Argosy All-Story Weekly — page 86: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

Waid The ultimate equation. might be. a for- midable one and the terms involved. But, that was the way he gained his livelihead. He had told Mr. Black that science could analyze a tear, without regarding the motives that brought it into being, but he knew now that a mystery that somehow steadily grew in profound and complex sit- uations and that might apply to Felice no jess than himself, was not to be coldly resolved into its sheer mathematical, sex- less symbols. The air was fragrant with the scent of flowers; the muted. notes of sleeping birds now and then interpolated dream-murmurs, alternating with more frequent squeaks from a cicada, fiddling somewhere in the Japanese dwarf maple, as if defying, in turn, the intermittent but clearly audible “twa-n-n-ng ” of: some robust frog in a nearby marsh. The whistle of a incunetvs down at the — railroad station recalled him to the in- sistent present. - Some one had cut the unicorn from the top of his hat. That had been. done See outside the wall. Now, it was no less: true, that some ‘one else had abstracted the contents of his bag. Arthur did not bother about panic fiat dealt with an emotion. The bald fact suf- ficed. The thing had been certainly done between the time he hurried out of the laboratory and the time he reéntered the ~Moran mansion—unless Foster had done it. Foster hadn’t known he was coming, €x- cept from the police. Foster was a fixed quantity—a stable integer. The others were unstable. Their acts proved it—especially the original theft of the unicorn. It was impossible to say, from the bald facts, whether the theft of the unicorn was. done by the same man or group of men as the theft of the contents of the bag. It seemed to be a different act, remote from the first, and so he determined to call it the act of a “y-man.” If it afterward turned out that the same man or group of men had done both things, then both + and 'y, whether standing for individuals or groups, would be identical. ARGOSY-ALLSTORY WEEKLY. “Things equal to the same thing are equal to each other.” . In that = the equation would read: “y= y. ”? And, the same terms, plus his missing bag and unicorn, would have a common significance. At present, they had no such significance. So, Arthur Tower merely mentally wrote down: Let x = a minus unicorn. Let y = a minus-contents-of-bag, He began with the first equation. The x-man could hardly have been in- formed that Arthur Tower would turn up the unexpected way he had at Bonicrest between seven and eight o’clock Thursday morning. = —- Arthur hadn’t known it, preell: until he had discovered that magic little black me Eke on the time-table. That seemed to resolve all doubts. 7 “ Unless, indeed,” he ees. “the un- prepossessing man. that Mrs. Evans phoned me about at the laboratery on Tuesday morning last was in some sort of communi- - cation with the man that took the unicorn. But that seems fallacious.” Patiently Arthur qevieecd the faets. “He must have known my identity; he could have known of it only from my ~ prospective employer; or, at least, through some avenue, legitimate or otherwise, con- nected with my application to Mr. Black for employment. I didn’t know Mr. Black and he didn’t know recap he had lots of applications.” = Twa-n-n-g!” boomed the he CHAPTER XXII. EQUATIONS ACTUAL. = RIEND frog,” smiled Arthur whim- F sically, as he whispered to himself, ‘““your applause may be both pre- mature and entirely erroneous, but it is no less vigorous. It fiits—part way!” he told himself, jubilantly. “Now, he saw me and I saw him when ] was in the taxi and McGuire and the other ‘ two men were getting in to take me to the — station and I was hiding the keys. “TH go back, and see how it fits, from (EO) micboo (EO