Empty Bottles

by Anthony M. Rud

 

By ANTHONY M. RUD
Author of “Nevada Diamonds,” “The Devils Heirloom,” etc.

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A SHADOW OF THE PAST SPREADS A GRIM CLOUD OVER THE LIVES
OF MEN OF THE UNDERWORLD—WHO WOULD FORGET THEIR PAST

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AFTER eight days, when the Turk felt certain that no suspicion attached to him, he drove out to the haystack cache in the identical truck he had used to rob the loft. Nearly all was brutally serene in his mind. He grunted contempt for both the police of this Mid-West city and for the avaricious merchant who would not spend one hundred dollars a month to procure the services of a watchman. Eleven thousand dollars' worth, wholesale, of the most expensive silk jerseys, chiffon stockings and lingerie direct from Paris had been the apparent price of his penny wisdom.

Dislabeled, and with the cases planed and camouflaged by coverings of glued Bristol board, these sheer, beautiful goods would pass through the hands of Abie Treiger, “general importer,” whose dingy shop occupied the third floor above a movie palace in a town thirty-odd miles to the west of Chicago. Thence, who could know? Abie kept his trade secrets, for they were worth discounts of “feefty, ten und t'ree” on the asking prices named by his furtive supply agents.

A cursory inspection made an evening earlier from the window of a taxicab hired to take him out Roosevelt Road toward the fistic mill at Sager's Arena in Aurora, had assured the Turk in respect to one of the minor worries. The buildings of this farm upon which stood the secret haystack, were dark—as untenanted as any of the crawfish flats outside Broadview. Now, if field rats hadn't gnawed their way into the filmy laces——

The Turk bit down upon his dead cheroot, grinning. The haul had come none too soon, for that dame had devilled him out of his honest job at the moonshine bar. Damn her! But then, she'd taken the worst end of the stick, at that. Between old Haskell and tending the kid she'd have her hands full and stuck to it; unless the crook was loosening up a lot better than he used to, he'd give her the air on any proposition like Benny!

Driving on, with the spotlight lowered to splash a brilliant stain upon the right-hand margin of the concrete road, the Turk's face became lax and heavy-jowled in the shadow behind the wheel. He drove miles more, growling occasional curses at some of the idiots coming from the west, fools who didn't know enough to dim the headlights of their cars.

Then he snapped on the dash bulb in order to read the odometer, and left the light burning. In the faint illumination, crouched like a toad upon the stiff, high seat, he looked to have no forehead—only a mass of black, tousled hair still sticky from the pomade of two nights since. His nose was bulbous, depressed into width at the bridge where the heel of some gang fighter had smashed it years before. The mouth was wide, with thick, pendulous lips. His neck had been absorbed, it seemed, by the pads of adipose above and below.

A lump, a clod with cunning, no more a Turk than he was an Irishman, Why the cognomen had been attached to an offspring of Slav-Levantine-Bavarian ancestry was answered only in some unwritten and now forgotten archive of a Continental slum.

Men had deceived themselves more than once concerning the Turk. Behind the swarthy skin and jaw, behind the slanting, matted brow, lay a brain stultified by long years of excesses, yet dangerous still, as were the long, capable fingers. Unbelievable as it now must have seemed to one who glimpsed the driver for a first time, the Turk nearly thirty years before had come to America as a promising apprentice to the repair chief of a Swiss firm exporting huge and expensive calculating machines.

Not even a genius could have learned the intricacies of these complex mechanisms in three years; ordinary students who ask only an operating knowledge must study and concentrate for weeks before keys and levers work their wills in division, discount and other processes of modern commercial affairs. A Swiss apprenticeship in watchmaking, or the repair of calculating machines, ends only when the master decides that his advice and example have begotten another master; rarely is it of less than ten years duration,

The Turk found a more lucrative profession, one in which the sensitive touch of trained fingers and the keenness of an auditory sense trained to diagnose trouble before taking down a machine, made him appear a genius. Only a lack of Napoleonic qualities in the leader of his gang of safe-crackers and loft-robbers brought the catastrophe—and a long hiatus in the Turk's activities. He had not been to blame. When the plain-clothes men surrounded the building he was working away upon the clicking tumblers of a safe, oblivious to the quick tapping on a window pane which signified that the others were on their respective ways.

This night he had been in as nearly an expansive mood as his surly, whisky-curdled nature could allow. One job, the looting of a delicatessen store from which he had carried away the tiny safe bodily, had gone askew. The very simplicity of the mechanism balked him for a few hours. Then, after a two-day debauch he returned to find the safe gone and only one empty beer bottle in the spot of hiding.

That bottle puzzled. It had not been there earlier; of this much the Turk was positive! The hair lifted along the back of his neck with a vague, elusive phantasm of memory he could not grasp and make his own. He departed New York City that night, swiftly, and in a stolen speed truck upon which he placed serial and motor numbers slightly different from those borne originally. In Chicago he registered the truck as his own, put it up for a needed repair, and then lay low in a job behind the bar of a soft-drink saloon while he sent for Benny, his crippled son. The bowed, limping child arrived almost starved; the Turk, half in hate and half in pity, threw food and white whisky into the child's stomach; then proceeded to ignore him as before.

The beer bottle slipped into obscurity. The Turk gathered courage, made a connection with a dependable fence, and then planned another coup. It came off with ridiculous ease; these Chicago cops and merchants were easy marks, for sure!

And now he passed the abandoned farm, looking for lights and seeing none. Stopping the truck on a side road, he reconnoitered. Nobody home. The stream of traffic passing constantly through the night on. Roosevelt Road bothered the Turk not a jolt. Without lights on his truck as he drove in, no one would suspect him of being other than a countryman. Why should anyone want to despoil a haystack? Pawing like a dog burrowing under a fence, the Turk dug quickly and silently into the stack. He slowed as he reached the spot he had left the cases. A dull apprehension began to seep into his brain. The first ought to have been about here. Had the hay slumped, covering the cases deeper?

Glancing around once, almost in fear, he began again to throw aside the fragrant timothy. A hundred pound slump of the dusty stuff from inside dropped upon his head and shoulders; but he shook himself, sneezed, and cleared this out in a hurry.

They were gone! Damn it, they were gone!

Further than he had any right to expect the cases to have receded, the Turk dug, sneezing imprecations as the hay dust filled his eyes, his nostrils. His knee came down upon something unyielding though small. Scraping away the lowest layer, his fingers closed upon the lump; it was small and hard. He lifted it, and by the feeling knew the object all too well.

Another empty beer bottle!

In a space of seconds the angry, dismayed cracksman changed character. The hair once more prickled up along the ridge of his neck, but this time in sheer terror. The coincidence meant something he could not remember, but something which menaced! What the hell was that bottle for? Who was jobbing him? What did he remember about an empty bottle? Somewhere, sometime—but the memory had been dosed too often with raw fusel oil and alcohol. There was nothing but fear, ten times enhanced because of its nature remaining unknown, ungrasped. The Turk backed from the hay tunnel on his hands and knees, cold sweat beading his cheeks. Just to get away and be alone to figure it out!

A circle cold and small pressed against the rearward bulge of his underslung jaw.

“Don't go for your gun, Turk,” bade a quiet voice. “I'd have no compunction in blowing you to hell, but as a matter of fact I'm not out for shooting. I need you other ways.”

“Huh? What——?” His voice came as a frightened croak.

“Never mind what, for now! All you need to know is that I am not a policeman; that I have written down and filed away thorough reports of your New York crimes—the confession of Lag Hillis, for instance, in which he tells how you and he scragged a bank watchman. Lag confessed to me and a priest. Do you remember?”

The rise of the Turk's shoulders and the bunched knots of muscle thrusting upward through the fat of his shoulders, were tantamount to a confession though he did not, could not speak.

“Of course you do,” continued the voice in calm certitude. “That was only one instance. I have also complete descriptions of three other occasions upon which you worked for Haskell's gang. They're written down, notarized, and waiting for my death or disappearance. The minute I don't show up they'll be placed in the hands of the police. Now I think probably you understand. I'm putting up my gat. Turn around. Were going back to town in your truck.”

Shaking with a fear he could not hide, the Turk obeyed. On his feet he towered above the immaculately garbed figure waiting—a slim, straight-featured little man who did not show a gun now, or seem to be in the slightest dread of his life!

“My taxi-guy!”

The slight stranger nodded, his lips twisting in a sidewise smile. “Yes, and many other men who have served you, Turk. Your memory for supers isn't very good. Can't you recall anyone before me who has limped like this?”

With that he strode out toward the truck. At each step his left hip sagged two or three inches though his shoulders and head remained square to the horizontal.

A surge of blurred, frightened memories came now. The guy who'd got him the flop at Staff Ritter's! Maybe the same bird who'd watched that time he grabbed the safe from the delicatessen.

Out flipped the Turk's automatic. The slight man waved it away, almost careless. “If I'd wanted your life, Turk,” he explained patiently, “I could split to the police long ago. I don't. I need you—and in addition, though it may make no impression whatever on your elementary mind, I may say that you can go ahead and shoot. You'll trade a bullet for the chair. That's all. I'm not particular. Go ahead and trade!”

The stranger actually reached inside the left hip pocket of his suit, withdrew a flat cigarette case and matches, then lit a Turkish cigarette of the oily, aromatic sort the Turk always had considered beneath the dignity of a man.

Turk did not shoot. Something more than fear stayed his hand. Already he had come under the spell of that soft, wire-strong voice—of sheer indifference as mirrored in that voice. A tight corner, for sure. But he'd see what this bird wanted. It couldn't be as bad as the chair.

It proved to be far less bad. The stranger explained nothing, but simply put the cracksman to work. There was a safe—made of wood. This safe was not supposed to hold valuables, but Turk had to work upon it according to blueprints furnished by the man he learned to call, simply, X.

There was no question of wages. X provided a bed, meals, and an occasional pint of moonshine whisky of the same corn-and-molasses ferment the Turk had dispensed and drunk for upwards of two years while working behind the so-called soft drink bar. Later, when the Turk needed clothing, an entire new outfit, from hat to shoes, was given to him without explanation. Also some extra ties and semi-soft collars, size eighteen; a few silk handkerchiefs of the colored variety he had affected.

Questions went unanswered. Little by little the Turk understood the object sought by his strange master. X was asking the Turk to throw down the entire profession of safe cracksmen! The blueprints, drawn by X himself, were as readable as those of a mechanical engineer. Also they were appallingly simple and straightforward in principle. X, knowing full well, it seemed, the means by which the Turk had made himself valuable to Connie Haskell in the old days, purposed to make a lock which would baffle every crook even of the Turk's own ability! No lock could be made to withstand “soup,” of course; but the scheme broached by X was intended to foil, not safe-blowers, but the gentler and more artistic craftsmen who specialized in opening boxes with the aid of their hands and ears alone.

In short, X proposed a sort of eccentric to the action of the main tumbler lock, an appliance whose rasping noise plus its non-pertinent ticks upon the steel, would hide and camouflage successfully the touch and sound of the combination. The device was to be made at first as an inexpensive attachment for use upon wall safes and other cheap safety-deposit contrivances; later it might be elaborated to include every good mechanism up to the two-thousand-dollar time locks of bank vaults. X stated that he insisted upon a finished article which would fool the most accomplished Jimmy Valentine; and one, also, which could be manufactured at a price of not more than five to thirty dollars, depending upon the variety of lock it was to protect.

X promised a patent, with a one-tenth interest assigned to the Turk. The prospect failed with the unwilling machinist; too long he had considered such contrivances as problems to be solved. The idea of manufacturing a lock device which would baffle even himself was revolting—though it caught and thrilled a deeper instinct, that of the maker and lover of fine machinery. But the Turk too long had been trained as a crook. The inverted loyalty which had made him accept eight years and some months of hard labor rather than betray his gang, came to the surface. He made the small mechanism, but saw to it that it worked in faulty fashion.

X frowned. He suggested corrections—the right ones. The Turk turned sulky and stalled; after all what matter if this man had the goods on him? A quick kill, a getaway, another change of name and occupation—his black eyes slitted as he looked at the man who held over him the threat.

Yet the mechanic delayed. There was something he could not fathom, something daunting in the gray, flinty eyes of the debonair little man! When X came around to supervise, which he did seldom, the Turk needed every bit of his self-restraint to keep from following the specifications laid down—as if by the old Swiss master. Once or twice, not bunglingly, but with an assurance which brought a scowl to the lips of the ex-apprentice, X filed off projections carefully provided by the Turk, projections which made impotent certain phases of the interference camouflage.

“You could have done that,” said X the last time. “I shall not threaten any more. Only this must be right. And now, because I am preparing for another of my human objectives, teach me the touch and system by which I can open safes.”

He made the request in a quiet voice, but one which brooked no denial. Explaining that his finger tips had been trained in the speedy and sensitive manipulations of a deck of cards, X took for granted his ability.

Sneering at what he thought presumption, the Turk obeyed. Where'd this bird get the idea he could get hep to a trick only a couple dozen burglars in the country could turn? Telling a guy to listen for this and that, and feel when the tumblers came into a worn notch, was good dope, but what would it mean to him? Nothing. Getting the hang of that trick was way beyond the ordinary goof. Maybe trying it would get X into trouble, though. The Turk gave his best advice and instruction, and complimented hypocritically as the younger man strove in vain to master the knack.

Then came a day when it seemed that X realized his deficiencies. Not once had he succeeded in opening the simple lock after it had been reset to a different combination. He took it away, however, and with it the door and mechanism of the wooden safe; the latter, in spite of the Turk's stalling, had neared perfection. The elder man meditated smashing it to bits, destroying the blueprints, and making a run for it on the day he killed X.

Those gray, flinty eyes of X seemed to divine his thoughts, however. The time he brought the materials for a second model, he directed the Turk to the window which looked down upon the grimy street. There an odd bit of drama was being enacted. A bluecoat swung slowly along the opposite sidewalk. Officer M'Goorty at the moment was thinking, doubtless, of the discomforts of a heavy uniform on such a hot day—especially when foaming relief no longer was passed out to him from the side doors of the vacant saloons.

Suddenly he stopped, staring down beneath the fore-shortened shade of a tattered awning in front of what had been Dan's Place. Was the heat affecting his brain, then? It looked like a bottle of beer, one which still wore its tin hat—and upon which the beads of coolness streaked the famous label!

With a bound M'Goorty pounced upon it, exclaiming reverently as he saw that there indeed had been no deception! An old-time label, too—bearing the legend at the bottom, “Alcohol By Volume, 3³⁄₄ Per Cent!”

Glancing about and upward, Officer M'Goorty suddenly tucked his prize beneath his coat, and turned swiftly for the haven of a doorway. At the instant his eyes reached a certain second story window across the street, a heavy, toadlike workman whose swarthy skin had gone to the color of green crayon, fell back clutching his gun—but without a thought of turning it upon the tyrant who kept him to this hateful task. The eyes of X glinted with contemptuous amusement mingled with memory and cold menace.

IN A small, primly furnished bachelor apartment, several miles from the warehouse room in which the Turk worked and slept, the man called X finished the first model. Not content with its seeming perfection, he waited its shipping to Washington several days longer. Though he had not allowed his subordinate to guess, back there under the Turk's tutelage X had found himself able to solve the combination of a simple lock. Still he practised, buying now a set of more intricate ones.

When he was satisfied that his eccentric, when attached in place, utterly destroyed the sound and feel by which a touch-and-ear cracksman worked, he shipped the model to a patent lawyer in Washington with a summary of his claims.

That was half his job. In case the second half failed, he would have to use the other model now being constructed slowly by the Turk. But X had no intention of failing. Irony lay behind his attitude and revenge upon the Turk, yet in dealing with the man who once had been the Turk's director and leader in affairs of crime, X would play a grimmer game. He went, as twice before, prepared to kill—though hoping to avoid this issue in favor of a better.

The spacious bungalow of James Leffingwell Haskell backed upon the slanting shore of Lake Michigan, facing one of the outside avenues of a north shore suburb through which Sheridan Road deserts its blue-eyed affinity to right-angle through the hinterland of glass-showcased apartments.

X knew the ground, and also believed that he knew that the house would be deserted at this early hour of the evening. Haskell, some time previously, had ordered seats for a musical revue from a downtown ticket broker.

In the act of crossing an expanse of darkened lawn to the north side of the wide piazza, X froze in his tracks. A brilliant light had flashed upon the very spot he would have reached in another moment! There was no shelter nearer than a hedge of box which lined the motor-way to the garage in the rear. As the door opened and a man's figure emerged, X bent and ran for the hedge, vaulting over and then peering cautiously above the close-branched greenery to discover whether or not he had been seen.

Apparently he was lucky. A woman's voice sounded in words of frosty farewell. The door closed. A slouching, heavy figure of a man vaguely familiar to X descended the broad steps and traversed the walk to the street. It was not Haskell, whose lank, bent and wizened figure would have been unmistakable in any light.

X waited, an edge of impatience rising now beneath the calm certainty of his usual poise. At least two persons on whom he had not counted had been present in the bungalow this evening. Possibly one of the servants had been entertaining in the master's absence; yet if that were the case, why had the man departed before ten? Haskell, if he were at the theatre indeed, could not reach his home earlier than midnight. Keeping to the shadows, and speculating concerning the two lighted rooms in the master's portion of the house, X made a stealthy way back to the garage.

It was a small, one-car structure of stucco to match the bungalow. The doors stood wide open. There was no car within.

X nodded in satisfaction. Haskell was away. As if in corroboration of the servant hypothesis—probably a quarrel would account for the early parting—the lights in the front of the bungalow all were extinguished save one dim bulb in the hall which X knew burned all night.

He hesitated no longer. Unaware of the crouching, toad-like figure who scowled in puzzled interest at the furtive one's goings and comings, keeping to his vantage point of shadow and hedge from which X's figure if not his face was discernible, the burglar stepped lightly up the front steps, moved along the piazza to the fourth French window—the one from which he had removed the wired alarm—jimmied it open, and entered. Behind him a heavy, crouching shape detached itself from the shadows and followed—tiptoeing with extreme caution and slowness. The Turk didn't understand any crook going after old Haskell, but the lay might be worth looking into. On account of his suspicious, miserly nature, the boss never had had any use for banks.

A faint gleam of light from the hall showed X the furniture. He moved swiftly through this wide living-room, tried a closed door on the southeast wall, found it moved under his hand, and pushed it open cautiously. The little office was dark.

No light could penetrate this den of the old miser-crook, but before beginning the supreme test, X closed and locked both of the two doors, and then searched out the wires to the alarms of the three alcove windows. Cutting these, he slid open gently one of the three, and peered down. The faint gray-blue from a distant street arc disclosed an open lawn, the grass of which was soft enough to dull the sound of a seven-foot drop—though it would, most assuredly, show footprints.

The first guarded flash of his lamp caused X to start, seizing his automatic. Then, with a silent laugh at his own scariness, he projected a faint glow from the powerful lens through his shrouding fingers, and moved toward the wheeled object in the far corner.

It was an invalid chair! From within its capacious arms came the faint suspirations of a sleeping child. X bent over, making certain that he was menaced by nothing more than a small boy clad in pajamas, a child who still clutched an open book, though he had turned out the desk lamp at his elbow!

X turned back. He reached high, pressing a button, then lowering the heavy panel of quarter-sawed oak which sprang away under his hands. Behind this stood the unwieldy contraption old Haskell, who should have known far better, thought was a safe. True, a second's quick examination showed X that the box was more intricate than any of the locked receptacles upon which he had practiced; yet now he had to succeed,

Spinning the larger dial, then revolving it to right and left more and more slowly, X listened for a space of ten minutes to the faint clicks and felt for the infinitesimal “give” which heralded a number or letter of use in the combination. With sensitive finger tips just touching the steel he caught one—another. Five such surrendered themselves; X made mental note, memorizing the positions, praying that he had not missed any. Probably he had not.

The second dial proved child's play in comparison. It set with a distinct click and loosening. The cracksman nodded in satisfaction. There was nothing superlatively difficult here, as the second dial merely had to be adjusted to a single position while the first was rotated in a correct succession of five numbers.

Now came mere routine, provided X had done his guessing correctly, the spinning off of permutations. Sooner or later the door would open. It did—on the third trial!

Fronting X was a double tier of locked steel drawers, but these he had expected. Removing a set of flat skeleton keys from their silencing of cotton, he opened one drawer after another. Though he had expected much, the sight of the scintillating diamond trays, the collection of finger rings, tiaras, lavalliers and brooches still in their settings, the assortments of cut rubies and sapphires brought a gasp of amazement and admiration to his lips. No wonder old Haskell had been able to desert the life of crime! How many dozens or scores of times must he have held out some precious portion of the swag captured by his human tools!

The cloth sack drawn from beneath X's jacket filled to bulging. And yet there was one last drawer. Liberty bonds! X inhaled sharply as he glimpsed the figure 10,000 on the topmost one of the sheaf, yet he took up the bunch bound by the rubber band, and then three strays which appeared more like municipals, thrusting all of them into the inside breast pocket of his jacket and fastening against loss with a safety pin. This vengeance would be sweeter even than he had dared to dream! How he would torture Haskell during the next month, sending in the mail a single gem crushed to powder, the broken ashes of a huge bond! The miser's soul would shrivel and die; and X would watch, unsuspected.

As he was finishing the job by wiping all the metal and wooden surfaces with a silk handkerchief to remove finger marks, a snuffling sigh from the invalid boy made him start.

“Don't be angry, Uncle Jim!” begged a faint, tired voice. “My back aches so bad!” Tears were not far away.

“I'm sorry. But hush, sonny! Just close your eyes and go to sleep again,” whispered X. “You mustn't make any noise just now.” He turned the flash around, at the same time completing the wiping of the oaken panel.

“But I wanted to tell you, Uncle Jim; I didn't want to make you mad. I just couldn't sleep at all; I guess I'm busting in two! It seemed like maybe I could read, so I got myself out of bed and come in here. I ain't hurt anything.”

In spite of his need to hurry away, something in the plaintive, tired voice tugged fiercely and suddenly at the vitals of the man who called himself X. He walked forward, holding the bright light upon the gaunt, pain-lined face of the lad in the chair in order that the latter might not distinguish the intruder.

Then all at once X discerned the reason for the wheeled chair. The lad, an undersized, ill-nourished boy with wan cheeks and great, dark eyes, one who might have been anywhere from nine to fourteen years of age, held his legs curled up in an unnatural position—one which sent a wave of sudden pain and compelling sympathy through the elder! Unconsciously X's hand pressed against the hip upon which he limped.

“I am not your uncle, just a messenger he sent to get something for him. Is Haskell really your uncle?” asked X swiftly, a strained note coming into his voice.

“Oh no! Miss Ellen just brought me here——”

A thumping crash, a hoarse command of which the words were indistinguishable, and then the continued impacts of heavy steps such as are made when men struggle, broke in upon the speech. X waited no longer. Reaching the window in three hurried steps he tossed out the filled bag, then vaulted after it. His heels sank deep in the damp sod.

A window shade ran up, throwing light outward to the lawn. Simultaneously plate glass splintered. X turned with his pistol ready, but the destruction had little direct bearing upon his escape. There in the oblong of light two men wrestled. One was tall, lank and old. The other appeared toad-like, bulbous in the grotesque distortion of conflict.

The hollow pung! of a shot jarred X into action. He saw, as a last tableau, the figure he knew to be that of the Turk, sinking out through the jagged glass of the broken window, his huge hands still clutching at the windpipe of his adversary. X ran, then walked, to the point he had cached the Gladstone bag which he had provided to hold the loot. On the way to the boulevard, where he would pick up a cab, he noted the lights of Haskell's car slowly retreating toward the garage. Apparently the chauffeur had not been alarmed.

X READ the account of the double tragedy for the third time while he waited the coming of Detective Sergeant Bill Sebastian. Piecing out by deduction the portions unstated in the newspaper account, X guessed that the Turk must have shadowed him, following him into the home of the old gang leader—probably from curiosity. Surprised by the return of Haskell, the Turk fought to escape. Haskell, no match for the middle-aged intruder, went down and out with a broken neck and black-blue sunken marks of fingers upon his skinny throat.

The shooting occurred as the two threshed about before the window. Though X had been inside the bungalow twice previously, spying out the hiding place of Haskell's unsold loot, he had not learned of the niece, Ellen Haskell, until she was mentioned by the boy cripple. That part was explained by the statement that Ellen Haskell only the day before had returned from a trip to Philadelphia taken in the boy's company.

And here X discovered a startling fact, one which caused his brows to crease in discomfort and perplexity. Ivan Andrus, the cripple, was said to be the son of the Turk!

Ellen, weeks before, had taken the boy to the Haskell home with the permission of Arieniev Andrus—he who was known as the Turk. Ellen, who devoted most of her days to settlement work, said that she had been attracted and compelled by the unfortunate child's extraordinary mentality. She wished to give him a chance—such a chance in a world as might be vouchsafed by a straight, whole body. For this end she had consulted several eminent child specialist surgeons.

She had shot the Turk. Coming into the room just at the moment when Andrus was killing her relative, she tried with all strength to part them—but in vain. Guessing Haskell's extremity and seeing a pistol lying upon the rug, she seized it and fired at the Turk's knees.

The heavy-calibered army pistol, jerking upward in her unaccustomed grasp, threw a slug glancing into the heart of Arieniev Andrus, though not until his deadly work upon Haskell had been completed.

Bill Sebastian, son of that old chief of detectives, Nicholas Sebastian, gasped and pinched himself furtively beneath the desk during X's calm, terse recital. The visitor, a slim, quietly-garbed youth in his early twenties, spoke in a businesslike fashion—quite as though the finding of a huge, stolen treasure were a part of any year's routine!

A riot of quite natural speculations seethed within the investigator's brain. Who was this chap who refused his name? A member of the mob which in the days of Sebastian the Elder baffled the watchdogs of half a continent? Son of the chief crook, perhaps, inheriting a vault full of stolen goods he did not dare to try to sell? A double-crosser, asking immunity through making a policeman his accessory after the fact?

Bill Sebastian's trained instincts denied. X was not pretending to narrate the whole story, yet there was decency and a likable quality in the level gray eyes. which made Bill ready to overlook small irregularities. Restitution of properties long believed lost was being offered. In reading the list of jewels alone, Bill remembered vaguely how his father had chewed his mustache and growled at the cleverness of men who could make away with such spectacular articles, escaping detection. There were the Triplets, three coal black diamonds next to priceless which once had been the chief treasure in the collection of a Baltimore millionaire—and for which there still stood a reward of twenty thousand dollars “and no questions asked.” None other of the stones X listed were valued as highly, yet several of the names had been connected with famous burglaries of the past. The Palmerston sapphires, the Bert Jones casket of Burmese rubies, the Telfer turquoise.

In all, X claimed to identify sixteen lots of stolen gems. Beside these he noted curtly at the end, “sixty-seven stones removed from settings; thirty-five pieces of silver, gold, and platinum jewelry.” He made no mention of the bonds. Haskell was known to have made some money in stock exchange speculation; unless proof to the contrary arose, X had an idea for the just disposal of this wealth.

The sergeant's eyes grew bright. More than the half of the reward money offered by the visitor loomed before him the tremendous boost such a recovery of the gems would mean for Bill Sebastian. X insisted he was to be kept clear of the affair; Bill's own word, backed by his known fidelity to a promise or a trust, was all the security wanted! X had chosen his man with care.

Two months before, the entire credit for a striking achievement in sleuthing had been grabbed from Bill by an ambitious superior. This was an opportunity to more than square matters—and Bill would not be backward! He rose, extending his hand. “I'm with you, X—with just the reservation that if you're not on the square you'll get the same treatment any other would receive!”

A smile which brought out youth and an invitation to comradeship from behind the mask of flinty gray, grew in X's eyes as he came to his feet, meeting the clasp halfway. “Sometime, Sebastian,” he said, “I'm going to tell you the same story I hope to be able to tell this afternoon to a person I have not met. Until then—well, I think the satchel I left with the desk sergeant may keep you busy!”

THE card brought to Ellen failed to mention the pseudonym of X. It bore the name, Sidney Torres Casson.

“I have come to speak to you a little about the crippled chap, Ivan Andrus,” began Casson quietly, bowing to the girl's reserved nod. In truth that courteous gesture concealed a sudden, mighty perturbation, a wondering, a rebellion, a knowledge—and a quickening of arteries and brain which both obeyed, the knowledge rather than the insurgent reaction of cynicism. Unknowing, he had guessed her thus! She would have had to be distant, dark-eyed, slim. It was near to the perfection of taste that she had not donned a height of mourning, but had chosen a frock of cream white with a trim of lavender. Casson, who now had shed the initial X for good and all, found his calm a goal to seek rather than a tool to use. Within two minutes he knew what he would not dare tell for months, years perhaps.

He struck exactly the one chord which could have demolished barriers permeable only to sympathy! Ellen Haskell straightened. Her eyes lost their impersonality; though shaded with grief that was not for the man who had died nor even for the man she had killed unintentionally, they regarded Sidney Casson with a great intensification. Perhaps a relative of the crippled boy, a man come to redeem the brutality and neglect and effects of which she could not assuage!

Casson plunged. He withdrew from his pocket a rubber-bound packet of bonds, then added to it the three strays he had found in the lowest tray of Nig Haskell's safe.

“There are papers worth close to two hundred thousand,” he said quietly. “I am told that you are the sole heir of Jeremy Haskell; therefore I bring them to you. I have asked a representative of the Capital National to call in one-half hour. He will be prepared to give you a receipt and take them off your hands for the present. A box in your name has been rented at the bank. Here is one key. I suggest that you give it to him for the time being. His name is LaFleur—a straightforward young chap with whom I have had some dealings.”

“But—but——?”

Ellen Haskell made no attempt to hide her gasping astonishment. “Those!” she cried. “All that? Oh, thank heaven!” With obvious difficulty she restrained an impulse to rise and leave the room.

“Go tell him!” bade Casson with a smile in his eyes. “I think I understand in part. Don't let him come in here—yet!”

Her glance showed doubt, yet she nodded sharply in decision. Five minutes later she returned, and without explanation gave her hand to Casson's clasp. High color had come from beneath the shadows of her days of trial.

“Thank you!” she said, and took a chair. “Please smoke if you wish, and tell me all.”

Sidney Casson was glad of the chance to divert his attention, which had been fastened too closely upon the girl. He lit a cigarette and blew upward a stream of smoke. Then he spoke.

“Just one question,” he observed. “Had Ivan's trouble anything to do with his father?”

Ellen's hands clenched, but she managed a quiet voice. “Only this: Arieniev Andrus was a drunkard. He had been so for many years. He struck his son time and time again—the last time with an empty beer bottle. The child's spine is injured, He needs an operation.”

“Enough!” cried Sidney Casson, choking. “You see me?” With that he walked a circuit of the great Persian rug, limping.

“Yes!”

“Then know why I came! I guessed. Ivan will have his chance.The same man swung a bottle upon me and broke my hip. I was six years old at that time. But let me tell more of a story than that, for the sake of the boy!

“We begin in the year 1904 in the upstairs room of a dingy Chicago saloon. A small lad lay on the bed, boning geography. His father returned. The man's eyes shone. He had not been drinking but he was terrifically excited and flowing over with jubilance! Highball had won the Derby at Washington Park! On his nose the man—my father—had placed three thousand dollars, within a ten-case note of his all!

“Dad never had balance. He had promised my mother that I should be educated off the turf; that I should go to school away from the tracks, and number none of touts, bookmakers and followers of the ponies among my friends.

“He did his best, but mother never guessed how broke he would be. Until the end of 1903 dad and I often slept in flop houses, haymows, or wherever we happened to be. It was a bad life—but dad, failing and becoming bitter, made me study day and evening on books he himself knew only by hearsay. Before I was nine I could spell down most grammar school graduates; I could describe every country in the world; I could—but never mind. Dad did his best, and I thank God that he died believing that he had fulfilled every expectation of my dead mother. You see, dad was drugged and robbed of his money. The drug killed him. Haskell, your uncle, was the man who directed the spoilage; Arieniev Andrus was a lookout for the gang.

“I won't try to tell it all. When dad was groaning out his life, Haskell's thugs came up. I saw them. All of them died too early, unfortunately; Pete and Sam, who did the poisoning, in the electric chair of New York State. Otherwise I should have paid them in more terrible coin!

“Haskell lived. So did Andrus. The rest of the original gang was scattered. I searched down each one, finding that save for one murderer serving a life sentence in Missouri, and two others who are in for long terms, there are no members of Haskell's original gang.”

The girl raised both hands in protest. “He always was kind—” she faltered, and stopped.

“Was he, honestly?” demanded Casson, a set of cynicism coming to his jaw. “Wasn't he a miser? Didn't he refuse to you just the five or six hundred dollars which you needed for the boy?” In that moment he forgot that a girl sat before him.

She dropped her glance, not speaking.

“Oh, you don't have to confess. I knew both Haskell and Andrus. Too well I knew them!”

With that he arose and walked the length of the great library. His limp was no more perceptible than ordinary, yet Ellen saw it. Her features twisted in pain.

“There is much—much—” she cried, shielding her eyes.

“Much that you did not understand!” he finished bitterly. “Aye! This much, however, you may know. Haskell and the Turk both have paid insofar as they could pay. Before Andrus died I made him give to me the whole cleverness of his mechanical talents; these, with a certain price of restitution I exacted from Haskell, will make my stake—the capital with which I shall start manufacturing. I need tell you little more.”

“But you haven't really explained anything!” she protested. “Won't you come with me and look at Ivan? The doctor gave him something to make him sleep. Now that I have money enough to do it, I shall take him to a hospital in Philadelphia, right away.”

In the semi-darkness of that chamber, looking down upon a boy whose life was to be changed in its entirety, Sidney Casson turned and clasped the hand of the silent girl. That touch was a pledge and a promise.