JACK TELLS THE STORY
Inside an hour O’Mally, Babbitts and I were on our way to Philadelphia.
All friction was forgotten, a bigger issue had extinguished the sparks
that had come near bursting into flame. A mutual desire united us, the
finding of Barker.
The train, an express, seemed to crawl like a tortoise, but the way I
felt I guess the flight of an aëroplane would have been slow. I had
hideous fears that he might give us the slip, but O’Mally was confident.
One of his men had got a lead on Barker through a vendor of newspapers,
from whom the capitalist twice in the last week had purchased the big
New York dailies. It had taken several days to locate his place of
hiding—a quiet boarding house far removed from the center of the
city—which was now under surveillance. As we swung through the night,
shut close in a smoke-filled compartment, we speculated as to whether he
would try and throw a bluff or see the game was up and tell the truth.
At the station O’Mally’s man met us and the four of us piled into a
taxi, and started on a run across town. It was moonlight, and going down
those quiet streets, lined with big houses and then with little
houses—still, dwindling vistas sleeping in the silver radiance—seemed to
me the longest drive I’d ever taken in my life. As we sped the detective
gave us further particulars. By his instructions the newsstand man, who
left the morning papers at the boarding house, had got into
communication with the servant, a colored girl. From her he had learnt
that Barker—he passed under the name of Joseph Sammis—had been away for
twenty-four hours and had come back that morning so ill that a doctor
had been called in. The doctor had said the man’s heart was weak, and
that his condition looked like the result of strain or shock. Questioned
further the girl had said he was "A pleasant, civil-spoken old
gentleman, giving no trouble to anybody." He went out very little,
sitting in his room most of the time reading the papers. He received no
mail there, but that he did get letters she had found out, as she had
seen one on his table addressed to the General Delivery.
The house was on a street, quiet and deserted at this early hour, one of
a row all built alike. As we climbed out of the taxi the moon was
bright, the shadows lying like black velvet across the lonely roadway.
On the opposite side, loitering slow, was a man, who, raising a hand to
his hat, passed on into the darkness along the area railings. Though it
was only a little after nine, many of the houses showed the blankness of
unlit windows, but in the place where we had stopped a fan-light over
the door glowed in a yellow semicircle.
As the taxi moved off we three—O’Mally’s detective slipped away into the
shadow like a ghost—walked up a little path to the front door where I
pulled an old-fashioned bell handle. I could hear the sound go jingling
through the hall, loud and cracked, and then steps, languid and
dragging, come from somewhere in the rear. I was to act as spokesman, my
cue being to ask for Mr. Sammis on a matter of urgent business.
The door was opened by the colored girl, who looked at us stupidly and
then said she’d call Miss Graves, the landlady, as she didn’t think
anyone could see Mr. Sammis.
Standing back from the door she let us into a hall with a hatrack on one
side and a flight of stairs going up at the back. The light was dim,
coming from a globe held aloft by a figure that crowned the newel post.
The paper on the walls, some dark striped pattern, seemed to absorb what
little radiance there was and the whole place smelled musty and was as
quiet as a church.
The colored girl had disappeared down a long passage and presently a
door opened back there and a woman came out, tall and thin, in a skimpy
black dress. She approached us as we stood in a group by the hatrack,
leaning forward near-sightedly and blinking at us through silver-rimmed
spectacles.
"My maid says you want to see Mr. Sammis," she said, in an unamiable
voice.
"Yes," I answered. "We’ve come from New York and it’s imperative we see
him this evening."
"But you can’t," she snapped. "He’s sick. The doctor says he mustn’t be
disturbed."
Talking it over afterward we all confessed that we were seized by the
same idea—that this lanky old spinster might be in the game and Barker’s
illness was a fake. Feeling as I did I was ready to leap forward, grab
her, and lock her in her own parlor while the others chased up the
stairs. I could sense the slight, uneasy stir of the two men beside me,
and I tried to inject a determination into my voice, that while it was
civil was also informing:
"I’m sorry, but it’s absolutely necessary that we transact our business
with him now."
"Can’t you give me a message?" she demurred, squinting her eyes up
behind the glasses. "I’ll see that it’s delivered in the morning."
"No, Madam. This is important and can’t wait. We won’t be long, we only
have to consult with him for a few minutes."
She gave a shrug as much as to say, "Well, this is your affair!" and,
drawing back, pointed to the stairs.
"He’s up there, fourth floor front, second door to your left."
To each of us the suspicion that she was in with Barker had grown with
every minute. The idea once lodged in our minds, possessed them, and we
went up those stairs, slow at first, and then, as we got out of earshot,
faster and faster. It was a run on the second flight and a gallop on the
third. On this landing there was no gas lit, but a window at the end of
the passage let in a square of moonlight that lay bright on the floor
and showed us the hall’s dim length and the outlines of closed doors.
It was the second of these, on the left-hand side, and creeping toward
it we stood for a moment getting our wind. The place was very cold, as
if a window was open, and there was not a sound. Standing by the door
O’Mally knocked softly. There was no answer.
In that half-lit passage, chilled with the icy breath of the winter
night and held in a strange stillness, I was seized by a grisly sense of
impending horror. If I’d been a small boy my teeth would have begun to
chatter. At thirty years of age that doesn’t happen, but I doubt whether
anyone whose body was supplied with an ordinarily active nervous system
would not have felt something sinister in that cold, dark place, in the
silence behind that close-shut door.
O’Mally knocked again and again; there was no answer.
"Try it," I whispered and the detective turned the handle.
"Locked," he breathed back, then—"Stand away there. I’m going to break
it. There’s something wrong here."
He turned sideways, bracing his shoulder against the door. There was a
cracking sound, and the lock, embedded in old soft wood, gave way, the
door swinging in with O’Mally hanging to the handle.
The room was unlit but for the silver moonlight that came from the
window, uncurtained and open. At that sight the same thought seized the
three of us—the man was gone—and O’Mally, fumbling in his pocket for
matches, broke into furious profanity.
I had a box and as I dug round for it, took a look about, and saw the
shapes of a chair with garments hanging over it, an open desk, and,
against the opposite wall, the bed. It was only a pale oblong, and
looked irregular, as if the clothes were heaped on it as the man had
thrown them back. I could have joined O’Mally in his swearing. Gone—when
our fingers were closing on him! Then I found the matches and the gas
burst out over our heads.
My eyes were on the bed and O’Mally’s must have been, for simultaneously
I gave an exclamation and he leaped forward. There, asleep, under the
covers lay a man. Quick as a flash of lightning the detective was beside
him, bending to look close at the face, then he drew back with a sound—a
cry of amazement, disbelief—and pulling off the bed clothes laid his
hand on the sleeper’s chest.
"God in Heaven!" he gasped, turning to us. "He’s dead!"
Babbitts and I made a rush for the bed, I to the head, where I leaned
low to make sure, staring into the gray, pale face with its prominent
nose and sunken eyes. Then it was my turn to cry out, to stagger back,
looking from one man to the other, aghast at what I’d seen:
"It’s not Barker at all."
For a moment we stared at one another, jaws fallen, eyes stony. Not a
word came from one of us, the silence broken by the hissing rush of the
gas turned up full cock in a sputtering ribbon of flame. I came to
myself first, turned from them back to the dead face, its marble calm in
strange contrast to the stunned consternation of the living faces.
"It’s not he," I repeated. "I’ve often seen him. It’s _not_ the man."
"Well—well——" stammered O’Mally, coming out of his stupor. "Who on earth
is it?"
"How do I know—Sammis, I suppose. It’s like him—the nose, the eyes and
the eyebrows, and the mustache. But," I looked at them, gazing like two
stupefied animals at the head on the pillow, "it’s _not_ Johnston
Barker."
O’Mally, with a groan of baffled desperation, fell into a chair, his
hands hanging over the arms, his feet limp on the floor before him.
Babbitts stood paralyzed, leaning on the foot of the bed. It was an
extraordinary situation—three live men, hot on the chase of a fourth and
in the moment of victory faced by the most inscrutable and solemn thing
that life holds—a dead man. We couldn’t get over it, couldn’t seem to
think or act, grouped round the bed with the whistling rush of the gas
loud on the silence.
Then suddenly, another and more distant sound broke up our stupefaction.
Someone was coming up the stairs. It jerked us back to life, and I made
a run for the door, O’Mally’s whisper hissing after me:
"If it’s that woman, keep her away for a while. I want to go over the
room."
It was Miss Graves, ascending slowly with the help of the balustrade. I
caught her on the landing and told her what we’d found. She was not
greatly surprised—the doctor had warned her. I explained the broken door
by telling her we had been alarmed by the silence and had forced our way
in. That, too, she took quietly, and turned away, gliding shadowlike
down the stairs to send out the servant for the doctor.
When I reëntered the room its aspect was changed. A sheet covered the
dead man and O’Mally and Babbitts, with all the burners in the
chandelier blazing, had started looking over the room. The detective was
already at work on the papers in the desk, Babbitts going through the
clothes over the chair and the few others that hung in the cupboard.
"Hustle and get busy," said O’Mally, as he heard me come in. "If this
isn’t Johnston Barker, it’s the man we’ve been trailing and I’m pretty
sure it’s the one that attacked Ford."
There was a table by the bedside with a reading lamp and some books on
it. Moving these I came upon two newspaper clippings, relating to the
suicide of Harland. In both Anthony Ford was mentioned. The reporters
had evidently spoken to him that night on the street, gleaning any
fragments of information they could. One alluded to the fact that he was
employed in the offices below Harland’s, the Azalea Woods Estates. These
words were heavily underlined in pencil.
"Looks like it from this," I said, showing the clipping to O’Mally.
He glanced at it and grunted, going back to his inspection of a sheaf of
papers he had found in one of the desk pigeonholes.
Meantime Babbitts had found in the coat that hung over the chair a
wallet containing a hundred dollars, a tailor’s bill for a suit and
coat, receipted and bearing a New York address, and Tony Ford’s house
and street number written in pencil on a neatly folded sheet of note
paper. Besides these there was one letter, dated January 13, typed and
bearing no signature. Its contents was as follows:
Enclosed please find one hundred dollars in two bills of fifty.
Will send same amount on same date next month if work should be
still delayed. Will communicate further later.
The envelope, also addressed in typewriting, was directed to Joseph
Sammis, General Delivery, Philadelphia, and bore a New York postmark.
We were working too quickly for much comment, but Babbitts held out the
paper with Ford’s address on it toward O’Mally.
"This bears it out, too," he said.
O’Mally looked at it, and snapped the elastic back on the documents he’d
been going over.
"From what I’ve seen here," he said, "Sammis was the man Ford was with
in the real-estate business. These are all contracts, bills and some
correspondence, the records of a small venture that went to smash," he
pushed the roll back in its pigeonhole—"not another thing."
"There’s not another thing in the room," I answered, "except two novels
and a stack of New York papers on the floor there by the bureau. Hist!
quiet!"
There were feet coming up the stairs. In a twinkling everything was as
it had been, Babbitts and O’Mally withdrew to the window and I went out
to see who was coming. It was Miss Graves and the doctor.
I explained the situation and found the doctor brusquely business-like
and matter-of-fact. It was what might have been expected. When he had
been called in that morning he had found Mr. Sammis a very sick man,
suffering from angina pectoris and a general condition of debility and
exhaustion. He had asked him if he had been subjected to any recent
exertion or strain but been told no other than a trip the day before to
Washington. Miss Graves said it was undoubtedly this trip that had done
the damage. He had been well when he started on Tuesday morning, but on
returning twenty-four hours later had been so weak and enfeebled that
one of the other lodgers had had to assist him to his room. An
examination proved that he had been dead some hours. Who his relations
were or where he came from Miss Graves had no idea and would turn the
matter over to the authorities.
It was close on midnight when we left, and there being no vehicle in
sight we walked up the street. The moon was as bright as day, and,
swinging along between those two lines of black houses, with here and
there a light shining yellow in an upper window, we were silent, each
occupied by his own thoughts.
I could guess those of the other two—Babbitts’ chagrin at once again
losing his big story, O’Mally’s sullen indignation at having followed a
clue that led to such a blind alley. But their disappointment and
bitterness were nothing to mine. All my hopes gone again, and this last
puzzle helping in no way, in no way as I then counted help.