Chapter II: Part 2

Quinlan and Pryor settled themselves heavily, lit fresh cigars, made laboured notes of the circumstances, and, when Lanagan finally restored the woman, gave her some breathing space and then informed her that she was to be taken to see her husband. To Lanagan she directed no look--addressed no word. She moved as one in a trance.

The detectives and their prisoner departed and Lanagan turned for the Miller cottage.

“That was a pure soul’s denial or it was a guilty soul’s defiance,” thought Lanagan. “But which?”

Long he turned that over.

“Frankly, on type I mistrust her; but what about that look in Miller’s eyes?”

Lanagan seldom went back on a “hunch.” At first flash he had declared the Watsons innocent. He was not yet ready to abandon that; and yet the circumstances were certainly trending toward them.

“But,” he concluded, “there’s a nigger in this woodpile somewhere that I haven’t located.”

The cottage had nothing to offer. Police, curio hunters, and shoals of newspaper men had combed it Lanagan hurried to the Oakland police headquarters and cocked his feet on Inspector Henley’s desk while that astute individual detailed to him the various steps taken by the police in fixing the crime on Watson. Lanagan was nettled. It sounded highly convincing.

“You’re sure of Watson?” he finally asked, quizzically, helping himself to a fist-full of Henley’s cigars.

“Clearest case I have ever handled,” said Henley, moving the cigar box out of reach. “Every link is complete. Further: the woman is in on it and we’ll have her within twenty-four hours. We’ll get the case before Baxter and they’ll swing inside of three months.”

“Well,” drawled Lanagan, “you’re wrong again, Henley.”

The inspector flushed. He had a lively recollection of how Lanagan had “trimmed” him on the Stockslager murder and he didn’t take kindly to the “again.”

“We’ve got the motive, the property; and the means, the hammer. What more do you want?”

“Well, to complete the alliteration, I suppose you want the murderer,” said Lanagan with a faint laugh. “And you haven’t got him. Pretty good smokes. Just slip back that box. I don’t get over your way very often. You act as though you had paid for those cigars yourself. Can I see Watson?”

“No,” said Henley, surlily. He never cared to argue the little matters such as Lanagan was fond of nagging him with; some way he had a feeling that Lanagan always knew just a trifle more than he told. He passed back the box. “But it’s an even break. Nobody’s seen him. Here’s his picture.”

Lanagan studied the front and profile of a young man of twenty-six, a face of surprising frankness and honesty. Every line held to Lanagan’s critical eye the lie to the number striped across his breast; another feature of our brilliant American police system that puts the rogue’s gallery blazon on a man before he is tried.

As Lanagan passed out, his eye fell on the bulletin board in the detectives’ room. The last discharge slip from San Quentin was pasted upon it, the slip by which all police stations are supposed to keep in touch with prisoners discharged during the past month. But through long familiarity few of the detectives stop to read carefully. More from habit than anything else, Lanagan read those sheets as a preacher reads the book--he scanned it.

The fifth name on the list caught his eye: Ephraim Miller, alias Thad Miller, alias Thornton Miles, alias Iowa Slim; assault to murder; twenty-five years. The slip was dated the first--five days back. There was little chance of its being read now. Swift as a lightning flash Lanagan had formed his theory. His mind leaped back to the meeting with Miller in front of the Palace. Ephraim and Thaddeus; they were old-fashioned names. Then there was the “Thad.”

Miller had been from San Quentin but four days: Miser Miller’s fear had been on him but a few days. Possibly this was a wayward son, some unrecognised offspring, some family skeleton recrudescent; perhaps it was this convict who had brought that fear into the eyes of Thaddeus Miller!

It was a long, fine chance; but the most brilliant of newspaper successes are scored on long, fine chances. Lanagan determined to take it. He “rapped” to the hunch, as he used to style it; under the impulse of his new idea he was a human dynamo.

He was back in San Francisco within an hour, and headed straight for Billy Connors’ Buckets of Blood, that famed rendezvous within a stone’s throw of the Hall of Justice, where the leaders of the thieves’ clans foregathered. There he waited an hour until “Kid” Monahan, popularly designated as King of the Pick-pockets, came in. The Kid was now a fence. He had retired from the active practice of his profession after doing time twice. “Ain’t there with the touch any more,” he remarked sadly to Lanagan one day. He was, moreover, credited with being the man for an outsider to “see” who wanted to operate locally.

“Kid,” said Lanagan, “I want you to find me Ephraim Miller, alias Thad Mills, alias Thornton Miles, alias Iowa Slim. Just out of San Quentin where he did twenty-five years for assault to murder.”

“We don’t keep no line on these old ones,” retorted the “King” professionally. “But if he’s goin’ to report here he reports to me. It’s pretty hard on us native sons with that reform bunch on the Police Commission and the sky pilots stuffing you guys on the papers full of knocks. There ain’t no touch-off work bein’ done around here by any travellers that we can help. When do you want him?”

“Meet me here to-night at ten. I must have him located by then.”

Lanagan had befriended the “King” once, and he held that illustrious gentleman’s absolute loyalty. He knew the “King” would have a dozen men out in as many minutes.

Lanagan headed back for Oakland to round up the loose ends of the story. He found police headquarters jammed with newspaper men and the smell of many flash powders heavy on the air.

“All right, Mr. Lanagan of the _Enquirer_,” quoth Henley. “You can talk to Watson now.” His tone was triumph.

Watson had confessed. He was sitting in a chair in the Inspector’s room, a huddled figure of misery. The mantle of age seemed to have settled on him overnight.

Lanagan was a hard loser. He stepped over to the huddled man.

“Do you mean to tell me, Watson,” he said so low that no one but Watson heard him; “do you mean to tell me that you are not lying, putting your neck in the noose--to save your wife?”

“No! No!” the denial was a shriek. “I killed him! I killed him for his money, I tell you!” He fell back, shivering.

Lanagan drove in on him. “You lie, I tell you,” he hissed. “You lie! You fool! It’s bound to come out! Tell the truth!”

“No, no,” moaned Watson. “I did it alone. God! I can feel his skull crunching yet!”

“You’ve got more imagination than I credited you with,” sneered Lanagan savagely. “That last was a good touch.”

There was a hustle as Quinlan and Pryor came through the prison gates from the detinue cells surrounded by an eager coterie of newspaper men.

“We’ve got her, Inspector!” cried Quinlan with unprofessional feeling. “She’s ‘spilled.’ Killed him herself, and says her husband is lying if he says he did it. They’re both in it. We will have the whole thing now.”

The woman was then brought out after her official statement had been taken. Nothing that the newspaper men could do could shake her story. In substance she said that she had worked on the old man for months to have the will made out in her husband’s favour. Knowing her husband was above such a deed, she planned and executed it alone. She had not had an opportunity to wash the hammer after she returned home, and only did so when the furor commenced. That was why it was still damp and why she had overlooked the two strands of incriminating gray hair.

The newspaper camera men snapped and exploded flashes; the inquisitorial circle broke up, and Watson having been removed, the room was cleared of all save Henley, Mrs. Watson, and Lanagan.

“Through?” asked Henley sarcastically.

“No,” snapped Lanagan. “You say you killed this man. I say, Mrs. Watson, you’re a liar. You no more killed that man than I did. You are lying to save your husband!”

His voice had risen; his aspect was fairly ferocious; his sallow face flushed to an unwholesome grey-blue; his eyes glowing again with that catlike phosphorescence that she had seen and quailed at once before.

But again he was doomed to disappointment at a breakdown, for again under the shock she collapsed after half rising to her feet with evident purpose to give him the lie as violently as he gave it to her.

Women, Lanagan reflected, are like electric wires. They are drawn to carry just so much voltage. A little overplus and they burn out. Each time he had bullied the woman just as her nerves were at the breaking point.

The matron bustled in with a side compliment on Lanagan for his brutality, and lifted the limp form. Lanagan, bitterly chagrined at the events of the day, turned on his heel to return to San Francisco. On the ferry he broke a vow of six months and fell back on absinthe. He reached the office at seven o’clock, wrote steadily for two hours a story identical as he knew it would be with all the morning papers, and then went out.

The word was passed swiftly that Lanagan was drinking again, and I was released for the night to round him up and get him home--my usual assignment under the circumstances.

On the chance that some of the choice spirits that foregather at Connors’ dive might have crossed his path, I dropped in there, and, to my unbounded relief, saw Lanagan himself at a table in deep conversation with “Kid” Monahan. I went over to his table, the “King” slipping out the side door. I had not Lanagan’s penchant for camaraderie with that breed, and took little pains not to let him know it.

The old wild, reckless light shone from Lanagan’s eyes, and I knew there was no measuring his stride that night, making pace or keeping it.

He laughed aloud. “Art there, old truepenny?” and slapped my shoulder. He was in high feather with himself, that was clear. “Come. Have you got your gun?” I nodded.

“That’s fine. Now for the grand ‘feenale,’ as Cæsar says about his _ponce à la toscana_. And success to all hunches!” There was something besides absinthe burning back in those eyes.

Questions were useless, so I trailed along. At Macnamara’s corner we picked up Brady and Wilson, two of Chief Leslie’s trustiest men.

“Did the chief instruct you?” asked Lanagan.

“He said to report to you and keep our heads shut or tend daisies,” replied Brady, the senior of the pair, and a cool and heady thief-taker; also the champion pistol shot of the department.

“My man is Iowa Slim, wanted for murder. Is heavily armed and desperate. He’s in the Tokio--Jap lodging house at Dupont and Clay. It looks like break the door and rush. Wilson, Norton, and I will take the door, and you, Brady, stand free of the rush and be ready to drop him if he shows fight. That is, Norton will--” turning to me in his quizzical, bantering way, “--if he relishes the job!”

I didn’t relish the job. But, as usual, when he spoke to me in that superior, teasing way I blundered in valiantly where my native caution would have feared to tread. I am free to admit that I am of that branch of the profession that believes a reporter full of lead in peace or war is of very little use on earth, and certainly not elsewhere, to the paper that employs him.

In the shadows the detectives nonchalantly slipped their revolvers into their side coat pockets. Neither was cumbered by an overcoat; double-line your sack coat, the old-timers will tell you, but keep away from excess encumbrances where possible. One gallant officer in my time lost his life because he was two seconds delayed unbuttoning an overcoat for his gun.

Fifteen minutes later we assembled, one by one, at convenient corners to the Tokio, a foul-smelling, ramshackle affair. One by one we drifted in, slipped off our shoes and tiptoed up the stairs, Lanagan in the lead, Norton bringing up the rear.

Lanagan paused before a corner door. He and Wilson braced against it. My bulk backed Wilson. Brady towered above us, standing free to have a clear sweep with both guns. He turned the light on full, taking every chance of making targets of us all for the one chance of getting a drop on Slim without bloodshed.

From an adjacent room a clock ticked loudly; somebody rolled over in bed, and the sounds came so clearly that it seemed my heart must have beat as loudly as a trip hammer. Yet it was not exactly fear, as I recall it; it was a sort of nervous tension to have it over with if it had to come.

“Slim! Slim!” It was a soft, sibilant whisper, and I could scarcely believe my ears. It was Lanagan at the keyhole. Then he rapped four times in quick, soft staccato, and then four times more. It was some code he had learned, possibly from Monahan.

There was a prolonged pause, and the sound of someone from within turning in bed, and another long pause. The strain on me was terrific. From the corner of my eye I caught the black muzzle of Brady’s left-hand gun. It was as steady as though held in a vise, and I had time to marvel.

“Slim! Slim! They’re after me! It’s Larry Bowman’s pal, Shorty!”

Another nerve-racking pause, and then at the very keyhole came through a soft, throaty whisper:

“Who?”

“Shorty Davis. Larry said you’d take me in. Quick, Slim, they’re after me!”

A key grated, the knob turned.

“Now!” hissed Lanagan, and with one mighty lurch we burst pell-mell into the room. I caught a flashing look at a slender, flannel-shirted figure with a week’s growth of beard as Slim whirled a foot ahead of us and with one leap cleared the room and swung with a murderous long-barrelled Colt in his hand.

His leap was quicker than the spring of a cat. He shot from the hip, but Brady, posted to do just the trick he did, spoiled the shot. Slim’s bullet ripped a two-inch hole through the floor as he crumpled down in a heap.

We stretched him upon the bed. He had got it in the lungs. Wilson started for the doctor.

“Remember,” said Lanagan, “the chief’s orders. You are not to talk. If it gets out, tell all reporters it’s a detinue case. I’ll answer for the rest.”

A few gnomelike, corpselike, yellow faces peered from doors, but a flash from Brady’s star sent them scurrying back. The shot was apparently not heard in the street, for no one came.

Lanagan turned to Slim, who was choking.

“You know what you were wanted for, Slim?” he asked in as cool a voice as a surgeon might ask for your pulse.

“That Oakland job, I suppose,” he gasped. “Well, boys, you did me a good turn croaking me. I never wanted to go back to that hell hole again. I did what I came out to do, what I’ve waited twenty-five years to do, and I’m ready to take my judgment. He sent me up there twenty-five years ago, and he murdered my father as surely as there is a God, who will some day dope it all out right according to a different scheme than they do here.”

Gasping, with many halts, he told his story. The surgeon came, shook his head, and devoted himself to keeping life until the story was taken down.

His father, a wealthy Iowan, had come to Thaddeus Miller’s ranch thirty years ago, bringing with him his entire fortune for investment. The son Ephraim remained at school back home. At Miller’s ranch the boy’s father had been found in the well one day, drowned. A whiskey bottle floated on the water beside him. His entire estate had been willed to Thaddeus Miller. In a sparsely settled community Thaddeus Miller’s story had been accepted--that the brother, in drink, had stumbled into the well. The son had journeyed across the continent to find himself disinherited. He had always been told he was to be his father’s heir. His father in Iowa had been a strict abstainer. So far as the son knew, he had never touched liquor. But his charge, that Thaddeus had in some fashion gotten his father intoxicated, forced him to sign a will, and then pitched him into the well with the bottle, while it created some natural excitement, could never be proved, and in the course of time became forgotten. In spite of a contest, the will stood.

Ephraim took to drink and fell in with evil companions. For petty offences he was sentenced and earned his name of Iowa Slim. One night in liquor, fired with his wrongs, he determined to ransack Miller’s house. He knew the old man kept a large amount of money concealed there. It was his, he believed, and he determined to have it. Miller had caught him. In the scuffle he beat his uncle and left him for dead, and in the stovepipe he had found a bag of gold. But as he was leaving the grounds, neighbours, driving along on the lonely country road, who had heard the first screams of the old man, surrounded him. The uncle prosecuted him with all the wealth and influence at his command, and the son, at the age of eighteen years, was sentenced to San Quentin for twenty-five years for assault to murder.

As sentence was pronounced he had turned on his uncle and warned him that the day he was freed from prison he would come back and kill him. From time to time he had managed to send threats by discharged convicts, who carried the word with the unfailing obligation of the convict brotherhood. He had driven the old man from place to place.

He had lost track of him for an entire year, and was planning how best to locate him again when he unexpectedly met him face to face on the streets of San Francisco, followed him to his home, waited until the neighbourhood was quiet, and then had stolen in, wakened the old man from sleep, and asked about his father’s property.

Under the fear of death Miller had made a promise of restitution, but in an unguarded moment he said he “would make a new will.” Slim demanded what he meant by a new will, and the uncle had confessed the will to the Watsons merely to cheat the nephew in case he had come back and fulfilled his courtroom threat. The uncle had kept count and knew to a day when Slim was to be released. Enraged beyond endurance at that, Slim had seized up the hammer and crushed the old man’s head.

“But as I live,” he breathed hoarsely, “the man was as good as dead before I hit him.”

“Yes,” Lanagan interrupted, “I know that, Slim.”

Slim looked at Lanagan with dull curiosity, but was too far gone to ask explanations, and he continued with his story, telling of sprinkling kerosene and touching it with a match. He then had gone to the Watson cottage, carrying the hammer, intending if the couple were not in to locate and destroy the will; and if they were to do double murder if necessary to get it. Miller had said they had it, an untruth, told evidently in the childish hope that Slim might leave him and search for it. While still waiting for an opportunity of entering the house, the smouldering fire had been discovered at the Miller cottage, and he had fled, the thought coming to him to leave the hammer on the Watson porch, not knowing the hammer belonged to them and had been borrowed by Miller. The arrest of the two for murder might pave the way for him to have his property restored as the next of kin to Miller.

He signed the confession laboriously, and the story was done.

“It’s all right, cull,” he said to Brady, dropping back to the vernacular. “You did me a good trick not sending me back. There ain’t no hard feelings on my part.”

He raised himself by a sudden effort, his eyes peering far, far away and beyond the sordid scene of his dissolution.

“I squared--all--accounts--dad--I squ’--”

He dropped back on the pillow. The surgeon bent his head to Slim’s breast, then slowly straightened up and drew the sheet over his face.

“Poor lad!” said Lanagan softly. “They will judge you differently there!”

Then again the newspaper mind curtly:

“Brady, you and Wilson stay here until I come back. Nobody gets in. Nobody, understand? Doc, we’ll have to impound you, too, until three. Understand, Brady?” Brady nodded.

“Now, Norrie,” snapped Lanagan incisively, “beat it, boy, beat it!”

For two hours Lanagan and I fed paper into our typewriters, with Sampson himself whisking the sheets away as they came from the platens. The M. E. even came in once or twice and tried to preserve his dignity while he scanned the copy hot from the typewriter.

The thrill of Lanagan’s great exclusive was throughout the entire plant. Not a half-dozen people in the office knew just what the story was, but each knew by the subtle instinct of communication that the big scoop of the year was shooting down the pneumatic to the composing room.

Not until we had the first papers, sticky and inky and fragrant, in our eager fingers, did we stir from our desks. Then followed the usual jubilation as the scouts ran in with the _Times_ and the _Herald_ with the “Watsons Confess” scareheads.

Ah, that is life, that exaltation of the “exclusive”!

We wandered leisurely down to the Tokio. The story was wide open now. We were through. The morgue notified, Brady and Wilson stayed to attend to the routine, and Lanagan announced that he was going to Oakland.

We caught the paper boat, riding luxuriously on heaps of _Enquirers_. Thus it happened that we were at police headquarters there with the copies of our own paper before the route carriers had made their deliveries. Lanagan stepped to the ’phone and rang up Henley.

“Feel like buying a drink?” asked Lanagan.

Over the wire came back some hearty and measured compliments. “You’re sure in an amiable humour. Well, come down. You’ve got two prisoners to free. If conditions at your jail weren’t so rotten I wouldn’t say anything till morning. But I need a drink, which is on you, and the Watsons need a breath of fresh air.” In fifteen minutes Henley was with us.

He was a gallant officer, that Henley. When he had finished he wrung Lanagan’s hand until I thought he never would let go.

“Bring in the Watsons,” he ordered.

In a moment they came in, a weary, worn, misery-marked couple. It was their first meeting since their imprisonment. With a sob, asking no why or wherefore, Mrs. Watson fell into her husband’s arms and mingled her tears with his. Her sobs--weary, worn, tired little sobs--echoed softly under the vaulted ceiling.

“I am pleased to inform you,” Henley said grandly, “that through the efforts of our brilliant young friend of the _Enquirer_, the murderer of Miller has been located. You are free.”

Then followed such a scene of hysterical gladness and tearful, joyous explanations as Henley’s room, that had beheld many strange and unusual scenes, had never witnessed.

Of course Watson, when arrested, confronted with the hammer and told that his wife had confessed, had yielded to the third degree and, unable to accept the full horror of it, yet had swiftly formed his plan to confess to save the woman he loved, even though she might have done the deed.

She, on her part, told a similar story, had formed her plan, for it appeared that when the furor was raised after the murder was discovered she had found the hammer on her porch with fresh blood stains; knew it had been in Miller’s cottage, and had washed it hurriedly, not knowing in her excitement just what to do, her husband even then having been taken to the scene of the crime by the police.

In face of his confession and her own hammer found stained in such manner, she had actually believed that he had committed the crime.

The police automobile drove up and the Watsons were escorted to it.

For the twentieth time, her eyes still tear-filled, Mrs. Watson said: “What can we ever do to thank you, Mr. Lanagan?”

“Forgive me certain brutal conduct,” laughed that individual. “As I hope the Lord will forgive me,” he added _sotto voce_, “for misjudging you.”

As the automobile sped away to return a very happy couple to their home, Lanagan, hat doffed and in hand, bowed profoundly after the retreating machine, and remarked with veneration to the world at large:

“The tenth woman, gentlemen, the tenth woman.”

Then to Henley: “Inspector, I believe you said something about buying?”

III

THE CONSPIRACY OF ONE

III

THE CONSPIRACY OF ONE

“Kind of caught you fellows off base, Norrie.”

Bradley, star man for the _Herald_, drawled it at me invidiously as I entered the police reporters’ room at the Hall of Justice. Merriman of the _Times_ and a half-dozen morning paper men, their copy turned in, had drifted down to the room to await any late developments. The Ratto story had been on for three days and the _Herald_ and the _Times_ had “put over” the arrest of Bernardo Tosci, Camorrist, at the expense of Lanagan and myself.

“Better shoot a few absinthe drips into Lanagan,” continued Bradley, “and then maybe you’ll land something. He’s been sober so long he’s lost his grip.”

Bradley had fared hardly at the expense of Lanagan on more than one occasion. I was about to fling it back at him when Lanagan’s voice interrupted me. He had entered the room unfortunately just in time to hear Bradley’s words.

“Possibly,” he said.

There was an embarrassed pause. Lanagan had a caustic tip to his tongue and they awaited it now. He studied Bradley without expression, leaning against the door sill. But, curiously enough, there was no outburst. It was always difficult to foresay just what form Lanagan’s humour would take.

“Charley,” he said at last to Bradley, and there shaded into his voice a subtle colouring of unconscious pathos, “What have I ever done to you? I have never done you dirt; nor any man in the business dirt. I have played the game square. Why is it that I am always singled out like that? Have I ever betrayed my paper or my friends? Have I ever brought dishonour to the name of the newspaperman? If I have drunk, it has been out of the public sight.

“I have fought hard, Charley; fought hard to break the habit. It belongs to a past day in our game. And irrespective of that I may wish to be remembered around here some day as something other than drunken Jack Lanagan. I can’t help it if I have a knack of landing stories. I’ve got to play the game right with my paper, haven’t I? And here in this reporters’ room of all places I thought for a little lift and a hand along and you are trying to shove me down.”

His voice hardened in bitterness:

“I’ve played a lone hand all my life, though, Charley; it seems to be in the cards that I keep it up.”

My eyes blurred because I alone knew how hard he had fought that battle. Beneath his cynical exterior he had a soul as sensitive to slights as a girl. Boyishly I made a lunge at Bradley, but Lanagan, with a swift move, had my arm in that lean, powerful hand of his.

“It don’t go,” he said, softly. “We are full grown men.”

There was an awkward pause. Then Merriman, of few words, said sententiously:

“It’s your move, Charley.”

And Bradley put out his hand, which Lanagan took.

“Jack,” said the _Herald_ man, “I’m a cad. There isn’t a righter man in the game than you.”

“Forget it then,” said Lanagan. “I have.”

But as we left the reporters’ room together I noticed that the whiteness that had come over Lanagan’s face remained there.

“Don’t let it worry you, Jack,” I said anxiously.

“Don’t you bother, laddie. He did me more good than liquor, and I never felt the dragging for the stuff worse than to-night. I’m going into this story now for fair, and I’m going in to smash the _Times_ and the _Herald_ flatter than a matrix.”

The Ratto case was one that occupied considerable public attention several years ago, interest arising in the first instance through the peculiar manner in which the crime was disclosed. Ratto, a wealthy Italian commission merchant, had disappeared, no great commotion being raised for the first few days. The police made the customary desultory “search”--the “search” consisting mainly of the name and description of Ratto being read out at the watches in the various station-houses. The mystery in the disappearance might have remained unsolved for weeks had it not been for a lineman, Waters, who, perched on the cross-tree of a telegraph pole commanding a view of the windows of a room in the vacant house where Ratto’s dead body lay, made the discovery. No policeman being in the vicinity, Waters, with residents of the vicinity, entered the house.

There had followed much newspaper speculation and police deduction. The Mafia and the Camorra came in for attention, the latter organisation being one that was at that time--long before the Viterbo trials--just coming to the attention of the American regular police and the secret service, as counterfeiting of American currency formed one of the Camorra accomplishments.

The peculiar interest in the manner in which the Ratto killing was discovered was this: three months previously a crime had been discovered under almost identical circumstances by the same lineman, Waters. In that case Rosendorn, a Jewish tailor, was found after a several days’ disappearance by Waters, at work on the lines, who happened to see the body as he glanced through the window of a vacant house from his elevated perch. Following the discovery of the body by Waters the case had been speedily cleared up by the police and proved to be an affair arising from conjugal jealousy.

Waters was a man well advanced in years. The strain of the appearance at the coroner’s jury and the preliminary hearings in the police court appeared slightly to unbalance his mind. The spectacle of the murdered man that he beheld through the windows of the vacant house was constantly before him. He was a man who had gone through a placid life and never figured in any scene of shocking violence or of murder.

After the disposal of the Rosendorn case Waters became possessed of a mania for climbing telegraph poles commanding the windows of vacant houses. Here and there and everywhere about the city he might be seen spiking himself up a pole, peering intently, and scuttling down. He was a familiar figure to all policemen and many citizens. He made a practice of haunting police headquarters, and, his imagination beginning evidently to visualise the first scene, once or twice led futile parties into vacant houses with the declaration that he had discovered a body. The police reporters humoured him and he came to know the most of them, particularly Lanagan, who found Waters’ case was of profound interest. Several stories were written about him and his self-appointed cross-beam task of discovering murdered people in vacant houses.

And then--he “made good.” Weeks of poking and prying and shinning up and down telegraph poles brought their reward and Waters discovered another crime: that of Ratto. He had been slain with an ordinary blackjack, which was found by the body.

During the three days of excitement following the discovery of the commission merchant’s body Waters thrived upon the publicity that he received. He carried bundles of papers containing accounts of his “find” and with his picture taken in many ways: climbing up telegraph poles, peering into a window from a cross-tree--a camera man nearly lost his life slipping on a cross beam taking this picture, and as he looked ten years ago, his last “gallery” picture unearthed “exclusively” by a proud “cub” reporter. He was as tickled as a boy, and it was confidently predicted around police headquarters that he would find an end in an insane asylum from pure joy in a month.

But the Ratto case did not clear up quite as easily as had the Rosendorn case. It will be recalled in San Francisco that a swift night ride in the police launch to Black Diamond had resulted in the arrest of Bernardo Tosci, claimed by the police to be the leader of the Camorra in the west. A police theory of attempted blackmail by that organisation seemed to have been well bolstered up. The local ramifications of the Camorra were proved beyond all doubt. Mysterious persons, suspected of being Camorra agents, who had been seen talking to Ratto shortly before his disappearance, were being diligently sought. The fear of the Camorra by the residents of the Latin quarter seriously hindered the police and newspaper men in their work, even the native-speaking Italian detail of upper officemen making little progress against the terror that the shadow of the Camorra threw upon the quarter. Police and newspaper judgment were slowly settling that Ratto’s death was due to one of those far-reaching conspiracies of the Camorra chieftain and his minions.

Such was the situation at midnight when Lanagan and I dropped out of the reporters’ room. The arrest of Tosci--that we had been “scooped” on--had been made shortly after midnight the night before. A sullen “hunch” on Lanagan’s part that the crime was in no way reminiscent of the methods of the Camorra, as he understood those methods from a mass of inquiry and first-hand reading, had led us away from the police headquarters just a few moments before Tosci had been slipped up the back elevator and placed in detinue. The man regularly assigned to the night police detail at the Hall of Justice, a new man on the “beat,” had missed the arrest, working against seasoned men on the _Times_ and the _Herald_ with their inside sources of prison information. However, we were supposed to be doing the “heavy” work on the story, so the burden of the “trimming” fell upon us.

Lanagan was morose. He had nothing more to say as we walked down Kearney street and turned up Broadway. I thought he was going to Cæsar’s--the original Cæsar’s with the two tables and the marvellous cuisine that pioneered the way for the glaring café chantant of to-day’s slumming parties,--but he walked rapidly past Cæsar’s and on to turn in at Bresci’s, a short distance up the slope of Telegraph Hill. It was a dirty little place, one of the corner “wine joints” sprinkled thickly in out of the way pockets of the congested Latin quarter. At Bresci’s, in addition to the bar, there was a little eating place at the rear, separated from the bar by dingy curtains. One room further back held a piano, where on occasion one might hear his ash man, or the flower vendor from Third and Market streets, or a waiter off duty from the downtown cafés, volume forth the Prologue or swing faultlessly through the Toreador’s song.

“Just got a tip that they are trying to hook mine host Bresci into the thing as a Camorra leader,” was all that Lanagan said.

We sat at one of the tables while Lanagan pulled the faded curtains almost together. Madam Bresci, she of the famed sauté mêlé, was indisposed, so the daughter, Bina, would serve us, if agreeable? Perfectly so, said Lanagan, rather with a note of satisfaction it struck me, though when I glanced at his face in some surprise, for he was a man who was ordinarily unmoved of women, it was expressionless.

Bresci went on to his bar after giving orders at the kitchen, and we sat there some time in silence; long enough for Lanagan to send the nicotine of three evil Manilas to his lungs. I saw that his eyes never left the opening through the curtains. Then his cigar, from his mouth for the moment, was suspended in air on its travel back and I followed his sharp glance through the curtain.

Dinoli and Alberta, two plain-clothes men detailed in the Latin quarter, had entered the saloon. Instantly the babble from the voices of many volatile Italians ceased. The saloon on the moment became quiet, save for the rattling of glasses and one click of the old-fashioned maplewood cash register. The detectives passed the time with Bresci, casually “sized up” the gathering, missing Lanagan and myself, and left. Instantly there broke forth a riot of sputtering Italian. The word “Ratto” we heard and then, obviously at some motion toward our curtains from Bresci, the babble stopped as suddenly as it began and within five moments the throng had idled out and the saloon was still.

“Bresci,” demanded Lanagan suddenly, “what were they saying out there about Ratto? Were they Camorrists?”

Bresci’s hand went straight over his head.

“_Corpo di Christo! Non! Non!_” he exclaimed, paling. “Oh, never speek such word here! Non! They say, too bad Ratto he keeled!”

He mopped his brow of its perspiration, suddenly started, and glanced furtively through the curtains to see whether anyone had come in and heard the conversation.

“I think you’re a liar, Bresci,” said Lanagan pleasantly. “But as I can’t talk Italian, I can’t prove it. It’s pretty funny how that pow-wow shut up the minute those coppers blew through that door. But you better wipe your streaming brow again and beat it back to the bar. You’ve got a customer. Who is--” Lanagan whispered to me as Bresci left, “no other than Lawrence Morton of the secret service, just assigned here from Seattle.”

Then he continued, “I met him the other day on that counterfeiting story at the beach. Just a shade curious, I should say, the attention Bresci is attracting to-night from the big and the little hawkshaws. It bears out my ‘tip.’”

Morton had a drink or two, complained of being tired, and drifted casually over to the curtains, opened them, saw us, and was backing easily away when Lanagan called out from the darkness--he had turned off the incandescent earlier:

“Come in, Morton. Nothing to get exclusive over,” switching on the light.

Morton dropped into a chair. If he was perturbed at being “made” he did not show it. He was generally reputed one of the two or three cleverest operators in the government service.

“That was good work you did on Iowa Slim, from all I hear,” he vouchsafed.

“There’s a better coming up,” replied Lanagan, indifferently. “What brings you to Bresci’s?”

Morton shrugged his shoulders.

“You know the two rules of our department?”

“Guard the president and turn up counterfeiters,” said Lanagan.

“Well, Lanagan, you’ve got the cachet to me from a good friend. The secret service man loses his job who talks; but I don’t mind taking a chance with you and telling you in confidence that in this particular case I’m not guarding the president; being as he is, as you know, in Washington.”

“Haven’t been sampling any--er--_salami_?” drawled Lanagan.

Morton laughed. “You sure are a clever one at that. No. I haven’t come across any that suited my palate. I’m particular.”

We had a _café royale_--with Lanagan pouring his thimble-full of cognac in my glass--and Morton left.

“The Camorra, it develops,” said Lanagan, “have been shipping to this country from ---- excellent counterfeit American bank notes. They ship them in _salami_ sausages. Maybe if one has gone astray we will get a slice of bank note with our _salami_ and _sauté_, for here it comes on a tray with the fair Bina serving.”

Bina, Bresci’s daughter, was an Italian of absolute beauty; one of those glowing faces and perfect forms you see in the old Italian masters.

I noticed in a moment that the comely Bina had much attention to show Lanagan. We finished our meal and Lanagan led the way to the inner room, where the piano was located. I had heard him at different times sputter out “rag,” but when Nevin’s “A Day in Venice” suite came breathing softly beneath his finger tips from out of that wrangly piano I could but listen in amazement. Man of mysterious beginnings, he had dropped into the San Francisco newspaper game over night, been given his “try-out” by the brotherhood, found to speak the language of the tribe, and had thereafter been unconditionally accepted. Such a mess as the Bradley affair only served to emphasise his leadership.

With the last fine chord of the _Buona Notte_ there was a stillness broken only by the instant and ecstatic handclapping of Bina. If I ever saw the thing called Love shine forth from the human eyes, it suddenly illuminated those dusky eyes that moment.

“O Madonna! Madonna!” she cried, softly. “Encore! Encore!”

Lanagan zipped through a lustspeil, to drop back then to the Last Composition. It was truly remarkable, the manner in which he brought the encroaching blindness of the great Beethoven sobbing out of the misery of the minor base.

“Did a lot of that sort of thing when I was younger,” he said, apologetically. “Before the wanderlust hit me.”

He was through. Bina fluttered about him and Lanagan’s head was close to hers. She was a full-sexed creature but young; and I balked. I spoke to Lanagan sharply after a moment or two and we departed. She gave him a shy little glance as he left.

He laughed. “What a Covenanter you are! A psalm singer gone wrong for fair!”

“I don’t like it,” I said, stubbornly, but with the best of intentions. “She’s only a child.” I didn’t yet know all the sides of this man Lanagan.

He whirled on me: and I got a swift sense of the power that could flash from those dark eyes, and I felt, with the intimacy of personal experience, how effective they must be when working upon a guilty mind.

“Let me tell you, Howard,” he bit out, using my given name for the first time in our friendship, “Norrie” being his ordinary salutation, “that I’m working on the Ratto story. Get me? What do you take me for, anyhow? I’ve stood one welt from my own kind to-night and I don’t want another.”

Lanagan received his second apology of the night; but he didn’t appear to want it at that. His uncanny faculty of reading men’s minds seemed to tell him that my remark was in good faith.

“Forget it,” he laughed. “But just for that, Norrie, I’ll keep to myself for the present the interesting bit of information that Bina gave me; for Bresci is a Camorra agent after all, and Bina, who is all eyes and ears, knows precisely the truth about Ratto’s death in so far as it pertains to the Camorra. I guess that will hold you for a while? But what a lover of music she is! Let’s call it a day. Don’t look for me to-morrow. I’m off on a little lay of my own. Keep in general reach of a telephone so I can get you in a hurry and give that slavedriver of a Sampson my distinguished compliments and tell him I will show up when it pleases me to get d---- good and ready.”

I hammered away at the routine of the story the next day--I was just a plain plodder, ordinarily dependable, but never particularly brilliant--and neither saw Lanagan nor heard from him. A lively angle was given to the story when Dinola and Alberti discovered, concealed in one of Ratto’s game refrigerators, six choice _salami_ sausages that his death had evidently prevented him disposing of in the proper way, for neatly rolled in a half-inch wad in the dead centre of each, was a roll of ten $100 gold bills of U. S. currency.

The secret service men, apprised, raged at the information being given to the press, claiming that they had been working to round up the entire gang for months, and that the publication would serve as warning to the others. But Leslie, more concerned with solving the Ratto mystery, and hanging it on Tosci than with handling Uncle Sam’s minor details, and being also a great believer in the assistance intelligent newspaper publicity could be to the police, gave the facts out. The facts would appear to link Ratto indubitably with the Camorra ring engaged in the importation of counterfeit currency and obviously eliminated the Camorra blackmail theory with respect to his death.

With Ratto now definitely established as a leader of the slippery Camorra--it was a hard organisation to get definite proof on--the police were thrown back on a theory of a fight between Camorra leaders, possibly over some division of the profits or some breach of faith. The Camorra history shows that it was not--nor is not--slow to take vengeance even on its own people.

Lanagan was missing the next day again, and I was surprised, in view of the sensational developments. I was following the police lead and it all pointed to the Camorra to me. Nor did he appear for work the third day nor give me word of himself. And on this day the police had an admission from Tosci that he had visited Ratto on the evening of his disappearance!

It may be well to say here, too, that the secret service men, although working at cross-purposes with the regular police, had been putting the screws to Tosci and Morton had finally gotten enough information to supplement his own investigations, and in a swift swoop five members of the Tosci gang were in the federal cells at the Oakland jail charged with handling counterfeit money.

All in all, the situation was growing highly complex for a routine plodder, and still no Lanagan! I had just about made up my mind to go on a still hunt for him, confident that he must have broken his vows of abstinence, when he called me up. His message was curt:

“Suggest to Sampson to stick personally until he hears from me. Meet me at once at Hyde and Lombard.”

Sampson usually left the office at midnight. Lanagan preferred his dynamic energy on the desk when a big smash was on; and when he asked for Sampson personally I knew he had landed. And Sampson always preferred being at the city desk when Lanagan was swinging home on the bit.

“Fine work!” was all Sampson said; it was not in his cold-blooded cosmos to show disinterested enthusiasm. Possibly it was that characteristic, coupled with twenty years’ seasoning at the wheel, that made him the greatest city editor in the West.

Lanagan’s clothes had that peculiarly hand-dog appearance that the newest suit will get when a man has slept in it once or twice; and Lanagan’s clothes were seldom new, so the appearance was emphasised. He had evidently found no time either to shave or change his collar. Worn lines were about his mouth and eyes such as you see in athletes who have “pulled off” weight in hard training. But his eyes, those dark, mesmeric eyes, were sparkling and the old engaging trick of smiling was there.

“Began to think maybe I _had_ ‘lost my grip,’” he said, with a short laugh. “But I have either turned up one of the finest police stories in my time or I have gone plumb crazy. We will soon know.”

Without more words, he walked quickly several blocks down over the eastern slope of the hill and turned into a narrow tradesman’s alley. I noticed that he was watching keenly before and after us. He slipped through a gate in a high board fence and we were in a yard overgrown with shrubbery and weeds. The house was a corner one and of that familiar type of old family residence, seen in most localities, that has gone to seed on a mortgage. It was vacant. He opened the kitchen door with a skeleton key and we walked upstairs, turning into a large room commanding a view of the street. He kept away from the window, I noticed.

“Draw up the Morris chair,” he said facetiously, as he squatted on his legs. I sat down against the wall and pulled out a cigar but he stopped me.

“Can’t take a chance. Smell of smoke might give the whole thing away. See anything curious about this room?”

I looked at the bareness of it and shook my head.

“Examine it,” he said. “You haven’t even looked it over.”

I knew he was not given to joking, so I got up and went over the room carefully. The door to the hall was swung back against the wall and I closed it.

Hanging on the door knob by the leather wrist thong was a blackjack, a duplicate of the one with which Ratto was slain. Lanagan was laughing quietly.

“What are your sensations at being in a prospective death chamber?” he asked.

Visions of being suddenly pocketed in that vast, out of the way mansion by a ring of Camorrists, assailed me, and I instinctively felt for my revolver.

“Don’t worry,” said the baffling Lanagan. “The trap won’t spring for several hours yet. But after it does spring,” he went on, “and this mess is over, I’m prepared to present the fair Bina with the biggest box of French mixed in town. That is,” quizzically, “if my puritanical Mentor will permit me to? But seriously, Norrie,”--his next words came forth rather hurriedly, and much as a shamed school-boy might make a confession,--“seriously these Italian girls are mature women at sixteen. And though you may not think it, I am only thirty-four.”

When it filtered into me what he was driving at I jumped to my feet and pulled him to his.

“Jack,” I cried delightedly, “you don’t mean--”

“No,” he said, shortly, “I don’t mean anything, now or any other time, Norrie, until I’ve taken a seat on this water wagon that I know I can ride for life.”

My thoughts shot back to that declaration in the reporters’ room that I had pondered often since uttered. It was clear enough now. He was a man’s man, Jack Lanagan; and looking back now even after the years that have passed since then, looking back from the content of my own cosy home, the tears spring and I stop writing. He did not marry Bina.

“That’s about enough of that,” he said. “I wanted you to get the lay of the house by daylight. Let’s get out of here. I’ve got to see Leslie.”

But we were only as far as the head of the stairs leading to the lower floor when a key grated in a lock some place beneath us and Lanagan gripped my arm, his finger to his lips, his eyes glittering like a snake’s. We swung back on tiptoes to a small closet at the end of the hall, pulling the door almost shut after us. Lanagan dropped, his eye to the keyhole. He had drawn his revolver and I drew mine; my heart was beginning to thump like a big bass drum. There came to my ears the sound of footfalls up the creaking stairs. At first it seemed like a dozen men and I concluded for once that one of Lanagan’s traps was going to spring the wrong way.

The footfalls disintegrated as they came nearer and I found there was but one person. Lanagan’s eye might have been stuck fast to that keyhole, for his hat brim did not waver the fraction of an inch as he held his rigid, cramped position for long minute after minute.

Finally the footfalls sounded back down the stairs. Lanagan did not move until, to our taut ear drums, came the sound of the closing rear door.

“Well?” I asked him, wiping the perspiration from my forehead.

All he said was “Fine! Fine! Wait a bit yet, Norrie! That was merely a scout, taking a last look to be sure that blackjack hadn’t been removed by any prospective tenants who might have been here.”

He glanced at his dollar watch. It was six o’clock.

“There’ll be two good hours before darkness,” he said. “We’ll take a chance and leave the house uncovered while I get hold of the chief. Unless you want to stay here?” he asked banteringly. I did not want to stay there, but he had me squarely in the door, as it were, and I had to say I would if he wanted it. I sometimes think many a man is made a hero against his will. Then a great shaft of illumination struck me and I asked: