The Riddle of the Yellow Zuri

Home > Mystery > The Riddle of the Yellow Zuri > Page 21
The Riddle of the Yellow Zuri Page 21

by Harry Stephen Keeler


  Casper Wolff nodded. “Yes, we both know ‘em, I guess. Well, to go on with the story, Jake Jennings and Lola Jennings had a front room in the second floor of the Mansion House in the town of Bixburg. There’s been a lot of free publicity in late months about new commercial uses for silver, including the recent process for plating chinaware and flowers with it, although I think myself that the real reason silver has come back is because of some complicated factors involving the stoppage of the Indian demonetization and the American loan to China in actual silver dollars. Be that as it may, it’s been in the limelight for a considerable while now, and Jennings, it seems, had secured for about a hundred dollars the complete ownership of a dead and defunct mine near there — an alleged silver mine — called the Black Eagle. He had also bought for fifty dollars or so a claim some thirty miles distant — a claim which I imagine from the price paid must have been salted once — registered as the Red Eagle. And he had linked these two valueless properties together under one name and one ownership — his own — and was preparing to make one grand cleanup on his newly acquired sucker list, with literature promising tremendous profits from these two mines. All of this I had to work out from what Lola was able to tell me when she came to my office in St. Paul Monday morning.” He paused. “And now for that twenty thousand dollar gold note.”

  “Yes,” echoed Carson slowly, “and now for that twenty thousand dollar gold note.”

  “Jennings, according to Lola’s somewhat incomplete description of his operations as they appear to her untutored mind,” continued Wolff reluctantly, “had had printed at a shop in Bixburg a thousand eight-page booklets describing the tremendous money-making possibilities in these mines, the Red Eagle and the Black Eagle, stressing all the new commercial uses of silver and describing in glowing terms the need of refined silver in the new dish-plating fad; he had hired a lock-box in the post-office, and had had printed a thousand large envelopes bearing his return address in care of that lock-box. Then he had started a checking account with a few dollars in the Bixburg bank, and he was all in readiness to make a clean-up and a skip to Europe; he intended actually to defraud by the use of the mails.

  “All day Thursday and Friday, surrounded on all sides by a dozen or so empty envelope boxes he had gotten from the Bixburg printshop, he had been hammering on a dilapidated typewriter he had rented, addressing his thousand envelopes from the precious sucker list he had acquired, working methodically right down the list, and filling in, immediately after the completion of each envelope, the sucker’s name on a form letter. This filled-in form letter he inserted at once in the envelope so that there could be no later mixup, and added to it one of the booklets and a blotter — ”

  “A blotter!” ejaculated Carson, more dumbfounded than ever. Now, for a certainty, he dimly glimpsed the impending and complete crash of his well-deduced structure; yet how he had been drawn into the Jennings affair — He gave it all up. The wires of fate had crossed in some strange way — and that way was the next thing to uncover.

  “A blotter,” repeated Wolff quietly. “That’s all I know. Just an enclosure to go in with the typed letter and the booklet — the usual hackneyed enclosure to hold a man’s attention on a proposition after he has considered it — a method used by a man like Jake Jennings who wasn’t an advertising expert and who didn’t know the subtleties of the game.” Wolff shrugged his shoulders. “But perhaps with that ultra-choice list of suckers he had, he didn’t need subtleties. Who knows?

  “At any rate,” continued Wolff, “after completing the addressing of each separate missive and envelope, and stuffing it as well, he placed it in direct rotation in the cardboard boxes, unsealed however, for, as Lola said, he had a half-thought in his mind to insert still one more enclosure — a reproduction of a photograph he’d got hold of, of one of his mines, taken ten years before and showing the mine actively operating. He was waiting a quotation from the town photographer on this, as to cost and time required to make a thousand or so prints. And so, finishing his job by supper time, he ate his supper, went out and took a walk and an evening cigar, and then returned and worked, so she said, till late in the night, checking each envelope carefully with the list he had, and, when he found a mistake, lifting it partly up in its box and correcting it in ink. It was, he told her — and there you have the natural born gambler’s superstition — always the letter which failed to get delivered, that would have otherwise reached the sucker who would have ‘kicked in with a huge wad of dough.’ And it was due to all this painstakingness on Jennings’ part that the whole present situation has come about.

  “Saturday morning Lola tells me, shortly after breakfast, Jennings went over to the town photographer, and found at once that he would have to give up his idea of enclosing the snapshot of his mine — rather, the one of his two mines — in his thousand waiting and checked envelopes. It wasn’t altogether that the cost was too high as that, with the photographer’s meagre equipment, it would take far, far too much time to make all the prints. He called up Lola in their room at the Mansion House on the decrepit telephone — one of these kind, it seems, where you actually ring the central switchboard yourself with your hand! — and informed her of the outcome of his visit. Then he hung up, and she heard no more from him for a little while. When he actually did get back, in person, to their room, he was all excited. ‘Lo,’ he told her, ‘I’ve made a tremendous killing! After I left the photographer’s and called you up about there being nothing doing on the snaps, I went on over to the bank to fix up my checking account. I talked a minute outside of it first with the landlord’s young son, fixing for him to do some petty drudgery for me, and then went on in the bank itself. While I was at the window of the cashier and teller of the dump, he turned his back. And so help me God, Lo, if I didn’t spot a twenty thousand-case note lying far over in his cage from the window — a twenty thousand-case note in a rube bank! That’s more money, Lo, than Harry Purvis’ whole outfit was worth. More, Lo, than you can dream about if you dream every night for a year. Bags and bags of it. Yes. A twenty thousand-case note. Can you beat it? I was chewing gum at the time, Lo, and I had my cane. It was inspiration. Just as his back was turned, the customer’s part of the bank was empty. I jammed my gum on the end of my cane, ran it through the grating, drew out that twenty-grand-note and copped a young fortune. And here I am. They must have discovered it a minute or so after I got out of the door, for I heard a hullabaloo going on back there — and I think I’m followed.’ “

  “And was he followed?” asked Carson, following this strange story with tense breath.

  “So Lola Jennings related to me,” said Wolff. “Jennings had walked to the window of their second floor front in the Mansion House while he was speaking, and after one hasty look downstairs on the dusty street spun around and told her: ‘They’re hot after me, Lo. There’s the bank cashier, the town marshal, and two deputies coming on a dog trot toward the hotel. Lo, we’ve got to stash that bill — and quick!”

  “And what did they do?” Carson put in quickly. But even as he asked the question he knew part of the answer.

  “Lola tells me he looked quickly around the room. Then he pressed into her hands what she describes as a crisp yellow paper with pictures on it, but which of course you and I know was the twenty-thousand-case note. ‘Lo,’ he told her, ‘this means fur coats for you, glad rags galore, an automobile for both of us, and Europe — if you do exactly what I tell you. Take one of those blotters over on that table there — yes — one from that pile we didn’t use — peel off the glazed top — yes, just exactly like you peel a mustard plaster off your chest — run a rim of paste — yes, the stickum-goo — around the margin of the bottom layer — slip this note in between the two layers and stick ‘em together again with the note between ‘em. Got it? Sure — just like a sandwich. Or rather, Lo, like a chocolate cake. That’s better. Quick as you’ve done that, slip the doctored blotter — the phony, see? — in one of the envelopes standing in the boxes ready for se
aling and mailing — better take that first box — I’ve chalked ‘A’s-B’s’ on the end of it — see it? — yes, the one with only half a label on the end — yes, that’s the one — slip the phony blotter in one of the envelopes standing in that box — and be sure to take out the blotter that’s already in it. Remember the envelope you switched blotters in, but under no conditions seal it in case they suspect we’ve hidden the note there. Don’t mark it either. Remember it, that’s all. We may have to do some swift work later. I don’t know. When they come up here later to comb the place over, don’t let your eyes rest on that envelope box. Nor on any of ‘em. That’s all. They’re coming closer now. I’ll beat it downstairs quick and stall things long enough to give you a chance to finish the job. They’ll come for you in no time. So get going.’ And downstairs he went in a big rush, where it appears from subsequent developments that he successfully delayed things for some twenty minutes or so, by the fact that the town marshal, unaware that he had already been up to his room, took him into custody, carted him off to the town lock-up and in the presence of witnesses searched him carefully, convinced that he was the man.

  “In the meantime, Lo Jennings wasn’t asleep on the job. She’s an illiterate of the worst type, but she can understand and follow instructions couched in plain and simple English. Indeed, she’s shrewd enough when she knows that fur coats and glad rags galore are in the offing. What woman isn’t? She grabbed off one of the unused blotters strewn around the table, opened it up with her thumb-nail and peeled it completely apart. With the tip of her finger she smeared paste from a nearby paste-jar all around the margin of the lower layer, slipped the crisp bill Jake had given her between the two layers and pressed them together again all around their edges. Then she prepared, before the town police could get back and take her up as they had her husband, to substitute it for one of the blotters in the hundred or so envelopes lying packed in the ?-B box he had indicated to her by its half label, ready like the rest, for sealing, stamping and mailing. But here she came a cropper. Illiterate as she was, she was a foxy enough kid to know that the room would be searched from bottom to top. She knew that Jake’s scheme of hiding it was all to the good. But one little thing Jake had quite forgotten when he had given her those last hasty instructions: she can’t read — she can’t count — she grew up in the Ozark mountains among people who don’t know one written or printed word from another. Picture yourself., my friend, facing an interminable row of envelopes written, for instance, only in Chinese characters, each with the same indentations as every other, each on the same paper, each printed in with the same size of letters, and you will be able to imagine the little puzzle that Lo Jennings faced when she found no way of impressing on her recollection the envelope in which she was to substitute for a blotter worth one-half a cent one worth what from her husband’s words was an enormous fortune.

  “Now you or I in the same position might have taken a pencil and marked a microscopic mark somewhere on the envelope we wished to identify later, but Jake, ever two steps ahead of the mind of the Law, had especially cautioned her against putting any marks on it, and his very caution had, in a sense, hypnotized her. And it was then, Lo tells me, that the idea came to her to ‘count off’ so many envelopes, not by numbers, which were outside of her ken, but by some method like the children in the Ozark hollows used to play what she calls ‘It’ — but which you and I know as ‘Tag’; one of the bigger girls, it seems, who had had ‘some schoolin’, as Lo terms it, had had a counting formula — you’ve heard it yourself, no doubt, when you were young, and so have I: ibbety bibbety sibbity sab, ibbety bibbety commella, and so forth around till the particular tag victim is selected. But the minds of people such as Lo Jennings work in peculiar channels. Both morons and illiterates are, if anything, super-wary rather than under-cautious. She was ‘afeared,’ she said, ‘that them there sheriffs, if they suspicioned her, would guess her!’ And right here was where the natural cunning of her type added itself to the natural cunning of the female of the species whether the species be illiterate or educated, savage or civilized. Over in the corner of the room was a screened box containing a Zuri, or Indian tiger snake, which she had had while she had been in Harry Purvis’ outfit as his snake charmer. It was yellow with black circular stripes running around its body from the tip of its tail to its head.” Wolff paused.

  “Yes, go on,” said Carson grimly. “I’ve seen the snake all right.”

  “It seems that it was a sort of pet with the girl,” Wolff continued glumly, “she having taken it bodily when she left Purvis’ outfit, together with one or two others that had since died off. Jennings had never liked the thing — but he hadn’t paid much attention to it, being busy trying to knock down money on his various fraudulent schemes. So what does Lo do, according to her own story, but take the tiger snake out of the box. There was a broken black ring at a point somewhere along its back, and she determined to use the snake to ‘count off’ on — and to use that very ring as a marker. You are, of course, at liberty to question her yourself as to just how she used it, but she demonstrates it invariably in the same way, when given a small box of printed business cards to take the place of the box of envelopes. I have tried her out with this and with a wooden ruler to represent the snake, a ruler with its end inked to represent the snake’s black tail-tip, and one of its inch-marks crisscrossed with ink to represent the broken ring. Likewise with a tape measure treated in the same way. And with a cane, too, whose ferrule I blackened and on which I painted some crude rings, one broken. Her story never deviates by a hair. She does know what she did. She put Mr. Snake in her left hand, the black tip of his tail just protruding from her thumb and index finger, his head hanging downward, and with her right hand she drew partially forth by its corner the first envelope in that A-B box, allowing it to remain sticking out cornerwise from its fellows. It was held thus, to quote her, by ‘them there letters a-bein’ sorta squoze agin one another, not tight-like, you know, not loose-like nuther. Jest squoze!’”

  A wry smile rested on Wolff’s lips as he endeavored to give this impromptu rendition of a Lola Higgsian description of conditions. Then the smile faded, he sighed audibly, and went reluctantly on.

  “This done,” he proceeded, “Lola drew Mr. Snake another notch forward, and for the second black ring that came in sight, counting his black tail as Ring I, she drew another envelope partially out. Each time she drew forth more of the snake from her left thumb and index finger, and exposed a new ring, she drew forth another envelope part way. At last the ring that came in sight was the broken one, and the envelope which corresponded to it she took altogether out of the box and substituted blotters in it. Which accomplished, she replaced it quickly, poked them all down, and put the lid back on the box. And there you are. Pretty cunning for an illiterate, eh?”

  Carson nodded slowly. “She used the snake practically as the Chinese use their abacus board,” was his comment. “But go ahead, Wolff. I follow you. In fact I’m two jumps ahead of you.”

  The other surveyed him curiously for a minute at his cryptic remark, and then continued without asking any questions.

  “She hadn’t much more than got this little stunt done — and done in such a way that she could find the envelope very readily later on for Jake — and replaced the snake in his box, than up come the officers of the law, make her go over to the town lock-up with them, and there submit her to a bunch of questions and a complete search by the wife and sister of the town marshal. As for Jake, he was still in custody, still protesting that he knew nothing of the stolen bill. Now Lo isn’t the brightest human being in the world, but she was able from the talk going on about her to gather a strange story about that twenty thousand dollars. A rancher living near Bixburg had cleaned up twenty thousand dollars in coin and currency in a gambling house in San Francisco several nights before, and drunk and hazy next morning had gone into a bank in ‘Frisco and exchanged his winnings for a single twenty thousand dollar note of the new — or comparat
ively new — Federal Reserve Bank issue of that denomination, which he had promptly put in his sock and started home with a quart of moonshine. When he got off the train, drunk as a lord, at Bixburg next morning, he had gone to the bank and deposited the twenty thousand dollar note to his account and the teller who was busy hadn’t even yet recorded its number before it had disappeared with the visit of Jake Jennings to the bank. This was what came out during the violent discussions and recriminations, and it was this that caused all the commotion. Twenty thousand dollars that Federal Reserve Bank note represented, for it was not recorded. Anyone could pass it with perfect safety to himself for there wasn’t a single way in which to identify it or to stop payment on it across the United States. There are thousands of such notes in continual use on big deals such as huge bond issues, secret stock market maneuvers, mortgage cancellations where gold is required to be tendered, and so forth. The man who had exchanged his gambling winnings for it had no recollection of what bank he had gotten it at in San Francisco; that bank likewise did not know who their customer was. The bank of Bixburg had credited him with twenty thousand dollars on his account, but had not yet recorded the number of the note. There you are. The trail of the note’s identity was lost in a trail of moonshine and carelessness. And that is the reason why I — well — why I fell for temptation. I saw a chance to make a piece of money without any possibility of ever getting tripped up in case I won.”

  Wolff paused a moment, his face the picture of regret. Then, with a philosophical shrug of his shoulders, he went on.

  “It was around three o’clock in the afternoon before Lola and Jake were let out of the town lock-up. The rube police hadn’t gotten a thing on them. But when they got back to their room they found conditions somewhat startling. In the first place, the room was pretty well in confusion, for the two marshals’ deputies had apparently searched it from top to bottom. And in the second place, the ten boxes of envelopes packed and ready for stamping, sealing and mailing, were gone!”

 

‹ Prev