[Mark Twain Mysteries 01] - Death on the Mississippi

by Peter J. Heck

  “Ritter paid no attention to the fellow’s offer. All he wanted was revenge on the man who had murdered his loved ones. He sent the thumbless man away without learning the location of the treasure. That very night he lured the man’s companion, the one who’d murdered his family, to a lonely place and drove a knife through his heart. Then he fled. He had his revenge, Cabot, but it gave him no satisfaction. Nothing could bring back his wife and child, and now he carried a load of guilt as well. After years of wandering, he finally returned to Munich, his hometown. His health had begun to fail him, and his terrible adventures of a few years earlier had left him in a morbid frame of mind, so he took a small place as the night watchman in a deadhouse.

  “His task was simply to watch the bodies for any sign that one of them might have been declared dead prematurely—for there was a great fear at that time of falling into a deep trance and awakening to find oneself buried alive. Such things do occasionally happen, although less often than the folks of Munich believed. Still, it was a great shock one night for him to hear the alarm that told him that one of the supposed corpses under his charge had come to life. When Ritter went to investigate, he discovered that the revived ‘corpse’ was the same thumbless soldier who had offered him a fortune so many years before!”

  I was astonished, and told him so. “It is surely a sign of some greater plan in the universe that he would find the very man who had wronged him under his power at such a moment,” I said.

  Mr. Clemens raised his eyebrows but made no reply, except to motion for me to replenish his whisky, which I did. My own glass was still half-full, and so I merely added another cube of ice. He took a long sip, said, “That’ll do the job,” and continued.

  “The two soldiers were Germans, so the coincidence wasn’t as remarkable as some I’ve seen,” said my employer, now fishing out a fresh cigar and lighting it. I waited a moment as the aromatic billows of smoke replaced the sharp smell of the match. “I can tell you that for this man of all men to show up in the deadhouse that night was in Ritter’s eyes the last stroke of justice long delayed. For all the guilt that he had felt after dispatching the murderer, seeing the thumbless man again brought back all his rage and grief. Suffice it to say that in the morning, the thumbless soldier’s place was back among the dead.”

  “What a monstrous tale!” I exclaimed.

  “Perhaps; Ritter claimed that he merely let the fellow expire from the cold, although I’m not convinced that he told me the full truth of it. Still, poor old Ritter was looking his own death in the eye, so I trust the story as a whole. But in any event, the thumbless fellow lived long enough to try to ask Ritter a final favor—to tell his son the location of some ten thousand dollars in gold, hidden back in the little river town in Arkansas where Ritter had played fortune-teller. And so Ritter came at last into the secret that he had turned his back on so many years before—too late to get any good of it. He was an old man, already sick, and knew in his heart that he had no chance of surviving the long voyage to Arkansas to recover it. And so he died without ever laying eyes on it.”

  “Ten thousand dollars! What a story!”

  Clemens nodded. “Just before Ritter died, he told me the location, and made a dying man’s last request, which I promised to honor. He begged me to retrieve the gold and send it to the thumbless man’s boy, if he proved at all deserving, as a final means of assuaging his burden of guilt. I traced the boy to an address in Germany, and (watching him from a distance, and making discreet inquiries) satisfied myself that he deserved the gold; and so, a couple of years afterwards, I took a journey down the Mississippi, on a boat called the Gold Dust, under the guise of researching a book. I did in fact end up writing that book, but my real purpose was to visit a certain town in Arkansas and find a fortune I had promised a dying man to send to a young German boy I had never met.”

  “And did you find it? This is a truly astonishing chain of events.” In truth, I had never before heard anything like it. I had dreamt of the romance of travel all my life, and read more than one wild tale of hidden treasure and dark doings, but I had hardly expected to find myself in the midst of such an adventure.

  He rubbed his chin meditatively, staring out the window toward the evening sun. Finally he looked at me and resumed his tale. “No, I didn’t. The fact is, I became aware that someone was following me, someone who knew the story somehow—perhaps the thumbless man had told it more than once—and that if I recovered the money my own life would be in danger. So I did not even land in the town where the money was hidden, and cooked up a cock-and-bull tale to relate the experience, with the names and events changed just enough to keep anyone who didn’t know the truth from guessing it. If you’d read my book, you’d know that upon my arrival in Arkansas, I found that Napoleon, Arkansas had been washed away, many years ago, by the river. Sometimes it’s to your advantage to have a reputation as a humorist: most readers seem to have taken the story as I intended, as a tall tale with a preposterous ending. But the treasure is real, and it was never even in Napoleon—it was in another town altogether.”

  “And the money is still there.”

  “As far as I know, yes.”

  “And you intend to get it this time.”

  “That I do.” Mr. Clemens eyed me critically. “And I fully intend to send it to that young man, who does not even know that it exists. Do you understand, Wentworth?”

  “I had no notion that you would do anything else with it.”

  “Bosh. You don’t know me well enough to be certain of that. I tell you nonetheless that it is my intent to fulfill that promise. The soldier’s son is alive and well, working hard to support his family. The years have proven him more than worthy of it.

  “The stinger is, I figured it was finally safe to go back for the gold when I heard that the larcenous old buzzard I’d suspected of tailing me was dead—he was a gambler and con man named George Devol, and you’d rather find a copperhead in your boot than tangle with him in his prime. But I don’t like it that Hubbard’s turned up—dead or alive—just as I’m about to go look for it again. Farmer Jack Hubbard and Slippery Ed McPhee were Devol’s main sidekicks in the old days—part of his gambling crew on the riverboats. For all I know, he managed to tip them both off to the German soldier’s gold before he died. So this little boat ride and lecture tour could turn out to be more dangerous than you had any right to believe—especially if McPhee shows up, with the idea of getting the gold for himself. It wouldn’t be fair not to let you know what you’re getting into if you go with me. Are you game?”

  “Sir, you can rely on me.” I meant it as earnestly as I have ever meant anything, and Clemens nodded his approval.

  “Good then, we’re a team.” We raised our glasses to seal the pact, and took a ritual sip. “Drink up now, Wentworth,” said Clemens. “We’ll see what sort of fare the cook has in store for us tonight, and I’ll tell you some of the other stories you’ve missed by not reading my books. What a pleasure to have a fresh audience for the old yarns!”

  3

  Early the next morning, Mr. Clemens sent me to buy newspapers, while he went to the telephone office. When I joined him there, he was just finishing an animated phone conversation. He extracted a promise from the other party to keep him informed, promised to feed him the best steak in New York for his trouble, and ended the connection. He took a few moments to chat with the “hello girls,” who operated the phones and who were clearly excited to have such a celebrity in their midst. He paid for the call, and we made our way to the breakfast table to fortify ourselves for the first leg of our trip. Our breakfast consisted of a thick, juicy beefsteak and hot coffee. In between bites, he told me what he had learned: mostly nothing. The source—evidently someone high on the police force—knew nothing more about the death of Hubbard, but confirmed that there was a Detective Berrigan assigned to the case. On the other hand, he (whoever he was) had heard nothing of the supposed connection to Mr. Clemens before the telephone call.

  �
�This should put to rest your doubts about Detective Berrigan,” I said.

  “You assume that the fellow we saw really is Berrigan,” said Mr. Clemens. “Easy enough to find the name of a real officer if you mean to impersonate one. Or to bribe one—which is even easier, if you get right down to it.”

  “But why go to all the trouble? I can’t see what anyone’s gained by the charade, if such a thing it is.”

  He frowned, took a sip of coffee, and shrugged. “You’re probably right. I suppose I’ll never be so old that I don’t get a little spooked when somebody I knew on the river is murdered. It’s the timing and the fact that he was looking for me that same day that really bother me. If I’d come home early, I’d probably have seen the poor old villain. He really could play billiards.”

  “Who is this McPhee fellow you mentioned?”

  “A no-good son of a rattlesnake. Has been, for as long as I can remember. He’s another one I met on the river, right after I became a pilot. He tried to swindle me out of the little bit I had, more or less for the principle of the thing, I suppose. Later that same trip, I saw him jump overboard to get away from a fellow who caught him with a couple of extra cards in his hand. He showed up on our next trip upriver, and acted as if nothing funny had happened, but the boys wouldn’t let him off that easily. They started calling him Slippery Ed, and the name stuck, although there’s few that remember how he got it.”

  “How does he manage to continue his career if he’s a known cheater? Surely the authorities would be aware of him by now.”

  “You might be surprised how many people will look the other way if you make it worth their while. There were plenty of riverboat captains who took in more in bribes than in salary. The better the gamblers did, the better the captain and crew did by turning a blind eye.”

  “I’m afraid I’ve never understood the appeal of games of chance.”

  “Ah, there’s the mistake everyone makes,” said Mr. Clemens. “The minute a professional gets involved, there’s no such thing as a game of chance. The professional is there to earn a living. I recall a court case in Nevada, where a miner was arrested for playing a game of chance on the Sabbath and defended himself by claiming that he was playing Red Dog, which was not a game of chance but of skill. The judge picked a jury of six chance men and six skill men, and sent ’em off with a deck of cards to determine the verdict. After a respectable interval for their deliberations, the chance men were broke to the wire, and the verdict was Not guilty. From that day on, Red Dog was exempted from all laws governing games of chance. Not that it kept the suckers from playing it.” He finished his coffee and, with a sigh, pushed away from the table.

  After breakfast, a cab took us downtown to Desbrosses Street, through traffic so thick I was afraid we would never get through without an accident. The streets were crammed with everything from bicycles and dogcarts to overloaded freight wagons pulled by six or even eight huge Percherons. I was convinced that we had left the hotel too late, but Mr. Clemens merely sat back and smiled. “These New York cabdrivers would have given old Hank Monk a pretty good run for his money. This fellow’s got a good horse, and he knows he’s got an extra fifty cents coming if he gets us in on time, and by gum, he’ll do it.”

  “Who was Hank Monk?” I inquired innocently.

  Mr. Clemens gave me a strange look. “I can tell you a most laughable thing. . . .” He shook his head. “No, it wouldn’t be fair. He was a driver on the old Nevada stagecoach lines. There was an old story—not true, but that’s beside the point—about how he once carried Horace Greeley, who made the mistake of letting Hank Monk know he was in a hurry. Hank set off at a breakneck pace and like to have killed poor Horace, but he got him there on time—what was left of him.”

  This anecdote did nothing to assuage my worries, but we arrived at the ferry slips in plenty of time—and miraculously, without mishap. Thence we took a ferry across the Hudson River to Jersey City, to catch our train: the Pennsylvania Railroad’s Limited Vestibule Express to Chicago. For this we arrived barely in time; luckily, Mr. Clemens had instructed me to send most of our luggage ahead the night before, leaving us to carry only one small carpetbag apiece, containing our toilet kits and a couple of changes of clothing. “Enough to hold us until we’re set up on board the boat,” said Mr. Clemens. “Never carry so much that it’ll slow you down when you’re in a rush.” I was vaguely pleased to think that I was already benefiting from the advice, however mundane, of a world traveler.

  The train took us south through New Jersey, flat country with occasional muddy rivers and unattractive towns, then across the Delaware River to Philadelphia, whence it would take us west to Chicago and St. Paul. There we would board our steamer for the journey down the great Mississippi all the way to New Orleans, with numerous stops along the way to allow for sightseeing and lectures. The steamer was, in fact, a veritable floating lecture hall, which would dock at every city of any consequence for as many lectures as the local citizenry could be expected to attend.

  I busied myself in reading over the detailed itinerary my predecessor (about whom Mr. Clemens had very little good to say) had prepared for our journey, and rapidly became befuddled by the complexity of our journey. I despaired of remembering all the riverside towns at which we planned to stop, let alone the hotels, restaurants, railroad stations, telegraph offices, post offices, and local people of note. At last, as we neared the outskirts of Philadelphia, I lay the thick portfolio across my lap and stared off into the pungent atmosphere of our smoking car. Surely I had gotten myself in deeper water than I had bargained for.

  Mr. Clemens looked up from his newspaper and divined somehow what was on my mind. “Here, Wentworth, don’t fret. There’s no need to turn into a walking Baedeker; if that’s all I needed, I could get one a lot cheaper than a secretary, and carry it a lot easier, too. The details will come to you soon enough.”

  “I’m sure I don’t know how. Learning Latin was child’s play to this, at least there’s some system to it. Here, I’ve got to remember a different set of facts for every town in twenty-five states.”

  “Oh, you’re barely started. By the time we get to New Orleans, I’ll expect you to know something. If you don’t know anything useful by the time we’re back to New York, it’ll be time to worry. For the present, just look a day or two ahead every morning and make sure you know what’s coming up next. Do you know where we’re going when we arrive in Chicago?”

  My blank expression must have spoken volumes. He pointed to the papers on my lap. With some embarrassment I fumbled through the pages until I found the information. “The Great Northern Hotel, on Dearborn Street.”

  “Good boy. Never expect more of your memory than it can handle. That’s why people write things down. It’s better to know where you can find something than to try to remember it and come up empty. Besides, there are new buildings going up, businesses opening and closing, people moving in and out, a thousand changes every day. I can guarantee you there’ll be a dozen or more things that have changed since the last time I was in Chicago.”

  “How am I ever to learn it, then?”

  “The trick is to learn the general lay of the land and fill in the specific map in your head as you need to. If you know that the best place to look for a cab, any time of day or night, is in front of a big hotel, that information is as good for London or Vienna as for Boston. There are exceptions to everything, but better to have your eyes open than your memory stuffed with useless baggage.” He stared out the window a while, then turned back to me. “The sooner you get good at this job, the sooner I can forget about the details and let you handle them. So any time you have any questions about the arrangements, better to ask than to wonder what to do.”

  We took our luncheon at the first seating, shortly before the train pulled into the Philadelphia station. The approach to this city is drab, with mills and manufacturing districts, but the center of Philadelphia is quite handsome, with broad parklands and a picturesque river—the Schuyl
kill, pronounced “skookill,” Mr. Clemens told me.

  After a brief stop to take on passengers at Broad Street Station, we turned west, through pleasant farm country interspersed with patches of woods: the famous Pennsylvania Dutch country. The landscape became hilly, then (after we crossed the broad Susquehanna River) gradually turned rugged and mountainous. I commented on the grand scenery we were passing through. Mr. Clemens, busy writing letters, glanced out the window. “You should see the Rockies,” he said. “These are barely hummocks.” He turned back to his writing and scarcely raised his head until it was time for dinner. As for me, I had plenty to occupy my mind as some of the most picturesque scenery I have ever laid eyes on rolled by, a wonderful moving pageant of mountains and rivers and forests. If Mr. Clemens knew of something better than this, I looked forward to seeing it; for now, Pennsylvania was fine.

  But while my eyes were busy with the view, my thoughts were on our mission to the west and Mr. Clemens’s odd story. Between the scenery and my speculations, I gradually lost track of time. It wasn’t until Mr. Clemens quietly asked whether I wanted a drink before dinner that I realized that the sun had moved well ahead of us. I glanced at my watch to see that it was nearly six.

  The smoking car began to empty out as other passengers went to the diner, and so we found ourselves with enough breathing room to talk without anyone close by to overhear. I took the opportunity to bring up the questions I had been mulling over all afternoon.

  “I’ve been thinking about Jack Hubbard,” I began.

  Mr. Clemens gave me a calculating look. “And what exactly have you been thinking, Wentworth?”

  “I’ve been wondering why you’re so convinced that what happened to Hubbard has anything to do with us. Couldn’t it be pure coincidence that he was trying to get in touch with you just before he died?”

  “It could be a coincidence. But if it’s not, I’m walking into danger. I just don’t fancy the risk.”