“All you got to do,” he announced, taking a seat on the porch, “is to wait till the Banner comes out, and then you’ll get all the news. I just been in there to tell Harry Squires about my discoveries, and he is workin’ his head off now gettin’ it all in shape for the subscribers to the paper. And that reminds me. He asked me to do him a favour. He says there are quite a number of cheap skates in this town that ain’t regular subscribers to the Banner. That’s why Ebenezer January’s barber shop is so crowded on Thursday mornings that Ebenezer is threatenin’ to stop his subscription. Ebenezer says there’s so many customers in his place waitin’ to be next with the paper that he ain’t hardly got room to hone up his razors after Wednesday’s work. I promised Harry I’d suggest that you all go around and subscribe today, because he says he’s engaged Ebenezer to whitewash the press-room tomorrow and the barber shop won’t be open at all. He says it’s an outrage that—”
He stopped short to glare in speechless amazement at a familiar figure almost under his nose.
“I thought I told you to stand guard back there, Alf Reesling,” he roared.
“Aw, thunder, he can’t run away,” protested Alf. “An’ nobody’s goin’ to steal him, so what’s the sense—”
“I’ll give you just fifteen minutes to get back there to Hawkins’s,” declared the marshal firmly. “If you’re not back there by that time, I’ll arrest you for contempt.”
“That suits me,” said Alf promptly.
“Yes, sir,” said Anderson, addressing the crowd, “I would have nabbed him today if he hadn’t gone an’ hung himself like this. He must have got onto the fact that I had him dead to rights. He knowed there wasn’t any escape for him,—no chance in the world. Wait a second! Don’t all talk at once,—and don’t ask questions! An’ say, Abner, it won’t do you any good to go round to the Banner office, because I swore Harry Squires to secrecy. So stay where you are. Harry won’t tell you a thing, even if your father-in-law is a regular subscriber. What time is it, Lum?”
On being informed by Lum Gillespie that it was later than he thought, Marshal Crow looked at his own watch and arose in some haste.
“By ginger, I got to get busy. I still got to see if I can find that letter Jake received yesterday afternoon. I wouldn’t be surprised if the contents of that letter had a good deal to do with his hurryin’ up this hangin’ business. Like as not it was a warnin’ from some confederate of his’n, lettin’ him know I was gettin’ purty hot on his trail. It’s mighty hard to keep these things from leakin’ out, ’specially when you’re workin’ at long range as I’ve been fer some time. My investigations have been carried on from one end of the country to the other. I finally got ’em narrowed down to a place out west called Sandusky, Ohio, an’ I was just on the point of telegraphin’ to the police out there that I had their man when this thing happens.”
He was assisted in his search for the letter by a volunteer organization of about one hundred men and boys. The search was a most diligent one. Much to the disgust of Ed Higgins, the floor of Jake’s sleeping apartment was yanked up by willing, excited citizens; the hay-mow was ransacked from one end to the other; the grain bins were turned inside out, and there was some talk of ripping off a section of the roof. At half past twelve o’clock, the marshal went home to his midday meal, leaving the work in charge of Lum Gillespie, the garage owner, whose love for Mr. Higgins was governed entirely by the fact that the liveryman’s business interfered considerably with his own prosperity.
Secure in the seclusion of his own woodshed, Marshal Crow slyly withdrew Jake’s letter from an inside pocket and reread it with great care. Later on, having fortified himself with a substantial dinner, he returned to the hunt. Advising the toilers that he was going to do a little private searching, based on a “deduction” that had come to him while he was at home, he ambled off in the direction of Power House Gulley. Half an hour later he reappeared and instructed the crowd to knock off work. He had found the letter just where he figured he would find it!
“I don’t see why in thunder you didn’t figure it out at breakfast instead of at dinner,” growled Ed Higgins, moodily surveying the wreckage. “I’ve a notion to sue you for damages. Look at that box-stall! Look at that—”
“Never mind, Ed; I’ll have Lum an’ the rest of ’em put everything back in order, jest as they found it. Now, you fellers get to work and put things in shape around here. I’m goin’ to take this letter over an’ show it to Harry Squires. It proves everything,—absolutely everything. See here, Alf,—what in thunder are you doin’ here? Why ain’t you guardin’ them remains as I told you to do?”
“I am guardin’ ’em,” said Alf. “I c’n guard ’em just as well from a distance as I can close up, an’ you know it. All I got to do is to walk to the corner there an’ I c’n see Hawkins’s place as plain as anything. I could see it from right here if it wasn’t fer Lamson’s store an’ the Grand View Hotel.”
The marshal gave him a look of bitter scorn, and strode away. The crowd straggled along behind. Anderson stopped at the Banner office door and, exposing the dirty envelope to the eager gaze of the crowd, advised every one present to step in and take out a year’s subscription to the paper. Then he disappeared. The crowd surged forward, filling the outer office with something like sardine compactness. The door to Mr. Squires’s private office, however, closed sharply behind Mr. Crow, and for the next fifteen or twenty minutes the young lady bookkeeper was busy taking subscriptions from the disappointed throng. She got sixty-three new subscribers and definite promises from a large number of citizens who were considerably in arrears.
“You’ll see it all in your paper tomorrow morning,” said Anderson, coming out of the inner office at the end of half an hour’s consultation with the editor. “All I can say to you now is that I have captured one of the most desperate criminals in the country. He has been wanted for nearly three years for a diabolical crime. It makes my flesh creep to think of him being loose among our women an’ children all this time. Is there any one here who ain’t subscribed to the Banner?”
Tinkletown slept fitfully that night when it slept at all. The sole citizen enjoying a peaceful night’s rest was Jake Miller. A singular circumstance connected with the broken rest of three-fourths of the people of Tinkletown was the extraordinary unanimity with which Jake became visible to them the instant they did drop off to sleep.
Bright and early the next morning, the Banner appeared with its gruesome story. Jake was in very large type, but not much larger, after all, than Marshal Crow. The whilom Mr. Squires, revelling in generosity, gave Anderson all the credit. He held forth at great length on the achievements of the redoubtable marshal, winding up his account with a recommendation that a movement be inaugurated at once looking to the erection of a memorial statue to the famous “sleuth.” The concluding sentence of this bold panegyric was as follows: “Do not wait till he is dead! Do it now!” And appended, in parentheses, the statement that the Banner would head the list of subscribers with a contribution of one hundred dollars!
In the body of his article, Mr. Squires printed in full the contents of the letter received by Jacob Miller on the afternoon before his death,—the letter which had been recovered, after the most diligent and acute search by Marshal Crow, at the bottom of an abandoned well in Power House Gulley,—the letter which so completely vindicated the theories and deductions of Tinkletown’s most celebrated son.
Jake’s letter was from his brother in Sandusky. It warned him that the authorities had finally located him in Tinkletown and that officers were even then on the way east to “pinch” him. They had run him down at last, despite the various aliases under which he had sought to avoid apprehension; brotherly love impelled him to advise Jake to “beat it” as “quick as possible.” Moreover, he went on to state that if they got him he’d “swing” as sure as hell. Brotherly interest no doubt was also responsible for the frank admission that the “family” had done all it could for him, and that if he had had
a grain of sense, or had listened to his friends, he wouldn’t have married her in the first place. And if he hadn’t married her, he wouldn’t have been placed in a position where he had to beat her brains out. Not that she didn’t deserve to have her brains knocked out, and all that, but “you can’t go around doing that sort of thing without getting into trouble about it.”
In short, Jake—(by any other name he was just as guilty)—had slain his wife, presumably in cold blood. At any rate, Mr. Squires, sustained by the information received from Marshal Crow, (who had gone deeply into the case), stated in cold type that it had been done in cold blood.
Apparently Jake had decided that he was tired of dodging the inevitable. It was quite clear that he could not endure the thought of being “swung” for his diabolical deed.
The account also stated that Marshal Crow had at once advised the Western authorities by telegraph that he had their man, but regretted to state the scoundrel had anticipated arrest in the manner now so well known to the readers of the Banner, long recognized as the most enterprising newspaper in that part of the State of New York.
A day or two later, after the inquest, an officer arrived from Sandusky. He was a spectator at the funeral of Jake Miller, whom he readily identified as the slayer of Mrs. Camp, and was afterwards a most interested listener to the recital given on Lamson’s porch by Marshal Crow, who, described with considerable zest and surprising fidelity the manifold difficulties he had experienced in “running the criminal to earth,”—one of the most puzzling cases he had ever been called upon to tackle.
The astonished officer walked over to the Grand View Hotel with Harry Squires. From time to time he passed his hand over his brow in a thoroughly puzzled manner.
“I don’t mind telling you, Mr. Squires,” he blurted out at last, “that we hadn’t the faintest idea that this fellow Camp was as desperate a character as all this. We looked upon him as a rather harmless, soft-headed guy,—but, my God, he turns out to be one of the slickest all-round crooks in the United States. No wonder he managed to give us the slip all these years. It only goes to show how even the best of us can be fooled in a man.”
“That’s right,” agreed Harry. “It certainly does show how you can be fooled in a man.”
“When I get back home and tell ’em at headquarters what a slick duck he was, they’ll throw a fit. Why, by Gosh, we all thought he was a nut,—a plain nut.”
“Far be it from me,” said Harry, “to speak ill of either the living or the dead.”
“It’s a wonder he didn’t up and blow the head off this old Rube when he found he was about to be cornered.”
Harry took that moment to relight his pipe, and then abruptly said “Good night” to the gentleman from Sandusky.
As he rejoined the group in front of Lamson’s, Marshal Crow was saying:
“I’m mighty glad Harry Squires had sense enough not to say in the Banner that as soon as Jake Miller found out that the jig was up, he took the law in his own hands, and lynched himself.”
THE DAUGHTER OF ANDERSON CROW (1907)
CHAPTER I
Anderson Crow, Detective
He was imposing, even in his pensiveness. There was no denying the fact that he was an important personage in Tinkletown, and to the residents of Tinkletown that meant a great deal, for was not their village a perpetual monument to the American Revolution? Even the most generalising of historians were compelled to devote at least a paragraph to the battle of Tinkletown, while some of the more enlightened gave a whole page and a picture of the conflict that brought glory to the sleepy inhabitants whose ancestors were enterprising enough to annihilate a whole company of British redcoats, once on a time.
Notwithstanding all this, a particularly disagreeable visitor from the city once remarked, in the presence of half a dozen descendants (after waiting twenty minutes at the post-office for a dime’s worth of stamps), that Tinkletown was indeed a monument, but he could not understand why the dead had been left unburied. There was excellent cause for resentment, but the young man and his stamps were far away before the full force of the slander penetrated the brains of the listeners.
Anderson Crow was as imposing and as rugged as the tallest shaft of marble in the little cemetery on the edge of the town. No one questioned his power and authority, no one misjudged his altitude, and no one overlooked his dignity. For twenty-eight years he had served Tinkletown and himself in the triple capacity of town marshal, fire chief and street commissioner. He had a system of government peculiarly his own; and no one possessed the heart or temerity to upset it, no matter what may have been the political inducements. It would have been like trying to improve the laws of nature to put a new man in his place. He had become a fixture that only dissolution could remove. Be it said, however, that dissolution did not have its common and accepted meaning when applied to Anderson Crow. For instance, in discoursing upon the obnoxious habits of the town’s most dissolute rake—Alf Reesling—Anderson had more than once ventured the opinion that “he was carrying his dissolution entirely too far.”
And had not Anderson Crow risen to more than local distinction? Had not his fame gone abroad throughout the land? Not only was he the Marshal of Tinkletown at a salary of $200 a year, but he was president of the County Horse-thief Detectives’ Association and also a life-long delegate to the State Convention of the Sons of the Revolution. Along that line, let it be added, every parent in Tinkletown bemoaned the birth of a daughter, because that simple circumstance of origin robbed the society’s roster of a new name.
Anderson Crow, at the age of forty-nine, had a proud official record behind him and a guaranteed future ahead. Doubtless it was of this that he was thinking, as he leaned pensively against the town hitching-rack and gingerly chewed the blade of wire-grass which dangled even below the chin whiskers that had been with him for twenty years. The faraway expression in his watery-blue eyes gave evidence that he was as great reminiscently as he was personally. So successful had been his career as a law preserver, that of late years no evil-doer had had the courage to ply his nefarious games in the community. The town drunkard, Alf Reesling, seldom appeared on the streets in his habitual condition, because, as he dolefully remarked, he would deserve arrest and confinement for “criminal negligence,” if for nothing else. The marshal’s fame as a detective had long since escaped from the narrow confines of Tinkletown. He was well known at the county seat, and on no less than three occasions had his name mentioned in the “big city” papers in connection with the arrest of notorious horse-thieves.
And now the whole town was trembling with a new excitement, due to the recognition accorded her triple official. On Monday morning he had ventured forth from his office in the long-deserted “calaboose,” resplendent in a brand-new nickel-plated star. By noon everybody in town knew that he was a genuine “detective,” a member of the great organisation known as the New York Imperial Detective Association; and that fresh honour had come to Tinkletown through the agency of a post-revolution generation. The beauty of it all was that Anderson never lost a shred of his serenity in explaining how the association had implored him to join its forces, even going so far as to urge him to come to New York City, where he could assist and advise in all of its large operations. And, moreover, he had been obliged to pay but ten dollars membership fee, besides buying the blazing star for the paltry sum of three dollars and a quarter.
Every passer-by on this bright spring morning offered a respectful “Howdy” to Anderson Crow, whose only recognition was a slow and imposing nod of the head. Once only was he driven to relinquish his pensive attitude, and that was when an impertinent blue-bottle fly undertook to rest for a brief spell upon the nickel-plated star. Never was blue-bottle more energetically put to flight.
But even as the Tinkletown Pooh-Bah posed in restful supremacy there were rushing down upon him affairs of the epoch-making kind. Up in the clear, lazy sky a thunderbolt was preparing to hurl itself into the very heart of Tinkletown, and at the very
head of Anderson Crow.
Afterward it was recalled by observing citizens that just before noon—seven minutes to twelve, in fact—a small cloud no bigger than the proverbial hand crossed the sun hurriedly as if afraid to tarry. At that very instant a stranger drove up to the hitching-rack, bringing his sweat-covered horse to a standstill so abruptly in front of the marshal’s nose that that dignitary’s hat fell off backward.
“Whoa!” came clearly and unmistakably from the lips of the stranger who held the reins. Half a dozen loafers on the post-office steps were positive that he said nothing more, a fact that was afterward worth remembering.
“Here!” exclaimed Anderson Crow wrathfully. “Do you know what you’re doin’, consarn you?”
“I beg pardon,” everybody within hearing heard the young man say. “Is this the city of Tinkletown?” He said “city,” they could swear, every man’s son of them.
“Yes, it is,” answered the marshal severely. “What of it?”
“That’s all. I just wanted to know. Where’s the store?”
“Which store?” quite crossly. The stranger seemed nonplussed at this.
“Have you more than—oh, to be sure. I should say, where is the nearest store?” apologised the stranger.
“Well, this is a good one, I reckon,” said Mr. Crow laconically, indicating the post-office and general store.
“Will you be good enough to hold my horse while I run in there for a minute?” calmly asked the new arrival in town, springing lightly from the mud-spattered buggy. Anderson Crow almost staggered beneath this indignity. The crowd gasped, and then waited breathlessly for the withering process.
The George Barr McCutcheon Megapack: 25 Classic Novels and Stories Page 284