Chapter VII: Part 7

Leslie stepped to the telephone stand and to his private line to headquarters.

“Prison,” he said, shortly. “Prison? Give me the matron. Mrs. Conness? Take that Ward girl into your room and give her the best you have until I get down. Give me Andrews. Sergeant Andrews? Take that Ward boy to the matron’s room and give him the best you have until I get down there.” He hung up the receiver. “Come on. We’ll pick up Brady. He lives just around the corner. We better get Maloney, too; he’s not far away. If this is the bird I think it is, we’ll take no chances. Known as the ‘Swallow.’ Two timer, Moyomemsing prison. Porch climber. Came out here about fifteen years ago and reported on, saying he wanted a chance to make good. We kept track of him for a couple of years. He was clerking and doing the right thing. Then we lost him.”

“I didn’t identify him that closely,” said Lanagan. “But he’s the man who did this trick and the other nine.”

Within twenty-five minutes Brady and Maloney were crowded into the machine with us. Lanagan gave a direction. At Pacific Avenue and Octavia Street we stopped, in the heart of the fashionable western addition. With Lanagan and Leslie in the lead, Brady and I next and Maloney bringing up the rear, we straggled along for several blocks.

At Washington and Buchanan Streets the Chief and Lanagan had stepped back and signalled us. We closed up. From the middle of the block on Washington Street came the sound of a taxicab starting. Leslie looked around the corner as the machine came towards us, and stepped to the street, flashing his shield. The machine stopped. The door opened. A head appeared. A familiar voice came.

“Hello, Chief! What’s up?”

Detective Harrigan stepped out.

“You’re up,” said Leslie, with a bitter oath. “You are under arrest. Brady, search the prisoner.”

Quick as a knife blade springs back Harrigan’s hand went to his hip; but as quick as he was, Leslie was quicker. There was a click, click and Harrigan stood before his superior officer and his brother detectives, manacled. With practised fingers Brady was running through his clothes. He passed over Harrigan’s revolver, handcuffs and billy. He brought forth a leather wallet. Leslie tore it open. It held an assortment of jewelry, jumbled together.

“So!” he said, his voice shaking with rage, “you knew it was the Swallow, did you? And you have been shaking him down for half the loot? Well, Officer Harrigan, you and the Swallow will be splitting cobble stones inside of a month. You dirty, rotten, gutter scut! You were framing to send two little kids to prison, were you? I wish I had let you pull that gun! We’d have saved the county the expense of a trial!”

He tore Harrigan’s coat back and ripped his star from his breast. He ground it under his heel until the number it held was obliterated, and then he hurled it spinning into the air and over the corner house. It landed faintly on a distant roof.

Harrigan noticed Lanagan for the first time and sprang for him, raising his manacled hands. But Leslie stopped him with a drive to the jaw that sent him staggering back against the machine.

“Take him in, Maloney,” ordered the Chief. “I’ve seen enough of him. We’ll get along without you now.”

Harrigan said not a word. He stumbled into the machine, Maloney following. It drove away.

“Jack Lanagan,” said Leslie, “I wish you were on my staff. You could have O’Rourke’s job to-night.”

“Thanks, Chief, I’ll be satisfied if you send O’Rourke to the fog belt,” replied Lanagan, sardonically. “Put a man like Royan in his place and you’ll have the kind of head the bureau needs.”

“Royan goes,” said the Chief. “You’re entitled to something on this night’s work.”

“We’ve got to hurry. Our man may have noticed that taxi incident.”

“I don’t think so. Harrigan came out of the house.” We walked up the street. “Take the rear, Brady,” said Leslie, and the detective stepped quietly down the cement path at the side of a fairly pretentious home. Leslie, Lanagan and I tiptoed up the front steps. We stood to one side, while Lanagan took the door. He rang twice. Footsteps came. It was evident Harrigan’s host had not yet retired.

“That you, Harrigan?” the voice came from inside before the door opened. Lanagan mumbled a yes. The door swung back and Donald Cutting, Esq., proprietor and general manager of the Phoenix Vacuum Cleaning Company stood staring at Lanagan from the brilliantly lighted hallway. For an instant he was speechless. Then he shouted:

“Well, what the devil do _you_ want around here at this hour of the morning? What gets into you reporters, anyhow? Has a citizen got any rights in his own home at all?”

“There aren’t many that you have.” It was Leslie. He had swung to the door directly before Cutting.

His revolver was at Cutting’s waist.

“Just keep your hands a little higher, Cutting: you’re pretty nifty with those digits of yours. Now back in there, so we can all sit down and talk.”

Cutting stood an instant as though frozen, and then mechanically stepped back. We all walked in. The door was closed.

“‘Swallow,’” said the Chief, “you’re through. We’ve got Harrigan with the goods. Where’s the rest of the loot? I mean outside the Robbins stuff. We’ve got that located.”

Cutting’s head dropped to his hands. He sat in silence, bowed.

“Donald, what is it? Is there any trouble?” A woman’s voice came over the balustrade. He straightened up, as though an electric current had shot through him.

“Nothing, Molly,” he said. “Just some old friends dropped in on me. I will be at liberty soon.”

“Your wife?” asked Leslie. “My wife,” replied Cutting.

In another moment she was sweeping from the broad stairway in a silken kimono, her hair flowing loosely, and stood before us.

Cutting looked directly at her, and in her eyes there was a light of questioning. “I must leave you, Molly,” he said. Still looking at him in that singular way, she asked: “For how long?”

“It is not in my power to say. These men are police officers. They knew me from the east. They want me to go down to the jail with them.”

“Will you be there long?”

“If I could help myself, I would not go at all.”

“Oh,” she said, with a nervous laugh. “I understand. Something possibly about that poor boy in your employ and that robbery.”

Lanagan’s black eyes were studying the woman intently; Leslie was watching Cutting. Both, I could see, were puzzled. Even I, with my duller perceptions, was sensible that there was some subtle undercurrent in this conversation; something cryptic that I could not solve.

“You will need your hat,” she said, and turned to the hat rack in the rear of the hall.

“It’s all right, Chief,” said Cutting, in an aside, arising, “you’ve got me. Please don’t make any scene before her.”

She returned with the hat. He fumbled with it.

“Kiss me,” he said. She did so; left his arms, but came back to them, a gush of tears starting as she clung to him in a passionate embrace.

“Go,” he said, faintly, his voice breaking. She turned and stumbled for the stairs. A quick look flashed from Lanagan to the Chief.

“One minute, madam,” said Leslie, sternly. “You had better come along, too.”

“_No!_” cried Cutting. “Never, Chief, as you are a man! Never in a million years! She has never known of my work out here; she knew me before Moyomemsing; she stuck by me during it all; she married me and we came out here. She knows nothing; nothing. She may have suspected, but she knew nothing. The old call claimed me, going through those houses making estimates on cleaning; why, it’s a disease, that’s all, Chief! I got pressed for money. I undertook too much in my business. I couldn’t handle it. I had notes to meet. I just fell naturally back to the old easy way. That’s all. Just went back to it because that’s the way I was born, I suppose; crooked.”

“Humph. Where did you send the stuff?”

“East. Except the Robbins. Needed money bad, didn’t want to take a chance handling it here, so I tried the message. What Harrigan didn’t get is down at the office in the safe.”

“We suspected that,” said Leslie. “How long has Harrigan been cutting with you?”

“Oh, well, don’t ask me that. Some time. He’s a wolf. I am a crook, but he’s got me lashed to the mast. The kid stuff was none of mine. I did lose one ring at the office. The boy found it. He got scared and contradicted himself. Harrigan framed the other thing about the house.”

“I guess it’s pretty nearly an even break,” said Leslie. He stepped forward to put on the wrist nippers. As he did so Cutting raised his hat to his head; his hand, coming down, stopped for a fraction of a second at his lips.

“Better this,” he said, rapidly, backing away, “I couldn’t go back. I’m a pretty old man, you know.”

As though he had been shot through the heart he dropped in a heap. Lanagan leaped for him. The Chief bent over him. They arose together. Lanagan picked up the hat and turned back the sweat band. Inside was a little envelope, pasted to the felt. It was half filled with white powder.

“Cyanide,” said Lanagan.

* * * * *

Such was the passing of the Swallow.

Lanagan, in his search for similar conditions in the ten burglaries found but one: that Cutting had personally visited each house to make the estimates of cost. That fact, coupled with the ring found at his establishment, convinced Lanagan that he and he alone was the man. Cutting worked four machines, each with its separate crew, and no other employee had worked in more than three out of the ten houses.

Anxious to keep track of Cutting after his theory began to impress him, he had learned that he was at the theatre. He had picked him up after the show, trailed him to a café, followed him in a taxicab as he took his wife home, and kept at his tail lights when he returned after one o’clock to discharge the machine and walk to a saloon well south of Market Street where he had met Harrigan. That was Lanagan’s first definite information that Harrigan and Cutting were involved.

Cutting and Harrigan had separated, Lanagan following Cutting to his establishment. He remained there some time, busied about his safe, and had then apparently gone directly home.

It was then that Lanagan picked me up.

Harrigan, of course, was the man who had passed through the alley. He then had gone on out to Cutting’s house, for a final distribution of the spoils, Cutting having evidently taken Harrigan’s share from the safe.

* * * * *

Late that same afternoon Lanagan sat in Leslie’s office with Robbins, who had just received his jewelry. Robbins drew out his check book.

“If you will permit me?” he said, to Lanagan. He had filled in “$250.” “How do you spell your name?”

Lanagan laughed. “Make it out to the Adams Piano Company,” he said.

Robbins looked politely inquisitive, but asked no questions. He wrote in the name. But Leslie was not so polite.

“What in the name of Sam Hill are you going to do with a piano?”

“Nothing, myself. I wouldn’t take it any more than I would take the money. You know that. But there is a girl I know who can use that piano and use it to very good advantage. And what’s more, she’s entitled to it.”

He picked up the check and carefully folded it, placing it in his pocket.

“I’m going over now and pick out the best piano the money will buy,” he said, “and I’m going to send it, with the compliments of Mr. Robbins, Chief Leslie and Jack Lanagan to a little home at 211 Clementina Street, Miss Ward is the name.”

X

OUT OF THE DEPTHS

X

OUT OF THE DEPTHS

The Stockslager case will be recalled immediately upon the Pacific Coast as a crime of some years ago marked by the peculiar atrocity of the circumstances. Aged Mrs. Stockslager, living in a small cottage at the extreme northern end of Thirty-third Avenue--in those days a region sparsely settled and visited chiefly by picknickers bound for Baker’s Beach--was found one Sunday morning literally hacked to pieces.

From the location of portions of the dismembered body it was apparent that the author had planned to carry the evidences of the crime away and sink them in the waters of the ocean, which tumbled and rolled on the rocks at the base of the steep cliff that marked the extremity of Thirty-third Avenue. A potato sack, with the torso, was found near the rear door to the cottage, indicating that whoever had committed the deed had probably been interrupted while carrying the remains to the bay; and had then fled.

A kitchen butcher knife was the weapon used. Robbery was evidently the motive, for the hut had been ransacked thoroughly, such poor and mean trinkets as the recluse was known to possess having been taken.

Mrs. Stockslager did a small business in sandwiches, pop corn and soda water with the picknickers. The rumours of a miser’s hoard that usually attached to such as she had long been current. But whether the slayer or slayers realised a profit in money could not be determined as there was no one who could be found sufficiently familiar with her life to say whether she did or did not have a store of money on the premises.

Such were the general facts which Sampson, city editor of the _Enquirer_, skeletonised tersely to Lanagan as that police reporter of superior talents reported for duty after a lapse of more than ordinary duration.

“Hop to it, Jack,” added Sampson. “You’ve had your salary for two weeks. Show your appreciation.”

Those were the days before automobiles might be requisitioned--occasionally--for big assignments, and Lanagan, taking the steam line that in those days twisted around the ocean shore, was considerably later than the coroner’s deputies, who had already discharged their functions and now were engaged in making an impromptu meal upon the old woman’s supply of sandwiches, the only loot available.

Phillips and Castle, special duty men from the Golden Gate Park police station, were also on the scene. The “upper office” at headquarters is recruited--where it is not recruited by politics or favouritism--by these active young officers on special duty at the outside stations, and Lanagan knew that this particular brace of plain-clothes men were hardworking and ambitious and without the “strings” that many times bring the ablest of upper office men a trifle too considerately into touch with the outlaw clans.

“What do you make of it, Phillips?” asked Lanagan, as the officer placed his note-book in his pocket.

“Wouldn’t call it a suicide, exactly,” replied Phillips, offishly.

Lanagan laughed. “No?” he drawled. “I wouldn’t put it past you to call it natural causes, though.”

Phillips flushed to the base of his thick neck but held himself from answering. He knew Lanagan by reputation and did not care to match wits with him. Lanagan worked with most of the “upper office” men on intimate terms, but found it occasionally necessary to put a “crimp” in the arrogance, or ignorance, of the outside station officers, who do not come into contact with newspaper men as frequently as the down town men and at times elect to affect the same impartiality with which they treat ordinary persons. Such Lanagan took pride in bringing to a proper appreciation of the honourable place occupied by the brothers of the Tribe.

Lanagan ignored the two detectives and gave his attention to the coroner’s deputies, the cottage and outskirts, and the contents of the wicker basket. Before the next train arrived, bringing a dozen reporters and camera men from the other papers, and myself, Lanagan had finished his investigations. I found him seated on a salt grass hummock, smoking and gazing absently up and down the ragged, rocky shore line. The surf was tumbling heavily although a few hundred yards out the sea was an undulating swell of greenish beauty.

“Some fine day,” was his greeting. “Let’s take a stroll down.”

We made our way down the cliff to the rocks at the water’s edge.

“Imagination is oftentimes a great thing in solving crime,” he remarked, as he poised himself perilously on a slippery rock and relit his cigar. “That and the ‘take a chance’ instinct. Call it a hunch, bull-luck, accident, or as one great French detective said, ‘le grand hasard.’ Beautiful picture, is it not?”

He pointed toward the Heads, where a Pacific Mail steamship was just putting her pilot down the side. She made a fine picture in truth, with her clean, lithe lines and her smoke blowing back like the wind-blown tresses of a girl.

We strolled along the intermittent stretches of sandy beach or clambered over the rocks and it finally struck me that Lanagan’s ferret eyes were not at all absent-minded or entirely busied with the natural beauties of the scene, but that he was examining closely every square inch of the ground we travelled; and the waters as we passed.

“Phillips is rather cagey,” he remarked. “He’ll have to be taught his place. He’s a good officer, though; and Leslie has his eye on him. We must look out for that chap. He not only has good legs, a prime requisite of a detective or a reporter, but he has a head that really works once in a while.”

He sat down finally under the shelter of a great rock and motioned me to do likewise. Then he pulled from his pocket, carefully tucked away, a V-shaped piece of paper written over with Chinese characters. The corner that made the apex of the V was crinkled.

“What do you make of it?”

“It’s a piece of a Chinese newspaper,” I replied.

“Really! You would do credit to Phillips. _Examine_ it this time.”

I tried again, but could make nothing of it.

“Look.”

He uncrumpled the slight crinkling at the apex and a tiny bit of red paper was exposed. I was ashamed of my own lack of observation; but just as puzzled as before and said so.

“I should say,” said Lanagan, “that this paper with the Chinese characters was a piece of wrapping paper; that someone tore it from a package with his finger nails and that a portion of the red wrapper of the package itself, came off in his finger nails. See?” He crumpled it up and sure enough it fitted neatly into the space under his finger nail.

“Well?” I asked, vaguely. Then I had an inspiration. The Chinese burial ground was only an eighth of a mile away. Lanagan obviously had some theory connecting Chinese with the crime, the bit of paper evidently having dropped from a Chinaman’s blouse. I told him so. He laughed immoderately but indulgently and carefully put the bit of paper away in his pocket.

“You’re a stem-winder when it comes to writing fancy leads for my police stories,” he said, still chuckling, “but I guess I’ll have to give up for keeps trying to make a detective out of you. I have shown you in perspective as it were, during the past twenty minutes, the solution of this entire crime--if my theory is not altogether wrong--and you can’t see it. Let’s get busy. Your legs can at least be of service to me.

“I want you to stick around here for a couple of hours. Tackle everybody in sight for a knowledge of Mrs. Stockslager; how long she has been out here, her past, who her family are if any, who her visitors have been; if she had any particular idiosyncrasies or hobbies. Take in all the houses within a radius of a mile--there are only four or five--and try to get some kind of a line on her. Don’t overlook the small boy. In out-of-the-way regions like this he is the pioneer of civilisation and you may tumble on to more through some roving urchin than all the grown-ups in the county. I will leave instructions at the office where to meet me later. I anticipate lively entertainment ahead.”

When we got back to the cottage the coroner’s deputies had gone, as had Phillips and Castle. Camera men were taking the house from many angles; artists were busy sketching the interior--that was the heyday of “yellow journalism”--marking the “spot” with the old familiar cross. Reporters were still cluttering around. A crowd of morbid persons, attracted out of the very sky like vultures, were already gathered.

“Suppose you’ve got it all cleared?” remarked Bradley of the _Times_ to Lanagan. He was Lanagan’s nearest approach to a rival as a police reporter.

“Clear as print can make it,” replied Lanagan as he turned for the train.

He ran for the car, leaving Bradley secretly uneasy. He had a wholesome regard for Lanagan and knew that he was of few words and not given to wasting them. I slipped the rest of the newspaper men and tramped the sandhills “covering” all the houses, “buzzing” an occasional small boy. The best I could get for two hours’ hard work--and the first “tip” came from an unwashed, sling-shooting young American--was a vague story that no one could substantiate, that Mrs. Stockslager had a worthless son who infrequently visited her for money. I hugged this information close until I could see Lanagan. It so happened he ordered me to keep it quiet for that day, giving no reasons.

I was chagrined the next morning to awaken and find that Bradley had the same piece of information and had “flashed” it on the front page for an exclusive double-leaded feature to his story.

The search then turned to the son. He could be traced to within six or seven months of the murder. I had to lumber along as best I could in handling the story without Lanagan’s assistance. The stories in all of the papers became monotonously uniform. On the third day the interest was thinning. There had not been a single new fact discovered; nor, so far as the _Enquirer_ was concerned, had there been a word from Lanagan.

“He must have something,” Sampson said to me irritably on the third day. “But take a flier through his hangouts on the chance that he might have gone off again.”

I shook my head. “That isn’t Lanagan with a story on,” I said. “He does his drinking when the story is turned in.” Nevertheless I took a quick skirmish to Connor’s, Fogarty’s and “Red” Murphy’s; looked up “Kid” Monahan and some of Lanagan’s intimates in the upper office. I could find no trace of him.

Toward evening I dropped back to the _Enquirer_ after a final round-up of the ends of the story at police headquarters, and there Lanagan sat with his heels on Sampson’s desk, with that pulseless individual shooting questions at him with the speed and precision of an automatic revolver.

“I’ve given you all I am free to give just now,” said Lanagan, shutting down on the questioning. “You’ve got a good enough scoop to hold the story for to-morrow. Let me handle the rest in my own way, will you?” He was nettled. “Don’t be so didactic. Do you think I’ve been spending the last three days with a dry nurse?” He was the only man on the _Enquirer_ who could take that tone with Sampson and hold his job.

“No. I know you’ve been on your toes hard, Jack, and I appreciate it. Only the news-call gets the best of me and this story has us all on edge,” replied Sampson.

“You’re not to go near the prison,” continued Lanagan. “I need Norton to-night. Let Martin write the story from here. Stockslager is absolutely out of it. He has been a trusty at the city prison for about six months, which clears him up. Name he goes under is ‘Swede’ Stockley. The police have known it all along but they have kept it dark for certain reasons which I am not at liberty now to state.

“Lend me that nice, new mackintosh of yours, Sampson. It’s raining like blazes and the enthusiastic Mr. Norton and myself will have a hard stand to-night. Take your raincoat, Norton. We are going out looking for ghosts around the Stockslager cottage. There’s a real ghost of the old lady out there and I’ve wanted for a long time to have a run-in with a genuine spook. She was seen on the cliff last night as the train stopped. McCluskey, the conductor, thought he heard a sort of moaning. He’s a pretty nervy chap and the moans, coming it seemed from the hut, didn’t scare him much. He walked over that way and silhouetted at the edge of the cliff he swears he saw the old lady herself. It was too much even for McCluskey and he ran back to the train.

“He and the engineer, Roberts, went back with a couple of crowbars although he didn’t say what good crowbars would do in tackling a bonafide ghost. They just got one glimpse of the thing and it disappeared and they both swear it couldn’t have had time to get any place before they reached the scene. It was a fairly clear night, during a break in the storm, and they wasted five minutes and then went back to their train.

“I was out there to-day and McCluskey told me the yarn. They’ve kept it quiet around the car barn for fear of being ridiculed. I have them pledged to secrecy. Don’t use that angle of the story to-morrow, though, as I want to do some ghost hunting before the whole town hears about it and flocks out there.

“Come on, Norrie. Got your gun?”

That ghost talk gave me all sorts of forebodings. With a black night ahead and a driving rain, ghost hunting on the scene of the murder, in an environment sufficiently forbidding on a wintry night in any event, failed to stir me to any particular height of enthusiasm.

“Fire ahead,” said Sampson, with one of his mirthless grins. But he was sitting comfortably in a steam-heated office.

It was nine o’clock when we boarded the steam cars at the old Central Avenue terminal. McCluskey was a solid-jawed, sensible, self-reliant looking chap. It puzzled me. A sober, steady man like that must have seen something very convincing before sponsoring talk of ghosts.

“Ghost hunting?” he asked.

“Yes,” replied Lanagan. “Good feature story, this ghost stuff. Keep it quiet for a day or two longer, will you?”

“Sure. I’ll be on the watch for the _Enquirer_ to see about it. Looked for it to-night, but didn’t see it.”

He slowed down for us about an eighth of a mile from the Thirty-third Avenue stop and we dropped off into a bitter rain.

That rain would have quenched the tail fires of hell.

We struggled on, heads down. There was no use in trying to talk and I knew Lanagan would take his own time about giving me any information. We suddenly pulled stiffly up against two bulky, raincoated figures. A dark lantern flashed, first in my face, then in Lanagan’s.

“Well, well!” It was Lanagan’s ready voice, pitched a trifle high on account of the beating rain. “If it isn’t Messrs. Phillips and Castle! Walking to reduce weight, I presume?”

“What are you fellows doing out here?” asked Phillips, gruffly.

“Well, Phillips, seeing that it’s you, I’ll tell you: It’s none of your business. Maybe we’re going to swim to the Farallones. Do you understand me perfectly?”

“Isn’t it? We’ll see. And I don’t know whether we want you snuffing around here or not,” replied Phillips. He was a choleric man, was Phillips, with a neck too thick even for a policeman. I thought for a moment Lanagan would have us both ordered back, but he only laughed, in that mocking, Machiavelian laugh of his that could rasp like a file on a sore tooth.

“Dear me,” he said, “your mood fits the weather, Phillips; very disagreeable. I am not concerned with your wants. I’m going to snuff to my heart’s content. Now please step off the right of way and permit us to pass. We are both citizens of this great and glorious city that overpays you most disgracefully in proportion to your attainments; and as such citizens our powers and privileges on the county domain are precisely as full and complete as yours. Phillips, you’ll never do. No policeman ever succeeds who begins by antagonising newspaper men. I’m telling you, you won’t do. Step aside, please. We want to go on and we don’t purpose to walk around you to do it.”

For a moment things looked ugly, with Phillips standing fast. Castle took him by the arm.

“Come on, Tom, you’re wrong,” he said, and the two officers stepped to one side and we passed on, with Lanagan chuckling aloud.

“Ghost hunting is becoming a regular fad,” he said finally. “And I shouldn’t be surprised to find a few more hunters scattered around. We will let Phillips and Castle pass.”

We stepped quickly to one side and sank down behind a hillock of very wet and very cold sand. Lanagan was correct. The two detectives had turned and followed us. They went on ahead, having missed us.

It was shivery. Here were four men, two trailing two others who assumed they were the trailers; and all bound for a murder house on a black night to hunt ghosts: for it was safe to assume that in some fashion Phillips and Castle had heard the ghost episode. Did we but know it at the time, we were in turn being trailed by two keen eyed, storm-coated men, each of whom kept a ready hand in his overcoat pocket.

For, as Phillips and Castle disappeared on ahead and we were just stepping back to the railroad tracks from our place of concealment, Lanagan suddenly bore back and dropped. I followed suit.

“More ghost hunters,” he whispered in my ear, pointing. Two blurred, indistinct figures passed along the right of way. It was awesome. But Lanagan gave me no time for questions. Stooping low, threshing softly through the dripping salt grass, in and out among the sand dunes, we worked our way gradually toward the cliffs along the ocean. The coat fairly well protected my body, but my shoes were soaked and I was drenched with the cold, numbing rain to my knees.

In a position I should judge about twenty yards from the point where the path from the Stockslager path led over the cliff to the rocks below, we crouched against a hummock. The ocean roared beneath us and the white froth of the breakers, tumbling on the rocks, could be faintly seen. Each time it would flash into the corner of my eye, I thought it was ghost time. I don’t believe in ghosts, of course; but, under such circumstances, one can’t help wondering a little bit. From behind us, as we lay there, once, twice, thrice, four times we heard the toot, toot of the train; and I knew that we had lain there for two mortal hours, because the train made hourly round trips.

I thought of Sampson and his snug office and his snug salary; and I compared myself, taking the chances of anything from a pistol ball to pneumonia for my thirty dollars a week. I concluded to quit the business at the end of this scrape. But I always determined to do that under such circumstances. So does every newspaper man; and they always show up for work the next day. Were we not at least potential paranoiacs we wouldn’t be newspaper men. Certainly otherwise we wouldn’t do the things we do for the pay we get. Regarding newspaper photographers, there is no question. They are all crazy; except one.

We had drunk the last drop from the healthy flask apiece we had brought and I was settling back in soggy misery for more suffering, my eyes so blurred with watching and staring that I could see slinking forms in fancy every place I turned, when Lanagan’s lean hand clutched my leg. He had taken a position lower and nearer the path than I and could get a dim perspective of the edge of the cliff just where the path descended.

I peered ahead. Faintly I could see a single figure, outlined in blurred relief and then it disappeared, apparently into thin air. Whether it was man or woman I could not have told. That it disappeared before my eyes I knew.

It gave one a creepy feeling. I was about to speak to Lanagan but his warning pressure was still on my calf. Probably thirty minutes passed, or it may have been only three. Another figure came into view; and then another, and disappeared.

Then I realised that the first figure had simply slipped down the path and out of sight. I wondered if something of the sort hadn’t happened when McCluskey was ghost hunting.

Still Lanagan held that vice-like clutch on me. Another prolonged interval. Two more figures bulked into view and disappeared. Many more minutes passed and Lanagan said no word. The wind during the hours had died away, but the rain continued, pelting now straight down. Lanagan’s hand finally loosened itself from my leg. He pointed over the ocean toward the intermittent flashes of the lighthouse at Land’s End. Between the Land’s End and Fort Point lights could be seen--the lights of a vessel.

“She’s a day overdue on account of the storm,” Lanagan shot up at me. “She’s heading through the Golden Gate now. We’ll have some fun shortly, I reckon.”

He straightened up and stretched himself and I did likewise, threshing my arms to start the blood into circulation. I was cold, cramped and grouchy.

“Jack,” I said impatiently, “cut out this mystery stuff and give me the facts. You’ve got me neck and neck with pneumonia now. Kick through with this story, whatever it is, or I’m going to tear down that cliff after those fellows and start something if only to keep warm.”

Of course he only laughed. The man must have been made of chilled steel.

“Easy, Norrie. Think of the ten cents’ carfare you can charge up on this assignment. That ought to be some compensation, that and the glory of the thing, even if you do get sciatica or lumbago or some other old woman’s complaint. Norrie, sometimes you make me weary. Here I’m staging one of the finest climaxes you have ever participated in. I have adopted a true Shakespearean method of suiting the natural surroundings to the action. It’s rather an epic situation, in my opinion.

“Now that liner--it was the Mail boat _Hongkong_--has finally passed inside the gate. Any minute something may happen, and I pick you out of the entire staff to be here when it does happen; here in an elemental atmosphere where human lives may be snuffed out as we snuffed out the contents of those flasks, and still you’re not satisfied. It’s a big, vital, gripping situation. Where’s your imagination?”

“Oh, hell. You’re drunk. Let’s chase down after those men. Let’s do something to start things, whatever they may be. I’m cold.”

Lanagan was genuinely put out with me. Later I knew why. He had been hanging around those bleak cliffs for two nights and skulking in the sand dunes for two days watching the Stockslager hut. No wonder I was a “quitter” by comparison. He whirled on me and I saw his eyes flashing with that curious light that I had seen in them on rare occasions when he was thoroughly aroused.

“You either quit whining or beat it back to town.”

If he had struck me in the face it couldn’t have affected me differently, such was the magnetism of that remarkable man.

“I beg your pardon, Jack. I didn’t mean to rough you,” I said, and he was his natural self in a moment, too.

“All right. Forget it. Let’s take a peek over the cliff.” We crawled to the edge of the path. Lanagan was ahead. He was on his feet with a leap the instant he struck the ledge, and I up beside him.

“_Ha!_” he shouted. “_They’re at it! Now we’ll see! Now we’ll see! Le grand hasard!_”

Far down below I saw a half a dozen flares in the darkness; smattered, smeared flares of yellowish light and then all was blackness again. There came no report from weapons, the roaring of the surf drowning that. More by instinct than anything else to be on the scene of action, I made a quick step toward the path. Lanagan’s hand was on my arm.

“Wait,” he said, curtly. “This is no funeral of ours. Wait.”

He knelt down, arching his hands around his eyes and peering long and intently.

“Revenue officers,” he said. “We can’t monkey with them. Haven’t got them on my staff like Leslie and his men. They’ll be up.”

Revenue officers! A light began to dawn upon me.

The toot, toot of the engine came.

“Beat it, Norrie! Hold that train,” ordered Lanagan. “There may be some wounded here to rush to town. Quick!”

I was already off on the run past the Stockslager hut to the little platform where the train stopped. It was some distance away around the curve. As I stood there, with the rain pattering a monotonous tattoo on the planking, there came a sudden groan, a drawn-out, rasping groan, and I whirled toward the house; my body one quiver of gooseflesh. It came again, from up toward the roof; and as it came there was a breathing of light wind across my face. I laughed aloud; but nervously. Another light puff of wind, another long-drawn groan--loose shingles, or a loose piece of clapboarding, giving, evidently, just the slightest against a nail. The other end of the ghost mystery was cleared.

The train pulled in. I told McCluskey there had been a shooting, and to hold the train.

“Can’t back her in. We’ll run out to the first switch!” he cried, as he jumped into the cab with the engineer.

I ran back to find four men bearing a form between them. Lanagan was alongside the leader of the four, talking swiftly. They kicked in the door of the hut and made a light. On the floor, littered just as it had been littered the Sunday morning of the murder discovery, they placed the figure they bore, a stalwart figure of a man. A leg and an arm, I could see, were useless. They felt of his arm and leg and he never winced, staring straight at the ceiling. They ripped away his oilskin coat, his over-shirt and undershirt. He had a bullet just over the heart, a deep wound and one that bled inwardly, for no blood oozed out.

Two of the four men had deposited on the floor bulky bundles wrapped in rubber, around which double pairs of life preservers were strapped.

He who seemed to be the leader of the four (“Marshall, chief revenue inspector,” Lanagan whispered to me), took the man’s pulse after the examination was ended. No one had spoken. In the faces of all, as far as I could detect in the murky light of the smoky chimney of an oil lamp, was a set, grim look; not the look that officers usually wear when there has been a killing or a successful capture in a crime.

Marshall straightened up. He said, solemnly:

“Billy, I think you are going. What have you got to say? Any message?”

“No, Jim,” said the man on the floor, weakly. “You got me right. I went into the thing with my eyes open. Only don’t ask me to squeal on the others. I got what I deserved, I guess. I’ve brought shame to the service and I’m ready to pass. Thank God, thank God,” he burst out with sudden choking, “the wife is not here--passed out last year, you know; and there never were any kiddies. No one to suffer but you boys that I’ve disgraced.”

A tear rolled from his eyes to the floor.

“Can I say a word to him, Marshall?” It was Lanagan who spoke. The other men had bowed their heads. On one or two faces I could see a tear, for all the wetness that the rain had left there.

“Enright,” said Lanagan, kneeling down beside the stricken man, “you know you are passing. Make a clean breast. _Who killed Mrs. Stockslager?_”

His eyes closed and he seemed to shrink as though trying to hug the floor he was lying upon. “Whisky!” came Lanagan’s sharp whisper. Unconsciously he was taking command of the situation, asserting his natural leadership as he always did in tense moments. Marshall passed him a pocket flask and he forced a sip to Enright’s lips, holding his head up with his left arm. The eyes opened.

“_I did._”

“Oh, God, Billy! No, no! Not that, not that!” It was Marshall. He broke down and sobbed like a boy. Twenty-five years he had been in the federal blue with Billy Enright, one in the revenue, the other in the customs service.

“Yes--_I did!_ Jim, get me a priest! Don’t let me die like this! For old time’s sake, Jim!”

The train was whistling on its return.

“We’re taking you right in,” said Lanagan, soothingly. “We’ll have a priest for you. Why did you kill her?”

Enright motioned for the flask with his free arm. Lanagan gave him a long pull. For a time at least his voice was stronger.

“She was threatening to tip off the gang. She used to work with us. She was well paid. She didn’t know I was in the service. She found it out some way. I came out one day to talk over with her about her threats. I’d been drinking, worrying over fear of exposure. She wouldn’t listen to reason. She was a wolf. She goaded me crazy, I guess. She taunted me about being a traitor to the country I served. Well, I lost my head. I grabbed the butcher knife and killed her. So help me God as I am about to die, that’s the truth.”

The eyes closed for a space, and then he continued:

“I stuck a few things in my pockets to make it look like robbery. Then I started to cut up the body to pack it in a sack and bury it or drop it off the cliff. I weakened and dropped it outside the door and ran. It was dark but I ran for miles around over the sandhills and it seemed she was always right after me. It was awful.

“I got my wits back later. I saw the police and the papers were after the son. I felt easier. There was a big shipment coming in on the _Hongkong_--$40,000 all told. No one would come out here and take a chance landing it. Afraid the police were watching the house. I volunteered. I figured if any one saw me nosing around I could give them the inspector talk. I hung around last night but the ship was held away out on account of the storm. I had to come out--again--to-night--that’s all, boys--”

The door flung open and through it came Phillips and Castle. McCluskey and Roberts followed. The train had stopped unnoticed, so tense was the interest within the hut in the dying man’s recital.

“Quick, take him up,” said Lanagan. They stooped to lift him.

“Here, what’s all this?” It was Phillips.

“Stand aside!” came Marshall’s blunt command. It was obeyed. Enright’s eyes had closed. He was made as comfortable as possible with cushions on the train, as that ancient rattle-trap strained and tugged to make the greatest speed of its history. Enright’s eyes did not open on the trip in.

They never opened again.

* * * * *

Lanagan filled in for me the details of the story. The bit of red paper, crinkled inside the paper with the Chinese characters, meant but one thing: opium. Here was where his wide acquaintance with the underworld and Chinatown, the customs service and the water front, aided him.

Puzzling over the presence of an opium wrapping in that isolated hut Lanagan had seated himself upon the salt grass hummock to smoke. Into his field of vision steamed the Pacific Mail liner--and his “hunch” came with it. His examination of the shore followed to locate a cove that would give a safe place to float the opium to land from a launch or white hall boat by day or night. Such a cove he had found, where the waters for a sixteenth of a mile deposited their driftwood. His theory was complete. The hut was a smuggler’s runway; the woman was in the ring and for a breach of faith had been slain, an attempt being made to have it appear she was slain by robbers.

* * * * *

That Marshall and his men had been preparing to close in on the gang that made the cabin their rendezvous Lanagan did not know until the night before.

“Then I found the whole map out here sprinkled with them. Recognised Marshall, who nearly tumbled over me; but he probably figured I was one of his men, and said nothing.

“It was funny. McCluskey and Roberts chasing ghosts with myself and four revenue officers as the audience. I nearly laughed when McCluskey told me the story this morning. They didn’t come within fifteen yards of the edge of the cliff, either, although they said they did.

“The weather man told me to-day the storm would blow over by evening and I figured the _Hongkong_ would be making port and the ring would attempt to land their stuff; every liner has been bringing it in. I came out last night on the chance she might try to make port.

“No one suspected Enright.”

It was a quarter to one o’clock when the train pulled into the depot. Marshall turned the body over to Phillips and Castle with a terse resume of the facts and then took his men and his bundles of opium and disappeared. They laid Enright out on a bench to await the coroner’s deputies.

Phillips came over to us.

“I guess I acted kind of stiff,” he said, in awkward apology. “But I want to hand it to you. You scored on us strong.”

Lanagan put out his hand. The detective took it.

“You’ll never make any mistake treating newspaper men right, Phillips. Just do this much for us now, will you? Hold off thirty minutes before you telephone the morgue. That will keep the story exclusively for the _Enquirer_.”

“I’ll do it,” said Phillips.

And he did; which may seem to the layman a little thing, but to the newspaper man a detail of vast importance; because it enabled Lanagan, sending the story to the office by telephone, to score once again in sensational manner over his contemporaries, the _Times_ and the _Herald_.

TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES:

Text in italics is surrounded by underscores: _italics_.

Obvious typographical errors have been corrected.

Inconsistencies in hyphenation have been standardized.

Archaic spelling that may have been in use at the time of publication
has been retained.

Incorrect page reference in the Table of Contents has been corrected.