Part 18

"Mrs. Kennedy," or Alice Norcross, as she was known to the members of the Postal Service whom she had assisted on more than one occasion when the services of a woman with brains were demanded, merely smiled and continued to fix her hair before the mirror.

"I'm not worrying about that," she replied. "You boys can always be trusted to arrange the details--but traveling always did play the dickens with my hair! What's the idea, anyhow? Why am I Mrs. Mabel Kennedy, and what's she supposed to do?"

In a few words Allison outlined what he was up against--evidently the operation of a very skillful gang of blackmailers who were not only perfectly sure of their facts, but who didn't run any risks until their victims were too thoroughly cowed to offer any resistance.

"The only weak spot in the whole plan," concluded the operative, "is that the letters invariably cease when the prospective victims lay their case before the postmaster."

"You mean that you think he's implicated?"

"No--but some one in his office is!" snapped Allison. "Else how would they know when to lay off? That's the only lead we have, and I don't want to work from it, but up to it. Do you know anyone who's socially prominent in Madison?"

"Not a soul, but it's no trick to get letters of introduction--even for Mrs. Mabel Kennedy."

"Fine! Go to it! The minute you get 'em start a social campaign here. Stage several luncheons, bridge parties, and the like. Be sure to create the impression of a woman of means--and if you can drop a few hints about your none too spotless past, so much the better."

"You want to draw their fire, eh?"

"Precisely. It's unfortunate that we can't rig up a husband for you--that would make things easier, but when it's known that I, Alvin Gregg, am your brother, I think it's more than likely that they'll risk a couple of shots."

It was about a month later that Mrs. Kennedy called up her brother at the Hotel Majestic and asked him to come over to her apartment at once.

"Something stirring?" inquired Allison as he entered the drawing-room of the suite which his assistant had rented in order to bolster up her social campaign.

"The first nibble," replied the girl, holding out a sheet of violet-tinted paper, on which appeared the words:

Of course your brother and your friends know all about the night you spent alone with a certain man in a cabin in the Sierras?

"Great Scott!" ejaculated Allison. "Do you mean to say it worked?"

"Like clockwork," was the girl's reply. "Acting on your instructions, I made a special play for Snaith, the postmaster's confidential secretary and general assistant. I invited him to several of my parties and paid particular attention to what I said when he was around. The first night I got off some clever little remark about conventions--laughing at the fact that it was all right for a woman to spend a day with a man, but hardly respectable for her to spend the evening. The next time he was there--and he was the only one in the party who had been present on the previous occasion--I turned the conversation to snowstorms and admitted that I had once been trapped in a storm in the Sierra Nevadas and had been forced to spend the night in a cabin. But I didn't say anything then about any companion. The third evening--when an entirely different crowd, with the exception of Snaith, was present--some one brought up the subject of what constitutes a gentleman, and my contribution was a speech to the effect that 'one never knows what a man is until he is placed in a position where his brute instincts would naturally come to the front.'

"Not a single one of those remarks was incriminating or even suspicious--but it didn't take a master mind to add them together and make this note! Snaith was the only man who could add them, because he was the only one who was present when they were all made!"

"Fine work!" applauded Allison. "But there's one point you've overlooked. This letter, unlike the rest of its kind, is postmarked Kansas City, while Snaith was here day before yesterday when this was mailed. I know, because Clarke's been camping on his trail for the past three weeks."

"Then that means--"

"That Snaith is only one of the gang--the stool-pigeon--or, in this case, the lounge-lizard--who collects the information and passes it on to his chief? Exactly. Now, having Mr. Snaith where I want him and knowing pretty well how to deal with his breed, I think the rest will be easy. I knew that somebody in the postmaster's office must be mixed up in the affair and your very astute friend was the most likely prospect. Congratulations on landing him so neatly!"

"Thanks," said the girl, "but what next?"

"For you, not a thing. You've handled your part to perfection. The rest is likely to entail a considerable amount of strong-arm work, and I'd rather not have you around. Might cramp my style."

That night--or, rather, about three o'clock on the following morning--Sylvester Snaith, confidential secretary to the postmaster of Madison, was awakened by the sound of some one moving stealthily about the bedroom of his bachelor apartment. Before he could utter a sound the beam of light from an electric torch blazed in his eyes and a curt voice from the darkness ordered him to put up his hands. Then:

"What do you know about the anonymous letters which have been sent to a number of persons in this city?" demanded the voice.

"Not--not a thing," stammered the clerk, trying to collect his badly scattered senses.

"That's a lie! We know that you supplied the information upon which those letters were based! Now come through with the whole dope or, by hell I'll--" the blue-steel muzzle of an automatic which was visible just outside the path of light from the torch completed the threat. Snaith, thoroughly cowed, "came through"--told more than even Allison had hoped for when he had planned the night raid on a man whom he had sized up as a physical coward.

Less than an hour after the secretary had finished, Elmer was on his way to Kansas City, armed with information which he proceeded to lay before the chief of police.

"'Spencerian Peter,' eh?" grunted the chief. "Sure, I know where to lay my hands on him--been watching him more or less ever since he got out of Leavenworth a couple of years back. But I never connected him with this case."

"What do you mean--this case?" demanded Allison. "Did you know anything about the poison-pen letters in Madison?"

"Madison? No--but I know about the ones that have set certain people here by the ears for the past month. I thought that was what you wanted him for. Evidently the game isn't new."

"Far from it," Elmer replied. "I don't know how much he cleaned up in Wisconsin, but I'll bet he got away with a nice pile. Had a social pet there, who happened to be the postmaster's right-hand man, collect the scandal for him and then he'd fix up the letters--faking some relative's handwriting with that infernal skill of his. Then his Man Friday would tip him off when they made a holler to headquarters and he'd look for other suckers rather than run the risk of getting the department on his trail by playing the same fish too long. That's what finally gave him away--that and the fact that his assistant was bluffed by an electric torch and an empty gun."

"Well, I'll be hanged," muttered the chief. "You might have been explaining the situation here--except that we don't know who his society informant is. I think we better drop in for a call on 'Spencerian' this evening."

* * * * *

"The call was made on scheduled time," Quinn concluded, "but it was hardly of a social nature. You wouldn't expect a post-office operative, a chief of police, and half a dozen cops to stage a pink tea. Their methods are inclined to be a trifle more abrupt--though Pete, as it happened, didn't attempt to pull any rough stuff. He dropped his gun the moment he saw how many guests were present, and it wasn't very long before they presented him with a formal invitation to resume his none too comfortable but extremely exclusive apartment in Leavenworth. Snaith, being only an accomplice, got off with two years. The man who wrote the letters and who was the principal beneficiary of the money which they produced, drew ten."

"And who got the credit for solving the puzzle?" I inquired. "Allison or the Norcross girl?"

"Allison," replied Quinn. "Alice Norcross only worked on condition that her connection with the Service be kept quite as much of a secret as the fact that her real name was Mrs. Elmer Allison."

"What? She was Allison's wife?" I demanded.

"Quite so," said the former operative. "If you don't believe me, there's a piece of her wedding dress draped over that picture up there," and he pointed to a strip of white silk that hung over one of the framed photographs on the wall.

"But I thought you said--"

"That that was part of the famous thirty thousand yards which was nailed just after it had been smuggled across the Canadian border? I did. But Allison got hold of a piece of it and had it made up into a dress for Alice. So that bit up there has a double story. You know one of them. Remind me to tell you the other sometime."

XVIII

THIRTY THOUSAND YARDS OF SILK

"I'd sure like to lead the life of one of those fictional detective heroes," muttered Bill Quinn, formerly of the United States Secret Service, as he tossed aside the latest volume of crime stories that had come to his attention. "Nothing to do but trail murderers and find the person who lifted the diamond necklace and stuff of that kind. They never have a case that isn't interesting or, for that matter, one in which they aren't successful. Must be a great life!"

"But aren't the detective stories of real life interesting and oftentimes exciting?" I inquired, adding that those which Quinn had already told me indicated that the career of a government operative was far from being deadly monotonous.

"Some of them are," he admitted, "but many of them drag along for months or even years, sometimes petering out for pure lack of evidence. Those, of course, are the cases you never hear of--the ones where Uncle Sam's men fall down on the job. Oh yes, they're fallible, all right. They can't solve every case--any more than a doctor can save the life of every patient he attends. But their percentage, though high, doesn't approach the success of your Sherlock Holmeses and your Thinking Machines, your Gryces and Sweetwaters and Lecoqs."

"How is it, then, that every story you've told dealt with the success of a government agent--never with his failure?"

Quinn smiled reminiscently for a moment.

Then, "What do doctors do with their mistakes?" he asked. "They bury 'em. And that's what any real detective will do--try to forget, except for hoping that some day he'll run up against the man who tricked him. Again, most of the yarns I've told you revolved around some of the relics of this room"--waving his hand to indicate the walls of his library--"and these are all mementoes of successful cases. There's no use in keeping the other kind. Failures are too common and brains too scarce. That bit of silk up there--"

"Oh yes," I interrupted, "the one that formed part of Alice Norcross's wedding dress."

"And figured in one of the most sensational plots to defraud the government that was ever uncovered," added Quinn. "If Ezra Marks hadn't located that shipment I wouldn't have had that piece of silk and there wouldn't be any story to tell. So you see, it's really a circle, after all."

* * * * *

Marks [Quinn went on] was one of the few men connected with any branch of the government organizations who really lived up to the press-agent notices of the detectives you read about. In the first place, he looked like he might have stepped out of a book--big and long-legged and lanky. A typical Yankee, with all of the New-Englander's shrewdness and common sense. If you turned Ezra loose on a case you could be sure that he wouldn't sit down and try to work it out by deduction. Neither would he plunge in and attempt by sheer bravado and gun play to put the thing over. He'd mix the two methods and, more often than not, come back with the answer.

Then, too, Marks had the very happy faculty of drawing assignments that turned out to be interesting. Maybe it was luck, but more than likely it was because he followed plans that made 'em so--preferring to wait until he had all the strings to a case and then stage a big round-up of the people implicated. You remember the case of the Englishman who smuggled uncut diamonds in the bowl of his pipe and the one you wrote under the title of "Wah Lee and the Flower of Heaven"? Well, those were typical of Ezra's methods--the first was almost entirely analytical, the second mainly gun play plus a painstaking survey of the field he had to cover.

But when Marks was notified that it was up to him to find out who was running big shipments of valuable silks across the Canadian border, without the formality of visiting the customhouse and making the customary payments, he found it advisable to combine the two courses.

It was through a wholesale dealer in silks in Seattle, Washington, that the Customs Service first learned of the arrival of a considerable quantity of this valuable merchandise, offered through certain underground channels at a price which clearly labeled it as smuggled. Possibly the dealer was peeved because he didn't learn of the shipment in time to secure any of it. But his reasons for calling the affair to the attention of the Treasury Department don't really matter. The main idea was that the silk was there, that it hadn't paid duty, and that some one ought to find out how it happened.

When a second and then a third shipment was reported, Marks was notified by wire to get to Seattle as fast as he could, and there to confer with the Collector of the Port.

It wasn't until after he had arrived that Ezra knew what the trouble was, for the story of the smuggled silk hadn't penetrated as far south as San Francisco, where he had been engaged in trying to find a cargo of smuggled coolies.

"Here's a sample of the silk," announced the Collector of the Port at Seattle, producing a piece of very heavy material, evidently of foreign manufacture. "Beyond the fact that we've spotted three of the shipments and know where to lay our hands on them if wanted, I've got to admit that we don't know a thing about the case. The department, of course, doesn't want us to trace the silk from this end. The minute you do that you lay yourself open to all sorts of legal tangles and delays--to say nothing of giving the other side plenty of time to frame up a case that would sound mighty good in court. Besides, I haven't enough men to handle the job in the short space of time necessary. So you'll have to dig into it and find out who got the stuff in and how. Then we'll attend to the fences who've been handling it here."

"The old game of passing the buck," thought Ezra, as he fingered the sample of silk meditatively. "I'll do the work and they'll get the glory. Oh, well--"

"Any idea of where the shipments came from?" he inquired.

"There's no doubt but that it's of Japanese manufacture, which, of course, would appear to point to a shipping conspiracy of some nature. But I hardly think that's true here. Already eighteen bolts of silk have been reported in Seattle, and, as you know, that's a pretty good sized consignment. You couldn't stuff 'em into a pill box or carry 'em inside a walking stick, like you could diamonds. Whoever's handling this job is doing it across the border, rather than via the shipping route."

"No chance of a slip-up in your information, is there, Chief?" Ezra inquired, anxiously. "I'd hate to start combing the border and then find that the stuff was being slipped in through the port."

"No," and the Collector of Customs was positive in his reply. "I'm not taking a chance on that tip. I know what I'm talking about. My men have been watching the shipping like hawks. Ever since that consignment of antique ivory got through last year we've gone over every vessel with a microscope, probing the mattresses and even pawing around in the coal bins. I'm positive that there isn't a place big enough to conceal a yard of silk that the boys haven't looked into--to say nothing of eighteen bolts.

"Besides," added the Collector, "the arrival of the silk hasn't coincided with the arrival of any of the ships from Japan--not by any stretch of the imagination."

"All right, I'll take up the trail northward then," replied Marks. "Don't be surprised if you fail to hear from me for a couple of months or more. If Washington inquires, tell them that I'm up on the border somewhere and let it go at that."

"Going to take anybody with you?"

"Not a soul, except maybe a guide that I'll pick up when I need him. If there is a concerted movement to ship silk across the line--and it appears that there is--the more men you have working with you the less chance there is for success. Border runners are like moonshiners, they're not afraid of one man, but if they see a posse they run for cover and keep out of sight until the storm blows over. And there isn't one chance in a thousand of finding 'em meanwhile. You've got to play them, just like you would a fish, so the next time you hear from me you will know that I've either landed my sharks or that they've slipped off the hook!"

It was about a month later that the little town of Northport, up in the extreme northeastern corner of Washington, awoke to find a stranger in its midst. Strangers were something of a novelty in Northport, and this one--a man named Marks, who stated that he was "prospectin' for some good lumber"--caused quite a bit of talk for a day or two. Then the town gossips discovered that he was not working in the interest of a large company, as had been rumored, but solely on his own hook, so they left him severely alone. Besides, it was the height of the logging season and there was too much work to be done along the Columbia River to worry about strangers.

Marks hadn't taken this into consideration when he neared the eastern part of the state, but he was just as well pleased. If logs and logging served to center the attention of the natives elsewhere, so much the better. It would give him greater opportunity for observation and possibly the chance to pick up some information. Up to this time his trip along the border had been singularly uneventful and lacking in results. In fact, it was practically a toss-up with him whether he would continue on into Idaho and Montana, on the hope that he would find something there, or go back to Seattle and start fresh.

However, he figured that it wouldn't do any harm to spend a week or two in the neighborhood of the Columbia--and, as events turned out, it was a very wise move.

Partly out of curiosity and partly because it was in keeping with his self-assumed character of lumber prospector, Marks made a point of joining the gangs of men who worked all day and sometimes long into the night keeping the river clear of log jams and otherwise assisting in the movement of timber downstream. Like everyone who views these operations for the first time, he marveled at the dexterity of the loggers who perched upon the treacherous slippery trunks with as little thought for danger as if they had been crossing a country road. But their years of familiarity with the current and the logs themselves had given them a sense of balance which appeared to inure them to peril.

Nor was this ability to ride logs confined wholly to the men. Some of the girls from the near-by country often worked in with the men, handling the lighter jobs and attending to details which did not call for the possession of a great amount of strength.

One of these, Marks noted, was particularly proficient in her work. Apparently there wasn't a man in Northport who could give her points in log riding, and the very fact that she was small and wiry provided her with a distinct advantage over men who were twice her weight. Apart from her grace and beauty, there was something extremely appealing about the girl, and Ezra found himself watching her time after time as she almost danced across the swirling, bark-covered trunks--hardly seeming to touch them as she moved.

The girl was by no means oblivious of the stranger's interest in her ability to handle at least a part of the men's work. She caught his eye the very first day he came down to the river, and after that, whenever she noted that he was present she seemed to take a new delight in skipping lightly from log to log, lingering on each just long enough to cause it to spin dangerously and then leaping to the next.

But one afternoon she tried the trick once too often. Either she miscalculated her distance or a sudden swirl of the current carried the log for which she was aiming out of her path, for her foot just touched it, slipped and, before she could recover her balance, she was in the water--surrounded by logs that threatened to crush the life out of her at any moment.

Startled by her cry for help, three of the lumbermen started toward her--but the river, like a thing alive, appeared to thwart their efforts by opening up a rift in the jam on either side, leaving a gap too wide to be leaped, and a current too strong to be risked by men who were hampered by their heavy hobnailed shoes.

Marks, who had been watching the girl, had his coat off almost as soon as she hit the water. An instant later he had discarded his shoes and had plunged in, breasting the river with long overhand strokes that carried him forward at an almost unbelievable speed. Before the men on the logs knew what was happening, the operative was beside the girl, using one hand to keep her head above water, and the other to fend off the logs which were closing in from every side.

"Quick!" he called. "A rope! A--" but the trunk of a tree, striking his head a glancing blow, cut short his cry and forced him to devote every atom of his strength to remaining afloat until assistance arrived. After an interval which appeared to be measured in hours, rather than seconds, a rope splashed within reach and the pair were hauled to safety.

The girl, apparently unhurt by her drenching, shook herself like a wet spaniel and then turned to where Marks was seated, trying to recover his breath.

"Thanks," she said, extending her hand. "I don't know who you are, stranger, but you're a man!"

"It wasn't anything to make a fuss about," returned Ezra, rising and turning suspiciously red around the ears, for it was the first time that a girl had spoken to him in that way for more years than he cared to remember. Then, with the Vermont drawl that always came to the surface when he was excited or embarrassed, he added: "It was worth gettin' wet to have you speak like that."

This time it was the girl who flushed, and, with a palpable effort to cover her confusion, she turned away, stopping to call back over her shoulder, "If you'll come up to dad's place to-night I'll see that you're properly thanked."

"Dad's place?" repeated Ezra to one of the men near by. "Where's that?"

"She means her stepfather's house up the river," replied the lumberman. "You can't miss it. Just this side the border. Ask anybody where Old Man Petersen lives."

Though the directions were rather vague, Marks started "up the river" shortly before sunset, and found but little difficulty in locating the big house--half bungalow and half cabin--where Petersen and his stepdaughter resided, in company with half a dozen foremen of lumber gangs, and an Indian woman who had acted as nurse and chaperon and cook and general servant ever since the death of the girl's mother a number of years before.