Detective Fiction Weekly. Vol.122, No. 6, October 1, 1938

Money on His Mind by Robert Arthur

Money killed Johnny English. Not the want of it, nor the having too much of it, but the wanting of it too much.

Johnny English must have been born with money on his mind. Certainly he had not learned to want it from anything around him. His father’s three hundred acres produced no luxuries. His father and mother and brother Thomas were sober and hard-working, and coveted nothing.

But Johnny English was not like them. There was money on his mind even as a boy, and he would sit and dream of the things he would someday do, when all the gold that was now only in his head would be in his pockets.

“Money!” Johnny used to say, and his dark eyes would flash and see far beyond the limits of Daleville, with its single business street and farmers’ market, its two small banks, its handful of stores, and its surrounding countryside sleepy with the heaviness of ripening crops.

“Money!” Johnny English used to say. “It’ll get you anything. Someday I’m going to have lots of it. I can close my eyes and see it — thousands of shiny gold pieces glittering there, as if my head was full of them. Soon I’m going out to get them. They’re waiting for me somewhere, and I’ll not come back to Daleville until I can bring them with me.”

When he talked like that, his dark eyes bright and feverish, his black hair falling unregarded down his forehead, a little muscle twitching unconsciously in his temple, his mother would look troubled and his father frown blackly.

“There’s nothing in your mind but nonsense,” Jonathan English would say severely then. “On a farm the only gold to be had is the gold you see in the pumpkins and the corn. That’s gold enough for an honest farmer. Now take a team and hitch it to the haying rake, for the whole lower pasture must be cut today.”

But often as not Johnny English would forget and wander off into the woods, his mind filled with bright schemes whereby he was going to fill his pockets with gold and have all the lovely things of life that he read about in books.

“It’s in my head,” he would tell you earnestly. “My head is full of gold pieces, I tell you. I feel them there like I feel the clothes upon me and the earth beneath me. When you feel a thing so hard, it’s going to be so. It has to be. There can’t be any other way about it. I’m leaving the day I’m twenty-one, and I’m not coming back until I have that gold.”

The same trouble that showed in his mother’s face when Johnny talked so mirrored itself in the eyes of Susan Relling as they sat together in the soft dusk on the bank of the stream that flowed through Johnny’s father’s lower hundred.

“Johnny,” Susan Relling said softly, fearfully, “Johnny forget about money. There’s gold and silver enough in the world for you without ever moving a step from Daleville. Look at the stars tonight, Johnny, and drink in the gold of them. Look at the moon on the water and know you own its silver, and no one can take it from you. To want more is foolish. That’s gold and silver enough for me if it’s you I’m sharing it with.”

But Johnny English did not think so.

“It’s not in Daleville that the money is,” he said feverishly, hunched forward, his hands on his knees. “And I’m going out to get it. Nor am I coming back until I bring it with me.”

“You’ve never even seen gold money, Johnny,” Susan Relling said presently, wonderingly. “How can you dream about it so and want it so much, then?”

“Maybe I’ve seen it and maybe I’ve not,” Johnny said mysteriously.

“But it takes money to go to the city,” Susan said persuasively. “And it takes money to make money, Johnny. And you have none.”

Johnny laughed like a man with a secret.

“I’ll get it,” he said. “And when I get it, I have a thousand schemes in my head to make it grow. I’ve saved enough, one way and another. Enough to go. Enough to go day after tomorrow, when my birthday comes. For one thing, Silar Brent paid me off today for helping cut in his woodlot the wood for the fuel company — a hundred cords of it. And beside that, there’s ways. There’s ways.”

And so he did, the second day after, taking the train while his mother and father and brother Thomas and Susan Relling stood on the platform in silence and watched the last car till it vanished round the bend. And some of the neighbors laughingly told them not to worry, that Johnny would be back within the week, finding it harder to get the gold he wanted than he thought. If it was his savings he was depending on to get him started, they said, he was bound to return soon, for it was not possible for him to have enough money to stay away for long.

But they were wrong.

For Johnny English had a scheme — a bright and glittering scheme for taking to the city with him the gold he needed to make more and yet more gold.

The scheme was simple. Though he did not have what he needed himself, he knew who did have it, and from him Johnny English meant to take it.

Johnny English remained in the city ten days. Then he took an evening train that let him off ten miles short of Daleville. He had said he was not returning until he brought gold with him, and he wasn’t. This little trip would bring him within a mile of his home, but no closer. And no one would ever dream that he had been that close.

From the obscure waystation, without even a stationmaster, where he descended from the train, he walked nine miles through familiar back roads. Unseen and unrecognized, he reached the farm of Silar Brent shortly before midnight.

Silar Brent was a farmer, a bachelor, and a New Englander — that is to say, thrifty. He was lean, suspicious, and un-neighborly. He had lost a thousand dollars in a bank failure in 1907, and had never trusted a bank since. He had a good farm and a well-cared for woodlot, and he had both gold and silver — not merely money, but the metal itself, the accumulation of thirty thrifty years.

Silar Brent’s bank was the commodious interior of a hot-air pipe that ran from his furnace to his never-used parlor. A locked metal box that could be slid into it and out of sight, almost out of reach, was to his mind safer than a bank that might fail. Besides, there was the dog outside and the loaded large-gauge repeating shotgun that adorned the wall above his bed.

He had said more than once that if anyone got past the dog, he would have six loads of buckshot to deal with — no light threat. Silar Brent was an uneasy sleeper, and he had no fear of being robbed.

Johnny English knew the location of the money wholly by accident. He had seen Silar Brent one day get out the box to pay off the crew of men Johnny had worked with in cutting the hundred cords of logs on Silar Brent’s carefully tended woodlot.

Besides Silar Brent, Johnny English was the only one who knew that hiding place — and no one knew he knew. Nor did anyone but Johnny English know the ease with which the dog and the shotgun could be circumvented by a clever lad with his head full of bright schemes as to what he could do with the money if only he had it.

Johnny had worked for Silar Brent several weeks a year for several years in succession now. And he had made friends with the ferocious mastiff that was Silar Brent’s watchdog. Johnny English had a knack for making friends with animals.

The shotgun was even easier. Johnny had just slipped into the house a day or so before the job was over, while Silar Brent was out in the yard superintending the loading of the wood for hauling to town. And Johnny had emptied all the shells from the repeating shotgun, to replace them with others from which he carefully extracted all the shot. Silar Brent was not a hunter. He knew the gun was loaded and in good working order. There was slight chance of his looking closer and discovering the deception.

So if he should wake and attempt to interfere — well, Johnny English would be in no danger.

Johnny English slipped down the road beneath the row of towering elms and entered Silar Brent’s farm yard. The smell of horses and chickens hung pleasantly acrid on the still, cool air.

The mastiff came charging up, deep and ominious rumbles in his chest. Just before the rumbles became warning barks, Johnny spoke soothingly.

“Here, boy, good boy,” he whispered softly. “You know me, boy. I’m Johnny. I’m your friend.”

The dog caught the familiar scent and sound, and the rumblings subsided. Johnny gave him a playful slap in the ribs and slid on past him up to the house.

It was still and dark, a vague black blur against the starlit sky.

Johnny got inside without more trouble than he had had with the dog — through the back door, with a key made from an impression taken while he was working for the farmer.

Once inside, getting into the locked parlor was not difficult. The lock stuck, and the key, made the same way the rear door key had been, proved hard to turn. But presently it gave, and Johnny English opened the heavy oak door with due regard for its tendency to creak. A moment later he was inside, in the musty darkness of the never aired room, bending over the hot air register.

It lifted out easily and he laid it aside. Then, on his knees, he reached far into the pipe and with extreme caution drew out the heavy cash box, sliding it along the level pipe until he could get a grip on it and lift it to a convenient table. It was so heavy.

He should have carried it outside before he forced it open, but there was a fever in him to see what was inside, to estimate his takings, and he could not resist the temptation.

In his pocket he had a narrow-bladed chisel, as sharp as a knife, brought along for this. He inserted the sharp edge beneath the lid of the japanned metal box and slowly lifted, his left hand holding the box down against the pressure.

There was a sharp snap, like a stick of wood breaking, and the metal tongue of the lock slipped from its seat. The box was open.

Johnny threw back the lid and played into it the light of the fountain-pen flash he had bought in a city drug-store. A fever seemed to sing in his veins as the yellow metal there caught the light and threw it back at him.

Silar Brent was a methodical man. The top tray of the box was divided into compartments, and each compartment held a different denomination of coin. There was a section of silver dollars and halves, but Johnny scarcely saw these. His eyes were riveted on the eagles and double-eagles, half-eagles and even quarter-eagles, glinting with a dull gold burnish in neat stacks in compartments that between them took up half the tray.

Silar Brent was not the man to surrender gold money to a government merely because the government asked for it. Most of that gold had been in his possession for twenty years or longer, and probably would have been there for twenty years more if he had been allowed his way in the matter.

Beneath the top tray was paper money, in neat bundles — much of it the old, large blanket bills that had not circulated for years.

Johnny English drew in a deep breath. There was probably ten thousand dollars here — maybe more. Enough to start a clever lad on the road to fortune that would fill his pockets with as much more again a dozen times over.

Johnny English drew another deep breath — and whirled about. A floorboard had creaked.

There at the doorway, half visible in the moonlight creeping beneath the lowered window shades, Silar Brent stood with his shotgun in his hands.

Neither of them said a word. Johnny English had tied his handkerchief over his face, and above it his dark eyes flashed and glittered with an ugly light that seemed to rise suddenly from the depths of his soul, as if it had been waiting there all these years to show itself.

Johnny backed slowly away from the menace of the held shotgun, felt the carving of the fireplace behind him, reached around for the brass-handled poker.

His fingers wrapped about it. Johnny English began to move stealthily back toward the open box of coin and bills.

“Thief!” Silar Brent said nasally, and pulled the trigger of the shotgun.

The gun leaped and roared. Echoes crashed through the room. Gold and scarlet burst from the muzzle. But the shell was empty of shot, and Johnny went unharmed.

Silar Brent seemed thunderstruck for an instant. He fired again. Johnny ducked, automatically, but again there was no whistle of shot to accompany the thunder of the powder charge.

Johnny was back beside the cash box now, and something seemed to snap in Silar Brent’s mind at the sight of the thief still unharmed, and about to loot his precious store. He dropped the shotgun and with a squall leaped for the cash box.

One hand scrabbled in the coins, snatching up a handful of gold pieces from one of the compartments. The other pummeled Johnny in the face.

He had had no time to raise the poker. But the narrow-bladed chisel was still lying on the table, and Johnny snatched it up with his other hand, and as he snatched it, struck out with it.

It met resistance, but not much. Silar Brent reeled away, half fell to his knees, and Johnny saw blood on the blade of the chisel.

“You old goat!” Johnny snarled, his voice rasping through the handkerchief that covered his mouth. “I guess I’ll have to kill you!”

Silar Brent stared up at him with an ashen, stricken face. He put out his right hand for support and it came down on the breech of the shotgun he had dropped.

Something like a wave of comprehension washed across the pinched white face of the farmer. Desperation glittered in his eyes. With his right hand he snatched up the gun and with his left he clawed at its muzzle. Something dropped to the floor with a tinkle and rolled away from him — a coin of the handful he had grabbed blindly out of the cash box in his lunge.

“Thief!” he panted hoarsely. “Thief! Ye took th’ shot out of my shells, did ye?”

He raised the shotgun. Johnny English leaped forward with catlike agility, swerving to one side to avoid the flash of the empty shell if the farmer managed to pull the trigger again before he reached him. He had dropped the chisel, and had the poker raised high over his head with both hands.

His arms contracted. His face, hidden beneath the disguising cloth, was twisted in a way no one seeing it now would have recognized. The poker began to swing down toward Silar Brent’s high-domed skull.

Silar Brent, still on one knee, pressed the trigger. The gun flamed and bucked. Johnny had turned his head to avoid the flash and the wadding, and he did not see it. Nor did he see when Silar Brent dropped back to the floor and lay gasping as the life ebbed out of the hole in his chest where the chisel had driven deep.

Johnny English saw nothing — not even the poker falling from his hands or the floor as he pitched toward it.

He had seen only a fearful light, all golden flame, within his brain for an instant as a solid mass struck him in the face. He had seen that golden flame and felt the lightest of feather blows as the hurtling charge from the shotgun muzzle struck him. Then he saw nothing and felt nothing.

He lay dead on the floor, and Silar Brent, half-beneath him, was dead too when they were found.

The country coroner in Daleville went about his examination half-heartedly, for the story was plain to read. The farmer had died of a chisel blow that had touched the outer covering of the heart. The unknown thief had died of a shotgun charge received in the side of the face.

A little reluctantly, the coroner took up his instruments and began his probing. And then after a moment he stared incredulously at the objects he had removed from the horrible wound in the dead thief’s head.

They were gold pieces — tiny two-and-a-half dollar gold pieces, quarter-eagles, part of the handful Silar Brent had had in his hand and then, in desperation, had poured into the muzzle of his shotgun in that moment on the floor when he saw his opponent advancing on him and realized his shells had powder but no shot in them.

“Mother of God,” the coroner, who was a religious man, said presently. “Mother of God! The boy’s head is as full of gold pieces as a rice pudding is of raisins.”

And then, looking closer, he recognized who it was, and knew whom he must call to impart the dreadful news.

Johnny English had come back to Daleville, as he had left it — with money on his mind.