It was while he was inspecting it that Marcia came into the parlor, and, looking up, Carson related to her the black woman’s story. “It must surely be the one,” she said, her instinctive dislike of the thing evidently partially overcome by its brilliant coloring and its very despoiled and pathetic appearance. She gazed with him at the thing which two days before had been a repugnant reptile, but which now had become merely an ornament — a bizarre ornament of the kind which appeals to savage and primitive minds.
Carson scratched his chin, while the negro woman looked up at him expectantly. At last he spoke. “Mrs. Johnson, I am more than convinced that this is the reptile for which the advertisement was inserted from this house. The party who advertised for it is not here now, and I have two suggestions to offer. You may leave it here with us if you care to trust us, and we will give you a receipt for it. The party who advertised for it has agreed to pay the sum of one thousand dollars providing the snake can be identified by certain markings. If it were the wrong one, it would of course be returned to you. On the other hand, if you will leave me your address I will arrange an appointment between us all. In any event, let me advise that you keep it out of your husband’s hands, for if he gets it again he’s liable to wager everything you and he have in the world on its supposed powers of good luck.”
“How soon, sah, does yo’ think dat you will know f’um de man whut you’s advuhtisin’ fo’?” she asked with the trustfulness of a child.
“Very soon,” Carson answered. “As soon as I can call him up and get him over here. Perhaps tonight — at least tomorrow morning. He has stipulated that it shall be dead or alive — and whether the fact that it has been stuffed by your husband will make a difference or not, I am not in a position to say.”
The negro woman pondered deeply for a moment. Then she spoke. “Well den, sah, Ah thinks ah jes’ leave de snek wid you, fo’ you an’ de lil gal both looks hones’. But — well — ah wuz wonderin’, sah, if yo’ couldn’t ‘vance me five dollahs on de snek, consid’in’ dat wuthless Sam o’ mine go an’ lose so much money.”
Carson hesitated. This was undoubtedly the reptile whose finding was worth two hundred and fifty dollars to Marcia, if not to himself. Then he dipped down in his pocket and drawing up his none too thick roll of money peeled off a five-dollar bill. Stepping to the parlor table, he wrote out a receipt with his fountain pen, giving the description of the serpent, filling in the woman’s name and address on East 31st Street, and signing his own together with his downtown office. Then securing the telephone number of a more affluent colored neighbor of hers, he bowed her out with plenty of assurances that he would ring her on the phone at the earliest possible moment. Once alone with Marcia, he and the girl looked at the snake and then at each other.
CHAPTER IX
SURPRISING NEWS
CARSON was the first to speak. “It must be the one,” he said. “I will wager beyond all doubt that we’ve secured Mr. Jake Jennings’ Zuri snake.”
“But suppose,” she asked wonderingly, “that he considers it neither alive nor dead?”
Carson made a nonchalant gesture with his hands. “Well, what do we care anyway, now that we’ve had such cheerful news in yesterday’s mail? We’ve done our part — he can accept it or reject it. He won’t break us whatever he does.” He glanced about him. “Well, honey-girl, suppose we put the blamed thing safely away now. Is Grandfather Desmond’s old safe that he’s used for so many years still working?”
She nodded. “Yes, Cliff. It’s in its old corner in his library. I think I’ll just let you carry the thing in there, however.”
So Carson, carrying the thing a bit squeamishly, followed her into a little room whose one window looked out upon the prairie-like region in which the nearest cottage was two blocks away, with only a phalanx of subdivision signs and fences intervening. It was a little library, its walls adorned by archaic steel engravings, a bookcase to one side filled with volumes whose bindings were cracked and yellow with the years, an old red couch against another wall. In the corner nearest the window stood a little old-fashioned black iron safe about two feet in height — a safe of the type that a country financier of the 1860’s might have to hold his Civil War currency. Marcia, bending over, unlocked it by a few turns of its dial, and clearing off an improvised shelf in it holding a few books and a cloth-bound ledger, made space on it for Carson’s burden. As for Carson himself, he laid out a sheet of newspaper on the shelf, looped the snake into a neat circle and deposited it there, where, with its beady blue eyes staring vacantly at them, they closed the door upon it. And as Marcia twirled the dial and locked the safe upon its strange occupant, they rose to their feet and laughed as by one impulse.
“It actually looked at me as though it had been abused,” the girl rippled.
“Didn’t it?” echoed Carson amusedly. He looked down at his hands. “And now for a cake of scouring soap!”
She laughed. “Well, cheer up, Cliff. The cook — myself — at least hasn’t touched the thing.”
As soon as Carson had scoured his hands thoroughly, and washed them twice, the more to remove from his mind the thought that he had handled the object, he repaired to the telephone in the front hallway and called up the National Hotel on Van Buren Street. Getting the clerk he asked, as before, to be connected with Mr. Jake Jennings. But he did not get the said Mr. Jennings — at least for the present. The clerk, after calling someone over to the phone and talking to that person for a moment, again spoke into the transmitter.
“You say it’s Mr. Jake Jennings you want to speak with?”
“Yes.”
“Well, Mr. Jennings went over to the Chicago detective bureau with a couple of officers who dropped up here, and he hasn’t been back since. If you’re a friend of his, I don’t mind telling you that I think he’s pinched — but I don’t know. Better call up there.”
Carson, somewhat bewildered, proceeded to ring the detective bureau. To his query about one Mr. Jake Jennings, he received in short order a reply from the desk sergeant.
“Yes, Jennings is here,” She said brusquely. “Locked up in a cell waiting for someone to bail him out.”
“On what charge is he being held?” asked Carson hurriedly, quite dumbfounded by the information that the genial Mr. Jennings was now in the iron grip of the police system.
“Arrested today and identified as Cal Buckman, one of the participators in the Harroway swindle of 1927.”
The Harroway swindle! It came back to Carson with a rush. Harroway was a newly made millionaire who had been swindled out of a big sum of money by a clever band of wire-tappers who had gotten his money by a spurious poolroom outfit and had then decamped. The police had searched for the ringleaders for a considerable time and had then apparently dropped the entire case. Evidently, as Carson now perceived, the police never went to sleep, or else a few astute minds among them were able to identify faces they passed on the street as belonging to certain pictures in their files!
“Is it possible for me to talk to Mr. Jennings?” he asked.
“Yeh — I guess so,” said the sergeant who was presumably in an amiable mood. “Hold the wire.”
For a long time Carson heard over the telephone circuit the sound of faint voices, the shuffling of feet along cement corridors, matches being struck, broken words and fragments of words, and then finally a voice directly in the receiver. He recognized it at once as that of the genial Mr. Jake Jennings. But Mr. Jennings’s voice held in it a pronounced trace of uneasiness, of worry.
“This is Clifford Carson — ” began Carson.
“Yes. I know you. Go ahead.”
“Well, Mr. Jennings, I’ve got the thing that we advertised for. I guess you know — ”
“Yes, yes. I know” retorted Mr. Jennings quickly. He paused, obviously thinking. Then he spoke. “Now I’ll tell you, young man, just how the land lies. I’m over here at the detective bureau locked up on a goofy charge — they think I’m someone I ain’t. Until I can get a
lawyer and arrange for some bail somehow, I can’t get to you. Can you give a receipt for that article and hold it till I get out?”
“I’ve already done that,” responded the younger man, “I have it.”
“O. K.” said Mr. Jennings succinctly. “Hold it. I’ll be out of here by tomorrow, I’m certain, if my messages don’t miscarry. I hope so anyway. Then I’ll see you pronto.”
Whereupon he said good-bye, and hung up, evidently to be conducted back to his cell.
It was a merry little dinner party that Marcia and Carson held that night, with a lot of dainties on the table and a lot of topics to talk about, not the least of which was this suddenly developed arrest of the genial Mr. Jennings as being one Cal Buckman of the old Harroway case. After supper she played for him and sang for him too, in a low sweet contralto, and at nine o’clock he took her as far as the Kildare exchange where she had to begin her night’s labor at about the time he was thinking of going to bed. An odd courtship indeed!
But that night, when he reached his rooms on Scott Street, who should he find seated on the bench in the hallway just outside of those rooms but a young man with sleek black hair, smoking a cigarette, a notebook protruding from one coat pocket of his checked suit, a highspeed newspaper camera on the floor beside him. Beyond any doubt he was a reporter on one of the city dailies, else a cameraman on one of the news photo services. He lost no time in speaking as Carson placed his hand on the doorknob of his door.
“Are you Mr. Clifford Carson?”
Carson nodded. He halted his entrance into his room. The check-suited young man stood up.
“I’m from the morning Herald-Examiner,” he said. “Been waiting here for you about an hour. Seems to me I know you, however. Oh — yes — you’re the man we ran a story about last week — funny I never thought of that. Of course — your picture was in it. That story about the Government’s new Bureau for the Investigation of Fraudulent Mining Stock?”
Carson nodded in corroboration. The other smiled. “Well, I’m here on a somewhat different story tonight, Mr. Carson. A man on Prairie Avenue phoned in a tip to the paper this evening that his wife’s washwoman had found a yellow snake of some kind and was to get a thousand dollars for it. The paper sent me out to get the full story from her. She gave me the address of the colored washwoman. So I went over to 31st Street and saw the washwoman. She showed me a receipt with your name on it, and your downtown address in the 333 Building. Agent of the building gave me your home address — and — well — here I am. That’s some story, Mr. Carson, that thousand-dollar snake. Of course you’ll give me the inside details of it?”
Carson smiled, but shook his head. He had no grudges against the press who had given him the very best of write-ups, even though those write-ups might have been partially accomplished by some official in Washington pulling the wires.
“I’m mighty sorry,” he told the reporter, “but beyond the little matter of the advertisement in the lost-and-found columns of all the papers which you’ve already undoubtedly seen, I’m not at liberty to give any details. There is no objection, perhaps, to my corroborating the fact that we have found the snake — pending final identification — beyond doubt the Zuri or tiger snake advertised for.”
“But why is it worth a thousand bucks?” asked the reporter pointedly.
Carson smiled again and shook his head as before. “I’m sorry,” was all he said, “but I’m not at liberty to give you the inside facts.”
“Are you people developing a venom serum?” persisted the other.
But Carson was not to be budged — and, indeed, he could give no explanation even if he wanted to. He shook his head decisively. “None of us at the address mentioned in the advertisement have anything to say at this time,” he declared.
The reporter, being a shrewd reader of men, ceased his questioning. He glanced down at his camera on the floor, then up again. “Well, don’t suppose you’ll refuse a picture of this Zuri snake for the morning edition of the Hera-miner,” he said hopefully. “It’ll make a crackerjack story even without the inside dope. The Thousand Dollar Snake!”
But Carson was again forced to shake his head. “The reptile is now locked up in a safe in the library of professor Angus Desmond whose name appears in connection with the advertisement. Professor Desmond is in Havana, Cuba, and is not expected back till about next Sunday. I am merely a friend of the family’s, and Miss Desmond, the only person in a position to open that safe, is a supervising operator at the Kildare automatic exchange on the night trick — so I couldn’t show you the snake even if I were of a mind to ride clear out there with you now, and even if I had a key to the house. As for Miss Desmond, she isn’t off duty till morning.”
“Well, that appears to settle it then,” said the reporter. He picked up his camera and slung the leather strap over his shoulder. “Thanks anyway, old man, for your courtesy. I’ll try to make a little something out of it at least.”
And sure enough, after a somewhat restless night’s sleep in which his most vivid dream appeared to be a representation of Mrs. Sam Johnson being pursued down a narrow street by a giant reptile which had a pair of huge dice for eyes, Carson woke up to find that there was indeed a story in the morning paper which was left at his room door each morning by the slavey of the Scott Street rooming house.
It described the almost miraculous return to its owner by a negro trackworker in the Union Station of a snake worth one thousand dollars, the mysterious Zuri or Tiger Snake of India. The reporter had culled his imagination to the nth degree. In his seven-hundred-word story he painted not only a vivid description of the tiger snake, but also the white walls of an Indian temple in the impregnable fastnesses of the Orient. He told of the dark-skinned priests who had owned the sacred snake, a variant on its breed and one whose venom served to lengthen their lives beyond that of their fellow men, thus increasing their standing among the rabble of India. And he told also of the bitter conflict being waged between these dark-skinned mystics and the learned zoologist who had bought the sacred snake in India from a traitor in the temple and who had brought it back to America to invoke the aid of science in determining the real cause of the ability of the venom to give human longevity. The precious snake, lost and regained by a newspaper want-ad, was the one clue which was to expose a set of Indian fakers who had waxed fat and rich for hundreds of years; under the scientific hands of an American zoologist it was to be used to undo the mysticism of the East. Now regained, the snake was carefully guarded within the six walls of an iron safe in Professor Desmond’s house at 5720 St. Giles Lane, and Professor Desmond himself was in Havana interviewing an apostate Indian priest who had escaped the temples and fled to Spain’s lost island.
Carson laughed aloud. It made a beautiful story — a beautifully wild fantasy wound around a few sparse facts — and all that was needed to make it literally blow up so far as the delectation of the public went was for it to further contain the additional mere details that the snake was now stuffed, and that all the venom which could be gotten from it, considering its wool body and its total absence of poison glands in addition, would not kill a mosquito nor lengthen the life of a three-months-old infant. But this information the story, fortunately for the story, did not contain!
But Carson, late arisen this bright Wednesday morning and reading his paper at the hour of nine when the contents of papers throughout the city were long since digested, was not the only person in Chicago after all who was perusing that same article. In the Ratagoba House, some two miles to the south, a catchpenny hostelry patronized by theatrical and circus people of the cheaper class, two persons who were registered there in different rooms but who at this instant sat closeted in the same room were also reading the article for the third consecutive time that morning — at least one was reading it to the other. The one who read the newspaper account was a man; the one who listened to it was a girl.
CHAPTER X
KENSINGTON ON THE WIRE
THE Ratagoba House w
as on North Clark Street, not far from the Chicago River, where that famous cosmopolitan thoroughfare was most run down at heel. Streetcar motormen, held up by the open bridge a block or so to the south, irritably thumped raucous gongs as they nosed their ponderous grinding juggernauts slowly past the doors. Huge cold-storage warehouses, dust-stained and greasy, reared themselves in the sky as though in silent condemnation of the Ratagoba House which stored only countless humans engaged in the most inutile profession in life, rather than the valuable things of existence such as butter, eggs and sides of beef. Cheap talkie shows along the street vied with equally cheap photo-postal galleries, and drugstores in which much winking was done between proprietor and customer dotted this portion of the city.
In room 418 of the Ratagoba House Casper Wolff, the morning Herald-Examiner in his hand, was just completing his third detailed reading of the article in the paper which Carson, fully two miles away, was perusing in the privacy of his own bedroom. Casper Wolff was a nervous, animated sort of man, with bushy grey hair, his age about 50, his eyes a bit shifty and greenish-hazel in color, his collar not the cleanest, his suit far from up to the minute in style — a man whose profession or trade a casual reader of character might be puzzled to find, but who might be deduced to be an individual who had to use his wits coupled with an occasional demonstration of sharp practices. His face was devoid of mustache or beard, but wrinkled; there were crow’s-feet around his eyes, and he had a nervous way of biting his lips as he talked.
The Riddle of the Yellow Zuri Page 14