Decidedly Odd
classified columns of one of the big dailies:

CONTENTS

Eva: The seventeenth of the tenth! Since you and your own are safe, do you become insensible that others now again wait in your place? And those that swing in the wind! Have you forgot? If you remember and are true, communicate. And you can help save them all! N. M. 15, 45, 11, 31; 7, 13, 32, 45; 13, 36.

The letter, to the first page of which the advertisement had been pinned, was dated the same day he had received it, postmarked three o’clock that morning, and written in the scrawling hand of a young man under strong emotion:

CONTENTS

Dear Sir: Before coming to consult you, I send for your consideration the advertisement you will find inclosed. This advertisement is the one tangible piece of evidence of the amazing and inexplicable influence possessed by the “hammering man” over my fiancee, Miss Eva Silber. This influence has forced her to refuse to marry me, to tell me that I must think of her only as if she were dead.

This advertisement appeared first on last Monday morning in the classified columns of three Chicago papers published in English, and in the German S——. On Tuesday, it appeared in the same morning papers and in four evening papers and the German A——. It was submitted to each newspaper by mail, with no address or information other than the text as here printed, with three dollars in currency inclosed in each case to pay for its insertion. For Heaven’s sake help me, Mr. Trant! I will call on you this morning, as soon as I think you are at your office. Winton Edwards.

Winton Edwards.

The psychologist had hardly finished this letter, when rapid footsteps in the corridor outside stopped at his office door. Never had there been a more striking entrance into Trant’s office than that of the young man who now burst in—disheveled, wet with the rain, his eyes red for want of sleep.

“She has left me, Mr. Trant!” he cried, with no prelude. “She has gone!”

As he sank dazedly into a chair, he pulled from his pocket a small leather case and handed it to the psychologist. Within was the photograph of a remarkably handsome girl in her early twenties—a girl sobered by some unusual experience, as showed most plainly in the poise of her little round head wrapped with its braid of lustrous hair, and the shadow that lurked in the 
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