"Don't look like the writing of the same person, do they?" countered Quinn. "Besides, that was one of the many phases of the matter which puzzled Elmer Allison, and raised the case above the dead level of ordinary blackmailing schemes."
Allison [Quinn went on, settling comfortably back in his big armchair] was, as you probably remember, one of the star men of the Postal Inspection Service, the chap who solved the mystery of the lost one hundred thousand dollars in Columbus. In fact, he had barely cleared up the tangle connected with the letters when assigned to look into the affair of the missing money, with what results you already know.
The poison-pen puzzle, as it came to be known in the department, first bobbed up some six months before Allison tackled it. At least, that was when it came to the attention of the Postal Inspection Service. It's more than likely that the letters had been arriving for some time previous to that, because one of the beauties of any blackmailing scheme—such as this one appeared to be—is that 90 per cent of the victims fear to bring the matter to the attention of the law. They much prefer to suffer in silence, kicking in with the amounts demanded, than to risk the exposure of their family skeletons by appealing to the proper authorities.
A man by the name of Tyson, who lived in Madison, Wisconsin, was the first to complain. He informed the postmaster in his city that his wife had received two letters, apparently in a feminine handwriting, which he considered to be very thinly veiled attempts at blackmailing.
Neither of the letters was long. Just a sentence or two. But their ingenuity lay in what they suggested rather than in their actual threats.
Does your husband know the details of that trip to Fond du Lac? He might be interested in what Hastings has to tell him.
The second, which arrived some ten days later, announced:
The photograph of the register of a certain hotel in Fond du Lac for June 8 might be of interest to your husband—who can tell?