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Title: Walker of the Secret Service

Author: Melville Davisson Post

Release date: July 23, 2020 [eBook #62740]

Language: English



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WALKER OF THE SECRET SERVICE


      *      *      *      *      *      *

                        By
              MELVILLE DAVISSON POST

  WALKER OF THE SECRET SERVICE
  MONSIEUR JONQUELLE: PREFECT OF POLICE OF PARIS
  THE MOUNTAIN SCHOOL-TEACHER
  THE SLEUTH OF ST. JAMES’S SQUARE
  THE MYSTERY AT THE BLUE VILLA
  UNCLE ABNER, MASTER OF MYSTERIES

             These Are Appleton Books

             D. APPLETON AND COMPANY
               Publishers  New York

      *      *      *      *      *      *


WALKER OF THE SECRET SERVICE

by

MELVILLE DAVISSON POST

Author of “Monsieur Jonquelle: Prefect of Police
of Paris,” “The Sleuth of St. James’ Square,”
“Uncle Abner,” etc.






D. Appleton and Company
New York :: London :: MCMXXIV

Copyright, 1924, by D. Appleton and Company

Copyright, 1920, by International Magazine Company.
Copyright, 1920, 1921, by The Ridgway Company.
Copyright, 1921, by The Pictorial Review Company.
Copyright, 1921, 1922, by The Consolidated Magazines Corporation.
Copyright, 1923, by The McCall Company.

Printed in the United States of America




                                CONTENTS

                   I. The Outlaw
                  II. The Holdup
                 III. The Bloodhounds
                  IV. The Secret Agent
                   V. The Big Haul
                  VI. The Passing of Mooney
                 VII. The Diamond
                VIII. The Expert Detective
                  IX. The “Mysterious Stranger” Defense
                   X. The Inspiration
                  XI. The Girl in the Picture
                 XII. The Menace
                XIII. The Symbol




                    WALKER OF THE SECRET SERVICE




                             CHAPTER I

                             The Outlaw


Near the entrance of the great circus tent there was a little man in
a canvas chair. He sat at the end of the long alley, which was hung
with painted signs.

Nothing had escaped me.

I had no money to see any wonder, and so had to be content with what
was displayed outside. It was early in the morning. The grass before
the tents had not yet been trodden down; few persons were about, and
I had the marvels of this fantastic alley to myself.

I had advanced slowly along every foot of it, and now I stood just
beyond the roped-off entrance to the big tent, and the little man in
the canvas chair.

There was something in the appearance of this man that drew my eye.
He sat in the chair as though every muscle were relaxed, his eyes
closed, his head drooping. Now and then he put up his hand and
pressed the fingers over his face. It seemed a habit, as though his
face had the sensation of being swollen.

No one disturbed him. He had been there for some time. I had noticed
him at the end of the alley when I arrived, precisely in this
posture, as of one worn out with some exertion.

I was looking at him as I had looked at the painted signs when the
canvas of the big tent was thrust up and a man came out. He was a
big young man in the overalls of a mechanic and he had some device
in his hand like a dome-shaped metallic box.

He went directly to the man in the canvas chair.

“Mooney,” he said, “there’s something wrong with this damned thing;
make it go.”

The little man opened his eyes without moving a muscle of his body.
Then he put out his hand, took the metallic device, rested it on his
knee, flicked a penknife out of his waistcoat pocket, and with a
screw-driver blade took a plate off at the bottom of the thing. Then
he adjusted something deftly inside, replaced the plate and returned
the device to the mechanic.

It had taken only a moment; his fingers had moved with the precision
of a pianist, and he had scarcely changed his position.

I had been greatly interested and had drawn a little closer. And
when I looked up, the eyes of the big mechanic were on me; he had a
hard, determined face and a sharp, piercing eye. I felt that he
easily summed me up and had the measure of me. The little man in the
canvas chair spoke as the mechanic turned away.

“White,” he said, “who’s it goin’ to be?”

“I don’t know yet,” replied the mechanic. “I’ll look ’em over.”

Then he disappeared under the circus tent.

I realized now that I was very close to the man in the canvas chair,
and I stepped back across the green alley. A little group of tent
hands were speaking as I came up.

“I wonder why they stick,” one of them was saying. “They can’t get
much out of the boss for fixing these jimcracks.... The big one’s an
expert mechanic and the dope Jimmy’s a wizard.”

It was late in the afternoon when I again saw the big mechanic.

The crowd from the circus was scattering. I had nowhere to go and
was standing idly in the road when the man came up. He looked me
over very carefully.

“Young fellow,” he said, “you don’t seem to be in much of a hurry;
perhaps you could take a note over to the Red Sign Bar.”

I explained that I was a stranger in the town, but he pointed out
very definitely how I could find the way.

“You will go into the bar,” he said, “and go straight through to the
back room. There you will find the tired man who fixed the dynamo.
Give him this note.”

He handed me a blank envelope sealed, and half a dollar. I needed
the half dollar, for I was hungry. I had not a cent in the world and
I had walked that afternoon ten miles into the town.

It was not possible to mistake the directions. I followed the road
the circus wagons had made from the meadow where the tents were
stretched, to the town. One could not miss the main street through
it.

Presently I found the Red Sign Bar. The bar was crowded, so my
passage was not marked. I opened the door at the end and went into a
room.

Immediately the man sitting at the table sprang up.

On the table before him were a number of railroad folders and a map,
and he was making some calculations on a blank sheet of paper.

He was the same man whom I had seen in the canvas chair in the alley
of side shows before the big tent of the circus. But he was visibly
changed. He was like a cat, incredibly active. His hands were in his
pockets and he did not move after he was on his feet.

I closed the door and, going forward, put the envelope on the table.

“A gentleman out at the circus,” I said, “sent you this letter.”

He sat down with the same soft, quick feline motion, tore the
envelope open with his finger and read the contents. But I had the
feeling that while his eyes were on the paper they were also very
carefully on me. Then suddenly he spoke.

“Do you know why White picked you?”

“Picked me for what?” I said.

He folded the paper over his finger and, reaching across the table,
showed me the lower half of what the note contained.

It was written in pencil in a large clear hand:

    The same baby that we spotted at the Junction goes to
    the tank at 10:15 to-night. She always takes a drink at
    this trough. I think there is money in her clothes, and
    here’s a fellow to help.

                                                      White.

He whisked the note back into his pocket.

“So you are going to help us,” he said. “You look like a husky
youngster.”

I was completely puzzled, but, as you will presently realize, I was
ready for almost any adventure. My first clash with organized
society had left me bewildered, and ready for any revenge that might
present itself.

The little nervous man, Mooney, regarded me searchingly for some
moments before he spoke. Then he said:

“Damn the Mexican government! There is some of its money going south
to-night. How would you like to have a piece of it?”

As I have said, I was ready for nearly any adventure, but especially
an adventure directed against a government with which we had lately
been at war, and which was still, one felt, a potential enemy.

I did not reply.

Mooney leaned back in his chair and regarded me for some time, his
hand moving about his face.

“You will be a stranger here,” he said, “and a reliable person or
White would have passed you up. He has the eye of the devil for
seeing through a man. Here’s a dollar.”

He took a paper dollar out of his waistcoat pocket and handed it to
me.

“Do two things,” he said, “and don’t talk; go out and get something
to eat and after that hunt up a piece of quarter-inch pipe about two
feet long; slip it up your coat sleeve and be at the entrance of the
big circus tent at eight o’clock.”

I went out like a person who has suddenly fallen from the
commonplace world into some story of the _Arabian Nights_.

There was about me and over the world a haze of adventure. The
details of this adventure were not clear, but it was one directed
against the crooked Mexican government, and it involved a treasure
like the treasure of the sunken Armadas.

It was the alluring stuff of the storybooks. I was ready for it with
these strange adventurers.

This state of feeling requires a word here.

After my father’s death, as I was now alone, I came down out of the
great blue mountains to seek my fortune, as the storybooks say. I
walked, and on the road I was overtaken by an adventure. Near a
little village I passed one of those local trains, common to this
country: an engine, one or two cars, and an old passenger coach. The
highway passed close beside the track, and as I trudged along a
fireman leaned out of the tender and called to me.

“Hey, Reuben,” he said, “ring your bell when you pass.”

I told him with some heat, that I would ring his neck if he came
down out of his iron box, and I went on.

But the thing was not ended. The train presently pulled on and, as
it passed, the fireman threw a lump of coal at me. I countered at
him with a stone, that missed the tender and struck the passenger
car behind it.

At the next village I was arrested and taken before a justice of the
peace. There I was told that it was a felony, under the laws of the
state, to throw a stone at a passenger train, and that the railroad
intended to put me into the penitentiary.

“And what are you going to do with the fireman who threw a lump of
coal at me?” I said.

“Nothing,” replied the justice. “He didn’t hit you.”

“Then you’ll not do anything with me,” I said, and I rose.

The little office of the Justice was at the end of the village. A
railroad detective sat beside me; the fireman who had made the
charge lolled in the door.

It all happened in a moment.

I threw off the railroad detective who caught at my arm and as the
big fireman swung around into the door I struck him as hard as I
could in the chest. He went crashing down the steps. I jumped
through the door and ran. The railroad detective followed me, firing
his pistol. But he was no match for my youth across the fields, and
he was soon out of sight.

I turned back the way I had come, crossed to another highway; and
here on this afternoon I was. I did not know how far I had traveled
and hardly the direction. You will see then how ready I was for any
adventure—and especially if a railroad was included. It had become,
by virtue of the injustice of this incident, an enemy open to
revenge.

I had no trouble to find a dinner, but I found myself beset with
difficulty about the piece of pipe. I tramped about the town during
the afternoon, but I could think of no place where a piece of
quarter-inch pipe could be obtained. It did not occur to me to go to
a plumbing shop, and if I had thought of that I would not have known
what excuse to make for my purchase. Besides, I had no money. You
will remember that I was young and extremely hungry and the dollar
and a half had disappeared in carrying out Mooney’s first direction.

I thought I should have to give it up.

Finally in a blacksmith shop I found a rusted rod that had been part
of a wagon brake. I asked the blacksmith to give it to me.
Naturally, he wished to know what I was going to do with it, and for
a moment I was in difficulty for an answer. Then I told him that
they wanted such a piece of iron out at the circus, and had promised
to give me a ticket in if I could find it. He laughed.

“I’m glad,” he said, “that there’s something else they want, if the
elephant ain’t thirsty.”

He flung me the rod and wished that I might enjoy the circus.

I had it in my sleeve when White appeared in the grass alley before
the circus entrance.

I got out of the crowd and followed him. It was now dark. We went
around the big tent, through the stables for the horses, then struck
out across the meadow in a direction opposite from the town.

I walked beside him with my piece of rod in my sleeve, very much as
a child, it now seems to me, might set out on a fairy expedition
with an all-abiding confidence in the resources of those conducting
him, and with no clear idea of what he might come to, unconcerned
and careless of events.

White had very few words during the long walk through the dark in
the meadow.

“You are a husky youngster,” he said. “You could shove along a bull
wagon or I miss my guess.”

He was correct in that estimate. I was a sturdy youngster, hardened
by the out-of-doors. Physically I was developed, but I seemed in my
conception of affairs to have been still a child, albeit approaching
that stage of youth where, instantly, as by merely awaking in the
morning, one becomes a man.

We came finally to the railroad track. There was a short switch with
a little red house beside it. It was less a house than a sort of box
with a low door. Leaning against this door, when we arrived, was
Mooney.

He was smoking a cigarette; the tiny point of light had been visible
to us as we approached.

“Young man,” he said, “did you bring the piece of pipe?”

I drew the rod out of my sleeve and handed it to him. He struck a
match and examined the door; there was a padlock on it. He thrust
the rod through the bow of the padlock and with a quick twist broke
it out of the lock. Inside was a hand car, and then it was that I
realized why these men were concerned to have what they called a
“husky” assistant.

It was with difficulty that we were able to get the car on the
track. Finally it was accomplished and we started away in the
darkness. I knew nothing about the operation of a hand car, but I
was quickly shown. We set out in the direction which I took to be
south of the town. White and I on opposite sides pumped the car and
Mooney squatted on the platform. He had under him what looked like a
feed sack, filled with something that had a considerable bulk. He
carried also the iron rod in his hand, but it had served his
purpose. At the first stream we crossed he tossed it into the water.

It was a piece of possible evidence and he did not wish it to be
picked up along the track. True, it connected neither him nor White
with the thing which we were undertaking, but perhaps I might be
remembered by it, and it was this man’s policy to leave no point at
which any one could begin with his investigation.

We went on for some time into the night.

Once in a while we passed a house lighted in the distance, but no
village and no dwelling near the track. There was hardly any sound
except that of the car on the rails. I wondered at how still the
world could be. For a long time we continued to move south, White
and I at the pump handles of the car and Mooney, as I have said,
squatted on the platform.

Suddenly in the silence he swore softly.

“What’s the matter?” said White.

The little nervous man replied, drawling out the words.

“It’s an ax,” he said. “We ought to have an ax.”

“That’s easy,” replied White. “We’ll pull up at the next house and
send our young friend to borrow one.”

And they followed that plan. At a turn of the road we made out a
house a few hundred yards above us on the slope of the hill. The car
stopped and I went to borrow an ax.

I do not know how it happened that there was no dog about, for there
are dogs at all these houses in the south. I looked outside, but
there was no ax to be found. Then I looked in at the window.

There was a wood fire dying down in the fireplace, and a ladder
leading to the loft. The person who lived there was evidently in his
bed above. The man’s coat and boots were on the floor by the ladder,
and beside the chimney there were some tools—a mattock, a hoe, and
the ax for which I was looking. It was a hinged window secured on
the inside by a button. The ax was safe from any method that I knew,
and I went back to the hand car.

I told the men what I had found.

Mooney got up from his sack on the platform.

“My son,” he said, “I will show you something useful; let us go back
for the ax.”

As we went along he took a newspaper out of his pocket and dipped it
in a ditch until it was thoroughly wet. When we reached the window
he spread the wet paper against the glass and with the pressure of
his hand broke the pane out.

The broken glass stuck to the paper and it made almost no sound.

Then he put his hand through and unbuttoned the latch, opened the
window and climbed in noiselessly like a cat, got the ax and came
out.

We were very near to our destination, it proved, and in half an hour
we reached a water tank. It was near a little creek and in a strip
of wood. I had judged that we were on our way to a water tank from
the few lines Mooney had shown me, and what he had said. The money
of the Mexican government would be on a train that would stop here
for water, and, like the pirates of the Spanish Main, it was our
affair to capture the treasure.

We stopped. Mooney got down and removed from the car a bundle upon
which he had been sitting. White and I upended the hand car and sent
it down the embankment into the thick bushes; then we moved around
behind the water tank to prepare for the undertaking.

The night had long ceased to be dark. There was no moon, but the sky
was sown with stars, and there was a sort of faint white light in
the world. We could see distinctly what we were about, even in the
thicket behind the water tank, shaded somewhat by the wood. Here
Mooney untied his bundle.

It contained three suits of overalls such as are worn by railroad
men, blue trousers and a sort of blue coat; they were not new.
Mooney was too clever a person, as I came afterward to realize, to
make his party conspicuous by any new article.

This was the disguise for our bodies. For head covering Mooney had
three sugar sacks dyed black, with round holes for the eyes and
mouth. These we pulled over our heads. He had also an ordinary
burlap feed sack—the “loot sack,” he called it.

Then he brought out the weapons.

He made a little speech about these weapons. They were the latest
model of automatic pistols, each precisely like the others. He said
it was a great mistake to go out with a different variety of weapons
because in a protracted fight there could be no exchange of
ammunition.

His voice drawled with nervous jerks at the end of it. He might have
been lecturing to a Sunday school. He asked me if I understood the
weapon. I did not understand it and said so.

“Well,” he said, “it is simple enough. You have only to pull the
trigger and keep on pulling it; whatever happens will be over by the
time you get to the last cartridge. Don’t worry about it, my son.”

He added another direction:

“Turn the muzzle up when you shoot; it don’t do any good to hit
’em.”

He made a little ridiculous gesture.

“The maneuvers of train robbing,” he said, “are directed against the
mind.”

Then he explained what each of us was to do.

White was to use the ax in order to break in the door of the express
car. He, Mooney, would be the gunman, and it was my part in the
business to stand on the platform between the express car and the
next passenger coach to keep back the conductor or any one else who
might attempt to go forward into the train.

They seemed to know precisely what the trainmen would do, and were
prepared to meet it. Either the man called White had watched this
train on some previous night or he had taken some other precaution
to discover precisely what would happen when the train stopped at
the tank, for they went into their parts when the event arrived
precisely as though they had drilled for it and were entering at the
cue of some director.

We were hidden in the bushes close beside the tank when the train
rolled in.

To me it seemed immense, gigantic, in the darkness. The blinding
headlight, the roar, and grating of the brakes seemed to make a
bewildering confusion. I think I should not have moved from the
bushes, in such confusion was I thrown, had I not been between the
two men; and as it happened, I got up with them.

We waited until the engine had taken water and the conductor and
porter had made their round of the train; then we slipped out of our
hiding place as the train pulled out. We swung on to the rear
platform of the express car precisely at the moment that the porter
climbed on to the steps of the same platform at the other side.

Mooney jammed his gun into the man’s face.

The porter nearly lost his hold on the rail of the car with terror.

“My God!” he muttered. “Don’t shoot.”

We must have presented every element of terror to him—the deadly
weapons and the three looming figures in their black peaked caps.

“Keep still,” said Mooney. “Do what you are told and you won’t get
hurt.”

White tried the door to the express car; it was open. He pitched
away the ax, seized the porter by the shoulders, and he and Mooney
rushed the express car, using the body of the terrorized porter for
a shield against any bullet that might be fired.

To their surprise they found the baggage master, mail clerk and
express messenger all sitting on the floor eating lunch from dinner
buckets.

There was no resistance.

They all threw up their hands almost with a single motion.

“Which is the express messenger?” said Mooney.

“I am,” replied one of the men.

“I want what you have in the way box,” he said.

The messenger denied having anything.

“Give me your key and I will find out.”

Mooney went about the thing with deliberation. He unlocked the box,
took out all packages, and put them in his loot sack. Then he left
White to stand guard over the men while he took the mail clerk into
the mail car to see what he could get there.

All this time I was standing at my post between the two cars looking
through the glass door into the faces of the passengers. I could see
the faces of the men before me clearly, for I was looking from the
dark into the lamplight. Nevertheless I felt as though their eyes
were fixed on me and each man had a weapon in his pocket; but no one
moved toward my end of the car.

There was no suspicion of the events that were going forward a few
feet beyond the door and I doubt, even if it had been known, whether
any one would have taken the chance of coming out of the door.

I must have been a formidable, mysterious figure. Although the
youngest, I was the largest of the three men, and with the pistol in
my hand and the “spook cap,” as Mooney called it, it would have
taken courage to have advanced against me.

It was the plan that when Mooney had finished with his work and had
the loot in the sack ready to go he would pull the emergency air
brake. This would stop the train instantly and we should all get off
on the fireman’s side of the train. He had explained to us in his
lecture behind the water tank that train officials always look on
the engineer’s side when any trouble arises.

I do not know how it happened, but for some reason Mooney directed
White to make this signal and by mistake he pulled the wrong cord.

That warned the engineer.

I felt the automatic air begin to clamp the brake shoes. The
engineer blew four long sharp blasts to call the conductor forward.
The conductor with the flagman at his heels started on the run. They
had been sitting in the car before me, all the time under my eyes.
Now they plunged through the door on to the platform.

I shouted at them as they advanced.

“Go back or I’ll shoot you to death.”

In my excitement I roared the words. They stopped suddenly like men
who had come up against an invisible wall, dropped back through the
door and closed it with a bang.

I heard Mooney call to me as he jumped down. I jumped with him.

By this time the train had stopped. The engineer was still blowing.
The conductor had run to the rear of the train, it seems, when I had
driven him back, and got a rifle, and was on the ground when I got
off. He was shooting at Mooney and White as they disappeared through
the bushes. He was almost up to me as I stood there on the step
uncertain what to do. Then I remembered the direction Mooney had
given, elevated the muzzle of the automatic and fired it in his
face.

I did not hit him, but I got the result Mooney predicted.

He dropped the gun and fell back with a startled cry. I took the
chance and plunged into the bushes after my companions. But my
assault on his mind did not permanently disable him; he stooped
over, groped for the rifle, got it in his hands, and began firing at
me as I ran. Once he hit a tree so close to me that the splinters
flew in my face, but in a moment I was covered by the wood.

I ran on for some distance and then squatted down behind a tree. But
no one followed. For some time there were confused noises, voices
scarcely audible at the distance; then the train moved on.

It was Mooney’s direction that after the train had passed we should
return to the water tank. “It would be better to go back at once,”
he said. There would be no posse for the train to leave, but later
the authorities would be informed and search would be made for us.

I followed his direction.

But I must have gone farther than the others, for both he and White
were behind the tank when I came up. He had lighted a little fire of
twigs and leaves and in this we burned the “spook caps.” I did not
see the “loot sack” and I asked him about the Mexican money.

“No luck, my son,” he said. “White had the wrong tip, but I am not a
man to disappoint a lad. Here’s twenty dollars for you. Meet the
circus at Marysville.”

He pointed out the direction through the fields.

I gave him back the automatic pistol and the railroad clothes and
prepared to set out on my journey. It was not above half a dozen
miles, he said, and I could not miss the way. He would show me. He
climbed up on the crossbars of the water tank and pointed out the
direction, the distant hilltop where I would find a turn of the
road.

I was about to set out when he stopped me.

“Wait a moment,” he said, “and I will put you clear of the
bloodhounds.”

He stooped and in the darkness carefully passed his hand over the
soles of my shoes.

I went up the railroad track until I was clear of the wood, climbed
the hill, and got down into the road. I had become an outlaw, a
member of the most daring gang of train robbers in all the annals of
that high-handed crime.




                             CHAPTER II

                             The Holdup


I slept that morning in the hay beyond the horse stalls.

It was afternoon before I wakened. I had gotten into the town just
as the circus was unloading, and, as it happened, the road upon
which I approached came first to the switch on which the horse cars
were standing.

The one thing about which I had any knowledge, in the whole circus,
was horses.

I stopped at the car and helped the man get the horses out. It was
doubtless a fortunate coincidence, because I fell in as a sort of
assistant to the man who had charge of the horse car, and it gave me
a kind of connection with the circus. I helped him get the animals
over to the field and under the horse tent, and when they had been
cared for I went to sleep.

I had now some money in my pocket and I sauntered about on that
afternoon, pleased with everything.

The experience of robbing my first train did not seem to affect me.
It was a sort of adventure whose elements of danger I had escaped,
and it was now ended. I seemed not to realize that there was any
further peril about it.

I saw Mooney in the afternoon in his canvas chair. He paid no
attention to me. White I saw a little later. It was at the evening
performance. I was helping to take away the horses that appeared in
the ring. I was not in the main circus tent but in an attached tent
in which the performers mounted.

I was bringing out a horse for one of these riders when White came
up.

There were two persons standing near the horse: a young girl dressed
like a fairy—dainty and lovely, I thought, in her gauze skirts and
gilded butterfly wings—and a little woman. This woman was small and
dark haired with narrow eyes and flat ears set close to her head.
She turned viciously on White when he came up.

“Don’t go near her!” she cried. “Don’t even look at her!”

“You are a fool, Maggie,” he said. “I want to speak to the boy.”

She turned suddenly toward me as though she had not noticed me
before.

“Where did you come from?” she said. Then she laughed. “It don’t
matter. I know where you are going.”

And she went out toward the entrance to the circus tent, following
the big white horse that carried the fairy.

White said only a few words to me when she was gone.

“Hang along with the circus; we have got straight dope on that
Mexican money and we’ll pick it up in a few days.”

I traveled with the circus as one might travel with a fairy caravan.
Everything was of the deepest and newest interest.

But the greatest wonder was the girl who rode the white horse. The
little, determined, black-haired woman was always with her. I saw
her only when I helped her into the saddle and took away the horse.

She stood between the girl and everybody.

There was no exception, but she did not seem to consider me. Once or
twice I saw her looking curiously at me when I brought the horse to
help the girl into the saddle.

Sometimes she talked with Mooney.

I suppose a week passed in this fashion; then one evening, as I was
helping to bed down the horses, White came into the tent. The
evening performance had ended and it was perhaps midnight.

“We are going to take a little motor ride,” he said. “Come along.”

I went with him.

We made a detour of the circus field and came into the border of the
town. It was a residence street of the better class of houses. It
was late and the lights of the street had been put out. We stopped
finally before a garage in a lot between two houses. The door to the
garage was locked and White turned the lock with some implement
which I could not see.

Then we went inside and carefully pushed the car out into the
street.

White locked the door again behind us. We pushed the car along the
street for perhaps a hundred yards before we got in. The man
understood the motor perfectly and we slipped along the street and
out of the town.

At a bridge on the outskirts we picked up Mooney. He had his bundle
as on our first adventure.

White ran the car at great speed for perhaps two hours; then we
pulled up by the roadside and stopped.

Before we got out of the car I had an explanation of Mooney’s occult
device against the bloodhound.

There was a mist of fog. It had begun to gather over the lowland. We
had noticed it—a white blanket lying on the fields as we came along.
It was now rising, but it came up slowly as though it were a sort of
impalpable stratum formed mysteriously out of the earth and
extending, under some mathematical direction, upward. It was like a
piece of enchantment in the manner in which the thing arose. It now
lay on the world about us extending to the macadam road.

Mooney took a flash light out of his pocket.

It was not the usual cylinder affair. It was, rather, a little squat
lantern with a bull’s-eye bulb; thick—necessarily so, I imagine—for
there was a powerful light concentrated on the small disc and it,
therefore, required a considerable battery.

He looked at the clock on the motor.

“We shall have some time to wait,” he said, “but the fog may
increase and we ought to look over the ground.”

I got up to get out of the car, when he put his hand on my arm.

“My son,” he said, “the bloodhound will be no friend of ours; let us
think of him before he thinks of us.”

He went on in a drawling voice.

“Every little sheriff,” he said, “has fitted himself out with one of
these trailing beasts.”

Then he laughed.

“They will be valuable, no doubt, for Little Eva and the ice, but
for us they will hardly constitute a menace.”

He reached into his pocket and took out a flask of what one might
imagine to be brandy.

“I have here,” he said, “a lotion to confuse his nose.”

He drew out the stopper, poured the liquid into his hand, and rubbed
it carefully over our shoes. I knew on the instant, by the odor, it
was turpentine. Mooney was very careful about this thing. The whole
of our shoes were carefully painted with the turpentine. He
explained the theory of the thing while he was at work.

“It makes me laugh,” he said, “to think how our brethren of the road
have been chased about by dogs.... It is ridiculous to be chased by
anything, especially a creature depending on its nose. It is the
fine discriminating sense of odors that distinguishes the
bloodhound. If our footweary predecessors had only thought about it
they might have saved themselves the walking.

“How does one destroy a delicate odor?

“The solution is simple—by laying down over it a heavier, gross one.
And here one must consider the instinct of the bloodhound. He will
follow the trail of a man, that is, something living, a thing which
he has observed to move, but he will not follow the trail of a pine
tree. Turpentine, to the dog’s sensitive nose, is a tremendous
stench that he will walk away from.”

The road, as I have said, ran parallel to the track. We got out now
and went directly across the field to the railroad. Here, close
beside the track, Mooney set up a piece of rotten cross tie. It was
to be a signal, as I later discovered; and we should return this
way.

Then he walked back along the track. I was perhaps at something more
than half a mile that we came to a semaphore. It was only in the
knowledge of future events that I understood what we were about to
do; and it is in the light of this knowledge that I am able to
describe what happened.

The men had determined to hold up the through passenger train from
Washington to New Orleans. Their original intention was to stop this
train at a water tank but for some reason they gave up this plan; I
think it was because knowledge of the other train robbery made them
fear that the usual stopping places would be watched. So they
determined upon another device. A macadamized road paralleled the
railroad track and they decided to commandeer a motor car, follow
the track to some isolated point, and there stop the train.

This road had what is known as the block system of signals; that is
to say, every mile along the track there was a semaphore which
informed the engineer whether or not there was another train in the
same block or on the same track.

In the day this signaling is done by painted arms and at night by
red, green, and white lights: the red light meaning to come to a
full stop until the white light is shown; the green light meaning
that the train is in the block and half through it; and the white
light meaning that the train is through the block and is at least a
mile distant.

It was Mooney’s plan to short circuit two of the wires of the
semaphore and make such connection that the red light would show.

When we were on the ground before the track, White, who seemed the
mechanic, tried to accomplish this. But the semaphore arm kept
turning around and around and would not stop.

It was the ingenious Mooney who found a way out of this difficulty.

“Take off the short-circuit wire,” he said; “climb the semaphore
pole and tie the red arm down so it will show all the time.”

When White found out that the semaphore could be thus managed he
left it as it was, restoring its proper connections.

Mooney had practically the same outfit we had used on the previous
occasion, except that he had invented a new kind of mask. This mask
was made so that it was placed in the hat and could not be seen. It
had a hem at the bottom, entirely around, and filled with shot so
that, immediately on lifting the hat, the mask dropped over the face
and stayed there.

There were no holes in it except two round ones for eyes.

We got into our disguises and waited for the train.

In order to make no mistake, it was the plan of this man to sit fast
until we heard the through train blow for a station, two miles away.
That would give us time to fix the semaphore.

It seemed a long time as we sat there in the darkness waiting for
the train; but it was perhaps, in fact, less than half an hour.
Directly we heard the whistle in the distance and we went down to
the track; White had got a piece of fence wire and he now climbed
the pole and tied the red semaphore arm down over the green and
white lights. Mooney went about fifty yards along the track in the
direction from which the train was coming, and waited at the place
where he thought the engine would stop. White and I hid ourselves
where he thought the baggage and express cars would stop.

But our calculations were not accurate.

Instead of the engine stopping where we thought it would, it ran on
for at least a hundred yards past the red light. There was a fog,
and the engineer did not see the red signal soon enough. The train
roared past us. We knew the engineer had thrown on the emergency,
“goosed the air” as White called it. The fire from the brake shoes
grinding on the wheels showed up red along the whole train. The
engineer reversed and brought back his engine to the point where
Mooney was hidden behind a tree on the right of way. The engineer
was following a rule of the road that one must not under any
circumstances run past a red light.

We jumped at once.

Mooney climbed into the engine and took charge of the fireman and
engineer. They made no resistance to the masked man with a weapon in
his hand. White rushed in and uncoupled the mail and express cars
from the rest of the train.

Now, on these through first-class passenger trains, a power
velocipede, or what is known in the dialect of the road as a
“gasoline speeder,” is always carried in the baggage car. It is an
emergency vehicle in order to enable one of the crew to get to a
telegraph station in case of a wreck or any accident. When the
engine stopped under this unexpected red light of the semaphore a
negro porter, seeing two masked men, ran to the baggage car and got
the vehicle out on the ground. He was lifting it on his shoulder.

I did not understand what the thing meant at the time, but I called
to White and he came out from behind the two cars.

The porter found himself before the round end of an automatic.

“Put that thing back,” said White, “or I’ll blow your head off.”

The man turned with the vehicle in his hands, thrust it back into
the baggage car and dropped where he stood, his face down, by the
side of the track.

By this time the passengers began to come off to see what had
happened to the train.

I don’t know precisely what I did, but to White there was no
confusion. He ordered every one back into the train and began to
fire along the sides to hurry them into the covering of the cars. In
the meantime, Mooney had brought the engineer and fireman back to
the mail car and had taken the mail clerks out of the car.

There had been no resistance to this man.

He shot out one or two of the windows to add emphasis to his
directions, but it was an emphasis that had not been needed. No
thought of resistance had occurred to anybody. Mooney sent the
trainmen to the rear. He impressed upon them that any man appearing
outside of the train would be killed.

In the whirl of these events I seemed to be little more than a
spectator.

To the train crew I was the third menacing figure, masked and armed,
but I am not certain what benefit I would have been to the two men
in a sudden emergency. It was my direction to stay with White and I
now ran with him to the engine. Mooney took charge of the end of the
train where White had cut it off. He stood on the platform of the
mail car.

We climbed up into the engine, White and I, and at once I saw that
this man knew precisely what to do. He threw the air brake into
release, dropped his reversing lever forward, opened the throttle
and started out like a skilled engineer.

He put me to shoveling coal into the engine.

“Make a green fire,” he said. “We shall stop shortly, and if we need
to start again we shall have a heavy fire ready.”

I did not know at the time what he meant by a green fire, but I knew
that he wished coal shoveled into the engine; I followed that
direction. We pulled down the track perhaps a half mile until we
reached the piece of rotten cross tie that Mooney had set up. Then
we stopped.

In every detail White handled the engine with skill.

Long afterward I realized fully what he was about. Before we got
down he put on the injector and filled the boiler with water up to
the third gauge so there would be no danger of its running dry and
burning out the crown sheet. He wished that train to go on and he
did not propose to disable it.

When we were on the ground he gave me definite orders.

I was to stand beside the engine and if anybody appeared in any
direction of the track I was to fire the automatic. He even stopped
to show me how the weapon worked, slipping back the top of it with
his hand so that, cocked and released, I had only to pull the
trigger with my finger.

Then he went down the side of the train to the express car.

I did not know until afterward the trouble in that car.

The men could find nothing of value. They ripped open the sealed
express, but they got little. As it afterward developed there was,
in fact, forty thousand dollars in currency in the car. But the
express messenger had taken a precaution against a holdup.

He had wrapped the packages of currency in old newspapers and laid
them on the floor of the car.

When it came out in the newspaper reports of the holdup White cursed
viciously; he had kicked these packages out of the way, with his
foot, when he and Mooney had searched the car.

The two men were gone a long time; disappointed in the express, they
had searched the registered mail.

As I stood there on the track before the engine I had a strange
sensation. It was very still; there was a ghostly fog, and somewhere
beyond me, as though out of the sky, I heard whispering voices.

I strained my ears to listen, standing as one does on tiptoe.

But I could not be certain. No word was audible to me nor any
decided voice, but now and then there seemed to be a murmuring in
the fog, and, what was beyond understanding, it seemed behind the
engine in the clouded sky.

What human creatures could thus whisper in the sky?

Mooney and White returned presently in no very pleasant mood. I
think the time taken with the thing made them uneasy. White had the
loot sack and we started along across the field, to where we had
left the automobile on the road.

It was then that I got the explanation of the mysterious voices.

There were three hobos riding on the top of the mail car. They had
been witnesses of everything that had occurred. They sat there like
immense buzzards outlined against the dim light of the sky. Mooney
stopped a moment. He seemed to reflect, turning his weapon about in
his hand. Then he spoke to the derelicts on the top of the car.

“If they pinch you for this job,” he said, “write me a letter.”

And he went on.

I thought for a moment that he intended to shoot the men, but no
such idea was passing through his mind. It had occurred to him that,
perhaps, these unfortunate derelicts would be charged with the
robbery.

And, as it happened, they were in very grave danger.

The posse that gathered, seeing them on the top of the car, opened a
fusillade. It was very lucky that the idea occurred to Mooney, for,
as it happened, these men drew all the suspicion of the officials.
Three men had held up the train. They were three men. They were
afterwards tried before the District Court of the United States and
very nearly convicted. No doubt they often recalled those
significant words of Mooney’s. But unfortunately he had left them no
address to which their communication could be sent.

When we got to the car Mooney again turned his lantern on the clock.
He swore softly; then he stood back a moment in reflection.

“We’re late,” he said, “I don’t see how we could have taken up so
much time on this job; it was the cursed mail.”

White did not speak and I remained silent, standing by the little
man now motionless in reflection.

I suppose it must have been five minutes ticked off by the clock
while he stood there. Then suddenly he came to a conclusion.

“Give me the spook faces,” he said.

He meant the masks under the hats. I handed him my hat, pulling the
mask up over my face. He seized White’s, drew off his own, and
disappeared in the direction of the track from which we had just
come.

I did not understand what the man was about, and I think White was
equally in the dark. But it was clear that the unexpected lateness
of the hour had put some of his calculations out of joint. White got
into the car and sat down at the wheel. The loot sack was already in
the tonneau and I got in beside it.

The fog had now come up thinly above the road.

It seemed to me that we had scarcely occupied the time it required
to get into the car when Mooney returned. He seemed to appear as an
apparition out of the mist. He got at once into the car and spoke to
White.

“Here’s the engineer’s cap,” he said. “I got it out of the box under
the seat in the engine.” He put it on.

“Now swing her round and step on her.”

He meant for White to turn the car and go back at the greatest speed
he could. The man, as I have said, was an expert with a motor. He
was only a moment at the turn and we were presently racing along the
road.

I did not understand what Mooney meant.

We all wore the blue jackets and overalls in which we had held up
the train. It was the distinguishing uniform of the train crew, and
now with Mooney wearing the engineer’s cap it seemed to me that we
had simply marked ourselves for certain identification.

But it was the reflection of inexperience.

Mooney, when he looked at the clock, foresaw what we were certain to
meet on the road and he skillfully prepared for it. Two miles down
the road was the station.

We raced toward it.

Suddenly, it seemed to me, a light loomed in the road, and another,
and in a moment we had come into a crowd of motor cars, trucks, and
the like, packed with men. It was the posse that Mooney knew would
come out from the town in the unexpected lapse of time. He foresaw
that the train crew would get the information of the holdup to the
town and it was this posse that we must be prepared to meet. If we
had got away earlier we could have passed the town before the posse
had assembled, but having taken so much time it was certain to be on
the way.

Had I been in control of the party, or White or any man of lesser
resources than this clever bandit, the search for the train robbers
would have ended there in the road.

But this person, called Mooney, was an extraordinary human creature.

It was not the bloodhound alone that he was able to outwit. When he
found the posse must be met, he prepared to meet it in the only way
certain of success.

He leaned over and whispered some direction to White when the lights
appeared, and we pulled up into the very crowd of motors.

My heart seemed to rise and fill my throat.

I saw, in a sort of confusion, the vehicles in the road; a motor
just a little ahead of us with some men; a truck before us driven by
a negro; a man in a hunting coat with a shotgun and two dogs—the
bloodhounds for which we had prepared; a low roadster almost beside
us.

It was the posse keeping together.

They had seen our lights and were prepared to stop us. The men stood
up with their weapons in their hands, an array of indiscriminate
firearms. Our motor did not entirely stop. We slowed down, running
into the crowd of men. Mooney got on his feet, shouting:

“We have ’em surrounded in the express car. Get there as fast as you
can; we’ve got to go into the town for gasoline.... Don’t stand
here. Hurry!”

To the posse the explanation was complete.

We were a party of the train crew; one could clearly see that. What
Mooney said coincided with the report that had come in to them.

We did not wait for these men to reflect about it. We ran on past,
Mooney shouting to them to make haste; that there was a man in the
road with a lantern to stop them.

“Let your cars out,” he cried, “for God’s sake.”

And we went on.

It was the only adventure on the way. The road skirted the town, and
once past it Mooney considered the peril ended. We took off the
trainmen’s uniforms and put them into the sack.

The fog increased, it seemed to me, but its very density covered the
close of our adventure. We ran along the street to the garage from
which we had borrowed the car. White handled it with skill. He
entered the street with a spurt of speed, then he cut off the engine
and we glided almost noiselessly along to the very door of the
garage. We got down. White unlocked the door and we pushed the car
in; then he locked it again carefully.

I don’t think he had a key; I think he manipulated that lock with a
bent nail. But at any rate we walked away, having restored the car
to its house, Mooney with the loot sack on his shoulder. It was
Saturday night and the circus remained over until Sunday in the
meadow beyond the town.

Only the top of the great tent stood now above the sheet of fog as
we set out across the field toward it.




                            CHAPTER III

                          The Bloodhounds


I think the third holdup undertaken by these men was the most
remarkable that ever occurred in all the history of train robberies.

I do not mean that the result of it was so remarkable or that it was
attended by peculiar adventures. But the cool nerve exhibited by
Mooney—his deliberate assumption of enormous risk, and his plan to
draw the attention of the authorities from his confederate—marks the
affair as without equal. The plan, too, to get away with what was
taken in the robbery was wholly original. In all record of criminal
methods I have never known this plan to be adopted by anybody else.

I think it was worked out by Mooney to meet a situation which he
knew now existed.

The two train robberies which we had undertaken had aroused the
country. The authorities could be expected to make every effort to
run down and capture the highwayman who should undertake a
repetition of these affairs. Mooney knew this and he worked out a
plan to meet it.

The circus was loaded and moving when I first learned of this new
adventure.

I was sitting in the box car with the horses. We had pulled up on a
siding near some little town. The door was open and Mooney and White
came in. White was very carefully dressed. He wore a new overcoat
and derby hat and he carried a leather suit case. He looked
precisely like one of the thousand traveling men who go about over
the country. When the two men got into the car, I did not know who
was with White, Mooney was so changed.

I looked at him with astonishment. I could not believe that the
person before me was the man with whom I had been so closely
associated. He had a heavy drooping mustache, long black hair and
deep-lined face. His eyes seemed lengthened and narrowed, and he
appeared taller and more erect.

Now, the man naturally in life was stooped, and with a weary,
nervous appearance, as though every motion were an effort. This
attitude, as I have come to know, was the languor of a drug and his
common appearance was the result of the use of it.

But to-day, by some powerful effort, or perhaps by virtue of an
excessive injection of the drug itself, his whole manner had
changed. Of course the appearance of the man was merely the result
of the make-up, amazingly skillful, which he had undertaken for the
thing he had in hand.

He explained to me that they had finally located the treasure train
and that they were going to hold it up to-night. He said that we
would probably be noticed and that it was necessary to change our
appearance so descriptions of us, which would be published abroad
over the country, would be wholly misleading.

I had been sleeping on some blankets in the horse car. There was
only a box for a chair. He directed me to sit down on the box;
fastened a horse blanket under my coat, between the shoulders, to
make a hump; and then he began to transform me into somebody else.
The man worked very carefully on my face and hair for perhaps an
hour, in the horse car. It was nearly dark. The train had gone on
and the door was closed. Mooney worked by the light of a lantern
which I carried in the horse car. Finally, when he had finished, he
held up a little hand mirror so that I might see the result of his
work.

I was astonished at the face I saw.

In that hour, under Mooney’s skillful manipulation, I had become
middle aged. My hair was streaked with gray; my face was lined. The
thing was like a piece of sorcery. There was a delicate network of
wrinkles about the eyes; there was even the sagging of age beginning
to appear in the outline of jaw and throat.

The man’s skill was uncanny.

He had transformed himself into a straight, vigorous motion-picture
desperado of middle life, turning the evidences of age backward in
his own case, while he carried them forward in mine. No one could
have known us for the same men; the transformation was too complete.
We were, in fact, not the same men; there could be no possibility of
those who would recognize us now ever being able to identify us when
these disguises were removed.

Mooney had with him a second of these leather suit cases, precisely
in every detail like the large one which White carried. He told me
nothing except that I was to go with him.

It was late of a Sunday evening. The circus train was making a long
run. About dark, as the train was going slowly, White got out. I
afterward learned that it was his plan to take a street car from
this point to a station where we were to board a through express.

About nine o’clock the train pulled into a town.

When it began to slow up, Mooney and I got out and closed the door.
We followed a road into town. Turning into the main street, we
walked leisurely over to the railroad station. Mooney, walking with
a brisk, active step, carried the leather suit case, and I trudged
beside him.

The town was evidently not very large and the through express made
only a short stop.

There was a line of people waiting to get on the train, standing
outside the station on the wooden platform. We went down through
this crowd to one end of it, for it was Mooney’s intention to take
the day coach nearest to the express car. Here I saw White waiting
with his suit case, as though he were an ordinary traveler.

When the train pulled in we got on with the other passengers.

We sat down about midway of the coach, but I noticed that White, who
was among the first to get on the train, went forward to the very
end of the coach and sat down on the last seat. At the next station
Mooney and I got off; we walked to the head end of the train and
when it started we climbed up the steps of this forward coach next
to the express car, as though we were going into the car from the
forward end of it. But we did not go in. We stopped on the steps
while the train pulled out.

I suppose we remained there for perhaps twenty minutes, until the
lights of the town disappeared and the train trailed out into the
great open country.

Then Mooney proceeded to put his plan for the holdup into operation.

He went over to the door of the express car and knocked on it. One
of the biggest men I have ever seen opened the door. Mooney’s weapon
seemed to appear suddenly almost in the man’s face. He stepped back
with a little cry, and we were instantly in the express car with the
door closed and locked behind us. There were two other men in this
car, and on top of the safe were a rifle and a short automatic
shotgun. The men for whom these weapons were provided made no effort
to avail themselves of them. They stood in the middle of the car
with their hands up as far as they could reach, their eyes wide,
their mouths gaping.

I think our appearance struck them with more terror than if we had
been masked highwaymen. Mooney was so evidently the stage type of
Western desperado; and I must have been, myself, a sinister figure—a
strange figure, with the big leather suit case in one hand and an
automatic pistol in the other. Mooney ordered the two men at the end
of the car to lie down on their faces; this they did with ludicrous
haste; one of them nearly fell in his effort to obey the order
quickly. They went even further than Mooney directed; they lay flat
with their arms around their faces as though to convince the outlaw
that they would make no efforts to see what was going on.

Mooney ordered the big man to open the safe.

The man was evidently in terror, but he was a sensible person. He
pointed out that he could not open it; that it had a time lock on
it. He went ahead of Mooney to the safe, squatted down in the car
and put his big finger on the lock.

“You can see,” he said, “I can’t open it.”

The man’s face was distended with anxiety.

What he said was the truth, but he was not certain that the
highwayman, standing a few feet behind him covering him with a
weapon, would believe what he said. He knew the stories of such
holdups: how express messengers had been ordered to open safes and
when they refused, or where unable to do so, they had been promptly
shot.

I think the man expected to be shot, as he squatted there beside the
safe, his big body loose, his face covered with sweat. Mooney saw
instantly that the man was telling the truth. I do not know that he
was, in fact, paying any attention to what the man said. He knew at
a glance that the safe was fitted with a time lock.

He advanced toward the man, and the express messenger’s face seemed
to puff out as though it were becoming suddenly swollen; I think he
was now convinced that the highwayman was about to kill him. But
instead, Mooney ordered him to lie down. He turned over on the floor
precisely like one who collapses from fatigue.

Mooney took the leather suit case from my hand.

“Shoot any man that moves,” he said hoarsely.

Then he went to work at the safe. The big messenger was so close to
the safe door that Mooney had literally to push his body out of the
way with his foot. Mooney got some tools out of the dress-suit case,
drilled the combination, and put in a charge of nitroglycerine.

He did it quickly, with incredible skill.

Then he ordered the express messenger to move up to the end of the
car.

“Go ahead,” he said, “or you will be shot full of scrap iron.”

The big man got up on his hands and knees and without turning his
head crawled to the end of the car and lay down.

Mooney took the horse blanket from under my coat, and whatever else
he could find in the car, and heaped them against the door of the
safe. Then he fired the nitroglycerine. He had gauged the explosion
to do exactly what he wished it to do. There was a dull sound and a
jar, but far less noise than I expected. The blanket and coats that
Mooney had heaped up against the safe were hardly thrown down, but
the combination was broken open and the man was able to manipulate
the tumblers.

In a very few minutes he succeeded in opening the safe.

There was another small steel door fastened with a lock. Mooney did
not even take time to get the key for this door from the express
messenger. He took a bunch of keys out of his own pocket, selected a
flat one, and turned the lock. He did it instantly, as though a lock
of this sort could be opened by a twist of the fingers.

There were a number of big brown envelopes sealed with red wax.
These Mooney packed in the dress-suit case; then he got up and we
went back to the door of the car through which we had entered.
Mooney opened the door and motioned me to step through it out on the
platform; then he spoke as though I still remained in the car.

“Keep these men covered,” he said, in the same harsh voice, “and if
one of them moves shoot him. I am going through the passenger
coaches.”

He stepped through the door and slammed it behind him. We were both
now on the outside of the express car. But in the imagination of the
men lying on the floor within it, one of the desperate highwaymen
remained, covering them with his weapon.

Mooney went ahead of me to the passenger car. He had the leather
dress-suit case in one hand and his automatic pistol in the other. I
followed behind him. He opened the door, and, entering the car, he
stood a moment looking at the amazed passengers. There was hardly a
sound, but astonishment brought everybody in the car even those half
asleep, up straining in their seats.

The highwayman of the storybooks was before them.

Mooney remained thus motionless for a moment until everybody in the
car could get the picture in his mind, then he spoke quick and
sharp.

“Turn,” he said, “—everybody—and face the other way.”

The passengers turned instantly; no man hesitated. The direction was
obeyed as though it were an order of a drill sergeant. White, who
sat at the end of the car, turned with the others.

Mooney stood in the aisle just beside this last seat in which White
had been sitting. He now put down his suit case and reached up,
pulled the emergency cord, and stopped the train. Then he picked up
the suit case and stepped back through the door to where I stood on
the platform.

Here a puzzling thing happened.

Mooney did not pick up the same suit case he put down; but he slid
the case into the seat where White was sitting and took up the case
White had beside him. They were precisely alike, and no one but
myself saw the exchange made. The passengers were facing the other
way.

When the train slowed up we jumped down. Mooney gave me the suit
case to carry. There was nothing in it, as I afterward discovered,
but a couple of bricks.

It was pitch dark. We both started straight off from the train. I
was ahead of Mooney.

I suppose I was about a hundred feet from the track when I went down
suddenly into a ditch; the dirt was soft and I was not hurt. I must
have fallen at least six feet. The train was still standing; the
people in the coaches had gotten out. We could hear them talking and
we could, of course, see the lights of the train. Mooney must have
seen me fall, for he slipped down into the ditch and spoke to me
softly. There might be a guard of some sort on the train and it was
advisable for us to keep in the ditch instead of climbing out on the
farther side.

We moved along the ditch as quickly as we could, for, I suppose, a
distance of some three hundred feet. Here we found a railroad tie
which some one had put across for a foot bridge. Mooney reached up
and caught the tie with his hands and climbed out; I followed his
example, passing up the suit case for him to hold until I got out.
We stood still for a moment, listening; presently we heard the train
pull out.

Mooney then led the way back to the railroad track. He seemed to
wish to get his bearings of the country. He seemed to know where he
was, although as I have said the night was dark, and we started down
the track in the direction from which the train had come. We
followed the track for about a mile until we came to a deep rock
cut. This cut seemed to be the indicatory point for which Mooney was
looking, and he at once began to run.

I followed him.

The cut seemed endless, and in spite of our speed I could see the
outlines rise higher and higher against the sky until the walls
seemed perpendicular, as though the track was cut down through solid
rock. The cut must have been over a mile long, for I was nearly worn
out when we reached the end of it.

Then we turned off sharply to the right. The country seemed open and
I followed Mooney, who walked swiftly across fields, until finally
we got into a road. I had no idea where we were going, or the
direction, except that it seemed to be at right angles to the
railway and through a country that Mooney knew. Taking the rock cut
for a point of departure, he was endeavoring to find this road which
we finally came into.

When we reached the road Mooney took the suit case, opened it, threw
away the bricks, carried it on for perhaps a mile, and tossed it
into a fence corner. I now understood what the man was doing. He was
making a deliberate trail for any one who should follow; this would
enable White to escape easily with the suit case which contained
what had been taken out of the express safe.

The posse which would presently come to the scene of the robbery
with the inevitable bloodhound would have no difficulty in following
our trail. Any number of persons on the train could identify us and
would remember that we carried the dress-suit case. The expressman
would identify it as being the one he had seen in Mooney’s hand and
into which we had packed the contents of the safe.

We continued to travel the road, running, as I afterward discovered,
due east, and about daylight we came to another railroad line. When
we reached this track Mooney stopped.

He explained then what he had been about.

It was his intention that there should be a plain trail which the
posse could follow across the country. The trail should end here, so
it would be evident that the robbers had boarded some train passing
on this track, perhaps a freight. The energies of the authorities
would then be directed toward the search of this railroad. They
would endeavor to find what trains passed in the night, and their
destination, and the whole search would be turned in this direction.

He now turpentined our shoes very carefully, and our clothing.

It was beginning to be daylight, and I could see something of the
lie of the country. We had come through a valley, but off to our
right there was the loom of a mountain. We went down the track for
perhaps half a mile; then we turned up into a wood and began the
ascent of the mountain.

The sun was up and we finally stopped in a wooded thicket on a sort
of knoll that overlooked the country. The valley we had crossed
stretched away to the west. The mountain seemed also to lie in that
direction. The railroad track extended at the foot of the mountain
below us, and from the point where we were hidden in the thicket, on
the little shoulder or knoll, I could see clearly the way over which
we had come and the point where we had emerged on the track.

Mooney had some food: dried meat and hard biscuit. We ate our
breakfast, and he went to sleep, curling up in the leaves of the
thicket as though nothing extraordinary had happened, and he was
peacefully in a bed.

I could not go to sleep.

The incidents of the adventure in which I had become involved ran
vaguely through my mind.

I am now certain that the explanation these men gave of their
failure to find anything of value in the two preceding holdups was
false; but it was clear that they were disappointed. They were on
the lookout for some large shipment of money which they expected to
obtain. I do not know whether they had any definite information
about such a probable shipment or whether they were merely trying
chances for it.

The story of the Mexican government money was, of course, merely a
pretense.

Looking at the thing now, it seems to me that I was not very much
impressed with that feature of the affair. It was a series of
adventures directed against my enemy, the railroad, somewhat as the
fairy adventures of the storybooks were directed against a dragon.

Mooney had given me a hundred dollars, not as part of the loot—for
they continued to insist that they had not found what they were
looking for—but as an honorarium out of his own pocket.

This was a large sum of money to me.

I do not remember precisely to what use I put the money except in
one shining instance. I bought a bracelet for the girl who rode the
white horse in the circus. It was a gold chain fastened with a lock.

And it very nearly caused a tragedy.

The little dark-haired woman Maggie, who was with the girl always,
like her shadow, noticed it immediately. I had given it to the girl
when she went into the afternoon performances. When she came out
Maggie seized her wrist, indicating the bracelet with some query.
The girl pointed toward me where, at some distance, I stood by White
near the horse tent. The little woman thought she meant White, and
she rushed at him like a mad dog. From somewhere about her, as
though out of the air, a knife flashed in her hand.

The thing happened in a moment.

White caught her by the shoulder and threw his body backward, but
she swung under his arm and struck at him. Fortunately her reach was
not quite long enough and the knife only slashed his coat. I caught
the woman’s arm. But it was all the two of us could manage to hold
her. She cursed and struggled like a harpy.

Mooney came sauntering up.

“It wasn’t White, Maggie,” he drawled; “it was the boy.”

The woman instantly ceased to struggle. We released her and she
stood for a moment looking at me, as though in some deep reflection.
Then she spoke.

“Why did you give it to her?”

I was embarrassed to reply. Finally I stammered it out.

“I don’t know.... I like her.”

She remained looking at me, her eyes narrowed, her hand extended
across the lower part of her face. But she did not go any farther
with her inquiry. Mooney continued in his relaxed drawl.

“What’s the notion, Maggie?” he said. “The girl’s not your child.”

She swung slowly toward him.

“Not your cursed notion!” she said, indicating me with a gesture.
And then she walked away.

I thought the thing out and in my youthful fancy the girl became the
fairy princess for which she each day made up. This woman was not
her mother. She was some royal foundling, changed by the fairies or
stolen at her birth. I treasured every word with her, every touch of
her hand, every look she gave me.

I thought about it as I sat there hidden by the undergrowth.

Then, suddenly, something caught my eye.

Far out in the valley in the direction from which we had come I
noticed a sort of blur; presently it became a group of dots moving
about, as one has observed minute organisms under a microscope. The
tiny things advanced until I presently saw that it was a crowd of
men; then in the distance I heard the baying of the dogs.

They seemed to come slowly.

The sound of the dogs increased and in a little while I could make
out individuals of the posse. A tall man moved in front holding two
dogs on the leash. They came along our trail right down to the
railroad. There the dogs stopped and I realized the efficacy of
Mooney’s precaution against the bloodhound. When the dogs reached
the place where we had turpentined our shoes, they stopped instantly
and began to howl.

The man led them about in circles, across the track and beyond it,
in every direction, but the dogs would not take up our trail. The
turpentine was a complete safeguard against them; they would not
follow it. The big man handled the dogs with skill; he moved out in
an ever widening circle; he covered the ground for a hundred yards
in every direction, from the point where our trail stopped, but it
was no use.

The dogs would not take up a trail fouled with turpentine.

The posse then gathered in a sort of council, and I sat watching
them through the thicket. They evidently came to the one obvious
solution of the matter—that the train robbers whom they had followed
to the track had, here, boarded some passing train; and they set out
southward along the track to what I imagine was the closest railway
station.

This was precisely the thing Mooney intended them to do.

He was so certain that they would do it that he slept peacefully
while this posse was within a quarter of a mile of us, and the dogs
baying along the edge of the mountain in which we were at that
moment concealed. I felt a vast relief when the posse departed, and
I lay back on the dry leaves with my hands linked under my head.

I must have fallen asleep, for when I awoke it was midday. Mooney
had found a little stream and had removed all the evidences of his
disguise. The wig he had buried under a stone and the make-up he had
removed from his face.

He took me through the bushes to the little rivulet, a mere thread
of water from some spring, and very carefully restored me to my
normal appearance. He removed the make-up with some sort of grease
and I washed my hair in the water which he had dammed up into a tiny
pool.

We now bore no relation, in our outward appearance, to the men who
had held up the train.

It was afternoon and we set out west through the edge of the
mountain. The going was rough and dangerous. We found deep gullies
and ravines that ran almost from the top of the mountain into the
very valleys. Some of these walls were almost perpendicular. They
looked to stand sheer for a hundred feet.

We had to follow these gullies for a great distance up the mountain
before we could cross them. Then, we came to ledges of rock which it
was impossible for us to scale; these we had to follow down the
mountain.

I suggested to Mooney that it would be easier to take a road, but he
replied that the news of the holdup would be generally over the
country and that it would be dangerous for strangers to be found on
any of the roads. He said the plan was to follow the mountain until
we came to the river about twenty miles farther west, and then to go
down the river to a town from which we could take a train.

As night came on we descended to the border of the mountain and
followed it west. About daylight we reached the river. We traveled
two or three miles over muddy ground and through weeds and grasses
to our waists, following down the river, looking for some chance
boat. Finally by a fallen tree we found a skiff. This boat had been
anchored in low water and the river afterward had risen and covered
it. It was now half full of mud.

We had to clean it out; there were no oars but Mooney got a piece of
board from a fence and we shoved off the boat and started down the
river. It was a heavenly sensation after the immense labor of that
night’s travel through the mountain. Mooney was trying to locate the
town at which he intended to stop and take a passenger train. He
thought the town was nearer to the river than it actually was, but,
as the river was low and the banks high, we failed to locate it
until we had passed it for a mile.

And here we came very nearly into a tragedy.

It seemed that this river was the highway of bootleggers who were
accustomed to bring liquor down into the state from a neighboring
city. We did not know this. But we discovered, later, that every
boat going down the river was searched. We were moving slowly
between the high banks when we heard a motor boat and saw that we
were being followed.

Mooney realized at once that it was of no use to endeavor to escape.

He told me to put my hand down into the water and drop the automatic
pistol; he did the same, and before the boat was on us we were rid
of any incriminating evidence. We did not know why we were being
followed or why there was a motor boat on the river. It was barely
possible that it was a party of the posse on the lookout for the men
who had held up the train.

There was only one course open to us—to face them as though we were
without concern.

Mooney stopped the skiff when the motor boat appeared and waited for
it to come up. Some one—I think it was a constable—called to us when
they approached.

“Hello, boys!” he said. “What have you got this morning?”

Mooney replied that he did not understand, and, without a further
word, they pulled up where they could see into our boat. We did not
know what they were about to do.

“We thought you might have a cargo of wet goods,” the constable
said.

Mooney did not reply and the man added:

“You boys live down the river, don’t you?”

“Yes,” said Mooney.

And with that the conversation ended and the motor boat went on.

We drifted down the river until we were out of sight of the motor
boat. Then we returned along the road to the town which we had
passed. Here we got our dinner at a restaurant, and calmly, like any
other passengers, walked over to the station and a train.




                             CHAPTER IV

                          The Secret Agent


Mooney’s experience with the last holdup made him consider a plan
more daring than any former adventure.

When the men came to examine the packages which Mooney had taken out
of the safe on the through express and which White had so skillfully
carried away through the trick of the exchanged suit case, they
found that what they had taken to be money was, in fact, bonds of an
industrial corporation, being shipped by sealed express.

This was a profound disappointment.

The bonds could not be negotiated, for they were registered. Mooney
thought he might be able to obtain some reward, and I think he did
take the matter up with a “fence” in one of the eastern cities.

The result of this ill fortune was that he determined on some plan
by which he would be able, at his leisure, to examine the sealed
express before taking it out of the car, for Mooney had always hated
having to hurry away without sorting the loot. And, with this
intention as a moving factor, he formulated a holdup so daring that
it would never have occurred to a person of less determined
assurance.

I have thought it advisable not to set out here the name of the
town, as it would serve to identify persons who ought not to be held
responsible for the fact that they were taken in by Mooney’s
ingenious plan.

We had resorted to no sort of disguise, except that both Mooney and
White were very well dressed. White had with him a small telegraphic
instrument in a paper box, and Mooney had one of those strapped
leather bags that are sometimes carried by physicians. Mooney and I
went on into the town, but White left the train some distance east
of that point.

It was about six o’clock when Mooney and I arrived. We went directly
from the railroad station to the sheriff’s office, in the basement
of the courthouse. Black letters painted on the window indicated it.

Mooney and I went down into the basement of the building, entered
this office, and inquired for the sheriff. A girl was making out
some tax receipts at a long wooden table. She said the sheriff was
in the other room, got up, opened the door, and we entered.

The sheriff was a little red-haired man. He looked up as we came in,
and turned over quickly a telegram which he had, apparently, just
opened and which was lying on the table before him.

Mooney at once addressed him.

“My name is Jarvis,” he said, “of the United States Secret Service.
I suppose the Department has advised you that I would be in here
this evening.”

The little man jumped up at that.

“Ah, yes!” he said. “I have just gotten a telegram. Have a chair.”

He thrust the telegram across the table towards Mooney, went around,
and closed the door.

I could see Mooney smile as he read the telegram.

It was marked from Washington and advised the sheriff that an agent
of the United States Secret Service would call on him some time this
afternoon. It named this agent as Inspector Jarvis. It requested the
sheriff to regard the communication as confidential in every
respect, and to be governed by the wishes of the agent. It was
signed by the Department of Justice.

This was a telegram that Mooney had written out on the train and
which it was White’s business to send by cutting the wire.

It was possible, of course, that Mooney could have impersonated an
agent of the Secret Service, but it was far safer to have this
impersonation preceded by a telegram from Washington. Mooney
believed that the average officer, in a small locality, would be
absolutely convinced by such a telegram, and that it would not occur
to him to verify it—which was, in fact, the case.

The procedure was precisely what this sheriff imagined the
government would follow if it wished his assistance in any matter.
It would send a telegram, directly to him, naming the agent and the
time of his arrival.

When the man came back from closing the door, Mooney at once began
his explanation.

He said that the government had information to the effect that a
gang of train robbers, who had been operating through the country,
intended to hold up the express that passed west over the line that
night at 1:30. The holdup would be attempted at the coal tipple west
of this town where the engine stopped. He said it was impossible to
be certain about this information—such sources of information were
necessarily not wholly reliable—nevertheless, there was fairly good
reason to believe that such an attempt would be undertaken.

He said that the Department was extremely anxious to round up these
bandits who had so far eluded capture. A plan had been determined
on, which he wished to carry out with the aid of the sheriff.

He then explained what he intended to do.

He said that the point of attack by the train robbers would be the
express car. He did not wish the sheriff, or any posse, to take part
in the effort to capture these outlaws; untrained men in an
undertaking of this kind would be of little use. The employment of
such persons usually resulted in someone being killed.

He would have two Secret Service men—he indicated me, and added that
the other would arrive on the midnight express; the train to be held
up.

He wanted the sheriff to come with him to the train.

He wished the conductor and the train officials to be impressed with
the fact that the Department of Justice was very anxious to effect
the capture of the men who might undertake to hold up the train at
the coal tipple, and to realize the necessity of following,
precisely, the directions which the Secret Service had outlined for
this undertaking.

He said he would be glad if the sheriff would take charge of the
express messenger and hold his force, in reserve, to come to the
assistance of the Secret Service men if it should be necessary. He
said it might happen that the Department’s information was
incorrect, or it might happen that for some reason the highwaymen
would not undertake to hold up the express on this night. In which
event it was of the utmost importance for every move in this affair
to be kept absolutely secret. If it were told, or found its way into
the newspapers, the gang of outlaws would discover the plan which
the Department of Justice had undertaken for their capture.

It was now about seven o’clock.

Mooney said he would go over to the hotel, get supper, and sleep
until the train came in. He would depend upon the sheriff to call at
the hotel for him about half an hour before the arrival of the
train.

That is the substance of Mooney’s conversation with the sheriff.

He had assumed a decided, rather abrupt manner, as of one accustomed
to being obeyed, and whose orders were to the point and accurate.
The sheriff promised to carry out his directions precisely, as he
wished, and we left his office and went over to the hotel.

We had supper and afterwards went up to our room. I was outwardly
calm enough, I suppose, but inside of me every nerve was on edge.
There were two beds in the room. Mooney advised me to go to sleep,
as we would certainly be up all night.

To me sleep was out of the question.

But my extraordinary companion lay down on the bed and in a very
short time was asleep; he continued to sleep up to the moment at
which the sheriff knocked on the door.

I sat by the window for a long time and looked out at the little
town and the hills beyond it until the night descended; then I lay
down on one of the beds. But I did not sleep.

I had not understood the plan upon which Mooney had determined. I
had seen him writing something on the train which he gave to White,
and I knew that White had a telegraphic instrument, but I did not
know the other details. The opening of this adventure was now
becoming clear to me. But what further plan Mooney expected to carry
out, I could not imagine.

The sheriff came for us at about half-past eleven, and we went over
to the railroad station. The man was very mysterious. The gravity of
the matter in which he had been asked to take part greatly affected
the sheriff. He felt the weight of responsibility and his
importance. The government had called upon him to assist it in one
of those secret undertakings about which he had always conjectured,
and now, at the opening of this adventure, he could not wholly
conceal his concern.

It was only a short distance to the station; nevertheless, the
sheriff had brought a hack, with a negro driver, to convey us.

When the train pulled in, the sheriff went at once to find the
conductor. A moment later an extraordinary conference took place.
The sheriff introduced Mooney to the conductor and showed his
telegram from the Department of Justice.

Mooney did not give the conductor opportunity to think very much
about the matter.

He said it was important for the endeavor to be kept as secret as
possible, as it might fail, and the government might wish to attempt
it in some other direction. He explained to the conductor as he had
explained to the sheriff, that the Secret Service was not entirely
certain about its information, and that the undertaking was in a
certain sense precautionary; nevertheless, nothing must be neglected
that might insure its success.

He pointed out that the fewest possible persons ought to be
permitted to know anything about it; that the train should go on,
precisely on its schedule; that nothing must be done to give any
official an idea of what was in hand; and, of course, no passengers
on the train must have any information as to what was about to take
place. The stop at this station was one of the briefest, and Mooney
hurried everybody into the train.

White, who had come on this train, now joined us, and Mooney
explained to the conductor what course he wished to pursue. The plan
of the Department was to effect the capture of the men who would
undertake to hold up the train at the coal tipple. He pointed out
that these bandits would enter the express car, as it was the sealed
express against which their endeavor would be directed. He said that
he, and his two men, would take charge of the express car, that the
express agent should go to the rear of the train and act with the
sheriff as a reserve force. In this difficult matter he preferred to
have with him only the trained Secret Service men, who were
accustomed to things of this sort. He said the express agent, or
untrained persons, would be of no benefit to him; they, in fact,
constituted a menace.

When the train moved out of the station the whole party went forward
to the express car.

The sheriff and conductor explained the matter to the express agent,
and introduced Mooney. Strange as it may seem, the express agent was
less astonished than any of the others had been. He was aware of the
holdups that had taken place throughout the country and he was, in
fact, expecting something of the sort to happen. He had a short riot
pump gun lying on the top of the safe and a big Colt revolver in his
pocket.

Mooney here took charge of the matter without any further
consultation with anybody. He told the express agent to go to the
rear of the train with the sheriff. They were not to do anything
unless they received a signal from Mooney.

This was the plan and it was immediately put into effect by Mooney.

But before the express agent left the car Mooney told him that he
wanted to place a package of marked bills in the safe. It might
happen, by some accident, that the bandits attacking the train would
get the best of it. In such event the package of marked bills would
serve in tracking them down. He said this precaution had been
determined upon by the Department in all cases.

He produced an envelope—a brown manila envelope—sealed and stamped
with red wax, and handed it to the express agent. The agent squatted
down by the safe, opened it quickly, and put the envelope in among
the other packages; then he closed the safe and locked it.

This device gave Mooney the combination to the safe.

He was standing close beside the express agent, stooping over with
the envelope in his hand, so that it could be placed in the safe
when the door was open, and he was therefore able to observe
precisely what turns were made on the dial. For one with the skill
of this extraordinary man, a glance was enough. When the express
agent had swung the door back, Mooney knew every detail of the
combination precisely.

The man now left the car.

Mooney fastened the door and proceeded at his leisure. He had
explained to the sheriff that the small black leather bag which he
carried contained handcuffs and weapons for his men. But it in fact
contained a variety of quite different articles.

He now opened it and sat down before the safe.

The bag contained drills which Mooney had intended to use if the
safe proved to be equipped with a modern time lock; as it was, these
implements were not required. It also held a plumber’s candle, a
tube of liquid glue, and a bundle of newspapers.

He opened the safe without any difficulty whatever, for he had the
combination directly from the express agent.

Inside of the safe were a number of sealed packages in large
envelopes. These envelopes were not only sealed with the gummed-down
flap, but they were also sealed with wax. Mooney removed all of
them. He lighted the plumber’s candle and very carefully held the
wax seals close to the flame until they were soft enough for him to
slip a knife blade under them.

When the wax seals on the packages were all thus softened and lifted
up without being broken, he opened the envelopes by rolling the
point of a pencil carefully along under the flap. There were quite a
number of these envelopes, all consigned to one bank and, while they
all contained new currency, the men were astonished to discover that
this currency was in small bills.

The whole of it was in one-and two-dollar bills. There was not a
bill of any larger denomination in the whole consignment.

It was possible, of course, if these men were acting on information,
that the persons forwarding that information to them knew this train
would carry a consignment of money but did not know the value of
that consignment. They may have estimated the value of it by its
bulk.

From the big stack of sealed envelopes, we all imagined that we had
now made the great haul always expected. But, while the volume of
currency was large, the actual value was in fact small; not, at the
farthest, above a thousand or fifteen hundred dollars.

Mooney cursed as the denominations of these bills continued to
appear in the packages. But there was nothing to do but go ahead.
And he carried it out, in every detail, precisely as he had planned
it. He removed the money from the envelopes, and packed it into his
bag. Then he filled the envelopes with newspaper until they appeared
to be the same bulk.

He had not enough newspaper for all the packages and we looked about
the car for anything we could find for the purpose.

When the envelopes were filled with paper so they resembled, in
bulk, their former appearance, Mooney gummed down the flaps and
pasted down the sealing-wax seals. The packages were now all
precisely in appearance as they had been when they were taken out of
the safe. The seals were not broken because they had been thoroughly
softened by the heat of the plumber’s candle before they had been
removed, and so were easily gummed back into position.

This was all carefully done. No one could have told that the
packages had been in any sense tampered with. Mooney had noted the
exact position they occupied in the safe, and he returned them
precisely to this position. The envelope, which he had given the
express agent to put in with them, he also restored to the position
it had occupied when the agent thrust it in. He had plenty of
leisure to carry this out unhurriedly. It had all been accomplished
by the time the train arrived at the coal tipple.

Mooney closed the safe. The train stopped to take coal and went on.

The sheriff, the nervous conductor, and the armed express agent
waited in vain for the signal to bring them forward into a desperate
encounter with outlaws.

When the train pulled out Mooney opened the door to the express car
and sent me back for the conductor and his associates.

They came immediately and Mooney acted out the last scene in his
comedy.

He told the men that the Department’s information about the holdup
at this tipple had been probably intended as misleading. One never
knew whether one had precisely any criminal plan. This information
may have been given out to the Department with the primary intention
of leading it to look for the train robbers at a point distant from
that at which they were intending to put their criminal operations
into effect.

He directed everybody, by order of the Department of Justice, to say
nothing about this matter. All were warned, under no circumstances,
to say anything about it, no matter if there should be an
investigation on account of the robbery having taken place at some
other point. The United States Secret Service had put into effect
here, on this train, a plan upon which it was accustomed to depend,
and this plan must not become public.

The man’s nerve and assurance were without limit.

When he had finished, he requested the express agent to return to
him the dummy package of marked bills which he had given him to put
into the safe. Any one else in the world would have hesitated to
have the safe opened, and would either have removed the dummy
envelope when he took out the packages of money, or would have left
it; but not Mooney. He had set out to do every detail in this
undertaking with precision and order, and he did not intend to leave
any item unaccomplished.

The express agent opened the safe, took out the envelope, gave it to
him, and locked the safe again. And at the next station we shook
hands with everybody and got down.

We took a through train east, having carried out what I felt at the
time, and what I now feel, to have been a criminal adventure of
unequaled assurance. So successful was it that we never heard
anything more about it. Nothing concerning it was ever published or
made known so far as I have been able to find out.

The robbery, of course, appeared when the packages of currency were
delivered at the bank. But nobody knew at what place this robbery
had been accomplished; whether it was done at the point of shipment,
some place along the line, or where the packages were delivered to
the banks.

It was likely that neither the sheriff nor any of the train
officials ever said anything about the government agent who took
charge of the express car on that night. There was no reason for
them to give any information.

Was it not the work of the United States Secret Service? And had
they not been warned to silence?




                             CHAPTER V

                            The Big Haul


It was a soft October night with a bare threat of frost in the air;
the sky gray with stars, and a vast silence.

Three men were lying out before a fire of tree limbs in a forest. It
was a country of mountains, the foothills of the Alleghenies
extending westward toward the Ohio. In every direction were wooded
hills, the rough mountainous foothills of the great range as it
broke down westward toward the flat lands.

For some reason that I do not know, Mooney was confident that he had
finally located the treasure train for which he had been always
looking.

As I have said before, in this narrative, I did not know what
sources of information were available to this man, but I think he
had some cue to what was being shipped. At any rate he was confident
that, at last, he was about to make “the great haul.”

We had come into this country together and had got off at a town
some fifty miles distant from the point at which we were now lying
before our wood fire. From this town we had each taken a different
train to a station in the direction of the place at which Mooney
intended to make the holdup. I had gone to a station farthest along
the line; from the two other stations, Mooney and White had walked
along the track until they picked me up. We came finally to the
water tank in the mountains, at which point Mooney had determined to
hold up the New York & St. Louis Express.

He knew all about this train; knew that it stopped at this water
tank in the mountains on schedule time, and knew what it carried on
this night.

We had all gone about a mile and a half east of the tank where a
small stream came down out of the mountain. We had followed this
stream perhaps a quarter of a mile into the wood and there we had
built the fire.

At midnight we got up and followed the little stream down to the
track; here we divided; White was to go about two miles west along
the track, while Mooney and I were to take up a position in the
shadow of the water tank.

We were barely in position, in the heavy shadow, when I heard the
train; it seemed far off, a low rumble in the mountains. Then
suddenly it thundered through a gap in the hills and pulled up by
the tank. It required only a few moments to take water, and as the
train pulled out Mooney and I slipped from the heavy shadow and
swung up on the rear of the tender.

We climbed very quickly down towards the engine cab.

Here I very nearly had a serious accident. I caught hold of
something in the darkness which looked like a hand rail. It proved
to be a rake used by the fireman, and it was hot. The inside of my
hand was scorched. I made some exclamation unconsciously indicating
that my hand was burned. The fireman and engineer both turned toward
us.

They were met by Mooney, the black mask over his face and a pistol
in his hand.

I had recovered myself and stood now beside him, also masked and
with a weapon. It was the old form of mask which Mooney had
invented; attached to the inside of the hat and loaded with shot to
hold it down. The men in the engine cab made no resistance. The
fireman merely stood with his mouth open, like a child before a
ghost. The engineer had some composure.

“Don’t shoot,” he said; “what’s the order?”

Mooney told the engineer to stop opposite a fire he would see on the
right hand side of the track about a mile further on. With the
pistol at his temple the engineer was not slow to obey this
direction. Mooney had told White to build a fire beside the track
when he reached the point about two miles west.

White had suggested a flash light as being better for this purpose.

But Mooney said there was always a possibility of a wrecking train,
or some special, passing, and if so, the man with the flash light
would stop the wrong train, but if it were a fire, built in the
woods, a passing train would give it no attention, as merely a hobo
camp.

White had followed his direction and we presently pulled up by the
fire. Mooney left me to guard the engineer while he took the fireman
in front of him and went down the side of the train. He made the
fireman cut the train in two back of the mail car.

I stood in the door of the cab with my weapon on the engineer. I
knew when the train had been cut, and, as Mooney had directed me, I
ordered the engineer to pull forward for fifty yards and stop.
Mooney sent the fireman back to the rear of the train after the mail
car had been uncoupled, then he went forward and joined White.

The two men took the clerks out of the mail car; they selected the
chief clerk, then they sent the remainder of the mail clerks to the
rear of the train. There was a touch of thoughtfulness in Mooney’s
consideration for these men; there was a chill of frost in the air
and he told them to put on their coats before they went out into the
night.

When these men had gone back to the rear of the train, Mooney,
White, and the chief clerk got into the mail car, then they signaled
the engineer to move ahead. I understood the signal and when the
engineer paid no attention to it I spoke to him as roughly as I
could.

“Go ahead,” I said, “until you are stopped with the air signal.”

He pulled the train out without a word, and when he got the air
signal he stopped.

Here Mooney left White in the car with the clerk and got down on the
ground in order to keep watch for any one who might be coming. I
learned afterwards precisely what happened in that car. The clerk
made some objections and Mooney spoke to him from the darkness
before the open door:

“Friend,” he said, “you are steppin’ on a trigger.”

It was the end of every form of hesitation.

The man pointed out the mail sacks at once. White cut the straps and
dumped the contents on the floor. He found a lot of securely sealed
packages which he knew from experience contained money. Tearing open
the corners of a few of them he discovered that they were bank
notes. He spoke to Mooney who now came up to the door of the car.

White was amazed; he realized that they had found the
long-looked-for big haul.

They selected one of the light mail sacks and put the packages into
it. Mooney then came forward to the engine. White sent the mail
clerk back down the track. Mooney now took charge of the engineer.

He made him pull down the track for perhaps half a mile, then he
stopped and put him off. He ran the engine, himself, for perhaps a
mile farther, then stopped again. White and I got out of the train
and Mooney gave the engine just enough steam at the throttle so that
it would move off slowly and stop a mile or so farther on, then he
swung down on the ground and joined us. He did not open the throttle
of the engine for he knew that on the twisting road through the
mountain the train might go off the track on the sharp curves.

It was his policy never to do unnecessary damage. He did not wish to
wreck the train or cause the possible wreck of any other train
traveling in the night.

We turpentined our shoes, and started in a due line north by west
toward a town on the Ohio River. We traveled all night. When
daylight appeared we stopped and hid ourselves in the mountains.
Here, Mooney and White opened the mail sack and examined the
packages of money.

They had one hundred and two thousand dollars in bank notes.

But it was not in the form of such bank notes as one is accustomed
to see. The notes were in sheets and unsigned, in the form that the
United States Treasury is accustomed to send currency to the
national banks.

This discovery did not seem to impress Mooney but it put White in
despair.

For a long time Mooney said nothing; finally he took White to one
side and talked with him; presently they came back to me. He showed
me the sheets of notes and pointed out that they could not be used.
They lacked the signatures of the bank officers and an attempt to
pass them would lead immediately to one’s arrest.

They determined now to hide the money and go on.

It was necessary to put it in some place where it would not be open
to the rain. For this purpose they looked about for a hollow tree.
Finally they found a chestnut on the wooded ridge of the hill. They
put the mail sack into the hollow of this tree—crowding it up
tightly so that it would not fall down—then they skillfully filled
the hollow of the tree with leaves and a few broken branches,
removing with care every trace of their work.

We went on.

We slept during the day, in the leaves, hidden by a tree top or
covered by a log and traveled at night. It was a long tiresome
journey. We carried provisions for three days. We had a compass,
flash lights, and a map; but it was heavy traveling in the night,
over the ridges of hills, across ravines, and through the dense
undergrowth of the valleys.

Finally, we came out before the town on the Ohio. Here Mooney handed
me five hundred dollars and told me to return to the circus; giving
me the name of the town for which I should purchase a ticket at the
station.

I never saw either of the two men again.

But I learned afterward what happened to them.

It was by no means the intention of these two men to abandon this
fortune in bank notes.

They brought the money in after I was gone. White went into the town
and bought a big traveling bag in a pawnshop. They put the notes
into it and checked it to a city in the southwest. But first Mooney
examined the notes, taking down the names of the national banks to
which they were consigned.

Then they made a rather extended tour together.

They went to the cities in which these national banks were located
and picked up there bills issued by the banks; this gave them the
signatures their money required.

Mooney showed White how to get the signatures on the currency.

He used a simple and ingenious method. He placed the bill of which
he wished to take off the signature on a piece of glass about 3 x 6
inches. He procured a pasteboard box and cut a hole in it somewhat
larger than the length and width of the signature; then he placed
the glass with the bill on it over this hole. He then laid a piece
of white paper over the glass and put a high candlepower light
inside the box. It was then an easy matter to trace the signature he
wanted on the white paper.

They then made a rubber stamp of the signature; making first a steel
etching of the traced signature and after that the stamp. They then
cut the bills, stamped them with the proper signatures, divided the
money and separated.

It seemed that the two men were not of one mind about the risk that
would follow the use of this money. Each adhered to his own
judgment. They were agreed upon one thing, that having made their
great haul, this form of criminal adventure was ended. They were
through with train holdups. They had each some fifty thousand
dollars in currency.

After having divided the money, Mooney followed the old plan of
trusting his share of it in the traveling bag. He checked it to
another point farther into the southwest, while White remained where
he was.

I am going to tell you what happened to White.

This daring robbery, with the loss of the big consignment of bank
notes of the Treasury, produced immense excitement in the country.

At two o’clock on the night of the holdup, the conductor in charge
of this train reported from the first telegraph office that he could
reach, that his train had been held up one mile west of that point,
by masked men who compelled the members of the crew, except the
chief mail clerk and engineer, to get off, and cut the mail car from
the rest of the train, taking it west with the engine.

The chief clerk returned at three o’clock in the morning and
reported that the robbers had stopped and compelled him and the
engineer to get off. They had then taken the engine and car farther
west.

At 3:00 o’clock the engineer reported that he was on his way west
looking for the engine.

At 4:15 o’clock he called from a way station, saying that he had
found the engine and would come back at once for the rest of the
train.

Immediately special trains were sent out, taking United States
Marshals, the sheriffs of neighboring counties, officers, and
bloodhounds. In a very short time Secret Service men, post-office
inspectors, and all the best experts in the service of the
government were on the scene.

But they were totally unable to discover anything.

The turpentine which we had used made the use of the bloodhounds of
no benefit to the detectives, and it was not possible to discover
the point at which we had left the engine and mail car. Nevertheless
the search was not abandoned.

It extended itself now in wider directions.

The banks throughout the country were notified of the serial numbers
of this currency; and the thing which Mooney, wiser than White,
foresaw, presently occurred. A clearing house in the southwestern
city to which White had gone, notified the Treasury Department at
Washington that one of these serial numbers had passed through.

The Treasury Department acted at once.

It sent two officials to this city to run the matter down. These men
were careful, experienced and able detectives. They set on foot
every investigation which seemed likely to have any result; but they
were not able to discover the source of the note which had been
observed by the clearing house.

But they remained in charge of the undertaking.

Finally fortune favored them. One day, a young girl came in to the
post office to deposit part of her salary at the Postal Savings
window. A bill which she offered was of the serial numbers of the
stolen currency. The post-office clerk who had been instructed to
look out for these numbers immediately called the two government
detectives to the window.

When questioned, the girl said she had gotten this bill from a
machinery company as part of her salary.

The two detectives went to this company.

They found that this particular note had been brought in by one of
their drivers who had received it from a man named White. They
discovered that this man White had a machine shop in the city.

They did not at once undertake to interview White.

They shadowed the machine shop until they had an opportunity to get
very careful observations of White. They had little data to go on,
but they thought he was about the size of one of the bandits
described by the mail clerks.

They examined the names attached to the note and finally determined
they had been made with a rubber stamp. They, then, interviewed all
the local stamp dealers, but could find no one who had any knowledge
of such a stamp.

However, they remained in the city and continued to shadow White.

They followed him from place to place, and wherever he made
purchases they would go in after him and demand of the storekeeper
the note which White had passed, giving another in place of it. They
would, then, have the person from whom they had obtained the note
write his name on it so that it could later be identified as having
been received from this man White.

In this manner they finally got a number of bills bearing the serial
numbers of the notes which had been taken in the train robbery. But
this was all the evidence they were able to obtain.

Finally when investigations in other directions all failed to bring
anything more to light, they determined to arrest White. Accordingly
one day they followed him when he got on a street car at his machine
shop, and when he got down, at some place of business in the city,
they stepped up to him and asked him if his name was White. He said
it was; they then asked him to go with them to help in regard to
some forgeries. White very willingly said that he would be glad to
help them in any way he could and would go if they insisted; but
that he knew nothing about any forgeries.

They took him to their office in the post-office building.

Here he was searched and a roll of these lost bills found in his
possession. They were all on the same bank, and, what seemed
significant, their serial numbers ran consecutively.

When questioned about where he had obtained this money, White
replied that he had won it in a poker game from two men who had come
into his shop several days before.

The two government detectives did not believe this story.

They talked to White a long time, but his statement could not be
shaken. He described the two men with whom he had played poker, gave
in detail their inquiries about some work they wished done at his
shop, pointing out the exact time at which the thing occurred, and
how the poker game had been led up to. He did not know the names of
the two men, but gave precisely their description.

The two government detectives remained unconvinced and they
determined upon an old experiment.

They took White to jail and locked him into a cell. Then they went
out, returned by the rear entrance and placed themselves where they
could watch the man in the cell. Here White, now very much
concerned, fell unconsciously into habits which he had acquired in
similar surroundings. He put his hands behind him and began to pace
up and down the cell—three steps down, three steps up, slowly, back
and forth—his head dropped forward in reflection.

The two government detectives watched him for a few minutes, then
they went out. They decided that White must have a penitentiary
record somewhere on account of his actions in the cell. The two
detectives went down to the telegraph office and sent a message to
every penitentiary in the United States, giving an accurate
description of White, and the holdup in which they believed him to
have taken part. They received a reply from the warden of a
penitentiary in the northwest, saying that a man answering that
description had served time for train robbery.

The detectives now determined to take White north for trial.

On this trip White escaped from the custody of the officials. The
manner of his escape was extraordinarily clever. It was done without
a struggle of any character. White simply disappeared.

The two detectives were traveling with White in the stateroom of a
pullman. The design of these staterooms is familiar to every one. On
the right of the entrance door is a couch running the full length of
the side of the room. On the immediate left is the lavatory and next
to that, also on the left, are the two double seats facing each
other across a small aisle. White sat next to the window on the
first seat beside a guard. The two government detectives were on the
couch facing White.

About ten o’clock at night and just before the train pulled into a
station, one of the government detectives went out into the car to
look up a porter in order to have the berths made up for the night.
As he left the stateroom, the other detective arose and stood in the
open door.

White, who had been sitting apparently asleep, got up slowly,
yawned, extended his arms and started leisurely toward the lavatory
door. The main door to the stateroom stood open. It was hinged to
swing inward and when so open covered the door to the lavatory. This
door to the stateroom was now about half open and the government
detective was standing in the door.

White had barely space enough to pass behind this door in order to
reach the lavatory, but he edged himself deliberately through
without arousing the slightest suspicion. Before the government
detective could step around the stateroom door in order to follow
White, he had entered the lavatory, slammed the door and locked it.

The government detective, now alarmed, began to beat on the steel
door and demand that White open it.

He received no answer, and, as it was impossible to break in the
door, he ordered the train stopped. Leaving the guard before the
door of the stateroom the two government detectives now jumped down
from either end of the car. These two men hurried toward each other
along the side of the car on which the stateroom was located. But
they found no sign of White. They then discovered that White had
made his way through the small window in the lavatory and dropped
off the moving train.

The authorities had now a definite description of White.

This they put out over the country, and another great man hunt
began. It was the theory of the officials that White, like any other
criminal who was being sought after, would at once undertake to
leave the country. White knew this and he determined upon precisely
the reverse of this course. He selected the most conspicuous and
consequently the very last place that detectives on the search for a
criminal would be likely to look.

They were finally able to trace him to Cincinnati. They had his
photograph and thousands of circulars were struck off from it and
posted in every depot and public place in the country; sent out
broadcast to every city and every federal officer. The clew in
Cincinnati mysteriously vanished.

But this man, clever and resourceful, was not fated to escape.

One day a medical student in a college in the middle west called on
the local post-office inspector. He said that he had seen the poster
describing White, which had been placed all over the country and had
observed the resemblance to a fellow student in the college. There
was a reward of $1000, and he wished to obtain this reward. The
student studied the description given in the poster. One of the
items of description was that the man wanted had a split thumb nail.
The student waited for an opportunity to observe his suspected
associate’s thumb. He found that the man’s hand corresponded to the
description; “ridge extending the full length of the thumb nail on
the left hand ... the thumb nail has evidently been split open and
the ridge left as a scar ... the third finger of the left hand is
somewhat crooked and stiff.”

The government authorities were at once notified by the post-office
inspector. The suspected student was shadowed, identified as White
and arrested.

He was brought north; this time attended with every precaution and
handcuffed to a guard. Here he was tried for the robbery, convicted
and sentenced to twenty-five years in the penitentiary.

Thus closed the career of White. The finish of Mooney was more
adventurous and spectacular.




                             CHAPTER VI

                       The Passing of Mooney


A strange fatality seemed to follow White and Mooney.

These two men were perhaps the most accomplished highwaymen that
ever operated in any country, and yet something unforeseen—something
they seemed unable to anticipate—always interfered to prevent them
from obtaining the great fortune they expected.

In one of the earlier robberies, the packages done up in old
newspapers which they kicked out of the way, when they were
searching for the shipment of money, contained the very treasure for
which they were looking; while the only thing they carried away from
that night’s work was an inconsiderable sum of money gathered from
the rifled registered mail.

The sealed packages that Mooney took out of the safe on the night
that he and I, in such theatrical fashion, held up the through
express, proved, upon examination, to be registered bonds of some
industrial corporation which were being delivered in the south,
while the loot from the last holdup had been about a thousand
dollars in small bills.

And now, finally in the great haul which they were at last able to
make, the only result was White’s capture and imprisonment for a
term of years, equal practically, for life. The thing ended also in
disaster no less for Mooney.

I have often wondered who this man really was and what was his
origin.

I think he had been in nearly every country, and he was familiar
with practically every device that could be of service to his
profession. He was a skilled electrician; a very wizard at it. The
manager of the circus was glad to carry him along although he had
practically no duties. But the skill with which he was able to
adjust anything of a mechanical nature that happened, for the
moment, to be out of repair, made him invaluable. And he seemed to
do it with no effort; with practically no preliminary inquiry, as
though, by a sort of instinct, he was able to locate the difficulty
and adjust it. I have always felt that given any sort of an even
chance the government officials would never have been able to outwit
this man. It was not any plan laid for him that tripped him up. It
was the inevitable tragedy of life.

I did not think about this very much at the time. I was young enough
for events to make little impression on me. The whole thing was a
sort of adventure, without, as it seemed to me, any moral relations.

I traveled on for some weeks with the circus precisely as I had been
accustomed to do.

I helped with the horses. My disappearance caused no comment in the
organization where my status was practically that of a roustabout. I
continued to adore the girl who rode the white horse, and whenever I
had an opportunity I talked to her. I could not have been very
skillful in dissimulation for my admiration was apparent to
everybody. Maggie did not say anything to me; she never even
mentioned White or Mooney, but I found her often regarding me as
though I were something she did not precisely comprehend, or as
though she were considering me in some plan about which she was very
much concerned.

They were careless and happy days.

Strange as it may appear, I never anticipated any after affect to
these adventures. I did not realize that I was in danger from the
law, or that what had happened to White might on any day happen to
me.

About two weeks later Maggie disappeared from the circus.

I learned the fact next morning from the girl who had been placed
under the chaperonage of one of the clowns’ wives, a morose wizened
old woman, whose husband, the life of the circus when the
performance was under way, was at all other times the most
melancholy person one could imagine, and whose withered wife seemed
never to escape from this depression. I learned also that the girl
was not related to Maggie, as Mooney had once intimated. She had
been adopted by this curious, capable woman, probably out of a
hospital.

I learned afterwards what this disappearance of Maggie meant. She
had received a telegram from Mooney who was involved in his last
adventure.

This woman was not in any sense an accomplice of Mooney.

I think he had never seen her until he joined this circus. I am sure
there was no understanding of any character between them. In his
extremity, Mooney merely turned toward her as perhaps the only
person he could think of.

He had been overtaken by an unforeseen misfortune.

After the bank notes had all been signed and made ready for
circulation, he left White in the south. He was convinced the plan
which White proposed to follow would bring him to misfortune. He
pointed out very clearly what would happen, and he was right. He had
no faith in White’s assurance and he had no intention to submit
himself to the possibility of any such disaster.

He had shipped his money to a city in the southwest and he followed
it there.

I do not know whether he intended to cross into Mexico or whether he
planned that the government officials who might be looking for him
should finally be able to trace him in that direction, and, from
this, to formulate the theory that he had crossed the southern
border.

This would be quite in line with the man’s character.

At any rate the fact was, that, having made this false trail toward
southern territory, he turned suddenly about and came north. He
brought the money with him in the traveling bag. But here in a
northern city he was overtaken by a misfortune which no man could
foresee and to which all are subject, no matter how wily or
skillful.

He was taken desperately ill and he realized his condition
immediately. He took the traveling bag to an express company and
shipped it to Canada to a fictitious person. Then he looked about
for a lodging house. He was afraid to go to a hospital; and, yet,
from what Maggie afterward said, Mooney was even then, in the first
few hours of his illness, certain that he had reached the end of his
career.

The man had no difficulty in finding what he was looking for; but
here he was met with one of those inexplicable vagaries of chance
for which there seems to be no adequate explanation.

It was night when Mooney got out of the cab and was helped into the
lodging which he had selected. In the preoccupation of his illness
he did not very closely regard the person who maintained this
lodging house. But in the morning when the man came up to the room
Mooney knew him instantly.

Years before in a holdup in which Mooney had been engaged there had
been a German mail clerk. More than once when Mooney had been in the
mood of reminiscence I had heard him talk about this ridiculous
person; a pale mild-mannered German, who had been simply unnerved
with terror when the bandit had entered the mail car. This man had
been physically unable, from sheer fright, to get down out of the
car when the mail clerks at the point of a weapon had been ordered
out.

He sat on the floor with his mouth open and his hands clasped
together.

Mooney used to laugh about it; about the ridiculous appearance the
creature presented and what he had done. He had pulled an empty mail
sack down over the man’s head and shoulders and left him there; and
there he had been found three hours later when the train pulled into
one of the central cities of the west. The German had not moved and
the mail sack was still pulled down over his shoulders when the
train men at the station came into the car.

The man had been laughed out of the service and had gone from one
undertaking to another, until, finally, destiny established him here
in this boarding house to meet Mooney when he should arrive ill in a
hired cab.

Mooney, as I have said, knew the man instantly, but it was not
likely that the man recognized the awe-inspiring bandit in his sick
lodger. But he looked at Mooney as at some person whom he had seen,
and the highwayman knew that it was only a question of time until
his host would be able to place him.

The impressions of fright are conspicuously vivid.

It was certain that this man’s mind retained the precise picture of
the one who had put him into such abject terror. The picture would
be clear in every detail. Time does not blur impressions like this.
It would be merely a question of the mental connecting up of his
impressions about this lodger whom, he felt, he had seen somewhere,
and the identity of the highwayman who had put him so desperately
into fear.

It was then that Mooney sent the telegram to Maggie. He got the
German to take it out to the telegraph office, and he awaited her
arrival. He did not send for a doctor. He knew perfectly well that
death was on him. He had contracted the swift deadly pneumonia which
at that time was devastating the country like a plague.

Maggie reached the city that evening and Mooney told her what to do.
He pointed out that the German lodging-house keeper had already hit
upon his identity and the house was being watched, for he had
noticed a window across the street, back of a barber shop, that
always had the shade pulled down. The window was visible from his
bed and he could see, by watching it, that this shade moved
occasionally.

He observed it closely and at one time saw a man’s hand, which was
all the evidence a person like Mooney needed. He knew perfectly well
that the German had recognized him and reported the fact to the
police.

He explained it all to Maggie when she came in. She knew then that
she would be shadowed when she went out of the house. He told her,
precisely, what he wished her to do.

It was about five o’clock in the afternoon.

Maggie presently left the house and was of course shadowed. She went
along the street until she came to a doctor’s office. She rang the
bell and entered. This destination seemed reasonable to the
plain-clothes man who was keeping her in sight. This was precisely
what one summoned to the bedside of an ill man would be expected to
do; go at once for a physician.

But it was not a doctor that Maggie was after.

It was an opportunity to call up the office of the express company
in Canada and tell them to ship the bag back to this city. If the
doctor were in, she would consult him about Mooney and ask to use
his telephone, and if he were not in she would ask the same
privilege, saying that she would return when the doctor should be at
home.

As it happened the doctor was not in the house, but the person in
charge of his office permitted Maggie to use the telephone. She
called up the express company in Canada and ordered the bag
reshipped. She left with the servant money to pay for the telephone
call and went out.

It was a very clever device because it did not occur to the
detective, who was keeping her in sight, that it was worth while to
go into the doctor’s office to inquire what she was doing there.

What she would be doing there was too obvious.

He therefore contented himself with shadowing her back to the
lodging house and keeping the place under his eye from the curtained
window behind the barber shop.

Maggie remained with the sick man that night. She endeavored in vain
to persuade him to have a doctor or to permit her to undertake such
simple remedies as might be at hand. Mooney knew he was dying. He
had no faith whatever in anything that might be done for him.

He was only concerned that Maggie should carry out his directions.

In the morning she again left the house; and was again shadowed as
every one was shadowed who came into it or went out of it. This time
Maggie went to the nearest drug store—about three blocks distant, at
the corner of a street—went in, spoke to the clerk and then went
around the counter into the back part of the store.

The detective who was watching her from the opposite side of the
street naturally concluded she was having some remedy prepared for
the sick man.

What Maggie had in fact done was to say to the clerk that she was
packing up some articles, which she had to move, and that she wanted
to get some empty boxes. The boxes were in the rear of the store and
the clerk told her she could go through and pick out what she
wished. She went through, went out the back door, down a neighboring
alley and took a taxicab to the railway station.

The detective waited in vain for her to appear. When finally she did
not come out he went in and discovered what had happened; too late
to overtake her.

Maggie went to the station, got the traveling bag, put it into the
taxicab and set about to carry out the remainder of Mooney’s
directions.

The detective called up headquarters and gave the alarm. The police
at once went about spreading the usual net for Maggie and then they
determined to arrest Mooney. They were now convinced that the man’s
illness was a pretense; and, a few minutes later, the detective and
three officers suddenly burst into the room where Mooney sat in bed
propped up with pillows, gasping for breath, in the closing stages
of pneumonia.

Mooney was painfully writing something on the blank sheet of a
letter pad with a stump of a pencil.

The officers covered him with weapons.

Mooney looked at them with a queer, ghastly smile:

“You are in time,” he said, “to witness my will.”

He extended his arm with the sheet of paper in his fingers.

The astonished officers took the paper to the window and read it in
amazement.

It ran as follows:

    “I, John Mooney, being at the end of life, do hereby
    make this my last will and testament.

    “Inasmuch as the United States Government, with a tender
    regard beyond that of friend or relative, has, now for a
    long time, been extremely solicitous to provide me with
    food, clothing and the necessities of life:

    “Now, therefore, in appreciative remembrance, I do, by
    these Presents, give and bequeath to the said United
    States Government fifty-one thousand dollars in bank
    notes, which I have caused on this day to be delivered
    to the Federal District Attorney of this city;

    “In the hope that the said United States Government,
    having thus esteemed me in life, may now, in death,
    cherish my memory.

                                     (Signed) “John Mooney.”

They realized now that the man was in the very extremity of death.
He was dying as he had lived, with a cynical disregard of everybody.
His very last words were in character:

“Tell ’em—no flowers.”

His voice was a gasping stutter.

In the meantime Maggie had gone to the railroad station, found the
traveling bag which had been reshipped, and had taken a taxicab to
the office of the District Attorney; precisely as Mooney had
directed in his will.

But there she had not carried out his directions in its exact
details.

I would like to write into this record that it was Mooney, on his
deathbed, who thought of the course that Maggie followed, but it
would not be the truth. He thought only of the cynical jest that he
endeavored to carry out in his death. It was Maggie who was thinking
of some one else. What she did will presently appear.

I suppose it was about a week later when a man came into the horse
tent, and walked up to me as though he were an old acquaintance:

“How do you do?” he said.

His greeting was so cordial, that, although I did not know him, I
put out my hand to shake hands with him. But instead of grasping my
hand as I expected, he took hold of it and turned it suddenly over
so he could see the palm.

There, still visible, was the red discoloration from the burn when I
had taken hold of the hot iron rod, on the night when we had climbed
down from the tender into the cab of the locomotive, in our last
holdup.

The man seemed surprised, as though at finding some confirmatory
evidence of which he had been in doubt.

He looked me over.

“You are only a boy,” he said. “How did you get mixed up in this
business?”

I was, myself, now astonished. I realized that the man was an
officer and that I had finally, in some manner, got into the
clutches of the law. It all seemed so incredible that I did not
undertake to make any reply to the man’s inquiry. He asked me to go
with him and I put on my hat and went without a word.

The circus was on that day at a rather large city.

We took a street car to the post-office, a big, white building in
the center of a public square. We got into the elevator and went up
to the second floor. The man took me along a narrow hall and into a
room which was entirely empty. Here he bade me wait, and went
through a door into an adjoining room.

I remained for some time quite alone. The sounds of the city came up
to me, but I seemed in some deserted place far from any one.

Finally the officer, who had arrested me, came back, opened the door
and asked me to go in. He closed the door behind me and went out
into the hall.

I found myself in a big sunlit room.

There was a table with several leather-bound books on it, some
folded papers in their wrappers and some written memoranda, on
sheets, lying about, and a chair where some one had just been
sitting. Then I saw the other person in the room; a figure standing
by the window; a big man with thick gray hair, tall and broad
shouldered.

He had been looking down into the street and now he turned about;
his face lighted with a friendly, quizzical smile. The smile
deepened; extended itself until it became a merry chuckle.

“So you are the desperate train robber!” he said.

“Well, sit down, Mr. Train Robber, I want to have a little
conversation with you.”

I was as embarrassed as a child and I sat down primly in the chair
and put my hands together in my lap. I must have presented a
ridiculous appearance, a big overgrown boy as uneasy as though he
were being photographed for his mother.

The man came over and sat down in his chair. He put his elbows on
the table and looked at me across the line of books.

“Is this all really true?” he said.

“Yes, sir,” I replied.

I knew of course what he meant although he made no explanation.

“Well,” he said, “it is incredible; it is entirely beyond belief.”

Then he got up and began to walk about the room.

“My boy,” he said, “you have been associated with two of the worst
crooks in the world and you have engaged in a desperate business.
What do you suppose we ought to do with you?”

“I don’t know,” I said.

I was still greatly embarrassed and these were the only words I
could think of.

The big man stopped at that, put his hands in his pockets and looked
at me:

“Neither do I,” he said.

Then he went on:

“You have courage—a dependable sort of courage. It is a quality rare
enough in the world; too rare, it seems to me, to be thoughtlessly
broken up. I am going to try an experiment.

“I don’t see why the courage which you possess should not be brought
to the service of the government instead of against it. Do you think
you could stick to us as faithfully as you have stuck to these two
inconsiderate blacklegs?”

He did not wait for me to reply; but he went on:

“Crime always fails,” he said. “There never was any man able to get
away with it. No matter how clever he is, there is always some point
at which his plans go to pieces; sooner or later something turns up
against which he is wholly unable to protect himself. The thing is
so certain to happen that it seems to look as though there were a
power in the universe determined on the maintenance of justice; a
power that is opposed to criminal endeavor and always at work to
destroy the criminal agent—just as it destroyed White and just as it
has destroyed Mooney.”

He went on as though he were speaking to himself.

“But it does not act as though it wished to destroy you.... I
suppose one’s large view in this matter ought to be consistent. If
one assumes that this Authority has exercised itself for the
ultimate destruction of these two hardened offenders, then one must
also believe that what has happened in your behalf has happened also
with an equal design.”

He began to walk about the room, his hands in his pockets, his chin
lifted as in some reflection.

“Well,” he said, “at any rate I am going to take it that way. I am
going to turn you over to Dix for a tryout in the Secret Service. We
have got to seize a number of dangerous Reds and your holdup
experience ought to make you a useful assistant for Dix. Besides,”
he added, “we are involved in a sort of promise about you.”

I said “Yes, sir.”

I was still embarrassed and astonished almost beyond any expression;
and, sitting thus primly on the edge of the chair, with my big hands
folded in my lap, I must have seemed to the man irresistibly
ridiculous, for he suddenly began to laugh.

“All right, Mr. Train Robber,” he said, “you will find some of your
friends just outside of the door, and when you have spoken with
them, go along the hall to the end of the building.... Dix is in the
room on the right.”

I got up awkwardly and backed out of the room and through the door
behind me.

It was only long afterwards that I learned by what agency these
events had come to pass.

When Maggie had taken the traveling bag containing the stolen bank
notes to the United States District Attorney on the day of Mooney’s
death, she had not handed them over to him, straight out, as Mooney
had directed. Instead, she had used the advantages of the situation
to bring me clear of the business.

I do not know the details.

But she seems to have gone over the whole thing with the Federal
authorities that morning, explaining all about my relations with the
two highwaymen, how I had come to get into it and how I had been
carried along; and then she promised to deliver the money to them
provided the government would grant me immunity. The matter was
taken up and discussed there in detail on that morning. The result
was that Maggie got the promise, that, if everything proved to be as
she described it, I should not be held responsible for the desperate
crimes that these men had carried out.

She was in fact a very skillful person and she conducted it with
immense cleverness.

They were amazed to find that she had the money in what they
imagined, when she came, was merely a personal traveling bag. And
they were astonished to discover that I was, in fact, merely the big
awkward, thoughtless youth that she had described to them; as they
were astonished to find the confirmatory discoloration of my burned
hand.

On the outside of the door I found Maggie and my fairy sweetheart.

The girl was in tears, but Maggie was a grim figure, with her little
crumpled ears lying tight to her head, her beady eyes and her hard
features—precisely like the devil, which she was not.

“You can kiss her, just once!” she said.

I stood like one in a dream, but the girl came up and put her arms
around my neck ... and I kissed her.

And then, through the rosy haze of the world, Maggie pushed in
between us.

“That’ll do,” she said. “You are to go to work now and make a man
out of yourself ... and then ... in three years we shall see about
it.”

I went along the corridor, to Dix ... in the room on the right.

                 *       *       *       *       *

And so came Walker into the United States Secret Service. The story
of his way upward in that service is not written out here. If you
wish to hear it ask his charming wife whose memories go back to the
time when the big tent of a circus was the Kingdom of Romance. But
you will find in the chapters to follow, some adventures in mystery
with which he was connected.




                            CHAPTER VII

                            The Diamond


The thing that keeps life keen is that you can never figure out
what’s ahead.

There’s always a surprise around the corner. The thing changes on
you, to use an expression of the vernacular. One begins in an
English drawing-room and winds up on the Gobi Desert. You never know
where the road’s going. Take it in big things, or take it in the
trivialities of life—it’s the same system.

But I am not going to lecture on philosophy; I am going to cite a
case—a case that had an immense surprise in it to me, and a series
of events that started out in one direction and concluded in
another. I saw them start simply enough, but they “changed on me,”
to keep our colloquialism.

I had just come down from Bar Harbor. I had an artificial diamond
made in Germany, and I was looking for Walker. Walker is chief of
the United States Secret Service, and he knows more about artificial
stones than any other man in America, unless it is Bartoldi.

Gems are a fad with Walker, and a profession with Bartoldi.

I do not know which of these motive impulses moves a man to the
higher efficiency. The keen man with the fad gets to be an expert,
and the necessities of trade makes the other one. Anyway, I wanted
to show my diamond to both of them.

I found Walker in the Forty-seventh National Bank on lower Fifth
Avenue. He waved a recognition and went on with what he was saying
to the cashier behind the grill:

“There was no robbery; that’s what puzzles me. How did they get the
thing? It’s lucky the bank discovered that it was missing almost
immediately and sent out the word. The package had just come in, and
was lying on a shelf under the bookkeeper’s desk.... But how did
they get it?”

And so I found Walker.

Nobody would ever have taken Walker for the chief of the government
Secret Service. In appearance he was the last person any one would
have picked out for a secret agent.

He looked like a practical person, and that is precisely what he
was. You never could think that the man had any imagination; and he
didn’t have any. At least, he didn’t have any imagination in the
sense that we usually understand it. I suppose he had the kind of
imagination that the inventor has, or the mathematician when he
figures the orbit of the stars, or the engineer when he has to make
some calculation on the stresses of a bridge.

I asked him to look at my diamond when he came out. His face took on
a decided expression of interest.

“Go up and see Bartoldi,” he said. “I will be along in an hour.”

He added with a sort of smile:

“There is no leisure in my trade. Somebody’s always either robbing a
national bank or trying to rob—boring from within or setting up some
game on the outside.”

Then he laughed.

Now, that is how I happened to find Walker—just when I wanted to
find him. By accident I stepped into something, as you would say.

Well, it was not explained to me. In fact, to say plain truth,
behind a lot of courteous indirections, he put me out of the bank
and sent me up to Bartoldi’s to await his coming in an hour. I do
not mean that he ordered me out. He enticed me out; he edged me out,
a good deal as one would do with a child that had wandered into a
rather tense conference.

I went up to Bartoldi’s. Everybody knows where it is.

He has a mammoth place on Fifth Avenue, rather far up—the trade is
going up. The big retailers saw that a dozen years ago. Bartoldi is
not the greatest jewel dealer in the world, but he is one of the
greatest. The greatest jewel dealer in the world is Mahadol in
Bombay; then come Vanderdick in Amsterdam, and Hauseman in Paris.

It is a big shop, as I have said. But you know it—there is no reason
to describe it here. A huge place with glass cases like every
American shop, and the jewels displayed, as is the almost universal
custom in America. Not like some of the foreign places, where you
see only a square of black velvet, and the jewel, when you have
named the kind you want, is brought out of a vault.

I was in this shop before the long counter that contains the tray of
diamonds, when Bartoldi appeared.

Appeared is precisely the word; I did not see him until suddenly he
was before me on the other side of the glass case.

He does not look like a jeweler. In fact, he does not look like
anybody in active life. He is big and gaunt, and, in spite of the
best tailor, he gives one the impression of an immense human body
dried out in some desert. But he is alive, all right. I would like
to see the man who could fool him about a jewel.

I showed him my diamond. It was a big diamond, unset, and I had it
folded up in a piece of tissue paper.

He squinted at it between his thumb and finger.

“Good specimen,” he said, “first-class specimen. You can see the
stratifications with your eye.”

He paused; then he went on:

“I never believed chemists could build up a diamond. Of course they
build up rubies, and they do it cleverly, deuced cleverly, but you
can always tell by the bubbles in them; they can’t get the bubbles
out.”

He moved my diamond out a little farther from his eye.

“I suppose it is insufficient pressure. If they could get the
angular cavities that are in corundum, they would be on the way; of
course they would never get the steady glow of the genuine ruby. But
they would fool the old ladies in a drawing-room.”

Then his voice went into a piping note.

“You would pass for the owner of rubies if you were rich enough to
back up the hypothesis.”

He twisted my stone around in his fingers; then he pointed to the
case under his hand, and set out a tray of diamonds.

He selected a table diamond as large as my false one and set above a
platinum band. I could not have told the difference.

My diamond was worth four hundred dollars. Bartoldi said there was
not a stone in the tray under five thousand dollars.

I stepped back to look at them from a little distance, about the
distance one would observe a diamond on a woman’s hand at dinner
across the table. I could not see any difference between the two
stones. They could have been interchanged, and they would have
fooled me at the distance. But they didn’t fool Bartoldi.

“Not much alike,” he said; “your stone has a sleek look.”

I did not see that. I told him I didn’t see it.

I knew that aspect of artificial stones, that appearance as if they
were pressed instead of cut. But it was the aspect of artificial
stones of a lower order than the one I had shown to Bartoldi. This
one was cut, and it looked crisp to me, very nearly as crisp as the
best one. But there is where the trained eye comes in. Walker knew
it was false, and Bartoldi knew it instantly. He could see the
stratifications with his eye.

I could see them with a good lens, but I could not see the sleek
look, and I moved toward the tray on the counter to get a close
view. I did not move directly ahead; I moved to one side—and I
discovered two persons who had come into the shop behind me.

I took up my diamond, and stood out of the way at once. I had no
wish to delay a customer. I was only idling with a laboratory
diamond, and Bartoldi had to sell jewels to keep his shop going. I
could not take up his time unless he happened to be at leisure.

The two persons who had come in at once attracted my attention. They
would have attracted the attention of anybody, even if there had
been nothing to follow. If one had chanced to observe them, one
would have stopped and considered them anywhere.

One would have been forced to think about them. They would have
stimulated one’s curiosity. No one could have passed those two
persons without undertaking to formulate some explanation; and to me
there was something more than their mere appearance.

In my mind there was a vague impression that I had seen them in some
other place. I could not at the moment remember the place; it was
what psychologists call subconscious, I suppose. At any rate it did
not crystallize into a memory. But it remained as a sort of
atmosphere behind the vivid impression they made on me.

The two persons were an old man and a girl. The two words go
together, but the two persons did not go together in any sense. The
girl was not past sixteen, and the man was past seventy. That would
be all right, an old man and his granddaughter, you would say.

But it was not all right. That was just exactly the impression that
was so cryingly conspicuous. It was not all right!

The man was very well dressed; everything about him was of the best
quality, and distinguished—perhaps just a little too distinguished,
a little too vivid. When one thought about it, one saw that he was
dressed somewhat for a younger part. There was a bit of color, a
suggestion of youth that the man did not have.

He was an old man, but he was a vigorous old man, and he had the air
and manner of wealth about him. I can’t precisely point out these
indicatory signs, but they were easily to be marked, and they are
not often successfully assumed. I suppose a clever actor could do
it. Walker used to say that the best actors were not on the stage;
they were in Joliet.

Now, that is what the man looked like—one of the idle rich, grown
old in an atmosphere of luxury. He ought to have had, as I figured
him up, a town house, a country estate, a yacht, and very nearly
every vice! His eyes, his bad mouth and his fat ears were good
evidential signs. I thought I knew the type!

The girl filled me with a sort of wonder. She wore a little cheap
hand-me-down dress that must have come from a village shop, and it
looked as though she had slept in it. She had slept in it!

The sort of crumpled-up appearance of that cheap material could not
be mistaken. She wore a straw hat lined with vivid color and loaded
with soiled artificial flowers. Her shoes were run down a bit. She
was generally soiled, as she would have been if she had traveled in
a day coach and slept in her clothes—and that is precisely what she
had done.

But all this could not obscure the fact that she was pretty, in a
sort of way. She had a pliant figure, and the charms that go along
with youth. Sleeping in one’s clothes, and the grime of a journey
can’t obscure that. She was young, and she had what youth has.

Now you understand why I said that the two together puzzled me.
Either alone would not attract a glance, and certainly not a line of
speculation. But the two together, as I have insisted, called upon
you for an explanation.

They puzzled me but they did not puzzle Bartoldi. I suppose he
understood it quicker than I. I understood it pretty quickly, just
as you have, no doubt, understood it all along, and as Bartoldi
understood it at a glance.

They came up to the glass counter, and the man asked to see a
diamond ring.

The girl did not look up. She did not say anything. She seemed to
wish to get as far as possible under the soiled hat.

Bartoldi set out some trays beside the one already on the table. The
old man moved a little to one side and the girl came quite close to
the glass counter. She bent her head down over the stones as though
she wished to see the rings and at the same time keep under cover of
the soiled hat.

She did not say a word. But she knew precisely what she wanted, for
she suddenly put out her hand and picked up the table diamond that
had lain beside my artificial stone on the glass case. She slipped
the stone on her finger and stepped back as though to be hidden a
little by the old man.

I got a surprise.

“Gad,” I said to myself, “big wages! Will he stand for it?”

Well, he did stand for it. He was a royal old sport; I will say that
for him.

Bartoldi said the price was five thousand dollars, and the old boy
never turned an eyelash. He made a careless gesture. I don’t think
he even O.K.’d the thing with a word.

He took a flat leather case out of his pocket, got out a draft,
asked Bartoldi for a pen, or rather indicated the wish for a pen
with a fiddling of his fingers, and when he got it, indorsed the
draft. Then he showed Bartoldi a letter that was in the envelope
that had contained the draft.

I followed them to the door. There was a taxicab waiting; they got
in and went up the Avenue.

That type of man ought to have a house somewhere on the Avenue; it
was August; the house would be closed; I began to put things
together.

I was standing there when Walker came up. I hailed him.

“Walker,” I said, “you got here a moment too late. You see that
taxicab?”

He made a little whimsical gesture.

“I see everything,” he said, “that the devil puts out to annoy me;
what’s in the taxicab?”

“There’s a case in it,” I said, “for the District Court of the
United States, on the criminal side, or I’m a poor detective.”

“All detectives are poor,” said Walker. “If they were rich, they
would have a town house, a country place and a string of hunters.”

“Well,” I said, “that’s what the old boy in the taxicab has got; and
he’s got something else that the United States doesn’t allow him to
take across a state line.”

Walker looked at me queerly. He put the tip of his finger to his
forehead.

“Touch of the heat?”

“Look here,” I said, “isn’t this sort of thing just as much in your
line of duty as trying to prevent the crooked cashier from boring
from within? Isn’t the United States by a fairly recent statute,
helping virtue to evade the dragon?”

Walker’s face wrinkled into a twisted smile.

“It’s helping the clever _fille de joie_ to levy a little blackmail
on the side.”

“Wrong dope, in this instance,” I said.

I began to describe to him the incident and the two persons. I
described them carefully, minutely, and he listened without a word
and without a motion. He stood perfectly still, there in the hot
street before Bartoldi’s mammoth shop.

But his manner had changed. He had now, I noted from the very
impassive aspect of the man, a deep, a profound, a moving interest
in this affair. He cursed softly as though he chopped the words with
his teeth.

“Ten minutes too late!” he said. “Where did they go?”

Walker was motionless for a moment, his head down, his eyes narrowed
in a profound reflection.

I interrupted him with a repetition of his words.

“Ten minutes too late!” I said. “You are two minutes too late. The
taxicab has hardly disappeared in the traffic yonder.”

I pointed up the Avenue. Walker did not look up.

“I was thinking of Bartoldi,” he said. “I am ten minutes too late
for Bartoldi.”

“That’s right,” I said. “Bartoldi could have told you who this man
was. He must have known him.”

“Oh, no,” said Walker. “Bartoldi didn’t know him.”

I was astonished.

“Surely Bartoldi knew him,” I said.

Walker’s voice became a sort of drawl.

“Surely he did not know him. Bartoldi would not have been a party to
this man’s criminal adventures.”

I laughed.

“What does Bartoldi care about criminal adventures? He’s a dealer in
jewels.”

“He will care about this criminal adventure,” said Walker.

Then he looked suddenly at me.

“Where do you think they went?”

I told him what I thought. This type of person would have a house on
the Avenue; it would be closed in August.

Walker shook his head.

“I think I know where they have gone,” he said.

Again I looked at him in astonishment.

“Then you know who this man is?”

Walker replied with an abrupt query:

“Did you see the inside of his hand—the right hand? That was the
thing to see.”

“How about the girl?” I replied, for Walker’s indirections were
putting me on my mettle. “Her hand will be the thing to see; it’s
got Bartoldi’s diamond on it.”

He looked up rather vaguely.

“I am puzzled about the girl; I do not understand what the girl has
to do with it.”

I laughed.

“Bartoldi understood,” I said.

“Bartoldi!”

Walker seemed to bounce out of his reflection.

“The devil! We’ve got to get back his diamond.”

He darted suddenly out to the traffic of the Avenue, hailed a
taxicab and beckoned me to get in with him.

I got in and we went up Fifth Avenue. We were held in a jam of
vehicles a block or two farther on.

“And so,” I said, “you think the girl is a nice little country
cousin, an esteemed relative—esteemed to the tune of a
five-thousand-dollar diamond?”

Walker was fingering his face in reflection.

“Nonsense!” he said. “The girl’s no relation to him.”

“Then why the five-thousand-dollar diamond?”

“That’s what I would like to know,” said Walker.

I laughed. The thing was too absurd.

“If the wage of a sin is a five-thousand-dollar diamond, there’s got
to be the sin to earn it. That old sport was not taking any chance
on getting the value of his money.”

“O. K.,” said Walker.

“Then you think he has been paid for it?” I said.

“Surely,” said Walker, “that man has been paid for it.”

The taxicab turned out of the Avenue presently when the jam of
vehicles was released, and stopped before the Grand Central Station.

Walker paused a moment when we got down.

“If I put the thing together correctly,” he said, “they will be
here. The girl came in for her diamond.... How she earned it puzzles
me.... The man had to get through with it as quickly as he could.”

He made a little gesture.

“From the station to Bartoldi’s in a taxicab and back to the first
train out—that would be his plan—to hurry.”

He added: “It was a risk, a big risk. But he had to take it. He
couldn’t trust anybody; he had to do it himself.”

I looked at Walker with what I imagined was an ironical smile.

“Then he would not be guilty under the statute,” I said, “for he
only brought the little baggage in to buy her a diamond.”

Walker seemed in a sort of reflection.

“Oh, yes,” he said, “he is guilty.”

“Then you want him?” I asked.

Walker suddenly looked at me with his eyes wide.

“Surely,” he said.

“Then why don’t you hurry?” I demanded.

He looked at me with a leisurely interest.

“If he’s here,” he said, “he can’t get out. I’ve got three of the
best agents of the Department in there—sent them up when I started
to Bartoldi’s to meet you.”

“But how would they know him?” I asked.

“They would know him by a scar in his hand,” replied Walker.

“They ought to know him by a girl on his arm,” I said.

Walker’s voice became reflective.

“I wonder if she could be his granddaughter, after all!”

I laughed. That laugh was like the key to a memory. I at once
remembered where I had seen this man and the girl.

It was at the end of the path that follows the sea south at Bar
Harbor. There is a great house where the path ends. It was closed;
the shutters were up, and the grounds only casually kept; I
remembered it now. I had undertaken one afternoon to get through
from this sea-path to the village street, and had wandered into an
immense sunken garden. I was making no sound.

The grass and leaves had covered the paths; it was very still, and
presently I heard the murmur of voices. I wondered who could be
here, for as I have said, the place was closed, and I was
discovering that there was no way through to the village street. I
went forward a few steps, and beyond me, standing in an angle of the
garden, obscured by an immense flowering vine, were this old man and
this girl.

I remembered the scene perfectly, now that I had the key to it.

The old man was speaking in a low voice, as though he urged
something, offered something, and the girl was listening in the
attitude in which I had observed her this afternoon, her head down,
her arms hanging. I had gone out quietly; I remember the explanation
that presented itself. The old man must be the owner of the place,
and the girl a keeper’s daughter, perhaps. The memory bore out my
impression, the impression which I received to-day and the
impression which had evidently convinced Bartoldi.

I told it all to Walker, very carefully and in detail, as we went
into the great lobby and down to the train exits. Walker caught my
arm in his big hand.

“That explains it,” he commented.

Then he stopped abruptly.

“By the way,” he said, as though it had just occurred to him and he
had now leisure to think about it, “let me have a look at that
artificial diamond.”

I took the piece of tissue paper out of my waistcoat pocket and
handed it to him. He unfolded the paper, took the diamond out and
retained it in his hand. We crossed through the throngs of people
everywhere grouped about in the great station, to the exit
indicating the evening train to Bar Harbor. We entered the little
group, and I realized suddenly that we were close behind the old man
and the girl. They were facing toward the gate.

Suddenly Walker opened his hand and dropped my diamond to the floor.
It clattered at the feet of the girl, and Walker stooped swiftly and
picked it up.

“Your daughter,” he said, speaking to the old man, “has dropped the
setting out of her ring; permit me to return it.”

The man turned instantly like a trapped animal. For a moment both of
his hands went into the pockets of his coat, and for an instant his
face was uncertain, vague, deadly; then he put out his hand for the
diamond.

Walker gave it to him and turned to me.

“Perhaps,” he said, “we had better see if the trunks got on. We have
nearly ten minutes to wait.”

And he walked away toward the great stair leading to the baggage
room.

The girl did not move; she did not speak; she remained as she had
stood in Bartoldi’s shop, her head down, concealed as far as she was
able to conceal it, under the drooping hat loaded with soiled roses.
Walker was crossing toward the great stair in his long stride and I
hurrying in my astonishment to overtake him.

“The devil, man!” I cried when I came up. “Why did you give him my
diamond?”

“I wanted to see if there was a scar in his hand,” said Walker. “He
had it.”

“Then you know him?”

“Surely,” said Walker.

“Aren’t you going to arrest him?”

Walker had returned to his careless manner.

“No,” he said, “I am not going to arrest him. You saw his hands go
into his pockets. There would have been a lot of people killed if it
hadn’t been for your diamond. It’s lucky I thought of it; besides, I
had to see the inside of his hand.”

“But my diamond,” I said, “when will I get it?”

Walker continued in his leisurely drawl:

“You will get your diamond when Bartoldi gets his.”

“When will that be?” I insisted.

“Right now,” replied Walker.

Then he paused in his stride, took off his hat and extended it for a
moment above his head like a tired person who would relax from the
fatigue of travel.

Immediately three persons, two men and a woman between them,
carrying bags, coats and the usual articles of travel, came out from
the crowd pouring into the station from the street and crossed
hurriedly into the group waiting at the entrance for the Bar Harbor
train.

Then a dramatic thing happened.

I could see the old man clearly; he was watching Walker out of the
tail of his eye, and he kept his hands in his pockets, but he was
not watching the three persons who came into the group as though
seeking the train for which he was bound; and as they passed,
quicker than the eye, the man’s hands were seized, dragged out of
his pockets and snapped into handcuffs. The pistols gripped in his
hands were swept out; they fell to the floor.

“The devil!” I cried. “The old boy is the most dangerous Lothario I
ever saw.”

Walker replied in his leisurely drawl:

“He’s the most dangerous bank swindler you ever saw.”

                 *       *       *       *       *

The girl had been questioned, and the thing was now clear. Walker
explained it all on the way to Bartoldi’s in a taxicab. I had my
diamond in my pocket, and Walker had Bartoldi’s to exchange for the
forged draft. The old man was Vronsky, the most notorious forger in
the world. He had bribed this girl, the janitress of the Empire Bank
at Bar Harbor, to steal a book of blank drafts and some sheets of
stationery. It was easy to do; the book of blanks was lying on the
bookkeeper’s desk in the package as it had come from the printer,
and the stationery had never been locked up.

With the blanks bearing the secret water mark of the bank, Vronsky
was able to forge drafts on New York and place them, establishing
his identity by a letter from the bank officials on this stationery,
in which they said they were sending him the draft which he intended
to pay out, and giving its amount and number.

“It was a clever scheme,” Walker added. “The secret water mark on
the draft blanks would show that they were genuine—that’s what
convinced Bartoldi; and the forged letter would show the identity of
the man who undertook to place it. The forgery gave Vronsky no
trouble; the problem was how to get the blanks and letter paper.”

“And he got them with a diamond,” I said.

Walker’s drawl lengthened.

“Precisely as we got him.”

And so this adventure opened with a diamond and closed with the
arrest of one of the worst criminals in the world. What was it I
wrote in the opening paragraph of this case? Go back and read it.




                            CHAPTER VIII

                        The Expert Detective


Walker kept two dog-eared magazines in a pigeonhole of his desk,
with a story marked in each. He kept them, he said, to reduce
enthusiasm, as a doctor keeps a drug to reduce a fever. They were
handed, with the regularity of a habit, to two types of visitors who
annoyed him: those persons who volubly admired the professional
detective; and that other class who assured him that the inspired
amateur, as, for example, some local prosecutor in a criminal case,
could outwit the acutest counselors of darkness.

I include the two stories in their instructive order.

                 *       *       *       *       *

The State had completed its case.

The conviction of the prisoners seemed beyond question.

Incident by incident, the expert detective, Barkman, had coupled up
the circumstantial evidence until it seemed to link the prisoners
inevitably to the crime. He was a big man, with eyes blue like a
piece of crockery, a wide face and a cruel, irregular jaw. One felt
that no sentiment restrained him; that he would carry out any
undertaking to its desperate end.

He sat now in the witness chair. He was the last witness for the
State, and, now that the case was complete, he had been turned over
for cross-examination.

It was afternoon. A sheet of sunlight entering through open windows
lay on the court room. It was a court room of a little city in the
South; a city but newly awakened to industrial activities, and the
conduct of its administration of justice still adhered to older and
more deliberate forms.

The court room was crowded with people down to the very railing that
separated the attorneys’ tables from the crowd.

The judge, a tall man, with a long, mild, unhealthy face, sat on the
bench. To the right of him and a step below was the clerk. The jury
were in chairs along the wall to the left of the bench. And between
the bench and jurors sat the witness.

The prosecuting attorney was before his table, a little to the right
of the first step to the bench. There were law books on his table,
and two polka-dot handkerchiefs lying loosely on some papers. The
man was no longer concerned with these articles. He sat back from
the table, his fingers linked together, his face lifted as in some
reflection.

Farther to the right, in two chairs against the railing, were the
prisoners. One, a big old man with a splotched, dissipated face and
his hair cropped close to his skull. Folds of fat lay along the base
of his neck, partly concealed by a white silk handkerchief held in
place under his chin by a long old-fashioned garnet pin. His
companion was a little, thin, fox-faced man who moved nervously in
his chair.

The most striking figure in the court room was the attorney for the
prisoners.

He sat between them, a chair’s width in advance, before his table.
There was nothing whatever on this table except an ink pot, two pens
and a big blotting sheet. There was also a thick pad of foolscap
paper provided for the convenience of the attorney in taking any
note of the testimony, but there was no word written on it.

The lawyer was a huge bulk of a man. He sat relaxed in his chair.
His thick, black hair was brushed smoothly. It was of an oily,
glossy blackness. His big, thick features were putty-colored, as
though the man’s skin had no vitality. His eyes were very nearly
closed; his mouth sagged open, the thick lips holding a cigar that
was not lighted.

Every detail of his dress was immaculate and arranged with extreme
care.

The man was perhaps sixty, but, in the big relaxed body and heavy
face, age was indefinite. He now took the cigar out of his mouth and
laid it down on the table. He moved like one coming out of a dream.

He had not immediately taken charge of the witness when the
prosecutor had released him for examination. But now, finally, at
the judge’s words, “Proceed, Colonel,” he at last looked up.

“You are an expert detective, Mr. Barkman.”

The voice had a strange dwindling whine as though it came from some
cavernous depth in the man’s immense body.

The witness looked about with a vague smile. “Well, Colonel,” he
said, “I have had some experience.”

“You have had a great deal of experience. You were Chief of Police,
then you set up a detective agency. You have had a lot of experience
in criminal investigation. And you have usually been right.”

This was generous treatment when the reverse was indicated.

The detective was not conspicuous for the confidence of the
community in a profession too often subject to cloud. His employment
in the bank affairs had followed from his intimate association with
Halloway, an association, as all knew, resulting from the handling
of a questionable matter in the banker’s private life.

The bank did not require a retained detective.

Was this man’s sinecure gratitude in the banker, or a sort of
blackmail? Here was material with which a reflection on the witness
could have been assembled. But the attorney chose rather to admit
the man’s superior mental acumen in criminal affairs.

The witness moved in his chair. “Well, Colonel,” he said, “I try to
be right.”

“And you have nearly always been right,” continued the attorney. “In
the Deal case you maintained that the decedent had not been killed
by a bullet fired from a cellar grating at a hundred yards along the
street east of the man’s window, and it was afterward shown that the
trajectory of a bullet fired from that point would have crashed into
an electric light midway of the distance. And in the Littlewood
case, you said the evidences of a struggle were manufactured,
because the slant of wood fibers in the broken window sash showed
that the pressure had been exerted from within the room and not from
without.”

The voice ascended into a lighter drawl with a facetious note in it.

“You have had a lot of experience, and you have had a lot of work,
but you have not got rich at it. You would like to be rich, wouldn’t
you?”

The witness laughed. “I suppose everybody would like to be rich,
Colonel.”

The attorney smiled, a big, loose, vacuous sort of smile.

“Old Bill,” he said, “here behind me, and Lyin’ Louie would like to
be rich, but they are more likely to be hanged.” He laughed again.
“You are not afraid of being hanged, Mr. Barkman?”

Everybody laughed. The eccentricities of this attorney were one of
the attractions of the court room. They were good-naturedly
overlooked by the officers of the court, who had been associated
with the man for a lifetime in an old-fashioned civilization,
leisurely and considerate.

The attorney made a gesture as of one putting by a pleasantry of the
moment.

“This was a very ingeniously constructed crime?”

The witness was now in an excellent humor. “I’d say it was,
Colonel,” he replied. “It was slick enough to fool me.”

“Ah!” The attorney continued. “I had forgotten that. It was your
theory in the beginning that the president of the Trader’s Bank, Mr.
Halloway, had accomplished the robbery himself, and, afterward,
dropped dead in his own house. He lay on the floor, when the body
was discovered, by the side of the library table. It was thought
that in falling his head had struck the heavy carved foot of the
table, causing the injury to the skull that resulted in death. The
physicians first called in were inclined to agree with that theory.
The immense strain of a criminal adventure might have caused the
accident after the man had returned to his house. Emotional
cataclysms have been known to bring on attacks of acute indigestion
or the rupture of a defective heart.”

“Sure, Colonel,” the witness assented, “that’s what the thing looked
like; and I was fooled about it; I admit it. There was no evidence
of a struggle in the room. It was only after Doctor North said the
man had been killed by a blow, probably with the poker, that I got
onto the right track.”

The attorney made a drawling assent.

“Yes,” he said, “that was a bad find.”

His voice went again into a strange laugh.

“It was mighty near a hangin’ find for Old Bill and Lyin’ Louie! You
got on better then, Mr. Barkman. You found two polka-dot
handkerchiefs that had been stuffed down into a vase in the library,
and then you found Old Bill and Lyin’ Louie. Now you are goin’ to
hang ’em, I reckon.”

There was a suppressed giggle in the court room. It was not shared
by the prisoners.

The big, old man of the close-cropped skull plucked the attorney by
the sleeve and spoke in an audible whisper.

“Looka here, Colonel,” he said, “I thought you was defendin’ us.”

The attorney replied, a higher note in his deep drawl.

“Yes,” he said, “that’s what I am doing. But you’ve got no sense,
Bill! You never had any sense. If you had had any sense you would
not have been in the pen-i-ten-tia-ry house. There was no reason for
you going to the pen-i-ten-tia-ry. Old Lansky tried to make a
bank-cracker out of you—I was in the cell with him on the night he
was hanged—he said you had no sense. He said you would never make
anything but a fence, and a damned poor fence ... that’s what he
said, Bill.”

He interrupted the long narrative by getting ponderously on his
feet. He reached out and took the two handkerchiefs from the table
of the prosecuting attorney and laid them down on his own.

Then he addressed the witness.

“Now, Mr. Barkman,” he said, “I’d like you to tell us precisely what
you think happened on the night of the twenty-seventh. I want you to
reconstruct this crime for us. I want you to show us just how Old
Bill and Lyin’ Louie went about this thing.”

The witness moved as though rearranging himself in his chair. He
shifted his shoulder a little to one side and he looked around
toward the jury.

“Well, Colonel,” he said, “I think I can tell you just exactly what
happened.”

He was not expecting to be interrupted. But he was interrupted by a
sort of explosive assent.

The big attorney was looking at him, resting his huge body on both
hands, on the table. The witness was for a moment disconcerted, then
he went on:

“It was like this,” he said, “as I figure it out. Everybody knows
that Old Bill was a bank-cracker.”

Again there was a sort of booming interruption.

“He was never a good bank-cracker,” the lawyer exploded; “he was a
poor bank-cracker. He was such a damn poor bank-cracker that he got
into the pen-i-ten-tia-ry house!”

The witness laughed.

“Anyway, Colonel,” he said, “when Louie drifted in here, the two of
them fixed up this game and they carried it out slick.”

Again the lawyer introduced an interruption.

“Now, that is just what I am anxious to know, Mr. Barkman. I am
anxious to know precisely what they did and how they did it. I want
to know, in detail, everything that happened that night.”

“Well,” replied the witness, “this is the way I figure it out,
Colonel, and I think it’s straight dope: these men fixed up their
plan and Louie hung around until he found that the bank president
was alone in his house. That was the night his family went to the
Springs. It was in the newspapers. Everybody knew it. Then about
midnight they went up to Mr. Halloway’s house.”

“And how did they get into the house?” inquired the lawyer.

“That was no trouble,” said the witness. “They rang the bell. They
wanted Mr. Halloway to come down just as he did come down, with his
dressing gown on, like he was found dead in the library.”

The attorney had changed his posture. He was idly fingering the two
polka-dot handkerchiefs.

The witness went on:

“When Mr. Halloway opened the door, one of these crooks jammed a
pistol against him. They shut the door and marched him into the
library. And there they told him what they were going to do. They
held him up, right there in the library, and forced him to give them
the combination to the bank safe.”

“And how were they to know,” inquired the attorney, “that the
combination which the banker gave them was the correct one? Would
not his impulse be—would not any one’s impulse be—to give an
incorrect combination of figures?”

The witness laughed.

“Old Bill would know the trick,” he said. “They would ask the banker
to give the combination. They would write it down as he gave it;
then they would wait a little while and ask him again, and if he had
made it up, he would not be able to remember. That’s an old trick.
It was done in the North Hampton bank robbery, where they burned the
cashier’s feet for lying.”

The big attorney swung around toward his clients.

“Did you ever hear of that, Bill?”

“No,” said the prisoner, “I never did.”

Again the attorney laughed that vague, futile laugh.

“I believe you, Bill,” he said, “although nobody else does—I’m paid
to believe you.”

He turned back to the witness.

“What happened then?”

The big prisoner with the folded white handkerchief for a cravat was
mumbling incoherently.

The attorney paid no attention.

He looked at the witness. “Go on, Mr. Barkman,” he said. “What did
they do next?”

“Well,” said the witness, “when they had got the correct combination
written down, they put a gun against Mr. Halloway and made him go
over to the telephone. They made him call up the watchman at the
bank and tell him just what he has sworn here Mr. Halloway told him
that night: that his child was sick and the doctor wanted him to
come right home. Mr. Halloway had to say just what they told him to
say, because there they stood with a gun against him. They could
hear every word he said. The bank watchman asked him what he could
do about leaving the bank, and they made Mr. Halloway say to him
over the telephone, to go ahead out to his house at once and that he
himself would drive over in his car and stay in the bank until the
watchman got back; then they hung up the receiver.”

The lawyer put a query:

“How do you suppose they were standing while Mr. Halloway was
calling the bank?”

The witness got up.

“Mr. Halloway was of course facing the telephone and the man with
the gun was standing behind him with the muzzle jammed against his
back. That would be the way they would be standing.”

He was about to sit down, but the lawyer interrupted him:

“Just a minute.”

He turned to the prisoner sitting on his left.

“Louie,” he said, “I want you to go over to Mr. Barkman and show us
just how you were holding that pistol against the banker’s back
while he was talking over the telephone. We’ll say Mr. Barkman’s the
banker.”

Everybody in the court room was astonished at this slip of the
attorney.

It would appear that he, like every one else, was convinced of the
guilt of the prisoners, and that this conviction had thus
unconsciously appeared in his words.

The man seemed not to realize what he had said. But the prisoner saw
it at once.

“Colonel,” he objected, “how can I show him how it was done when I
didn’t do it?”

The attorney made an exasperated gesture.

“Oh, Louie,” he said, “you are such a liar that nobody believes
anything you say. Do what I tell you.”

Then he stooped over the prisoner.

“Just a moment, Judge,” he explained; “I have got to encourage my
client.”

He whispered something in the man’s ear.

The prisoner rose and went over to the witness; he took him by the
shoulders and turned him around toward the judge, so that his back
was to the jury. He moved him until he got him in precisely the
position which he wished and then he thrust his long forefinger in
the man’s back, with the other fingers doubled up.

“How’s that, Colonel?” he said.

“Well,” said the attorney, “what do you think about it, Louie? Do
you think it’s O.K.?”

“Sure,” said the prisoner.

Then he came back and sat down in the chair.

The whole court room was amused and astonished. It was as good as a
theater.

The attorney returned to his examination of the witness.

“Proceed, Mr. Barkman,” he said. “What did they do next? Did they
make Mr. Halloway go over to the bank? His car was seen there and he
was, himself, seen going in, by some persons passing at the end of
the street. He was alone. How did they make him go over there alone,
accomplish the robbery, and come back to his house?”

Again the witness smiled shrewdly.

“They didn’t make him do it,” he said. “Old Bill there, he’s about
the size of Mr. Halloway.”

He turned about to the jurors.

“Mr. Halloway was a man, as you all know, about as big as I am. Old
Bill put on the banker’s hat and his long light overcoat. The
runabout stood under the porte-cochère outside. He went out, got in
this car and drove it over to the bank. He had the banker’s key to
the door and he had the combination to the safe, so he went in,
opened the safe, picked out the money and brought it back with him.”

The attorney suddenly interrupted.

“Now, there,” he said, “right there. Why did they take only big
bills and not smaller currency? There were twenty thousand dollars
taken in big bills—five-hundred and one-thousand-dollar bills. Why
did they take that and not the smaller currency?”

“I can explain that,” said the witness. “You see they had to hide
this money after they got it—they had to look out for that; they
might have to move pretty quickly. They could not trust anybody to
keep it for them and they were afraid to conceal it, so they would
have to carry it around with them. That’s the reason they took big
bills.”

“Ah,” said the attorney, “I understand it now. It puzzled me a lot.
I could not see what they meant by taking big bills and leaving the
rest of the money; but it’s clear now.”

He swung suddenly around to the prisoners. “Louie,” he said, “you
never told me that.”

The creature grinned, his face broken into a queer extended smile.

But the big prisoner to the right showed evidence of no such
conciliatory mood.

He got up.

“Judge,” he said, “we’re bein’ double crossed. I paid the Colonel,
here, a hundred dollars in honest money to defend us, and just look
what he’s doin’ to us.”

Everybody laughed.

The lawyer turned about and spoke to the man as he might have spoken
to an impertinent child.

“Sit down, Bill,” he said. “Louie knows that I am making a proper
defense, don’t you, Louie?”

The little fox-faced man continued to grin. But he said nothing.

“Now, Bill,” the lawyer went on gently as to a child, “Louie’s got
some sense; not much. He learned how to open registered envelopes,
when he started in to be a mail clerk, by watching the post-office
inspectors rolling a pen handle under the flap; and he learned to
feel for money in the envelope before he opened it. The post-office
inspectors taught him that. Louie had sense enough to learn it. He
learned it well. He can tell the feel of a bill through the thickest
envelope that was ever mailed. But you are a fool, Bill; Lansky told
me that. Nobody but a fool, after he robbed the Norristown bank,
would have hidden the money in the loft of an abandoned schoolhouse,
with a trail of cinders leading from the window up to the trap in
the ceiling. Anybody but a fool would have wiped his feet off before
he climbed in the window.”

The whole court room was convulsed with laughter; even the judge
smiled.

Nothing could have been more of the essence of comedy than these
passages between the attorney and his client.

The big lawyer turned again to the witness. “Now, Mr. Barkman,” he
said, “what did they do when Bill got back with the money?”

“They finished the job,” replied the witness.

“Well,” said the attorney, “what did they do?”

“It is clear what they did,” replied the detective; “they killed Mr.
Halloway with the fire poker, then they hid the two handkerchiefs
they had over their faces when they came in, and then they got out
of town.”

The witness sat back in his chair as though he had finished with his
testimony.

The big attorney stood up. The whole aspect of the man, as by the
snap of a switch, had undergone a transformation. The huge bulk of
him was vital. His heavy slack face was firm.

“Mr. Barkman,” he said, “why did the men who killed Hiram Halloway
wear no masks on their faces?”

“They did wear masks on their faces—they’re on the table before
you.”

The lawyer did not look down at the articles before him. His voice
was now hard and accurate like the point of a steel tool.

“Take it as a hypothetical question then. Suppose they wore no
masks. What would that fact indicate?”

The attorney for the State rose.

“I object,” he said. “There must be evidence in the case tending to
support the assumed facts in a hypothetical question.”

“The evidence shall be presently indicated,” replied the lawyer.

The judge passed on the objection at once.

“The Colonel promises to point out the evidence later. He may go on;
the witness has been introduced as an expert.”

The lawyer again faced the man in the chair. He repeated his
question.

The witness seemed doubtful.

“I don’t know,” he said.

“You don’t know! Reflect, Mr. Barkman. Would it not mean that the
person or persons who accomplished this criminal act felt that they
were so well known to Hiram Halloway that no ordinary disguise could
conceal their identity?”

The witness did not immediately reply, and the lawyer went on:

“And is not this the reason why Hiram Halloway was killed?”

“Why he was killed!” repeated the man in the chair.

“Yes, precisely the reason. One must credit even a common thief with
some intelligence. No one uselessly adds the crime of murder to a
lesser crime. Masked assassins wholly unknown to the decedent would
have gagged and bound him. It would have answered their purpose as
well. But not the purpose of a known, unmasked assassin. Safety for
him lay only in the banker’s death.”

The attorney added:

“That death was so unavoidably necessary—to cover the identity of
the assassin—that the evidences of an accidental death were arranged
with elaborate care. Is it not true?”

The witness had been twisting his feet about; his face uncertain.
Now it took on a dogged look.

“It’s true that the thing was a slick job.”

The attorney took one step toward the witness. “Now, Mr. Barkman,”
he said, “can you tell me why assassins who had so carefully staged
this tragedy to appear accidental should leave behind them two
handkerchiefs, with eye-holes cut in them, thrust carelessly into a
vase on a table? They might be found, and that discovery would, at
once, negative the theory of accidental death.”

“They wanted to get rid of the masks.”

“But if they wore no masks? Is it not inconceivable that they would
have placed them there to jeopardize all that they had so carefully
planned?”

The witness was watching the attorney, the dogged look deepening in
his face.

“If they didn’t wear masks, of course they wouldn’t have put them
there—it would have been a fool thing.”

The attorney moved out closer to the witness. The point, as one
might say, of his voice seemed to sharpen.

“Now, Mr. Barkman, if these masks were not put into the vase on the
table by the assassins, then they were put there by somebody else;
and if they were not put there on the night of the robbery, they
were put there later; and if they were put there by some one later,
it was one who had access to the house later; and if they were put
there by one having access to the house after it was established the
banker did not die from a natural cause, then they were put there to
deceive.”

He paused, and his final sentence descended like a hammer:

“And the deception in presenting false evidence of _two_ men would
consist in the fact that but _one_ man had, in fact, accomplished
the crime.”

The prosecuting attorney was on his feet.

“Your honor,” he said, “this is all built up on the theory that the
assassins did not wear masks. There is no evidence to support such a
theory. The handkerchiefs that the assassins took off of their faces
and hid in the vase are here in the case for everybody to see.”

The attorney for the prisoners put out his hand and took up the two
polka-dot handkerchiefs which were lying on the table before him.

“It is the cleverest criminal,” he said, “who always makes the most
striking blunder. The accomplished assassin of Lord William Russell
carried away the knife with which his victim was supposed to have
cut his own throat. When the human intelligence, set on murder,
undertakes to falsify the order of events, the absurdity of its
error increases with its cunning.”

He shook the two handkerchiefs out and stretched them in his
fingers.

“They are here for everybody to see,” he echoed, “and if everybody
will look, he will see that these two handkerchiefs were never tied
around the faces of assassins; he will see—everybody—that, while
these handkerchiefs have eye-holes cut in them, the corners of them
are as smooth and uncreased as though they had been ironed; if they
had been tied around the faces of assassins, they would show the
strain and the fold of the knot!”

He turned now toward the judge.

“Your Honor,” he said, “the elaborate ingenuity of this whole
criminal plan is utterly beyond the feeble intelligence of these
prisoners. It is the work of some competent person; some person well
known to the decedent; some person who knew a disguise to be
useless; some one who had access to the house and was able to set up
the evidence of a second theory after the first had failed—such an
one was the assassin of Hiram Halloway.”

There was absolute silence in the court room. The witness sat
gripping the arms of his chair, his face distended as with some
physical pressure.

The big attorney, at the end of his significant pause, added a final
sentence:

“And now, that we have found the money, we can name the man!”

The prosecuting attorney, utterly astonished, put the question, the
answer to which the whole court room awaited:

“Found the money! Where?”

The big lawyer sat down in his chair; his huge body relaxed; his
face assumed its vague placidity and his voice descended into its
old, deep-seated, dwindling whine:

“It’s sewed up in the lining of Mr. Barkman’s coat. Lyin’ Louie felt
it when he posed him for the jury.”




                             CHAPTER IX

                 The “Mysterious Stranger” Defense


“Now, Ellen,” said the attorney, “I want you to tell us precisely
why you called to me when you ran out of the house—why you said,
‘Save me, Colonel.’”

“I was scared,” replied the witness. “I didn’t know what was going
to happen to me.”

“You thought the same thing that had happened to the lawyer, Mr.
Collander, might also happen to you.”

“I don’t know, Colonel. I was scared.”

It was the third day of the criminal trial. Colonel Armant had put
the prisoner on the stand in her own defense. It seemed a desperate
hazard. A woman remains an experiment as a witness. The old experts
about the court room were pretty nearly a unit against the
experiment in this case. The prisoner was too much of an enigma; one
of those little, faded, blonde women, with a placid, inscrutable
face—capable of everything or of nothing, as one chose to assume it.

The big attorney went on.

“You did know that something had happened to Mr. Collander?”

“I heard the shots—yes, I knew something had happened to him.”

“Just a moment, on this feature,” continued the attorney. “You do
not agree with the chief of police about the number of shots fired;
you thought there were three shots; one, and then two together, or
almost together?”

The prosecuting attorney interrupted.

“If you are going to lead the witness, Colonel,” he said, “why don’t
you lead her to some purpose? Why don’t you lead her to say there
was only _one_ shot?”

The huge counsel for the prisoner put out his hand toward the
speaker, in the gesture of one who brushes aside a disturbing fly,
but he did not otherwise move in his chair. His whole body was in
repose. He spoke without moving a muscle.

“Now, Ellen,” he said, “the prosecuting attorney makes it a point
against you that you were expecting something to happen. What do you
say about that? You don’t deny it, do you?”

“Well, Colonel,” replied the witness, “I thought something might
happen to Mr. Collander. I thought it all along.”

“Then you did expect it?”

“Yes,” replied the witness, “I suppose you could say I did expect
it.”

The attorney rose.

“That brings us to another point made against you.”

He took up a weapon lying on the table before him. It was a
thirty-two-caliber cylinder revolver of the usual type.

“You can identify this weapon?” the attorney asked.

“It is the revolver that Mr. Collander kept in his bedroom.”

“Now, Ellen,” said the attorney, “the State has introduced testimony
to show that you took this pistol to the gunsmith, Mr. Parks, and
had him clean it and load it for you. That was on Tuesday, a week
before Mr. Collander’s death. The prosecuting attorney calls on me
to explain that incident on some theory, if I can, which will be
inconsistent with his theory that you thereby provided yourself with
a weapon in order to kill Mr. Collander.” He paused. “We are not
concerned with anybody’s theory, Ellen, but what is the truth about
it?”

“I was afraid, Colonel, just as I have said. I thought there ought
to be a pistol in the house that would shoot.”

The attorney paused a moment as in reflection; then he went on.

“That’s the second point the State makes against you. There is still
another; let us get them all together so we can tell the jury
precisely what they mean. The prosecuting attorney has shown, here,
by a number of witnesses, that you sometimes threatened the lawyer,
Mr. Collander; that you have been known to quarrel with him, and
that you have more than once said you would kill him. Now, isn’t
that true?”

The witness hesitated a moment. She looked vaguely about the court
room; presently her eyes rested on the floor.

“Yes,” she said, “it’s all true; but I was not the only person who
wanted to kill him.” She hesitated. “What I said was talk—just talk;
the other people who wanted to kill him meant it.”

The big attorney lifted his body with a little gesture.

“The fact is, Ellen, that you were always fond of him.”

The witness continued to look down at the floor.

“Yes,” she said, “too fond of him, Colonel.”

The attorney seemed to draw his big body together. He stood up
before his table.

“Now,” he went on, “let us get all the bad features of this case
together. You say other persons wished this man’s death. What makes
you say that, Ellen?”

“Well, Colonel,” replied the witness, “that’s pretty hard for me to
answer. Everybody knows that Mr. Collander had a lot of enemies, a
lot of people didn’t like him; a lot of people who had just as much
reason to threaten to kill him as I had, and they must have meant it
when I didn’t mean it.”

“Ellen,” said the attorney, “let us try to be a little more precise
about this. You say that there were persons who wished to kill the
lawyer, Collander; that you thought he was in danger, and that you
had this weapon cleaned and loaded so he would have some means of
defending himself.”

The prosecuting attorney interrupted.

“Just a moment, Colonel,” he said. “The witness hasn’t said anything
of the sort.”

The attorney made an irrelevant gesture.

“Perhaps not entirely in those words,” he said, “but it is the
substance and intent of the answers. I shall permit her to reply for
herself. What do you say about that, Ellen?”

The witness answered at once.

“That’s it,” she said, “that’s exactly it. I thought Mr. Collander
was in danger of being killed, and I thought he ought to have a
pistol that was loaded and would shoot. That’s why I took it to Mr.
Parks.”

The big attorney nodded in assent.

“Now, what made you think that the decedent was in danger of his
life? You must have had some reason for it?”

“Well,” said the witness, “people were always coming to see Mr.
Collander. I have often heard him in a quarrel with people who came
in to see him. His study opens out on the porch; they sometimes came
to the porch and knocked on the door.”

“They didn’t always knock on the door, did they?” inquired the
attorney. “Sometimes they called him?”

The witness looked at the lawyer as though she did not precisely
follow his question.

“Yes,” she said, “sometimes they called him.”

“And then they would be standing down on the ground,” continued the
attorney. “The porch before the door is narrow; that would put them
below Mr. Collander if he were standing in the door.”

“Yes, sir,” said the witness, “the ground is lower than the porch;
anybody standing on the ground would be below Mr. Collander.”

Again the prosecuting attorney interrupted.

“What’s that go to do with it?” he said. “Are you going to drag in
the ‘mysterious stranger’ defense?”

The big lawyer swung around on his feet.

“Your Honor,” he said, addressing the judge, “I object to this
expression. It is an unfair expression. It has no place in a
judicial trial of which the sole object is to arrive at the truth.
The prosecuting attorney has no right to undertake to prejudice the
prisoner before the jury. That is an ungenerous expression. If the
prisoner did not kill Mr. Collander, some one else did kill him, and
if we don’t know, precisely, who that other person was we cannot
dismiss him as mythical, as a ‘mysterious stranger,’ as though he
were a figment of the imagination.”

The judge did not reply. He was accustomed to these passages between
the attorneys, staged always for effect, and he took no part in them
if he could avoid it.

The prosecuting attorney replied with ill-concealed irony.

“If the prisoner did not kill him!” he echoed.

“Quite so,” replied the Colonel, “and for your benefit, sir, I will
say that I propose to show, in a moment, that she not only did not
kill him, but that she could not have killed him.”

The prosecuting attorney made a vague gesture in the air with his
extended fingers. The aspect of irony remained.

“Go to it,” he said.

“Now, Ellen,” continued the attorney, “what made you think there was
some one outside of the house on the ground below the porch who
called Mr. Collander to the door?”

The prosecuting attorney was on his feet before the sentence was
ended.

“Your Honor,” he said, “this thing is ridiculous. Colonel Armant has
started in at the end of this case to set up one of the old stock
defenses. Your Honor knows ’em; everybody knows ’em; they are the
last resort of the guilty; the ‘alibi’ and the ‘mysterious
stranger.’ He could not use the alibi because everybody saw this
woman on the spot. Not even Colonel Armant with all his acuteness
could get in an alibi. As it happened, Robert McNagel, the chief of
police, was out at the engine house just below Collander’s
residence. Colonel Armant was there; they were sitting in the engine
house when they heard the shots. McNagel ran with the Colonel to
Collander’s house; they were the first persons on the ground.
McNagel was there when the woman ran out of the house and when she
shouted, ‘Save me, Colonel.’ He went after her and brought her back,
so the alibi had to be given up. The only thing left is the
‘mysterious stranger.’”

The prosecuting attorney laughed.

“Colonel Armant has to get something to make a defense out of. We
have shown that this woman had a motive for killing Collander. It is
the oldest motive in the world. She lived there as housekeeper. I
don’t say that other persons did not want to kill him. I have not
undertaken to mislead the court about him. Everybody knows our
brother Collander was a pretty gay old dog who took a lot of chances
on somebody killing him, no doubt. And somebody did kill him, but it
was not a ‘mysterious stranger.’ We have shown who it was. It was
the person who had a motive to kill him, the opportunity to kill
him, and who not only threatened to do it, but who had prepared a
weapon with which to do it. Here are the elements that the law
requires; time, place, opportunity, motive and conduct. Why, she as
good as said it when McNagel ran after her to bring her back into
the house. It was lucky McNagel was on the ground.”

The big attorney made an explosive assent.

“It is lucky,” he said, “that McNagel was on the ground. It’s the
very luckiest thing that ever happened.”

He turned about toward the prosecuting attorney, now returning to
his chair.

“It is true,” he said, “I was sitting in the engine house with
McNagel when we heard the shots. He ran with me and we were the
first persons on the ground. And that reminds me, I want to ask
McNagel a question or two just here.”

He looked around. The chief of police was sitting in a chair inside
the rail, just behind the prosecuting attorney.

He made a motion as though about to rise.

“Don’t get up,” said the lawyer. “You can answer where you are. Now,
Bobby,” he said, “we heard two shots close together. They were very
close together, were they not?”

“Yes, Colonel,” replied the chief of police, “the two shots were
fired in rapid succession.”

“But there was interval enough,” said the lawyer, “for us to be
certain that there were two shots.”

“That’s right, Colonel,” replied the chief, “they were close
together, but there were two shots; and that was confirmed by the
fact that the pistol on the floor had been twice discharged; there
were two empty cartridges in it when we picked it up. It had been
fired twice.”

“Just a moment, Bobby,” the lawyer interrupted. “I want to be
absolutely certain about this; there could be no mistake about the
fact that you heard two shots; isn’t that true?”

“Yes, it’s true,” said the chief, “we heard two shots, there
couldn’t be any mistake about it.”

“Sometimes,” said the colonel, “it happens that shots are fired so
close together that they make one report. I mean several shots may
be fired so rapidly that at a little distance one hears but one
report, or so confuses all of the reports that they appear to make
but one; isn’t that true?”

“Yes, it’s true,” replied the chief of police. “It happened when
Jones was killed over at the power plant, and it happened in our
fight with the Lett burglars; I could not say how many times the man
had shot at me. I thought he shot at me three times, but he must
have shot at me five or six times, for every chamber in his pistol
was empty.”

“Ah!” said the colonel. “Now, Bobby, that’s just exactly what I
wanted to find out. Sometimes shots are fired so close together that
the most experienced person—a competent person like yourself—could
not say whether there was one report or several reports.”

The chief of police took hold of the lapels of his coat in either
hand and looked at the attorney.

“You have got it right, Colonel. But you are not trying to make out
that only one shot was fired on the night Collander was killed, are
you?”

The lawyer’s face took on an expression of immense surprise.

“Oh, Bobby,” he said, “of course not. What I particularly wish to
establish, make certain, is that there were two shots close
together; but certainly two shots. Now, isn’t that absolutely the
fact, Bobby? There may have been more shots fired, simultaneously
with these—there may have been three shots or four shots—but beyond
question, beyond doubt, there were at least two. We heard them; you
heard two shots; isn’t that right, Bobby?”

“That’s right,” replied the chief of police, “there were two, sure.”

“Bobby,” continued the lawyer, “you are chief of police; you and I
were the first persons on the ground. You know more about this than
anybody else, and your statement about it is worth more than the
statements of all other persons put together; now, listen to me
carefully and correct me if I make any mistake. Isn’t this what
happened? You and I, and some of the boys, were sitting in the
engine house; we were talking; I was telling you about the Baker
case—strangest case in the world—when we heard these shots; one
right after the other. I do not know how many, but two certainly.
You and I ran up to the Collander residence which stands just across
the street from the engine house. As we went in, the prisoner here,
Ellen, ran out, and as she ran out she shouted ‘Save me, Colonel.’
You ran after her to catch her and I went on into the house. By that
time Scalley, on the route out here, had come up; you turned the
woman over to him and came back. I was standing in the door that led
into Collander’s study.”

The Colonel stopped. He looked intently at the chief of police.

“Now, Bobby,” he said, “you won’t mind if I say that I have always
taken a great deal of interest in you. When you were first appointed
I tried to give you the benefit of my experience. I pointed out what
ought to be done when a crime was discovered. You are a capable man,
Bobby; you saw what I meant and you have profited by it. You know
what to do when you get on the scene of a crime. You know how
important it is that every precaution shall be taken to preserve the
scene of a criminal act, in every detail, precisely as it happened
when the crime was discovered; isn’t that so, Bobby?”

“Yes, it’s so. I don’t deny that you put me on to a lot of things
and, also, I have learned some for myself. Anyhow, that’s right. The
first thing to do is to see that everything stays just the way it
is.”

“Precisely!” replied the attorney. “Now, Bobby, isn’t it true that
Collander was lying on the floor dead, that his pistol was lying on
the floor beside him—two chambers in it empty—and all doors and
windows were closed? There were bookcases around the room with glass
doors; these were all closed. Now, the first thing you did, Bobby,
was to take every precaution to see that all articles in the room
should remain precisely as they were found; you put seals on all
doors and windows, on all drawers of the tables, and on the doors of
the bookcases, so that they would remain closed precisely as they
were found. You also carefully chalked on the floor the position of
the articles that had to be removed—such, for example, as the weapon
and the decedent’s body; isn’t that precisely true?”

“Yes, it’s true, Colonel, that’s what I did.”

“Now,” said the lawyer, “from the appearance of the table in that
room was it not evident that Collander was at work on a brief—there
was a pad on the table before him, and the papers in the case of the
Bridge Company against the Western Railroad? We know that he was at
work on this brief because the case was coming on for a hearing, and
because his notes on the pad were in ink and the ink was not dry;
isn’t that true?”

“Yes,” replied the chief of police, “that’s true.”

“Every paragraph written on the pad,” the attorney continued, “was
part of an opinion from a U. S. Report. It was half of a long
syllabus of the opinion; he had it about half written out. As I say,
the ink was not yet dry on it; it still blurred a little when one
rubbed one’s finger on it. Now, we see what the man was doing. He
was sitting at the table copying this syllabus when he was
interrupted; isn’t that true, Bobby?”

“It must have been that way,” said the chief of police. “Collander
must have been sitting there when the thing began.”

The Colonel continued.

“Collander was killed by a bullet that entered the chest and ranged
upward. It was found against the shoulder blade, so flattened that
no one could say precisely the caliber of the bullet; isn’t that
true?”

The prosecuting attorney interrupted.

“There’s nothing in that, Colonel,” he said. “The surgeons say that
the bulk of the bullet was about the size of a thirty-two caliber;
there was the pistol on the floor from which it had been fired.”

The big attorney made a gesture with his hand. “Let us adhere
precisely to the truth,” he said, “and the truth is that the bullet
was so battered that no one can say accurately what caliber it was.
Doctor Hull says that he thinks it was a thirty-two, but he also
says that he does not know.”

The prosecuting attorney persisted.

“But there on the floor was the pistol from which two bullets had
been fired.”

“Ah!” said the attorney. “Now, we have got to the very point by
which the innocence of this prisoner is established. If two bullets
were fired in that room, with the doors and windows closed, and one
of them killed Collander, where did the other one go that did not
kill him?”

He turned to the chief of police. He advanced toward him. His voice
became low—became confidential—as of one who discusses a secret,
covert, hidden matter with another.

“Now, Bobby,” he said, “I directed you to go over that room from top
to bottom carefully, every inch of it, precisely as it stood after
you had sealed the doors and windows. For what purpose? To
determine, Bobby, what became of that other bullet. A bullet cannot
vanish. It cannot disappear. It has to hit something. Did you find
what it hit?”

The chief of police moved in his chair. His figure lost some aspect
of its assurance. He became perplexed. His voice took on a sort of
apology. He looked at the judge, at the prosecuting attorney, at the
jury.

“I have to tell the truth about it,” he said finally. “I couldn’t
find where that other bullet hit. I never could find it.”

“You went over everything in the room, didn’t you?” continued the
Colonel. “You went over it with Doctor Hull and with Scalley. You
went over every inch of it.”

“Yes,” replied the chief of police, “we went over every inch of it.”

“And you didn’t find the mark of the bullet?”

The chief of police addressed the judge.

“No, your Honor, we couldn’t find it. It’s a mystery what became of
that other bullet. The person who shot at Collander must have missed
him the first time because only one bullet hit him and there were
two shots fired. I heard ’em, and there were two empty cartridges in
the pistol. Whoever killed him must have shot at him and missed him.
But if they did, that bullet had to hit something in the room; and
it never hit anything in the room!”

“Ah!” The attorney’s voice returned to its normal volume. “You
couldn’t be mistaken about that, Bobby?”

“No,” the chief of police answered, “there can’t be any mistake
about it. I went over it too carefully, too many times; there’s no
bullet mark in that room.”

He said it with an energy of final decision that dismissed the
question conclusively.

The court room was now awake. The packed audience leaned forward. It
had now a deep, new interest; the interest of a doubt; the interest
of a mystery.

Colonel Armant closed his case at this point.

He had, now, the two elements for which every attorney labors in a
desperate criminal defense; a doubt and an involving mystery. The
doubt he would build up in his argument, and for the mystery he had
the solution ready.

But he was too wise, too greatly a master of effect, to disclose
that solution before the proper dramatic moment. He had no intention
to permit the attorney for the State to discount his explanation in
the opening speech to the jury.

It was after that, when in his argument he had prepared the way,
when his defense had been carefully built up, and the state of
feeling in the court room—tense and expectant as before a closed
door, that he uncovered the solution, like one who, with a
magnificent gesture, flings that closed door open.

McNagel could find no bullet mark in the room, because there had
been no shot in the room.

The assassin, on that night, had called Collander to the door; he
had gone with his own pistol in his hand. And there with the door
open, looking out on to the porch, the shooting had occurred.

It had been an instantaneous duel.

Collander had fired twice and the assassin simultaneously with the
last report of the pistol. It was this third shot that the prisoner
had distinguished.

How clear it was!

Collander was fearful of this thing. He was looking for it to
happen; and so he went to the door with the weapon in his hand, and
he fired on the instant the menace appeared.

The lawyer reënacted the dramatic scene; the man feeling the impact
of the bullet, sprang back, closing the door, then he staggered, the
pistol fell out of his hand, he tried to reach his chair, but the
wound was mortal, and he lurched, falling behind it, as they had
found him.

The confirmatory facts were now conspicuous; no mark of a bullet in
the room, and the range of the bullet upward from the assassin
standing on the ground below the decedent!

It was an impressive piece of tragic acting. And under its vivid
dominance the jury believed themselves to look on at the very act of
murder. They saw the thing as it had happened, and the stamp of the
attorney’s vigor impressed it as with a die.

No array of subsequent argument could dislodge it.

Not guilty, was the verdict within an hour.

                 *       *       *       *       *

Colonel Armant and the now vindicated prisoner went out of the court
room, down the steps and into his office in the basement of the
court house.

The woman sank relaxed into a chair.

“Colonel,” she said, “you saved me to-day!”

The lawyer looked at her in surprise.

“Why no,” he replied, “I didn’t save you to-day!”

His voice descended into its long dwindling whine.

“I saved you, Ellen, when you asked me to save you. While McNagel
ran to fetch you I put back into the bookcase the law book from
which Collander was copying out the citation for his brief—the law
book that he held up before him to ward off your first shot—the
bullet-hole is in the cover of it.

“Ellen,” he said, “if you had fired down over that book the second
time instead of up under it, as you did, I don’t know how in hell I
could have managed to clear you!”




                             CHAPTER X

                          The Inspiration


“Will there be a bobby to hear her scream, north of the Zambezi?”

There were two persons in the room.

It was a small room, looking out over St. James’s Park, and attached
to the library of the great London house. It was meant for the
comfort of one who wished to withdraw from the library in order to
examine some book at his leisure, or to make some annotation. There
were a table, two comfortable chairs, and a painting, rather large
for the room, representing an affair of honor on a snow-covered
highway in the rear of a French column, presumably Napoleon’s army
in Russia.

The conversation between the two persons in the room, Lord Donald
Muir and Walker, of the American Secret Service, had passed its
preliminary stage.

The youth seated in one of the great chairs was a typical product of
the aristocracy of England. He was little more than a boy, but he
had already something of the reserve, the almost pretentious
restraint, of his race. But he was not entirely within this
discipline; an intensity of feeling broke out. It appeared now and
then in a word, in an inflection of his voice, in a gesture.

He sat very straight in the chair, in his well-cut evening
clothes—his gloves crushed together and gripped in a firm hand that
could not remain idle under his intensity of feeling. He was a very
good-looking boy, with a single startling feature, his eyebrows were
straight and dark, while his hair, weathered by the outdoors, was
straw-colored. It gave his blue eyes at all times a somewhat tense
expression.

Walker had come to London for a conference with the American
Ambassador on the passport forgeries, and he had remained a guest at
the Embassy ball. And when the Ambassador had asked him to hear the
boy and help him if he could, he had gone with Lord Donald Muir into
the little room beyond the great library.

The Ambassador had explained the matter. He had given him each
detail; the girl’s mother was American; she had married the Earl of
Rexford; she was dead; Rexford was dead, and here was this dilemma.
Walker knew each of the persons in this drama, especially Sir Henry
Dercum, who had been in the English foreign service, and at one time
attached to the Embassy in Washington.

Walker was standing, now, before a window, looking out into the
night that enveloped London. The boy continued to speak.

“Will he not have the right to take her anywhere he likes?”

The Secret Service agent made a slight gesture, as of one rejecting
a suggestion. The gesture was unconscious. The man was thinking of
what Lord Donald Muir was saying to him.

“I suppose he has the right to take her anywhere he likes, provided
he remains within the jurisdiction of the English law.”

“Surely,” replied the boy. “Dercum is a clever beast; he will keep
within the jurisdiction of the English law.”

Walker turned slightly, his face was outlined against the black
square of the night framed in the window.

“Then why do you have this fear about it?” he said.

There came a sudden energy into Lord Muir’s voice.

“That is all very well as a theory,” he said, “but it is quite
different in fact.... The English law runs in South Africa; that is
the theory. It is a very fine theory, as it used to be lectured into
us at the Hill—a great empire providing precisely the same measure
of protection for its subject at the most distant point of its
dominion that it provided for him in the very capital itself. That
is as nearly as I can remember it. It is a fine theory.”

“It is a magnificent theory,” replied the Secret Service agent, “and
England has always endeavored to maintain it.”

Lord Muir twisted his gloves; his brown hands gripped them.

“But England can’t maintain it; that is the very thing I mean. What
protection can the law of England give her in northwestern Rhodesia?
The law of England will run there in theory, but it’s Dercum’s
damned will that will run there in fact.”

He gripped the gloves suddenly with both hands, as though he were
about to destroy them.

“Will there be a bobby to hear her scream?”

He leaned forward in his intensity.

“And what will she be when she comes out? And she won’t come out
until Dercum’s ready. I will tell you what she will be, she will be
what Dercum intends her to be.”

He looked at the Secret Service agent, his face covered with sweat.
Then he continued:

“Do you think this fine English law will do her any good then?”

Walker came a step or two away from the window. He looked down at
the boy. His face was composed, with that vague expression it always
took on when his interest was very much awakened.

“Sir Henry Dercum,” he said, “will have some instincts of a
gentleman.”

“If he has any instincts of a gentleman,” replied the boy, with a
sudden energy, “he has kept them so far concealed. London does not
know about this man. I have had him looked up. He was unspeakable in
Hongkong. No members of the English colony came down to the boat to
see him off, although he did represent the empire. But he is a
clever beast; one can’t get at him.

“I wanted my solicitor to resist his confirmation as guardian, but
he said I was not a party in interest.”

The boy’s voice was charged with an intense vigor.

“I wonder why the law is always so helpless about anything that is
important. I had rather see her go to the devil than to Dercum. The
devil has a reputation for what he is, and Dercum has a carefully
built up reputation in London for what he is not—an explorer, with
that sporting instinct that is dear to the English, and a gentleman,
when the fact is, he is a crook, a thief when it comes to the
accumulation of scientific data, and a bounder! But he is not a
fool, and that’s what makes him so damnably dangerous; he is
infinitely clever.”

Walker remained where he had been standing, looking down at the man
in the chair, his face in its vague repose. The dilemma of Lord
Donald Muir profoundly impressed him.

“I am very much puzzled about this matter,” he said. “I cannot say
that I trust Dercum, but I can say that I have no reason not to
trust him. In fact, he has acted, the American Ambassador tells me,
with extreme delicacy. The property which the girl takes from her
mother lies in America. He has made no effort to exercise any
control over it; he has, in fact, advised the Ambassador that he
would be pleased to have the trustees of her mother’s estate
continue to administer this property until the girl comes of age to
receive it. That did not sound like a man with a design.

“It was quite possible for him to obtain the sale of this property
in America and the transfer of the funds into his custody under the
English law, but he takes the other course. This does not seem
precisely consistent with your estimate of the man.”

There was a note as of a bitter laugh under Lord Muir’s answer.

“It’s precisely consistent with my estimate of him. What the brute’s
after is the girl; when he gets her, he will get everything with
her. Why hurry? When Dercum has degraded her enough, he will get all
the rest of it; he knows what he is doing.”

The boy got up suddenly.

“And I can’t stop him,” he said, “unless I go and kill him; and the
beast is too clever to be killed except in the nastiest way. ‘The
duel has gone out with the lace coat,’ he laughs at me with his
little reptilian eyes under the heavy eyelids. ‘Have a bit of
patience, my boy; I have no objection to you, if you please my ward.
But you must wait a little; she is quite young. It is admirable to
be youthful and impetuous, but it makes life difficult for a
guardian.’ That’s what he says. And I know what he thinks, and I
know what he is going to do.”

The Secret Service agent interrupted:

“What, precisely?”

“It will be just what I told you a moment ago,” replied Lord Muir.
“He is laying plans now; she’s quite keen to get into any queer
corner of the earth. It is easy enough to get a girl worked up,
especially when she has a big legend of her father before her. He
will do precisely what I have said, take her into South Africa.”

He got up with sudden energy.

“The law can’t stop him, but there must be something, and that’s why
I come to you, sir,” he added.

“To me,” said Walker, “—because you believe in providence?”

“Yes, sir,” the boy continued, “that is precisely the reason I came
to you. It is true that the American Ambassador has a point of
attack with Dercum because of these American properties, but that is
not the thing I depended upon. My uncle, when he was chief of the
criminal investigation department of Scotland Yard, used to say when
we had a perplexed thing to take up with America: ‘We can unravel
it, if Captain Walker comes up with one of his inspirations from
heaven.’ Well, sir, I have come to you for one of these
inspirations.”

Walker laughed softly. The reputation was perhaps his greatest
asset—a sort of intuition arising at certain complicated stages of
an affair, the sudden swift realization of some essential hitherto
unobserved.

Walker continued to smile.

The young man was looking at him with a tense, serious expression.

“You will have one of these inspirations, Captain Walker?”

The Secret Service agent began to walk about the room.

He was disturbed that Lord Donald Muir should come to him with this
affair. It was not a thing in which he ought to take any part.
Outside of some courteous discussion at the request of the American
Ambassador, he did not see how it was possible for him to have
anything to do with the matter. And further, it disturbed him that
this youth should come depending upon what was to him the absurd
phase of a detective reputation.

Scotland Yard called his sudden swift insight into some complicated
matter, “the inspirations from heaven of the Chief of the American
Secret Service,” and not precisely with a complimentary accent. The
thing annoyed him. But he smiled at the youth in the chair—that
vague, placid smile for which the man was famous.

“I do not see what I can do, my dear Lord Muir,” he said; “but I
shall be receptive to any inspiration that may arrive. Let us go
down.”

They went out of the little room into the great library.

It was a long, immense room, and the doors were closed. As they
passed through, the music from below ascended, and the vast
confusion of human voices, like the hum of some distant insect hive.
Walker opened the door, and they were at once above an immense sea
of human figures, gay, brilliant.

The crowded Embassy ball moved below them. The jewels, the gowns of
women, the color of uniforms gave the thing the aspect of an almost
barbaric saturnalia. The dense crowd overflowed onto the bronze
stairway.

Lord Muir entered and was lost in the immense throng, seeking the
one about whom he was so greatly concerned. The Chief of the
American Secret Service went slowly down the stairway, moving his
hand along the mahogany rail under which, in a magnificent frieze, a
wood-nymph entangled in a flowering vine fled from the pursuit of
satyrs. He was more disturbed than he had been willing to admit.

This girl was the daughter of that charming American woman who had
married the Earl of Rexford.

Captain Walker had not cared greatly for the Earl of Rexford; he was
too typically an Englishman, following conventions that seemed a
trifle out of modern times; but he was compelled, in a measure, to
admire him. While other men wasted their fortunes in the frivolities
of London, this man had spent what he could get in exploration, in
fitting out expeditions to discover unknown places of the earth. And
he went with them, enduring the hardship and peril.

He had died in his greatest venture. The whole expedition had
perished on one of the wind-swept plateaus of the Antarctic. It was
Dercum who had gone in to find him, and he had found him frozen to
death—the very dogs frozen, in one of those fearful depressions of
temperature that sometimes descend in an immense blizzard on this
wind-swept plateau.

From Dercum’s report he had very nearly reached Rexford alive. The
expedition had evidently held out for days against the blizzard. The
Earl of Rexford had been the last man to go. In the snow hut, on the
canvas table, was his diary, written up. Beside it, on the blank
sheet, were a dozen paragraphs in which he had directed the
appointment of Dercum as guardian for his minor daughter, with all
custody and direction of his estate.

The Secret Service agent passed these things through his mind as he
descended—the brilliant laughter, the murmur of voices below, making
a swirl of noises. He remembered some of the details arising in the
formal matter of Dercum’s appointment after his return. A solicitor
or some official authority had ventured a doubt about the
handwriting on the page beside the last entry in the diary. But it
was shown to him that the writing of innumerable pages of the diary
varied, due to the cold or to the physical condition of the writer
at the time.

The persons in Dercum’s expedition, persons whose integrity could
not be doubted, had been but a few minutes behind him in entering
this snow hut in which the Earl of Rexford had been found, and they
had at once, at Dercum’s direction, written their signatures at the
bottom of the page.

The diary had been immediately authenticated. It could not have been
afterward changed. And it was shown that these signatures, written
in that immense cold by benumbed fingers, varied from the normal
signatures of the individuals returning to their common environment
of life. In fact, no one could have said who had written these
signatures if the men who had written them that day, at Dercum’s
direction, in the snow hut on the canvas table, had not been present
in England to establish the fact. The diary, the ink, the pen were
there on the canvas table, and these men had established by their
signatures the authenticity of this writing beyond question.

At this moment a tall man wearing a distinguished order passed the
Chief of the American Secret Service.

“Sir,” he said, “are you perhaps receiving an inspiration from
heaven on our Hyde Park murders?”

Walker smiled.

“It would be my only hope,” he said, “against the superior
intelligence of Scotland Yard.”

And he went on. He was annoyed by the incident. Would he never
escape from this ridiculous pretension!

As he entered the crowd overflowing on the bottom of the stairway,
he caught a glimpse of Sir Henry Dercum and the girl in an eddy
beyond where the great newel post turned. Dercum’s big shoulders
would be anywhere conspicuous. He was a massive Englishman, with a
wide, Oriental face, purpled by good feeding, and little reptilian
eyes under heavy lids that very nearly obscured them. The man had a
habit of lifting his head when he was very much concerned, as though
to get a better view of his subject without the effort or the danger
of raising his eyelids.

The girl before him was in the splendid lure of youth; her dark hair
was lifted, by some subtlety of the coiffeur’s art, into a
beautiful, soft background for her face; her dark eyes and her
delicate skin were exquisitely brought out by it. She was in the
first bud of life, and she was very lovely. But there was more than
mere physical beauty; there was the charm of inexperience, the charm
of adventurous youth that does not question, and, like charity,
believeth all things—that inexperience which is gayly ready for any
adventure into what it beautifully imagines to be a fairy world.

The Secret Service agent saw the expression bedded into Dercum’s
heavy face, and he knew what it meant. He heard also the sentence he
was speaking.

“You will need a bit of change from all this artificiality.”

“Do I look stale so soon, Sir Henry?”

The girl laughed.

His eyes traveled over her, his head thrown back in a slow,
heavy-lidded expression as though it were a physical caress.

“Ah, no,” he said; “but you will have inherited some of your
father’s interest in the waste places of the earth. How would you
like to go with me and find a lost river?”

“I should love it,” she said. “Where is your lost river, Sir Henry?”

He looked about him.

“Let us find a seat somewhere,” he said, “and I will show you a
map.”

They got out of the crowd, traversed the long hall that runs
parallel to St. James’s Park, and entered the conservatory.

Walker followed. Dercum’s words had almost the sting of a blow. It
was the verification of Lord Donald Muir’s anxiety. If love were
blind, Walker reflected, it had surely the intuition of the saints.
Dercum’s plan, the plan which Walker had considered academic and
unlikely, was practical and on the way.

The Chief of the American Secret Service went on into the
conservatory, through fringes of the gay crowd floating everywhere
like gorgeous butterflies disentangled from the mass. He stopped
beside an immense vase filled with Japanese chrysanthemums of a
peculiar color, huge like a shock of hair on an immense stem. They
entirely obscured him, and he did not move.

It was not in any definite plan that he had entered the conservatory
and stopped behind this mass of flowers. He had been surprised,
shocked by the swift verification of this boy’s fear, and he wished
to reflect on it. It was not that he had followed to hear what
Dercum said; the details of what he said would be now unimportant.
It was the man’s intention alone that mattered, and this intention
required no further explanatory word.

He felt a sudden and desperate anxiety. This girl, lovely and
inexperienced, was entirely at Dercum’s will; as her guardian he
would have exclusive control of her, and, with the man’s cleverness,
what he wished he would accomplish. The English law, having put the
girl into his charge, would not concern itself about intentions that
could not be established. It would concern itself only with the
overt act, and when Dercum resorted to that he would be beyond a
running of the King’s writ.

Walker felt himself pressed for reflection, and he stopped here
unmoving, without a plan. But as chance would have it, he stopped
precisely at the place he would have selected if he had followed in
determination to hear every word that Dercum was about to say. Sir
Henry and the girl were just beyond him—beyond the screen of
flowers, on a bench by the window. Their words, although
under-uttered, came clearly to him; and in his vague reflection, the
skill with which Dercum moved in his plan was conspicuously evident.

The man was getting the lure of a land of mystery into his story; he
was deftly stimulating the girl’s fancy; he was calling her interest
in her father’s adventures to his aid; he was making a wonder
expedition out of this thing he had in mind. No element of thrill,
or color, in this adventure was lacking.

Walker could almost see Dercum’s finger on the map. But the map
would be only a property of the thing he was staging. He did not
explain precisely where this river lay, or the route to it. But on
some golden afternoon they would unship at a seaport, assemble a
fantastic company and go into some lost country that would be like
the Wood beyond the World, or the waste regions of some fairy
kingdom. And they would go now, this very summer, when the London
season had slacked a little.

Dercum was beginning to specify dates. Walker could not see him, but
he knew that the bit of pencil moved on the map; he would arrange
everything. From the few words of the girl, reaching him across the
Japanese chrysanthemums, she was entranced. A butterfly entangled in
illusions—she was ready to go, and she would go.

And with his clear vision, the vision not accustomed to be obscured
by detail, the Chief of the American Secret Service saw that the
thing could not be prevented. One could interfere with the custody
of a guardian only with an established intent in an English court.
This intent must be based on evidence, and there would be no
evidence; there would not be even the knowledge that the thing was
contemplated. With infinite cleverness Dercum had drawn the girl
into a conspiracy of silence. They would arrange it; they would keep
their own counsels, and they would go. It would have all the secret,
alluring charm of a fairy adventure.

Walker heard the pledge of silence, and knew that they were coming
out. He saw, also, looking down the long hall toward the
drawing-room, Lord Donald Muir advancing in his search. He would be
here in a moment; the three of them would meet, in a moment, just
beyond where he stood behind the chrysanthemums. Already Dercum and
the girl were very nearly up to him.

What would he do?

There was something surely to be done. The world behind its harsh,
indifferent machinery must be controlled by some immense considerate
impulse. All the operations of life could not be abandoned to a mere
physical fatalism, to laws that were unthinking, or to a tendency
that could not change. There must be something in the universe to
interfere against the iniquity of human intentions and this
indifference of nature! And suddenly, with a flash of vision, Walker
saw what had happened in Rexford’s snow hut, on the plateau of the
Antarctic, during the twenty minutes that Dercum had been there
before his expedition had come up—he saw it as clearly as though he
had been looking on.

He called to Lord Donald Muir, and he advanced to meet Dercum and
the girl.

“Sir Henry,” he said, “will you release these young people to the
dance and walk a moment with me?”

Dercum lifted his big Oriental face, looking out under his heavy
eyelids. He moved the tips of the girl’s fingers to his lips, and he
nodded to Muir.

“You will be a very brilliant couple,” he said. “I shall be charmed
to observe you.”

And then he turned to the Chief of the American Secret Service.

“Ah, Walker,” he said, “I have not seen you since the old days in
Washington.”

The Chief of the American Secret Service put his hand through
Dercum’s arm and drew him along beside him, down the hall, with an
ease of manner as though he were the warm companion of a lifetime.

“My friend,” he said, “I am going to ask you to release this
guardianship and go on your expedition alone.”

Dercum stopped suddenly, his body rigid.

“You have overheard,” he said.

Walker smiled. He made a slight gesture.

“It is one of the perquisites of the Secret Service,” he said. “You
will grant my request, Sir Henry.”

“Your request?” Dercum’s voice was almost a stutter. “I grant it?”

The Chief of the American Secret Service took a firmer hold of his
arm.

“Walk with me,” he said; “we may be noticed.... Ah, yes, my friend,
you will grant it.”

“Why should I grant it, pray?” said the amazed Dercum.

“You will grant it,” replied Walker, “because you will not wish to
answer in the English courts—in the English criminal courts—a
question that has just occurred to me.”

The Chief of the American Secret Service laughed; two persons
connected with a Continental Embassy were regarding him. Then he
went on:

“How did it happen, Sir Henry, that when you came on Lord Rexford’s
expedition on the Antarctic plateau, that morning, when you entered
his snow hut some twenty minutes ahead of the other members of your
expedition, and in that low temperature, in that deadly Antarctic
temperature, you found everything frozen, the food, the very mercury
in the thermometer, the bodies of the dead—how did it happen, Sir
Henry”—and his hand moved on Dercum’s arm like a caress—“how did it
happen that the ink on the canvas table was not also frozen?”




                             CHAPTER XI

                      The Girl in the Picture


I advanced to meet the man with a sense of victory. The United
States Secret Service had searched the world for him. He had been
long concealed. But my sense of victory vanished when I saw him.

He sat in a great chair on the long terrace that overlooked the
sweep of lawn and the dark, rapid river. He had been, all the time,
under our very noses. We had thought of every other place except an
English country house within a jump of London. And he had been
sitting here in every comfort that money could assemble.

He did not rise when I was brought out to him.

He leaned back in the chair, lifted his heavy face, and laughed!

“And so,” he said, “you finally wormed it out of her.”

I could not keep my voice level—so effectively was the man escaping
us after all this search.

And I did not know what the huge creature meant. On the night
before, some one had called up Scotland Yard and said our man was
here; the English Secret Service was giving us all the aid it could.
The call from some shop in Regent Street could not be traced—so it
had been a woman! I replied as though I were in his secret.

“She knew you were safe.”

He laughed again. “Sure, she knew it!”

He pointed to a chair a few feet beyond him across a table.

“Sit down,” he said. “I want to talk about her—that’s the reason I
wanted you to come.” He laughed again. “You thought you’d sleuthed
it out, eh? Not by a jugful. I sent her word to put you wise. I
wanted to clear some things up before I cashed in. But it was a
clean lie. What I wanted was somebody to listen while I talked about
her. Sit down.”

It was a strange introductory. But it was a mystery that had puzzled
everybody, and I was willing to hear all that he had to say about
it. I took the chair beyond him.

He shot his head forward suddenly, in a tense gesture.

“She’s a heavenly angel!” he said. “I don’t know what God Almighty
meant by setting her in the game with the bunch of crooks that He’s
got running the world—unless He counted on me.” The laugh became a
sort of chuckle in his big throat—“Ain’t she a heavenly angel?”

He whipped a worn photograph out of his pocket and reached it across
the table to me.

It was the photograph of a girl with a narrow slit cut out across
the face. It had been taken from a painting; one could tell from the
flat surface. A strange background of beauty and an indescribable
charm in the pose of the girl remained even in the mutilated
picture.

“I cut the face,” he added, “so she wouldn’t come into the case if
you caught me; your little Westridge must have been slaughtered at
the loss of her.”

Again he touched me at an unexpected point.

Shortly after the thing had happened, Lord Westridge returned to
England. He had come to visit some rich Americans, and there was a
rumor that some adventure had befallen him. Nothing definite ever
came to me, and I liked the man too little to inquire; all the blood
from the original Glasgow solicitor would “bite a shilling.” But
again I replied as though I were in his secret.

“What happened to Westridge?” I said.

The man twisted around in his chair.

“Friend,” he said, “you’ve got a head full of brains or you wouldn’t
be Chief of the United States Secret Service; now answer me a
question—What’s the biggest notion in the Christian Church?”

“I don’t know,” I answered him truthfully.

“Well, I know,” he went on. “It’s the notion that you’ll get what’s
a-comin’ to you!”

He looked at me with a big, cynical leer.

“That’s what happened to your little Westridge—and the next time you
see him he’s a-goin’ to get another jolt. He will be damned sorry
that you found me. He couldn’t squeal, any place along the line, but
I’ll bet a finger he didn’t let Scotland Yard forget about me.”

And again I saw an incident of this long search, for the man before
me, from another angle. The Blackacre Bank had kept the search hot
for him, pretending the public welfare. I saw it now, that was
Westridge’s money box—that would be little Westridge in the
background.

He eyed me curiously in a moment’s pause.

“He kept slippin’ you the word, eh? Well, she blocked him at that,
even if she didn’t know it.”

There came a sudden energy into his voice.

“An’ if the plague hadn’t got me I’d ’a’ saved her that trouble; I’d
’a’ played ring-a-round-a-rosy with you.”

He lifted himself in the chair with the strength of his hands on the
broad arm-rests. And I realized more fully what a physical wreck he
was—the lower part of his body was motionless.

“I want to tell you about this thing,” he said. “And then you can go
ahead with your warrant.”

“I fear,” I replied, “that a somewhat higher authority has got in
before the King’s writ.”

He chuckled as though the deadly fact were a sort of pleasantry.

“Sure,” he said, “the big Judge has beat you to it.”

He looked out, a moment, at the woolly Highland cattle in the
distant meadow, at the age-old beech-trees and the dark, swift,
silent water, and then the upper part of his big body settled in the
chair.

“I thought it was a slick trick, but maybe it was God Almighty.
Anyway when the thing was pulled off I slid up to Bar Harbor and set
down in a hotel. I figured it out like this—you look for a crook in
the places that crooks go, and you look for a gentleman in the
places where gentlemen go. I’ll switch it.

“I got me some quiet clothes. I limped a little to show that I
wasn’t golf-fit and I didn’t talk. I just set about with the New
York _Times_ and the _Financial Register_ and let the days pass.
When there was doings in the hotel I was there in my all-right
evening clothes, in a chair against the wall, and I limped along the
sea path in the afternoon for a little exercise.

“I looked some bored to keep the proper form. But I wasn’t bored. I
was seeing something new and I was getting more light on it all the
time.

“I was seeing that this bunch was living up to a standard that
nearly all the people I’d ever seen were only pretending. That was
the difference, I soon figured it out.”

He flung up his hand in a curious, expressive gesture.

“I’m a crook, keep that in your head, and the thing was like a
theater to me. I began to watch the actors; then I saw _her_ and
Westridge.”

He moved in his chair.

“She was there with an old faded grandmother that read novels and
smoked cigarettes—and was a lady. And right there is where this real
bunch has got the goods! They don’t let down because they do some
things that would make you cross your fingers on the other set.”

He leaned back in the chair.

“Well! I got to watching her and your Englishman. I watched them
dancing in the hotel, and riding, and playing tennis at the
Casino—I’d never seen any people like them.

“And pretty soon I got on to something; this Westridge gentleman was
trying to buy the girl, but he didn’t want to pay for her. He was
putting out the bait, but he had a string to it.

“I got on to his dope.

“If he could dazzle her into marrying him she’d get her board and
clothes. The real thing that was next to his hide was his money.
‘All for _me_,’ that was the notion.”

He went on with no break in his words.

“I got to thinking about it. This little Westridge was forty; he’d
never change; and the girl was at the age when the things he was
dangling were all mixed up with moonshine. He might win, and if he
did she was headed for hell.

“I saw it all clean out to the end.”

He moved in the chair.

“I used to set about, and look at her, and it made me cold all over.
The devil was on the job right here just as he was in the
Tenderloin. He was working on a higher-class line, but it was only a
different sort of road to his same old hell.

“It would be a heavenly angel flung to a wolf no matter how you
dressed the situation up; an’ I said to myself, ‘You can’t beat him.
The devil’s got a set of traps for any kind of a layout!’”

He lifted himself on his great hands and turned the whole of his
body toward me.

“Now,” he said, “what’s the difference how you ruin a woman? When
you got the job finished, ain’t it finished? If you string it out
over a dozen years and kill everything nice and generous and lovely
in her with your little, contemptible ‘all for _me_’ meanness,
inside of a preacher’s permit, ain’t you ruined her, just the same
as if you’d white-slaved her? And ain’t it the same motive, ‘all for
_me_,’ darn the difference?

“I tell you,” he shook the arms of the chair in his great hands,
“the thing begun to get my goat. Her father, a lawyer in the South,
was dead. She had only the old Boston grandmother (I heard the talk
among the women) and the coin was getting scarce. Your little
Englishman played in form, every point correct, and he was goin’ to
get her.

“I seen it!

“She was standing before the hotel desk with the bill that the clerk
puts in your box at the end of the week, when his big motor snorted
in against the wooden steps. Your little Westridge understood it for
the grin started. It was the same old grin that goes with the
job—I’ve seen it on all of ’em.

“An’ that settled it!”

His voice became cold, level, even like a metallic click.

“‘Now, my little gentleman,’ I said to myself, ‘we’ll just see if
you do! Right here is where “Alibi Al” sets in with a stack of
blues.’

“I got up, folded my newspaper, and took a turn up and down the
veranda, as though I was trying out my game leg, an’ then I limped
down to the fashionable church just across from the library.

“I stepped up inside the door.”

He paused, and his voice changed to its former note.

“You see I had to have a little help on this job. It had a big loose
end.

“I went in and sat down in a pew. It was dim and quiet and I got
right down to business. I didn’t run in any of the prayer-book
curtain-raisers. I put the thing right up to the boss.

“‘Now, look here, Governor,’ I said, ‘has a helpless little girl got
a pull with you, or is it bunk? Because I’m a-goin’ to call you, and
if the line your barkers are putting out is on the level, you’ve got
to come across with the goods. If there’s nothing to it, the
Government ought to shut ’em up on a fraud order—I’m a-goin’ to
carry one end of this thing; get busy at the other end!’

“Then I went out.

“That night I went over to see little Westridge.

“They’d been to dinner at Jordan’s Pond and had come in early.
Westridge wasn’t in the hotel; he was stopping with the
Lesterfields; a big, gray stone house facing the sea. The butler
showed me in. There wasn’t anybody about but Westridge. The
Lesterfields were down at Newport.

“He was surprised to see me—didn’t understand it; he’d never met me
in the social line. But it was America where anything might happen,
even a man come to see you that you hadn’t been introduced to.”

The speaker paused to move one of his knees; he lifted it with his
hands.

“I didn’t waste any time cutting brush before Mr. Westridge. I went
right in to what I had to say. My line was: friend of the girl’s
father, blunt old Western business man, no manners, and don’t give a
cuss for you. Easy stuff, you see, and the kind of thing your
Englishman expects in the ‘States.’

“He was mighty formal, as you’d say, but he didn’t throw any
stuttering into Alibi Al. I set down, just as if the place belonged
to me, and I waved a hand at him. I said to myself, ‘You’re a little
piker; line up and take what’s coming to you.’

“But what I said out loud was like this,

“‘Carrots has got a little bunch of stuff that’s goin’ to be wiped
out if it ain’t covered.’

“That was her nickname among the youngsters, because her blue-black
hair in the sun had a heavenly copper glint.

“He looked mixed up.

“‘What, precisely, do you mean?’ he says.

“I didn’t pay any attention to him. I went on just as if he hadn’t
said a word.

“‘Women’s got no sense about business—she’s agoin’ to lose it?’

“‘Lose what?’ he says.

“‘Rotten the way they bring girls up,’ I says, the same as if he
hadn’t spoke. ‘Here’s this steel bunch beating the stuff down; her
broker wires for somethin’ to cover it, an’ she sticks the telegram
up against the lookin’-glass so she’ll remember to write to him next
week—can you beat it?’

“I saw everything that was goin’ through him, same as if you’d
rolled it out on the picture reel.

“The ‘old friend, no manners, darn the difference’ stuff had hooked
him. And there were two other hooks: this girl had some property
that he didn’t know of, and the friends of the family, like me, was
a-coming to him about it.

“Because what?

“Because it was settled stuff on our side that she was goin’ to take
his arm up the church aisle. It was the first straight dope he’d
had, an’ it bucked him, same as it bucked me to know that she was
dangling him with no word passed.

“He set up now pleasant as you please.

“‘Ah—er, yes,’ he says; he hadn’t got the name I was playing under.

“I bellowed at him, an’ he mighty near jumped.

“‘Johnson!’ I said. ‘Alonzo Johnson, Kansas City!’

“‘Quite so, Mr. Johnson,’ he says, quick, same as you’d apologize,
‘there’s some business affair to discuss, I fauncy?’

“He fell right in with the line of dope mighty easy and comfortable.
You see it was something like the way they do things up in his
country. The old uncle or the family lawyer calls on you, when ma
thinks that things are pretty well understood with the young people,
and gits down to figgerin’. It was near enough to my line to go
across with him. He knew that the girl hadn’t got any men folk, so
an old friend of the family would fit the form as a sort of
next-of-kin, as the law-books say.”

The big man linked his fingers together on the chair arm.

“As I was sayin’, he walked right in and made himself at home with
the notion. He called her ‘Carrots’ straight back at me; it was
‘Kiss her, pap; she’s our’n now,’ and he begun to grin.

“On the soul of Satan, man, it was all I could do to keep my foot
away from him. I wanted to hoist him out of that chair and skite him
around among the furniture—but I had to keep my poker face on.

“He bounced up and got a box of cigars and a little dish full of
matches and shoved them across the table. I took one, bit the end
off, scratched the match on my foot, lighted it, and went ahead.

“‘It’s the butt end of what she’s got,’ I says, ‘an’ it’s in the
door.’

“He knew all about business, and he picked the things right out.

“‘You mean,’ he says, ‘that her solicitor has invested her fortune
in a stock on margin and the market is declining?’

“‘You got it,’ I says, ‘only she done it herself, on some tip from
her swell friends.’

“‘How extraordinary!’ he piped; his voice got thin when it hit
money. ‘Is it a legitimate stock?’

“‘Sure,’ I answered, ‘one of the six good ones.’ I didn’t know how
many good ones there was.

“‘Why does it decline?’ His voice went up like a singing school.

“‘The steel bunch are clubbing it,’ I says.

“He understood that, and began to finger around his little wax
mustache.

“‘Quite so,’ he cheeped, ‘quite so.’ Then he squared toward me.

“‘Ah—er, Mr. Johnson,’ he says, ‘I fauncy you came with some plan
about it.’

“‘Plan nothin’,’ I says; ‘the stuff’s got to be covered—they’ll git
it beat under her figger in another day’s poundin’.’

“‘Ah—er—quite so,’ he was cool as a julep; ‘you are intending, I
fauncy, to cover the margin?’

“I leaned over the table and blew a mouthful of smoke on him.

“‘Sure!’ I roared in his face, ‘if I can get fifty thousand dollars,
quick.’

“He ducked out of the smoke.

“‘That’s a very large sum of money,’ he says.

“I lolled over the table an’ smoked on him like a Dutch uncle.

“‘Big money!’ I gurgled it, like a man choking on a laugh. ‘Do you
know how much Carrots has got hanging on it?’

“He didn’t answer that; I knew he wouldn’t.

“‘Where, precisely, do you expect to get this money?’ he says.

“I set up more calm like at that.

“‘Well,’ I says, ‘I thought maybe we could raise it together.’

“He wanted that fake fortune saved for him, so it would come along
with the girl, but he wanted somebody else to carry the chance.

“I knew it, and I smoked on him. I hung over the table and puffed it
in his face. He tried to duck out of it, and I followed him around.
It done me good. I couldn’t spit on the little tightwad.

“‘Now, look here, Mr. Westridge,’ I says, ‘don’t you get a wrong
notion in your head; I’m not a-goin’ to let you take any risk on
this. I’m a-goin’ to take the risk; there ain’t none, in fact; the
stuff’s got to bounce back. It’ll go to the sky when the steel bunch
get all they can grab of it. But whatever risk there may be,’ I
sputtered it out on him, ‘is _mine_. I’ll put up the backing an’ you
get me the money by to-morrow at noon.’ I was nearly across the
table, an’ I didn’t wait for him to cut in with a question. I took a
big envelope out of my pocket and flashed the stuff on him. He came
up with a chirp.

“‘My word!’ he says, ‘where did you get this?’

“‘Well,’ I answered, ‘London’s a big selling point with us—you can’t
trade with the English and not take their stuff, can you? The Johnny
whose name’s on that stuff put it up with me—same as I’m putting it
up with you. There’s fourteen of them. Ain’t they good for fifty
thousand?’”

“He spread the certificates out on the table and run his fingers
over them. It was old-fashioned love-touchin’.

“‘Oh!’ his voice flickered up, ‘beyond question.’

“‘Done!’ I says. ‘Keep it until I come back with your money—an’ get
me the cash before noon to-morrow.’

“‘Don’t you want a memorandum?’ he says.

“I waved my hand, careless, like it was nothin’.

“‘That’s all right,’ I says; ‘I don’t want any promises about that,
but there is a thing that I do want a promise about.’

“I threw my cigar in the fireplace and set down.

“‘I want you to promise me that you won’t ever say anything to
Carrots about this, nor to anybody; it’s between us—she’s a
high-strung youngster,’ I added; ‘this thing’s got to be buried with
us, no matter what happens. Is it a trade?’

“We shook hands on it and I got out.

“Before twelve the next day he sent me a draft on New York for the
money—an’ I’d won a lap.”

The afternoon sun lay on the terrace of the gray stone house, where
the big creature, dead to the middle, talked from his chair,
clearing the mystery that had covered his disappearance from the
world. It was an extraordinary story, and I wished to get it, in
detail, precisely clear.

“It was fiction,” I asked, “this explanation to Westridge?”

He looked at me in a sort of wonder.

“Sure,” he said. “I made it up.”

“There wasn’t any of it true?”

“Not a word,” he answered. “Don’t you understand? This was a little
game that me and God Almighty was settin’ up on the side.”

“You knew nothing of the girl’s affairs?” The thing seemed
incredible to me.

“That’s right,” he replied, “not a thing, except that her father, a
lawyer in the South, was dead, and the small coin was beginning to
mean something—an’ of course the little game of this Westridge
person—it was a blind pool; nobody in on it but God Almighty.”

I could not forbear a comment.

“He seems to have helped you in the opening.”

The big creature turned heavily toward me.

“With little Westridge?” There was deep irony in his voice. “I
didn’t need any help to handle him. That was ABC stuff. The big
trouble was ahead.”

“With the girl?” the query escaped me.

“No,” he replied; “that was my job too. You listen. I’m comin’ to
it.

“I looked out for a chance to get the girl by herself, an’ about
four o’clock I got it. There had been a fog in; it cleared a little
and she went for a walk. She took the path along the sea toward
Cromwell’s Harbor and I followed her. She turned back where the path
ends at the harbor, and just before a big house, that hadn’t been
opened that season, I met her.

“I stopped in the path.

“‘Missie,’ I said, ‘could I speak to you a minute?’

“There was no sham business about her. She was clean and straight
and afraid of nothin’, like an angel of God.

“‘Certainly,’ she said. ‘What is it, sir?’

“‘It’s about something I owe to your father,’ I said.

“She looked me straight in the face.

“‘My father’s executor, Mr. Lewis, would be the one to see,’ she
said. ‘I know nothing about business.’

“‘It ain’t business,’ I said, ‘it’s honor. Could I walk along with
you a step?’

“‘Why, yes,’ she answered, ‘if you like.’”

The big man moved his loose bulk in the chair.

“I know something about stories,” he said. “I’ve had to make ’em up
so a jury would believe ’em, an’ I done my best as I limped along by
her.

“‘I ain’t always been rich,’ I says. ‘I was down an’ out in the
eighties, an’ I was a-goin’ to do somethin’ that would have ruined
me, when by God’s luck I met Harry in Louisville.’ (I’d heard the
old women call her father Harry, so I had that much to go on.)

“‘Al,’ he says, ‘what’s the trouble?’

“I suppose it was in my face. I was broke down an’ I told him. He
got it all in his head, an’ then he patted me on the shoulder. ‘Old
man,’ he said, ‘a little money ain’t goin’ to do you any good. I’ll
get you fifty thousand dollars an’ you go out to the race course
this afternoon an’ pick a winner.’

“I tried to turn it down. I didn’t want to lose his money, I didn’t
know one horse from another. But he just laughed and kept patting me
on the back. ‘A beginner for luck,’ he says. ‘Where’s your nerve,
Al?’ Well, I picked that big Dercum colt that nobody had ever heard
of, a five-to-one shot, an’ he romped in!

“I was a-limpin’ along the sea-path, a-proddin’ the gravel with my
cane an’ a-talkin’ to my feet, same as if I was afraid the
recollection would get away with me if I wasn’t careful. The girl
didn’t say nothin’ and I went on.

“‘Harry wouldn’t touch the winnin’s; he picked out his fifty
thousand and put me out of the room.’

“I limped on, talking to my feet.

“‘And it saved me two ways, for the thing I was agoin’ to do would
have ruined me.’

“My voice got down pretty near in a whisper.

“‘I never saw Harry after that,’ I says, ‘until last night.’

“She stopped quick, an’ I went on a step or two.

“‘My father?’ she said.

“‘Yes,’ I says, not looking up, ‘Harry, just as he looked that
morning in Louisville—only he was troubled.’

“Then I turned on her like I was makin’ a clean breast of it. I had
the tears startin’ and the right choke-up, an’ it wasn’t all jury
dope. I didn’t want that heavenly angel fouled over by little
Westridge. It balled the heart out of me.

“‘Now, Missie,’ I said, ‘you’ve got to help me even this thing up. I
don’t know nothin’ about your affairs—I don’t want to know. But
you’ve got to take that same bunch of money and chance it on
something.’

“She shook her head, and I had a bad hour. All along that sea-path,
with the fog dodging in and out, I kept right at her; I never lost a
step. I was old and rich; money was nothin’ to me. I didn’t have a
soul in the world. I couldn’t take it with me, an’ I couldn’t face
‘Harry’ with the debt hanging over—‘Have a heart! have a heart!’
That was my line of dope. I was pleading for myself—an’ it was the
only line that ever would have got her.

“‘But what should I do with the money?’ she said finally, in a sort
of queer hesitation.

“‘I’ll tell you that to-night,’ I answered.”

The huge creature seemed to relax, as though there had been a vital
tension in the mere memory of the thing.

“That cleaned up my end of it,” he continued, “and after dinner when
it was getting a little dark, I limped over to the church. I had the
last copy of the _Financial Register_ in my hand. I stopped in the
door. The church was closed and it was dark, but I didn’t need any
light for the business I come on.

“‘Governor,’ I says, ‘the rest of this job’s up to you. I’m a-goin’
to open this magazine here in the dark and the first thing that’s
advertised at the top of the page on the right-hand side is the
thing I’m a-goin’ to tell her to put the coin on—Ready,’ I says, ‘go
to it!’ and I folded back the page and went over to the hotel.”

Again he paused.

“I got a jolt when I saw the page. It was some sort of Canadian gold
mine, so fishy that the letters had scales on ’em. But I says to
myself, ‘That’s the Governor’s business,’ an’ I cut it out, put it
into an envelope with the draft, and left it at the desk for her.”

He paused.

“The next morning I slid out. Eight months later the plague struck
me. I crippled into England, asked her to hide me while I died, and
she put me here.”

“And the gold stock,” I said, “I suppose it turned her out a
fortune?”

The energy came back for an instant into his voice.

“It was so rotten,” he replied, “that the Governor General of Canada
summoned all the victims to meet with him for a conference in
Montreal.”

At this moment I caught the sound of a motor entering the gates at
some distance through the park. The huge paralytic also heard it,
and his attention was no longer toward me. It was on the great
coach-colored limousine drawing up at the end of the avenue of
ancient beech trees.

I looked with him.

A girl helped out by footmen stepped down into the avenue, carpeted
now with the yellow autumn leaves. Even at the distance it was
impossible to mistake her; her charm, her beauty were the wonder of
England. And on the instant, as in a flash of the eye, I recalled
the painted picture hanging in the great house in Berkeley Square,
the picture from which this creature’s mutilated photograph had been
taken, the picture of a young girl, in an ancient chair, with no
ornament but a bit of jade on a cord about her neck.

“It’s the young Duchess of Hurlingham,” I said.

The big creature beside me was struggling to rise, his voice in an
excited flutter.

“Sure,” he said, “God Almighty didn’t throw me down. When she went
up to that conference in Montreal, He had young Hurlingham on the
spot—fine, straight, clean youngster as ever was born. It was love
her at sight; an’ now”—he made a great gesture as though to include
something without a visible limit—“she’s got all these places in
England, an’ all that Standard Oil money that belonged to his
mother’s people.”

The girl, radiant as a vision, was advancing on the carpet of golden
beech leaves, and I hastened to put a final query, the thing I had
come here to find out. I had given up the idea of an arrest. The man
was dying.

“What did you do with the registered bonds that you got when you
cracked the vault of the British Embassy in Washington the night
before you went to Bar Harbor? They had Lord Dovedale’s name on
them, and they could not be negotiated.”

The whole sagging body of the unsteady creature strained toward the
advancing vision as toward an idol. His voice reached me, stuttering
as with fatigue.

“That’s the stuff I put up with Westridge for the loan—go and take
it away from him!”




                            CHAPTER XII

                             The Menace


We never could persuade Walker to discuss his adventures in
enforcing the prohibition Amendment: perhaps because the methods of
the service were in use and could not be revealed.

But one night, when we pressed him, he took the proofs of a magazine
story out of a locked file and gave them to us.

“Here,” he said, “is the great peril to the Amendment. We had to
suppress the whole magazine issue to get this story out. Of course
the elements in this story are fictitious, but on any day they may
become an appalling reality.”

We read the story. And here it is:

               “Five Millions is a Big Sum of Money.”

                 *       *       *       *       *

“Sure, it’s a big sum of money. But I’m going to do this thing up
right! You heard me wishin’ the other day that I could double cross
the bunch of cranks that’s a-runnin’ this country. Well, I’ve done
stopped wishin’. I’m goin’ to do something to double-cross ’em. You
hear what I say, Stetman! I’m a-goin’ to offer five millions of
dollars to any chemist who can find the active principle in
alcohol!”

The attorney, tall, angular, incisive, did not move.

Arnbush pounded on the table with his fat clenched hand.

“The rest of the bunch can keep on wishin’ and startin’ little
lawsuits. I’m goin’ after this thing good and proper.”

He was a stout, heavy man, advanced in life. His hair was white and
thick, his eyes gray. His manner was heavy and determined, like that
of one accustomed to crush out, by superior mass, opposition before
him. One thought of the steam roller as the man’s ideal of an
attacking engine.

It was night. The two were at a table in the corner of the big
Waldorf dining room that looks out on Fifth Avenue. It was beyond
the hour at which even the late arrival dined. It was drawing on
toward midnight. A less known or a less valuable guest would hardly
have kept a place in the big dining room at this hour. An old waiter
hung about, evidently attached by impressive gratuities to this
guest; peculiar, but with an open and enormous purse to sustain it.

The man was accustomed to obtaining what he wanted, and at any cost
in money. Avarice was not a motive in the man. The motive in him,
deep-seated and dominant, was power. Money was a jinn to be
commanded, to fetch and carry and break open as he wished.

Arnbush and the attorney, Stetman, sat at the table after the
fragments of the dinner had been removed. They were at the end of
days of innumerable meetings, conferences, and legal discussions
with the owners and lawyers of a business now threatened with
destruction.

The great distiller chewed an unlighted cigar.

The lawyer smoked a cigarette, flicking the ashes, with care and
precision, into a metal tray on the table beside his arm.

He was an able man in his profession: fertile in resources,
accurate, but with a large daring that fitted him for adventuring
beyond the conceptions of little counselors in the law. And he was
not too elevated in his own esteem to disregard any notion of his
client, however bizarre it might appear in its raw suggestion.

The distiller’s big hand was thumping on the table.

“You hear what I say, Stetman! I’m goin’ to land this bunch of
cranks! On the day you discover the active principle in alcohol
they’re done! There’s nothin’ to it, they’re done! The whole country
will get drunk and stay drunk! God Almighty couldn’t stop it when
you get the kickdrop out of the bottle of water that’s in a quart of
alcohol.

“It’ll take an army of agents to stop the smuggling of liquor as it
is; how will they stop it if a man can carry the punch of a barrel
of whisky in an ounce bottle?”

Arnbush’s voice thickened with an indignant energy.

“And I’m a-goin’ to put up the money to get it. I’m a-goin’ to put
up five millions of dollars!

“You hear what I say, Stetman! You cut out the lawsuits. This
country’s goin’ to hell, an’ I’m goin’ to give it a shove along.”

He extended his big hand, with a determined gesture, across the
table.

“You go down to your office in the morning and write a codicil, or
whatever you call it, to my will offering five millions of dollars
to any chemist who discovers the active principle in alcohol.”

He flung out his fat fingers.

“No ifs an’ ands, Stetman, you do what I tell you!”

The lawyer very carefully removed the ashes from his cigarette. “I
shall have to think about that a little,” he said.

“I’ve already done the thinkin’,” cried the distiller. “You do what
I tell you!”

The explosion of his client did not disturb the lawyer. He was
accustomed to this energy; and the magnitude of his fees compensated
for the manner.

“It is not your intent,” he said, “that I shall wish to consider; it
is the form that it might take. A bald offer would hardly do. We
shall have to stage the thing in some scientific purpose; perhaps a
foundation of some sort would be required with your intention
attached as a rider.”

He paused and fingered the cigarette.

“It will be a delicate thing to handle, if one would not have the
first Congress emasculate it. It may be necessary to put this fund
under some other government, and to include some benefit to the arts
or to the public welfare.”

He paused again and one could see that he traveled in his mind,
swiftly like a scouting plane, above the field of the idea. The
unusual features of the thing and the obvious difficulties in the
way did not drive him in upon the reply: “It cannot be done.”

This was an answer he avoided. It was the secret of the man’s
career. To find a way, he took in every case, to be the purpose of
his employment; and he climbed into a fortune on it. He held Arnbush
and others of his kind because they were never met with that reply.
He found a way in some sort of fashion.

Arnbush was quieted by this reflection.

“Sure!” he said. “That’s what I pay you for, Stetman. You fix the
thing so it’ll hold water.”

The lawyer continued, as though he were suggesting devices to
himself:

“It might be advisable to indicate the existence of this offer to
the leading chemists in the country. There is Lang and Neinsoul,
just beyond us here on Park Avenue. No better man in America than
Lang; fine type of Swiss. I don’t know why he holds on to the German
name in the firm, except that it is one of the most celebrated firm
names in the world.... Great genius, Neinsoul; no doubt about
it—incredible things to his name. I suppose Lang feels that the firm
name is a sort of trade-mark.”

The lawyer paused.

“I might see Lang on the way down—and sound him a bit; he’s a late
owl, usually in Keator’s after midnight.... I’d like to know what a
first-class chemist like Lang would think about the possibilities of
a discovery of this sort.... Surely somebody has undertaken it.
There must be an active principle, as you say, in alcohol—some
chemical element upon which it depends for its effect. And it might
be possible to separate that from the other medium. It may be, in
fact, some powerful element, of which there are only slight traces
in the alcohol of commercial liquors.”

The big distiller thrust himself forward in his chair.

“Sure, Stetman!” he said. “Ain’t our chemists been saying that all
along? And ain’t they been huntin’ it?... But they’re too little for
the job! Sure, there’s something in alcohol that gives it the
punch.”

“Well,” the lawyer replied, “Lang is a pretty big man.... I’ll see
you in the morning.”

He rose. Arnbush went out with him into the corridor and, when the
lawyer had gone, he took the elevator to his room.

But Arnbush did not go at once to bed. He sat down by the window,
looking out on the avenue and the passing vehicles, and through the
cañons and vistas of the city, blue in the starlit night.

He was bitter and determined.

The great business of which he was the leading spirit had been
ruined. He saw clearly that this was the end. He had a larger vision
and a sounder judgment than his associates. Their desperate legal
writhings almost amused him. They were plainly useless.

Revenge was the only consolation open.

He had an immense fortune, an incredible fortune; well, he would use
a portion of it to nullify the victory of his enemies. He would sow
their hopes with ruin, such ruin as the half-mad creatures never
imagined. They could regulate and limit the use of commercial
liquor, but the thing he would discover they could neither control
nor regulate. Like Samson he would lay hold of the pillars of the
house and all should go down to ruin with him. He would offer a sum
so great that the ablest chemists of the world would be in his
service. Five millions of dollars should go into this discomfiture
of his enemies.

He sat a long time before the window; finally a sound disturbed him.
The telephone bell was ringing. He rose and went over to it. The
voice speaking seemed far away, and the man thought it was a
long-distance call from some remote point.

“This is Neinsoul,” the voice said. “Come to our laboratory on Park
Avenue; I think we have discovered the thing you are looking for.”

It was a moment before Arnbush realized the message. Evidently
Stetman had seen his man. And the chemists were keen; their interest
could not wait. Well, five millions was a huge sum. They might very
well fear that a cooler mood in the rich distiller would reduce the
offer. But the hour was late, and Arnbush replied with some urgency
upon the point.

The thin, distant voice was insistent.

“I shall not be here in the morning; you must come to-night.”

This repeated answer seemed final and decisive. In the course of an
ordinary affair Arnbush would have ordered the speaker to remain and
await his arrival in the morning. But the voice seemed one not
easily to be ordered. And Arnbush was still hot with the moving
impulses of his affair. There was no mood for sleep on him, although
the night was advanced. And he determined to go. He got his coat and
hat and descended into the street.

A few minutes brought him to the number.

The building, gaunt with its lightless windows, was abandoned. But
the door to the dark entrance opened as he approached.

“We shall have to walk up,” a voice said. “It is not far.”

Arnbush could not see the man; but he recognized the voice, and he
went in. It seemed a long journey up the stairs. Finally they came
into a room lighted dimly, above a table, with a gas jet.

The room was fitted with all the devices of a chemist’s trade; there
was the faint, pungent odor of such a place about it. Two tall
windows looked out above the city, and there was a chair and a stool
beside the table.

The chemist was now visible to Arnbush: a tall, stooped figure in a
sort of smock; a big, nearly naked head, bulging above the brows and
fringed with straw-colored hair; a pasty face, livid and unhealthy;
and thick, myopic glasses that reduced the eyes behind them.

The chemist took the stool behind the table and indicated the chair
before it for his guest.

Arnbush was fatigued with the long climb, and he at once sat down.

The chemist came directly to the point; he made no disquisition on
his wealthy patron, the hour, or the affair.

“I have discovered the thing you are seeking,” he said. “I will show
it to you.”

He took a little glass tube from a rack before him and held it
under the light. It was partly filled with a thick, viscous,
golden-colored stuff.

“That is circine,” he said. “It is the element of virtue in all
distillations. In alcohol,” he continued, “one finds it imperfectly
produced. This sample I am showing you is pure.”

He rose, got a glass, filled it halfway with water from a spigot,
added a drop of the fluid from the tube and handed it to Arnbush.

“Drink that,” he said.

The golden-colored essence had disappeared completely into the
water, making a rich amber liquid, and the man thought that he was
about to taste something peculiar or unpleasant.

He got the staggering shake-up of his life.

At the first touch of the liquid to his tongue, the man paused,
removed the glass, and sat back in his chair, looking in wonder at
the chemist.

He had tasted something heavenly! The aroma of a soft, aged, velvety
liquor was in his mouth; a liquor beyond the product of any human
distillation; the liquor that one has dreamed of, forgotten in some
ancient cask, bedded down in cobwebs in a warehouse, or hidden by
one’s father through a lifetime.

The man was too shaken to be coherent. He began to stutter.

The chemist was undisturbed.

“Drink it,” he said.

Arnbush leaned over and drank off the fluid, And at once every
sensation in his body changed: a warm glow extended to his fingers;
there was soft, insidious stimulation, and the fatigue of his
exertions vanished.

And there was more than this.

The ego in the man was elevated. It took on dominance and majesty;
bothered and hectored, heretofore, it was now a king. And the spirit
of the man, rising as though newly born in some womb of the sun,
realized that this was the thing that every human creature tasting
of liquors eternally longed for. It was the thing for which the
world had been going to alcohol to seek—the supreme, moving motive
of all drunkenness! It released, and strengthened, and ennobled that
thing within the human body which every man thinks of as himself.

Or at least it seemed like that to Arnbush.

And there was with this heavenly taste of liquor the alluring
enchantment of a drug. The world softened and became a place of
pleasure, but it was the pleasure of a mental dominance, and it was
the softness of a plastic kingdom. The individuality in the man was
glorified.

What alcohol promised, this amazing fluid gave!

Arnbush put down the empty glass, and regarded the chemist, across
the table, with a growing wonder.

“You have found it!” he said.

It was the comment of one who finds a treasure; the comment of one
who, after a doubtful search, looks down on a heap of gold-pieces
gleaming under the broken lid-boards of a chest.

“You have found it!”

It was the supreme expression of a victory immense and final. He had
now within his hand the ruin of his enemies. And the stimulated ego
in the man exulted. He would destroy their victory over him beyond
the wildest conceptions of disaster. They were now trapped and
huddled, and the weapon was in his hand.

His revenge stood out a shining figure before his face!

No need now for the trust fund in a death testament. He should live
to see it. And he put the eager query, foremost in his mind.

“Is it difficult to manufacture?”

The chemist had been sitting with his elbow on the table, his jaw
bedded in the fork of his hand, his pale eyes behind the myopic
lenses on Arnbush.

It was a strange reflective watching, as of one who was beyond the
common motives of a normal life; as of one who sat at a window,
before a world that it no longer interested him to enter, or out of
which he had been ejected—and who, being thus, had found a medium
for vicarious influence.

He replied without a change in his peculiar posture.

“It is the widest distributed of all known elements,” he said, “and
the easiest to isolate.... Anybody can make it and the material is
before every door. I bid you observe how simple the process is.”

He removed his hand, drew forth a drawer in the table and took out a
candle, an ordinary clay pipe and some green, little seed. He packed
the seed into the pipe bowl with his thumb and set it above the
flame.

Arnbush looked on, astonished.

The temperature of the night had changed. A faint premonition of the
morning was on the way. There was a suggestion of chill entering
through the window. And there was silence.

The dim flame of the gas jet overhead and the candle on the table
threw a flickering arc of light about the pale hand, the clay pipe
with its bowl of seed sitting in the flame, and the big, nearly
naked, head extended toward them.

And while the distiller watched, there appeared, at the mouth end of
the pipe stem, a drop of green. It lengthened and widened slowly
until it hung there like a pear-shaped emerald.

The chemist removed the pipe from the flame of the candle.

“That is circine,” he said. “It is present in all vegetable life,
especially in the seed. Any of the plants of the Ambrosia family are
rich in it. I have used here the common green seed of the ragweed
and a little heat.

“But I bid you mark that in this form the circine is not free. It is
locked up in the molecule. If you tasted this drop of green, it
would be bitter and have no effect. The circine is, as I have said,
cased off in the molecule. It must be freed to have any virtue.”

He rose, got a broken-handled cup and from a plate beside it a pinch
of substance that looked like a gray mold, pulverized it between his
fingers, placed it in the cup, and added the drop of green liquid on
the pipe stem.

He warmed the cup above the candle, and presently, when he had
finished, handed it to Arnbush.

Within lay a globule of the golden fluid!

“Here,” he said, “we have the circine free. Taste it.”

He took the cup and added a little water.

The distiller touched it to his lips, and with a great effort of the
will replaced it on the table. In his mouth was, again, the taste of
that rich, heavenly liquor, seasoned, an age long, in some hidden
cask.

The chemist went back to his stool.

“The substance I have added to the drop of green is a fungus
culture. Among the innumerable varieties of fungi there is, alone,
one culture which has the power to destroy the shell about the
molecule and set the incased circine free. And as it happens, this
fungus is of almost universal distribution; is as available as bread
mold.”

He paused, and added:

“As I have said, circine is the very commonest of all elements, and
the simplest to obtain. A workman can make it with his pipe, adding
a pinch of this fungus—as I have shown you with these humble
implements.”

The chemist paused and resumed his posture, his chin gathered into
his hand; his eyes, diminished by the thick lenses, on Arnbush, in
that reflective watching as of one looking from a window.

And the distiller saw, in a vast sweep of vision, the effect of this
discovery.

As by the rubbing of a lamp he had obtained the thing he wished for,
more perfectly adapted than his wish could hope. From this day the
whole world would be drunken. No human creature, having tasted of
this heavenly liquor, would return to abstinence; no laws could
possibly prevent its use. A thing that any man could make with a
clay pipe, some seeds, and a pinch of fungus was beyond a sumptuary
law. Once known, even a death sentence on the thing would be a dead
letter in a statute.

And the man thrilled, in a great upward sweep of the heart, at this
ruin of his enemies.

He saw what he would do. He would hold the secret, buy advertising
space in every newspaper, and on a given day make the whole thing
known. Once the discovery was known, he saw clearly, not even the
infinity of God could prevent a drunken world.

Arnbush rose and went over to the window. The city lay dumb and
silent before him. His enemies were sleeping in their beds, and he
stood above them, with their ruin in his hand.

It was a great, expanded moment.

Arnbush remained with his hands behind him, looking out. There was
no sound or evidence of life behind him. When, finally, he turned,
the chemist was sitting in that watchful pose.

The distiller spoke, in the vigor of his victory.

“This is the greatest thing that was ever discovered!”

Neinsoul replied without moving, without a gesture.

“We consider circine,” he said, “the most important element so far
released by us. The habit-forming drugs upon which we have
heretofore depended are limited in their influence, and we have
obtained from them only a fragmentary result. We have long sought
something of universal appeal.”

“Well, you got it,” interrupted Arnbush; “the country’ll drink
itself into hell on this stuff.”

In his satisfaction he overlooked the chemist’s plural pronoun.

The muscles about Neinsoul’s lips distended in a sort of weird
smile.

“We shall hardly hope for that,” he said. “In fact, the effect of
circine on the human body is not deleterious. Neither depression nor
nausea follows its use; there are none of the unpleasant
after-effects of alcohol, or the so-called habit-forming drugs. In
truth, many persons of weak individuality will be physically
advanced by circine.”

He continued to speak distinctly, in his thin, distant voice.

“It is the prime virtue in circine that it builds up and hardens the
individuality of the user. It makes him, in the end, wholly
self-sufficient. He will not go to another for any element of
sensation. It is the influence of exterior organisms that the
circine continually resists.

“All drugs released by us have had some psychic effect, as for
example, the degenerative moral effect of opium. This psychic
influence of circine is not degenerative in the individual, but it
is eliminative of all influences psychic, exterior to the
individual. I do not mean that it touches ordinary sensation which
is of physical origin. But it removes all response to foreign
psychic stimuli or physical stimuli moving from a psychic
origin—as, for example, the love lure in its various psychic and
psycho-physical expressions.

“Under the influence of circine, that basic element of the
individual which he calls himself is built up to a completeness
which will wholly reject any sensation depending upon another,
whether that sensation be psychic, as in morals, or psycho-physical,
as in the love lure.”

He paused abruptly, and looked up. The air entering through the
window was beginning to freshen; a faint gray haze was appearing in
the sky behind the city. And the chemist acted like one in haste to
an appointment. He seized a tablet, in the drawer before him, tore
off a sheet, wrote hastily upon it, and thrust it across the table
to Arnbush.

“There is the chemical formula of circine,” he said, “and the name
of the fungus. I must go.”

The distiller began to speak about his offer, the lawyer Stetman,
the other partner, Lang, and what should now be done in payment and
the legal transfer.

But the chemist hurried him; he could not listen; he had no time,
and it was unimportant.

In some confusion and as swiftly as he could, Arnbush descended the
stair and went out into the street. The door clicked behind him, and
he heard the footsteps of the chemist going down as though to pass
out through the basement.

Morning had now arrived. And Arnbush returned across the city to the
Waldorf.

But he returned like one entering with a triumph. He walked, his
shoulders thrown back, his head up, like a conquerer. The effect of
this wondrous fluid, even from his taste of it, remained. He would
impose his will on this crank-ridden country, and he had the power
folded in his pocket.

He began to go over in his mind the things Neinsoul had said.

He had some knowledge of the phraseology of such a trade, from the
chemists employed about his manufactories; and he understood the
substance of the discourse. He reviewed it now carefully in detail.
This stuff was circine. It was the active principle in all
fermentation; one got it from green seed, heat, and a pinch of
fungus. And he passed on into a scrutiny of Neinsoul’s statement
about the effect of circine.

He was in this abstraction when, at the entrance to the hostelry, he
stopped.

There was some bustle about the door. A limousine stood open and a
young man and a girl were getting out. There was rice scattered on
its fenders; and the two were radiant. Their manner was infectious;
passers stopped, the hall boys and the porters had come out—all were
smiling.

Arnbush followed them inside.

He drew near to the young man and the girl, and he observed them
closely. It was no new incident in the common life. But before the
formula he carried in his pocket the scene had a peculiar interest.

It was scheduled in his plan to cease.

He marked the power, the stimulus, the resistless charm of this
thing Neinsoul had called the love lure. The hardest creature about
his task paused and stood up smiling, as though the incident
released within him some memory or some hope.

Arnbush walked about, thrusting through the group of persons, to
keep the two within the sweep of his eye. He would miss no detail.
And when they passed out of his sight and hearing he stood for some
time looking at the elevator as at the abandoned spot of some
transfiguration.

Then he filled his big lungs and shrugged his shoulders. Well, there
would be no more of this thing! And he went in to breakfast.

The old waiter was slow this morning and, Arnbush thought,
inattentive. He spoke to him sharply.

The man was obsequious and apologetic. His wife was ill; he was in
acute distress. They had been long together, and happy; dependent on
each other; the twain one flesh, as the mystic words expressed
it.... If she should die!

Arnbush plunged his hand into his pocket, drew out his purse and
gave the man a bill. It was in three figures. But the distiller was
accustomed to add substance to his sympathy—not words only, although
the words were from the heart.

“There, there, Henry! She’ll pull through.” And he patted the old
man on the shoulder.

This was impulse. Upon reflection he moved a little in the chair.

The memory of Neinsoul watching as from a window occurred to him.

He drank a little coffee and got up. But he could find no cigar to
suit him. He tried a handful and threw them down. He wandered awhile
about the corridors and finally went out. He would walk down to
Stetman’s office. It was early, but the lawyer was accustomed to
come in early, in order to be undisturbed at his morning’s work.

The air had come in from the sea; it was fresh and vital, and as the
man walked he began to recover some measure of his poise. Several
blocks down Fifth Avenue, he stopped.

A procession of small children in some religious ceremony was coming
up on the other side. He waited until they were opposite; then he
crossed. He walked slowly along the line, paused, and, returning,
passed it again. He looked with a profound, a consuming, an eager
interest at each child.

He watched the procession disappear, took a step or two, and then,
hurrying to the curb, began to gesticulate wildly with his stick. A
taxicab answered; he plunged in and shouted an address.

Stetman was among his law books when his client entered. He rose
from his stooped posture.

“I was working on your matter,” he said.

Arnbush came forward, shouting from the threshold:

“Well! You don’t have to work on it no longer. I got it. Do you see
that, Stetman? Do you see what’s on that paper?”

He thrust Neinsoul’s formula before the astonished lawyer. The man
looked at the chemical hieroglyphics and the text below it, written
in a fine, accurate, thin hand.

“Where did you get this?” he said.

“Where did I get it!” cried the distiller. “You know where I got it.
I got it from your firm of chemists, Lang and Neinsoul.”

The lawyer stepped back from his table.

“I didn’t see Lang,” he said, “he was not at Keator’s.”

Arnbush went on shouting in his excitement.

“Anyhow, I got it of Neinsoul! An’ you see what I’m goin’ to do with
it!”

He flourished the paper a moment, wildly, before the lawyer’s
strange, contracted face, and then he tore it into bits, scattering
the fragments about the room.

And, oblivious to the amazement in Stetman, he went on shouting. The
very act of tearing the formula seemed to increase the fury of his
manner.

“You think I’m crazy, eh! Well, I ain’t crazy! What for do I want to
stop a young feller from falling in love with his sweetheart?...
What for do I want to break up the companionship of old people?...
What for do I want to keep all the little children out of the
world?... You hear what I say, Stetman?”

The lawyer thought his client was insane. He came around the table,
his face drawn.

“Who have you seen?” he said.

Arnbush was now in a fury of declamation.

“Neinsoul!” he shouted. “Ain’t I told you! ... Neinsoul! He called
me up on the telephone after you left. An’ I went over to their
laboratory on Park Avenue.”

“And Neinsoul was there?”

The lawyer’s voice was low, tense, amazed.

“Sure, he was there,” Arnbush roared. “Ain’t I told you!”

The lawyer made a single exclamation.

“Good God!” he said.

Arnbush turned on him, swinging heavily on his big feet, as on some
ponderous hinges.

“What for do you say, ‘Good God’?”

“Because,” replied the lawyer, “if Neinsoul was there, he got out of
hell to come.... He died three years ago in Essen, poisoned by a
blinding gas that he had invented for the German army.”




                            CHAPTER XIII

                             The Symbol


To Marion Dillard there was mockery in the symbolism of the night.

She was alone. On the table before her was an open telegram—the
grating fitted into the last opening of the trap. She was a
dark-haired, slender girl with that aspect of capacity and
independence with which the great war endowed our women: the high
courage that no assault of evil fortune could bludgeon into
servility. She sat in her chair before the table, to the eye,
unconquered.

But it was to the eye only. In the magnificence about her the
wreckage impending was incredible; the great house fitted with every
luxury, the library in which she sat, its rug the treasure of a
temple, its walls paneled!

To Marion Dillard, in her chair before the table, with the telegram
open before her, the whole setting was grotesque. All over the city,
white with newly fallen snow, were the symbols of this majestic
celebration of the birth of the Saviour. They were not absent in
this room. Holly wreaths hung in the windows, and the strange ivory
image, representing the crucifixion of Jesus of Nazareth, which her
father had always so greatly prized, had been brought out, after the
usual custom on this night, and placed on the table. It sat on a
black silk cloth embroidered with a white cross. As a work of art it
was not conspicuously excellent; but her father prized it for the
memory of a great adventure.

Marion Dillard leaned back in the chair, reviewing the events that
had moved against her as though with some sinister design. Her
father was dead. A cross of white marble stood on a hilltop in
France to his memory. It had been erected by every people in the
great war, for her father, moved by a high, adventurous idealism,
too old for longer service in the American army, had taken his own
fortune—and, alas, the fortune which he held in trust for
another—and with it maintained a hospital base on the western front
for the benefit of every injured man, friend or enemy.

Marion Dillard reflected: Of what avail was it that her father had
not realized that this trust money was going into his big
conception? He had drawn on his resources in America until every
item of his great fortune was pledged, and by some error, this
estate, in trust, had gone into the common fund. Appalled, when she
came to examine the accounts, Marion had endeavored to cover the
matter, hoping that the decision of the United States Circuit Court
of Appeals in a suit to recover a tract of coal lands in the south
would be decided in favor of her father’s estate, and thus furnish
the money to replace this trust. And so she had somehow managed to
go on.

This telegram on the table was the end. “Reversed and dismissed,”
were the sinister words of it. On this night commemorating the birth
of that great founder of brotherhood, whose idealistic conceptions
her father had always so magnificently followed, she must decide
what she would do.

The thing was sharp and clear before her. She must either wreck the
majestic legend of her father, or degrade herself! As she had
carried the thing along by various shifts since her father’s death,
she could easily make it appear that she had, herself, embezzled
this trust fund. That would leave the memory of her father clean;
but it clearly meant that she herself could not escape the criminal
courts. The heirs of her father’s friend were insistent and hostile.
They would have the pound of flesh, now that the fortune was gone.

For a time she sat motionless, her eyes vaguely on the carved ivory
image on the table before her. Then, she got up, and, with her hands
clasped behind her back, stood looking down at the crucifix.

It was about ten inches high, rudely carved in the Chinese fashion
out of the segment of an elephant’s tusk four inches in diameter.
The cross represented the trunk of a tree, the roots thrust out for
the base. The figure, with arms extended, was nailed to the broken
limbs of this tree-trunk, forming the cross. The whole top of the
tree-trunk made the head of the figure, thrown back under a crown of
thorns. And there in the quaint English letters cut around the base
was the legend: “Inasmuch as you have turned your head to save us,
may He turn His head to save you.”

Well, the thing was an idle hope. There was no help in the world:
either her own life or the memory of her father was on the way to
dreadful wreckage!

Then desperation overcame her. She went out of the library through
the great hall to the door. A maid helped her into her coat. She
gave a direction that the servants should be dismissed for the
night, no one should remain up, she would let herself in with her
latchkey when she returned. She went out.

At the bronze gates as she passed into the street a man sauntering
along the wall spoke to her. She knew him at once. It was Walker of
the Secret Service. So they were already beginning to keep her under
surveillance! The explanation of this detective did not mislead her.
He was looking for a dangerous criminal, he said, who had come into
the city and had made inquiries about this house.

Marion Dillard replied with some polite appreciation of the
thoughtfulness of the police for her security, and went on. At the
end of the bronze fence, as she passed, she observed another figure
crouched against the wall as though it also kept guard on her house;
but it moved away as she approached, as though to conceal itself
around the turn of the wall inclosing the spacious grounds. She
smiled grimly. The watch kept on her would be efficient; here was
another. She went along the street to the great bridge.

She paused for a moment before the immense stone lions on their
great pedestals at the bridge head. They looked old, haggard,
changing into monsters under a draping of snow! Then she set out to
walk across the bridge into the country beyond, past the cathedral
on the hill, lighted, and from which the melody of vague and distant
music descended. And the feeling in the girl as she moved dreadfully
in the night, became a sort of wonder. Was this a vast delusion,
or was there in fact a Will in the universe determined on
righteousness, and moving events to the aid of those who devoted
their lives to its service?

She went on, walking stiffly like a dead body hypnotized into a
pretension of life.

                 *       *       *       *       *

There was no sound on the sea. It was a vast, endless desert of
water on which the sun lay as though fixed. Only the chugging of the
rusted freighter broke the immobility of the silence. The tramp
looked like a battered derelict, not battered by the stormy elements
of the sea; but haggard by the creeping detritus of inactivities in
crowded tropical ports. The steel hull was covered with rust; the
stack leprous, and the metal devices of the deck newly covered with
a cheap paint.

There was no breath of air in the world, either to disturb the
immense placidity of the sea or to vary the thin line of smoke
vaguely blending into the distant sky line.

Two men sat against a drum on the rear of the ship. If one had been
searching the world for types of the worst human derelicts, the
search would have ended at the drum on the rear of this tramp. The
types were villainous, but they were distinct—in marked contrast.
The little man was speaking.

“Cut along with it, Colonel,” he said. “How much did the Chink give
you?”

He was a thin, nervous creature, with a habit of fingering his face,
as though to remove some invisible thing clinging to it. It was
impossible to place the man, either in nationality or environment of
life. He might have been a Cockney, born under the Bow Bells; but it
was more probable that he was a New York gunman. He had picked up
habits of speech in every degraded port of the east, as a traveling
rat picks up a scurvy.

The man he addressed was big, with a putty-colored face, dead-black
hair plastered down with water over an immense head beginning to
grow bald. He was dressed in a worn frock coat—the clothes of a
clergyman—threadbare, but clean. His shoes, even, showed evidences
of an attempt at polish. He wore a clean, white, starched shirt and
a low collar with a black string tie. A huge black stogy hung in the
corner of his mouth. He sat relaxed in a heap against the drum, he
had a white handkerchief over his shirt front, tucked into the
collar in order to protect his linen from the ash and while his body
remained immobile he whittled a piece of pine board. The long knife
blade polished to the edge of a razor, moved on the wood as in some
grotesque manner of caress. He gave the appearance of one
unutterably weary; an immense sagging body in which all the fibers
were relaxed.

He was devitalized with opium.

His voice, when he spoke, presented the same evidence of utter
languor. His lips scarcely moved, and the sound seemed to creep out
in a slow drawl.

“The Chink gave me two yellow boys. He had six in his hand. ‘You
bring Major Dillard of the American Division here to-night,’ he
said, ‘and you get the other four.’ Of course, he didn’t speak
English. He spoke the Manchu dialect. I know the Manchu dialect.
That’s where I had a flock; but I came in when the Boxers started.
That’s how I came to be on hand when the Allied armies began their
march under old von Waldersee.... You understand, I had left the
mission.”

He spoke with a nice discriminating care in the selection of his
words, as though it were a thing in which he had a particular and
consuming pride. The gunman laughed.

“You mean you had been kicked to hell out of it, and were livin’ on
the country.”

There was a faint protest in the Colonel’s drawl.

“It’s true I was not sent out by any of the great sectarian
missions. I adopted the work, and I was not in favor with the
regular organizations in China. They resisted my endeavors.”

“I’d say they did,” his companion interrupted. “You’re the worst
crook in the world barrin’ one, not so far away.” He laughed.
“There’s a circular posted up in every mission in Asia givin’ your
mug, and tellin’ what a damned impostor you are. Some vitriol in the
descriptions of you, Colonel. I’ve seen ’em.”

The man was not disturbed. The drawl continued:

“Yes, Mr. Bow Bell,” he said; “quite true, quite true. I was not in
favor with the regular organizations.”

The names which the two derelicts applied to one another they had
themselves selected, inspired by the impression produced upon each
other at the time of their meeting on the ship. The big man had
called the gunman Mr. Bow Bell, and the gunman had named his
companion Colonel Swank. They had made no further inquiry. Men of
this character are not concerned about names.

Bow Bell put his fingers over his face, drawing them gently down and
removing them together from the point of his chin, as though he
brushed something away.

“So you crawled out of your rat hole, when the column started, to
see what you could pinch. Good pickin’, eh, what?”

Colonel Swank made a low, murmured exclamation.

“History tells us,” he said, “how the rich cities of antiquity were
looted by the soldiery of invading armies; but there can hardly have
been a parallel to this in any known case. The whole country for a
considerable distance on either side of the line of march was
denuded of every article of value, even the venerated images of
Buddha in the holy temple of Ten Thousand Ages were broken to pieces
with dynamite, under the impression that they concealed articles of
value. Of course, the Chinese population stowed away everything they
could; but they could not hide the women, and they were not always
able to conceal their treasures; such as carved ivory, cloisonné,
vases, silks, furs, and the like.”

“The lid was off,” said Bow Bell, “about as it would be in India if
the English went out. I once asked a Rajah in the Punjab what he
would do if the English left India, and you ought to have seen his
grin. ‘I’d take my regiment and go down to the coast, and there
wouldn’t be a virgin or a ten-anna bit left in Bombay.’ ... Cut
along with your story. The Chink gave you two gold twenties to bring
in Major Dillard, with four more in his hand if you put it over. You
brought him in, didn’t you? Gawd, is there anything you wouldn’t do
for a hundred and twenty dollars! Name it, Colonel, let me hear what
it sounds like.”

Swank’s voice did not change. He was unresponsive to the taunt.

“Yes,” he said, “I was so fortunate as to induce Major Dillard to
visit the monastery under my guidance, though it required some
diplomatic effort, and some insistence; but the Major had confidence
in my cloth, and he was making every effort to prevent a looting of
the country along the line of march.”

Bow Bell laughed in a high staccato.

“Confidence in your cloth! It was just a piece of your damned luck
that the American officer never heard of you. He thought you were an
honest-to-God missionary. You’d know all the tricks. You’d be
sanctimonious enough to fool the Devil, for a handful of yellow boys
minted in America. I’d lay a quid on the Saints that you fooled him
all right.... Well, go on and tell me about it. You say the old
Viceroy, with the Boxers on one side and the foreign devils on the
other, was cooped up in a monastery along the line of march, with
the women of all the important families in the Province, and
everything of value that they hadn’t time to bury. You’d nose it
out, Johnny-on-the-spot. You couldn’t get it yourself—some Chink
would have put a knife in you—and it was no good to you for the
foreign devils to get it, so you took your little old hundred and
twenty, and went in to the American Headquarters to see Major
Dillard, eh, what!”

He went on condensing the unessentials in the hope of getting
Colonel Swank forward with his narrative.

“The viceroy was sick, and too old to travel. It was all he could do
to sit up. His only chance was to put himself under the protection
of the American Expeditionary Force. The English were on ahead, and
he knew what the Russians and Germans would do to him. Gawd! He’d
gathered it up for ’em! It was like saying, ‘Come along, boys. I’ve
got the stuff corralled for you. Here’s the girlies, and here’s the
pieces of eight. Go to it. Gawd!... No wonder they dug up the yellow
boys.... You’d ’a’ got more if you had held out. Did that occur to
you?”

Swank made a vague gesture,—a languorous moving of his hand over his
threadbare knee.

“One should not consider a reward for aiding others in distress;
besides my resources were very low at the time, and American gold in
the East was at a premium.”

“Too hungry to trade, eh, what?” said Bow Bell. “I have been like
that; but you must have been damned hungry, Colonel. Gawd! You must
have been starved to the bone ... cut along. Was it night?”

“It was evening,” continued Colonel Swank. “Night was coming on by
the time I had persuaded Major Dillard to come with me. I had a good
deal of difficulty to get him to come with me alone, without a
guard. Not that he was afraid. This American officer was not afraid.
You could tell that by his face. There was no way to frighten him;
but it was irregular, and he had practically to go incognito. The
Viceroy had stipulated with me that I should bring the American
officer alone. He did not wish the common soldiers to know what the
monastery contained. I had some difficulty to convince Major
Dillard; but as I have said, he had faith in my cloth.”

“Gawd,” said the gunman, and he spat violently on the deck. “Suppose
he had been on to you, you damned old renegade. My word, you were in
luck!... Did they send a yellow chair?”

The placidity of Swank was unmoved.

“No,” he said, “as it happened, the chairs were red. It was some of
the chairs in which the women had been brought in. You know, a bride
in China is always sent to the house of her husband in a red chair.
All the red chairs in the province had been commandeered to bring in
the young daughters of the high Chinese residents, to the protection
of the Viceroy. They sent what they had. Yellow is the Royal color
in China. The Viceroy couldn’t use it.”

Bow Bell interrupted with a sort of vehemence.

“Damn it, man, get on. You’re the slowest brute I ever saw to get
into a story. It was night when you set out with Major Dillard in
the red chairs. How far was it to the monastery?”

But the deliberation of Swank’s narration was not to be hurried. His
hand moved the long sharp blade of his knife slowly along the piece
of soft wood, removing a shaving like a ribbon. He went on in his
slow drawl.

“The monastery was a few miles west of the advancing column. The
American Division had just come up; behind it was a smart regiment
from Berlin; and behind that, farther down, were the Russians. You
see the whole Expeditionary Force in China had been put under the
command of Count von Waldersee. The German Emperor had intrigued for
this supreme command; had, in fact, openly solicited it from the
Chancelleries of Europe. You will find it all described in the
memoirs of von Eckerman. The German Emperor thought he would make a
great point in the world if the supreme command of the allied forces
in China should be put under a German officer. The Asiatic would be
impressed with the superior importance of German Arms—‘Observe, if
you please, how all Nations looking about for a leader have selected
a German general!’”

Swank paused as from the weariness of effort.

“The Emperor was immensely keen about it; but it only made the
Chancelleries of Europe laugh. It was Wilhelm II at his theatricals;
besides, any Prime Minister of discretion could see the awkward
situations that would confront the nominal head of the Expeditionary
Forces; and so the Chancelleries of Europe laughed, and, turning
away their faces, gravely acceded to the Emperor’s request. That is
how von Waldersee came to command the column. He was a big,
purple-faced German, wearing a helmet with a black eagle on the top
of it, and a white chin strap; and he always rode a black charger.
The theatrical conceptions of the Emperor must be carried out in
detail. And the officious von Waldersee was overlooking no occasion.
An orderly had just arrived from the German High Command as I
entered to interview Major Dillard, and as it happened the American
general put the message, that this orderly carried, into his pocket
as he came out with me.”

Bow Bell cursed under his breath.

“I know all that,” he said. “Everybody knows it. Get on to the real
thing. What happened to the Viceroy, and the girlies, and the loot?”

Undisturbed, unmoved, and deliberate, Colonel Swank continued with
his narrative.

“We set out in the red chairs. I was in front, for I was to lead the
way, and Major Dillard was directly behind. We traveled for about
three miles west, across the fields, and then through a wood to a
slight elevation on which the monastery was situated. We passed
first under that queer thing which is to be found in China—a sort of
gateway, and triumphal arch; but without any supporting wall about
it. This arch had now a big tarpaulin stretched across it on which
was painted an immense white cross. Through the arch, on a
flag-paved road we approached the main structure of the monastery.
True to the usual form of architecture, the lower part was of stone,
and the upper part of wood. It was crowned by towers, roofed with
yellow tiles, and painted in vivid colors. On the corner of the roof
were innumerable bells, that rang weirdly in the slight wind. On
either side of it, standing on immense pedestals were two enormous
lions. Very strange these lions appeared before us as we entered the
paved court. They had that old haggard, sinister aspect that the
Oriental alone can give to the features of a beast; that aspect of
merging, as by some degeneration, into a monster. Before us was a
double-roofed square tower, with a door on either side.

“We got down from the chairs and went in. At the door stood the old
Chinese official who had given me the two yellow boys. He now handed
me the remaining four, and we entered the monastery. Within there
was an immense image of Buddha, covered with gold leaf. The temple
was lofty, and dimly lighted, and the colossal image of Buddha,
glittering as though of pure gold, and holding the sacred lotus in
his hand, ascended into the lofty upper spaces of the temple. A
circular stairway, mounted around the inner walls of the temple so
that one might go up to the very face of the Buddha, sitting in his
eternal calm.

“All along this stairway there were images in clay, painted in
divers colors.

“About us as we entered the temple were crowds of Buddhist priests,
their heads shaven, and wearing the characteristic dress—the long
yellow robe confined at the waist by a sash, and felt-soled
slippers. They moved noiselessly, as though they were the spirit
company attendant on this immense image. However, we were not come
to idle before the wonders of a Buddhist monastery. The Chinese
official went on and we followed behind him. He passed through a
door at the rear of the shrine, and we were at once in an immense,
low room. It was a very big room.

“One was not able to see what decorations the walls had contained,
as they were heaped on all sides to the ceiling with bales of silks,
furs, and embroideries; and all about were chests and boxes, piled
in some confusion, as though they had just been brought in. The
whole chamber was a warehouse, and it was filled to the ceiling,
except for a narrow passage through the middle. This we traversed,
and, coming to the end of it, passed through a yellow door into
another chamber. We entered here a room of lesser dimensions; but it
was fitted up after the usual idea of Chinese luxury—great mirrors
around the walls; rich rugs on the floor; a variety of clocks, all
going at a different hour; and many screens and tapestries.

“In the middle of the room in a chair padded with silk cushions sat
the Viceroy. He was an ancient man, evidently at the end of life.
His face was like wrinkled parchment. The white, straggling beard
remained on his face; but the whole dome of his skull was bald. It
was as bare as the palm of a hand. It was yellow with age.

“But the most striking thing in the place was the women.

“The whole room was literally crowded with young Chinese women; the
daughters of the important men of the province. They sat about on
the priceless carpets, clothed in exquisite silks, embroidered with
designs of their hereditary houses. They looked like quaint dolls,
their hair knotted in the usual Chinese fashion with gum, and thrust
through with ornaments of jade, and gold pins; their mouths
painted.”

“Gawd,” said Bow Bell, “what a layout for the Hun! Mohammed couldn’t
beat it in his heaven. Get along!”

Colonel Swank continued in his dreary, monotonous voice.

“The Viceroy was too ill to rise; but he made a salute in the German
fashion with his hand when Major Dillard entered; and he began at
once to address the American through the Chinese official who
accompanied us, and whose English was as good as my own. He asked
for protection to the Monastery, and a guard; and extending his hand
to the great storeroom through which we had passed, he offered the
American anything that he wished in payment for this protection.
Major Dillard endeavored to explain that the Allied Armies were not
on a quest of loot; but were merely endeavoring to relieve the
legations at Pekin, and establish order in the country; that they
could receive no compensation for this service; and that he would
endeavor to protect the Monastery.

“But he was disturbed about a guard.

“The American Expeditionary Force was not large, and he was easily
able to see the international complications that might arise if he
left here an American guard to clash, perhaps, with the German
division behind him.”

Swank moved slightly in his position against the drum of the
freighter. The ash from the half-burned stogy fell on the white
cotton handkerchief. There came a shadow of interest into his voice.

“At this moment,” he said, “while Major Dillard was engaged with the
difficult problem before him, an extraordinary event occurred. There
was a clamor of voices outside. A Chinese guard hurtled through the
door, and fell on the floor before the Viceroy. There was a sound of
heavy footsteps, the clang of side arms, the echo of guttural
voices, and a moment later a dozen German officers entered the room.

“They were young Prussian under-officers from the portion of the
German company behind the American Division. They stopped inside the
door, lost for a moment in wonder at the very miracle of the thing
they were seeking. Then they noticed Major Dillard standing beside
the Viceroy’s chair. They brought their heels together and made him
a formal military salute; but it was clear they regarded him as of
no particular importance—as merely a soldier from the American
Division to be accorded the usual amenities; but not to be permitted
to interfere with any design they had in mind.

“There followed a brief, verbal passage at arms, with a shattering
dramatic sequel.

“Major Dillard explained that the Monastery was under the protection
of the American Division; that it must not be disturbed; and
requested the German officers to withdraw. They replied with a
courtesy in which there was a high contempt; that as the American
Division had passed on, and the German Company arrived on the
ground, the Monastery was under the _protection_—they got a
sneering, contemptuous note in the word—of the German Expeditionary
Force, and they must insist on their right of control.

“They looked about at the rich loot, the ancient Viceroy, and the
painted women, and what they meant by protection to the monastery
was as clear as light.

“They were all under the influence of liquor; one or two of them
were plainly drunk. It was evident that Major Dillard could not
control them, and it was clear that their contention of their right
of control over the Chinese territory adjacent to their Division was
in point of legal virtue superior to that of the American Division
that had passed on, and from which Major Dillard had returned here.
They spoke with an exaggerated courtesy to the American; but they
were clearly intending to seize the monastery, to ignore any claim
of the Americans over it, and they made that intention insolently
evident. The old Chinese Viceroy understood it at once. Despair
enveloped him. His chin dropped on his bosom, and he put out his
hands like one resigned to the inevitable. The young, insolent
Prussians advanced into the room.

“It was at this moment that the dramatic sequel arrived.”

Colonel Swank paused; he made a slight gesture with the hand in
which the long sharp blade of his knife moved on the soft wood.

“I have mentioned,” he said, “how in character were the acts of
Wilhelm II in this international affair, and now one of these
theatrical gestures intervened with a shattering dénouement. Major
Dillard offered no further argument. He took out of his pocket the
message which he had received from von Waldersee as we were setting
out and read it: It was an order of the High Command putting a
portion of a German Company under the command of that foreign
general whose division it followed. And, thus, this order put the
German advance guard, of which these Prussians were officers under
the command of the American General. It was the Emperor’s gracious
return for the grant of the supreme command to von Waldersee. Major
Dillard made no comment. He gave a curt order as though he were
addressing a sergeant’s squad:

“The Prussians were to remain and guard the Monastery during the
whole of the Allied occupation; nothing should be disturbed; they
would be held responsible for every life and every article, and for
the rigid preservation of order. It was a hard, clear, comprehensive
direction: And they were to report to him in Pekin.

“The amazement of the young Prussian officers was beyond any word to
express. Their jaws dropped; their very eyes bulged. The drunken
ones were instantly sober. They recognized the black eagle and the
signature of the German High Command. Every vestige of human
initiative vanished out of them. Von Waldersee’s order was an ukase
of the All Highest—the direction of the Emperor—a command of the War
Lord. They formed in a line before the American, clicked their
heels, and saluted. And he set them about the outside of the
Monastery as a guard; and went away in his chair.”

Bow Bell threw himself forward from the iron drum of the tramp with
a great cackle of laughter.

“Gawd!” he cried. “Could you beat it! A look-in, and then to be
snapped up like that! Gawd!” He rocked himself on the deck, his
hands clasped about his knees. “I can see ’em,” he stuttered. “Oh,
my word!” He continued to rock in his paroxysms of laughter. “And
they couldn’t touch a girlie or a cash piece. Gawd! what a neat
little hell!”

He turned toward his companion.

“And what did you do, you fat, old crook? What did you do? Stay on
for a little of the loot the American wouldn’t take?”

Colonel Swank resumed his narrative as though there had been no
interruption.

“I remained,” he said, “though not entirely at my own initiative.
The old Viceroy had drawn the conclusion from some remarks of Major
Dillard that the white cross which the monks had put up before the
gate of the Monastery was a protecting symbol of the great Christian
religions, and that in some manner its effect on Major Dillard had
produced the result which followed. This impression doubtless arose
from the fact that in his order to the Prussian officers Major
Dillard had directed that the cross should be permitted to remain.
It was his idea doubtless that this religious symbol would help to
protect the Monastery from the remainder of the Expeditionary Force.
They might take it to be a hospital, or some missionary place of
refuge. But the Viceroy got the idea that it was to the sacredness
of this symbol that he owed his protection, and he began to inquire
of me upon the point. Why was the cross a sacred symbol in our
religion?

“I explained it to him: that, Jesus of Nazareth, the Messiah of the
Christians, had been crucified on a tree, and that this cross was
symbolical of that crucifixion; of that vicarious atonement for the
sins of the world. He did not understand the metaphysics of my
explanation; but he understood its physical essentials; that the God
of the Christians had been crucified on a tree, and that this
concrete representation was, therefore, sacred, as the images of
Buddha in his eternal calm, with the lotus flower in his hand; that
the cross meant to all Western religions what the image of Buddha
meant to Asia.

“He understood crucifixion. It was a torture of death known to the
Chinese; but reserved only for the lowest criminals. It had been
supplanted in later years by the _lingchi_, or death of a thousand
cuts; but it was an old practice, and the archives of his province
contained ancient paintings of it. He interrogated me minutely upon
the details of this crucifixion, and I gave him an accurate picture
of it: The Man of Sorrows crowned with thorns, and nailed to the
cross. But in the translation I made use always of the Chinese word
for tree. A lack of precision in language which had presently a
definite result.”

Again Bow Bell spat upon the deck.

“The hell you did,” he said. “You sanctimonious old crook. You ought
to have had your tongue cut out. No missionary society would put up
with you for a minute. You used to be a faro dealer in Hongkong
until you got too cursed crooked for even a Chinese gambler to stand
you.”

Colonel Swank did not resent this digression.

“For a week,” he said, “I remained in the Monastery as a guest of
the Viceroy. I was treated like a prince. I dined on roast quail
covered with clotted cream, and candied rose leaves; and then I was
given a present for Major Dillard and sent on to the American
Division. I traveled in a chair like an envoy, parallel to, but at
some distance from, the line of march, and I overtook him before he
reached Pekin.”

“And what was the present?” said Bow Bell. “Twelve she asses laden
with gold?”

“No,” replied the Colonel in his weary drawl, “it was not. It was a
carving in ivory representing the crucifixion of Jesus of Nazareth
as I had described it, wrapped in a piece of black silk embroidered
with a white cross, not worth a pound and six pence. The carving, a
mediocre work of art, might have been worth a hundred dollars in
America.

“You will recall that I used the word tree in my description to the
Viceroy, and this carving represented an ivory tree made of the
whole segment of an elephant tusk. It was about four inches in
diameter, and ten inches high. The base represented the roots of the
tree spread out, so that the thing would stand in balance. Broken
limbs represented the cross pieces to which the hands of the figure
were nailed. The feet were spiked together on the trunk; the head
thrown back, and encircled with a crown of thorns, made the entire
top of the carving, that is to say, the top of the tree.”

“Well, for Gawd’s sake,” said Bow Bell. “A piece of carved
elephant’s tusk for a job like that!... Did you steal it?”

Colonel Swank went on:

“And it was carved in tiny English letters around the base with a
legend, not badly worded for a pagan imitation of the Scriptures:
‘Inasmuch as you turned your head to save us, may He turn His head
to save you’.... No, I didn’t steal it. How could I steal it? There
was a Chinese runner on each side of the chair. I was never out of
sight of them, and they each had a knife. I delivered it to the
Major.”

“Well, he didn’t get much for his trouble,” said Bow Bell. “It’s no
good to be good!”

His voice descended into a confidential note; he leaned a little
toward his companion.

“Now, you said you had a notion about this thing at the beginning of
your talk. What was that notion, Colonel?”

“As I recall,” Swank continued, “it was a discourse about the
exaggerated value which devotees of a religion place upon their
symbols. They all seem to feel that the sacredness of these symbols
is an ample payment for any immensity of service. It is a very
strange and universal belief. The English resident of a native state
in India once received a gold Buddha for saving a Rajah’s life, and
it was not even gold. It was only plated.”

“But that’s not all you said,” interrupted Bow Bell. “You said you
were going to America. You said you were going to find that
crucifix. You said you had a notion about it. What is your notion?”

For a moment Colonel Swank did not reply. His hand moved the long
sharp blade of the knife peeling off ribbons of pine from the piece
of soft wood. The sun was going down, and the sea continued to be as
placid as a sheet of glass. There was no one in sight on the rear of
the deck of the freighter; but at the moment Swank began to speak
one of the Chinese crew appeared. The Colonel lowered his voice, and
what he said passed in a whisper to his companion.

What happened after that was fatal and unforeseen for this
ill-omened person.

Bow Bell looked quickly about the deck. The individual of the
Chinese crew had passed behind the leprous stack of the freighter.
Bow Bell spoke softly, and leaned over toward his companion.

“You’re going to get a lot of ash on your shirt, Colonel,” he said;
and taking hold of the hand in which his companion held the knife
with which he had been whittling the piece of packing board, he
brought it up with a firm grasp, and drove the long blade into the
man’s chest just under the heart, guiding it carefully with the
fingers of his left hand so that the blade would enter in the
interstice between the ribs.

For a moment the huge body of the man did not move. Then, his eyes
widened, and his mouth extended in a sort of wonder.

“Why, you dirty little beast!” he drawled. “You dirty little beast!”

Then his head fell forward, the great, slack body quivered,
shuddered, and was motionless.

Bow Bell turned the handle of the knife down, pressed the blade in
against the chest to prevent hemorrhage, buttoned the frock coat
over the knife, tucked the disturbed, cotton handkerchief into the
man’s collar: And to the eye, Colonel Swank, drunk with opium, had
fallen asleep over his narrative, his chin sunk comfortably on his
chest, the body propped against the drum, and supported by Bow
Bell’s shoulder.

A moment later the Chinese deck hand came out from behind the stack,
and moved along the rail of the rear deck, making his inspection of
the ship. And the iron nerve of Bow Bell presented itself.

“Hey, John,” he said. “Speakee Linglish?”

“Vellee good,” replied the Chinaman, continuing to move along
the rail. “Speakum Plittsburg: Hullee-lup, hullee-lup, lu
lalle—bastard!—Speakum Hongkong pololo plony belong-house.” His
voice, went suddenly up in a high, sharp, whining cry: “Lide ’im
off, Major. Oh, damn!”

Then he shuffled off unconcernedly along the rail around the rear of
the ship, and disappeared toward the prow.

Night descended.

A little later Bow Bell lifted the apparently opium-drunken body of
Colonel Swank to his feet, and helped him to the rail of the ship.
There the two stood for a moment close together as in confidential
talk, until, as the gunman turned away, the opium-drunken Colonel,
by some loss of balance, fell forward over the rail into the sea.

With a great cry Bow Bell ran forward to report the accident.

                 *       *       *       *       *

It was midnight when Marion Dillard returned.

Despair like an opiate had finally drugged her into a sort of
physical submission, and she had turned back to the comfort of her
house as one on his way to death warms himself before a fire. She
let herself in.

The house was silent. The servants, pleased to obtain a holiday on
this night, had gone out. She removed her coat and hat, and laid
them on a console in the hall; and went into the library. She moved
softly, as one will under a breaking mental tension. It was
midnight; the great clocks of the city were beginning to strike.

The door to the library was open. Marion Dillard turned from the
hall into the room; but on the threshold she stopped. The figure of
a man leaned over the library table, a cap pulled over his eyes, a
dark handkerchief tied around the lower part of his face. He held
the massive, carved ivory crucifix in his hands, and he was intent
on some undertaking with it.

The girl took a step forward, and, at the sound, the figure turned,
and a weapon flashed in his hand. Immediately the silence in the
room was shattered by the explosion of a shot. Marion Dillard
imagined that the burglar had fired at her; but, if so, why did the
creature sway, put out a convulsive hand, drop his weapon on the
rug, and crumple in a heap.

The voice of the detective, whom she had found on guard at the gate
as she went out gave the explanation. Walker came forward from
behind the curtain of a window.

“Bad gunman,” he said, “wanted all over the world. I had to kill
him.”

And he indicated the crumpled body of Mr. Bow Bell.

“But what was he doing to that ivory crucifix? It looked like he was
trying to twist it.”

Marion Dillard went forward and took up the heavy piece of carved
ivory.

The head thrown back crowned with thorns, making the top of the tree
on which the figure was impaled, had been twisted around until it
faced backward. It was loose, and she lifted the head out of the
carving.

The whole interior of the ivory tree was hollow, and packed with
rice powder.

The girl picked up a metal paper knife, and loosened the powder in
the hollow ivory. Hard pellets were embedded in the rice powder, and
when she released them, great oriental pearls appeared—huge,
magnificent—a double handful of them; unequaled, matchless,
priceless, worth the ransom of a province.

And at the moment, the last stroke of the clocks sounded above the
city, commemorating the hour of the birth of the Saviour of the
World.





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