The man in the long blue car was a person of consequence. The big
traffic policeman had stopped all north and south traffic, but the
chauffeur of the blue machine darted in front of a stopped Bowling Green
car without the slightest slackening of speed, and shot between an
eastbound slot car and a westbound delivery truck. Traffic cop 7389
saluted gravely and silenced with a warning scowl the snarling driver of
a held-up van, who had to reach the ten-thirty boat.
The lone occupant of the roomy tonneau, rigidly straight on the
cushions, answered the salute with a barely perceptible nod of his head,
and a half smile of the thin, almost bloodless lips. But there was no
change of expression in the granite-hard gray eyes, nor a movement of
the straight back. One lean hand gripped the tonneau door, the fingers
resting just above the small silvered monogram on the blue enamel; the
other dropped lightly on the seat beside his knee. John T. Villers, the
power behind the throne of Money, was on his way to his office.
It was characteristic of the man that he did not lounge back in his
seat; that his pose was one of tense rigidity. No one had ever seen John
T. Villers relax; none of the hundreds who knew him thought that he
could relax. Alert, watchful, a machine for the massing of millions; a
machine that never required rest; that never needed the lubrication of
pleasure to insure its smooth running; a human mechanism that never
deviated a hair’s breadth from its schedule. Such was the king of the
kings of finance.
At ten-fifteen he would be at his office in Wall Street. Elsewhere, a
monarch of half a million fighting men paced the floor of his castle
room, impatiently awaiting the word that a simple touch of a desk button
in that Wall Street office would bring. Ten thousand yellow coolies,
half a world away, idled in bamboo-thatched construction huts for a
stroke of John T. Villers’s pen. And he answered the salute of a traffic
policeman!
Men and women on Broadway halted in their hurrying to stare at the big
blue car, and the silent, straight-backed occupant; for the face and the
pose of the financier were as familiar to the reading public as Broadway
itself. Weak-chinned men of the unemployed ranks cursed the “luck” that
gave him money and them hunger. Clerks, from high office windows,
bemoaned the fate that compelled them to commence work at eight and
allowed him to begin at ten. There was no sign in the hard gray eyes of
the man who answered the traffic men’s salutes that the money machine
had been working until daylight over the inch-thick packet of papers now
buttoned tightly beneath his coat. The machine never showed signs of its
running.
At Murray Street a deeper inclination of the head was the honour paid a
business friend in a passing automobile. At Park Place the blue machine
skirted ahead of the traffic block where the huge Woolworth Building
mounted skyward. A taxi darted in front of it, tried to cut in ahead;
then stopped. Villers’s chauffeur cursed under his breath as he swerved
toward the curb. The wheels of the smooth-running car struck the thin
end of a building girder, ran over it with a great jolt that jarred the
car body down on its springs. A fat traffic cop hurried across the
street just as the stalled taxi came to life and scurried down Broadway.
The blue car had never even paused; the incident was closed.
The chauffeur bent lower over his wheel so that his muttered oaths would
not reach the silent man behind him, for he knew that his job hung on
the hair of his employer’s morning humour. John T. Villers’s one rule,
whether it be for trusted clerks or chauffeurs, was smoothness; he did
not like jolts.
The next traffic cop, who had sworn sympathetically when he saw that
jar, let his jaw drop and his salute become a gesture of surprise. The
lone man in the tonneau was lying back in the cushions, his eyes closed,
the fingers of the hand that had been on the door relaxed.
“’Tis a tired man he is this mornin’,” muttered the traffic man in
sympathy.
The car swung into Wall Street, stopped before the world-known banking
house of Villers. Instantly the chauffeur was down, his hand pulled open
the door. But the machine that never relaxed was sleeping. Wonderment
came to the face of the driver; then fear. He laid a hand lightly on the
shoulder of his employer. The breathing man did not stir. The fear on
the chauffeur’s face deepened. Mr. Villers must be sick!
He obeyed the first instinct, and looked wildly around. Relief chased
some of the fear away when he saw the approaching private watchman, who
had been stationed before the Villers’s house for years.
“Mr. Villers is sick!” he cried.
The watchman brushed him aside, and stared at the bloodless face with
the closed, blue-veined lids.
“He must ’a’ fainted!” gasped the watchman; and he, too, looked wildly
around for help.
“Can I be of any assistance?” Both jumped nervously as the stout,
full-bearded man with the black satchel spoke. “I am a doctair.” He
enunciated the words slowly, distinctly, with a pause after each.
“Mr. Villers has fainted.” They chorused it, huge relief in their
voices, and stepped back instantly.
The bearded man stepped to the car, ripped open the unconscious man’s
coat and vest, and placed his hand over the beating heart
professionally.
“Heart trouble. Seerious,” he told them slowly, as if the words caused
him trouble. “Tell them inside.” Both started. He called the watchman
back. “Spread the robe on the side-walk.” The watchman’s clumsy fingers
fumbled with the robe as the physician put his ear to the financier’s
chest, muttered an angry ejaculation, and fumbled with the black bag at
his feet.
“It’s ready, sir.” Then the watchman swore under his breath at the
crowding men and boys who had apparently sprung from the very side-walk.
The big man paid not the slightest attention. He lifted the slight form
of the man of millions and laid it gently on the robe-covered stones.
“He must go to a hospital,” he announced with precise distinctness. “I
will call the ambu-lance.”
The crowd parted, he hurried through.
Inside the banker’s office the chauffeur blurted the news to the
multi-millionaire’s private secretary, utterly unmindful of the two
strangers who were with him.
“Fainted?” echoed the secretary blankly.
“Fainted?” repeated the red-cheeked, black-haired stranger.
“Men like Villers don’t faint. Where is he?” The chauffeur stared at the
deep-chested, striking-looking man with the wavy white hair, fine as
silk, and the strong, lean face, whose extreme paleness was accentuated
by the great blue circles of the smoked tortoise-shell library glasses
that rested lightly on the nose with its delicate, sensitive nostrils.
“Show me where he is, Sydney.” The cleft chin was set at an ominous
angle, his slim stick, apparently of heavy ebony, dangled idly between
the tapering fingers of his right hand.
“Can’t you see the crowd running?” The shock had made the chauffeur
forget that he was only a chauffeur; he jerked his head toward the door
he had opened so unceremoniously.
“I am blind.” The white-haired man said it simply, quietly.
“Come, Thorn.” His apple-cheeked secretary led the way from the office,
the blind man at his heels. Villers’s private secretary and the
chauffeur followed dumbly after.
There were now two policemen to keep the surging crowd from the still
body of the master of millions on the cold side-walk. The outer ranks
parted for the apple-cheeked man, the blind one followed him to the
centre. One of the policemen mopped his brow in relief as they entered
the small circle.
“It looks like heart trouble, Mr. Colton,” he murmured nervously.
“Think so, Thompson?” The end of the slim stick touched a knee of the
prostrate man lightly. Thornley Colton knelt and picked up a lax arm.
His fingers felt the pulse.
“That’s what the doctor said it was.” The watchman licked his dry lips.
“He ought to be back by now.”
“Doctor?” snapped the kneeling man, without looking up.
“He laid him there t’ call th’ ambulance.” Once more the watchman wet
his lips.
“Who is Mr. Villers’s physician?” The blind man’s finger-tips were
lightly brushing the coat-lining.
“Doctor Clayton.” The private secretary answered.
“Get him. Quick!” The tone of the voice sent a bareheaded clerk who had
followed them on the jump to obey.
“Is it a serious heart attack?” stammered the still-dazed private
secretary.
“Heart attack? _No!_” The blind man spoke sharply, crisply. “This is a
morphine stupor!”
“Morphine?” gasped the dazed secretary incredulously.
“Yes!” The word was jerked out, a slim fore-finger and thumb raised an
eyelid of the prostrate man. “See the contracted pupils? Pin-points!”
“But how----Thank Heaven, Mr. MacLaren!” The secretary’s voice changed
from helpless amazement to joyous relief as the square-shouldered,
square-chinned man with the iron-gray hair pushed his way though the
crowd.
“My God! What does this mean?” cried the new comer.
The blind man rose, picked up his stick, and brushed his trousers knees.
“It means robbery--now,” he said grimly. “It will probably mean murder
in a few hours!”
Dreyfus MacLaren, the one man in all the world who enjoyed the full
confidence of John T. Villers, paced the floor of his office with
nervous strides, halting at every turn, ears strained to catch the
faintest sounds from the inner room, where the doctor worked over the
unconscious money machine. On the street outside, stretching from the
sub-treasury steps to the dingy buildings where the sugar brokers buy
and sell, the crowd still waited, whispered. In the outer room of the
financier’s office came the low-voiced hum of half a hundred newspaper
men, tensely waiting a word from that inner room. At the end of his
small office MacLaren swung around to face the blind problemist, who
rolled the thin, hollow stick he always carried between his tapering
white fingers.
“My God, Mr. Colton!” he broke out. “It couldn’t have happened!”
“It did,” answered the blind man mildly.
“But he was in an open automobile; a thousand persons saw him; he
answered the salutes of, perhaps, fifty policemen along Broadway. No one
was near him; no one could have got near enough to render him
unconscious with morphine.”
“The fact that he is still in a morphine stupor is the best answer to
that.” Thornley Colton’s voice was still mild, even gentle.
“You say that the man who lifted him out of the car did not inject the
stuff?”
“Yes. The bounding pulse my fingers felt told me immediately that it had
been in the system at least ten minutes. The bounding pulse, as it is
called, is peculiar to morphia. I have made a special study of pulse
beats.” The blind man did not add that the pulse, to him, was the
Keyboard of Silence that told many secrets of the heart to the
supersensitive finger-tips that always rested on the wrist when he shook
hands.
“Then that puts it right up to the chauffeur, whom the police arrested,”
admitted MacLaren. “But I can’t see how he did it,” he added.
Sydney Thames, silent in a corner chair, also shook his head.
“He didn’t!” snapped Colton. “If the police were forced to use brains
instead of feet to hold their jobs, there wouldn’t be so many fool
mistakes made. They should have arrested the automobile,” he finished
seriously.
Before the surprised expression on MacLaren’s face could be put into
words the inner door opened, and the grave-faced doctor stood before
them.
“Has Mr. Villers’s family been notified?” he asked.
“He won’t die!” There was utter disbelief in MacLaren’s tone.
“He will die,” amended the physician quietly. “His nerve has been
keeping his worn-out body going for years; such an overdose of morphine
could not but be fatal. I have tried to arouse him, but heroic methods
would only result in an instant stopping of his heart. He will sleep
for, perhaps, an hour more; then he will quietly stop breathing.”
“My God, doctor! That is murder!” MacLaren’s great body dropped limply
into a chair, his face was white. He had refused to believe, before,
that the master of millions could die. It was impossible. The wonderful
machine could not stop. Now it was silent, useless.
The doctor was speaking: “There is no doubt that a heavy dose of morphia
is responsible; every symptom points to it unmistakably, but”--the
physician stroked his Vandyke perplexedly--“I have been unable to find
the spot on his body where the hypodermic needle entered. I have
minutely examined the chest, the abdomen, the arms, thighs, even the
face. It is puzzling, very.”
“Mr. Villers is still lying on his back?” The question was put casually
by the blind man, whom the physician had not even noticed.
“Certainly!” The doctor answered as one answers a foolish question.
“If you will turn him gently on his side for a moment you will probably
find the broken point of the hypodermic needle under his
shoulder-blade.”
“His back--why----” The physician darted through the inner door.
The doctor’s going left them silent. MacLaren’s square shoulders were
hunched forward, his eyes fixed steadily on the closed door. Sydney
Thames, in the big leather chair in the corner, was tense, rigid. A
hundred times he had heard the blind man, whom he loved, make a
statement of this kind. Never had he known him to be wrong; but always
did he fear that Thornley Colton would make some terrible mistake in his
sureness of himself. And the sightless problemist smoked his cigarette
calmly, the great, blue circles of eyes fixed on the ceiling above him.
The door opened; the doctor faced them.
“The needle had broken under the right shoulder-blade--as you said.”
Doctor Clayton’s keen eyes bored the blind man with a look of
half-suspicion.
The words seemed to arouse MacLaren; he realized their significance.
“How--did--you--know--that?” Each separate word was a gasp. “And blind!”
The tone of his voice was a demand for explanation.
“I knew it because of my blindness,” explained the problemist quietly.
“We of the darkness must learn to visualize, mentally, what your eyes
accept unconsciously. We learn to see with our brains, you see without
them. My whole life has been spent in this development of mental
visualization. I can instantly picture, in my brain, a scene that has
been given me in pieces by my four other senses. And that mental picture
often goes back to events that lead up to, and make, the scene.”
“Do you mean that you can _imagine_ who administered the morphine?”
asked MacLaren incredulously.
“Not at all!” There was just a shade of impatience in the tone. “I have
no clairvoyant powers. I haven’t the remotest idea of the guilty
persons’ identity--yet. But I knew Mr. Villers; I knew his habits, just
as every man in New York, and Europe, too, who reads the papers, knows
them. He has probably been given more columns of newspaper space than
any other man who ever lived. Everything he did was machine-like, never
changing; as sure as the sun and moon. I know how he sits in an
automobile; I know the attention he attracts. You do, too, but you
accepted them merely as something too obvious for the brain--as merely a
routine report of the eyes. So, when I felt the unmistakable morphia
pulse, an instant’s thought told me the only possible way it could have
been administered. The trained mind doesn’t have to take up time with
the consideration of innumerable possibilities; it is trained to the
instant elimination of impossibilities. The back was the only place it
could have been injected.”
“How? By whom?” They chorused it eagerly.
“By the innocent tool of a master mind: Mr. Villers’s automobile.”
“The automobile! What do you mean?” Incredulity, amazement were in the
voices of the excited men.
“During the excitement attending the carrying of Mr. Villers to his
office my fingers were examining the cushions of the tonneau. The
upholstery had been cut in the crease formed by the two tuft buttons,
about where a man’s back would come. A specially made hypodermic was
inserted, and the cut sewed. Of course, the crease concealed the
stitches. No one ever used the car but Villers, and every one knows how
he sits in the machine. You heard the statement of the chauffeur before
the police arrested him. The jolt caused by the girder and the stalled
taxi in front of the Woolworth Building were all that was needed. If
that had not succeeded, the taxi would have swung in front and caused a
collision. Then the ‘doctor’ would have gotten right on the job there,
as he did here, when the taxi hurried on ahead to be on hand here. The
breaking of the hypo needle was almost a certainty. It only required the
barest fraction of an instant for the stuff to enter the body, and the
broken needle would at once destroy the instrument and make its presence
for some time unsuspected by any one sitting in the car.”
“How fiendish,” murmured Doctor Clayton, and the words seemed puerile.
MacLaren shook his head, as if to clear the cobwebs from his usually
alert brain; then he leaped to his feet, totally unmindful of the dying
man in the next room.
“Colton, he _can’t_ die! The quarter-billion Chinese loan must be put
through to-day. The new German bond bid is being held open for us till
midnight. Another twenty-four hours’ delay means that we lose both. He
had all the data, the papers! They were----”
“Stolen,” finished Thornley Colton quietly. “That was the object of the
game--as I told you outside.”
“I never thought of them!” In MacLaren’s voice was the strong man’s
contrition for an unpardonable oversight. His teeth snapped together
with the squaring of his jaw as he paced the room before the silent
blind man and the red-cheeked, black-haired Sydney Thames. Behind the
closed door they could hear the hum of the doctor’s voice, as he tried
vainly to call up the Villers’s up-town house; though a hundred thousand
black-typed extras were on the street telling of the racing special
train that was bringing the family to the city and the dying man.
MacLaren made a circuit of the office before he stopped in front of the
blind man, who idly twirled his cane. The sudden stopping of the machine
that he had thought could not stop had unnerved him completely, driven
every other thought from his mind. But theft was something he
understood. It meant money. MacLaren, too, was a money machine.
“The loss of those papers means millions!” He was calm now, with the
calm of deadly earnestness. “More than that! The stealing of those data
Mr. Villers had means that the United States will be frozen out of both
the Chinese and German loans. You know how we had to fight for the
chance! Ours is the only American banking house that could handle them.
All the figures were prepared by Mr. Villers, and you know his
invariable rule to hold things like this until his last minute of grace.
Those papers must be recovered before midnight! Even the murder--there
seems to be no doubt that it will be murder--pales into insignificance
beside this, and”--there was a curious catch in his voice--“God knows I
loved John T. Villers. But the loss of that Chinese loan means that the
United States won’t have a say in the new republic; that American
interests will be crowded out by the powers who control China
financially. Every last detail was in those papers he was to have ready
to-day. Think of the German loan!” He was pacing the floor again,
talking as he walked. One money machine had stopped; another must take
its place. “The loss of those papers means a loss of at least ten
millions to us, and American interests in China and Germany will lose a
hundred millions in the next ten years!”
“Midnight,” murmured Thornley Colton, as a sensitive finger-tip touched
the crystalless watch in his pocket. “And it’s now one-fifteen.”
“Less than eleven hours!” MacLaren fairly jumped to the telephone on his
desk. “The police must have inducements to hustle!” One hand lifted the
receiver; then he swung round. “_You!_” It was almost an accusation as
he hurled it at the blind problemist. “You solved that code-book theft
for us a year ago. I’d forgotten! There isn’t a minute to lose!”
“A man is dying in the next room,” reminded Thornley Colton quietly.
MacLaren wet his dry lips. “I know.” His voice was lower, calmer. “But
think what it means. The hugeness of it! A theft of a hundred millions!”
It wasn’t lack of human feeling in MacLaren. He was a money machine,
doing what the man in the next room would wish done.
The blind man nodded understandingly. “I came in this morning to see Mr.
Villers regarding his cheque for our Home for Blind Children. We haven’t
received it this year.”
“If you can recover those papers I will give you my personal cheque for
a hundred thousand!”
“I never accept fees,” corrected Colton. “The solving of mysteries is my
recreation. But if you will continue Mr. Villers’s contributions to the
home----” His expressive lips finished the sentence without words.
“Yes! Ten times the amount.” MacLaren was half out of his chair, staring
at the blind man.
“Thank you. That home means a lot to me.” The blind man spoke
reverently. “Sydney and I will look into the case after lunch; I am
hungry.”
“Hungry? My God!” MacLaren fell back weakly into the chair. “Don’t you
realize that you have less than eleven hours? Don’t you understand that
every minute of delay may be fatal?”
“Oh, no,” replied the problemist easily. “It will be at least several
hours before the man who has the papers finishes his elaborate
precautions for putting the police off his trail. There is no sense in
hurrying after a man who is dodging and doubling to avoid possible
pursuit. When he is convinced that his trail has been covered he will
resume his normal way. The chased hare can wear out a hundred dogs that
follow his devious windings, and when they are worn out he returns to
the bosom of his family, contented and serene. That’s where the ferret
gets him.”
For a full minute MacLaren stared, as if the blind man had presented a
problem in Euclid which he could not understand. Then he brushed his
sweat-beaded forehead with a trembling hand. “But the police didn’t
waste an instant,” he protested. “There are two hundred detectives
working now. They’ve got a minute description of the man.” He stopped
suddenly. “You weren’t even present when they questioned the chauffeur
and the watchman!”
“The senseless bulldozing of the police always makes me lose my temper,”
confessed Thornley Colton. “I spoke to the chauffeur for ten minutes
before the detectives arrived. Afterward I preferred to sit here, where
I could smoke a cigarette and use the telephone.”
“But the police learned that the man who lifted Mr. Villers from the car
was stout, with a full brown beard, and dressed in light gray,”
persisted MacLaren.
“And in this office, alone with my cigarette, I learned that he was slim
and smooth-shaven,” smiled Thornley Colton, as he rose. “But those are
minor details. He had the nail of his right index finger broken, and
wore a curious thumb ring. Also, he did not actually place the
hypodermic in the tonneau cushions. That was done by a small, slightly
built man, and a very beautiful woman who is left-handed.”
“Without eyes----” began MacLaren gaspingly.
“With my ten eyes.” Thornley Colton held out his two hands, with their
tapering hypersensitive fingers.
Broadway was a pandemonium of newsboys’ shouts; Wall Street a murmur of
low-voiced speculation; newspaper offices a buzz of humming activity.
John T. Villers was dead--murdered. London whispered it solemnly, Paris
gesticulated over it, Berlin gutturaled the news phlegmatically, Tokyo
took it with characteristic lack of characteristics. Men in tin-roofed
cable offices on the coast of Africa caught the telegraph clicks with
news eagerness instead of curses. The wireless aerials of a thousand
ships filched the story from the air. The man who had builded the
American empire of money was dead. Would the empire crumble? Would the
world-power of money return to the seats of the mighty on the other side
of the ocean, where it had been before the money machine had demanded a
hand-grasp on the golden sceptre the jealous hands of Europe had wielded
so long? The money machines of Paris, London, Berlin awaited the answer
that would be in the Chinese loan, the German loan--the answer that was
in the pocket of a murderer!
And in the quiet dining-room of the old Astor House Thornley Colton
complained to the waiter of the lack of crust shortening in the
apple-pie he was eating. It was three o’clock.
Across the table Sydney Thames chewed his cigar nervously and tried to
keep his mind on the “latest” extra he held in his hands. He had read
the life story of John T. Villers, printed under the great black word:
“DEAD!” It was the story of the poor boy who came to the city, the story
of machine-like habits, of putting through vast deals only when he had
taken the last possible hour to consider every point, until he became
known in Europe and America as “Last-Minute” Villers.
He read of Johnson, Villers’s personal chauffeur, who slept alone with
his wife and three small children in the big private garage that was now
empty because the dozen other Villers machines and their drivers had
gone to Bar Harbour with Mrs. Villers and the two sons. He read of
Johnson’s five years of service, of his exemplary habits, his nights
spent at home with his family; even of his taking his wife and two
larger children to the theatre the night before, while the baby was
cared for by a neighbour. Even the police admitted that he was innocent,
but police-like, they still held him.
The story of finding the curious hypodermic, surrounded by a strong
spring to hold it in place, caused Sydney to laugh nervously. The police
had not discovered it until reporters, who had interviewed MacLaren
after Thornley Colton had left, told them of it. Now the search was on
for the taxi which had caused the Villers machine to run over the
girder. And there was no clue! The three traffic policemen who had seen
the whole thing had neither number nor idea of the machine. It was red;
so were a thousand others. An expert had said that the hypodermic of
death had been made abroad, possibly in Germany. And that was all.
But the papers revelled in the details; they gave inch-typed prominence
to the announcement that MacLaren had offered a huge reward for certain
papers stolen from the unconscious Villers. It was a big story; the
biggest story of the most daring crime New York had ever known.
Yes, Sydney read, and re-read, until the inch paragraph in the lower
left-hand corner regarding the activities of a band of international
smugglers was a relief. On any other day that story would have been
given prominence, to-day it was only a filler. He glanced up at the
clock on the wall, then his eyes turned toward the blind man, in them a
look of appeal for hurry.
“Nervous, Sydney?” smiled Thornley Colton over the top of his glass of
milk.
Thames flushed, as he usually did when this man, who had picked him up
as a bundle of baby-clothes on the banks of the English river that had
given him the only surname he had ever known, read his thoughts.
“It is five minutes past three,” he murmured apologetically.
“And we haven’t done a thing,” finished Colton, the smile still on his
thin, expressive lips.
“But this is so big; the consequences----”
“Do you expect the success of this murder to pave the way for others?”
interjected Thornley Colton mildly.
“I wasn’t thinking----” Sydney stopped suddenly.
“Of the murder.” The problemist again finished the sentence for him.
“You were thinking of the stolen data. So are a million others.” The
smile was cynical, now. “What a pitiful thing a human life is, compared
to a few millions. No one thinks of Villers’s death as the death of a
man. It is merely the stopping of a machine with its work unfinished.”
He took a bill from his fold and laid it beside his plate. “Come, then;
I’ll get busy.”
“To the Villers garage?” asked Thames eagerly. “There should be
countless clues, for you, leading to the persons who placed the
hypodermic.”
“All superfluous,” declared Thornley Colton, with a slight wave of the
thin, hollow stick he always carried. “Following a multitude of
unimportant clues is police work. We are going to the office of the
Manhattan Tug and Lighterage Company; yesterday was quite foggy.
Remember?”
“What----” began Sydney amazedly.
Thornley Colton interrupted. “The same?” he asked quietly.
Sydney Thames choked back the words and glanced over the dining-room.
His brain, trained for years to count steps for the man who could not
see, and who refused a guiding arm, calculated rapidly. “The waiter is
serving the table twelve steps straight. Turn eleven, four right, and
seven to the door, left.”
A nod, and the blind man hurried forward confidently with long, swinging
strides, the hollow cane dangling idly from his fingers. Sydney
followed, and, at the door, he stepped beside Colton. The slight touch
of his sleeve on the sightless man’s arm guided him to a taxi-cab. It
was not until the directions had been given, and they were on their way
toward the Battery, that Thornley Colton spoke.
“The Manhattan Tug and Lighterage Company got a whole lot of free
publicity a few weeks ago in connection with that rescue at sea of the
Oldwell private yacht by one of their big sea-going tugs that happened
to be near. Recollect?”
“Yes,” admitted Thames, puzzled. “But what has that to do with it?”
“Nothing, except that the story went the rounds, and the name would
naturally occur to any one who needed a sea-going tug. I have an idea
that the fog of yesterday caused several persons a whole lot of anxiety.
Ah, here we are.”
Dazedly Sydney Thames followed the blind man to the side-walk. What had
a sea-going tug to do with a robbery on Wall Street? What had the fog of
yesterday to do with the murder of to-day? But Sydney knew the
uselessness of the eager questions that were in his mind. The problemist
would tell him, all in good time. So, silently, he fell in beside
Thornley Colton, and guided him into the offices with the slight touch
of his sleeve.
President M‘Inness was the man Colton asked for, and they were shown
into the private office immediately.
“Glad to see you, Mr. Colton; glad to see you!” boomed the
wide-shouldered, rugged-faced man, as he took the other’s fingers in his
vice-like grip. “What is it this time; smugglers again? They say a new
gang’s workin’. They’re even watching my boats.”
Thornley Colton shook his head, for answer to that last. Then he came
right to the point.
“You got a wireless from the _Moravia_, early yesterday morning, to take
a passenger off at Quarantine, and rush him to New York.” It was not a
question; it was a simple statement of a known fact.
“Sure,” admitted M‘Inness. “Then the Lord stepped in and brushed away
the fog at midnight, and the _Moravia_ docked at eight o’clock this
morning.”
“Can you give us the name that was on the wireless?”
“Sure. I guess you’ve heard it often enough. Percy Vanderpoole.”
Sydney Thames could not repress a gasp of surprise; but Thornley
Colton’s tone was merely casual as he said:
“Dreyfus MacLaren’s nephew?”
“That’s him. He’s got about nine million dollars, you know, and he’s
certainly been making it fly in the four years since he left college.
Hasn’t brains enough to get in out of the rain, either.”
“Um!” Thornley rolled the hollow stick between his fingers absently.
“Nothing else in the wireless, I suppose?”
“Nope. Just wanted a tug if the _Moravia_ was held up after two o’clock.
Wasn’t. The fog lifted, she docked, and we lost two hundred dollars.”
The sentence ended in a wry smile.
“From what I’ve heard of Vanderpoole, and from what I know of him, I
should think he’d have taken that tug anyway, and hang the expense.” The
blind man rose. “He must have been taking some one’s advice,” he
finished.
“Be the first time he ever did, then, according to the papers,” grunted
M‘Inness. “Accordin’ to them I’ve seen, he has a bug for giving fool
dinners.”
“So I’ve heard,” murmured Colton, backing toward the door.
“Ain’t any use asking your game, I guess?” grinned the amiable Mr.
M‘Inness.
“You’ll probably read about it in the morning papers,” smiled Colton.
Then he hurried out, his brain automatically counting the steps it had
registered as he entered.
On the side-walk outside, Sydney allowed his thoughts to find expression
in two words:
“Great Scott!”
“It was a surprise,” admitted the problemist. “It means a total change
of plans. Take me to a telephone.”
There was one at hand in the corridor of a big office building. For
nearly half an hour Colton telephoned, while Sydney waited outside the
closed booth vainly trying to understand this new complication. What
connection had the nephew of the man who had offered them a hundred
thousand dollars for the recovery of the papers with their theft, and
with the murder of John T. Villers?
Colton emerged from the booth, a smile of triumph on his thin lips.
“Now a jewellery store, Sydney,” he said crisply. “I want to buy a
cheap, unset diamond.”
“A diamond?” echoed Thames blankly.
“Exactly. I’ve just accepted an invitation for you and me and MacLaren
to a little dinner aboard Percy Vanderpoole’s yacht this evening. I’m
going to see if a diamond really has the wonderful power of suggestion
so often attributed to it.”