It lacked three minutes of five by the big clock in the tower when the
east-bound Chicago express rumbled into the station at Buffalo. The
train had not yet come to a standstill when a hatless man jumped from
the platform of the rear sleeping-car and ran across the tracks into
the depot restaurant. A few minutes later he reappeared, carrying a cup
of coffee in one hand and a small paper bag in the other.
With these he hurriedly made his way back to the car through a
straggling procession of drowsy tourists, who were taking advantage
of the train's five minutes' stop to breathe the crisp morning air.
The last of these had already resumed his seat when the man without a
hat again appeared at the lunch counter, returned the borrowed dishes,
and ordered coffee for himself. He had just picked up the cup and was
raising it to his lips when the conductor's "All aboard" rang through
the station.
Leaving the coffee untouched, he thrust a five-dollar bill at the
attendant, grabbed his change, and started in pursuit of the moving
train. He had almost reached it when an unlucky stumble sent the
coins in his hand rolling in all directions along the floor. Quickly
recovering himself and paying no heed to his loss, he redoubled his
efforts, and, though losing ground at every step, kept up the hopeless
chase to the end of the station. There he stopped, panting for breath.
The slip had proved fatal. He had missed the train!
As he stood staring wildly through the clouds of dust that rose from
the track, a young woman, evidently deeply agitated, suddenly appeared
in the doorway of the vanishing car. Upon seeing him, she made frantic
attempts to leap from the platform, when she was seized by a man and
pulled back into the car. When the door had closed upon the two
the bareheaded man in the station faced about and philosophically
muttered:—
"It's fate!"
Then, after pausing a few moments, as if to collect his thoughts,
he slowly retraced his steps to the scene of his mishap and began
calmly searching for his lost change. Circling closely about, his eyes
scanning the floor, he succeeded in recovering first one and then
another of the missing coins, until finally, after repeated rounds, he
lacked only one dollar of the whole amount. At this point he paused,
clinked the recovered coins in his hand, looked at his watch, and then
started on a final round. As this failed to reveal the missing piece,
he gave up the search, transferred the contents of his hands to his
trousers' pocket, and started in the direction of the telegraph office.
He had proceeded perhaps twenty paces when it occurred to him to turn
about and cast one more look along the floor. As he did so his eye
fell upon a shining object lodged in an opening between the rail and
planked floor, a few feet from where he stood. He stooped to examine
it, and, seeing that it was the missing coin, reached for it, but
found the opening too narrow to admit his fingers. He tried to recover
the piece with his pocket-knife, and, failing in this attempt, took
his lead-pencil, with which, after repeated attempts, he succeeded in
tossing it upon the floor.
With an air of subdued satisfaction, he walked away, and was about to
convey the coin to his pocket when a sudden impulse led him to examine
it. Holding it up before his eyes, he stopped, scrutinized every
detail, and as he turned it over and over the puzzled look on his face
changed to one of rigid astonishment. For fully a minute he stood as if
transfixed; then, rousing himself and looking anxiously about as if to
see if any one had observed him, he hurried to the cashier's desk in
the restaurant, and, producing the bright silver dollar, asked the girl
if she happened to remember from whom she received it.
She didn't remember, but would exchange it for another, she said, if
he wished. Politely declining the offer and apologizing for having
troubled her, he said that, as the coin he held in his hand was
separating a loving wife from her husband, he wished very much to find
some trace of its former owner. The girl looked up, thought for a
moment, then, pulling out the cash drawer, and examining its contents,
said she might have received it from the conductor of the Lake Shore
express which had left for Cleveland at 3.15. She now recalled that
when she came on duty at midnight there was no silver dollar among
the change in the cash drawer, and that the only one she remembered
receiving was from Sleeping-Car Conductor Parkins.
The man thanked her and hastened to the telegraph office, where he sent
this message:—
"CONDUCTOR, EAST BOUND CHICAGO EXPRESS,
UTICA, N. Y.
"Please ask lady in section seven of sleeping-car Catawba to
await her husband at Delavan House, Albany.
"A. J. HOBART."
After requesting the operator to kindly rush the despatch, he proceeded
to the ticket office, procured a seat in the 5.45 fast mail for
Cleveland, and, with his hand clutching the coin in his pocket and his
eyes fixed upon the floor, meditatively paced up and down the platform,
waiting for the train to arrive.
As he did so he was disconcerted to find himself the object of
wide-spread curiosity; even the newsboys with the morning papers
favored him with an inquiring stare as they passed. Wondering what was
amiss, he suddenly put his hand to his head, which furnished an instant
explanation. He was hatless.
Looking at the big clock, he saw that it lacked ten minutes of train
time, and, hastily crossing over to the farther track, he disappeared
through the west end of the station.
Among the passengers who boarded the 5.45 fast mail for Cleveland when
it thundered into the station, ten minutes later, was the bareheaded
gentleman of a few minutes ago, now wearing a stylish derby. Once in
the train, he settled himself in his seat with a sigh of relief and
satisfaction. Not until then did the really remarkable character of the
situation dawn upon him. On the very day which he had hailed as one of
the happiest of his life he was traveling at the rate of about sixty
miles an hour away from the girl he loved devotedly and to whom he had
been married just seventeen hours. A queer opening of his honeymoon! In
his anxiety to get a cup of coffee for his wife, he had lost his hat,
then lost his change, and, lastly, lost the train.
Why did he not follow his bride at once? What mysterious spell had come
upon this seventeen-hour bridegroom that he should fly from her as
swiftly as the fast express could carry him? His hand held the solution
of the problem—simple, yet unexplainable—a silver dollar! It held
the secret he must unravel before he could return to her; it was not
then that he loved her less, but that this bit of precious metal had
suddenly developed an occult power that had turned their paths, for the
present, in opposite directions.
At the first stopping place he sent another message, which read as
follows:—
"MRS. A. J. HOBART, Delavan House, Albany, N. Y.
"Cannot possibly reach Albany before to-morrow morning.
"ANSEL."
With his brain filled with excited thoughts, the young man entered
the sleeping-car office at Cleveland four hours later and asked for
Conductor Parkins. He was told that this official would not be on duty
before night, though possibly he might be at his home on St. Clair
Street.
To the address given him the indefatigable young man repaired at once,
and found the genial gentleman for whom he sought breakfasting with his
family. He kindly gave audience at once to his visitor.
"This coin, which you gave the cashier of the restaurant in Buffalo,"
said the latter, revealing it in the palm of his hand; "can you tell me
from whom you received it?"
Parkins remembered receiving cash from but two passengers the night
before, one a traveling man who got off in Cleveland, and the other a
woman whose destination was Erie. The stranger might ascertain their
names by consulting the car diagram at the ticket office. "You seem
interested in the coin," he added, smiling.
"I am, for a good reason," laughed the young man in reply. "It is
separating a man from his wife." And with these engimatical words he
made his adieu, with thanks, hastened to the ticket office, and an hour
later was scouring the city for one Richard Spears.
The register of the Stillman House contained the freshly written name
of "Richard Spears, Providence, R. I.," but that gentleman, when
found in his room showing samples of hardware to a prospective buyer,
regretted that he could not throw any light on the particular dollar
his visitor held up to his gaze, and remembered distinctly that he had
given the conductor a two-dollar bill in payment for his berth. He came
from a section, he said, where people took no stock in silver dollars.
It was three o'clock in the afternoon when a man got off the train
at Erie and inquired of the cabmen and depot master regarding a lady
who had arrived on the early train from Buffalo. An hour later he was
driving along a country road some miles south of the town inquiring for
the Wickliffe farm.
As he finally drove up to the house which was his destination he was
conscious of a strange excitement. This, he realized, was probably
his only remaining chance to trace the coin by whose mysterious power
he had been drawn into this wild chase with the hope of identifying
its former owner. He took a hasty note of the general features of the
place. It had a comfortable, well-to-do look; a two-story house, white,
with green blinds. Most of these were closed, as is customary with
country houses, but the windows at the right of the big front door,
opening on a small porch, were shaded only by white curtains. There was
a sound of voices within as he stepped up to the door and rapped.
Mrs. Wickliffe, a pleasant-faced little woman, sat surrounded by
three children and a neighbor's wife, to whom she was displaying some
purchases. As one of the children opened the door, admitting the
stranger into this animated scene, she was standing before a mirror
trying on a new bonnet, which was eliciting extravagant praises from
the neighbor.
After listening to his story, Mrs. Wickliffe said that her memory was
so treacherous that she really couldn't say for certain whether or not
she gave the conductor the shining dollar, but that if she did she
must have received it from her son in Germantown, Pa., from a visit
to whose house she had just returned, and who before her departure had
exchanged some money for her. She added that, as she took no interest
in coin collecting, a dollar was simply a dollar to her and that she
thought a woman was very foolish to take up with a fad which might ruin
her happiness.
Her unknown caller thought so, too, admired her taste in millinery,
took the address of her son, and, clutching the fatal coin more firmly
than ever, drove back to Erie, where he boarded the New York night
express.
To the young man who still clutched the silver dollar sleep was
impossible. A multitude of exciting fancies crossed his brain. The
developments he hoped to bring about, the curious solution of the
problem, its effect upon his future, and the future of one so dear to
him,—all this murdered sleep for him as effectually as did the crime
on Lady Macbeth's soul. It drove him into the smoking-car, where he
sank into a seat and planned and conjectured between puffs of Havana
smoke until the train reached Albany. So completely absorbed had he
become in the solution of this knotty problem in which his accident
of the morning had involved him, and so convinced was he that the
information must be for the time kept a secret, that he actually began
to dread what was clearly inevitable,—the explanation he must shortly
make to his wife.
His inclination was to tell her all. His duty to others forbade this.
After pondering over the matter, he decided to explain that he had a
happy surprise in store for her, one that had an important bearing on
their future, and which unfortunately necessitated a change in their
plans for a honeymoon in Europe.
This, on reaching the Delavan House, he expressed to a very pretty and
very anxious little woman who was awaiting him, together with a good
many other things not necessary to this story. And, instead of the
steamer for Europe, the reunited pair took a train for Philadelphia.
Early the next day the young man presented himself at the office of Dr.
James Wickliffe, at Germantown, who smilingly admitted having given
the shining dollar to his mother two days before. He had received the
coin from a patient, a letter-carrier named John Lennon, and remembered
it because of the following strange story, related to him by Lennon
himself.
A few days before, the carrier was engaged in delivering mail from door
to door along Vine Street, Philadelphia, when a zigzag trip across the
street and back again brought him to the narrow stairway of a dingy
brick house, in front of which hung an enormous brass key bearing the
word "Locksmith." Here he paused to draw a little parcel from his
bundle. As he did so he heard something fall with a metallic clink upon
the stone pavement. He looked and saw that it was a silver dollar,
which rolled toward the gutter and came to a stop close by the curb.
Hastening to pick it up, he instantly dropped it with a cry of pain.
_The coin was almost red hot!_
The letter-carrier stood nursing his hand and thinking for two or three
minutes. Silver dollars do not commonly drop out of the sky. But that
this one should thus fall like a meteorite in a condition too heated
for handling was certainly more than surprising—it was astounding! The
man looked up at the dingy brick house and examined it attentively,
noting that the ground floor was occupied as a green grocery and that
all of the windows were shut save one in the third story.
Then he kicked the mysterious coin into a puddle, fished it out again
with his fingers, and put it into his trousers' pocket. He was about to
investigate further, when some small boys called his attention to the
fact that it was the first day of April, whereupon he proceeded on his
way. He gave no further thought to the matter until that night, when
he found that his thumb and forefinger had been so badly burned as to
require treatment.
The next morning he called upon the doctor, who dressed the painful
hand and received the mysterious coin in payment for his services.
That night, behind locked doors in one of the officers' rooms of the
United States Mint in Chestnut Street, two men were engaged in a long
whispered conference. The wife of one of the men, as she sat in her
room in the Continental Hotel, anxiously waiting for her husband, was
beginning to wonder whether, after all, marriage was a failure!
Two days later, in speaking of the seizure of over forty thousand bogus
silver dollars and the clever capture of three of the most dangerous
counterfeiters that ever attacked the currency of the United States,
the _Daily News_ said:—
"The most remarkable part of the whole story is that one of the coins,
fresh from the machine of one of the counterfeiters, fell out of a
third-story window near which he was working, was picked up while
almost red hot by a letter-carrier, and passed as genuine through
various hands until it reached Buffalo, where, by the merest accident,
it came into the possession of Mr. Ansel Hobart of the Secret Service.
That gentleman noticed an imperfection at one point of its rim, and
succeeded in tracing the coin to the headquarters of the gang on Vine
Street in this city, where, under the cloak of a locksmith shop and
green grocery business, six hundred of the spurious coins were turned
out daily. So admirably were these counterfeits executed as to defy
scrutiny save by experts of the Government. The coins were not cast
in molds after the ordinary fashion, but were struck with a die, and
plated so thickly with silver as to withstand tests by acids. The
defect which led to the discovery was found only in the one coin
already spoken of, and it is supposed that it was this defect that
caused the piece to spring from the finishing machine and fall out of
the window."
And the New York newspapers of three days later contained the
intelligence that the White Star steamer "Majestic," which sailed for
Liverpool that day, had among her passengers Mr. and Mrs. Ansel J.
Hobart, of Chicago, Illinois.
[Illustration]
Advertisements.
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"I cannot speak too enthusiastically of what my dressmaker has done for
the last two seasons. All the former annoyance of heavy sleeves (which
are also very hot in warm weather) has been done away with, and it is
such pleasure to me to use no special care of the skirt when either
riding or boating as I am sure every fold will instantly disappear the
moment I walk."
"What different materials do you use to accomplish this?"
"Why, really the same, only you know the AMERICAN HAIR CLOTH CO.—I
believe that is the name—make one grade of linings so thin as not
to be objectionable to the thinest white material even, and then the
heavier grades which are just as suitable for winter use as for summer,
and all their styles in either gray, black or white."
"How much does this really add to the weight of the skirt without any
lining?"
"My dressmaker says that an entire skirt if it were made up as a
separate skirt of seven yards would weigh but 12 ounces, and if one
should use their 170/3 it is almost as light as air itself."
"Why, these figures are new to me; what do they mean?"
"I took pains to investigate that, and their =10/4=, =10/5= and =98/3=
is the style usually used for skirts and can be had in either gray or
black, though of course they make heavier grades, principally used by
tailors."
"Either the =84/3=, =146/3=, =170/3=, =184/4= or =200/4=, is all right
for thin sleeves, so that if the dealer has not all these styles he
ought to have one surely."
"I am very glad for this information, for I confess that while I have
been forced to follow the fashion. It has been at great discomfort,
especially in the hot weather, with what I have had used for linings;
and I had really no knowledge of these different grades, or in fact
that HAIR CLOTH CRINOLINE was really the perfect thing to be used for
both skirts and sleeves."
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