. They were not to know that a more expert porch climber didn’t exist than this man who had been a professional trapeze man in a circus. They say he ran up the side of that house like a monkey. Directly he had done it and people began talking he knew he’d been unwise. He had been posing as a retired dentist and here he was running up walls like the count in Dracula. He moved away and presently denied the story so vehemently that an intelligent young lawyer investigated him and he is now up the river.”
“That’s an interesting study,” Mr. Lund commented. He was thoroughly taken up with the subject. “Do you know any more instances like that?”
“I know hundreds,” Anthony Trent returned smiling. “I could keep on all night. Your town of Somerville produced Blodgett the Strangler. You must have heard of him?”
“I was at school with him,” Lund said almost excitedly. It was a secret he had buried in his breast for years. Now it seemed to admit him to something of a kinship with Anthony Trent. “He was always chasing after women.”
“That wasn’t the thing which got him. It was the desire to set right a Harvard professor of anatomy on the subject of strangulation. Blodgett had his own theories. You may remember he strangled his stepfather when he was only fifteen.”
“He nearly strangled me once,” Mr. Lund exclaimed. “He would have done if I hadn’t had sufficient presence of mind to bite him in the thumb.”
“Good for you,” said the other heartily. “You’ll find the history of crime is full of the little mistakes that take the cleverest of them to the chair. And yet,” he mused, “it’s a great life. One man pitting his courage and knowledge against all the forces organized by society to stamp him out. You’ve got to be above the average in almost every quality to succeed if you work alone.”
Mr. Lund felt a trifle uncomfortable. The bright laughing face that had been Anthony Trent to him had given place to a sterner cast of countenance. The new Trent reminded him of a hawk. There was suddenly brought to the rather timid and elderly man the impression of ruthless strength and tireless energy. He had been a score of times in Anthony Trent’s room and had always found him amusing and light hearted. Never until to-night had they touched upon crime. The New York over which Mr. Lund gazed from the seat by the window no longer seemed a friendly city. Crime and violence lurked in its every corner, he reflected.