Treasure and Trouble Therewith Part 34

At nine that night Mark was sitting by his table, his book on his knee, his eyes on the smoke wreaths that lay across the air in light layers, when his dreams were broken by a knock on his door. It was his landlady with a telegram:

"Mother very sick. Pneumonia. Come at once. SADIE."

There was a train for Stockton in half an hour, and he could make the distance between the town and the ranch by horse or stage. He made a race for it and at the station, finding himself a few minutes ahead, took a call for Crowder at the _Despatch_ office and caught him. In a few words he told him what had happened, that he didn't know how long he might be away and that if news came from Jim before his return to let him know.

Crowder promised.

CHAPTER XXV

WHAT JIM SAW

The next morning Crowder sent a letter to Fong advising him of Mark's departure. Should Jim get back from Sacramento within the next few days he was to communicate with Crowder at the _Despatch_ office. The young man had no expectation of early news, but he was going to run no risks with what promised to be a sensation. His journalist's instincts were aroused, and he was resolved to keep for his own paper and his own _kudos_ the most picturesque story that had ever come his way. He went about his work, restless and impatient, seeing the story on the _Despatch's_ front page and himself made the star reporter of the staff.

He had not long to wait. On Monday morning he was called from the city room to the telephone. Through the transmitter came the soft and even voice of Jim; he had returned from Sacramento the night before, and if it was convenient for Mr. Crowder could see him that afternoon at two in Portsmouth Square. Mr. Crowder would make it convenient, and Jim's good-by hummed gently along the wire.

The small plaza--a bit of the multicolored East embedded in the new, drab West--was a place where Orient and Occident touched hands. There Chinese mothers sat on the benches watching their children playing at their feet, and Chinese fathers carried babies, little bunched-up, fat things with round faces and glistening onyx eyes. Sons of the Orient, bent on business, pa.s.sed along the paths, exchanging greetings in a sing-song of nasal voices, cues braided with rose-colored silk swinging to their knees. Above the vivid green of the gra.s.s and the dark flat branches of cypress trees, the back of Chinatown rose, alien and exotic: railings touched with gold and red, lanterns, round and crimson or oblong with pale, skin-like coverings, on the window ledges blue and white bowls upholding sheaves of lilies, the rich emblazonry of signs, the thick gilded arabesques of a restaurant's screened balconies.

Crowder found his man standing by the pedestal on which the good ship _Bonaventure_ spreads its shining sails before the winds of romance. A quiet hail and they were strolling side by side to a bench sheltered by a growth of laurel.

Mayer had appeared at the Whatcheer House the day before at noon. Jim, crossing the back of the office, had seen him enter, and loitering heard him tell the clerk that he would give up his room that afternoon as his base had shifted to Oregon. Then he had gone upstairs, and Jim had followed him and seen him go into No. 19, the last door at the end of the hall on the left-hand side.

The hall was empty and very quiet. It was the lunch hour, a time at which the place was deserted. Arming himself with a duster Jim had stolen down the pa.s.sage to No. 19. Standing by the door he could hear Mayer walking about inside, and then a sound as if he was moving the furniture. With the duster held ready for use Jim had looked through the keyhole and seen Mayer with a chisel in his hand, the bed behind him drawn out from the wall to the middle of the room.

Emboldened by the hall's silence, Jim had continued to watch. He saw Mayer go to the corner where the bed had stood, lift the carpet and the boards below it and take from beneath them two canvas sacks. From these he shook a stream of gold coins--more than a thousand dollars, maybe two.

He let them lie there while he put back the sacks, replaced the boards and carpet and pushed the bed into its corner. Then he gathered up the money, rolling some of it in a piece of linen, which he packed in his suitcase, and putting the rest in a money belt about his waist. After that he took up his hat and Jim slipped away to a broom closet at the upper end of the hall.

From here the Chinaman saw his quarry come out of the room and go down the stairs. At the desk Mayer stopped, told the clerk he had vacated No. 19, but would wait in the office for a while as his train was not due to leave till the afternoon. From the stairhead Jim watched him take a seat by the window, and, the suitcase at his feet, pick up a paper and begin to read.

It was a rule of the Whatcheer House that a vacated room was subjected to a "thorough cleaning." Translated this meant a run over the floor with a carpet sweeper and a change of sheets. The door of No. 19 had been left unlocked, and while Mayer sat in the office conning the paper, Jim with the necessary rags and brooms was putting No. 19 in shape for the next tenant. An inside bolt on the door made him secure against interruption, and the bed drawn to the middle of the floor was part of the traditional rite. Carpet and boards came up easily; his cache empty Mayer had not troubled to renail them. In the s.p.a.ce between the rafters and the flooring Jim had found no more money, only a bunch of canvas sacks, and a dirty newspaper. With the Chinaman's meticulous carefulness he had brought these back to his employers; in proof of which he laid a small, neatly tied package on Crowder's knee. For the rest his work was done.

He had paid the Whatcheer room boy and seen him reinstated, had followed Mayer to the depot, viewed his transformation there, and ridden with him on the night train back to San Francisco.

To Crowder's commending words he murmured a smiling deprecation. What concerned him most was his "prize money," which was promised on Mark's return. Then, nodding sagely to the young man's cautioning of secrecy, he rose, and uninterested, imperturbably enigmatic and bland, pa.s.sed out of sight around the laurels.

Crowder, on the bench, slipped down to a comfortable angle and thought.

There was no doubt now--but what the devil did it mean? A concealed h.o.a.rd hidden under the floor of a men's lodging house--that could only be stolen money. Where had he stolen it from? Was he some kind of gentleman burglar, such as plays and novels had been built around? It was a plausible explanation. He looked the part so well; lots of swagger and side, and the whole thing a trifle overdone. _What_ a story! Crowder licked his lips over it, seeing it splashed across the front page. At that moment the parcel Jim had given him slipped off his knee to the ground.

He had forgotten it, and a little shamefaced--for your true detective studies the details before formulating his theory--picked it up and opened it. Inside a newspaper, its outer sheets mud-stained and torn, were six small bags of white canvas, marked with a stenciled "W. F. & Co." Crowder sat erect and brushed back his pendent lock of hair. He knew what the stenciled letters stood for as well as he knew his own initials.

Then he spread out the paper. It was the _Sacramento Courier_ of August 25. From the top of a column the heading of his own San Francisco letter faced him, the bottom part torn away. But that did not interest him. It was the date that held his eye--August 25--that was last summer--August 25, Wells Fargo--he muttered it over, staring at the paper, his glance gla.s.sily fixed in the intensity of his mental endeavor.

Round date and name his memory circled, drawing toward a focus, curving closer and closer, coming nearer in decreasing spirals, finally falling on it. With the pounce a broken sentence fell from his lips: "The tules!

Knapp and Garland!"

For the first moment of startled realization he was so surprised that he could not see how Mayer was implicated. Then his mind leaped the gap from the holdup in August to that picturesque narrative still fresh in the public mind--Knapp's story of the robbed cache. The recollection came with an impact that held him breathless; incidents, details, dates, marshaling themselves in a corroborating sequence. When he saw it clear, unrolled before his mental vision in a series of events, neatly fitting, accurately dovetailed, he sat up looking stupidly about him like a person emerging from sleep.

He had work to do at the office, but on the way there stopped at the Express Company for a word with Robinson, one of the clerks, whom he knew. He wanted information of any losses by theft or accident sustained by the company since the middle of the preceding August. Robinson promised to look up the subject and let him know before the closing hour.

At six Crowder was summoned to one of the telephone booths in the city room. Robinson had inquired: during the time specified Wells Fargo and Company had suffered but one loss. This was on the twenty-sixth of August, when Knapp and Garland had held up the Rocky Bar stage and taken thousand dollars in coin consigned to the Greenhide Mine at Antelope.

It was Crowder's habit to dine at Philip's Rotisserie at half past six.

They liked him at Philip's. Madame at her desk, fat and gray-haired, with a bunch of pink roses at one elbow and a sleeping cat at the other, always had time for a chat with "Monsieur Crowdare." Even Philip himself, in his chef's cap and ap.r.o.n, would emerge from the kitchen and confer with the favored guest. But tonight "Monsieur Crowdare" had no words for anyone. He did no more than nod to Madame, and Gaston, the waiter, afterward told her he had hardly looked at the menu--just said bring anything, he didn't care what. Madame was quite worried over it, hoped "_le cher garcon_" wasn't sick, and comforted herself by thinking he might be in love.

Never before in his cheery existence had Crowder been so excited. Over his unsavored dinner he studied the situation, planning his course. He was resolved on one point--to keep the rights of discovery for the _Despatch_. He could manage this, making it a condition when he laid his knowledge before the Express Company people. That would be his next move, and he ought to do it soon; Mayer's withdrawal of the money might indicate an intention of disappearing. He would go to Wells Fargo and tell them what he had found out, asking in return that the results of their investigation should be given to him for first publication in the _Despatch_.

It was a pity Mark wasn't there--he didn't like acting without Mark. But matters were moving too quickly now to take any chances. There was no telephone at the ranch, or he could have called up long-distance, and a telegram, to be intelligible, would have to be too explicit. He would write to Mark tomorrow, or perhaps the next day--after he had seen the Express people.

To be secret as the grave was the charge Crowder laid upon himself, but he longed to let loose some of the ferment that seethed within him, and in his longing remembered the one person to whom he dared go--Pancha.

Hers were the legitimate ears to receive the racy tale. She was not only to be trusted--a pal as reliable as a man--but it would cure her of her infatuation, effectually crush out the pa.s.sion that had devastated her.

CHAPTER XXVI

PANCHA WRITES A LETTER

Pancha had been much alone. Crowder had seen her several times, the doctor had come, the chambermaid, one or two of her confreres from the theater. But there had been long, dreary hours when she had lain motionless, looking at the walls and thinking of her wrongs. She had gone over and over the old ground, trodden the weary round like a squirrel in a cage, asked herself the same questions and searched, tormented, for their answers. As the days pa.s.sed the weight of her grievance grew, and her sick soul yearned to hit back at the man who had so wantonly wounded her.

Gradually, from the turmoil an idea of retaliation was churned into being. It did not reach the point of action till Monday evening. Then it rose before her imperious, a vengeance, subtle and if not complete, at least as satisfying as anything could be to her sore heart. It was that expression of futile anger and poisoned musings, an anonymous letter. She wrote it on the pink note paper which she had bought to write to Mayer on. It ran as follows:

Dear Lady:

This letter is to warn you. It comes from a person friendly to you and who wants to put you wise to something you ought to know. It's about Boye Mayer, him that goes to your house and is after your sister. Maybe you don't know that, but _I_ do--it's truth what I'm telling you every word.

He's no good. Not the kind to go round with your kind. It's your sister's money he wants. If she had none he'd not trouble to meet her in the plaza opposite the Greek Church. Watch out for him--don't let her go with him. Don't let her marry him or you'll curse the day. I know him well and I know he's bad right through.

Wishing you well,

FROM A FRIEND.

She had written the letter to Lorry as the elder sister, whose name she had seen in the papers and whom Crowder had described as the intelligent one with brains and character. Her woman's instinct told her that her charges might have no weight with the younger girl, under the spell of those cajoleries and blandishments whose power she knew so well. With the letter in her hand she crept out to the stairhead and called to the clerk in the office below. Gushing had not come on duty yet, and it was the day man who answered her summons. She asked him to post the letter that night, and he promised to do so. The lives of the group of which this story tells were drawing in to a point of fusion. In the centripetal movement this insignificant incident had its importance. The man forgot his promise, and it was not till the next day at lunch that he thought of the letter, posting it on his way back to the hotel.

In her room again, Pancha dropped on the sofa, and lay still. The exertion had taxed her strength and she felt sick and tremulous. But she thought of what she had done with a grim relish, savored like a burning morsel on her tongue, the bitter-sweet of revenge.

Here an hour later Crowder found her. She was glad to see him, and told him she was better, but the doctor would not let her get up yet.

"And even if he would," she said, "I don't want to. I'm that weak, Charlie, you can't think. It's as if the thing that made me alive was gone, and I was just the same as dead."

Crowder thought he understood his friend Pancha even as he did his friend Mark. That she could have complexities and reservations beyond his simple ken had never occurred to him. What he saw on the surface was what she was, and being so, the news he was bringing would be as a tonic to her broken spirit.

"You'll not stay that way long, Panchita," he said. "You'll be on the job soon now. And what I've come to tell you will help on the good work. I've got a story for you that'll straighten out all the creases and bring you up on your feet better than a steam derrick would."

"What is it?" She did not seem especially interested, her glance listless, her hand lying languid where he had dropped it.

"It's about Mayer."