Lanagan, Amateur Detective

by Edward H. Hurlbut

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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