They led the great E. H. Merriwether to the cellar. There he saw that the furnace coal had been taken out of its bin and put in the adjoining compartment. The plank floor had been taken up, and what looked like a short trench—or a grave—had been dug. Outside stood a pile of crushed stone, some bags of cement, some bundles of steel rods, a section of five-inch iron soilpipe with a mushroom-head trap at one end, and concrete-workers' tools.
“After we make absolutely sure that you are dead we throw a lot of soft mortar into the grave, deposit the corpse, and then pour in more cement—so that you will be completely surrounded by it. It will make it very difficult indeed to recognize you when they try to chip away the hard cement—if they ever try! Then we fill the grave up to the top with concrete, using plenty of steel rods—not to re-enforce the concrete at all, but to make it very hard digging with a pick.
“We also stick the soilpipe into the—er—cavity in order to account for the disturbed pavement. Intelligent searchers—your son and his detectives—will assume it is plumbing—and seek no further. We replace the plank flooring in the bin and fill it up with coal, thereby further obliterating all traces of your grave.
“We have provided for that part, you see. Why, my dear Mr. Merriwether, what we really do to you is confer immortality on you. We elevate you to the rank of one of the mysteries. Charlie Ross and E. H. Merriwether! Just assume that we'll do what I say. Very well! Now, visualize the search made for you. Endow your people with superhuman ingenuity. Useless!”
The man waved a hand toward Mr. Merriwether; but Mr. Merriwether said:
“You assume that the search will be exclusively for me—but they will also search for you!”
“My dear sir, that is unkind of you!” The man spoke reproachfully. “We know that when we go into the plunder-recovery business we must guard against the chief contributory cause of the vast majority of all business' failures, according to the statistics of Dun and Bradstreet—to wit, insufficient capital. Murderers are caught when their faces and habits and families are known. Usually their lack of means forces them to betray themselves. But nobody knows how the men who will kill E. H. Merriwether look, simply because we have enough money to go anywhere. We will become tourists—like thousands of others. Some of us will stay in New York; others will go on round-the-world tours. See this?”
The man pulled from his pocket some packages of well-worn bills, with the bank-wrappers round them, though a finger hid the bank name. Also the man showed to Mr. Merriwether several books of travelers' checks of the fifty-dollar denomination—the specimen signature also being covered by the man's finger.
“Enough for all,” said the man. “Kindly oblige me by thinking of what you would do in my place; and, in all frankness, acknowledge that nothing would be easier than to get away. Ordinary crime is so largely accidental that the average criminal is at the mercy of even the unintelligent police. Professionals do the same thing over and over and acquire telltale mannerisms. Also, they lack culture, and find the class attraction too strong to resist—besides always being hard up and therefore defenseless. Whenever you find a crook who is thrifty, you will find him always out of jail—like any other business man of equal thrift. We have gone about this case systematically. We wanted your million—but, more, we wanted the sport of taking it from a man who had no moral right to the particular million we desired. If you had been a really conscienceless financier we'd have made it five millions; in fact, it is because we are not sure that even this million is tainted that we ask you to pay it to us for giving you a fine daughter-in-law. Shall we go up-stairs?”
The master of the house led the way up-stairs and Mr. E. H. Merriwether, escorted by the stalwart footmen with the intelligent faces, followed, his own intelligent face impassive. That he was thinking meant only that he was doing what he always did.