Chapter VI: Part 6

Below the basement floor were a dozen rooms not high enough for a man to stand erect in. The light of day never entered. What light they received came from one main gas jet in the corridor or the occasional flash of a policeman’s pocket light as the Chinatown squad made their rounds. Save for the members of the squad, and at times a jaded police reporter, idling from the reporters’ room in the near-by Hall of Justice on a quiet night through the district with the squad sergeant, it is probable no white man save the “fiends” of the district had ever before gasped for breath in that foul den--no white man, that is, before Captain Robert Swanson, who entered there one night never to emerge. It was three days before one of the denizens of the subcellar, finally realising that the occupant of the next bunk was not in the stupor of drug but the stiffness of death, made his way with frantic hippity-hoppings to the first member of the squad he could find and reported the matter, not forgetting to whine for his ten cents for so doing.

Such, in substance, were the facts in the mystery that set the city and the coast--Swanson was a notable figure in shipping circles--in a ferment for a week.

For, more than the initial fact of finding the body in Chinatown’s cesspool, five days had now elapsed with not one single additional fact of consequence to clear the mystery. Suspects without number had been jailed. Every ex-convict, “fiend,” vagrant, or questionable character of the district, white, yellow, or black, male or female, had been put through the police mill. The opium dens had been emptied of their wastrels, blinking like bats in the light of day. Swanson’s past and his present life were run under a high-power lens; his servants’ and his employees’ lives and the lives of his former servants and former employees; Chief Leslie was a fellow member of the Cosmos Club with Swanson, and if any additional good to his natural police pride were necessary to spur him on, that afforded it. Every recourse that police experience could adapt or devise was applied.

Always there was lacking motive: that mainspring for crime.

That Swanson had by any chance been addicted to the drug habit was early dismissed. Practically every hour of his methodical life could be accounted for for months back.

But in so far as his movements were concerned from the moment he left his doorstep on Wednesday evening until the body was found, he may as well have left his doorstep invested in an invisible mantle, for no living person that could be located had seen him alive.

There was one peculiar circumstance. He had worn that night a heavy ulster overcoat, although the night had not been chilly, and Mrs. Swanson had remarked on it at parting. The coat was not found with the body.

It is not exaggeration to say that in physical output Lanagan worked harder than any three reporters or detectives during the first five days of the case. He did not take me into his confidence: he seldom did until the “smash” approached on any story. He smoked eternally or chewed to pulp his own select brand of rank Manilas, or consumed innumerable cigarettes. Lanagan never had to bother with the daily routine of a story; that was all left to me. His work was the big “feature” stuff. He might not write a line for a week and then he would saunter into the picture with a news sensation that would upend the town.

But there seemed to be no “upending” on this case. During the five days that had elapsed the big portion of the work had fallen to me. Lanagan had absolutely not turned a trick. On Wednesday evening at midnight, as I turned in my story for the day, identical as I felt it would be with the other two morning papers, Lanagan ’phoned me to meet him at the Hall of Justice.

I drifted down there.

“I just wanted to tell you,” was his greeting, “that I am going to disappear. Don’t look for me. I will discover myself when the time comes. I’m going to lose myself up in Chinatown, for the solution of that story is there, and I’m not coming until I’ve landed something and choked off the side remarks of the _Times_ and _Herald_ outfit, if I stay there for the balance of my natural life. The police can hang as they please to their hoary old dogma that a ‘hop head’ never commits murder. Just because they’re so positive, I am going to take the other tack; at least until I have proved their theory to my own satisfaction. There isn’t a man outside the frequenters of this quarter knew of that subcellar and that’s the theory I am going to stick with now. Keep in pretty close touch with the office so I can get you in a hurry if anything turns up. Good-by.”

In another moment he was walking rapidly up Washington Street to disappear down Dupont, out of sight for three days.

The story had run eight days and a dearth of fresh angles had thinned it out a trifle, when, on Saturday evening, along about ten o’clock, as I hung around the local room hoping against hope for a call from Lanagan, it came.

“Meet me in front of old St. Mary’s,” he said, shortly, and I thrilled instantly with that same premonitory tremor that always came over me when the climax was on. I sped down Kearney Street and in the shadow of the church steps picked him up.

“Dorrett is watching me,” he said. “He’s been covering me for days.” Dorrett was the oldest special policeman in Chinatown and generally held to be a “leak” for the _Herald_ through personal friendship for a former police reporter, now city editor of that paper. In such fashion do papers develop their “sources” of news. “I have one clue that may be the key to the solid brick wall we have been up against. And I am not going to lose that key to the _Herald_ via Dorrett,” concluded Lanagan, as he suddenly stepped fully into the glare of the gas street lamp on the corner just as Dorrett sidled up. I saw that Lanagan had deliberately exposed himself.

“Really, Dorrett,” he remarked in that sinister tone he could assume so well on occasion, “some of these days I shall actually trip over you if you persist in blundering beneath my feet. You might fall quite hard in that case and hurt yourself. However, just tell Cartwright” (city editor of the _Herald_) “that I am going to hand him a package of nitroglycerin right on your own particular little bailiwick, will you? Please run along now, like a good little special policeman, because we are going to lose you--thusly.”

He turned on his heel and ran for a California Street car just lumbering past us up the hill and I followed suit. After a few blocks he crossed through the car and dropped off on the other side. Scouting cautiously back toward Chinatown by way of Washington Street, drifting along with eyes wide for Dorrett, we finally made Ross Alley, where Lanagan stopped for a fraction of a second at the wicket of the gambling house at No. 8.

At that time it was a strict rule of the gambling “joints” that a white man could not enter. Personally, for all of my four years’ dubbing around on police, I never had been able to enter a Chinese gambling house when the play was on. Yet the lookout flashed one glance at Lanagan, grinned yellowly and ingenuously, and the massive solid oak door before us swung noiselessly open and we passed quickly through. As it shut behind us I heard a faint click-click, and glanced back. Three separate two-by-four scantlings, heavily re-enforced with iron, had dropped back into their sockets. The door was as solid as a concrete wall against the axes of the Chinatown squad; the theory being that by the time the squad had the door battered down, the players had departed through some secret runway.

“Melodrama?” laughed Lanagan at me. “But I had to come by the back door, as it were. I wouldn’t like to have any stray police or reporters or Dorrett suspect I was about to interview the man I am. They might smell a rat, possibly. We are more isolated among these hundred Chinks, gambling their fool heads off, than we would be in one of Leslie’s dark cells.”

We passed directly through the long room with its eight high tables, at each of which ten or a dozen impassive Celestials, with chopsticks, beans, and teacups, stood engaged in the contraband pastime of fantan. At a table or two a pie gow game was running, and in a corner dominoes. The air was so heavy and heated that I felt the perspiration starting in an instant. The Chinese gambler, if he is winning, sticks in that thick atmosphere for hours at a time.

At the rear of the room was another door, likewise barred in triplicate. Here another lookout grinned friendly at Lanagan and pressed on an innocent-appearing nail head in the wainscoting and the bars dropped and the door opened to a steep ladder. We went down about ten feet into a blind areaway between two buildings.

It was as black as your derby hat. But Lanagan, the marvellous, stepped ahead with assurance and I followed him gropingly. In another moment he rapped faintly on what I took to be a section of the brick base of the building, a click sounded, he took me by the arm, pulled me after him, another click, and the next moment a blaze of electric light discovered us to be in a small lounging room elaborately appointed in Oriental furnishings.

“Hullo, Mist’ Lamagum!”

The voice came from a corpulent, twinkling-eyed, richly garbed Chinaman just arisen from a massive chair of ebony and mother-of-pearl.

“Hello, Fu,” said Lanagan, sinking into another massive chair and motioning me to do likewise.

“My friend Norton, Fu. Norton, Mr. Fu Wong, otherwise known to me as Why Because. You will understand ‘why because’ presently.”

“Why? Becaus’? I tell you,” said Fu Wong, chuckling. “Him funny boy, Mist’ Lamagum. He, whatyoucalem, jolly me. You likem smoke?” He pressed a button on the arm of his chair and a flowing-garbed Chinese boy appeared with rich Havanas on a tray, together with individual teacups and two-piece teapots for three.

“Did you find See Wong?” Lanagan asked abruptly, while I studied Fu, whom I knew by reputation as one of the Chinese merchant princes. “I am in a hurry, Fu.”

“I catchem. He say Charley drive aut-o-mob-_eel_. Charley live there three, fo’ wicks. She cry one time See bringem tea: ‘Oh, Charley! Charley! Why fo’ you do him? What’s mala you, Charley?’ She stop quick see See. Why? Becaus’? See, he donno. He say Charley he usem, what you call ’em? Hop.”

For the first time since this story broke, that singular flashing, almost like a cat’s eyes, flamed into Lanagan’s dark eyes and they shot a responsive shiver of high tension interest through me, because I knew that at last he had struck the trail.

“You have done more for me than I can ever repay,” said Lanagan at parting. “You are a remarkable man, Fu Wong.”

Fu laughed boyishly.

“Why? Becaus’? You save my sto’ good name? I help you.”

As we went back out the way we came in, Lanagan enlightened me.

“Fu is president of the Suey Sing Tong. There is a Chinaman, Swanson’s cook, See Wong, whom I have been hammering on for two days. Of all the household servants, I have a vague suspicion of him. I couldn’t land him. Finally I looked up his affiliation, found he was a Suey Sing man, and then I enlisted the services of Fu Wong. See Wong would have to talk to his tong leader where the police or the reporters couldn’t drag information out of him with a team of mules. He purely and simply wouldn’t ‘sabe,’ and that’s all the satisfaction you could get.

“‘Why Because’ is not only proprietor of one of the biggest bazaars here and a director of the Chinese Bank, but he is also proprietor--I am telling you Chinatown secrets and not to be repeated--of of the gambling house we came through and several others. He is one of the powers of the quarter.

“There was an English tourist robbed in his bazaar once of a couple of hundred dollars and I was sent up here. Fu laboured under the impression that the entire sixteen pages of the _Enquirer_ were going to be turned over to that particular robbery. He felt the disgrace of the thing keenly, as any high-class Chinaman would, and personally offered the Englishman back the money. That was a good story. For some reason Fu, not understanding the American newspaper idea of ‘human interest,’ elected to think I had written a eulogy of him deliberately. I could have had half his store at that time, I guess, if I had wanted it. But I took a cigar and a cup of tea, and ever since that time I have been taken inside the inner circle up here. The room we were in is a runway through the basement of the bazaar next door in case of a raid.

“‘Charley’ was a chauffeur named Thorne, employed by Mrs. Swanson about three months ago for several weeks. He was one of the numerous wastrels that that woman of unostentatious but magnificent charities had under her protection. There are scores in and about the city, men and women, boys and girls, that she had taken from the under side of life and put on top. I didn’t see him, but some of Leslie’s men did and found nothing suspicious. Had they known he was a ‘hop,’ however, they might have thought differently. It establishes a very clear apparent connection between Swanson and the Palace Hotel and the only definite clue that has been turned up. We will save a lot of time by getting his address from Leslie.”

Lanagan was through with Leslie in a few moments.

“He is going home, but will be on tap with Brady and Wilson if we need him later,” he said. “He got curious when I mentioned Thorne, but promised to lay off until he heard from me. Thorne lives at Lombard and Larkin, where, in view of Mrs. Swanson’s undoubted suspicion that he committed the crime, coupled with See Wong’s charge that he is a ‘hop,’ we will now proceed to call on him.”

We were there in a few moments. It was a squalid lodging house, in charge of a slatternly beldam. She didn’t know whether Thorne was in or not. He was kind of loony, lately, she thought.

“Too bad,” said Lanagan, genially. “Has Charley been so that he couldn’t be out the last week? He wasn’t feeling well last time I saw him.”

“Ain’t seen much of him this week,” she replied. “I didn’t know about it, but I am beginnin’ to think he is one of them there fiends. He is actin’ something awful sometimes lately, what with his skippin’s and hoppin’s. You can go on up.”

The door was locked, but it was a rickety affair and the lock yielded to the pressure of our shoulders. A man who might have been any age from twenty to forty swung himself to a sitting position on a disordered bed and glared at us with eyes that were wide open but only half seeing.

“Full of hop; and I might as well jam him on a gamble,” said Lanagan, in an aside to me as he stepped quickly over and pulled Thorne to his feet, slapped him across the face, and sat him down in a chair. A high-pitched, querulous protest was voiced at the treatment, and then Thorne whimpered:

“Oh, you are so cruel! What have I ever done to be treated so cruelly?” He began to cry.

“Done? You snivelling viper, put on your shoes and come with me to jail. You murdered Robert Swanson and you are going to hang for it. Get up and come along.” Again Lanagan caught him a sharp slap across the face. This time Thorne did not whimper. A look of cunning came into his eyes.

“Getting your wits back pretty quick, now, eh?” sneered Lanagan.

Thorne stared. It seemed for a moment his clouded eyes entirely cleared; and then the film of the drug-sodden brain fell over his eyes again, and he relapsed to his hunched position. He was shivering and rocking himself, his angular knees drawn up to his chin, clasped around with his arms.

“Oh, dear! Oh, dear!” His voice was pitched high again like a woman’s. “Why is everyone so cruel to me? I am very nervous, as you can see, gentlemen. I really need something to quiet my nerves. It is the doctor’s orders, really. Would it be asking too much, now, to ask for the loan of ten cents? Oh, dear--”

“_Thorne!_” Lanagan, his aspect actually ferocious, leaped before the half-arisen suppliant. I shrank back myself, his acting was so consummately done.

“I’ll give you ten cents, you viper! You murdering, crawling, poisonous viper! I’ll give you the condemned cell at San Quentin and the death watch and the black cap, and the quick drop, until they crack that snake’s neck of yours into a dozen pieces! That’s what I’ll give you!”

Chattering, jabbering incoherently, his long, lean, sharp-nailed, claw-like hands working spasmodically before his face and toward Lanagan, the fiend huddled back. He glanced from side to side, his head lolling, as though seeking some avenue of escape by a desperate leap.

Lanagan’s eyes were within a foot of his face. Thorne began to foam at the mouth. I thought he was going into a fit as I watched, fascinated, the horrible scene. Bearing down upon the wretch with savagery in his voice and manner, Lanagan hammered on:

“Give you ten cents! What do you want with ten cents? You’ll never get another shot of coke as long as you live, Thorne! Never in this world! You are coming with me now, coming where you will never need coke again! Coming to your death by hanging for murder! _Not another shot in all this world will you ever get!_”

With a shriek that was more animal’s than man’s, Thorne suddenly lunged forward. Quicker than the dart of a snake’s head, those hands, with their long, lean, writhing fingers, had twisted around Lanagan’s neck. With a strength that was the strength of temporary insanity, he flung Lanagan from him and fell with him. Then, like a lean gorilla, he shook Lanagan’s head from side to side while he screeched fearful imprecations.

“_You lie! You lie! I’ll get all I want! That’s what he said, and I killed him, and I’ll kill you, too! Yah! Yeeah!_” He trailed away into a maniacal scream.

I hurled myself at him, but the fiend, for the moment at least, had the strength of three men. I finally managed to get in a blow that settled him.

Lanagan, rubbing his bruised neck ruefully, rose slowly. He was panting a little but chuckling.

“Score one for mental suggestion on a weak subject,” he laughed. “But I didn’t figure those scrawny hands had quite that much strength. This murder is clearer than print. We all but re-enacted the scene.

“Now, my boy, to establish the connection that would bring a man of Swanson’s position to a rendezvous at the Palace, to arouse the slumbering demon in this human orang-utang. It’s rather a commentary on that hoary police doctrine that a dope fiend never commits murder. I was right.”

Within thirty minutes Chief Leslie and Brady, and Wilson, his right-hand men, were in the room, and Lanagan swiftly detailed the circumstances. Thorne had come to and was shaking and shivering as the drug wore out of his system, leaving him nerve-racked. He did not attempt to repudiate his utterance, but sullenly admitted the murder.

In view of the words overheard by See Wong, there was but one person to clear up the mystery. Leslie, Lanagan and I hurried in the chief’s machine to the Swanson home, nearly midnight as it was. That they had had Thorne once under examination and had permitted him to go was a source of bitter chagrin to the chief. Thorne showed none of the ravages of the habit that men of weaker physique exhibited; the day the police picked him up he had happened to be comparatively normal, and consequently he had passed safely through the quiz.

Mrs. Swanson had not yet retired, and, upon learning that the chief was one of her late callers, summoned us at once to the drawing-room. She had one of those splendid faces seen occasionally in the aged, where strength of mind or religious fervour has brought endurance of lifelong secret pain of body or soul. The calmness of a noble resignation looked forth in a slight clouding of her clear eyes and expressed itself in the faint traces of suppression about her mobile lips. The gleaming, snow-white hair, combed straight back from a forehead of a remarkable breadth in a woman, invested her like an aureole.

She was a woman probably of sixty years.

“You will appreciate, gentlemen, I trust,” she said in a low voice of refined modulation, “that I have endured much and am still suffering.”

“It is a very painful errand we are on, Mrs. Swanson, and we will endeavour to be brief,” said Lanagan in a voice that a Chesterfield might have envied for courteous inflection and gentleness of expression, “but nevertheless it is an errand that must be performed.” He glanced at the chief, who nodded.

“Speaking as a newspaper man,” continued Lanagan, “it is my wish at all times to spare the feelings of those, particularly women, with whom I am brought into relation. But the true newspaper man is a seeker after truth, and he must follow as definite a path as the police follow.”

There was an eloquent pause. She gazed from one to the other during the interim, as though striving to read their thoughts. It was evident that the undercurrent that these skilled cross-examiners intended to convey had carried home.

“Well?” finally. Neither Lanagan nor Leslie spoke. There was another pause. She said at last: “You have some information to impart to me? Or some information to seek?”

“We desire to inform you,” said Leslie slowly, and with just a shade more of hardness in his tone as the detective began to work in him, “that we have under arrest the confessed murderer of your husband.”

She leaned involuntarily forward in her chair and grasped the arms so hard that her knuckles showed white through the fair skin of her hands.

“And we desire to inform you,” added Lanagan quickly, “that the name of your husband’s murderer is Charles Thorne; and we desire to ask you what the motive was for the murder of your husband by Charles Thorne; _and why, when you suspected that Charles Thorne was the murderer, you did not immediately notify the police?_”

Her hands slowly relaxed their grip on the chair arms as she sank back into its depths. Curiously, in the way the light struck down at her hair and her face, it seemed that the beautiful halo of white that had invested her, and the delicate, well-preserved whiteness of her skin, turned suddenly to dirty grey. If ever the blight of age settled visibly in fact or in fiction, it settled upon her then.

“You--have--Charles--Thorne--under--arrest?” she said, and her very tone was grey. She did not deny the truth of the charge; she did not express satisfaction that the murderer was found; she merely asked whether they had Charles Thorne under arrest.

“Yes.”

Her eyes closed and her head dropped suddenly back against the chair. We stepped swiftly forward, but before we could take any measures to revive her, her eyes had opened again. The lips moved. She was speaking, but so gaspingly that we bent to hear.

“It is the end of the long night,” she said with many halts; “the end of the long night. A life’s nightmare is done. God have mercy on me--”

She stopped completely. Then:

“God pity all mothers who bear as I bore--”

Another long pause. She was by strong effort retaining the clarity of her faculties under some heavy shock. She repeated:

“Who bear as I bore!”

The silence became acutely poignant.

“It must be told,” she breathed finally. “You have asked me why I did not tell you my suspicions. I will tell you now. Charles Thorne--”

Her next words came so low that had it not been for the pregnant silence of the great drawing-room they could not have been heard.

“_Is my son._”

I found I had been holding my breath; and I glanced quickly at Lanagan, to see his breast falling with a deep exhalation.

“My husband did not know,” she continued, colourlessly. “Charles Thorne does not know I am his mother. I have tried to live a full Christian life. I have given by tens of thousands to aid the erring. I have thought to make all atonement....

“And yet the blood of my blood slew the heart of my heart, my dear husband, one of God’s noble men....”

After that wrenching confession her normal poise began by degrees to return as the strength of an extraordinary mind began to assert itself. The story was soon told: of an alliance before her marriage to Swanson, of the boy, taken by the father, to be sent back to her after fifteen years. The dissolute father, on his deathbed, sent Charles back to the mother.

For fifteen years since that day she had steadily stood sponsor for the boy. To her husband he was but one of the many others of her objects of charity. It may be said the boy inherited the dissolute traits of his father. Finally, her own children by Swanson all marrying, that profound mysterious quality of motherhood prompted her to make one last effort to redeem the boy under her own eyes, and she adopted the dangerous course, for her, of bringing him to the house as a chauffeur.

That he was given to drugs she did not know. Thorne had been caught in a series of petty thefts. Swanson had finally been compelled to discharge him. He had left the house with maledictions upon Swanson. Instinctively she had felt he was the author of the crime.

Considering all of these circumstances, and understanding the character of the fiend and his paternity, it is evident that in his brain, constantly weakening under drugs, became fixed a sinister purpose to work out some scheme of revenge on Swanson for driving him from a rich home and a cozy living, with ample funds and opportunity for a secret indulgence in his weakness.

As it subsequently appeared, Thorne did not originally plan murder. Some abortive scheme of blackmail had but half formed in his crazy brain. He lured Swanson with a cunning letter, full of explicit directions, to the Palace Hotel by writing that he was seriously ill there. He begged that Mrs. Swanson be not informed until after Swanson had seen him. He wanted an opportunity to redeem himself, he wrote; and Swanson, as warm-hearted as his wife, and not caring evidently to worry her needlessly about the condition of one of her charges until he had made an investigation, set out on his errand of humanity, never to return.

He wore his ulster, obviously so that he would not be recognised going alone into the Palace Hotel. In the subcellar he had met Thorne. There was a prolonged talk, and Swanson made the mistake of chiding the fiend on his habits. Desire coming upon him strongly, Thorne finally exhibited himself in all his ugly weakness, and the spectacle was too much for the eyes of Swanson, unaccustomed to such sights. He was stooping his way out of the little room after sternly refusing Thorne’s appeal for money, when the long, lean fingers of the half-insane man, with some congenital strain outcropping perhaps of that vagabond, dissolute father, found an easy goal in a man already half-suffocated in the thick air of the place.

Alarmed, when his fit had passed, at what he had done, and fearing to rob the body, Thorne had quakingly slipped into Swanson’s ulster and made his way in terror to his own room. First he had journeyed to the foot of Powell Street, weighted the coat with a rock, and cast it into the water of the bay. It was subsequently recovered and served as the single bit of incriminating evidence to substantiate his confession. His letter to Swanson, in Swanson’s pocket, he had taken with him to destroy by tearing into fine bits.

Such were the salient features of a most extraordinary crime as ultimately established.

But to return to Mrs. Swanson’s drawing-room, where Lanagan is speaking:

“Charles Thorne does not know, then, that you are his mother?”

“He does not know.”

“Who does know?”

“No living person save myself and you gentlemen.”

“In that case, then, Mrs. Swanson,” said Lanagan simply, “your secret will die with us.”

She choked in attempting to speak, and, tears streaming from her eyes, bade us each adieu. For my part I confess I was blinking like a boy. The outer doors closed behind us. Then:

“Back to the room for you, chief,” snapped Lanagan laconically. “Throw Thorne in at 2:15. Charles Thorne, a former chauffeur, murdered Swanson after attempted blackmail failed. You stand, of course, chief?”

“Stand, Jack?” replied that sterling officer, “it’s in so deep it can only come out when the last drop leaves my veins.”

“I knew that,” said Lanagan. “Now, Norrie,” sharply, “get together! We have exactly _fifty-five minutes to press time_!”

IX

THE DOMINANT STRAIN

IX

THE DOMINANT STRAIN

“Sampson,” said Lanagan, “there’s something queer about that Robbins case. Professional second story men aren’t returning to the scene of a $10,000 burglary and sending by messenger a written proposition to return the property for a cash settlement. They know how and where to negotiate the stuff and they take no chances; particularly not with one of their number under arrest--assuming the Ward boy is one of them. And that is another queer angle: seasoned crooks don’t operate with sixteen-year-old boys.”

“How do you account for the ring found on him?”

“I don’t--yet.”

“What’s your theory?”

“Haven’t any. But ten ‘second-story’ cases in three months in one district winding up with a $10,000 job is against all form.”

“Dig into it then. Here, see who this is as you go out. May be about the suspect. Same name.”

He handed Lanagan a visitor’s card. Scrawled across it in a nervous hand was: “Jennie Ward. Important.”

In the ante-room a girl with a crutch arose to meet him, but he motioned her back to her seat. She had the pinched face and the wistful sadness of those condemned to life but half-whole. It was evident before she spoke a dozen words that she came as so many others come to the newspaper ante-room: in futile, uncomprehending protest at the entire system of News.

It was her brother, Jimmy, who was under arrest, and she said he was innocent. Jimmy told her he found the ring, therefore he did find it, because Jimmy never told her a lie. She did not see why papers should print such things, even if he had been arrested, and why they did not try to prove a boy innocent rather than aid the police in trying to prove him guilty.

Lanagan listened patiently at first, with an occasional question; and then he listened with a deepening interest as the girl’s fervour grew.

“It is only the rich whose wrongs you right!” she exclaimed at last passionately. “What rights have we poor? I cannot afford even a lawyer. Mamma does washing. She is old and timid, and she was afraid to come to the papers. I mostly educated myself, sir; I had to. I have learned the piano at the Sunday school. I have a little class of pupils there. The teacher helps me get them. I just teach the first lessons, you know. I make $4.25 a week. Mamma makes about $7 when she is not sick. Jimmy has been making $8, with a raise to $9.50 coming the first. So you see we manage to make out, all of us together, and send my three little brothers to school.

“And now--now--all the people on the street are talking about us and my little brothers won’t go to school--the others call them names--everyone saw Jimmy’s picture in your paper to-day--

“Won’t you please help us? We haven’t any men folks to fight for us now with Jimmy locked up. Please, sir, help us get Jimmy out!

“I went to police headquarters and waited hours and hours to see Jimmy--and then--and then finally the detectives--they took me and said I would see Jimmy--but they took me to a room and shut the door--and they swore at me--

“They said I--better tell everything or go to--jail--why--why they talked like _I_--knew about the robbery and they were--going--to arrest--me--”

She fainted; just drooped quietly back into the chair, wearily, hopelessly, woefully, without so much as a sigh. Lanagan breathed quickly as he ministered to her.

“Poor little sis!” he said, softly. “Plucky little mother of the tenements! Taking a full-grown man’s place! But what a handicap!”

Her eyes opened. “Oh,” she fluttered, her thin, sensitive lips quivering in apology, “I fainted, didn’t I? How queer. I never fainted before. I cannot afford to give way like that. Sometimes, though! Oh, sometimes I wish I could! I wanted to in front of the detectives--my brain whirled and whirled and whirled with fire like pinwheels but I wouldn’t--I wouldn’t give them the satisfaction!” Her slight hands with their long fingers clenched; her eyes sparkled. “Harrigan. That is his name. He was the worst. The brute! oh, if I were a man! I would kill him for what he said to me!”

“Never mind Harrigan. Leave him to me,” said Lanagan. “You are only exciting yourself. Go home now and try not to worry. We are going to look into your brother’s case.”

“Thank you,” she said, with shining eyes. There were at no time any tears. She had been trained in a life where tears are inadequate.

Lanagan watched her as she hobbled on her one crutch down the hall to the elevator, her useless limb swinging loosely. She was a pathetic little figure, with her man’s brain, her grown woman’s pride, and her little misshapen body; a fourteen year old girl, wearing “long clothes” in grim earnest. A quick pang shot through him; cripples always saddened him. They have infinitely so much less than the meanest wastrel who has health.

“The judgment of a cold-blooded detective against the judgment of a loyal sister,” mused Lanagan. “Which is it?”

An hour’s study at police headquarters of the reports on all ten of the burglaries established in Lanagan’s mind one settled conviction: they were all committed by the same author, and whoever it was--whether an individual or a gang--had first become reasonably familiar with the interior arrangements of the houses entered, and with the daily routine of the households.

In the Robbins case, for instance, from the time the last member of the household left the bedroom, or second floor, to go down to the dining-room on the first floor for dinner, until a member of the household returning upstairs found the evidences of the burglary, only twenty-five minutes had passed; and yet in that time the thief or thieves had entered the house and had left it after cleanly ransacking three bedrooms. An open bathroom window and the drain pipe to the ground gave mute evidence of the burglar’s route.

In all of the cases only precious stones were taken: nothing monogrammed was touched, nor watches, silverware, trinkets or bric-à-brac. But this was of no particular consequence. The average expert thief prefers the precious stones. Removed from their settings they are difficult to identify and easy to negotiate.

“Professional work, all of it,” muttered Lanagan, arguing to himself. “But what about that message?”

The extraordinary boldness that had marked all the crimes culminated in the Robbins case when a man, with smoked glasses, heavy moustache, soft hat pulled down and ulster turned up, gave a small boy ten cents to carry an envelope to the Robbins home, but a block from where the man stood. Enclosed in the message, which offered to return the jewelry for $5,000 cash, was a brooch that had been among the articles stolen. It was sent as proof that the offer was genuine. The message said the police were not to be notified. If the family desired to negotiate, they were to send the boy back with the single word, “Yes,” and they would be communicated with later.

In the excitement of receiving the message under such singular circumstances a member of the family, forgetting or disregarding the caution, telephoned the police, holding the boy in the house. The police misunderstood the call, and a patrol wagon load of reserves clattered up to the door within ten minutes, under the impression murder was being done.

Naturally, the man on the corner had ample time to escape. No further offers to negotiate came to the family. On the second day the police placed under arrest the Ward boy. He was employed as a helper with the Phoenix Vacuum Cleaning Company, which had been engaged a few days before at the Robbins home.

“And at the start he made a bad case, superficially, by his contradictions,” reflected Lanagan, reviewing the case.

In their investigations the detectives, examining the two men and the helper, Jimmie Ward, who had operated the cleaning apparatus at the Robbins house, learned that the boy had been noticed that morning examining a diamond ring. Asked where he got it, he had replied he found it on the floor of the washroom at the establishment. No one claimed the ring. The matter was called to the attention of Cutting, the proprietor and manager of the company, but he knew of no customer having reported such a loss.

The detectives--Harrigan and Thomas--took the boy to headquarters for further questioning, and he had there said he found the ring on the sidewalk. On that contradiction he was placed under arrest and locked up in detinue.

Further, the police regarded as damaging the fact that a robbery a week previous had been committed in the same neighbourhood in a home where the cleaning apparatus had been engaged, the Ward boy serving as the helper in that house also. He had worked with a different crew of men than had been on the Robbins house, and this fact, in the police theory, eliminated the remaining employees of the company as it was highly improbable that they were all in a “second story” ring. They redoubled their efforts to find the supposed connections of Ward on the theory that he operated with an outside gang.

“‘Jimmy said he found the ring and if he said he found it he did find it,’” said Lanagan, repeating the sister’s earnest declaration. “Well, for her sake--I hope he did.”

Hour after hour Lanagan, tirelessly, kept at his rounds, visiting in turn each of the ten homes in the western addition that had been robbed during the last three months.

Long before he reached the Robbins home, the last of the ten, he had formed his startling theory. In nine of the cases he had discovered that which he set out in search of: a constant condition present in them all. There was just one question that he wanted to ask at the Robbins home.

He found the home in a flurry of excitement. Police headquarters had rung up and asked that a member of the household come at once to the detective bureau to identify if possible a bracelet that it was believed had been among the stolen articles and that had been recovered.

Lanagan, arriving just as the senior Robbins was leaving in his automobile, was invited to accompany him. He did so; but first he had asked and had had answered the one question he came to ask.

In the office of O’Rourke, night captain of detectives, they found O’Rourke, Harrigan and Thomas grouped around a woman, huddled down on a chair. Lanagan caught a low sob, a helpless, forlorn, frightened sob, that sent a curious sensation of nausea through him. He stepped quickly forward to gaze down upon the misery-racked form of the cripple, Jennie Ward.

“I don’t know anything! Oh, I don’t know anything!” she wailed. “I found it on the door step!”

O’Rourke had turned as they entered. He stepped to his own desk, holding the bracelet toward Robbins.

“That is my daughter’s bracelet, sir,” Robbins said. “It was my Christmas present to her.”

Harrigan, listening, nodded in satisfaction.

“I knew it,” he said. “I guess we had better throw the little gutter snipe in, cap; a little pressure now and she’s bound to squeal.”

“Oh, oh, oh!” Sobs were shuddering from the girl.

“_Squeal!_ You damned clodhopper! Give her a bullet and kill her now if you are trying to! You don’t throw her in!”

It was Lanagan. He had whirled from the huddled form to send the words cutting through the air at Harrigan like a whiplash. The girl flung up a white face in a swift look of wild hope.

“_I don’t know anything, Mr. Lanagan! Don’t let them put me in jail!_”

She threw herself from her chair in an attempt to clasp his arm but her withered and shrunken limb crumpled under her and she sank to the floor with a sharp cry of pain. Lanagan leaned and lifted her to the chair.

Harrigan had an ugly look as he measured the distance from himself to Lanagan.

“Yes, Harrigan; you rotten thief. Clodhopper is too mild for you!”

“You bum,” said Harrigan, with deadly levelness. “You drunken bum.”

Lanagan’s leap was catlike. It took all the mighty O’Rourke’s strength to tear his fingers free. Lanagan was not a Queensbury fighter when tackling two hundred pounds of policeman. O’Rourke had Harrigan by the arms. Thomas had Lanagan. For a second or two there was not a sound but the panting of grappling men. Then discipline told. Harrigan’s arms relaxed.

“You are relieved from duty, Officer Harrigan,” said O’Rourke. “Until I lay the matter of your insubordination before the Chief.”

The detective turned on his heel and walked from the room, stopping at the door. “I’ll get you, Lanagan,” he said. Lanagan ignored him.

“Now, Jack,” said O’Rourke, grimly, as Thomas freed the reporter. “Why won’t we throw this girl in?”

“Because,” said Lanagan, still breathing heavily, “she is innocent.”

“How do you know?”

“I know. That is enough. If you won’t take my word ring up the Chief and he will.”

O’Rourke knew the close friendship between Lanagan and Chief Leslie and the confidence the chief had in his judgment. He gazed doubtfully at the girl and then at Robbins. Secretly, he respected Lanagan also and he was impressed by Lanagan’s assurance.

“We aren’t justified in holding the girl,” he said to Robbins. Then to Lanagan: “All right. You win.”

But as Lanagan left the room with the girl to send her home in the police automobile, O’Rourke had an afterthought. He turned to Thomas.

“We might just as well cover up. Watch the house to-night. There’s something queer about this whole business that I don’t get yet.”

“Whatever happens keep calm until I see you again,” was Lanagan’s last counsel to the girl. Through the scene in O’Rourke’s office she had kept crouched down in her chair, watching with wide eyes; save for one quickly shrilled: “_Give it to him!_” as Lanagan’s sinewy fingers twined around Harrigan’s throat.

“It was terrible of me to say that, wasn’t it?” she asked. “But I couldn’t help it! He is a bad man! I feel it!”

“He’s what we call a ‘wrong’ detective,” said Lanagan, drily. “Don’t think about him any more.”

“Let me have Norton,” he said, some moments later to Sampson, and to me he said:

“I want you to cover 211 Clementina Street. Don’t bother anybody. Just see who goes in or out or hangs around there. I’ll pick you up later down there. Wait for me no matter what happens.”

He jumped into a taxicab at the curbing and whirled away out Market Street. I hastened to my station, in that gloomy, narrow street of rookeries. Almost opposite 211 was a deep doorway. I flattened back in the shadows, trusting to luck that the occupants were all in bed and that no one would walk up on me. I was not bothered. An hour passed and another. I heard someone come out of a house a few doors above me and saunter down the street toward me. I huddled back. The figure passed within six feet of me. By the dim rays of the gas lamp on the corner, throwing its feeble area of light a dozen yards, I recognised Detective Thomas.

He slipped into the side door of the corner saloon. “Off his job, whatever it is,” I said to myself. “Something should happen now. It usually does in such cases.”

It did. Noiselessly on the opposite sidewalk passed a figure in a heavy black overcoat with a high collar turned up around the ears and a soft hat pulled down. In front of 211 the figure stopped for a fraction of a second, it may have been to look for something that had been dropped; but it appeared to me to fumble an instant by the steps. The figure then passed rapidly on.

Thomas, a fresh cigar between his teeth, sauntered back to his post. The figure that had stopped at 211 had disappeared around the corner at Seventh Street. Thomas had certainly missed the episode entirely.

There was a long interval. The door at 211 opened, slowly. A girl came out, finally; a girl with a crutch. She came down the three steps, looked up and down and across the street, and suddenly dropped down and I could see that she was rummaging in the space under the stairs.

Stepping easily, I saw Thomas, his cigar still puffing leisurely, cross the street. He was almost beside the girl before she saw him. There came a faint cry of alarm, quickly smothered, as she straightened up, her back to the house. I walked quickly to them in time to hear Thomas’s voice:

“Well, miss, find any presents? Little late for Santa Claus, isn’t it? But let’s see. Let’s just see what you were looking for under those stairs.”

He dropped to his knees, threw his pocket flash about, and arose, a small package wrapped in a newspaper in his hand. The girl was staring with startled, wide eyes. She was breathing quickly, her thin bosom rising and falling. Thomas wheeled on me, was about to snap at me, thought better of it, and remarked:

“Oh, well, you’re dropped to me. I might as well let you in.”

He tore off the paper wrapping from the package and in the flash of his pocket light I saw the glitter of a pair of diamond ear drops.

“Do you make them?” he asked, triumphantly. I nodded. The jewels unquestionably answered the description of those stolen from the Robbins home. It came to me like a physical blow, the shock that such a frail, broken bit of humanity as the little back alley waif before me was entangled in a thieves’ gang. I knew she was the suspect’s sister. She still held her defiant place against the house.

“I guess this time, young lady, you will go in,” said Thomas, tersely. “Do you want anything from the house? Got any thing to say? You are going to jail.”

She began to tremble violently, but her lips were still compressed.

“No,” she managed to say at last. “No! I was watching! I know now! I know! But I will not talk to you! Please don’t waken my mamma or my little brothers--let us go--now--if I must.” She started to hobble away in feverish haste, shaken with sobs that she would not permit to escape her lips. Seldom have I been affected with such a sense of sadness as came over me then: all of the tragedy that would have been in the situation with even a whole girl under such circumstances was doubled by her condition.

“Got her dead to rights that time,” chuckled Thomas to me. “She’ll spill now sure. The rest of the stuff must be cached around here somewhere.”

“You think there is no question about the Ward boy?” I asked.

“Not the slightest. And she is in and is covering up. They’re all crooked, these back alley rats. There’s more in the gang, of course. That stuff was put there, I suppose, to-night, for her to ‘shove.’ Probably she peddles it. You never can tell how these gangs operate.”

I glanced again at the pitiable little misshapen thing dragged away from her home to a cell and an iron bed at the city prison and I couldn’t trust myself to reply to Thomas.

By a curious change that is gradually making me less valuable as a newspaper man the older I become in the business, I find myself unconsciously taking sides against my paper with fellow beings whose frailties or sorrows make them grist for the newspaper mill. I felt so toward this poor girl now, a victim of congenital influence in all likelihood; obviously a product of the malnutrition of the under classes.

Thomas took his prisoner away in a taxi and I hurried to a telephone and gave the story to Sampson in that fashion. I then hastened back to Clementina Street, where to my great relief, I was picked up by Lanagan within a few moments.

I related everything to him. When I had finished his eyes shone more brightly than the gas jet over our heads. Never had I beheld him so far from the composure for which he was noted. For a minute or two he anathematised O’Rourke by all the carded oaths and a few that he invented.

“Back, back in jail, is she! So, O’Rourke couldn’t take my word! We’ll see, oh, we’ll see! Wait.”

He ran up the steps to 211. After a long period, the door opened. It was the mother. Briefly Lanagan explained what had happened. The poor old toothless soul was about past being shocked further. But quickly Lanagan, in that compelling way of his, calmed her fears. He promised that she would have her son and daughter back--before daylight.

_Before daylight!_ It fairly took my breath away.

“What is it, Jack? Give me a line,” I demanded in excitement. “Heavens, man, it’s quarter to two! How are you going to get a story in the paper to-night now? You’ll only break it for all the papers.”

Lanagan stopped short in his rapid walk and laid his hand on my shoulders.

“I’ve been in this game fifteen years, Norrie,” he said, with a solemnity new in him. “Let me tell you something, and I say it who have the right: there comes a time just once every so often when a newspaper man puts humanity above his paper. Remember that. You are betraying no trust with your paper when you do; you are betraying your trust with yourself, with your fellow man, and with your conscience when you do not. This is one of them.”

That was all. But many times in the years that have whirled by since then and since that strange, marvellous man passed out of the newspaper life of the west, have those words come back out of the dark of a back alley, to guide me.

He was not working for an “exclusive” now; he was working to free a mite of a cripple girl and her stunned and misused brother from the inner tier of cells at the city prison.

He said no more. At Market Street he flung open a taxicab door and we jumped in. He called an address to the driver. It was Chief Leslie’s home. We were there within fifteen minutes. Lanagan held his finger on the button until the door swung open and the Chief himself appeared, wrapped in a lounging robe, his hair tousled, his beard rumpled, but his grey eyes wide and alert. Lanagan brushed in and I after him. He sat the Chief down on a settee and for ten minutes he hammered away. At last Leslie’s fist banged the settee arm.

“By the Lord Harry, you’re right! And I want to flash that bird again! It all comes back to me now; I couldn’t make out the other day where I had seen him before. Little stouter, but same man or I’ll cut my throat!”

He took the stairs to the next floor three at a time. Within five minutes he was back, fully dressed.

“Got your machine out here yet?”

“Yes,” said Lanagan. “But don’t forget the Wards.”