The Big Book of Rogues and Villains

The Infallible Godahl Frederick Irving Anderson

Just as the perfect murderer is someone who commits the crime without being suspected, perhaps even having the death seem accidental or natural, the Infallible Godahl has never even been suspected of a crime, much less been caught or convicted. He may well be the greatest criminal in the history of mystery fiction. Unlike such better-known thieves as A. J. Raffles, Arsène Lupin, and Simon Templar (the Saint), who rely on their wit, charm, intuition, and good luck to pull off a caper, Godahl has a purely scientific approach to jobs. His computer-like mind assesses every possibility in terms of logic and probabilities; his successes are triumphs of pure reason — the inevitable victory of superior intellect. His uninterrupted series of successes has made him wealthy enough to join the Pegasus Club, which has a membership restricted to fifty millionaires.

The New York Police Department is endlessly frustrated by the perfect crimes committed by Godahl, whose activities are known only to Oliver Armiston, a writer who has recorded some of his exploits. Godahl’s only fear is of those afflicted with blindness or deafness, as he believes that the loss of any sense heightens the sensitivity of those that remain.

The exploits of Godahl are the product of one of America’s most underrated mystery writers, Frederick Irving Anderson (1877–1947), who also created the only slightly better-known jewel thief Sophie Lang. Born in Aurora, Illinois, Anderson moved east and became a star reporter for the New York World from 1898 to 1908 and then became a successful and highly paid fiction writer for the top American and English magazines, notably The Saturday Evening Post, in which most of his mystery stories, and all six of his Godahl stories, were first published.

Anderson’s stories are written in a slow, circuitous style that may discourage the impatient reader but have a subtle richness that rewards the careful one who will appreciate the events that transpire between the lines.

“The Infallible Godahl” was first published in the February 15, 1913, issue of The Saturday Evening Post; it was first collected in The Adventures of the Infallible Godahl (New York, Thomas Y. Crowell, 1914).

Oliver Armiston never was much of a sportsman with a rod or gun — though he could do fancy work with a pistol in a shooting gallery. He had, however, one game from which he derived the utmost satisfaction. Whenever he went traveling, which was often, he invariably caught his trains by the tip of the tail, so to speak, and hung on till he could climb aboard. In other words, he believed in close connections. He had a theory that more valuable dollars-and-cents time and good animal heat are wasted warming seats in stations waiting for trains than by missing them. The sum of joy to his methodical mind was to halt the slamming gates at the last fraction of the last second with majestic upraised hand, and to stroll aboard his parlor-car with studied deliberation, while the train crew were gnashing their teeth in rage and swearing to get even with the gateman for letting him through.

Yet Mr. Armiston never missed a train. A good many of them tried to miss him, but none ever succeeded. He reckoned time and distance so nicely that it really seemed as if his trains had nothing else half so important as waiting until Mr. Oliver Armiston got aboard.

On this particular June day he was due in New Haven at two. If he failed to get there at two o’clock he could very easily arrive at three. But an hour is sixty minutes, and a minute is sixty seconds; and, further, Mr. Armiston, having passed his word that he would be there at two o’clock, surely would be.

On this particular day, by the time Armiston finally got to the Grand Central the train looked like an odds-on favorite. In the first place, he was still in his bed at an hour when another and less experienced traveler would have been watching the clock in the station waiting-room. In the second place, after kissing his wife in that absent-minded manner characteristic of true love, he became tangled in a Broadway traffic rush at the first corner. Scarcely was he extricated from this when he ran into a Socialist mass-meeting at Union Square. It was due only to the wits of his chauffeur that the taxicab was extricated with very little damage to the surrounding human scenery. But our man of method did not fret. Instead, he buried himself in his book, a treatise on Cause and Effect, which at that moment was lulling him with this soothing sentiment:

“There is no such thing as accident. The so-called accidents of every-day life are due to the preordained action of correlated causes, which is inevitable and over which man has no control.”

This was comforting, but not much to the point, when Oliver Armiston looked up and discovered he had reached Twenty-third Street and had come to a halt. A sixty-foot truck, with an underslung burden consisting of a sixty-ton steel girder, had at this point suddenly developed weakness in its off hindwheel and settled down on the pavement across the right of way like a tired elephant. This, of course, was not an accident. It was due to a weakness in the construction of that wheel — a weakness that had from the beginning been destined to block street-cars and taxicabs at this particular spot at this particular hour.

Mr. Armiston dismounted and walked a block. Here he hailed a second taxicab and soon was spinning north again at a fair speed, albeit the extensive building operations in Fourth Avenue had made the street well-nigh impassable.

The roughness of the pavement merely shook up his digestive apparatus and gave it zest for the fine luncheon he was promising himself the minute he stepped aboard his train. His new chauffeur got lost three times in the maze of traffic about the Grand Central Station. This, however, was only human, seeing that the railroad company changed the map of Forty-second Street every twenty-four hours during the course of the building of its new terminal.

Mr. Armiston at length stepped from his taxicab, gave his grip to a porter and paid the driver from a huge roll of bills. This same roll was no sooner transferred back to his pocket than a nimble-fingered pickpocket removed it. This, again, was not an accident. That pickpocket had been waiting there for the last hour for that roll of bills. It was preordained, inevitable. And Oliver Armiston had just thirty seconds to catch his train by the tail and climb aboard. He smiled contentedly to himself.

It was not until he called for his ticket that he discovered his loss. For a full precious second he gazed at the hand that came away empty from his money pocket, and then:

“I find I left my purse at home,” he said, with a grand air he knew how to assume on occasion. “My name is Mister Oliver Armiston.”

Now Oliver Armiston was a name to conjure with.

“I don’t doubt it,” said the ticket agent dryly. “Mister Andrew Carnegie was here yesterday begging carfare to One Hundred and Twenty-fifth Street, and Mister John D. Rockefeller quite frequently drops in and leaves his dollar watch in hock. Next!”

And the ticket-agent glared at the man blocking the impatient line and told him to move on.

Armiston flushed crimson. He glanced at the clock. For once in his life he was about to experience that awful feeling of missing his train. For once in his life he was about to be robbed of that delicious sensation of hypnotizing the gatekeeper and walking majestically down that train platform that extends northward under the train-shed a considerable part of the distance toward Yonkers. Twenty seconds! Armiston turned round, still holding his ground, and glared concentrated malice at the man next in line. That man was in a hurry. In his hand he held a bundle of bills. For a second the thief-instinct that is latent in us all suggested itself to Armiston. There within reach of his hand was the money, the precious paltry dollar bills that stood between him and his train. It scared him to discover that he, an upright and honored citizen, was almost in the act of grabbing them like a common pickpocket.

Then a truly remarkable thing happened. The man thrust his handful of bills at Armiston.

“The only way I can raise this blockade is to bribe you,” he said, returning Armiston’s glare. “Here — take what you want — and give the rest of us a chance.”

With the alacrity of a blind beggar miraculously cured by the sight of much money Armiston grabbed the handful, extracted what he needed for his ticket, and thrust the rest back into the waiting hand of his unknown benefactor. He caught the gate by a hair. So did his unknown friend. Together they walked down the platform, each matching the other’s leisurely pace with his own. They might have been two potentates, so deliberately did they catch this train. Armiston would have liked very much to thank this person, but the other presented so forbidding an exterior that it was hard to find a point of attack. By force of habit Armiston boarded the parlor car, quite forgetting he did not have money for a seat. So did the other. The unknown thrust a bill at the porter. “Get me two chairs,” he said. “One is for this gentleman.”

Once inside and settled, Armiston renewed his efforts to thank this strange person. That person took a card from his pocket and handed it to Armiston.

“Don’t run away with the foolish idea,” he said tartly, “that I have done you a service willingly. You were making me miss my train, and I took this means of bribing you to get you out of my way. That is all, sir. At your leisure you may send me your check for the trifle.”

“A most extraordinary person!” said Armiston to himself. “Let me give you my card,” he said to the other. “As to the service rendered, you are welcome to your own ideas on that. For my part I am very grateful.”

The unknown took the proffered card and thrust it in his waistcoat pocket without glancing at it. He swung his chair round and opened a magazine, displaying a pair of broad unneighborly shoulders. This was rather disconcerting to Armiston, who was accustomed to have his card act as an open sesame.

“Damn his impudence!” he said to himself. “He takes me for a mendicant. I’ll make copy of him!”

This was the popular author’s way of getting even with those who offended his tender sensibilities.

Two things worried Armiston: One was his luncheon — or rather the absence of it; and the other was his neighbor. This neighbor, now that Armiston had a chance to study him, was a young man, well set up. He had a fine bronzed face that was not half so surly as his manner. He was now buried up to his ears in a magazine, oblivious of everything about him, even the dining-car porter, who strode down the aisle and announced the first call to lunch in the dining-car.

“I wonder what the fellow is reading,” said Armiston to himself. He peeped over the man’s shoulder and was interested at once, for the stranger was reading a copy of a magazine called by the vulgar The Whited Sepulcher. It was the pride of this magazine that no man on earth could read it without the aid of a dictionary. Yet this person seemed to be enthralled. And what was more to the point, and vastly pleasing to Armiston, the man was at that moment engrossed in one of Armiston’s own effusions. It was one of his crime stories that had won him praise and lucre. It concerned the Infallible Godahl.

These stories were pure reason incarnate in the person of a scientific thief. The plot was invariably so logical that it seemed more like the output of some machine than of a human mind. Of course the plots were impossible, because the fiction thief had to be an incredible genius to carry out the details. But nevertheless they were highly entertaining, fascinating, and dramatic at one and the same time.

And this individual read the story through without winking an eyelash — as though the mental effort cost him nothing — and then, to Armiston’s delight, turned back to the beginning and read it again. The author threw out his chest and shot his cuffs. It was not often that such unconscious tribute fell to his lot. He took the card of his unknown benefactor. It read:

“Humph!” snorted Armiston. “An aristocrat — and a snob too!”

At this moment the aristocrat turned in his chair and handed the magazine to his companion. All his bad humor was gone.

“Are you familiar,” he asked, “with this man Armiston’s work? I mean these scientific thief stories that are running now.”

“Ye... yes. Oh, yes,” sputtered Armiston, hastily putting the other’s card away. “I... in fact, you know — I take them every morning before breakfast.”

In a way this was the truth, for Armiston always began his day’s writing before breakfasting.

Mr. Benson smiled — a very fine smile at once boyish and sophisticated.

“Rather a heavy diet early in the morning, I should say,” he replied. “Have you read this last one then?”

“Oh, yes,” said the delighted author.

“What do you think of it?” asked Benson.

The author puckered his lips.

“It is on a par with the others,” he said.

“Yes,” said Benson thoughtfully. “I should say the same thing. And when we have said that there is nothing left to say. They are truly a remarkable product. Quite unique, you know. And yet,” he said, frowning at Armiston, “I believe that this man Armiston is to be ranked as the most dangerous man in the world to-day.”

“Oh, I say—” began Armiston. But he checked himself, chuckling. He was very glad Mr. Benson had not looked at his card.

“I mean it,” said the other decidedly. “And you think so yourself, I fully believe. No thinking man could do otherwise.”

“In just what way? I must confess I have never thought of his work as anything but pure invention.”

It was truly delicious. Armiston would certainly make copy of this person.

“I will grant,” said Benson, “that there is not a thief in the world to-day clever enough — brainy enough — to take advantage of the suggestions put forth in these stories. But some day there will arise a man to whom they will be as simple as an ordinary blueprint, and he will profit accordingly. This magazine, by printing these stories, is merely furnishing him with his tools, showing him how to work. And the worst of it is—”

“Just a minute,” said the author. “Agreeing for the moment that these stories will be the tools of Armiston’s hero in real life some day, how about the popular magazines? They print ten such stories to one of these by Armiston.”

“Ah, my friend,” said Benson, “you forget one thing: The popular magazines deal with real life — the possible, the usual. And in that very thing they protect the public against sharpers, by exposing the methods of those same sharpers. But with Armiston — no. Much as I enjoy him as an intellectual treat, I am afraid—”

He didn’t finish his sentence. Instead he fell to shaking his head, as though in amazement at the devilish ingenuity of the author under discussion.

“I am certainly delighted,” thought that author, “that my disagreeable benefactor did not have the good grace to look at my card. This is really most entertaining.” And then aloud, and treading on thin ice: “I should be very glad to tell Oliver what you say and see what he has to say about it.”

Benson’s face broke into a wreath of wrinkles:

“Do you know him? Well, I declare! That is a privilege. I heartily wish you would tell him.”

“Would you like to meet him? I am under obligations to you. I can arrange a little dinner for a few of us.”

“No,” said Benson, shaking his head; “I would rather go on reading him without knowing him. Authors are so disappointing in real life. He may be some puny, anemic little half-portion, with dirty fingernails and all the rest that goes with genius. No offense to your friend! Besides, I am afraid I might quarrel with him.”

“Last call for lunch in the dinin’ cy — yah — aa,” sang the porter. Armiston was looking at his fingernails as the porter passed. They were manicured once a day.

“Come lunch with me,” said Benson heartily. “I should be pleased to have you as my guest. I apologize for being rude to you at the ticket window, but I did want to catch this train mighty bad.”

Armiston laughed. “Well, you have paid my carfare,” he said, “and I won’t deny I am hungry enough to eat a hundred-and-ten-pound rail. I will let you buy me a meal, being penniless.”

Benson arose, and as he drew out his handkerchief the card Armiston had given him fluttered into that worthy’s lap. Armiston closed his hand over it, chuckling again. Fate had given him the chance of preserving his incognito with this person as long as he wished. It would be a rare treat to get him ranting again about the author Armiston.

But Armiston’s host did not rant against his favorite author. In fact he was so enthusiastic over that man’s genius that the same qualities which he decried as a danger to society in his opinion only added luster to the work. Benson asked his guest innumerable questions as to the personal qualities of his ideal, and Armiston shamelessly constructed a truly remarkable person. The other listened entranced.

“No, I don’t want to know him,” he said. “In the first place I haven’t the time, and in the second I’d be sure to start a row. And then there is another thing: If he is half the man I take him to be from what you say, he wouldn’t stand for people fawning on him and telling him what a wonder he is. That’s about what I should be doing, I am afraid.”

“Oh,” said Armiston, “he isn’t so bad as that. He is a... well, a sensible chap, with clean fingernails and all that, you know, and he gets a haircut once every three weeks, the same as the rest of us.”

“I am glad to hear you say so, Mister... er—”

Benson fell to chuckling.

“By gad,” he said, “here we have been talking with each other for an hour, and I haven’t so much as taken a squint at your card to see who you are!”

He searched for the card Armiston had given him.

“Call it Brown,” said Armiston, lying gorgeously and with a feeling of utmost righteousness. “Martin Brown, single, read-and-write, color white, laced shoes and derby hat, as the police say.”

“All right, Mr. Brown; glad to know you. We will have some cigars. You have no idea how much you interest me, Mr. Brown. How much does Armiston get for his stories?”

“Every word he writes brings him the price of a good cigar. I should say he makes forty thousand a year.”

“Humph! That is better than Godahl, his star creation, could bag as a thief, I imagine, let alone the danger of getting snipped with a pistol ball on a venture.”

Armiston puffed up his chest and shot his cuffs again.

“How does he get his plots?”

Armiston knitted his ponderous brows. “There’s the rub,” he said. “You can talk about so-and-so much a word until you are deaf, dumb, and blind. But, after all, it isn’t the number of words or how they are strung together that makes a story. It is the ideas. And ideas are scarce.”

“I have an idea that I have always wanted to have Armiston get hold of, just to see what he could do with it. If you will pardon me, to my way of thinking the really important thing isn’t the ideas, but how to work out the details.”

“What’s your idea?” asked Armiston hastily. He was not averse to appropriating anything he encountered in real life and dressing it up to suit his taste. “I’ll pass it on to Armiston, if you say so.”

“Will you? That’s capital. To begin with,” Mr. Benson said as he twirled his brandy glass with long, lean, silky fingers — a hand Armiston thought he would not like to have handle him in a rage — “To begin with, Godahl, this thief, is not an ordinary thief, he is a highbrow. He has made some big hauls. He must be a very rich man now — eh? You see that he is quite real to me. By this time, I should say, Godahl has acquired such a fortune that thieving for mere money is no longer an object. What does he do? Sit down and live on his income? Not much. He is a person of refined tastes with an eye for the esthetic. He desires art objects, rare porcelains, a gem of rare cut or color set by Benvenuto Cellini, a Leonardo da Vinci — did Godahl steal the Mona Lisa, by the way? He is the most likely person I can think of — or perhaps a Gutenberg Bible. Treasures, things of exquisite beauty to look at, to enjoy in secret, not to show to other people. That is the natural development of this man Godahl, eh?”

“Splendid!” exclaimed Armiston, his enthusiasm getting the better of him.

“Have you ever heard of Mrs. Billy Wentworth?” asked Benson.

“Indeed, I know her well,” said Armiston, his guard down.

“Then you must surely have seen her white ruby?”

“White ruby! I never heard of such a thing. A white ruby?”

“Exactly. That’s just the point. Neither have I. But if Godahl heard of a white ruby the chances are he would possess it — especially if it were the only one of its kind in the world.”

“Gad! I do believe he would, from what I know of him.”

“And especially,” went on Benson, “under the circumstances. You know the Wentworths have been round a good deal. They haven’t been overscrupulous in getting things they wanted. Now Mrs. Wentworth — but before I go on with this weird tale I want you to understand me. It is pure fiction — an idea for Armiston and his wonderful Godahl. I am merely suggesting the Wentworths as fictitious characters.”

“I understand,” said Armiston.

“Mrs. Wentworth might very well possess this white ruby. Let us say she stole it from some potentate’s household in the Straits Settlements. She gained admittance by means of the official position of her husband. They can’t accuse her of theft. All they can do is to steal the gem back from her. It is a sacred stone of course. They always are in fiction stories. And the usual tribe of jugglers, rug-peddlers, and so on — all disguised, you understand — have followed her to America, seeking a chance, not on her life, not to commit violence of any kind, but to steal that stone.

“She can’t wear it,” went on Benson. “All she can do is to hide it away in some safe place. What is a safe place? Not a bank. Godahl could crack a bank with his little finger. So might those East Indian fellows laboring under the call of religion. Not in a safe. That would be folly.”

“How then?” put in Armiston eagerly.

“Ah, there you are! That’s for Godahl to find out. He knows, let us say, that these foreigners in one way or another have turned Mrs. Wentworth’s apartments upside down. They haven’t found anything. He knows that she keeps that white ruby in that house. Where is it? Ask Godahl. Do you see the point? Has Godahl ever cracked a nut like that? No. Here he must be the cleverest detective in the world and the cleverest thief at the same time. Before he can begin thieving he must make his blueprints.

“When I read Armiston,” continued Benson, “that is the kind of problem that springs up in my mind. I am always trying to think of some knot this wonderful thief would have to employ his best powers to unravel. I think of some weird situation like this one. I say to myself: ‘Good! I will write that. I will be as famous as Armiston. I will create another Godahl.’ But,” he said with a wave of his hands, “what is the result? I tie the knot, but I can’t untie it. The trouble is, I am not a Godahl. And this man Armiston, as I read him, is Godahl. He must be, or else Godahl could not be made to do the wonderful things he does. Hello! New Haven already? Mighty sorry to have you go, old chap. Great pleasure. When you get to town let me know. Maybe I will consent to meet Armiston.”

Armiston’s first care on returning to New York was to remember the providential loan by which he had been able to keep clean his record of never missing a train. He counted out the sum in bills, wrote a polite note, signed it “Martin Brown,” and dispatched it by messenger boy to J. Borden Benson, The Towers. The Towers, the address Mr. Benson’s card bore, is an ultra-fashionable apartment hotel in lower Fifth Avenue. It maintains all the pomp and solemnity of an English ducal castle. Armiston remembered having on a remote occasion taken dinner there with a friend, and the recollection always gave him a chill. It was like dining among ghosts of kings, so grand and funereal was the air that pervaded everything.

Armiston, who could not forbear curiosity as to his queer benefactor, took occasion to look him up in the Blue Book and the Club Directory, and found that J. Borden Benson was quite some personage, several lines being devoted to him. This was extremely pleasing. Armiston had been thinking of that white-ruby yarn. It appealed to his sense of the dramatic. He would work it up in his best style, and on publication have a fine laugh on Benson by sending him an autographed copy and thus waking that gentleman up to the fact that it really had been the great Armiston in person he had befriended and entertained. What a joke it would be on Benson, thought the author; not without an intermixture of personal vanity, for even a genius such as he was not blind to flattery properly applied, and Benson unknowingly had laid it on thick.

“And, by gad!” thought the author, “I will use the Wentworths as the main characters, as the victims of Godahl. They are just the people to fit into such a romance. Benson put money in my pocket, though he didn’t suspect it. Lucky he didn’t know what shifts we popular authors are put to for plots.”

Suiting the action to the words, Armiston and his wife accepted the next invitation they received from the Wentworths.

Mrs. Wentworth, be it understood, was a lion hunter. She was forever trying to gather about her such celebrities as Armiston the author, Brackens the painter, Johanssen the explorer, and others. Armiston had always withstood her wiles. He always had some excuse to keep him away from her gorgeous table, where she exhibited her lions to her simpering friends.

There were many undesirables sitting at the table, idle-rich youths, girls of the fast hunting set, and so on, and they all gravely shook the great author by the hand and told him what a wonderful man he was. As for Mrs. Wentworth, she was too highly elated at her success in roping him for sane speech, and she fluttered about him like a hysterical bridesmaid. But, Armiston noted with relief, one of his pals was there — Johanssen. Over cigars and cognac he managed to buttonhole the explorer.

“Johanssen,” he said, “you have been everywhere.”

“You are mistaken there,” said Johanssen. “I have never before tonight been north of Fifty-ninth Street in New York.”

“Yes, but you have been in Java and Ceylon and the Settlements. Tell me, have you ever heard of such a thing as a white ruby?”

The explorer narrowed his eyes to a slit and looked queerly at his questioner. “That’s a queer question,” he said in a low voice, “to ask in this house.”

Armiston felt his pulse quicken. “Why?” he asked, assuming an air of surprised innocence.

“If you don’t know,” said the explorer shortly, “I certainly will not enlighten you.”

“All right; as you please. But you haven’t answered my question yet. Have you ever heard of a white ruby?”

“I don’t mind telling you that I have heard of such a thing — that is, I have heard there is a ruby in existence that is called the white ruby. It isn’t really white, you know; it has a purplish tinge. But the old heathen who rightly owns it likes to call it white, just as he likes to call his blue and gray elephants white.”

“Who owns it?” asked Armiston, trying his best to make his voice sound natural. To find in this manner that there was some parallel for the mystical white ruby of which Benson had told him appealed strongly to his super-developed dramatic sense. He was now as keen on the scent as a hound.

Johanssen took to drumming on the tablecloth. He smiled to himself and his eyes glowed. Then he turned and looked sharply at his questioner.

“I suppose,” he said, “that all things are grist to a man of your trade. If you are thinking of building a story round a white ruby I can think of nothing more fascinating. But, Armiston,” he said, suddenly altering his tone and almost whispering, “if you are on the track of the white ruby let me advise you now to call off your dogs and keep your throat whole. I think I am a brave man. I have shot tigers at ten paces — held my fire purposely to see how charmed a life I really did bear. I have been charged by mad rhinos and by wounded buffaloes. I have walked across a clearing where the air was being punctured with bullets as thick as holes in a mosquito screen. But,” he said, laying his hand on Armiston’s arm, “I have never had the nerve to hunt the white ruby.”

“Capital!” exclaimed the author.

“Capital, yes, for a man who earns his bread and gets his excitement by sitting at a typewriter and dreaming about these things. But take my word for it, it isn’t capital for a man who gets his excitement by doing this thing. Hands off, my friend!”

“It really does exist then?”

Johanssen puckered his lips. “So they say,” he said.

“What’s it worth?”

“Worth? What do you mean by worth? Dollars and cents? What is your child worth to you? A million, a billion — how much? Tell me. No, you can’t. Well, that’s just what this miserable stone is worth to the man who rightfully owns it. Now let’s quit talking nonsense. There’s Billy Wentworth shooing the men into the drawing-room. I suppose we shall be entertained this evening by some of the hundred-dollar-a-minute songbirds, as usual. It’s amazing what these people will spend for mere vulgar display when there are hundreds of families starving within a mile of this spot!”

Two famous singers sang that night. Armi — ston did not have much opportunity to look over the house. He was now fully determined to lay the scene of his story in this very house. At leave-taking the sugar-sweet Mrs. Billy Wentworth drew Armiston aside and said:

“It’s rather hard on you to ask you to sit through an evening with these people. I will make amends by asking you to come to me some night when we can be by ourselves. Are you interested in rare curios? Yes, we all are. I have some really wonderful things I want you to see. Let us make it next Tuesday, with a little informal dinner, just for ourselves.”

Armiston then and there made the lion hunter radiantly happy by accepting her invitation to sit at her board as a family friend instead of as a lion.

As he put his wife into their automobile he turned and looked at the house. It stood opposite Central Park. It was a copy of some French château in gray sandstone, with a barbican, and overhanging towers, and all the rest of it. The windows of the street floor peeped out through deep embrasures and were heavily guarded with iron latticework.

“Godahl will have the very devil of a time breaking in there,” he chuckled to himself. Late that night his wife awakened him to find out why he was tossing about so.

“That white ruby has got on my nerves,” he said cryptically, and she, thinking he was dreaming, persuaded him to try to sleep again.

Great authors must really live in the flesh, at times at least, the lives of their great characters. Otherwise these great characters would not be so real as they are. Here was Armiston, who had created a superman in the person of Godahl the thief. For ten years he had written nothing else. He had laid the life of Godahl out in squares, thought for him, dreamed about him, set him to new tasks, gone through all sorts of queer adventures with him. And this same Godahl had amply repaid him. He had raised the author from the ranks of struggling amateurs to a position among the most highly paid fiction writers in the United States. He had brought him ease and luxury. Armiston did not need the money any more. The serial rights telling of the exploits of this Godahl had paid him handsomely. The books of Godahl’s adventures had paid him even better, and had furnished him yearly with a never-failing income, like government bonds, but at a much higher rate of interest. Even though the crimes this Godahl had committed were all on paper and almost impossible, nevertheless Godahl was a living being to his creator. More — he was Armiston, and Armiston was Godahl.

It was not surprising, then, that when Tuesday came Armiston awaited the hour with feverish impatience. Here, as his strange friend had so thoughtlessly and casually told him was an opportunity for the great Godahl to outdo even himself. Here was an opportunity for Godahl to be the greatest detective in the world, in the first place, before he could carry out one of his sensational thefts.

So it was Godahl, not Armiston, who helped his wife out of their automobile that evening and mounted the splendid steps of the Wentworth mansion. He cast his eye aloft, took in every inch of the façade.

“No,” he said, “Godahl cannot break in from the street. I must have a look at the back of the house.”

He cast his eyes on the ironwork that guarded the deep windows giving on the street.

It was not iron after all, but chilled steel sunk into armored concrete. The outposts of this house were as safely guarded as the vault of the United States mint.

“It’s got to be from the inside,” he said, making mental note of this fact.

The butler was stone-deaf. This was rather singular. Why should a family of the standing of the Wentworths employ a man as head of their city establishment who was stone-deaf? Armiston looked at the man with curiosity. He was still in middle age. Surely, then, he was not retained because of years of service. No, there was something more than charity behind this. He addressed a casual word to the man as he handed him his hat and cane. His back was turned and the man did not reply. Armiston turned and repeated the sentence in the same tone. The man watched his lips in the bright light of the hall.

“A lip-reader, and a dandy,” thought Armiston, for the butler seemed to catch every word he said.

“Fact number two!” said the creator of Godahl the thief.

He felt no compunction at thus noting the most intimate details of the Wentworth establishment. An accident had put him on the track of a rare good story, and it was all copy. Besides, he told himself, when he came to write the story he would disguise it in such a way that no one reading it would know it was about the Wentworths. If their establishment happened to possess the requisite setting for a great story, surely there was no reason why he should not take advantage of that fact.

The great thief — he made no bones of the fact to himself that he had come here to help Godahl — accepted the flattering greeting of his hostess with the grand air that so well fitted him. Armiston was tall and thin, with slender fingers and a touch of gray in his wavy hair, for all his youthful years, and he knew how to wear his clothes. Mrs. Wentworth was proud of him as a social ornament, even aside from his glittering fame as an author. And Mrs. Armiston was well born, so there was no jar in their being received in the best house of the town.

The dinner was truly delightful. Here Armiston saw, or thought he saw, one of the reasons for the deaf butler. The hostess had him so trained that she was able to catch her servant’s eye and instruct him in this or that trifle by merely moving her lips. It was almost uncanny, thought the author, this silent conversation the deaf man and his mistress were able to carry on unnoticed by the others.

“By gad, it’s wonderful! Godahl, my friend, underscore that note of yours referring to the deaf butler. Don’t miss it. It will take a trick.”

Armiston gave his undivided attention to his hostess as soon as he found Wentworth entertaining Mrs. Armiston and thus properly dividing the party. He persuaded her to talk by a cleverly pointed question here and there; and as she talked, he studied her.

“We are going to rob you of your precious white ruby, my friend,” he thought humorously to himself; “and while we are laying our wires there is nothing about you too small to be worthy of our attention.”

Did she really possess the white ruby? Did this man Benson know anything about the white ruby? And what was the meaning of the strange actions of his friend Johanssen when approached on the subject in this house? His hostess came to have a wonderful fascination for him. He pictured this beautiful creature so avid in her lust for rare gems that she actually did penetrate the establishment of some heathen potentate in the Straits simply for the purpose of stealing the mystic stone. “Have you ever, by any chance, been in the Straits?” he asked indifferently.

“Wait,” Mrs. Wentworth said with a laugh as she touched his hand lightly; “I have some curios from the Straits, and I will venture to say you have never seen their like.”

Half an hour later they were all seated over coffee and cigarettes in Mrs. Wentworth’s boudoir. It was indeed a strange place. There was scarcely a single corner of the world that had not contributed something to its furnishing. Carvings of teak and ivory; hangings of sweet-scented vegetable fibers; lamps of jade; queer little gods, all sitting like Buddha with their legs drawn up under them, carved out of jade or sardonyx; scarfs of baroque pearls; Darjeeling turquoises — Armiston had never before seen such a collection. And each item had its story. He began to look on this frail little woman with different eyes. She had been and seen and done, and the tale of her life, what she had actually lived, outshone even that of the glittering rascal Godahl, who was standing beside him now and directing his ceaseless questions. “Have you any rubies?” he asked.

Mrs. Wentworth bent before a safe in the wall. With swift fingers she whirled the combination. The keen eyes of Armiston followed the bright knob like a cat.

“Fact number three!” said the Godahl in him as he mentally made note of the numbers. “Five — eight — seven — four — six. That’s the combination.”

Mrs. Wentworth showed him six pigeon-blood rubies. “This one is pale,” he said carelessly, holding a particularly large stone up to the light. “Is it true that occasionally they are found white?”

His hostess looked at him before answering. He was intent on a deep-red stone he held in the palm of his hand. It seemed a thousand miles deep.

“What a fantastic idea!” she said. She glanced at her husband, who had reached out and taken her hand in a naturally affectionate manner.

“Fact number four!” mentally noted Armiston. “Are not you in mortal fear of robbery with all of this wealth?”

Mrs. Wentworth laughed lightly.

“That is why we live in a fortress,” she said.

“Have you never, then, been visited by thieves?” asked the author boldly.

“Never!” she said.

“A lie,” thought Armiston. “Fact number five! We are getting on swimmingly.”

“I do not believe that even your Godahl the Infallible could get in here,” Mrs. Wentworth said. “Not even the servants enter this room. That door is not locked with a key; yet it locks. I am not much of a housekeeper,” she said lazily, “but such housekeeping as is done in this room is all done by these poor little hands of mine.”

“No! Most amazing! May I look at the door?”

“Yes, Mr. Godahl,” said this woman, who had lived more lives than Godahl himself.

Armiston examined the door, this strange device that locked without a key, apparently indeed without a lock, and came away disappointed.

“Well, Mr. Godahl?” his hostess said tauntingly. He shook his head in perplexity.

“Most ingenious,” he said; and then suddenly: “Yet I will venture that if I turned Godahl loose on this problem he would solve it.”

“What fun!” she cried clapping her hands.

“You challenge him?” asked Armiston.

“What nonsense is this!” cried Wentworth, coming forward.

“No nonsense at all,” said Mrs. Wentworth. “Mr. Armiston has just said that his Godahl could rob me. Let him try. If he can — if mortal man can gain the secret of ingress and egress of this room — I want to know it. I don’t believe mortal man can enter this room.”

Armiston noted a strange glitter in her eyes.

“Gad! She was born to the part! What a woman!” he thought. And then aloud:

“I will set him to work. I will lay the scene of his exploit in — say — Hungary, where this room might very well exist in some feudal castle. How many people have entered this room since it was made the storehouse of all this wealth?”

“Not six besides yourself,” replied Mrs. Wentworth.

“Then no one can recognize it if I describe it in a story — in fact, I will change the material details. We will say that it is not jewels Godahl is seeking. We will say that it is a—”

Mrs. Wentworth’s hand touched his own. The tips of her fingers were cold. “A white ruby,” she said.

“Gad! What a thoroughbred!” he exclaimed to himself — or to Godahl. And then aloud: “Capital! I will send you a copy of the story autographed.”

The next day he called at The Towers and sent up his card to Mr. Benson’s apartments. Surely a man of Benson’s standing could be trusted with such a secret. In fact it was evidently not a secret to Benson, who in all probability was one of the six Mrs. Wentworth said had entered that room. Armiston wanted to talk the matter over with Benson. He had given up his idea of having fun with him by sending him a marked copy of the magazine containing his tale. His story had taken complete possession of him, as always had been the case when he was at work dispatching Godahl on his adventures.

“If that ruby really exists,” Armiston said, “I don’t know whether I shall write the story or steal the ruby for myself. Benson is right. Godahl should not steal any more for mere money. He is after rare, unique things now. And I am Godahl. I feel the same way myself.”

A valet appeared, attired in a gorgeous livery. Armiston wondered why any self-respecting American would consent to don such raiment, even though it was the livery of the great Benson family.

“Mr. Armiston, sir,” said the valet, looking at the author’s card he held in his hand. “Mr. Benson sailed for Europe yesterday morning. He is spending the summer in Norway. I am to follow on the next steamer. Is there any message I can take to him, sir? I have heard him speak of you, sir.”

Armiston took the card and wrote on it in pencil:

“I called to apologize. I am Martin Brown. The chance was too good to miss. You will pardon me, won’t you?”

For the next two weeks Armiston gave himself over to his dissipation, which was accompanying Godahl on this adventure. It was a formidable task. The secret room he placed in a Hungarian castle, as he had promised. A beautiful countess was his heroine. She had seen the world, mostly in man’s attire, and her escapades had furnished vivacious reading for two continents. No one could possibly connect her with Mrs. Billy Wentworth. So far it was easy. But how was Godahl to get into this wonderful room where the countess had hidden this wonderful rare white ruby? The room was lined with chilled steel. Even the door — this he had noted when he was examining that peculiar portal — was lined with layers of steel. It could withstand any known tool.

However, Armiston was Armiston, and Godahl was Godahl. He got into that room. He got the white ruby!

The manuscript went to the printers, and the publishers said that Armiston had never done anything like it since he started Godahl on his astonishing career.

He banked the check for his tale, and as he did so he said: “Gad! I would a hundred times rather possess that white ruby. Confound the thing! I feel as if I had not heard the last of it.”

Armiston and his wife went to Maine for the summer without leaving their address. Along in the early fall he received by registered mail, forwarded by his trusted servant at the town house, a package containing the envelope he had addressed to J. Borden Benson, The Towers. Furthermore it contained the dollar bills he had dispatched to that individual, together with his note which he had signed “Martin Brown.” And across the note, in the most insulting manner, was written in coarse, greasy blue-pencil lines:

“Damnable impertinence. I’ll cane you the first time I see you.”

And no more. That was enough of course — quite sufficient.

In the same mail came a note from Armiston’s publishers, saying that his story, “The White Ruby,” was scheduled for publication in the October number, out September twenty-fifth. This cheered him up. He was anxious to see it in print. Late in September they started back to town.

“Aha!” he said as he sat reading his paper in the parlor car — he had caught this train by the veriest tip of its tail and upset the running schedule in the act — “Ah! I see my genial friend, J. Borden Benson, is in town, contrary to custom at this time of year. Life must be a great bore to that snob.”

A few days after arriving in town he received a package of advance copies of the magazine containing his story, and he read the tale of “The White Ruby” as if he had never seen it before. On the cover of one copy, which he was to dispatch to his grumpy benefactor, J. Borden Benson, he wrote:

On another he wrote:

He dispatched these two magazines with a feeling of glee. No sooner had he done so, however, than he learned that the Wentworths had not yet returned from Newport. The magazine would be forwarded to them no doubt. The Wentworths’ absence made the tale all the better, in fact, for in his story Armiston had insisted on Godahl’s breaking into the castle and solving the mystery of the keyless door during the season when the château was closed and strung with a perfect network of burglar alarms connecting with the gendarmerie in the near-by village.

That was the twenty-fifth day of September. The magazine was put on sale that morning.

On the twenty-sixth day of September Armiston bought a late edition of an afternoon paper from a leather-lunged boy who was hawking “Extra!” in the street. Across the first page the headlines met his eye:

It was ten o’clock that night when an automobile drew up at Armiston’s door and a tall man with a square jaw, square shoes, and a square mustache alighted. This was Deputy Police Commissioner Byrnes, a professional detective whom the new administration had drafted into the city’s service from the government secret service.

Byrnes was admitted, and as he advanced to the middle of the drawing-room, without so much as a nod to the ghostlike Armiston who stood shivering before him, he drew a package of papers from his pocket.

“I presume you have seen all the evening papers,” he said, spitting his words through his half-closed teeth with so much show of personal malice that Armiston — never a brave man in spite of his Godahl — cowered before him.

Armiston shook his head dumbly at first, but at length he managed to say: “Not all; no.”

The deputy commissioner with much deliberation drew out the latest extra and handed it to Armiston without a word.

It was the Evening News. The first page was divided down its entire length by a black line. On one side and occupying four columns, was a word-for-word reprint of Armiston’s story, “The White Ruby.”

On the other, the facts in deadly parallel, was a graphic account of the robbery and murder at the home of Billy Wentworth. The parallel was glaring in the intensity of its dumb accusation. On the one side was the theoretical Godahl, working his masterly way of crime, step by step; and on the other was the plagiarism of Armiston’s story, following the intricacies of the master mind with copybook accuracy.

The editor, who must have been a genius in his way, did not accuse. He simply placed the fiction and the fact side by side and let the reader judge for himself. It was masterly. If, as the law says, the mind that conceives, the intelligence that directs, a crime is more guilty than the very hand that acts, then Armiston here was both thief and murderer. Thief, because the white ruby had actually been stolen. Mrs. Billy Wentworth, rushed to the city by special train, attended by doctors and nurses, now confirmed the story of the theft of the ruby. Murderer, because in the story Godahl had for once in his career stooped to murder as the means, and had triumphed over the dead body of his confederate, scorning, in his joy at possessing the white ruby, the paltry diamonds, pearls, and red rubies with which his confederate had crammed his pockets.

Armiston seized the police official by his lapels.

“The butler!” he screamed. “The butler! Yes, the butler. Quick, or he will have flown.”

Byrnes gently disengaged the hands that had grasped him.

“Too late,” he said. “He has already flown. Sit down and quiet your nerves. We need your help. You are the only man in the world who can help us now.”

When Armiston was himself again he told the whole tale, beginning with his strange meeting with J. Borden Benson on the train, and ending with his accepting Mrs. Wentworth’s challenge to have Godahl break into the room and steal the white ruby. Byrnes nodded over the last part. He had already heard that from Mrs. Wentworth, and there was the autographed copy of the magazine to show for it.

“You say that J. Borden Benson told you of this white ruby in the first place.”

Armiston again told, in great detail, the circumstances, all the humor now turned into grim tragedy.

“That is strange,” said the ex-secret-service chief. “Did you leave your purse at home or was your pocket picked?”

“I thought at first that I had absent-mindedly left it at home. Then I remembered having paid the chauffeur out of the roll of bills, so my pocket must have been picked.”

“What kind of a looking man was this Benson?”

“You must know him,” said Armiston.

“Yes, I know him; but I want to know what he looked like to you. I want to find out how he happened to be so handy when you were in need of money.”

Armiston described the man minutely.

The deputy sprang to his feet. “Come with me,” he said; and they hurried into the automobile and soon drew up in front of The Towers.

Five minutes later they were ushered into the magnificent apartment of J. Borden Benson. That worthy was in his bath preparing to retire for the night.

“I don’t catch the name,” Armiston and the deputy heard him cry through the bathroom door to his valet.

“Mr. Oliver Armiston, sir.”

“Ah, he has come for his caning, I expect. I’ll be there directly.”

He did not wait to complete his toilet, so eager was he to see the author. He strode out in a brilliant bathrobe and in one hand he carried an alpenstock. His eyes glowed in anger. But the sight of Byrnes surprised as well as halted him.

“Do you mean to say this is J. Borden Benson?” cried Armiston to Byrnes, rising to his feet and pointing at the man.

“The same,” said the deputy; “I swear to it. I know him well! I take it he is not the gentleman who paid your carfare to New Haven.”

“Not by a hundred pounds!” exclaimed Armiston as he surveyed the huge bulk of the elephantine clubman.

The forced realization that the stranger he had hitherto regarded as a benefactor was not J. Borden Benson at all, but some one who had merely assumed that worthy’s name while he was playing the conceited author as an easy dupe, did more to quiet Armiston’s nerves than all the sedatives his doctor had given him. It was a badly dashed popular author who sat down with the deputy commissioner in his library an hour later. He would gladly have consigned Godahl to the bottom of the sea; but it was too late. Godahl had taken the trick.

“How do you figure it?” Armiston asked, turning to the deputy.

“The beginning is simple enough. It is the end that bothers me,” said the official. “Your bogus J. Borden Benson is, of course, the brains of the whole combination. Your infernal Godahl has told us just exactly how this crime was committed. Now your infernal Godahl must bring the guilty parties to justice.”

It was plain to be seen that the police official hated Godahl worse than poison, and feared him too.

“Why not look in the Rogues’ Gallery for this man who befriended me on the train?”

The chief laughed.

“For the love of Heaven, Armiston, do you, who pretend to know all about scientific thievery, think for a moment that the man who took your measure so easily is of the class of crooks who get their pictures in the Rogues’ Gallery? Talk sense!”

“I can’t believe you when you say he picked my pocket.”

“I don’t care whether you believe me or not; he did, or one of his pals did. It all amounts to the same thing, don’t you see? First, he wanted to get acquainted with you. Now the best way to get into your good graces was to put you unsuspectingly under obligation to him. So he robs you of your money. From what I have seen of you in the last few hours it must have been like taking candy from a child. Then he gets next to you in line. He pretends that you are merely some troublesome toad in his path. He gives you money for your ticket, to get you out of his way so he won’t miss his train. His train! Of course his train is your train. He puts you in a position where you have to make advances to him. And then, grinning to himself all the time at your conceit and gullibility, he plays you through your pride, your Godahl. Think of the creator of the great Godahl falling for a trick like that!”

Byrnes’s last words were the acme of biting sarcasm.

“You admit yourself that he is too clever for you to put your hands on.”

“And then,” went on Byrnes, not heeding the interruption, “he invites you to lunch and tells you what he wants you to do for him. And you follow his lead like a sheep at the tail of the bellwether! Great Scott, Armiston! I would give a year’s salary for one hour’s conversation with that man.”

Armiston was beginning to see the part this queer character had played; but he was in a semi-hysterical state, and, like a woman in such a position, he wanted a calm mind to tell him the whole thing in words of one syllable, to verify his own dread.

“What do you mean?” he asked. “I don’t quite follow. You say he tells me what he wants me to do.”

Byrnes shrugged his shoulders in disgust; then, as if resigned to the task before him, he began his explanation:

“Here, man, I will draw a diagram for you. This gentleman friend of yours — we will call him John Smith for convenience — wants to get possession of this white ruby. He knows that it is in the keeping of Mrs. Billy Wentworth. He knows you know Mrs. Wentworth and have access to her house. He knows that she stole this bauble and is frightened to death all the time. Now John Smith is a pretty clever chap. He handled the great Armiston like hot putty. He had exhausted his resources. He is baffled and needs help. What does he do? He reads the stories about the great Godahl. Confidentially, Mr. Armiston, I will tell you that I think your great Godahl is mush. But that is neither here nor there. If you can sell him as a gold brick, all right. But Mr. John Smith is struck by the wonderful ingenuity of this Godahl. He says: ‘Ha! I will get Godahl to tell me how to get this gem!’

“So he gets hold of yourself, sir, and persuades you that you are playing a joke on him by getting him to rant and rave about the great Godahl. Then — and here the villain enters — he says: ‘Here is a thing the great Godahl cannot do. I dare him to do it.’ He tells you about the gem, whose very existence is quite fantastic enough to excite the imagination of the wonderful Armiston. And by clever suggestion he persuades you to lay the plot at the home of Mrs. Wentworth. And all the time you are chuckling to yourself, thinking what a rare joke you are going to have on J. Borden Benson when you send him an autographed copy and show him that he was talking to the distinguished genius all the time and didn’t know it. That’s the whole story, sir. Now wake up!”

Byrnes sat back in his chair and regarded Armiston with the smile a pedagogue bestows on a refractory boy whom he has just flogged soundly.

“I will explain further,” he continued. “You haven’t visited the house yet. You can’t. Mrs. Wentworth, for all she is in bed with four dozen hot-water bottles, would tear you limb from limb if you went there. And don’t you think for a minute she isn’t able to. That woman is a vixen.”

Armiston nodded gloomily. The very thought of her now sent him into a cold sweat.

“Mr. Godahl, the obliging,” continued the deputy, “notes one thing to begin with: The house cannot be entered from the outside. So it must be an inside job. How can this be accomplished? Well, there is the deaf butler. Why is he deaf? Godahl ponders. Ha! He has it! The Wentworths are so dependent on servants that they must have them round at all times. This butler is the one who is constantly about them. They are worried to death by their possession of this white ruby. Their house has been raided from the inside a dozen times. Nothing is taken, mind you. They suspect their servants. This thing haunts them, but the woman will not give up this foolish bauble. So she has as her major domo a man who cannot understand a word in any language unless he is looking at the speaker and is in a bright light. He can only understand the lips. Handy, isn’t it? In a dull light or with their backs turned they can talk about anything they want to. This is a jewel of a butler.

“But,” added Byrnes, “one day a man calls. He is a lawyer. He tells the butler he is heir to a fortune — fifty thousand dollars. He must go to Ireland to claim it. Your friend on the train — he is the man of course — sends your butler to Ireland. So this precious butler is lost. They must have another. Only a deaf one will do. And they find just the man they want — quite accidentally, you understand. Of course it is Godahl, with forged letters saying he has been in service in great houses. Presto! The great Godahl himself is now the butler. It is simple enough to play deaf. You say this is fiction. Let me tell you this: Six weeks ago the Wentworths actually changed butlers. That hasn’t come out in the papers yet.”

Armiston, who had listened to the deputy’s review of his story listlessly, now sat up with a start. He suddenly exclaimed gleefully:

“But my story didn’t come out till two days ago!”

“Ah, yes; but you forget that it has been in the hands of your publishers for three months. A man who was clever enough to dupe the great Armiston wouldn’t shirk the task of getting hold of a proof of that story.”

Armiston sank deeper into his chair.

“Once Godahl got inside the house the rest was simple. He corrupted one of the servants. He opened the steel-lined door with the flame of an oxyacetylene blast. As you say in your story that flame cuts steel like wax; he didn’t have to bother about the lock. He simply cut the door down. Then he put his confederate in good humor by telling him to fill his pockets with the diamonds and other junk in the safe, which he obligingly opens. One thing bothers me, Armiston. How did you find out about that infernal contraption that killed the confederate?”

Armiston buried his face in his hands. Byrnes rudely shook him.

“Come,” he said; “you murdered that man, though you are innocent. Tell me how.”

“Is this the third degree?” said Armiston.

“It looks like it,” said the deputy grimly as he gnawed at his stubby mustache. Armiston drew a long breath, like one who realizes how hopeless is his situation. He began to speak in a low tone. All the while the deputy glared at Godahl’s inventor with his accusing eye.

“When I was sitting in the treasure room with the Wentworths and my wife, playing auction bridge, I dismissed the puzzle of the door as easily solved by means of the brazing flame. The problem was not to get into the house or into this room, but to find the ruby. It was not in the safe.”

“No, of course not. I suppose your friend on the train was kind enough to tell you that. He had probably looked there himself.”

“Gad! He did tell me that, come to think of it. Well, I studied that room. I was sure the white ruby, if it really existed, was within ten feet of me. I examined the floor, the ceiling, the walls. No result. But,” he said, shivering as if in a draft of cold air, “there was a chest in that room made of Lombardy oak.” The harassed author buried his face in his hands. “Oh, this is terrible!” he moaned.

“Go on,” said the deputy in his colorless voice.

“I can’t. I tell it all in the story, Heaven help me!”

“I know you tell it all in the story,” came the rasping voice of Byrnes; “but I want you to tell it to me. I want to hear it from your own lips — as Armiston, you understand, whose deviltry has just killed a man; not as your damnable Godahl.”

“The chest was not solid oak,” went on Armiston. “It was solid steel covered with oak to disguise it.”

“How did you know that?”

“I had seen it before.”

“Where?”

“In Italy fifteen years ago, in a decayed castle, back through the Soldini pass from Lugano. It was the possession of an old nobleman, a friend of a friend of mine.”

“Humph!” grunted the deputy. And then: “Well, how did you know it was the same one?”

“By the inscription carved on the front. It was — but I have told all this in print already. Why need I go over it all again?”

“I want to hear it again from your own lips. Maybe there are some points you did not tell in print. Go on!”

“The inscription was ‘Sanctus Dominus.’ ”

The deputy smiled grimly.

“Very fitting, I should say. Praise the Lord with the most diabolical engine of destruction I have ever seen.”

“And then,” said Armiston, “there was the owner’s name — ‘Arno Petronii.’ Queer name that.”

“Yes,” said the deputy dryly. “How did you hit on this as the receptacle for the white ruby?”

“If it were the same one I saw in Lugano — and I felt sure it was — it was certain death to attempt to open it — that is, for one who did not know how. Such machines were common enough in the Middle Ages. There was an obvious way to open it. It was meant to be obvious. To open it that way was inevitable death. It released tremendous springs that crushed anything within a radius of five feet. You saw that?”

“I did,” said the deputy, and he shuddered as he spoke. Then, bringing his fierce face within an inch of the cowering Armiston, he said:

“You knew the secret spring by which that safe could be opened as simply as a shoebox, eh?”

Armiston nodded his head.

“But Godahl did not,” he said. “Having recognized this terrible chest,” went on the author, “I guessed it must be the hiding-place of the jewel — for two reasons: In the first place Mrs. Wentworth had avoided showing it to us. She passed it by as a mere bit of curious furniture. Second, it was too big to go through the door or any one of the windows. They must have gone to the trouble of taking down the wall to get that thing in there. Something of a task, too, considering it weighs about two tons.”

“You didn’t bring out that point in your story.”

“Didn’t I? I fully intended to.”

“Maybe,” said the deputy, watching his man sharply, “it so impressed your friend who paid your carfare to New Haven that he clipped it out of the manuscript when he borrowed it.”

“There is no humor in this affair, sir, if you will pardon me,” said Armiston.

“That is quite true. Go ahead.”

“The rest you know. Godahl, in my story — the thief in real life — had to sacrifice a life to open that chest. So he corrupted a small kitchen servant, filling his pockets with these other jewels, and told him to touch the spring.”

“You murdered that man in cold blood,” said the deputy, rising and pacing the floor. “The poor deluded devil, from the looks of what’s left of him, never let out a whimper, never knew what hit him. Here, take some more of this brandy. Your nerves are in a bad way.”

“What I can’t make out is this,” said Armiston after a time. “There was a million dollars’ worth of stuff in that room that could have been put into a quart measure. Why did not this thief, who was willing to go to all the trouble to get the white ruby, take some of the jewels? Nothing is missing besides the white ruby, as I understand it. Is there?”

“No,” said the deputy. “Not a thing. Here comes a messenger boy.”

“For Mr. Armiston? Yes,” he said to the entering maid. The boy handed him a package for which the deputy signed.

“This is for you,” he said, turning to Armiston as he closed the door. “Open it.”

When the package was opened the first object to greet their eyes was a roll of bills.

“This grows interesting,” said Byrnes. He counted the money. “Thirty-nine dollars. Your friend evidently is returning the money he stole from you at the station. What does he have to say for himself? I see there is a note.”

He reached over and took the paper out of Armiston’s hands. It was ordinary bond stationery, with no identifying marks of any consequence. The note was written in bronze ink, in a careful copperplate hand, very small and precise. It read:

“Most Excellency Sir: Herewith, most honored dollars I am dispatching complete. Regretful extremely of sad blood being not to be prevented. Accept trifle from true friend.”

That was all.

“There’s a jeweler’s box,” said Byrnes. “Open it.”

Inside the box was a lozenge-shaped diamond about the size of a little fingernail. It hung from a tiny bar of silver, highly polished and devoid of ornament. On the back under the clasp-pin were several microscopic characters.

There were several obvious clues to be followed — the messenger boy, the lawyers who induced the deaf butler to go to Ireland on what later proved to be a wild-goose chase, the employment agency through which the new butler had been secured, and so on. But all of these avenues proved too respectable to yield results. Deputy Byrnes had early arrived at his own conclusions, by virtue of the knowledge he had gained as government agent, yet to appease the popular indignation he kept up a desultory search for the criminal.

It was natural that Armiston should think of his friend Johanssen at this juncture. Johanssen possessed that wonderful oriental capacity of aloofness which we Westerners are so ready to term indifference or lack of curiosity.

“No, I thank you,” said Johanssen. “I’d rather not mix in.”

The pleadings of the author were in vain. His words fell on deaf ears.

“If you will not lift a hand because of your friendship for me,” said Armiston bitterly, “then think of the law. Surely there is something due justice, when both robbery and bloody murder have been committed!”

“Justice!” cried Johanssen in scorn. “Justice, you say! My friend, if you steal from me, and I reclaim by force that which is mine, is that injustice? If you cannot see the idea behind that, surely, then, I cannot explain it to you.”

“Answer one question,” said Armiston. “Have you any idea who the man was I met on the train?”

“For your own peace of mind — yes. As a clue leading to what you so glibly term justice — pshaw! Tonight’s sundown would be easier for you to catch than this man if I know him. Mind you, Armiston, I do not know. But I believe. Here is what I believe:

“In a dozen courts of kings and petty princelings that I know of in the East there are Westerners retained as advisers — fiscal agents they usually call them. Usually they are American or English, or occasionally German.

“Now I ask you a question. Say that you were in the hire of a heathen prince, and a grievous wrong were done that prince, say, by a thoughtless woman who had not the least conception of the beauty of an idea she had outraged. Merely for the possession of a bauble, valueless to her except to appease vanity, she ruthlessly rode down a superstition that was as holy to this prince as your own belief in Christ is to you. What would you do?”

Without waiting for Armiston to answer, Johanssen went on:

“I know a man— You say this man you met on the train had wonderful hands, did he not? Yes, I thought so. Armiston, I know a man who would not sit idly by and smile to himself over the ridiculous fuss occasioned by the loss of an imperfect stone — off color, badly cut, and everything else. Neither would he laugh at the superstition behind it. He would say to himself: ‘This superstition is older by several thousand years than I or my people.’ And this man, whom I know, is brave enough to right that wrong himself if his underlings failed.”

“I follow,” said Armiston dully.

“But,” said Johanssen, leaning forward and tapping the author on the knee — “but the task proves too big for him. What did he do? He asked the cleverest man in the world to help him. And Godahl helped him. That,” said Johanssen, interrupting Armiston with a raised finger, “is the story of the white ruby. ‘The Story of the White Ruby’ you see, is something infinitely finer than mere vulgar robbery and murder, as the author of the Infallible Godahl conceived it.”

Johanssen said a great deal more. In the end he took the lozenge-shaped diamond pendant and put the glass on the silver bar, that his friend might see the inscription on the back. He told him what the inscription signified — “Brother of a King,” and, furthermore, how few men alive possessed the capacity for brotherhood.

“I think,” said Armiston as he was about to take his leave, “that I will travel in the Straits this winter.”

“If you do,” said Johanssen, “I earnestly advise you to leave your Godahl and his decoration at home.”

The Caballero’s Way O. Henry

In “The Caballero’s Way,” O. Henry, the pseudonym of William Sydney Porter (1862–1910), created a character who went on to become a beloved figure in motion pictures, radio, television, comic books, and comic strips, undergoing a major change from his original incarnation. The Cisco Kid is not a heroic figure in this short story, but the exact opposite, a killer and multiple murderer who is transformed in the first film, In Old Arizona (1929), into a sartorial, dressed-all-in-black, turn-of-the-century Mexican hero who captures outlaws and rescues damsels in distress. Warner Baxter won the Best Actor Oscar, the second ever given, for his portrayal of the Cisco Kid. There were multiple films about him, plus 156 half-hour television programs (among the first to be shot in color) between 1950 and 1956. He was played by Duncan Renaldo; his sidekick, Pancho (a character not in the original story), was played for comic effect by Leo Carrillo.

As O. Henry, Porter wrote approximately six hundred short stories that once were as critically acclaimed as they were popular. Often undervalued today because of their sentimentality, many nonetheless remain iconic and familiar, notably such classics as “The Gift of the Magi,” “The Furnished Room,” “A Retrieved Reformation” (better known for its several stage and film versions as Alias Jimmy Valentine), and “The Ransom of Red Chief.” The O. Henry Prize Stories, a prestigious annual anthology of the year’s best short stories named in his honor, has been published since 1919.

“The Caballero’s Way” was originally published in the July 1907 issue of Everybody’s; it was first published in book form in O. Henry’s Heart of the West (New York, McClure, 1907).

The Cisco Kid had killed six men in more or less fair scrimmages, had murdered twice as many (mostly Mexicans), and had winged a larger number whom he modestly forbore to count. Therefore a woman loved him.

The Kid was twenty-five, looked twenty; and a careful insurance company would have estimated the probable time of his demise at, say, twenty-six. His habitat was anywhere between the Frio and the Rio Grande. He killed for the love of it — because he was quick-tempered — to avoid arrest — for his own amusement — any reason that came to his mind would suffice. He had escaped capture because he could shoot five-sixths of a second sooner than any sheriff or ranger in the service, and because he rode a speckled roan horse that knew every cow-path in the mesquite and pear thickets from San Antonio to Matamoras.

Tonia Perez, the girl who loved the Cisco Kid, was half Carmen, half Madonna, and the rest — oh, yes, a woman who is half Carmen and half Madonna can always be something more — the rest, let us say, was humming-bird. She lived in a grass-roofed jacal near a little Mexican settlement at the Lone Wolf Crossing of the Frio. With her lived a father or grandfather, a lineal Aztec, somewhat less than a thousand years old, who herded a hundred goats and lived in a continuous drunken dream from drinking mescal. Back of the jacal a tremendous forest of bristling pear, twenty feet high at its worst, crowded almost to its door. It was along the bewildering maze of this spinous thicket that the speckled roan would bring the Kid to see his girl. And once, clinging like a lizard to the ridge-pole, high up under the peaked grass roof, he had heard Tonia, with her Madonna face and Carmen beauty and humming-bird soul, parley with the sheriff’s posse, denying knowledge of her man in her soft melange of Spanish and English.

One day the adjutant-general of the State, who is, ex officio, commander of the ranger forces, wrote some sarcastic lines to Captain Duval of Company X, stationed at Laredo, relative to the serene and undisturbed existence led by murderers and desperadoes in the said captain’s territory.

The captain turned the colour of brick dust under his tan, and forwarded the letter, after adding a few comments, per ranger Private Bill Adamson, to ranger Lieutenant Sandridge, camped at a water hole on the Nueces with a squad of five men in preservation of law and order.

Lieutenant Sandridge turned a beautiful couleur de rose through his ordinary strawberry complexion, tucked the letter in his hip pocket, and chewed off the ends of his gamboge moustache.

The next morning he saddled his horse and rode alone to the Mexican settlement at the Lone Wolf Crossing of the Frio, twenty miles away.

Six feet two, blond as a Viking, quiet as a deacon, dangerous as a machine gun, Sandridge moved among the jacales, patiently seeking news of the Cisco Kid.

Far more than the law, the Mexicans dreaded the cold and certain vengeance of the lone rider that the ranger sought. It had been one of the Kid’s pastimes to shoot Mexicans “to see them kick”: if he demanded from them moribund Terpsichorean feats, simply that he might be entertained, what terrible and extreme penalties would be certain to follow should they anger him! One and all they lounged with upturned palms and shrugging shoulders, filling the air with “quien sabes” and denials of the Kid’s acquaintance.

But there was a man named Fink who kept a store at the Crossing — a man of many nationalities, tongues, interests, and ways of thinking.

“No use to ask them Mexicans,” he said to Sandridge. “They’re afraid to tell. This hombre they call the Kid — Goodall is his name, ain’t it? — he’s been in my store once or twice. I have an idea you might run across him at — but I guess I don’t keer to say, myself. I’m two seconds later in pulling a gun than I used to be, and the difference is worth thinking about. But this Kid’s got a half-Mexican girl at the Crossing that he comes to see. She lives in that jacal a hundred yards down the arroyo at the edge of the pear. Maybe she — no, I don’t suppose she would, but that jacal would be a good place to watch, anyway.”

Sandridge rode down to the jacal of Perez. The sun was low, and the broad shade of the great pear thicket already covered the grass-thatched hut. The goats were enclosed for the night in a brush corral near by. A few kids walked the top of it, nibbling the chaparral leaves. The old Mexican lay upon a blanket on the grass, already in a stupor from his mescal, and dreaming, perhaps, of the nights when he and Pizarro touched glasses to their New World fortunes — so old his wrinkled face seemed to proclaim him to be. And in the door of the jacal stood Tonia. And Lieutenant Sandridge sat in his saddle staring at her like a gannet agape at a sailorman.

The Cisco Kid was a vain person, as all eminent and successful assassins are, and his bosom would have been ruffled had he known that at a simple exchange of glances two persons, in whose minds he had been looming large, suddenly abandoned (at least for the time) all thought of him.

Never before had Tonia seen such a man as this. He seemed to be made of sunshine and blood-red tissue and clear weather. He seemed to illuminate the shadow of the pear when he smiled, as though the sun were rising again. The men she had known had been small and dark. Even the Kid, in spite of his achievements, was a stripling no larger than herself, with black, straight hair and a cold, marble face that chilled the noonday.

As for Tonia, though she sends description to the poorhouse, let her make a millionaire of your fancy. Her blue-black hair, smoothly divided in the middle and bound close to her head, and her large eyes full of the Latin melancholy, gave her the Madonna touch. Her motions and air spoke of the concealed fire and the desire to charm that she had inherited from the gitanas of the Basque province. As for the humming-bird part of her, that dwelt in her heart; you could not perceive it unless her bright red skirt and dark blue blouse gave you a symbolic hint of the vagarious bird.

The newly lighted sun-god asked for a drink of water. Tonia brought it from the red jar hanging under the brush shelter. Sandridge considered it necessary to dismount so as to lessen the trouble of her ministrations.

I play no spy; nor do I assume to master the thoughts of any human heart; but I assert, by the chronicler’s right, that before a quarter of an hour had sped, Sandridge was teaching her how to plait a six-strand rawhide stake-rope, and Tonia had explained to him that were it not for her little English book that the peripatetic padre had given her and the little crippled chivo, that she fed from a bottle, she would be very, very lonely indeed.

Which leads to a suspicion that the Kid’s fences needed repairing, and that the adjutant-general’s sarcasm had fallen upon unproductive soil.

In his camp by the water hole Lieutenant Sandridge announced and reiterated his intention of either causing the Cisco Kid to nibble the black loam of the Frio country prairies or of haling him before a judge and jury. That sounded business-like. Twice a week he rode over to the Lone Wolf Crossing of the Frio, and directed Tonia’s slim, slightly lemon-tinted fingers among the intricacies of the slowly growing lariata. A six-strand plait is hard to learn and easy to teach.

The ranger knew that he might find the Kid there at any visit. He kept his armament ready, and had a frequent eye for the pear thicket at the rear of the jacal. Thus he might bring down the kite and the humming-bird with one stone.

While the sunny-haired ornithologist was pursuing his studies the Cisco Kid was also attending to his professional duties. He moodily shot up a saloon in a small cow village on Quintana Creek, killed the town marshal (plugging him neatly in the centre of his tin badge), and then rode away, morose and unsatisfied. No true artist is uplifted by shooting an aged man carrying an old-style .38 bulldog.

On his way the Kid suddenly experienced the yearning that all men feel when wrong-doing loses its keen edge of delight. He yearned for the woman he loved to reassure him that she was his in spite of it. He wanted her to call his bloodthirstiness bravery and his cruelty devotion. He wanted Tonia to bring him water from the red jar under the brush shelter, and tell him how the chivo was thriving on the bottle.

The Kid turned the speckled roan’s head up the ten-mile pear flat that stretches along the Arroyo Hondo until it ends at the Lone Wolf Crossing of the Frio. The roan whickered; for he had a sense of locality and direction equal to that of a belt-line street-car horse; and he knew he would soon be nibbling the rich mesquite grass at the end of a forty-foot stake-rope while Ulysses rested his head in Circe’s straw-roofed hut.

More weird and lonesome than the journey of an Amazonian explorer is the ride of one through a Texas pear flat. With dismal monotony and startling variety the uncanny and multiform shapes of the cacti lift their twisted trunks, and fat, bristly hands to encumber the way. The demon plant, appearing to live without soil or rain, seems to taunt the parched traveller with its lush grey greenness. It warps itself a thousand times about what look to be open and inviting paths, only to lure the rider into blind and impassable spine-defended “bottoms of the bag,” leaving him to retreat, if he can, with the points of the compass whirling in his head.

To be lost in the pear is to die almost the death of the thief on the cross, pierced by nails and with grotesque shapes of all the fiends hovering about.

But it was so with the Kid and his mount. Winding, twisting, circling, tracing the most fantastic and bewildering trail ever picked out, the good roan lessened the distance to the Lone Wolf Crossing with every coil and turn that he made.

While they fared the Kid sang. He knew but one tune and sang it, as he knew but one code and lived it, and but one girl and loved her. He was a single-minded man of conventional ideas. He had a voice like a coyote with bronchitis, but whenever he chose to sing his song he sang it. It was a conventional song of the camps and trail, running at its beginning as near as may be to these words:

and so on. The roan was inured to it, and did not mind.

But even the poorest singer will, after a certain time, gain his own consent to refrain from contributing to the world’s noises. So the Kid, by the time he was within a mile or two of Tonia’s jacal, had reluctantly allowed his song to die away — not because his vocal performance had become less charming to his own ears, but because his laryngeal muscles were aweary.

As though he were in a circus ring the speckled roan wheeled and danced through the labyrinth of pear until at length his rider knew by certain landmarks that the Lone Wolf Crossing was close at hand. Then, where the pear was thinner, he caught sight of the grass roof of the jacal and the hackberry tree on the edge of the arroyo. A few yards farther the Kid stopped the roan and gazed intently through the prickly openings. Then he dismounted, dropped the roan’s reins, and proceeded on foot, stooping and silent, like an Indian. The roan, knowing his part, stood still, making no sound.

The Kid crept noiselessly to the very edge of the pear thicket and reconnoitred between the leaves of a clump of cactus.

Ten yards from his hiding-place, in the shade of the jacal, sat his Tonia calmly plaiting a rawhide lariat. So far she might surely escape condemnation; women have been known, from time to time, to engage in more mischievous occupations. But if all must be told, there is to be added that her head reposed against the broad and comfortable chest of a tall red-and-yellow man, and that his arm was about her, guiding her nimble fingers that required so many lessons at the intricate six-strand plait.

Sandridge glanced quickly at the dark mass of pear when he heard a slight squeaking sound that was not altogether unfamiliar. A gun-scabbard will make that sound when one grasps the handle of a six-shooter suddenly. But the sound was not repeated; and Tonia’s fingers needed close attention.

And then, in the shadow of death, they began to talk of their love; and in the still July afternoon every word they uttered reached the ears of the Kid.

“Remember, then,” said Tonia, “you must not come again until I send for you. Soon he will be here. A vaquero at the tienda said to-day he saw him on the Guadalupe three days ago. When he is that near he always comes. If he comes and finds you here he will kill you. So, for my sake, you must come no more until I send you the word.”

“All right,” said the stranger. “And then what?”

“And then,” said the girl, “you must bring your men here and kill him. If not, he will kill you.”

“He ain’t a man to surrender, that’s sure,” said Sandridge. “It’s kill or be killed for the officer that goes up against Mr. Cisco Kid.”

“He must die,” said the girl. “Otherwise there will not be any peace in the world for thee and me. He has killed many. Let him so die. Bring your men, and give him no chance to escape.”

“You used to think right much of him,” said Sandridge.

Tonia dropped the lariat, twisted herself around, and curved a lemon-tinted arm over the ranger’s shoulder.

“But then,” she murmured in liquid Spanish, “I had not beheld thee, thou great, red mountain of a man! And thou art kind and good, as well as strong. Could one choose him, knowing thee? Let him die; for then I will not be filled with fear by day and night lest he hurt thee or me.”

“How can I know when he comes?” asked Sandridge.

“When he comes,” said Tonia, “he remains two days, sometimes three. Gregorio, the small son of old Luisa, the lavendera, has a swift pony. I will write a letter to thee and send it by him, saying how it will be best to come upon him. By Gregorio will the letter come. And bring many men with thee, and have much care, oh, dear red one, for the rattlesnake is not quicker to strike than is ‘El Chivato,’ as they call him, to send a ball from his pistola.”

“The Kid’s handy with his gun, sure enough,” admitted Sandridge, “but when I come for him I shall come alone. I’ll get him by myself or not at all. The Cap wrote one or two things to me that make me want to do the trick without any help. You let me know when Mr. Kid arrives, and I’ll do the rest.”

“I will send you the message by the boy Gregorio,” said the girl. “I knew you were braver than that small slayer of men who never smiles. How could I ever have thought I cared for him?”

It was time for the ranger to ride back to his camp on the water hole. Before he mounted his horse he raised the slight form of Tonia with one arm high from the earth for a parting salute. The drowsy stillness of the torpid summer air still lay thick upon the dreaming afternoon. The smoke from the fire in the jacal, where the frijoles blubbered in the iron pot, rose straight as a plumb-line above the clay-daubed chimney. No sound or movement disturbed the serenity of the dense pear thicket ten yards away.

When the form of Sandridge had disappeared, loping his big dun down the steep banks of the Frio crossing, the Kid crept back to his own horse, mounted him, and rode back along the tortuous trail he had come.

But not far. He stopped and waited in the silent depths of the pear until half an hour had passed. And then Tonia heard the high, untrue notes of his unmusical singing coming nearer and nearer; and she ran to the edge of the pear to meet him.

The Kid seldom smiled; but he smiled and waved his hat when he saw her. He dismounted, and his girl sprang into his arms. The Kid looked at her fondly. His thick, black hair clung to his head like a wrinkled mat. The meeting brought a slight ripple of some undercurrent of feeling to his smooth, dark face that was usually as motionless as a clay mask.

“How’s my girl?” he asked, holding her close.

“Sick of waiting so long for you, dear one,” she answered. “My eyes are dim with always gazing into that devil’s pincushion through which you come. And I can see into it such a little way, too. But you are here, beloved one, and I will not scold. Que mal muchacho! not to come to see your alma more often. Go in and rest, and let me water your horse and stake him with the long rope. There is cool water in the jar for you.”

The Kid kissed her affectionately.

“Not if the court knows itself do I let a lady stake my horse for me,” said he. “But if you’ll run in, chica, and throw a pot of coffee together while I attend to the caballo, I’ll be a good deal obliged.”

Besides his marksmanship the Kid had another attribute for which he admired himself greatly. He was muy caballero, as the Mexicans express it, where the ladies were concerned. For them he had always gentle words and consideration. He could not have spoken a harsh word to a woman. He might ruthlessly slay their husbands and brothers, but he could not have laid the weight of a finger in anger upon a woman. Wherefore many of that interesting division of humanity who had come under the spell of his politeness declared their disbelief in the stories circulated about Mr. Kid. One shouldn’t believe everything one heard, they said. When confronted by their indignant men folk with proof of the caballero’s deeds of infamy, they said maybe he had been driven to it, and that he knew how to treat a lady, anyhow.

Considering this extremely courteous idiosyncrasy of the Kid and the pride he took in it, one can perceive that the solution of the problem that was presented to him by what he saw and heard from his hiding-place in the pear that afternoon (at least as to one of the actors) must have been obscured by difficulties. And yet one could not think of the Kid overlooking little matters of that kind.

At the end of the short twilight they gathered around a supper of frijoles, goat steaks, canned peaches, and coffee, by the light of a lantern in the jacal. Afterward, the ancestor, his flock corralled, smoked a cigarette and became a mummy in a grey blanket. Tonia washed the few dishes while the Kid dried them with the flour-sacking towel. Her eyes shone; she chatted volubly of the inconsequent happenings of her small world since the Kid’s last visit; it was as all his other home-comings had been.

Then outside Tonia swung in a grass hammock with her guitar and sang sad canciones de amor.

“Do you love me just the same, old girl?” asked the Kid, hunting for his cigarette papers.

“Always the same, little one,” said Tonia, her dark eyes lingering upon him.

“I must go over to Fink’s,” said the Kid, rising, “for some tobacco. I thought I had another sack in my coat. I’ll be back in a quarter of an hour.”

“Hasten,” said Tonia, “and tell me — how long shall I call you my own this time? Will you be gone again tomorrow, leaving me to grieve, or will you be longer with your Tonia?”

“Oh, I might stay two or three days this trip,” said the Kid, yawning. “I’ve been on the dodge for a month, and I’d like to rest up.”

He was gone half an hour for his tobacco. When he returned Tonia was still lying in the hammock.

“It’s funny,” said the Kid, “how I feel. I feel like there was somebody lying behind every bush and tree waiting to shoot me. I never had mullygrubs like them before. Maybe it’s one of them presumptions. I’ve got half a notion to light out in the morning before day. The Guadalupe country is burning up about that old Dutchman I plugged down there.”

“You are not afraid — no one could make my brave little one fear.”

“Well, I haven’t been usually regarded as a jack-rabbit when it comes to scrapping; but I don’t want a posse smoking me out when I’m in your jacal. Somebody might get hurt that oughtn’t to.”

“Remain with your Tonia; no one will find you here.”

The Kid looked keenly into the shadows up and down the arroyo and toward the dim lights of the Mexican village.

“I’ll see how it looks later on,” was his decision.

At midnight a horseman rode into the rangers’ camp, blazing his way by noisy “halloes” to indicate a pacific mission. Sandridge and one or two others turned out to investigate the row. The rider announced himself to be Domingo Sales, from the Lone Wolf Crossing. he bore a letter for Senor Sandridge. Old Luisa, the lavendera, had persuaded him to bring it, he said, her son Gregorio being too ill of a fever to ride.

Sandridge lighted the camp lantern and read the letter. These were its words:

Sandridge quickly explained to his men the official part of the missive. The rangers protested against his going alone.

“I’ll get him easy enough,” said the lieutenant. “The girl’s got him trapped. And don’t even think he’ll get the drop on me.”

Sandridge saddled his horse and rode to the Lone Wolf Crossing. He tied his big dun in a clump of brush on the arroyo, took his Winchester from its scabbard, and carefully approached the Perez jacal. There was only the half of a high moon drifted over by ragged, milk-white gulf clouds.

The wagon-shed was an excellent place for ambush; and the ranger got inside it safely. In the black shadow of the brush shelter in front of the jacal he could see a horse tied and hear him impatiently pawing the hard-trodden earth.

He waited almost an hour before two figures came out of the jacal. One, in man’s clothes, quickly mounted the horse and galloped past the wagon-shed toward the crossing and village. And then the other figure, in skirt, waist, and mantilla over its head, stepped out into the faint moonlight, gazing after the rider. Sandridge thought he would take his chance then before Tonia rode back. He fancied she might not care to see it.

“Throw up your hands,” he ordered loudly, stepping out of the wagon-shed with his Winchester at his shoulder.

There was a quick turn of the figure, but no movement to obey, so the ranger pumped in the bullets — one — two — three — and then twice more; for you never could be too sure of bringing down the Cisco Kid. There was no danger of missing at ten paces, even in that half moonlight.

The old ancestor, asleep on his blanket, was awakened by the shots. Listening further, he heard a great cry from some man in mortal distress or anguish, and rose up grumbling at the disturbing ways of moderns.

The tall, red ghost of a man burst into the jacal, reaching one hand, shaking like a tule reed, for the lantern hanging on its nail. The other spread a letter on the table.

“Look at this letter, Perez,” cried the man. “Who wrote it?”

“Ah, Dios! it is Senor Sandridge,” mumbled the old man, approaching. “Pues, senor, that letter was written by ‘El Chivato,’ as he is called — by the man of Tonia. They say he is a bad man; I do not know. While Tonia slept he wrote the letter and sent it by this old hand of mine to Domingo Sales to be brought to you. Is there anything wrong in the letter? I am very old; and I did not know. Valgame Dios! It is a very foolish world; and there is nothing in the house to drink — nothing to drink.”

Just then all that Sandridge could think of to do was to go outside and throw himself face downward in the dust by the side of his humming-bird, of whom not a feather fluttered. He was not a caballero by instinct, and he could not understand the niceties of revenge.

A mile away the rider who had ridden past the wagon-shed struck up a harsh, untuneful song, the words of which began:

Conscience in Art O. Henry

William Sydney Porter (1862–1910), under the pseudonym O. Henry, wrote approximately six hundred short stories and, with the possible exception of Edgar Allan Poe, is the most beloved short story writer America has produced.

Arrested for embezzlement from a bank in Austin, Texas, he served three years in an Ohio State Penitentiary, where he was befriended by a guard named Orrin Henry, who in all likelihood inspired the famous pseudonym.

His stories have been criticized for being overly sentimental, but they remain staples of the American literary canon. The master of the surprise ending, O. Henry has written such classics as “The Gift of the Magi,” “The Last Leaf,” “The Ransom of Red Chief,” and “A Retrieved Reformation,” which became better known when it was staged and later filmed as Alias Jimmy Valentine.

His most significant contribution to the mystery and crime genre is The Gentle Grafter (1908), selected by Ellery Queen for Queen’s Quorum as one of the one hundred six greatest mystery story collections of all time. All the Grafter stories feature Jeff Peters and Andy Tucker, a couple of con artists who enjoy various levels of success. They are usually broke and struggle with the concept of being fair to their marks. They don’t generally steal, and if their hapless target is too simpleminded, they endeavor to give him a little something in return for the money they bilk from him. The Grafter tales are more humorous than most of O. Henry’s other stories, so many of which are poignant or dark.

“Conscience in Art” was originally published by the McClure Syndicate, appearing in numerous newspapers all around the United States at various dates; it was first collected in O. Henry’s The Gentle Grafter (New York, McClure, 1908).

“I never could hold my partner, Andy Tucker, down to legitimate ethics of pure swindling,” said Jeff Peters to me one day.

“Andy had too much imagination to be honest. He used to devise schemes of money-getting so fraudulent and high-financial that they wouldn’t have been allowed in the bylaws of a railroad rebate system.

“Myself, I never believed in taking any man’s dollars unless I gave him something for it — something in the way of rolled gold jewelry, garden seeds, lumbago lotion, stock certificates, stove polish, or a crack on the head to show for his money. I guess I must have had New England ancestors away back and inherited some of their stanch and rugged fear of the police.

“But Andy’s family tree was in different kind. I don’t think he could have traced his descent any further back than a corporation.

“One summer while we was in the middle West, working down the Ohio valley with a line of family albums, headache powders, and roach destroyer, Andy takes one of his notions of high and actionable financiering.

“ ‘Jeff,’ says he, ‘I’ve been thinking that we ought to drop these rutabaga fanciers and give our attention to something more nourishing and prolific. If we keep on snapshooting these hinds for their egg money we’ll be classed as nature fakers. How about plunging into the fastnesses of the skyscraper country and biting some big bull caribous in the chest?’

“ ‘Well,’ says I, ‘you know my idiosyncrasies. I prefer a square, non-illegal style of business such as we are carrying on now. When I take money I want to leave some tangible object in the other fellow’s hands for him to gaze at and to distract his attention from my spoor, even if it’s only a Komical Kuss Trick Finger Ring for Squirting Perfume in a Friend’s Eye. But if you’ve got a fresh idea, Andy,’ says I, ‘let’s have a look at it. I’m not so wedded to petty graft that I would refuse something better in the way of a subsidy.’

“ ‘I was thinking,’ says Andy, ‘of a little hunt without horn, hound, or camera among the great herd of the Midas Americanus, commonly known as the Pittsburg millionaires.’

“ ‘In New York?’ I asks.

“ ‘No, sir,’ says Andy, ‘in Pittsburg. That’s their habitat. They don’t like New York. They go there now and then just because it’s expected of ’em.’

“ ‘A Pittsburg millionaire in New York is like a fly in a cup of hot coffee — he attracts attention and comment, but he don’t enjoy it. New York ridicules him for “blowing” so much money in that town of sneaks and snobs, and sneers. The truth is, he don’t spend anything while he is there. I saw a memorandum of expenses for a ten days trip to Bunkum Town made by a Pittsburg man worth $15,000,000 once. Here’s the way he set it down:

“ ‘That’s the voice of New York,’ goes on Andy. ‘The town’s nothing but a head waiter. If you tip it too much it’ll go and stand by the door and make fun of you to the hat check boy. When a Pittsburger wants to spend money and have a good time he stays at home. That’s where we’ll go to catch him.’

“Well, to make a dense story more condensed, me and Andy cached our Paris Green and antipyrine powders and albums in a friend’s cellar, and took the trail to Pittsburg. Andy didn’t have any especial prospectus of chicanery and violence drawn up, but he always had plenty of confidence that his immoral nature would rise to any occasion that presented itself.

“As a concession to my ideas of self-preservation and rectitude he promised that if I should take an active and incriminating part in any little business venture that we might work up there should be something actual and cognizant to the senses of touch, sight, taste, or smell to transfer to the victim for the money so my conscience might rest easy. After that I felt better and entered more cheerfully into the foul play.

“ ‘Andy,’ says I, as we strayed through the smoke along the cinderpath they call Smithfield street, ‘had you figured out how we are going to get acquainted with these coke kings and pig iron squeezers? Not that I would decry my own worth or system of drawing room deportment, and work with the olive fork and pie knife,’ says I, ‘but isn’t the entree nous into the salons of the stogie smokers going to be harder than you imagined?’

“ ‘If there’s any handicap at all,’ says Andy, ‘it’s our own refinement and inherent culture. Pittsburg millionaires are a fine body of plain, wholehearted, unassuming, democratic men.

“ ‘They are rough but uncivil in their manners, and though their ways are boisterous and unpolished, under it all they have a great deal of impoliteness and discourtesy. Nearly every one of ’em rose from obscurity,’ says Andy, ‘and they’ll live in it till the town gets to using smoke consumers. If we act simple and unaffected and don’t go too far from the saloons and keep making a noise like an import duty on steel rails we won’t have any trouble in meeting some of ’em socially.’

“Well Andy and me drifted about town three or four days getting our bearings. We got to knowing several millionaires by sight.

“One used to stop his automobile in front of our hotel and have a quart of champagne brought out to him. When the waiter opened it he’d turn it up to his mouth and drink it out of the bottle. That showed he used to be a glassblower before he made his money.

“One evening Andy failed to come to the hotel for dinner. About 11 o’clock he came into my room.

“ ‘Landed one, Jeff,’ says he. ‘Twelve millions. Oil, rolling mills, real estate, and natural gas. He’s a fine man; no airs about him. Made all his money in the last five years. He’s got professors posting him up now in education — art and literature and haberdashery and such things.

“ ‘When I saw him he’d just won a bet of $10,000 with a Steel Corporation man that there’d be four suicides in the Allegheny rolling mills to-day. So everybody in sight had to walk up and have drinks on him. He took a fancy to me and asked me to dinner with him. We went to a restaurant in Diamond alley and sat on stools and had a sparkling Moselle and clam chowder and apple fritters.

“ ‘Then he wanted to show me his bachelor apartment on Liberty street. He’s got ten rooms over a fish market with privilege of the bath on the next floor above. He told me it cost him $18,000 to furnish his apartment, and I believe it.

“ ‘He’s got $40,000 worth of pictures in one room, and $20,000 worth of curios and antiques in another. His name’s Scudder, and he’s 45, and taking lessons on the piano and 15,000 barrels of oil a day out of his wells.’

“ ‘All right,’ says I. ‘Preliminary canter satisfactory. But, kay vooly, voo? What good is the art junk to us? And the oil?’

“ ‘Now, that man,’ says Andy, sitting thoughtfully on the bed, ‘ain’t what you would call an ordinary scutt. When he was showing me his cabinet of art curios his face lighted up like the door of a coke oven. He says that if some of his big deals go through he’ll make J. P. Morgan’s collection of sweatshop tapestry and Augusta, Me., beadwork look like the contents of an ostrich’s craw thrown on a screen by a magic lantern.

“ ‘And then he showed me a little carving,’ went on Andy, ‘that anybody could see was a wonderful thing. It was something like 2,000 years old, he said. It was a lotus flower with a woman’s face in it carved out of a solid piece of ivory.

“ ‘Scudder looks it up in a catalogue and describes it. An Egyptian carver named Khafra made two of ’em for King Rameses II about the year B.C. The other one can’t be found. The junkshops and antique bugs have rubbered all Europe for it, but it seems to be out of stock. Scudder paid $2,000 for the one he has.’

“ ‘Oh, well,’ says I, ‘this sounds like the purling of a rill to me. I thought we came here to teach the millionaires business, instead of learning art from ’em?’

“ ‘Be patient,’ says Andy, kindly. ‘Maybe we will see a rift in the smoke ere long.’

“All the next morning Andy was out. I didn’t see him until about noon. He came to the hotel and called me into his room across the hall. He pulled a roundish bundle about as big as a goose egg out of his pocket and unwrapped it. It was an ivory carving just as he had described the millionaire’s to me.

“ ‘I went in an old second hand store and pawnshop a while ago,’ says Andy, ‘and I see this half hidden under a lot of old daggers and truck. The pawnbroker said he’d had it several years and thinks it was soaked by some Arabs or Turks or some foreign dubs that used to live down by the river.

“ ‘I offered him $2 for it, and I must have looked like I wanted it, for he said it would be taking the pumpernickel out of his children’s mouths to hold any conversation that did not lead up to a price of $35. I finally got it for $25.

“ ‘Jeff,’ goes on Andy, ‘this is the exact counterpart of Scudder’s carving. It’s absolutely a dead ringer for it. He’ll pay $2,000 for it as quick as he’d tuck a napkin under his chin. And why shouldn’t it be the genuine other one, anyhow, that the old gypsy whittled out?’

“ ‘Why not, indeed?’ says I. ‘And how shall we go about compelling him to make a voluntary purchase of it?’

“Andy had his plan all ready, and I’ll tell you how we carried it out.

“I got a pair of blue spectacles, put on my black frock coat, rumpled my hair up and became Prof. Pickleman. I went to another hotel, registered, and sent a telegram to Scudder to come to see me at once on important art business. The elevator dumped him on me in less than an hour. He was a foggy man with a clarion voice, smelling of Connecticut wrappers and naphtha.

“ ‘Hello, Profess!’ he shouts. ‘How’s your conduct?’

“I rumpled my hair some more and gave him a blue glass stare.

“ ‘Sir,’ says I, ‘are you Cornelius T. Scudder? Of Pittsburg, Pennsylvania?’

“ ‘I am,’ says he. ‘Come out and have a drink.’

“ ‘I’ve neither the time nor the desire,’ says I, ‘for such harmful and deleterious amusements. I have come from New York,’ says I, ‘on a matter of busi — on a matter of art.

“ ‘I learned there that you are the owner of an Egyptian ivory carving of the time of Rameses II, representing the head of Queen Isis in a lotus flower. There were only two of such carvings made. One has been lost for many years. I recently discovered and purchased the other in a pawn — in an obscure museum in Vienna. I wish to purchase yours. Name your price.’

“ ‘Well, the great ice jams, Profess!’ says Scudder. ‘Have you found the other one? Me sell? No. I don’t guess Cornelius Scudder needs to sell anything that he wants to keep. Have you got the carving with you, Profess?’

“I shows it to Scudder. He examines it careful all over.

“ ‘It’s the article,’ says he. ‘It’s a duplicate of mine, every line and curve of it. Tell you what I’ll do,’ he says. ‘I won’t sell, but I’ll buy. Give you $2,500 for yours.’

“ ‘Since you won’t sell, I will,’ says I. ‘Large bills, please. I’m a man of few words. I must return to New York tonight. I lecture tomorrow at the aquarium.’

“Scudder sends a check down and the hotel cashes it. He goes off with his piece of antiquity and I hurry back to Andy’s hotel, according to arrangement.

“Andy is walking up and down the room looking at his watch.

“ ‘Well?’ he says.

“ ‘Twenty-five hundred,’ says I. ‘Cash.’

“ ‘We’ve got just eleven minutes,’ says Andy, ‘to catch the B. & O. westbound. Grab your baggage.’

“ ‘What’s the hurry,’ says I. ‘It was a square deal. And even if it was only an imitation of the original carving it’ll take him some time to find it out. He seemed to be sure it was the genuine article.’

“ ‘It was,’ says Andy. ‘It was his own. When I was looking at his curios yesterday he stepped out of the room for a moment and I pocketed it. Now, will you pick up your suit case and hurry?’

“ ‘Then,’ says I, ‘why was that story about finding another one in the pawn—’

“ ‘Oh,’ says Andy, ‘out of respect for that conscience of yours. Come on.’ ”

The Unpublishable Memoirs A. S. W. Rosenbach

Perhaps the greatest rare-book dealer in the history of the United States was Abraham Simon Wolf Rosenbach (1876–1952), who also was a collector of rare books and manuscripts. As a bookseller he was noted for his exceptional scholarship and business acumen.

He received his undergraduate and Ph.D. degrees from the University of Pennsylvania, where he was a teaching fellow for six years before joining with his brother to found the Rosenbach Company; he specialized in books and his brother in antiques. The firm soon became the most lucrative bookselling business in the world, boasting such clients as J. Pierpont Morgan and Henry Huntington. The Rosenbach Company acquired and sold an unimaginable eight Gutenberg Bibles and thirty Shakespeare first folios. During the course of his career, Rosenbach is said to have spent about seventy-five million dollars at auctions.

Among much else, he was particularly noted for his magnificent collection of children’s books, ultimately donated to the Philadelphia Free Library. His book on the subject, Early American Children’s Books (1933), is still regarded as a standard reference book. He was a frequent writer on bibliographical and literary subjects, producing numerous articles and books, including Books and Bidders (1927) and A Book Hunter’s Holiday (1936). His one effort in fiction, The Unpublishable Memoirs (1917), features a bibliophile who finds methods of adding books to his collection that he might otherwise not have found attainable.

“The Unpublishable Memoirs” was originally published in The Unpublishable Memoirs (New York, Mitchell Kennerley, 1917).

It was very cruel.

He was dickering for one of the things he had desired for a lifetime.

It was in New York at one of the famous book-stores of the metropolis. The proprietor had offered to him for one hundred and sixty dollars — exactly the amount he had in bank — the first and only edition of the “Unpublishable Memoirs” of Beau Brummel, a little volume issued in London in 1790, and one of two copies known, the other being in the famous “hidden library” of the British Museum.

It was a scandalous chronicle of fashionable life in the eighteenth century, and many brilliant names were implicated therein; distinguished and reputable families, that had long been honoured in the history of England, were ruthlessly depicted with a black and venomous pen. He had coveted this book for years, and here it was within his grasp! He had just told the proprietor that he would take it.

Robert Hooker was a book-collector. With not a great deal of money, he had acquired a few of the world’s most sought after treasures. He had laboriously saved his pennies, and had, with the magic of the bibliophile, turned them into rare volumes! He was about to put the evil little book into his pocket when he was interrupted.

A large, portly man, known to book-lovers the world over, had entered the shop and asked Mr. Rodd if he might examine the Beau Brummel Memoirs. He had looked at it before, he said, but on that occasion had merely remarked that he would call again. He saw the volume on the table in front of Hooker, picked it up without ceremony, and told the owner of the shop that he would purchase it.

“Excuse me,” exclaimed Hooker, “but I have just bought it.”

“What!” said the opulent John Fenn, “I came especially to get it.”

“I’m sorry, Mr. Fenn,” returned the proprietor, “Mr. Hooker, here, has just said that he would take it.”

“Now, look here, Rodd, I’ve always been a good customer of yours. I’ve spent thousands in this very shop during the last few years. I’ll give you two hundred dollars for it.”

“No,” said Rodd.

“Three hundred!” said Fenn.

“No.”

“Four hundred!”

“No.”

“I’ll give you five hundred dollars for it, and if you do not take it, I shall never enter this place again!”

Without another word Rodd nodded, and Fenn quickly grasped the little book, and placed it in the inside pocket of his coat. Hooker became angry and threatened to take it by bodily force. A scuffle ensued. Two clerks came to the rescue, and Fenn departed triumphantly with the secrets of the noble families of Great Britain securely in his possession.

Rodd, in an ingratiating manner, declared to Hooker that no money had passed between them, and consequently there had been no sale. Hooker, disappointed, angry, and beaten, could do nothing but retire.

At home, among his books, his anger increased. It was the old, old case of the rich collector gobbling up the small one. It was outrageous! He would get even — if it cost him everything. He dwelt long and bitterly upon his experience. A thought struck him. Why not prey upon the fancies of the wealthy! He would enter the lists with them; he would match his skill against their money, his knowledge against their purse.

Hooker was brought up in the mystic lore of books, for he was the son of a collector’s son. He had always been a student, and half his time had been spent in the bookseller’s shops, dreaming of the wonderful editions of Chaucer, of Shakespeare, of rare Ben Jonson, that some day he might call his own. He would now secure the priceless things dearest to the hearts of men, at no cost to himself!

He would not limit his choice to books, which were his first love, but he would help himself to the fair things that have always delighted the soul — pictures, like those of Raphael and da Vinci; jewels, like Cellini’s; little bronzes, like Donatello’s; etchings of Rembrandt; the porcelains (True Ming!) of old China; the rugs of Persia the magnificent!

The idea struck him at first as ludicrous and impossible. The more he thought of it, the more feasible it became. He had always been a good mimic, a fair amateur actor, a linguist, and a man of parts. He possessed scholarly attainments of a high order. He would use all of his resources in the game he was about to play. For nothing deceives like education!

And it had another side — a brighter, more fantastic side. Think of the fun he would get out of it! This appealed to him. Not only could he add to his collections the most beautiful treasures of the world, but he would now taste the keenest of joys — he would laugh and grow fat at the other man’s expense. It was always intensely humorous to observe the discomfiture of others.

With particular pleasure Hooker read that evening in the Post this insignificant paragraph:

“John Fenn, President of the Tenth National Bank of Chicago, departs for home tonight.”

He laid the paper down immediately, telephoned to the railroad office for a reservation in the sleeping-car leaving at midnight, and prepared for his first “banquet.” Hooker shaved off his moustache, changed his clothes and his accent, and took the train for Chicago.

As luck would have it, John Fenn was seated next to him in the smoking-car, reading the evening papers. Hooker took from his pocket a book catalogue, issued by one of the great English auction houses. He knew that was the best bait! No book-lover that ever lived could resist dipping into a sale catalogue.

Hooker waited an hour — it seemed like five. Fenn read every word in the papers, even the advertisements. He dwelt long and lovingly over the financial pages, running his eyes up and down the columns of “to-day’s transactions.” He at last finished the perusal, and glanced at Hooker. He said nothing for awhile, and appeared restless, like a man with money weighing on his mind. This, of course, is a very distracting and unpleasant feeling. Several times he seemed on the verge of addressing his fellow-traveller, but desisted from the attempt. Finally he said:

“I see, friend, that you’re reading one of Sotheby’s catalogues.”

“Yes,” answered Hooker, shortly.

“You must be interested in books,” pursued Fenn.

“Yes,” was the brief response.

“Do you collect them?”

“Yes.”

Fenn said nothing for five minutes. The stranger did not appear to be very communicative.

“Pardon me, Mr. — , I am also a book-collector. I have quite a fine library of my own.”

“Really?”

“Yes, I always visit the shops when I go to New York. Here is a rarity I picked up to-day.”

The stranger expressed little interest until Fenn took from his pocket the “Unpublishable Memoirs.” It was wrapped neatly in paper, and Fenn carefully removed the little volume from the wrappings. He handed it to the man who perused so assiduously the auction catalogue.

“How extraordinary!” he cried, “the lost book of old Brummel. My people were acquainted with the Beau. I suppose they are grilled right merrily in it! Of all places, how did you come to purchase it in the States?”

“That’s quite a story. A queer thing how I bought it. I saw it the other day at Rodd’s on Fifth Avenue. I did not buy it at first — the price was too high. Thought I would be able to buy it later for less. This morning, I went to see Rodd to make an offer on it, when I found that Rodd had just sold it to some young student. The confounded simpleton said it belonged to him! What did that trifler know about rare books? Now I know how to appreciate them.”

“Naturally!” said the stranger.

“I’ve the finest collection in the West. I had to pay a stiff advance before the proprietor would let me have it. It was a narrow squeak — by about a minute. The young jackass tried to make a scene, but I taught him a thing or two. He’ll not be so perky next time. How my friends will enjoy this story of the killing. I can’t wait until I get home.”

The stranger with the freshly-shaven face, the English clothes, and the austere eyes did not seem particularly pleased.

“How extraordinary!” he said, coldly, and returned to his reading.

Fenn placed the book in his pocket, a pleased expression on his face, as if he were still gloating over his conquest. He was well satisfied with his day, so intellectually spent among the banks and book-shops of New York!

“By the way, I am acquainted with this Rodd,” said the Englishman, after a pause. “He told me a rather interesting story the other day, but it was in a way a boomerang. I don’t like that man’s methods. I’ll never buy a book from him.”

“Why not?” asked the inquisitive Mr. Fenn.

“Well, you’d better hear the tale. It appears he has a wealthy client in Chicago and he occasionally goes out to sell him some of his plunder. He did not tell me the name of his customer, but, according to Rodd, he is an ignoramus and knows nothing at all about books. Thinks it improves his social position. You know the type. Last winter Rodd picked up for fifty dollars a beautifully illuminated copy of Magna Charta issued about a hundred years ago. It’s a fine volume, printed on vellum, the kind that Dibdin raved about, but always considered a ‘plug’ in England. Worth about forty guineas at the most. You know the book?”

Fenn nodded.

“Well, it worried Mr. Rodd how much he could ask his Western patron for it. He left for Chicago via Philadelphia and while he was waiting in the train there he thought he could ask two hundred dollars for it. The matter was on his mind until he arrived at Harrisburg, where he determined that three hundred would be about right. At Pittsburgh he raised the price to five hundred, and at Canton, Ohio, it was seven hundred and fifty! The more Rodd thought of the exquisite beauty of the volume, of its glowing colors and its lovely old binding, the more the price soared. At Fort Wayne, Indiana, it was a thousand dollars. When he arrived at Chicago the next morning, his imagination having had full swing, he resolved he would not under any circumstances part with it for less than two thousand dollars!”

“The old thief!” exclaimed Fenn, with feeling.

“It was a lucky thing,” continued the stranger, “that his client did not live in San Francisco!”

At this Fenn broke forth into profanity.

“I always said that Rodd was an unprincipled, unholy, unmitigated—”

“Wait until you hear the end, sir,” said the Englishman.

“That afternoon he called on the Western collector. He had an appointment with him at two o’clock. He left Rodd waiting in an outside office for hours. Rodd told me he was simply boiling. Went all the way to Chicago by special request and the brute made him cool his heels until four o’clock before he condescended to see him. He would pay dearly for it. When Rodd showed him the blooming book he asked three thousand five hundred for it — would not take a penny less — and he told me, sir, that he actually sold it for that price!”

“Don’t you believe it,” said Fenn, hotly. “Old Rodd is an unqualified liar. He sold it for five thousand dollars. That’s what he did, the damn pirate!”

“How do you know, sir?”

“How do I know, know, know!” he repeated, excitedly. “I ought to know! I’m the fool that bought it!”

Without another word Fenn retired to his stateroom.

The next morning when Fenn arrived at his office in the Fenn Building, he called to one of his business associates, who, like his partner, was interested in the acquisition of rare and unusual books.

“I say, Ogden, I have something great to show you. Picked it up yesterday. In this package is the wickedest little book ever written!”

“Let me see it!” said Mr. Ogden, eagerly.

Fenn gingerly removed the paper in which it was wrapped, as he did not wish to injure the precious contents. He turned suddenly pale. Ogden glanced quickly at the title-page for fear he would be seen with the naughty little thing in his hands.

It was a very ordinary volume, entitled, “A Sermon on Covetousness, a Critical Exposition of the Tenth Commandment by the Rev. Charles Wesley.”

“The devil!” exclaimed John Fenn.

“How the old dodge works,” said Robert Hooker to himself on his way back to New York. “The duplicate package, known since the days of Adam! And how easy it was to substitute it under his very eyes! I shall call Beau Brummel’s ‘Unpublishable Memoirs’ number one in my new library.”

The Universal Covered Carpet Tack Company George Randolph Chester

Boston Blackie’s Code Jack Boyle

Jack Boyle (1881–1928) wrote only one book about Boston Blackie, but the character resonated enough to inspire around ten silent films about him, followed by fourteen “B” movies made by Columbia from 1941 to 1949, all starring Chester Morris, who played him as much a detective as a criminal employing his unique skills, just outside the law, to bring about justice. The success of the films led to two radio series, one starring Morris and the second Richard Kollmar (1944–1950), and a television series (1951–1953) starring Kent Taylor.

In his introduction to Boston Blackie (1919), the author wrote about the ex-convict and cracksman, “To the police and the world he is a professional crook, a skilled and daring safe cracker, an incorrigible criminal made doubly dangerous by intellect... But to me,... ‘Blackie’ is something more — a man with more than a spark of the Divine Spirit that lies hidden in the heart of even the worst of men. University graduate, scholar and gentleman, the ‘Blackie’ I know is a man of many inconsistencies and a strangely twisted code of morals.”

Blackie does not consider himself a criminal; he is a combatant who has declared war on society. He is married to a pretty girl named Mary, his “best loved pal and sole confidante,” who knows what he does and joins in his exploits.

Curiously, Blackie lives and works in San Francisco; Boston has nothing to do with the book and is never mentioned, just as it never served as a background in any of the films.

“Boston Blackie’s Code” was first published in Boston Blackie (New York, H. K. Fly, 1919).

Her throat tightened in an aching pain as her eye fell on the thin gold band that encircled a slender finger. Martin Wilmerding had stooped to kiss that hand and ring on the day it first was placed there.

“Dear little wife,” he had said, “that ring is the symbol of a bond that never will be broken by me. Throughout all the years before us, whenever I see it, this hour will return, bringing back all the love and devotion that is in my heart now.”

Recollection of the long-forgotten words swept her with a sudden revulsion of feeling, and she sprang to her feet. In that instant she realized for the first time why she had come to love Don Lavalle. It was because in his fresh, ardent, impulsive devotion he was so like the Martin Wilmerding who had kissed her hand and ring with a vow of lifetime fealty that had left her clinging to him in tearful ecstasy.

“Don,” she said, “if you really love me, go — now, now.”

Lavalle’s arms, eagerly outstretched toward her, dropped to his side. It was not the answer he had awaited so confidently. A vague resentment against her tinged his disappointment with new bitterness.

“That is final, is it, Marian?” he asked.

“Yes, yes. Don’t make it harder for me. Please go,” she cried almost hysterically.

He slipped into his overcoat.

“Perhaps you will tell me why,” he suggested with increasing asperity.

“Because of the boy and this,” the woman said brokenly, laying a finger on her wedding-ring.

“Nonsense,” he cried angrily. “What tie does that ring represent that Martin Wilmerding has not violated a hundred times? You have been faithful to it, we know, even though you admit you care for me. But has he? I have not the pleasure of your husband’s acquaintance, but no man ever neglected a wife like you without a reason.”

“Go, please, quickly,” she pleaded, shivering.

“I will,” he said, instinctively avoiding the blunder of combating her decision with argument.

He caught her in his arms, and stooping quickly, kissed her on the lips. She reeled away from him, sobbing.

“Our first and last kiss. Good-by, Marian,” he said gently, and left the room.

She followed, clutching at the walls for support as she watched him from the doorway. He adjusted his muffler and caught up his hat without a backward glance, and she pressed her two hands to her lips to choke back a cry. Then as he opened the outer door, the crushing misery of her loneliness swept over her, overpowering self-restraint and resolution.

“Don, oh, Don!” she pleaded, stumbling toward him with outstretched arms.

In a second he was at her side, and she was crying against his breast.

“I can’t let you go,” she sobbed. “I tried, but I can’t. Take me, Don. I will do as you wish.”

From his hiding-place Blackie saw them re-enter the room. The woman stopped by the fireplace, drew off her wedding-ring and after holding it a second between shaking fingers, dropped it into the ashes.

“Dead and gone!” she said. “Dead as the love of the man who put it on my finger.”

“My ring will replace it,” said Lavalle tenderly, but with triumph in his eyes. “Wilmerding will want a divorce. He shall have it, and then you’ll wear the wedding-ring of the man who loves you and whom you love — the only ring in the world that shouldn’t be broken.”

“Don, promise me that you will never leave me alone,” she pleaded falteringly. “I don’t ever want a chance to think, to reflect, to regret. I only want to be with you — and forget everything else in the world. Promise me.”

“Love like mine knows no such word as separation,” he answered. “From this hour we will never be apart. Don’t fear regrets, Marian. There will be none.”

“My boy,” she suggested, “he will go with us. Poor little Martin! I wouldn’t leave him behind fatherless and motherless.”

“Of course not,” he agreed. “And now you must get a few necessaries together quickly — just the things you will require on the steamer. You can get all you need when we reach Honolulu, but there is no time for anything now, for under the circumstances it is best that we go aboard the steamer before morning. Can you be ready in an hour?”

“In an hour!” she cried in surprise. “Yes, I can, but... but... how can we go aboard the steamer tonight? We can’t, Don. Your passage is booked, but not mine.”

“My passage is booked for Don Lavalle and wife,” he informed her smilingly.

She turned away her head to hide the flush that colored her face.

“You were so sure as that!” she murmured, with a strangely new sense of disappointment.

“Yes,” Lavalle answered, “for I knew love like mine could not fail to win yours. Will you pack a single trunk while I run back to my hotel and get my own things together? I can be back in an hour or less. Will you be ready?”

“Yes, I will be ready,” she promised wearily. “I will only take a few things. I want nothing that my — husband ever gave me. I shall only take a few of my own things and the jewels in the safe that were in Mother’s collection. They are my own, and they’re very valuable, Don. It will not be safe to risk packing them in my baggage. I’ll get them now and give them to you to keep until we can leave them in the purser’s safe tomorrow. Be very careful of them, Don. They couldn’t be replaced for a fortune.”

Boston Blackie saw her hurry to the wall — saw the sliding door roll back; with a quickly indrawn breath, he watched the woman fumble nervously with the combination-dial. The safe-door swung open, and she rapidly sorted out a half-dozen jewel-cases and re-closed the safe.

“Here they are, Don,” she said, handing the gems to Lavalle. “I have taken only those that came from my own people. And now you must leave me. I must pack, and I can’t call the servants under these circumstances. I must get the boy up and ready; and also,” — she hesitated a second and then added — “I must write a note to Mr. Wilmerding telling him what I have done and why.”

“Don’t mail it until we are at the dock,” warned the man. “Where is he — at his club or out of town?”

“He’s at the Del Monte Hotel near Monterey — or was,” she answered. “The letter won’t reach him till tomorrow night.”

“And tomorrow night we will be far out of sight of land,” Lavalle cried. “That is as it should be. I am glad I never met him, for now I need never do so.”

He stuffed the jewel-cases into his overcoat.

“I’ll be back in my car in an hour,” he warned. “Hurry, Marian, my love. Each minute until I am with you again will be a day.”

He caught up his hat and ran down the steps to the street, where his car stood at the curbstone.

As the door closed behind him, Marian Wilmerding sank into a chair and clutched her throat to stifle choking sobs. Intuitive womanly fear of what she was to do paralyzed her. For many minutes she lay shaking convulsively as she tried to overcome the dread that chilled her heart. Then the dismal atmosphere of the masterless home began to oppress her with a sense of wretched loneliness.

She rose and with hard, reckless eyes shining hotly from behind wet lashes, ran upstairs to pack.

As Donald Lavalle threw open the door of his empty car, a man who had slipped behind him around the corner of the Wilmerding residence stepped to his side.

“I’m sorry to have to trouble you for my wife’s jewels, Lavalle,” he said.

The triumphant smile on Lavalle’s face faded, and he shrank back in speechless consternation.

“Your wife’s jewels!” he ejaculated, trying to recover from the shock of the utterly unexpected interruption. “You are—”

“Yes, I am Martin Wilmerding; and the happy chance that brought me home tonight also gave me the pleasure of listening from the window-seat of the living-room to your interesting tete-a-tete with my wife.”

A gun flashed into Boston Blackie’s hand and was jabbed sharply into Lavalle’s ribs.

“Give me Marian’s jewels,” the pseudo-husband cried. “Hand them over before I blow your heart out. That’s what I ought to do — and I may, anyway.”

Lavalle handed over the cases that contained the Wilmerding collection of gems.

“Now,” continued his captor, “I want a word with you.”

A gun was thrust so savagely into Lavalle’s face that it left a long red bruise.

“I have heard all you said tonight. I know all your plans for stealing away my wife,” the inexorable voice continued, “and I’ve just a word of warning for you. You are dealing with a man, not a woman, from now on; and if you phone, write, telegraph, or ever again communicate in any way with Marian, I’ll blow your worthless brains out if I have to follow you round the world to do it. Do you get that, Mr. Don Lavalle?”

“I understand you,” said Lavalle helplessly.

Again the gun-muzzle bruised the flesh of his cheek.

“And as a last and kindly warning, Lavalle,” Blackie continued, “I suggest that you take extreme precautions to see that you do not miss the Manchuria when she sails in the morning; because if you are not on board, you won’t live to see another sunset if I have to kill you in your own club. Will you sail or die?”

“I’ll sail,” said Lavalle.

“Very well. That’s about all that requires words between us, I believe. Go, and remember your life is in your own hands. One word of any kind to Marian, and you forfeit it. I don’t know why I don’t kill you now. I would if it were not for the scandal all this would cause when it came out before the jury that would acquit me. Now go.”

Lavalle pressed the button that started the motor as Boston Blackie stepped back from his side.

“I’ve just one word I want to say to you, Wilmerding,” Lavalle began, his foot on the clutch. “It’s this: You have only yourself to blame. Don’t accuse Marian. You forced her into the situation you discovered this evening, by your neglect of the finest little woman I ever met. I was forced into it by a love I admit frankly. Don’t blame Marian for what you yourself have caused. I won’t ever see or communicate with her again.”

“That’s the most decent speech I’ve heard from your lips tonight,” said the man beside the car, dropping his gun back into an outside pocket. “I don’t blame her. I’ve learned many important facts tonight — one of which is that the right place for a man is in his own home with his own wife. I’m going to remember that; and the wedding-ring that was dropped into the ashes tonight is going back on the finger it fits. Good night.”

Lavalle without a word threw in the clutch, and his car sped away and was enveloped and hidden by the fog.

Halfway down the block, Boston Blackie came to another car standing at the curb with a well-muffled chauffeur sitting behind the wheel. As he climbed in, the driver, Mary, uttered a low, thankful cry.

“No trouble. I have the jewels here — feel the packages; and a whole lot happened,” said Blackie with deep satisfaction. “I’ve a new story to tell you when we get home, Mary. It’s the story of a big burglar named Blackie and a little boy named Martin Wilmerding and a still littler woolly dog named Rex, and a woman who guessed wrong. I think it will interest you. Let’s go. I have several things to do before we go home.”

When they reached the downtown district, Blackie had Mary drive him to the Palace Hotel. There he sought out the night stenographer.

“Will you take a telegram for me, please,” he said. Then he dictated:

Though there was a telegraph-office in the hotel, he summoned a messenger-boy from a saloon and sent the message.

Then he went to another hotel and found a second stenographer, to whom he dictated a second message.

Summoning another boy, he sent the second message from a different telegraph office.

“Those telegrams, and how they came to be sent, will be a mystery in the Wilmerding home to the end of time,” he thought, deeply contented.

“Let’s go home, Mary,” he said then, returning to his car and climbing in. “I think I’ve finished my night’s work, and I don’t believe I’ve done such a bad job either.”

He was silent for a moment.

“I’ve given a wife to a husband,” he said half to himself. “I’ve given a father to a child; I’ve given a mother the right to look her son in the face without shame; and I’ve played square with the gamest little pal I ever want to know, Martin Wilmerding, Jr., and his dog, Rex. And for my pay I’ve taken the Wilmerding jewel-collection. I wonder who’s the debtor.”

The Gray Seal Frank L. Packard

A popular writer of adventure fiction who was born in Canada of American parents, Frank Lucius Packard (1877–1942) made numerous trips to the Far East and elsewhere in search of adventure material, resulting in such popular works as Two Stolen Idols (1927), Shanghai Jim (1928), and The Dragon’s Jaws (1937). His greatest success, however, came with the Jimmie Dale series, which sold more than two million copies.

Dale, like his namesake, O. Henry’s Jimmy Valentine, is a safecracker who learned the skill from his father’s safe-manufacturing business. A wealthy member of one of New York’s most exclusive clubs, Dale leads a quadruple life. He is the Gray Seal, the mysterious thief who leaves his mark, a gray seal, at the scene of his crimes; Larry the Bat, a member of the city’s underworld; Smarlinghue, a fallen artist; and Jimmie Dale, part of New York’s social elite. In the Raffles tradition of so many other cracksmen in literature, Dale’s burglaries are illegal, of course, but they are benevolently committed in order to right wrongs and they involve no violence. There are five books in the series, beginning with The Adventures of Jimmie Dale (1917) and concluding with Jimmie Dale and the Missing Hour (1935). Seven films were made from Packard’s novels and short stories, most notably The Miracle Man (1932) starring Sylvia Sidney and Chester Morris; the story of another character, a con man, was released as a silent picture in 1919. Several two-reel silent films, starring E. K. Lincoln as Jimmie Dale, were based on short stories published in The Adventures of Jimmie Dale (1917).

“The Gray Seal” was originally published in People’s Ideal Fiction Magazine in 1914; it was first collected in The Adventures of Jimmie Dale (New York, George H. Doran, 1917).

Among New York’s fashionable and ultra-exclusive clubs, the St. James stood an acknowledged leader — more men, perhaps, cast an envious eye at its portals, of modest and unassuming taste, as they passed by on Fifth Avenue, than they did at any other club upon the long list that the city boasts. True, there were more expensive clubs upon whose membership roll scintillated more stars of New York’s social set, but the St. James was distinctive. It guaranteed a man, so to speak — that is, it guaranteed a man to be innately a gentleman. It required money, it is true, to keep up one’s membership, but there were many members who were not wealthy, as wealth is measured nowadays — there were many, even, who were pressed sometimes to meet their dues and their house accounts, but the accounts were invariably promptly paid. No man, once in, could ever afford, or ever had the desire, to resign from the St. James Club. Its membership was cosmopolitan; men of every walk in life passed in and out of its doors, professional men and business men, physicians, artists, merchants, authors, engineers, each stamped with the “hall mark” of the St. James, an innate gentleman. To receive a two weeks’ out-of-town visitor’s card to the St. James was something to speak about, and men from Chicago, St. Louis, or San Francisco spoke of it with a sort of holier-than-thou air to fellow members of their own exclusive clubs, at home again.

Is there any doubt that Jimmie Dale was a gentleman — an innate gentleman? Jimmie Dale’s father had been a member of the St. James Club, and one of the largest safe manufacturers of the United States, a prosperous, wealthy man, and at Jimmie Dale’s birth he had proposed his son’s name for membership. It took some time to get into the St. James; there was a long waiting list that neither money, influence, nor pull could alter by so much as one iota. Men proposed their sons’ names for membership when they were born as religiously as they entered them upon the city’s birth register. At twenty-one Jimmie Dale was elected to membership; and, incidentally, that same year, graduated from Harvard. It was Mr. Dale’s desire that his son should enter the business and learn it from the ground up, and Jimmie Dale, for four years thereafter, had followed his father’s wishes. Then his father died. Jimmie Dale had leanings toward more artistic pursuits than business. He was credited with sketching a little, writing a little; and he was credited with having received a very snug amount from the combine to which he sold out his safe-manufacturing interests. He lived a bachelor life — his mother had been dead many years — in the house that his father had left him on Riverside Drive, kept a car or two and enough servants to run his menage smoothly, and serve a dinner exquisitely when he felt hospitably inclined.

Could there be any doubt that Jimmie Dale was innately a gentleman?

It was evening, and Jimmie Dale sat at a small table in the corner of the St. James Club dining room. Opposite him sat Herman Carruthers, a young man of his own age, about twenty-six, a leading figure in the newspaper world, whose rise from reporter to managing editor of the morning News-Argus within the short space of a few years had been almost meteoric.

They were at coffee and cigars, and Jimmie Dale was leaning back in his chair, his dark eyes fixed interestedly on his guest.

Carruthers, intently engaged in trimming his cigar ash on the edge of the Limoges china saucer of his coffee set, looked up with an abrupt laugh.

“No; I wouldn’t care to go on record as being an advocate of crime,” he said whimsically; “that would never do. But I don’t mind admitting quite privately that it’s been a positive regret to me that he has gone.”

“Made too good ‘copy’ to lose, I suppose?” suggested Jimmie Dale quizzically. “Too bad, too, after working up a theatrical name like that for him — the Gray Seal — rather unique! Who stuck that on him — you?”

Carruthers laughed — then, grown serious, leaned toward Jimmie Dale.

“You don’t mean to say, Jimmie, that you don’t know about that, do you?” he asked incredulously. “Why, up to a year ago the papers were full of him.”

“I never read your beastly agony columns,” said Jimmie Dale, with a cheery grin.

“Well,” said Carruthers, “you must have skipped everything but the stock reports then.”

“Granted,” said Jimmie Dale. “So go on, Carruthers, and tell me about him — I dare say I may have heard of him, since you are so distressed about it, but my memory isn’t good enough to contradict anything you may have to say about the estimable gentleman, so you’re safe.”

Carruthers reverted to the Limoges saucer and the tip of his cigar.

“He was the most puzzling, bewildering, delightful crook in the annals of crime,” said Carruthers reminiscently, after a moment’s silence. “Jimmie, he was the king-pin of them all. Clever isn’t the word for him, or dare-devil isn’t either. I used to think sometimes his motive was more than half for the pure deviltry of it, to laugh at the police and pull the noses of the rest of us that were after him. I used to dream nights about those confounded gray seals of his — that’s where he got his name; he left every job he ever did with a little gray paper affair, fashioned diamond-shaped, stuck somewhere where it would be the first thing your eyes would light upon when you reached the scene, and—”

“Don’t go so fast,” smiled Jimmie Dale. “I don’t quite get the connection. What did you have to do with this... er... Gray Seal fellow? Where do you come in?”

“I? I had a good deal to do with him,” said Carruthers grimly. “I was a reporter when he first broke loose, and the ambition of my life, after I began really to appreciate what he was, was to get him — and I nearly did, half a dozen times, only—”

“Only you never quite did, eh?” cut in Jimmie Dale slyly. “How near did you get, old man? Come on, now, no bluffing; did the Gray Seal ever even recognise you as a factor in the hare-and-hound game?”

“You’re flicking on the raw, Jimmie,” Carruthers answered, with a wry grimace. “He knew me, all right, confound him! He favoured me with several sarcastic notes — I’ll show ’em to you some day — explaining how I’d fallen down and how I could have got him if I’d done something else.” Carruthers’s fist came suddenly down on the table. “And I would have got him, too, if he had lived.”

“Lived!” ejaculated Jimmie Dale. “He’s dead, then?”

“Yes,” averted Carruthers; “he’s dead.”

“H’m!” said Jimmie Dale facetiously. “I hope the size of the wreath you sent was an adequate tribute of your appreciation.”

“I never sent any wreath,” returned Carruthers, “for the very simple reason that I didn’t know where to send it, or when he died. I said he was dead because for over a year now he hasn’t lifted a finger.”

“Rotten poor evidence, even for a newspaper,” commented Jimmie Dale. “Why not give him credit for having, say — reformed?”

Carruthers shook his head. “You don’t get it at all, Jimmie,” he said earnestly. “The Gray Seal wasn’t an ordinary crook — he was a classic. He was an artist, and the art of the thing was in his blood. A man like that could no more stop than he could stop breathing — and live. He’s dead; there’s nothing to it but that — he’s dead. I’d bet a year’s salary on it.”

“Another good man gone wrong, then,” said Jimmie Dale capriciously. “I suppose, though, that at least you discovered the ‘woman in the case’?”

Carruthers looked up quickly, a little startled; then laughed shortly.

“What’s the matter?” inquired Jimmie Dale.

“Nothing,” said Carruthers. “You kind of got me for a moment, that’s all. That’s the way those infernal notes from the Gray Seal used to end up: ‘Find the lady, old chap; and you’ll get me.’ He had a damned patronising familiarity that would make you squirm.”

“Poor old Carruthers!” grinned Jimmie Dale. “You did take it to heart, didn’t you?”

“I’d have sold my soul to get him — and so would you, if you had been in my boots,” said Carruthers, biting nervously at the end of his cigar.

“And been sorry for it afterward,” supplied Jimmie Dale.

“Yes, by Jove, you’re right!” admitted Carruthers. “I suppose I should. I actually got to love the fellow — it was the game, really, that I wanted to beat.”

“Well, and how about this woman? Keep on the straight and narrow path, old man,” prodded Jimmie Dale.

“The woman?” Carruthers smiled. “Nothing doing! I don’t believe there was one — he wouldn’t have been likely to egg the police and reporters on to finding her if there had been, would he? It was a blind, of course. He worked alone, absolutely alone. That’s the secret of his success, according to my way of thinking. There was never so much as an indication that he had had an accomplice in anything he ever did.”

Jimmie Dale’s eyes travelled around the club’s homelike, perfectly appointed room. He nodded to a fellow member here and there, then his eyes rested musingly on his guest again.

Carruthers was staring thoughtfully at his coffee cup.

“He was the prince of crooks and the father of originality,” announced Carruthers abruptly, following the pause that had ensued. “Half the time there wasn’t any more getting at the motive for the curious things he did, than there was getting at the Gray Seal himself.”

“Carruthers,” said Jimmie Dale, with a quick little nod of approval, “you’re positively interesting tonight. But, so far, you’ve been kind of scouting around the outside edges without getting into the thick of it. Let’s have some of your experiences with the Gray Seal in detail; they ought to make ripping fine yarns.”

“Not tonight, Jimmie,” said Carruthers; “it would take too long.” He pulled out his watch mechanically as he spoke, glanced at it — and pushed back his chair. “Great Scott!” he exclaimed. “It’s nearly half-past nine. I’d no idea we had lingered so long over dinner. I’ll have to hurry; we’re a morning paper, you know, Jimmie.”

“What! Really! Is it as late as that.” Jimmie Dale rose from his chair as Carruthers stood up. “Well, if you must—”

“I must,” said Carruthers, with a laugh.

“All right, O slave.” Jimmie Dale laughed back — and slipped his hand, a trick of their old college days together, through Carruthers’s arm as they left the room.

He accompanied Carruthers downstairs to the door of the club, and saw his guest into a taxi; then he returned inside, sauntered through the billiard room, and from there into one of the cardrooms, where, pressed into a game, he played several rubbers of bridge before going home.

It was, therefore, well on toward midnight when Jimmie Dale arrived at his house on Riverside Drive, and was admitted by an elderly manservant.

“Hello, Jason,” said Jimmie Dale pleasantly. “You still up!”

“Yes, sir,” replied Jason, who had been valet to Jimmie Dale’s father before him. “I was going to bed, sir, at about ten o’clock, when a messenger came with a letter. Begging your pardon, sir, a young lady, and—”

“Jason” — Jimmie Dale flung out the interruption, sudden, quick, imperative — “what did she look like?”

“Why... why, I don’t exactly know as I could describe her, sir,” stammered Jason, taken aback. “Very ladylike, sir, in her dress and appearance, and what I would call, sir, a beautiful face.”

“Hair and eyes — what color?” demanded Jimmie Dale crisply. “Nose, lips, chin — what shape?”

“Why, sir,” gasped Jason, staring at his master, “I... I don’t rightly know. I wouldn’t call her fair or dark, something between. I didn’t take particular notice, and it wasn’t overlight outside the door.”

“It’s too bad you weren’t a younger man, Jason,” commented Jimmie Dale, with a curious tinge of bitterness in his voice. “I’d have given a year’s income for your opportunity tonight, Jason.”

“Yes, sir,” said Jason helplessly.

“Well, go on,” prompted Jimmie Dale. “You told her I wasn’t home, and she said she knew it, didn’t she? And she left the letter that I was on no account to miss receiving when I got back, though there was no need of telephoning me to the club — when I returned would do, but it was imperative that I should have it then — eh?”

“Good Lord, sir!” ejaculated Jason, his jaw dropped, “that’s exactly what she did say.”

“Jason,” said Jimmie Dale grimly, “listen to me. If ever she comes here again, inveigle her in. If you can’t inveigle her, use force; capture her, pull her in, do anything — do anything, do you hear? Only don’t let her get away from you until I’ve come.”

Jason gazed at his master as though the other had lost his reason.

“Use force, sir?” he repeated weakly — and shook his head. “You... you can’t mean that, sir.”

“Can’t I?” inquired Jimmie Dale, with a mirthless smile. “I mean every word of it, Jason — and if I thought there was the slightest chance of her giving you the opportunity, I’d be more imperative still. As it is — where’s the letter?”

“On the table in your studio, sir,” said Jason, mechanically.

Jimmie Dale started toward the stairs — then turned and came back to where Jason, still shaking his head heavily, had been gazing anxiously after his master. Jimmie Dale laid his hand on the old man’s shoulder.

“Jason,” he said kindly, with a swift change of mood, “you’ve been a long time in the family — first with father, and now with me. You’d do a good deal for me, wouldn’t you?”

“I’d do anything in the world for you, Master Jim,” said the old man earnestly.

“Well, then, remember this,” said Jimmie Dale slowly, looking into the other’s eyes, “remember this — keep your mouth shut and your eyes open. It’s my fault. I should have warned you long ago, but I never dreamed that she would ever come here herself. There have been times when it was practically a matter of life and death to me to know who that woman is that you saw tonight. That’s all, Jason. Now go to bed.”

“Master Jim,” said the old man simply, “thank you, sir, thank you for trusting me. I’ve dandled you on my knee when you were a baby, Master Jim. I don’t know what it’s about, and it isn’t for me to ask. I thought, sir, that maybe you were having a little fun with me. But I know now, and you can trust me, Master Jim, if she ever comes again.”

“Thank you, Jason,” said Jimmie Dale, his hand closing with an appreciative pressure on the other’s shoulder “Good-night, Jason.”

Upstairs on the first landing, Jimmie Dale opened a door, closed and locked it behind him — and the electric switch clicked under his fingers. A glow fell softly from a cluster of shaded ceiling lights. It was a large room, a very large room, running the entire depth of the house, and the effect of apparent disorder in the arrangement of its appointments seemed to breathe a sense of charm. There were great cozy, deep, leather-covered lounging chairs, a huge, leather-covered davenport, and an easel or two with half-finished sketches upon them; the walls were panelled, the panels of exquisite grain and matching; in the centre of the room stood a flat-topped rosewood desk; upon the floor was a dark, heavy velvet rug; and, perhaps most inviting of all, there was a great, old-fashioned fireplace at one side of the room.

For an instant Jimmie Dale remained quietly by the door, as though listening. Six feet he stood, muscular in every line of his body, like a well-trained athlete with no single ounce of superfluous fat about him — the grace and ease of power in his poise. His strong, clean-shaven face, as the light fell upon it now, was serious — a mood that became him well — the firm lips closed, the dark, reliant eyes a little narrowed, a frown on the broad forehead, the square jaw clamped.

Then abruptly he walked across the room to the desk, picked up an envelope that lay upon it, and, turning again, dropped into the nearest lounging chair.

There had been no doubt in his mind, none to dispel. It was precisely what he had expected from almost the first word Jason had spoken. It was the same handwriting, the same texture of paper, and there was the same old haunting, rare, indefinable fragrance about it. Jimmie Dale’s hands turned the envelope now this way, now that, as he looked at it. Wonderful hands were Jimmie Dale’s, with long, slim, tapering fingers whose sensitive tips seemed now as though they were striving to decipher the message within.

He laughed suddenly, a little harshly, and tore open the envelope. Five closely written sheets fell into his hand. He read them slowly, critically, read them over again; and then, his eyes on the rug at his feet, he began to tear the paper into minute pieces between his fingers, depositing the pieces, as he tore them, upon the arm of his chair. The five sheets demolished, his fingers dipped into the heap of shreds on the arm of the chair and tore them over and over again, tore them until they were scarcely larger than bits of confetti, tore at them absently and mechanically, his eyes never shifting from the rug at his feet.

Then with a shrug of his shoulders, as though rousing himself to present reality, a curious smile flickering on his lips, he brushed the pieces of paper into one hand, carried them to the empty fireplace, laid them down in a little pile, and set them afire. Lighting a cigarette, he watched them burn until the last glow had gone from the last charred scrap; then he crunched and scattered them with the brass-handled fender brush, and, retracing his steps across the room, flung back a portiere from where it hung before a little alcove, and dropped on his knees in front of a round, squat, barrel-shaped safe — one of his own design and planning in the years when he had been with his father.

His slim, sensitive fingers played for an instant among the knobs and dials that studded the door, guided, it seemed by the sense of touch alone — and the door swung open. Within was another door, with locks and bolts as intricate and massive as the outer one. This, too, he opened; and then from the interior took out a short, thick, rolled-up leather bundle tied together with thongs. He rose from his knees, closed the safe, and drew the portiere across the alcove again. With the bundle under his arm, he glanced sharply around the room, listened intently, then, unlocking the door that gave on the hall, he switched off the lights and went to his dressing room, that was on the same floor. Here, divesting himself quickly of his dinner clothes, he selected a dark tweed suit with loose-fitting sack coat from his wardrobe, and began to put it on.

Dressed, all but his coat and vest, he turned to the leather bundle that he had placed on a table, untied the thongs, and carefully opened it out to its full length — and again that curious, cryptic smile tinged his lips. Rolled the opposite away from that in which it had been tied up, the leather strip made a wide belt that went on somewhat after the fashion of a life preserver, the thongs being used for shoulder straps — a belt that, once on, the vest would hide completely, and, fitting close, left no telltale bulge in the outer garments. It was not an ordinary belt; it was full of stout-sewn, up-right little pockets all the way around, and in the pockets grimly lay an array of fine, blued-steel, highly tempered instruments — a compact, powerful burglar’s kit.

The slim, sensitive fingers passed with almost a caressing touch over the vicious little implements, and from one of the pockets extracted a thin, flat metal case. This Jimmie Dale opened, and glanced inside — between sheets of oil paper lay little rows of gray, adhesive, diamond-shaped seals.

Jimmie Dale snapped the case shut, returned it to its recess, and from another took out a black silk mask. He held it up to the light for examination.

“Pretty good shape after a year,” muttered Jimmie Dale, replacing it.

He put on the belt, then his vest and coat. From the drawer of his dresser he took an automatic revolver and an electric flashlight, slipped them into his pocket, and went softly downstairs. From the hat stand he chose a black slouch hat, pulled it well over his eyes — and left the house.

Jimmie Dale walked down a block, then hailed a bus and mounted to the top. It was late, and he found himself the only passenger. He inserted his dime in the conductor’s little resonant-belled cash receiver, and then settled back on the uncomfortable, bumping, cushionless seat.

On rattled the bus; it turned across town, passed the Circle, and headed for Fifth Avenue — but Jimmie Dale, to all appearances, was quite oblivious of its movements.

It was a year since she had written him. She! Jimmie Dale did not smile, his lips were pressed hard together. Not a very intimate or personal appellation, that — but he knew her by no other. It was a woman, surely — the hand-writing was feminine, the diction eminently so — and had she not come herself that night to Jason! He remembered the last letter, apart from the one tonight, that he had received from her. It was a year ago now — and the letter had been hardly more than a note. The police had worked themselves into a frenzy over the Gray Seal, the papers had grown absolutely maudlin — and she had written, in her characteristic way:

Things are a little too warm, aren’t they, Jimmie? Let’s let them cool for a year.

Since then until tonight he had heard nothing from her. It was a strange compact that he had entered into — so strange that it could never have known, could never know a parallel — unique, dangerous, bizarre, it was all that and more. It had begun really through his connection with his father’s business — the business of manufacturing safes that should defy the cleverest criminals — when his brains, turned into that channel, had been pitted against the underworld, against the methods of a thousand different crooks from Maine to California, the report of whose every operation had reached him in the natural course of business, and every one of which he had studied in minutest detail. It had begun through that — but at the bottom of it was his own restless, adventurous spirit.

He had meant to set the police by the ears, using his gray-seal device both as an added barb and that no innocent bystander of the underworld, innocent for once, might be involved — he had meant to laugh at them and puzzle them to the verge of madness, for in the last analysis they would find only an abortive attempt at crime — and he had succeeded. And then he had gone too far — and he had been caught — by her. That string of pearls, which, to study whose effect facetiously, he had so idiotically wrapped around his wrist, and which, so ironically, he had been unable to loosen in time and had been forced to carry with him in his sudden, desperate dash to escape from Marx’s the big jeweler’s, in Maiden Lane, whose strong room he had toyed with one night, had been the lever which, at first, she had held over him.

The bus was on Fifth Avenue now, and speeding rapidly down the deserted thoroughfare. Jimmie Dale looked up at the lighted windows of the St. James Club as they went by, smiled whimsically, and shifted in his seat, seeking a more comfortable position.

She had caught him — how he did not know — he had never seen her — did not know who she was, though time and again he had devoted all his energies for months at a stretch to a solution of the mystery. The morning following the Maiden Lane affair, indeed, before he had breakfasted, Jason had brought him the first letter from her. It had started by detailing his every move of the night before — and it had ended with an ultimatum: “The cleverness, the originality of the Gray Seal as a crook lacked but one thing,” she had naively written, “and that one thing was that his crookedness required a leading string to guide it into channels that were worthy of his genius.” In a word, she would plan the coups, and he would act at her dictation and execute them — or else how did twenty years in Sing Sing for that little Maiden Lane affair appeal to him? He was to answer by the next morning, a simple “yes” or “no” in the personal column of the morning News-Argus.

A threat to a man like Jimmie Dale was like flaunting a red rag at a bull, and a rage ungovernable had surged upon him. Then cold reason had come. He was caught — there was no question about that — she had taken pains to show him that he need make no mistake there. Innocent enough in his own conscience, as far as actual theft went, for the pearls would in due course be restored in some way to the possession of their owner, he would have been unable to make even his own father, who was alive then, believe in his innocence, let alone a jury of his peers. Dishonour, shame, ignominy, a long prison sentence, stared him in the face, and there was but one alternative — to link hands with this unseen, mysterious accomplice. Well, he could at least temporise, he could always “queer” a game in some specious manner, if he were pushed too far. And so, in the next morning’s News-Argus, Jimmie Dale had answered “yes.” And then had followed those years in which there had been no temporising, in which every plan was carried out to the last detail, those years of curious, unaccountable, bewildering affairs that Carruthers had spoken of, one on top of another, that had shaken the old headquarters on Mulberry Street to its foundations, until the Gray Seal had become a name to conjure with. And, yes, it was quite true, he had entered into it all, gone the limit, with an eagerness that was insatiable.

The bus had reached the lower end of Fifth Avenue, passed through Washington Square, and stopped at the end of its run. Jimmie Dale clambered down from the top, threw a pleasant “good-night” to the conductor, and headed briskly down the street before him. A little later he crossed into West Broadway, and his pace slowed to a leisurely stroll.

Here, at the upper end of the street, was a conglomerate business section of rather inferior class, catering doubtless to the poor, foreign element that congregated west of Broadway proper, and to the south of Washington Square. The street was, at first glance, deserted; it was dark and dreary, with stores and lofts on either side. An elevated train roared by overhead, with a thunderous, deafening clamour. Jimmie Dale, on the right-hand side of the street, glanced interestedly at the dark store windows as he went by. And then, a block ahead, on the other side, his eyes rested on an approaching form. As the other reached the corner and paused, and the light from the street lamp glinted on brass buttons, Jimmie Dale’s eyes narrowed a little under his slouch hat. The policeman, although nonchalantly swinging a nightstick, appeared to be watching him.

Jimmie Dale went on half a block farther, stooped to the sidewalk to tie his shoe, glanced back over his shoulder — the policeman was not in sight — and slipped like a shadow into the alleyway beside which he had stopped.

It was another Jimmie Dale now — the professional Jimmie Dale. Quick as a cat, active, lithe, he was over a six foot fence in the rear of a building in a flash, and crouched a black shape, against the back door of an unpretentious, unkempt, dirty, secondhand shop that fronted on West Broadway — the last place certainly in all New York that the managing editor of the News-Argus, or anyone else, for that matter, would have picked out as the setting for the second debut of the Gray Seal.

From the belt around his waist, Jimmie Dale took the black silk mask, and slipped it on; and from the belt, too, came a little instrument that his deft fingers manipulated in the lock. A curious snipping sound followed. Jimmie Dale put his weight gradually against the door. The door held fast.

“Bolted,” said Jimmie Dale to himself.

The sensitive fingers travelled slowly up and down the side of the door, seeming to press and feel for the position of the bolt through an inch of plank — then from the belt came a tiny saw, thin and pointed at the end, that fitted into the little handle drawn from another receptacle in the leather girdle beneath the unbuttoned vest.

Hardly a sound it made as it bit into the door. Half a minute passed — there was the faint fall of a small piece of wood — into the aperture crept the delicate, tapering fingers — came a slight rasping of metal — then the door swung back, the dark shadow that had been Jimmie Dale vanished, and the door closed again.

A round, white beam of light glowed for an instant — and disappeared. A miscellaneous, lumbering collection of junk and odds and ends blocked the entry, leaving no more space than was sufficient for a bare passageway. Jimmie Dale moved cautiously — and once more the flashlight in his hand showed the way for an instant — then darkness again.

The cluttered accumulation of secondhand stuff in the rear gave place to a little more orderly arrangement as he advanced toward the front of the store. Like a huge firefly, the flashlight twinkled, went out, twinkled again, and went out. He passed a sort of crude, partitioned-off apartment that did duty for the establishment’s office, a sort of little boxed-in place it was, about in the middle of the floor. Jimmie Dale’s light played on it for a moment, but he kept on toward the front door without any pause.

Every movement was quick, sure, accurate, with not a wasted second. It had been barely a minute since he had vaulted the back fence. It was hardly a quarter of a minute more before the cumbersome lock of the front door was unfastened, and the door itself pulled imperceptibly ajar.

He went swiftly back to the office now — and found it even more of a shaky, cheap affair than it had at first appeared; more like a box stall with windows around the top than anything else, the windows doubtless to permit the occupant to overlook the store from the vantage point of the high stool that stood before a long, battered, wobbly desk. There was a door to the place, too, but the door was open and the key was in the lock. The ray of Jimmie Dale’s flashlight swept once around the interior — and rested on an antique, ponderous safe.

Under the mask Jimmie Dale’s lips parted in a smile that seemed almost apologetic, as he viewed the helpless iron monstrosity that was little more than an insult to a trained cracksman. Then from the belt came the thin metal case and a pair of tweezers. He opened the case, and with the tweezers lifted out one of the gray-coloured, diamond-shaped seals. Holding the seal with the tweezers, he moistened the gummed side with his lips, then laid it on a handkerchief which he took from his pocket, and clapped the handkerchief against the front of the safe, sticking the seal conspicuously into place. Jimmie Dale’s insignia bore no finger prints. The microscopes and magnifying glasses at headquarters had many a time regretfully assured the police of that fact.

And now his hands and fingers seemed to work like lightning. Into the soft iron bit a drill — bit in and through — bit in and through again. It was dark, pitch black — and silent. Not a sound, save the quick, dull rasp of the ratchet — like the distant gnawing of a mouse! Jimmie Dale worked fast — another hole went through the face of the old-fashioned safe — and then suddenly he straightened up to listen, every faculty tense, alert, and strained, his body thrown a little forward. What was that!

From the alleyway leading from the street without, through which he himself had come, sounded the stealthy crunch of feet. Motionless in the utter darkness, Jimmie Dale listened — there was a scraping noise in the rear — someone was climbing the fence that he had climbed!

In an instant the tools in Jimmie Dale’s hands disappeared into their respective pockets beneath his vest — and the sensitive fingers shot to the dial on the safe.

“Too bad,” muttered Jimmie Dale plaintively to himself. “I could have made such an artistic job of it — I swear I could have cut Carruthers’ profile in the hole in less than no time — to open it like this is really taking the poor old thing at a disadvantage.”

He was on his knees now, one ear close to the dial, listening as the tumblers fell, while the delicate fingers spun the knob unerringly — the other ear strained toward the rear of the premises.

Came a footstep — a ray of light — a stumble — nearer — the newcomer was inside the place now, and must have found out that the back door had been tampered with. Nearer came the steps — still nearer — and then the safe door swung open under Jimmie Dale’s hand, and Jimmie Dale, that he might not be caught like a rat in a trap, darted from the office — but he had delayed a little too long.

From around the cluttered piles of junk and miscellany swept the light — full on Jimmie Dale. Hesitation for the smallest fraction of a second would have been fatal, but hesitation was something that in all his life Jimmie Dale had never known. Quick as a panther in its spring, he leaped full at the light and the man behind it. The rough voice, in surprised exclamation at the sudden discovery of the quarry, died in a gasp.

There was a crash as the two men met — and the other reeled back before the impact. Onto him Jimmie Dale sprang, and his hands flew for the other’s throat. It was an officer in uniform! Jimmie Dale had felt the brass buttons as they locked. In the darkness there was a queer smile on Jimmie Dale’s tight lips. It was no doubt the officer whom he had passed on the other side of the street.

The other was a smaller man than Jimmie Dale, but powerful for his build — and he fought now with all his strength. This way and that the two men reeled, staggered, swayed, panting and gasping; and then — they had lurched back close to the office door — with a sudden swing, every muscle brought into play for a supreme effort, Jimmie Dale hurled the other from him, sending the man sprawling back to the floor of the office, and in the winking of an eye had slammed shut the door and turned the key.

There was a bull-like roar, the shrill cheep-cheep-cheep of the patrolman’s whistle, and a shattering crash as the officer flung his body against the partition — then the bark of a revolver shot, the tinkle of breaking glass, as the man fired through the office window — and past Jimmie Dale, speeding now for the front door, a bullet hummed viciously.

Out on the street dashed Jimmie Dale, whipping the mask from his face — and glanced like a hawk around him. For all the racket, the neighbourhood had not yet been aroused — no one was in sight. From just overhead came the rattle of a downtown elevated train. In a hundred-yard sprint, Jimmie Dale raced it a half block to the station, tore up the steps — and a moment later dropped nonchalantly into a seat and pulled an evening newspaper from his pocket.

Jimmie Dale got off at the second station down, crossed the street, mounted the steps of the elevated again, and took the next train uptown. His movements appeared to be somewhat erratic — he alighted at the station next above the one by which he had made his escape. Looking down the street it was too dark to see much of anything, but a confused noise as of a gathering crowd reached him from what was about the location of the secondhand store. He listened appreciatively for a moment.

“Isn’t it a perfectly lovely night?” said Jimmie Dale amiably to himself. “And to think of that cop running away with the idea that I didn’t see him when he hid in a doorway after I passed the corner! Well, well, strange — isn’t it?”

With another glance down the street, a whimsical lift of his shoulders, he headed west into the dilapidated tenement quarter that huddled for a handful of blocks near by, just south of Washington Square. It was a little after one o’clock in the morning now and the pedestrians were casual. Jimmie Dale read the street signs on the corners as he went along, turned abruptly into an intersecting street, counted the tenements from the corner as he passed, and — for the eye of any one who might be watching — opened the street door of one of them quite as though he were accustomed and had a perfect right to do so, and went inside.

It was murky and dark within; hot, unhealthy, with lingering smells of garlic and stale cooking. He groped for the stairs and started up. He climbed one flight, then another — and one more to the top. Here, treading softly, he made an examination of the landing with a view, evidently, to obtaining an idea of the location and the number of doors that opened off from it.

His selection fell on the third door from the head of the stairs — there were four all told, two apartments of two rooms each. He paused for an instant to adjust the black silk mask, tried the door quietly, found it unlocked, opened it with a sudden, quick, brisk movement — and, stepping in side, leaned with his back against it.

“Good-morning,” said Jimmie Dale pleasantly.

It was a squalid place, a miserable hole, in which a single flickering, yellow gas jet gave light. It was almost bare of furniture; there was nothing but a couple of cheap chairs, a rickety table — unpawnable. A boy, he was hardly more than that, perhaps twenty-two, from a posture in which he was huddled across the table with head buried in out-flung arms, sprang with a startled cry to his feet.

“Good-morning,” said Jimmie Dale again. “Your name’s Hagan, Bert Hagan — isn’t it? And you work for Isaac Brolsky in the secondhand shop over on West Broadway — don’t you?”

The boy’s lips quivered, and the gaunt, hollow, half-starved face, white, ashen-white now, was pitiful.

“I... I guess you got me,” he faltered “I... I suppose you’re a plain-clothes man, though I never knew dicks wore masks.”

“They don’t generally,” said Jimmie Dale coolly. “It’s a fad of mine — Bert Hagan.”

The lad, hanging to the table, turned his head away for a moment — and there was silence.

Presently Hagan spoke again. “I’ll go,” he said numbly. “I won’t make any trouble. Would — would you mind not speaking loud? I... I wouldn’t like her to know.”

“Her?” said Jimmie Dale softly.

The boy tiptoed across the room, opened a connecting door a little, peered inside, opened it a little wider — and looked over his shoulder at Jimmie Dale.

Jimmie Dale crossed to the boy, looked inside the other room — and his lip twitched queerly, as the sight sent a quick, hurt throb through his heart. A young woman, younger than the boy, lay on a tumble-down bed, a rag of clothing over her — her face with a deathlike pallor upon it, as she lay in what appeared to be a stupor. She was ill, critically ill; it needed no trained eye to discern a fact all too apparent to the most casual observer. The squalor, the glaring poverty here, was even more pitifully in evidence than in the other room — only here upon a chair beside the bed was a cluster of medicine bottles and a little heap of fruit.

Jimmie Dale drew back silently as the boy closed the door.

Hagan walked to the table and picked up his hat.

“I’m... I’m ready,” he said brokenly. “Let’s go.”

“Just a minute,” said Jimmie Dale. “Tell us about it.”

“ ’Twon’t take long,” said Hagan, trying to smile. “She’s my wife. The sickness took all we had. I... I kinder got behind in the rent and things. They were going to fire us out of here — tomorrow. And there wasn’t any money for the medicine, and — and the things she had to have. Maybe you wouldn’t have done it — but I did. I couldn’t see her dying there for the want of something a little money’d buy — and... and I couldn’t” — he caught his voice in a little sob — “I couldn’t see her thrown out on the street like that.”

“And so,” said Jimmie Dale, “instead of putting old Isaac’s cash in the safe this evening when you locked up, you put it in your pocket instead — eh? Didn’t you know you’d get caught?”

“What did it matter?” said the boy. He was twirling his misshappen hat between his fingers. “I knew they’d know it was me in the morning when old Isaac found it gone, because there wasn’t anybody else to do it. But I paid the rent for four months ahead tonight, and I fixed it so’s she’d have medicine and things to eat. I was going to beat it before daylight myself — I” — he brushed his hand hurriedly across his cheek — “I didn’t want to go — to leave her till I had to.”

“Well, say” — there was wonderment in Jimmie Dale’s tones, and his English lapsed into ungrammatical, reassuring vernacular — “ain’t that queer! Say, I’m no detective. Gee, kid, did you think I was? Say, listen to this! I cracked old Isaac’s safe half an hour ago — and I guess there won’t be any idea going around that you got the money and I pulled a lemon. Say, I ain’t superstitious, but it looks like luck meant you to have another chance, don’t it?”

The hat dropped from Hagan’s hands to the floor, and he swayed a little.

“You... you ain’t a dick!” he stammered. “Then how’d you know about me and my name when you found the safe empty? Who told you?”

A wry grimace spread suddenly over Jimmie Dale’s face beneath the mask, and he swallowed hard. Jimmie Dale would have given a good deal to have been able to answer that question himself.

“Oh, that!” said Jimmie Dale. “That’s easy — I knew you worked there. Say, it’s the limit, ain’t it? Talk about your luck being in, why all you’ve got to do is to sit tight and keep your mouth shut, and you’re safe as a church. Only say, what are you going to do about the money, now you’ve got a four months’ start and are kind of landed on your feet?”

“Do?” said the boy. “I’ll pay it back, little by little. I meant to. I ain’t no—” He stopped abruptly.

“Crook,” supplied Jimmie Dale pleasantly. “Spit it right out, kid; you won’t hurt my feelings none. Well, I’ll tell you — you’re talking the way I like to hear you — you pay that back, slide it in without his knowing it, a bit at a time, whenever you can, and you’ll never hear a yip out of me; but if you don’t, why it kind of looks as though I have a right to come down your street and get my share or know the reason why — eh?”

“Then you never get any share,” said Hagan, with a catch in his voice. “I pay it back as fast as I can.”

“Sure,” said Jimmie Dale. “That’s right — that’s what I said. Well, so long — Hagan.” And Jimmie Dale had opened the door and slipped outside.

An hour later, in his dressing room in his house on Riverside Drive, Jimmie Dale was removing his coat as the telephone, a hand instrument on the table, rang. Jimmie Dale glanced at it — and leisurely proceeded to remove his vest. Again the telephone rang. Jimmie Dale took off his curious, pocketed leather belt — as the telephone repeated its summons. He picked out the little drill he had used a short while before, and inspected it critically — feeling its point with his thumb, as one might feel a razor’s blade. Again the telephone rang insistently. He reached languidly for the receiver, took it off its hook, and held it to his ear.

“Hello!” said Jimmie Dale, with a sleepy yawn. “Hello! Hello! Why the deuce don’t you yank a man out of bed at two o’clock in the morning and have done with it, and — eh? Oh, that you, Carruthers?”

“Yes,” came Carruthers’s voice excitedly. “Jimmie, listen — listen! The Gray Seal’s come to life! He’s just pulled a break on West Broadway!”

“Good Lord!” gasped Jimmie Dale. “You don’t say!”

The Dignity of Honest Labor Percival Pollard

Lingo Dan (1903), one of the rarest books in the mystery genre with no copy catalogued or auctioned in a half-century, is a collection of stories about an extremely unusual fictional character. Receiving his sobriquet because of the flowery language he uses, he is a hobo, thief, con man, and a shockingly cold-blooded murderer — extremely unusual for nineteenth-century crooks. Although Lingo Dan also proves himself to be a patriotic American with a deep streak of sentimentality, he remains an unpleasant fellow who nonetheless has a significant position in the history of the mystery story: the year of the first story and the subsequent book makes him the first serial criminal in American literature.

Joseph Percival Pollard (1869–1911) was an important literary critic in his day, befriended both by Ambrose Bierce and H. L. Mencken. He wrote twelve books before his early death at the age of forty-two, but Lingo Dan was his only mystery. He was best known for his works of literary criticism, most successfully with Their Day in Court (1909).

In his scholarly work The Detective Short Story: A Bibliography (1942), Ellery Queen (a collector and scholar of mystery fiction as well as a bestselling novelist) quotes from an inscribed copy of the book in which Pollard wrote: “I expect for [Lingo Dan] neither the success of Sherlock Holmes, Raffles, etc., nor yet the immunity from comparison with those gentlemen. Yet it is at least one thing the others are not: American.” Today, no one compares his character to those he cites, as Lingo Dan is an utterly forgotten figure in the literature of roguery.

“The Dignity of Honest Labor” was first published in book form in Lingo Dan (Washington, D.C., Neale Publishing Co., 1903).

To the sound of the rattling husks being pulled from the yellow maize came the voice of Lingo Dan.

“It is passing wonderful,” he said, “what a fascination your industry has for me, Billy! There is something so rare, so unusual, so bizarre, about it! Indeed, this past month or so — how quaint our lives have been. We have been engaged in honest toil—”

“You, eh?” Billy grunted, and stuffed some husks into a sack so viciously that the sharp edges of the dry leaves cut his hand like a knife. “Yes, you have — like Hell!” He wiped the scarred hand across his hair.

“My good Billy, you forget the ethic basis of the division of labor. It is true that yours has been of the hands — here is a handkerchief, Billy, to bind over that somewhat unsightly cut; a kerchief washed by Miss Mollie’s own fair hands, I dare say — while mine has been of the head. I have been planning our deliverance, Billy. Do you think these elaborations come to me of their own accord? You judge me too highly.” He stretched his legs out at full length, and, his hands clasped behind his head, stared out through a chink of the log-built crib. He sighed. From without came the monotonous buzzing of the cotton gin. “Why is it, Billy,” he went on, “that we can not find contentment in these peaceful ways of life? Think, Billy — to watch the white fluffs of cotton blossoming on one’s own land; to hear the wind whispering in the aisles of one’s own cornfield; to feel that just so much of fair fresh air and sunshine was one’s own — were it not pleasant? — I beg your pardon? Oh — really, Billy, your language is scarce academic. But you are right — we hardly seem the proper figures for that setting. We lack some atom of the elemental human; we are the victims of our versatilities.” For a time there was no sound save that of the savage ripping with which Billy denuded the ears of corn. Then the other spoke again, in a voice from which the abstract and the dreamy was suddenly absent. “You are sure we were not noticed that Sunday?”

“Sure!” said Billy.

“And that you have your part of the business well in mind?”

“Dead easy.”

“Then it becomes merely a question as to how soon that coquette, Opportunity, chooses to beckon to us. Hush a moment, Billy! Yes, our friend, the Deacon, approaches.”

Billy handed over a sack that was half full of the corn shucks. When the farmer whose hired men these two were opened the door of the crib and called them to dinner, Lingo Dan was husking the one ear of corn that had engaged his attention that day.

When his daughter Mollie was setting the table for supper that evening, Sam Travis, familiar to the fellow members of his church as Deacon Travis, came in from the kitchen chuckling to himself. “Been a’figuring things out,” he said, “and dinged if the two of ’em’s done a speck more’n one man’s work o’ shucking that there corn! One man’s work — and we feeds the two of ’em. But the fact is I sort er reckin listening to the tall cuss is as good as reading a magazine. Ever know sech a gift o’ gab, Mollie?”

“No. But he never learnt it on a farm!”

“That’s right, too, Moll; but I ain’t a’going to make no man’s past lead me to the sin of curiosity, Moll — leastwise not in Texas. Ah... h! Wish your mother was alive to smell that cornbread o’ yours, Moll!”

Molly smiled with pleasure. But as the others came in, and while she moved about serving the dishes, her face took on lines of pain. Presently her father noticed that she was making the merest pretence of eating. “Ain’t you well, Moll?” he asked.

“One o’ my headaches, dad,” was the girl’s answer.

“Too bad! An’ tomorrow Sunday! The first Sunday ’the month; an’ me not there to pass the plate!” Deacon Travis passed his cup for more tea, and sighed sadly.

“I’m sorry, dad. Can’t you go without me?”

“No — sir! Not much! Got to see to your having camphor on your forehead right along.”

There was a coughing noise from Lingo Dan. “If you really find yourself unable to go, would it be asking too much, might the buggy be allowed to take my companion and myself to holy worship? It is — not often,” he paused and smiled wistfully at the Deacon, “that we have a chance.”

Deacon Travis looked pleased. “Sure thing, you can have the team. Never thought you was given to churchgoing; might ’er asked you before. Sure you know the way?”

“Perfectly; it is very kind of you.”

When they were alone with each other once more, Deacon Travis remarked to his daughter that it was perhaps a sort of special Providence that had given her a headache, so that two thirsty souls might have an opportunity to drink of the spiritual waters of the Word. Which philosophic point of view, however, was not completely cheering to Miss Mollie herself.

The little frame church, where the farmers of that region are wont to congregate every Sunday, stands on a slight lift of the prairie, where a narrow cross road leaves the North Road for the mountains. Nowhere else in the world would these hills be termed mountains; but here, contrasting vividly enough with the monotonous level of the prairie, they seem somehow to merit the title easily enough. Cedar-clad, these mountains make the horizon, at one point of the compass at least, green and fresh and picturesque. In the hot days, that are the rule in Texas, the shade of these cedars becomes a veritable oasis for travelers whose road takes them in that direction.

And it may be possible that many of the good farm folk being driven churchward that bright, torrid Sunday morning, would have preferred, in their heart of hearts, the cool of the cedar mountains to the hot church benches. Still, if such thoughts came to them while the white dust skurried with and behind their wheels, they put them away again as speedily as possible. They felt that they had every right to be proud of having a church at all. There were communities, in the same county, and not such a vast distance away, either, that were as godless as they were unprosperous. To feel that their own congregation was one made up of well-to-do folk, and to drive through the fields that showed such bountiful harvests was to be glad, also, that they had had the grace, years ago, to call to them a clergyman from the East, to build a church, to support it in every fitting, and, frequently, many a magnificent way. Good fortune, or good judgment, had ordained that the Rev. Martin Dawson prove himself exactly the best pastor in the world for that community. He was an oldish man, not too much the doctrinarian, a pleasant companion personally, and popular not only with the members of his congregation, but with the Eastern folk he had left when coming to Texas. His popularity, and the pleasant manner of his life reacted happily upon his congregation in another direction. After his old college chum, the Rev. James Langan, had paid him a visit some years ago, such glowing reports had been taken back East that thereafter this little Texas farm community had constantly the advantage of hearing many really admirable preachers in their little church. When their good pastor arose as the services opened, and introduced to them his “brother in the Lord” from say Hartford, and there followed a sermon as eloquent as occurs in the towns only where the pew rents are based on such incomes as millionaires have, these good people were no longer surprised. They listened, with interest and gratitude, and thanked fortune once more for giving them such a pastor. As for the visiting clergymen, such visits to their old friend Dawson were by way of holiday. That none of these visitors were the kind that might attempt any discourse tinctured with indoor rather than outdoor theology, was a point rigorously watched by Mr. Dawson.

The Rev. Martin Dawson was a bachelor. Alone with an old servant, who now acted as sexton, verger, and church warden rolled into one, he lived in a small house some two miles from the church, on the road that eventually passed Sam Travis’s farm. Every Sunday morning these two old people betook themselves with surplice and sermon into the little road wagon, and allowed a lazy, easy-going grey mare to convey them leisurely to church. Then followed the duties of the day; the minister prayed and preached, his servant took up the collection. There were some moments in which the minister, his surplice laid aside, chatted cheerily with the members of his congregation, refusing, perhaps, many an invitation to dinner, and then home again, behind the grey mare to convey them leisurely to church. Frequently, to be sure, there was the clerical visitor also; and once or twice it had happened that the visitor had come alone with the old servant, the Rev. Dawson being heir to a gout that, at times, took him quite off his feet.

As the many vehicles of various shapes and capacities came bowling along the dusty roads that approached the church from the different points of the compass, one young farmer with sharper eyes than most people have, identified a buggy that was coming at right angles to his own.

“There’s the Travis rig,” he remarked to his wife.

“Mollie’s been promising me a recipe for putting up Alexandrias; I hope to goodness she ain’t forgot it today.”

“I reckon,” he went on, “you’ll have to wait for that recipe. It’s the Travis rig, but it ain’t the folks. Looks more like some of parson’s friends.”

“Shaw — I’m sorry! One of Moll’s headaches, I guess.” And they drove on, joggedly.

In the Travis buggy, Lingo Dan was discoursing on the curious inconsistencies in human nature.

“A dear old soul, that parson! Eh, Billy — a dear old soul! But only human, after all. No strength of spiritual warp can break the bonds imposed by such coarse creature things as — as ourselves. I hardly think it likely he can break that rope unaided. And as for the partner of the righteous household, I believe you corded him up pretty securely, didn’t you, Billy? Yes, I think we may be sure they are safely fettered for a while. Quite allegorical, this act of ours, Billy; do you not note the allegory? The fetters of the flesh — fetters of the flesh; if your education, Billy, had not been shamefully neglected, you would find many a Sunday school memory in that dear old phrase: The fetters of the flesh. In a measure I regret that force was necessary. A crude thing, after all, is force. If one had been able to obtain their promises, their holy oaths — how much finer, how much more of the age of Honor! But that... that was impossible. A dear old soul! But short in his breath — very short! And then the inconsistency of him — did you note that? While he thought we merely came for common robbery, he seemed to feel little, save, perhaps regret for our misguided ways; but the instant I laid hands on his sermon and his surplice — Olympus, that was a mighty rage, eh, Billy! I was glad I had him bound by that time; had he been free just then, his rage — there is no telling what the dear old soul might not have done. A wonderfully inconsistent thing, human nature! Faceted like the brilliant; as full of surprises as — the weather!”

During all this monologue, jerked out with sudden silences, and laughings, at intervals, Billy sat stolidly binding a handkerchief about one hand.

“Bit me,” he growled, “old beast!”

“Hush, Billy! A sexton — your late antagonist — a sexton, a man whose solemn office it is to aid materially the Last, the Great Divorce — the soul’s decree of separation from the body — to call such a man a... a beast — oh, Billy!”

As they neared the church their eyes caught gladly the sight of the numerous vehicles standing about the fence, and approaching on the different highways.

“It is a case of ‘Auspice Deo,’ ” Lingo Dan went on. “Eh, Billy? Nil desperandum, auspice Deo! Observe what a pleasant congregation we are to have. Glorious, glorious! You have the key to the vestry?”

“Right here,” Billy tapped his pocket.

“And for my part — how delightful are the ways and means of modern civilization sometimes — the dear old soul’s sermon is typewritten! Although,” and here the speaker lowered his voice, as if unwilling to parade whatever had the least glimmer of vanity about it, “I dare say I should not be so utterly bad at an impromptu. I have known the time — in days that are now dead—”

“And buried!” This came from Billy like a fierce reproach. It was evident that gropings into the past had no more charms for him.

Lingo Dan looked slightly hurt. “True — most true. How close to the mark you do shoot, Billy — never a divergence, never a stroll into the abstract — ah, sometimes I believe I envy you, Billy.”

But Billy only grunted. It was the grunt of unbelief.

In a few moments they had reached the vestry door. Billy hitched a rope from the bridle to the fence. Then he opened the vestry door, and the two of them stepped in. Billy noted with dull astonishment that his partner slipped into the surplice with apparent knowledge of its technique. Then the organ began the services of the day.

When the music ceased, a tall, pale figure arose beside the desk that faced the altar railings.

“Dearly beloved brethren,” said the strange clergyman, “my portion in these services was merely to have been the sermon, but sudden indisposition coming to your good pastor, Mr. Dawson, I am here to make what shift I can as substitute.”

There was a pause. The speaker’s eyes swept about the church. Every seat was taken. But in every face he saw nothing save kind encouragement. Far in the last row, deep in shadows, loomed the face of him that was called Billy. All this the clergyman saw in a flash. Then he began, in the conventional voice of the preacher:

“Dearly beloved brethren, the Scripture moveth us in sundry places—” and thereafter the services continued drowsily and perfunctorially. There was nothing to show that the official of the occasion was not versed and practiced in these devotional functions. At times the congregation caught a note of fervor, of loving emphasis placed on some phrase that was more than usually freighted with the poetry that informs the Prayer book; in the mere elocution of the man they scented a sermon that would make them forget even the stifling heat.

From outside came the occasional whinnying of a horse, and the pawing of impatient feet. Beyond that, only the heat, quivering against the fences in visible form.

On the back bench Billy was exerting the last vestiges of his self-control to keep from snoring.

When the general “Amen” had closed the rehearsal of the Creed, the preacher moved to the pulpit. With bowed head he stood silent for some seconds. Then he folded his sermon to his liking. As he read the text he flushed for a space, but his voice never faltered. It was from the gospel of St. Matthew, and it read:

“Beware of false prophets, which come to you in sheep’s clothing.”

It was a pity that the Rev. Dawson could not have heard the eloquent delivery his sermon was given by his locum tenens. Use blunts the faculties somewhat, and it is certain that had its actual author preached this sermon it had not seemed half so powerful. As it was, each word, each phrase had behind it all the nervous vigor of a musical voice, a mind at high tension.

As he turned to the final page of the sermon an agonizing suspicion crossed the ear and the mind of the preacher. Was that a snore from the back bench?

If even the faintest chance of such a thing existed, it was necessary to grasp measures of force. Into the mere reading of another man’s words it was possible to infuse but a limited amount of enthusiasm, after all.

Ostentatiously he closed the pamphlet from which he had been delivering his sermon. With eyes roving soulfully about the faces before him, he brought his voice to its most musical, gripping pitch.

“And so, my brethren,” he exhorted, “sixthly and lastly, we approach the lesson to be learned. What is so rampant in the world today, as this hypocrisy, this wearing of the mask, the borrowed plume that Matthew warned against in the words of the text. The face is given man oft-times but to hide the soul. New doctrines come and go; men prate of new religion and new science; the traders on the world’s trend-to-believe make bargains in the market place. And who, of us here, dare say that some time in his life he has not played the hypocrite? Have all of us worn naught save these same garments, material and spiritual, that we stand in now? It is the one besetting sin; the cancer that is eating wholesome candor from the world. Here, in the open air, under the clear sky, you think the wearing of the mask can be but rarely. You err; the mask is worn, in city or in country. Look to your hearts and find the answer there. Look—” His voice roared up against the rafters, so that there was a quick shuffling heard from the rear bench, and the preacher’s straining eyes caught the shine of Billy’s amazement, and to himself he actually thanked God! “Look — deep in to your hearts!”

With something like a sob in his breath, the preacher turned his face to the East. “And now to the Father” muttered his voice. With the suspense over, the ring of eloquence was no longer necessary.

Then he turned to the table, looking apparently heavenwards, actually at Billy. As the latter lumbered up the aisle, the preacher droned in his monotone, standing with his hands folded in front of him.

“Let your light so shine before men, that they may see your good works.”

With these well-known texts, he proceeded the while Billy passed the wooden plate nervously up and down the pews. The envelopes containing the contributions fell with a shuffling sound of paper upon paper. There were no casuals in this congregation; the actual sight of coin was hardly ever obtruded.

At last the collection was over. The plate, heaped up with white riches, stood beside the railing of the chancel. The preacher raced to the benediction.

After that, with a change in his voice, he came forward a step, and said:

“If the congregation will wait a few moments, I shall be glad to meet the individual members of it personally.”

Those who watched him closely always declared that he had the most winning smile they had ever seen.

Then, with a quick snatch of the collection plate he hurried into the vestry. Into a corner went the surplice.

“Thank the Lord,” he whispered to himself, “that this stuff’s all folded in paper. Makes less noise.” He slipped the money into a handkerchief and opened the outer door cautiously.

Another second or two and the Travis buggy was whirling over the highway to the mountains, a cloud of dust concealing it.

In the church the congregation awaited their meeting with one of the most eloquent preachers they had heard in many a day.

Several hours later, after a forced march through cedar brush that hid all tracks impenetrably, Lingo Dan and Billy stopped beside a mountain spring.

Spreading the contribution envelopes out on the cool rocks in the shadow of the hill that held the spring, Lingo Dan proceeded to open them, to count the gains from their adventure.

Billy got up with an oath.

Lingo Dan lay back on his back and roared with laughter. When he had breath enough, he said: “But Billy, do you count the sensation as nothing?”

Every contribution was a check.

The Eyes of the Countess Gerda May Edginton

A name that rarely resonates for readers of mystery fiction is May Edginton, the nom de plume of May Helen Marion Edginton Bailey (1883–1957), though she was a prolific writer of romances and has a connection to the American musical theater of perhaps greater import.

As H. M. Edginton, she wrote a novel, Oh! James! (1914), which inspired the 1919 stage play My Lady Friends, which lives in infamy in Boston because the owner of the Boston Red Sox sold Babe Ruth to the New York Yankees to finance it. The play in turn was the basis for the musical No, No, Nanette (1924), which, continuing to recycle the story, was adapted for film in 1930 and 1940 before again becoming a hit when it was revived on Broadway in 1971.

Among the many films based on her stories, novels, and plays were The Prude’s Fall (1924), a silent film written by Alfred Hitchcock, who also was the assistant director; Secrets (1933), starring Mary Pickford, based on Edginton’s play of the same title; and Adventure in Manhattan (1936), starring Jean Arthur, based on her story “Purple and Fine Linen.”

The central character in The Adventures of Napoleon Prince (1912) has help, in the best tradition of Raffles, with his sidekick, Bunny, and, on the other side of the legal fence, Sherlock Holmes with his Watson. Aiding Prince in his nefarious schemes are his beautiful and devoted Gerda, described as his sister, and Dapper, his discreet and faithful servant.

“The Eyes of the Countess Gerda” was originally published in The Adventures of Napoleon Prince (New York, Cassell, 1912).

Among the new tenants in the new block of very desirable flats not far from Victoria were a lady, young, charming and alone; a semi-paralytic man of any age from thirty to forty, accompanied by a pretty sister; and a tall, bronzed young man, who had apparently nothing more serious to do than to organise beautifully his bachelor housekeeping. The first named lady had been installed in Flat 24 for a month when the invalid and his sister moved into No. 20 of the flats below; the bronzed young man entered into possession of No. 23 a few days after the occupation of No. 20.

The young man, whose name, as testified by the indicator in the vestibule, was Mr. John Luck, had not been there many days before he made the acquaintance of the invalid and his sister. It was begun in quite an accidental fashion, as the hall porters saw — the trio most obviously never having met before — and it progressed casually and as politeness demanded, beneath the eyes of the same porters and a lift attendant of inquiring mind — just a “Good-morning, again!” or “Fine weather!” or “Beastly day!” and the like. A few days of these vestibule meetings resulted in the discussion of a camera which the invalid man was taking into the Green Park for the purpose of snapshotting winter scenes. It appeared Mr. John Luck knew a good deal of that make of camera; the invalid — Mr. Napoleon Prince, as testified by the indicator — had not used it before.

“You were just going out?” said the little paralytic pleasantly. “Only for a walk? Walk our way, won’t you, for a few minutes, and go on telling me about this machine?”

So that Mr. John Luck walked out by the chair of Mr. Napoleon Prince, which he wheeled himself, and by the side of the very pretty girl, his sister. All of which was seen and observed by the porters and the lift-man.

“If people of our profession only realised, Johnnie,” the little man in the chair observed as they passed out of the quadrangle, “what a deal depends on these seeming trivialities, there would be more genius rewarded, and fewer police triumphs.”

“We have nothing definite in view, Nap?” the young man hazarded.

“No, no!” Napoleon replied. “Why should we? We are gourmets, not gourmands. We have enough for the present, n’est-ce pas, mes enfants?”

“Let’s be good for a while, Nap,” said the girl.

“You hear that, Luck,” said Napoleon, smiling. “Mary tells us to be good. We will settle down for a few months, and be beneficent citizens, then. We’ll do the theatres, and you shall take Mary to the races, and we will make the acquaintance of our neighbours, and entertain them innocently.”

“Hurrah!” cried Mary. She wore a high-waisted coat of clinging lines, furs, and a wide hat, and she looked exquisite.

Johnnie Luck walked with freer step.

“Good!” he agreed. “Very good!”

“I believe,” said Napoleon, glancing at them, one on either side of him, as he wheeled along past Buckingham Palace, “that you are both wretchedly respectable at bottom.” They turned into the Green Park. “Leave me to run about and take my photographs, and philosophise on the profits of respectability, while you two take the brisk exercise that is good for you, and philosophise on — anything you like.”

There was the faintest trace of a smile — a little grim or wistful — on his large pale face as he steered away from them. They walked about the Park for an hour, seeing nobody but each other, hearing nothing but their own low-toned talk, and forgetting entirely the size of the world — theirs being populated by two — until running wheels beside them brought them back to realisation of Napoleon.

“I am sorry,” said he, “but I have used all my plates, and want my lunch. Johnnie, our acquaintance has ripened sufficiently, I imagine, for me to ask you to share the lunch.”

The trio went home, and lunched together in the Princes’ dining-room. After the meal:

“Mary is going to shop,” said Napoleon. “She is going to the Stores, because it is so respectable. But you, Johnnie—”

Johnnie Luck looked hopefully at Mary, who, in the sweetest of frocks à la Joséphine, was standing to warm one small slippered foot at the fire.

“Don’t take him with you, Mary,” said Napoleon whimsically. “I want someone to talk to.” Adding: “And you don’t know him well enough, either.”

She laughed, told Luck to stay, and left them.

“Get cigars, Johnnie,” said the little man, “draw up that chair, put your feet on the mantelpiece — because it must be such a fine thing to be able to do — and make yourself generally comfortable.”

They smoked at ease, each looking into the fire silently. Presently:

“Like your place, Johnnie? I’ve never asked.”

“All right, thanks.”

“I mentioned you should take number twenty-three or twenty-four. Better not to be on the same floor, you see.”

“I see. Oh! yes, these little cautions are worth observing, of course. Number twenty-four was taken before we came, you know.”

“So I suppose,” said Napoleon, looking into the fire. A quarter of an hour ticked by before he roused himself to say anything further. Then it was, gently:

“Johnnie, you’re seeing something in the fire, ain’t you, old man? Don’t be ashamed to be sentimental; be proud of it. I was seeing much the same sort of thing, I guess.”

John Luck had seen the Joséphine girl’s little face, of course, gleaming up at him, but—

“You!” he said, confounded, to Napoleon. “You, Nap!”

“Yes, I,” said Napoleon, with a snap, looking up. “I’ve got a man’s heart, I suppose, if I’ve only got half his body. And at that time, you see, I was whole. It was seven years ago, nearly.”

Luck nodded, and looked at him in a man’s silence of sympathy.

“It was the only time I’ve ever been done, Johnnie,” said the little man. “Done, and not got my own back. You see, it was a woman. Like to hear? I’d like to tell you. I was travelling in Italy for the Cosmopolitans’ gang I’ve told you about, and we’d got a great scoop on. I was their smartest man, and they gave the chief part to me. Well, I was in the Opera House in Florence one night, when I saw one woman among all the others. It was a crowded house — Royalty there — but after I’d looked at her I didn’t see much else — you know. She was young and dark, with marvellous eyes; dressed in white with a scarlet cloak. She was with a man, and they sat close to the orchestra. I managed to follow them out, and to see her close. My word, Johnnie, magnificent! But, I thought, not happy. She had no gloves on, and there was no wedding ring — so she was, that far, free. I went home and dressed. Next morning— Ever been in Italy, Johnnie?”

Luck shook his head.

“Such mornings as you get!” said Napoleon. “It was spring, I remember, about March— Ever read poetry, Johnnie?

The little man’s voice caressed the words melodiously. He went on:

“I met her in the square, riding down to the river. I kept her in sight all the morning, and followed her when she rode at a foot pace back to an hotel. So I learned her address. I forgot all about the Cosmopolitans, and all that sort of truck. There seemed only one thing that mattered... She was evidently staying at the hotel. I learned her name: the Countess Gerda di Veletto. I wrote to her, signing myself: ‘A very mad Englishman,’ and giving an address. Johnnie, boy, that same evening a page from the hotel brought me an answer. I have it here in my letter case. I’ve always carried it. Like to see it? Because I’d like to show it to you.”

The folded sheet that he pulled out was worn almost to tatters at the creases. Johnnie Luck, feeling rather foolish and rather intrusive, read:

Luck passed this back in silence, and Napoleon returned it to the letter case, and thence to his inside breast pocket. He went on evenly.

“Johnnie, by that time I was loving her as I never loved a woman before, and never shall again. Her ‘deep trouble and anxiety’ gave me thought. I wrote her, crazed. Could I do something? Might her mad Englishman meet her at any hour and any place? Any way, would she command him? She wrote back that she could not see me that evening, as a friend would be dining with her. A friend? Who was this ‘friend’? I got half mad with jealousy, and watched the hotel, as if I could pick out her visitor from the crowds. But when I saw the man who had been with her at the Opera go in, I knew that I had picked him out.

“I went home and wrote to her again. I begged her to make an appointment with me, let me do something for her if I could. She answered at once, as before, saying that I could call the next day, but she could see nobody till then. She was at her wits’ end to escape from some trouble. I read a good deal between the lines of that letter, as she meant me to do. She knew how to leave room between the lines — which is an art, my dear Johnnie, of the highest order. I saw despair and fear in it. She said recklessly at the end that it was only monetary, her trouble. Five hundred pounds, after all, would clear her, and she was going to ask her friend for it that night. I remember phrases such as: ‘I’m not that kind of woman, either, you very mad Englishman... It goes cruelly hard... but there! he will be only too eager to give, as it will be only too bitter for me to take.’ And then, with a sort of sudden return to formality, she added that she would be pleased to give me a few minutes’ interview the next day.

“Johnnie, Gerda knew her book, boy. She realised, as very few people of our profession realise, what an important study is your book of psychology. Women, as a rule, are better at that game than men. Criminologists trace crime to heredity, to suggestion, to physical phenomena, to environment. But women go one better than that. They use the emotions; they know the weight of an eyelash, the value of the turn of a head, of a word, and more, of an unsaid word. It was what she did not say in that letter that made me see red and shake with absolute bestial rage. I thought of the chap at the Opera — recalled his face — his tricks of gesture, his age, all about him. He was a nice-looking, young dark fellow, but I got a vision of Mephistopheles. I imagined him driving a bargain with her for the five hundred. I had plenty of money — the Cosmopolitans’ money — on me. I got notes for five hundred and put them into a letter, begging her to take them from the very mad Englishman, who would not even ask to see her in return, rather than from her ‘friend.’ But how I hoped for that meeting she’d promised! She sent an answer filled in between the lines — you know. I was to call and be thanked in person for ‘the loan.’ The next evening, at seven, I was to dine with her.”

“And?” Luck asked, after a longish pause had fallen.

Napoleon replied tersely.

“I went, blindfold as I had acted, and shaking with excitement, to her hotel at seven o’clock. I came out at seven ten, sane. She had left early in the morning with, presumably, several articles of jewellery missed by other visitors, and my — or rather the Cosmopolitans’ — five hundred pounds. Police inquiry — from the other victims, not me, Johnnie — elicited the fact that she had left Florence with her ‘friend,’ but they could not be traced. I cursed solid for some while — imagining her laughter.”

Luck nodded.

“It must have been the softest thing she’d ever been on,” said Napoleon, “and yet she was dealing with the cleverest man she had, in all probability, ever met with.”

He made the assertion ruminatively, and with no conscious arrogance.

“Since then,” he resumed, “I have relied less on science in my profession, less on logical sequence, and have recognised that chance, emotion, and adventure are very potent contingencies to be reckoned with. Her eyes had melted me. My science, my logic, my ingrained suspicion of the world, went by the board. It was, as I say, a very soft thing. She could not have expected to draw the money before she had granted me an interview, at least. And how she must have laughed when she did it! She and her friend! It must be the joke of their lives. And when you come to think of it, Johnnie, it is excruciatingly humorous that I... I... I... should have tumbled into that!”

There was nothing in the little man’s pale face to betray that he had ever felt the excruciating humour of the situation, so John Luck did not laugh either.

“Logic is a fool to love,” said Napoleon.

“It is an interesting story,” Luck remarked.

“What reminded me of it,” said Napoleon, turning his head, and fixing his auditor with his brief bright glance, “was seeing her eyes in the fire just now, as you were seeing someone else’s, eh, Johnnie? I’ve never, these seven years, forgotten Gerda.”

“Nor forgiven her?”

He evaded that. “And what called up those eyes, Johnnie, was seeing another pair very like them as I came out of the building this morning. She was a pretty woman named Muswell, the lift-man told me.”

“My neighbour, I expect, in number twenty-four.”

“That so? Do you know her? She looked wistful, worried, down on her luck, though Mary tells me her frock must have cost exactly ten pounds nineteen and eleven pence halfpenny.”

“No, I don’t know her. Often met her going up or down, of course. I’ve noticed the worried air. Perhaps she’s just lonely. Seems a sin for a pretty woman like that to be living all by herself.”

“She has eyes just like Gerda’s,” said Napoleon softly. He looked into the fire again, his chin sunk a little, his face merely a pale mask. Then he asked:

“Have you ever credited me with weakness, Johnnie?”

Luck smiled so broadly at this question that a spoken negative was unnecessary.

“Yet all men are weak,” said Napoleon, answering the smile, “and my weakness, my soft spot, my tenderness, is for eyes like Gerda’s. I loved her — and she hurt me. She had never set eyes on me — I just worshipped from my distance. Never mind. I loved her, and love is love, and, as I say, above all the logic in the world. I had a charwoman in Paris once with eyes a little like hers, and I did what I could to help that charwoman because of Gerda. Gerda wouldn’t have done it, but never mind. Now I meet Mrs. Muswell here in these flats, and she has eyes that are the very duplicate of Gerda’s. She looks lonely, unhappy, unlucky. Convention forbids Mary to call on her, and offer her some palliation of her loneliness, because it seems that she arrived here first. Apparently she will not call on us. And I want to do some good turn for a girl with Gerda’s eyes. Arrange the matter for us, Johnnie.”

“How?”

“Make her acquaintance, as she’s next door. Make her talk. Make her tell you she’s lonely. Then beg her to call on those nice people, the Princes, whose acquaintance you have made since coming here. And so on.”

“How do I make her acquaintance, Nap?”

“Oh! run along, Johnnie!” said Napoleon, vastly tickled at this helplessness. “You are a very pretty young man — don’t blush! You have the ordinary social gifts, and a pair of eyes to appreciate the blessings the gods grant you in the way of alluring neighbours. You have a charming flat next her own, and you are both solitary young people. The conditions are so favourable as to allow of positively no interesting obstacles to surmount at all.”

Mary here returned from the Stores, and voted her shopping dull.

“Polly,” said her brother, “Luck, here, is going to bring his neighbour, Mrs. Muswell, to call on you tomorrow afternoon. It is an old love-story—”

Mary looked frostily from one to the other.

“Of mine, child, not Johnnie’s,” Napoleon continued, preparing to wheel from the room; “an old love-story of which her eyes remind me. So we are going to be exceedingly kind to Mrs. Muswell, child, please.”

A quite beautiful woman opened the door of her flat to Mr. John Luck the next morning. She was tall, dark, slight almost to leanness, and vivid; she looked any age from twenty-five to thirty, but it was most probably thirty. She wore an artful gown. Her eyes were very lovely — big, straight, innocent, appealing.

“I am sorry to trouble you,” said Mr. John Luck, with his engaging smile, “but I have lost my kitten, and I think she must have come in to you, with the milk, or something. May I look, please?”

The lovely apparition looked Mr. Luck over.

“Come in,” said she simply, and, closing the door behind him, led the way to a little drawing-room as artful as her frock. A very queer Eastern little drawing-room. She motioned him with frank kindness — her absence of all conventional mannerism was refreshing — to a seat, and inquired the name and description of the kitten.

“She answers to anything, but is generally called ‘Puss,’ ” replied Mr. Luck admiringly, “and she is about the most spiritual cat I have ever met.”

“What colour is your dear little kitten?”

“She is white,” said Luck. “All spirits are, you know. I am sure you would love her. Are you fond of cats?”

“Very,” she answered, smiling softly and doubtfully.

She stared at him much as a puzzled child might do. Then they rose and looked for the kitten all over the flat, but it could not be found. No answer came to any appeal of “Puss!” or any other name. The search proving futile, they returned to the drawing-room, and sat down again.

“I am your next-door neighbour, you know,” he said, when one or two topics had been exhausted, and she gave him no unkind hint to go.

“Oh! — yes?” she said doubtfully.

“They are jolly flats, aren’t they?”

“Yes.”

“But even a flat is very lonely for one person, isn’t it?”

“Yes.” She added with great simplicity: “I am very lonely.”

“What a sin, Mrs... Mrs.—”

“Muswell,” said she, hesitating over the name. He registered the hesitation. “I have no friends at all in London now.” And she sighed.

“Why not call on some of the people here? The newer comers, you know.”

“Oh, do you think they—”

“Would love it?” said Mr. Luck. “I do. There’s a charming pair, brother and sister, just below you, whose acquaintance I’ve made since coming here. They’d be delighted, I know they would. Their name is Prince.”

“Oh! Do you mean the poor little invalid gentleman, Mr. — ?”

“My name is Luck. And I do mean the invalid and his sister. I say, are you very, very conventional?”

She shook her head, still smiling her doubtful, half timorous smile.

“No, I’m afraid I’ve lost touch with English conventions. I... I’ve been out of England so long.”

A faint sigh again, and the words seemed to call up to the dark wells of her eyes some best-forgotten thing from fathoms deep.

“Then,” he said, “do let me take you down to call this afternoon, Mrs. Muswell. Will you?”

After the necessary preliminary hesitations, she consented.

“Although,” she said, “I am afraid of making friends. I—”

“Why should you deprive people?”

“My story,” she said after a pause, “is rather an extraordinary one. I... I could hardly tell such a stranger, but—”

“Certainly not,” replied Mr. Luck, promptly rising to take his leave. They skook hands by a sort of mutual impulse, she looking at him very straightly, he looking back very reassuringly. So he returned to his own demesne, anticipating with pleasure the hearing of this pretty woman’s extraordinary story at a very near date, for he was but human. “In here after dinner,” said he, looking thoughtfully round his drawing-room, “over coffee, with a dim light. Almost any cushions would suit her as a background.”

He took her down that afternoon to call on the Princes, as prearranged.

The visit was a success. Afterwards Mary said, but kindly, that she looked like a woman with a story.

Luck assented grudgingly to the possibility.

Napoleon, with his mysterious smile, agreed with Mary. The young widow certainly had a story. He looked remotely into the fire. Probably he was seeing Gerda’s eyes.

The young widow’s extraordinary story was not long withheld from Johnnie Luck.

That same evening, having dined in his flat, he was seated at his piano, playing softly, and singing softly in a voice worth better things, some doggerel nigger melodies, when a lady was ushered in on him by the very discreet servitor whom Luck had engaged.

It was Mrs. Muswell.

She was in a simple black chiffon gown, and she looked appealing.

“You will think this very strange, I suppose,” she began, as he jumped up with every manifestation of pleasure to meet her. “At least, I suppose you will think it strange — I forget just exactly what one may or may not do in England. Can I sit down?”

“I am sure you may do that,” said he, smiling, and hastily dragging forward a chair which held cushions of the right colour for her complexion.

She dropped a soft black roll which she carried — it looked like a small hearthrug — and sank into the chair.

“You were so very kind to me this morning and this afternoon,” she said hesitatingly, “that I would like to... to tell you about myself, unconventional as I suppose it seems. But then, as I told you, I have forgotten how to be properly conventional like your nice English girls.”

She bit her lip, and her eyes looked as if they held tears.

“My dear Mrs. Muswell,” he said interestedly, sitting down near her, “conventions are always wrong, because they indicate a state of things that calls for unnatural restraint. Whereas things are not in the least in that most deplorable state. Why can’t we all be natural, and say what we like to each other? Why make acquaintance by the almanac?”

“Why, indeed?” she echoed innocently. “Can I, then, tell you everything, and ask your advice upon the situation, because I have no older friend than yourself here? Would a nice English girl do it?”

“She would love it,” replied Luck earnestly.

She was very charmingly full of doubts and indecisions, half smiling. “I was brought up in England,” she said; “my mother was English, but my father was Italian. You can see the Italian in me, can you not?”

The discreet servitor here brought in the coffee tray, to which he had discreetly added a second cup and saucer, and withdrew. Luck ministered to his guest; she tasted the coffee and gave a little exclamation.

“How good! I have not had it so good since I escaped from—”

She stopped. “We used to eat sweets with it there,” she said rather faintly. “Rich, delicious sugary things like chocolate, marrons glacés, almond paste, crystallised violets, and Turkish delight all rolled together.”

A box of chocolates, bought for Mary, was pushed away behind the furnishings of an occasional table. Luck found this, and, untying the ribbon, offered the sweets.

“It is the nearest thing I can do,” said he apologetically.

She helped herself. She had very white teeth, over which her red lips crinkled back prettily. “Not that I want to remember anything about it,” she sighed. “It is all too painful — too degrading — too—”

“I assure you that I will give you the best advice in my power.”

“I know it, and I am going to tell you my story.”

He sat before her, holding the open chocolate box; she began to talk, stopping now and again to help herself and nibble at the bonbons as a child may nibble sweets and tell a fairy tale.

“My mother, as I told you, was English, my father Italian. I was brought up during my childhood in England, but when I was eighteen I went with my parents to Paris. There my mother died, and I was left entirely to my father’s care. It was not good care. Heaven forgive me for speaking ill of him, but it was very bad care. So bad for a girl of only eighteen, straight out of a convent school in England.”

“A convent school?”

“Yes. I spent my holidays there as well as the terms. It was very peaceful and sweet; I loved it. One lived asleep. When I came out of that dear place the awakening was very sudden, crude, bewildering. But then I realised the world outside, and that I was alive in it. I simply threw myself into all the excitement my parents provided. When my mother died, my father went on providing excitements. I played, like a child still, with everything and everybody, till at last, seeing that I could not or would not understand that I was grown up, and what were his aims for me, my father spoke. ‘Julie,’ he said — in Paris it was, after a ball — ‘when are you going to marry?’

“The question was a horrid shock. I had not thought of marrying. I was happy. My world was Arcadia — not a dull one, of course, in Paris — but mentally Arcadia. ‘I shall always stay with you, papa,’ I said to him lightly. ‘I have other plans for you, ma chérie,’ said he to me heavily. And the next day he introduced me to Prince Mustapha. The prince had just come from Constantinople on a diplomatic mission, I understood. He was quite young, charming, and polished like our own men. I went about with him a great deal, my father dropping chaperonage when possible. I let the prince, as it were, into my Arcadia among all my other friends. I had very few women friends; but that, of course, was my father’s fault. You believe me that it was Arcadia?”

She looked like a child afraid of the construction which may be put by an irreverent elder upon the truth which it is telling.

“I see you believe me,” she resumed. “You are good, kind. Then came a horrible day; my father storming and telling me that I was talked about in every club and café in Paris; and Mustapha proposing marriage. I was so afraid of my father, so anxious to escape from such a blustering parent, that I accepted the prince. We were married in Paris — I, like an ignorant girl, not questioning the validity of the rite between one of his religion and one of mine, and we — my husband and I — travelled back together to Constantinople.”

A long pause.

“I do not really think that I can go on,” she said very faintly. But when she had dried her eyes and eaten a few more chocolates she insisted bravely on doing so.

“The prince had a harem—”

“Good heavens!” cried Luck.

“A harem. And I was one of his — called by courtesy — wives. I had been in his house twenty-four hours before I knew. I reproached him passionately. I said: ‘If my father knew of this—’ He replied: ‘Your father knew well. I paid him twenty-five thousand francs to help him with his debts.’ So I understood that it was a question of buying and selling. I, a free girl with English blood in my veins, had been sold! I saw what a broken reed I had to lean on in my father — my only reed, too! What could I do? I had been with Mustapha for a week. I... I stayed. I became one of the harem. One of the sleepy, fattening, decorated pets and slaves. I was that for eight years, and suddenly I revolted strongly enough to devise, with all the odds against me, my escape. I planned it for seven months, watching every sign and listening to every sound of life I could catch from outside to help me build a scheme. One thing I was resolved on: I would not go penniless.

“Just at that time there was a craze among us in the harem for making mats of black silk and wool an inch and a half thick. I had been for eight years Mustapha’s favourite, and he had lavished jewels on me. As soon as I began to plan my escape, I commenced to hide these chains and necklaces in the weaving of my mat. One by one, very cunningly, I put my ornaments away, always keeping up to the last something to wear when Mustapha sent for me. I quarrelled with the other women, who had hated me from the beginning, and for seven months we hardly spoke, so I could sit away from them, and they never came to look at and handle my work, and chatter about it, as they did with one another’s. By the time the mat was nearly finished my plans were ripe, and occasion came. We always walked at will on the roof garden. I went up alone with my mat one evening, and dropped myself right down from the roof into the top of a big fruit tree underneath. It seemed a sickening distance. I lay there and looked over the wall into the street. It was a comparatively quiet spot, away from the market place and principal squares. At last I dared to climb down and over the wall by the aid of the fruit trees that were trained along it. So I walked out free into a street for the first time in eight years. As free as I could be, that is. Of course, I went veiled. I got my passage money and an escort privately from the British Consul, and so I came back at last to England and to London.”

She stopped to eat chocolates, and for some time there was a silence.

“Poor, poor girl!” said Johnnie Luck at last.

“You are good, kind,” she said softly. “Advise me.”

“What to do with your life? I couldn’t.”

“No, no!” said she. “What to do with my jewels. They represent my capital, you see. I have no money. I must sell them, yet very privately, because I could not bear anyone to hear this story — except you, of course, my good friend. The English are so prejudiced. I want to start a new life among them fairly. Besides, there is another reason why I must keep my secret.” She looked reserved.

“Your story is, of course, perfectly safe with me.”

“I know it. To return to the jewels, there must be at least ten thousand pounds’ worth in the mat.”

Luck looked respectfully at the soft black roll lying at their feet.

“Would you confide in the Princes?” he asked. “Napoleon Prince knows a great deal about... er... the... the curio markets of the world, and he might be able to assist you.”

Reluctantly she consented to confide in Mr. Napoleon Prince at the earliest opportunity — on the morrow, if possible.

After she had gone, leaving a faint aroma of some Eastern perfume clinging to his cushions, Luck descended to No. 20. He found Napoleon up, smoking before a gorgeous fire, but Mary had retired early to bed.

“News, Johnnie?” said the little man, smiling slightly.

Luck related Mrs. Muswell’s story. “Preposterous, eh?” he asked.

Napoleon had listened through it, merely nodding and commenting, with very little amazement. “Preposterous enough to be true,” he replied oracularly. “You will learn not to discredit melodrama, Johnnie, presently. All the melodramas ever written are nothing to the melodramas that are lived every day.”

“She’s going to ask your advice on my recommendation, Nap.”

“She couldn’t come to a better quarter,” replied Napoleon, looking into the fire.

“You will help her, then, in some way, like a good chap?”

“I shall help — Gerda’s eyes!” said Napoleon, smiling.

“Good-night, Nap.”

“Night-night, Johnnie.”

And he was left looking at the eyes in the fire.

The tenant of No. 24 came, according to arrangement, the next afternoon to the Princes’ flat. She carried with her a rolled-up black bundle — the mat woven, according to her story, in the harem of Prince Mustapha. Luck was there. Mary was charmingly kind. Napoleon pressed her hand in his left one, and said that he hoped she would not be vexed to know that Mr. Luck had already told them the story. Mr. Luck thought she might be glad to be saved the very painful recital.

No, she was not vexed. Yes, she was glad — thank you, kind people. She unrolled the black mat.

“Feel!” she said to Napoleon.

He felt, among the softness of the silk and wool, chains and layers here and there of hard, lumpy substances.

“Necklaces?” he queried.

She answered eagerly, frankly: “Two necklaces, nearly a dozen brooches, a girdle, a chain, many pairs of earrings, ruby, emerald and topaz. The necklaces are diamonds and pearls. How can I sell these things so as not to excite suspicion and call attention to myself? Mustapha may be looking for me, and I dare not attract his notice.”

“He could not touch you in England, dear child,” said the little man, with a fatherly air.

“But the story!” she said passionately. “The story! That would come out! And it must never be known — because I... I have so much at stake — I—”

Suddenly she put her handkerchief to her face and sobbed, her shoulders rocking. Napoleon watched her thoughtfully. Luck was really distressed. Mary administered what comfort she could give to a stranger and rang for tea.

During the dispensing of it the visitor recovered somewhat, and looked up with a quivering smile through tears that made her black eyes shine like jewels.

“What must you all think of me?” she gasped. “I am sorry. I am very sorry. But, as I said, I have so much at stake. I... I am going to be married.”

She sipped her tea, while Mary and Luck looked at her with exclamations of mutual sympathy and interest.

“You see,” she said in a low voice, “I am not really Mustapha’s wife. The marriage in Paris was not valid. In spite of my... my degradation, I am free. Let me tell you.” She caught Mary’s hand, looking with great understanding from her to Johnnie Luck. “You, dear girl, you will feel with me. On my way home to England I met, in Austria, a young officer of the Austrian army, on leave. We... we” — her eyes drooped — “we loved each other from the first moment,” she said in a strangled voice, “and I promised to marry him. I tried to forget my story. Then I saw everything in what seemed its hideous impossibility, and I went on, without a word of good-bye to him. I dared not trust myself to say good-bye. But he followed me here.”

“Delicious!” cried Mary warmly to Luck. He looked back at her as if to say: “Exactly as I should do!”

Their visitor went on: “And he found me yesterday. I renewed my promises to him, and we shall be married as soon as I have sold these and provided myself with a little money, and bought a trousseau, and so on. You see, ostensibly I am a young widow in comfortable circumstances. I am so afraid of the least hitch — of any inquiry leading to knowledge of what constitutes my capital” — she indicated the mat — “and then as to how I came by these Eastern-looking jewels — even if Mustapha does not trace me as I dispose of them. You understand — it’s not a wicked deception? It is the happiness of two lives — mine and Friedrich’s — that—”

“We understand perfectly,” said the Joséphine girl sweetly. Napoleon was looking at the black roll.

“May we see some of the things?” he asked.

The visitor assented, and cutting the strands of the mat, they brought some of the ornaments to light. They were much as she had described them — rather roughly cut gems, some in heavy Eastern settings. Napoleon examined them one by one with the air of a connoisseur. He took little implements out of his waistcoat pocket, and tapped the stones, looking at them closely, their owner meanwhile looking closely at him. She grew a little pale during the examination, and spoke of the devotion of Mustapha, who would lavish ornaments to any value upon her.

“I think,” Napoleon said at last, “that I might get you three thousand pounds for these in various markets that I know of. I am a bit of a traveller, as you may know, and through buying art curios I have been in touch with many dealers in Europe and Asia.”

Her face fell. “You think they are not worth more?”

“They may be,” he replied, “but that could be ascertained when they have been examined by experts. Sleep on the matter, my dear lady, and then let me know if you will put it into my hands.”

“You are good,” she said gratefully. “Good and kind, all of you. We may be able to talk further of it tomorrow. Friedrich is coming to dine with me tonight. Would you—” She looked from one to the other.

“Would you,” Mary responded, “bring him down to us for coffee? We should be charmed.”

The invitation being accepted with thanks and beaming smiles, Mrs. Muswell withdrew, Johnnie Luck accompanying her to carry the black roll to the flat above. She extolled the kindness of his friends and himself.

“Is he rich?” she asked plaintively, “your Mr. Prince?”

Receiving a cautious reply, she said childishly: “If he is, perhaps he would like to buy my jewels himself, and dispose of them at his leisure, at a big profit. It will be so hard for me to wait. So very, very hard. And I will not go to Friedrich without what they call a dot.”

Accepting with a smile the compliments obviously to be turned on this, she vanished into her flat, and they saw her no more until nine thirty, when, charming and excited, she brought down Friedrich for a few minutes to be introduced to them. He was a dark, spruce, military-looking man, extremely smart. After coffee she took him back to her own flat again.

“Darling things!” said Mary. “Be kind to them, Nap.”

“Yes,” said Luck, “be kind to them, Nap.”

“Children,” said the little man, drinking a third cup of coffee in unwonted absence of mind, “I am already devising extensive plans of benevolence and philanthropy. All the world loves a lover. Here is to our pretty friend and her gallant Friedrich!” He drank the toast in coffee. “I anticipate that we may see her quite early in the morning.”

It was comparatively early in the morning when Mrs. Muswell called at No. 20. Mary had gone out betimes to buy some articles of which her brother professed himself in instant need, for which she had to go half across London, and so would not be back before lunch. Johnnie Luck had, in response to a message from the paralytic, descended to No. 20. When he came, Napoleon had little to say, however, beyond desultory chat. He seemed to be listening. When a ring was heard, his face cleared and he smiled.

“I would lay you a hundred to one, Johnnie, that is the heroine of the Harem Melodrama.”

“Do you mean to imply that you do not believe—”

“My dear Johnnie, I discredit nothing and credit nothing. I tell you she has Gerda’s eyes, which is ample reason for my doing what I am about to do.”

She was ushered in.

“Ah, my dear lady! We were speaking of angels. A very good morning to you!”

But she looked as though the morning were far from very good. She was distraite, worried. Under her arm she carried the black mat in a roll. When, seemingly too abstracted to give any formal greeting to either man, she had sat down, she said impulsively:

“Mr. Prince, I come to ask your immediate help in my trouble. Friedrich” — her eyes looked wet — “is ordered to rejoin his regiment. He is leaving England tonight.”

They were all attention, making little murmurs of sympathy. She went on:

“He implored me yesterday evening — it was after we left you — to marry him before he left, to return to Austria with him. But first I want to get rid of these. I will not go to Friedrich’s family — his cold, proud family — without a penny. Mr. Prince, what shall I do? Who will buy at a moment’s notice?”

“Very few people, I am afraid, dear lady,” said Napoleon.

She bit her lip and trembled. Her eyes were magnificent.

“I told you yesterday,” he said, taking her unresisting hand, “that you could probably get three thousand for the lot without much haggling. Probably — not certainly. I do not trust my judgment to say certainly. You might get more, as I also told you, if you were content to wait and submit them to the really best experts—”

“No, no!” she exclaimed hurriedly. “I could not wait — now. Who would give me three thousand for them?”

“That,” he replied, “I could not say at such short notice. I should have to find out. But I will give you two five for them down now, here, if you are willing to take it.”

“Two thousand five hundred?”

“Yes. I do not offer you the full three thousand I suggested as their value, because, dear lady, I am a hard business man underneath my soft side, and you must give discount for cash, and for the trouble in store for me in disposing of the jewels. Also I may get barely more than my own money back, or even not as much. There might be a great deal more, I own, but the chances are as much for one as t’other. You see all this?”

“I see... I see.” She began breathing lovely gratitude, but he stopped her.

“Don’t thank me. I mentioned just now that soft side of mine, and my softness is for your eyes.”

She looked at him, beautifully. He looked back full at her, appreciatively.

“You have the eyes,” he said softly, “of someone I once loved. Luck, an errand, please.”

Luck came forward.

“My bedroom is next door, and there’s a little dispatch case on the table by my bed. If you don’t mind — my wretched helplessness,” he explained to her, as Johnnie Luck left the room. When the door closed, he added: “I want to claim a tremendous boon of you, dear lady, because you have the eyes of the girl I once loved.”

“Ask it,” said she, all softness.

“A kiss,” said the little man.

In a moment Johnnie Luck would be back. She gave herself time for a little murmur of hesitation, surprise; then she rose from her chair, came close, and bent and kissed him. Her lips were very soft, and she kissed Napoleon on the lips. She sat down again. A flush swept up all over his pale face, passed, and was gone. The face was serene again when Luck came in with the dispatch case.

Napoleon unlocked it with his left hand, and found three crackling notes.

“I don’t often keep this amount of money out of my bank,” he explained. “It is pure coincidence, accident, what you will, that I have it to hand this morning. Later in the day it would have been paid to my account. They are three thousand-pound notes. Could you oblige me, somehow, with the change, dear lady?”

“Five hundred pounds,” she considered.

“If you will hand over that, I will hand over this,” he said with such charming apology that there could be no insult in the caution. “I am, as I said, a business man, and I do things in a business-like way.”

“I can give you the notes, I believe,” she answered. “I have about that amount, and I will go to get it. It is absolutely my all, of course, and it would not have been a dot fit for an Austrian officer’s wife.”

Luck sprang to open the door. She passed out smiling — not to her own flat, though, but hastily down to the street. Near the Army and Navy Stores her Friedrich waited.

Napoleon sat waiting her return, the fingers of his left hand drumming on the notes on the table, his eyes fixed rather absently on space. The black mat lay on the floor.

“Nap,” said Luck, “ain’t it risky, old man?”

“Her eyes, Johnnie!” said Napoleon. “Her eyes!”

He would say no more. In perhaps ten minutes the beautiful visitor hurried back. She was flushed and a little breathless, which condition she explained by the fact of the search she had had for the notes. She had put them securely away, under lock and key, forgotten where, and been terrified — so terrified — in consequence. But here they were, all safe and sound. Would Mr. Prince count them?

Mr. Prince counted them, thrust them into his breast pocket, and handed over three thousand-pound notes, enclosing them first in an envelope out of the dispatch box. He stretched out his left hand, and she put hers into it. He looked up at her, standing tall, vibrant, glowing, victorious.

“My congratulations to Friedrich,” said he. “My felicitations to yourself. A very pleasant journey. Good-bye.”

“Good-bye, kind, good friends.” She shook hands with both. “I am going out now. Guess for what?”

“To be married?” Luck hazarded.

She nodded. “To be married. We leave for Austria to-day.”

“Happy Friedrich!” said Luck.

“Happy Friedrich!” cried Napoleon.

The graceful creature went out, making an emotional leave-taking. The two men were left together, and the black mat lay on the floor. Napoleon’s face had grown deathly.

“Mary will be amazed,” began Luck.

“Oh! Ah!” He looked down at the mat. “Cart that truck away, there’s a good fellow.”

“Truck? I suppose you’ll see your money back again all right?”

Napoleon looked — laughed noiselessly.

“Stuff’s simply ‘fake’ all through, Johnnie, my dear good fool.”

“What, Nap? And you knew it? Well, Nap, who’s the fool?”

“Not I, Luck. ‘Friedrich,’ perhaps, and she. My notes were ‘fake,’ too.”

Johnnie sat down.

“Ah! I can do notes. One of the things I’ve learned. Those were three of the kind the Cosmopolitans use, though, and were ready to hand.”

“Her five hundred?”

“Real. Screaming humour? Rattling farce, eh?”

“So, after all — you cheated Gerda’s eyes?”

“I cheated Gerda’s wits.”

Light began to show through for Luck. He gazed at the little man, now beginning to tremble in his invalid chair.

“We’ve been dealing with Gerda, you see, John Luck. And with her ‘friend.’ Who do you think, Johnnie, was the man she brought in to drink my coffee and liqueurs? The chap of the Florence Opera House! And what do you think is written inside the flap of that envelope I put her notes in?”

Luck shook his head.

“ ‘To Gerda, from her very sane Englishman.’ Funny, eh? Any questions, Johnnie?”

“Yes, Nap. Did you take these flats because you knew she was here?”

Napoleon nodded.

“Did you mean all through to get back at her, as soon as you had the chance?”

Napoleon nodded.

“Did you know what kind of story she’d come out with this time?”

Napoleon shook his head. “Know? Who does know, John Luck, what a woman plots and plans? Women lick men — they lick the rest of creation — at tricking. They don’t work by logical sequence, but by accident. You can’t insure against that kind of accident, either. There’s no policy obtainable. Women — they haven’t human science, but they’re given monkey minds. Their mischief is more nimble than ours. They lay a plot like a three-volume novel about princes, and harems, and troubles and anxieties and love, and start creation playing their absurd melodramas and believing they’re real. They feel your pulse, and they know all about you. And nature aids a woman — saturates her in the part she’s taking. She can laugh and cry and quiver — her brain plays on her body like a bow on fiddle strings — and she’s given lips that are so cursed soft, Johnnie — and eyes! And I’ve got my own back, Johnnie. There’s no laugh any more, except for me. But do what I will, I’ll never get the feel of her lips off mine — nor her eyes out of my heart — never exorcise her away.”

Johnnie Luck got up very suddenly and quietly, and left the little man swayed against the table with his head on his arm.

The Willow Walk Sinclair Lewis

A Retrieved Reformation O. Henry

Scores of plays, motion pictures, and radio and television programs have been based on stories written by O. Henry, the pseudonym of William Sydney Porter (1862–1910), but no tale has proved to be as fecund as “A Retrieved Reformation” for inspiring dramatic works.

Seven years after the story’s first publication in 1903, it began a successful Broadway run with the title that remains familiar more than a century later, Alias Jimmy Valentine. It was adapted by Paul Armstrong and starred H. B. Warner as the world’s greatest safecracker, now retired because of his love for a woman. The play, and the films that followed, all closely adhere to the story line that places Jimmy in a hopeless dilemma. A 1921 stage revival, also successful, featured Otto Kruger in the title role.

The first film version starred Robert Warwick in a 1915 silent. A bigger-budget 1920 silent version featured Bert Lytell. A close remake of the silents with William Haines as Jimmy and Lionel Barrymore as the detective on his trail was released on November 15, 1928 — Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer’s first partially talking film. It was completed as a silent film; Irving Thalberg later sent Barrymore and Haines to repeat their performances for the last two reels, this time recording with sound. The first dramatic version with a title different from Alias Jimmy Valentine was The Return of Jimmy Valentine (1936) with Roger Pryor, in which a reporter writes a series of articles speculating about whether the legendary safecracker is still alive. He thinks he has tracked down the old criminal who now is a respected bank manager in a small town. The last film (though there were numerous later radio and television adaptations) was Affairs of Jimmy Valentine (1942), starring Dennis O’Keefe, in which the advertising agency for a radio program offers $10,000 to anyone who can find the real Valentine, now a middle-aged newspaper editor played by Roman Bohnen.

“A Retrieved Reformation” originally appeared in the April 1903 issue of Cosmopolitan under the title “A Retrieved Reform”; it was first collected in O. Henry’s Roads of Destiny (New York, Doubleday, Page, 1909).

In the prison shoe-shop, Jimmy Valentine was busily at work making shoes. A prison officer came into the shop, and led Jimmy to the prison office. There Jimmy was given an important paper. It said that he was free.

Jimmy took the paper without showing much pleasure or interest. He had been sent to prison to stay for four years. He had been there for ten months. But he had expected to stay only three months. Jimmy Valentine had many friends outside the prison. A man with so many friends does not expect to stay in prison long.

“Valentine,” said the chief prison officer, “you’ll go out tomorrow morning. This is your chance. Make a man of yourself. You’re not a bad fellow at heart. Stop breaking safes open, and live a better life.”

“Me?” said Jimmy in surprise. “I never broke open a safe in my life.”

“Oh, no,” the chief prison officer laughed. “Never. Let’s see. How did you happen to get sent to prison for opening that safe in Springfield? Was it because you didn’t want to tell where you really were? Perhaps because you were with some lady, and you didn’t want to tell her name? Or was it because the judge didn’t like you? You men always have a reason like that. You never go to prison because you broke open a safe.”

“Me?” Jimmy said. His face still showed surprise. “I was never in Springfield in my life.”

“Take him away,” said the chief prison officer. “Get him the clothes he needs for going outside. Bring him here again at seven in the morning. And think about what I said, Valentine.”

At a quarter past seven on the next morning, Jimmy stood again in the office. He had on some new clothes that did not fit him, and a pair of new shoes that hurt his feet. These are the usual clothes given to a prisoner when he leaves the prison.

Next they gave him money to pay for his trip on a train to the city near the prison. They gave him five dollars more. The five dollars were supposed to help him become a better man.

Then the chief prison officer put out his hand for a handshake. That was the end of Valentine, Prisoner 9762. Mr. James Valentine walked out into the sunshine.

He did not listen to the song of the birds or look at the green trees or smell the flowers. He went straight to a restaurant. There he tasted the first sweet joys of being free. He had a good dinner. After that he went to the train station. He gave some money to a blind man who sat there, asking for money, and then he got on the train.

Three hours later he got off the train in a small town. Here he went to the restaurant of Mike Dolan.

Mike Dolan was alone there. After shaking hands he said, “I’m sorry we couldn’t do it sooner, Jimmy my boy. But there was that safe in Springfield, too. It wasn’t easy. Feeling all right?”

“Fine,” said Jimmy. “Is my room waiting for me?”

He went up and opened the door of a room at the back of the house. Everything was as he had left it. It was here they had found Jimmy, when they took him to prison. There on the floor was a small piece of cloth. It had been torn from the coat of the cop, as Jimmy was fighting to escape.

There was a bed against the wall. Jimmy pulled the bed toward the middle of the room. The wall behind it looked like any wall, but now Jimmy found and opened a small door in it. From this opening he pulled out a dust-covered bag.

He opened this and looked lovingly at the tools for breaking open a safe. No finer tools could be found any place. They were complete; everything needed was here. They had been made of a special material, in the necessary sizes and shapes. Jimmy had planned them himself, and he was very proud of them.

It had cost him over nine hundred dollars to have these tools made at a place where they make such things for men who work at the job of safe-breaking.

In half an hour Jimmy went downstairs and through the restaurant. He was now dressed in good clothes that fitted him well. He carried his dusted and cleaned bag.

“Do you have anything planned?” asked Mike Dolan.

“Me?” asked Jimmy as if surprised. “I don’t understand. I work for the New York Famous Bread and Cake Makers Company. And I sell the best bread and cake in the country.”

Mike enjoyed these words so much that Jimmy had to take a drink with him. Jimmy had some milk. He never drank anything stronger.

A week after Valentine, 9762, left the prison, a safe was broken open in Richmond, Indiana. No one knew who did it. Eight hundred dollars were taken.

Two weeks after that, a safe in Logansport was opened. It was a new kind of safe; it had been made, they said, so strong that no one could break it open. But someone did, and took fifteen hundred dollars.

Then a safe in Jefferson City was opened. Five thousand dollars were taken. This loss was a big one. Ben Price was a cop who worked on such important matters, and now he began to work on this.

He went to Richmond, Indiana, and to Logansport, to see how the safe-breaking had been done in those places. He was heard to say: “I can see that Jim Valentine has been here. He is in business again. Look at the way he opened this one. Everything easy, everything clean. He is the only man who has the tools to do it. And he is the only man who knows how to use tools like this. Yes, I want Mr. Valentine. Next time he goes to prison, he’s going to stay there until his time is finished.”

Ben Price knew how Jimmy worked. Jimmy would go from one city to another far away. He always worked alone. He always left quickly when he was finished. He enjoyed being with nice people. For all these reasons, it was not easy to catch Mr. Valentine.

People with safes full of money were glad to hear that Ben Price was at work trying to catch Mr. Valentine.

One afternoon Jimmy Valentine and his bag arrived in a small town named Elmore. Jimmy, looking as young as a college boy, walked down the street toward the hotel.

A young lady walked across the street, passed him at the corner, and entered a door. Over the door was the sign, “The Elmore Bank.” Jimmy Valentine looked into her eyes, forgetting at once what he was. He became another man. She looked away, and brighter color came into her face. Young men like Jimmy did not appear often in Elmore.

Jimmy saw a boy near the bank door, and began to ask questions about the town. After a time the young lady came out and went on her way. She seemed not to see Jimmy as she passed him.

“Isn’t that young lady Polly Simpson?” asked Jimmy.

“No,” said the boy. “She’s Annabel Adams. Her father owns this bank.”

Jimmy went to the hotel, where he said his name was Ralph D. Spencer. He got a room there. He told the hotel man he had come to Elmore to go into business. How was the shoe business? Was there already a good shoe-shop?

The man thought that Jimmy’s clothes and manners were fine. He was happy to talk to him.

Yes, Elmore needed a good shoe-shop. There was no shop that sold just shoes. Shoes were sold in the big shops that sold everything. All business in Elmore was good. He hoped Mr. Spencer would decide to stay in Elmore. It was a pleasant town to live in and the people were friendly.

Mr. Spencer said he would stay in the town a few days and learn something about it. No, he said, he himself would carry his bag up to his room. He didn’t want a boy to take it. It was very heavy.

Mr. Ralph Spencer remained in Elmore. He started a shoe-shop. Business was good.

Also he made many friends. And he was successful with the wish of his heart. He met Annabel Adams. He liked her better every day.

At the end of a year everyone in Elmore liked Mr. Ralph Spencer. His shoe-shop was doing very good business. And he and Annabel were going to be married in two weeks. Mr. Adams, the small-town banker, liked Spencer. Annabel was very proud of him. He seemed already to belong to the Adams family.

One day Jimmy sat down in his room to write this letter, which he sent to one of his old friends:

On the Monday night after Jimmy sent this letter, Ben Price arrived quietly in Elmore. He moved slowly about the town in his quiet way, and he learned all that he wanted to know. Standing inside a shop, he watched Ralph D. Spencer walk by.

“You’re going to marry the banker’s daughter, are you, Jimmy?” said Ben to himself. “I don’t feel sure about that!”

The next morning Jimmy was at the Adams home. He was going to a nearby city that day to buy new clothes for the wedding. He was also going to buy a gift for Annabel. It would be his first trip out of Elmore. It was more than a year now since he had done any safe-breaking.

Most of the Adams family went to the bank together that morning. There were Mr. Adams, Annabel, Jimmy, and Annabel’s married sister with her two little girls, aged five and nine. They passed Jimmy’s hotel, and Jimmy ran up to his room and brought along his bag. Then they went to the bank.

All went inside — Jimmy, too, for he was one of the family. Everyone in the bank was glad to see the good-looking, nice young man who was going to marry Annabel. Jimmy put down his bag.

Annabel, laughing, put Jimmy’s hat on her head and picked up the bag. “How do I look?” she asked. “Ralph, how heavy this bag is! It feels full of gold.”

“It’s full of some things I don’t need in my shop,” Jimmy said. “I’m taking them to the city, to the place where they came from. That saves me the cost of sending them. I’m going to be a married man. I must learn to save money.”

The Elmore bank had a new safe. Mr. Adams was very proud of it, and he wanted everyone to see it. It was as large as a small room, and it had a very special door. The door was controlled by a clock. Using the clock, the banker planned the time when the door should open. At other times no one, not even the banker himself, could open it. He explained about it to Mr. Spencer. Mr. Spencer seemed interested but he did not seem to understand very easily. The two children, May and Agatha, enjoyed seeing the shining heavy door, with all its special parts.

While they were busy like this, Ben Price entered the bank and looked around. He told a young man who worked there that he had not come on business; he was waiting for a man.

Suddenly there was a cry from the women. They had not been watching the children. May, the nine-year-old girl, had playfully but firmly closed the door of the safe. And Agatha was inside.

The old banker tried to open the door. He pulled at it for a moment. “The door can’t be opened,” he cried. “And the clock — I hadn’t started it yet.”

Agatha’s mother cried out again.

“Quiet!” said Mr. Adams, raising a shaking hand. “All be quiet for a moment. Agatha!” he called as loudly as he could. “Listen to me.” They could hear, but not clearly, the sound of the child’s voice. In the darkness inside the safe, she was wild with fear.

“My baby!” her mother cried. “She will die of fear! Open the door! Break it open! Can’t you men do something?”

“There isn’t a man nearer than the city who can open that door,” said Mr. Adams, in a shaking voice. “My God! Spencer, what shall we do? That child — she can’t live long in there. There isn’t enough air. And the fear will kill her.”

Agatha’s mother, wild too now, beat on the door with her hands. Annabel turned to Jimmy, her large eyes full of pain, but with some hope, too. A woman thinks that the man she loves can somehow do anything.

“Can’t you do something, Ralph? Try, won’t you?”

He looked at her with a strange soft smile on his lips and in his eyes.

“Annabel,” he said, “give me that flower you are wearing, will you?”

She could not believe that she had really heard him. But she put the flower in his hand. Jimmy took it and put it where he could not lose it. Then he pulled off his coat. With that act, Ralph D. Spencer passed away and Jimmy Valentine took his place.

“Stand away from the door, all of you,” he commanded.

He put his bag on the table, and opened it flat. From that time on, he seemed not to know that anyone else was near. Quickly he laid the shining strange tools on the table. The others watched as if they had lost the power to move.

In a minute Jimmy was at work on the door. In ten minutes — faster than he had ever done it before — he had the door open.

Agatha was taken into her mother’s arms.

Jimmy Valentine put on his coat, picked up the flower and walked toward the front door. As he went he thought he heard a voice call, “Ralph!” He did not stop.

At the door a big man stood in his way.

“Hello, Ben!” said Jimmy, still with his strange smile. “You’re here at last, are you? Let’s go. I don’t care, now.”

And then Ben Price acted rather strangely.

“I guess you’re wrong about this, Mr. Spencer,” he said. “I don’t believe I know you, do I?”

And Ben Price turned and walked slowly down the street.