Short Stories (magazine)/Plundered Cargo/Chapter 1

by Robert Welles Ritchie

 

Chapter I

INTRODUCING A FERRIS WHEEL

Before-The-Fire-San Francisco was the Land of Romance for a continent. The seven seas brought mysteries to be unladen at her wharves. Mountains and deserts of the hinterland sent silent men to play strange games in her places of business and of pleasure. The city behind the Golden Gate was vibrant with the pulse of life, a little raw but spiced for strong palates.

There, in those times, a mahogany-colored monarch of the South Seas could launch a sugar king on his career by so small a circumstance as losing to him a third of his kingdom over jackpots in a hotel room. An untutored negress might make herself mistress of a fortune by voodoo magic. A black-birder and pirate wanted by three great powers could pass the collection plate of a Sunday ashore.

This tale, one whereon murder will be done and barratry—with shipwreck, and villainy finally unmasked—finds its beginning in that city of enchanted hills in those days of its earlier glory. And it is in tone that so trivial a circumstance as the breaking of the driving machinery of a Ferris wheel near the Cliff House should start something destined to come to its climax in the Vermilion Sea.

A shrill whistle squeak told that the manager of the Ferris wheel had duly delivered to his customers five cents' worth of revolutions. The great swinging circle of lights slowed down to discharge passengers, car by descending car, on the platform between the giant struts supporting the axle. A man in a yachting cap and with a roll of tickets conveniently under his arm stood at the point of debarkation to urge another voyage.

“Hey, Bill, 'nother swing around the circle for you?” The ticket seller leaned through the gap in a swinging gondola's side to touch its single passenger on the elbow.

The one thus addressed roused himself from a doze. He lifted the rim of a hard derby from the bridge of his nose and gave the ticket vendor a searching look.

“You guarantee this's good for loss o' memory, spots before the eyes an' that tired feeling in the morning?”

“All of that and then some, Bill.”

“Give me fi' dollars' worth, then.”

This magnificent deal having been arranged, the passenger settled himself in his private gondola—paid for certainty for the rest of the night—and tilted the rim of his derby back to the bridge of his nose to indicate that conversation was finished. His car swung upward. The Ferris wheel was merrily on its way. From over to the right of the revolving wheel, from the blazing windows of the Cliff House a hint of gay band music came winging down the keen north breeze. Nearer at hand, stretching from horizon to horizon north and south, the moon-dimpled Pacific floated its dishes of gold on changing waves. A lace of surf drew patterns along the shore far as the eye carried.

The giant wheel had made, say, three complete revolutions when a link in the endless chain drive between engine and axle snapped. The wheel stopped. It happened that with the stopping of the wheel the man who had bought five dollars' worth of rides was marooned in his gondola at the very top of the wheel's swing, a full seventy-five feet above the peanut shells on the beach. That circumstance meant nothing to him, at the moment, for he slept. But he presently awoke. It was cool up there, and the north wind blew into his ears and stirred the cobwebs which had stretched themselves across his brain. He pushed his derby up from his eyes and fixed his gaze on the box of light which was the distant Cliff House.

“Guess the old skip's stalled 'round the five hundred level,” he murmured, and his hand automatically went out to find the hoist signal and give it a tug. Then he caught a glimpse of the ocean and knew he was not back in the Gold Lode mine shaft. He hooked his chin on the edge of the car and looked down. He saw the tops of the other cars ranged in a springing curve below him. A man's arm dangled from the one next down the rank.

“Hullo, down there!”

A wide brimmed black hat with a high creased crown was poked out from beneath the eaves of the car. The hat turned. A heavily bearded face twisted upward.

“Take your foot off the brake, Gran'paw!” bawled the young man in the car above.

“I have no foot on the brake, young fellow,” the bearded one answered with great dignity.

Feeling a sociable need for further conversation, the young man of the upper car leaned swiftly out from the gondola, seized the roof edge and swung himself over it. Like a monkey he worked his way down amid steel struts until his feet plumped on the roof of the gondola he sought. A final swing and he was inside.

“Good even', Gran'paw,” he said with a wide grin. “How's tricks?”

The elderly gentleman allowed his eyes to travel slowly over the vivid checks of the intruder's spring suit enwrapping an athletic figure until they came to rest on his features. Surprisingly blue eyes with a hint of the devil in them; wide mouth of a comedian and a sturdy chin thrusting out over a choker collar and cerise puff tie: that was the sum of them.

“Good evening to you, sir,” the elderly gentleman finally replied with no visible excess of enthusiasm.

“There speaks a scholar and a gentleman!” The visitor clapped the venerable one on the knee with a resounding thwack. “Kind of man 'at makes the grade with ole Spike Horn—that's me; Spike for short. Put 'er there with ole Spike Horn!” Mr. Horn thrust out a paw in infectious camaraderie. The whiskered one was constrained to return the clasp.

“My name is Chitterly,” he said, and his voice had a fine rumbling resonance as from long public speaking. “Old Doctor Chitterly is the title given me in affectionate testimony to my long and varied practice of medicine along the shores of the Pacific Slope from Vancouver to Ensenada; and if I do say it myself——”

“Doc, you're worth climbing down here just for a look-see.” The younger man drew back in exaggerated pleasure of a connoisseur before a rare work of art.

An eye-filling picture indeed he saw. A gentleman of the old-school was Doctor Chitterly; big bodied, lusty, competent. Massive shoulders stretched the Prince Albert coat of ancient cut. His generous white beard flowed down over a hard shirt bosom wherein a single diamond glimmered through the fog of the ultimate hairs. His eyes, innocent of specs, had a touch of humor under the heavy thatch of white brows. White hair cascaded down from beneath the wide brim of his old style hat to curl rakishly over the velvet collar of his coat. One would have said here was a railroad builder of the West's roaring Sixties miraculously preserved beyond the time of his contemporaries.

Had young Mr. Horn but known it, the worthy doctor in his way was quite as great a citizen as any golden spike driver on a trans-continental railroad. From the tail-board of his black and gold medicine wagon, last surviving chariot of a golden age of quackery, Old Doctor Chitterly had studied the world of men and women from a penetrating angle. He had conned the heart of mankind through its every gullible weakness. Pain, real or imaginary, had stood folk before him stripped of all play masks of sham and pretense. Perhaps that is the reason a ripe humor lodged in his eyes.

Yes, a seasoned old gentleman was Doctor Chitterly.

“How come you all by your lone in this big wheel, Doc?” inquired Mr. Horn vivaciously.

“Mr.—um—Spike, this is a custom of mine, riding in a public wheel on Saturday night. If I find myself on a Saturday night in a city which boasts one of these—ah—conveniences I ride in it. Change, you know. I've ridden horizontally in pursuit of my profession so many thousand miles it's a real novelty to ride—shall we say perpendicularly.”

For all young Horn's boisterous humor—not untinged by stimulus alcoholic—and despite his taking of liberties with one's dignity, the good doctor began to find himself drawn to the gaudy rapscallion before him. Before the pounding and tinkering noises below gave way to the creaking of the repaired wheel Doctor Chitterly learned that his young friend Spike had sold his interest in the Golden Lode mine at Goldfield for one hundred thousand dollars; that he'd come to San Francisco to “build a fire under the town”; that he had a private trolley car carrying an Italian stringed orchestra of five pieces and a colored bottle opener waiting his pleasure on a spur track over by the Casino.

And the good Doc had gotta come along! Just gotta! No fr'ens in town, Horn hadn't.

Vainly did Doctor Chitterly protest that a private sightseeing car with a five-piece stringed orchestra and a negro butler was a bit gaudy for one of his profession. When their car was once on earth Doctor Chitterly found his arm imprisoned by Spike's arm, and he was rushed through the pleasure grounds to where a brilliantly lighted car stood on a rusty spur behind the dancing pavilion, an admiring and expectant throng about it. With the air of an emperor Mr. Horn shouldered a way for himself and his patriarchal friend through the crowd at the steps. He pushed Doctor Chitterly, resisting feebly, through the door into the luxurious interior. An obsequious colored man popped into a cubby as if on a signal and reappeared with a napkin wrapped about the neck of an opulent bottle.

“Where now, Mr. Horn?” A motorman in special uniform entered from the front platform. “Can switch to any track in the city.”

“Le's play all the switches then. No fav'rites, mind you. Let 'er rollick!”

They trundled away from the Casino to a derisive cheer from the envious. Doctor Chitterly took the fizzing glass offered him diffidently and against the promptings of long conviction.

Spike called his attention to the mountainous figure of a man asleep in a chair behind the musicians' palms.

“See that li'l fellah?” Spike whispered as if in the presence of the great. “Great lil man, eh? That's Walla-Walla, the Iron Man! Found him in Thalia—you know: vaudeville theatre. Let you hit him in the rear with billiard cue, ball bat, anything. Hit him hard's you can for only two bits—that's Walla-Walla, the Iron Man. There's talent for you!”