EDITORIAL NOTE
This remarkable narrative of Arctic exploration is itself a remarkable confirmation of the wisdom of that tireless hunt for NEWS which has become second nature to the newspaper man, and while distinctively a mark of his calling, has attached to his profession the opprobrium of “yellowness.” The appropriation of this color—so intimately associated in nature with the golden illumination of the noon, the royal charm of lilies, and the enduring lure of gold—to designate an irresponsible and shameless sensationalism has never been adequately explained. The “yellowness” of the live journalist, turning with an instinctive scent to follow to its end every new trail of incident, sniffing in each passing rumor the presence of hidden and serviceable scandal, and ruthlessly breaking through the sham obstruction of modesty to snatch the culprit or to free the victim, cannot certainly be referred to the torpor marked by thejaundiceof the invalid, nor to the weakness of the last stages of an emaciating fever. Perhaps if the reproach is to be made, or can be made, intelligible, the yellow color finds its subtle analogue in a mustard plaster.
That popular cataplasm has a dignified and ancient history, and is gratefully recorded in literature for nearly two thousand years as acontrarientof value, allaying hidden aches through the excoriation of the uninjured and painless surfaces. Theprocess seems to involve an injustice in principle, but it is, in spite of abstractions, a beneficent practice. The “yellowness” of newspapers may amaze modesty, startle discretion, and afflict innocence, but it cures interior disorders, and the unpleasantness of an ulcerated or inflamed skin should be condoned or forgotten for the benefit of a regulated stomach or a renovated joint.
However, this allen passant, as only remotely, and yet diffidently, related to the manner of my obtaining the circumstances and facts of the following adventure. I have attributed my success to the pertinacity of instinct and the olfactory sense of mischief. It is true. Without one or the other—though the combination of both rendered failure impossible—I might not now be in the enviable position of proclaiming a “beat” on my professional rivals which no amount of editorial venom, aspersion, contempt and innuendo will ever obliterate from the annals of journalism, as unprecedented.
I am indeed afflicted at moments with a sort of discomfiture over my own modesty in not having ransacked to better advantage the commercial possibilities of my tenacity and acumen. Incredible and hypnotizing as is this story of Mr. Alfred Erickson, as a foil to its romantic daring and its transcendent interest, the brief relation of the episode—and its development—that led to its publication, has a delightful thrill of excitement, and an up-to-date volubility, so to speak, of incident, that frames the story in the most exhilarating contrasts.
An office boy, a temporary expedient for a messenger and page, Jack Riddles, mercurial, vagarious, and quick-witted, a sandy haired, long-limbed, peaked-nosed and weazel-eyed creation, with flattened cheeks, whose jackets were alwaysshort, and whose trousers despised any intimacy with the tops of his shoes, got me the story.
Jack is destined for great things in our metropolitan annals. In the mission of the Progressive party, with its millennial attachments, Jack and his sort would be progressively eliminated. Crime exists for detection, and detection is Life at itsnth power for such as he. Jack is endowed with a rare intuition of ways and means when the center of a reportorial mystery is to be perforated, and the process of “getting there” tohimis as inevitable as the first half of the alphabet. Riddle’s only counterpart was Octavius Guy, alias Gooseberry, Lawyer Bruff’s boy in Wilkie Collin’s story of the Moonstone.
He began his exploit on the top of a Fifth Avenue ’bus, and it was about the middle of September, 1912. Jack has a Hogarthian sense for the multitudinous, the psychological, the junction of circumstance and expression in revealing a plot or betraying a criminal. To hang over the railing of a Fifth Avenue ’bus and watch the crowds, the motor cars, each vibratory shock, as the behemoth shivers and plunges, bringing your interpretative eye unexpectedly into a new relation with the faces of that ceremonious throng, was intoxication for Jack. It evoked exuberantly the passion of espionage. There was indeed concealment here, in the packed and methodical progression of people and people, and yet more people. Yet with an average dumbness or dullness, or just the homogeneous stare of business, or the vapid contentment of contiguity to riches and fashion, Jack caught glimpses, direct, profound, of dismay or discontent; of the pallid, revolting grimace of suffering, the snarl of envy, or the deeper placidity of crime.
They were rare, but Jack watched for them; his precocity ran that way and he was rewarded. Itused up his dimes, it widened the solutions of continuity in his nether garments and brought his feet more familiarly in contact with the hard flagging. Some supersensual instinct urged him. The succeeding story attests the splendor of the revelation he uncovered. Jack may have been about eighteen years of age.
It was opposite the Public Library, just below Forty-second Street on Fifth Avenue and on the west side of that thoroughfare that Jack’s eyes, after a long stop which held up an endless phalanx of automobiles, fell upon a man and woman who conveyed to his thought a hint of crime. The woman was beautiful too, a Spanish siren, full in form, with developed curves that yielded so slightly to the sway of her tight fitting mauve dress as to start the conjecture that she did not belong to the more rarified types of Venuses. A light feather boa, deliciously pearly gray in tone, heightened the carnation of her cheeks. These in turn yielded to the orbed splendor of her eyes, and that to the wealth of black hair darkly globed underneath a maroon velvet turban-like cap, in whose folds twinkled a firmament of greenish stars. Jack literally devoured her radiance, so near was he to her as she descended with her companion the last terrace to the sidewalk between the amorphous lions of the Public Library.
The man with her was inordinately, insolently handsome, dark and tall, dressed a little beyond the form of reticence, as was the woman. Herein perhaps lurked the confession of their mutual depravity to Jack, an untutored psychologist; to all besides it appealed as a momentary sensation, to some as barely an infringement of good taste.
The man wore a light fedora hat that suited the bravado of his curled and graceful moustache, the ovate outlines of his face, his liquid, voluptuouseyes, the sensuous thickness of his lips. Observation stopped short at his face where he intended it should. Its arrest was made imperative by a blue and ormolu tie, relieved against a softly-tinted yellow shirt, carrying a horseshoe of demantoid garnets in a wreath of little diamonds. His feet were encased in tan gaiters, a permissible distraction. For an instant only the spectator was rewarded with an appreciation of their admirabletournure. Otherwise he was in black, relieved by the white lining at the lapels of his coat, and he carried a cane in his gloved hand.
It was a few instants after Jack’s ravished eyes had fastened on this entrancing couple, that the cane was raised sharply in the air to descend abruptly on the woman’s head. The attack involved the man’s slight retreat—a backward gesture—and his turning aside, whereby his profile cut keenly across the sunlit stone behind him, and Jack was shocked into a delighted recognition of the same profile in a print in the show window of Krauschaar’s gallery. He remembered the title; it was “Mephistopheles, A Modern Guise of an Old Offender”; a smiling, swarthy beau at the feet of a remonstrating and beautifulingenue.
The explosion was evidently the climax of an altercation. Jack recalled the previous animated demeanor of the couple. Explanatory reflections were cut short by the velocity of the woman’s defense. She flung herself on the man, caught his arms with her outstretched hands, and kicked him viciously. Infuriated, he tore himself away, raised the cane and the next moment would have inflicted a harsher insult on the defiant Amazon, into whose face, so Jack thought, had sprung a tigerish fury, when, from the stupified and expectant crowd before them, half shrinking and half jubilant, shot a tall figure, whose interposition transfixed both contestants.
This meteoric stranger was remarkable for his broad shoulders, and a peculiar taper in his frame downward to his feet, that made him figuratively a human top, the impression of any actual deformity arising from his immense chest, on which, by a connection scarcely deserving consideration as a neck, sat his squat, contracted head. Prodigious whiskers covered his face, invading his high cheeks almost to the outer limits of his sunken eyes.
This hirsute prodigality contrasted with his cropped cranium and his closely shaven lips. The latter were long and thin-compressed, they seemed to separate his chin from the rest of his face by a red seam. His forehead was low and his head was covered with a steamer-tourist’s cap. His clothes were of plaid.
As he rushed between the wranglers he caught each by the shoulder, and he pushed them apart. He had turned toward the avenue, facing the wondering throng, and Jack heard him speak quickly and sharply, but in a guttural, obscured way that suggested something that was not English or, if it was, it was hopelessly incoherent to Jack’s ears from its imperfect articulation.
The man and woman seemed stunned into immobility, and then obeying his gesture, followed him on the sidewalk, jostled and pressed by the crowd which at first, inquisitive but timorous, had recoiled a little from the enigmatical encounter and then, almost obstreperous and decidedly interested engulfed the trio, who however pushed their way through, energetically piloted by the stranger. How quickly a drama evolves!
All three had almost simultaneously stepped into the littlescenario, and yet by the illusion of an assumed sequence the last actor seemed a novelty, related as unexpected, to the other two, as more familiar and apparent. None of the three spoke,nor did they heed the interruption of the spectators who tardily parted to let them pass. The moment Forty-second Street was reached the leader turned toward Sixth Avenue. Jack standing on the roof of the ’bus, which slowly swung off into the restored movement northward as the obstruction somewhere ahead disappeared, saw them enter an automobile opposite the northern entrance to the library and dash westward.
Jack did not argue the matter with himself. He had no compunctions. He jumped straight for the to him (as perhaps to anyone) tangible certainty that he had struck a trail of iniquity. But how to follow it? His ruminations were cut short by the loud honk of an automobile and there, returning to Fifth Avenue at Fiftieth Street, he saw the yellow limousine which contained the suspects wheeling into the procession and, forced by the unrelieved pressure to relax its impatience, moving with the limping concourse at the same pace.
Jack watched it eagerly. His eyes never left it. It swayed a little to the right and to the left as the driver, probably under threats or persuasion, endeavored to insert his vehicle into the chance spaces that opened before him. This irregular and tentative progress brought the automobile at length directly alongside of the ’bus which had on it the Nemesis of its (the automobile’s) occupants. It was underneath Jack’s very eyes; he could have dropped on its roof almost unnoticed. Jack’s heart beat with trip-hammer throbs, and his mind rehearsed the possibilities of murder, arson, burglary, brigandage, kidnapping, etc., gathering headway in that uncanny conference going on there below under that burnished but impenetrable roof. But he was exulting too with the steel-clad certainty of having a “case,” and that a little intensive use of his wits would promote him from theoffice floor to a reserved seat in the Reporters’ Sanctum.
A jolt, a lurching swing, the vituperative shriek of an ungreased axle, and the ’bus followed a meandering lane that brought it into an unimpeded headway. Jack sprang to his feet and watched behind him the still imprisoned limousine—it too shot ahead; noiselessly as a speeding bird it overtook the ’bus and then with a graceful curve, almost as if in mockery of his impotence, it vanished into east Fifty-eighth Street.
Jack had a message for the Director of the Metropolitan Art Museum. It was from myself in response to an inquiry as to what space we could afford for a description of a new Morgan exhibit. Jack was a safe messenger, unmistakably accurate, but we always discounted his celerity, because of his preferences for a ride on a Fifth avenue ’bus and the little delinquencies of delay his observational powers tempted him to perpetrate. He was an hour later than the most generous allowance of time would justify. Jack was to bring back “copy” for the next day’s issue. I lectured him. He was sullenly respectful, indifferently contrite, and showed a taciturn preoccupation that impressed my reportorial instinct as significant.
As a matter of fact the missing hour was used in traversing Fifty-eighth Street. The fruit of Jack’s search was diminutive but it was conclusive. On the pavement in front of No. — east Fifty-eighth Street, Jack picked up a microscopic green glass star. He knew where it belonged—the spangled turban on top of the massed hair of that afternoon’sdebutante;debutanteto Jack’s official criticism.
This minute betrayal had dropped from her hat, from nowhere else, and the belligerent cane of her escort had dislodged it. It had lain somewhere in the folds and creases of the soft velvet, to fall justthere, unsuspectedly at the entrance of her retreat—a frail enamel bead releasing to the world a marvelous secret. For Jack Riddles intended to watch that house; he would enter it; if it concealed some half consummated plot of SIN, if indeed the plot was over, its victims disposed of, and the conspirators were there enjoying the harvest of their guilt, he would know it, and—the eventuality of failure never entered his head. He felt, in every fibre, a certainty of wrong-doing, something shadowy, perhaps darkly cruel in these people. His prescience was involuntary; he never explained it, he never himself understood it.
Jack lived in Brooklyn, with his wifeless father. That night as he left the office he dropped a postal at a lamp post and took a car north. He was following the trail. A little transposed I submit Jack’s story as he gave it to me the next morning.
He came to the office a little late, and knocked at my door. On entering I saw instantly that he was in an advanced stage of nervous excitement. He was pale, and a fluttering involuntary movement of his hands, one over the other, as he stood before me, with a glitter in his peculiarly shaped and small eyes betrayed his mental agitation. He was quite wet, had probably been drenched, and the first symptoms of a chill showed that precautions were necessary to avert a possible collapse. I told him to sit down, opened a cellarette, which had its professional and commercial uses, and poured out a rather stiff jorum of the best whisky I owned.
As he swallowed in a gulping manner the proffered contents of the glass, he was rather a ludicrous and yet pitiful and heart-moving object. His disordered hair, shabby clothes and a certain forlorn wistfulness in his glance upward to me, combined with his lean and disjointed anatomy gave him an expression that was at once tender andlaughable. Only a Cruikshank could have done it justice. His spirits revived, animal heat reasserted itself, and back with it, as if it had stood somewhere aside until invited to return, came boastingly his invincible pugnacity and confidence.
“Mr. Link,” his speech was customarily hesitating with a deprecatory manner as if forestalling interruption or correction, and impeded by a slight stutter, but now, in the tide and torrent of his thoughts, under the sway of the elation over his first bit of detective work, it was rapid but coherent, and oddly picturesque. “Mr. Link, I’ve nipped a pretty piece of mischief in the bud—seems so to me. Of course I’m just on the trail, and fetching up to the big game that I think is in sight, barring the trees—may take more work than I think. But the proposition is as clear as glass that there’s a crooked game being pulled off at — east Fifty-eighth Street, and I’m convinced that ‘the deceits of the world, the flesh and the devil,’ as it goes in the prayer book, are behind it. Now here’s the evidence—not much you may say, but I’ll hang up my reputation on it—you know, Mr. Link, I have a little hereabouts at finding out things, and I’m just convincedit—won’t drop.
“I was on the ’bus, stalled just below Forty-second Street, opposite the Library. I saw a couple of people, a man and a woman, coming down the steps to the street. The woman—Well, I couldn’t begin to tell you how stunning she was. Beauty was just all over her, thick too, from her feet to her head. I remember now the thought struck me as I looked at her that she’d make a brass man turn round to see her when she’d passed. And the goods on her were as sweet and gay as herself—a picture, Mr. Link, a real picture, if ever a woman made one. The man was with her, good-looking and cruel; neat, too, and Hell painted on him soplain it would make an angel throw a fit—if an angel could, supposin’.
“Now Mr. Link I hadn’t looked that long,” Jack snapped his fingers, “before I felt, sir, that they wererotten, not four flushers, but thereal bad, like those the Sunday School man told us of, who ‘build a town with blood, and establish a city by iniquity.’” The pause Jack interpolated here was as oracular as the quotation. I did him a great injustice to seem indifferent and impatient. Really I felt the thrill of an inevitable sensation approaching, and—I saw beyond it hypnotizingcopy. Jack desiderated encouragement, approval—I looked at the clock over my desk and yawned. Surely it was deliberate malice.
“Like that, sir!” Jack clapped his hands loudly; the ruse broke through my affectation, and startled me into attention that he was keen enough to see was as intense as he wished it to be.
“Like that, sir, they hit out at each other, and there was a fight on! Then a husky— Well, a—white-hope you might have called him—bounced in; they knew him, he knew them, and the three chased off in an automobile. I lost ’em, found ’em, and tracked ’em down east Fifty-eighth Street. She had green stars in her hat—things you could hardly see—but theyshone! I found one on a doorstep—and last nightI watched the house!”
The typical story teller who at such a juncture lights a cigar, finishes an unsmoked pipe, empties a glass of grog, or rises with unconcealed surprise over his neglect to fulfill an engagementelsewhere, could not have surpassed the self-control with which Jack, for the same purpose, intimated his own retirement. He rose, crushing in his thin fingers his poor bleached blue cap, his small sparkling eyes raised to the clock, which a moment before I hadinvoked so heartlessly to aid the hypocrisy of my assumed exemption from common weaknesses.
“I think, Mr. Link, it’s time for me to see Mr. Force.” Mr. Force was an assistant in the press-room.
The rebellious spirit of honesty which I had shamelessly essayed to crush, got decidedly the best of the situation now; behind it was the pressure of my own exorbitant curiosity.
“I think Jack, you’ll sit down and finish your story.”
Jack sat down.
“There was a vacant or closed house opposite. I perched on the top step of the porch and glued my eyes on No. —. I think, sir, that if any man or woman inside had winked an eye at me from across the street, I’d have seen it. But it wasn’t light enough for long to watch trifles, and I just kept looking at the front door and the windows. It was right funny how the lights changed. They broke out first on the second floor, then they dropped to the basement, then they climbed to the third story, down again to the first, but they ended in the attic windows and they stayed there. Everything else was as black as the tomb.
“The wind hustled about a little, splashes of rain hurried along with it, and it grew dark in the street. Once or twice the shades lifted and, Mr. Link”—Jack was a picture of poignant eagerness—“I saw the big peach and her man, the two of the Library steps, just the same as I see you. They’d open the window too and look out together down into the street. I knew why, sir. They expected that limousine—and it came.”
The constraint of any position more repressive than sitting to Jack, now on the edge of his exposure could not be imagined. He stood up, moved towards me, the color mounting in his pale cheeks,his body bent a little forward, and his eyes lighting up with an interior brilliancy that suddenly made me realize Jack might become a good-looking man.
“After that they’d go away from the window farther back; I think they carried a lamp with them for the light would fade away, or else they turned the gas off. At eleven o’clock—I could hear the clock bells from the steeples—the wind was racing and it began to rain hard. I got some shelter under the doorway; the light never left the attic across the street. I felt it all over me, sir, that IT was coming. I’m not sure, I may have fallen asleep, but I came to with a bounce. Lightning was chasing through the sky and the thunder was booming and—the door of No. — was open; the light from the hall flickered over the wet sidewalk, but the shower had passed. The man and the woman both stood there for an instant, then they went in and the door shut with a slam. I thought, sir, I had lost the trail. I never felt worse. I hated them, Mr. Link. Good reason, too.” His hands suddenly searched his vest, they were unrewarded; his face grew blank and he dropped his hands helplessly, while a piteous look of consternation and utter despondency shot from his eyes to mine, by this time fully sympathetic and as lustrous as his own.
His glance fell on his hat that lay at his feet on the floor, a flood of revived remembrances followed; he snatched it up, fumbled in its lining and pulled out a scrap of wrinkled paper. The returning sunshine of confidence renewed again the handsome look I had noticed before. He certainly was working up his effects with a remarkable melodramatic insight that was captivating.
“I ran down the steps into the street, I had heard a distant croak of an auto-horn, and on top of it came the toll of one o’clock from a tower. Ihad been asleep over an hour. There was no light in No. — except upstairs, as before, in the attic. Then the croak seemed to come from towards the East River, and I saw two balls of light rushing at me. IT WAS THE LIMOUSINE. I started back, and stumbled over a small cobble stone. It looked like an intervention—a message, Mr. Link—who knows? I picked it up, and I pulled out a jack knife I had in my pants. Why? I didn’t know, but, sir, they both came in handy.
“The auto sneaked up quiet enough, wheeled round facing East River, and crept in a little to one side of No. —. Mine wasn’t the only pair of eyes watching for it. It had hardly grazed the curb when the front door opened and there stood Mephistopheles, behind the beautiful woman, both in the half dark. I knew them, alright. The man came down the steps bareheaded, he carried a short something in his right hand. The sprinkle started again, and a smash of thunder roared overhead, and a clot-like gloom came out of it. Under that cover I dashed over the street like a hare, and crept tight up to the back of the car. In it sat Husky—the peg-top fellow that met ’em in Fifth Avenue—and another man, smaller, and sort of muffled up. The chauffeur in front never stirred from first to last.
“Meph. opened the door; Husky stepped out; he shook the little man. I heard him mutter ‘Come out here. Be fly, but quiet, or by God, I’ll stick yer through and no compunctions, mind yer.’ The bundle inside stirred; I peeped in from behind, a little higher; he was in a black bag or something like it, and as he stooped under the door and stumbled out, the two caught him, lifted him and started up the steps, where the woman leaned forward—it seemed to me she kept clapping her hands together softly as if she couldn’t hold in for delight. Then, sir—”
Jack straightened himself, bent back, relaxed, pitched forward with one outstretched arm, projected like a catapult, in front of him, “then, sir, I let fly—not at them—I didn’t know who I might hit and anyhow, hit or miss, they’d slipped off through that door quicker’n snakes. That was no use. The cobble stone slammed through the glass side of the limousine, it went through that and split the window opposite. I haven’t pitched for the Bogotas for nothing, sir. Before they had time to think, I jabbed my jack knife through the tire and off it went like a mortar. Everything was quiet then up above and the crash and the explosion had the center of the stage, as you people say. I guess it made their hearts jump. They looked around, the woman screamed, and—I screamed—and that chauffeur didn’t even turn about. For nerve or sheer fright he had the record. Perhaps at such times, sir, you can’t distinguish. Eh?
“Well, they lost their grip on the bundle, for it was a pretty uneasy load to carry now; the interruption perhaps gave the fellow inside some hope. He rolled down the steps onto the pavement like a bag of beans, moving slightly like a strangled dog. I heard Husky’s voice, ‘Inside, inside with him! Don’t stop, swat him,’ and then the black scoundrel raised his cudgel and beat the poor creature insensible. I heard him groan where I stood. I was crazy with rage; I felt myself suffocating. I had been shouting, ‘Help! Help!’ but my voice left me; I discovered that I was very wet, and then a strange vertigo came over me, a pain crossed my chest, and a fire seemed to rage in my throat. I was sick, sir. I am—”
Jack tottered. I caught him, poor fellow; exposure and overstrained emotions had prostrated him. And he was still damp; perhaps breakfast-less. I had been thoughtless, but no time was tobe lost. There was an emergency room in the building, and there Jack was hurried. Strengthened with nourishment, and warmed again into animation with stimulants, revived by sleep—he hardly stirred for sixteen hours, so deathlike was his slumber—he just escaped a serious illness. Recuperation was instantaneous; his own mental energy worked wonders and when two days later he returned to the theme of his story hardly a trace of his weakness was betrayed. He was keen to engage in the solution of the midnight mystery and he implored me not to share his discovery with anyone else except the police to whom indeed I had already related Jack’s experience. Jack realized that their co-operation was indispensable. It was then he showed me the wrinkled scrap of paper which he had secreted in the lining of his cap, and afterwards stuck in his trousers’ pocket, and which I had forgotten.
There was printed on it in pencil, “I am a prisoner. My life is in danger. A. E.”
The paper was of the thin and excellent quality used in engineers’ pocket tables and handbooks.
It appeared that Jack upon feeling the sudden desertion of his strength had stolen again to the doorway of the empty house opposite No. — and must have drowsed away there the rest of the night, urged apparently by his ineradicable hope of further disclosures. His persistency was rewarded by finding this puzzling and startling bit of evidence. He found it, most remarkably, on the floor of the abandoned limousine.
The car had remained undisturbed all night in the street, and this strange neglect on the part of its previous users could only be explained by the supposition that they feared some unpleasant complications, involving disagreeable explanations with its actual owners, unless they were the owners of itthemselves. Jack crawled over to the car in the earliest hour of the morning before the dawn had yet grown strong enough to make its outlines visible, while night practically covered the street. No. — was dark from basement to attic, not a light shone in it anywhere. He remembered that very distinctly.
He had had an indefinite premonition or fancy that something left behind in the car might be found; clues like that figured in all the romances of detection. He explored with his hands the corners, the cushions, and the floor, when, passing his hand along the edge of the carpet mat covering the floor, it encountered a bit of paper rolled up into a pellet. After the discovery of the writing he went to an owl wagon restaurant, and then hastened to the newspaper office.
But two hours later, when the daylight swept through the city, he returned to Fifty-eighth Street, from a restless feeling of suspicion, and agonized too with the thought of the abused and helpless prisoner.The auto was gone, and the mysterious house revealed nothing, with its shades drawn down and its immobile identity with the other sandstone fronts hopelessly complete. If murder dwelt behind its expressionless stories, or some dastardly drama of persecution, extortion, torture, effrontery and crime had been enacted there, no telltale signal betrayed it. And yet to Jack’s inflamed imagination it confessed its guilt; somehow to his obsessed eye he saw the meanness of its degradation, as if it shrank away from its orderly and decent neighbors; as if indeed its neighbors frowned upon it. He returned to the office and told me his story.
A newspaper man has the keenest sort of scent for sensation—especially theyellownewspaper man, and I fail to recoil from making the confession ofmy personalyellownessin that respect. He is seldom bewildered by scruples, seldom daunted by danger; he doesn’t think of them. He starts the engines of exposure and arrest, and records the result. Half an hour after Jack’s story was told Captain B— of the — precinct was closeted with me, and I repeated Jack’s adventure.
Jack’s description of the three principals in this suspicious criminal alliance was insufficient or inadequate to enable Captain B. to recognize them among the notables of both the under and the upper worlds with whom he was acquainted. I had not then seen the paper Jack found.
“Mr. Link,” Captain B. finally said, after a short silence following my communication, “you feel pretty sure of this young fellow, Jack Riddles? The name suggests an equivocal character.”
“I feel a good deal surer of him, perhaps, than I do of myself—if you can understand.”
“Oh I catch that. Well No. — will be watched night and day for a short time. Your young friend’s rather violent exploit may have scared its tenants off. The auto went. Perhaps they went with it. It won’t do to break in at once. We must have some evidence of occupation and a line on the occupants that runs straight with Riddles’ description.”
“But that wretched man? Suppose they kill him. A little less carefulness, Captain, might save him and, under the circumstances, I don’t think I’d be squeamish over precedents.”
“Oh, that team isn’t ready for murder yet—they’re not thinking of it. They’ve kidnapped someone for one reason or another. Bagging him that way showed they wanted something out of him. I’ll place them in twelve hours or so, and if they cover the same size Riddles gave I’ll take the risk and search the house.”
“Of course you’ll let us in, Captain, on the ground floor so to speak?”
“Sure! I’ll tip you on the first peep we hear. But get that boy on his legs; we’ll need him.”
It was just a day and a half later that a policeman brought me a sealed envelope. Of course I knew who had sent it. There was no answer the policeman said, and left. I opened the missive expectantly. I was not disappointed. Its contents were more rapturously thrilling to my journalistic hunger for marvels and mysteries, and those labyrinthine prodigies of subterranean deviltry that Cobb, or Ainsworth, or George Sand revelled in, than any mess of crime I had tumbled onor in, since Joe Horner, our chief city reporter, went through a hatchway in the Bronx and dropped into a hogshead of claret (Zinfandel) with two dead bodies in it!
Captain B.’s note ran: “Riddles corroborated. They’re there; three of them and a squeegee. Up to mischief—perhaps forgery—something like it. Pounce on them tomorrow. We’ve moved like mice, and the trap has been set quietly. Nothing more simple. Guess you might like to be in at the death. Bring Riddles. We break cover at 11 p.m. Meet at the police station * * *”
Riddles was then on the mend, and when I told him how matters stood, the boy smiled grimly, caught my hand and exclaimed: “Good medicine for me, Mr. Link. I feel it to the end of my toes. That’s the tonic I need. Trust me, I’ll be with you, strong and hearty.” He was.
Captain B. had arranged the affair tactfully. He had conveyed his suspicions to the householder on the west side of No. — and had secured his permission to admit three plain-clothes men through his backyard to the backyard of No. —; also his own party of six, with Riddles and myself as press agents,onto the roof, whence we expected to effect an entrance through the roof door or skylight, while a few men on the street would intercept flight in that direction. Riddles was radiant; it was a beautiful tribute to his sagacity; all this had come about through his quick insight, his instantaneous sense of obliquity, alias crookedness, when he saw the quarreling pair on the Public Library steps. As we cautiously climbed over the low parapet separating the two roofs, with only the light of the stars to guide us, not altogether appropriately I recalled Jonathan Wild’s chase of Thomas Dauell over the housetops, and also the burglary at Dollis Hill in Jack Shepard. There were more apposite occurrences in fiction to compare our maneuvers with, but I thought of these.
I had shown to the Captain the pathetic call for rescue scrawled on the paper scrap. It was palpably written by a foreigner, perhaps a German, certainly someone of Teutonic origin, and the paper had been torn from a book, some such technical guide for engineers as I had suggested. It did not interest Captain B. greatly. He told me, before we started out, that the “peg-top” man—a Hercules—the beautiful woman and “Mephistopheles” had all been seen, and no one else, but that dark ruby glass, identical he thought with that used by photographers, had been inserted in the front attic windows, where he suspected the imprisoned man was kept at work in some nefarious trade, from which the trio derived support or profit. As to the criminal character of “the bunch” he had no doubts. The two men almost invariably carried bundles into the house, but none out.
We were at the doorway of a little triangular erection which covered the stairway leading from the roof to the attic and our approach, in rubbers, had been almost noiseless. The door was shut, butonly locked; the precautions against invasion had been forgotten or overlooked. It was not even bolted. Evidently the conspirators or counterfeiters, or whatever they were, apprehended nothing; we might catch them red handed. A stout chisel enabled us to force the door inward, and a dark lantern revealed a dilapidated stairway below, ending in a kind of storage room, cluttered up with the refuse of successive occupancies, a dangerously inflammable chaos of rubbish, in which a feebly sputtering match could create a conflagration before it was suspected. It required some discrimination to cross thisdebriswithout starting some crumbling avalanche of fragments in the boxes, baby carriages, stoves, chairs, trunks, picture frames, racks and easels. As it was, with our best efforts slides occurred, and the mastodon-like tread of the detectives sank noisily through an occasional bandbox. We paused anxiously—I did, at least—at such moments, but the crash, so it sounded to me, brought no response. I reasoned the house must be vacant, and that our quarry had escaped.
We found that a closed door opened upon a narrow hallway, and as we softly drew it back loud voices most unexpectedly became audible, certainly proceeding from the front rooms of that very floor; from that front room wherein Jack had noticed the light, and where the detectives reported the insertion of the ruby panes. A hoarse dominant swelled up in the excited conversation. Jack leaned towards me and whispered “That’s Husky”; Captain raised a warning finger, and we filed out, one by one, gingerly tiptoeing toward the room which now unquestionably contained the objects of our search. The familiar scare or thrill which submerges all lesser emotions, as the danger point in an encounter is approached, decidedly manifested itself somewhere in my anatomy, or probably all over it.
Any mental analysis of my feelings was abruptly halted by the threats or altercation now heard very clearly in the room before us.
We had reached the door, beneath which a streak of light gave a penumbral illumination to the end of the little hallway. Below, in the house itself, absolute silence reigned, and apparently as complete darkness. Our approach was unnoticed. The excitement or rage that overpowered the speaker, breaking out in threats that now became intelligible and startled us into a fierce impatience to interfere, had certainly stopped his ears. The suffocation of anger had made him deaf.
“Damn you—you’ll show us the trick, or else your starved and scorched body will take the consequences. We know well enough you can do it. You’ve led us on with blind promises, but now we’ve got you where we want you. You can’t get out of this, remember, until we get what we want. Can you understand?”
“And then you’ll kill, I suppose?” The voice was strained, thick, foreign in accent, and low.
Riddles stretched himself up to my ear again and whispered “A. E.?” I nodded assent.
“No! No! Oh, no; but—you must not stay here.” The voice was a woman’s. “We’ll take care of you. Nicely too, Diaz, I guess. We’ll keep you where you won’t tell tales.” A mean, cynical laugh followed, a muttered corroboration from a third person, who had evidently crossed the room. It was this last voice that continued the harangue of the prisoner in a smooth, polished, plausible manner that thinly veiled its heartlessness; its crafty insinuation betrayed a designing selfishness, but it seemed welcome after the barking hoarseness and ferocity of its predecessor, and the cruelty of that feminine sneer. Its climax came at the close witha threat of fiendish wickedness that broke the tension of our restraint.
“Alfred Erickson, perhaps you can understand your predicament a little better, if you will stop to think it over. You are a stranger here, and you are in our power. That, you probably realize pretty well by this time. There is something else you may not so clearly comprehend, and that is, we are not afraid of consequences, because in your case, so far as we are concerned, there will be no consequences! You can extricate yourself easily enough if you will be sensible. Obstinacy has its merits under some circumstances; your perseverance in your Arctic experiences was rewarded—and we know exactly how—but obstinacy is of no avail just now, and no rescuing party from Norway, or even from the New York police will save you from, perhaps, an unfortunate calamity.”
This allusion appealed facetiously to the others, and there arose a musical outburst of laughter from the lady, with an accompaniment of harsh bass grunts from the first speaker. The voice continued:
“You possess a secret that the whole world has been hunting for, and we propose that the world will go on hunting for it before you will ever be able to tell it. Share with us and, under reservations, you will be well cared for. Refuse and, as we have gone so far, we will find—and you too—the rest of the way very simple. You’re not at this moment likely to be able to help yourself. That little incident outside,” Riddles nudged me again, “meant nothing. You’re as much buried alive in this attic in the first city of the world, as if you occupied a tomb of the Pharaohs. We’re not as self-controlled as you seem to be. We may get restless. Then, sir”—we heard him step forward; I imagined him leaning close to his victim, for itwas evident the man was in some way confined—“then, sir, up you go—you and your secret—in smoke.”
His smothered rage broke out then, and we heard him strike the man and curse him. There was the remonstrance of a cry—that was all. The next instant we would have forced our way through a stone wall had we been against it, but Captain B. raised his hand. His trained endurance amazed me. The voice resumed:
“Now what do you propose to do?”
“Yes, what?” from the first ruffian.
We held our breaths and listened with all our ears.
“Let me get up. Let me talk this over with you. You are driving me crazy! I can’t think. I will forget what you say I know. You—”
“Hell with your parleying. I’ll untie your tongue. I guess your memory will work quick enough after this”; it was Husky threatening.
Then succeeded the jeering encouragement of the woman and, strange paradox, the voice was rich, enticing, but mocking.
“Oh, yes; just a little stimulation will hurry up matters. Diaz we can’t wait much longer and,” the menad fury broke loose, “if this miserable creature holds out much longer we shall be ruined. Burn him—burn him—scald it out of him, Huerta; the dolt, simpleton, idiot—”
There was a shuffling movement inside, the sudden bristling, rushing sound of an airblast (Could it be a naphtha lamp?) and then a raving, rending, terrifying cry, something that meant fear and rage and madness, the awful, marrow-chilling shriek of insanity.
Quicker than thought a man behind me shoved us aside. He raised an iron mallet; it struck the door with a splintering crash—another and another—thedoor burst inwards, torn from its lock, torn from its hinges, and we all rushed forward. I heard a shot, then another; the group in front of me parted and an extraordinary scene was revealed, one I can never forget. A huge broad-shouldered man was crumpled upon the floor. There had fallen from his hand a thick, long soldering iron; it had been red or white hot; fallen on the floor it was burning into the boards, and little swinging flames encircled it. Near at hand was the large form of a plumber’s furnace with the blue whistling flame still shooting from it. Huddled in a corner, cowering behind a menacing man—quickly subdued, however, by a pointed revolver—was the beautiful woman, a half dishevelled creature in a deep yellow wrap, fastened a little distance below her peerless throat by a big turquoise brooch. Her abundant hair had become loosened, and it poured over her shoulders in a raven tide.
The man in front of her was Riddles’ Mephistopheles. He was pale, and the pallor hardly became him. Although strikingly handsome it gave a peculiar expression to his face, of craven hate and sinister fear, if that can be understood. In both his and the woman’s eyes shone a horrible surprise. But the overpowering object in the room was the half-naked figure of a man with extended arms and divergent legs, strapped to a narrow table by iron bands. These latter passed over his wrists and ankles, and were actually screwed to the table. His face was not readily deciphered; whiskers covered his chin, a high forehead beneath overhanging light hair and a large mouth formed together the suggestion of a very dignified and intelligent face. His condition was heart-rending; bruises covered his body, one eye seemed swollen and shut, and scars—I shuddered at the thought of their having been caused by the iron in the hands ofthe prostrate fiend—marked the white but defaced skin of his shoulders and arms.
There was little furniture in the room—the tortured man had probably been kept on the table at night—a few chairs, a second table, and towards the front of the room a long table covered with a confusion of physical apparatus. It was the work of a minute to search the criminals, and to handcuff them; though the woman cried bitterly at the degradation Captain B. was taking no chances, and then the liberation of the pitiable victim of these inhuman miscreants was effected. The stiffness of his limbs almost forbade movement, and he cried with pain—and for that matter I am sure with joy too—as we tenderly raised him, lifted him into a chair, and tried to relax the rigid muscles. His agony, crucified so on his back, must have been incalculable; evidently his resolute refusal had driven his tormentors furious, and made them incarnate demons. But what was it—the SECRET? Reader, you are not to know, except as you find it out yourself, by reading this almost incredible story.
With our prisoners—the Hercules was carried out; his femur had been split by the Captain’s bullet and he was in desperate pain—we made our way down through the house. There seemed to be only two rooms showing any signs of habitation, two rooms on the second floor used as bedrooms, and their furnishment was a droll mixture of bareness and luxury. Shreddy and hanging wallpaper, a superb rug or so, a sumptuous easy chair, and then wooden kitchen chairs, plain bedsteads, but a bureau or toilet table covered with jewel boxes, and in a corner odds and ends of silver utensils, heaped up into quite a noticeable hillock. Was it these that the men had been seen carrying so constantly into the house? Our prying about uncovered somedecanters of wine incongruously stowed away in a pantry below a washbasin. Their contents helped Erickson, and some of the rest helped themselves.
Riddles had been gloating over the capture of his game; his eyes never left the sullen, downcast face of Mephistopheles, distorted too at moments with angry scowls, nor the disturbed shadowed splendor of the woman’s countenance. At an unguarded instant Mephistopheles sprang out of the hold of his captors, and brought his clenched, handcuffed wrists down on the head of Jack, who promptly dropped.
“You dirty little fox, you did this. I know now. I’ve seen you hanging about here. I’ll mark you! I’ll mark you! I’ll tear your liver and heart out yet. Oh, I don’t forget. Diaz never forgets.”
He was jerked back into decorum and silence, and somewhat injuriously rebuked as well, but a little scar, bare of hair, was to remain as a memento of his regard for Jack Riddles for many a long year afterwards.
I bargained successfully with Captain B. for the possession of Erickson, and I took him home in a taxi, greatly to my journalistic bliss. He was pretty dangerously ill for days; the nervous breakdown was dreadful. He raved and shouted and was almost maniacal in his outbreaks. It was the natural reaction of a powerful mind and nature against the circumstances of his degradation and insult. But he finally came round all right, the glow of health covered his cheeks, and his earnest eyes welcomed me with sanity and gratitude. Then he told me his story, in two parts. The first part explained the predicament in which we found him here in New York, the second— Well, the reader has it before him in this volume, exactly as it appeared in the daily issue of theNew York Truth Getter.
A few words more to explain Mr. Erickson’s equivocal, abject position in New York, as we found him, and this Editorial Note will no longer restrain the puzzled and vexed subscriber. These words will be very few indeed, and may indeed prove very unsatisfactory. Yet they will conveniently make a skeleton framework or outline for deductions, with which the reader may fill its expressionless and yawning blanks, after the gift of his imagination or the bias of his temperament, upon reading the ensuing narrative.
Alfred Erickson reached San Francisco from the Arctic Exploration, herein circumstantially described. In San Francisco he formed, rather rapidly, the acquaintance of Angelica Sigurda Tabasco, and Diaz Ilario Aguadiente. There were mutual prepossessions. Mr. Erickson also fascinated his new friends by certain wonderful claims, which were however partially supported by ocular demonstration. They all came to New York. In New York Mr. Erickson came to grief. He had come too far from the base of his operations, and he suffered from a complicated treatment. We rescued him from its worst effects. I think that is all. I will not trust myself to say more for fear of my own remorse over misleading statements. Angelica and Diaz were never prosecuted. Erickson was afraid to tell his story before he wrote his book (this book), and we all agreed he acted wisely from a commercial standpoint, and the police so impressed Angelica and Diaz with their—the police’s—contiguity under any and all circumstances, in this country anywhere, anyhow, that they left it. And Jack’s “Husky” turned out to be a hardened photographed and historic criminal, who had played the heavy villain in the little mystery under the same impelling motive that animated the minds and tongues of Angelica and Diaz. He had alsocaptivated this captivating pair by blandishments less peculiar than beauty, and he had wound up Alfred Erickson into the tightest kind of a knot of physical embarrassments, from whose Gordian embrace Erickson had been delivered through the intervention of the very humble instrument of Fate, Jack Riddles.
“Husky’s” name eluded determination for a while, but was revived through his own inadvertence in talking in his sleep, wherein the confession transpired of his having “done up” Blue Brigsy at a time when he himself carried the soubriquet of “Monitor Dick.” The clue was slight; it proved sufficient, and landed him in Sing Sing for a quarter of a century.
Jack Riddles was “lifted.” He was taken out of the proletariat, the pages, office boys and messengers, and placed among the police reporters, where he was duly taken in hand under instruction to acquire the current cursorial gait and speed of the slam-bang reportorial style. He will get it. This relieves the situation created by Riddles’ opportune circumspection from the top of the Fifth Avenue ’bus.
The reader, albeit he may demur at the jejune skipping around the explanation of the mystery at No. — east Fifty-eighth Street, has hereby had the situation sufficiently cleared to feel himself ready to enjoy Erickson’s story, and I assure him, he may look forward with expectancy to find the residue, or the heart, of that mystery resolved at, let me say, page 400 or thereabouts, assuming that by that time he cares any more about it. So that, pleasantly impelled by the spur of curiosity, as regards a secret yet undivulged, let him accept our editorial invitation— Does he not see our obeisance, and the sweep of our hand pointing to a door opening upon unimaginable wonders?—to peruse the history of avoyage more marvelous than that of Marco Polo, of Father Huc, of Mandeville, of Munchausen, of Sinbad, the Aethiopics of Heliodorus, of Ariosto, of Gulliver, of Ulysses, of Peter Wilkins, of Camoens, of Pomponius Mela.