straggled along behind. Anderson stopped at the _Banner_ office door
and, exposing the dirty envelope to the eager gaze of the crowd, advised
every one present to step in and take out a year's subscription to the
paper. Then he disappeared. The crowd surged forward, filling the outer
office with something like sardine compactness. The door to Mr.
Squires's private office, however, closed sharply behind Mr. Crow, and
for the next fifteen or twenty minutes the young lady bookkeeper was
busy taking subscriptions from the disappointed throng. She got
sixty-three new subscribers and definite promises from a large number of
citizens who were considerably in arrears.
"You'll see it all in your paper tomorrow morning," said Anderson,
coming out of the inner office at the end of half an hour's consultation
with the editor. "All I can say to you now is that I have captured one
of the most desperate criminals in the country. He has been wanted for
nearly three years for a diabolical crime. It makes my flesh creep to
think of him being loose among our women an' children all this time. Is
there any one here who ain't subscribed to the _Banner_?"
Tinkletown slept fitfully that night when it slept at all. The sole
citizen enjoying a peaceful night's rest was Jake Miller. A singular
circumstance connected with the broken rest of three-fourths of the
people of Tinkletown was the extraordinary unanimity with which Jake
became visible to them the instant they did drop off to sleep.
Bright and early the next morning, the _Banner_ appeared with its
gruesome story. Jake was in very large type, but not much larger, after
all, than Marshal Crow. The whilom Mr. Squires, revelling in generosity,
gave Anderson all the credit. He held forth at great length on the
achievements of the redoubtable marshal, winding up his account with a
recommendation that a movement be inaugurated at once looking to the
erection of a memorial statue to the famous "sleuth." The concluding
sentence of this bold panegyric was as follows: "Do not wait till he is
dead! Do it now!" And appended, in parentheses, the statement that the
_Banner_ would head the list of subscribers with a contribution of one
hundred dollars!
In the body of his article, Mr. Squires printed in full the contents of
the letter received by Jacob Miller on the afternoon before his
death,--the letter which had been recovered, after the most diligent and
acute search by Marshal Crow, at the bottom of an abandoned well in
Power House Gulley,--the letter which so completely vindicated the
theories and deductions of Tinkletown's most celebrated son.
Jake's letter was from his brother in Sandusky. It warned him that the
authorities had finally located him in Tinkletown and that officers were
even then on the way east to "pinch" him. They had run him down at last,
despite the various aliases under which he had sought to avoid
apprehension; brotherly love impelled him to advise Jake to "beat it" as
"quick as possible." Moreover, he went on to state that if they got him
he'd "swing" as sure as hell. Brotherly interest no doubt was also
responsible for the frank admission that the "family" had done all it
could for him, and that if he had had a grain of sense, or had listened
to his friends, he wouldn't have married her in the first place. And if
he hadn't married her, he wouldn't have been placed in a position where
he had to beat her brains out. Not that she didn't deserve to have her
brains knocked out, and all that, but "you can't go around doing that
sort of thing without getting into trouble about it."
In short, Jake--(by any other name he was just as guilty)--had slain his
wife, presumably in cold blood. At any rate, Mr. Squires, sustained by
the information received from Marshal Crow, (who had gone deeply into
the case), stated in cold type that it had been done in cold blood.
Apparently Jake had decided that he was tired of dodging the inevitable.
It was quite clear that he could not endure the thought of being "swung"
for his diabolical deed.
The account also stated that Marshal Crow had at once advised the
Western authorities by telegraph that he had their man, but regretted to
state the scoundrel had anticipated arrest in the manner now so well
known to the readers of the _Banner_, long recognized as the most
enterprising newspaper in that part of the State of New York.
A day or two later, after the inquest, an officer arrived from Sandusky.
He was a spectator at the funeral of Jake Miller, whom he readily
identified as the slayer of Mrs. Camp, and was afterwards a most
interested listener to the recital given on Lamson's porch by Marshal
Crow, who, described with considerable zest and surprising fidelity the
manifold difficulties he had experienced in "running the criminal to
earth,"--one of the most puzzling cases he had ever been called upon to
tackle.
The astonished officer walked over to the Grand View Hotel with Harry
Squires. From time to time he passed his hand over his brow in a
thoroughly puzzled manner.
"I don't mind telling you, Mr. Squires," he blurted out at last, "that
we hadn't the faintest idea that this fellow Camp was as desperate a
character as all this. We looked upon him as a rather harmless,
soft-headed guy,--but, my God, he turns out to be one of the slickest
all-round crooks in the United States. No wonder he managed to give us
the slip all these years. It only goes to show how even the best of us
can be fooled in a man."
"That's right," agreed Harry. "It certainly does show how you can be
fooled in a man."
"When I get back home and tell 'em at headquarters what a slick duck he
was, they'll throw a fit. Why, by Gosh, we all thought he was a nut,--a
plain nut."
"Far be it from me," said Harry, "to speak ill of either the living or
the dead."
"It's a wonder he didn't up and blow the head off this old Rube when he
found he was about to be cornered."
Harry took that moment to relight his pipe, and then abruptly said "Good
night" to the gentleman from Sandusky.
As he rejoined the group in front of Lamson's, Marshal Crow was saying:
"I'm mighty glad Harry Squires had sense enough not to say in the
_Banner_ that as soon as Jake Miller found out that the jig was up, he
took the law in his own hands, and lynched himself."
THE END
End of Project Gutenberg's Anderson Crow, Detective, by George Barr McCutcheon