LANAGAN

“TWO MORE SHOTS TORE THROUGH AND SPRAYED US WITH SPLINTERS”

LANAGAN

AMATEUR DETECTIVE

BY

EDWARD H. HURLBUT

WITH ILLUSTRATIONS BY
FREDERIC DORR STEELE

New York
STURGIS & WALTON
COMPANY
1913

Copyright, 1913, by
STURGIS & WALTON COMPANY
Set up and electrotyped. Published March, 1913

CONTENTS

ILLUSTRATIONS

FROM DRAWINGS BY
FREDERICK DORR STEELE

LANAGAN

AMATEUR DETECTIVE

I
WHITHER THOU GOEST

I
WHITHER THOU GOEST

JACK LANAGAN of the San Francisco Enquirer was conceded to have “arrived” as the premier police reporter of San Francisco. This honour was his not solely through a series of brilliant newspaper feats in his especial field, but as well by reason of an entente that permitted him to call half the patrolmen on the force by their given names; enjoy the confidences of detective sergeants, a close-mouthed brotherhood; dine tête-à-tête in private at French restaurants with well-groomed police captains on canvasback or quail out of season, and sit nonchalantly on a corner of the chief’s desk and absent-mindedly smoke up the chief’s two-bit cigars.

It was an intimacy that carried much of the lore of the force with it: that vital knowledge not of books. Bill Dougherty on the “pawnbroker detail” knew scarcely more “fences” than did Lanagan; Charley Hartley, who handled the bunco detail, found himself nettled now and then when Lanagan would pick him up casually at the ferry building and point out some “worker” among the incoming rustics whom Hartley had not “made,” and debonair Harry O’Brien, who spent his time among the banks, was more than once rudely jarred when Lanagan would slip over on the front page of the Enquirer a defalcation that had been engaging O’Brien’s attention for a week.

So it went with Lanagan; from the “bell hops” of big hotels, the bar boys of clubs, down to the coldest-blooded unpenned felon of the Barbary Coast who sold impossible whiskey with one hand and wielded a blackjack with the other, the police sources were his.

Consequently Lanagan, having “arrived,” may be accorded a few more liberties than the average reporter and permitted to spend a little more time than they in poker in the back room at Fogarty’s, hard by the Hall of Justice. Here, when times were dull, he could drift occasionally to fraternise with a “shyster,” those buzzards of the police courts and the city prisons who served Fogarty; or with one of the police court prosecuting attorneys affiliated with the Fogarty political machine, for Fogarty was popularly credited with having at least two and possibly three of the police judges in his vest pocket. Or he could rattle the dice with a police judge himself and get the “inside” on a closed-door hearing or the latest complaint on the secret file; and he could keep in touch with the “plain-clothes” men who dropped in to pass the time of day with Fogarty; or with the patrolmen coming on and off watch, who reported to Fogarty as regularly as they donned and doffed their belts and helmets things they thought Fogarty should know.

In this fashion does the police reporter best serve his paper; for it is by such unholy contact that he keeps in touch with the circles within circles of the police department of a great city. Some he handles by fear, some he wins by favour, some he wheedles. In the end, if he be a brother post-graduate, the grist of the headquarters’ mill is his.

Of the shysters there is Horace Lathrop, for instance, who boasts a Harvard degree when he is drunk—never when he is sober.

Horace is sitting with Lanagan at Fogarty’s rear room table, while Lanagan sips moodily at his drink.

Larry the Rat, runner for the shysters, pasty of face, flat of forehead as of chin, with an upper lip whose malformation suggests unpleasantly the rodent whose name he bears, shuffles in and bespeaks Lathrop at length. That worthy straightens up, glances at Lanagan, and then remarks:

“Casey has just brought in a moll,” and arises, with elaborate unconcern, to leave the room.

“Well,” drawled Lanagan, “what else?”

“Nothing. That’s all I know. Going to try to get the case now, whatever it is.”

“Is that all you told him, Larry?” asked Lanagan. The Rat mumbled unintelligibly and shuffled away.

“The Rat’s answered after his breed,” said Lanagan. “He says no, it is not. Now, Horace—pardon me, Barrister Lathrop—kick through. You know I’ve got to deliver a story to my paper to-day. Come on.”

Lanagan never wasted words with Lathrop. There were a few trivialities that he “had” on that individual. But Lathrop balked.

“Look here, Lanagan, all I got’s her name and address. It isn’t square. She may have a roll as long as your arm. You print this story, the newspaper men go at her for interviews, tip her off about me, she gets a regular lawyer, and where do I come off? You fellows are always crabbing our game. I gave you that shoplifter story a week ago and you played it for a column. You know you did, Jack; now you know you did.”

Lathrop had been whining. Now he stiffened.

“I ain’t going to,” defiantly; “I’m tired o’ being bullied by you. Aw, say now, Jack, it’s a big case. And I got a wife and kids to look out for”—which was a fact—“and here you come taking the bread and butter out of their mouths. It ain’t square, Jack; you know it ain’t.”

All morals to all men, reflected Lanagan, and laughed lazily, pulling a copy of the Enquirer across the table.

“See her, Horace? Right on this page—page one, column two, right here, with your name in big black-face letters—a little story of about one-third of a column on that $750 touch-off on that Oroville deacon, who went astray for the first time of his life and was pinched as a drunk—to be fleeced by you and your precious band. There isn’t any way of getting his money back, or proving a case against you or the two cops who cut the roll with you and Fogarty. I didn’t print the story, but I’ve got the facts pretty straight; and it goes right here—right in this nice, conspicuous place for the grand jury to see and for that wife and those ‘kids’ to see also, who, singular as it may sound, actually don’t know what particular brand of a ‘lawyer’ you are. Get all that?”

Lathrop “got” it.

Lanagan was then told that the detinue cells held a young woman of remarkable beauty, Miss Grace Turner, taken from a family rooming house on O’Farrell Street. Also that through Lathrop word of her arrest was to be taken to her brother there. Lathrop—or Larry the Rat, both being cogs in the same machine—had come by the information by the underground wire that runs from every city prison to the bail-bond operators and their shysters without.

Fogarty was the bail-bond chief, and possibly one of the plain-clothes men who just now rested his elbow upon the bar may have passed that name and address to Larry the Rat.

The “detinue” cases are those on the secret book at headquarters, that stable police violation of Magna Charta; the detinue cases, therefore, become the focus of the police reporter’s activity.

“And incidentally, Horace, you stay away from 1153A O’Farrell Street until I get through,” was Lanagan’s final command.

“But what about Fogarty?” whined the shyster. “He must know by this time I got the case. You know what he could do to me if he wanted to, Jack.”

“Yes, and I know what I could do to him if I wanted to, and he knows it, too,” snapped Lanagan. “Leave him to me.”

“I’m a friend of Miss Turner’s,” he said as the landlady opened the door at 1153A O’Farrell. “I wish to speak with her brother.”

“He’ll be glad to see you. He has been worrying. You ain’t another one of them detectives? I didn’t tell him, though. He was asleep and the doctor said he shouldn’t be worried just now. It might be fatal. What did they do with the poor, dear girl?”

“Merely holding her for a few hours. What was the trouble?”

“Giving a bad check to the druggist for medicine. She did the same thing at the grocer’s. It’s a dirty trick, I say, to arrest the poor thing. Why, the grocer’s bill was only a few dollars. They don’t eat enough to keep my canary. The man eats mostly almonds. Something wrong with his stomach, and that seems to be all he can eat. Funny, ain’t it?”

The garrulous woman led Lanagan to a doorway in the rear. He knocked and, in response to a feeble voice, entered.

Propped up with two pillows was a young man whose wasted features were bright with a hectic flush; whose arms, hanging loosely from his gown, were shrunk to the bone and sinews. The eyes were grey, steady, and assured; so much so that Lanagan half halted on the threshold as he felt the response in his own sensitive brain to the personality that flashed to him through those eyes. A man of mental power, thought Lanagan; of swift decision and of iron will.

The voice was little more than a gasp, but each word by effort was clearly uttered.

“You’re an upper office man?”

“No. I am a newspaper man. Why did you ask that?”

“Because they were here and took my sister for overdrawing what little funds we had in bank.”

There was concentrated fury in his weak voice.

“Still I am curious to know how you knew they were plain-clothes men that took her?”

“How? A newspaper man ask how? Because they walk like a ton of pig lead. And didn’t that cursed grocer threaten to have her arrested for a paltry four or five dollars? I heard her scream when they took her. This”—more quietly, with a slight shrug and comprehensive gesture to indicate his wasted form and flushed cheeks—“this particular complaint serves to strengthen our outer faculties for a while at least, even if it is at the expense of our inner ones.”

“I take it your sister is bringing you from the interior to the South?”

“Yes. We came from South Dakota. We were robbed of our tickets on our first night here. She has been trying to get something to do to save enough money to get as far as Los Angeles. It came on me suddenly, alcohol helping. Sis stuck when they turned me out. On general principles, I don’t blame father. I gambled a mortgage on to the old ranch and twenty years on to his head. Anyhow, here we are, Sis and me. That’s what you fellows on the papers call a human-interest story, isn’t it?”

There was something about the measured and sinister tone that told of the bitterness of a baffled strong man, in the face of a situation that he was powerless to avoid. Lanagan wondered what that man would have done—or tried to do—to him if he were in full possession of his strength. He judged from those level grey eyes that the session would not be uninteresting.

“Yes, it might be a human-interest story,” said Lanagan, “and then again—it might be better than a human-interest story.”

He was looking at the tip of his cigar, flicking the ashes from it as he said it; but he caught the swift, suddenly veiled flash that the keen eyes shot to his face. To all appearances, though, Lanagan did not see that glance. He had not liked the ready talk about upper office men; and he would take oath that in the wasted features, round the ears and the neck, were the tell-tale traces of that prison pallor that requires many a long day to wear away.

“For instance,” Lanagan continued, still flicking at his cigar tip, “if you were being kept under cover here?”

It was only a swift, partial intake of breath, but Lanagan caught it, and then the man spoke so easily and smoothly that the newspaper man believed himself deceived.

“Well, I am. That’s a bet. But just until Sis can get me away; that’s also a bet.”

Then there followed details, the man on the pillows supplying with facility a pedigree that went back to the Mayflower. Lanagan had been fishing; yet as he left the room he was uneasy and far from being satisfied. As the story stood it was a neat little “human-interest” story—as Harry Turner had said—and worth a column and a half. He had comforted Turner to the extent of informing him that the shysters had his sister’s case and would probably have her out before night. He drifted moodily back to police headquarters. There Lathrop met him.

“Nothing stirring,” he said, disgustedly. “They’ve turned her loose. Grocer wouldn’t prosecute. She’s got a sick brother. Don’t think she was a live one, anyway.”

Lanagan ground one palm into the other. Three-quarters of the story was gone with the woman free and his “hunch” was afloat without an anchor. He drifted into Chief Leslie’s office and helped himself to a cigar.

“Chief, what did you have on that Turner girl?”

Leslie was past being surprised at anything Lanagan knew. He stopped studying a police circular long enough to look up. “Couple of little checks, but the complaining witness withdrew. I wouldn’t write her up if I were you. She’s one case entitled to sympathy. I talked to her. Thoroughbred, that girl; consumptive brother; taking him South. So I turned her loose.”

Leslie fell to studying his circular again and Lanagan drew up a chair to look over the circular also, a little privilege he alone enjoyed of the newspaper men at headquarters. Then he whistled softly; Lanagan was past being surprised at anything—almost. That whistle was about his most demonstrative exhibition.

The circular was from Denver and offered $5,000 reward for information leading to the “arrest and conviction” of Harry Short, wanted for highway robbery and murder. The details of a Denver crime that a brief time before had shocked the country were given and the customary police description, with the front and profile pictures from the rogues’ gallery.

“Would probably be found with a woman,” the circular read, “posing as his wife or sister.” There followed a description of the woman, Cecile Andrews, and her history. She was the daughter of a country minister who became enamored of Short when he did odd jobs about her father’s place. She had refused to give him up when he was charged with triple murder. In some way, it was believed, she had managed to join him in hiding, for she had disappeared as completely as he.

Leslie finally became annoyed at Flanagan’s prolonged whistle.

“Good heavens, Jack,” he said irascibly, “I’m trying to get these descriptions in my head. Take that whistle outside.”

“All right; but say, chief—” The tone was tense, drawn taut like a fiddle string. Leslie wheeled. Lanagan’s eyes were lighting up with that curious brightness that flamed there when the strange brain of the man was at work, when there was action promised, when the tortuous mazes of some enigma were unfolding to that inner sight.

“Say, chief,” he went on, “I wonder if I could make a trip, say to Paris, on about one-half of that reward? I’ve always had a curiosity to study that Paris police system. I don’t approve of newspaper men taking blood money. It isn’t in our game. But it might be proper to take about one-half of that money in a case like this for a trip like that. What do you think?”

Leslie’s eyes were searching Lanagan’s. He knew of old that Lanagan was not a quibbler and that he never wasted words.

“You’ve got something, Jack. What is it?”

“Him,” said Lanagan inelegantly, tapping the face upon the circular.

Leslie jumped straight up out of his chair. The police reporter lit a fresh cigar from Leslie’s top desk drawer, where the good ones were.

“It’s this way, chief; but the story’s mine, mine absolutely.”

“You’ve brought me the tip, the story’s yours. That’s the way I play the game,” said Leslie.

“This woman was the girl you arrested. Her brother’s out in a rooming house on O’Farrell Street, laid up with consumption—galloping, too, it appears to me.”

Leslie was an explosive man, and after a swift glance through the circular description of the woman again, he expressed himself volubly and with unction. It never occurred to him to question the accuracy of Lanagan’s statements. He would have taken the newspaper man’s word over that of one of his own men.

Lanagan telephoned to Sampson, city editor of the Enquirer, and before that cold-blooded individual could get in a word, Lanagan had said enough to indicate to Sampson that something choice was on the irons. Lanagan had asked for me, and I was detailed to report to him in thirty minutes at Van Ness Avenue and Eddy.

It was just thirty minutes later that the chief, Lanagan, Brady, Wilson, and Maloney—three of Leslie’s steadiest thief takers—and myself were dropping singly into 1153A O’Farrell Street, Lanagan having preceded us to reassure the landlady. Maloney went on through to take the alleyway, the room having a window over the alley. Softly and swiftly we massed before the door. Lanagan took the door, rapping. There was no answer. The chief signaled for a rush.

Leslie never carried but one gun, and this he now rested in the hollow of his left arm. He towered above and behind us as we noiselessly wedged against the old-fashioned, flimsy door. My heart was beating like a trip hammer. I never seem to be able to get over that thumping just before the opening engagement when I am elected to make a target of myself. I confess freely that I always went into those thrillers with Lanagan in the full expectation of getting my own name and picture in the papers, and the complimentary designation usually accorded a man of my profession by the paper he serves when mishap befalls him: “A reporter who was killed.”

The chief breathed a soft command, the wedge crashed, the bolts burst, and we were in—an empty room.

There was an awkward pause, it seemed to me for an hour; it may have been but a minute, while Leslie slipped back into his holster that ugly gun of his. Lanagan was turning slowly, examining every corner of the room. His eyes were living, snapping fire.

“I guess, chief,” he drawled, “I won’t make the reservations to-day for that little trip of mine.”

The bed was unmade, but the room showed no traces of recent occupation save several empty medicine bottles from which the labels had been washed, and on a closet shelf a paper sack half full of almonds. There were almond shells on the floor. For the rest the room held but the ordinary appurtenances of a room of its kind; washstand, bowl, towels and rack, and cheap dresser.

The landlady was summoned. She was more surprised than Lanagan or the chief. She had not seen the girl return; had not seen the pair depart; had believed that the man was too sick to leave his bed.

Galvanic Leslie, within an hour, had men at the ferry building, at the Third and Townsend Street Depot, covering every boathouse that had launches or tugs for hire; the suburban electric lines were covered and the country roads leading south. The great mantrap that so easily can be thrown around the peninsula of San Francisco, the trap that time and again has caught the thieves of the world when they have fled for haven to the Western Coast metropolis, was set. And yet so quietly was the work done, so implicitly had Leslie impressed upon every district captain, every detective, every patrolman concerned with the story, the necessity for absolute secrecy that not one of the other great papers of San Francisco knew that the jaws of that trap were gaping hungrily. Probably there was no reporter save Lanagan who could have broken into that story once Leslie had commanded his men to secrecy. They knew what disloyalty to that disciplinarian meant too well to trifle with him.

Within the city proper, plain-clothes men by shoals flooded every hotel and lodging house that might by any possibility harbour the pair. The hospitals were watched; half a dozen doctors known to Leslie worked among their professional brothers, but no one was attending such a man as Turner.

And the wonder grew to Lanagan that the story, scattered now well over the city, was even yet escaping the innumerable sources of news of the Times and the braggart Herald, to say nothing of the evening papers, the Record and the Tribune. In such fashion, though, by grace of newspaper luck, are the greatest successes scored after they have knocked around under the very feet of half the newspaper men of a city.

Of that army of plain-clothes men none worked harder than Lanagan. For days I did not see him. Sometimes I would locate him in the foulest sinks of the Barbary Coast or Chinatown. Here, with products brewed in some witch’s caldron, he would be in fraternity, trying ceaselessly to tap that underground wire by which the convict bayed in a great city sends word to his kind. But always he failed. “Kid” Monahan laboured in vain; “Red” Murphy, credited with knowing more thieves than all the coast saloon men put together, could secure no trace; Turner, or Short, had found no refuge in the hutches of the drug or the opium fiends. Lanagan met men who should have been in San Quentin; one night he crossed “Slivers” Martin, who had broken from a deputy sheriff and escaped a ten-year sentence.

Slivers was waiting until he could get out of the city. Yet even Slivers knew nothing of such a one as Turner. Finally Lanagan turned his attention to the residence sections.

At times he would drag me with him. For hours he would ramble up one street and down another, always trying the fruit stands, the grocery stores, the delicatessen stores, and always he asked one question: Did a blond young woman, with dark blue eyes, blue tailored suit, quick, nervous walk, come in and buy nuts, particularly almonds? A dozen times the answer was yes. And when the customer was not known to the proprietor, Lanagan would take up his watch, tireless, indefatigable, and wait until that person appeared or passed on the street. Always he met with failure.

Lanagan, always gaunt, became cadaverous. For four days I lost him. I worried and spent my nights trying to locate him, but his old haunts knew him not. One day there came a call for me.

“You, Norrie?” It was Lanagan’s voice; it sounded thin and tired. “I’ve landed. Come to Eddy and Van Ness. Got your gun?”

A quick shiver went over me. The climax had come. I borrowed Sampson’s gun, having left mine home.

“Heard from Lanagan, have you?” asked that austere individual. I nodded. “Has he landed? Yes? Good luck,” said Sampson, his eyes sparkling. He knew that Lanagan’s pride, after the first fiasco, prevented his ringing up until the story was clinched.

“Give Lanagan my regards. Let us hear from you. It is not necessary to tell either you or Lanagan to do your best for speed.”

Sampson, reckoned the coldest-blooded city editor in the West, was yet the most responsive to a story. He was a driver, but he knew how to humour men. I disliked him personally, and would avoid him out of the office, but in harness would have worked both legs to the ankle for him. Most of the men on his staff had that fanatical loyalty for him as a city editor; yet outside they seldom spoke of him save to damn. Curious breed, reporters.

To his credit as a city editor, in all of those two weeks he had not complained. He spoke about Lanagan to me only twice. He knew I was worried, and knew, I think, that I had spent many a night searching for him, finally to appear for work without sleep. But he knew that Lanagan was out for the paper first, last, and all the time; knew that that bloodhound quality of sticking to the trail would never let him quit till he had proved that there was no way of landing the story.

Lanagan’s appearance shocked me. He had not shaved for a week. Rings were under his eyes, red-lidded for want of sleep. His pale cheeks held an unhealthy flush and he coughed once or twice in a fashion I did not like, but that old magnetic smile was there.

“Scared as a rabbit, I’ll bet, and wishing you’d insured your life first,” he laughed, pulling me into a doorway. Then, more seriously, “Norrie, I’m just a wandering hulk, a derelict; whatever you will. My passing would be nothing to a soul on earth.”

I had never heard Lanagan speak in that way.

“No soul on earth,” he repeated.

Then he swept me with those luminous eyes of his, and they were as clear and as unclouded as my own. I knew that I had caught a swift glimpse as the shutter opened upon the vista of his past; that secret past that now I understood.

For a moment I was conscious of nothing save that this man whom I loved like a brother was in pain and I could do nothing for him. With his swift perceptions, Lanagan had caught my mood and our hands met; that lean, sinewy hand was as firm as steel. Then, with his facile art, he had thrown aside his humour of introspection and spoke briskly.

“Norrie, I don’t want to tangle you with this against your will. This man, I believe, is the hardest game this city has held in my time or yours. He will die with his stockings on. It looks like gun play.”

Frankly, I was for quitting, inwardly. Outwardly, because of that mesmeric way of his, that teasing, superior tone, I was all for the climax. Besides, I did not want to leave him to himself in that humour to go into a mess; I knew his reckless ways too well.

We walked rapidly up Eddy Street and turned on Franklin until near the corner of O’Farrell, where, entering a flat, Lanagan led the way to the top story. Here we entered an unfinished alcove room in the rear with a dormer window covered by a heavy curtain of burlap. The slightest possible rent had been made in the curtain. Lanagan told me to look. Opposite was a dormer window corresponding to our own, the next house being one of similar design. The alley between was possibly ten feet. Our window was the only one that could command the other.

In the opposite house the curtain was of ordinary heavy lace. After peering intently for a time, I could distinguish through it a woman’s figure and a bed, upon which a form could be discerned.

“There you are, Norrie. That man shows his caliber by moving round the corner from his former home while the police look for him elsewhere. He knows by now the police descriptions are here; that I must have recognised him, and that the hunt is on. My almond trail landed when I came back to this territory just on the final chance that the man was big enough to figure out that his surest safety lay right here. She has been out but a few times, buying those eternal almonds. Malted milk has been added to his diet, too. I picked her up, trailed her, and the rest was easy.

“The man’s stomach is gone. Incidentally, they owe a week’s rent there, and she is living mostly on almonds now, too; so I guess the exchequer is pretty low. I didn’t suppose there were any more women left in the world like that. This girl, born of good family, daughter of a minister, takes up with that triple-stained murderer and sticks. She surely took that honour and obey in epic earnest—if she married him; if not, why, the more credit to her for sticking.

“It isn’t for us to judge, Norrie. Keep your eye glued to that hole while I go into the next room—I’ve rented this attic, by the way—and grind out copy.”

It was four o’clock then; at nine Lanagan ceased writing. He had made in longhand 6,000 words of as clean-cut, brilliant a narrative story of its kind as, under similar pressure, has ever appeared in print. As in all of Lanagan’s stories, it was “the police” who had learned this and that. Lanagan has made several detective sergeants in his time.

“Leslie will meet us here at one o’clock. We must keep the smash until two, fire the story at Sampson by telephone to lead off my stuff with; hold them in the room until three, and we beat the town again.”

He hurried out to return in half an hour. He had telephoned to Sampson that the story would break about two o’clock and to hold the paper until he had heard from us; then he had sent his copy down by messenger boy and loaded up on a bundle of the choicest of the rank brand of Manilas he chose at times to affect. I noticed as he lit a match that his hands shook. I wanted him to lie down until one, but his only answer was to fix me with those eyes of his, glowing like a cat’s in the darkness (we were smoking with the lighted ends of our cigars held inside our hats, so careful was Lanagan lest any trace be given to the opposite room), and he laughed that curious laugh of his.

“When this is over, Norrie,” he said, “I’ll sleep for a week. Half that $5,000 is mine; you and Leslie and the others can divide the rest.”

Really, I saw Lanagan in my mind’s eye already snooping and prying around those Paris byways; it sounded too assured as he said it. I wondered whether I cared for blood money; figured that I would accept it, and began pleasantly in the gloom to spend my “bit” with much contentment. I concluded I would accompany Lanagan on that Paris trip.

One o’clock came, and with it Leslie, Brady, Wilson, and Maloney. Brady was put at the aperture. A faint light in the opposite room brought the two figures out into bold relief. The rest of us moved to the outer room, where the plain-clothes men slipped their revolvers to their side coat pockets. I wished lonesomely that I had brought two and that I might feel braver, although I had as much chance of shooting a revolver with my left hand without disaster as of sailing an aeroplane with either. At that I believe I would have felt more in the picture with two.

The plan was to pull a fire alarm, and as soon as the engines clattered into the street, scatter to the top story, rap on the door as if to warn the occupants, take them off their guard when the door was opened, and the thing was done. That programme was carried out. When the apparatus swung up from O’Farrell, filling the still night air with those strident bells of terror and alarm, we sped to the top floor and made the corridor.

“Fire! Fire!”

It was Brady’s hoarse voice; and even I thrilled, it was done so realistically. I, as the one most likely unknown to the pair, had been selected to take their door. I rapped loudly and shouted the alarm. Brady was on one side of me, Lanagan on the other. Wilson, Maloney, and the chief on either side again in the dark hall, flattened to the wall, guns drawn ready for the rush. The door opened six inches a startled, wan face with lustrous blue eyes, shining vividly above deep circles of black, looked into mine through the aperture. Possibly something in my face, possibly native suspicion and fear, induced her to essay to slam the door. I pushed my shoulder to the door and shoved, Brady at one shoulder, Lanagan at the other. She gave back with one more wide-eyed look that went over my shoulder and caught the grey-bearded chief, known to her, huddled back for fear of that very thing.

There came one shrill scream: “Harry! The police!” and she had turned and fled and we pushed in vain—the door was chained! One united crash again, the fastenings gave just as the slight figure, quicker than a swallow, had darted within the inner room and slammed the door shut in our faces. A bolt shot to place as a bullet from within tore through the panelling and clipped the rim of Brady’s hat, and that towering figure bore back out of range and swung us in a mass with him. Two more shots tore through and sprayed us with splinters. We flattened against the wall.

“The jig is up, Short; you may as well come out.”

It was Leslie, calm as if he were delivering orders to his chauffeur. A shot rewarded him, impinging perilously close to his shoulder. The man within was dying with the convict’s last desperate ambition to take a policeman with him. We dropped flat. There was a pause, while Brady and Leslie counselled in whispers whether to risk a rush. The silence became acute, punctuated now and then by whisperings from the inner room.

It sounded as if she were pleading with him; his note of finality could not be mistaken, although the words were not heard. Another silence, and then to our straining ears, rising clearly above the din and clamour of doors below stairs opening and shutting, of shoutings and excited cries, came a trembling voice floating through the jagged holes of the inner door—trembling with the strength or the ardour of a determination rather than any dread or fear:

“Then, Harry, take me, too! Take me, too!”

“No, Cecile, no!”

There was silence again from within; and again that voice, now touched with pleading still more earnest:

“It is only right, Harry dear; all that the world held I sacrificed for you. If you don’t take me, I will follow you!”

Prolonged to acuteness became the silence again; the man’s voice, hoarse, gasping, finally came:

“Pray, Cecile.”

And again that voice, trembling, yet clear as the beautiful sweeping chords of a harp, came floating with the acrid revolver smoke through the jagged, ugly rents in the panelling, and seemed to flood the room with something almost like a visible radiance:

“Our Father, who art in heaven!”

I saw Maloney, his blue-nosed revolver in hand, half risen, make the sign of the adoration, touching his forehead and his chest with that grim muzzle. Leslie stood slowly upright, his massive head sunk into his breast. Lanagan breathed hard and deep. It was awesome; we were held in the spell of that strange and extraordinary occurrence. On that beautiful voice went to the end:

“And lead us not into temptation; but deliver us from evil. Amen.”

“Amen!” echoed the murderer’s choking voice.

“The door! To save her!”

It was Leslie’s electric whisper, and at his signal we crashed with our united strength. With the crashing came two shots, and I caught Lanagan’s harsh curse at my ear and his swift mutter: “Too late!” The door gave.

She knelt with her head fallen upon her clasped hands, just as she had knelt in that final prayer, beside the bed. He was lying back upon the pillow.

There was no dry eye there. Veteran thief-takers, men who had stood with their backs to the wall and death baying them a score of times; men who would risk the billy or knife or gun as blithely as they would go to their morning meal; to whom suffering and violence and death were daily allotments, bowed themselves before the melancholy end of that misguided girl.

Yet possibly, for her, it was better so.

It was Lanagan’s voice that brought me back. Lanagan, answering the newspaper call, with the dominant newspaper demand still strong upon him and over him; Lanagan, quick with instinctive thought for the high-strung, chafing Sampson down at the Enquirer office and the press waiting for the release gong; Lanagan, the genius of his craft, asserting once again his incomparable newspaper superiority to me, still dreaming the precious seconds away at the pathetic fate of that poor piece of clay kneeling there; Lanagan, crisply as a colonel in the field, snapped:

“Scatter, Norrie, for a ’phone!”

II
THE PATHS OF JUDGMENT

II
THE PATHS OF JUDGMENT

JACK LANAGAN had a Sunday off, the first in weeks. A man of whim and caprice in his leisure moments, he had made no plans. This Sunday morning, after idly reading the morning papers, rolling and consuming innumerable brown paper cigarettes meanwhile, he finally sallied forth in his ill-fitting clothes toward the Palace grill and breakfast. And this being luxuriously ended, he was laved and shaved to his heart’s content. Then, perfumed like a boulevardier, he issued forth into Market Street to join that morning throng drifting down toward the ferry building for the institutional Sunday outing across the bay. He permitted himself to drift with the current, perfectly and vastly at ease with all the world. He had switched from cigarettes to an evil Manila, poisoning the air cheerfully for yards around him. Lanagan rather enjoyed the exclusiveness given him by his noisome cigars.

Rourke, Fleming, and little Johnny O’Grady of the Herald, with a camera man, whirled out of Market Street in an automobile, and Lanagan jerked alertly round to watch them out of sight, speculating as to what the story might be. He had half determined to drift over to the office, when Truck One swung into Market Street from O’Farrell. Other fire apparatus was swinging into and out of Market Street, clanging stridently, and Lanagan turned again to the ferry. Fires interested him but little. Always the chance, he remarked once to me fastidiously, of some chump of a fireman squirting water all over you, which spoiled your clothes. I never knew whether Lanagan was having a quiet joke in that or not. His entire wardrobe would have been scorned by a rag picker.

He had been puffing his oakum industriously, and now was attracted by the spectacle of a man beside him nearly doubled over with a fit of coughing. He was shaking and beating at his breast with large, bony hands, and Lanagan noted professionally the rheumatic knuckles and the nails like claws, yellow and dirty. His breath came in sharp whistles, short and staccato, and he was taking possibly a third of a normal respiration at a time.

A particularly violent paroxysm, followed by all evidences of entire suspension of breath, brought Lanagan to the man’s side with a leap. He swung the huddled form against a hydrant.

“Here you!” he called, to a passer-by, “call Douglas 20 and tell them to shoot the harbour ambulance up here.” To himself he said: “This man is sick. He needs attention and needs it quick.”

But at the words the hunched, choking figure straightened spasmodically, flashing a look upon Lanagan that Lanagan, used to malevolence in all its forms expressed upon features the most evil, had not seen quite equalled. Accustomed to the ill-featured and repulsive as they strain through the bars at the city prison, yet even Lanagan started back momentarily in revulsion.

“I have seen misers,” thought Lanagan, “but this is the real miser of all fact and all fiction. I would know him in a million. Fellow I used to see in my dreams when I was a youngster. Pneumonia sure. About six hours for him and then six feet.”

Thus lightly diagnosing and disposing of the man and his case, Lanagan motioned the citizen, who had meantime stopped, to go on with the call. But the strange, gnomelike figure, flashing another look, a singular blend of loathing, hate, fear, and timidity, upon the newspaper man, started to hobble away. Lanagan dropped his hand on the man’s shoulder to restrain him. But the harsh features turned a look so glowering and repellent upon him that he withdrew the restraining hand. The coughing had ceased. The little old man was still breathing sibilantly and swiftly, rather like a panting dog or cat, which he suggested, but by extraordinary effort of will had fought away the more violent exhibition of his seizure. He commenced to shuffle down the street, with one furtive, fearful, backward look that went on past Lanagan and up Market Street.

“You need a hospital, man,” said Lanagan curtly, “and I’m going to take you there. Wait.” He placed his hand again on the man’s shoulder. But the manikin-like creature flung the hand viciously from him and again flashed that strange look of blended hate, fear, and timidity upon the newspaper man.

“Let be!” he grated. “Let be!”

A car clanged to the safety station. The grotesque figure, still half-hunched over at the paroxysm from Lanagan’s Manila, started for it and Lanagan made no further effort at detention. He climbed laboriously to the platform, and Lanagan shrugged his shoulders.

“I certainly am not going to dry-nurse you, old man, but I ought to at that. If I ever saw a man marked for death, you’re that man.”

Despite a long afternoon idled away beneath mine host Pastori’s shade trees and the somnolent influence of cobwebbed Chianti, Lanagan found his miser’s features constantly before him.

“He’s my miser, too,” he mused, in the vernacular of childhood. “I shouldn’t have let him escape me after finding him.”

Returning late, Lanagan for once in his life went to his room without his inevitable last call at police headquarters. Consequently he was several hours late in the morning on the news of a very fine police story when he awakened to find his miser—Thaddeus Miller of Oakland—pictured on the front pages of all the morning papers. There was no mistaking that face. It was his miser. He had been murdered in his cabin, a clumsy attempt having been made to fire the cabin to destroy the crime and its evidence.

A young clerk, a neighbour to the miser, was under arrest. It appeared that the clerk, James Watson, was found named in the will as sole legatee to an estate valued at close to a quarter of a million dollars. Upon the Watson porch had been found a hammer, freshly washed, the handle not yet dry. But clinging to the claws, unobserved by whoever had washed the blood from the hammer, were two strands of white hair that brought the hammer home to the crime in the cabin. Watson, the stories related, had only known Miller for a few months. He had been seen leaving the cottage shortly before eight o’clock. The fire was discovered smouldering at nine-thirty o’clock, extinguished, and Miller found with his skull crushed, lying on a kerosene-soaked bunk, to which, fortunately, the clumsily started fire had not yet communicated.

Watson had made a bad case out for himself initially by denying that he had seen Miller at all that day or knowing that he was named in the will. When confronted by neighbours who had seen him leaving the cottage and one neighbour who had heard his wife speak of the will, he took refuge in protestations that he had denied everything through fear and terror. He then admitted owning the hammer, but professed himself at a loss to account for the fact of its having been freshly washed and of the strands of gray hair.

Raving his innocence, he had come to the verge of physical collapse. He repeated constantly the name of his wife and begged the police to bring her to him. But he was being held in strict “detinue,” the papers said, until the third degree was given him. At the time of going to press confession was expected momentarily.

Mrs. Watson, after a police examination, had been permitted to return to her home. Her story was that both she and her husband had befriended Miller on different occasions, out of pity for his forlorn and miserable condition. She admitted that on one occasion he had jocularly remarked that he would not forget her husband in his will, but had attached no importance to his remark. She had never heard him speak of any person that he feared. She admitted that her husband had visited Watson at his cabin in the evening, but that the circumstance was not unusual. He had remained but a moment, Miller being in an unusually morose mood—had been so, in fact, for three or four days. She was at a loss to account for the condition of the hammer.

“And yet,” growled Lanagan, “I’m eternally doomed if I think either of them did it. That fellow gave me a look that spelled fear; abject, abnormal fear; it was the concentration of the fear of a lifetime of a hare who runs with the dogs always at his heels. And it was not fear of the Watsons either.”

Lanagan, stopping at the office only long enough to receive instructions, made the narrow-gauge ferry by bowling over an obstreperous ticket-taker who tried to shut the gate in his face. Not that there was any particular need for such spectacular haste; it was merely Lanagan’s way; Lanagan “showing off,” as some of his professional brothers would invidiously have it. But I, who knew him better than any news writer in the business, say not. Lanagan was a genuine eccentric. And in this particular case he was fighting for time. Bitter experience had taught him the value of minutes. Indeed, a cardinal rule of his business that Lanagan sought to drive into my slower newspaper intelligence was to get on the ground first.

Lanagan knew of old that every city editor in town would be accepting the very plausible police version, and would be awaiting the expected confession from Watson. Watson might confess, but, Lanagan had a sullen “hunch” that he wouldn’t.

Lanagan moved most of the time by “hunches,” as many successful newspaper men—to say nothing of detectives—do. Hunches and luck may be called by such fancy brands as inductive or deductive, intensive or extensive analytical capacity; but in the long run most crimes are solved on luck, hunches, and through the invaluable aid of police “stool pigeons,” more politely known as “sources.” An intuitive judgment of men is about as good an asset as a reporter or detective can have, coupled with a faculty for quick decision and personal bravery.

More than any one thing, it was possibly this faculty for swift intuitive analysis that carried Lanagan to his high degree of success. However, man and man’s judgments are fallible; it was so ordered in the original scheme of things, for very obvious reasons.

Lanagan went directly to the Watson cottage. The brilliant American police system had permitted some scores of curious and morbid persons to trample over every inch of ground within a hundred yards of the Miller hut. Privileged friends of the patrolman on guard there, after the traditional American custom also, had been permitted to slip inside and paw over the belongings and stare to their hearts’ content. Lanagan knew of old what the situation there would be. That could wait. He was more concerned with having the first meeting of the day with Mrs. Watson.

It was a modest little “bungalow style” of home that he approached, much like that of any one of thousands of small-salaried men in the transbay suburban sections. An air of good taste, neatness, and care in the trim little lawn, the cleanliness of the walks, stairs and porch, and the precision with which all of the shades were drawn against the morning sun, marked it possibly a bit more individual than many of its kind. Mrs. Watson herself opened the door to his ring. She bore the outward evidence of grief. Her eyes were red and swollen, her cheeks hectic, her hair disheveled. She was blond, with large blue eyes, set possibly a line too closely together, chiseled nose, delicate, shapely ears, saving the lobe was not quite as free as an exact taste would require, and a well-moulded chin.

“I am Mr. Lanagan of the Enquirer,” he said, adding some words of apology. He had a way with women—and with men as well—when he so desired, that was singularly ingratiating; a soft trick of speech, an ingenuousness of manner, a certain dignity that seemed to lift him from the mean atmosphere of his ill-fitting clothes and marked him with personality.

“You may come in,” said Mrs. Watson.

As he followed her to the parlour and she lifted the shades, he noticed that she was of good figure, rather lithe in her movements, laced well in for a housewife unappareled for the street, not more than three-and-twenty, and that she walked with that scarcely perceptible lift of the shoulders and swing of the hips that denotes a woman not entirely unconscious, even in the stress of melancholy circumstances, of the gaze of a man; a suggestion of affectation, the unmistakable mark of a woman inclined by temperament to be naturally frivolous; or even, upon occasion, reckless. He noticed, too, that she wore French heels.

“Curious type certainly,” commented Lanagan mentally. “Sort of a domesticated coryphée; with the homing instinct implanted where the wanderlust was planted in her sisters. One who has settled into marriage where her like settle, with as little concern, into the round circle of the night lights. Everything different except that generic vanity. Rather an odd mating for a clerk, and a plodder at that, to judge from his picture,” thought Lanagan.

Lanagan sat with his back to the window, putting Mrs. Watson in the full light.

“Is there anything you can say, Mrs. Watson, that could throw any light upon this affair? Any enemies that Miller ever spoke about? Any visitors that he has had of late? Any letters or other messages that he received? Any threats?”

She threw both hands forth with a despairing gesture.

“Nothing, nothing!” she moaned, as tears came. “It is terrible, terrible! He is innocent, innocent I say! I know he is innocent! I know it!”

She sobbed for a moment, and then, with a sudden gesture of determination, straightened up, dried her eyes, and composed herself.

Lanagan had been watching her with eyes that seemed to narrow and lessen to little black beads. His ears, gifted with abnormal power for receiving and disintegrating into each component shade of meaning or emotion the tones of the human voice, drank in every word that she uttered, marked each sob that shook her form.

“You do not believe your husband guilty, do you?”

Her lips parted in an exclamation of protest, and Lanagan for the first time caught the upper lip; a lip as thin as a paper cutter, that drew tautly and white across the perfect teeth. It suggested a knife to Lanagan.

“She holds true to the type,” he commented to himself grimly. “A curious type, surely, for a prosaic clerk!”

Lanagan’s brain was churning. His beady eyes gleamed as though touched with phosphorescence. Under the concentration of his gaze, the woman unconsciously shrank. Rising from his chair with a movement almost tigerish, he strode before her, upturned her face so that her eyes looked straight up into his, and then, his voice terrific in its tension, and yet scarcely louder than a whisper, said:

“Did you wheedle Thaddeus Miller into making a will in your favour and then murder him?”

So quickly that her act seemed rather involuntary than by any conscious impulse, she leaped to her feet, her breast rising and falling tumultuously. She struggled inarticulately for speech, raised her hand as though to strike him in the face, and collapsed in a swoon at his feet.

Lanagan gazed coldly down upon her without qualm. He was impersonal now; the incarnation of newspaper truth. He only regretted that she had balked him by swooning. Swiftly he straightened her out, loosed her collar, and was busily engaged chafing her hands when heavy footfalls sounded from the porch, and the bell rang loudly.

“By the brogans and the ring, our friends of the upper office,” commented Lanagan cynically as he opened the door. Quinlan and Pryor from the Oakland department entered, viewing Lanagan suspiciously as they beheld the still form upon the floor.

“She’s in better shape for the hospital than your third degree in the detinue cells,” remarked Lanagan, vouchsafing no explanations. “Went out just this minute as I was interviewing her.”

Quinlan and Pryor settled themselves heavily, lit fresh cigars, made laboured notes of the circumstances, and, when Lanagan finally restored the woman, gave her some breathing space and then informed her that she was to be taken to see her husband. To Lanagan she directed no look—addressed no word. She moved as one in a trance.

The detectives and their prisoner departed and Lanagan turned for the Miller cottage.

“That was a pure soul’s denial or it was a guilty soul’s defiance,” thought Lanagan. “But which?”

Long he turned that over.

“Frankly, on type I mistrust her; but what about that look in Miller’s eyes?”

Lanagan seldom went back on a “hunch.” At first flash he had declared the Watsons innocent. He was not yet ready to abandon that; and yet the circumstances were certainly trending toward them.

“But,” he concluded, “there’s a nigger in this woodpile somewhere that I haven’t located.”

The cottage had nothing to offer. Police, curio hunters, and shoals of newspaper men had combed it Lanagan hurried to the Oakland police headquarters and cocked his feet on Inspector Henley’s desk while that astute individual detailed to him the various steps taken by the police in fixing the crime on Watson. Lanagan was nettled. It sounded highly convincing.

“You’re sure of Watson?” he finally asked, quizzically, helping himself to a fist-full of Henley’s cigars.

“Clearest case I have ever handled,” said Henley, moving the cigar box out of reach. “Every link is complete. Further: the woman is in on it and we’ll have her within twenty-four hours. We’ll get the case before Baxter and they’ll swing inside of three months.”

“Well,” drawled Lanagan, “you’re wrong again, Henley.”

The inspector flushed. He had a lively recollection of how Lanagan had “trimmed” him on the Stockslager murder and he didn’t take kindly to the “again.”

“We’ve got the motive, the property; and the means, the hammer. What more do you want?”

“Well, to complete the alliteration, I suppose you want the murderer,” said Lanagan with a faint laugh. “And you haven’t got him. Pretty good smokes. Just slip back that box. I don’t get over your way very often. You act as though you had paid for those cigars yourself. Can I see Watson?”

“No,” said Henley, surlily. He never cared to argue the little matters such as Lanagan was fond of nagging him with; some way he had a feeling that Lanagan always knew just a trifle more than he told. He passed back the box. “But it’s an even break. Nobody’s seen him. Here’s his picture.”

Lanagan studied the front and profile of a young man of twenty-six, a face of surprising frankness and honesty. Every line held to Lanagan’s critical eye the lie to the number striped across his breast; another feature of our brilliant American police system that puts the rogue’s gallery blazon on a man before he is tried.

As Lanagan passed out, his eye fell on the bulletin board in the detectives’ room. The last discharge slip from San Quentin was pasted upon it, the slip by which all police stations are supposed to keep in touch with prisoners discharged during the past month. But through long familiarity few of the detectives stop to read carefully. More from habit than anything else, Lanagan read those sheets as a preacher reads the book—he scanned it.

The fifth name on the list caught his eye: Ephraim Miller, alias Thad Miller, alias Thornton Miles, alias Iowa Slim; assault to murder; twenty-five years. The slip was dated the first—five days back. There was little chance of its being read now. Swift as a lightning flash Lanagan had formed his theory. His mind leaped back to the meeting with Miller in front of the Palace. Ephraim and Thaddeus; they were old-fashioned names. Then there was the “Thad.”

Miller had been from San Quentin but four days: Miser Miller’s fear had been on him but a few days. Possibly this was a wayward son, some unrecognised offspring, some family skeleton recrudescent; perhaps it was this convict who had brought that fear into the eyes of Thaddeus Miller!

It was a long, fine chance; but the most brilliant of newspaper successes are scored on long, fine chances. Lanagan determined to take it. He “rapped” to the hunch, as he used to style it; under the impulse of his new idea he was a human dynamo.

He was back in San Francisco within an hour, and headed straight for Billy Connors’ Buckets of Blood, that famed rendezvous within a stone’s throw of the Hall of Justice, where the leaders of the thieves’ clans foregathered. There he waited an hour until “Kid” Monahan, popularly designated as King of the Pick-pockets, came in. The Kid was now a fence. He had retired from the active practice of his profession after doing time twice. “Ain’t there with the touch any more,” he remarked sadly to Lanagan one day. He was, moreover, credited with being the man for an outsider to “see” who wanted to operate locally.

“Kid,” said Lanagan, “I want you to find me Ephraim Miller, alias Thad Mills, alias Thornton Miles, alias Iowa Slim. Just out of San Quentin where he did twenty-five years for assault to murder.”

“We don’t keep no line on these old ones,” retorted the “King” professionally. “But if he’s goin’ to report here he reports to me. It’s pretty hard on us native sons with that reform bunch on the Police Commission and the sky pilots stuffing you guys on the papers full of knocks. There ain’t no touch-off work bein’ done around here by any travellers that we can help. When do you want him?”

“Meet me here to-night at ten. I must have him located by then.”

Lanagan had befriended the “King” once, and he held that illustrious gentleman’s absolute loyalty. He knew the “King” would have a dozen men out in as many minutes.

Lanagan headed back for Oakland to round up the loose ends of the story. He found police headquarters jammed with newspaper men and the smell of many flash powders heavy on the air.

“All right, Mr. Lanagan of the Enquirer,” quoth Henley. “You can talk to Watson now.” His tone was triumph.

Watson had confessed. He was sitting in a chair in the Inspector’s room, a huddled figure of misery. The mantle of age seemed to have settled on him overnight.

Lanagan was a hard loser. He stepped over to the huddled man.

“Do you mean to tell me, Watson,” he said so low that no one but Watson heard him; “do you mean to tell me that you are not lying, putting your neck in the noose—to save your wife?”

“No! No!” the denial was a shriek. “I killed him! I killed him for his money, I tell you!” He fell back, shivering.

Lanagan drove in on him. “You lie, I tell you,” he hissed. “You lie! You fool! It’s bound to come out! Tell the truth!”

“No, no,” moaned Watson. “I did it alone. God! I can feel his skull crunching yet!”

“You’ve got more imagination than I credited you with,” sneered Lanagan savagely. “That last was a good touch.”

There was a hustle as Quinlan and Pryor came through the prison gates from the detinue cells surrounded by an eager coterie of newspaper men.

“We’ve got her, Inspector!” cried Quinlan with unprofessional feeling. “She’s ‘spilled.’ Killed him herself, and says her husband is lying if he says he did it. They’re both in it. We will have the whole thing now.”

The woman was then brought out after her official statement had been taken. Nothing that the newspaper men could do could shake her story. In substance she said that she had worked on the old man for months to have the will made out in her husband’s favour. Knowing her husband was above such a deed, she planned and executed it alone. She had not had an opportunity to wash the hammer after she returned home, and only did so when the furor commenced. That was why it was still damp and why she had overlooked the two strands of incriminating gray hair.

The newspaper camera men snapped and exploded flashes; the inquisitorial circle broke up, and Watson having been removed, the room was cleared of all save Henley, Mrs. Watson, and Lanagan.

“Through?” asked Henley sarcastically.

“No,” snapped Lanagan. “You say you killed this man. I say, Mrs. Watson, you’re a liar. You no more killed that man than I did. You are lying to save your husband!”

His voice had risen; his aspect was fairly ferocious; his sallow face flushed to an unwholesome grey-blue; his eyes glowing again with that catlike phosphorescence that she had seen and quailed at once before.

But again he was doomed to disappointment at a breakdown, for again under the shock she collapsed after half rising to her feet with evident purpose to give him the lie as violently as he gave it to her.

Women, Lanagan reflected, are like electric wires. They are drawn to carry just so much voltage. A little overplus and they burn out. Each time he had bullied the woman just as her nerves were at the breaking point.

The matron bustled in with a side compliment on Lanagan for his brutality, and lifted the limp form. Lanagan, bitterly chagrined at the events of the day, turned on his heel to return to San Francisco. On the ferry he broke a vow of six months and fell back on absinthe. He reached the office at seven o’clock, wrote steadily for two hours a story identical as he knew it would be with all the morning papers, and then went out.

The word was passed swiftly that Lanagan was drinking again, and I was released for the night to round him up and get him home—my usual assignment under the circumstances.

On the chance that some of the choice spirits that foregather at Connors’ dive might have crossed his path, I dropped in there, and, to my unbounded relief, saw Lanagan himself at a table in deep conversation with “Kid” Monahan. I went over to his table, the “King” slipping out the side door. I had not Lanagan’s penchant for camaraderie with that breed, and took little pains not to let him know it.

The old wild, reckless light shone from Lanagan’s eyes, and I knew there was no measuring his stride that night, making pace or keeping it.

He laughed aloud. “Art there, old truepenny?” and slapped my shoulder. He was in high feather with himself, that was clear. “Come. Have you got your gun?” I nodded.

“That’s fine. Now for the grand ‘feenale,’ as Cæsar says about his ponce à la toscana. And success to all hunches!” There was something besides absinthe burning back in those eyes.

Questions were useless, so I trailed along. At Macnamara’s corner we picked up Brady and Wilson, two of Chief Leslie’s trustiest men.

“Did the chief instruct you?” asked Lanagan.

“He said to report to you and keep our heads shut or tend daisies,” replied Brady, the senior of the pair, and a cool and heady thief-taker; also the champion pistol shot of the department.

“My man is Iowa Slim, wanted for murder. Is heavily armed and desperate. He’s in the Tokio—Jap lodging house at Dupont and Clay. It looks like break the door and rush. Wilson, Norton, and I will take the door, and you, Brady, stand free of the rush and be ready to drop him if he shows fight. That is, Norton will—” turning to me in his quizzical, bantering way, “—if he relishes the job!”

I didn’t relish the job. But, as usual, when he spoke to me in that superior, teasing way I blundered in valiantly where my native caution would have feared to tread. I am free to admit that I am of that branch of the profession that believes a reporter full of lead in peace or war is of very little use on earth, and certainly not elsewhere, to the paper that employs him.

In the shadows the detectives nonchalantly slipped their revolvers into their side coat pockets. Neither was cumbered by an overcoat; double-line your sack coat, the old-timers will tell you, but keep away from excess encumbrances where possible. One gallant officer in my time lost his life because he was two seconds delayed unbuttoning an overcoat for his gun.

Fifteen minutes later we assembled, one by one, at convenient corners to the Tokio, a foul-smelling, ramshackle affair. One by one we drifted in, slipped off our shoes and tiptoed up the stairs, Lanagan in the lead, Norton bringing up the rear.

Lanagan paused before a corner door. He and Wilson braced against it. My bulk backed Wilson. Brady towered above us, standing free to have a clear sweep with both guns. He turned the light on full, taking every chance of making targets of us all for the one chance of getting a drop on Slim without bloodshed.

From an adjacent room a clock ticked loudly; somebody rolled over in bed, and the sounds came so clearly that it seemed my heart must have beat as loudly as a trip hammer. Yet it was not exactly fear, as I recall it; it was a sort of nervous tension to have it over with if it had to come.

“Slim! Slim!” It was a soft, sibilant whisper, and I could scarcely believe my ears. It was Lanagan at the keyhole. Then he rapped four times in quick, soft staccato, and then four times more. It was some code he had learned, possibly from Monahan.

There was a prolonged pause, and the sound of someone from within turning in bed, and another long pause. The strain on me was terrific. From the corner of my eye I caught the black muzzle of Brady’s left-hand gun. It was as steady as though held in a vise, and I had time to marvel.

“Slim! Slim! They’re after me! It’s Larry Bowman’s pal, Shorty!”

Another nerve-racking pause, and then at the very keyhole came through a soft, throaty whisper:

“Who?”

“Shorty Davis. Larry said you’d take me in. Quick, Slim, they’re after me!”

A key grated, the knob turned.

“Now!” hissed Lanagan, and with one mighty lurch we burst pell-mell into the room. I caught a flashing look at a slender, flannel-shirted figure with a week’s growth of beard as Slim whirled a foot ahead of us and with one leap cleared the room and swung with a murderous long-barrelled Colt in his hand.

His leap was quicker than the spring of a cat. He shot from the hip, but Brady, posted to do just the trick he did, spoiled the shot. Slim’s bullet ripped a two-inch hole through the floor as he crumpled down in a heap.

We stretched him upon the bed. He had got it in the lungs. Wilson started for the doctor.

“Remember,” said Lanagan, “the chief’s orders. You are not to talk. If it gets out, tell all reporters it’s a detinue case. I’ll answer for the rest.”

A few gnomelike, corpselike, yellow faces peered from doors, but a flash from Brady’s star sent them scurrying back. The shot was apparently not heard in the street, for no one came.

Lanagan turned to Slim, who was choking.

“You know what you were wanted for, Slim?” he asked in as cool a voice as a surgeon might ask for your pulse.

“That Oakland job, I suppose,” he gasped. “Well, boys, you did me a good turn croaking me. I never wanted to go back to that hell hole again. I did what I came out to do, what I’ve waited twenty-five years to do, and I’m ready to take my judgment. He sent me up there twenty-five years ago, and he murdered my father as surely as there is a God, who will some day dope it all out right according to a different scheme than they do here.”

Gasping, with many halts, he told his story. The surgeon came, shook his head, and devoted himself to keeping life until the story was taken down.

His father, a wealthy Iowan, had come to Thaddeus Miller’s ranch thirty years ago, bringing with him his entire fortune for investment. The son Ephraim remained at school back home. At Miller’s ranch the boy’s father had been found in the well one day, drowned. A whiskey bottle floated on the water beside him. His entire estate had been willed to Thaddeus Miller. In a sparsely settled community Thaddeus Miller’s story had been accepted—that the brother, in drink, had stumbled into the well. The son had journeyed across the continent to find himself disinherited. He had always been told he was to be his father’s heir. His father in Iowa had been a strict abstainer. So far as the son knew, he had never touched liquor. But his charge, that Thaddeus had in some fashion gotten his father intoxicated, forced him to sign a will, and then pitched him into the well with the bottle, while it created some natural excitement, could never be proved, and in the course of time became forgotten. In spite of a contest, the will stood.

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.