Date: 1910-12-31T15:00:00+00:00
Keywords: Short Fiction; Wit and Humor; Satire; Crime; Mystery; War
Description: Irvin Shrewsbury Cobb (23 June, 1876 – 11 March, 1944) was an American author, humorist, editor, and columnist from Paducah, Kentucky who relocated to New York in 1904, living there for the remainder of his life, writing for the New York “World”, “The Saturday Evening Post”, “Cosmopolitan”, and other newspapers and magazines. Cobb wrote more than 300 short stories and 60 books (most of these being collections of his stories and articles). Some of his works were adapted for film. * * * * Cobb was one of America’s most popular humorists during the first third of the 20th century, but his writing
Publisher: MobileRead.com
Rights: Text is the public domain in countries where copyright is “Life+70” or less.

WINDFALLS

A GATHERING
OF SHORT STORIES
BY

IRVIN S. COBB

Contents

~

Titlepage

WINDFALLS

An Open Season for Ancestors
The Adventure of the Want Ad
The Adventure of the Innocent Bystander
The Adventure of the Chained-Up Lady
The Adventure of Mr. Pandora
The Broken Shoelace
Old Ben Alibi
The Story that Ends Twice
The Wasted Headline
Snake Doctor
Faith, Hope and Charity
This Hero Business

About This eBook

WINDFALLS

An Open Season
for Ancestors

~

My name is Jones, the full name is Jubal T. Early Jones, and I am one of the Kansas City Joneses. Ours is one of those old or Southern families. My great-grandfather came out across the mountains from Virginia at an early period. I have never been able to understand why he should have come at all, because from what I was able to gather of the facts he could have stayed at home and beaten the case probably. But at any rate he came, in a more or less hurried manner, losing the sheriff and the posse on the way, and settled in Kentucky and raised a large family. Then my grandfather in turn moved West, partly, I take it, because of the inherited pioneering instinct, and partly on account of some litigation arising from his having shot a neighbor with one of those old-fashioned squirrel rifles with a brass-bound stock and bone sights, such as so many of the hardy pioneers of those early days of our country used in conducting arguments over line fences and strayed shoats. We have been in Kansas City ever since and are very well thought of there and socially prominent, an aunt of mine having been one of the first persons in the Southwest to introduce the custom of eating dinner at suppertime and serving the coffee black afterward instead of along with.

At the same time, until I married I never undertook to pry very deeply into the family history. I was content to stop with my Grandfather Jones, whom I remember as a small boy – that is, when I was a small boy, not Grandfather Jones – eating his chewing tobacco off the stalk and never wearing a coat except when going to church or to a funeral or something of that general nature, and otherwise deporting himself in the simple, unostentatious style of the good old days. The way I figured it out our family was as old as anybody’s if you accepted the Garden of Eden account, and almost as old and perhaps even more active if you believed in the Darwin theory.

But after I married my wife things were different. You see, she was a Lemon. I do not use the word Lemon in the irreverent or slang sense. I would not think of doing so in the case of a New England Lemon. And my wife is one of the Lemons of Providence – Providence, Rhode Island. It seems that up in that section you speak of the Lemons of Providence as you would of the Cedars of Lebanon, say, or the Bulls of Bashan, or any thing staple like that. They have lived in Providence for several generations, having come over in the Mayflower; in fact, from what I have been able to gather, the original Lemons made several round trips back and forth on the Mayflower, going over in the spring after fresh supplies of spinning wheels and warming pans and new recipes for serving witches and such things, and coming back in the fall in time to put up their mincemeat and salt down the codfish for the winter. So I feel that I am warranted in saying that Mrs. Jones’ people come of very old, very aristocratic stock. Nearly all her male ancestors on both sides were in the French and Indian Wars and the Revolution. From what I can learn they must have known General Israel Putnam well enough to call him Izzy, and as for Mad Anthony Wayne – well, I figure that what really made him mad was having so many Providence Lemons hanging round, all of them willing at any time to advise him freely about how to run his army.

It was really romantic the way I came to meet the present Mrs. Jones, she being of the East and I of the Sunny South – or West by South anyway. We met, as you might say, across the bloody chasm. I was having some dental work done at the time, and while I was in the chair she came in to have some work done on her teeth. After the dentist had withdrawn himself from me and I was able to sit up he introduced us. Afterward my wife confided to me that with my mouth shut she never would have known me for the same person; there seemed to be so much more to me.

But that was the way the acquaintance began, and in time we came to know each other better; and she came to Kansas City on a visit to a college chum and we became engaged and were married at the Second Presbyterian Church and went to Niagara Falls on our wedding tour. But it was after we moved to New York to live that this ancestry business first came seriously into our lives. As the home paper put it, I decided to go East to accept a very lucrative and important position with one of the great commercial enterprises of the metropolis, feeling that my talents demanded a larger field than was afforded me in Kansas City. The paper also said that my many friends would wish me all success in my new sphere of activity and briefly sketched my life up to that point. The facts were all stated correctly, I having written the piece myself in order to save the reporter trouble. So we came East and I got a job soliciting life insurance, and we did well and lived in a flat.

At the end of the second year I got a raise and we moved out to North Orange. It was a very exclusive and highly restricted neighborhood; we found that out as soon as we made the first payment on the house and moved in. Nearly every family on our street – Edgemere Terrace was either High Church Episcopalian or Old Line Republican and in some cases both, and there was hardly a household that didn’t keep two servants, or three, if you counted in the man that came to tend the furnace and mow the lawn. For example, the Henry J. Kittengers lived right behind us on their estate. Ours was only a villa plot, forty by eighty, but the Kittengers had an estate consisting of three full lots. Almost every Sunday they were visited by relatives owning a very large touring car, and they themselves had an inlaid piano-playing attachment and a dog that was said to be worth either nine hundred dollars or nine thousand, I forget which. I never saw the inlaid piano-playing attachment myself, as the Kittengers never called upon us and, of course, in view of that we did not return the call, but I saw the dog frequently, because nearly every morning the Kittengers’ second girl used to take him out walking on a leash and pass our house. In rainy weather she carried an umbrella – over the dog. I could not understand this at first, but my Uncle Polk Jones, who lives with us and has a very clear way of putting things, explained it. He said if you had a hired girl and she took pneumonia or something and died on you you could always get another one not exceeding twenty-two dollars a month at an employment agency, but it was not so easy to replace a dog worth nine thousand dollars – or even nine hundred dollars, for that matter. I suppose he was right, because he certainly was a very rare and unusual looking creature – I am referring now to the dog. He had a large massive frame with a wooly coat and a peaceful expression on his face, and long fluffy fringes growing all the way down his legs, like you see on certain chickens. Judging from his appearance alone I should say that he was a cross between a Polled Angus and a Buff Cochin China, but Uncle Polk always insisted that there must be some Siberian Yak in him too. However, never having specialized on dogs I would not presume to say for sure.

I forgot to state that the name of our place in North Orange is The Beeches. My wife was set at first on calling the place Gray Gables, but she found out that two of the families on our street had already had a serious quarrel over both families having selected that name for their houses, and we compromised on The Beeches, which has a very attractive sound, we think, and will be exceedingly appropriate just as soon as the two slips I purchased from a traveling agent for a nursery garden grow up into towering trees, which the agent says they should do in a very short time.

Well, anyhow, after we were settled at The Beeches we noticed that there was a space just over the living-room mantel which neither the loving-cup trophy that I won at our bowling club nor the tall drinking stein which Mrs. Jones’ Aunt Clara Louise Lemon brought us as a souvenir of her European tour seemed to fit into properly. I thought at first it would be just the place for my stuffed moosehead. I am very fond of that moosehead. It was almost the first thing I bought after we moved into the flat on West One Hundred and Ninety-seventh Street. I bought it at an auction sale, and it was a very handsome head, with the long, sloping Roman nose peculiar to mooses and a pronounced under lip and a very fine set of black whiskers hanging down. I intended it for a decoration for the dining room of our flat, but after we got it hung we found that owing to the size of the room and the ceiling being low his chin whiskers came right down on the dining table, and you had the feeling that you were taking your meals with one of the old Hebrew prophets – Isaiah, say, or Exodus or Deuteronomy – which was depressing.

So we never enjoyed him as we should, and when this question of filling the space over the living-room mantel came up I suggested putting my moosehead there. But Mrs. Jones didn’t like the notion, and after sitting looking at the spot with an intense expression for a few minutes she had an idea. She was enthusiastic over it too. She said we could have the coats-of-arms of the Lemonses and the Joneses framed to match and hung side by side there. But right there the hitch came. So far as we knew, the Joneses didn’t have any coat-of-arms.

Uncle Polk, who was present at the time, suggested that she just hang the Lemons’ family tree at one side, and on the other side a neat worsted motto or something of that sort, stating that the Joneses also ran. But it was plain to see from her expression that my wife resented this suggestion as bordering upon the frivolous. At the same time she did not care to hurt Uncle Polk Jones’ feelings, because he has property. She pointed out gently, but nonetheless firmly, that it would never do to hang up just the coat-of-arms of the Lemonses, because if we expected our children to grow up and go with the best families of North Orange – and she, for one, certainly did – they, the children, would be under a severe social handicap if the impression should get round that they only had ancestors on one side. She went on to say that all the really representative American families were going in now for ancestors and coats-of-arms and family trees, and that it was a very laudable thing, and she wanted me to take it up and trace the Joneses out for her sake and the sake of the children, if not for my own.

“Just think, my dear,” she said,“it might develop that you were eligible for some of our most exclusive military organizations – the Society of the Colonial Wars or even the Society of the Cincinnati.”

Uncle Polk spoke up here and said he guessed that wouldn’t be possible hardly, because so far as he knew, none of our folks ever lived in that part of Ohio, although his mother had a cousin who married a hardware dealer residing in Galliopolis. But he could tell by the look she gave him, and so could I, that he was making a mistake, and he hushed up and didn’t interrupt again for quite a spell. Eudora went on to say – Eudora is my wife’s first name – that here she was qualified for the Colonial Dames, and the D. A. R., and the Mayflower Descendants and all the others, nearly, and me with hardly an ancestor to my back, so to speak, and it wasn’t right. I inquired then how I was going to remedy the situation at that late date. Eudora said it would be easy. She said there were men in New York and several other cities who made a regular business of searching out genealogical records for people. It was a high and noble and patriotic calling, Eudora said, and the men were very conscientious about it. I could go to one of them and have him look up my whole family tree for me. She said the expense would be trifling compared with the results, and, anyway, I was doing so well in the insurance business that she thought I certainly owed that much to her and the children. When a woman puts a thing that way, what are you doing to do?

Well, there it was settled without any argument, and I asked Eudora how we were going to get started. As Uncle Polk said, it wouldn’t be fair to walk in on one of these experts and ask him to go ahead and equip me with a complete line of ancestors without giving him something to start on. Eudora said that would be easy. We had only to sit down with a paper and pencil and figure out the Jones family tree as far as we could go, and then when we couldn’t go any farther we could hand the net results over to one of these professional family-tree choppers and let him do the rest.

So that very evening after dinner we three gathered round the mission center table in the living room, and Eudora drew a line running straight up and down which she said represented me. Uncle Polk said, seeing how stout I was getting, wouldn’t it be better to draw the line a little thicker; but Eudora checked him with one of those looks of hers and wrote my name alongside the stem, as she called it. Then she made another line, branching off the main line, and labeled it Sarah Jane Whittlemore for Ma, Ma having been a Whittlemore; and then she drew another line branching off in the opposite direction, which was for Pa, and she wrote his name on it; and then we worked in some more limbs for my grandparents on both sides. By that time the Jones family tree had begun to look like one of those two beeches on the front lawn, the healthier one of the two. But after that we were up a stump, because I couldn’t remember whether my great-grandfather’s name on my grandfather’s side was Pedigo or Jorgenson; but it was one or the other,I was pretty sure of that, although along here the name Dodson kept coming into my mind. Afterward I recalled that Dodson was the man that my grandfather lamed with the squirrel rifle, so really he wasn’t related to us at all and only got worked into the family tree by accident; but I am speaking now of what happened on this first evening when we were tracing out the Joneses.

But Eudora said in order to be on the safe side she would just put my great-grandfather down as Pedigo-Jorgenson, and, anyway, a hyphen inserted here and there wouldn’t hurt – many of the leading families were beginning to use them – and then we could go right ahead. But that was just the trouble – we couldn’t go ahead. All we had was a short trunk line and two branches, one running up to the Whittlemore country and the other on out to Pedigo-Jorgenson junction. Uncle Polk said it reminded him of a railroad that they built once in Southern Illinois when he was living there. The name of the road, he said, was the Gulf, Continental & Pacific Slope, but after the promoters got thirty-seven miles of it built they ran out of money and stopped but kept the name; and so the name used to protrude out at each end of the right-of-way, and one dark night the engineer – they had only one engineer – mistook the name for the track and ran the train off the end of it, painfully injuring a traveling salesman for a jewelry house at Akron, Ohio. He said he would probably remember the traveling sales man’s name in a minute, and he was going on to tell some more anecdotes about the Gulf, Continental & Pacific Slope when Eudora interrupted with an air which indicated that she suspected him of trifling. She said we could talk about railroads anytime, but on the present occasion the subject was distinctly ancestors. And after Uncle Polk had begged her pardon my wife said that it was evident we had now gone as far as we were able and must worry along as well as we could with the materials on hand, and she gave us the name of one of the specialists who stood very high among ancestors and told us we’d better go to see him the first thing in the morning. After my wife had retired Uncle Polk told me he was going along with me.

“Jube,” he says, “I’m going to see you through this. Remember, boy, I’m behind you to the bitter end. I don’t exactly know yet just how many ancestors it now takes to make a mess, but before we’re through, you take it from me, we’ll have enough. We’ll have ’em racked up round here like cordwood. It’s evident from what Eudora says that you can’t qualify for any of these clubs that she sets so much store by if you merely have an ancestor interspersed in here and there. You’ve got to be able to produce a full book.

“Up until now,” says Uncle Polk, “I’d always supposed the Joneses had as many ancestors as anybody else, but it seems there were considerable many gaps when we didn’t have any at all. We just had ’em intermittently, like measles. It’s a blotch on our family escutcheon that’s got to be unblotched, if it breaks a leg. Darn the expense!” he says; “you and me are going into the open market after a full collection of souvenir ancestors if they’re to be had at any price,” he says. “And if they ain’t we’ll get them made to order.

“Of course,” says Uncle Polk, “I don’t expect that we’ll ever be able to meet Eudora even-steven and match her, ancestor for ancestor. She’s got too big a start on us. F’r instance, now, take that ancestor of hers back in the old country that she’s always throwing up to people, that et off her own private set of gold plates. We can’t expect to produce the equal of that. The nearest we can come to it was your Aunt Elvira Jones out in Joplin, and her set was only vulcanized rubber ones. Still,” he says,“let us be thankful for small things and not look a gift ancestor in the mouth. Aunt Elvira’s served her mighty well for upward of twenty years and gave general satisfaction to all concerned except when she et corn on the cob or winter apples. Give your Aunt Elvira a good, hard cooking apple to work on and she sounded like a fox-trotting horse with a loose shoe crossing a covered bridge. But they never slipped down and bit the hand that would caress ’em, as I’ve seen some ungrateful sets do in my time. Well, let’s go to bed.”

First thing the next morning Uncle Polk and I ran into town and we went to an address on Forty-third Street that Eudora had given us. We went up fifteen or sixteen stories on the elevator and knocked at a door that had the name of T. Eustace Winterbottom on it. A soft voice told us to enter in, and we entered in. There was a room full of framed pictures of ancestors and coats-of-arms and shelves loaded with large, serious-minded looking books, and in the center of a rug stood a tall young man with sort of long hair and one of those flowing mauveties such as I’ve often seen worn by persons who had obtained their own consent to be prominent in a literary or artistic way. He said he was T. Eustace Winterbottom, and there seemed to be no reason to doubt him, because he looked like the kind of person that would naturally have that kind of a name, and I told him what we had come for. In reply he intimated, in well-chosen and graceful language, that we had certainly come to the right place, because he’d made a particular study of the old Southern families; and with that he began in a familiar way mentioning the Washingtons, and the Lees, and the Lords Baltimores, and the Fairfaxes, and a lot of others who’ve had colleges and pastry named for them. He didn’t lose his confidence either when I handed him the Jones family sapling, showing its progress as far as we’d gone, but said he had no doubt that he would be able to furnish us with some very gratifying information within the space of a few days. He then accepted a retaining fee, or nomination stake, and we came away.

He did it too. In less than a week I had a note on scented monogram paper from T. Eustace Winterbottom asking me to call. Uncle Polk went with me.

T. Eustace was all in a flutter of enthusiasm. He had rarely been called upon, he said, to trace a family of more aristocratic lineage than the Kansas City Joneses. It seemed I was related directly or by collateralties to practically all of the really important families of Virginia and Tidewater Maryland, and as far back as he’d traced the line on the other side of the ocean we were going better all the time. One of my ancestors had gone on a crusade with a very distinguished crusader named Godfrey D. Boullion, and another he said was a belted earl.

Uncle Polk chirked up here and wanted to know who it was that belted him and whether he deserved it. But Mr. Winterbottom only raised his eyebrows in a genteel way, denoting passing annoyance, and went on to say he regretted to have to inform me that he had discovered there was, back about 1695, a bar sinister on the paternal side. Uncle Polk told him not to let that worry him, because we’d never been what you’d call strict prohibitionists, anyhow, but to go ahead and see if he couldn’t tree some more old Joneses, and we paid him something on account and came away. But when we got outside Uncle Polk wasn’t satisfied.

He said he didn’t much fancy that young fellow’s dragging in a member of a family who’d run a saloon, even if it was away back yonder in the seventeenth century; and what was the use, Uncle Polk said, of disinterring an earl that got belted, unless you could furnish the name of the other party and the facts in the case? I also gathered from Uncle Polk’s remarks that he thought by collateral ancestors Mr. Winterbottom meant borrowed ones, and he seemed to resent this too.

“I wouldn’t like to stop him in his mad career,” said Uncle Polk to me as we started down the street,“because you can see with half an eye that if we dragged that young sleuth hound off the scent at this time he’d probably lie right down on his side and die of disappointment. But there’s no reason why we shouldn’t have another of the T. Eustace boys working on the family tree simultaneously with this one. Variety is the spice of ancestors,” he said, “and you and me are going the whole hog on this thing. Let’s branch out a little.”

It seemed to be pretty good advice, and as Uncle Polk was paying the bills I took it. The next man we struck was making a specialty of what Uncle Polk called Revolutionary trade. Just as soon as I’d told him what I’d come for he gave a start of surprise and said that I bore a remarkable resemblance to a very prominent aide-de-camp on General Washington’s staff, and he was sorry that he didn’t have his picture to show me so I could see the likeness for myself. He’d loaned it to an art collection. But he was certain I must be his descendant and, though he wouldn’t be sure without looking up the proper authorities, he was likewise under the impression that one of the old Virginia Joneses had inter-married with one of the Rosses, of Philadelphia, which would probably make me a relative of Betsy Ross, creator of the American flag.

“Where does George Cohan come in?” asked Uncle Polk here.

“Cohan? Cohan?” said the genealogical person as if he’d never heard the name before. “I do not understand.”

“I reckon that you never saw one of Georgie’s musical shows,” said Uncle “What did you say this Ross lady did?”

“She designed the American flag,” said the young man, rather severely, I thought.

“All right then, just as you say,” said Uncle Polk; “but you can take it from me that George collaborated.”

It looked as if it was going to take a good time for this to soak into him, so we paid him an initiation fee – or rather Uncle Polk did – and we left before he came out of his trance. Uncle Polk said:

“Son, why should we stop here when we’re just beginning to find the going good? Why should we slight that great division of our country, known as the New England States? Seems like to me I’ve heard that some of our people came from up that way, or if they didn’t they might’ve if they’d thought of it. Let’s see if we can’t scratch up a stock of good, durable New England ancestors somewhere?”

We did it without much trouble. We located an elderly expert with black-rimmed glasses and a wide ribbon running down over the left ear, who referred with the utmost cordiality to all the old New England families whose names you encounter in those typical New England stories that reach their climax when Miss Mehitable Peabody, the spinster, lets the cat out and winds up the clock for the night. He took something on account and promised he’d do the best he could for us in the territory where he held the patent rights.

And then Uncle Polk fairly cut loose. He lugged me round to every genealogical expert in town and put our case into all their hands too. We made one trip to Boston to see a very fancy and exclusive family tree climber, and handed him a fee that caused him to put on his linesman’s spurs and shin up the Jones’ family trunk without delay. We made another to Baltimore to connect with a specialist of the Eastern Shore country, and we wrote to all the other large ancestry centers that weren’t readily accessible by rail – such as Charleston, and Richmond, and Salem, Massachusetts, and Savannah, Georgia, and New Orleans. Toward the last I noticed that Uncle Polk had sprouted out and was tacking quite a few fancy names onto our stubby little original list. Sometimes it would be one name and sometimes it would be another. I asked him about it, and he told me he was borrowing some of them out of the newspapers and the others he was copying off the signatures on banknotes.

“On the whole,” he said, “I find I’m getting the best results from the twenty-dollar bills. Now that Augustus Eversole that I handed in to the last fellow we saw as the name of your maternal great-great-grandfather was mentioned in a dispatch from St. Paul yesterday. He shot a sheriff. The other one I gave him – Milus Q. Pillarshott – he is the president of the First National Bank of North America, at Lover’s Leap, Iowa. Son, we’re going to qualify, you and me are. Let alone having one family tree – why, we’ll have an impenetrable forest, some native stock and some, as you might say, grafted on.”

And we have, pretty near it. That was three months ago, and I now have a large orchard with more specimens coming in all the time by mail. I don’t want to appear proud or unduly puffed up, but at this | present writing I am probably the most l widely connected human being in the habitable globe. As Uncle Polk says, we’re several laps ahead of the Belgium hares already and gaining fast on the microbes. And aristocratic – aristocratic is no word for it!

I have the papers in the house to prove that I am a lineal descendant of nearly everybody that ever amounted to anything anywhere. Among my ancestors were such persons as Alfred the Great, Henry the Eighth, Charlemagne, Lucretia Borgia, Brian Boru and the Apostle Paul. I could name many others if I had more time, but these should be sufficient I think to show who I am. I am directly related to every really important figure in the early history of our own country, with the exception of Benedict Arnold and Shays’ Whisky Rebellion. In me are mingled the strains of Cavalier, Puritan, Creole, Greenbacker, Huguenot, Mormon, Knickerbocker Dutch, Pennsylvania Dutch and plain Dutch: Quaker, North German Lloyd, Mohawk Indian, Pilgrim, Free Will Baptist, Old Blue Wedgwood, French émigré, Irish refugee, Italian Renaissance, and so on, right down to the Bryan Free Silver Movement. I am eligible for all the military and patriotic societies we now have, and when some new ones are formed I’ll be eligible for them too.

I find, on consulting the attested documentary evidence, that my forefathers practically had charge of all the great wars – Civil War, both sides, War with Mexico, War of 1812, Revolutionary War, French and Indian War, and thence straight on back up to and including the Punic Wars – First Punic and Second Punic. I claim blood ties with the Quincys, the Adamses and the Winthrops, of New England; the Beekmans, the Van Cortlandts and the Livingstons, of New York; the Rittenhouses and the Biddles, of Philadelphia; the Randolphs, the Tuckers, the Byrds and the Lees-both branches, Light Horse Harry and William Custard – of Virginia; the Prestons, the Clays and the Breckinridges, of Kentucky, with a whole lot of scattering returns from the outlying districts yet to hear from. My immediate forebears may have had some trouble sometimes keeping the family legs covered, but I could change my family arms three times a day, if I were a stylish dresser, and still have a complete outfit left over for Sundays, weddings and afternoon receptions.

It has cost me a good deal of money – or rather it has cost Uncle Polk Jones a good deal – but we figure that it is worth the money. When I encounter some poor, pauperized descendant with only one set of ancestors to his name, I feel like taking him by the hand and leading him into my jungle and losing him. But I am not vainglorious and boastful about it. Why should a man be stuck up even though he is a multi-descendant, fairly bloated with ancestors? There’s a lot of pleasing variety to my ancestry too. Every one of my family tree sprouts out differently after you get above the second branch. There is one of them, in colors, that looks like a picture of the nerve system of the human body.

After all, I don’t think I’ll frame my family trees and hang ’em up over the living-room mantel along with my wife’s. In the first place, the general effect would be that of a small body of Lemons entirely surrounded by Joneses, and I have no desire to lord it over Eudora, because in the matter of ancestors she has done the best she could, and is not to blame for the discrepancy now existing between us. And, in the second place, there would be enough of them to paper the entire room, and I rather like the paper we have on the wall at present. I shall save my family trees as a priceless heritage for the children. But if the Henry J. Kittengers should ever call I shall bring out the whole lot and just naturally overwhelm them in their tracks.

I’m not going to join any of the patriotic or military societies either. If I joined just one or two the others would feel slighted, and if I joined them all I wouldn’t be doing anything else for several months. Uncle Polk thinks as I do, that it would be better for me to leave them all on an equal footing and not cause heartburnings or jealousies.

I have talked the matter over very thoroughly with him and I have decided to join the Uniform Rank of the Knights of Pythias. They have a noble uniform and a sword to wear, and I always was fond of turning out for parades and funerals and things.

The Saturday Evening Post, 07 Oct 1911

THE ISLAND OF ADVENTURE

The Adventure
of the Want Ad

~

“Judge,” said the young man, “would you mind reading that part over again? – the clause immediately following the bequests to the servants, I mean.”

“Certainly,” said the elder man; and adjusting his spectacles just so, he read from the document he held in his hand:

“All the rest, residue and remainder of my estate, which I estimate to approximate in value five million dollars, I give, devise and bequeath to my beloved son, Gramercy Square Jones, and to his heirs forever, providing that, during the five years immediately following the date of my death, he remains constantly within the corporate limits of the city of Greater New York. During said period of five years, or for such portion there of as he shall obey my wishes and command, he shall been titled to and shall receive the whole income of my estate not otherwise bequeathed. In event he fails, refuses and neglects so to remain within said limits of said city of Greater New York and departs therefrom during said five years, I give, devise and bequeath all my said estate to the purposes hereinafter set forth, saving only that therefrom an income shall be paid to my said son during his natural life of one thousand dollars a year.”

The judge paused and glanced up.

“Shall I read further,” he inquired,“or is that enough?”

“Thank you,” said the young man; “that is enough. I think I remember the rest. If for any reason I fail to obey this command the property goes to charity – mainly the erection of more of the Jason Jones type of lodging houses and hotels. That’s right – isn’t it?”

“In substance that,” said the judge; and for a long minute the young man and the old one sat there, looking at each other – the one blankly, the other blandly. The elder man might have sat, just as he was, for a picture of an elderly, successful corporation lawyer; but the younger was in his outward form as unlike the average New York millionaire’s son as you could well imagine a young man of twenty-four or thereabout to be. He was rather short in stature and of a studious and thoughtful aspect, with a round, smooth face. There was something precise and old-fashioned about him. He was all in black – one black crape band about his black derby hat and another about the left sleeve of his black cheviot coat; a black pearl pin in his black four-in-hand; black over-gaiters; a tightly rolled black umbrella with a plain ebony handle across his knees. The rims of his noseglasses were of black rubber and the ribbon that dangled downward from them was of black silk.

These glasses added to the bookish, almost owlish, appearance of their wearer; but if you had looked past their heavily convexed lenses you would have noted that the eyes behind the glasses were of a clear and sparkling brown, with little glintings of yellowish light in them.

The pause threatened to grow embarrassing. Judge Pike sought to relieve it. “H’m!” he said, clearing his throat ceremoniously. “Your father—”

The heir broke in on him.

“That will of my father’s – I suppose it is incontestable?”

“It is,” said the lawyer grimly – “I drew it. Eccentric your father may have been – I am not denying that – and hardheaded and stubborn, but he was no lunatic, Mr. Jones; and no honest jury on earth could be made to believe he was. Besides,” he added,“if I am any judge of human nature you would be the last person on earth to set up such a claim.”

“I should be the last to do that,” agreed the young man; “but this will now – this provision that binds me so fast——” He paused.

“Your father was born and brought up here in New York, and was intensely proud, as you know, of the fact that he was a native-born citizen. He made his fortune here. He married here and here he died. He believed in New York – its destinies and its powers. Manhattan Island was his fad – if an island fourteen miles long, with more than two million people on it, may be called a fad.”

“Nobody on earth has better reason than I to know all that,” said the legatee. “It is because of those things that I must go through life wearing a comic-opera name. It is true I have managed to hide part of my secret – until this will is probated nobody will know what my middle initial stands for. And that reminds me, judge – isn’t there some way in which this will can be privately probated so that the newspapers won’t get hold of it and make me the laughing-stock of the country?”

The judge inclined his gray head.

“There are ways,” he said, “of accomplishing such ends – sometimes.”

“He reared me with the idea that New York was to be my home always and that I must find my life work here. From the time I can remember anything at all, it seems to me he was drilling that thought into me. And now——”

The young man got up and, crossing the room to a window, looked outward and downward. Ex-Judge Alonzo Pike’s law offices were located high up in the tower of the Metropolitan Building, facing westward. Spread out twenty-odd stories below young Gramercy Jones, the city lay like a great irregular lozenge. With a turn of his head he could see it north and south – to the south the masses of skyscrapers, and beyond their serried, ragged skyline a glint of distant blue that would be the bay; to the north the hotel district, the heart of the shopping district, the club district and the trees of Central Park, set like a green seam in a gray garment, and then on and on for miles beyond until they melted flat like a plain – the jungles of apartment houses, flat houses, tenement houses. In front of him was the North River, crisp and burnished under a bright autumnal sun, and constantly furrowed and plowed and harrowed by every imaginable variety of steamcraft. At his back he knew lay the East Side, where tenement shouldered up to loft building, and the flagpoles and marble porticoes of one street were balanced by the loaded clotheslines and iron fire escapes of the next. Out of sight, beyond the three rivers that made the island, were the other boroughs – Richmond and Queens, Brooklyn and the Bronx; palace and slum; boulevard and cowpath; shoreline, sea beach, rugged hills; cornfields and the most congested quarters on earth; unbroken woodlands, country lanes and country lands; asphalt, stone, brick; good, fat truck patches – the home and the workshop of nearly five millions.

But Gramercy Jones stood there and looked abroad with a gloomy eye, and saw it all as an ugly prison.

“Five years – in jail!” he said half to himself. He turned and came back and sat down again, nursing his neatly rolled umbrella; and, whatever the inner rioting rebellion of his thoughts, the look of his eyes was clear and steady.

“Judge Pike,” he said,“I’ll be twenty-five years old my next birthday – and so far as human experience goes I am still a baby in swaddling clothes. I’ve lived a cloistered life. My father wrapped me in cottonwool when I was a child and I never escaped – not for a single minute. I am the tutorized, specialized, Harvardized product of his jealous care. And yet”-he hesitated a moment – “and yet I think I have concealed about me somewhere the soul of an adventurer and a wanderer.”

Over his glasses the old lawyer speared him with a quizzical glance.

“Please don’t laugh at me, judge,” said the legatee. “Wait until you hear all I have to say. You see, sir, I never had any boyhood – while other boys were being boys I was being educated. Books were my playfellows and I have preserved the illusions of storybooks. I thought when I came of age I might be allowed to cut the leading strings and do something, and see something and be something on my own account; but my father wouldn’t have it so. These last few months, when he was failing so fast, he kept telling me that my duty lay here in New York that here was where I should be content to stay, carrying on his business and his philanthropic schemes. I think he suspected what was in my mind. Then I thought when he died I should be free – not that the thought made my grief over his death any the less – but now I know that he has reached across the grave to tie me to his plans and his ideals.

“Judge, I’m a hothouse plant. I’m as precise in my way of living as an old maid. I have hardly a friend of my own age. Sometimes I’m afraid that I am just a pedantic, academic young prig – and I didn’t want to be that. I wanted to cure my future self of my present self. I wanted to go out and see the world – the real world where things happen. And now——”

“You’ve been abroad?”

“Yes, twice – with a courier on one side and a hired college professor on the other – Rollo and his tutors. I mean the real world.

“I – I had some plans mapped out in my mind. I wanted to go up the Amazon. There are said to be lost cities in Peru – I was going to look for them. I wanted to go to Siberia and study the Russian convict system at first hand. I wanted to kill a tiger in India. Judge Pike, I’ll venture there’s hardly a better shot in this city than I am, and yet I’ve never aimed a rifle at anything larger than the target in a Sixth Avenue shooting gallery, or killed anything more dangerous than a tame pheasant on my cousin’s place over on Long Island! Maybe, sir, you can understand how I feel!”

“My boy, I think I can understand,” said the old judge; and then in a different tone he asked briskly: “What do you mean to do?”

“What can I do? I speak three languages indifferently well and read two more indifferently badly; but I doubt whether I can make a decent living in any one of the five. Besides, I venerate my father’s memory. I obeyed him living and I’ll still obey him dead. Oh, I’ll take the money – I’ll stay here; but I’ll be a prisoner serving a five-year sentence, with no time off for good behavior,” he concluded bitterly.

“Five years isn’t very long,” said the judge – “not at your age.”

“I’m afraid it will be long to me.”

“And you will have all the money you can possibly spend.”

“And no way to spend it. I’m not a rounder – I never had a chance to learn to be one, even if I had cared to. I don’t chase women or highballs, and I haven’t the gambling instinct. I’m no joy-rider. Do I look like a stage-door Johnny? Yes, I shall have everything I could want except the things I do want – adventure and a peep at the places where things happen,” he finished, unconsciously repeating a phrase he had used before.

“Very well,” said Judge Pike sharply – “have it!”

“Have what?”

“Adventure.”

“Where – here in New York?”

“Yes, here in New York.”

“What kind of adventure?” demanded the young man scornfully.

“Any kind – all kinds,” answered the lawyer. “My son, this town of New York is the place where things happen.”

“Judge,” argued Gramercy Jones, “since I came home from Cambridge I’ve spent more than two years here. I spent all my childhood and most of my boyhood here. I’ve never seen a fireman rescue anybody from a burning building; I’ve never seen a policeman stop a runaway horse. I never saw a crime committed or an act of heroism performed. Once I did come on a crowd trying to mob a pickpocket. I pushed my way in too, hoping to see – and a policeman rammed his elbow into the pit of my stomach so that it made me deathly sick; and I had acute indigestion afterward. I was standing in Herald Square one election night when a cab ran over a man; but it didn’t hurt him – he was drunk. The most exciting thing I ever saw was a waiter dropping a tray of dishes on a man at the Waldorf. I’ve read about all the thrilling things in the newspapers, but I never saw any of them happen.”

“Nor I, if I must confess it,” said the old judge – “not since I retired from criminal practice anyway; but that’s not the fault of New York. That’s the fault of the people who lead the kind of lives that we – you and I – live. We are like horses in a treadmill – we plod back and forth over a given path. Broadway, Fifth Avenue, Riverside Drive; a club or two; a hotel or two; a few cross streets uptown and a few double-cross streets downtown round Wall Street – that is our New York. But you may take my word for it that things do happen here – they happen every day and every hour. There are more lost cities in New York than there ever were in Peru – waiting for a Pizarro to explore them and a Dickens or a Eugene Sue to write them. There are tigers in New York as dangerous as any in India – human tigers that wear their stripes only part of the time. No need for you to travel to Siberia. Right over back of here on the East Side, not a mile from this office, there are gentle-born women – ladies – who have the everlasting marks of the irons on their wrists and ankles, and in the flesh of their backs the scars furrowed by the knout – or else the sob sisters of the Sunday papers are all liars.”

He checked himself, smiling at his own fervor. “I’m getting eloquent – and eloquence is an expensive commodity that I usually reserve for the courtroom. But the point is, young man, that with your income you can find plenty of adventures in New York – yes, and share in them too, I’ll be bound.”

Enthusiasm is an infectious thing. Behind the black-rubber-rimmed glasses, little topaz sparks played in the brown eyes of Jason Jones’ son and heir.

“I wonder,” he said reflectively – “I wonder whom I could get to show me the way?”

“That also might possibly be arranged,” said Judge Pike. He reached for his desk telephone. “I’ve a man in mind now – I’ll see if it’s possible for him to dine with you tonight. His name is Grist – he’s a newspaperman and he ought to be able to help you.”

•     •     •     •     •

The man who sat opposite Gramercy Jones at a small dining table at the Lotus Club that night severely violated all of young Mr. Jones’ preconceived notions of how a New York newspaperman should look and should act. He was not Bohemian-looking or long-haired; nor seemingly was he a hard drinker. In age he was nearer forty than thirty, and in appearance nearer fifty than forty. He was quietly dressed, gray-haired, steady-paced – if one might judge by the surface indications – and unexcitable.

Under this unemotional shell, though, Dana Grist carried the secrets of two abiding hobbies – he had one of the finest private collections extant of the eggs of North American birds; and he thought in headlines. To him, inwardly, children were never children – they were either Babes or Tiny Tots, depending on the width of the imaginary head he was erecting at the time; and a young married woman was generally a Child-Bride, though sometimes a Girl-Wife. Instinctively he disliked celebrities with long names and favored those with one-syllable names – wherefore he voted for Taft and against Roosevelt. He might be using perfectly ordinary language in conversation; but all the time, back in certain cells of his brain, he would be industriously recoining common terms of speech into the mintage of his craft – making Probe out of inquiry, and Pact out of agreement, and Rack out of witness chair.

Now this night, while he sat studying the youthful round face of his host through the smoke of a mighty good cigar, he was mentally building a three-column, triple-decked head for the story he had just heard. Young Multimillionaire! – no, that would be too long – wouldn’t it? His lips moved silently as he checked the letters off on his fingers. Young Croesus! – ah, that would be better – Young Croesus Seeking Adventure! With an imaginary blue pencil he crossed out Adventure and substituted thrills; and before his eyes, like an architect who views his finished work when the foundations are not dug, he saw the heading assemble itself in these words:

Young Croesus, Bound Fast to New York by His Father’s Will, Hunts for Home-made Thrills!

For half a minute he contemplated this pleasing creation. Then with an undrawn sigh at the thought that so lovely a news story would never see blackface type, he lowered his cigar and spoke:

“Mr. Jones, I rather like your way of approaching this subject. In the first place, you didn’t begin by putting me under solemn pledge not to print what you were about to tell me. That’s a mistake quite a good many people make from time to time. You assumed that, as a gentleman, I would keep the confidences of another gentleman. I’m obliged to you for that. In the second place, I think I know, in a measure at least, how you feel. I felt that way myself twenty-odd years ago when I was nearer your age than I am now, and came down here from upstate – a raw cub of a kid, full of big dreams and big ideals that were subsequently run through a printing-press and flattened out for me. Well, I’m going to do what I can to make you have your wish.”

“You mean that you yourself will join me?” asked Gramercy Jones eagerly.

Dana Grist laughed a little, half-regretful laugh.

“Not for me!” he said. “I used to be a police reporter and I flattered myself then that I knew this town from its taproots to its top branches; but I threw a splint in my enthusiasm – I got a mental Charley-horse, so to speak and now I’m tied to a desk. Why, I’d be lost one block either way off Park Row. Legmen see New York for me now, and rewrite men paint the pictures, and a makeup editor puts the frame round ’em. But I’ve got a man in my mind who can show it to you – if he will. He knows this town as an eyewitness; I know it only by current rumor.”

“Who is he?” asked Gramercy Jones. “And where shall I find him?”

“I’ll find him for you,” said Grist. “He’s a house detective now at one of the hotels, but he used to be a plain-clothesman down at headquarters. And he’s on the level – or, anyway, I think he is,” he added with a touch of the constitutional skepticism of a veteran newspaper reporter. “He’s a lot wiser than he looks, and he’s not so awfully stupid to look at, at that. I tell you what – I’ll drop down by the Royal tonight and leave a note there for Fogarty, telling him to call on you at your house in the morning. How would that do?”

•     •     •     •     •

If Dana Grist had capsized all Gramercy Jones’ conceptions of the average newspaperman, so the person who called upon him betimes next morning upset, in an even greater degree, that young gentleman’s mental drawing of the average detective. To begin with, he wasn’t an Irishman; that was plainly to be seen. Indeed, if manners, voice, and physical characteristics counted for anything at all he was the very opposite of Irish, being Jewish. He did not wear a bristling mustache and he wasn’t a large, burly person, though he had a sizable width of shoulders and a sufficiently broad chest. He was, moreover, modestly habited. There were two points, though, whereat he bore the distinguishing marks of his calling, had Gramercy Jones known enough to look for them – his eye and his foot. He had the chilly, disillusioned, appraising eye of the experienced policeman, and he had the broad, flat foot that comes of pounding a beat on hard city paves.

“Let me see now,” said the slightly puzzled Jones. “Mr. Grist said, I believe, that your name was Fogarty.”

“Well, if he did I guess he didn’t mean it that way,” explained the caller, “because Grist knows well enough that my name is Max Furst. I used to be a kind of a two handed, amachure prizefighter when I was a kid growing up over here on the East Side – that’s where I got these” – he lifted his upper lip with a blunt thumb to expose a row of gold teeth, and tapped gently a slight depression in the bridge of his nose – “and I fought under the ring name of Young Fogarty. When I quit to go on the force the name sort of stuck. I’m Amurikin, all right; but my old folks both come from the old country. My mother, she don’t speak anything but Yiddish yet.”

“I understand,” said Mr. Jones. “I didn’t know that there were many of your race in the police department.”

“Only a few more’n twelve hundred – that’s all,” said Mr. Furst simply.

“May I ask,” continued the young man, “what salary you draw in your present employment?”

“Eighteen hundred a year – and pickings.”

“On the strength of Mr. Grist’s recommendation,” said Mr. Jones, “I am prepared to offer you five thousand a year – no pickings – and all expenses paid.”

“Boss,” said Mr. Furst, “I’m hired.” He laid his hat aside with the air of one prepared to begin work right away. “Mister Grist just left word that you wanted to see me,” he added inquiringly . “He didn’t say what you was wanting in particular.”

“I want you,” said Mr. Jones firmly, but with a slightly increased color, “to enable me to have a series of adventures here in New York – unusual adventures, you know – and, if possible, thrilling ones.”

A thin, small sigh of disappointment escaped Mr. Furst. “That’s the worst of them happy dreams,” he remarked, half to himself – “they never come true; but I didn’t think Grist would be slipping me this kind of a bunk.” He reached for his hat.

“Wait a minute, please,” said Gramercy Jones. “I suppose you think I am not mentally well balanced.”

“You gotter nice place here, Mister Jones,” parried Mr. Furst politely, “and I’d like to visit with you a while if I had the time, but I gotter be getting back on the job.”

He backed toward the door, but Gramercy Jones put a hand upon his sleeve and detained him.

“Perhaps my announcement was a trifle sudden,” he said. “Read this first.” He produced from his breast pocket a copy of his father’s will and indicated a certain paragraph. “Please read this, and then I’ll explain.”

Mr. Furst read as requested. Then he listened to a swift account of Mr. Gramercy Jones’ aims and aspirations. Then a smile split his face; then he laid his hat aside again. “Boss,” he said,“excuse me. I hired myself to you. Then I fired myself. Now I hire myself back.”

“Very good,” said Mr. Jones. “When can you start your employment with me?”

“Who – me?” said Mr. Furst. “This minute if you’ll loan me your telephone long enough to resign.”

“That is better still,” said Mr. Gramercy Jones. “and can we start looking for adventure at once – say, today?”

“Boss,” said Mr. Furst, “we sure can. What kind of an adventure now was you thinking of?” he asked, speaking with the brisk air of a tradesman who has a full stock and to whom it is no trouble whatever to show goods.

“I rather thought,” said Mr. Jones reflectively,“that we might begin by an incursion, as it were, among criminals – into the crime world. Your duties, I assume, have taken you much among such people?” Mr. Furst nodded emphatically. “And I should imagine it might be interesting in the extreme to study the methods and the— er – personalities of criminals at first hand.”

“What kind of criminals did you have in mind?” asked his new employee. “There’s kinds and kinds of them birds,” he explained professionally.

“Almost any kind would do, I suppose,” said Gramercy Jones. Then, rather vaguely, he went on: “How about confidence men? – bunco-steerers as they used to be called. I have heard somewhere that they are the aristocrats among thieves, and here just the other day I read in the paper that the town was full of them.”

“And for oncet,” said Mr. Furst oracularly,“the papers was dead right.”

“Could I in some way get in actual touch with a group of these persons – and perhaps witness some of their operations?”

“Could you?” repeated Mr. Furst. “Boss, it’s a pipe!” From his side coat pocket he hauled a neatly folded copy of a morning paper and proceeded to undo it. “It ought to be right here,” he commented.“Slick’s got his little old ad in nearly every day.” He turned to a page devoted to small advertisements and ran a well-kept if somewhat stubby finger down a column headed Business Opportunities. “Here she is,” he said, and refolding the sheet he passed it over to the intensely interested young man fronting him. “Read that there one,” he bade him-“the one that’s signed Confidence.”

Wonderingly young Mr. Jones adjusted his black-rimmed glasses and read:

WANTED – Person holding important position with large corporation desires to communicate immediately with responsible party who can command reasonable amount of ready money for immediate use. Opportunity to double or treble capital within forty-eight hours, without risk. Guaranty of absolute security given to right party. Answer at once, as time for successful operation is limited. Address CONFIDENCE, care General Delivery.

“I see,” said Gramercy Jones, still in no way enlightened, since what he had read appeared to differ in no essential respect from any one of a number of similar notices that banked it above and below. “What shall I do?”

“Answer the ad,” commanded Mr. Furst.

“And what will follow?”

“Nothing much – except you’ll get your chance to see the inside workings of the meanest and the smartest gang of con artists in the United States – wireless wiretappers I guess you’d call ’em – wiremen is what they call themselves. And, unless I miss my guess, you’ll also pay a friendly call to Slick Neumeyer’s wire store.”

•     •     •     •     •

Within the brief passage of the next few days, Mr. Gramercy Jones, under the skillful schooling of ex-Sergeant Max Furst, late of the Central Office, was to learn a lot that he had never suspected regarding those classes of the community who hid in respectability’s broad shadow was to learn, for example, that in the underworld, as in the higher, there were top crusts and lower crusts and, still farther down, lowermost crusts; that the best thieves in New York, which was to say the smartest and the most successful and the best dressed, did not hide themselves away in darkly shaded retreats, but walked the streets boldly like other men, being much given on cool fall days to sunning themselves upon the bright side of Broadway between Forty-fifth Street and Twenty-ninth Street, and also to frequenting in numbers a couple of discreetly run, quiet cafés standing within a short stone’s throw of two of the biggest hotels in town; that they mainly knew the police and were to the police mainly known; and that outside the narrow bounds of their own crooked calling they were an amazingly ignorant, amazingly simple race of beings. But first of all, by way of the A-B-C lesson in this his education, he was to meet Mr. Chappy Morelli, head steerer for Mr. Slick Neumeyer.

It all came to pass just as the sophisticated ex-sergeant had predicted – through a letter that Mr. Jones, at Mr. Furst’s dictation, wrote on the stationery of the Harvard Club and signed openly, with his own name and his own address, stating in effect that he, Jones, desired to know more of the plan outlined by Confidence in his advertisement in the daily press of current date. Response was most speedy. The letter was posted at noon; at six o’clock that evening a reply came back by special delivery requesting Mr. Jones to meet “our Mr. James K. Moore” at Forty-third Street and Broadway, northeast corner, promptly at ten-thirty o’clock the next morning. Also Mr. Jones was to wear a blue necktie and carry a white pocket handkerchief prominently displayed in his left hand; by which signs being made known to “our Mr. Moore,” the latter would thereupon approach Mr. Jones and make himself known to Mr. Jones, and explain to Mr. Jones the nature of the enterprise. But in any event Mr. Jones must bear in mind that secrecy and silence were, so to speak, the watchwords of the hour. In short, he language of the writer was such as to invest the entire transaction with a pleasingly clouded air of mystery.

“‘Our Mr. James K. Moore’ – huh?” mused Mr. Furst over this reply. “Well, I’m not so wise at rapping to all their monikers as I used to be when I was down at 300 Mulberry; but, unless I’m mistaken, that can’t be nobody but Chappy Morelli. Chappy was the outside man for Slick’s mob the last I heard, and I guess he still is – the old scrambled-eyed son-of-a-gun!”

“Shall I know him when I see him?” inquired Mr. Jones, now fully committed to the venture.

“Boss, you can’t miss him. When you see a party that there ain’t nothing about him on the level – not even his eyes – that’ll be our old college chum, Chappy. And you don’t need to be feeling scared. Just act interested and let him carry you along.”

“Which,” rejoined young Mr. Jones, “will require no great amount of acting on my part I am interested. I think I am more interested than I’ve ever been in my whole life.”

In the morning, therefore, at ten-thirty sharp, Mr. Jones, wearing a sky-blue tie and holding a white linen handkerchief in the left hand, presented himself at the northeast corner of Forty-third Street and Broadway, directly saw his man approaching, and knew him straightway by reason of the graphic description of Mr. Furst. Truly there was little about “our Mr. James K. Moore” that was on the level. So badly focused were his eyes that he looked at the world narrowly across the bridge of his nose, which nose was slightly skewed off at an angle, and one eyebrow was a trifle higher than the other, thus adding materially to the bias aspect of Mr. Moore’s countenance. Indeed, a headquarters detective who had been an able seaman in his youth had aptly put it that Chappy’s face always looked as if it were getting ready to jib and go about. This twistification of features appeared to extend to the owner’s mannerisms too. He talked out of one side of his mouth – the lower side – meanwhile retaining a cigarette fast in the upper side; he wore his brown derby hat at a slant, and when removing it from his head to gesture with in conversation he did not hold it stiffly by the brim and shove it straight out from the chest, as is the custom in certain circles of metropolitan life – he drew a diagonally downward line through the air with it. However, barring these small personal details, Mr. Moore was like any other habitual boulevardier of Broadway, even to the yellow buckskin gloves.

Moreover, his fashion of addressing himself to Mr. Jones was marked by a commendable and specious ease of manner. It was he who suggested that the matter in hand might well be discussed in privacy, and it was he who led the way to a secluded corner of a small, quiet bar nearby.

Here Mr. Jones, being pressed to take something, took a glass of mineral water. Mr. Moore ordered for himself a small beer, and in such thin tipple he drank ceremoniously to their better acquaintance. This formality over, he proceeded by shortcuts straight to business.

“This is a very confidential matter, Mister – er – Mister Jones,” he began, meanwhile studying his companion; “and before we go any further I’ll have to ask you a few questions about yourself. We ain’t taking anybody but respectable and responsible parties in on this deal, and mighty few of them. Your name now – Jones – it’s a pretty common name.”

The younger man caught the hint and his answer was candid – and in the main truthful.

“Well,” he said,“I lately came into a rather good-sized property. I’ve never earned any money though; nor until very lately have I had the personal handling of any very considerable sum. And I imagine that most of the people I know think I am rather incapable of handling large sums – of making successful investments, and that sort of thing. So I saw your ad in yesterday’s paper, and I answered it.”

Mr. Moore hunched himself a little closer with an oblique motion – and licked his lips with a slantwise tongue. Already he could tell that he was going to care for this serious-looking young man in black – already he felt strangely drawn to him. With his semi-Cyclopean gaze he drew a dead bead on the ingenuous face of the young man, and his next question came forth as softly as a pussycat’s purr:

“You inherited this money, you say?”

“Yes, from my father – the late Jason Jones. He was a wall-paper manufacturer here in New York.”

At this moment Mr. Moore could have looked through the smallest known size of keyhole without winking.

“Not the millionaire Jason Jones – not him that put up all these here cheap hotels for down-and-outers?” he asked, almost with awe in his tones.

“That was my father,” said Gramercy Jones. “I am his only son.”

Like twin yellows in a shaken double-yolk egg Mr. Moore’s eyes swam toward each other. It looked as though they meant to override the intervening barrier and riot together in joysome abandon. This surpassed his fondest hopes – this was so good it was almost too good! In all his experience as a big-game hunter this was the nearest he ever came to having the buck-ague. By a stern inward spasm he controlled his nerves, his voice and himself, but not his eyes.

“That being the case,” he said heartily,“I can see that this is going to be a fortunate thing for all concerned. You want to prove to these friends of yours that you’re able to hop right in and swing a big deal without asking their advice – that’s you, ain’t it? And you’re looking for somebody to put you on to a perfectly legitimate, absolutely safe proposition – and that’s me!” His voice sank to a note of hushed and intense confidence.

“Right here, Mister Jones, is where I lay my cards down on the table – so as you can see every move. You know, don’t you, that in this state the telegraphc ompanies are supposed not to handle racetrack results – the names of the winners, and all that?”

Young Mr. Jones nodded. “I think I’ve heard something to that effect.”

“Sure you have – you muster,” declared Mr. Moore. “And you know, don’t you, that there ain’t supposed to be any poolrooms running in this town?”

Again Mr. Jones gave signs of assent.

“Well, you’re wrong both ways,” continued the informative Mr. Moore. “The telegraph companies handle racing news just the same as they ever did – only it’s done under cover. Else how could the newspapers everywhere get the word? You tell me that! And there are more poolrooms running right now in this town of Noo York than there’s been any time the last ten years!

“I can tell what you’re wondering now. You’re wondering how a party like me, who’s just a plain businessman the same as yourself, comes to know these things. Well, I’m coming to that part now. My cousin is the manager of the private racing bureau of the National Eastern Telegraph and me and him is just the same as brothers. Seeing us together you’d think we was brothers – that’s how clost we are.

“And that’s what makes me so sore on the play that’s coming off. After him being a faithful employee all these years his company’s fixing to fire him – can him out! Yes, sir – next week out poor old Billy goes!” At the thought of the outrage about to be perpetrated upon his so-beloved cousin Mr. Moore snatched off his hat and, with its brim for a weapon, mowed down at least a square yard of imaginary grass.

“Now, then, here comes the main part of it,” resumed Mr. Moore, when by dint of this exercise he had dulled the edge of his indignation: “Before he’s chucked out Bill is going to get even. He’s going to get good and even with them poolrooms, because the poolroom people are the ones that’re responsible for him being chucked out thataway, they being sore on him without cause. You know how the first flash of each race comes in – don’t you – winner, place and show? Well, inside the next day or two Bill is going to hold back the flashes on certain races until the fellows that’re working in with him on the play can get down some big bets on the horse that they know has already won – and then we all clean up big! D’ye make me?”

“I – I don’t think I quite understand,” said Mr. Jones.

“Listen: We’ll say that this café we’re a-sitting in now is a poolroom. Acrost the street, say, is a public telephone. Say, it’s two-thirty in the afternoon and time for the first race somewhere – Benning or Toronto, or any old racetrack. Well, you and me, say, are in this poolroom. We slip out, go acrost to that telephone yonder and call up my Cousin Bill. Bill he’s waiting at the other end of the line with the name of the winner. If it’s a long shot we hustle to get our bets down. If it ain’t, we wait until a long shot does win. Then we lam right back and get our bets down. Bill allows us five minutes or so. Then he lets the flash go – you see he’s been holding it back all this time – and it’s sent in to the main office and telephoned out to all the poolrooms at oncet. They call out the winner and we win. Now d’ye get me?”

Mr. Jones indicated that now he got him.

“But,” he pondered,“I fail to see why a total stranger to you should be permitted to participate in these transactions.”

“I was coming to that. We can’t turn this trick more than oncet or twicet or at most three times, because the poolrooms are bound to catch on soon to what’s doing. And, though Bill’s pretty well fixed, he can’t scrape up enough money all by himself to pull off the big killing single-handed – fifty thousand is what he’s aiming to cleanup. So he’s taking in a few good fellows that know a good thing when they see it and can keep their mouths shut – taking ’em in on condition that they split up their winnings with him, fifty-fifty. I put it to you – could anything be fairer than that? But he don’t care how much they make so long as he makes his share – that’s Old Bill all over. And that show I come to be in on it myself – and me just a plain business guy; I travel for a living. That’s how he come to put that ad in the paper. And that’s how you come to get your chance too – you being, as I understand it, a young man that wants to show these here doubting friends of yours that you’re wise enough to handle your own coin. Say, Jones,” he demanded, “ain’t it just a beautiful thing?”

“But isn’t it taking an unfair or, as you might put it, a dishonest advantage of these poolrooms?” demurred Mr. Jones doubtfully.

“Jones,” countered Mr. Moore with deep conviction, “did you ever stop to think what them poolroom people are? Sharks and crooks, that’s what they are – just plain crooks, breaking the law every day of their lives and making thieves and defaulters out of poor young Wall Street clerks and honest working men. Why, it’s what they deserve! If you’re asking me personally I say it’s a good thing to take the money away from such low crooks as them folks!”

Seemingly won over from any foolish scruples by the virtuous force of Mr. Moore’s argument, the young man sat in study for a moment. Another thought seemed to come to him:

“Your advertisement said something about a positive guaranty against any loss on the part of your prospective associates.”

“Spoke like a wise young fellow!” ex claimed Mr. Moore, admiration fairly reeking in his voice. “I think the more of you for saying it, and so will Old Bill. That’s all been provided for. We’re going to let you make a small bet first as a convincer – see? – to prove that everything is on the dead level and that you can’t lose. Pretty near Bill’s last words to me this morning was on that very subject. ‘Chappy,’ he says to me – he calls me Chappy sometimes – ‘Chappy,’he says,‘if this here Mister Jones looks like an all-right guy you take him in; but, before you let him risk a red cent of his own money, you bring him to me and I’ll satisfy him.’

“Say, Jones, what do you say to taking a little run up to see Bill right now? You’ve got the time to spare and so’ve I. You’ll enjoy knowing Bill – why, it’s an actual pleasure just to meet that fellow – and he can explain the whole thing to you better than what I’ve done.”

“I think,” said Mr. Jones – “I think I’ll go. It can’t do any harm to look into the matter, anyhow, can it?”

“Harm?” expostulated Mr. Moore as though detesting the bare sound of the word. “It can’t do you nothing but good. Jones, there really ain’t any limit to the money you ought to make out of this thing. I’m only a piker myself. I wish I had your chance – I’d make myself independent and well fixed for life, all right, all right! Say, here, Jones, you don’t want to pike along on this. You gotter remember it’s just putting your money in and taking it out – doubled three or four times. I’ve took a liking to you, and if you don’t bet a whole wad of money for yourself I’m going to be the sorest guy in Noo York.”

So Mr. Jones waited for him while he visited the nearest telephone booth and then they issued forth upon the street. Jones turned as if to go south, but Moore caught him by the elbow, steering him eastward across Broadway and toward Sixth Avenue.

“The racing bureau of the telegraph company ain’t downtown,” he explained; “it’s away uptown – up in Harlem. They have to run it undercover just like I was telling you. The L for us.”

During the ride northward the general trend of Mr. Moore’s conversation betrayed a deep – rooted fear that his newfound friend would not bet enough to take the practical bulk of their evilly earned spoils away from the nefarious poolroom sharks. He repeatedly made mention of sums of money ranging up into the thousands and tens of thousands. Plainly he was of the belief that when Opportunity knocked at the door you should reciprocate by knocking Opportunity in the head.

At One Hundred and Twenty-fifth Street they left the Elevated and, walking north a block or two, turned off where there was a side street, lined mainly with Harlem apartment houses of the second grade, there being shops below and living quarters above. At the first crossing to the east the guide stopped dead short on the corner and pointed to a building diagonally opposite. This building looked squatty alongside its neighbors, being but two stories in height. There were To Let signs in the dusty lower windows.

“There she is!” he said. “There’s Bill’s little old hang – out upstairs there.” He paused a moment, mopping his forehead briskly with a yellow-bordered handkerchief, and then took a catercornered course over, with young Mr. Jones at his side.

Seemingly there was small need for excessive caution in approaching the snug retreat of his Cousin Bill, for, as he entered a passageway opening off the street and started up the stairs, Mr. Moore puckered his lips and burst into a brisk strain of whistling. Instantly, from above, Mr. Jones’ ears caught the muffled metallic chatter of telegraph instruments, and this sound rose to a brisk clatter of dotting and dashing when Mr. Moore opened a door and ushered Mr. Jones into a long room, where a double row of shirtsleeved men sat facing each other at a table, each plugging away industriously at his brass key. Sheets of yellow flimsy paper strewed the floor like autumn leaves; a big wire cable ran along the ceiling; wires ran down the legs of the table into the floor; and humped down at a rolltop desk in the far corner was a stoutish man, with green blinkers over his eyes and straw sleeve-protectors on his arms. At sight of the men he rose and came forward.

“Billy,” said Mr. Moore affectionately, “shake hands with my friend, Mister G. S. Jones. Jones, this is my cousin, Bill Malloy. Both you fellows gotter know each other better,” added Mr. Moore with jaunty warmth.

And certainly Mr. Malloy was cordiality itself. He was just starting to say something when one of the busy operators called out, “Revised chart for Benning’s coming in,” and began scratching with a pencil on a pad of paper.

“Excuse me one minute, gents,” said Mr. Malloy – “business before pleasure.” He gathered up the sheet the operator shoved at him and stepped into a telephone booth set against the wall. As he sat with his mouth at the transmitter, his profile being strongly visible through the glass door, Gramercy Jones was struck by Mr. Malloy’s somewhat startling resemblance to a large frog. He had heavy-lidded eyes, a flat nose and a broad lower face that melted imperceptibly into a fat throat. Also he was studded at unexpected spots with prominent growths of a warty nature – there was one wart on his chin and another growing out of his forehead like an aborted little horn.

Fifteen minutes later, having conducted an earnest and uninterrupted period of conversation, Mr. Malloy concluded as follows, meanwhile regarding the younger member of his audience with eyes that glistened greasily:

“Now I guess you understand. Here’s the card.” He paused to scribble something upon a scrap of blank cardboard. “This ought to get you two fellows in without any trouble. You’ve just about time to get yourselves a bite of lunch and make it. Get in and make yourselves acquainted and hang round until just before two-thirty. Then chase out and call me up – Chappy’s got my number – and I’ll have the flash on the first race and I’ll be holding it back. Lam right back, make your little bet and see what happens. Then, if you’re convinced, Mister Jones, we’ll frame up the big killing for tomorrow. I guess I can get all my other partners in the deal lined up by then.”

As they emerged from the door young Mr. Jones, who chanced to be in the rear, noticed a sudden silence behind him and, sending a quick glance over his shoulder, saw the six operators all staring hard at him. Instantly, though, their six heads went down, their six sets of fingers became busy again, and the brassy click of the Morse code filled the long room.

All the way back downtown, and all through their hurried luncheon, Mr. Moore’s mind seemed to harp on certain subjects namely: the amazing good-heartedness and generosity of his Cousin Bill; the heartless and soulless state of corporations in general and telegraph companies in particular; the absolute public necessity of administering a deserved and drastic lesson to the poolroom sharks; and the utter idiocy of putting up hundreds to win paltry hundreds, when one could put up thousands and win thousands. Mr. Jones, outwardly attentive and agreeably inclined toward these sentiments, was inwardly pondering upon two things – first, that two blood cousins should be so exceedingly unlike in personal appearance; and, second, that all those telegraph operators should have been sending and none of them receiving!

From lunch they repaired afoot to a certain number in West Twenty-seventh Street, Mr. Moore refreshing his memory en route by a glance at the scribbled address furnished him by his cousin. Coming to the place, they found it aloft building, occupied on the lower floor by a dealer in tailors’ findings; and they started up the stairs, the third floor being their instructed destination. At the second-floor landing, however, a voice hailed and halted them:

“Where goin’, gents?”

A large, authoritative person, having the look about him of a watchman, stood in the shadow of a doorway.

“What do you care?” parried Mr. Moore aggressively.

“Becuz everything up above is shut down.”

“You mean——” began Moore.

“I mean there’s nothin’ doin’ up above.”

“Maybe this’ll make you change our mind,” said Moore confidently, and he showed the watchman his treasured scrap of cardboard. “See whose name is written there – don’t you? Does that mean anything to you – huh?” The guardian of the stairs slanted the card the better to read what was on it.

“Sure,” he said – “that’s all right. Any friends of this gent is welcome any time – but you see, gents, we ain’t runnin’ today. The police inspector of the district was up yistiddy sayin’ things was running too wide open down here, and he give orders for us to close down for a few days. See?”

“That’s too bad,” said Moore blankly. “Well, come on, Jones – I guess it’s up to us to wait.”

“Hold a secont, gents,” said the watch man. “Course you ain’t reg’lar customers, and I may be takin’ a chance; still – say. lemme have that there card a minute.” Pressing it flat against the wall he superinscribed it with new figures. “S’pose you go up to this here number in Sixty-fourth Street. The lid is on a little looser up there and you’ll find a nice, classy, quiet place, fully purtected – and I guess you kin git yourselves a little play.”

Mr. Jones spoke of a cab, but Mr. Moore, presumably from motives of frugality, thought a surface car would do as well. So it was on a surface car they rode to Sixty fourth Street. On the right of them, off the Park a short distance, they came to an old-time brownstone residence, which was exactly like all the other old brownstones flanking it, except that the storm doors at the top of the stoop were drawn to and the lower windows were closely curtained – a secretive, hooded-looking house.

“This must be the place,” said Mr. Moore; and, with Mr. Jones behind him, he went up the flaked stone steps, pushed back the storm doors, and stood in a small vestibule facing an inner door of glass, closely blinded with dark green draperies. Upon this door Mr. Moore boldly rapped three times with his knuckles. At that, a slit appeared in the curtains and an eye peered through at them – the slit being narrow and the eye being hard and hostile. Followed a short, embarrassing pause. Then the door opened cautiously for a couple of inches only, grating against the chain that held it fast within, and a husky voice inquired:

“Wotcher want?”

Mr. Moore felt for his talismanic scrawl, now smudged and thumbed by much handling, and passed it in through the small opening. It was whisked from him by the fingers of an unseen hand. There was another delay, but only a momentary one, and then the chain dropped and the door was drawn back just far enough to admit them, one at a time, and instantly was closed and locked behind them. They found themselves standing in a narrow, bare hallway, smelling of disuse and emptiness. Ahead of them a flight of uncarpeted stairs ran up into the body of the house, and on their left was a closed door. The lookout man indicated this door with a flirt of his thumb. Mr. Moore turned the knob and they walked into what had once been the drawing room of a wealthy citizen’s home. Yellow brocaded silk panels, now faded and streaked, were still upon its walls, and about its four sides ran a tarnished picture molding.

Hesitating on the threshold, young Mr. Jones glanced about him curiously – this was his first visit to a poolroom. To begin with, the long, narrow room was perhaps a third full of men – mostly youngish appearing men – seemingly intent on their own pressing affairs. They hardly glanced his way. The appearance unannounced of two strange newcomers had caused no flurry of interest. Against the opposite wall, facing him, was tacked a long row of large cardboard sheets, cabalistically inscribed with jumblings of names and numbers. There was a blackboard, also, similarly ciphered over with chalkmarks.

A desk telephone, with an attendant, was in one corner; at the back was an improvised buffet, presided over by a plump yellow negro in an apron; a large ornate clock was placed high up on the yellow wall paneling; there were chairs for all and rugs of fair quality upon the floor.

The most prominent object of furnishing, however, was a cashier’s small wooden booth, with a wicket and a window in it – and behind it a functionary enthroned on a high stool. He looked in their direction and nodded noncommittally. Mr. Jones took particular note of this person; he was indeed a person to attract more than passing attention. He was bald – excessively bald. He had no hair whatsoever upon his head, and none upon his face either – unless you took into account a few white bristles that protruded from his scalp and a few marking where his eyebrows should have been. His face, of a curiously wrinkled, puckered aspect, looked as though it had been hard-boiled in some devastating chemical bath, which had removed all expression from it, along with all follicular adornment.

Nobody had bidden them welcome; but, on the other hand, nobody had barred their way. So, on a nudged hint from Mr. Moore, Jones slid into the nearest vacant chair and Moore took the chair next him. The yellow negro made his way to them, bearing cigars, and offered to bring drinks.

“It’s all new to me,” whispered Mr. Moore to Mr. Jones. “How ’bout you?”

Plainly the clandestine but fascinating business of the day was just starting. Almost as though their entrance had been his speaking cue, a gentleman – whose attire, though sufficiently striking, did not seem in cut and material to match his evident opulence – presented himself at the cashier’s window. Here he planked down an imposing sheaf of currency and in a good carrying voice announced curtly:

“Fifteen hundred on Tuscaloosa to win!”

“Which is it, Mister Drake,” inquired the cashier affably – “a tip or a hunch?”

“Never mind that,” snapped back Mr. Drake with a trace of hauteur in his tones. “I make the bet and that’s enough for you.”

“Excuse me, Mister Drake – no offense,” said the properly humbled cashier as he scooped in the bills without counting them, and wrote out the ticket.

Behind the dignified but venturesome Drake came one whom the cashier hailed as Mr. Rhinelander; and he invested a like goodly sum upon a certain nag to take the second race on the day’s card. Following this, operations grew even more active. There was a general forward movement toward the wicket and much money crossed the narrow shelf. The negro brought one stout gamester a highball, and for a tip received, in full sight of all who cared to witness it, a two-dollar bill. The telephone jangled its bell and the attendant was prompt to answer.

“Mister Gates’ bettin’ commissioner on the wire,” he called out, holding one hand over the transmitter while he addressed his superior. “He wants to know whether you’ll take five thousand even on Miss Madden to win the second race.”

The cashier hesitated only a bare second. “Tell him we’ll accommodate Mister Gates!”

A moment later the telephone man announced that Mr. Keene was calling up to risk seventy-five hundred upon Outlander in the third race. Well-known names – yes, famous names – passed back and forth; and in the midst of it all the cashier sang out:

“Gents will please hurry – first race oughter be starting in less’n ten minutes now.”

Seemingly startled, Mr. Moore touched Mr. Jones’ arm, and, with half a turn of his head, indicated the clock on the wall. The hands pointed to two-twenty-three.

“Time for us to be getting busy,” he whispered out of the southerly corner of his face, and they both rose.

Their departure appeared to beget no more attention than their entry had occasioned. Mr. Moore merely told the guardian of the outer door that he and his friend wished to slip out and call up a friend, and that they would probably return almost immediately – and the lookout accommodatingly took down his chain and let them go.

Diagonally across the road the white and-blue metal sign of a pay station [pay phone] showed above the door of a cigar store, and they made for it fast. Mr. Jones lingered at the showcase while Mr. Moore darted into the booth and slammed the door behind him. In an almost miraculously short time he was out again, a pencil in one hand, a scrap of paper in the other, and his mismated eyes twitching madly.

“Here she is!” he panted joyously. “The flash came in just as I called up Bill – luck, huh? a rank outsider called Grand Slam wins! Here ’tis!”

He crowded the paper into Jones’ hand. On it, hastily penciled, the young man read: Grand Slam-Nobility – Tuscaloosa.

“Now we’ll see – we’ll see now!” exulted the jubilant Mr. Moore as, side by side, they dusted back across the street. “What d’ye say to risking ten apiece on the test bet?… Gimme your ten then – here’s mine.”

Without demur the lookout man admitted them; the yellow-walled room now resounded with a subdued bustle and buzz of excitement. Moore was at the wicket in a second, with young Jones right behind him.

“We’d like to bet ten apiece on Grand Slam to win the first race!” blurted out the leader.

“Ten what?” inquired the cashier briskly.

“Dollars,” said Mr. Moore, showing haste – “ten dollars.”

The cashier’s boiled face lengthened and the skin wrinkled upon the frontal arch of his skull, betokening, you would say – were you an interpreter of wrinkles – passing annoyance.

“This is our first bet here, you know,” explained Mr. Moore apologetically. “We – we’re just sort of feeling our way today.”

“Oh, well, in that case—” said the cashier listlessly. He wrote out the tickets. “Here y’are – twenty on Slam, at four to one, to win.”

At that precise instant the telephone bell rang and the young man in charge snatched down the receiver and put it to his ear. The room grew tense with the silence of many listening ears as he chanted his tidings:

“They’re off at Benny’s – Tuscaloosa in the lead! Blue Warrior second! Nobility thoird!” He called them at the quarter, at the half, at the three-quarters, in the stretch and at the finish – “Grand Slam win! Nobility second! Tuscaloosa thoird!”

Behind them young Mr. Drake swore loudly: “Fifteen hundred of my good coin gone – the skate!” a babble of surprise, of chagrin and sportsmanlike lamentation ran back and forth; but, restrained exultation showing in his step, Mr. Moore led a triumphant way to the cashier’s window.

They stood alone there – plainly these two were the only customers who would cash in; the poolroom must have won thousands, and the hairless money changer at the wicket was in a state of restrained and gentlemanly glee.

To each of them he counted out five ten dollar bills – their original stake of ten dollars each returned and their winnings of forty each multiplied upon it.

“Here you are, gents!” he said, and in high good humor added: “You’ve got all the luck. But listen!” He addressed them confidentially. “If you come back again we’ll always be glad to see you; only next time I’ll have to ast you to bet a little real money. You can tell this ain’t no place for pikers. We’re paying high for protection and running an exclusive place, as you might say; and you see for yourself the kind of customers we’ve got. The best people is playing with us – not the shoestring players. Going? Well, good day, gents; and when you come again I’ll have to ast you to go a little stronger. The roof is our limit and no bet’s too big for us here.”

“Will we go a little stronger next time?” exulted the buoyant Mr. Moore as he and Jones stood outside upon the stoop. “Will we go a little stronger next time? Well, I guess yes!” He laid a caressing hand upon his companion’s coat sleeve. “Tomorrow,” he said impressively, “I go the limit! Every cent I can raise goes down for the big killing. Gee, if I had your bankroll now! Jonesy, old boy, if you don’t take fifty thousand away from these ginks tomorrow I’m going to be the sorest guy on earth. That’s how much I think of you! come on over here – I’m going to open just one little chilly quart in honor of what’s coming off!”

•     •     •     •     •

Half an hour later, in the house on Gramercy Square, the experienced ex-Sergeant Furst was speaking:

“Sort of fat headed, you say, and shiny looking – and he’s afflicted with warts? That would be Toad Maloney. Toad always plays the telegraph company manager – managing a lot of dry batteries and dummy instruments. He was a sure-enough operator in his day, though, and a rattling good one – dispatcher for a railroad till they blacklisted him for crooked work. Once in a while a come-on happens along who knows something about telegraphing, and that’s where Toad shines; he could talk telegraphing with Edison himself. And the cashier, you say, was bald as an onion? That’s Slick Neumeyer’s half-brother Issy, better known among close friends as Issy the Egg. Oh, I guessed right, boss, the very first time – it’s Slick Neumeyer’s mob.”

“But it isn’t all entirely clear to me yet,” said young Gramercy Jones. “This Chappy person certainly was able to get the correct results of that first race at two-thirty or thereabout!”

“Simplest thing in the world,” explained his most efficient teacher – “Toad wasn’t at that fake office of his when Chappy called him up. He was down at some bulletin board; and he took the result off as they posted it up and then dusted for the phone. You see, boss, the clock in that bunk poolroom was set back half an hour. If you’d ’a’ looked at your watch you’d ’a’ found the time was near three.”

“Oh!” said Mr. Gramercy Jones, enlightened. “But another question, please: If the counterfeit poolroom was in Sixty-fourth Street, why did they send me – steer me” – he corrected himself— “why did they take the trouble to steer me to Twenty-seventh Street first?”

“Two reasons,” said Mr. Furst – “both good ones. It give them more time to rig up the joint and get the shills there; it takes more supes to frame up a wire store than it does chorus boys for a musical show. And, in the second place, the grafters have found out that by first taking a customer downtown that way it always convinces him somehow that the thing is on the level; the turnin’-point they call that.”

“And what is supposed to happen after this?” pursued the willing pupil. “I have an idea, of course; but it isn’t all entirely clear in my mind.”

“Well, it goes like this,” said Mr. Furst: “Tomorrow you’re expected to risk your pile – ten thousand, twenty thousand, thirty – as much as they can induce you to put up. And, when the time comes to get the telephone flash from Toad, Chappy makes you do the telephoning – saying that, as you’re risking the most, it’s only fair for you to get the information – see? – direct. And the second you get the right number Toad will bellow through from the other end that he’s just got the flash in and that there ain’t a second to lose – you’re to place your roll on such and such a geegee. ‘Place it all there!’ he’ll yell to you and then ring off sudden, as though somebody’s cut in on him. And you go hiking back, you and Chappy, and you both bet your limit – only you put up your own money and he bets the roll that’s been slipped to him beforehand by Slick; and then the race comes in and your horse runs second instead of first – and you’re cleaned. Then you two stagger out, you being all stunned like and broke up, and him pretending to be, and you make for the place where Toad is waiting. He shows up, grinning all over at the prospect of getting his share of the winnings – only there ain’t any winnings; and for a minute he acts like he was going crazy and he can’t understand why you didn’t win. Chappy wants to know why he sent in the name of the wrong horse, and he says he didn’t. And then you tell your part of it, and Toad swears that what he told you over the ’phone was to play the horse for place – for second place, d’ye see? – because the winner was a short-price favorite; but the place-winner, the horse that run second, was a long shot and there was more money to be made there. Pretty soon you get to believing that he did say that, and then you think you’re the party that’s to blame for everything and not him, and you feel worse off than ever.”

“But why all this byplay,” asked his employer,“when the victim has already been fleeced?”

“Why, don’t you see, boss? That part of the frame-up is fixed in case a guy has got any kale left. One of ’em suggests that if he can raise another roll there’s still a chance to get it all back. And he, being desperate now, jumps at the chance; and nine times out of ten he scrapes up another wad somewhere – and loses again. This time the flash comes in from the track twisted; and before they can get it corrected he’s bet on the wrong horse again. That mob play for the casenote every time.”

“But, really now, were there ever any persons so deluded as to make the second venture?”

“A bunch – a big bunch. There was Old Man Weiner, the music – box man, that’s got that big place downtown. He was a human meal ticket for Slick’s mob, Weiner was. He handed them thirty thousand before he rapped – and, at that, I think they had to tell him. And there was the bank teller from up in New Hampshire. He’s doing his bit now in state’s prison for cleaning out the bank to feed it to Slick and Issy and their bunch. And plenty more if I could think of ’em. But the bank teller was the juiciest melon they ever cut up – until you came along today and filled ’em all full of happy hopes. Boss, I’ll bet that right now, in some snug little dump up in the Tenderloin, Slick and Issy and Toad and Chappy Morelli, and the rest of ’em, are setting round a table declaring dividends on you.

“But, at that, they gotter make big money. It takes a chunk of dough to frame a wire store right. There’s the protection and the two phony joints to be rigged up, and the rent to pay, and the shills to hire, and the money they pretend to bet – that’s all real money you seen ’em handling up there this afternoon.”

“But when the victims – the – er – suckers – complain to the police, what then?” Plainly young Mr. Jones wanted all the information available on this topic.

“They don’t always holler – not always. That’s why these fellows play for city people. City people pose as wise and hate to admit they’ve been trimmed for easy marks. It’s the come-on from the high grass that yells. But what’s the use? S’pose he does yell? Ain’t he been engaged in a crooked scheme himself, scheming with crooks to rob crooks? He ain’t got any standing in court! That’s what the high court held here a few years ago when Jerome rounded up Chris Daly’s mob and tried to send ’em away. But the last general assembly fixed the law to cover that; and, though it ain’t been tested yet, the fellows that work the wire are scared of what might happen.

“And say, boss, you’ll excuse me for correcting you, but don’t never speak of a come-on as a sucker. That’s a sucker word – ‘sucker’ is. It ain’t being used on the inside any more. What you call a sucker is a prospect when he starts going, and he’s a guy if he goes, and he’s a customer after he’s went the route. See?”

“All of which being the case,” suggested young Mr. Jones, “hadn’t we better be embarking upon our own little scheme?”

“In a minute,” said Mr. Furst as he reached for his hat and smiled a happy smile which exposed nearly all his gold teeth.

The remainder of the afternoon and the evening of this momentous day sped busily for the amateur conspirators. First, there was a sprint in Mr. Jones’ car from Gramercy Square to Park Row at a rate that made more than one peg-post policeman erect a warning arm; and on the heels of this was a private conference in that department of a daily newspaper known as the Morgue, where Mr. Grist, meanwhile building noble headlines in his head, dug through two big manila envelopes labeled respectively Confidence Men, and Wire-tappers; and Mr. Jones, beaming pleasantly through his glasses, sorted out the clippings Mr. Grist handed across a desk to him; and Mr. Furst took the clippings and noted down divers names and addresses in a small notebook.

A little later Mr. Furst, having hurried back uptown with the same disregard for existing traffic regulations that had marked his ride down, was in the act of completing certain negotiations of a private and confidential nature with the caretaker of a furnished-room establishment immediately adjoining a certain address in West Sixty-fourth Street, just off the Park – this caretaker being a person of a dour and stolid aspect, who looked as if he knew how to keep things, such as secrets and any money that might come his way. And, money having passed between them, Mr. Furst, wearing blue overalls and the belt kit of a telephone lineman, was presently emerging through a scuttle upon the roof of the furnished-room house in question. Once there, though, he paid no attention to adjacent wires or wiring. He contented himself with crossing on dainty tiptoe to the roof of the house next door. Here he deftly pried loose the glass top of a sky-light, afterward propping it carefully ajar with a handy half-brick he culled from a loosened chimney top.

A little later still, Mr. Furst, having rid himself of his disguise of overalls and belt, and having had further intimate conversation with the above-mentioned caretaker, was coursing busily about the great city of New York in a taxicab, calling now on the West Side and now on the East Side, stopping now at an apartment building, now at a place of business, and again at a private house; and from time to time using the telephone – with utter disregard for expense. From dusk until well after midnight Mr. Furst was thus busied; and as a result of his activities there was assembled in the old-fashioned reception room of the Jason Jones home fronting Gramercy Park, at ten o’clock the following morning, a strangely assorted company. There was young Mr. Gramercy Jones, acting as host; then there was Mr. Max Furst, acting as spokesman of the occasion; and as guests there were four gentlemen – first, a small, bustling, white-haired man with a white goatee, who looked like a Frenchman and spoke like a German and was in fact a Swiss; second, a large, rawboned, silent man with roan hair, hay eyebrows and a sorrel mustache, who answered briefly when addressed as Mr. Shaunnessy, and who was a contractor doing a general trucking business in the Bronx; third, an old-young man, rather shabbily dressed, with bleak, hopeless eyes, who looked as though he might be an unsuccessful solicitor of life insurance or something of that sort: and fourth and finally, a tall, well-built man still in his early thirties, who, without naming names, had been a wonder as a halfback at Princeton and a horrible failure at business later on – indeed, at first sight, a most strangely mixed company. The conference lasted upwards of an hour, though, and appeared to be generally satisfactory to all present.

For a brief period now it is well that this narration of events should run chronographically. It was one-forty-five P.M. by his own watch when Mr. Gramercy Jones met by appointment Mr. Chappy Morelli, alias Moore, at the news-stand in the lobby of the Hotel Mackinaw. It was one-forty-eight when he whispered in that individual’s eager ear words that caused the ostensible Mr. Moore’s frame to quiver with a delightful tremor of glad tidings and abiding joy; and it was one minute later when he cautiously exposed to Mr. Moore’s glorified and dazzled vision a roll of bills of such seemingly great and goodly proportions that the palpitant Mr. Moore could scarcely believe his own eyes, intimately close together though they were. It was exactly two-fifteen P.M. when, having traveled to their destination on as near an airline as the plan of New York streets would permit, Messrs. Jones and Moore were admitted to the house of the hooded windows in West Sixty-fourth Street, finding there a duplication in all essential respects of the well stage-managed scene of the day before, and presented by the same cast. And it was two-twenty-four by the hands of the doctored clock upon the wall when Moore nudged Mr. Jones’ arm as a warning.

From this point on, for some minutes, things continued to occur with such confusing rapidity as to make it impossible to chronicle them with regard to the exact time and proper sequence of their occurrence; but with suddenness and unexpectedness they began occurring just as these two – Moore and Jones – had reached the street door and the lookout man had opened it, and Mr. Moore, being slightly in advance, had put one foot out upon the stoop. From behind, then, Jones gave Moore so violent and quick a shove in the small of the back that he shot down the steps headfirst, with his limbs spraddled wide, like a flying squirrel; and, practically at the same instant, young Jones so deftly and agilely blocked the half-drawn door with his own body that Mr. Max Furst, leaping nimbly forward from his hiding-place round the corner of the stoop, was safely inside and had taken the lookout’s throat in his two sinewy hands before that astounded person could say Jack Robinson. Indeed, the hapless and helpless lookout man could say nothing at at all; only his eyes goggled unpleasantly in his head, and from his guttered and protruding tongue dripped inarticulate gurglings.

The brisk scuffling of feet and struggling of bodies marking these events were at once an alarm and a signal. Without measurable lapse of time it was followed by an apprehensive scurrying on the part of the men within the parlor and by infinitely quicker action on the part of a smaller group of four men who for some minutes past had been waiting in the house, at the stair-landing of the floor above, in their stockinged feet, and all somewhat disheveled by climbing over a roof and through a skylight and down a scuttle and two dusty flights of stairs. Now, in a compact human waterfall, they cascaded down the steps; and as Mr. Jones flung the parlor door open for them hospitably they charged in full tilt upon Slick Neumeyer’s astonished band of kindred spirits, and at that one dazed shillaber fell over a chair and yelled the dread word:

“Bulls!”

Had there been time, Issy Neumeyer could have offered convincing argument to show that a police invasion was the remotest of possibilities; but alack! there was no time. And of all the race of thieves who rarely fight, but run away to live to thieve some other day, your soft-bodied confidence man is first in flight, and fleetest too. Scared stiff, taken by surprise, huddled together, sprawling apart, the whole crowd of them broke toward the rear, having in mind only the providentially rigged get-away that led through a mystic maze of backyards and out upon the next street by way of a subsidized barroom. It was, considering all things, a fair enough start; but, as in any other race, there are winners and there are losers – there must be, to make of it a race.

For example, there was Issy, surnamed the Egg. A fatal two seconds he tarried in his cashier’s booth, striving with clutching hands to salvage the real money of make-believe bets; and with a glad whooroo of recognition Mr. Shaunnessy – he of the general trucking business in the Bronx – was upon him, overturning him and his booth together, then plucking the ill-fated Issy forth from its wreckage like a periwinkle from a shattered shell, and hammering him with a large and horny fist upon his face and his onion-bare head. The shabby, small man who looked like an insurance solicitor had forethoughtedly brought along a sawed-off billiard cue for a weapon, and he wielded it to wondrous effect upon the limbs and bodies of the rearmost of the jammed fugitives; and at every blow got back something in return for the shipwreck of his business and all the other woes that his answering of the want ad signed “Confidence” had brought upon him. The former halfback of Princeton, also in his day a luckless trafficker in Slick Neumeyer’s spurious wares, likewise bethought him of his lost ten thousand; and, wading mightily into the mass, by the simple expedient of knocking them together he well-nigh split the skulls of two squirming crooks. As for Mr. Weiner, music-box manufacturer of Union Square, he became a small, unshod Switzer-American berserker and went stark mad for vengeance. But young Gramercy Jones leaned against the wall and enjoyed it to his uttermost.

The sight of an overdressed person with skinned knees and eyes that seemed to look in all directions at once, running away at top speed, meanwhile wearing an expression of intense chagrin and shock upon his face, had attracted the attention of the policeman on the beat; and as he swung round the corner out of Central Park West the sounds of battle that filtered through walls and windows brought him pelting hotfoot up the stoop of the house. Mr. Furst, still retaining a firm grip of one hand upon the breathing facilities of the writhing doorman, answered his imperative rap upon the door.

“What’s the trouble here?” demanded the policeman, shoving forward as if to enter.

“It’s Slick Neumeyer’s little wire store being rough-housed and otherwise put on the blink by a few old customers of the firm,” said Mr. Furst calmly – “and you can come in if you want to; but if you do you’ve gotter make a report, and then the main squeeze will be asting you and the captain of your station house how it comes that a wirejoint is running full blast in this precinct. If you’ll take a tip from me – I’m Furst, that used to be first – grade sergeant at headquarters – you’ll run right along, bo.”

For a moment only the policeman pondered. Then he turned back down the steps and somewhat roughly dispersed a small group of passers-by who had stopped and were peering up at the curtained windows. Now Mr. Furst faced his prisoner toward the rear, and with the words “On your way, scout!” kicked him along the hallway about fifteen feet as a start. Then, putting his hands into his pockets, he strolled into the parlor in time for the final scene.

The last of the trapped and beleaguered wiretappers had torn himself free and fled; and little Mr. Weiner now held the center of the picture. His white goatee was bristling, his crest of hair stood erect like a fretful kingfisher’s, and he uttered a rattling war cry not unlike the call of that same belligerent bird. Mr. Weiner had a chair-leg for a tool and with it he was destroying fixtures and furnishings. He maimed the telephone with one blow and the lunch counter with two; and as he smashed and splintered he chanted certain words in Weberfieldian English:

Bang! Biff! “Yah, dey blayed me for a zucker!” Biff! “Und dey mate me loose my money on a horse callt Fadeavay!” Bang! “But who didt de fading avay to day? Dey didt!” Bing! Bang!

“They shure did!” said Mr. Shaunnessy, rubbing the barked knuckles of his right hand on his leg, while in his left he held aloft a captured bankroll. “And in so doin’ they left behind six hundred and fifty dollars!”

“Not to mention the forty they handed me yesterday,” said Gramercy Jones – “making in all six hundred and ninety!” concluded young Mr. Jones happily.

The Saturday Evening Post, 08 Dec 1912

THE ISLAND OF ADVENTURE

The Adventure
of the
Innocent Bystander

~

Issy the Egg, quoting him, was sure one sore guy. It is rarely that an experienced big city grafter permits himself the sweetened luxury of cherishing a grudge. He takes the good with the bad, balancing off each day’s sheet when the sun goes down, and hopes diligently for better things on the morrow. But Mr. Isadore Neumeyer was in himself a rare variety of his species.

Behind the shined and unhaired dome which had earned for him his familiar name, Issy the Egg packed a brain amply convoluted for treason, stratagems and spoils, and also revenge. And so, long after sundry contusions of an egg-plant purple color dimmed to a darkish blue and then to a greenish overlay and finally faded out altogether and were lost in the general pale character of his facial aspect, Issy, in his secret soul of souls, plotted ample rejoinders upon the young and ingenious person whom he held responsible for the bruises afore said, that person being a certain young Mr. Gramercy Jones, of Gramercy Square.

It was abundant proof of Issy’s ability to see a cause behind an effect that he had, long before this, dismissed from his scheme of reprisals all thought of Mr. Shaunnessy, the orange-haired trucking contractor from up in the Bronx, whose fist had inflicted these injuries upon his shrinking and sensitive flesh. Even in the stress of that direful moment when Mr. Shaunnessy was beating him full sore, Issy the Egg had recognized in him mainly the instrument of another’s will; and, though he had many of the attributes of the snake, he was not so foolish as some snakes which strike at the club that has scotched them, but overlook the hand directing the club. It was this young Gramercy Jones that he meant to sting – Gramercy Jones who, inheriting the fortune of his father, the late Jason Jones, upon condition that he confine himself to the city of Greater New York for five consecutive years, had, as all the reading world now knew, set forth to have a series of adventures upon the island of Manhattan; and at the very outset of his career, while pretending to be a dupe, had engineered a counter demonstration of former victims upon the wireless wiretapping establishment of Issy’s half-brother and partner in business, Mr. Slick Neumeyer, to the temporary discomfort and undoing not only of Slick and Issy but of their entire coterie of steerers, stalls, shillabers and stagehands.

From the outset Issy the Egg had known full well who and what Gramercy Jones was; in his earlier dealings with the Neumeyer brothers the youthful heir had pretended no deception regarding his identity and his place of residence. But not until the papers got hold of the story of Jason Jones’ freakish will and printed it, along with more or less garbled accounts of its attendant results, did the group of confidence men realize to the full how badly they had been not only disappointed but deceived and outwitted in their attempt to trade Gramercy Jones costly experience for valued currency. Now, then, having digested the tale to its last available detail, Issy the Egg had some passing feeling of disregard for the violent Mr. Shaunnessy and for those others whose aid Gramercy Jones had enlisted in that disastrous raid upon the make-believe poolroom of the Messrs. Neumeyer. He also nourished a certain harsh resentment for Max Furst, formerly a first-grade detective at police headquarters, whom he knew, in the light of this later information, as Gramercy Jones’ salaried employee. But for Gramercy Jones himself he had a hatred which, for intensity, was to these other hatreds as bulk iodoform is to sachet powder.

There being nothing better to do at the moment, he bided his time, nursing his wrath to keep it warm; and so warmly did he nurse it that it fairly scorched his insides, warping his caution with its glowing heat and making him reckless – or as nearly reckless as one of his trade and precarious footing in organized society could afford to be. To get even, to get good and even and then some, that was the root of his aims and fondest aspirations. And chance served him, as chance has served many another of Issy the Egg’s calling in life before now. In the first blare and glare of publicity that followed the discovery of their secret, Gramercy Jones and Max Furst, his hired mentor, fled to lodgings so securely hidden that they were able to baffle even those keen-nosed young beagle-hounds, the reporters for the afternoon papers. All by himself, it was Issy the Egg who found them out.

One day in December, when the holidays impended, Issy the Egg was taking the air in the front door of Dressy Dave’s café, hard by Broadway, and as he lounged there he saw Max Furst pass, intent upon some errand that carried him briskly by. He recognized Max Furst quickly enough. In a not so dimly distant past, when Furst was yet a plain-clothesman, business had thrown them intimately together, with the result that two faithful but by no means flattering likenesses of Issy the Egg, one full face and one side view, and two sets of correctly classified copies of Issy the Egg’s right and left thumbprints had ever since adorned the official souvenir album of the Central Office identification bureau, along with certain addenda touching upon his habits, history and personal appearance, more distinguished for accuracy than for compliment. At the time Issy had regretted these things, without attaching any personal blame to Mr. Furst for his share in them. It had been Mr. Furst’s business to round him up, to bring him in, to mug, measure and thumbprint him, and it had been his – Issy’s – misfortune to endure it. But now he saw Furst pass him by with a glad inward start of recognition, feeling sure that if he successfully trailed Furst the trail must lead him to that same youth who, upon being taken for a gull, had turned out a sparrow-hawk – in short, must lead him to Gramercy Jones.

Instantly abandoning the convenient covert of Dressy Dave’s half-basement bar, he set out to shadow Max Furst; and so canny was he about it that Mr. Furst, who had himself done many a similar job, both in line of duty and in the way of professional pleasure, never suspected his presence once. There were stops and starts at this place and at that, with Furst busied in his own affairs and Issy the Egg lurking a safe and discreet distance in the rear but eventually the unconscious Furst led Issy the Egg right to the sedate and quiet district of residential Brooklyn, where for a season Gramercy Jones had snuggled in to permit the newspaper search for him to abate the edge of its fervor. Nor did the usually wise and wide awake Furst have any reason to suspect that this careful espionage continued until the stealthy con man’s head contained a fair working index and ground plan of the habitual movements and customs of the young refugee from undesired publicity.

All along Issy the Egg had known what shape his vengeance would take when blessedly the opportunity came for whetting it. As he conceived it, the innocent-appearing and round-faced Jones should be repaid in his own coin. He should be beaten – mishandled and man-handled. Many times, caressing the recent sites of his own injuries, Issy the Egg had ordained it in his mind that Gramercy Jones should be pounded out of shape – not killed outright, but slugged into fitness for trepannings, joint settings and fracture reducings. He fancied such finishing touches as a broken nose and a few ribs caved in and, perhaps, an eye knocked out. For weeks past his thoughts had dwelt gloatingly upon such whimsies as these. To repeat, he had known all along what he would have done. Now, with the precious information of the enemy’s whereabouts and movements in his possession, he knew how it should be done.

Nowhere did it enter into the scope of his plans that he, Issy the Egg, should do it. That would mean a measure of personal risk, and it ran counter to all the traditions of his trade for a grafter to take that kind of a chance. No; but he would pay a price – the top market price, if need be – to have Gramercy Jones suitably beaten; and when this beating came to pass he, the man behind the plot, would be on hand there in some safe and handy spot to see it and enjoy it and get his money’s worth out of it. At the prospect he hugged himself fairly and his expressionless mask of a face puckered up with pleasurable thought.

Moreover, he understood exactly how to go about setting these plans in motion. As one whose years of greatest activity had been spent in the higher and more rarefied levels of crime – which means theft by trick and device rather than theft by violence – he knew exactly where one stratum of his world overlapped and impinged upon another. He knew just where gangster jointed on to gunfighter, and gunfighter dovetailed to gambler, and gambler connected with election thief, and he with grafter, and soon and so forth, the whole forming a many-celled structure which in the city reached up from the lowermost layer of evil, from the very mud sills of crookedness, to the pinnacle, which was a roosting-place for such unclean birds as the venal among the criminal lawyers, the bribable among the police, and the unscrupulous among the political bosses. And above them, still, as the very cream on the jam and the icing on the cake, perched the fixable magistrate and the approachable judge, so that what started at the bottom was felt in due time at the top, and what originated up at the top was in due time filtered downward through separate but nonetheless affiliated influences to the bottom again.

Now, then, having first found his hare, Issy the Egg set about having him caught and cooked. His quest led him, first off, to find a friend whose wider acquaintance with things downtown would serve to supply him, an aristocrat of the uptown, with exact information touching on certain conditions that he sensed in a general way only, as a farmer in one end of a county may be acquainted with the state of crops in another, without knowing the names of those who sow and reap and garner there. It was in Dressy Dave’s, of an evening toward the end of the week, that he waited for the man he sought. He waited long and patiently. It was getting close onto midnight when two men entered.

They made a queerly mated pair; seen together here, they suggested a steam tug towing a big iron tramp into port. He who towed was a slim, tubercular little man of, say, forty. His appearance belied his record, or his record his appearance; anyway one certainly belied the other. In his youth he had been an expert in the higher mathematics of elections, having at his beck a troop of trained repeaters, and at his back a squadron of fighting guerrillas. Now in his maturer years he was a prizefight promoter and a developer of ring material; and of the two this was by odds the harder job, seeing that the average petted and pampered prizefighter is by nature more temperamental than a grand-opera star, more fickle than a flirt, and rather more primitive in his emotions than a caveman. It takes a born general to handle competently a string of meat-fed prizefighters, but this little man was all that. He was the acknowledged Wellington of his class: a general not alone by birth but by breeding.

The hulking human freighter who followed him so closely through Dressy Dave’s front door was the latest and the newest and the most promising of his heavyweight offerings; and looked the part. He was more than six feet tall, but by reason of a mighty shoulder-breadth seemed less. He had hair the color of bleached celery, white eyebrows, the pinky white skin of a healthy baby, and the arm-reach of an orangutan. His nose met his forehead in a straight and unbroken line, and his lower jaw came out flush to balance off this top jutted profile. He had large, pale blue eyes, stupid, round and bovine. Here, you might say, was a creature, part Assyrian bull, part stalled ox and all animal, and yet at that a perfect fighting mechanism; ruminative in peace and terrific in battle, with a small, quiet brain tucked well away in a reënforced skull and a jaw as insusceptible to jars as a tamping ram. Here, you knew instinctively, was one who would do his fighting by rule and by rote purely, without temper, without heat, but only with a merciless bovine thoroughness; and it was evident to any onlooker that he had a desperate fear for this small consumptive who herded him into the ring and out again, and groomed him up by day, bedded him down at night, and fed him on his proper fodder in the morning.

Side by side they lined up at the bar. The manager was in black, dressed as plainly as the minister’s son of the proverb, but the fighter wore more colors than a Joseph. A diamond horseshoe, half life-size, weighted down his bulging scarf, and his hand in its red leather glove looked like a buck’s haunch. A barkeeper in white advanced toward them, displaying that touch of deference which, like his lager, was kept always on tap, but dispensed as a delicate attention for such only as successful vaudeville actors, high police officials, and potential heavyweight champions.

“What’s the good word, gents? And what’ll it be?” The fighter rested his kid-incased vast paws upon the rail in the attitude of a dancing bear, and turned upon his trainer a look that was both cowed and cow-like. The little man interpreted the silent query.

“Make it a beer, Sandy,” he said, “and make it be just one. In a minute we’ll go eat a few dozen eggs and a ham. I’ll take a small beer myself,” he added, aiming his last words at the flattered barkeeper, and then he turned, answering a nudge at his elbow, to find Issy the Egg waiting to speak to him. He nodded the non-committal nod that passes for a formal greeting in certain fellow-crafts of city life. “Hello, Issy!” he said genially. “How’s the boob crop? Doing your Christmas shoplifting early?”

It being evident, though, that Issy sought to engage him confidentially, he bent his head sidewise and Issy spoke in an undertone inaudible to the fighter and to the barkeeper. The promoter listened, squinting at nothing in particular and coughing his phthisical, mechanical cough behind his hand. The matter upon which Issy the Egg bespoke his advice would have been surprising to many. This listener seemed to take it as a matter of course.

“I tell you,” he said speculatively when Mr. Neumeyer had concluded,“since all this mess started up over the Cosmopole killing, it ain’t so easy any more to get these little jobs done right – the gatmen are sort of diffident and shy. Still, I guess it can be done if you come across with the tariff. Here’s what you do, you drop down to the Moss Rose, in Chatham Square – you know the place? and ask for Blink Parsons. Tell Blink I sent you – mentioning my name won’t do any harm – and put it up to Blink the same as you have to me. He’s got a bunch of good handy boys in his stable. He can stake you to the game you’re looking for if anybody can.”

•     •     •     •     •

There is a Chinatown that the sightseer in New York knows. It is a showplace and a property shop – Chinese groceries and Chinese restaurants, a trust-owned joss house where tourists are commoner than worshipers, a make-believe opium den, a make-believe gambling-place, a make-believe Tong headquarters, a slum mission and an old church; these last two are real, though. And there is another Chinatown, which hides behind the first like a masker behind a false face. Those who know the way of it – and they are few enough – can, if they choose, lead you to it. They can lead you to the inner court where, silent and untenanted because it is haunted, is the little second-floor room where Bow Kim, the slave girl, was murdered, which, though a small enough thing in itself, created a subsequent devastating mortality among Four Brothers and On Leongs, both; and thence on to the windowless, airless cubby where the old comedian of the disbanded Chinese theater troupe lies day and night on his bunk, surrounded by the fancy headdresses that he used to wear. He has a skin as dead as a discarded snake’s hide, and the hand that holds his pipe looks like a swatch of yellow rattan canes and he just lies there and smokes. And finally, if so minded, these guides can bring you to the inner circle of Chinatown, which is partly yellow but mostly white. Now this inner Chinatown has for its clearing house, its reading room and its pleasure place, the Moss Rose Club, which is located right round the corner so that it is altogether of Chinatown, without being in it.

Issy the Egg timed wisely the hour of his call at the Moss Rose Club. Evening would have found the place made ready against the profitable coming of slumming parties. There would have been professional raggers and their professional steadies grouped in pairs at the beer-slopped tables, and professional coon shouters, with their aprons on, balancing their tin trays – in the Moss Rose the minstrel bard doubles as a waiter – and a professional piano teaser tormenting his instrument, and in a far and gloomy corner, like a jaguar in its lair, a professional bad man, with the face of a gargoyle and the heart of a rabbit, strongly posed for the awesome admiration of the rubber-necked. But now it was the peaceful middle hour of the afternoon, and the real man-about-town of Chinatown took his ease at his inn.

The air was agreeably sticky with the smells that moved in when the place was first opened and had been there ever since, taking on with age the dignity of a fixed institution. The piano, mercifully silent for the moment, showed its yellow teeth like an old peevish dog. The filtered daylight touched gently the cracks in the murals. These last were patriotic representations in the primary oils of the Three Hills of History – Bunker, Malvern and San Juan; for the Moss Rose is nothing if not ardently patriotic.

Amid these surroundings were disposed a small, select company of congenial spirits. Messrs. Big Doggie, Nathan Alaska and Yiddle December – names as well known at police headquarters as on the list of floor managers when the Chatsworthy Club gave its grand annual civic and masked ball – had their heads together, discussing an approaching public function of that popular organization, and speculating upon the possibility of an invasion on the part of the hostile Jack Tomado gang. At the next table to them, in lonely state, sat Mr. Beansey Hawkman, engaged perhaps in philosophic pondering on the mutability of human affairs, which would be a natural yet possibly painful trend of thought, seeing that Beansey had but lately lost a comrade. It would seem that he and English Chip had turned a trick in raw silks, the proceeds running well up into real money. Subsequent to this, a sinister and persistent rumor had circulated to the effect that English Chip meant to prove indeed a perfidious son of Perfidious Albion and engage in traitorous double-dealings with the police on the exchange basis of evidence for immunity.

Then, at Beansey’s suggestion, he and English Chip had gone skiff-riding upon the East River of a dark evening, the avowed object being to pay a call upon a Brooklyn waterside warehouse. As to its purpose, at least, the expedition proved a failure, for Mr. Hawkman had returned not only without loot but without a partner, his easy explanation being that English Chip had fallen over board and clumsily got himself drowned, which explanation was the more acceptable by reason of the fact that at no time had the late Chip been what you might call generally popular in his own set. And so, if Beansey was short a friend, he was long on security in relation to that transaction in raw silks; and this may have accounted for the admiring glances cast in his direction by Jake the Fits, so called from a proneness to fits in moments of excitement, an affliction that had prevented him from rising above the status of a mere loft thief. And so on! Each one here present had a name and a fame all his own.

Entering circumspectly, Issy the Egg made direct for the bar in front. To conform to the best traditions, the person behind the bar should have been gross and red-faced, as beefy as a brisket, with a fist like a bed pillow and an arm like the bolster. But, to tell the truth, he was a small, sallow person, seemingly of straight American breed and, to all outward appearances, of a mild and reserved demeanor. these two – the con man and the divekeeper – had never met in their lives before, but a certain astronomy of the underworld made them instantly aware of each other as luminous in different orbits of the same planetary system.

Without any bothersome formality, Issy the Egg leaned over the bar and in due order stated his own name, his sponsor’s name, and the nature of the business that had brought him so far south and east of his habitual using grounds in the Tenderloin. Blink Parsons harkened to him, gazing not into his caller’s face but off into space.

“I guess maybe Johnny Greek is the boy you’re looking for to turn this trick,” he said when it came his time to make reply. “If he ain’t got other engagements on hand, Johnny Greek is the candy, all right.”

“Is he round here?“asked Issy the Egg.

“No – it’s kind of early in the day for Johnny to be round,” said Parsons. “He don’t generally show up until he’s got waked up good and had a bite to eat and a pull on the pipe; but I guess I can locate him – he ought to be right round in Doyers Street.”

He looked through the arched opening that set apart bar-room from sitting room, and called out:

“Hey, Yiddle! Send the Sweet Caps Kid in here.”

As prompt almost as a harlequin in a pantomime, there came through the swinging doors, obeying his call, a short youth whose most conspicuous adornments were a cigarette, permanently affixed to his lower lip, and a blue flannel shirt, decorated, coster-style, with many pearl buttons upon breast and collar. The Sweet Caps Kid belonged to a large and, in its way, a valued brotherhood – he was a pickpocket in a small and piddling way; a go-between for thieves; a lobby gow for Chinatown, which is Mongol-Manhattanese for “messenger” and, on secret occasions, a stool-pigeon for the police.

“Sweets,” ordered the barman, “you go round to Mow Gow’s and tell Johnny Greek to get up and come round here. There’s a party waiting to see him on important business, tell him. Stay there till you get him up-see?”

The Sweet Caps Kid swallowed and digested a large mouthful of smoke, then vanished by the side way; and, as these other two waited against his returning, they drank sparingly together and passed the time of day discussing congenial topics variously.

“Who is this Johnny Greek – a wop?” asked Issy at length.

“No,” said Parsons, “he ain’t. He comes from down in them South American countries somewhere.” He waved his arm widely to include a whole continent. “And he’s some good boy, Johnny is. You don’t want to be rating him too low by his looks. Johnny’s one of them hop-fighters; he’s got a habit – see? Take his pipe away from him and he’s that mild a kid could shove his face in for him; but turn him loose on the old stuff and let him smoke maybe two or three pills, and there ain’t nowhere Johnny won’t go for a pal or a piece of change. Get me?”

Being abundantly well acquainted with this commonest of all types of modern East Side gun fighter – the type whose desperation is born of drugs, smoked, swallowed, sniffed or injected Issy the Egg nodded understandingly and mentally prepared himself for a disappointment in the matter of Johnny Greek’s outward shell. Perhaps it was just as well that he did, because Johnny Greek, entering a minute or two later closely tagged by the Sweet Caps Kid, was almost the last person in that whole assembly district whom even so experienced a judge as Issy the Egg would have picked for his job.

To begin with, Johnny Greek was absurdly slight and short. He could not have been over five feet three; it was doubtful whether he would have tipped the beam at one hundred and ten pounds, with all his clothes on. Now he did not have them all on – he lacked a collar to his neckband, his shoelaces were in a slovenly state of looseness, and he was bareheaded. The hand that held the seams of his overcoat together at his naked throat was small enough for a girl, and yet too thin and blue-looking for any girl. It was shaking too. It was plain that, coming out of Mow Gow’s into the open, the cold had bitten shrewdly into Johnny’s marrow. He flinched up against the bar, looking not at the waiting Issy but at Blink Parsons.

“Johnny, this party here is an all-right guy,” stated the divekeeper. “I know him. He belongs to one of the swell uptown mobs. He wants to talk to you about something that’s in your line.”

Being thus suitably introduced, the pygmy looked over his hunched shoulder upward at Issy the Egg, who towered above him a full head; and Issy had his first chance to look into the other’s face. Instantly he experienced an uncomfortable sensation.

Johnny Greek’s hair, which was black and straight, bespeaking in his ancestry a Latin breed, hung down on the narrow forehead in a matted, frayey effect of bangs; the face under the black fringe was thin and sunken, with a pointed receding chin; the skin was of a peculiar slick grayish cast, as though it had been thinly coated with cold mutton grease. The eyes saved this face from utter insignificance. They were big eyes, fringed with long lashes like black floss, lashes that a professional beauty might have envied, and the distended, dead-black pupils seemed to melt and swim in a soluble fluid substance. Their dreamy, dozy stare some way disconcerted Issy the Egg strangely – daunted him fairly.

“We’ll go back here and sit down and talk,” said Johnny Greek in the tone of one giving an order. “It’s warmer there and I’m cold.” His voice was such a voice as might be expected to issue from such a frame – low and almost musical, and daintily accented, with none of the flat ugliness of the Bowery speech in it anywhere.

Even so redoubtable a person as Beansey Hawkman, mulling his drink by the warmth of his hand cupped round the glass, drew in his feet politely for the shambling passage of the shrunken and shivery little man. Yiddle December and his two friends hailed him with almost a studied affability. The gunfighter gave small heed to their greeting. Together they sat down at a table against the back wall, with their bent heads just below where a staggering buff-and-blue hero upbore a perfectly stiff Old Glory; and here Johnny Greek listened, with a drowsy ophidian droop to his eyelids, while Issy the Egg outlined the undertaking he had in contemplation for him.

“I take it you don’t want any hand in this yourself?” inquired Johnny Greek when Issy the Egg had finished.

“No – not me – no,” stated Issy the Egg, wriggling in his seat in a vain effort to feel comfortable. “But I’m sure going to be on hand to see it done. Maybe you’ll need me to point this guy out to you – you ain’t never saw him, of course. Anyhow I’ll be there! I’ll be the innocent bystander,” he concluded, his face wrinkling with appreciation of the point of his own conceit.

“Then it’ll be like this,” said Johnny Greek, gently ticking off each separate item of the proposed enterprise on the tabletop with a slim forefinger. “To make it sure, you’ll be there to point out this party; that’s in case I shouldn’t know him. There oughtn’t to be any hitch, though, because I used to know Furst and you say Furst is always with the party. Anyway you give me the office and then I cut loose.

“Of course I don’t touch him myself – I make the gun-play and the standoff. There’ll be two boys with me – they do the rough work. The party has his map altered and goes to the hospital – for about a month. That’s the layout – ain’t it?”

“You’ve got it,” assented Issy the Egg, highly gratified, though still strangely ill at ease. “His map shoved in and the hospital for his.” He entered into a lengthy and minute description of the person who was to undergo these painful physical alterations. And so at length he came to the main question: “What’s the price of this going to be – including everything?”

Johnny Greek, speaking in a tone of flat finality, told him, and Issy the Egg had no stomach for arguing a lower rate. He then and there paid something on account.

“I’ll hand you the rest down here as soon as the job’s done – that same night,” he added easily.

“I know you will,” said Johnny Greek. He said it gently, almost sleepily, but there was a subtle little under-thread of meaning in his words that affected Issy the Egg throughout his system, particularly at the roots of his hair and southward along his back-marrow.

“When is’t to be – now?” asked Johnny Greek.

“The sooner the better to suit me,” said Issy the Egg. “I can lead you to him any night almost.”

“This is Friday – ain’t it?” asked Johnny Greek. “I lose count of the days.”

“Saturday,” corrected Issy.

“All right then; it’s Saturday,” agreed Johnny Greek. “Sunday comes tomorrow. Monday night I’ll be busy somewhere else. We’ll set this job down for Tuesday night.”

“Tuesday night is Christmas Eve though,” said Issy the Egg.

“Is it?” said Johnny Greek in the tone of one to whom time and the calendared divisions of time signified little. “So much the better! The crowds will be thicker – it makes the getaway easier. And say, look here, Neumeyer,” he went on slowly, “if this should get out afterward and make any trouble for me I’ll know who it was that did the loose talking.” His big eyes fixed on Issy the Egg with a baleful cuttlefish stare, and the sinister liquid in which they floated became as a corrosive acid that seemed to eat into the wriggling con man’s being and sear him. “I’ll know who did the talking – see?” he repeated.

Issy the Egg had a feeling. He had a feeling that Johnny Greek was looking right into him and right on through him, clear to the back of his neck where his spine jointed on. He turned the color of a sick oyster. His tongue curled in his mouth and became suddenly parched and acrid to the taste. With a visible effort he moistened it into elasticity and began a speech of an excessively reassuring and promissory nature. The gunman cut him off short, midway of the first sputtered sentence.

“That’s enough!” said Johnny Greek. “I was only telling you-that’s all. You can run along now. I’m going back to Mow’s to get a little more sleep – I got up out of bed to come over here.” He shivered violently. Issy the Egg obeyed. He went straightway, nor stood upon the order of his going.

•     •     •     •     •

Daytimes young Gramercy Jones, in his somber black mourning garb and his monkish spectacles, with the black rubber rims on them, might prowl in all manner of strange and unhallowed places – and so he did, being accompanied always by the inevitable ex-Sergeant Max Furst – but 8:15 P.M. was sure to find him sitting in a certain stagebox at the Olympian Temple of Classy Vaudeville, still with Mr. Furst for a mate. This valued knowledge Issy the Egg had acquired as the chief fruitage of his vigilant shadowing. Furthermore, he knew that, following the evening performance, these two invariably waited at the stagedoor of that same well-known theater. In the profundities of his own wisdom Issy the Egg was perhaps justified in the assumption that Gramercy Jones, being of the susceptible age of twenty-four, had been attracted to some one or another of the women performers doing a turn at the Olympian. It might be – so Issy reasoned it out to himself – La Belle Esmeralda, the Spanish toe-dancer; and then again it might be Mamie Burns, of the team of Biddle and Burns; they both were on the bill of the current two weeks. As to that detail, Issy felt only a passing interest; and probably he would have displayed doubt had he been told the truth of the case, which was that Jones and Furst served nightly as cavaliers to a talented but forlorn child performer living permanently at the same house in Brooklyn where they were stopping temporarily. The main point with Issy was that from careful and patient watching he could now be reasonably sure of locating the enemy at a given hour and a given point, and this knowledge fitted into the rest of his plans like a bone into a socket.

Accordingly, at the beginning of the last hour before Christmas Eve ended and Christmas Day began, Johnny Greek came speeding uptown with his two chosen helpers, to earn the prize money of Issy the Egg by sending Gramercy Jones to the nearest hospital. It was an entirely conventional and proper Christmas Eve, in so far as that snow was falling – heavy enough to make slanting lines through the air and put a sugary-white rime on the furs of the women and the hat brims of the men, but so light as to be obliterated by the feet of the multitude as fast as it fell. Half a mile south, in the main shop district, the eleventh-hour purchasers by the frenzied thousands contended viciously with one another and with tired-out clerks, buying gifts that were unsuitable, for people they didn’t care for, because these people in return were going to do the same for them – turning the Christmas Eve into the Christmas evil. Up above, where the hotels, the cafés and the theaters packed in together, in the best-lighted and worst-paved spot upon the habitable globe, the crowds were not quite so thick or quite so maniacal.

This particular district would be at its maddest and its gladdest one week hence, on New Year’s Eve, when celebrants, over-dressed and under-dressed, would unite, with wine, women and song – but not much song – to make a pagan’s revel out of a Christian’s night. Still, though, the cafés were reasonably well filled – there are always a few score thousands to be stayed with food and plied with drink in New York of an evening; and the wide street was a screen for a shuttling succession of those endlessly shifted moving pictures that make a winter’s night on Broadway a thing to remember afterward.

Not even the Broadway spirit could altogether kill out the Christmas spirit. Above the roar of the traffic rose the insistent tinkle of a bell, where at every corner stood a modern Christian martyr in the person of a Santa Claus in a red flannel tunic and cotton-batting whiskers, shivering beside his canvas chimney into which the charitable dropped their contributions for the holiday dinners of the poor. Through the gasoline reek that was everywhere there seeped smells of spicy evergreens; and there were sprigs of holly on the coat lapels of some of the men and on the fur boas of some of the women. Had there been a few children about, the illusion of Christmas might almost have been complete, but of course there weren’t any children. On Broadway, upon the night before Christmas, you can find almost any kind of a human being except a young child. Newsboys don’t count, they being world-wise, world-wary little old men who emerged from the cradle, or its tenement substitute, into an acute and violent maturity.

Up beyond and down below, where natural darkness contended with artificial illumination for the mastery of the night, the sirens of countless automobiles bleated and blatted unendingly, like the voices of lost souls adrift in a yellowish-gray sheol.

One of these banshee voices belonged to the vehicle that was swiftly bearing to the appointed place Johnny Greek and his brace of picked co-workers. Neither of these gentry was particularly large, but both of them were particularly strong and particularly bad. One, known as Scranton Dutch, was a yeggman of ability and repute in his profession, spending his summers on the road professionally and his winters in the city. The other, a swarthy person answering to the name of Tony simply, had in those bright and profitable recent days of bombthrowing and throatcutting activities, served in the triple role of corresponding secretary, walking delegate and subscription collector for a close corporation of Mulberry Bend Black Hand experts; and both of them were tried and proved wolves of the Manhattan badlands.

The oldtime gangman of New York – the gangman of fifteen or even ten years ago – might have felt abashed and out of his proper element in the Broadway environs. He would have hesitated long and figured out the chances well before he undertook a contract to maim a rich young man in these parts. But he was of a different blood and breed, less cruel, perhaps, certainly less subtle – a carnal fighter merely, fond of red liquor and mixed ale and of beating up policemen and sailors; in short, a person given over to the rawer and cruder forms of lawless indulgence.

These three, however, were of a newer generation, diverging widely from their vanished predecessors, not only in look and in race but in habit and thought. They were habitual users in one form or another of drugs; they added to their crimes a certain orientalized refinement and finish of brutality and, thanks to the introduction into their social system of those products of modern civilization – the hypodermic syringe, the automatic revolver and the high-powered touring car – they were not in the least afraid to conduct their operations within earshot and eyeshot of the city’s main thoroughfare, as the newspaper es of the period might abundantly attest.

They came now, riding in state in a taxicab, and Johnny Greek was coiled upon the backseat and made a small, dark, inert bundle there. He blinked his long silken lashes as the lights flittered by. His skin was grayer than ever, as if an extra coat of the cold suet had been poured over it, and his gorged eyes seemed fairly to drown in their thick fluid, which was like pot liquor. His companions themselves, well primed with gin and cocaine, knew these symptoms well, and with them were well content. It was when Johnny Greek saw things through the haze of the pipe that he turned from harmless to deadly. They were prepared to tag after him blindly and do his bidding unquestioningly – hungry pythons following a puff-adder to the kill.

According to instructions already given, their driver, himself a thief and the partner of thieves, stopped his machine alongside the curbing, half a block east of where the lights of the Olympian Temple of Classy Vaudeville made a yellow sunburst in the night. At once his three passengers were out of the car and making off in single file along the sidewalk, muffled and silent, with their hats drawn well down on their faces, but in no wise to be distinguished at a casual glance from any other three pedestrians to be found in the length and breadth of the Tenderloin at that same hour.

To explain more fully and make clear the situation that now impended, we might diagram it after the fashion followed by a newspaper artist plotting out a picture. Let A and B represent respectively Gramercy Jones and Max Furst, waiting just outside the stage door; let C be Issy the Egg, on watch from a vantage place forty feet away. D, E and F are the three musketeers from Chatham Square, now afoot and drawing momentarily nearer to the chosen spot. The point marked X, we will say, represents the stage door itself, it being set into a blank wall under the protecting shadow of an outside iron stairway, some twoscore yards to the westward of the brilliantly lighted archway of the main entrance, from which the evening audience is pouring forth in a thick torrent to the accompaniment of automobiles honking and wheeling at the curb, and a carriage starter bellowing cabalistic numbers through a megaphone, and one pestered policeman doing his best to herd the crowd away by proper and orderly channels.

Led by their poisonous little pilot-snake, the two strongarms came on cautiously, holding to the outer edge of the pavement. As they emerged out of the murk into the brighter patch made by the one sputtering arc light above the stagedoor, Issy the Egg saw the leader and, forgetting in his eagerness the inborn caution of his craft, he stole out into the open. He came up so close to his unsuspecting quarries that from behind he could almost touch them, and he made the signal that had been agreed upon – made it once, twice, three times. In that same instant Max Furst’s guardian angel nudged him on the arm and bade him turn round and be quick about it. He pivoted on his heel and in one sliding glance he took in Issy the Egg and his beckoning arm: and then, just on beyond Issy, he saw the looming figures of Johnny Greek, Scranton Dutch and Brother Tony of the Black Hand brotherhood. He had time only to snatch at Gramercy Jones warningly and to throw himself back, bracing his shoulders against the wall in anticipation of the coming shock.

Then the blow fell. But before it fell there was a delay so brief as to be measured only in split seconds.

The cause for this fractionally fleet stoppage in the rushing course of events was Johnny Greek. Three of the little gummy black pills smoked, or even four, and Johnny Greek would have been as keen as a rat-dog. But, honing up his nerves for the work in hand, he had, in the privacy of Mow Gow’s place, smoked five, and that was exactly one too many. His stupefied brain rolled and waggled in a poppy haze and his thoughts fought together.

Some things, now, were clear enough to him. He had the place right – that was sure enough – and there was somebody to be beaten up into fit shape for surgery. There was to be a signal for the beginning. He was to make the gunplay while those two trusty subcontractors of his, Scranton and Tony, did the rough work.

The brimming black eyes fell on a face. This face he faced dimly – it belonged to an oldtime Central Office bull whom he had known somewhere, hundreds or thousands of years before. Was the bull to be the recipient of the slugging? No, that was not it. The bull would be somewhere near the chosen victim – that was it. Seeking for that victim, his rolling, brimming stare shifted from Furst to one who hovered almost alongside Furst. And, clear through the mists that fogged his intellect, he beheld a hairless puckered face and a bald round head and a hand frantically motioning. He knew that face too. Had he seen it before? Or had it been described to him minutely? No matter – it was fixedly associated in his memory with this lucrative and congenial enterprise!

Out of his overcoat pocket came the automatic. Making a circling sweep of the gun to hold off interference from whatever quarter, Johnny Greek gave the order:

“Take him, you – the guy with the cap!”

Max Furst barely did yank his startled employer backward into the protection of the stage door as the two subcontractors bore past them. Just beyond there was a jolt of contact – a mingling together of three thrashing bodies – a squeak of terror from somebody – and then a newsboy was yelling: “Fight!” The steady currentlike movement of the crowd broke into confused eddyings, and then rolled forward in an excited groundswell, packing closely, as is the habit of a crowd, and delaying the one lone policeman who came at a run, diving through the intervening human surf. He made good time, considering, but then Scranton and Tony were fast workers too.

They came bounding back now and left behind them a silent black heap on the sidewalk against the theater wall. looked for a moment like an overcoat, crumpled and dropped there. Greek’s waving gunbarrel cleared an amply wide path for them through the scrambling pack; and, with him ahead setting the pace, they jumped the curb, crossed the asphalt, and while the bewildered policeman made abortive starts this way and that, misled by conflicting shouted advice, they tumbled into their taxicab and were presently gone, streaking away without regard for the speed law. They had made one mistake which, however, gave them no worry, because they didn’t know yet they had made it.

As Max Furst drew Gramercy Jones out of the confusion into a quieter and less excited spot round the corner of Broadway, they heard the clang of the gong as the ambulance wormed its way through the Christmas Eve crowds. Already Mr. Furst had fully diagnosed the state of the case.

“Boss,” he was saying, “I’ve got it figured out: Issy the Egg frames up a beating for you or me-you, I guess – and the dope goes wrong and he gets it himself. You had all the luck this time. You had your nerve with you too. I seen the look on your face when the play came off and that little hop-fighter was poking his gat your way. I guess you’re the White Hope, all right, chief!”

From this occasion dated the period when Max Furst quit calling the young man boss and began calling him chief.

The Saturday Evening Post, 01 Mar 1913

THE ISLAND OF ADVENTURE

The Adventure
of the
Chained-Up Lady

~

When a young person who has but lately chipped the Harvard shell comes into an estate of five millions, more or less, upon a condition imposed by an obstinate and eccentric father that for the space of five years he does not set foot outside the boundaries of the city of Greater New York; and when this new-pipped fledgling of the Cambridge nest sets forth, with deliberation and premeditation, to have a series of thrilling adventures upon the island of Manhattan and within her sister boroughs; and when, to that end, he hires for his guide, and if need be his guardian, an efficient ex-headquarters detective – when in rapid sequence these things befall, and on their heels come sundry adventures, it makes a story such as is bound sooner or later to find its way into the public prints of the period.

Despite the best efforts of former Sergeant Max Furst, and of Dana Grist, assistant city editor of one of the afternoon papers, and of the family solicitor, Judge Alonzo Pike – these three being the sole sharers of the legatee’s secret – there came a morning when the tale of Jason Jones’ queer will and its attendant results saw type – saw serried columns of blackfaced type – and thereafter for a space of time the spry young men of the daily press made young Gramercy Jonas’ life a burden to him.

Now, then, notoriety threatened the very breath of life of his well-laid plans, whereas in anonymity alone lay a guaranty of their success; since how could you expect a young man of wealth, how ever ably chaperoned and financed, to delve undisturbed at the roots of hidden things when his personal aspect was as well known to the casual reader as that of the newest Broadway matinée idol or the latest and most popular wife murderer? Therefore Gramercy Jones and these his friends were much put to it.

So by stealth, while some persevering reporters took turns playing tunes on his door knocker and others sought vainly at the area-way to bribe his servants, and enterprising staff photographers with cameras hid under their coats hung about his stoop, Gramercy Jones quitted his house in Gramercy Park and fled to quieter lodgings elsewhere. In one regard he was deeply fortunate. By of the last will and testament of the erratic philanthropist capitalist, and they printed that; they followed the son’s course through college, a staid and plodding-enough recital – and they printed that, too, suitably garnished and sauced with those pleasing curlicues of fancy by which a skilled reporter makes a sprightly tale out of a dull one; they printed pictures of Jason Jones, deceased, and pictures of the Jason Jones home, fronting Gramercy Park, and of the Jason Jones type of cheap hotels; and likewise pictures of Gramercy Jones’ lawyer and his butler and his chauffeur and his manservant and his maidservant – but they printed no pictures of the young man himself. Or at least they printed none that might be deemed trustworthy.

It is true the city editor of the Evening Star, being rendered desperate by the failure of his legmen to find an existent photograph and of his camera squad to click a coveted snapshot, called in one of his staff artists – a youth with an imaginative pencil and a fertile fancy and set him to making a pen-and-ink portrait of a vaguely described young man of, say, twenty-four, which portrait the Evening Star boldly published as the only exclusive, authentic, true, correct and copyrighted likeness of the suddenly famous heir. But, because this picture looked like so many rich men’s sons and so utterly unlike the round-faced and spectacled person whom it was fondly presumed to represent, unforeseen contingencies resulted from the Evening Star’s stroke of enterprise. It enabled divers rakish youths to pose in public places as Gramercy Jones until they were rounded up and exposed for brassy counterfeits. And it enabled the real and genuine Gramercy Jones, safe in the cloistered calm of his new hiding-place, to plan for himself fresh campaigns of adventure in the city that Judge Pike had aptly called the place where things happen.

For the nine days that he continued to be a front-page asset and for weeks thereafter, Gramercy Jones’ mail was heavier than it had been in his whole life before. To him by a roundabout route, came letters in sheafs and shoals and enveloped avalanches. It would seem that everybody in New York had read about Jason Jones’ will and the terms under which the son inherited, and then that everybody had sat right down and written to the son. To those who hold that life in a metropolis makes people cold and unresponsive to the needs of a fellow-being, there would have been an illuminating surprise in the number of purely disinterested and absolutely unselfish persons who, out of the fullness of the heart, were moved to address Gramercy Jones, each with a separate plan whereby much happiness and good might accrue to that young man.

It was in an apartment on one of Brooklyn’s quiet by-streets that this mass of mail, carefully re-addressed and re-forwarded, descended upon its intended recipient. For expert advice he had turned to Max Furst on the day of the first printing of the story. Upon this occasion they had been sitting together inside the drawing room. Outside, one early bird of a reporter was keeping a determined finger pressed firmly against the door button; and another, poising himself precariously on the iron palings, was trying vainly to peer in at the curtained window – and, with a sensation somewhat closely akin to panic, Gramercy Jones had asked Mr. Furst what they had better do now.

“A cinch!” had answered Mr. Furst. “We wait until dark and then we lam out the back way and hide somewheres.”

“You forget, don’t you, that I can’t leave Greater New York?” he had said in his turn; “that if I do I forfeit my fortune, and that one of your duties is to see that on no account do I leave New York?”

“No, I don’t forget that,” Mr. Furst had replied. Then Mr. Furst had coined an unconscious epigram. “Boss, when you’re hiding out from New York, New York is the safest place there is to hide out in. The big mistake an amachure crook makes when he turns a trick here is hiking out for some small town, where the people take notice of a stranger; and he gets nailed by some wise Johnny Raw of a rube policeman. The professional knows better. He holes up right here in town and generally he’s safer than he would be anywhere else on the map. Take it the way it was here last summer, when they bumped off Rosey the Gambler up there in front of the Cosmopole. For weeks, all over this country, they was looking for Ike the Dropper for plugging Rosey – and finding him, too, every day – only it always turned out to be the wrong guy. And all the time Ike was right here – he’d just moved from the upper East Side to the lower West Side.

“And there was the Fan Mathewson murder case – you remember that, I guess? – here about eight or nine years back. There was a big reward out for Fan Mathewson’s brother-in-law, Bert Roach – he would be the state’s main witness if they could just find him. I was down at 300 Mulberry, at the old Central Office then, and I worked on that case myself for a solid year nearly – me and my side partner, Heiney Blum. The district attorney had us going over North America with fine-tooth combs for Bert Roach. Why, oncet they sent me and Blum clear to El Paso, Texas, after a suspect that looked as much like Bert as Tom Sharkey looks like Doctor Parkhurst – just about. And all that time Bert Roach and his wife had took another name and were living across the river in Brooklyn, all nice and cozy. They might ’a’ been there yet, only Bert got full of mixed ale one night and did a little too much slack talking. Brooklyn, or Williamsburg, or Long Island City – you can’t beat any of those towns right across the river for places to hide in. But Brooklyn is the best. Say, boss, how about us taking the veil and moving over to little old Brooklyn until things quiet down?”

Brooklyn it was. Expense being no object, the furniture went in that same afternoon and they went in that same night. From the rear windows of his quiet suite on the top floor of a sedate and dignified house on Columbia Heights, Gramercy Jones could count the windows in the looming skyscrapers of Manhattan. A five-minute walk, followed by a ten-minute ride on the Subway, would take him under the river, straight into the seething center of downtown New York; and yet – such is the incurious way of the Greater City – he was safer from discovery here than he could possibly have been in Portland, or Peoria, or Pass Christian. And it was here that he went through his augmented mail, seeking to find somewhere in it the seed of suggestion that would bear the delectable fruit of adventure.

For a while, though, his lading of letters, gross as to weight, ran light as to prospect. Of chances to invest money advantageously he was offered no end. For the small sum of one thousand dollars the Mike Mustard Literary and Pleasure Club, of the Fourth Assembly District, stood ready to make him a life member, in addition guaranteeing him a swell time on all beefsteak dinners, chowder parties, shore dinners, outings, games and other occasions.

One who signed himself with mysterious cryptograms, and who admitted in so many words serving time in reformatory institutions, generously offered to put himself entirely at the disposal of Mr. Jones with a view to introducing him to the real underworld – he, though avowedly a reformed and honest man, being still in touch with the criminal classes. Opportunities of going into paying businesses; of meeting attractive young women – object matrimony – and altruistic young men – object friendship; of buying stocks; of backing theatrical enterprises; of relieving human distress in all its branches – of these there were hundreds.

Had he enjoyed the income of fifty millions instead of a mere five, the young man might have laid it all out to advantage among obliging strangers.

Once in a while there was a prayer for help that breathed real worth and real want; and here, with Mr. Furst’s efficient aid, Mr. Gramercy Jones administered anonymously. But not until the beginning of the third week did there come one which contained even a scant promise of the germ of the thing for which he was seeking. It ran thus:

Sir: I have read in the papers of you and your plight. As one prisoner to another, I appeal to you. You, by the terms of your father’s dying command, are bound fast. I, too, am bound fast-held by one who wishes me ill and who, for his own wicked ends, keeps me a prisoner.

You have money at your command. If with money you have also courage and shrewdness it lies in your power, perhaps, to bring blessed freedom to a helpless woman who has almost ceased to hope. Yet I must warn you that there is risk – great risk and danger – for you, and perhaps for both of us. Those who have me in their power are both unscrupulous and desperate; and one of them – my own kinsman – is a man who will stop short at nothing, as he has proved in his treatment of me.

This note I hope to drop in the street, praying that through kindly hands it may come to you.

So, if you fear the danger, destroy these lines and forget if you can that a victim of unutterable cruelties ever sought your help. But if you have a heart and are brave you will station yourself opposite the house at Number 58 1/2 Fifth Avenue any morning during the coming week about the hour of ten, and you shall see what you shall see. I will know you, I think; but if I give a sign make no sign of recognition in return. It will be then for you to find some means of secretly communicating with me; and that, I warn you, will be difficult. If you succeed your reward will be the gratitude of the innocent victim of a villainous conspiracy. If you fail——

But, remember, in no emergency, now or hereafter, must you ask aid from the authorities. There are good reasons for this, as you will learn.

Remember the place, Number 58 1/2 Fifth Avenue, and the hour – ten o’clock any forenoon during the coming week. Watch the green carriage and those who enter it!

More I dare not write now; nor my name. I sign myself

Fettered.

Succor for the oppressed – what could be a nobler aim!

Something inside of Gramercy Jones gave a little jump. He read the letter all the way through again. Then he examined it closely – the paper itself, the handwriting, the envelope in which it had come. The paper was of heavy linen; unscented, unruled, expensive plainly; such paper as a well-bred woman keeps for her correspondence. It bore no monogram nor any crest or date. Mainly the writing was in an angular, steep hand, such as so many educated women have come to use. Each sentence began in such a style, but toward the end the script lost its distinctive character and became confused and forrnless, almost as though two persons – a refined woman and a half-grown child – had collaborated in the construction. Yet the spelling was good and the letter itself – except for the last hysterical-sounding line of postscript – seemed to him self-contained and sincere, considering the circumstances under which it was conceivably written.

He considered the envelope – a heavy, square envelope of color and texture to match the paper, properly addressed to him at his house in Gramercy Park in the same hand that had written the rest, and bearing in a lower corner the hobbed imprint of a heel and a smear of dried mud, showing where some passer’s foot had trodden upon it before another came along and saw it, and took it up and mailed it. The postmark was smudged somewhat, but by holding it at a slanting angle he made out that it had been stamped at the general post-office at noon of the day before.

He carried this letter to Mr. Furst, who sat at ease in the next room, digesting breakfast and enjoying the comic supplements – this was a Sunday morning, and the floor about Mr. Furst was littered ankle-deep with those hebdomadal products of the metropolitan press at which strict Sabbatarians do so vehemently and shrilly rail, notwithstanding Sunday papers are compiled during the week and printed before midnight of Saturday. Mr. Furst laid aside his cigar and, marking with one forefinger the exact spot where he had left off his contemplation of the homicidal whimsicalities of the Hausenpfeffer Twins, he read the letter through once and again.

“What do you think of that?” demanded his employer when Mr. Furst was done.

“It might be a plant – might be somebody trying to slip something over on you,” he diagnosed; “or it might be that a plain nut wrote it. Taking it just as it lays, I’d say offhand that it’s got a kind of nutty look to me. And yet you never can tell – it might be on the dead level. The longer I live in this town the more convinced I am that you can’t never tell what’s coming off next. And yet, at that” – he amended as the ingrained cynicism of the veteran thief-taker came out in him – “And yet, at that, the strangest things usually turn out to be the phoniest when you give ’em the acid test. But” – the astute ex-sergeant was hedging again – “But, as I says before, you never can tell. This address now – that’s a pretty good district; considerable many of them old-fashioned rich people still live down round Washington Square. I tell you what, boss; suppose I go scouting there and give this place a look? And tomorrow, if it suits you, we might both be kind of piking round when this green carriage that’s mentioned here comes along.”

It was so agreed. In two hours or less the investigator was back from his scout, and in his eyes the light of a quickening interest shone.

“Boss,” he began, “there’s something doing – maybe. It’s just a bare chance that we’ve hit a lead that’ll take us somewheres. I looked this Number 58 1/2 over. It’s one of them old brick houses, a residence; and it’s got a brass plate on the front door, with the name of a Doctor Snodgrass on it – no initials and no telling what kind of a doctor he is – just the name. It’s one of them places that looks like nothing ever came off there – and that’s the kind of a place where pretty near anything is liable to come off.

“I talked with the man on the beat. He’s a young gabby cop, and he opened up as soon as I’d told him who I was and that I used to be a headquarters man. It seems there’s only four people that belong in this here house. There’s an old pappy guy, with trimmed-up whiskers – he’s the doctor, I judge; and a big husky woman that seems to do the work; and a man that drives the carriage and lives over the stable at the back; and a young lady that’s supposed to be an invalid. She’s some kind of kin to Old Whiskers. Anyway, that’s what Miller – he’s the cop – picks up from talking to the housegirls next door. And every morning them other two – the doc and the woman – they take the young lady out for a ride in a closed carriage. There’s never anybody else along with them, and this young lady’s never in sight except this once a day, which might or might not be suspicious. And they never have any women coming in from outside – no visitors or callers! Boss, it might pay us: to give the house a look tomorrow; anyhow it won’t take long.”

Nor did it. It was, as the scout had described, an old-fashioned, sad-looking house of brick. It was the second house from the corner and was one of a row all much alike, except for such variations of ornamentation as fanlights over some doors and gargoyle waterspouts over others. Handrails were at the steps of all, some of brass and some of iron, the brass ones being polished brilliantly and the iron ones set off with iron lion heads, snarling, and iron gamecocks, rampant, and iron dogs, couchant – and such-like cast-metal atrocities of the mid-sixties. The row was flanked at the south by Washington Park, its trees and flower-beds serving as a barrier to the onmarching hordes of Gaul and Goth, Latin and Levantine; and flanked upon the north by loft buildings, marking where the shirtwaist trade and the ready-made clothing trade crept nearer year by year – a beleaguered spot, holding out against inevitable change, the last ditch of a scanty yet heroic handful of that semi-mythical breed known familiarly in print as the Old Knickerbocker Families.

As for Number 58 1/2, there was nothing to set it apart from its neighbors above it and below it and across the way from it, except a certain air of genteel decay about its pocked brick front and the small brass plate on the door, and the closely blinded windows, shutting out the bright sharp sunshine of this fine November morning, Yet to the fancy of the imaginative young adventure-seeker waiting upon the opposite sidewalk it had about it, some way, an air of suppression and reticence; an air of keeping its secrets to itself.

He did not have long to wait. Ten minutes after the hour he and Furst saw a two-horse carriage swing briskly round the corner below and draw up at the stoopline of 58 1/2. It was a closed carriage of the square-bodied coach pattern, painted a bottle-green. The driver was a middle-aged man, weather-beaten and glum-looking, in a somewhat shabby green livery with tarnished metal buttons. This person, having halted his team, sheathed his whip and sat at ease, staring straight ahead. In a minute the door opened and three persons issued forth – first, an oldish, withered-looking slender man, whose beard was van-dyked down to a sharp point and who wore a heavy overcoat and a flat-topped derby hat; and behind him, side by side, two women – one a stout, capable-looking person of a stern and iron-jawed aspect, with something of the domestic in her dress and manner and something of the companion; the other slenderer and of a more youthful figure, in a black frock. She had furs about her throat and a thick black veil down over her face, and her arms were buried midway to the elbows in a large flat muff.

As they came down the steps the older woman had one hand thrust inside the crook of the younger woman’s elbow and held her fast, though there was no suggestion of indecision about the pose of her body, no droop of weakness to the veil-swathed head. From his place, diagonally across, young Gramercy Jones marked this warderlike grip of the square-jawed woman, and marked, too, the quick and apprehensive glance the man shot up and down the avenue as he opened the carriage door and waited for the others to step into it.

Then something happened. Just when the elderly woman’s bulk was half hidden from view by the intervening side and rear of the coach-body, and the old man was out of sight altogether, the younger woman seemed to hang back for the fraction of a second. She threw up her veil with a peculiar strained motion of her arms in her muff and looked straight across at Gramercy Jones; and all in a flash he saw a strained, colorless face – a young face, so he thought – and a pair of big, staring eyes, either gray or blue, he couldn’t tell which at the distance, but, at any rate, wide-open eyes, which flashed an instantaneous appeal and a message and a warning at him – he saw all that and something else. He judged Furst must have seen it all, too, for at his elbow he heard a fervently muttered “Hully Gee!”

The veil dropped; there was an urging forward of the shrouded figure; the younger woman bent her head and vanished within the carriage. The door slammed and instantly the carriage was in motion, swinging about and moving north at a brisk gait in the rows of upbound travel, leaving the sidewalk in front of Number 58 1/2 bare, and leaving the two spies across the way staring with startled eyes at each other.

“Did you see her face?” demanded Gramercy Jones.

“Not to notice clost,” said Mr. Furst; “but I saw her hands – one of them; she was wearing darbies inside of that there muff.”

“Darbies?”

“Sure,” explained Furst – “nippers – come-alongs – handcuffs. When she jerked up her veil one of her hands slipped out of her muff, and I got a good flash at it. You can’t fool me about those things, boss – I’ve seen too many people wearing ’em. That young lady had the darbies on her, all right! I saw the steel bracelet round the wrist and an inch or two of the chain. Say,” he added suddenly, “we clean forgot to trail that cab!”

•     •     •     •     •

Of the two avenues that run parallel courses along the rocky spine of Manhattan Island, one might be called the cheapest street in the world and its twin the costliest. I am not saying that Fifth Avenue has not its cheap spots, speaking comparatively, or that Sixth Avenue has not its highly expensive ones; but, speaking with regard to the prevalent characteristics of these two, I contend the comparison is a proper one – Sixth Avenue the cheapest, Fifth Avenue the costliest. On Sixth Avenue there are places in plenty where one may buy a square meal, with a choice of meats – tripe or beef stew – a cup of ostensible coffee and a slice of obvious pie for fifteen cents; and on Fifth Avenue, in equal abundance, also, are places where stewed prunes are forty-five cents a portion, plain, or sixty cents with cream. The prevalent table d’hôte tariff of Sixth Avenue is sixty cents for a six course dinner – with wine, mind you – whereas at sundry Midas-menued establishments on Fifth Avenue that same sixty cents would not take you past the soup, if it took you that far. On Sixth Avenue, choosing the right shop, a whole suit of clothes – coat, waistcoat and trousers – may be had, new, for three dollars; twenty dollars is really the lowest price that a certain tailor, just one block removed, would think of charging you for a pair of riding breeches. Did he accept less his self-respect would suffer and probably he could not meet his rent.

Green parrots, acutely alive and warranted potential conversationalists, may, in season, be bought on Sixth Avenue for as low a figure as two dollars; other green parrots, forever past speech, seeing that they are dead and stuffed, fetch most fabulous prices at Fifth Avenue’s leading millinery shops. Along Sixth Avenue, in basement bat-caves, are starveling artists producing Old Masters; and up in attics are weary sweat-shop workers, making rare cobwebby foreign things; and in back rooms are skinny artisans turning out genuine antiques for which, if current rumor runs true, sundry art sellers and lace importers and furniture dealers on Fifth Avenue ask – and are given – their weight in minted gold. Those who walk the wide ways of mid-Fifth know not the habitual pedestrians of lower Sixth – a gulf as wide as the world and as deep as the sea, and something less than seven hundred feet in measurable space dividing them. So it goes.

So it went with particular reference to a certain block well downtown. At this point Fifth Avenue presented a view of sister rows of old homes, staring blankly across the asphalt aisle at one another like a double file of prim deaconesses who from long association had run out of things to talk about, and so stood brooding and silent. Only once in a while, at long intervals, an interloper of a fussy family hotel or an ornate-fronted apartment house loomed aggressively like a dressy stranger that had intruded upon a Shaker meeting. Right over on Sixth Avenue, back to back with this, was quite another world – a motley, messed and mussy world, piebald and polyglot, and thrown together any way at all; a world where L trains loped by unceasingly and truck tires fretted the worn cobbles; with here a fur-curing shop and there a bird-and-animal store; and here again a Chinese laundry, and there a Greek restaurant or an Italian green grocery – or what you pleased; with tenements piling above, story on story, and the roar of the traffic below, and smells of sorts everywhere. And, because the life of the one was more virile than the life of the other, Sixth Avenue had crept round the corner and invaded the side street, impressing its character upon dwellings and dwellers three-fourths of the way eastward to Fifth.

This creeping course of absorption and transformation was to prove a lucky thing for our two conspirators. Before dark of this same November Monday, Mr. Furst, as agent, had completed the dicker that put at the disposal of himself and his principal the top floor of a four-story warehouse building. This building ran back into the block to a greater depth than its neighbors, and by a still luckier circumstance it had side windows let into its eastern wall, which windows looked across an intervening space of court yards and shed tops directly into the rear elevation of the house that bore upon its front the brass nameplate of the uninitialed Doctor Snodgrass.

At these windows, then, armed with opera glasses and equipped with certain other needful things, Gramercy Jones and Max Furst kept faithful ward and watch until nearly midnight that same night and through most of the next day; but not until twilight of the second evening was their chilly vigil in any wise rewarded. The dusk was thickening, blotting out the unutterable homeliness of the back yards, when lights flashed on in the top floor of the house of their faithful scrutiny. True, lights had shone there the night before for a space of hours; but then the shades had been drawn and they had seen nothing except vague shadows passing the opaque squares of the windows. Now, by happy chance, the shade of one of the two back windows was up, and as the lights flared on they had a most excellent view of a considerable space of the interior. It was plainly a woman’s bedroom into which they looked. They could see with distinctness a rear wall with pictures on it, one end of a heavy brass bed, an easy chair drawn up at the foot of the bed and, just beyond, a dressing table upon which things of glass and silver glittered – toilet articles evidently.

In the same second they comprehended all this they saw, crossing their line of vision from right to left, the stout, blue-linen-clad shape of the square-jawed woman of the day before – it was she plainly who had lighted the lights. She vanished, but almost instantly she reappeared, leading by the arm a younger woman. Though her street frock was replaced now by a loose boudoir gown of some silky texture and her hair hung in plaits over her shoulders, and though Gramercy Jones had seen her but once, and that fleetingly, he knew her.

Plainly before their eyes she sank listlessly into the easy chair at the foot of the bed and put both her hands up to her face, the loose sleeves slipping away from her slender bare arms at the gesture. The stout woman bent over her a moment as though aiding her to arrange her dress; and then, as she stepped aside again, Gramercy Jones made out what the older woman had been doing, and he sucked in his breath with a sharp intake!

Clasped about the sitter’s waist, drawing in snugly the fullness of her silk gown, was a two-inch band of some metal that shone white, like tempered steel. At the front, where the clasp or the buckle of an ordinary belt would have been, was a small lock, caught through a fetter bolt; and swiveled from it there dangled a steel chain the size of a trace chain, its links glinting brightly as the stout woman held it by the other end. And now the jailer was stepping back a foot or two and carrying the free end of the chain over the brass footrail and making it fast with another lock.

There sat this woman, leashed to her bed like an animal to its kennel. For half a minute, perhaps, the amazing picture stood out, clear in every detail – the prisoner huddled down wearily in her chair; one thin hand fumbling at the broad steel zone which encompassed her waist, the other playing with a jangling loop of her chain; her white face with its wide eyes looking straight out toward them; thick plaits of light hair hanging over her shoulders; her small feet, in bedroom slippers, resting upon a stool.

It was no more than half a minute however. For the serving woman, or the jailer, or whatever she might be, swung her broad back round and saw, then, that the nearer window was unshaded. The focused glasses of those two unsuspected spectators in the gloom brought her close up to them, and made plain the look of sudden chagrin and surprise upon her broad face as she started forward and yanked the shade down. She halted it, however, some four or five inches from the bottom of the casing and drew the sash up to meet it, leaving a small space for air and ventilation – a space so small that now the watchers in the warehouse could make out nothing through the slit except a narrow strip of the rug covering of the bedroom floor.

What they could see, though, was a dim and diffused shadow as the captive rose and paced back and forth across the glowing square of the window opening. Evidently her tether was short, and purposely so, to hold her a safe distance from the window. This was proved by the indistinctness of her outlined figure. Young Gramercy Jones, squatting in his own darkened window with his eyes glued to his glasses, thought he could make out the shifting slide of the steel trace chain – almost thought he could hear the grate and jangle of hard metals as loop and lock played back and forth along the horizontal bedrail.

And as he crouched there, looking and listening, he heard the voice of former Sergeant Max Furst. Startled for once out of his professional calm, that gentleman was saying something over and over again to himself in a heavy whisper.

“Well, what do you know about that – huh?” That was what he said. “Well, what do you know about that?”

•     •     •     •     •

It was immediately after this that the big inspiration came to young Gramercy Jones. Leaving the ex-sergeant on duty at the window of their hired loft, he hurried down the three flights of stairs to the street and then raced eastward at top speed, his spectacles shining in the lamplight and his neatly creased trouser legs twinkling, until he came at the end of a short dash to Fifth Avenue. The avenue, stretching away to the northward at a gentle uphill slant, resounded now to its evening tides of travel. Coming down in endless lines plodded tired work teams, drawing trucks and vans to their stable quarters below the Square; going up passed many smart automobiles, their varnished tops glimmering like the scales on the back of an endless snake as they whizzed under the light cast by the ornamental round lamps that hung in clusters of threes, like big, luminous damson plums. Every cross-street was a flumeway for thick, living black sluices – garment workers, fur workers and millinery workers by the uncounted thousands – men, women and wizened children pouring along afoot from their workplaces on the lower West Side to their living places on the lower East Side.

Our young man poised himself on the curbing, looking for a taxicab to hire; but, before one appeared, a double-decker bus lumbered by, headed north, and scooting across the asphalt, he swung himself aboard it. His destination was Fourteenth Street, half a dozen blocks or so distant. He had remembered that the Christmas shopping season having been forced forward some of the big shops would surely be open. So they were – most of them. At Fourteenth Street he dropped off and dived into the one on the corner, because it was the nearest. a floor-walker, who might have been old Mr. Urban Urbanity’s favorite son, directed him across an acre-wide expanse of floor and through long lanes of counters and booths to the spot he sought. Ten minutes or less and he was hurrying out of the place with his purchases under his arm, leaving behind him in the toy department a young lady stricken with the stutters by reason of the size of the gratuity that had been slipped into her palm in consideration of speedy and intelligent service.

“M-M-Madeline!” she called in a glad quaver, addressing another young lady whose pompadour was in the nature of an architectural triumph. “Say, Madeline!”

“Uh-huh!”

“Did yer see what that young jumpman bought just then?”

“Nump!”

“Well, y’ should ’a’ saw the tip he slipped me for waitin’ on him prompt!”

Before the high-coiffed Madeline had absorbed the full details, young Gramercy Jones, pelting along at top speed, was well on his way back to the half-lighted loft where Mr. Furst, faithful as another Man Friday, watched vigilantly at his window.

“She set down again after a bit,” he explained as the panting Jones worked with nimble fingers, loosening the strings from about his parcel, “and, so far as I can tell from her shadow, she ain’t moved since. But the point is, boss, can you hit that crack in that window without hitting her?”

His employer shucked away the clinging paper, revealing what he had bought and brought – a slim black bow, half a dozen slender arrows and half a dozen balls of strong, light twine-kite string it was, really.

“I ought to,” he said, while Furst helped him reeve the end of one of the balls of string to the butt of one of the arrows – “I ought to if I haven’t forgot all I ever knew. When I was in England two years ago – with my last tutor – it was a choice for the afternoons of tennis, tea or archery. I didn’t care for tea, and those who played tennis didn’t seem to care for me; so in self-defense I went in for archery.” He fitted the notch in the arrow to the cord of the bow, letting the hitched-on twine run free behind him. “This bow is a pretty flimsy affair – the best they had in that store though. And we’ve two things in our favor – there’s no wind blowing and we have a downward slant for the shot.” He leaned half out of the window, aiming for the narrow parallelogram of open space between the sash and the sill of that curtained window, seventy to eighty feet away.

His nerves were jumping so that the first shot went badly wide and wild. Listening, they heard the light shaft strike softly against the brick wall of the house of mystery and drop. Furst hauled it in-it was all splintered and bent – and speedily made a twine tail ready for another. The second arrow must have been feathered poorly, for before it left their sight it skewed downward sharply and fell upon a shed roof with a sharp little striking sound.

Time was to them a precious commodity; they realized this. Any second, for all they knew, the she-dragon in blue linen might be coming back to minister to her fettered charge. But just the same Gramercy Jones took his time, making sure of his aim and his weapons. He stretched himself half out of the window, with the feathered butt of the dart almost brushing his ear and the bow drawn back until it whined under the strain. He waited until a tiny puff of wind had died away. The bow twanged – and then the bowstring flipped back and broke with a mournful little snap. But the arrow was on its way, whizzing true.

“A great shot!” exulted Max. Furst. “Right clean through the crack – it must have hit the bed and fell right at her feet! Look at her shadow! She’s bending over to pick it up. She’s holding to it! I can feel the string tightening! Boss, this here’s one bet we win if we never win another.”

Exultation filled Gramercy Jones, too, but he was too busy for words. He was tearing a sheet of paper from a notebook and scribbling ten hurried lines upon it with a pencil; then he was hitching paper and pencil together with a scrap of string, and jabbing a hole in the folded-over paper with his penknife, and threading the hole upon the tautened twine that Furst held ready, and sending it dancing and whirling out and along and down the tiny cable.

Now came Mr. Furst’s chance to show his share of skill. Deftly he manipulated the line so that the note, with the pendent pencil to carry it the faster, twirled out of sight into the darkness to reappear a moment later fluttering like a small white bird in the oblong of light at the window. The ex-sergeant lifted the cord shoulder-high; lowered it; raised it again; gave it a sharp, decisive flip, and with a final flutter the message passed over the window-ledge and disappeared from their ken behind the shrouding shade.

Followed a minute of aching suspense – Furst holding the cord steady, Jones keeping the fingers of his right hand resting lightly upon it, and both of them watching the indistinct shadow that shifted and wavered behind the curtain. Then a response came. The twine stirred with life at the other end as a fishline stirs when a fingerling nibbles the bait; and then, in succession, came three insistent small jerks upon it as though the fingerling were firmly hooked and trying to get away.

“That’s it, sure,” whispered Gramercy Jones – “that’s the signal I wrote down for her to give – three jerks!”

“Fine business!” said Mr. Furst tensely. “Fine and dandy business!”

There was another pause – a much longer one – and the string became slack under their hands and sagged laxly, showing that it had been released by the captive. With infinite care Mr. Furst drew it in, hand over hand. In the center of that distant patch of light, they thought they could make out the cord crawling back over the window-ledge toward them. Suddenly it hitched – that must be the arrow catching against the projecting rim of the window-casing within, Max Furst figured; and he was right, too, for a quick yet gentle side-arm twitch brought the arrow up into view, turning and twisting. It teetered for a second across the sill, showing something white, like paper, made fast to it; and then it dropped out, scraping against the rough masonry of the wall as it fell. But, before it could catch and tangle upon unseen obstacles below, the manipulator jerked it high, like a skilled angler lifting a well-hooked fish; and then, working as fast as his hands could shift one above the other, he hauled in the string out of the well of thick blackness beneath. Speedily up it came into sight, the arrow dangling straight downward with a fold of paper bound to it by a scrap of ribbon – and young Gramercy Jones leaned far out of the window and gripped it in his eager fingers.

These fingers trembled a little as he twisted the binding away, freed the paper, spread it flat upon the bare planking of the floor and knelt over it. There was a gas jet in the wall, a single tip, showing a mere nub of blue flame; for precaution’s sake they had turned it no higher. So Furst squatted by Gramercy Jones, lighting one match from the stub of another while he, with his knees upon the dusty boards, bent his head low to read. One side of the paper was scrawled over with his own hurried writing – the prisoner had used his paper for the reply. He flipped the sheet over and there was her answer – she had used his pencil too. It was hard to make it out, for the writing was eloquent of great haste and greater agitation. It began:

“Thank Heaven, you have found a way to reach me! I knew you would!

“Now you must know the secret of my chains – my dreary captivity – the secret which these wretches have kept so well all these years – and you will save me! I feel that you will. Like a valiant knight you will save me!

“I tremble so I can hardly write——” [An erasure.]

“I am friendless and at the mercy of these creatures. It is my own uncle who is their leader – while I am kept here he uses my fortune as his own. Yet, for the sake of my family, I would spare——” [Another erasure.]

“You must move fast. Of late I have begun to fear that my very life is in danger. Sometimes I think that he is mad – that all of them are mad – and I know that I am in danger.

“It is you who must find a way to free me. I cannot help you, except by being brave and patient. You must enter this house – from the rear would be the best, I think, and night the best time. There are back stairs leading to the top of the house, and you know the location of my room. Always after ten at night I am alone. Bring tools with which to free me – night and day I am chained.

“I sign my true name here:

“ROWENA FAIRFAX.

“Oh, how brave and noble to bring succor to the distressed!”

It was in the chill youth of the following morning, back among the calming and disillusioning settings of Brooklyn, that Max Furst’s blood circulation began to slacken below his ankles. His policeman’s fashion of reasoning, which had been driven below by a sudden and most violent shock, was returning to the surface. Enthusiasm was ebbing and doubt abode with him.

“Boss,” he said after a long period of study, “I don’t want you to think I’m getting cold feet on this here proposition. And, of course, if we pull the thing off the way we’re figuring on doing it, it’ll beat any kind of an adventure that I could steer you up against; but something keeps telling me there’s something phony here. I’ve got a hunch!”

“You saw the chain on her – didn’t you?” answered Gramercy Jones, all ablaze with the thing that had kept him awake most of the night. “You saw how she was taken on that carriage ride? Well?”

“Yes – I know all that,” said Mr. Furst defendingly. “I admit that it carried me right off my feet. It was like a chapter out of a story book coming true – only it’s been my personal experience that chapters out of story books don’t never come true. Another thing – this here Rowena lady says she’s friendless. If we get her out, what are we going to do with her?”

“We can think of that later,” said Gramercy Jones. “The first thing is to get her out of that house.”

“Well, I’m with you there,” agreed Mr. Furst. “But I’ve sure got a hunch; something keeps a-telling me—”

For all his before-breakfast misgivings, former Sergeant Furst was a busy man that day. He went shopping, and his shopping led him to places widely apart in more ways than one – to a small pawnbroker’s shop on the Bowery; to the star’s dressing room of a vaudeville theater in Harlem; to a shoe store in Forty-second Street, and to a garage in Broadway. By the middle of the afternoon he was back.

“Everything’s fixed, I guess,” he was saying as he hauled various bundles of various shapes out of his pockets. “Here’s the electric flashlight – the best that’s made. Here’s the rubber sneakers to wear on our shoes. The car will be waiting in the side street right in front of the loft building – and I know the chauffeur.

“And here’s the niftiest little pocket kit of burglars’ tools you ever saw. Old Solly Nauheim, the fence, let me have them – under pressure. Ain’t that the slickest little collapsible jimmy you ever saw? and here’s a couple of files and a bunch of master keys that’ll unlock any shackle that ever was made. Howlando, the Handcuff King, says so, and he ought to know. He’s a friend of mine and I borrowed ’em off of him.”

If Gramercy Jones had anticipated that there were great difficulties to be surmounted at the outset of their rescue expedition on behalf of the lady at 58 1/2 Fifth Avenue he was disappointed. With Mr. Furst in charge, the preliminaries worked out as simply as so much short division. Noiseless as cats in their rubber-soled galoshes they padded through the lower hall of the loft building on the side street and stood in an inky-black rear court, confronted by a high board fence. They scaled this fence and another like it, with no greater damage than the loss of some skin off of Gramercy Jones’ hands and a tear in the skirt of Max Furst’s overcoat; and now they were in the back yard of the prison house, with bricks under their feet and a dim expanse of masonry facing them. They listened and heard nothing. The sergeant gripped the handle of his electric night stick and sprayed a slender shaft of light against the wall, showing a window barred with iron and a solid wooden door. The hour was ten-forty-five P.M.

The whole place seemed as quiet as a tomb, and as dark as one too. Both of them were a bit nervous. Gramercy Jones was a good bit so, if the truth must be known, but it was not the nervousness that presages either indecision or retreat.

“The door for ours!” whispered the sergeant. He let his darting pencil of light play over the surface of the door a moment, then doused the wand and pocketed it, and reached for his jimmy. There was a brisk little snick of high-tempered steel as he coupled it together. He wedged its viciously sharp nose against the cranny where door and door jamb met and heaved with all his might. The creak of the bolt was audible to them through the thick paneling.

“Just as easy!” he grunted softly. “No wonder so many fellows turn burglars. She’s giving, boss – she’s giving!”

She gave.

The door opened its full width, and a wide, bright flare of light shone full in their blinking eyes. In the opening an elderly bearded gentleman in a dressing gown stood, looking them in their startled faces. Gramercy Jones gave a small, quick gasp – he experienced the shocked feeling of one stepping out of a warm bed into a cold shower bath. Mr. Furst backed off slowly until his shoulders rubbed the fence that barred his further retreat. Stooping to a half squat, he poised himself lightly upon the balls of his feet, his right hand stealing gently into his right pocket. A timeworn favorite of the hack copywriter sprang into his mind, in large black letters: CAUGHT LIKE RATS IN A TRAP!

“Gentlemen,” said the elderly person in a reassuring voice,“good evening.”

He glanced from one to the other of them keenly, they keeping silent. At a time like this it is excessively difficult to make offhand conversation with a total stranger.

“There is no occasion for alarm, gentlemen,” went on the bearded man soothingly . “You, my friend, may take your hand off that revolver – I am not armed and I am not going to raise my voice. There is no danger, I assure you.” He stepped back a pace hospitably. “This courtyard is a chilly place for introductions,” he said dryly. “Walk in, please – I am quite alone in this part of the house. And besides, you are two to one.”

He turned his back upon them, leaving the door wide open. They followed him single file.

Their host – if you could call him that – led the way down a long hall to the front and, throwing open a side door, stood at one side courteously, with a gesture of welcome. Entering, they found themselves in what was evidently the study of a professional man – a table littered with books and papers was before them; a green-shaded student’s lamp was burning on the table; a small coal fire was in an open grate; there were bookcases and cabinets about the walls; and a dull-colored, badly worn rug upon the floor.

“Gentlemen,” said the bearded man pleasantly, “be seated, won’t you?”

They sat. The sensations of the diner who saves the best bite for the last only to lose it off his fork into his lap as his mouth opens for it; of the climber who, ascending stairs in the dark, reaches for the top step that isn’t there; of the sleeper who dreams of dropping from vast heights and awakens to find himself upon the floor – all these and more, multiplied, were Gramercy Jones’ sensations as he sat down. As for Mr. Furst, he slid his person into a chair, perching on its very edge, with his feet drawn up under him at a taut and springy angle. Thus far neither had spoken a word.

The man in the dressing gown came in and took a place directly in front of the fire, facing his pair of unexpected guests. His hands were under the skirt of his dressing gown and he flapped its tails up and down gently. He eyed them, in turn.

“If I am not mistaken I have seen you both before,” he said almost blandly. “You were lurking across the street yesterday – or was it the day before? – when my carriage came to take members of my household out driving. My name is Snodgrass– Doctor Snodgrass. I am a specialist in certain diseases. And what names are you gentlemen using for this occasion?”

There was a little embarrassing pause. “My name is Jones,” said the younger man truthfully. “Mine’s Furst,” came from his partner.

Quite so,” said the doctor. “Now, gentlemen, let us understand each other. You two have been engaged tonight in an act of potential housebreaking – though nobody could be pardoned for mistaking you for real burglars – and I take it that you know something of the private affairs of this house. Therefore I assume that none of us would care to have any publicity result from this” – he hesitated a moment – “this unexpected little meeting. We may as well be quite frank with one another – eh?

“Oh, I beg your pardon,” he said in an apologetic tone, and reached for a cedar box upon the table, “may I offer you cigars? Being a total abstainer myself I cannot offer you anything stronger than a smoke.”

Gramercy Jones shook his head as the imperturbable doctor extended toward him a box half full of very black cigars. He saw now at close range that the chief demon of this Castle Ogre was no demon at all– merely a sharp-eyed, rather weary-looking gentleman, with a carefully trimmed gray vandyke and thin gray hair. The ex-sergeant must have seen it, too, for his right hand came now for the first time out of his coat pocket, took a cigar – and stayed out. He rolled the cigar in his fingers, not offering to light it.

“Now, then,” said Doctor Snodgrass, “perhaps there is a question or so you gentlemen would like to ask me? I will be glad to answer you – not because I have to, but because I want to.”

Gramercy Jones spoke up and it was perhaps characteristic of Jason Jones’ son that, making no excuses for his presence, he went straight to the point.

“Who is the young lady confined upstairs on the top floor of this house?” he said.

“That,” said the doctor promptly, “is my niece and my ward.” He teetered on his heels.

“Is she of legal age?”

“She is” – the tone was dry – “and considerably more. The lady is nearing her thirty-ninth birthday.”

“Is she an heiress?”

“She inherited a considerable property, which I administer for her. I see what you are driving at, my young friend – my niece is a hopelessly insane person. I am her legal guardian – also her natural one.”

“Is her insanity an excuse for keeping her – for keeping Miss Rowena Fairfax a chained prisoner?”

“Yes and no,” said Doctor Snodgrass. “Since her fifteenth year, my unfortunate niece has been insane. Her affliction came upon her at an impressionable age, when her mind was full of romantic story books. She continually imagines she is first one and then another story-book heroine. There is a scientific name for her malady – it is a well-defined type. Lately – within the last year or two – she has fancied herself a prisoner. To her this house is a prison tower and I am its chief jailer. These chains that you seem to know of – how, I don’t know – are demanded by her. To her diseased mind there is no incongruity in the fact that she first insists upon wearing them, and then, while wearing them, accepts them as proof of her captive state.

“Only by going through the mummery of binding her wrists can she be induced to go for a daily ride. Only by affixing a somewhat ornamental arrangement of chains about her waist can her attendant induce her to retire quietly to bed at night. If we do not do these things she would tie herself up with towels and handkerchiefs, which would be a highly uncomfortable and possibly an injurious proceeding. I see that you have happened upon a part of the secret and so I am telling you the rest of it – fully and unrestrainedly.

“Now, gentlemen, are you satisfied that I am dealing with you truthfully? If not I can offer you further proofs, only asking that all this which I am telling you shall be treated confidentially. I can show you, if you wish to see them, quite an elaborate collection of light but serviceable fetters – my niece’s fancy in these matters changes frequently and we try to humor her. I have no objection to your making discreet inquiries regarding my standing as a citizen and as a professional man. I am fairly well known as an alienist in this community, though I have retired from practice to devote myself more to study.” He smiled softly. “I might-ahem! – furnish you with a list of references.”

There was conviction in his tone. You could not look at him and listen to him and doubt the fact of all that he said. Moreover, Mr. Furst’s mind, rummaging in a forgotten pigeonhole of his memory, had already placed him. He had figured as an expert insanity witness in a murder trial wherein Mr. Furst had had his small official share.

“Was there anything further you wished to know?” inquired the doctor.

Mr. Gramercy Jones shook his head.

“And you, sir,” said their host, turning to Furst, “was there anything you desired to say to me?”

“Nothing except ‘Good night’ and ‘Excuse me,’” said Mr. Furst, with some fervor, as he got upon his feet.

“Then it is my turn – if you will wait a minute?” said Doctor Snodgrass. “Was it by means of a note dropped from the carriage that my niece first enlisted your sympathies and kind offices?” There was a thin strain of mockery in his voice as he asked the question.

Mr. Jones nodded. “That, I imagine, was it,” he confessed. “I think she saw my name in the papers – it has appeared in print several times lately.”

“Quite so,” said the physician. “I thought as much. We watch for those things – but she has the cunning of the insane. Once or twice before she eluded us and did this same thing. And her manner today led me to suspect that she had outwitted us again, which may account for my lack of surprise when I discovered you two gentlemen trespassing at a late hour upon my premises; in fact, I may say that I was rather expecting you.” He cleared his throat. “I may add, though, that the previous affairs did not have quite the – shall I say dénouement? – that has brought us three together this evening.”

Now he appeared to notice that they were both upon their feet.

“Gentlemen, must you go?” he asked.

“I think so,” said Gramercy Jones, and for the first time in some hours his youthful and ingenuous face bore the suggestion of a smile. “We happen to have a cab waiting round the corner,” he added simply as he started for the door.

With all due ceremony, the doctor escorted them to the front door. “By-the-way – one more question on my part,” he said as he drew it open for their passage: “By what name was it you called my niece?”

“Miss Rowena Fairfax,” Gramercy Jones answered.

“Ah, indeed!” said Doctor Snodgrass. “Well, I prefer not to leave you deceived in any detail of this sad case. The lady’s name is Amanda Phipps. Good night, gentlemen; mind that top step!”

They stood outside on the sidewalk and realized that it was a cold night; and for a moment nothing was said. Then Mr. Furst remarked softly, as though to himself:

“I had a hunch!”

“If you haven’t lit that cigar the doctor gave you I wish you’d let me have it,” said Gramercy Jones after another brief pause.

“Sure thing,” consented Mr. Furst; “only I didn’t know you smoked!”

“I don’t,” explained his employer. “I’m going to keep it as a souvenir of this – this adventure.”

They were almost at the corner before Mr. Furst again broke the silence:

“Boss, in them two letters that the nutty lady wrote, she made the same mistake twicet – both times she spelled succor wrong!”

The Saturday Evening Post, 28 Dec 1912

THE ISLAND OF ADVENTURE

The Adventure
of Mr. Pandora

~

At a quarter to twelve o’clock on the night of a January the fifteenth, all the fourth-floor windows on the Center Street side of police headquarters were penetrated by bullets of lead, steel or other hard substance. Beginning at the upper corner of the building and continuing to the lower or Grand Street corner, the windows in succession were expeditiously perforated.

Downstairs on the ground floor there were men – a few of them – in the Detective Bureau and also one or two in the Bureau of Identification, which closes at midnight. On the top floor under the tower, in the Telegraph Bureau, which is so called because it is really a telephone exchange, there were more men; but the three floors lying between were locked up and dark and untenanted. The elevator had quit running at eleven.

Down in the Detective Bureau the official in charge, Captain Wigramme, was enjoying a short and satisfying sleep in a chair tilted back. Years before, when but an ordinary patrolman, Captain Wigramme had slipped away from his post to take a nap in an unfinished warehouse and had roused at exactly the right moment to detect three members of the Gashouse Gang in the act of tunneling through a side wall into the Cob Dock Savings Bank next door – a fortunate circumstance to which he owed promotion and his present eminence. He was a frequent sleeper, but a light one; and so the first tinkling crash of glass above brought him out of his slumber, standing up. He took the wide flights of stairs, three steps at a jump; and as he climbed he heard in regular succession little smashes that sounded as though some one, with a methodical hand, was stripping the prisms from an old-fashioned crystal chandelier and dropping them upon a hard floor. To such accompaniment, he reached the fourth floor, and as he threw open a door of the big bare gymnasium he flinched back involuntarily, for from without somewhere came the phut of air released from a high pressure tube and the furthermost window along the front cracked and split. Pawing at his hip for his gun, Wigramme ran to another and a nearer window, one that already had a star-shaped shatter in its center, and he peered out. Across Center Street, on the eaves of a three-story building used by Bamberger Brothers as a button factory, he saw outlined plainly against the skyline the figure of a man half crouching. He called out and the figure waved an arm at him, as though in greeting, and then vanished back from the cornice.

It could not have been more than three minutes later when Captain Wigramme, with two plainclothes men and a doorman at his heels, sped up the stairs in the button factory and, finding the scuttle conveniently ajar, emerged upon the flat roof. There was no one there; but someone had been there, all right enough. Plain as print in the half-inch of snow that covered everything were the foot tracks of the mysterious marksman, showing how he had climbed out of the scuttle, how he had moved back and forth upon the roof, and how finally at a briskened gait he had fled by the same route he came. While the others were making a search of the block that yielded them nothing, Wigramme took measurements of these footprints. They were just such footprints as a well-shod man who wore a pointed-toed, size seven-and-a-quarter shoe would track out in smooth, thin snow. Unfortunately there was no peculiar depression of the right instep, no cross of nailhobs in the left heel such as a fugitive should by rights leave behind him for a clew.

That positively was all the baffled and indignant Captain Wigramme had to go on, except a row of ragged holes in a row of desecrated windows, and some three or four of the conical metal missiles that had made the holes. These last, by diligent hunting, he found upon the floor of the gymnasium.

That a miscreant should so violate the dignity of the very home of the police department was an inconceivable thing was, in fact, incredible. Nevertheless it was quite true. It was only too true. When, after circling and recircling the block, his search squad had returned to him with empty hands and full excuses, Captain Wigramme took what seemed to him the best course in such an emergency. He called up the hotel where the police commissioner lived, and after some travail got the commissioner on the telephone and gave to him the extraordinary details of an extraordinary outrage. The commissioner thought on reflection that the matter should be kept quiet, if possible. With this judgment of his superior Captain Wigramme agreed absolutely.

A press gang of dazed detectives went forth into the arched void of night to find certain needed artisans and to commandeer certain requisite supplies. Before daylight came, the rules of the Glaziers’ Union, touching on the proper hours of employment, were being violated by a crew who with numb fingers and puzzled faces worked on the fourth floor of headquarters; and by rising-time for most folks, new and virgin panes replaced the fractured sheets of window-glass in the gymnasium. Measured by dollars and cents, the damage had been small. In its effects upon the peace of mind of the commissioner, the captain, and such others as shared the secret, damage was enormous. Moreover this sort of thing could not well be kept quiet. Somebody talked. Some headquarters man, with a close friend among the headquarters reporters, let a hint seep out of the corner of his mouth in passing – or something. Police headquarters, which presents a stone face in front, is a sieve behind.

There were stories – astounding, amusing and sarcastic – in every afternoon paper in town. That night, going home on the cars, all New York laughed a laugh of derision for a police force that boasted of having collared the Black Hand bomb-makers, but could not keep its new and expensive headquarters from being shot full of jaggedy apertures. Figuratively speaking, the raw winds of public disfavor whistled through these apertures and chilled the whole department, from the august commissioner down.

For some weeks past the police wing of the municipal government had been flapping lamely. A series of daring flat robberies in Harlem had gone undetected and unpunished. In Brooklyn there had been a daylight murder of a jeweler; and the murderer, though known was yet at large. Finally ten days before, there had befallen the lamentable fiasco of the Howland Grainger case. By reason of his personal eccentricities and the number of lawsuits he had filed against his relatives, Howland Grainger was the most noted member of the noted Grainger family of millionaires, publishers, cotillion leaders and world travelers. Pestered into desperation by litigation and other annoyances, his elder brother, J. Reeves Grainger, had Howland Grainger declared mentally incompetent by a jury in lunacy. The body of Howland Grainger had been awarded into custody for commitment to an asylum. Thereupon two detectives escorted him to headquarters to await further steps on the part of his gratified kinspeople; whereupon Howland Grainger, in a moment of abated vigilance on the part of his custodians, had walked calmly out of the building and had continued walking in a westerly direction until he reached the Hudson River and also a ferry boat. The latter transported him across the former; he was safe on the Jersey shore before the alarm had time to spread.

Once safely outside the jurisdiction of New York, he had found a complaisant and accommodating judge to declare him sane, and he had since remained in peace and security, or as much peace as one of his erratic inclination could endure. For this and for these other things the police had been under a constant skirmish fire of editorial criticism, which was bad enough. Now they were being stung with the barbed shafts of newspaper wit, which was worse. As stated, the whole town laughed.

Dana Grist, acting city editor of the Evening Planet, did more than laugh. Suddenly remembering something that had occurred within his own ken on the afternoon before – the afternoon of the fifteenth – he proceeded to put two and two together, which for a city editor during business hours is professionally regarded as an infinitely better employment than laughing. From his memory he reproduced the whole incident. It must have happened just about three o’clock, because he was closing down his desk for the day. One of the copy boys had dumped upon his desk a sheaf of mail addressed to the city editor and he had hastily sifted it through. It had been, for the most part, the customary run of a city editor’s mail – anonymous complaints against this person or that thing; scrawled appeals for aid from deserted wives of the tenements; letters of praise or condemnation for the editorial policy; a threat of a libel suit; a dozen or more announcements of concerts, meetings, banquets and benefits – mainly stuff that might be classified under four headings: The useless, the spiteful, the irresponsible, and the pitiable. But toward the end of the job, he had come upon one letter that caught his attention and held it a minute or two – a single sheet of notepaper in a plain envelope, neatly typewritten. As nearly as he could now recall, it had run so:

The time – 11:45 P.M.;

The place – Center and Grand Streets;

The occasion – Opening of Pandora’s Box;

Motto – Those who live in glass houses should beware of stones.

(Signed) a Brother to Pandora.

Yes; that was it substantially. He could even remember what he had said at the time. “a press agent’s stunt?” he had asked himself – “or just a plain crank?” Then as he had tossed the letter into an already gorged wastebasket: “Well, all the cranks aren’t dead yet. I wish sometimes all the press agents were” – and had taken himself off. He wished he had saved that letter; but he hadn’t, so he did the next best thing. He sent a man up to see whether the commissioner had not also received an advance notice from the person whom Dana Grist mentally card-indexed as Mr. Pandora. The commissioner wouldn’t say “Yes” and wouldn’t say “No”; in fact he said practically nothing, but said it in such away as to convince the reporter that the commissioner had indeed had some warning. Dana Grist filed the incident away in the back part of his head along with a million other things, and awaited further developments.

He did not have to wait long. On the following Friday night the Police Captains’ Protective Association held its annual beefsteak dinner at Greeley’s on Broadway, just above Columbus Circle. At one o’clock in the morning, when the underdone beefsteaks were bleeding their reddest juices and the beer was pouring freest, a masked man, subsequently described as being of medium height and well dressed, entered the café downstairs and at the point of a showy and shiny pistol held up one lone barkeeper and two tarrying patrons. Then he did the strangest thing that ever a masked highwayman did since Robin Hood taught his disciples the rudiments of the highway trade. Punctuating his commands with the eloquent muzzle of his weapon, he made the barkeeper open the slide of the cigar stand and remove the gaudy paper bands from fifty 50-cent cigars. With his free hand he stuffed the cigar bands into the side pockets of his overcoat and, still commanding the inexplicable situation by force of arms, backed swiftly out of the side door and was instantly gone, leaving one lone barkeeper and two tarrying patrons surcharged with astonishment and other emotions too numerous and conflicting for cataloguing. Later his pistol was found where he had dropped it on the sidewalk. It was of pressed tin; there were evidences to show it had once contained cinnamon drops – the red and sticky kind.

Arriving at his post of duty that same morning, Dana Grist found upon his desk a small oblong package neatly wrapped and addressed to the city editor. A district messenger boy, nowise to be distinguished from any one of a thousand district messenger boys, had brought it to the Evening Planet half an hour earlier, had left it and had gone away. Dana Grist cut the strings, undid the wrappings and exposed a plain flat box containing ten gilded paper bands that had once encompassed the plump bellies of as many fifty-cent cigars, also a scrap of paper bearing the single line:

“Compliments of Pandora’s Brother.”

First putting the box and its contents in a safe place, Grist undertook a quiet investigation. Presently he had reason to believe – without being able definitely to confirm the belief – that similar remembrances, of flat boxes and cigar wrappers, had already reached the commissioner, and the bewildered Captain Wigramme, and the toast-master of the beefsteak dinner, and perhaps others. But none of these seemed to care to make public the circumstances of the bestowal, and neither did Dana Grist. He kept his counsel and bided his time, having in mind a most beautiful story for future printing.

Perhaps it was the association of cigar bands with cigar stores, or perhaps the mysterious unknown took his cue from an editorial appearing in one of the morning papers in which the combined intelligence of the police department was likened to the mental equipment of a wooden Indian. Whatever the actuating impulse may have been, his next achievement had to do with wooden Indians. Like the horsecar and the May party, the wooden Indian is a relic of an earlier period of the national development which abides still in New York. There is at least one wood-turning shop on the lower West Side where all the most popular styles of sidewalk statuary of the mid-Victorian period are manufactured to order. Generally the design is that of a mighty timber chieftain, though sometimes it is an Indian maiden and sometimes a columbine; and then again it may be a Punch, with a downturned nose and an upturned hump and a bundle of carved wooden cigars in his carved wooden grasp. Some that you see are new and varnishy and smell of the paint; and some are old and seamy and weather-cracked clean through. By day small shopkeepers use them to advertise their wares and by night draw them on their castered bases into screened area-ways and chain them fast.

In the early hours of a Sunday toward the end of January a patrolman attached – but not deeply – to the East One Hundred and Twenty-sixth Street Station was trying doors along upper Third Avenue. A block ahead of him he saw a long automobile standing in front of the cigar store of M. Blatz, and saw also what he took to be two men wrestling across the sidewalk from the doorway of the cigar store toward the car. He mended his gait; and at that one of the wrestlers seemed to give his antagonist a sharp shove, so that the latter tumbled heavily into the tonneau, with two legs protruding stiffly over the side. The victor sprang into the driver’s seat and threw on the power and fled northward so fast that the policeman, hurrying up, could not make out the figures on the license tag dangling from the rear axle. Having failed to make a catch, the policeman deemed it the part of wisdom to dismiss the occurrence from his mind, and would no doubt have succeeded in this had not M. Blatz subsequently appeared at the station house to report lamentingly that during the night a valued wooden Indian belonging to him had been unscrewed from its wheeled pedestal in his basement doorway and feloniously removed. Simultaneously at other station houses in the upper city more complaints of a similar nature were being duly recorded.

However M. Blatz and his fellow victims of depredation did not mourn for long. Miles downtown their property had already been recovered. A crippled Cyclops of a one-eyed Punch, big enough almost for the figurehead of a brig, had been found at daylight, a shameful spectacle, reclining at a drunken angle against a side entrance of the exclusive and high-minded Hotel Gorham in Fifth Avenue, where the police commissioner had rooms. Two others, these being an old and decrepit Indian brave and a new and shiny Indian maiden, were at the moment of discovery standing sentry in solemn wooden majesty at the stoop of Captain Wigramme’s house down Greenwich Village way, while the fourth – M. Blatz’ cherished possession – had greeted a startled milkman from a recess behind the storm door of a lofty apartment house on Riverside Drive. Without divining the reason, Dana Grist guessed, or thought he guessed, why such an attention had been visited upon this last-named establishment – one of his employers lived there.

It is within the limits of a pardonable exaggeration of the real facts to state that the police force ran round in circles. The commissioner, who was a dyspeptic person and prone to worry, read the papers of the current issue and felt nervous prostration stealing insidiously over him. Captain Wigramme, who was of a full habit of life and a broad girth, betrayed alarming symptoms of a red-faced and swelling nature. For a period of minutes it seemed an even-money proposition, whether he would have apoplexy before he burst or would burst before he had apoplexy. Certain of his friends in the detective Bureau dissuaded him from looking at the afternoon papers. Certain of his enemies there took steps to counteract these precautionary measures; they sent him marked copies by special delivery. M. Blatz received by mail an envelope containing a twenty-dollar bill and nothing else. Three other cigar dealers were remembered after the same fashion.

It became apparent to all those interested – and they numbered up into the millions by now – that one person, a person with funds at his command undoubtedly, and an automobile of his own and a monstrously developed idea of the physical sense of humor, had been responsible for this sequence of weird achievements. Officially suspicion centered on Ryan Evans, long recognized as the champion practical joker of the Eastern seaboard; but Ryan Evans had no trouble in establishing a satisfactory alibi. He confessed that for some time past he had been entertaining the quaint notion of posing for a day as a wax figure at the Eden Musée, with a view to frightening into conniption fits the first inquiring patron who poked him with umbrella, cane or hatpin to see whether he was real; but, he added frankly, in the midst of operations by so gifted and ingenious an amateur as the person now performing, he, though an avowed professional, was amply content to sit quiet, awaiting the next manifestation of a power higher than his own. He was quoted to that effect in an interview.

Mr. Evans’ wishes in this regard were speedily and amply gratified. On the Sunday preceding Saint Valentine’s Day, the Sunday issue of The Planet called exclusive attention to the pretty thought that anciently birds were supposed to choose their mates on Valentine’s Day. As if in verification of this venerable superstition Broadway, shortly before six A.M. of February the fourteenth, was suddenly infested by a large number of birds which, if they did not mate, at least had ample opportunity for so doing. Mainly these were birds of a gay plumage and of tropical or semi-tropical antecedents, such, for example, as finches, love birds, parakeets and parrots; also there were small mammals in abundance.

So far as later investigation developed, the first evidences of an unusual condition existing on Broadway were given by a droop-eyed and tangle-legged gentleman who, on issuing from his favorite all-night café, had his vision focused by the sight of five white rats approaching him single file along the sidewalk, followed by a feebly wriggling and half-frozen grass snake of a vivid green aspect. By all the traditions of our literature this gentleman should have shrieked aloud at the spectacle and then should have fled wildly away somewhere to take the pledge. The gentleman did nothing of the sort. He cloudily contemplated the procession until it had disappeared in a basement; then, proceeding to the nearest corner where a policeman on fixed post was stationed, he was in the act of inquiring whether anybody in the vicinity had reported the straying of five white rats and a pea-green snake, when the policeman himself gave a violent start and was aware of bobbing white blobs that were guinea-pigs and racing yellowish streaks that were English pheasants, and on a cornice overhead a chattering small gray shape that was a chilled and homeless monkey. Also there was much bird life beginning to manifest itself here and there and everywhere.

Such phenomena occurring in such a place at such an hour were naked scandals, crying aloud to the high and unresponsive heavens. From the two Tenderloin station houses came reserves who, assisted by cabmen and drivers of newspaper delivery wagons, spent the hours before breakfast in an uncongenial pursuit of bewildered birds and beasties. The white rabbits were the easiest to catch and the monkeys the hardest. Meanwhile two precinct detectives sought the fountainhead of this zoological flood. They found it in a bird-and-animal store three numbers off Broadway in a side street, where the front door was widely ajar and the cages and coops stood all empty and yawning and smelling strongly of their late occupants; and at the extreme rear lingered a pungent odor of the drug, whatever it was, that had driven the stock in trade forth into an inhospitable city at an unseemly hour. The detectives called it burglary or worse and went to seek the owner of the depopulated establishment.

After some trouble he was located at an address in the Bronx. He was of Greek nativity, with a name ending in polopoulos. He manifested interest when the news was broken to him, but no alarm. It seemed that only two days before he had sold out his entire business to a gentleman who paid cash down. What did this gentleman look like? Was he tall? Perhaps so. Or he was short? Well, he might be. Was he light or dark? Probably so; he would not be sure. The purchaser had plenty of money, though; he was certain of that; and he either had a mustache or he did not, one or the other, said the Greek, thereby betraying one of the most inexplicable and common vagaries of the human understanding. Who ever forgets a set of whiskers? And who, two days after parting from a casual stranger, can remember whether or not he was mustached?

During that day it was made plain that not all of the merchandise of this side-street bird-and-animal store had been dispossessed into the dawn to make a Broadway holiday for early risers. A cabman, unidentified, brought to an express office certain coop-like parcels for delivery to the persons designated upon tags attached. He prepaid the charges and drove away. The express company, asking no questions, carried out its share of the contract, which explains why two tiresomely verbose Mexican yellow-headed parrots, one male and one female, reached Mr. Ryan Evans. But the police commissioner received African macaws and Captain Wigramme might have had a pair of South American toucans, only he refused to sign for them or indeed to accept them, using strong and violent language to an entirely innocent expressman.

It was on the second evening following this, and many who love to prolong a laugh were still laughing quite loudly, when Dana Grist called upon his friend, Gramercy Jones. If you have read sundry preceding stories you already know that Gramercy Jones was a young man of wealth and education and a roving turn of mind, who for some time had been seeking adventures in the city of New York under the tutelage of one Max Furst, ex-detective sergeant. On this particular evening Mr. Furst was away on leave, prosecuting his own private affairs, and his youthful employer sat alone in his library, studying a map of the greater city. There were pestered lines in the newspaperman’s face, and Gramercy Jones saw them the first thing when Grist entered. He offered cigars and made a pretense at raking the coal fire that burned in the grate.

Following his custom, Dana Grist built a couple of imaginary headlines inside his brain, erased them, waited until his cigar was drawing well, and spoke.

“Young man,” he began, “since you started going round this town digging up adventures, the results have been fair – haven’t they?”

“Beyond my expectations,” said the younger man, beaming through his large and black-rimmed glasses, which were one of the outward evidences of a Harvard education.

“That’s good,” said Grist. “Tell me, have you anything on foot at the present moment?”

“At the present moment,” said Gramercy Jones, smiling, “business in our line is at a low ebb.”

“All right, then,” stated Grist; “so much the better. I’ve come down here tonight to give you a chance to share in an adventure that may be worth your while; and then again it may not. Anyhow it is a ready-made adventure – you won’t have to dig it up yourself – and for the time being it is a secret.”

“Max Furst has been heard to admit that I keep a secret pretty well.”

“I’m sure of it; that’s one reason why I’m letting you in on this one. Do you want a chance at finding the weird genius, whoever he is, who has been making star-spangled goats of the police department – I mean the man who smashed the windows at headquarters last month and did all those other freakish things?”

Gramercy Jones sat up straighter in his chair.

“One man then has been responsible for all of them?” he asked.

“The police only think so,” explained Grist; “but I know it to be so. You see, for some reasons best known to himself, this strange and ingenious person, Mr. Pandora – that is my pet name for him – has in a measure taken my paper into his confidence. So far as I can learn he has honored us above all other papers in town, and now, having had his fill at toying with the police, he is about to play a while with the Evening Planet! Look here a minute.”

He took a creased slip of yellow paper out of a pocket-book and spread it out flat upon the reading table. “This lettergram, prepaid, was filed at the Broad Street Station in Philadelphia this afternoon at two o’clock.”

Over Grist’s shoulder Gramercy Jones read the telegram:

city editor planet, newyork
exclusive advance information for your guidance i expect to cross brooklyn bridge from brooklyn end tomorrow morning between hours of eight-thirty and nine will emerge from bridge at street level of park row side and go north on center street if questioned will give name by which you already know me but you may also recognize me by my jewelry which will be conspicuous and unusual
pandora’s brother

“Do you think he will keep his word?” asked Jones as Grist folded up the yellow slip.

“I’m sure of it,” said Grist. “Now here’s the situation: I want to nab this gentleman. In the first place this” – he flipped the telegram with his finger – “is an open challenge to our city staff and that means the smartest city staff in town. In the second place it would be a beautiful thing, an absolutely beautiful thing, for the Evening Planet if we could capture and expose this peculiar person who laughs at the police and makes the whole town laugh at them too.”

“What you would call a big beat, I believe?” said Gramercy Jones.

“What I would call the biggest beat that I can imagine,” asserted Grist. “In the present state of the public curiosity I would rather find this Pandora than Charley Ross or The Man Higher Up with the goods on him. I’d rather find Pandora than the murderer of Millionaire Snell. I want to nab this gentleman and I want the Planet to get all the credit for it. I don’t care whether he is a crank, a criminal, or the greatest practical joker of the present century – I want Mr. Pandora.

“Ever since I took a desk job I’ve been trying to find two things! One is a reporter who can write a story of a prison without calling attention somewhere in the story to the fact that the prison has gray walls.” A whimsical squint narrowed his eyes. “And the other is an absolutely exclusive, world-beating beat. I’ve given up hope of one, but this looks like a chance to make good on the other. Our slippery friend tells us here just where he’s coming from and which way he’s going. He tells us the time, within half an hour. I know he is of medium height and rather plump. I know he has small feet – his footprints in the snow on the roof of that button factory proved that. He has small hands – the barkeeper he held up at Greeley’s remembered that much. And now we have his word for it that he will be wearing conspicuous jewelry. We’ll make that headquarters crowd squirm if we nail him right under their noses.”

“Then you aren’t going to ask the police to watch for him?” inquired Gramercy Jones innocently.

“Certainly not. This is our private tea party. Tomorrow morning I expect to have a squad of the keenest reporters in town watching that bridge entrance. I’m going further than that – one of the private detective agencies is going to furnish us some people too; they’ll be disguised, I guess. If you – and your man Furst – want a hand in this, meet me in the city room of the Planet any time before eight-thirty o’clock in the morning. I’ll have reporters’ cards for you. Are you booked for it?”

“Expect us by eight at the latest,” said Gramercy Jones.

•     •     •     •     •

Every weekday morning Brooklyn is a funnel through which half a million human atoms slide; and the spout of this funnel is Brooklyn Bridge. There are other spouts, plenty of them, but this is the main one. It always has been and probably it always will be. Here the stream runs the thickest and jams the tightest and squirms the squirmiest. In the morning it pours into Manhattan, ramming and cramming, smashing and splashing, even as the waters came down at Lodore; and in the late afternoon it reassembles itself, thickens, solidifies, jellies, coagulates, and then, reversing the laws of gravity and the commonest rules of physics, pours back up the spout and sprays itself out through the funnel.

Hence twice daily is presented the spectacle of the bridge crush, a thing of which the metropolis professes heartily to be ashamed and of which secretly it is inordinately proud, seeing that no other city anywhere can show a duplicate of it, or anything like a duplicate of it. And because it has no colorable counterpart elsewhere, sociologists come to study the types it produces, and traffic experts to figure out plans for easing it, and native writers to tap its floods for heart-interest stories, and British writers to put chapters about it in their inevitable volumes of American notes. Others come too – thieves to prey on its component units, and policemen to catch the pickpockets and to herd the multitudes into their appointed channels.

On a certain morning in February Brooklyn’s half-million crossed the bridge as usual on jammed trains and over-flowing cars and packed footpaths, coming two or three or four thousand to the minute, congesting along the bridge levels and disgorging from the inadequate terminal, with a swirling, spreading, twisting movement suggestive of myriad oats spraying out of a hopper. The Subway, burrowing underground like a mole, sucked in its share of the onrushing army; the Elevated road, straddling along on its thousand legs like a great iron earwig, took its share; but the bulk of the crowds spread fanwise over City Hall Park or gorged into wriggling black masses in the tortuous gorge of Nassau Street and the widening gore of Park Row, traveling mainly westward and southward. There were lesser torrents, yet thick enough ones, debouching from the main currents to flow eastward toward the Bowery or to splash in living scallops and waves across the triangled plaza to where Center Street, sprouting off Park Row like a tendril off a taproot, winds northward past the gray towers of the Tombs and the red walls of the Criminal Courts Building, on past the gold dome of police headquarters, and finally loses itself two miles northward in a maze of contradictory crossways.

Those of the half-million who took this latter route between eight-thirty and nine o’clock found their way strangely hampered and obstacled. First to pass there was a shifting skirmish line of alert young men, who shuttled back and forth in the streaming travel lane sat the upper exits under the overhanging lip of the bridge mouth. Only Gramercy Jones and Max Furst, keenly watchful from a point a few paces northward, knew these nervous pedestrians to be Evening Planet reporters. Back of and behind the reporters were other persons, whose bodies, facing all the same way, formed, as it were, rocks in the rapids against which the northbound currents inevitably splashed and bumped.

There were, to begin with, two sandwich men. One sandwich man was boxed, like a turtle in its shell, between stiff boards strapped to him front and back; and one displayed a dangling row of sample shoes swung on a steel trellis that rested upon his shoulders and reared itself high above his head. Both of them were of a huskier build and a more resolute mien than one generally finds among the draggled failures who recruit the ranks of the army of living advertisements. There was a shoe-string peddler who seemed deeply interested in the watch-chains and scarfpins of those who pushed by him, but not at all in shoe-strings. There were two robust newsboys, or newsmen, rather, shoving early editions at all and sundry, being meanwhile oblivious to the curses and scowls of younger rivals. There was an apple girl, and a Salvation Army lass with keen eyes under her poke bonnet and a tambourine outstretched for contributed coppers; and there was a woman with collar-buttons to sell, but not selling many, though she looked eagerly this way and that, as though for custom – and there were others who seemed to have no business there except to thrust themselves across and through the human tide-rips.

Small things befell. A plainclothes man recognized a purse-snatcher in the press and snatched him. A smirking and smiling youth of flirtful tendencies had both smirk and smile slapped off his face by a Wall Street stenographer with deep prejudices against being ogled by strange young men. A woman fainted on the stairs going up to the L. Two trucks jammed their wheels, and the drivers swapped the fighting words. Toward nine the strain of the rush relaxed and the crowds thinned perceptibly, for the worst of it was over. Still, though, there were thousands yet coming and yet to come of all classes and conditions – rich man, poor man, beggarman, thief; doctor, lawyer, merchant, chief. And, as if in living illustration of the rhyme, here came now, coupled fast together, one who seemed the thief and one who, if not the chief, was at least the chief’s deputy.

Off a streetcar that crossed the bridge and swung broadside on at the street level there climbed a tall man with a black mustache, and directly behind him, bumping against him awkwardly, a shorter, darker man whose coat collar was turned up and whose hat brim was turned down. Watching from a point close up to the tracks, two of the Evening Planet’s reporters instantly noted why this pair kept such close company. They were linked together by handcuffs; the smaller man’s right wrist was made fast to the taller man’s left wrist. As the reporters, with casual interest, surveyed this not uncommon spectacle, they saw a uniformed policeman on duty at the switch step up inquiringly and swap brief speech with the taller of the two. Then the policeman jerked his thumb backward over his shoulder and the tall man half steered, half pulled his prisoner through the thinning tides of foot travel and drew him aboard a northbound car, their united arms making an arch as one preceded the other up the steps of the car’s rear platform. For an instant the steel chain of the cuffs was drawn taut and glittered in the sunlight.

One of the reporters was a very new reporter and had the new reporter’s inquisitiveness, which is boundless as the sea and extends to things not connected with the day’s work. Moved by this fledgling curiosity, he approached the guardian of the trolley switches.

“Who were your friends,” he asked, flashing his reporter’s card – “the two that just spoke to you?”

“Never seen either of ’em before,” said the policeman; “that’s why I stopped ’em. The officer said he come from borough headquarters over in Brooklyn – one of that batch of plainclothesmen the commish promoted the other day, I guess. He’s taking the other party up to court for a witness in some trial, I believe.”

“Did you get the prisoner’s name?” inquired the young reporter, wondering whether the case could amount to anything.

“He give it to me, but it sort of slipped my mind. Funny sounding – a wop name, I take it to be. Let’s see! Seems like to me it began with a P – I know it put me in mind of a cigar. Panetela? No; that wasn’t it.”

“Was it Pandora?” demanded the young reporter abruptly.

“You got it, kid,” said the policeman and then stared, for the young reporter had turned and had shouted something to his partner and both of them were skittering across the cobbles, gathering up recruits as they went. But it was too late. Spaced off at irregular intervals, four trolley cars were in sight moving briskly up Center Street. The fleetest of foot in all the Planet’s squadron of vedettes had hard work catching the last car of the four; and the man he sought was not on the last car.

By a tedious process of elimination, there was found in the car barns at noontime a conductor who remembered among his forenoon fares two who rode shackled together. He would not be sure, but he thought these passengers got off at Franklin Street, where the Bridge of Sighs arches over from the Tombs to the Criminal Courts. There, no doubt, the bonds had been slipped off the wrists and the pair had vanished. Pandora had kept his word. He had crossed the bridge; he had worn his jewelry in plain view – a broad steel bracelet – he had given his name, and he had gone up Center Street. Dana Grist raised the young reporter’s salary five dollars a week and scolded the others and had to be satisfied with that.

Three days passed before he called again upon his friend, Gramercy Jones. It was of a Sunday morning that he came. This time Mr. Max Furst was present.

“I’m only going to stay a minute,” stated the caller; and it was plain that worry berode him heavily and roweled him deeply. “Well, I’ve been hearing from our friend Pandora again,” he said. “He’s still playing tag with us. I hope he’s enjoying it more than we are!”

“I think I’ll have to go after that guy in earnest,” said Max Furst, his professional pride inflamed.

“I wish you luck,” said Dana Grist. “Night before last he sent us another telegram. It came from Jersey City. He said he would pass up and down Fifth Avenue at Forty-second Street on Saturday morning, riding and walking – those were his words – and that he would pass up and down Broadway at Twenty-third Street on Saturday afternoon, riding and talking!”

“Picks out nice quiet places – don’t he?” Max Furst grinned.

“He does – and he gets away with it too,” said the Planet’s acting city editor. “Of course we had men watching yesterday. Like idiots, we couldn’t think of any one who would be riding and walking on Fifth Avenue except a mounted policeman, and while our men were watching for a made-up imitation traffic man, Pandora was calmly going by all morning at hour intervals.”

“How was he disguised?” inquired Gramercy Jones.

“He wasn’t disguised at all,” said Grist disgustedly – “or at least not much. He was a conductor on a Fifth Avenue motor bus.”

“Walking and riding,” said Gramercy Jones softly, and Max Furst vented his admiration in a low whistle. “And in the afternoon when he was to be riding and talking – how did he do that?”

“Oh, that was simple – almost as simple as we were,” explained Grist bitterly. “He bribed the megaphone orator on one of those sightseeing cars to let him take his place. He wrote us afterward – Pandora wrote us – and told us how he had turned both tricks; and sent men to the bus line’s stables and to the rubberneck hack people and they confirmed the statement.”

“Why don’t you drop him?” asked Gramercy Jones.

“We can’t,” confessed Dana Grist; “he won’t let us! I heard from him this afternoon – it was a special-delivery letter, post-marked Newark. He offers to give us one more chance to find him – it’s to be the last one, he says. If we fail he promises to write to the Journal and tell how he fooled the Planet’s bright young men. Kindly little joker – isn’t he? I guess he’s going to make the Planet the laughing-stock of Park Row. Here is what he says.”

He slipped a typewritten note out of its envelope and found a certain paragraph:

“‘Meet me Monday of this week’ – that’ll be tomorrow – ‘on the south side of Fourteenth Street between Broadway on the west and Third Avenue on the east, any hour from ten to six. Look for me behind the spinach.’”

“Might I ask what the plan of campaign is?” asked Gramercy Jones.

“Oh, we’re going to do the best we can,” said Dana Grist. “We still cling to hope. There are three restaurants on the south side of Fourteenth Street in that block. We’ve arranged to have a man in the cashier’s booth of each of those restaurants on the lookout for the first man who orders a bale of spinach to eat; and we’ll also have men dressed as private policemen on duty in front of a couple of the moving-picture places along there, and they’re to keep their eyes open for a man carrying an armload of spinach or wearing spinach in his buttonhole. That’s all that I can think of to do, and I’ve thought until I’m woozy.”

He stood up to go.

“I’d be glad enough,” he said, “if you two cared to take an independent whirl at this job. If you caught our friend the adventure would be yours – and the story would be the Planet’s.”

Gramercy Jones opened his lips to speak; but Max Furst telegraphed him a silent message to be silent. The door closed behind the departing Grist.

“The trouble with that Grist,” said Max Furst, “is that he’s been cooped up in an office so long he ain’t wise to what’s going on in this town. He’s actually forgot how people talk; and when it comes to picking out a place to look for a party in Fourteenth Street he’s overlooked the one best bet.”

“What do you mean?“inquired Gramercy Jones.

“Well,” said Furst, “I’ve got a notion. It might be worth something and then again it might not. Chief, you know what spinach means, don’t you?”

“I think I do,” said Jones, “but I shall make sure.” He got a dictionary from a bookshelf, opened it and sought the right page.

“‘Spinach,’” he read off – “‘an annual pot-herb, usually eaten boiled.’ That’s spinach as I understand it.”

Max Furst had a constantly growing admiration for his young employer. He also had a high regard for his own job. Something respectfully akin to the pity that one feels for the worthily innocent accented his next remark.

“And so that’s all the word spinach means to you,” he mused softly. “Chief, we may be dubbing round on a dead card, but the idea I’ve got is worth tryin’ out, I think. Will you just trail along a while and let me play my own string out?”

“I’ll promise to go and ask no questions,” pledged Gramercy Jones. “I always learn something when I go with you.”

“Thanks!” said Max Furst. “Get your hat and coat and let’s take a little walk. Even if my dope goes wrong on this other thing, I’ll give you a peep at old Mamma Brockway’s lodging house and that’s worth seeing itself.”

“I never heard of it,” confessed his employer. “Is it far from here?”

“Not more’n half a mile,” said Max Furst, “and I guess there ain’t another boarding house in the world just like it.”

•     •     •     •     •

It was as this highly competent person had said. A walk of not more than half a mile brought them to where East Eleventh Street, butting headlong into the marble rear of Grace Church, stops dead short, as though dazed by the collision, and gives itself over to a stunned contemplation of the dingy dwellings, now mostly made over into shops and flathouses, that line its seamed and fractured pavements. It is right round the corner from Broadway, and yet miles away, buried and hidden like an appendix burrowing blindly in the midriff of the city. Max Furst, leading the way, crossed to the south side and went along the block until he came to a red-brick house that was tall and narrow and old, with a succession of fire-escape ladders cascading down its front. In the parlor window was a framed sign that read simply:

BROCKWAY

Lodgers and Meals

“Here we are,” he announced. “I was down here once the best part of a week, off and on, working on the tattooed-man murder mystery. That was sure a mighty pretty murder.”

They mounted the steps of the stoop and in the area-way paused, while the leader of the expedition considered the names scrawled on cards stuck behind the bleared glass fronts of a battery of mailboxes. As they stood there the front door opened and they scrooged aside while a queer-looking pair passed them. One was a dwarf not much over three feet tall, who seemed to be all head; and the other was a giant not much under seven feet in height, who seemed to be all legs. They went down the steps and turned into a basement dining room beneath the stoop; and such were their widely divergent modes of locomotion an illusion remained with Gramercy Jones that it had been the dwarf who strode and the giant who paced along. As they disappeared from his view, the giant said something in a strangely thin, conciliatory tone and the dwarf snapped back an answer so and deep it seemed to come from the bowels of the earth beneath his majestically mincing feet, whereat the giant spoke even more apologetically than before.

Finding the particular letterbox of his search, Furst pressed the button that was below it and in response the doorlatch clicked its hospitable triple click. Furst turned the knob and they entered a narrow hallway half dark and odorously reminiscent of bygone baits of fried cabbages and stewed onions. The blue-haloed ghosts of many a boiled dinner haunted that hallway and followed them while they climbed the creaky stairs into the musty upper precincts of Brockway’s. Also it was evident that at no very remote date somebody had spilt the coal oil and that somebody else had let the gas escape.

As they felt their way along the second-floor landing, a man came out of a room and brushed by them. Surprised at this person’s noiseless tread, Gramercy Jones followed him with his glance and saw that he had no arms, but only stubs of arms, and that his feet were incased in mitt-like socks which left his ten toes bare.

“Hennessy – that’s the next floor up, ain’t it?” asked Max Furst of the armless one, who merely grunted an affirmative without turning his head, and continued to pad noiselessly away.

By now young Gramercy Jones was prepared for almost anything, and when at the third floor his conductor rapped on a door and the door began to open a begrudging inch at a time, he looked hard to see what there might be to see. What he saw framed in the narrow opening was a rather stout woman of thirty-five or so, with a shrewish blue eye. Her hair was twisted into a careless and casual knot upon her head and her kimono gaped at the throat. She had heavy eyebrows meeting in an unbroken line above her nose, and she was further distinguished by having a long, silky, inky black beard. It was a beard to remind one of French artists and Dunkard preachers and those pictures of hermit saints painted by Old Masters of the early Flemish school. It was indeed a beautiful beard – and a woman wore it. Gramercy Jones sustained a shock. His guide, though, seemed not in the least surprised.

“Hello, Miss Hennessy,” said Max Furst briskly.

“Do I know you?” inquired the woman suspiciously.

“Sure you do,” Max Furst told her. “Don’t you remember – I was up here from the old Central Office the time of the Thomas J. Wakeley murder case?”

“Oh, yes, I do place you now,” she answered, and her voice warmed with curiosity. “Say, has there been something turrible happenin’ round here again?” she queried eagerly.

“No,” admitted Max Furst,“I just came to see you on a little business matter. Can I bring this gentleman into your room?”

“You can if the gentleman can stand a mighty mussed up place,” and the bearded lady tittered apologetically. A statement so truly feminine, issuing from a set of whiskers so excessively masculine, struck Gramercy Jones as the queerest thing he had ever heard in his life.

Miss Hennessy threw open the door hospitably and they entered a room where a screen half hid a rumpled bed. Upon the walls there were many photographs of unusual-looking subjects and the top of a dressing table bristled with a most variegated and complete collection of hair restorers, dandruff cures and dye products, both domestic and imported. Also on a table was a partly emptied bottle of beer and one and a half cheese sandwiches and an article of china in pink and white, identified from the memory of one like it which he had seen in childhood. It was a mustache cup.

“You gents’ll have to excuse the looks of everything,” said the tenant as she waved them to chairs and let her own plump frame drop upon a sofa that emitted dust from its cushions and an agonized squeak from its sore-burdened springs. “I really ain’t had time to tidy up yet. I slept kind of late today,” she continued, “and I was just taking my lunch here in my room instid of going downstairs. I do hate to talk about people that’s in the profession, but I must say, if you was to ast me, that there’s certain parties in this house that I can’t stand for or abide. It’s enough to take a strong man’s appetite, let alone a lady’s that’s had refined family raisings in her time, to watch that there Arno, the Mexican glass eater, taking his coffee out of a saucer. Besides all of which, he ain’t Mexican either – he’s South Clark Street, Chicago.

“Calling theyselves genuwine human curios!” went on the bearded lady acidly. “With the exception of me and maybe a couple of others, I want to tell you, Mister – Mister——”

“Furst; and this gentleman with me is Mister Jones.”

“Is that so? Glad to meet you, I’m sure, Mister Jones. Well, Mister Furst and you, Mister Jones, as I was saying, I don’t mind telling you in confidence that the most of them is just plain snides and fakes. That’s what’s crabbing this profession and making it so hard on us real artists – the fakes, them and the movies. How many swell dime musées did there used to be right here in this town? And how many is there now, I ast you? Just one, and it ain’t so much.”

“The last time I saw you down there, you certainly was the hit of the whole show, all right,” stated Mr. Furst diplomatically.

“Yes,” she assented purringly; “I suppose I was.” One plump hand stole up soothingly and smoothed down the beautiful flossy beard. The conviction was imprinted upon the tablets of Gramercy Jones’ understanding that, deftly applied, flattery might prove as soothing to a bearded lady as to any other lady .

“You’ve got your own following down there too,” persisted Furst. “You know all the regulars too – don’t you? And if some stranger was to be snooping round down there off and on all day tomorrow, with maybe a make-up on, I’ll bet any amount you could spot him in a minute – couldn’t you?”

“I could if I was there,” assented Miss Hennessy; “any artist’s bound to get to know their own public.”

“Why, you’re still working down to Gruber’s, ain’t you?” inquired Max Furst, betraying surprise.

“Well,” said Miss Hennessy,“I am and then again I ain’t – I’m laying off for a day or two. Of course I’ll go back soon, but right this minute I’m laid off-with full salary.”

“Any time they lay you off they’re cheating the public,” stated Max Furst with gallantry.

“I didn’t do it myself,” she informed him; “and right there comes in the funny part. If you two gents knowed Moe Fineberg as well as I do you’d know he ain’t the one to throw away good money, especially with the business fell off like it’s been lately. But here just yesterday he comes to me and says he wants me to take a few days off and sort of rest up and he’ll send for me again when needed. Now what do you know about that?”

Judging from his manner, it might be figured that Max Furst knew a good deal about that. He hitched his chair forward. “So that’s the way it is,” he said half to himself. “I might have guessed it.” Then in a brisker tone: “Miss Hennessy, you still wear a make-up when you go out on the street, the same as you used to, don’t you?”

“It’s rare I go out except evenings,” she stated with dignity. “a genuwine human curio can’t afford to cheapen herself. It’s poor business; so I always wear my special costume when going out – you know, Mister Furst; it’s the same one you seen me in oncet or twicet before.”

He nodded, beckoning to his employer to draw nearer.

“Lady,” he said confidentially, “I’m going to put you in the way of making a nice piece of extra money.”

•     •     •     •     •

The Hall of Human Curios at Gruber’s Dime Musée in Fourteenth Street opened directly off the zoo, where a mangy black bear found entertainment in his own mange and a cageful of parrots conversed together stridently, and a few flea-ridden monkeys gazed through their wire-fronted homes, contemplating the casual spectator with that look of unbounded contempt for the Caucasian races that is only seen in the eyes of caged monkeys and Oriental laundrymen. But, though situated thus, within easy smelling distance of the zoo, the Hall of Human Curios had a vastly different aspect. Here, upon a low platform stretching the length of a long room, in stiff-backed chairs, each with a row of photographs on sale at his or her feet, sat the chief attractions of Gruber’s. There was a very short, very aggressive gentleman, and a very tall, very mild one; a fluffy Circassian beauty with a head like a bushel and eyes like a white rat’s; a gentleman who was tattooed all over with lodge emblems, gallant firemen and bold sailor laddies; a sword swallower and a glass eater talking shop together; and others besides.

They sat at ease, having cast off for the moment the professional pose, for this was of a morning, with midday nearly two hours off, and the real audiences of the day had not yet begun to appear. Two straying spectators, plainly of a rural breeding, had passed through and on again into the zoo, leaving the hall deserted of patrons for the moment. A group of three came in together and halted a moment by the door. One of the trio the reader of these stories would have recognized as Gramercy Jones. The second naturally was Max Furst. The third was a short, stoutish-appearing person muffled from neck to heels in a checked ulster and with a peaked fore-and-aft tourist’s cap drawn well down over the face. This visitor was adorned by a handsome black beard.

Entering at this precise moment from a doorway at the back, Mr. Moe Fineberg, the manager of the establishment, beheld the whiskered new arrival in the group of three at the door and uttered a single word of profanely profound alarm. He started forward; then hesitated for a second of indecision, shrinking behind a pillar that was painted blue and ornamented with dusty bunting.

The sharp blue eye of the bearded one swept the hall. The glance traveled along the line of forms upon the platform – past the dwarf, past the giant, past the tattooed man, past the albino lady, past—— there was a shriek that permeated and filled the hall! It made Mr. Fineberg shrivel in his tracks and his hiding-place. It caused the freaks to rise as one from their several stiff-backed chairs. What they saw with unfeigned astonishment, what Mr. Fineberg saw with poignant distress, what Max Furst saw with great satisfaction and Gramercy Jones with the deepest interest, was the overcoated figure leaping forth from its place between its two companions, and darting nimbly across the intervening space, and seizing the silk-shod ankles of a bearded lady sitting in the center of the row of freaks, and heaving her bodily off the platform, and with shrill cries attacking her upon the floor.

Now then this widely diversified audience was to witness occurrences more disconcerting still, for as these two struggled together they uttered loud words, the one of rage and the other of protest; and the strangest thing about this was that, though one of these voices was evidently masculine, the other was indubitably feminine; yet the soprano sounds came through the beard of that one who was appareled as a man, and the bass notes issued from the beard of that one who wore the silken trappings of a woman.

Not for long, however, was this perplexing puzzle of sex and gender to endure. The peaked cap dropped off in the struggle and a great fall of disarranged hair sprayed down the back breadth of the checked overcoat; in this same instant a plump hand twined itself in the luxuriant whiskers of the ostensible bearded lady who had been removed so violently from the platform, and fetched away a good half of them, thereby revealing them to be mere crape-hair counterfeits.

At this Mr. Moe Fineberg ran forward, sputtering the air with moist appeals and lamentations, whereupon the ulstered belligerent, now fully revealed in her true person as Miss Milly Hennessy, turned upon him.

“You big stiff!” she shrieked. “You big stiff! You lied to me! That’s my wrapper this fake is wearing! And my stockings! And my slippers!”

Calling him a scoundrel and a deceiver and a dissembler, or words to those effects, she raked her finger-nails down his face with a sudden, quick clawing motion and scraped off much cuticle, which Mr. Fineberg, for the sake of his looks, could ill afford to spare. a stout person never has any more skin than just enough, anyhow, and Mr. Fineberg was undeniably stout.

Freed from the detaining grip of Miss Hennessy, the person who had been posing as the bearded lady rose and sought to get away. He was rather a stout man, with small hands and feet and staring brown eyes; and he cut a comical figure, with his silken wrapper half on and half off his coatless back and his trouser-legs rolled up high above the heeled slippers that he wore. The mangled fragments of his false whiskers clung to his chin. Max Furst reached out a hand and plucked him back and held him fast.

“Nix on the getaway,” he said happily. “You belong to me, Mister Foxy Pandora.” And at that, curiously enough, the captive ceased to struggle and became passive. He coolly removed a high-coifed woman’s wig, kicked out of his flowered robe and stood quiet. Not so Miss Mildred Hennessy. Like the enraged tigress of the jungle, she had tasted blood and, also quite like the afore-said tigress, she struck clawingly at Moe Fineberg again and again. He backed away from her with his eyes, his eyebrows, his tongue, his shoulders and his hands – especially his flapping hands – all moving rapidly in his efforts to coin excuses.

“Milly, Miss Milly, please shut up yelling; I can explain,” he begged.

“Explain nothing!” she cried, artistic temperament all ablaze within her. “How come that scoundrel yonder to be wearing my exhibition things – explain that! How come you to lay me off and put a fake on in my place – explain that!”

Overcome by her emotions Miss Hennessy collapsed in a heap of checked ulster and black whiskers, and the preliminary symptoms of acute hysteria sounded forth shrilly.

Opportunely saved from further mutilation by this manifestation of feminine weakness, Mr. Fineberg became once more the master of his own destinies.

“Hey, get back to your chairs where you belong!” he ordered the platform audience harshly, and the clustering human curios shrank to their places – only the dwarf did not shrink, but stalked defiantly; but the giant on his spindly legs almost ran. “Otto,” he bade a uniformed man just entering, “keep that door shut and shoo any rubbernecks away.” He faced Furst and Jones. “Are you the guys that’re putting me in Dutch here?” he demanded. “What’s the idea? What’s coming off?”

“My name is Furst,” said the ex-sergeant – “from headquarters,” he continued curtly. He might have added that, though from headquarters, he was three full years from there; but half a truth, like half a loaf, can be made to serve as well on occasion as a full measure of either truth or loaf. It served here.

“It’s a pinch then,” opined Moe Fineberg sagely and sadly. Before continuing he glanced nervously over his shoulder toward the palpitating and vocal mound of ulster prone on the floor alongside the platform.

“Say, you know, officer, I suspected something when this party here braced me to lay Milly off and let him take her place. He tells me it’s to win a bet, which I didn’t believe at the time; but his money looked good to me and I fell for his play.” He glared at the strangely passive prisoner balefully. “Say, ain’t there no way to square this? If it gets in the papers it’ll cripple business.”

“You and your bunch keep your mouths shut and it’s squared already,” said Max Furst. “This is strictly a private pinch – see? Ain’t there some quiet way me and my friend here can get out of this place with our man – a back entrance or something like that?”

“Sure there is,” agreed Mr. Fineberg eagerly. “That there hallway yonder leads to Thirteenth Street. Look here,” he added anxiously; “I don’t want no patrol wagon round drawing a crowd – lemme get you a cab.”

Gramercy Jones spoke up for the first time. He had been studiously eying the trapped Pandora.

“We have a car out in front,” he said. “You might tell my driver to bring it round into Thirteenth Street.”

Moe Fineberg started off to obey. From behind came a calliope-like blast of particular vehemence, halting him.

“Say,” “he plaintively beseeched, “how’m I going to square this here matter with Milly yonder when she gets over that fit she’s having?”

“That,” remarked Max Furst, as he slipped off his overcoat and draped it round the shoulders of his charge;“That, bo, is your little job.”

The captured stranger plucked the last shreds of his arboreal disguise from his chops and went with them without resistance. During the short ride to Gramercy Jones’ house he maintained an uncanny silence, answering no questions and smiling his inscrutable and silent smile, like a person well content with himself. Indeed he said but little up until the time some two hours later when, safely locked in a closed ambulance belonging to a discreet private asylum in Staten Island and amply escorted by two square-jawed attendants, he started upon a much longer ride.

Shortly thereafter Gramercy Jones, sitting down to a belated luncheon with Max Furst and Dana Grist for his guests, was enlightened as to certain phases of the case that still mystified him. By now he knew the elusive Mr. Pandora was no other than Howland Grainger, he of the large income and the vividly eccentric tendencies, who, after being adjudged in New York mentally incompetent, had escaped from Captain Wigramme’s grasp into New Jersey and from there had ventured back maliciously to harry the feelings of the constituted authorities.

“But why can’t you print the story?” Jones asked of Dana Grist.

What with coming post-haste in a cab, and what with telephoning and telegraphing to divers persons and ordering the ambulance and all, Dana Grist had not until now had time for breathing properly, let alone for elucidating puzzles.

Sorrowing like a true newspaperman for what could never be, Grist gazed at him mournfully.

“Because,” he explained, “the chief financial backer of The Planet – I’m telling you this in confidence – happens to be J. Reeves Grainger, the brother of the person who just left us bound for Staten Island. It was J. Reeves Grainger who had Howland Grainger declared insane. That is why Howland, with his twisted notions of revenge, picked out The Planet to have fun with, and that is why The Planet will never print this story. It’s all in the family.”

“Ah,” said Gramercy Jones, “I am constantly adding to the deficient education I acquired at Cambridge.”

Glancing over the table he noted that the potted tongue was garnished with green herbage. He touched a morsel of it with his fork.

“Furst,” he said, “if in the Manhattanese tongue chin-whiskers are spinach, would you mind telling me what is your pet name for the genuine article?”

The Saturday Evening Post, 15 Mar 1913

The Broken Shoelace

~

I

In the aching, baking middle of a sizzling New York’s summer, there befell New York’s regular “crime wave.” When the city is a brazen skillet, whereon mankind, assailed by the sun from above and by the stored-up heat from below, fries on both sides like an egg; when nerves are worn to frazzle-ends; when men and women, suffocating by tedious degrees in the packed and steaming tenements, lie there and curse the day they were born – then comes the annual “crime wave,” as the papers love to name it. In truth the papers make it first and then they name it. Misdeeds of great and small degree are ranged together and displayed in parallel columns as common symptoms of a high tide of violence, a perfect ground swell of lawlessness. To a city editor the scope of a crime wave is as elastic a thing as a hot weather “story,” when under the heading of Heat Prostrations are listed all who fall in the streets, stricken by whatsoever cause. This is done as a sop to local pride, proving New York to be a deadlier spot in summer than Chicago or St. Louis.

True enough, in such a season, people do have shorter tempers than at other times; they come to blows on small provocation and come to words on still less. So maybe there was a real “crime wave,” making men bloody-minded and homicidal. Be that as it may, the thing reached its apogee in the murder of old Steinway, the so-called millionaire miser of Murray Hill, he being called a millionaire because he had money, and a miser because he saved it.

It was in mid-August that the aged Steinway was choked to death in his rubbishy old house in East Thirty-ninth Street, where by the current rumor of the neighborhood, he kept large sums in cash. Suspicion fell upon the recluse’s nephew, one Maxwell, who vanished with the discovery of the murder.

The police compiled and widely circulated a description of the suspect, his looks, manners, habits and peculiarities; and certain distant relatives and presumptive heirs of the dead man came forward promptly, offering a lump sum in cash for his capture, living; but all this labor was without reward. The fugitive went uncaptured, while the summer dragged on to its end, burning up in the fiery furnace of its own heat.

For one dweller of the city – and he, I may tell you, is the central figure in this story – it dragged on with particular slowness. Judson Green, the hero of our tale – if it has any hero – was a young man of some wealth and more leisure. Also he was a young man of theories. For example, he had a theory that around every corner of every great city romance lurked, ready for some one to come and find it. True, he never had found it, but that, he insisted, was because he hadn’t looked for it; it was there all right, waiting to be flushed, like a quail from a covert.

Voicing this belief over a drink at a club, on an evening in June, he had been challenged promptly by one of those argumentative persons who invariably disagree with every proposition as a matter of principle, and for the sake of the debate.

“All rot, Green,” the other man had said. “Just plain rot. Adventure’s not a thing that you find yourself. It’s something that comes and finds you – once in a lifetime. I’ll bet that in three months of trying you couldn’t, to save your life, have a real adventure in this town – I mean an adventure out of the ordinary. Elopements and automobile smash-ups are barred.”

“How much will you bet?” asked Judson Green.

“A hundred,” said the other man, whose name was Wainwright.

Reaching with one hand for his fountain pen, Judson Green beckoned a waiter with the other and told him to bring a couple of blank checks.

II

So that was how it had started, and that was why Judson Green had spent the summer in New York instead of running away to the north woods or the New England shore, as nearly everybody he knew did. Diligently had he sought to win that hundred dollars of the contentious Wainwright; diligently had he ranged from one end of New York to the other, seeking queer people and queer things – seeking anything that might properly be said to constitute adventure. Sometimes a mildly interested and mildly satirical friend accompanied him; oftener he went alone, an earnest and determined young man. Yet, whether with company or without it, his luck uniformly was poor. The founts of casual adventure had, it seemed, run stone dry; such weather was enough to dry up anything.

Yet he had faithfully tried all those formulas which in the past were supposed to have served the turns of those seeking adventure in a great city. There was the trick of bestowing a thousand-dollar bill upon a chance vagrant and then trailing after the recipient to note what happened to him, in his efforts to change the bill. Heretofore, in fiction at least, the following of this plan had invariably brought forth most beautiful results. Accordingly, Judson Green tried it.

He tried it at Coney Island one July evening. He chose Coney Island deliberately, because of all the places under the sun, Coney Island is pre-eminently the home and haunt of the North American dime. At Coney, a dime will buy almost anything except what a half-dime will buy. On Surf Avenue, then, which is Coney’s Greatest Common Divisor, he strolled back and forth, looking for one of an aspect suitable for this experiment. Mountain gorges of painted canvas and sheet-tin towered above him; palace pinnacles of lath and plaster speared the sky; the moist salt air, blowing in from the adjacent sea, was enriched with dust and with smells of hot sausages and fried crabs, and was shattered by the bray of bagpipes, the exact and mechanical melodies of steam organs, and the insistent, compelling, never-dying blat of the spieler, the barker and the ballyhoo. Also there were perhaps a hundred thousand other smells and noises, did one care to take the time and trouble to classify them. And here the very man he sought to find, found him.

There came to him, seeking alms, one who was a thing of shreds and patches and broken shoes. His rags seemed to adhere to him by the power of cohesive friction rather than by any visible attachments; it might have been years since he had a hat that had a brim. It was in the faint and hungered whine of the professional that he asked for the money to buy one cup of coffee; yet as he spoke, his breath had the rich alcoholic fragrance of a hot plum pudding with brandy sauce.

The beggar made his plea and, with a dirty palm outstretched, waited in patient suppliance. He sustained the surprise of his whole panhandling life. He was handed a new, uncreased one-thousand-dollar bill. He was told that he must undertake to change the bill and spend small fractional parts of it. Succeeding here, he should have five per cent of it for his own. As Judson Green impressed these details upon the ragged vagrant’s dazed understanding, he edged closer and closer to his man, ready to cut off any sudden attempt at flight.

The precaution was entirely unnecessary. Perhaps it was because this particular panhandler had the honor of his profession – in moments of confidence he might have told you, with some pride, that he was no thief. Or possibly the possession of such unheard-of wealth crippled his powers of imagination. There are people who are made financially embarrassed by having no money at all, but more who are made so by having too much. Our most expensive hotels are full of whole families who, having become unexpectedly and abruptly wealthy, are now suffering from this painful form of financial embarrassment; they wish to disburse large sums freely and gracefully, and they don’t know how. They lack the requisite training. In a way of speaking, this mendicant of Coney Island was perhaps of this class. With his jaw lolling, he looked at the stranger dubiously, uncertainly, suspiciously, meanwhile studying the stranger’s yellow-back.

“You want me to git this here bill changed?” he said dully.

“That is the idea,” said Judson Green, patiently. “You are to take it and change it – and I will trail behind you to see what happens. I’m merely making an experiment, with your help, and I’m willing to pay for it.”

“This money ain’t counterfeit?” inquired the raggedy one. “This ain’t no game to git me in bad?”

“Well, isn’t it worth taking a chance on?” cross-fired Green. The pimpled expanse of face lost some of its doubt, and the owner of the face fetched a deep breath.

“You’re on,” he decided. “Where ’bouts’ll I start?”

“Anywhere you please,” Judson Green told him. “You said you were hungry – that for two days you hadn’t eaten a bite?”

“Aw, boss, that was part of the spiel,” he confessed frankly. “Right now I’m that full of beef stew I couldn’t hold another bite.”

“Well, how about a drink? A long, cool glass of beer, say? Or anything you please.”

The temporary custodian of the one-thousand-dollar bill mentally considered this pleasing project; his bleared eye glinted brighter.

“Naw,” he said, “not jist yit. If it’s all the same to you, boss, I’ll wait until I gits a good thirst on me. I think I’ll go into that show yonder, to start on.” He pointed a finger towards a near-by amusement enterprise. This institution had opened years before as “The Galveston Flood.” Then, with some small scenic changes, it had become “The Mount Pelee Disaster,” warranted historically correct in all details; now it was “The Messina Earthquake,” no less. Its red and gold gullet of an entrance yawned hungrily, not twenty yards from where they stood.

“Go ahead,” ordered Judson Green, confirming the choice with a nod. “And remember, my friend, I will be right behind you.”

Nothing, however, seemed further from the panhandler’s thoughts than flight. His rags fluttered freely in the evening air and his sole-less shoes flopped up and down upon his feet, rasping his bare toes, as he approached the nearest ticket booth.

Behind the wicket sat a young woman of much self-possession. By all the outward signs she was a born and bred metropolitan and therefore one steeled against surprise and armed mentally against trick and device. Even before she spoke you felt sure she would say oily if she meant early, and early if she meant oily – sure linguistic marks of the native-born New York cockney.

To match the environment of her employment she wore a costume that was fondly presumed to be the correct garbing of a Sicilian peasant maid, including a brilliant bodice that laced in front and buttoned behind, an imposing headdress, and on both her arms, bracelets of the better known semi-precious metals.

Coming boldly up to her, the ragged man laid upon the shelf of the wicket his precious bill – it was now wadded into a greenish-yellow wisp like a sprig of celery top – and said simply, “One!”

With a jangle of her wrist jewelry, the young woman drew the bill in under the bars and straightened it out in front of her. She considered, with widening gaze, the numeral 1 and the three naughts following it. Then through the bars she considered carefully him who had brought it. From one to the other and back again she looked.

“Woit one minute,” she said. It is impossible to reproduce in cold type the manner in which this young woman uttered the word minute. But there was an “o” in it and a labial hint of an extra “u.”

“Woit, please,” she said again, and holding the bill down flat with one hand she turned and beckoned to some one at her left.

A pace behind the panhandler, Judson Green watched. Now the big comedy scene was coming, just as it always came in the books. Either the tattered possessor of the one-thousand-dollar bill would be made welcome by a gratified proprietor and would be given the liberty of the entire island and would have columns written about him by a hundred gratified press-agents, or else there would be a call for the police and for the first time in the history of New York a man would be locked up, not for the common crime of having no money, but for having too much money.

Obedient to the young woman’s request, the panhandler waited. At her beck there came a stout person in a green coat and red trousers – Italian soldiers wear these colors, or at least they often do at Coney Island – and behind her free hand the young woman whispered in his ear. He nodded understandingly, cast a sharp look at the opulent individual in the brimless hat, and then hurried away toward the inner recesses of the entrance. In a minute he was back, but not with determined police officers behind him. He came alone and he carried in one hand a heavy canvas bag that gave off a muffled jingling sound, and in the other, a flat green packet.

The young woman riffled through the packet and drove a hand into the jingling bag. Briskly she counted down before her the following items in currency and specie:

Four one-hundred-dollar bills, six fifty-dollar bills, twelve twenty-dollar bills, five ten-dollar bills, one five-dollar bill, four one-dollar bills, one fifty-cent piece, one quarter, two dimes and one nickel. Lifting one of the dimes off the top of this pleasing structure, she dropped it in a drawer; then she shoved the remaining mound of money under the wicket, accompanying it by a flat blue ticket of admission, whisked the one-thousand-dollar bill out of sight and calmly awaited the pleasure of the next comer.

All downcast and disappointed, Green drew his still bewildered accomplice aside, relieved him of the bulk of his double handful of change, endowed him liberally with cash for his trouble, and making his way to where his car waited, departed in haste and silence for Manhattan. A plan that was recommended by several of the leading fiction authorities as infallible, had, absolutely failed him.

III

Other schemes proved equally disappointing. Choosing mainly the cool of the evening, he traveled the town from the primeval forests of the Farther Bronx to the sandy beaches of Ultimate Staten Island, which is in the city, and yet not of it. He roamed through queer streets and around quaint by-corners, and he learned much strange geography of his city and yet had no delectable adventures.

Once, acting on the inspiration of the plot of a popular novel that he had read at a sitting, he bought at an East Side pawnshop a strange badge, or token, of gold and black enamel, all mysteriously embossed over with intertwined Oriental signs and characters. Transferring this ornament from the pawnshop window to the lapel of his coat, he went walking first through the Syrian quarter, where the laces and the revolutionary plots come from, and then through the Armenian quarter, where the rugs come from, and finally in desperation through the Greek quarter, where the plaster statues and the ripe bananas come from.

By rights, – by all the rights of fiction, – he, wearing this jewelled emblem in plain sight, should have been hailed by a bearded foreigner and welcomed to the inner councils of some secret Bund, cabal, council or propaganda, as one coming from afar, bearing important messages. It should have turned out so, certainly. In this case, however, the sequel was very different and in a great measure disappointing.

A trifle foot-weary and decidedly overheated, young Mr. Green came out of the East Side by way of Nassau Street, and at Fulton turned north into Broadway. Just across from the old Astor House, a man wearing a stringy beard and a dusty black suit stood at the curbing, apparently waiting for a car. He carried an umbrella under one arm and at his feet rested a brown wicker suit-case with the initials “G. W. T.” and the address, “Enid, Oklahoma,” stencilled on its side in black letters. Plainly he was a stranger in the city. Between glances down the street to see whether his car was nearing him, he counted the upper stories of the near-by skyscrapers and gazed at the faces of those who streamed past him.

His roving eye fell upon a splendid badge of gold enamel gleaming against a background of blue serge, and his face lighted with the joy of one meeting a most dear friend in a distant land. Shifting his umbrella from the right hand to the left, he gave three successive and careful tugs at his right coat lapel, all the while facing Judson Green. Following this he made a military salute and then, stepping two paces forward, he undertook to engage Green’s hand in a peculiar and difficult cross-fingered clasp. And he uttered cabalistic words of greeting in some strange tongue, all the while beaming gladly.

In less than no time, though, his warmth all changed to indignation; and as Green backed away, retreating in poor order and some embarrassment, he gathered from certain remarks thrown after him, that the outraged brother from Enid was threatening him with arrest and prosecution as a rank impostor – for wearing, without authority, the sacred insignia of an Imperial Past Potentate of the Supreme Order of Knightly Somethings or Other – he didn’t catch the last words, being then in full flight. So the adventure-seeker counted that day lost too and buried the Oriental emblem at the bottom of a bureau drawer to keep it out of mischief.

He read the papers closely, seeking there the seeds of adventure. In one of them, a pathetic story appeared, telling of a once famous soldier of fortune starving in a tenement on Rivington Street, a man who in his day – so the papers said – had made rulers and unmade them, had helped to alter the map of more than one continent. Green investigated personally. The tale turned out to be nine-tenths reporter’s imagination, and one-tenth, a garrulous, unreliable old man.

In another paper was an advertisement richly laden with veiled pleadings for immediate aid from a young woman who described herself as being in great danger. He looked into this too, but stopped looking, when he ran into an affable and accommodating press-agent. The imperiled young lady was connected with the drama, it seemed, and she sought free advertisement and was willing to go pretty far to get it.

Coming away from a roof garden show one steaming night, a slinky-looking, slightly lame person asked Green for the time, and as Green reached for his watch he endeavored to pick Green’s pocket. Being thwarted in this, the slinky person made slowly off. A Van Bibber would have hired vigilant aides to dog the footsteps of the disappointed thief and by harrying him forth with threats from wherever he stopped, would speedily have driven him desperate from lack of sleep and lack of food. Green had read somewhere of this very thing having been done successfully. He patterned after the plan. He trailed the gimpy one to where he mainly abided and drove him out of one lunchroom, and dispossessed him from one lodging house; and at that, giving his pursuer malevolent looks, the “dip” went limping to the Grand Central and caught the first train leaving for the West.

And then, at the fag end of the summer, when all his well-laid plans had one by one gone agley, chance brought to Green an adventure – sheer chance and a real adventure. The circumstance of a deranged automobile was largely responsible – that and the added incident of a broken shoe-string.

IV

It was in the first week in September and Judson Green, a tired, badly sunburned young man, disappointed and fagged, looked forward ten days to the expiration of the three months, when confessing himself beaten, and what was worse, wrong, he must pay over one hundred dollars to the jubilant Wainright. With him it wasn’t the money – he had already spent the amount of the wager several times over in the prosecution of his vain campaigning after adventure – it was the upsetting of his pet theory; that was the worst part of it.

I believe I stated a little earlier in this narrative that Judson Green was a young man of profoundly professed theories. It came to pass, therefore, that on the Saturday before Labor Day, Judson Green, being very much out of sorts, found himself very much alone and didn’t know what to do with himself. He thought of the beaches, but dismissed the thought. Of a Saturday afternoon in the season, the sea beaches that lie within the city bounds are a-crawl with humans. There is small pleasure in surf-bathing where you must share every wave with from one to a dozen total strangers.

Mr. Green climbed into his car and told his driver to take him to Van Cortlandt Park, which, lying at the northernmost boundaries of New York City, had come, with successive northerly shifts of the center of population, to be the city’s chief playground.

When, by reason of a confusion of tongues, work was knocked off on the Tower of Babel, if then all hands had turned to outdoor sports, the resultant scene would have been, I imagine, much like the picture that is presented on most Saturdays on the sixty-acre stretch of turf known as Indian Field, up in Van Cortlandt Park. Here there are baseball games by the hundred and football games by the score – all the known varieties of football games too, Gaelic, Soccer, Rugby and others; and coal black West Indian negroes in white flannels, with their legs buskined like the legs of comic opera brigands, play at cricket, meanwhile shouting in the broadest of British accents; and there is tennis on the tennis courts and boating on the lake near-by and golf on the links that lie beyond the lake. Also, in odd corners, there are all manners of queer Scandinavian and Latin games, for which no one seems to know the name; and on occasion, there are polo matches.

Accordingly, when his car drew up at the edge of the parking space, our young man beheld a wide assortment of sporting events spread before his eyes. The players disported themselves with enthusiasm, for there was now a soft coolness in the air. But the scars of a brutal summer still showed, in the turf that was burnt brown and crisp, and in the withered leaves on the elms, and in white dust inches deep on the roadways.

Young Mr. Green sat at his ease and looked until he was tired of looking, and then he gave the order for a home-bound spin. Right here was where chanced stepped in and diverted him from his appointed paths. For the car, now turned cityward, had rolled but a few rods when a smell of overheated metals assailed the air, and with a tired wheezing somewhere down in its vital organs, the automobile halted itself. The chauffeur spent some time tinkering among its innermost works before he stood up, hot and sweaty and disgusted, to announce that the breakdown was serious in character. He undertook to explain in highly technical terms the exact nature of the trouble, but his master had no turn for mechanics and small patience for listening. He gathered that it would take at least an hour to mend the mishap, perhaps even longer, and he was not minded to wait.

“I’ll walk across yonder and catch the subway,” he said. “You mend the car and bring it downtown when you get it mended.”

At its farthest point north, the Broadway subway, belying its name, emerges from the earth and becomes an elevated structure, rearing high above the ground. Its northernmost station stands aloft, butt-ended and pierced with many windows, like a ferry-boat cabin set up on stilts.

Through a long aisle of sun-dried trees, Judson Green made for this newly risen landmark. A year or two years before, all this district had been well wooded and sparsely inhabited. But wherever a transit line goes in New York it works changes in the immediate surroundings, and here at this particular spot, the subway was working them, and many of them. Through truck patches and strips of woodland, cross-streets were being cut, and on the hills to the westward, tall apartment houses were going up. On the raw edge of a cut, half of an old wooden mansion stood, showing tattered strips of an ancient flowered wallpaper and a fireplace, clinging like a chimney-swift’s nest to a wall, where the rest of the room had been sheared away bodily. Along Broadway, beyond a huddle of merry-go-rounds and peanut stands, a row of shops had sprung up, as it were, overnight; they were shiny, trim, citified shops, looking a trifle strange now in this half-transformed setting, but sure to have plenty of neighbors before long. There was even a barber shop, glittering inside and out with the neatness of newness, and complete, even to a manicuring table and a shoe-shining stand. The door of the shop was open; within, electric fans whirred in little blurs of rapid movement.

See now how chance still served our young man: Crossing to the station, Judson Green took note of this barber shop and took note also that his russet shoes had suffered from his trudge through the dusty park. Likewise one of the silken strings had frayed through; the broken end stood up through the top eyelet in an untidy fringed effect. So he turned off short and went into the little place and mounted the new tall chair that stood just inside the door. The only other customer in the place was in the act of leaving. This customer got up from the manicure table opposite the shoe-shining stand, slipped a coin into the palm of the manicure girl and passed out, giving Green a brief profile view of a thin, bearded face. Behind the back of her departing patron, the manicure girl shrugged her shoulders inside of an ornate bodice and screwed up her nose derisively. It was plainly to be seen that she did not care greatly for him she had just served.

From where he was languidly honing a razor, the head barber, he who presided over the first of the row of three chairs, spoke:

“You ought’nter be making faces at your regular steadies, Sadie. If you was to ask me, I think you’ve got a mash on that there gent.”

The young person thus addressed shook her head with a sprightly motion.

“Not on your life,” she answered. “There’s certainly something about that man I don’t like.”

“It don’t never pay to knock a stand-by,” opined the head barber, banteringly.

As though seeking sympathy from these gibes, the young lady denominated as Sadie turned toward the well-dressed, alert-looking young man who had just come in. Apparently he impressed her as a person in whom she might confide.

“Speaking about the fella that just went out,” she said. “August yonder is all the time trying to guy me about him. I should worry! He ain’t my style. Honest, I think he’s nutty.”

Politely Green uttered one of those noncommittal sounds that may be taken to mean almost anything. But the manicure lady was of a temperament needing no prompting. She went on, blithe to be talking to a new listener.

“Yes, sir, I think he’s plumb dippy. He first came in here about two weeks ago to have his nails did, and I don’t know whether you’ll believe it or not – but August’ll tell you it’s the truth – he’s been back here every day since. And the funniest part of it is I’m certain sure he never had his nails done in his life before then – they was certainly in a untidy state the first time he came. And there’s another peculiar thing about him. He always makes me scrape away down under his nails, right to the quick. Sometimes they bleed and it must hurt him.”

“Apparently the gentleman has the manicuring habit in a serious form,” said Green, seeing that Miss Sadie had paused, in expectation of an answer from him.

“He sure has – in the most vi’lent form,” she agreed. “He’s got other habits too. He’s sure badly stuck on the movies.”

“I beg your pardon – on the what?”

“On the movies – the moving pictures,” she explained. “Well, oncet in a while I enjoy a good fillum myself, but I’m no bigot on the subject – I can take my movies or I can let ’em be. But not that man that just now went out. All the time I’m doing his nails he don’t talk about nothing else hardly, except the moving pictures, he’s seen that day or the day before. It’s right ridiculous, him being a grown-up man and everything. I actually believe he never misses a new fillum at that new moving picture place three doors above here, or at that other one, that’s opened up down by Two Hundred an’ Thirtieth Street. He seems to patronize just those two. I guess he lives ’round here somewhere. Yet he don’t seem to be very well acquainted in this part of town neither. Well, it sure takes all kind of people to make a world, don’t it?”

Temporarily Miss Sadie lapsed into silence, never noticing that what she said had caused her chief auditor to bend forward in absorbed interest. He sat with his eyes on the Greek youth who worked over his shoes, but his mind was busy with certain most interesting speculations.

When the bootblack had given his restored and resplendent russets a final loving rub, and had deftly inserted a new lace where the old one had been, Mr. Green decided that he needed a manicure and he moved across the shop, and as the manicure lady worked upon his nails he siphoned the shallow reservoir of her little mind as dry as a bone. The job required no great amount of pump-work either, for this Miss Sadie dearly loved the sound of her own voice and was gratefully glad to tell him all she knew of the stranger who favored such painful manicuring processes and who so enjoyed a moving picture show. For his part, Green had seen only the man’s side face, and that casually and at a fleeting glance; but before the young lady was through with her description, he knew the other’s deportment and contour as though he had passed him a hundred times and each time had closely studied him.

To begin with, the man was sallow and dark, and his age was perhaps thirty, or at most thirty-two or three. His beard was newly grown; it was a young beard, through which his chin and chops still showed. He smoked cigarettes constantly – the thumb and forefinger of his right hand were stained almost black, and Miss Sadie, having the pride of her craft, had several times tried unsuccessfully to bleach them of their nicotine disfigurements.

He had a manner about him which the girl described as “kind of suspicious and scary,” – by which Green took her to mean that he was shy and perhaps furtive in his bearing. His teeth, his eyes, his expression, his mode of dress – Mr. Green knew them all before Miss Sadie gave his left hand a gentle pat as a sign that the job was concluded. He tipped her generously and caught the next subway train going south.

V

Southbound subway trains run fast, especially when the rush of traffic is northward. Within the hour Judson Green sat in the reading room of his club, industriously turning the pages of the club’s file of the World for the past month. Presently he found what he was seeking. He read a while, and for a while then he took notes. Pocketing his notes, he ate dinner alone and in due season thereafter he went home and to bed. But before this, he sent off a night lettergram to the Byrnes private detective agency down in Park Row. He wanted – so in effect the message ran – the best man in the employ of that concern to call upon him at his bachelor apartments in the Hotel Sedgwick, in the morning at ten o’clock. The matter was urgent, important – and confidential.

If the man who knocked at Green’s sitting-room door that next morning at ten was not the best man of the Byrnes staff, he looked the part. He was square-jawed, with an appraising eye and a good pair of shoulders. He had the right kind of a name for a detective, too. The name was Cassidy – Michael J.

“Mr. Cassidy,” said Judson Green, when the preliminaries of introduction were over, “you remember, don’t you, what the papers said at the time of the Steinway murder about the suspect Maxwell, the old man’s nephew – the description they printed of him, and all?”

“I ought to,” said Cassidy. “Our people had that case from the start – I worked on it myself off and on, up until three days ago.” From memory he quoted: “Medium height, slender, dark-complected, smooth-faced and about thirty-one years old; a good dresser and well educated; smokes cigarettes constantly; has one upper front tooth crowned with gold—” He hesitated, searching his memory for more details.

“Remember anything else about him that was striking?” prompted Green.

“Let’s see?” pondered Mr. Cassidy. Then after a little pause, “No, that’s all I seem to recall right now.”

“How about his being a patron of moving pictures?”

“That’s right,” agreed the other, “that’s the only part of it I forgot.” He repeated pretty exactly the language of the concluding paragraph of the official police circular that all the papers had carried for days: “Formerly addicted to reading cheap and sensational novels, now an inveterate attendant of motion-picture theaters.” He glanced at Judson Green over his cigar. “What’s the idea?” he asked. “Know something about this case?”

“Not much,” said Green, “except that I have found the man who killed old Steinway.”

Forgetting his professional gravity, up rose Mr. Cassidy, and his chair, which had been tilted back, brought its forelegs to the floor with a thump.

“No!” he said, half-incredulously, half-hopefully.

“Yes,” stated Mr. Green calmly. “At least I’ve found Maxwell. Or anyway, I think I have.”

Long before he was through telling what he had seen and heard the afternoon before, Mr. Cassidy, surnamed Michael J., was almost sitting in his lap. When the younger man had finished his tale the detective fetched a deep and happy breath.

“It sounds good to me,” he commented, “it certainly sounds to me like you’ve got the right dope on this party. But listen, Mr. Green, how do you figure in this here party’s fad for getting himself manicured as a part of the layout – I can see it all but that?”

“Here is how I deduced that element of the case,” stated Green. “Conceding this man to be the fugitive Maxwell, it is quite evident that he has a highly developed imagination – his former love of trashy literature and his present passion for moving pictures would both seem to prove that. Now then, you remember that all the accounts of that murder told of the deep marks of finger-nail scratches in the old man’s throat. If this man is the murderer, I would say, from what we know of him, that he cannot rid himself of the feeling that the blood of his victim is still under his nails. And so, nursing that delusion, he goes daily to that manicure girl—”

He got no farther along than that. Mr. Cassidy extended his large right hand in a congratulatory clasp, and admiration was writ large upon his face.

“Colonel,” he said, “you’re immense – you oughter be in the business. Say, when are we going to nail this guy?”

“Well,” said Green, “I think we should start watching his movements at once, but we should wait until we are pretty sure of the correctness of our theory before acting. And of course, in the meanwhile, we must deport ourselves in such a way as to avoid arousing his suspicions.”

“Just leave that to me. You do the expert thinking on this here case; I’ll guarantee a good job of trailing.”

Inside of forty-eight hours these two, working discreetly, knew a good deal of their man. For example, they knew that under the name of Morrison he was living in a summer boarding house on a little hill rising to the west of the park; that he had been living there for a little more than a fortnight; that his landlady didn’t know his business, but thought that he must be an invalid. Among the other lodgers the impression prevailed that he suffered from a nervous trouble. Mornings, he kept to his room, sleeping until late. In fact, as well as the couple occupying the room below his might judge, he did most of his sleeping in the daytime – they heard him night after night, walking the floor until all hours.

A maid-servant of ultra conversational tendencies gratuitously furnished most of these valued details, after Michael J. Cassidy had succeeded in meeting her socially.

Afternoons, the suspect followed a more or less regular itinerary. He visited the manicure girl at the new barber shop; he patronized one or both of the moving picture places in the vicinity, but usually both, and then he went for a solitary walk through the park, and along toward dusk he returned to the boarding house, ate his supper and went to his room. He had no friends, apparently; certainly he had no callers. He received no letters and seemingly wrote none. Cassidy was convinced; he burned with eagerness to make the arrest without further delay. For this would be more than a feather in the Cassidy cap; it would be a whole war bonnet.

“You kin stay in the background if you want to,” he said. “Believe me, I’m perfectly willing to take all the credit for pulling off this pinch.”

As he said this they were passing along Broadway just above the subway terminal. The straggling line of new shops was on one side and the park stretched away on the other. Green was on the inner side of the pavement. Getting no answer to his suggestion, Mr. Cassidy started to repeat it.

“I heard you,” said Green, stopping now dead short, directly in front of the resplendent front of the Regal Motion Picture Palace. He contemplated with an apparently unwarranted interest the illuminated and lithographed announcements of the morrow’s bill.

“I’m perfectly willing to stay in the background,” he said. “But – but I’ve just this very minute thought of a plan that ought to make us absolutely sure of our man – providing the plan works! Are you at all familiar with the tragedy of ‘Macbeth’?”

“I don’t know as I am,” admitted Mr. Cassidy honestly. “When did it happen and who done it?”

Again his employer seemed not to hear him.

“Let’s go into this place,” he said, turning in towards the hospitable portals of the Regal. “I want to have a business talk with the proprietor of this establishment, if he’s in.”

The manager was in, and they had their talk; but after all it was money – which in New York speaks with such a clarion-loud and convincing voice – that did most of the talking. As soon as Judson Green had produced a bill-roll of august proportions, the proprietor, doubtful until that moment, showed himself to be a man open to all reasonable arguments. Moreover, he presently scented in this enterprise much free advertisement for his place.

VI

On the following afternoon, the weather being rainy, the Regal opened its doors for the three-o’clock performance to an audience that was smaller than common and mostly made up of dependable neighborhood patrons. However, there were at least two newcomers present. They sat side by side, next to the central aisle, in the rearmost row of chairs – Judson Green and Michael J. Cassidy. Their man was almost directly in front of them, perhaps halfway down toward the stage. Above a scattering line of heads of women and children they could see, in the half light of the darkened house, his head and shoulders as he bent his body forward at an interested angle.

Promptly on the hour, a big bull’s-eye of light flashed on, making a shimmering white target in the middle of the screen. The music started up, and a moving-picture soloist with a moving-picture soloist’s voice, appeared in the edge of the illuminated space and rendered a moving-picture ballad, having reference to the joys of life down in Old Alabam’, where the birds are forever singing in the trees and the cotton-blossoms bloom practically without cessation. This, mercifully, being soon over, a film entitled “The Sheriff’s Sweetheart” was offered, and for a time, in shifting pictures,horse-thieves in leather “chaps,” and heroes in open-necked shirts, and dashing cow-girls in divided skirts, played out a thrilling drama of the West, while behind them danced and quivered a background labeled Arizona, but suggesting New Jersey. When the dashing and intrepid sheriff had, after many trials, won his lady love, the ballad singer again obliged throatily, and then from his coop in the little gallery the lantern man made an announcement, in large, flickering letters, of a film depicting William Shakespeare’s play, “Macbeth.”

Thereupon scene succeeded scene, unfolding the tragic tale. The ill-fated Duncan was slain; the Witches of Endor capered fearsomely about their fearsome cauldron of snaky, froggy horrors; and then – taking some liberties with the theme as set down by the original author – the operator presented a picture wherein Macbeth, tortured by sleeplessness and hag-ridden with remorse, saw, in imagination, the dripping blood upon his hands and vainly sought to scour it off.

Right here, too, came another innovation which might or might not have pleased the Bard of Avon. For as Macbeth wrestled with his fears, the phantom of the murdered Duncan, a cloaked, shadowy shape, crossed slowly by him from right to left, traversing the breadth of the screen, while the orchestra rendered shivery music in appropriate accompaniment.

Midway of the lighted space the ghost raised its averted head and looked out full, not at the quivering Macbeth, but, with steady eyes and set, impassive face, into the body of the darkened little theater. In an instant the sheeted form was gone – gone so quickly that perhaps no keen-eyed juvenile in the audience detected the artifice by which, through a skilful scissoring and grafting and doctoring of the original film, the face of the actor who played the dead and walking Duncan had been replaced by the photographed face, printed so often in the newspapers, of murdered Old Man Steinway!

There was a man near the center of the house who got instantly upon his legs and stumbling, indeed almost running in his haste, made up the center aisle for the door; and in the daylight which strengthened as he neared the open, it might be seen that he wore the look of one stunned by a sudden blighting shock. And at once Green and Cassidy were noisily up too, and following close behind him, their nerves a-tingle.

All unconscious of surveillance, the suspect was out of the door, on the pavement, when they closed on him. At the touch of Cassidy’s big hand upon his shoulder he spun round, staring at them with wide-open, startled eyes. Above his scraggy beard his face was dappled white and red in patches, and under the mottled skin little muscles twitched visibly.

“What— what do you want?” he demanded in a shaken, quick voice. A gold-capped tooth showed in his upper jaw between his lips.

“We want a word or two with you,” said Cassidy, with a sort of threatening emphasis.

“Are you— are you officers?” He got the question out with a separate gulp for each separate word.

“Not exactly,” answered Cassidy, and tightened his grip on the other’s shoulder the least bit more firmly. “But we can call one mighty easy if you ain’t satisfied to talk to us a minute or two. There’s one yonder.”

He ducked his head toward where, forty yards distant, a middle-aged and somewhat pursy patrolman was shepherding the traffic that eddied in small whirls about the steps of the subway terminal.

“All right, all right,” assented the captive eagerly. “I’ll talk to you. Let’s go over there – where it’s quiet.” He pointed a wavering finger, with a glistening, highly polished nail on it, toward the opposite side of the street; there the park came right up to the sidewalk and ended. They went, and in a minute all three of them were grouped close up to the shrub-lined boundary. The mottled-faced man was in the middle. Green stood on one side of him and Cassidy on the other, shouldering up so close that they blocked him off, flank and front.

“Now, then, we’re all nice and cozy,” said Cassidy with a touch of that irony which a cat often displays, in different form, upon capturing a live mouse. “And we want to ask you a few questions. What’s your name – your real name?” he demanded roughly.

“Morrison,” said the man, licking with his tongue to moisten his lips.

“Did you say Maxwell?” asked Cassidy, shooting out his syllables hard and straight.

“No, no – I said Morrison.” The man looked as though he were going to collapse then and there.

“One name’s as good as another, I guess, ain’t it?” went on the detective. “Well, what’s your business?”

“My business?” He was parrying as though seeking time to collect his scattered wits. “Oh, I haven’t any business – I’ve been sick lately.”

“Oh, you’ve been sick lately – well, you look sick right now.” Cassidy shoved his hands in his pockets and with a bullying, hectoring air pushed his face, with the lower jaw undershot, into the suspect’s face. “Say, was it because you felt sick that you came out of that there moving-picture show so sudden?”

Just as he had calculated, the other jumped at the suggestion.

“Yes – yes,” he nodded nervously. “That was it – the heat in there made me faint.” He braced himself tauter. “Say,” he said, and tried to put force into his tones, “what business have you men got spying on me and asking me these things? I’m a free American citizen—”

“Well now, young fellow, that all depends,” broke in Cassidy, “that all depends.” He sank his voice almost to a whisper, speaking deliberately. “Now tell us why you didn’t feel real sick until you seen your dead uncle’s face looking at you—”

“Look out!” screamed the prisoner. He flinched back, pointing with one arm wildly, and flinging up the other across his face as though to shut out a sight of danger. There was a rattle of wheels behind them.

Judson Green pivoted on his heel, with the thought of runaways springing up to his mind. But Mr. Cassidy, wiser in the tricks of the hunter and the hunted, made a darting grab with both hands for the shoulder which he had released. His greedy fingers closed on space. The suspect, with a desperate and unexpected agility, had given his body a backward nimble fling that carried him sprawling through a gap between the ornamental bushes fringing the park sward. Instantly he was up and, with never a backward glance, was running across the lower, narrower verge of Indian Field, making for the trees which edged it thickly upon the east. He could run fast, too. Nor were there men in front to hinder him, since because of the rain, coming down in a thin drizzle, the wide, sloped stretch of turf was for this once bare of ball-players and cricket teams.

Upon the instant, Cassidy was through the hedge gap and hot-foot after him, with Green coming along only a pace or two behind. Over his shoulder Cassidy whooped a call for aid to the traffic policeman in the roadway. But that stout person, who had been exiled to these faraway precincts by reason of his increasing girth and a tendency toward fallen arches, only took one or two steps upon his flat feet and then halted, being in doubt as to what it was all about. Before he could make up his mind whether or not to join the chase, it was too late to join it. The fugitive, traveling a straight course, had crossed the field at its narrowest point and had bounded into the fringe of greenery bordering the little lake, heading apparently for the thick swampy place lying between the ball ground and the golf links. The two pursuers, legging along behind, did their best to keep him in sight, but, one thing sure, they were not gaining on him.

As a matter of truth, they were losing. Twice they lost him and twice they spied him again – once crossing a bit of open glade, once weaving in and out among the tree trunks farther on. Then they lost him altogether. Cassidy had shown the better pair of legs at the start of the race, but now his wind began to fail. Panting and blowing fit to shame porpoises, he slackened his speed, falling back inch by inch, while the slighter and younger man took the lead. Green settled to a steady, space-eating jog-trot, all the time watching this way and that. There were singularly few people in sight – only a chronic golfer here and there up on the links – and these incurables merely stared through the rain-drops at him as he forced his way among the thickets below them.

Cassidy, falling farther and farther behind, presently met a mounted policeman ambling his horse along a tree-shaded roadway that crossed the park from east to west, and between gulps for breath told what he knew. Leaning half out of his saddle, the mounted man listened, believed – and acted. Leaving Cassidy behind, he spurred his bay to a walloping gallop, aiming for the northern confines of the park, and as he traveled, he spread the alarm, gathering up for the man-chase such recruits as two park laborers and a park woodchopper and an automobile party of young men, so that presently there was quite a good-sized search party abroad in the woodland.

As for Judson Green, he played his hand out alone. Dripping wet with rain and his own sweat, he emerged from a mile-long thicket upon an asphalted drive that wound interminably under the shouldering ledges of big gray rocks and among tall elms and oaks. Already he had lost his sense of direction, but he ran along the deserted road doggedly, pausing occasionally to peer among the tree trunks for a sight of his man. He thought, once, he heard a shot, but couldn’t be sure, the sound seemed so muffled and so far away.

On a venture he left the road, taking to the woods again. He was working through a small green tangle when something caught at his right foot and he was spun about so that he faced the opposite direction from the one in which he had been traveling, and went down upon his hands and knees, almost touching with his head a big licheny boulder, half buried in vines and grass. Glancing back, he saw what had twisted him off his course and thrown him down – it was an upward-aimed tree-root, stubby and pointed, which had thrust itself through his right shoe lacing. The low shoe had been pulled half-way off his foot, and, under the strain, the silken lace had broken short off.

In the act of raising himself upright, he had straightened to a half-crouch when, just beyond the big green-masked boulder, he saw that which held him petrified in his pose. There, in a huddle among the shrubs, where he would never have seen it except for the chance shifting-about of his gaze, was the body of a man lying face downward the head hidden under the upturned skirts of the coat.

He went to it and turned it over. It was the body of the man he sought – Maxwell – and there was a revolver in Maxwell’s right hand and a hole in Maxwell’s right temple, and Maxwell was dead.

Judson Green stood up and waited for the other pursuers. He had won a hundred-dollar bet and Cassidy had lost a thousand-dollar reward.

Red Book magazine, Sep 1913

Old Ben Alibi

~

If Ben Ali Crisp, of The Daily Star, better known among enemies as Old Ben Alibi, had not been about the smartest city editor on the hemisphere he would have made a great detective. Probably it isn’t going too far to say he might have made the great detective of his generation; one whose name would live on afterwards, bracketed with the names of McPartland and Pinkerton, Byrnes and Burns, and whose work, by lovers of the comparative, would have been likened to the fictional achievements of Sherlock Holmes and Hawkshaw and Nick Carter.

Those in place to know the facts conceded to him an indubitable genius in this direction. Police Commissioner Dudley did, for one. District Attorney Salmon did, for another. And neither Salmon nor Dudley liked a hair in Crisp’s head. However, this prejudice of theirs in no wise distinguished them as persons holding to a unique view. Of those who did not like a hair in that grizzled head there was, as you might say, one for every hair. To go about Park Row publicly disliking Crisp merely was expressing a common sentiment.

Still, at that, and even so, the estimation in which the members of his own staff and the members of other staffs held him had nothing to do with the special gift which had been given Ben Ali. Call it intuition, call it a flair for deduction and elimination, call it a sublimated news sense, call it an apt instinct for reaching a conclusion by processes of addition and subtraction. Call it whatsoever you please. Whatever it was, he had it and there was no denying he had it. He’d proved it more times than several.

For instance, mark that time away back yonder when Crisp had been star man on the old Intelligencer. The Intelligencer has been a memory and a shelf-load of mildewed files these twenty-odd years, but the recollection of Crisp’s work on the Starbuck kidnaping abides as a green spot in the minds of many unofficial historians.

At one o’clock one morning he limped into the Intelligencer shop with a bundle on his arm and a crumple of scribbled sheets of scratch pad in his hand. He was streaked with coal soot and smeary with brick dust and one wrist dripped blood where broken glass had nicked it. Tradition records how he traveled the length of the city room till he came to the far end where old Walrus Clarkson sat on the night desk getting ready to put the late mail edition to bed. He halted and Clarkson looked up at him from under his green eye-shade, and there befell a little pause while all others present stared at the pair of them. Crisp loved the dramatic and the spectacular; all good newspaper men do. He prolonged the stage wait, noticeably. Then:

“Boss,” he said, “here’s the story of the missing Starbuck baby.”

And laid down his scrambled wad of copy in front of Clarkson.

“And here’s the Starbuck baby.”

And put the bundle down on the desk alongside the copy.

Then there was the time he proved that the Prospect Heights murder over in Brooklyn was no murder at all, but a suicide devised to seem a murder; proved it with the help of a fox terrier and on the testimony of the said fox terrier. And the time when he set out, with nothing better to start off on than a strip of red oilcloth and an overcoat button, and after six weeks of single-handed delving dug up the evidence which sent a dishwasher to the chair and a midwife to prison for life; that was the Garfunkel trunk mystery, so called. There was the famous Rossiter case up in Westchester. Unraveling it was perhaps Crisp’s greatest coup of all and the tale of it makes a tale which should be told, but not now. And there was the time he rigged the trap for Tappan, the cracked dynamiter who tried to blow Fergus Hite into small, untidy particles – and came almighty near succeeding, too. It is with this last named matter that we deal here. It is chosen chiefly for the reason that it came to pass after Wendover had founded the Daily Star and had lured Crisp in from the outside to be its city editor.

The Fergus Hite story started off with a bang – literally. It was one of those infrequent bangs which are heard round the world.

As may be recalled, old Mr. Hite, at the time of the attempt upon his life, was Wall Street’s outstanding figure as an independent operator. On the Stock Exchange and in the newspaper offices they called him Cheese-Paring Fergy. In sundry other places they called him by much worse names than that – miser, for example, and bloodsucker and oppressor of the poor. From pinched bellies spring bitter words and the old man’s wheat corner, whereby the price of a loaf of bread had been boosted from five cents to nine, was a recent and a grievous memory in the public mind. Now then, encouraged by the success of that manipulation, he was reputed to be organizing a second combine with intent to control the milk supply of Manhattan Island.

Wherefore he figured scandalously on front pages and in editorial columns and the paragraphers sped barbed and libelous darts into his epidermis. Mighty little he cared for that! So long as the cash rolled in it was all one to old Fergus. But this publicity, this gush of printer’s ink, served a purpose which came very near being his mortal undoing. Before anyone who could read fair print, it set up a picture of his personality, his habits, the way he lived, the way he ran his office.

For example, the papers had told, not once but often, how he never threw away anything which by a stretching of the most frugal imagination might be regarded as having the slightest possible value; how he saved strings and twine and waste paper and old cigar boxes and empty medicine vials and stray corks and pins and all. They had described how he never trusted anyone to open and read his private mail but opened it all himself and, if there were letters of importance, personally answered them, with his long, shriveled fingers pecking out the words on the keys of a rattletrap of a second-hand typewriter which he had picked up somewhere at a rare bargain price; and then, according to some mysterious filing system of his own, stored the correspondence away in lock-up wooden packing cases.

So much for that; it is told because it has a bearing. One morning in the spring of the year old Fergus sat over his mail in the inner room of the dingy two room suite he occupied on the top floor of the Hite Building in Broad Street, four doors off Wall. He might have had his choice of any of the floors of the Hite Building. He owned it. But he chose to rent out its choicer parts. Snug quarters up under the roof suited him. He was an early riser. He was at his desk at an hour when most Wall Street men were chipping the breakfast egg. It was eight-forty-five, about, when his man, Darrow, came in to tell him he was wanted on the telephone by Mrs. Hite. He had no desk telephone; that would be an expensive and utterly unnecessary luxury, seeing there was a perfectly dependable wall phone in the front room.

Darrow was another of his pet economies. In almost any other operator’s office Darrow would have been what is called a confidential clerk or a managing clerk. But Mr. Hite, you see, never gave his confidences to anyone; and as for managing the more intimate affairs of his business, he attended to all that himself. Darrow was a sort of clerical man of all work, a middle-aged shabby chore boy, obedient but dull.

As the old man got up from where he sat, he tapped with his fingers a package which lay upon his desk. It was an oblong package, rectangular in shape, measuring about twelve inches the long way and perhaps five inches across. It looked as though it might contain a box or a carton. It was wrapped and double-wrapped in heavy manila paper. Mr. Hite already had removed the outer wrapping and at the moment of Darrow’s intrusion was engaged in trying to free the stout string which bound the inner layer of paper. Afterwards, with that faculty of his for minute detail, he was able to state that one end of this cord was fast under a turned-in fold of the paper as though, by chance, the sender had let it twist inside the parcel proper and then, unwittingly, had fitted the top on it.

“Here, Darrow,” he said, “finish undoing this package. I’ll be back in a minute.”

He had no need to warn Darrow not to cut the cord and not to tear the paper and, above all, not to open the enclosure itself when he had released it from its wrappings. Darrow had been with Hite a long time; his sense of curiosity was schooled to an ordered restraint, which was one reason why he held his job – that, coupled with the still better reason that he worked for small pay. In suffering him to handle any mail at all his employer departed from an established rule. Darrow might safely be trusted not to tamper with office precedents on an independent account.

Hite went out of the room closing the door behind him. Darrow, presumably, took the partly undone parcel in his hands and, finding the string binding already somewhat loosened, cast it off and then gave a sharp tug at the imprisoned length, caught under the sliding wooden lid. This is what must have happened. Experts from Headquarters subsequently were able to reconstruct the action substantially as it must have occurred.

At eight-forty-seven, or thereabouts, came an explosion which shook the Hite Building from its gables to its basement. Simultaneously smoke gushed through the shattered sashes of a top floor window siding upon a narrow court toward Wall Street. Those in the building felt the jar of the shock; persons passing along the sidewalk, including a patrolman, heard the crash and some of them saw the sudden pouring of yellowish smoke from the blown-out window frame. It was the patrolman who led the hunt for the source and cause of the explosion. He ran up the stair flights, floor by floor, with a constantly growing queue of startled civilians tailing at his heels, until he came to the top story.

Wisps of smoke of a most curious and unwholesome smell crept through the jambs of a door which bore on a lettered tin sign, “F. Hite, Investments.” There was no sound of life within, nor any answer to the policeman’s knock. He thrust open the door and entered, coughing because of the smoke and the strange reek, and the more hardy among those at his back came scrooging in behind him. Mr. Hite, unhurt but in a dumb palsy of fear, was face downward on the floor. Power of speech did not return to him for some minutes thereafter; he was conscious, though. He pointed a lean finger that quivered toward the inner room, making little choked whimpering noises down in his throat.

In there, where the unsavory fumes were thicker, they found Darrow against a side wall, with both arms blown off at the elbows and his chest all caved in. His face was a blur of mutilation; he must have died instantly. The desk was wrecked, its flat top ripped to bits and its sides sprung. Strangely enough, the rest of the meager fittings had suffered no serious hurt. Burst window panes and scars in the wall where flying metal scrappage had struck – these about finished out the tally of damage.

Now, ninety-nine times out of a hundred, the police investigation into this tragedy would have assumed at the outset a two-way angle. Lieutenant Hughey Fay, the Headquarters specialist in explosives, would have set about gathering up the fragments of the devilish thing that had killed Darrow and rebuilding them into a semblance of their original shape with a view, if possible, to identifying the device as the characteristic handicraft of some particular anarchist or group of anarchists. And while he was doing this the Detective Bureau would be seining the back eddies of the island, West Side, East Side and Little Italy, uptown, for all avowed or suspect advocates of the theory of achieving economic reforms by force. “Drag Net Out for Hite B’ldg Dynamite Assassin” – this probably would have been Ben Ali’s choice for his seven column top line; or possibly it might have been “Round-up of Red Radicals Follows Broad St. Bomb Outrage.” He loved the alliteration in a scream head.

But this was the hundredth case, and for once the police found their work simplified; that is to say, their work, on the face of it, seemed simple enough at the outset. Instead of routing out and chasing down a whole shoal of the known enemies of capitalistic society and then, by the crudely effective methods of the third degree, endeavoring to fix color of presumptive guilt upon this man or that woman, they had merely to find one given person. When they found him they could take their ease; the rest of it would be a job for the District Attorney’s office. Before Darrow’s body was stiff they knew their man’s name and were looking for him and the scent seemed fresh and hot and Central Office was in a free sweat of anticipatory joy. They got the name from old Fergus. It was almost the first thing they did get from him after he regained his faculties for sane utterance.

First, though, they had to nurse him back to the point where he could think and speak coherently. They had to stand over him and chafe his hands and give him stimulants and assure him, times past counting, that there was no more danger, that he was quite safe.

So it took time to bring him round; it took the better part of a precious half hour. Here was a quiet old gentleman, one well on past seventy, concerned solely with his own business and asking only to be let alone, who’d had a shaving close call from a violent and a most distressing end. Merely a chance coincidence, a hairline deviation from his daily routine, had saved him. Likewise, although probably none present discerned it. he had another secret and poignant concern. It was not so much for Darrow’s death that he sorrowed inwardly. Even at the wages he paid, a suitable successor to Darrow might easily be found. But a forty dollar desk practically had been demolished and, when all is said and done, a forty dollar desk is a forty dollar desk. He came very near to collapsing all over again when an ambulance surgeon and a policeman carried him into his inner room and he beheld the state of it. He had not wished to go in there at all, but it was necessary that he should go in order that he might find the letter for them.

The letter, now, was almost the first thing he had spoken of after his fear-addled mind began rationally to function. It had come to him on the day before, he remembered. According to his custom, he had filed it away in one of his wooden storage chests.

It was a short letter, brisk and businesslike and, excepting for the signature, done on a typewriter. Its author began by saying he had read in the daily press that Mr. Hite had underway an amalgamation of the principal companies of the local dairy industry. Assuming this to be a correct statement, he assumed also that Mr. Hite would be interested in a new style of milk container which he, the writer, had devised and perfected and upon which he expected shortly to ask a patent. This container was intended for use in retail deliveries. It was light and dependable; it was leak-proof and it was sanitary. Above all, it was cheap – could be manufactured at very small cost and was not easily broken. The word “cheap” was made in capitals and heavily underlined; plainly the sender had divined the surest way of interesting the recipient.

The second and concluding paragraph set forth that within forty-eight hours Mr. Hite would receive by mail, properly boxed, a specimen of the invention. His personal examination of the sample was invited with a view to negotiations for the exclusive use of this handy and economical little article – “economical” also capped and underscored – in the event of Mr. Hite’s realizing, as he must, its merits and its undoubted superiority over any glass, composition or metal milk bottle now on the market. Then followed a name and an address.

The name was Axel Tappan. The address was an address in Great Jones Street. Mr. Hite was by now able to recall that the name Tappan likewise had been written in the upper left-hand corner of the package which had reached him this present morning.

No great amount of figuring was required. The name of the man already was familiar to thousands among New York millions: Axel Tappan, notorious crank inventor, American born, of mixed Dutch and Scandinavian breeding, designer of any number of mechanical devices, a genius whose brain had been clabbered by overmuch reading of anarchistic tracts and who, before that happened, publicly had been heard to voice a perpetual hate for all owners of swollen fortunes because one such, in times gone by, triggered him out of a patent car coupling device worth a lot of money. Who else but Axel Tappan, already on record among the listed believers in the curing of social and financial ills by smash and scatteration – who else but Axel Tappan would have been so likely to evolve this almost perfect plan for encompassing Fergus Hite’s destruction and, on top of that, boldly to furnish in advance such sure evidence against himself?

If further proof of the identity of the murderer were needed – which it wasn’t, it seemed – the remains of the bomb provided it, as the experts pointed out later that same day. This trick of sealing it in a perfectly innocent appearing outer covering, with a common string apparently accidentally hitched under the box lid within, a string connecting with a coiled spring which on a sharp pull would bring a tiny hammer smartly down upon the cap of the bomb proper – they found bits of the hammer and scraps of the spring – was absolutely just such a trick as Axel Tappan might be expected to contrive.

Five minutes, say, after old man Hite’s shaking forefinger had pointed out the letter where it lay atop a riffle of papers in one of his crude filing cabinets, things began to happen here and there and everywhere. Make it six minutes for good measure – two minutes for the policeman to read the letter and two minutes for him to fire a rapid volley of leading questions at Mr. Hite and the last two minutes for him to get Headquarters on the telephone. It was quick work, with more of the same to follow – a general alarm going out over the Central Office wires to every corner of the five boroughs, a patrol wagon load of reserves tearing off from the Mercer Street station bound for the address in Great Jones Street; and in the shops of all the evening papers the staffs throwing together the second batch of extras of that crowded morning. One crop had been on the streets fot half an hour or more, these telling in bulletin flashes of Fergus Hite’s miraculous escape and of the shocking death of one of his employees. This second sowing would broadcast in sharp, staccato paragraphs the brief summary of this newest and most startling denouement. Some of the papers called it startling, some called it sensational; some called it both sensational and startling, which undoubtedly it was.

That was a day for extras. They trod upon one another’s tails coming off the presses, as the fresh developments kept piling up and pyramiding. Mark how they did:

For one thing, the police did not catch Tappan. Neither that day nor the next day nor the day after did they catch him. For the matter of that, the police never did catch him. Here came the cops, clattering into Great Jones Street, spilling out the back end of their patrol wagon in a blue cascade and swarming into and around the specified house, which was an old residence converted into a rooming house.

Their man wasn’t there. He had been there but he was gone. His late landlady supplied excited information as to the manner of his departure. All the early part of the morning he had been hanging about the street doorway; he seemed to be waiting for something, she thought. Then a news vender came into the street baying extras. Tappan had bought a paper from this person, had glanced at the front page, had crumpled the sheet into his pocket, had drawn his hat down over his face, had walked away, going eastward. That was half an hour, roughly, before the search party came. In view of everything, she hardly expected him back.

Other information the furnished room lady likewise furnished. Her vanished lodger had more than one biding place. He had three that she knew of. Sometimes he stayed in her house, sometimes in a loft building up on west Sixteenth Street, sometimes at an address across town somewhere on Second Avenue. Accounting for his absences, he had mentioned these places to her. She rather thought he might have yet other quarters, for he was sort of peculiar, Mr. Tappan was, although always quiet and orderly and minding his own business and paying every week in advance. And just to think – all this time he’d been plotting to kill up somebody and bring shame and scandal upon as decent, respectable, hard working a woman as ever was in this world! The question was, who could a lone widow woman trust? The answer was, simply nobody at all.

Only the four men that stayed behind to watch the premises in case the wanted man should venture back to the neighborhood heard the further chapters of the lady’s Jeremiad of pessimistic outpourings. The others of the disappointed raiding squad had pressing and immediate business elsewhere. This also was true of the plainclothes men who by now were swarming in to join the chase. The call was urgent for them to go, straightway and swiftly, some to Sixteenth Street and some to Second Avenue and find those other two establishments of the vanished assassin.

There was no great trouble about finding either. In a narrow loft building on Sixteenth Street Tappan, using his own name, had a whole floor under lease. He’d had it for several years past; was one of the regular tenants. On Second Avenue, in a shabby flat-house masquerading as an apartment house because it had an elevator and an artificial palm in the front entry way, he had, some months before, rented a three room suite. The detectives broke in the door here; on Sixteenth Street the janitor, using his pass key, let them in when they showed their badges to him.

Immediately, the purposes of both places were revealed. The loft, evidently, was his workshop; the flat was his playhouse – his green room, rather – where latterly he had made up and rehearsed for sinister undertakings; this also was plainly to be seen. In the loft, ranged in glass cabinets, were working models of many completed inventions, some full sized, some in miniature. In drawers under the cases were neatly arranged the plans, the scale drawings, the patent office papers for each of these. There was a forge, a wood-turning lathe, a portable smelter, laboratory equipment, all manners of tools and implements, an array of delicate mechanisms for testing and welding and weighing and balancing. A jumble of unfinished parts, of things half done and then cast aside, cumbered the corners and filled odd jogs in the walls and made unsightly rubbish heaps on the floor. There were no recognizable explosives about, nor were any prime constituents out of which explosives might be mixed and made to be found in the cluttered place.

These, though, were in the Second Avenue rooms, in an abundance fit to blow up a regiment. Also, the official invaders came upon much else of interest – such objects, for instance, as crepe hair, camphor gum, grease paint, wigs and shells of false teeth so fashioned that they might be slipped into place over the wearer’s real teeth, thereby changing the set of his lips and the lines of his mouth. A roomy closet, built out into the kitchen, housed a wardrobe ample to provide for a dozen masquerades, and all complete down to the shoes and the hat that matched with each change. There were canes, umbrellas, handbags and a litter of what actors would call personal props for character make-up. Drawing on this abundant store, its owner might go forth as a tired businessman, a panhandler, a book agent, a clergyman, a longshoreman. It was like the costume room, back stage, of a resident stock company’s theater. No, there’s a better simile – it was like a page out of an old-fashioned dime novel.

It made news, all this swiftly uncovered revelation of the triple role essayed through months and perhaps through years by this Axel Tappan. What gorgeous news it did make all through that happy day for evening papers!

But when night time came and the morning papers took over where the evening papers left off, the biggest possible piece of news still was lacking. Tappan had not been run to cover, nor been caught nor been killed. His whereabouts was unknown, was not even to be guessed at. The pursuit had been less than an hour behind him in Great Jones Street, less than forty minutes behind him in Second Avenue, where another tenant who knew him by sight but not by name had seen him hurrying through a hallway, apparently bound for outdoors, carrying in his arms a very large bundle which looked as though it might contain wearing apparel. This must have been about ten-thirty A.M., so the tenant witness told the police.

For sake of chronological exactness, make it exactly ten-thirty A.M. Right then and there the fugitive passed beyond the ken of recognizing eyes.

So much for the first day, which was a Tuesday. On Wednesday, in the forenoon, the fugitive himself supplied the chief development of the second day story. This voluntary act on his part was meat to Park Row but to Headquarters it was poison. For, through the mails to the City News Association, which served all the papers barring one or two, came a statement written by Axel Tappan and signed by Axel Tappan. There was evidence of its authenticity in the autograph, and further evidence in the shape and alignment of the typed matter. Comparison of these with the facsimile of the letter to Fergus Hite, which had appeared in all the papers by now, proved it.

The statement was not long, but it was, as the saying goes, pithy. The undersigned began by expressing regret that a poor wage slave – his own phrase – should have been sacrificed as a sort of vicarious substitute for the man whose life had been aimed at; still, in the working out of the battle for communism there must be innocent victims as well as guilty ones. He had intended, he said to surrender of his own free will as soon as word reached him of the successful outcome of his prime design. The design having unfortunately mischanced, he had, on hearing of the failure of the plan, altered his intentions and now was minded to put in motion a single-handed campaign of extermination against divers conspicuous enemies of the masses in the community – an undertaking which he had been contemplating and planning for months past. He had put it aside because he felt the death of Fergus Hite might serve as an object lesson and a warning to his fellow extortionists of the capitalistic class. Now, as proof of his power, he would revive it and put it into execution.

He was at this writing in Manhattan Borough, so the statement ran. He meant to stay in Manhattan and to stay at large, too, going and coming as he pleased. He defied the officers of the law to lay hands on him until of his own accord he chose to surrender. That would be after his appointed work was accomplished. And his work was to be this:

By agencies which, on his professional word of honor as a scientist he guaranteed would not go askew, with forces which could not conceivably be combated by the chosen objects of his private warfare, he pledged himself to obliterate from a world they had infected for too long, certain men. He named them – Fergus Hite; Mannesmann, the international banker; Connors, the traction magnate; Dulaney, the coal king; Forbes, the head of the metals trust; and Spotswood, the millionaire publisher, all outstanding Wall Street figures. These six men might as well be setting their earthly houses in order. For them the handwriting was on the wall. Signed:

Yours for Vengeance

Axel Tappan

The postmark was that of the branch postoffice on west 102nd Street and the time showed six-ten o’clock of Tuesday night.

The latter circumstantial and indisputable detail was what especially galled the withers of the Police Department. Seeking to save his own face, the Commissioner professed to see in this a fact testifying to the efficiency of his force. True, the police had not as yet unearthed the assassin but, on the other hand, the city had been so closely ringed about with watchers, so closely guarded at ferry docks and railroad terminals, that the fugitive could not slip past the cordons. The public might expect satisfactory results before many hours had passed.

That was what he said. It was a voicing, though, of what he desired, not of what he knew. When he said this, Commissioner Dudley was merely sparring for time, shadow boxing with an elusive hope. For neither he nor any man of the department had the faintest idea where Tappan was, still less the faintest idea of what the man might do next.

They lacked a photograph of him; the available descriptions merely composited him as a person of medium height, utterly commonplace in appearance, with no distinguishing marks excepting that in moments of stress or annoyance he involuntarily twitched his left eye.

And so through Wednesday and Thursday and on to the end of the week they delved and scanned and searched and super-searched; nursed theories that flopped, followed leads that ran into blind ends, built up elaborate structures of deduction which, having footless foundations, presently flattened of their own weight. They tracked every squint-eyed or twitchy-faced man who showed himself on the street. And out of it all nothing at all came. And while they and all the amateur detectives in town were doing thus and so, and while the rest of the town was in a free and pleasant perspiration of anticipated tragedy, old Ben Ali, down in the Star office, threw himself into the story up to his armpits. It was exactly seasoned and savored to his liking. It was gravy to his favorite dish, sop on his daily bread.

He rang all the changes on it. In the handling of it the Star led the afternoon field, as usually it did unless Crisp happened to be sick at home or off on a vacation. His star descriptive writer wrote semi-editorial stuff, girding [sic] at the authorities for their failure to get track of a fugitive so daring, so defiant and so dangerous. Little Lily Simmons, queen bee among the sob sisters, preached a sharp sermon on the inefficiency of men, even in the field of crime detection where always their sex had ruled, pointing out that where masculine powers of analysis had utterly failed, feminine intuition might yet succeed. Under her pen name of Nita Dare she wrote it, but Crisp furnished both the text and the doctrine. He filled a whole page on Friday with graphic accounts of the movements and behavior of the six distinguished citizens marked for removal on Tappan’s death list, telling how Hite, already terribly nerve-shaken, had suffered a relapse, how Spotswood had run away to Europe and Connors to the mountains, how Mannesmann had gone into retirement behind locked doors in his mansion on Park Avenue, how Delaney, in a state of collapse, was under specialists’ care and how that canny old Scot, Forbes, gamest of the group though he was, stirred abroad only with a hired retinue of hawk eyes and strong arms to protect him.

On Saturday, too, he scored a clean beat on the town by printing a second warning note from Tappan. It had been mailed direct to the Star and in it Tappan reiterated his dreadful pledge against the panic-stricken sextet of Wall Street notables and then, with a touch of added audacity, tendered his congratulations to the paper for its masterly handling of the story. He was reading all the papers regularly, he wrote, and the Star, in his opinion, had this week proved itself far and away the livest of the lot. He himself conceded it. And who, all things considered, was a better judge?

But by the middle of the following week, ten days after Darrow’s taking-off, the story in spite of artificial stimulation began noticeably to peter out. Then it was that Crisp came to the point which all through this narrative I, as the chronicler, have been striving to reach. He had a saying:

“Any fool can get the news when the news is there to get. It takes brains to produce news when it isn’t there and make the reader swallow it and like it and beg for more. It’s the difference between picking ripe plums off a limb and breeding a plum the way this fellow Burbank does. And that’s a favorite little trick of mine when a story begins to go sour.”

He was like that. There was no false modesty about old Ben Ali. So far as the public was concerned he was perfectly willing that his personality should be buried in the paper he served. As a city editor his coups were anonymously recorded always, as it is proper that a city editor’s coups should be. But behind the scenes, patting himself on the back over this or that of his journalistic achievements was his favorite indoor sport.

In this instance, feeling the story turning rancid under his fingers, he began Burbanking. He began when he summoned to him for private conference Sheridan, the best of his leg men. Sheridan had been covering various ends of the assignment.

“Sherry,” he started off, “this is strictly between us – under your hat. I’ve got a little hen on in this Tappan case. If the stunt works out the Star gets the credit. If it flops nobody here in the office except the two of us need be any the wiser. See?”

“Yes sir,” said Sheridan, “I get you.”

“Good. Now then, what’s your own private inside dope on this fellow – a nut, isn’t he?”

“Nutty as a fruit cake, the way I figure him,” said Sheridan. “Why, boss, just look at the way he’s acted from the start. If ever there was a guy who was plumb different from everybody else——”

“I thought so,” broke in Crisp. “You’re no fool, Sherry. In some respects you’re a pretty wise kid. But I see you’re laboring under the same delusion that all the other newspaper men on the story and all the cops and everybody in the District Attorney’s office are laboring under. You figure because the man is different in some respects from the run of human beings that he’s different in every possible respect. What none of you seem to remember is this: Human nature is the same the world over. Merely because a human being has twisted notions about the big things of life, it’s no sign that in certain cardinal elemental contingencies he won’t behave exactly as the ordinary man would under similar circumstances. All of us are crazy in spots, I take it. Mighty few of us are crazy all over, all the time. Admitting Tappan to be a bug in most respects, it’s still a cinch he has his ordinary everyday side, too – pride, vanity, ambition, curiosity, cupidity, such traits as you have and I have and everybody we know has.”

“All right, sir,” said Sheridan. “for the sake of argument I’ll admit you’re right. But even so, what does that get us?”

“It may get us a lot before we’re done,” said Crisp. “Now then, Sherry, listen here. If you’d lost something you valued – a watch or a dog or a younger brother – and you couldn’t find it, by looking on your own hook, what’s the next thing you’d do?”

“Advertise,” answered the reporter.

“Exactly,” said Crisp. “Well, that’s what I’m going to do in this case – advertise for Tappan.”

“Do you expect him to answer your advertisement?” asked Sheridan incredulously.

“I do – and in person,” said Crisp. “He will, if the ad is played up the right way. Never mind that part now, though. What I’m interested in just at present is knowing something of the situation with regards to that place of Tappan’s uptown. I don’t mean the dump in Second Avenue – I mean that layout of his in Sixteenth Street.”

“Well, it’s some layout,” stated Sheridan. “Why, boss, there didn’t seem to be any mechanical line, scarcely, that he hadn’t dabbled in at one time or another. You ought to see that line of cabinets he kept the models and patterns of his inventions in – sixty of them in all and ranging all the way from a stabilizer to keep steamships from rolling to a thingamajig for fastening women’s dresses up the back and a new fangled carpet sweeper.”

“Yes?” said Crisp, with a touch of the dry scorn for lesser minds which was part of him. “I read the papers myself, Sherry – it’s a part of my business. But you phoned in here one day last week that the police said there was no evidence to show he’d ever made any effort to put most of his inventions on the market. What I want to know is just which of his inventions have been manufactured and marketed and just which ones have not been. Do you know, by any chance?”

“Yes, I do,” stated Sheridan, in the manner of a good reporter who overlooks no detail however trivial or however irrelevant to the main issue. “I think I can call off most of them, offhand.”

“Fine!” commended his superior. “That’s what I want to hear.”

Sheridan made ready, aimed and fired off a list of things. Crisp halted him before he was half through.

“That’s enough,” he said. “Here’s the next point: The Central Office has got the place under guard, naturally?”

“Sure – uniformed men on duty up there, day and night.”

“It would know enough to do that,” stated Crisp. “Do you happen to know any of these men personally?”

“Some of them – yes,” said Sheridan. “They work in shifts, of course – two at a time. Anyway, if I don’t know them they know me; they’ve all seen me up there one time or another.”

“They’d all be strangers to me – it’s been years since I was out on an assignment,” said Crisp apparently apropos of nothing at all. “One more thing, Sherry – is there much danger that any reporter for any other paper in town might be hanging about who’d recognize me if he saw me up there?”

“Not much chance,” said Sheridan; “that end of the story is pretty well frazzled out. But say, what’s the big idea, chief? Thinking of running up there to give Tappan’s shop the once-over yourself?”

“That’s the identical idea,” said Crisp, in his most matter of fact tone. It was as though he were regularly in the habit of nosing the cold spoor of a staled news story.

He pivoted about in his swing chair and hailed the head copy boy who loafed on a seat below the little platform where Crisp overlooked the city room.

“Issy, run into the art room and get me a bunch of drawing materials – a couple of drawing pencils and three or four pieces of drawing board – enough to make a show. And tell Mr. Faunot or whoever’s in charge to borrow a police card off of one of the artists – bring that along with you, too.” Issy jumped to obey. Crisp faced the astonished Sheridan again. “Sherry, what sort of a sketch artist do you think I’d pass for? I’ll get by, won’t I?” He let one eyelid droop in a half wink. Sheridan swore afterwards there was a suspicion of a twinkle in the eye behind the lid. But the rest of the staff put this down as a fiction, born of Sheridan’s love of exaggeration. They said the Old Man’s eyes hadn’t twinkled for so long they must have forgotten how. He stood up.

“Oh, Flynn!” he called to the head copy reader. “Sit in here on the desk for me, will you? I’m going uptown for a couple of hours or so – on a little private business … Come on with me, Sheridan.”

•     •     •     •     •

As a matter of fact he was back at the Star building in less than two hours. On his way upstairs to the editorial rooms he stopped by the Advertising on the main floor. Conklin, the assistant advertising manager, lifted his eyebrows in surprise when he saw who it was that stood in the door of his room. Like most men who work on the news side of a daily paper, Crisp had small use personally for the business office, its personnel or its performances. Social visits by him downstairs were rare events.

“Hello, Conk,” he said. “Loafing as usual, I see. Well, rouse up and tell me something. Tell me what former active newspaper men are handling publicity for some of the bigger department stores. I don’t mean reformed solicitors out of some business office or ex-circulation boosters – I mean honest-to-God newspaper men – ex-reporters who’d know a good press agent stunt when they saw it. Hold on – don’t give me the names of all of ’em. Just tell me which one of the whole lot is the smartest of the whole lot.”

“Seabright, I’d say,” answered Conklin; “used to be assistant make-up man on the Clarion. He’s with Strassmer Brothers.”

“Sufficient – I remember him in the old days,” said Crisp. “Get him on the wire for me, will you? – you know him personally I suppose – and ask him to run down here to see me between now and three o’clock this afternoon. Tell him there’s a chance for his shop to get some good free publicity – that ought to fetch him.”

Then he went on upstairs to his own domain leaving Conklin burning with a high fever of unslaked curiosity. But before relieving Flynn on the city desk he sat down in one of the battery of telephone booths over against the side wall and told Jessie, the operator on the Star’s exchange switchboard, to get for him a certain number. Shortly thereafter head office boy Issy decided his duties required him to slip into an adjoining booth. He cocked a keen ear close up to the dividing wooden partition and heard the concluding utterances of his boss over the wire.

“You understand? Six of your best operatives – five men and one woman – to report to me personally tomorrow morning for instructions, and don’t forget that the woman must be young and good looking and smart as a whip. That’s all – no, hold on a bit; there’s one thing more I’d almost forgotten; important, too. Tell them not to come to the Star office – have them all report to me at nine o’clock in my rooms at the Epworth apartment on Seventy-third Street just off Broadway. I’ll talk to them there where there’ll be no chance for a leak. That’ll be all – good by.”

For the remainder of the work day Issy was inwardly consumed by the same febrile fires which afflicted Conklin down in the Advertising.

•     •     •     •     •

If the approach to the climax of this narrative has been prolonged and drawn out, the climax itself was briefened and may briefly be summed up, thus justifying the law of averages and compensations. Perhaps it would be better to have it, as nearly as may be, in the words of the man responsible for it.

This is Ben Ali Crisp enthroned at his desk in the Star’s city room, speaking to a worshipful audience. Behind his back his men may call him slave driver and czar, but at this moment – which is late on Tuesday afternoon after the final sporting extra has gone to press – they give him the meed of an unqualified admiration for the thing he has done, which is a thing that has brought glory to the Star and, by indirection, to them and to all and sundry that serve the Star. There is a happy gleam in his puckered, cold eye, also exultation in his tone as he tells them certain details which, in part at least, have been to this group unrevealed until now:

“Yep, I had the notion in the back part of my head almost from the beginning. But I chose to hold back on it and give old Dudley up at Headquarters enough rope to hang himself with.

“I waited, you see, until the Commissioner had quit promising and begun apologizing. That seemed to me to be the psychological moment, as you rewrite men are so fond of saying. So I had Sheridan take me up there to Tappan’s workshop, I pretending to be a staff artist coming to make sketches, and while he stalled for me, keeping those two dumb cops engaged at one end of the loft, I was busy at the other end. It didn’t take me five minutes to pick out which one of Tappan’s working models I wanted to swipe. I’d decided in advance it probably would be either his patent carpet sweeper or his patent can opener, because it had to be something suitable for show window demonstration. See? But the can opener was the thing I decided on – being small and compact and easy to carry. So I just slid it into my coat pocket, along with the plans and specifications for it, and then a little while after that, when I’d gone through the motions of making a couple of pictures, I gave Sherry the high sign and we came on away. It was like taking candy from a baby.”

“And the can opener turned the trick, didn’t it?” puts in one of the copy readers.

“No, it didn’t turn the trick, either,” says Crisp. “It helped, of course, but at that, there were half a dozen other inventions in the lot which might have served – any one of them – in a pinch. What really did the trick was that full page ad that we ran three days hand running in all our editions and then stuck into the Sunday edition.

“I wrote that ad myself – sat up nearly all of last Wednesday night at my apartment getting it blocked out to suit me. And it was a good job if I do say it. Here, give it a close look – if all of you haven’t already done so.”

He spreads out before them a sheet ripped from the Sunday edition. His fingers play over it lovingly, as a painter’s fingers might play over one of his masterpieces.

“See here, now – on the surface it’s just an ordinary display ad for the ‘Little Giant Improved Automatic Can Opener’ – that’s the name I gave it myself – ‘A New Boon to Housewives and Cooks – Warranted to Open Any Tin or Other Light Metal Receptacle – Operates Instantly, Easily and Neatly – A Child Can Use It’ – and so forth and so on. ‘Beginning Monday next’ – that’s yesterday – ‘it will be demonstrated daily, from ten to four, in the largest show window of Strassmer Brothers’ department store on Twenty-third Street, and immediately thereafter is to be put on sale by this firm as sole agents for the manufacturers.’ And then down here in this box, in smaller type, is a full and complete description of the Little Giant. And that’s all there is to it – on the surface.

“Innocent looking enough, you’d say, wouldn’t you? On the face of it, it’s just what it seems to be – a bona-fide boost for a patent kitchen utensil, paid for by a concern which has a lot of faith in the new wrinkle it’s putting out – that’s all, eh? The average reader is going to figure it out to be just that. But it’s not meant for the average reader – it’s meant to nail the attention of just one man – Axel Tappan, Esquire.

“Look here at the jokers concealed in it. It’s Tappan’s own invention – this half-tone inset proves that and the description of it proves it all over again in another place. He’d been reading the papers all along – we know that already – and the chances are he’ll read this ad. If he misses it the first insertion or the second it’s almost as good as an open and shut cinch that he’ll run across it on Saturday or Sunday. Sooner or later it’s bound to catch his eye – he being naturally interested in can openers, having invented one himself. And in half a minute after he sees the spread, he realizes that it’s his own invention or else its twin brother, that’s being advertised here, a full page at a clip. And he’s bound to conclude one of two things – either that somebody has bodily stolen his can opener since he ducked out and left his workshop in the hands of the police and is now about to pirate the thing on a big scale or, what’s not so likely, that some other inventor has evolved an original style of can opener that’s an exact duplicate of his. The thing just naturally can’t go wrong – he’s hooked from that moment.

“Anyway that’s what I figure on. So, all day Sunday, with the curtains drawn, we’re rigging up our stage in Strassmer’s biggest front show window and drilling our actors. The head window dresser is there along with Seabright, the firm’s publicity man. I’m there. My specially engaged troupe, direct from the M. J. Brock private detective agency, are there. We trick out that show window with shelves and tables and cases of canned goods and ice boxes and things so as to make it look like a model pantry. And then I put the full strength of the company through a series of dress rehearsals.

“So, Monday morning – that’s yesterday – we’re ready to go; and at ten o’clock we do go. Brock’s smartest woman operator – smart and good looking, too – in the get-up of a maid servant, is back of that big sheet of plate glass demonstrating the Little Giant on cans of tomatoes and out of the corner of her eye watching the crowds that gather outside the window. If you’ve never tested it you’d be surprised to see how clear your vision is when you’re back in under an overhang looking out through a piece of fine clear glass toward people or objects pressing close up against the other side of the pane in the open. I don’t know whether it actually magnifies but I do know that with the naked eye you can detect things that you’d probably overlook altogether at the same distance if the glass wasn’t there between you and them.

“Well, the girl is there, as I tell you, with her weather eye peeled. Two of Brock’s best men are hidden in some false work back of the faked pantry wall, with their eyes glued to peep holes, helping her watch. There’s a floor walker hanging about the main entrance to the store right alongside the show window and there’s a carriage starter at the edge of the pavement twenty feet away and out in the street there’s a White Wings killing time – all three of them hired hands from Brock’s staff in proper make-up. What with one thing and another, including a couple of reporters standing by in the offing, we’ve put on quite a production.

“I’m banking the whole show on human nature. It’s human nature for a man or a woman – any man or any woman – no matter how big a hurry they’re in, to stop and watch a pretty girl demonstrating any thingamajig or other in a store window. And it’s human nature manifolded for a person who’s especially and personally interested in the article that’s being demonstrated to give it some earnest and sincere attention. As for Tappan – well, I tell myself that if he’s read our decoy ad and if, with all his crazy crotchets, he’s got one single solitary normal human impulse left in his system he’ll be there in the flesh, sooner or later but probably sooner, and unless he’s got a supernatural gift for repressing his feelings he’ll give himself away, too.

“Well, that’ll be about all, I guess. Even such of you as haven’t been working on any angle of the story today know the rest of it yourselves. You saw the flash in the first extra we put out and you’ve seen the full story in all the regular editions after that.”

“Go on please, boss,” says Whitney of the sports desk. “I just got in a little while ago and missed the big doings. I’d like to hear the whole of the inside dope, the way you tell it.”

“Well, there’s not much more to tell,” says Crisp. “Our man doesn’t show up yesterday, but he does show up this morning. He’s beautifully made up as a crippled street beggar – wig, ragged clothes a mile too big for him, toes sticking out of his shoes, his left arm strapped down to his side under his dirty shirt, a pair of smoked glasses on his nose and a “gat” on his hip. But when he pokes his nose up against that show window and sees his own little pet can opener in operation that left eye of his starts twitching and jerking as if he had St. Vitus’s dance. The girl sees it – his glasses help to hide his eyes but the whole upper left side of his face is affected; she can’t help seeing it. She isn’t dead sure that it’s our man, but at that she’s pretty sure, and she tips the signal to the fellows back of the scene and they take the word to the three men outside and they all five begin to close in on the suspect, moving up in a casual sort of way but ready to jump him at the first quick move.

“Maybe he’s organizing to break loose and get violent – nobody can say as to that – but he never gets the chance. Because Burkham – that’s the big fellow who’s playing the carriage starter’s role – slips up close enough to him to see where the false hair of the wig joins the real hair at the temples and he sees that the imitation sunburn on the back of the ragged man’s neck has rubbed off on his shirt collar. That’s ample for Burkham. He just wraps both of those long arms of his around the stranger and in half a minute he’s been rushed in off the street and frisked for his gun and rushed out by the rear delivery entrance of the Strassmer building and shoved into a closed cab that’s been stationed there all along, in charge of Sheridan, and the cab has pulled out for Park Row, leaving a lot of people milling around in a high state of excitement, thinking they’ve seen a kidnaping pulled off in broad daylight on Twenty-third Street.

“Well, in a way of speaking, that’s what they have seen. But, be that as it may, on his way down here in the cab, Tappan owns up to the detecs and to Sherry that he’s Tappan – which is interesting but unnecessary – and when he gets here he spills his whole story, telling where he’s been hiding and how he’s fooled the cops and what his plans were for killing off that rich Wall Street bunch when he got round to it and all. And we hold him here until the Star is out with the exclusive story and then I send him on up to the Central Office with my personal compliments.”

“A magnificent journalistic achievement, truly,” says Lang, the chief editorial writer, who generally speaks as he writes – that is to say, sonorously and with impressive gravity; “and I congratulate you. Mr. Crisp, upon it. To serve the ends of justice, as you this day have served them, should be to us all a source of——”

“Ends of justice be hanged!” breaks in Crisp. “Any dub of a lawyer that Tappan hires to defend him can convince any other twelve dubs on a jury that the man is crazy. His trial will be a stroll through a courtroom into an insane asylum – that’s all. I’m not concerned about the ends of justice. I wanted to show up Mr. Police Commissioner Dudley and likewise Mr. District Attorney Salmon, who’s been swearing all along the man was sane and responsible, and I’ve done both. And, most of all, I wanted to put the Star across for the biggest beat in ten years – and that’s done, too.”

Speaking these last twenty words he drops his tone of vainglory and sinks his voice almost to a reverent key. And his men know that, involuntarily, he is practicing the only religion he has, bowing down and worshiping before the only deity he acknowledges – they know he is making oblation at the high altar of that club-footed, tangle-eyed, inky-fingered god of his called News.

Cosmopolitan, Sep 1922

The Story
that Ends Twice

~

Now, every story, we’ll concede, should have a beginning and an ending. But suppose you have a story to tell which ends twice instead of once. Obviously the fair thing to do is to tell both endings and let the hearer take his pick. In the present instance that exactly is what I must aim to do, seeing that the tale is double-tailed.

The beginning of it was in the springtime of yellow journalism when The Daily Beam, first and foremost expositor of the new cult, was setting a standard for enterprise which made copy cats in the same field to gasp with envy and to wriggle with jealousy. In one regard The Beam was most aptly named, and in another most ineptly misnamed. It cast its lights afield and far; but they shone not with the healthy glow of sun-born shafts nor yet with the honest yellow of true gold, but rather with the poisonous shine of a copperhead’s skullcap, gleaming from out of a rank growth.

Chiefly to its city editor, Ben Ali Crisp, better known behind his back as old Ben Alibi, the paper owed its evil eminence in those times. Jason Wendover, its owner, might be the man who put up the money to run it, but the hand which forged its bolts and sped them forth was the hand of Ben Ali. It was Crisp who, day in and day out, sat making unholy publicity of what by every right should have been hallowed privacy; stirring streaky sensationalism into the news mixture; tearing down this one the while he built up that one; now, by ruthless but libel-proof indirection, destroying some woman’s reputation and making a mock of some man’s peace of mind; now fighting municipal corruption even while The Beam stewed in the scarcely less unpleasant mess of its own ethical short-comings. He was like a sinister sort of scientist who at will distilled unpleasant essences out of the air and harnessed them into orange-tinted rays. He was a huckster of the salacious and a monger of the suggestive; granted. But one thing every rival editor on the Row begrudgingly did concede to him: Even though, as they claimed, he might know the news only to distort it, still he knew it, right enough. Sitting at his cluttered desk, with steel spindles pointing up in front of him like the protective quillery of a porcupine; sitting there coining imaginary headlines in his head when he was not building real ones, he could smell a human-interest yarn nine miles away. He could scent the track of hidden scandal as the Australian aboriginal is said to be able to scent footprints. These open critics of his – who in secret, if the truth were known, were likewise his admirers – proclaimed his besetting fault to be that he so rarely was satisfied with the news just dry-so; always he must dress it up in fancy circus clothes. They called it his fault, but in their hearts they meant it was his virtue, for, as I said a bit ago, this was in the seed time of the yellow journalism when the printed stuff had to wear spangles.

Crusades against this or that, campaigns in favor of the other thing were as fat on the bones of The Daily Beam, for they made copy which made talk which made subscribers; also they made enemies, but along with the enemies, friends. And the friends bought the Beam. Every weekday a half million or more of them bought it at a cent a copy. Translate half a million daily cents into terms of dollars and you have something. Out of The Beam, Wendover garnered profits sufficient to enable him to run at least two other daily papers at a loss. That they did run at a loss was because, so some folks thought, neither of them had a Ben Ali Crisp for its first mate. You see there was only one Crisp, and he was The Beam’s and The Beam was his and these twain were as one flesh.

Having set up a mayor of his choosing, Wendover, through his papers, undertook to tear him down. Current rumor had it that a personal quarrel between the publisher and the publisher’s mayor lay at the back of the suddenly blossoming quarrel. By one report the puppet in the City Hall, having gone drunk on sudden power, refused point-blank to be a puppet any longer, and turned and struck the hand that had stroked him. On the other hand it was said that Wendover made such demands of the creature of his favor as to fray the bond of political gratitude, which at best is a fragile thing, to the sundering point.

Without inquiring into actions and reactions it is sufficient for our purposes to state that the fight on both sides was a bitter one. The administration whacked hard at The Beam and The Beam went after the administration blood-raw. Going after somebody or something was gravy in Ben Ali’s dish, a sop most savory and pleasing to his professional palate. With that almost uncanny instinct of his for finding vulnerable chinks in the armor-proofings of a foe, he promptly fell upon the police department as offering the best areas of attack.

Well, the police department, and especially that wing of it called the detective bureau, was in a pretty bad way. Even the most ardent backers of the City Hall crowd admitted in confidence that something might be wrong with the present conduct of the detective bureau. It remained for Ben Alibi to demonstrate how utterly wrong it was; and here is the way this was to come about:

Almost literally it might be said that Crisp was married to The Beam. Certainly he had no other wife, being a widower and childless. Also he was a creature of solitary habits, having few interests outside of the daily job. He was not much of a reader – that is to say, though he read all the papers he rarely read books. Evenings be mainly patronized theaters. Vaudeville, drama, comedy, musical show, burlesque show or whatnot, it made no great difference to him. What he sought was entertainment between dinnertime and bedtime. More often than not he did his theater-going without company. He went alone on a night I have in mind.

The theater which drew his patronage was one of the lesser uptown theaters well off the main beat of Broadway. Here a manager with more of money than experience, and more of hope than either money or experience, was trying the annual autumnal experiment of offering repertoire by a resident stock company with a weekly change of bill. The play this night was a Broadway success of ten years before, which very possibly ten years thence would be a Broadway success again, when the present generation of theater-goers had died off or lost their memories and when a playwright, who perhaps now was schoolboy or office boy, had dug it up and rewritten it and given to it a different setting and a new and seasonable name. It is easy enough to stroll round the copyright law, though hard enough sometimes to tear through it.

To Crisp, sitting well down front, the play itself meant little. The acting of it bored him to his very marrow, but he stayed on for the reason that he would have been bored still more had he left. It was in the second act that a small thing, occurring on the stage, whittled his interest to a sharp point. There came on a player playing a minor part. The part was that of a lawyer, and in accord with an honored tradition of drama the actor wore the side whiskers and the white spats which so many lawyers wear on the stage and so few wear off of it. It was only a shred of a part – an entrance, a few lines, then off again.

What focused Crisp’s attention was the peculiar pronunciation of one word – a forced and unnatural intonation rather than a grammatical fault – into which the character lapsed as he made his farewell speech at the moment of his exit. Crisp recalled that an exactly similar small crime of misinflection had annoyed his ear at an earlier period of the play. Yet to the best of his recollection this had been the first appearance of this particular actor. It was a curious coincidence – if coincidence it was – that two men had given the same unusual twist of accentuation to the same syllables of the same word.

He thought a bit – and he had the answer. An identical artificiality of voice pitch had been employed by the actor who had played the part of a dissolute youth in Act One. Physically there had been nothing about the first man to suggest the second; all the stranger, then, that they should share so pronounced a mannerism.

Crisp’s program had fallen out of his lap upon the floor. he bent sidewise and picked it up and smoothed it out and found the page in it whereon the names of the members of the cast followed one another in the order of their appearances. In the half light of the theater his eye ran part way through the list, and at once he experienced a little shock of surprise. A man wearing the somewhat stagy-sounding name of Wilfred Dean had played both parts – in Act One, the dissipated brother of the heroine; in Act Two, the family lawyer. Reading on farther down a line or so, Crisp saw a second repetition of the name. Before the piece ended this Dean would be seen again, this time in the role of a police captain. As though wishful to advertise the versatility of an otherwise unimportant figure in his troupe the manager had altogether discarded the old playhouse subterfuge of tacking a different name to a small-part actor for each character assumed by that actor.

On the tail of his discovery an idea – an audacious, gorgeous idea – germed in Crisp’s brain. With impatience he waited for the next reëntry of the Dean man. After the raising of the curtain for Act Three he had not very long to wait.

The trend of action gave warning, and certain spoken lines came as cues to pave the path for the intervention into the plot of the police captain. He appeared, and at sight of him Crisp uttered a small grunt of admiration. At the beginning, as the profligate brother, the actor had been to the life a very young man, youthful in gesture, in gait, in the way he wore his clothes, in the way he used his hands. Presenting the lawyer role he had been an embodiment of dignified middle age, deliberate and slow spoken, and finicky in his movements. Now, by processes of transition the police officer, the figure he offered was bulky and over-fed, with a stolid mien, a husky voice and an air of lurking sagacity.

It was true, of course, that in each part the man had had the advantages of the customary counterfeiting devices of grease paint and wigs and costumes and crape hair to help him out; a sketchy mustache for the nephew, gray muttonchops to bracket the lawyer’s face, a sorrel-colored and bristly overhang on the top lip of the policeman. But watching him in this reincarnation Crisp realized that something more than the use of common accessories of stage disguisement lay behind the illusory marvel of it. Before now in vaudeville he had seen a so-called protean artist give imitations of various notables, but there, no matter how lifelike the impersonation, no matter how deft the use of false beards and the trickery of certain features painted in or certain features painted out, still had he been able, from the audience, to see behind these maskings always the same man with the same shape of figure, the same unmistakable outlines of contour.

Here, though, was something bigger and more subtle than mimetic skill; more than mere adeptness at the stage science of building one face on top of another. Here exhibited was an innate ability on the part of this man Dean to bury his own self within the form of the character he simulated. It was a plastic physical adaptability carried to the nth power. For not only his expression but all about him – the set of his head upon his shoulders, the play of his limbs, the very length of his limbs, the tone and timbre of his voice, the fashion after which he sat down and the fashion after which he got up again – had at each appearance seemed altered, made over literally.

And yet, granting to him the possession of this almost miraculous gift for bodily transfiguration, Crisp sensed why the man still was what he was – a small-part mummer, a doer of bits in a second-rate stock company. And the reason for it was this: On his own account he radiated nothing. All that he had of dramatic strength was sucked up and absorbed in the part he played and none of it remained to him: Plainly he lacked the thing called magnetism, and, lacking it, plainly was destined to go on to the end of his little theatrical chapter being merely a scrap of living background, a fragment of animated scenery, as it were, with no earthly prospects of developing a distinguished name in his profession.

Another time Crisp, who in many of his attributes was human enough outside of the newspaper shop, might have found it in his heart to pity a man so gifted in certain regards and so utterly lacking in a greater quality. But now he tingled with a mounting gratification as the curtain dropped on an old-fashioned climax and he rose and joined one of the queues of men filing up the aisles to stretch their legs and puff cigarettes in the lobby through the intermission.

He, though, had something better to do than the stretching of legs or the burning of tobacco. Behind the wicket in the box office he found the house manager – the manager’s name was Simonson, and Crisp knew him slightly – and he beckoned to him to come outside. Simonson quit his job of checking up the night’s slim receipts and straightway came. His manner was the heavily genial, almost the affectionate.

House managers crave to be on friendly terms with city editors, for out of the relationship often grows the most delectable fruit that sprouts in the orchard of theatrical by-product – free publicity.

By word and by deed Mr. Simonson published it that it was a pleasure to see Mr. Crisp, and by those same tokens made it evident that it would be an added pleasure to serve him in any way possible. Hopefully, in the moment of warmly clasping Crisp’s hand, he advanced the suggestion that if there was anything now he could do? – with a tentative rising inflection.

“Yes,” said Crisp, “there is something you can do. You can tell me something about a chap that’s playing here in your company. His work, in a way, struck me as being high class. His name, as the program gives it, is Dean – Wilfred Dean.”

“Oh, yes,” said Simonson. “New man – came on and joined us last week from somewhere out West.” In the approved Broadway manner he spoke of the West as a cosmopolite might speak, say, of Equatorial Africa. “Clever, isn’t he?”

“In some respects, very,” said Crisp. “At make-up I think he’s the best I’ve seen in a long while. Is he a young fellow? It’s hard to tell, seeing him only in character.”

“About twenty-four I should guess,” said Simonson; “maybe twenty-five or six. If he only had a little more stuff of his own it would help. That’s what he lacks now – the knack of putting himself over – personality, you know.”

“I noticed that lack,” said Crisp. “Well, so much the better.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“Nothing,” said Crisp. “I was just thinking out loud, that’s all.”

“Would you like to meet him, Mr. Crisp?” asked Simonson. “I can take you round behind right now if you’d care to go. He doesn’t change for the last act – plays the police captain right through to the finish. He’d interest you, I think, as a study; he’s got such a large fine opinion of himself.”

“I want very much to meet him,” said Crisp, “but I don’t believe I care to meet him to-night. I don’t want to run any risk of his getting self-conscious and overdoing his acting because he thinks possibly there’s someone out in the audience who’s especially interested in him. I want to study him as he is. But I’ll tell you what you can do for me, Simonson. You can send that young chap down to me at The Beam to-morrow morning. Round eleven o’clock would be a good time if you can drag him out of bed that early. If an idea that I’ve got in my head now pans out, after I’ve talked with him, there may be something in it for him personally and there’s sure to be a whaling big slug of good press stuff in it for this theater – that is if, as I say, the scheme I’ve got in mind should develop.”

“My dear Mr. Crisp,” stated Simonson with enthusiasm, “he’ll be there at eleven o’clock to-morrow morning – without fail. I assure you, sir, without fail.”

“Good,” said Crisp. He turned away, then turned back. “Oh, by the way, how tall is this chap Dean?”

“Offhand I should say about five feet, eight or nine. But I’ve noticed that, playing, he seems to have the knack of shrinking in or stretching out, depending on the character he’s doing.”

“And what would you figure his weight to be?”

“At a rough guess, somewhere round a hundred and fifty pounds.”

“Fair enough,” said Crisp, evidently pleased at these details. “One thing more: What’s the color of his eyes? That’s one thing no man on earth can change – the color of his eyes.”

“Brown, I think,” said the puzzled Simonson,“sort of hazel, you know.”

“Better and better,” said Crisp cryptically. “Well, good night.” And he returned to his seat, leaving Simonson cooking hot with a fever of unslaked curiosity.

•     •     •     •     •

The following day, sharp at eleven, Crisp, having read a card brought in to him from the anteroom and having dispatched an office boy to escort the caller through the mystic maze of the over-crowded city room, stared across his desk at the approaching visitor. What he saw pleased him: A slender, compactly built young man, cheaply but affectedly over-dressed, with a commonplace, rather vain face. The ceremonials of introductions and handshaking having been accomplished, Crisp lost no time in getting to the start of his business. In his professional aspects Crisp never did waste time. It was a habit born of working ten hours a day with one eye on a restless staff and the other on a dependable clock.

“Sit down, please,” he said, indicating a chair alongside his own and sinking his voice to a pitch where it was inaudible to any person excepting the one for whose ears his words were intended. “I’ll come right to the point with you, Mr. Dean. I saw you last night up at the Royalton Theater. You seem to know a good deal about the art of make-up.”

“Thank you – my admirers think so too.” At the compliment the smirk on Dean’s face greatly had magnified itself.

Crisp gathered up from his desk top a sheaf of photographs, and with them two larger squares of bristol board bearing newspaper pen-and-ink drawings; and he thrust the whole lot of them into the actor’s hands.

“Look through these pictures,” he bade Dean. “They’re all of the same man but made at different times and in different attitudes and under different circumstances. Take as much time as you please to go through them, and when you’re through tell me whether you honestly believe you could make up so as to pass for that man – so that you could even deceive people who knew him by sight – so that you could fool his own mother if she were alive. It’s not an easy job, this one that I have in mind for you to tackle, because if my little plan appeals to you and goes through, you’re not going to be on a stage with lighting effects to help you and to hide the marks of the greasepaints and the gum where the false whiskers are stuck on your face. You’re going to be out on the public street, in the broad daylight, face to face with the people you’ll have to fool. So please think it over carefully, Mr. Dean, before you commit yourself.”

He reared back in his swivel chair, studying Dean while Dean in turn painstakingly studied the dozen or more photographs and the two drawings. At the end perhaps of the fifth minute Dean handed back the collection and made his answer.

“I can do it,” he said. “I don’t want to talk about myself – that’s something I rarely or never do – but I give you my word of honor, sir, that I’m the only man in the profession here in New York or anywhere else who could do it. Of course you understand I’m speaking now only of the face itself. A pair of those thick eyeglasses such as this man wore – whoever he was – ought to help me some, and that heavy black hair of his and those spindly whiskers will be a cinch to reproduce. The nose will be the hardest of all – I mean that peculiar flare of the nostrils – but I can get away with that, too, by a little original device of my own. If I can judge by these photographs, the man you want me to imitate has a dark skin, so there’s no need of using any grease paint. I can make up for the complexion with a vegetable dye, and that I mix myself according to a private recipe I discovered. Yes, sir, I’ll guarantee to get away with the face part of it; but you see I don’t know anything about this man’s build or about the way he walked or the way he handled his hands and his body, or any little mannerisms that he may have had. Those are the things that count in a real true-to-life impersonation, and if you watched me closely last night you may have noticed that those are the very points where I’ve got a shade the best of it on any actor you ever saw.”

“You needn’t worry about that,” said Crisp. “If, with your help, this plan of mine goes through – and it looks to me now as though it might – I’ll put you in touch with a man who’ll spend days or weeks, if necessary, in drilling you in every noticeable peculiarity, every important habit of gesture and speech and movement that characterized the original of these photographs. He knows them all – Horowitz does.

“You’ll have still another advantage on your side, too. I’m going to be able to rig you out from head to foot in clothes which once belonged to the man you are to impersonate. I can even furnish you with a shirt he has worn and one of his neckties. And now then,” he went on, “I suppose it’s up to me to end this little mystery and to give you the inside facts. I understand you’re more or less of a stranger in this town; that you came here lately. All the same, I presume you must have heard something about the Magrune murder case?”

“I’ve seen something about it in the newspapers somewhere,” said Dean vaguely. “Wasn’t it a man named Magrune who killed a woman or somebody?”

“You’ve got it. About a month ago one Sidney Magrune murdered a woman named Sonia Gradleigh. He called himself a doctor and she called herself his wife. They were both of them liars. He wasn’t a doctor and never had been one, though I believe at one time he was a medical student. He was a general-purposes crook – fake trance medium, fake fortune teller, quack healer, malpractitioner, confidence man – yes, and ex-jailbird too. And she’d never been married to him nor to anyone else, so far as we can learn. They lived in a flat over here on the lower West Side, upstairs over a Syrian bakeshop. Well, it seems they fell out about something – by all accounts they’d been quarreling for months – and he killed her. It was about as brutal an affair as you can imagine. After he’d choked her he cut her throat and – well, anyhow, there were a lot of messy and unpleasant details. You can read all about it in some clippings that I’m going to hand you to read in order that you may familiarize yourself with the man’s personality.

“Anyhow, before he’d finished with the ghastly job of getting rid of the body the thing was discovered. He had a warning and he made his getaway. That is to say, he escaped out of the house and probably out of the neighborhood, but from all the available evidence on hand he didn’t succeed in getting out of town, either because he figured that New York would be a safer place to hide in than any smaller place in the country would be, or because the general alarm was out so quickly he didn’t have the nerve to try to get away by train or boat, knowing that all the railroad stations and all the ferry slips and docks would be guarded.

“At least, it’s the theory of the police that he stayed on Manhattan Island, and, for once, at least, probably the police are right in their guess. So it practically amounts to a certainty that for more than a month now this man Magrune, with a reward out for him, with his pictures and his complete description tacked up in every police station, has been at large right here in town, and still the police aren’t able to find him. They know his habits and his mannerisms and all his former hangouts. They know his Bertillon measurements and his height and his weight and his thumb prints; all these things were already on file up at headquarters. And still they can’t nail him!”

“Sounds almost incredible,” said Dean.

“It isn’t so incredible as it sounds if you know something about the rotten condition which prevails in the police,” stated Crisp. “The force has fallen down on nearly every big job that it’s tackled since the new city administration went into power. This Magrune case is only the culmination of eight or nine solid months of absolute inefficiency. We’ve had a regular reign of crime – a crime wave. Why, there’ve been more holdups, more burglaries, more assaults and more homicides committed in this town in the last eight months than ever before in any five years.

“Now then, day in and day out, ever since early last spring the Beam has been pounding the police department for failing to give the people service and protection. We’re going after the police all the time and particularly we’re going after Inspector Malachi Prendergast, He’s the pompous old stiff who’s supposed to be the head of the detective bureau. We’re particularly anxious to smoke him out because he’s a pet of the present police commissioner and the commissioner is a pet of the mayor’s and the mayor is no friend of this paper, believe me! You get my drift, don’t you? They call him Honest Mal Prendergast. Well, according to his own lights he may be honest; anyhow we haven’t been able to bring any of the grafting home to him yet, but he’s an obstinate, swelled-up, chesty, quarrelsome old flatfoot – a typical product of the old-time school of cops. He isn’t fit to hold the job he’s got and we’ve proved it time and again here in this paper – proved it a dozen different ways.

“But I’m getting a little bit tired of printing lists of unpunished crimes and uncaught criminals. I guess maybe the public is getting tired of seeing them printed so often; so I’m going further than this. I’m going to try an experiment. If it succeeds we’ll just naturally blow the whole police department out of the water, and on top of that we’ll put across the biggest stunt that any paper in this town ever did put across. If it fails – well, if it fails there’s no particular harm done. I figure, though, it’s better than a fifty-fifty proposition that it won’t fail.

“Now here’s where you come into my scheme of things. I got the notion last night when I sat watching you shift from one character to another up at the Royalton. This is what I want you to do and if you’re willing to do it I’ll make it worth your while in more ways than one: I want you to make yourself up as this missing murderer, Magrune. I want your disguise to be absolutely complete, absolutely perfect in every possible detail. This’ll be after you’ve spent as much time as you please with the man I’m going to hire to drill you in the part; this Horowitz that I spoke of a bit ago. He knew Magrune intimately and I’ve already called him up over the telephone and fixed him and he’s highly agreeable to the idea. What’s still better, he knows enough to keep his mouth shut; and, by the way, that’s a thing you must do, too – keep the whole affair a dead secret until the job is done. Do you follow me?”

Plainly he had communicated some of his own enthusiasm to his bearer. The actor’s vapid face was alight with interest as he nodded an affirmative.

“All right then,” continued Crisp; “at eight o’clock some day soon – and of course for our purposes the sooner the better because it would spoil everything if in the meantime some copper should accidentally nab Magrune – at eight o’clock some morning you, made up as Magrune, will start from a given point downtown here and you’ll walk round New York all day. You’ll walk up to policemen – men who are supposed to be watching for Magrune every minute – and you’ll ask them questions. For example, you’ll ask one cop, let us say, how to get to a certain address; and you’ll ask another how to get to a certain ferry slip; so on and so forth. You’ll keep this up for a couple of hours or so. If you get away with it, if nobody identifies you as Magrune, you’ll go still further. You’ll walk past some of the resorts where Magrune used to loaf; places which would be closely watched if the police were on their job, only I’m betting they aren’t. Along here you’ll try to duplicate as closely, as possible his former ways and habits. In fact, you’ll play a slice right out of his daily life as he lived it before he committed this murder, and became a fugitive.

“Last of all, provided you succeed in this chapter of the plot – and I’m nursing a hunch that you will succeed-it’ll be up to you to pull oh the most daring trick of the whole performance. You’ll hop on a trolley car and you’ll ride uptown to police headquarters and you’ll drop off there and walk boldly in at the front door, and you’ll go upstairs, right past the doors of old Prendergast’s office in the detective bureau, and you’ll hang about the building for, say, twenty minutes – long enough to make the test complete and thorough. Of course you must have some seemingly legitimate business which brought you there. We’ll dope that out later. In fact, we’ll dope out a lot of the fine points later. I’m just sketching in the broad general outlines for you now.

“All along, though, remember this: From start to finish you’re to keep a note of each incident, setting down the time when you spoke to this person or to that one, or when you did this, that or the other thing. Particularly, you want to be careful to remember the number of every policeman you encounter. If you think it’s possible to do so without rousing suspicion and without increasing the risk of recognition as Magrune, it would be well to get his name as well as his number. I’ll have two reliable persons, one a reporter for this paper and one an outsider, who’ll shadow you from the time you start out. They’ll be trailing you for two purposes: one purpose being to check their reports against yours in order to in sure absolute accuracy, but the main reason is to make it possible for them, under oath as eyewitnesses, to substantiate your own account of your own movements.

“Assuming that you don’t get nabbed, you’ll leave police headquarters and you’ll come back here to this office and you’ll sit down here and dictate a complete statement of everything that happened – the whens, the hows, the wheres and the wherefores. I’ll have a stenographer waiting to take your dictation, and another man – an expert re-writer – on hand to lick the story into proper shape for publication. Still, to all intents and purposes it will be your own story, and after you’ve compared it with the original draft from the stenographer’s notes so as to make sure that no mistake however small has crept into it you’ll sign your name to it; and on the following day I’ll smear it all over every edition of this paper.

“It’ll give New York the hardest jolt it’s bad in years when it reads how easy it is for a notorious murderer to ramble round town and chat with purblind cops in uniform. It’ll give the detective bureau all the sensations that Charleston, South Carolina, had when that earthquake hit it a few years ago. It’ll give Inspector Malachi Prendergast a lifelong vacation, without salary, or I miss my guess. And finally, young man, it’ll give you the finest piece of free advertising, the biggest, juiciest chunk of publicity that any actor, big or little, ever had in his life. That’s the main thing for you to keep before your mind.

“But that isn’t all you’ll get out of it. If you undertake the job I’ll hand you a retaining fee of a hundred dollars before you start. If you fail through no fault of your own, we’ll add another hundred to it. If you succeed, you get an additional cash bonus from The Beam of five hundred dollars, and on top of that you get all this press stuff handed to you – stuff which no amount of money could buy. You’ll be a made man. I wouldn’t be surprised but what some Broadway manager starred you just on the strength of what The Beam will have to say about you. The least you can hope for is forty weeks, booked solid, on vaudeville big time. Well, how does it sound to you?”

“Great!” exclaimed Dean. “It sounds simply great to me! I’d be a fool not to jump at the chance, especially as I’m probably the one man alive with the ability to make a go of it. But, Mr. Crisp” – and here for the first time a note of doubt crept into his voice – “but suppose I do get caught – then what?”

“That’s easy, too,” explained Crisp. “Suppose you do get caught. You’ll submit to let the cop who’s nailed you put the bracelets on you and give you a ride to some station house or to headquarters as the case may be. When you get there you pull off your disguise and give the cops the laugh. The Beam needn’t figure in the thing at all; in fact, it mustn’t figure in it in case of a fall-down. You can say that you made a bet with somebody that you could make up as Magrune and get away with it. They’ll have to take your word for it. You can have the other party to the supposed bet planted and all ready to back up your statement. The worst that can happen to you is that you’ll be locked up for a few hours, but sooner or later they’ll have to let you go because they can’t charge you with any offense. You won’t have done anything criminal. In any event you’ll get a good chunk of money for yourself and a good slice of publicity, because when the reporters get hold of it they’re sure to play up the story as a press agent’s stunt, and your present employer uptown probably will be almost as well satisfied as though the trick had succeeded. He’s sure to hand you more salary and give you the better parts to play. Oh, you can’t lose, no matter which way the cards fall. It’s me – or rather it’s The Beam – that’s taking all the risk.”

With a movement which in his eagerness he for once in his life failed to make stagy and dramatic, Dean shoved out his hand.

“Mr. Crisp,” he said, “it’s a bargain. I’ll be ready to start studying the part this afternoon. I’m a very quick study – I’m noted for that. Oh, by the way,” he added, “how about the wardrobe I’m to wear? You said something about furnishing me with some clothes which belonged to this man, and of course if we can get hold of a suit of his own clothes it would be better than stuff bought from a costumer or out of a shop.”

“By Jove!” said Crisp. “I’ve been so carried away by the scheme itself that I forgot about that feature. And I should have remembered it, too, no matter what else I might forget. As it so happens, I’ve got the complete outfit that Magrune wore on the very night he killed that woman. The murder was committed on the night of the twenty-first of last month. The following night – which would be the twenty second – when Magrune was interrupted before he had finished the task of doing away with the body he beat it out the back way, dressed just as he was, while the woman who’d caught him at his ghastly job was falling down the front steps of the house yelling for the police at every jump. Now the weather on that night was thick and muggy and foggy. Probably the fog was of aid to Magrune in making his getaway. Having cleared out of the neighborhood, it’s my own private theory – and in a minute you’ll see why I have that private theory – that he got a rigging of new clothes somewhere and took them to a hiding place he had chosen, wherever it was, and there changed from the skin out. Then he made a bundle of his discarded outfit and he carried this bundle under his arm, out partway across Brooklyn Bridge, and he dropped it over the parapet, figuring that it would sink in the East River and stay there, especially as he had weighted it with a couple of paving stones.

“But the fog, which had helped him out before, now fooled him. Certainly he couldn’t see and doubtlessly didn’t suspect that at the very moment when he was pitching the bundle over the railing a sea-going tug belonging to the Tipton Wrecking Company was passing under the bridge on its way to a salvaging job off the Jersey shore down below Atlantic City. The bundle dropped straight as a plumb-bob and fell upon the deck of the tug and stayed there; at least, that’s the only plausible explanation to account for its being found there next morning.

“The deckhand who found it turned it over to the captain. The captain, whose name is Grady, stuck it into a locker and forgot all about it. The wrecking job down the coast kept him and his tug busy off and on for four weeks, about. Day before yesterday, when he got back to his home in Brooklyn, he read in a paper a description of the clothing worn by Magrune at the time of his flight, and then for the first time it dawned on him that probably he was in position to furnish a clue to the mystery of the man’s disappearance. The average man would have gone straight to the police, but this Grady is a pretty smart chap. In his experience as a wrecking master he’d often had dealings with reporters and he knew that almost any newspaper in New York will pay a good price for an exclusive tip on a good news story. As luck would have it, one of my copy readers lives next door to him and the two men are friends. So Grady put on his hat and his coat and went next door and told our man what he had and wanted to know whether it was likely The Beam would slip him a piece of money in exchange for the bundle of clothes and the deckhand’s story. That was night before last.

“The copy reader raised me on the telephone and I authorized him to offer Grady fifty dollars to turn the stuff over to us. Yesterday I had the clothes brought to this office and photographed. Then I framed up a picture layout and a story, intending to spring it to-day to show that The Beam, unaided and working independently of any official cooperation, could dig up important facts in connection with a big murder right under the nose of the police force. The story was in type all ready to go into the make-up for to-day’s first edition when I saw you last night at the theater; and right away I cooked up this new proposition. Before I went to bed I telephoned down here to the shop and had that story killed. It will make our sensation all the stronger when it comes out that in your wanderings round town disguised as Magrune you were wearing the same clothes, even down to the collar and the cravat, that he wore when he fled on the night after he butchered the girl.”

Crisp reared back in his chair, in his satisfaction massaging the palm of one hand against the palm of the other.

“Taking one thing with another,” he said, “it looks to me as though the outlook for pulling off our little stunt according to program and schedule could hardly be any brighter than it already is.”

Now right there was the only place where in Crisp’s judgment went the least bit agley.

As a matter of fact the outlook was to grow brighter still. It reached a peak of positive brilliancy on the afternoon of the following day but one, when the individual, Horowitz, already mentioned in this account, called him up to report that as far as he, Horowitz, was concerned the rehearsals were over, the stage was set and the production ready for performance.

“Does he look like him?” broke in Crisp, overtopping Horowitz’s triumphant announcement with his own snapped words. “That’s the principal point – does he look like him?”

“Does he look like him?” echoed the elated voice of Horowitz. “Boss, he don’t only look like him – he’s him! That’s all there is to it – he’s just naturally him from the skin out. Why, it’s the greatest thing I ever seen done in my life, and the quickest too! You remember my tellin’ you about that little trick Magrune had of sort of pullin’ his left leg along behind him when he walked, like as if he had a weight hitched to it? Well, this here Dean’s got that down perfect. And you remember, don’t you, my speakin’ to you about the way Magrune sort of glared when he was lookin’ at anything hard so his eyes seemed like they was fixin’ to pop out of his head? Well, he’s got that too. Hell’s bells, boss, he’s got everything Magrune ever had – walk, talk, looks, everything! It seems like he can just naturally turn himself into Magrune. I knowed Magrune from the time we was kids together, and yet when I look at this feller I can’t believe my own eyes. If I didn’t know better I’d swear it was the Doc, on a stack of Bibles a mile high!”

“Good!” commented Crisp. “How did the photographs turn out?”

“Best ever! Your man just finished developin’ and printin’ from the negatives. Lay a picture of this here actor in his make-up alongside a genuwine picture of Magrune – full face, side face, any old way you please – and I’ll dare anybody on earth – yes, I’d dare Magrune if we had him here – to tell t’other from which. That’s how good it is.”

“Bully!” said Crisp. “We won’t forget to play up the resemblance in the pictures when we cut loose with the story. All set, are you? All right then, we’ll ring up the curtain to-morrow morning, bright and early. You have our man at the appointed starting point at least half an hour ahead of time – eight o’clock’s the hour, you know. You take him over there from your flat in a closed carriage… No, never mind, I’ll attend to the carriage. It’ll be at your place at seven o’clock and my two men that are going to tag him – Seville and Sloane – they’ll be along at the same time…. No, hold on a minute, I’ve a smoother plan than that. I’ll come myself in one of Mr. Wendover’s carriages, and I’ll bring both of the men along with me. I want to be on hand to see this thing launched.”

•     •     •     •     •

According to schedule, sharp on the dot, it was launched auspiciously, easily, with out slip-up or mishap. Audaciously it was carried out, tremendously it succeeded, grandly next day was it exploited. The top headlines shrieked from margin to margin of The Daily Beam. The picture layouts filled columns. The main story filled the better part of two pages. It led off with an introduction done in old Ben Alibi’s best newspaperese – hard staccato sentences, brief yelpy paragraphs and plenty of exclamation points. Next came Dean’s own article with his signature above it, one double-leaded column of it succeeding another; next the confirmatory evidence of the two trailers, done chronologically and descriptively, but embodied in the form of affidavits sworn to by Messrs. Seville and Sloane before a notary public and publicly attested by that functionary under his official seal; next, a somewhat guarded account purporting to relate how, through its own enterprise, The Beam came to be in possession of the garments worn by the fugitive murderer when the murder was committed; next a recital of recent police shortcomings in shortand in general; finally a flattering sketch of the life, the histrionic triumphs and the rare gifts of Mr. Wilfred Dean, Thespian. A spirited cartoon by The Beam’s star artist derived its inspiration from the front page; a denunciatory editorial by The Beam’s chief leader writer emphasized the charges so adequately presented and so amply substantiated elsewhere in the current issue.

Rival papers along the Row could not afford to ignore the story, for after all it was news even though it might be called, after a fashion, manufactured news. The press associations spread it broadcast. The syndicates borrowed liberally from it. The resident New York correspondents of papers all over this country and in European countries as well lifted chunks of it to be incorporated into special dispatches. Leased wires sang under the burden of it and cables rode it across three thousand miles of sea bed.

So wherever people read the English language, the tale of this gorgeous coup was told and was talked about and was marveled at and was admired. Dean, undetected and, more than that, unsuspected, had wandered at will all day in the midst of millions. A patrolman in uniform had piloted him through the weaving traffic of West Street to the very pier doors of a transatlantic steamship line. Another patrolman, also in uniform – badge, number, full name, and an accurate if unflattering pen picture of the unfortunate officer being supplied – actually had discussed with Dean the Gradleigh murder, and with expressions of thanks had accepted the gift of a cigar from the spectacled, scantily whiskered stranger in the rumpled gray suit. For hours on end the masquerader had loitered in the neighborhood where the crime was committed, even venturing near the former familiar haunts of his double. And last of all, as a crowning stroke, he had invaded police headquarters, strolling deliberately through the wing where the detective bureau was housed, to inquire in the lost-property office for a fictitious missing hand bag.

Supplementary installments, stressing and elaborating the original exposé, ensued print – wise. For so long as popular interest in it endured, the story was amplified into a sort of serial, continued and continuing from day to day. Much space was given to the summary ousting of Honest Mal Prendergast from authority and, less than a week later, to his dismissal from the force, a shorn and shamed figure of proved incompetency.

Under pressure of popular demand the staff over which he had ruled underwent a drastic housecleaning. Indeed, the whole force was shaken up, shaken down, over-hauled, reorganized and, as a final outcome, purged of sundry scapegoats who, whether entirely blameful or not, were sacrificed as burnt offerings upon the altar of a righteous and an aroused civic indignation. Innocent heads, perhaps, fell with guilty ones, as so often is the way of it when a disciplinary upheaval such as this one occurs in city or state. This was deplorable but inevitable.

The mayor shrank from prideful and distended bulk to a diminished and apologetic shape, promising reforms to deputations of irate taxpayers, and in private uttering sincere swear words. Both in displacement and total gross tonnage, His Honor lost heavily. Contemporaneous chapters dealt with the suddenly glorified and exalted Mr. Wilfred Dean, who overnight, so to speak, found himself lifted out of the ruck of unconsidered and unfashionable mummers and elevated to a pinnacle of dizzying prominence, with the Fifth Avenue photographers craving permission to reproduce his favorite poses in their display cases; with clamoring vaudeville managers thrusting fat contracts at him; with Sunday editors sending their brightest young women to him to interpret the views he might graciously deign to utter upon the congenial interrelated subjects of himself and his art; with expensive tailors in braided morning coats calling in person respectfully to solicit the favor of his patronage; with discreet valets answering his advertisements for a gentleman’s capable manservant. I may state in passing that Mr. Dean’s head became, as the saying goes, completely turned – an all the more easily accomplished phenomenon seeing that it was the sort of head which easily might be turned, being but lightly ballasted anyhow.

Old Ben Alibi’s brain, now, was of solider stuff. He, the creator, the designer, the real guiding and governing force of the invention, was content to bide on, more or less anonymously and altogether unsung, in the background of the glory he had builded; on the temperamental side satisfied by the reflection that he had poured essences of green envy into the prevalent yellowish composition of every saffron-souled competitor sheet in town; and on the material side enlarged by a raise in salary which promptly and voluntarily had been conferred by a gratified and grateful employer – a raise so magnificently opulent as practically to double his already handsome income. Naturally enough, The Beam, occupying to the story the relation which proud parent holds to child, exploited its achievement and incidentally itself, until the story had been squeezed as dry and juiceless as a barkeeper’s lemon. While a single news element remained of it The Beam stayed with it, nursing it along to its ultimate conclusions. Crisp personally saw it through to the end – at least he thought he did; only, as a matter of fact, he didn’t.

For to this story, as I stated at the outset and as I now repeat, were two distinct and widely dissimilar endings. But neither of these endings did The Beam or any other paper print then or thereafter, for the very good reason that none of them knew them. One of these destined terminations transpired coincidentally with the development of a certain phase of the main issue. The other, ensuing as a sort of long-belated after-effect, a buried offshoot, really, of the main taproot of the occurrence, was foreordained not to come to pass until some years had elapsed. Upon me, as chronicler, it therefore devolves as a duty and obligation to set forth, firstly, the first, and secondly, the second of these two endings. Upon the reader, as judge, rests the burden of deciding for himself which one of the two of them, from the standpoints of suitable sequences and correct dramatic values, is really the proper ending.

•     •     •     •     •

Just as the police and reporters had deduced almost from the moment of raising the hue and cry, Magrune stayed in New York all through the month of the hunt for him. He dared not try to quit it. He was not sure he would have tried to quit it, even though circumstance and opportunity had favored such a course, because he believed, and probably rightly so, that his chances for eluding the pursuing pack were brighter in the brick-and-mortar jungles of Manhattan than they possibly could he were he set adrift in the unaccustomed havens of lesser towns, where the sight of a stranger breeds curiosity and begets a closer scrutiny than the merely casual. The truth of this were doubly true, given that the fugitive had a trustworthy confidant, standing handily by to furnish him with close coverts and to warn him did the chase grow warm and to confederate with him in divers helpful and protecting fashions. And he had such an aid. Butcher that he was, with never a single honest bone in his body or one honest impulse in his crooked soul, he nonetheless had a friend to his need.

In the middle of an afternoon in the latter part of September, five weeks to the day, from the day he killed her, he crept, a furtive form, all eyes and ears and rasping nerves, down a flight of narrow wooden stairs from a loft room above a disused stable in a by-street just off Washington Street, in the lower West Side. The spot was not a quarter of a mile distant, on an air line, from the tenement where he did the killing. In this particular back eddy of this particular district there were apt to be only foreigers about – Armenians and Syrians and Turks, perhaps a Greek or two. The peril of recognition by one of these aliens, few of whom could speak English and probably none of whom could read English and all of them living a life apart in their own dingy quarter, was a faint one. It was faint almost to the point of being negligible; and yet, for all that, nonetheless a peril.

But a motive more compelling than the danger of detection had impelled him to venture out of his warren even while prudence tugged at the reins of his will power to make him bide behind barred doors in the better security of the supposedly deserted attic. The solitude of that room abovestairs had grown to be to him a horror unendurable. Alone up there, he saw things in remote corners to which the daylight, filtering through a screen of dust and spiderwebs across the dormer windows, did not reach. To him the dark places under the withers of the sloping roof were peopled with dreadful presentiments. The sight of human beings, the sound of their voices, the immediate presence of them and the contact with them – all these, with a taste of clean sunshine, he felt he must have or go out of his head.

Call him any kind of a misbegotten dog of a rogue you pleased, still and with all that, this man Magrune was not the woof and weave of a man out of which your calloused man-killer is fashioned. It had been a fit of gusty and uncontrollable passion, with gnawing remorse for its inevitable offspring, rather than premeditation and rather than a deliberate bloodthirstiness which had driven him to brutal means for ridding himself of the poor drab of a street woman, who had become to him an abomination. Having killed in haste he now was repenting at leisure.

Then, too, there was an abundance of contributory factors, seemingly all devised to weighten the burden of his torment. He was a creature hunted; ringed about by active and potential enemies, with every man’s hand except one man’s hand raised against him. On his head was a price. On his wrists, in tortured fancy, he could feel the grip of the gyves; on his limbs, often and again, he could feel the leather housings of the chair, binding him fast for the lethal shock.

The chair, with its furbishings of straps for the limbs and its surcingle for the chest and its cap electrode for the skull, was one of the things he saw; only one, though. Upstairs in the abiding gloom he saw the condemning faces of twelve men in a jury box. He saw the judge in his black robe that was like a shroud. He saw the inside of the death house, with its cell doors double barred, and behind each wattled slit a dim outline of a captive pacing back and forth like a cage beast in the zoo. He saw the woman lying dead on her kitchen floor in a dabbling of red clots and splashes.

And now, in this moment, as with wary quiet steps he came to the foot of the stair well and peeped cautiously forth this way and that along the length of a cobbled short alley ending blind against a brick wall, he saw something more starkly terrifying to him than any or all of these things. He saw himself.

To his left the alley, as I just now said, ran blank against tall brickwork. To his right, at a distance of perhaps thirty feet from his sheltering doorway, it debouched upon the sidewalk of the street meeting it at cross angles. At the mouth of the alley, clearly revealed in the breadth of the opening, stood the profiled image of himself, a solid shape, casting a shadow upon the rutted pavement.

He tried to make his stunned intelligence tell him that it was a lie; that his startled gaze was focused upon a figment of a fretted imagination, but his two popped eyes told him it was no lie. All his senses told him it was no lie. His brain proclaimed the inconceivable verity of it in a voice that rolled against his eardrums like the beating of breakers in the sea. It couldn’t be true, and yet by all truth it was true. There, a rod away, stood he, himself, while he, himself, crouched in a doorway and looked upon himself.

Following his flight he had altered in all possible outward regards his mien and his appearance. He no longer wore the thick-lensed glasses which had distinguished him. At once he had thrown these away. Also on the night of flight he had clipped and shorn his beard. Daily since then he had shaven his face, lip, chin and cheeks, to the quick. His hair had been conspicuously long, as befitting his charlatan role of seer and prophet; now it was clipped close to his poll so that the skin of the scalp showed through the black bristles. A month and more spent away and apart from sunshine and wind had yellowed his naturally dark skin to a tallowy pallor. He had lost flesh – perhaps twenty pounds. Upon his body were the jean overalls and the flannel shirt of a stable hand; and on his feet, coarse brogans. Through his time of hiding he had schooled his mind and drilled his members in an effort to cast off some of his more marked bodily idiosyncrasies. The trick of widening his lids back from over his hypermetropic eyes; the trick of dragging his left foot slightly as he walked, which was a heritage of a two-years sentence he had served in a Georgia chain gang with a heavy fetter riveted on his ankle; the mechanical trick of twitching at the lobe of one ear with the fingers of one hand, which was the hardest of all to cure since it had been a part of his nature through all his conscious life – these things he had striven manfully to master, and except when he forgot his lessons and automatically reverted to form, had fairly well succeeded in mastering.

In effect, then, this was the transformed Sidney Magrune who quivered between the door lintels glaring down that little alley.

But this, his other self, his duplicate – his whatever it was – looked as he had looked before the metamorphosis, not as now he was; not thin and cropped, not bleached and bare jowled, not garbed to pass current for a day laborer, not in any wise the Sidney Magrune of these latter weeks, but the Sidney Magrune of the longish mane and the spindly beard and the spectacles – that very same Sidney Magrune for whom the arm of the law had spread the net of the law, here revealed before his gaze as an authentic, full-dimensioned embodiment.

Thus far he had beaten the police, but was he to beat himself? What mortal, armed only with natural devices, could cope with the supernatural? What man could beat unreality made real? What man could best a hallucination made flesh? What was the use of further struggle, since here, behold, his own self had played him traitor, materializing in a guise which with his own hands he had abolished, coming to this place, of all places, most surely to betray him?

Against every flinching impulse, against every protesting instinct of self-preservation, he forced his unwilling body out of the doorway and he flattened himself against the stable’s front and he slid sidewise one noiseless pace toward the alley mouth, then two, then three, then halted. Those other phantoms which had haunted him – the chair, the jurors’ faces, six faces to a row and twelve faces in all, that murdered dead body crumpled down on that patterned kitchen oilcloth – they, time after time, had faded into nothingness after he mustered the will to advance upon them across the attic floor. To this twin apparition he must apply the same test. If when he neared it it dissolved into air he would know then that no man’s eyes other than his could see the thing he now saw. If only it would dissolve! And yet even in the moment of launching the test, he felt as a profound conviction that the test must fail.

It did fail. The vision did not melt away, Instead its contours took on firmer form as he crept down upon it. It stirred and vouchsafed him added, most indisputable proofs of actuality.

Slowly and idly, as though having no particular mission, it moved southward, traveling in the direction in which it had faced. In the same split second of its getting under way the watcher, pasted to the wall, saw how one hand came up automatically to tug at the lobe of one ear; saw, too, how the left foot dragged after its mate; and heard the small scuffing sound the foot made in its dragging. And then, just before it vanished beyond the corner of the building abutting on the alley at its south side, the watcher, with a shock which dwarfed what agonized sensations had preceded it through all that pregnant half minute, realizes that this, his copied self, this twin shape, wore the garments which had been worn by him on the night of the murder.

In a flash he recognized the items – gray suit, tan shoes, shirt, collar, tie; garments, all, which should be, which must be, which had to be buried forever in the ooze at a river’s bottom or else all plausibility was in default.

The man saw upon the lower sleeves of the coat and upon the front of the waistcoat the brownish dull stains which he vainly had sought to scrape away. By reason of his affliction of farsightedness, which was enhanced since he no longer wore lenses to correct it, he could make out small blotches of that same dried-out brown color on the soiled cuffs of the shirt.

The vision passed beyond his range of sight. He heard its footsteps die away and within the space of time it took for them to die away he already had decided upon a course. He was doomed, undone – doomed and undone by this Judas of a double of his, which could not live, and yet which did live. In reason, there could be no explanation for a thing that was utterly without reason. Yet that which could not exist, existed. That which could not be, indubitably was. And so to keep himself from one death he must die another death, a speedier one, and one less dreadful to contemplate. Saving this, there was no alternative.

Resolution manifested itself in his look and his gait as he dived for the shelter of the stair well.

Back in his loft he stayed until the darkness fell, horror all the while feeding on him. When the darkness had fallen he came forth again and, looking neither to the right nor to the left, made for the North River. No one took note of him as, half walking, half running, he traversed the cross street to the water. No one saw him slip off the string-piece of the dock.

A twisting subcurrent, worrying his drowned carcass as a big snake might worry a dead rabbit, carried it under the dock head and left it there, caught fast in a nest of broken-off pilings. The body was never found.

•     •     •     •     •

On a cold night in the winter of 1902, down on the Bowery, in a flop joint – or, as persons who never patronize such places might say, a cheap lodging house – two paying guests of the establishment disturbed its peace and quiet by engaging in a bout of fisticuffs.

In accordance with the rules and regulations of the management, each of these persons had paid, on entering, the sum of fifteen cents, this payment entitling him to pick out the softest spot, not already tenanted by some earlier-arrival, which he could find upon the floor of a long room, and to lie down on it and sleep there till morning. Chance would have it that an old man and a younger one, coming in practically together, should choose adjacent floor spaces. They were related, in a way of speaking, by being members both of the great brotherhood of the city’s homeless miserables, but otherwise were strangers. Stretched out there in their rags upon the bare boards of the noisome hot dormitory they fell into talk. Persons who have no futures usually talk of their pasts. It would seem that this couple did.

Of a sudden they were up on their feet and at each other’s throats. Unevenly matched, as they were, in the matter of the disparity of ages, the weakness and the waste which their habits had wrought upon them paired them fairly as to relative strength and energy. Neither was able by his fists and his feeble kicks to inflict any visible damage upon the body of his antagonist, but wrestling about, clouting the air with vain and flabby blows, they trampled with their feet their nearer neighbors and they broke the slumbers of all present.

Sounds of tumult reached the ear of the proprietor’s assistant, called by courtesy the night clerk. He came swiftly from his post below and pried the brace apart, and of them demanded explanations for behavior so unseemly. Failing to get coherent statements from the excited and already breathless belligerents, he single-handed reduced them by forcible measures to comparative silence, and accepted the proffered testimony of divers volunteer witnesses touching on the seeming cause of the quarrel. Then having insured better order through the night by exercise of a customary procedure – summary ejectment of the offenders – the night clerk went back again downstairs and made a report to his chief regarding the whys and wherefores of the incident.

“From wot I hears it’s like dis,” he said. “It seems dese two bums flops down side by each, and right away dey gits social and starts in spielin’ to one another about their past lifes. Dey drools along fur a little while, till dey gits to where they’re talkin’ about wot it was dat made bums of de two of ’em. I gits dis – see? – from a coupla other bums dat’s layin’ awake next to ’em and overhears ’em.

“De old bum he claims he used to be on de cops. Yep, by his tellin’ of it he was no less dan a way-up guy among de bulls. He says they comes a shake-up in de department and he’s made de fall-guy for the lot o’ other bulls wot’s got better protection dan wot he’s got. So he’s chucked out wit’ a bad name, and he spends all de money he’s got laid by on mouthpieces, tryin’ to git de courts to put him back on de force. But de lawsuit goes agin ’im and all his old pals quit cold on ’im and he goes from worse to worser until finally de booze gets ’im, and here he is, down and out for de count. Wit’ dat, de younger bum speaks up and says it ain’t so much hard luck as it’s goo much good luck dat’s put him where he is.

“He goes on and says dat he used to be a actor wit’ a swell job and everything, and money in all his pockets. He says he’s a good fellow whilst he’s got it but it seems like he can’t stand prosperity. And after a while, he says, he gits to hittin’ up de pace too hard and he loses his job and his frien’s give ’im de go-bye-bye, and next he falls for de pipe and takes to hittin’ it regular, and here he is.

“Den de old bum speaks up again and says it was a damn fresh play by a damn fresh actor dat started him on de downgrade and he asks de young bum if he ever knowed another actor named somethin’-or-other, and de young bum speaks up and says, w’y, dat’s his own moniker; and at dat de old bum lets out a string o’ cusses and hauls off and pastes de other bum in de jaw, and dat’s how it starts.”

“Kind of a funny quincidence, if it’s true,” mused the proprietor, who in his sophisticated sphere was by way of being something of a philosopher. “I mean, it’s kind o’ funny dese two stiffs should meet up this-a-way in a flop joint years and years, maybe, from de time their trails first crossed. Wot do you make out of it, Blinky?”

“Wot t’ell should I make out of it?” stated the assistant. “One of ’em’s a rum hound and de other’s a hop head. Chances is one of ’em is a liar and de other can’t tell de trut’ neither. Or maybe dey both dreamed it – nearly every one of dese here bums is got his own little pet fairy tale. Anyway, wot t’ell’s de diff anyway? So I just t’rows de both of ’em outdoors in de street and I tells ’em to settle their quarrels on de sidewalk, and I lets it go at dat!”

Let the reader decide.

The Saturday Evening Post, 04 Sep 1920

The Wasted Headline

~

Veterans of the newspaper game whose memories of active affairs in print shops run back for so far as two decades should have no trouble in fixing chronologically the period when there befell the thing of which I mean to tell. For the time of it was the time when yellow journalism, having passed its pumpkin-colored apogee, was by slow gradations fading to a saffronish aspect. Mind you, I’m not claiming that it yet was not very yellow in spots, for in spots it was – and to a somewhat lesser degrees till is – but generally speaking the severity of the visitation had abated, as though a patient, having been afflicted for a spell with acute jaundice, might now be said to be suffering merely from biliousness.

It still, though, was in the day of the signed statement; the day of the studhorse headline; the day when the more private a man’s affairs might be the more public they were made; the day when to-day’s exclusive exposé would be to-morrow’s libel suit and day after to-morrow’s compromise out of court.

Oldsters of the craft will remember how the plague started, and how as a sort of journalistic liver complaint it spread through the country so that newspapers both great and small caught it and broke out with red ink, like a malignant rash, and with weird displays of pictures and type, like a madness. There were certain papers in certain cities which remained immune, for the owners of these papers being conservative men or having conservative clienteles – which came to the same thing – took steps to quarantine against it, so to speak, and thus escaped catching the disease. But The Daily Beam did not have to catch it; it was born with it, the lusty child of a craze for sensation and a plague for freakishness. And Jason Q. Wendover, its owner, was its Allah; and Ben Ali Crisp, its city editor, was his prophet.

Behind his back his staff called him Ben Alibi; to his face they called him Chief. Ask any man who broke into big-town newspaper work along about the time, say, of the Spanish-American War if he recalls Chief Crisp; and then sit back and prepare to hear tales of journalistic audacity, of journalistic enterprise and of journalistic canniness, all of them smeared and drippy with the very essence of yellowness. If he knew how to suck eggs and spew the yolks abroad he likewise knew how to hide the shells afterward, a gift which made him all the more valuable to The Daily Beam and to its proprietor, as shall develop.

There was the time when the exposures about the treatment of the prisoners confined in the State Home for Wayward Girls at Wilfordshire first came out. Other papers were content to print page-long accounts of the testimony offered before the commission of legislative investigators to whom the inmates one after another described how they had been triced up to their cell gratings with their arms drawn tautly above their heads and their feet barely touching the floor; and how for lesser breaches of discipline they had been balled and chained or ducked in ice-water baths or locked up for solitary confinement in sound-proof cubicles. It made good reading. Charges of cruelty in reformatory institutions always have made and always will make good reading. But the inspiration of Ben Ali Crisp carried him beyond the mere publishing of the testimony and the mere interviewing of the superintendent and the accused keepers. Any city editor worth his salt knew enough to send good reporters to the hearing and with spread and layout to play up what copy the reporters sent back from the town of Wilfordshire. What did Crisp do?

Here’s what: One morning he had Lily Simmons report to him at eight o’clock instead of nine, which was her regular hour for coming on duty. To quote the sporting desk, Lily Simmons was his one best bet as a woman special writer. She weighed about ninety pounds, was a stringy little budget of nerves and nerviness, and she drew down ninety dollars a week for the work she did, and in three years’ time wrecked her health doing it. Under the pen name of Nita Dare she wrote heart-interest specials about murderers and visiting royalties and socially prominent divorcées and other popular idols of the hour. Under the guidance of the seemingly slack but nonetheless rigid discipline of the trade she followed, she went down in submarines and up in balloons and came back to the shop and wrote adjective-laden accounts of her sensations and her emotions. To prove the perils of working girls in a great city she once had stood on a certain corner after dark and kept tally – for subsequent publication – of the number of men who accosted her between eight-thirty and eleven P.M. And by common consent she was the most gifted sob sister of her hectic journalistic generation.

At eight o’clock this day, pursuant to orders, she came . Crisp was waiting for her. He took her into a disused cubby room back of the art department, where old drawings, photographers’ supplies and such like things were stored. Out of one coat pocket he hauled a pair of handcuffs and out of the other a clothesline. On Lily’s bony little wrists he locked the cuffs, ran the rope through the middle link of the chain connecting them, passed the rope over a stout hook set high in the wall and drew her up until her arms were stretched straight above her head and her heels cleared the floor. Then he made the rope fast against slipping and went out and locked the door behind him, leaving her there on tiptoe with her face against the plastering. He left her there until four o’clock in the afternoon. When he let her down she was in a dead faint, but came to in ample time to do six columns of regular Edgar Allan Poeish agony stuff, which under the screaming six-column caption “How it Feels to be Strung Up for Eight Hours at Wilfordshire, by Nita Dare,” ran in next day’s editions of the Beam and made the town sit up and take notice for a week.

Then – so the reminiscent veteran will probably tell you – there was the famous headline which Crisp wrote once upon a time. Only a headline it was, but it started a laugh which laughed a distinguished young profligate right out of the United States. Long after Mr. Chauncey Chilvers had hidden his diminished head in Paris, then the favorite refuge of the discredited wealthy American waster, and long after the girl he had expected to marry had married somebody else and divorced that somebody else and married again, folks still were grinning over what Crisp did on the day when one of his reporters brought in the tale. It had to do with a gorgeous reception at the home of the fiancée’s parents in Park Avenue, with the appearance of the prospective bridegroom in a condition which might charitably be described as confused; with his attempts, under the guidance of a shocked but sympathetic secondman, to ascend a flight of steps to the gentlemen’s cloakroom on the second floor; with his abrupt somersaulting descent from the top step back down again to the main hallway of the mansion at the very moment when the young woman and her father had issued from the drawing-room to welcome certain guests of the utmost social and financial importance; and with the final upshot, which was the summary expulsion of the disheveled and incoherent offender into outer darkness.

The yarn, as written, was exactly the sort of grist which suited the Beam’s news hoppers. So Crisp put it in wide measure on the front page and over it he ran in inch-deep italics the top caption: How to Lose a Rich Bride. And immediately below this he framed a sort of combination of headline, decoration and illustration which was copied from coast to coast, becoming in time a headlining classic. It was like this:

IT’S
AS EASY
AS FALLING
DOWNSTAIRS!!!

The heavy black type supplied part of the picture; the tumbling manikin did the rest.

Then there was the time when the Beam was pushing its campaign against alleged inefficiency in the police department, taking text for its most vehement preachments from the failure of the force to capture the notorious “Doctor” Sidney Magrune, proved murderer and fugitive, going at large with a fat price on his head and his photograph and printed description stuck up in every station house. Crisp hired a stock actor to make himself up as this badly wanted person. Thus disguised, the actor spent a whole day strolling about populous parts of town, occasionally inquiring a direction from a patrolman on post and actually winding up at dusk by walking into headquarters and making inquiry at the Lost Property Bureau touching on a fictitious missing hand bag. The tale of the experience being printed in full in next day’s Beam resulted in three things – enhanced reputation for the Beam, a raise in salary for Crisp and the loss of a lifelong job for Inspector Malachi Prendergast, head of the detective bureau.

There is a sequel to the tale of this coup which sometime will bear telling, but not here; it’s too long.

Crisp was like that. He saw the news and he raised it. If a rival paper saw the raise, matching enterprise against audacity, he went the other fellow one better. There were risks to be taken of course – risks of damage actions, risks of personal reprisal on the part of some hot-headed citizen who figured that in the Beam’s desire to print not necessarily what was true but what was interesting he had sustained an injustice which only might be alleviated by the blackening of eyes and the bloodying up of noses. But for such contingencies Crisp, like a wise general who never plans an offensive but he shapes along with it his defensive, was usually prepared. It was to this forearming instinct that he owed the play upon his middle name – the lengthening of Ali into Alibi – which the men in the city room employed in speaking of him when he was safely out of their hearing.

For example:

One day a solid-looking individual with the air about him of nursing a grievance almost as large as he was walked into the Beam building and asked that he might see the city editor. He was told to go up to the third floor and inquire for Mr. Crisp. Aboard a creaky elevator he ascended to the third floor, and having traversed a corridor that was heavy with the distinctive smell of every newspaper shop – a perfume compounded of old paper smells, fresh ink smells, stale paste smells and photography chemical smells of any age at all – he came at the far end of the corridor to an anteroom where a square-jawed attendant took down his name and inquired what his business might be.

Now had this gentleman – Gillespie was the name he gave – been one of several common enough types that came to the Beam; had he been a crank seeking publicity for the exploitation of his pet fad, or an unfaithful servant desirous of peddling unsavory details of his master’s or his mistress’ private life for a price, or one of those unattached mercenaries of the newspaper game known as a tipster, he would have been bidden to take a seat upon a hard and uncomfortable bench and wait his turn. But Mr. Gillespie, it seemed, had come to demand redress and correction of a gross error deeply affecting him personally, which had appeared in the columns of yesterday’s Beam, and for such as he there was a standing rule designed by the owners with a view to proving how zealous was the Beam to render fairness to all. Hesitating only long enough to make up his own mind that the caller was the sort not apt to turn physically violent, the attendant summoned an office boy from within and promptly the gentleman was escorted through the city room, on past the copy desk and the battery of desks of the rewrite men, to where on a raised platform like a schoolmaster’s dais and behind a wide flat-topped desk that was bristly with steel spindles sat a prematurely grizzled man of forty or thereabouts. At the stranger’s approach this man rose in greeting. “Are you the man in charge?” demanded Mr. Gillespie, mounting the rostrum.

“Well,” said the other, “I imagine I’m the man you wish to see. I’m the city editor – Crisp is my name. And your name is——”

“Gillespie – James G. Gillespie, of Gillespie & Swope, wholesale carpets. Here’s my card.”

“Sit down, Mr. Gillespie, please.” Crisp waved to a chair which his personal office boy had shoved forward. “Now then, how can I serve you?” His manner was cordial but businesslike, in contrast to Mr. Gillespie’s, which was businesslike enough but stiff to the point of hostility.

“Well,” stated Gillespie, “you can begin by correcting this outrageous misstatement of facts which appeared in the last edition of your sheet yesterday afternoon.” and he laid on the desk before Mr. Crisp a crumpled clipping. “My partner says I ought to sue you people for libel. My wife, who is ill in bed as a result of this thing, says I ought to horsewhip somebody for it. But I decided that before I took any steps I’d come here to you and personally insist on an immediate retraction of this infamous error.”

“Quite right, Mr. Gillespie. You did the right thing. I’m glad you did come, though I’m sorry that such an errand should bring you. Pardon me one moment.” He glanced briefly at the clipping. “Now then,” he went on, “suppose you tell me the real circumstances in this affair? It says here – but suppose you tell me your side first?”

Mr. Gillespie told him at length and with heat. By his way of telling it there had been an incredible perversion of the truth. He had been put in an entirely false light; he had been held up to ridicule; he had been wounded in his general reputation; he had been embarrassed, humiliated, chagrined – and so on and so forth for five minutes.

When he had done Mr. Crisp spoke, and in his tones, his look and his bearing was a real distress hardly repressed.

“Mr. Gillespie,” he said, “first and foremost and before everything else we have two great aims in getting out this paper-to fight the battles of the people and to tell the truth. The truth hurts people sometimes – we can’t help that! We have our duty before us. But when meaning to do the right thing, as we always aim to do, we print something which turns out to be untrue it hurts us as a newspaper and it hurts me – personally – more than it possibly can hurt anyone else. I want you to believe me when I tell you this. And right here and now, before your eyes, I intend to make proper amends for unintentionally wounding you.”

“How are you going to go about doing that?”

“Just one moment, please, and I’ll show you.” He hailed the head copy reader. “Flynn, look through yesterday’s schedule and see what reporter turned in the story that ran in the final under the heading Rich Merchant Figures Strangely in Raid on Gay Road House.”

Flynn ran practiced fingers through a sheaf of scribbled sheets. Then, “Overton wrote that story, Mr. Crisp’,” he answered.

“Overton, eh?” Mr. Crisp’s accent was ominous. “Boy, tell Mr. Overton to come here.”

The boy vanished behind a rack of lockers at the opposite side of the big room. Immediately from some recess back of the lockers there appeared a small shabby man with white hair and a bleak, pale face. He was in his shirt sleeves. He wore a frayed collar of an old-fashioned cut, a little rusty black tie and on his lower arms calico sleeve protectors. His stubby fingers were stained with ink marks. Everything about him – his pigeon-toed, embarrassed step as he approached his superior, his uneasy light-blue eye, the fumbling hand that he lifted to a stubby white mustache – seemed to advertise that here was a typical example of the well-meaning but unsuccessful underling. He offered a striking contrast to the smart-appearing younger men scattered about the city room, who raised their heads from what they were doing to follow him with their eyes as he crossed the floor.

“You wanted me, Mr. Crisp?” said he, halting on the farther side of the city editor’s desk.

“Yes, I wanted you.” Mr. Crisp’s voice was grim, with an undertone of menace in it. He shoved the clipping in his hand almost into Overton’s face. “You wrote this – this thing?”

“Yes, sir, I wrote it, but——”

“Never mind the buts. Never mind offering any explanations or any excuses. You admit you wrote it – that’s sufficient. Well then, do you know what you’ve done? You’ve done this gentleman here a great injustice – he’s convinced me of it. You’ve injured one of the most prominent and respected citizens in this whole city. You’ve made his family unhappy. And in injuring him you’ve injured the Beam. Well then, you know the rule on this paper about this sort of thing.”

“Yes, but Mr. Crisp,” pleaded the stricken offender, “you know how hard I try to be careful about details. You know I’ve never made a slip before. And I thought I got my information from reliable sources.”

“You thought? What business had you thinking? How often have you heard me say that the Beam wants proof behind every statement it prints – cold, hard proof; not what somebody thinks. Overton, you’re done here. I’m sorry for you – but as I said just now you know the rule about carelessness. You can’t stay in this shop another hour. Here” – he scribbled a line on a scrap of paper – “hand this to the cashier on your way out. It’s an order for what salary is coming to you. And now please get your hat and coat and leave here and don’t you ever come back.”

There was final judgment in the way he said it. He had been judge, jury and accuser before; now his mien was that of the executioner performing a disagreeable but necessary task conscientiously – and relentlessly. The condemned one bowed his abashed head as though realizing the futility of any appeal, any plea in extenuation or any plea for pardon. Without another word he turned away, a pitiable shrunken little figure of failure and regret and humiliation, and went back to the corner whence he had emerged. Half a minute later, with his hat on his head and his coat on his back, he reappeared and with his eyes fixed on the floor in front of him passed out solitary and aloof in his disgrace.

Mr. Crisp turned to Mr. Gillespie.

“Well, sir,” he said, “that job is done – and to your satisfaction, too, I trust.”

Mr. Gillespie was a kindly enough man. In his own business he was not given to maintaining discipline so mercilessly as this. The thing he had just seen gave him almost a guilty feeling. In a sudden rush of compassion he forgot the principal object that had brought him hither.

“I’ve got to go – just remembered an important engagement,” he said. “I’ll probably be back later in the day.”

And out he hurried to overtake this man Overton – or whatever the little fellow’s name might be. He caught up with him at the elevator. Together in an awkward little silence they descended to the street floor.

“Say, listen here,” blurted out Mr. Gillespie when they had stepped out of the car – “say now, that was pretty rough on you. I realize that you didn’t know me – that you had no malicious desire to hurt me in what you wrote – that you merely got the thing twisted round the wrong way. Really I suppose it’s the sort of thing that might happen any time. Newspapers have to fill up their columns somehow. I’m sorry about this – really I am. Don’t you suppose that if you waited here and I went back and had another talk with your city editor and told him that I wished he’d take you back that maybe – well, damn it, man, I’m supposed to be the aggrieved party to this transaction anyhow and he ought to listen to me if I put in a word for you!”

The discharged man shook his head.

“I’m much obliged to you, sir,” he answered miserably, “and I’m sure it’s very kind of you to volunteer to help me, especially under the circumstances, but really, sir, it’s no use. I’ve broken the strictest rule in this whole place and I’ve got to take the consequences. One slip-up, and out a man goes. It was just my luck that it happened to be me. No, sir, I’ll take my medicine and get out.”

“But say now,” pressed Mr. Gillespie, “you’re not exactly a young man. It might be sort of hard for you to get another job. If you should need help now to sort of tide you over while you’re looking round for something else to do——”

“Thank you for that too, sir,” said Overton. “But please don’t concern yourself about me. I’ll get along, I guess – I always have. And I don’t need any help, sir – honestly I don’t. Good day, sir.”

He shambled away toward the rear, heading presumably for the cashier’s department, and Mr. Gillespie, after watching his retreating figure for a moment, passed out into the street, filled with a sense of vague indefinable regret for things in general.

As for Overton, he bided where he had stopped in an elbow of the wall until Mr. Gillespie was safely gone. Then without visiting the cashier’s office he took a walk round the block, came back to the Beam building, rode upstairs to the third floor, silently and unobtrusively reinserted himself into the busy city room, passed behind the locker cabinets to a sort of alcove within hearing but out of sight of the others, and there hung his hat and coat on pegs and sat down at a cluttered desk and went to work as though nothing out of the ordinary had happened.

As a matter of fact, so far as Overton was concerned, nothing out of the ordinary had happened. Being fired by Crisp – publicly and ignominiously fired before all the city room and before irate complainants – was the principal part of his job. He was used to it. It happened to him at least once a fortnight, once a week sometimes, occasionally as often as twice a week. In the organism of The Daily Beam machine he was a humble but a useful cog, for he was the scapegoat, the vicarious sacrifice, the official whipping boy for the sins of others. a whipping boy at fifty – that was what Overton was.

Once upon a time he had been a reporter of indifferent sorts; but that had been so many years before that Overton hated to think back to the time of it. When his legs began to wear out – and his imagination – he had been put on the exchange desk reading papers for reprint stuff; odd times he compiled clippings for the “morgue,” where the published doings and sayings of notables were kept in envelopes filed and indexed, and once in a while he subbed for the frowsy ex-copy reader who under the pen name of Beth Blair wrote the column called Balm to the Lovelorn. When Wendover bought the old and moribund Evening Star and renamed it the Beam and gave it a new and a yellow life, Overton came as a legacy from the old ownership along with the hacked and battered office equipment and the green shades on the dangling electric globes and the rest of the fixtures.

It was Crisp who saw in Overton possibilities for the role of scapegoat and developed him in the part. The little man had a sort of cheap histrionic talent. Cast in another mold of environment he might have made a fair actor. Crisp discerned this and worked to bring it out in him – and succeeded amply well. Physically Overton was qualified from the beginning; he looked – well, so hang-doggish. With mighty little prompting he learned to simulate to the very life the guilty aspect of a self-confessed, yet well-intentioned incompetent; and he learned to take his cues from Crisp, as Crisp in turn took his from those indignant persons who came to protest against this or that published thing. So well did he learn that his play-acting very often served a double purpose. Primarily it was designed to give Crisp a chance to prove the seeming determination of the Beam to be strictly accurate and to punish by instant and ignominious dismissal any member of the staff who might unintentionally break the rule. Secondarily Overton’s very mien of sorrowful resignation to his make-believe fate, his dumb and stricken acceptance of dire consequences more often than not so quickened the sympathies of the injured party that the latter – as witness the case of the forgiving Mr. Gillespie – forgot or forewent his original intention of suing the paper for damages.

Considering all things, it might be said that Overton earned his salary, which was thirty dollars a week; just what it had been for long years. He sat at the exchange desk using shears and paste pot and a leaky fountain pen, and on the pay roll was carried as exchange editor, but really, as has been stated, his job was to be fired as frequently as Crisp’s system of office policy dictated that somebody should be fired before witnesses. To Overton it made no difference who had turned in the offending story or who had telephoned it in or who had rewritten it. His task was to assume sponsorship for the slip-up, to be dismissed with harsh words, to get his hat and coat, to leave the office, to walk round the block – and come back again. The city room had its nickname for him. With a sort of half-pitying contempt it called him The Worm.

He had no friends in the office, unless Flynn, head of the copy desk, might be called his friend. So far as anyone knew he had no friends outside the office; nor any kith or kin. It was vaguely understood that he lived in a lodging house somewhere up on Third Avenue and that he took his meals in mean restaurants – places where scrap meat masqueraded as Irish stew and chopped-up gristle as Hungarian goulash. If he drank he drank alone; certainly no one had ever seen him buy a drink for another or accept a drink which another bought. If he had ever had a romance in his life, or a sweetheart or a wife or a child or a tragedy, nobody knew about it and nobody cared. Anyhow, he did not look to be the sort of person who would have a romance, but only the sort who would have loneliness and hopelessness for a portion through all the days of this life. From eight in the morning until four in the afternoon he sat at his desk in the alcove behind the lockers, at noontime eating his luncheon out of a paper parcel and emerging only on those occasions when Crisp summoned him forth to play his appointed character. At four he went away; at eight next morning he returned; that, so far as the staff of the Beam kenned it, was the sum total of his existence. Once in a great while, when the tides of copy moved slackly, Flynn would invade his refuge to sit for a few minutes on the edge of Overton’s cluttered desk and exchange commonplaces with the little man. It always was commonplaces that they exchanged; never confidences. Even so, Flynn saw more of him than any other man in the shop. He was not a mystery, because to be a mystery, a man must rouse the interest or the curiosity of his fellows; must awaken on their part a desire to understand the reasons underlying his aloofness or his isolation, as the case may be. This colorless, solitary creature had not even the elements within him or about him to quicken interest. The office accepted him for what he was – its official scapegoat – and called him by that singularly cruel and singularly appropriate title of The Worm.

As for Crisp, it was characteristic of the man that he never saw in Overton a figure to rouse one’s sympathy or one’s compassion, which is the next of kin to sympathy. It probably never occurred to him that the role he had drilled Overton to play so excellently well was a role calculated to undermine a man’s sense of self-respect. Or if it did occur to him ever he gave the thought no consideration. For Crisp, with all his flair for sensationalism, was a good city editor, which is another way of saying he worshiped the great brazen god Results. He was all for action; subsequent reactions, concerned him not a whit. He rarely pressed a reporter to reveal how the reporter had got a difficult story. He was too deeply gratified if only the reporter had got it to inquire regarding the deceit, the evasion, the twisting about of facts or the subterfuge that might have been practiced. This did not imply delicacy on Crisp’s part, nor was it indifference to details. It was in the day’s work, that was all. To him journalistic ends amply justified journalistic means.

Outside the shop Crisp may have been a reasonably human and a reasonably kindly being – probably he was. Inside he was a bloodhound; the picked leader of a trained and greedy pack. Chronicles of misery or misfortune or disgrace were things to be caught at and elaborated and spread-eagled in print. Privately the victims might have his personal condolences; professionally they constituted merely so much good live copy, and as such were to be exploited. Loss of life in a steamship disaster or a tenement-house fire or a railroad wreck was to be desired; the greater the loss of life the bigger the story. After he locked his desk and went away he might have such thought for the dead and the maimed as any average man would have. But before that his solicitude was all aimed at gathering up and weaving into the printed tale every morbid charnel-house detail of horror and suffering which would twist at the heartstrings of the reader and make the reader buy later editions.

Crisp may never have heard of the editor who said he was not too good to print anything which the Almighty permitted to happen, but just the same that was his creed. City editors – some of them – get to be like that; just as reporters, trained to read hidden motives and secret causes under the vanities and the pretensions and the seeming disinterestednesses of those with whom in the discharge of their duty they have daily to deal, become in time the most cynical, the most suspicious, the most skeptical of modern breeds. There’s a nigger in every woodpile – find said nigger! That briefly is your average seasoned reporter’s viewpoint of the affairs of life as they relate to the news.

Crisp had another characteristic common among his kind, but in his case developed to a degree which would have made him a marked man any place except in a newspaper shop – the one place where the type is somewhat relevant. He thought in headlines and he frequently spoke in headlines. Tell him a man’s name and promptly – and mechanically – his fingers began checking off the letters of that man’s name as he counted up and balanced off to see whether the name would fit into the top deck of a headline built of this size type or that size type. For obvious reasons he was drawn instinctively to individuals with short names and instinctively disliked individuals with long names. To him a suicide agreement between two or more persons was a Pact always, just as an official investigation was a Probe and a country-wide search for someone was a Dragnet and an anarchist was a Red and a child of a few years was either a Tiny Tot or a plain Tot, depending upon the caption he mentally set about constructing in the same instant that the subject was mentioned in his hearing. One of the headquarters men would get him on the telephone to report, let us say, that a six-year-old tenement dweller crossing a street had been killed by a trolley car under particularly distressing circumstances.

“Forbes,” he would call out to a rewrite man, “take this story from Doheny, will you? Tiny Tot With Penny Clutched in Chubby Hand Dies ’Neath Tram Before Mother’s Eyes! Write about six sticks of it.”

You see, before ever the tale of the tragedy had been detailed by the outside leg man to the inside desk man, Crisp would have framed in his mind a suitable heading.

Similarly if you stated to him that a young woman defendant was on the witness stand up at the Criminal Courts Building undergoing a searching cross-examination at the hands of the prosecutor, and thanks be to the latter’s persistent proddings making significant admissions, he simultaneously would be translating the intelligence inside his brain to something after this fashion: Accused Girl, on Rack, Bares All. Probably in his sleep he dreamed headlines; certainly he lived with them by day.

This in some share was due to his training. He had been a copy reader before he had become a city editor; but more it was due to the fact that he sucked up and absorbed and made part and parcel of himself whatsoever pertained to the trade he followed. To the job he held, the work he did and the paper he served he gave a whole-souled, single-purposed devotion, which in a more lucrative field than this might have made a rich man of him. The Beam was at once his child and his father. Its twisted ideals, its dubious moralities, its shrieking fakeries, its hysterical crusadings, its frequent service in the public good, its blatant assumption of pure motives, its uncoverings of secret corruptions, its deliberate misrepresentations of causes and individuals, its vain boast in and its actual worthy performances might offer to others a paradoxical mixture of commingled great faults and great virtues, but to old Ben Alibi, sitting there coining imaginary headlines in his head and shaping the news to suit his mood, they were all virtues.

Why not? He had been a main factor in modeling the Beam into what it was, and mortal man rarely quarrels with his own pet creations. In his service to this mud-footed, brass-mouthed idol of his he spared neither himself nor any other. Wherefore it was quite natural that Crisp should take no heed of little Overton’s private feelings touching on the sorry contribution which Overton made to the Beam’s well-being. To Crisp, Overton merely was a cog in the machine and to be treated as a cog.

Accepting such treatment, Overton cogged along, at intervals coming forth from his hiding place like a timorous mouse from behind a wainscoting, to be scolded for another’s fault and fired for another’s transgression and then to take his regular walk round the block and return to potter over exchanges while waiting the occasion of his next public appearance. The staff lost count of the number of times its members had witnessed the byplay at Crisp’s desk.

No doubt Overton lost count – if indeed he ever tried to keep one – of the number of times he went through it.

But there is an old saying to the effect that the worm will turn. Probably in the instance of the original worm the turning there of occasioned all the more surprise among the other worms present because of its very unexpectedness; probably if the truth were known the impulse for revolt had been stirring and stewing in that wormly soul all unsuspected for a long time before it was made manifest in the astounding fact of acrobatism. No doubt it is hard enough to fathom the phenomena of these reactions in worms; and in humans even harder by reason of a human’s superior facilities for concealing the secretly working inner emotions.

As regards Overton, it already has been stated that he had somewhat of the acting instinct, which means the instinct for dissembling. Just precisely when his submerged sense of self-respect, his half-drowned, half-dead manhood began to grow sick of the hateful thing he did to earn his daily bread is past knowing and past guessing at even. It must have been through months, possibly it was through years, that the spirit of rebellion was quickening within him, never by word or deed or look from him betraying itself, yet constantly strengthening and fortifying itself upon the bitter mental food it fed on, against the coming of the hour when the worm, turning, would cease forever thereafter to be a worm and would rise to another plane – a plane as far remote from its former estate and estimation as John Hancock is from Judas Iscariot.

•     •     •     •     •

One blistering hot day about midday there came to the Beam office a fluttered young woman with a grievance. Having been brought to Crisp, she stated it. It seemed she was a professional entertainer; she did turns at Sigmund Goldflap’s all-night place uptown. Her name – or anyhow the name she gave Crisp – was Lotta Desmond. Two nights before one of the other girls in Sig Goldflap’s troupe had killed herself after a quarrel with one now referred to by this Lotta Desmond as the other girl’s “jumpman friend.” And the Beam had printed a picture of Lotta Desmond with the other girl’s name under it, whereat Lotta had suffered deep humiliation. She couldn’t understand why this awful mistake had been made. She’d always liked to read the Beam – it was her favorite evening paper. She had never been mixed up in any scandals herself. She was a lady all over, if she did say it herself. She felt as if she could not hold up her head again. People who knew her, seeing her picture in the paper, would naturally think she was the one who had killed herself. And something would have to be done right away to put her right with people. Stating her case, she raised her voice shrilly as persons in her walk of life are apt to do under stress of emotion. She repeated the main points of her indictment over and over again, each time using the same words, as might also have been expected of her, considering what – plainly – Lotta Desmond was. Before she was through she was weeping noisily and – one might say – vulgarly.

The city room listened to the vehement outburst, grinning collectively to itself. The city room felt it knew good and well what had happened. It had happened before. To dress up the story of the suicide, Crisp had demanded a photograph. Accordingly the reporter assigned to the job had brought in a photograph. There had been difficulties in the way of fulfillment of Crisp’s order, and the reporter had taken a chance – so the city room, harkening, figured the thing out. Possibly the reporter had abstracted a photograph from a grouped presentment of Goldflap’s talent. In such case one might assume he – being naturally hurried – had selected a likeness of the wrong girl. Possibly he had induced a Tenderloin photographer to let him have a photograph, in which event the photographer might have made the mistake with the coincidental result that a picture of this Lotta Desmond had been bestowed instead of the picture of her dead sister performer. Anyhow the main point with the reporter had been to get a photograph – some photograph, somehow. Dealing with individuals of no social or financial importance the Beam quite often made these little mistakes.

As he sat hearing Lotta Desmond’s indignant recital, Crisp had been studying her. It was easy to appraise her. It was easy to assign her her proper niche in the scheme of existence. She had a young body and an old face. You might call her a youthful hag. Her hair was a straw yellow – darker, though, at the roots where the dye had been carelessly laid on. Her frock was a monstrosity of cheap gaudiness. It combined certain of the primary tints – green, blue, brick-dust red; it might have borrowed its color scheme from a map in an atlas. The jewelry she wore would have been worth thousands if it had been genuine. She had about the mentality of a guinea pig – just about. She should be easy – the customary artifice should amply suffice to cajole her out of any idea she might have lurking in that two-cent brain of hers touching on a claim for cash damages for injury to reputation and peace of mind. So he worked the office trick – he questioned Flynn, as per the regular routine, and he sent a boy to summon Overton before him.

Up to a certain point the game of subterfuge was played through as it had been played many a time before. Overton, faithful and letter-perfect in his part of the penitent criminal, took cue from Crisp’s snapped questions and made – or rather began to make – the expected answers. It was not in the book for him to be allowed ever to complete a sentence; he must be caught up sharply with his admissions half-framed and incomplete. It was the effect of the confessed delinquent’s demeanor that Crisp desired to produce rather than any definite statements which might be remembered and used afterward in the event of punitive proceedings legally forwarded.

In the midst of the dialogue Overton raised his whitish head and looked full into the face of her for whom the scene had been devised. If he had read compassion for his seeming plight in her shallow pale eyes it was more than any other person there read in them. To the rest she seemed still what she had been from the moment of her appearance – a fit subject for Crisp’s favorite scheme of deception; a young person indignant, yet somewhat pleased at her elevation into prominence before so many strange men; rather embarrassed, and sure before many ticks of time had passed to be suitably placated by the prospect that on her account a man had been discharged from service and sent adrift. It is not probable either that she reminded him of anybody that he had ever known – of anybody, say, that he might have cared for once upon a time. Past doubt what happened was that regardless of contributory causes or the lack of them this hour chanced merely to be the particular hour of Overton’s declaration of independence. It was the hour ordained for his private honor to come forth and walk abroad among men, and since a private honor was a thing which none there had ever credited him with owning, what followed now was all the more unexpected by the audience.

“Stop it, Crisp!” broke in Overton in a voice none there had ever heard him use. “Stop this damn mummery!”

The strangest part was that Crisp did stop – stopped with his eyes goggling in amazement and his lower jaw ajar on a half-finished sentence. He had such a look on his face as a bulldog might have in the event of a sudden counterattack by a bunny rabbit. Overton spoke to the girl.

“Young lady,” he said, “this whole thing was got up and staged to fool you – but it ends right here. I never heard of you before and I never heard of your photograph before and I had nothing to do with the printing of it either. But if I’m any judge of such things – and God knows I should be, considering what I know about this shop – you’ve got a claim for damages against this newspaper and I advise you to get out of here as quickly as you can and go find yourself a lawyer and put your case in his hands. You heard this man fire me just now. Well, he’s fired me fifty times before now, but it didn’t take because it wasn’t meant to. But now it does take, because I’m firing myself here and now.”

He swung back on Crisp.

“Listen!” he ordered, and his words came from him straight and hard like bullets from a machine gun. “They call me The Worm round this shop. And that’s what I have been and that’s what I am – a worm. But you’ve heard, I guess, that a worm will turn, and that’s what I’ve done – I’ve turned. And if you open your mouth to me again I’ll smash you in it – you white-livered yellow cur dog!”

He set his back to Cris and the girl and walked away. He nodded a farewell to Flynn as he passed the copy desk, went behind the lockers, came out again with his hat on his head and his coat on his arm; and in the shocked hush which possessed the room he walked out, head erect and shoulders up, for once in his life a figure of force and dignity. The girl followed – a new-formed resolution plainly quickening her to a brisk gait. The city room watched her until her skimpy skirts flipped out the door, then with one accord all present looked toward Crisp.

“The worm turns, eh?” he said casually, half to himself, half to those within hearing. “Well, Flynn, I guess we’ll have to find a likely candidate somewhere for the vacancy that’s just occurred and break him in.”

He checked off sundry letters on the fingers of one hand, repeating the letters aloud as he did so: “W-o-r-m T-u-r-n-s.”

And the city room knew that its chief was translating an experience into a headline – a headline which must go to waste.

The Saturday Evening Post, 08 May 1920

Snake Doctor

~

In the North they call them Devil’s darning needles. But in the South they are snake doctors, and for a reason. These harmless and decorative dragonflies with their slim, arrow-like bodies, their quick darting flight and their filmy wings, as though the arrows had been flocked with bits of drawn lace, are clothed down there with a curious fetish. When a cotton-mouth is sick – and if his feelings match his disposition he must be sick most of the time – the snake doctor comes hurrying to him with the medication for what ails him. Perhaps seventy-five or a hundred years ago some slave newly in from Africa saw a cotton-mouth moccasin sunning its flat, heart-shaped head on top of the yellow creek water, and along the creek came flashing one of these swift creatures seeking a perch upon which to leave its eggs, and the black man saw it suddenly check and hover and stand at poise in the air an inch above the snake’s still head, and from that figured this strange bug was a voodoo bug, ministering to the ailing reptile. In such a matter any man’s theory is as good as the next one’s. The provable thing is that a good many of the whites and more than a good many of the Negroes believe in the fable for a fact; and nearly all of them, regardless of color, know the libeled insect as snake doctor.

Now, one of the men I have intent to write about here was known as Snake Doctor, too; and for this, also, there were reasons. To begin with, he was very long and thin, a mere rack of bones held together under the casing of a taut yellow skin; and he had popped, staring eyes, and was amazingly fast in his bodily movements. See him slipping through the willows, so furtive and quick and diffident, with his inadequately small head, his sloped shoulders, his erratic side-steppings this way or that. And inevitably you were reminded thereby of his namesake. To top the analogy, he lived right among the moccasins, taking no harm from them and having no fear of them, seemingly .

Along Cashier Creek, where they throve in a wicked abundance, was his regular ranging ground. His cabin stood in the bottoms near a place notorious for its snakes. They were his friends, so to speak. He caught them and with his bare hands he handled them as a butcher might handle links of sausage. He sold them, once in a while, to naturalists or showmen or zoölogical collectors; there was a taxidermist in Memphis who was an occasional customer of his. In the season he rendered down their soft fat and drew it off in bottles and retailed it; snake oil being held a sovereign remedy for rheumatism.

By such traffickings he was locally reputed to have made large sums of money. But he rarely spent any of this money; so he went by the name of miser, also. Well, in a way of speaking, he was a miser: zealously he coveted what he got and kept it hidden away in the chinking of his log shack. But he was nowhere near so well-off as the community gave him credit for being. The snake business is a confined and an uncertain business and restricted, moreover, to its special markets. A dealer’s stock in trade may be plentiful, as in this case, but his patrons must be sought. To he exact, Snake Doctor had ninety-seven dollars in his cache.

But swearing to the truth of this on a stack of Bibles a mile high wouldn’t have made the people in the Cashier Creek country have it so. Popular opinion insisted on multiplying his means and than adding noughts. Nor could you, by any argument, have won over his neighbors, white or black, to a fair estimate of the man’s real self, which was that here merely was a poor, shy, lonely eccentric touched in the head by hot suns and perhaps by spells of recurrent swamp fevers.

They had contempt for him, but mixed in with the contempt was fear. To them he was to be shunned as one having commerce and familiar footing with the most loathly and the most hated of all the creatures that crawl. There was a solitary exception to the current rule of prejudice; a single individual among them who had a human compassion for him and a measure of understanding and right appraisal of him. This individual, curiously enough, was a woman. She was a minority of one. We’ll come to her presently. The rest had forgotten his proper name or else had never heard it. By their majority voice he was Ole Snake Doctor. They knew he was familiar with the ways of the cotton-mouth; they half believed he spoke its language.

In this particular region, ordinary folks believed many things that weren’t so. Superstition, sprouting out of ignorance, had twisted honest nature into a myriad of perverted and detractive shapes. The innocent little blue-streaked lizard was a “scorpyun” and its sting killed. A porous white stone found in the bellies of rutting deer was the only known cure for a mad dog’s bite; clap it on the wound and it clung fast like a leech and sucked the poison out. You never saw many jay-birds in the woods between dinner time and dusk on a Friday because then nearly all the jay-birds had gone below to tell the news of a malicious world to their master, the Devil. You rarely could hit a rain crow with a rifle bullet because this slim, brown, nervous bird enjoyed the special protection of old Nick. If a snapping-turtle closed his jaws down on your flesh he wouldn’t let go till it thundered. A breath of warm air blowing across your path on a cool night in the woods meant a “witch-hag” had passed that way.

Or take snakes: the Prophet of Old put the curse on them forever after when in his story of the Garden he typified evil as a serpent; mankind has been enlarging the slander ever since. Moreover, in these parts, Caucasian ingenuity as regards snakes and their ways had overlaid a deep embroidery of ill repute upon an already rich background of African folklore. There was the hoop snake, which is mischievous and very deadly, and wears a deadly horn in its head, and there was the joint snake, which is a freak: both fabulous but both accepted as verities. All well-meaning snakes lay under the scandalous ban. Milk snakes, garter snakes, chicken snakes, puff snakes, blue racers and coachwhips were to be destroyed on sight; for their licking, forked tongues were “stingers” and dripped venom. If bitten by any snake, your hope was first to drink all the raw whiskey you could get hold of. Or if within ten minutes after being bitten, you clamped upon the wound the still-quivering halves of a young chicken which, while alive, had been split open with a hatchet or a knife, there yet was a chance for you. Lacking either of these cures or both of them, you must expire in torment. The bitten part would swell enormously; the poison, spreading and magnifying in your blood, would rack you with hideous pains; then swiftly it would reach your heart and you were gone.

Every sort of snake was tricky and guileful, but the moccasin of the low grounds the most so of all. Kill a moccasin and spare its mate, and the mate would track you for miles, set on vengeance. It was the habit of the moccasin when meat was scarce to lie beneath the yonkerpads – pond lilies, a Northerner would call them – with its head shoved up among the broad green leaves and its mouth stretched wide and gaping, a living lure for such luckless birds and bees as mistook the snare of the parted jaws with their white linings for a half-opened lily bud.

It was in accord with a quite natural law that the moccasin should he singled out for these special calumnies. Of the four venomous snakes of Temperate North America he is the least personable in looks and behavior. He lacks the grace of his upland cousin, the copperhead, and he lacks the chivalry of his more distant kinsman, the rattler, which gives the enemy due warning before it strikes. He has none of the slimness of form nor patterned beauty of that streak of fanged lightning which lives in the palmetto scrubs, the coral snake. He is mournfully colored and miserably shaped. The tones of dull creek mud and of stale creek slime mingle in his scrofulous mottlings. There is leprosy in the pale foxings of his lips, and dropsy in his bloat amidships. Only in the eyes of the taxidermist does he redeem himself for these manifold shortcomings. Being without bright tints to fade in the mounting, his stuffed skin needs no special varnishing to make it seem authentic. It is a poor compliment, perhaps, but his only one. On all other counts and for all other qualities he is copiously defamed and folks generally are prone to believe the worst of him.

Japhet Morner did, for one. For him, swamp water a-thrive with typhoid germs, or rancid corn pones in which the active seeds of pellagra lived, or mosquitoes carrying malaria and chancre in their bills, conveyed no sense of peril. The mosquitoes were to be endured, the water was to be drunk, and biliousness was the common lot of man, anyway. At least, in this neck of the woods it was. But snakes, now, were different; any snake and all snakes whatsoever. He accepted for truth all the hard things that might be said of a snake. Certain other things he likewise believed, namely, that first, his nearest neighbor, Snake Doctor, held unwholesome communion with the cotton-mouths; that second, Snake Doctor had a treasure in money hid away in his shack – on this point he was very sure; and that third, the same Snake Doctor was entirely too fond of his, Japhet’s, wife, Kizzie Morner, and she of him.

So it would appear he had a triplet of reasons for holding the other in disfavor – envy of him for his stored wealth, a gnawing suspicion from seeing in him a potential philanderer, and finally, that emotion of fearsome distrust bred out of stupidity and credulity which his kind were likely to have for any fellowman in different likeness from the run of them. That the shambling, soft-brained Snake Doctor was as sexless as a dirt clod would have been apparent to any straight-seeeing observer; and it should have been as plainly visible even to this husband of hers that Kizzie Morner was a good woman and an honest one. But the jaundiced eye sees everything as yellow, and yellow is the color for jealousy, too, and it suited Japhet Morner’s mood to brew jealousy in his mind. Brewing it steadily there was strengthening his will for the putting through of a private project which for a long time he had been conning over in his thoughts. The issue came to a head on a certain day.

It was a day in that dreary season of the year when the birds have quit singing in the daytime and the locusts have started. Summer had sagged as though from the sheer exhaustion of its own wasted fervor. The lowland woods had lost that poisonous green sprightliness which came to them in early April and lasted until the August hot spell set in. Even the weeds, which in the bottoms grew rank and high and close-set, almost, as canes in a canebreak, were wilted and weary looking. The sun had come up that morning behind clouds. In the middle of the forenoon the clouds still banked together to hide the heavens, but the heat seemed intensified and pressed the unstirring air close down to the burnt earth. As Japhet Morner came out of the timber into the famished clearing behind his house, the sweat dripped from him and he panted in the close, still humidity. His two dogs trailed him, their tongues lolling. One of them brushed against his leg. He hauled off and fetched the dog a sound kick in the ribs. He was not in a happy humor.

At sun-up, after a breakfast of cold scraps left from the night before, he had gone down to Cashier Creek to get a bait of sunfish. If he were lucky he might catch a catfish for his string. He had no luck, though. The creek was shrunken; it was lower than he ever remembered seeing it. The drought had sucked up its strength. At the shallows it was no more than a thin, sluggish trickle. In deeper places there scarcely was current enough to keep twigs and dropped leaves moving on the unrippled coffee-colored surface.

Japhet fished and fished and was rewarded with no nibbles whatsoever; seemingly, even the littlest fishes were too languid to bite at the worms he dangled for them in likely spots. He came downstream to the Big Hole, so called, where, an eighth of a mile up from Snake Doctor’s shanty, the creek widened to thrice its usual breadth. Here a tight wedge of driftwood blocked the waters. Each successive freshet added flotsam to the rude dam – lost cross-ties, uprooted trees, corn stalks, chips, dead weeds, sticks. Ordinarily this lesser riffle would cover the pool so thickly that, with the top dressing of cream-colored foam, there was created the simulation of a solid footing; a stranger might have been pardoned for believing he could walk across and keep dryshod. But now all here was clear of gently eddying débris. The consumed stream, instead of slapping against the spanning driftage, ran under it with an oozy, guzzling sound. Directly in the middle there was a busy little whirlpool, funnelling downward.

On one of the lowermost of the bared logs a cotton-mouth was twisted up, taking his ease in the congenial fever warmth. He was a big fat one – fully two feet long and as thick through his girth as a boy’s arm. From the bank edge above Japhet saw him and looked about for something to throw at him. In a section where gravel is rare and all rock formations are buried a hundred feet down under the silt, the verb “to stone” is neither used nor known. Your weapon invariably is a “chunk” and with it – a hard clod or a lump of wood or whatever it is – you “chunk” away at your target. The man found a sizable missile, a heavy, half-rotted sycamore bough, and he snapped it off to suitable length and flung it, twirling, at the motionless mark. His aim was good. The stricken snake flapped out of coil and dragged its broken loops from sight into an interlacing of naked limbs on the farther side of its log. The stick bounced hard and splashed in the pool. Japhet saw how then it swirled around and around and then, briskly, was sucked beneath the jam. With a quickened curiosity he moved downstream a rod or two and waited. Although the jam was now, so to speak, a suspension bridge, and in places stood inches clear of the water, the stick did not emerge into view below it. No drift showed there, either; the creek for a space flowed clear of rubbish. Evidently, objects caught in that small whirlpool above were carried in and under to lodge and be held fast by some submerged trap-work of soaked and sunken limbs. Probably they would stay there for months, perhaps stay there always. Turning the matter of the phenomenon over in his mind, he flung away his bait can, spun his fishing cane so that the line wrapped around it, and made off through the woods for his home, nearly a mile away. The two dogs tracked along at his heels. Coming out of the woods one of them made the mistake of nudging him.

Having disciplined the scrooging dog with his boot toe he slouched out into the six-acre “dead’nin’.” His puny patch of corn, for lack of the hoe, was smothering in weeds. In bare spots where the thin soil was washed so close down to the underlying clay-pan that here not even weeds would sprout, the crawfish had pushed up their conical watch towers of dried mud. Tall ash boles, girdled and dead, threw foreshortened shadows across the clearing – shadows such as gallows trees might cast. His house, of two rooms and built of unpainted up-and-down planking, squatted in the inadequate shade of a stunted chinaberry tree. A well was at one corner. There was no flower bed, no truck patch, no fencing. Across the open space, with the heat waves dancing before him, the outlines of the house seemed to waver and twist like an object seen through smoke. It stood a foot from the earth on log props. Because of seepage there were no cellars in this neighborhood. The inevitable dogs lived under the houses and bred their fleas there, and the hogs, too, if so be a house owner had any hogs.

It was nearly noon now. His wife, in a skimpy blue frock open at the throat, was cooking the midday meal, the principal meal of the three. He came up to the door and she, looking up from the cook stove where she was turning the strips of sizzling fat meat in the skillet, saw the look on his face. Her mouth twitched apprehensively. By the signs she knew when he was in one of his tantrums.

“Ketch anything, Jafe?” she asked, nervously.

“Ketch anything this weather? – whut’d you expect I’d ketch?” From his voice it might be figured that, vicariously, he blamed her for the failure of his expedition.

He hunkered down on the doorstep, his fishing pole still in his hands.

“That pore ol Mist’ Rives come by here a spell ago mighty nigh shook to pieces with a chill,” she said, after a bit.

“Oh, he come by, did he?” His tone, purposely, was disarming. “Well, did he come in?”

“Jes’ fur a minute.”

“Jes’ fur a minute, heh? And whut did he want?”

“He wanted could I give him somethin’ fur his ailmint. He jes’ about could drag one sorry foot before the other – barely could make it up here from his place. I reckon he must be down in bed with the fever by now; I could tell by the touch it was risin’ in him when he left here and started back home ag’in. It’ll be mighty pitiful, him down flat of his back and nobody there to do nothin’ fur his comfort. I give him a dos’t out of our Butler’s Ager Drops. I would ’a’ give him a little smidgin’ of licker only – only——” She left the sentence unfinished. “That pore shackly Mist’ Rives, he—— Oh, please don’t, Jafe!”

Turning, he had cut viciously at her with the long cane. She shrank back as it whipped through the air, and took the lashing stroke on her forearm, thrown up to fend off the blow.

“Mist’ Rives! Mist’ Rives!” He mimicked her, furiously. “How many times I got to tell you that there old hoodoo’s name is Snake Doctor? Him that’d skin a louse fur its hide and taller and you callin’ him ‘Mist’ Rives’! You’ll be callin’ him ‘Honey’ and ‘Sugar’ next without I learn you better. Pet names, huh? Well, I aim to learn you.”

She flinched at the threat, rubbing the welt on her skin; but he made no effort to strike her again. He sat glowering, saying nothing at all as she made hurry to dish up the food and put it before him; she hoped the weight of victuals in his stomach might dull the edge of his temper. For her part, she had the wisdom to keep silent, too. She ate on her feet, serving him between bites and sups, as was the rule in this household.

After dinner he stretched himself on the floor of the inner room. But he did not sleep. He was busy with his thoughts. One thing he had seen that day, and another thing he had heard – he was adding them together, as the first sum in a squalid equation. She drew a cane-bottom chair outdoors and sat under the chinaberry tree, fanning herself and “dipping” snuff with a peach twig which she scoured back and forth on her gums. After a little while she was driven into the kitchen. It began to rain in sharp, violent showers. The rain made the house inside no cooler; merely changed it from a bake-oven to a putrid steambox.

It was getting along toward four o’clock before Japhet emerged from the front room. He drew on his heavy knee-length boots, which he had removed before lying down, and laced them up. This done, he spoke to her for the first time since noon.

“Where’s that there vi’l of licker?” he said. “Fetch it here to me.”

They kept a small store of whiskey by them – all in that district did the same – for chills and possible snake bites. She brought him a pint flask nearly full and he shoved it into his hip pocket. Then immediately, as though moved by a fresh idea, he hauled it out again and put it down on the kitchen table.

“Come to think about it,” he said, “I won’t be needin’ to tote no sperrits along with me where I’m goin’. Cotton-mouths is all down in the slashes or else along the creek, and where I’ll be all this evenin’ is up on Bailey’s Ridge in the high ground.”

He was not given to favoring her with explanations of his motives or accounts of his movements. This departure from fixed habit emboldened his wife to put a question.

“Fixin’ to go shootin’, Jafe?” she asked, timidly.

“I aim to gun me a chance of young squirrels ’twixt now and dusk time. I heard ’em barkin’ all ’round me this mornin’. Ef they’re that plenty in the low ground they’ll be out thicker’n hops after the mulberries and the young hick’ry nuts up Bailey’s Ridge.”

He took up his single-shot rifle where it stood in a corner, and from an opened box on a shelf scooped a handful of brass shells. Then he went outside and tied up both his dogs. One was a hound, good for hunting rabbits. It was proper that he should be left behind. But the smaller dog, a black mongrel, was a trained squirrel dog. As his wife stood in the doorway, Japhet read the dumb curiosity which her face expressed.

“With the leaves ez thick ez the way they air, still huntin’ is best this time o’ year,” he explained. “So I won’t be needin’ Gyp. Don’t let neither ones of ’em gnaw hisself loose and follow after me. Set me up a snack of cold supper on a shelf. Likely I won’t git back till its plum’ nighttime – gunnin’ fur them squirrels is best jes’ before dark, and I’ll be away off yonder at the fur end of the Ridge, three miles from here, when I git ready to start back. ’Taint ez ef I wuz rangin’ in the low ground.”

He turned north through the struggling corn rows and in a minute was gone from her sight into the dripping woods. He kept on going north for nearly a mile until he came to where a wild red mulberry tree stood in a small natural opening. Some of the overripe fruit, blackened and shriveled, still clung to the boughs; and where there are mulberries in the summer woods, there squirrels almost certainly will likewise be. Very neatly he shot two young grays through their heads. Japhet was a master marksman. It was his only gentlemanly accomplishment. In all other respects he was just plain white trash, as one of his negro neighbors would have phrased it-behind Japhet’s back. But unsuspected by any who knew him, he had a quality of mind which is denied many of his class-an imagination. It was in excellent working order this day. He now was proving that it was.

He tied the brained squirrels together and swung them, tails downward, over a strap of his suspenders. If needed, they were to be evidence in his behalf – part of his alibi. Next he sat down under a tree a while. He sat out two brisk showers with the intervals between them. Then, getting up, he set off, keeping always to the deeper woodlands, in a swing which would bring him down Bailey’s Branch, now wasted to a succession of lazy dribbles, and along the skirts of Little Cypress Slash to the sunken flats edging Cashier Creek. The arc of his swing was wide. It took him all of two hours, traveling carefully and without haste through the steamy coverts, to reach the point he aimed for.

He came to halt, cautiously and well sheltered, behind the farthermost fringes of a little jungle of haw bushes where the diminishing woods frayed out in a sort of green peninsula fifty yards or so back of Snake Doctor’s cabin. This was his chosen destination, so here he squatted himself down in a nest of sodden leaves and grass to wait. It had begun to shower again, good and hard. He was drenched. No matter, though; he figured he would not have so very long to wait. As it turned out he didn’t.

There was no house dog to come nosing him out and barking an alarm. That Snake Doctor owned no dog would have marked him, in this part of the land, as a person totally different from his fellows, even had there been lacking other points of variance. What Snake Doctor did own was a mare, or the ruins of one. She was housed in a log crib a few rods behind the only slightly larger log cabin of her owner. Where he stooped, Japhet could hear her stirring restlessly in her stall. He might have seen her through the cracks between the logs of her shelter except for a brush fence which bounded the small weed-grown clearing.

His plan was simple enough and yet, as he saw it, fault-proof. Feeding time was at hand; soon Snake Doctor, ailing though he was, surely would be coming out from his cabin to bait the old rack-of-bones. Japhet counted on this. He’d get him then, first pop. He’d teach him what the costs were of colleaguing with another man’s lawful wedded wife, and the lesson would be the death of him. At a half crouch in his ambush, Japhet told himself that his motive was jealousy; that he was here as a white man and an injured husband for the satisfaction of his personal honor and in the defense of his threatened threshold. By a conscious effort of his will he kept in the background of his mind the other purpose that had brought him on this errand. It had to do with money – with Snake Doctor’s hoarded money.

The next step after the principal act would be to dispose of the body. That should be easy. He could carry the meager frame over his shoulder for a mile, if need be. And he wouldn’t have to carry it for a mile, either – only as far as the Big Hole; then lower the burden into the water and let it slip in under the log jam. The chunk he had killed the moccasin with had stayed under there; skinny old Snake Doctor would stay there, too. This done, he would come back here to the cabin and hunt out the hidden treasure. He figured it shouldn’t take him a great while to find it; he already had a sort of notion as to its whereabouts, a strong clue to start on. Having found it he would circle back up through the woods, reëntering his field from the upper or northern side, with two squirrels flapping his flank for proof that he had been hunting on Bailey’s Ridge. Suspicion never could touch him. Why should it?

He counted on the rain which was now falling to wipe out his tracks in Snake Doctor’s horse lot. Anyhow, it probably would be days or weeks before any one missed the hermit and made search for him; in that time the tracks would have vanished, rain or no. It was greatly in his favor that when Snake Doctor was from home, or supposed to be, folks religiously refrained from setting foot on the premises. They mightily feared the cotton-mouths with which the recluse was reputed to consort. There was even a story that Snake Doctor kept for a watchman in his house the granddaddy of all created cotton-mouths and set this monster on guard when he stirred abroad. So he needed no locks on his doors nor bar for his single window, the legend amply protecting his belongings in his absences.

Two minutes passed, fifteen, and Japhet was up on his knees, his rifle at poise, his eyes vigilant through the tops of the weeds which fringed the ambuscade. Something or other – something quick and furtive – stirred behind him. Startled, he turned his head, saw that the disturber was a belated catbird, and looked front again. In that brief space of time the victim had come into sight. Through the rain and the slackening daylight he could see, above the ragged top of the intervening brush fence, the white patch of Snake Doctor’s loppy old straw hat and below the hat the folds of a dark coat drawn over a pair of hunched narrow shoulders as the wearer of these garments came briskly toward the stable, which meant also toward him. At this distance he couldn’t miss.

Nor did he. At the shot, the figure jerked backward, then went over face forward. The killer rose upright, exultation contending with tautened nerves within him. He stole up to the fence, set a foot in the tangled brushwood with intent to climb it, and then, at what he saw, froze into a poised shape of terror, his eyes bulging, his mouth opened in a square shape, and his rifle dropping from his twitching fingers.

He had just killed Snake Doctor – killed him dead with a 32-caliber slug through the head. And here on his doorsill stood Snake Doctor, whole and sound, and staring at him! And now, Snake Doctor, dead by all rights and rules, yet living, was uttering a cry and starting out of the doorway toward him.

Japhet Morner had sucked in superstitions with his mother’s milk. He believed in “ha’nts,” in “witch-hags” and “sperrits,” believed in “conjures” and “charms” and ghosts and hoopsnakes; believed that those under the favor of infernal forces might be killed only with a bullet molded from virgin silver. And his mistake was, he had used lead out of a brass shell.

Power of motion returned to him. He threw himself backward and whirled and ran into the deep of the darkening woods, making whimpering, whining sounds like a thrashed puppy as he went.

Terror rode him into the dense timber. Exhaustion, dizziness, the feeling that he must get under the shelter of a sound roof, must have the protection of four walls about him, brought Japhet Morner out again; this was along toward midnight. The rain had ceased; the moon was trying to come forth. a short distance southeast of his place he struck a dirt road which would lead him there. Beyond the next bend he would be in sight of home.

Around the turn he saw coming toward him a joggling light – a lantern hung on a buggy or light wagon, he figured – and heard the creak of wheels turning in the muddied softness. Nameless horrors had made a fugitive of him; the fugitive instinct still possessed him. He flattened down in a clump of bushes to hide until the traveler passed.

Moving briskly, the rig was almost opposite him when, from the other direction – the same direction he had been following – came a call:

“Hello there! – who’s joggin’?”

“Whoa! Stiddy, boy!” Whoever was driving pulled up his horse, which had shied at the sudden hail. “Me – Davis Ware,” he answered back. “That you, Tip Bailey?”

“Yep, hoofin’ it out from the Junction, and tolerable tired, if anybody should ask you. What’s bringin’ you out this hour of night, Davis-some body sick?”

“Sick nothin’! There’s been hell poppin’ in these bottoms to-night.”

Behind the weed screen ten feet away the listener stiffened, his blood drumming in him. He knew the speakers, both neighbors of his, one of them a local leader. The foot passenger hurried up alongside the buggy; his face, inquisitive and alarmed, showed in the dim circlet of lantern light.

“What do you mean?”

“A killin’ – that’s what I mean. An abominable, cold-blooded killin’ ef ever there wuz one.”

“God! Who’s been killed?”

“I’m fixin’ to tell you, man. It happened jes’ shortly before dusk at ole Snake Doctor’s place.”

“Was it him was killed?”

“Gimme time, can’t you?” This Ware was one who must tell his tale his own way or not at all. “It seems like Snake Doctor’s been chillin’ lately. He wuz purty bad off to-day – I mean yistiddy. And so, right after supper time when the rain wuz lullin’ a little, Mizz Kizzie Morner she footed it down from her place to his’n, fetchin’ some physic with her and a plate of hot vittles fur him. It seems like she wuzn’t feared to go there. I’d ’a’ been, I’ll own up, but she wuzn’t. Well, purty soon after she got there it seems like he tried to git up out of his bed to go feed that old crow-bait sorrel nag of his’n. It had started in ag’in by then, pourin’ down hard, and so she made him stay where he wuz. And she put on his old hat and throwed his old coat round her to keep off the wust of the wet, and she started out of the back door to do the feedin’. And no more’n she’d got outside in the lot than a shot come from the aidge of the woods right over the fence and down she went with a bullet through her brains.”

“God’s sake! Dead?”

“No, not dead, but same ez dead. She barely wuz breathin’ here not ten minutes ago when I left her house. Old Doctor Bradshaw, he’s there with her now and he says it’s a miracle she’s lasted this long. Well, it seems like Snake Doctor jumped up at the shot and run out to see whut had happened and there she lay a-welterin’. And him – well, he’s been takin’ on like all possessed ever since. I wouldn’t ’a’ believed he could ’a’ had so much feelin’ in him ef I hadn’t seen him with my own eyes. It wuz him run for help, though – he did have sense enough left to do that. He found me in my tobacco patch and I dropped everything and took out fur there, and a bunch of us picked her up and toted her home on a wagon bed. She’s shot in the left side of the head just over the temple; the bullet went clean through and come out on the right side.”

“But who did it?”

“I’m comin’ to that. ’Twuz that low-flung husband of hers done it – that’s who. It seems like he must ’a’ followed her down to Snake Doctor’s and laid in wait fur her and felled her ez she come out. Gawd knows why onless ’twuz jes’ pure pizen meanness.”

“The murderin’ dog! They’re certain ’twas him, then?”

“Shore ez gun’s iron ’twuz him. Snake Doctor ketched a quick look at him over the fence ez he darted off. And right there they found his rifle where he’d dropped it before he whirl’t and run – fool thing fur him to do – and I seen his tracks myself, in the soft ground, goin’ and comin’, and where he must ’a’ stood when he fired. I seen ’em by lantern light after I got there – and fully half a dozen others did, too. There’s a long red streak on her arm where he must ’a’ been whuppin’ her durin’ the day.”

“Hangin’s a sight too good! Did they catch him?”

“No, but they will. Some thinks he’s made fur the slashes and hid out there-his tracks led off that way. There’ll be a line of men throwed all the way round Little Cypress before sun-up. They’re organizin’ the posse at the Morner place.”

“Sheriff got there yet?”

“No, but he’s due by daylight or sooner. They telephoned in from Gallup’s Mills to him and he’s already started fur here with his pack of dogs. The trail ought to lay good, ground bein’ damp the way it is. Ole Snake Doctor he’s carryin’ on and ravin’ round, sayin’ the Lord’s goin’ to strike the murderer down in his tracks. But I’m puttin’ my main dependence on them bloodhounds – on them first, and then mebbe on a good stout plow line and the limb of a tree. Oh, they’ll ketch him, and when they do I ’low to be there! I’m jes’ puttin’ out fur my place to roust out my oldest boy and fetch him back with me. There’s a good size crowd already.”

“Don’t let me hold you up any longer, then,” said the pedestrian, a deadly grimness in his tone. “I’m ready now – got a pistol here in my hip pocket. That poor thing! She always was a good-hearted, hard-workin’ woman and mightily put upon. As for Jafe Morner – well, if I should be so lucky as to be the one to jump him out of the sticks, I’m goin’ to shoot first and ask questions afterwards. I’ll be waitin’ there at Morner’s, Davis.”

He broke into a half run.

In the patchy moonlight which sifted through the shredding rain clouds Snake Doctor’s house made a black square against the lesser blackness of its background. To it, panting in his haste, came the assassin, running. He feared the place – to the bottom of his desperate soul he feared it – but a fear yet greater was driving him hither. Previously it has been stated that this man had a powerful imagination. To a literate person it might have been a gift. to him, in this emergency, it was a curse. It set his sore and smitten nerves on end; still, it honed his wits to a sharper edge.

What he overheard back there on the dirt road had remodeled his formless flight into a shaped intent. Now he had to deal, not with phantoms and haunting apparitions, but with tangible dangers; dangers not less frightful than those others perhaps, but to be coped with and – if his luck held – outwitted by physical devices. There was no remorse in him. After all, he fairly well was suited by the outcome of his mistake; getting safely away was what concerned him. In his present plight, weaponless, without a cent in his pocket, with the countryside rousing to hunt him, escape was out of prospect. But with money to buy his way along, he’d have a good chance. Let the sheriff come on with his dogs, then, let the mob form, with their talk of a rope and cold lead. With any sort of break he’d best them. He would strike through the deep timber for the river; in six hours of steady traveling he could make it. At the river he would hire a shanty-boater to ferry him across to the Arkansas side; in some town over there buy clothes and get his hair cut; then catch a train and travel as far west or as far south as the steam-cars would take him. And it was Snake Doctor’s cash that would buy the way for him! He had little time, though.

Mighty little. He knew the interior arrangements of Snake Doctor’s one room – the pallet in this corner, the fireplace in that, the chair and table drawn out on the sagging floor. In the one spying visit he ever had paid Snake Doctor two weeks before, when this shooting scheme first formed in his mind, he had noted these things in detail. He had marked also the very spot where he felt certain the place of concealment for the money was. All through his stay Snake Doctor, tremulous and plainly apprehensive, had maneuvered to keep between the unbidden, unwelcome caller and the corner where his comforters and blankets were placed. Also, the recluse’s eyes had helped to betray him; time and time again they had turned nervously to the wall just beyond and above the bedding, a point, say, five or six feet above it. Just about there, probably in a concealed gap between or behind the logs, the loot surely must be.

He thrust through the planked door, sagging on its leather hinges, and crossed directly to the fireplace. There was no fire in it, but, stooping and fumbling with his hands he found chips there ready to be kindled, and under the chips scraps of paper – good! He needed a light of sorts to search by. He had matches in his pocket, corked in a bottle, water-tight. He got them out as quickly as his shaking fingers would let him. There were only four of them. One after another he struck them. But the paper was damp from rain coming down the mud chimney, and no fire caught until the fourth and last match had been struck. Then it merely flickered; it ran slowly along the edge of the charring paper, threatening to go out.

All right, then, let it go out if it wanted to. He could see in the dark as well as the next one, and had hands to feel with. He made for the corner diagonally across the cabin and ran his hands swiftly along the exposed upper surface of a certain log, probing for any deep depressions in the rotted bark adhering to it, nicking the dried clay mortar with his nails. He tried that log without result, started on the log above it – and sucked in his breath as loose scraps of bark fell away at his touch from where they covered a niche in the joining. The cavity thus exposed was roughly circular in shape, the diameter, about, of a man’s arm; he could tell that by fingering its edges. This must be the hole. Greedily he thrust his right hand in. It touched something – something slick and firm and smooth – and there came a quick darting sting as pointed things, sharp and keen, jabbed his thumb, tearing the skin as he jerked his hand out.

In that same breath the feeble flame in the fireplace caught well and flared up, its blaze filling the cabin with a wavery, unreliable radiance. Japhet Morner, flinging his hand up before his face, saw by that red brightness that on the inner side of his thumb were two tiny torn punctures, half an inch apart, from which drops of blood had started; and then, on beyond, two feet away, at the level of his stricken eyes he saw the forepart of a thick snake, its hideous dull-marked head lifted and thrust back just within the round of the orifice, its mouth wide open, with the cottony linings revealed, its neck taut and curved as though ready to strike again.

He gave a strangled, slobbering howl and leaped to the other side of the room, sobbing, gasping, uttering fragments of formless sound. The blood pumped and spurted from his flirted thumb to prove the wounds though minute were deep.

He must have whiskey to drink or the cloven, hot carcass of a freshly killed chicken to bind fast to the bite, or he was done for. At his house half a mile away was whiskey and there chickens were asleep on their roost. He might make it. He whirled about, then recoiled as though a hard blow had stopped him. He couldn’t go where men were assembling, ready and anxious to stretch his neck for him.

Now then, his brain told him that, already and thus soon, quick pangs were leaping down his thumb, through his hand, flaming along his wrist and up his arm. The poison must be racing in his veins, mounting and growing, as he had heard it would. He had a feeling that his hand was swelling, making the skin tighter and tighter. There was no help, and even did help come now, it would come too late. He howled and dropped and rolled on the floor.

Up in the creviced wall the forward length of the snake showed, its head still guardingly reared on its slim neck, its lidless pale eyes, like twin bits of blurred glazing, aglow in the shifting firelight.

He got upon his feet, and a terrific pain struck at his heart, squeezing and wringing it. His throat closed and he choked. A second pain twisted his heart.

With a drunken leap he cleared the sill of the rear doorway, ran in a wavering course a few strides out across the horse lot and then, as his knees gave way under him, he pitched forward on his face, his lolled mouth full of weeds and muddy grass stems. The cramping fingers of his outstretched right hand almost touched a reddish black smear where the earth was trampled and the grass flattened down.

•     •     •     •     •

“Good reddance, by gravy! I’d call it that; wouldn’t you, doc?”

The speaker was driving Doctor Bradshaw back to his home near Gallup’s Mills. The other raised his head wearily. He had been up all night and he was an old man.

“Well,” he said, “I’d not have wished the death he died on any man, no matter what he’d done to deserve it. Yet I reckon there was a sort of rough justice in it, too. Anyway, we’ve been saved a lynching or else a regular hanging. And one would have been a scandal on the county and the other an expense to the taxpayers. Maybe you have got the right idea about it, Jim Meloan.

“I’m looking at it more from the professional point of view. I’ve had two strange experiences this past night, Jim. I’ve seen an under-nourished, sickly woman, after being shot through the brain, linger for nearly seven hours before dying, and I’ve examined the body of a man who’d been killed by a snake bite – killed good and quick, too, judging by the evidences.”

“Well, doc, ain’t that the way a cotton-mouth always does kill a man – sudden like? I’ve always heard tell——”

“Never mind what you’ve heard,” said the old doctor; he was cross because he was sleepy. “I’m going by the facts, not by fairy tales. I was born and raised down here, and I’ve been practicing medicine in this county for going on forty-six years. And I tell you that in all my life I’ve never known of but two or three people actually being bitten by water moccasins, and until this morning early I never had personal knowledge of anybody at all dying from the bite of any kind of snake. Horses? – well, yes. Dogs? – maybe so. But not a human being.

“Still, the proof is clear enough in this case. I think I’ll write a paper about it for the next meeting of the State Medical Society. The places where the fangs nipped him were right there in the ball of his thumb – two bloody deep little scratches, side by side. And then there was that look on his face – ugh! I’m fairly hardened, but I’m not going to forget Jafe Morner’s face in a hurry. He died quick, I’d say offhand, but he died hard, too; I’ll swear to that part of it. Well, he was the kind who likely would flicker out pretty brisk under certain circumstances. Ever notice the color of his skin and those heavy pouches under his eyes? Bad whiskey and bad food and swamp fevers didn’t put those signs on him. The late Japhet had a rotten bad heart, jimmy.”

“He shorely did,” agreed Meloan, fervently. “Yistiddy proved that.”

“I don’t mean exactly in that sense,” explained the physician. “I mean there was an organic weakness. Curious thing, though, there was no swelling round the wounds nor any swelling in his hand or arm; no noticeable blotching of the skin, either. And yet, if there’s anything in the accepted theories of the toxic effects of a venomous snake’s bite, those conditions should have been marked. Oh, I’ll have quite a paper to read before the Society!”

“Mebbe the swellin’ had done went down before you got to him,” suggested the morbidly interested farmer.

“No, he couldn’t have been dead more than a short while when they went down there to set the dogs on the trail and found him; Sheriff Gill tells me he was still warm. And I was there not ten minutes after that. It’s a mighty unusual case – several features about it that puzzle me. F’rinstance now, what about the snake that gashed him? Which-a-way did it come from beforehand and where did it head for afterwards? I didn’t see any snake tracks in the ground close to where he was laying – I looked for ’em, too. Still, the horse lot was pretty well trompled. Now, that poor forlorn old creature that you people in this neighborhood call Snake Doctor, he’s got his own pet theory about it. He keeps on saying it was the vengeance of the Lord falling upon a red-handed murderer. He thinks the fellow was drawn back to the seat of his crime – well, that might be so; I’ve heard of such things before – and that the Divine Wrath lit on him. But if I was him I’d be poking under the stable or the cabin for a whopping big snake.

“He tells me, though – and he ought to be an authority on the subject if anybody is – he tells me that a water moccasin never travels many yards away from the water and that nighttimes they always den up somewhere, being cold-blooded creatures that love the sunshine. And on top of that he swears to me that there never have been any moccasins close about his diggin’s unless he’d brought ’em there dead or else as prisoners in a sack.”

“Why, looky here, doc,” broke in Meloan, “he lied to you, then. There’s always been a sayin’ round here that Snake Doctor kept a huge big cotton-mouth right with him in his house all the time!”

“Yes, that’s true. I saw it myself, not an hour ago,” said the doctor, smiling a little. “I reckon the old fellow’s smarter than folks give him credit for being. He took me in his shack and showed it to me.”

“But I thought you jes’ now said——”

“Wait till I finish. He took me in and showed it to me, just as I’m telling you. But it was deader than Hector. It was a stuffed snake – with glass eyes and all. It seems a professional taxidermist who was up here from Memphis some years ago mounted it for our eccentric friend. Well, I’ll tell the world he made a good job of it. Lifelike? – you bet you! See it in a poor light and you’d almost be ready to swear you saw it move its head. I wouldn’t have the thing round me for any amount of money. But it seems this old fellow had a purpose in keeping it.

“That point came out in a sort of a peculiar way, too. It’s been common gossip, I understand, that Snake Doctor had a store of money laid by. No doubt you’ve heard exaggerated stories about the size of his wad; but I’m prepared to tell you it wasn’t much – just under a hundred dollars, all told. After he’d calmed down he told me he didn’t crave to keep it any more. He said he wanted it spent, paying for a proper funeral for that poor woman – said she was the only friend he’d had in the world; the only one that ever gave him a kind look or a kind word. So he asked me and Tip Bailey to take charge of it and then he took me in his shanty and got it out from the secret place where he’d kept it hid. It was tucked down in behind a break in the chinking between two of the side logs. And – listen to this, Jim – right in front of it, just back inside the mouth of the opening, he’d set that stuffed cotton-mouth of his, figuring that the bare sight of it, with its neck all bent like as if it was fixing to lunge, and its jaws wide open, would kind of discourage anybody who might take a notion to start exploring in there.

“And then, for a further precaution – oh, he’s plenty smart in his way! – he’d gone and lined the inside of the hole all round the edges and halfway down to the bottom with coils of barbed wire, with the points sticking up every which-a-way. Anybody who rammed his hand in there suddenly would certainly get gaffed. Not that anybody would who’d seen the snake first.”

The old doctor yawned heavily. “Purty cute little notion, I’d call it.”

Cosmopolitan, Nov 1922

Faith, Hope
and Charity

~

Just outside a sizable New Mexico town, the second section of the fast through train coming from the Coast made a short halt. Entering the stretch leading to the yards, the engineer had found the signal set against him; the track ahead was temporarily blocked.

It was a small delay, though. Almost at once the semaphore, like the finger of a mechanical wizard, made the warning red light vanish and a green light appear instead; so, at that, the Limited got under way and rolled on into the station for her regular stop.

But before she started up, four travelers quitted her. They got out on the off side, the side farthest away from the town, and that probably explains why none of the crew and none of the other passengers saw them getting out. It helps also to explain why they were not missed until quite some time later.

Their manner of leaving her was decidedly unusual. First, one of the vestibule doors between the third sleeping car and the fourth sleeping car opened and the trap in the floor flipped up briskly under the pressure of an impatient foot on the operating lever. A brace of the departing ones came swiftly into view, one behind the other. True, there was nothing unusual about that. But as they stepped down on the earth they faced about and received the figure of a third person whose limbs dangled and whose head lolled back as they took the dead weight of him into their arms. Next there emerged the fourth and last member of the group, he being the one who had eased the limp figure of Number Three down the car steps into the grasp of his associates.

For a fractional space their shapes made a little huddle in the lee of the vestibule. Looking on, you might have guessed that there was a momentary period of indecision touching on the next step to be taken.

However, this muddle – if that was what it was – right away straightened itself out. Acting with movements which seemed difficult and awkward, the two burden bearers carried their unconscious load down the short embankment and deposited it on the cindery underfooting close against the flank of the slightly built-up right of way.

Number Four bent over the sprawled form and fumbled at it, shoving his hands into first one pocket and then another. In half a minute or less he straightened up and spoke to the remaining pair, at the same time using both hands to shove some article inside the vent of his waistcoat.

“I have got them,” he said, speaking with a foreign accent. They pressed toward him, their hands extended.

“Not here and not yet, Señores,” he said sharply. “First we make sure of the rest. First you do, please, as I do.”

Thereupon he hopped nimbly up the shoulder of the roadbed and headed toward the rear of the halted train, slinking well in under the overhang of the Pullmans. His mates obeyed his example. They kept on until they had passed the tail coach, which was a combination coach, and then they stepped inward between the rails, still maintaining their single-file formation. Immediately the dusk swallowed them up.

There was something peculiar about the way each one of these three plodding pedestrians bore himself. The peculiarity was this: He bore himself like a person engaged in prayer – in a silent perambulating act of piety. His head was tucked in, his face turning neither to the right nor left; his eyes were set steadfastly forward as though upon some invisible goal, his hands clasped primly together in front of him.

Thus and so the marching three plodded on until the train, having got in motion, was out of sight beyond a curve in the approach to the station. Then they checked and came together in a clump, and then, had you been there, you would have understood the reason for their devotional pose. All three of them were wearing handcuffs.

The man who had spoken before unpalmed a key ring which he was carrying. Working swiftly even in the half-darkness, he made tests of the keys on the ring until he found the proper keys. He freed the wrists of his two fellows. Then one of them took the keys and unlocked his set of bracelets for him.

He, it would seem, was the most forethoughted of the trio. With his heel he kicked shallow gouges in the gritty soil beside the track and buried the handcuffs therein.

After that they briefly confabbed together, and the upshot of the confab was that, having matched for the possession of some object evidently held to be of great value, they separated forces.

One man set off alone on a detour to the southeast, which would carry him around the town. His late companions kept on in a general westerly direction, heading toward the desert which all that day they had been traversing. They footed it fast, as men might foot it who were fleeing for their lives and yet must conserve their strength. As a matter of fact, they were fleeing for their lives. So likewise the one from whom they had just parted was fleeing for his life.

•     •     •     •     •

It was partly by chance that these three had been making the transcontinental journey in company. Two of them, Lafitte the Frenchman, and Verdi the Italian who had Anglicized his name and called himself Green, met while lying in jail at San Francisco awaiting deportation to their respective countries. Within a space of a month, each had been arrested as a refugee from justice; the formalities for extraditing the pair of them were swiftly completed.

So, to save trouble and expense; to kill, as it were, two birds with one stone, the authorities decided to send them together across to the eastern seaboard where, according to arrangements made by cable, they would be surrendered to police representatives coming from abroad to receive them and transport them back overseas. For the long trip to New York a couple of city detectives had them in custody.

When the train bearing the officers and their charges reached a junction in lower California where the main line connected with a branch line running south to the Mexican border, there came aboard a special agent of the Department of Justice who had with him a prisoner.

This prisoner was one Manuel Gaza, a Spaniard. He also recently had been captured and identified; and he also was destined for return to his own land. It was not by prior agreement that he had been retransferred at this junction point to the same train which carried the Italian and the Frenchman. It just happened so.

It having happened so, the man who had Gaza in tow lost no time in getting acquainted with his San Francisco brethren. For a number of reasons it seemed expedient to all the officers that from here on they should travel as a unit. Accordingly the special agent talked with the Pullman conductor and exchanged the reservations he previously had booked for a compartment adjoining the drawing-room in which the four from the city were riding.

It was on a Friday afternoon that the parties united. Friday evening, at the first call for dinner, the three officers herded their three prisoners forward to the dining car, the passage of the sextet through the aisles causing some small commotion. Their advent into the diner created another little sensation.

Since it was difficult for the handcuffed aliens to handle knife and fork, they were given such food as might readily be eaten with a spoon or with the fingers – soups and omelets and soft vegetables and pie or rice pudding. The detectives ate fish. They shared between them a double order of imported kippers.

Presumably they were the only persons on the train who that day had chosen the kippered herrings. Shortly, the special agent was giving private thanks that his church prescribed no dietetic regulations for Friday, because within an hour or two after leaving the table, the San Francisco men were suffering from violent cramps – ptomaine poison had them helpless.

One seemed to be dangerously ill. That night near the border between California and Arizona he was taken off the train and carried to a hospital. During the wait at the station, a local physician dosed the second and lesser sufferer, whose name was McAvoy, and when he had been somewhat relieved, the doctor gave him a shot of something in the arm and said he ought to be up and about within twenty-four hours.

Through the night McAvoy slept in the lower berth of the compartment and the special agent sat up, with the communicating door open, to guard the aliens, who were bedded in the so-called drawing-room.

Their irons stayed on their wrists; their lone warden was accepting no foolish odds against himself. He had taken the precaution to transfer the keys of the Frenchman’s handcuffs and the Italian’s handcuffs from McAvoy’s keeping to his own, slipping them on his key ring, but this had been done in case McAvoy should become seriously ill en route and it should devolve upon him to make a lap of the journey single-handed.

Next morning McAvoy was much easier but he felt weak, he said, and drowsy. Given a full twelve hours of rest, though, he thought he would be able to go on guard when the nightfall came.

So he lay in his berth, and the special agent occupied an end of the drawing-room sofa. The trapped fugitives sat smoking cigarettes, and when the officer was not too near, talking among themselves.

Mainly they talked in English, a language which Gaza the Spaniard and Lafitte the Frenchman spoke fairly well. Verdi or Green, as the case might be, had little English at his command, but Gaza, who had spent three years in Naples, spoke Italian; and so when Verdi used his own tongue, Gaza could interpret for the Frenchman’s benefit. They were allowed to quit the drawing-room only for meals.

When dinner hour came on that second evening of their trip, McAvoy was in a doze. So the Department of Justice man did not disturb him.

“Come on, boys,” he said to the three aliens; “time to eat again.”

He lined them up in front of him in the corridor and they started the regular processional. It was just at that moment that the train broke its rhythmic refrain and began to clack and creak and slow for that unscheduled stop outside that New Mexico town. By the time they had reached the second car on ahead, she’d almost stopped and was lurching and jerking.

In the vestibule beyond that second car the special agent was in the act of stepping across the iron floor lip of the connection when a particularly brisk joggle caused him to lose his hat. He gave a small exclamation and bent to recover it. Doing so, he jostled Gaza, the third man in the line and therefore the next to him.

The agile Spaniard was quick to seize his chance. He half turned, and bringing his chained wrists aloft, sent them down with all his might on the poll of the officer’s unprotected skull. The victim of the assault never made a sound – just spraddled on his face and was dead to the world.

No outsider had been witness to the assault. No outsider came along during the few seconds which were required by the late prisoners to open an off-side car door and make their escape after the fashion which already has been described for you. Nobody missed them – for quite a while nobody did.

It wasn’t until nearly nine o’clock, when McAvoy had roused up and rung for the porter and begun to ask questions, that a search was made and an alarm raised.

•     •     •     •     •

Penned up together through that day, the aliens had matched stories, one story against another. A common plight made them communicative; a common peril caused each to turn with morbid reiteration to his own fatal predicament.

Said the Frenchman to the Spaniard: “He” – indicating his recent cellmate, the Italian – “he knows how with me it stands. With him, I have talked. He speaks not so well the English but sometimes he understands it. Now you shall hear and judge for yourself how bad my situation is.”

Graphically, this criminal sketched his past. He had been a Marseilles dock hand. He had killed a woman. She deserved killing, so he killed her. He had been caught, tried, convicted, condemned. While lying in prison, with execution day only a few weeks distant, he had made a getaway.

In disguise he had reached America and here had stayed three years. Then another woman, in a fit of jealousy, betrayed him to the police. He had been living with that woman; to her he had given his confidence. It would appear that women had been his undoing.

“Me, I am as good as dead already. And what a death!” A spasm of shuddering possessed him. “For me the guillotine is waiting. The devil invented it. It is so they go at you with that machine: They strap you flat upon a board. Face downward you are, but you can look up, you can see – that is the worst part. They fit your throat into a grooved shutter; they make it fast. You bring your head back; your eyes are drawn upward, fascinated. Above you, waiting, ready, poised, your eyes see the – the knife.”

“But only for a moment do you see it, my friend,” said the Spaniard, in the tone of one offering comfort. “Only a moment and then – pouff  – all over!”

“A moment! I tell you it is an eternity. It must be an eternity. Lying there, you must live a hundred lives, you must die a hundred deaths. And then to have your head taken off your body, to be all at once in two pieces. Me, I am not afraid of most deaths. But that death by the guillotine – ah-h!”

The Spaniard bent forward. He was sitting alone facing the other two, who shared a seat.

“Listen, Señor,” he stated. “Compared with me, you are the lucky one. True, I have not yet been tried – before they could try me I fled away out of that accursed Spain of mine.”

“Not tried, eh?” broke in the Frenchman. “Then you have yet a loophole – a chance for escape; and I have none. My trial, as I told you, is behind me.”

“You do not know the Spanish courts. It is plain you do not, since you say that,” declared the Spaniard. “Those courts – they are greedy for blood. With them, to my kind, there is not mercy; there is only punishment.

“And such a punishment! Wait until you hear. To me when they get me before them they will say: ‘The proof is clear against you; the evidence has been thus and so. You are adjudged guilty. You took a life, so your life must be taken. It is the law.’

“Perhaps I say: ‘Yes, but that life I took swiftly and in passion and for cause. For that one the end came in an instant, without pain, without lingering, yes, without warning. Since I must pay for it, why cannot I also be made to die very quickly without pain?’

“Will they listen? No, they send me to the garrote. To a great strong chair they tie you – your hands, your feet, your trunk. Your head is against a post, an upright. In that post is a collar – an iron band. They fit that collar about your neck. Then from behind you the executioner turns a screw.

“If he chooses he turns it slowly. The collar tightens, tightens, a knob presses into your spine. You begin to strangle. Oh, I have seen it myself! I know. You expire by inches! I am a brave man, Señores. When one’s time comes, one dies. But oh, Señores, if it were any death but that! Better the guillotine than that! Better anything than that!”

He slumped back against the cushions, and rigors passed through him.

It was the Italian’s turn. “I was tried in my absence,” he explained to the Spaniard. “I was not even there to make my defense – I had thought it expedient to depart. Such is the custom of the courts in my country. They try you behind your back.

“They found me guilty, those judges. In Italy there is no capital punishment, so they sentenced me to life imprisonment. It is to that – that – I now return.”

The Spaniard lifted his shoulders; the lifting was eloquent of his meaning.

“Not so fast,” said the Italian. “You tell me you lived once in Italy. Have you forgotten what life imprisonment for certain acts means in Italy? It means solitary confinement. It means you are buried alive. They shut you away from everyone in a tight cell. It is a tomb, that is all. You see no one ever; you hear no voice ever. If you cry out, no one answers. Silence, darkness, darkness, silence, until you go mad or die.

“Can you picture what that means to one of my race, to an Italian who must have music, sunshine, talk with his fellows, sight of his fellows? It is in his nature – he must have these things or he is in torture, in constant and everlasting torment. Every hour becomes to him a year, every day a century, until his brain bursts asunder inside his skull.

“Oh, they knew – those fiends who devised this thing – what to an Italian is a million times worse than death – any death. I am the most unfortunate one of the three of us. My penalty is the most dreadful by far.”

The others would not have it so. They argued the point with him and with each other all through the day, and twilight found their beliefs unshaken.

Then, under the Spaniard’s leadership, came their deliverance out of captivity. It was he who, on the toss-up, won the revolver which they had taken from the person of the senseless special agent. Also it was he who suggested to the Italian that for the time being, at least, they stick together. To this the Italian had agreed, the Marseilles man, Lafitte, already having elected to go on his own.

After the latter, heading east by south, had left them, the Spaniard said reflectively:

“He is optimistic, that one, for all that he seemed so gloomy and downhearted today when speaking of that guillotine of his. He said he now had faith that he would yet dodge his fate. Five minutes after he is off that train he speaks of faith!”

“I cannot go quite so far,” answered the Italian. “We are free, but for us there will be still a thousand dangers. So I have not much faith, but I have hope. And you, my friend?”

The Spaniard shrugged his shoulders. His shrug might mean yes or it might mean no. Perhaps he needed his breath. He was going at a jog-trot down the tracks, the Italian alongside him.

•     •     •     •     •

Take the man who had faith. Set down as he was in a country utterly strange to him, this one of the fugitives nevertheless made steady progress. He got safely around and by the New Mexico town. He hid in the chaparral until daybreak, then took to a highway running parallel with the railroad.

A “tin canner,” which is what they were beginning to call an itinerant motor tourist in those parts, overtook him soon after sunup and gave him a lift to a small way station some forty miles down the line. There he boarded a local train – he had some money on him; not much money but enough – and undetected, he rode that train clear on through to its destination a hundred miles or so farther along.

Other local trains carried him across a corner of Colorado and clear across Kansas. Some forty-eight hours later, he was a guest in a third-rate hotel on a back street in Kansas City, Missouri.

He stayed in that hotel for two days and two nights, biding most of the time in his room on the top floor of the six-story building, going down only for his meals and for newspapers. The food he had to have; the newspapers gave him information, of a sort, of the hunt for the three fugitives. It was repeatedly stated that all three were believed to be fleeing together. That cheered Lafitte very much. It strengthened his faith.

But on the morning of his third day in this cheap hotel, when he came out of his room and went down the hall to ring for the elevator – there was only one passenger elevator in this hotel – he saw something. Passing the head of the stairs, which ended approximately midway of the stretch between the door of his room and the wattled iron door opening on the elevator well, he saw, out of the corner of one watchful eye, two men in civilian garb on the steps below him.

They had halted there. Whether they were coming up or going down there was no way of telling. It seemed to him that at sight of him they ducked slightly and made as if to flatten themselves back against the side wall.

He gave no sign of having seen them. He stilled an impulse to make a dash for it. Where was he to dash for, with the stairs cut off? He followed the only course open to him. Anyhow he told himself he might be wrong. Perhaps his nerves were misbehaving. Perhaps those two who seemed to be lurking just there behind him on those steps were not interested in him at all. He kept telling himself that, while he was ringing the bell, while he was waiting for the car to come up for him.

The car did come up and, for a wonder, promptly; an old-fashioned car, creaky, musty. Except for its shirt-sleeved attendant, it was empty. As Lafitte stepped in, he glanced sideways over his shoulder, making the movement casual – no sight of those two fellows.

He rode down, the only passenger for that trip, so there were no stops on the descent. They reached the ground floor, which was the office floor. The elevator came to a standstill, then moved up a foot or so, then jokingly down six inches or so, as the attendant, who was not expert, maneuvered to bring the sill of the car flush with the tiling of the lobby.

The delay was sufficiently prolonged for Lafitte to realize, all in a flash, he had not been wrong. Through the intervening grille of the shaft door he saw two more men who pressed close up to that door, who stared in at him, whose looks and poses were watchful, eager, prepared. Besides, Lafitte knew plainclothes men when he saw them.

Up above and here below, he was cut off. There still was a chance for him, a poor one but the only one. If he could shoot the elevator aloft quickly enough, check it at the third floor or the fourth, say, and hop out, he might make a successful dart for the fire escape at the rear of the hotel – provided the fire escape was not guarded. In the space of time that the elevator boy was jockeying the car, he thought of this, and having thought it, acted on it.

Swinging his fist from behind with all his might, he hit that hapless fellow on the point of the jaw and deposited him, stunned and temporarily helpless, on his knees in a corner of the cage. Lafitte grabbed the lever, shoved it over hard, and up the shaft shot the car. Before he could get control of it, being unfamiliar with such mechanisms and in a panic besides, it was at the top of the house. But then he mastered it and made it reverse its course, and returning downward he pulled the lever, bringing it toward him.

That was the proper notion, that gentler manipulation, for now the car, more obedient, was crawling abreast of the third-floor level. It crept earthward, inch by inch, and without bringing it to a dead stop he jerked up the latch of the collapsible safety gate, telescoped the metal outer door back into its folded-up self, and stooping low because the gap was diminishing, he lunged forward.

Now that elevator boy was a quick-witted, a high-tempered Irish boy. He might be half dazed but his instincts of belligerency were not asleep. He told afterward how, automatically and indignantly functioning, he grabbed at the departing assailant and caught him by one leg and for a fleeting moment, before the other kicked free, retarded him.

But by all that was good and holy he swore he did not touch the lever. Being down on all fours at the rear side of the slowly sinking car, how could he touch it? Why, just at that precise fraction of a second, the elevator should pick up full speed was a mystery to him – to everybody else, for that matter.

But pick up full speed it did. And the Irish boy cowered down and screamed an echo to a still louder scream than his, and hid his eyes from the sight of Lafitte, with his head outside and his body inside the elevator, being decapitated as completely and almost as neatly as though a great weighted knife had sheared him off at the neck.

•     •     •     •     •

Take the Spaniard and the Italian: Steadily they traveled westward for nearly all of that night which followed their evacuation from the Limited. It put desirable distance between them and the spot where they had dumped the special agent down. Also it kept them warm. This was summertime but on the desert even summer nights are chilly and sometimes downright cold. Before dawn, they came on a freight train waiting on a siding. Its locomotive faced west. That suited their book.

They climbed nimbly aboard a flat and snuggled themselves down behind a barrier of farm implements. Here, breakfastless but otherwise comfortable, they rode until nearly midday. Then a brakeman found them. Harshly he ordered them to get out of there.

Immediately though, looking at them where they squatted half hidden, his tone softened, and he told them he’d changed his mind about it and they could stay aboard as long as they pleased. On top of this, he hurried forward as though he might have important news for the engine crew or somebody.

They chose to get off. They had noted the quick start as of recognition which the brakeman had given. They figured – and figured rightly – that by now the chase for them was on and that their descriptions had been telegraphed back and forth along the line. The train was traveling at least twenty miles an hour, but as soon as the brakeman was out of sight, they jumped for it, tumbling like shot rabbits down the slope of the right of way and bringing up jarred and shaken in the dry ditch at the bottom.

Barring bruises and scratches, Green had taken no hurt, but Gaza landed with a badly sprained ankle. With Green to give him a helping arm, he hobbled away from the railroad.

To get away from that railroad was their prime aim now. Choosing a course at random, they went north over the undulating waste lands and through the shimmering heat, toward a range of mottled high buttes rising on beyond.

It took them until deep into the afternoon to cover a matter roughly of five miles. By now, Gaza’s lower left leg was elephantine in its proportions and every forced step he took meant a fresh stab of agony. He knew he could not go much farther. Green knew it too, and in his brain began shaping tentative plans. The law of self-preservation was one of the few laws for which he had respect. They panted from heat and from thirst and from weariness.

At the end of those five miles, having toiled laboriously up over a fold in the land, they saw close at hand, and almost directly below them, a ’dobe hut, and not quite so near at hand, a big flock of sheep. At the door of the cabin, a man in overalls was stripping the hide from a swollen dead cow.

Before they could dodge back below the sky line, he saw them and stood up expectantly. There was nothing for them to do except to go toward him. At their slow approach, an expression of curiosity crept over his brown face and stayed there. He looked like a Mexican or possibly a half-breed Indian.

When Gaza, stumbling nearer, hailed him in English, he merely shook his head dumbly. Then Gaza tried him in Spanish and to that he replied volubly. For minutes they palavered back and forth; then the stranger served them with deep drafts from a water bottle swinging in the doorway with a damp sack over it. The water was lukewarm and bitterish-tasting but it was grateful to their parched throats. Then he withdrew inside the little house and Gaza, for Green’s benefit, translated into Italian what talk had passed.

“He says he is quite alone here, which is the better for us,” explained the Spaniard, speaking swiftly. “He says that a week ago he came up from Old Mexico, seeking work. A gringo – a white man – gave him work. The white man is a sheepman. His home ranch is miles away. In a sheep wagon he brought this Mexican here and left him here in charge of that flock yonder, with provisions for a month.

“It will be three weeks then before the white man, his employer, comes again. Except for that white man he knows nobody hereabouts. Until we came just now, he had seen no one at all. So he is glad to see us.”

“And accounting for ourselves you told him what?” asked Green.

“I told him we were traveling across country in a car and that going down a steepness last night the car overturned and was wrecked and I crippled myself. I told him that, traveling light because of my leg, we started out to find some town, some house, and that, hoping to make a short cut, we left the road, but that since morning and until we blundered upon this camp, we had been quite lost in this ugly country. He believes me. He is simple, that one, an ignorant, credulous peon.

“But kind-hearted, that also is plain. For proof of it observe this.” He pointed to the bloated, half-flayed carcass. “He says three days ago he found this beast – a stray from somewhere, he knows not where. So far as he knows there are no cattle droves in these parts – only sheep.

“She was sick, she staggered, she was dizzy and turned in circles as if blind, and froth ran from her mouth. There is a weed which does that to animals when they eat it, he says. So, hoping to make her well again, he put a scrap of rope on her horns and led her here. But last night she died. So to-day he has been peeling her. Now he goes to make ready some food for us. He is hospitable, also, that one.

“And when we have eaten, then what? We can’t linger here.”

“Wait, please, Señor. To my mind already an idea comes.” His tone was authoritative, confident. “First we fill our empty stomachs to give us strength, and then we smoke a cigarette, and while we smoke, I think. And then – we see.”

On frijoles and rancid bacon and thin corn cakes and bad coffee, which the herder brought them on tin platters and in tin cups, they did fill their empty stomachs. Then they smoked together, all three of them, smoking cigarettes rolled in corn-husk wrappers.

The Mexican was hunkered on his heels, making smoke rings in the still, hot air when Gaza, getting on his feet with difficulty, limped toward the doorway, gesturing to show that he craved another swig from the water bottle. When he was behind the other two, almost touching them, he drew the special agent’s pistol and fired once and their host tumbled forward on his face and spraddled his limbs and quivered a bit and was still, with a bullet hole in the back of his head.

This killing gave the Italian, seasoned killer as he was, a profound shock. It seemed so unnecessary, unless—? He started up,
his features twitching, and backed away, fearing the next bullet would be for him.

“Remain tranquil, Señor,” said the Spaniard, almost gaily. “For you, my comrade, there is no danger. There is for you hope of deliverance, you who professed last night to have hope in your soul.

“Now me, I have charity in my soul – charity for you, charity for myself, charity also for this one lying here. Behold, he is now out of his troubles. He was a dolt, a clod of the earth, a creature of no refinement. He lived a hermit’s life, lonely, miserable. Now he has been dispatched to a better and a brighter world. That was but kindness.” With his foot he touched the sprawled corpse.

“But in dispatching him I had thought also for you – for both of us. I elucidate: First we bury him under the dirt floor of this house, taking care to leave no telltale traces of our work. Then you make a pack for your back of the food that is here. You take also the water bottle, filled. Furthermore, you take with you this pistol.

“Then, stepping lightly on rocky ground or on hard ground so that you make no tracks, you go swiftly hence and hide yourself in those mountains until – who can tell? – until those who will come presently here have ceased to search for you. With me along, lamed as I am, me to hamper you, there would be no chance for either of us. But you, going alone – you armed, provisioned, quick of foot – you have a hope.”

“But – but you ? What then becomes of you? – You – you sacrifice yourself?” In his bewilderment the Italian stammered.

“Me, I stay here to greet the pursuers. It is quite simple. In peaceful solitude I await their coming. It cannot be long until they come. That man of the freight train will be guiding them back to pick up our trail. By tonight at latest I expect them.”

At sight of the Italian’s mystified face he broke now into a laugh.

“Still you are puzzled, eh? You think that I am magnanimous, that I am generous? Well, all that I am. But you think me also a fool and there you err. I save you perhaps but likewise perhaps I save myself. Observe, Señor.”

He stooped and lifted the dead face of his victim. “See now what I myself saw the moment I beheld this herder of ours: This man is much my shape, my height, my coloring. He spoke a corrupt Spanish such as I can speak. Put upon me the clothes which he wears, and remove from my lip this mustache which I wear, and I would pass for him even before the very eyes of that white man who hired him.

“Well, very soon I shall be wearing his clothes, my own being hidden in the same grave with him. Within ten minutes I shall be removing this mustache. He being newly shaven, as you see for yourself, it must be that in this hovel we will find a razor. I shall pass for him. I shall be this mongrel dull wit.”

A light broke on the Italian. He ran and kissed the Spaniard, on both cheeks and on the mouth.

“Ah, my brother!” he cried out delightedly. “Forgive me that for a moment I thought you hard-hearted for having in seeming wantonness killed the man who fed us. I see you are brilliant – a great thinker, a great genius. But, my beloved” – and here doubt once more assailed him – “what explanation do you make when they do come?”

“That is the best of all,” said Gaza. “Before you leave me you take a cord and you bind me most securely – my hands crossed behind my back – so; my feet fastened together – so. It will not be for very long that I remain so. I can endure it. Coming then, they find me thus. That I am bound makes more convincing the tale I shall tell them.

“And this is the tale that I shall tell: To them I shall say that as I sat under this shelter skinning my dead cow, there appeared suddenly two men who fell upon me without warning; that in the struggle they hurt my poor leg most grievously, then, having choked me into quietude, they tied my limbs, despoiled me of my provender and hurriedly departed, leaving me helpless. I shall describe these two brutal men – oh, most minutely I shall describe them. And my description will be accurate, for you I shall be describing as you stand now; myself I shall describe as I now am.

“The man from the train will say: ‘Yes, yes, that is true; those are surely the two I saw.’ He will believe me at once; that will held. Then they will inquire to know in which direction fled this pair of scoundrels and I will tell them they went that way yonder to the south across the desert, and they will set off in that direction, seeking two who flee together, when all the while you will be gone north into those mountains which will shelter you. And that, Señor, will be a rich part of the whole joke.

“Perhaps, though, they question me further. Then I say: ‘Take me before this gringo who within a week hired me to watch his sheep. Confront me with him. He will identify me, he will confirm my story.’ And if they do that and he does that – as most surely he will – why, then they must turn me loose and that, Señor, will be the very crown and peak of the joke.”

In the excess of his admiration and his gratitude, the Italian just naturally had to kiss him again.

They worked fast and they worked scientifically, carefully, overlooking nothing, providing against every contingency. But at the last minute, when the Italian was ready to resume his flight and the Spaniard, smoothly shaven and effectually disguised in the soiled shirt and messy overalls of the dead man, had turned around and submitted his wrists to be pinioned, it was discovered that there was no rope available with which to bind his legs. The one short scrap of rope about the spot had been used for tying his hands.

The Spaniard said this was just as well. Any binding that was drawn snugly enough to fetter his feet securely would certainly increase the pain in the inflamed and grossly swollen ankle joint.

However, it was apparent that he must be securely anchored, lest suspicion arise in the minds of his rescuers when they arrived. Here the Italian made a contribution to the plot. He was proud of his inspiration.

With the Mexican’s butcher knife he cut long narrow strips from the fresh slick cowhide. Then the Spaniard sat down on the earth with his back against one of the slim tree trunks supporting the arbor, and the Italian took numerous turns about his waist and his arms and the upper part of his body, and tightly knotted the various ends of the skin ribbons behind the post. Unaided, no human being could escape out of that mesh. To the pressure of the prisoner’s trunk, the moist, pliant lashings would give slightly but it was certain they neither would work loose nor snap apart.

So he settled himself in his bonds, and the Italian, having shouldered his pack, once more fervently kissed his benefactor in token of gratitude, wished him success and made of! with many farewells.

So far as this empty country was concerned, the Italian was a greenhorn, a tenderfoot. Nevertheless, he made excellent progress. He marched northward until dark, lay that night under a murdered man’s smelly blanket behind a many-colored butte and next morning struck deeper into the broken lands. He entered what he hoped might be a gap through the mountains, treading cautiously along a narrow natural trail halfway up a dauntingly steep cliff side.

He was well into it when his foot dislodged a scrap of shaly rock which in sliding over the verge set other rocks to cascading down the slope. From above, yet larger boulders began toppling over into the scoured-out passageway thus provided, and during the next five minutes the walled-in declivity was alive and roaring with tumbling huge stones, with dislodged earth running fluid like a stream, with uprooted stunty piñons, with choking acrid dust clouds.

The Italian ran for dear life; he managed to get out of the avalanche’s path. When at length he reached a safe place and looked back, he saw behind him how the landslide had choked the gorge almost to its brim. No human being – no, not even a goat, could from his side scale that jagged and overhanging parapet. Between him and pursuit was a perfect barrier.

Well content, he went on. But presently he made a discovery, a distressing discovery which took the good cheer right out of him. This was no gateway into which he had entered. It was a dead end leading nowhere – what Westerners call a box canyon. On three sides of him, right, left and on ahead, rose tremendously high walls, sheer and unclimbable. They threatened him; they seemed to be closing in on him to pinch him flat. And, of course, back of him retreat was cut off. There he was, bottled up like a fly in a corked jug, like a frog at the bottom of a well.

Frantically he explored as best he could the confines of this vast prison cell of his. He stumbled upon a spring, and its waters, while tainted lightly with alkali, were drinkable. So he had water and he had food, some food. By paring his daily portions down almost to starvation point, he might make these rations last for months. But then, what? And in the meantime, what? Why, until hunger destroyed him, he was faced with that doom which he so dreaded – the doom of solitary confinement.

He thought it all out and then he knelt down and took out his pistol and he killed himself.

•     •     •     •     •

In one of his calculations that smart malefactor, the Spaniard, had been wrong. By his system of deductions, the searchers should reach the ’dobe hut where he was tethered within four hours or, at most, five. But it was nearer thirty hours before they appeared.

The trouble had been that the brakeman wasn’t quite sure of the particular stretch where he had seen the fugitives nestled beneath a reaping machine on that flat car. Besides, it took time to spread the word; to summon county officials; to organize an armed searching party. When at length the posse did strike the five-mile trail leading from the railroad tracks to the camp of the late sheep herder, considerably more than a day had elapsed.

The track was fairly plain – two sets of heavy footprints bearing north and only lacking where rocky outcrops broke through the surface of the desert. Having found it, they followed it fast, and when they mounted the fold in the earth above the cabin, they saw the figure of a man seated in front of it, bound snugly to one of the supports of the arbor.

Hurrying toward him they saw that he was dead – that his face was blackened and horribly distorted; that his glazed eyes goggled at them and his tongue protruded; that his stiffened legs were drawn up in sharp angles of agony.

They looked closer and they saw the manner of his death and were very sorry for him. He had been bound with strands of fresh rawhide, and all through that day he had been sitting there exposed to the baking heat of the day.

Now heat, operating on damp new rawhide, has an immediate effect. Heat causes certain substances to expand but green rawhide it causes to contract very fast to an ironlike stiffness and rigidity.

So in this case the sun glare had drawn tighter and tighter the lashings about this poor devil’s body, squeezing him in at the stomach and the breast and the shoulders, pressing his arms tighter and tighter and yet tighter against his sides. That for him would have been a highly unpleasant procedure but it would not have killed him.

Something else had done that. One loop of the rawhide had been twisted about his neck and made fast at the back of the post. At first it might have been no more than a loosely fitting circlet but hour by hour it had shrunk into a choking collar, a diminishing noose, a terrible deadly yoke. Veritably, it had garroted him by inches.

Cosmopoitan, Apr 1930

This Hero Business

~

By rights this story should appear in the table of contents somewhere back of a cover showing two decrepit veterans, one in blue with a peaked cap, the other in gray with a slouch hat, clasping hands beneath the flag of a more or less reunited country. Or, if the magazine strove to be one of these right-up-to-the-minute magazines, the cover design would be that of a little child placing a memorial wreath upon a grave, with a sort of cloud effect of figures above her, featuring, among others, a Valley Forge fencible, an Andy Jackson rifleman, a Mexican War dragoon, a Gettysburg defender, a ’98 Rough Rider and an A. E. F. doughboy; in short, an allegorical and panoramic design. For this is a Decoration Day story, having to do with a thing which happened May 30, of this year, in the town of Shawnee Run, Indiana. The fact that it is being printed a good long while after last Decoralion Day and a considerable while before next Decoration Day may seem, to a conscientious magazine editor, a bad business. Probably he has put it in this number under protest. But, either way, it makes no material difference in Shawnee Run. Shawnee Run is used to being six miles off the main road and six months behind the times.

In your day, if ever you have strayed from the beaten track anywhere in our glorious Middle West, which is so called because it is nowhere near the Middle and a long stretch this side of the West, you might have seen a score or more of Shawnee Runs. You pick out a bit of frayed selvage on the fringes of the Corn Belt and there you assemble a collection of a hundred and fifty-odd houses, mainly wooden houses, white with green shutters. You string most of these houses like beads upon a cord along a length of rutty main street which is all mud when it rains and all dust when it doesn’t. Populate the spot with six hundred and forty individuals of assorted native types.

At the edge of town trace out a winding yellowish creek, with fine tall trees on its banks, and schools of small pan-fish in the deep holes below the drift jams left by the last high water. Put in three churches for religion’s sake and a moving picture grotto for week-day entertainments; also a garage and a couple of filling stations. Establish your burying place a mile and a half from town in a weed field, which insists on thinking it is a cemetery. Shake gently, and take some summery afternoon when you’ve nothing else particularly to do. That’s Shawnee Run, and you’ll find it mildly pleasant and soothing to the taste.

Shawnee Run may be forty minutes, by Tin Lizzie, from the county seat and an all day’s run from the Lincoln Highway, but it has its town characters and its town institutions just as larger communities have them, and has also its traditional claims to fame. For instance, a man who once was favorably mentioned by himself and several of his friends for the nomination for vice-president lived in Shawnee Run. Likewise it is the birth-place of one of the most masterly and compelling orators in the present Lower House of Congress. This great man lends luster to another state now and has done so since his early manhood, but here it was he first saw the light of day, and his former fellow citizens are proud of the circumstance. And finally, yet for the purposes of this narrative foremost, it has its official military heroes, two in number.

For a long while, though, it had only one – Captain Jere Rudolph, late of the One Hundred and Twenty-first Indiana Volunteers. Then, in the late fall of 1918, about the time the Armistice was signed, young Mort Overstreet came back from France, all crippled up, to make the second. By virtue of rule of seniority if for no other reason, it is fitting that, briefly, we first should consider the former.

For a good many years Captain Rudolph reigned, as the phrase is, supreme. Originally or, that is to say, immediately after the Civil War, there had been among the residents of Shawnee Run some ten or a dozen men who helped to hold the Union and loose the slave. Those were the times when there was an old soldier vote to be reckoned with, and politicians catered to it and played up to it and made the Bloody Shirt to wave in the breeze and drip anew. But one by one these others got old and grew fragile; one by one they sickened and dropped off. So, in due time, Cap’n Jere alone remained and he remained intact. It would seem that he meant to linger on forever. At any rate, he looked as though this might be his intention.

The years might nibble at him but they didn’t bite in deeply. Generally, a man on reaching a certain age becomes paunchy and pouchy, or else he wastes away to a great thinness and the frame of his bones bends in and bends out like a trellis no longer able to bear the fading life draped over it. But Cap’n Jere stayed square and firm as a brick smokehouse. In fact, he rather would put you in mind of a smokehouse, a little solid one, built to stay. He was a small sandy-red man with a bullet head and short neck and humorous eyes. He was a widower and childless. He had some money laid by from his more active years and this and his pension kept him in comfort. He was past sixty before the white began to show, like silver wires, in his sorrel hair. He was getting along toward seventy before his legs began to skew under him and he needed a cane to walk with. He had carried a cane before then but for dignity’s sake merely. Now he needed it. To the people of his home town he was a human symbol and inheritance of their patriotism and, by that same token, an institution. He made speeches on important occasions. He loved to make speeches. He was prominent at gatherings; no one disputed with him his right to the place of prominence. He was a public citizen and a public character. He was Shawnee Run’s official hero.

Excuses were to be made for his occasional outbreaks of testiness, also for his inclination to repeat the same stock stories over and over again. Naturally a man who’d fought as bravely as Cap’n Jere had would have a high and touchy temper; choler marching with courage. And why shouldn’t a man who had done spunky deeds on the field of battle be permitted, yea encouraged, to tell about them? Wasn’t listening to him just about the same as reading history out of a book? And wasn’t history frequently tiresome although important? Well, then?

It is true that when the Yanko-Spanko affair came along his glory suffered an eclipse. But it was only a partial eclipse and not for long. It would appear that Cap’n Jere resented the project of sending troops to make the Cubans free almost as one might resent a personal insult. It was as though he felt slighted somehow; as though, for the time being, his war and its survivors were being brushed aside to make way for a lot of bumptious amateurs. He couldn’t understand, either, why an old company commander, still in the prime of his health and strength, knowing how to handle men and not afraid of the smell of powder smoke, wasn’t offered a commission. He spoke of the whole thing as a picnic. He called the first land encounter with the enemy a skirmish. The hysterical newspapers might speak of it as an engagement and a battle. He knew better – it was a skirmish, a brush between outposts. In his war it wouldn’t have counted. They had battles then as were battles. Take Cold Harbor, now – or Shiloh or Missionary Ridge.

When he said this, on an evening in front of Biggs & McKenna’s – and would have said much more except that he was interrupted – one of the assembled audience had the presumption rather to take issue with him. It was Banks Ferguson who took on the sacrilegious job of interruption.

“Well, say now, Cap’n Jere, you look here!” Ferguson said. “These boys that got killed yistiddy in this skirmish as you call it – ain’t they been killed just as dead as anybody you knew that got killed fightin’ the Rebels?”

There was a snicker from the group – a snicker of outright approval for the thrust. It was the first time such a thing ever had happened. Before this it would have seemed a sacrilege. In Cap’n Jere’s affronted ears it was exactly that – a sacrilege and a mocking. He gave a tremendous snort and turned on his heel and went briskly away from there.

He got over his sulks soon, though. News of what happened on a May morning in foreign and far-off parts known as the Philippines previously had given him cheer; other things, subsequently occurring, likewise pleased him mightily. As he came stumping toward the loafing place one hot afternoon those already collected there saw that his face was red and radiant and they heard him shooting off his favorite expletive at every other step.

“Goddle Midey!” he was saying. “Goddle Midey!”

Once upon a time the Reverend Ames, pastor of the Baptist church, had summoned spirit mildly to remonstrate with Cap’n Jere for his frequent use of certain words. He ventured to remind Cap’n Jere that the Good Book expressly forbade the taking of the name of Deity in vain.

“Why, Goddle Midey, elder!” Cap’n Jere had exploded. “That ain’t cussin’! That’s just the way I talk!”

Now he burst in among them and his voice, rising to a dominant bellow, submerged all lesser sounds of speech. They stopped talking about whatever it was they had been talking about and listened to him. They had to, that’s all; there was nothing else for them to do.

“Goddle Midey, gentlemen! Did you read about what’s happened – did you see what it says in the paper? Gen’l Joe Wheeler takin’ his boys into action and yellin’ to ’em ‘Come on, boys – let’s give the Yankees hell!’ Forgettin’, by gummies, that he was fixin’ to lick a passel of those Spaniels, or whatever ’tis they call themselves in their native language, and thinkin’ he was chargin’ into us fellers again. Bet he knew the difference, though, when he hit their line – yes sirree bob!

“Well, it all only goes to show that when they need somebody to lead ’em they pick out one of the veterans, Blue or Gray, it don’t make no great matter which. These young West Pointers and these brash state guard officers are good enough for drillin’ green hands in camp, I guess, but when the real fightin’ starts who do they fall back on? On us old timers, that’s who!

“Now, then, there’s little old dried-up Joe Wheeler singin’ out to his men to give the Yankees hell! Well, they weren’t Yankees this time, but Goddle Midey, I’ll promise you that hell was what he gave ’em just the same! He’s quite a fightin’ man, this feller Wheeler is. He may ’a’ fought on the other side from me but you got to give the Devil his dues. I remember one time down in Mississippi a bunch of those rusty raggety scoundrels of his made me run fifteen miles betwixt sun-up and sunset and then when night time came on I felt refreshed enough to keep right on runnin’ most of the night.”

He paused, beaming expectantly. Whenever Cap’n Jere spoke of having run away from the enemy it was customary for some person to say in the tones of a well simulated surprise: “Why, Cap’n Jere, I didn’t know you ever let those Rebels run you!” and then he would gurgle happily and reply: “Run, hey? Why Goddle Midey, son, there was times when if I’d ’a’ had a feather in my hand I’d ’a’ flew!” And then, as if acting on signal of drill, all within hearing would laugh heartily.

Members of the present company knew the procedure. They had been schooled in the routine of it – the opening statement by him, the question, the apt retort of the answer, then the rewarding outburst. It was one of Cap’n Jere’s most reliable whimsies – a sprightly joke, indeed, but requiring cooperation to bring it out properly.

Having spoken the key line he waited, according to formula. He kept on waiting. For once, no volunteer came briskly in on the cue. A daunting little pause ensued. Two or three men straightened themselves free where they leaned against the front wall of the store and moved off, making rather an ostentatious show of their departure. Mr. Joel Biggs, head of the firm, started humming “There’ll be a hot time in the old town tonight” with almost a theatrical air of absent-mindedness. Sundry others took up the thread of their conversation where Cap’n Jere had riven it. Somebody began snapping his elastic sleeve supporters with an impious little slapping sound. The snub might have been rehearsed beforehand, so perfectly was it acted out.

For a second time, from that same stage, Cap’n Jere made his exit, haughtily, but nevertheless greatly discomfited. He made it to the hateful music of a derisive chuckling and giggling behind him.

But pretty soon after that the Spaniards gave in, and in a little while more the handful of volunteers who had gone from Shawnee Run were mustered out and came back. None of them had been farther away from home than Tampa, Florida; there was but one who got that far. The rest had been detained at Chickamauga or Savannah. And so Cap’n Jere, still the only individual in Shawnee Run who ever had heard the whine of a hostile bullet in the hour of battle, was restored to a pedestal which ceased to totter and again became quite firm under his feet.

There this ancient stayed, assured and secure, while a newer generation and a less regardful one than his was growing up about him. It was a season of transition. Even into remote communal backwaters such as Shawnee Run came changes – changes in mode of speech, in mode of action and thought. They didn’t exactly creep in; they rode in with the dust of the first automobile; they dropped from the wings of the first passing Wright machine. But excepting that he went game in both legs, and took on a piping tone in his voice; excepting that his head now was snow-white where once it had been the color of rusty iron; and excepting that with passing time he grew a bit more prolix in conversation and a trifle more dictatorial in manner, the patriarch didn’t materially change. Then, eight years ago at the other side of the world, there sprang up a thing which was to alter all lesser things on this particular atom of the planetary system.

It took a great war to make a civic institution of Cap’n Jere. It took a little war – a short horse of a war and soon curried – to jostle him on the perch of his neighbors’ rearing. It took the greatest of all possible wars utterly to shake him down. Perhaps for his intolerance he deserved overthrowal; perhaps, as the fellow says, he had it coming to him. Undeniably he was over-spoiled, vastly puffed up in his own image. Popular idols often suffer from such failings, to their ultimate undoing. Or perhaps it merely was that in his stubbornness and his conceit he set himself on the path of a mighty storm and the winds of it blew him flat, making shards of his senile vanities and broken pot-sherds of his pride.

You couldn’t put your finger on a definite place and say that here, right here, was where the thing started. In such cases you rarely can do that. Who can make a chart for the beginnings of the formless thing we call public opinion? The point remains that, seemingly all at once, Captain Rudolph became a sort of town jibe. Let him come hobbling into a group and young Joel Biggs or somebody would say, lifting the voice slightly and with a studied air of casualness: “Well, I see by an article in last Sunday’s supplement of the Chicago paper that there’s already been more casualties in the Battle of Verdoon than the entire list of killed, wounded and missing amounted to in this country from 1861 to 1865.” Or young Eddie Boatwright, the rising notary public, would be moved to direct attention to the interesting fact that the total weight of metal fired from the Federal Army’s guns in the three days of Gettysburg would have fed the artillery of the Allies for less than twenty minutes on any given day along the western front.

These little byplays had a way of taking place whenever Cap’n Jere dropped in; really, the thing amounted to a habit. Pretty soon he quit dropping in. He sat on his front porch and read “The Memoirs of U. S. Grant.” There were long spells when he sat there, not reading, but just staring at nothing at all.

Even in his absence he served to adorn a moral and point a comic tale. Utterances of his made in the early stages of European hostilities before he withdrew from village club life – or its equivalent – were remembered and cherished and repeated with variations agreeable and suited to the moment. One utterance in particular was a favorite. It figured frequently in the extensive repertoire of that natural-born but now middle-aged cut-up, Banks Ferguson. Altering his heavier tones to a perfect simulation of the other’s petulant quaver, he would speak after this fashion:

“What kind of a war is this one over in Yourupp as compared with My War? If you knew so much, Mister Smarty, you tell me that? Now, mine was a war to save the Union. What does a war that’s only affectin’ the whole world amount to alongside of that? And squattin’ down in a loblolly at the bottom of a trench and shoot in’ away at men two or three miles away where you can’t even see ’em – what kind of a war is that to fight? And usin’ airplanes and balloons and submarines and pizen gas and tanks and all sorts of new fang-dangled contrapshuns – why, it’s a machine-made war, that’s what ’tis! Why, Goddle Midey, you might just as well ship a lot of self-cockin’ post-hole diggers and automatic thrashin’ machines up to the front to do your fightin’ for you, and you stay at home and be comfortable. Now, you take My War: You stood right out in the open, man to man, where you could see the whites of the other feller’s eyes as he come at you and the color of his insides when you let ’em out of him on the p’int of your bayonet. That was a real war, Amurikin ag’inst Amurikin, not a long distance affair, like the one these here furriners are carryin’ on. Goddle Midey, no sirree bob!”

A good joke is a good joke and this one, being treasured and nursed along, lasted until our own country quit backing and filling and flung herself headlong into the mess on the side of right and decency. From then on for better than a year and a half people had something important to think of and to do. There were volunteer recruits to be patted on the back and cheered as they went away and promised that the whole wide world would be theirs, with the compliments of a generous and a grateful nation, when they came victoriously home again. There were draft boards to be organized. Mothers gave their boys, wives gave their husbands, children their fathers. Older men gave of their time and their enthusiasm.

And through it all, while this hot and burning fever of patriotism ran through our nation’s veins, the veteran, by general consent as it were, remained in retirement. For him the times were out of joint; his nose, as the saying goes, was out of joint too – dislocated by spry and eager youngsters swelling about in khaki and just yearning to go for the throats of the Heinies. They made a proper modern image of American valor; local sentiment enshrined them, collectively, in the niche that had been left vacant when Cap’n Jere crawled into his hole and pulled the hole after him.

He crawled in definitely and, as one might say, for keeps, after the people of Shawnee Run, regardless of race, creed or politics, confederated together following the declaration of a state of war for a grand patriotic rally. The committee on arrangements met in Lawyer Dave Lucas’s office to map out the program and the Reverend Ames suggested that Captain Rudolph and after him the Honorable Oscar Tawney of Medlarsville be invited to address the meeting.

“Why those two?” asked Mr. Joel Biggs, Senior, sharply.

“Yes, that’s what I’d like to know – why them two?” echoed Banks Ferguson.

“Well,” said the Reverend Ames, rather taken aback, “it’s following a precedent, you know, to have Captain Rudolph speak at all public gatherings – it’s grown to be sort of a tradition among us. And Mr. Tawney, having lately been elected county judge and being a man of ripened years and mature judgment, might very well follow him, don’t you think?”

“Or in other words,” said Joel Biggs, Junior, “you’d have your speakers appear in order of senility, eh?” Joel, Junior, was lately returned from an eastern college where he had taken the full academic course and would shortly enter munitions work, thereby getting himself exempted from the draft call. “Well, I’m against it – for one.”

“You and me both, Joey,” spoke up Banks Ferguson. “I’m in favor of leavin’ old man Jere off the list altogether. He’s got to be a regular nuisance and nothin’ short of it. He’d spile the whole blow-out fur us. That’s what he’d do – Goddle Mideyin’ all over the place – excuse me, Rev’rend, but that’s the fact – and talkin’ about what he done at the Battle of Shiloh till everybody was plum wore out. We don’t want to hear no more about the late war; we want to hear somethin’ about the present one. And we don’t need no imported spielers neither, the way I look at it. This is goin’ to be strictly a Shawnee Run affair, ain’t that the general idea? All right, then, let’s confine ourselves to local talent and cut out all the old fossel-backs that’re playin’ hookey from the graveyard on borrowed time. It’s a young man’s war; let’s hear from the young men then. I nominate Joel Biggs, Junior, for chairman of the meeting and Eddie Boatwright to make the principal talk. Eddie’s well read and a hustler and he knows how to make it snappy.”

As it turned out, Eddie Boatwright did make it snappy. He had the gift of the apt word and the whiplash metaphor. His development into a seasoned orator dated from this auspicious debut. He became the best four-minute speaker in the county and was sent all over the State, rousing the people and having complimentary pieces printed about him in the papers. So quite naturally and as a matter of course he was chosen to make the address of welcome when Mort Overstreet come back from France in November of 1918, stepping stiffly on a composition leg which creaked slightly in the hinges when Mort put his weight down on it. The old Captain wasn’t on hand when this great event took place, either. He wouldn’t have fitted into it, probably. At any rate he stayed in the hole of his own digging that had been pulled in behind him, getting older and feebler by the hour, and without a contest, and by common consent, the invalided Overstreet took over the honors and the duties of being Shawnee Run’s official hero in succession of Captain Jere Rudolph, removed.

The incumbent had no youthful rivals either. Shawnee Run’s military contingent had been remarkably lucky or, dependent upon one’s point of view in such matters, remarkably unlucky. Of her quota for war service only a few had actually gone overseas and a fewer number still had seen the front lines. There were but two Gold Star mothers in town when the fighting ended and in both instances their boys had died of diseases in cantonment on this side of the salt water.

The one exception to the rule of immunity from physical bemanglement was this spindly youth, Mort Overstreet. It seemed that while he lay ailing one night in April, in a hospital near a French place referred to by him as the town of Barley Duck, a German airman had sprinkled the area with bombs and he, huddled and shriveling under his blankets, had been one of the victims. So now he was back home again, most honorably maimed, with a wound stripe on his sleeve, and on his left breast one of those French Craw de Gears. Here, by grannies, was a hometown boy who’d been decorated by the French government for meritorious conduct and fortitude under suffering, and kissed on both his cheeks by one of their biggest generals! Shawnee Run, from Mr. Joel Biggs, Senior, her richest citizen, to the smallest small boy trailing Mort in dumb adoration, felt that she owed him homage and bestowed it freely.

Howsomever, when the first glamorous sheen of his home coming wore off, it was not to be denied that the new idol proved somewhat of a general disappointment. The trouble with him seemed to be that except for his limp he was exactly the same gangling Mort Overstreet who had gone away in the spring of 1917 – the same slow talking, slow moving, spraddle-armed young person. Discipline had not made him smart or alert; it had not made him tidy of dress. If anything, he seemed more slouchy and more indolent than he had been before he went for a soldier – and that was saying a good deal.

Anyhow, the war was over now – Germany had thrown up both hands and quit – and people were getting normal again. With normality came calmness. If war is glory gone on a drunk, surely the first six months of peace is the next morning after the jag. Now Shawnee Run, in common with the rest of the country, had for many months been swallowing sublimated enthusiasm in great gulps. The need for taking the medicine having passed, her communal stomach naturally turned slightly sour. Don’t set her down as being in any temperamental respect different from the rest of the country. You will recall how, when the first of our combat divisions returned from foreign service, New York went wild over the victorious legions as they marched through Fifth Avenue beneath triumphal arches. But here just the other day, when some stray remnants of the A.E.F. landed, after doing garrison duty for so long in Germany, the lone policeman who met them as they filed off the transport was in doubt whether he should run them in for having no visible means of support or for parading through a public thoroughfare without a permit. He couldn’t arrest them for causing a crowd to collect, because they didn’t cause any crowd to collect. And Shawnee Run is merely New York City as prescribed by a homeopath.

Be all this as it may, the point I am trying to get at is that public opinion in its reactions toward one-legged Mort Overstreet presently showed decided and chilling modifications. Perhaps I can best sum it up in the progressive stages of its cooling-off by quoting here three representative citizens, speaking separately and on succeeding occasions. First, we have Mr. Banks Ferguson, addressing a sympathetic group of listeners some two months after the close of hostilities:

“Say, takin’ him by and large, ain’t he turned out to be about the dumbest imitation of a conquerin’ hero ever you seen in your life? Here the Ladies’ Aid goes and gets up a congratulation party at the Methodist church specially on his account. He’s to be the center of attraction, with everybody shakin’ hands with him and Presidin’ Elder Burris all prganized to make a complimentary speech about him right to his face. And what does he do? Smack in the middle of things he ups and disappears and later on we find out that he’s sneaked away and gone on home and went to bed. Says he’s gittin’ tired of bein’ fussed over; says if anybody’s interested in his case they might spend a little time findin’ out why his back pay is bein’ held up on him. That’s gratitude for you – ain’t it? And try to git him to tell you somethin’ about the war or how a battle looked or the way one of them big shells sounded when it went off close to you – just try, that’s all. He’ll start in with a pack of tiresome drivel about the cooties, or about how they don’t measure distance over there by miles the way civilized people do but by killymeeters, whatever they are. Or else he’ll talk about the mud – just mud, mud, mud. He’s got mud on the brain. Seems like, to hear him tell it, he didn’t see nothin’ over there for months on a stretch except mud and killymeeters. Well, these here killymeeters may a-been more or less of a novelty, but who wants to hear about all them different grades of foreign mud when we’ve got a mighty superior domestic brand right here at home? You take that piece of Main Street up toward the bridge on a soft March day followin’ after a hard winter and I’ll back her for mud ag’in the world … Honest, Mort Overstreet gits me plum’ outdone with him sometimes, the way he acts. I only hope next time we have a war there’ll be somebody goin’ from here who’ll have noodle enough to furnish a few of the real details for local consumption when he gits back.”

Imagine the lapse of six months more and hearken to Mr. David Lucas, attorney at law, also real estate and loans, farm mortgages a specialty. This is Mr. Lucas speaking:

“Well, sir, he was in here again yesterday wanting to know why that mix-up about his disability allowance hadn’t been straightened out yet up at Washington. That makes the third time in less than a month he’s come to my office or else waylaid me on the street to pester me about that blamed claim of his. Didn’t I take his case as an act of charity? Didn’t I write to my close friend Jake Hargis asking him to give the matter his personal interest? Didn’t I get a letter back from his secretary, practically by return mail, saying that just as soon as suitable opportunity offered the secretary would bring the matter to Congressman Hargis’s attention? Didn’t I turn that letter over to Overstreet? Don’t he know that the government is still all snarled up over all these new problems? Hasn’t he got any consideration, any patience? Don’t he know——

“But oh shucks, what’s the use! Where does he get off any how, to be bleating around like that? Why, he didn’t even get hurt in action. As a matter of fact, I doubt whether he ever saw any real action. And yet he had doctoring and free nursing, the best of care from the government…

“Say, some of these returned veterans of ours give me a pain anyway. They’re getting their vocational training and their allotments of reclaimed waste lands, or anyhow they will get ’em in due course of time when the government gets round to those details. And while they’re waiting why, in the name of all that’s holy, don’t they go to looking for jobs instead of loafing, about, acting like they thought the country owed ’em a free living for the rest of their natural lives?… How’s that, Tobe? – hard for a crippled boy to get a job, you say? Well, so far as I recall, Mort Overstreet never exactly lost his eyesight looking for a job of work while he still had both his legs.” (Applause.)

Thirdly, let us overhear what the senior Mr. Biggs, head of the firm of Biggs & Son, successors to the old established concern of Biggs & McKenna, and Shawnee Run’s most affluent and influential citizen, has to say. What he says will be worth pondering over, for it is the Voice of Business that speaks through him and Business, we must admit, has had just cause for grievance and resentment in these distressing post-war days:

“And now it’s to be a bonus act, eh? Well, I’m flat against it. You men can tell anybody you please that I’m flat against it. That’s exactly what I told this young cripple, Overstreet, no longer ago than this morning right in this store. We’re being eaten up with taxes as it is. And now, on top of all the rest, it seems we’re going to be called on to pay a few billions for a bonus. What I want to know is, did this bunch fight for their country through patriotic motives or did they fight for money through mercenary motives? Nobody seems to appreciate that those who stayed at home did their share, too, and carried the burden and footed the costs. Why, my back is broke right now from paying for the load of Liberty Bonds and Victory Bonds that I’ve got over there in my safe. I could get big interest on the money if it wasn’t all tied up in government securities. But you don’t hear me kicking. Only, I must say this: Just let Congress try to shove us into the next fool war that comes along and then you’ll see whether the businessmen of this country will rally like they did this last time!”

This brings us up to Decoration Day, last past. Most years Decoration Day had not meant a very great deal to Shawnee Run. The banks and the stores closed; some families went picnicking and some heads of families went fishing. Those who visited the neglected and treeless burying ground, a mile and half from town, did so as individuals and not under organized auspices.

This year, though, Shawnee Run was signally favored by the high gods of coincidence. The Honorable Gilbert J. Gifford, that distinguished Representative from a far-away district, who, half a century before, had conferred an everlasting honor upon the town by being born in it, had returned upon business connected with the settling up of a distant kinsman’s estate. He was an orator of parts – of about all the oratorical parts there are; the walls of the halls of Congress might so attest. As they say in the argot of the ball field, he had everything – speed, control, change of pace, a hot fast one, a slow curve. And in his own appreciative ears the sound of his voice, uplifted in rhythmic elocution, was the sweetest music ever crooned. Being waited upon by a delegation, he graciously agreed to deliver an oration on the thirtieth in commemoration of his country’s defenders, both the quick and the dead.

The occasion justified elaboration. By subscription a fund was raised – the Biggses, father and son, heading it with substantial donations – to meet all special and extraordinary expenses. One of the Medlarsville brass bands – not the best one but the other one – was engaged. A parade by automobile and carriage to the cemetery was ordered; the journey if made afoot was a considerable one, especially when the weather was warm. And it usually is warm on the edge of the Corn Belt when spring is melting into summer.

Decoration Day morning came in hot and humid, with clear skies but with the lurking threat of an abrupt change of weather in the moist stickiness of its air. Because the second-best Medlarsville band had to take part in a forenoon parade at home and so could not drive across country from the county seat until after that job was finished, the formal exercises in Shawnee Run were to begin at two P.M.

The parade was to start sharp on the hour. Those in charge – the grand marshal and his aides – were determined it should move promptly, and worked valiantly to that end; so it got under way shortly after three o’clock, the band leading. In the first car following it, holding thus the prime place of distinction – a car with the top turned back – rode Congressman Gifford with Mr. Lucas, Mr. Boatwright and the Messrs. Biggs. The next car bore Shawnee Run’s two Gold Star mothers and the pastors of the three local churches. On the back seat of the third car sat, side by side, Shawnee Run’s pair of best known ex-fighting men, Captain Jere Rudolph sitting on the right, young Mort Overstreet on the left. Marching bodies, secret order lodges in full regalia, and citizens generally, made up the tail of the procession. It passed out Main Street and over the Iron Bridge in a thick yellow dust cloud of its own raising.

At the outset there had been doubt in the minds of some of those in authority as to whether Captain Rudolph would be willing to favor by his presence the services of the day. He had grown perceptibly feebler of late, and somehow seemed sort of distant and standoffish toward people generally – sort of shy. Yes, shy was really the better word of the three to describe it. But when the Reverend Ames, as spokesman for the committee on arrangements, called upon him at his cottage and urged his participation, to the end that the great event might properly be out-rounded and made complete, the octogenarian gave his consent promptly. So doing, he showed a faint trace of his one-time sprightliness.

“I’ve been sort of calculatin’ that the next time I wore my Grand Army clothes out to that cemetery I’d be stayin’ on there permanently after the rest of the folks had come on back to town,” he said. “So I can’t scarcely say but what I’m willin’ to take the jaunt with a reasonable guarantee of finishin’ out the round trip. Maybe me and young Overstreet might enjoy visitin’ with each other, too, during the ride – I figure we’d be likely to have somethin’ congenial to talk about. I may not git down street more’n about once in a coon’s age these days but even so I manage to keep track of things generally … Yes, elder, you may tell the rest of the committee I’ll be all dressed up and ready when the rig comes by for me on next Tuesday afternoon.”

But when Tuesday afternoon came his spurt of vivacity appeared to have run its course. He, who once upon a time had been so prolific of speech, seemed now to be concerned with abstracting thoughts which kept him for the most part dumb as he sat in the car. Young Overstreet ordinarily was slow of speech, and this day embarrassment had tied his tongue in a double bowknot. There was a suggestion of a deeper emotion than embarrassment in his manner and in his face. It might almost have been suspected to betoken a touch of sullenness – of chronic discontent, say. However, few persons, if any. took cognizance of his attitude or Cap’n Jere’s, either. The eyes of all beholders were naturally upon the front car where the great man rode with his guard of honor.

Through the first three-quarters of an hour the ceremonies at the cemetery hardly could have gone forward more auspiciously than they did go. Of course, when the band played “The Star Spangled Banner” the assemblage, trying to sing it, made rather a hash of the job. Still, they did as well as most of us could have done had we been there. But following the opening prayer, the bandsmen blared forth the air of “The Battle Hymn of the Republic” and all hands came in splendidly with the words of “John Brown’s Body.” When they came to the chorus, Mort Overstreet, singing under his breath, rendered it according to a version which had found popularity with his overseas contingent. This way:

All we do is sign the payroll,

All we do is sign the payroll,

All we do is sign the payroll –

And we never draw a gol dam cent!

But only Cap’n Jere, alongside him, heard the parody or marked the ironic emphasis of the singer’s tone.

Next, on being introduced with fragrant sentences of praise by Mr. Eddie Boatwright, the orator of the day went at it grandly. He led off appropriately with a quotation from a standard work of poetry. He invoked the shades of America’s warrior hosts to hearken to the words he now would speak; the inference was that if they did so they would enjoy a rare treat. In uplifting sonorous measures he drew a symbolic image of the flag of our country with particular reference to what the flag meant personally to him. He made it plain – no, that’s not right; he made it fancy – that he heartily endorsed the flag. He approved the estate of motherhood. Home ties had from him the strongest of commendations. He told how liberty had been born on this continent when the soil of the land had sprouted with the blades of bayonets like the blades of the corn and how that, out of the fiery furnaces of battle, our civilization had been smelted.

A captious critic and one uninspired by the prevalent mood of the moment might have detected in Congressman Gifford’s manner a hint that he rather fancied himself to be probably the most conspicuous and finished product of this same civilization of which so glowingly he spoke. But his hearers, without exception, found his utterances to their liking and so indicated. Well, it was a good speech as Congressman Gifford full well knew. In all the eight times heretofore that he had delivered it, it never yet had failed him. Approaching his climax he lifted both arms above his handsome iron-gray head:

“And so, my friends,” he cried out, his voice quavering as though it came forth through sobs choked back, “and so, my dear friends, today we gather in this sacred spot, hallowed to us by precious associations and made beautiful by the tender and loving hands of gentle womanhood. And as here we mingle with these gallant returned heroes of the Great World War whom I see before me and whom we ever shall delight to honor and to cherish and to whom we pledge our grateful devotion, our support and our jealous care now and hereafter – and as here we stand among the last resting places of our sacred dead of other and lesser wars, whose gallant memories and valorous deeds we always shall treasure in the caskets of our souls, I raise my reverent eyes to yonder dome of pure and flawless blue and——”

Matching the action to the cue of the words he did indeed lift his eyes and then and there, for the first time in his life. Congressman Gifford was guilty of starting to paint a vocal masterpiece and then leaving it unfinished. He looked aloft – and broke off his apostrophe in midflight. All of his audience looked where he had looked and a nervous titter ran through their ranks. For overhead, the flawless blue dome just referred to magically had vanished. In that same moment the sunshine had been cut off. Out of the west, while they listened with senses enchained by his eloquence, a great black cloud, swollen and heavy with unspilt rain, had been swiftly rolling and spreading. It was now upon them, promising one of those torrential tropical downpours which seem so oddly out of place in temperate North America but which nevertheless persistently occur about once in so often in our summertimes.

Even as Congressman Gifford fumbled for his next word the first gross drops fell, spatting like clots in their upturned faces and making fat stipples where they struck in the dust on spots from which the turf was worn away. Another instant, and a bolt of fork-tailed lightning ripped asunder the dropsical belly of the heavens and let the deluge down upon them in sheets and waves and flooding vertical cataracts. How that rain did rain! Subsequently the visitation was spoken of as a young cloudburst. It certainly deserved the name.

Decoration Day for Shawnee Run broke up right there. Rather, it was washed out by the roots. Nobody moved to adjourn but everybody moved to depart. Men, women and children, bandsmen, lodgemen, committeemen and all, they sped for shelter. The trouble was, though, that of fitting shelter there was none that side of town. Who would dare tarry under a roadside tree or take refuge beneath an iron bridge when that two-pronged lightning was flickering like an infernal tuning fork across the black keyboard of the firmament and evoking the deep bass music of the thunderclaps behind each quivering play of its blazing tines?

Those fleeter of foot reached the parking spaces outside the burying ground fence, flung themselves into the cars, six, eight or ten to a load, and went homeward as fast as the skidding tires could turn. The rest followed afoot – children crying in their fright, women with the hair plastered against their faces and their holiday finery soaked and spoiled, men swearing as the sop ran down the backs of their necks and the mud came sloshing in over the tops of their shoes. Three minutes earlier that road to town had been a ribbon of crinkled dust, ankle-deep. Now it was a yellow batter, all creaming and sticky and slick. Through it they went, slipping and falling. It was a free-for-all foot race, and the prize was to get under a weather-tight roof and might the Devil take the hindermost.

There were two of the hindermosts. One of them was Cap’n Jere and he never even started. The first plunge of the getaway caught him unawares. Blinded by the sudden drenching, battered against by more agile bodies, buffeted and bewildered and fumbling, the old man had a confused recollection of being upheld by someone and then, when that other slipped and went down, of seeking to aid him to his feet.

The next thing he knew with sureness was when he found himself down on the earth gasping and wheezing, at the back of the speakers’ stand which had been built up into the air, stair-steps fashion. He wasn’t out of the rain here. Short of being inside four stout walls there was no escaping the rain. But in this lee he was somewhat protected from the wind which now had come and was blowing the rain before it in slanting streaks like silver lances all aimed the same way. He was holding fast to some dependable object. As his eyes cleared, he was surprised to discover that this object was a human arm inside of a wringing wet sleeve. Arm and sleeve, it next developed, were the property of his late riding companion, Mort Overstreet. So it must have been Mort who had steered him hither. He’d done it handily, too, seeing that Mort himself was gimpy.

His rescuer drew him down for better shelter beneath the overhang at the rear of the framework. They squatted there, getting wetter and wetter, if such a thing were possible for a pair already wet to the point of saturation, but also getting their breath back, which was the main thing. The younger man was the first to speak:

“Well, Cap’n,” he said with a sort of slow bitterness, “there don’t seem to be but just the two of us left.”

“Likely you’re right,” answered Cap’n Jere. “It would appear that, in a manner of sayin’, everybody else has went off and left us behind. Well, speakin’ for myself, I’d say that bein’ deserted this-away has its advantages. We don’t have to listen to anybody makin’ an oration about us heroes, do we?”

Young Overstreet stared at him and took puzzled note of a twinkle in the eyes behind the blurred spectacles and of a broad grin that exposed the full strength, uppers and lowers, of the Captain’s false teeth. Water coursed in streams down the puckered old face. His shoes must be full of water by now; his pockets, too, probably; Mort’s were. Yet here he was with that cheerful grin on his face. There was no mirth in the lame boy’s soul or in his voice, either, as he spoke again:

“Left us – you bet! Never gave neither one of us a thought, none of ’em. And that big windbag of a Gifford – he was the first to up and fly. I seen him. One minute swearin’ that us World War veterans would always be looked out for by him and the next minute beatin’ it through the crowd fur a front seat in somebody’s car. What do you know about that?”

“Only what you tell me,” said Cap’n Jere, still smiling as at a good joke. “I didn’t see him go myself. Still, I wouldn’t put it past him – knowin’ the run of the breed. I was something of a public speaker myself before I reformed. And public speakers have a cravin’ to be out in front.”

Apparently the young cloudburst had restored to the old man a measure of his former sprightliness – a freshet from on high livening up a withered century plant.

“Son,” he said briskly, “for quite a spell I’ve been waitin’ my chances to get to have a little talk with you in private. I look on this here rain as sort of providential – it’s give me the opportunity without nobody else round eavesdroppin’ and everything comparatively quiet. I’ve been studyin’ you – you may not have suspicioned it – but I’ve been studyin’ you, such few times as I’ve run across you. Unbeknownst to you I was studyin’ whilst we were comin’ out here together today. I think I know what’s been passin’ through your mind off and on. I figure, in a way of speakin’, that I’ve also been goin’ through the same things you’ve went through.” He halted to let a particularly loud thunderclap die away in rumblings.

“Yes, sir, I wanted specially to talk with you about this here business of bein’ a popular hero. It’s like almost any other business – it has its ups and downs. I know, because I’ve been all the way through it and you’ve only just recently started in to followin’ it. Yes sir, the hero business is certainly a funny kind of business. Snug up a little bit closer and let me tell you some of the ins and outs of it.”

There is lack of space and time here for repeating all under this heading that Cap’n Jere had to say. While the storm beat down on him and the ruined bunting drained its paint-box colors upon him he spoke, without interruption from his hearer, for perhaps five minutes. We quote here only his concluding remarks, delivered with a due seriousness:

“I’d say, furthermore, that the difference between your war and mine was that mine lasted so long that the folks at home got used to seein’ the results of it about ’em – the human wreckage and all – whilst yours was over and ended so quick that the let-down feelin’ come slap-bang when the enthusiasm was still runnin’ high and the whole thing was still more or less of a hurrah and a novelty. It left people feelin’ like as if they’d spent a whole pile of money on a show and then hadn’t got the worth of their money. They fussed over you a lot when you first got back, didn’t they? Well, in our case it was different. We just straggled in with our discharge papers in our pockets and went to work again and whilst everybody here was glad to see us home again there was no excitement. They just took us as a matter of course. Why, Goddle Midey, son, except among ourselves, us veterans wasn’t called by our military titles as a general thing. That came later.

“But in due time us fellers that’s saved the Union got our proper rewards. Congress quit talkin’ about what it was goin’ to do for us and really done somethin’. We got political recognition and we got public offices, some of us, and we got our pensions. Some that didn’t deserve it got on the rolls – coffee-coolers and sutlers and camp followers and the likes of that – even some deserters. There had to be abuses in the system but the main p’int, I take it, was that sooner or later every deservin’ veteran was looked after. And you mark my words, son, in due time you boys that fought this last war will get your just deserts, too. You’ll hear people goin’ round sayin’ that republics are ungrateful. That’s a lie! Republics ain’t ungrateful and they ain’t ungenerous, neither – leastwise, I’m here to testify to it that this here one’s not. And some of these days you’ll be sayin’ the same thing about your country that I do. You may feel different about it right now but you won’t feel so always.

“Of course a feller that goes into the hero business is liable to make his mistakes, same as in any other line. F’r instance, if he should chance to get crippled up in battle the best thing he can do for his own peace of mind is just to stay right where he fell and die there and be buried there. That’ll give the folks at home a chance to carve his name on a nice monument and make fancy speeches about him and appreciate his memory and all. He’s no trouble to anybody any more; he’s a pleasure and a pride. But if he insists on gettin’ well and draggin’ himself back, maybe blind or with a timber leg or an empty coat sleeve flappin’, he’s a trouble and a care. And on top of that, if he goes round lookin’ neglected and actin’ reproachful people’s consciences start hurtin’ ’em and they take it out on him; they git to dislikin’ him, I guess, because it makes ’em so uncomfortable every time they see him, to think that maybe they’re shirkin’ their own responsibilities in the premises. I ain’t blamin’ ’em so much for it, neither – it’s only human nature. And nearly everybody suffers more or less from human nature.

“But there’s one yet greater mistake you can make in this hero business – and that’s the mistake of livin’ too long. Don’t live too long, son – take my advice and don’t stay on and on till the hero business quits payin’ its regular dividends.” His tremulous hand stole out and patted his companion on his wet shoulder.

“Don’t hang on till you lose step with the procession and your pet stories git to be tiresome and folks begin callin’ you a pesky old nuisance behind your back. You maybe think it’s hard on you now to be looked on as a burden and you still young and healthy. But wait till you git old and back-numbered and then you’ll know – Goddle Midey, boy, you’ll know what ’tis then!”

“And yet you just now said republics ain’t ungrateful,” quoth young Overstreet huskily. He wiped awkwardly at his cheek.

“I said it and I say it again,” answered the old man. “They ain’t ungrateful. But sometimes they are powerful forgetful!… Say, looky yonder! Those clouds are breakin’ away there to the west’ard and the rain’s beginnin’ to slack off. What say we start hoofin’ it towards town? We can’t git any damper than what we already are, can we? and neither one of us ain’t salt nor sugar, to melt away.”

“Think you can make it?” asked Mort.

“Well, we’ve still got one sound leg between the two of us,” said Cap’n Jere, “and we can kind of hold on to one another. Come on, Cumrud, let’s try it anyway. Don’t mind me callin’ you ‘Cumrud’ do you?”

“‘Buddy’ was what we used to call a good pal over in France,” said Mort.

“Was it? Well, I reckon it’s never too late for an old feller like me to try to be up to date. So, Buddy, if you can sort of git braced yourself and then help me up on these here old crooketty pins of mine, I figure we might make a start.”

Somewhat shaken by the effort, he finally stood upright. “Why, Goddle Midey,” he said brightly, “what’s a brisk little shower to a couple of old campaigners? This storm ain’t a patchin’ to one I remember we had down in Georgia right soon after the Surrender. Them slickery red clay hills! – I can shut my eyes and see ’em right now!”

“And alongside the mud that we used to plow through over in France that there road yonder looks like a paved sidewalk,” said young Mort. “Hang on to my arm. That’s the ticket. All set, Buddy? Well, then, let’s go!”

Cosmopolitan, Oct 1922

About this eBook

WINDFALLS

A GATHERING OF SHORT STORIES
BY
IRVIN S. COBB
(1876–1944)

Irvin Shrewsbury Cobb was an American author, humorist, editor, and columnist from Paducah, Kentucky who relocated to New York in 1904 for the remainder of his life, writing for the New York World, The Saturday Evening Post, Cosmopolitan, and other newspapers and magazines. Cobb wrote more than 300 short stories and 60 books (most of these being collections of his stories and articles). Some of his works were adapted for film.

Cobb was one of America’s most popular humorists during the first third of the 20th century, but his writing was not limited to comedy only. His descriptive writing was masterful, and his stories were often dramatic, poignant, tragic – even terror-ridden.

* * * *

This is my own compilation. The stories in this collection were found in magazine archives at Hathi Trust.

This ebook was created by ECM for MobileRead.com, August 2017, and may be freely distributed for non-commercial purposes.

The contents of this book first appeared 1911–1930 in various magazines. Text is in the public domain in countries where copyright is “Life + 70” or less.

OCR errors were corrected; punctuation, diacritics, and italics formatted. Story titles are cross-linked to table of contents. Initial publication is cited at the end of each story.

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