THE MYSTERY OF THE HAMMAM
With the enthusiasm of an amateur detective, Admeh Drake paid his dollar for admission, and passed through two anterooms into an artificially tropical atmosphere. Turkish baths were a luxury outside the scheme of things; he knew nothing of the arrangements. He paused, uncertain how to proceed; uncertain, too, as to the best plan for catching the yellow-bearded man stripped. While he hesitated, an attendant showed him into a dressing-room. He saw naked men passing with towels twisted about their loins.
For the first time in many days, he took off his wrinkled, creased clothes. Pausing on the balcony without the door, he surveyed the carpeted, gaudily decorated apartment below. It was midnight, the busiest hour of the twenty-four in the baths. Heavier than the atmosphere of steam and steamed humanity rose the fumes of liquor. Few there are sober in a Hammam at that elbow of the night. Not knowing that the sweating heat takes the edge and fervor from the wildest intoxication, Admeh wondered, as he watched, at the subdued murmur of their babblings. His eye ranged over a group sitting up in towel robes, chatting drowsily, over a drunken satyr thrusting his heavy limbs from under the covers and singing a sleepy tune, over two others sunk in stupor. Beyond them was a group of jockeys, who had come to reduce weight; all were young, small, keen-eyed, each was puffing a huge cigar. In that bower of transformation, where all men stood equal as at the judgment, their worldly goods shrunk to a single bath towel, he found it hard to pick his man, yet no one could he see with the clay-yellow hair and beard that marked the mysterious person for whom he was searching.
Following others who slipped down the stairs in the single, levelling garment, Admeh went across the main salon, through a double glass door, and into an ante-chamber considerably hotter, where men were lolling back, wet and shiny, in canvas chairs. He saw the rubbers working in the room beyond, saw that the men under their hands were black and brown of hair and beard.
To the right, another glass door caught his eye. He passed in and gasped at the heavy, overpowering temperature. His glasses, to which he had clung with the instinct of a near-sighted man, burned on his nose. Men, glistening and dripping, sat all along the wall, their feet in little tubs of water.
In the corner sat the mysterious stranger of the yellow hair and beard. He was singing sentimentally. Admeh, practised in the lore of intoxication, watched him. “The jag’s growing,” he said to himself. In fact, the fumes of liquor, heat driven, were mounting steadily. Crossing the room, so as to command the stranger’s right side, he saw round his upper arm a black rubber bandage, like those used to confine varicose veins. The problem resolved itself into a question of tearing off that bandage.
“Hotter’n the hazes of the Philippines!” babbled the man with the yellow beard. Piecing together the description of her husband given by Maxie in the story of her adventures, Admeh was more than ever persuaded that this was the object of his search, that under the elastic bandage was the mark of identification by which he was to know the legatee of the fortune left by the old bell-ringer.
The man of the yellow beard sang maudlin Orpheum songs and prattled of many things. He cursed San Francisco. He told of his amours. He offered to fight or wrestle with anyone in the room. “A chance,” thought Admeh, as he took the challenge. But in a moment more, the drunken man was running again on a love-tack, with the winds of imagination blowing free. Nevertheless, this challenge gave Admeh an idea. What he could not encompass by diplomacy he might seize by force. In that method, all must depend upon the issue of a moment. If he could tear away the bandage in the first dash he would win. But let the struggle last more than a moment and others would intervene; then he would be thrown out and the chance would be gone. Mentally he measured bodies against the stranger; man for man he saw that, both being sober, he himself was badly over-matched. Broader and taller by many inches, the stranger was of thick, knotty limbs, and deep chest; Admeh himself was all cowboy nerve and wire, but slight and out of condition. It was bull against coyote.
“The question is,” thought Admeh, “can I and his jag lick him and his muscle?”
The stranger, singing again, lurched along the hot tiling to another room. Admeh gasped like a hooked trout as he followed through the door. It was the extra-hot room, where the mercury registered one hundred and sixty degrees. The stranger’s bristles began to subside and his lips crept together. The amateur detective drew nearer and, languid as he was with the terrific heat, gathered his force for the attempt. At that moment an attendant with trays of ice water slouched in on his felt shoes. Admeh slipped back into his chair.
This entrance had a most surprising effect on him of the yellow beard. Some emotion, which Admeh took to be either fear or anxiety, struggled to break through the veil of his debauch; he stared with bleary but intent eyes. In a moment he was lurching for the door. Glad of the relief from that overwhelming heat, Admeh followed. The trail led through the anteroom, past the rubbers and their benches, through another double glass door. A rush of steam fogged his spectacles; when it cleared a little, he saw dimly, through the hot vapor, that he was in a long, narrow closet, banked on one side by benches and by pipes which were vomiting clouds of steam. Groping from one side to the other, he found that they were quite alone.
With no further hesitation, Admeh rushed on his man and grasped for the right arm.
By the fraction of an inch he missed his hold. The stranger, with a quickness amazing for one in his condition—and what was more surprising, without a word—lashed out and caught Admeh a blow under the chest which whirled him back on the hot benches and fairly jerked his spectacles from his nose. The issue was on, and it was first honors for the stranger. Unsteady on his legs, but still determined, Admeh closed again, ducked under a ponderous blow and grappled round the waist. He managed to get one hand on the bandage, but in no wise could he tear it away, for the stranger held him in a bear-grip, tight about the neck. So they struggled and grunted and swayed through the misty clouds from the hot benches to the slippery floor and back to the benches again. Their bodies, what with the exertion and the steam, ran rivulets; their throats were gasping. Once, twice, they staggered the room’s length. Admeh was beginning to feel his breath and his senses going together, when the grasp about his neck slackened in tension.
“I and the jag win,” he thought, with what sense was left in him. He gathered his strength into its last cartridge, and gave a heave and a fling; they went down to the floor with a wet slap, Admeh above. He felt his opponent collapse under him. For a moment he, too, saw the universe swing round him, but with a great effort he tore away the bandage and pressed his near-sighted eyes close to the right arm.
There, in faded colours, was a tattooed design on the white skin. Admeh made out the word “Dotty,” framed in a border of twisted snakes. His quest was done. Faint, weary, languid, he prepared to get away before his assault was discovered. The door opened; some one caught Admeh by the arm. With no more fight in him, he raised himself to one knee and recognised the attendant, the sight of whom had before so nearly sobered his drunken opponent.
“What the devil——” said the new-comer, and stopped as his eye caught that mark on the arm. Then he bent down, passed his finger over the design, studied it, and peered into the white, senseless face behind the yellow beard.
“My work—it is the very man!” he exclaimed, in tones of the greatest interest. Turning to Admeh he asked:
“Now why did you want to know about that mark, and what were you scrapping for?”
“What do you know about him?” retorted Admeh.
“Story for story,” said the attendant.
“Story for story, swapped sight unseen,” agreed Admeh. “But let’s get him out of here first, because he’s in a pretty bad fix between his fight and his jag.” Together they carried him to a dressing-room, laid him on a bench, and closed the curtain. Here Admeh’s last spark of strength left him; he collapsed in a heap on the floor. With practised hands the attendant set about reviving them both. In ten minutes the man of mystery slept heavily, stupidly, on the bench, and Admeh was sitting against the wall breathing cool relief from the outer air. Briefly, he told of his singular errand, omitting, from some hazy idea of policy, the item about the legacy.
“Well,” said the rubber, after Admeh Drake had finished his tale, “your yarn certainly is curious, but I can beat it. What d’you think of this?—I tattooed that name and mark on this fellow’s arm, and I know the history of it, but he has no idea to this day how it ever come there, nor who ’Dotty’ is, nor why I did it, nor anything at all about it. He was the hero of as queer a yarn as I ever heard, and he knew no more about it all the time than a babe unborn!”
He rang an electric bell; a boy answered.
“Tell the boss to send for the extra man,” he said. “I’m done up for to-night, and I’m going to lay off for a while.”
So saying, he took Drake into an adjoining room, shared by the employees of the baths, and, after making himself comfortable on a lounge with a blanket wrapper, he told the following joyous romance: