Find the Clock

by Harry Stephen Keeler

  “Yes, a one-thousand-six-hundred-dollar crash it would be,” the girl returned. “An instant loss of one thousand six hundred dollars, considering that it is far more easy to dispose of a perfect piece, even at the higher valuation, than a reconstructed one at the minimum price. Many collectors will be — ”

  But at this juncture of her words the door to the small adjoining kitchen opened and the coal-black Negro maid stuck her woolly head in excitedly. “Mis’ Iris, how long you’m say de roas’ bif mus’ stay in de ovem?”

  Not a flicker of Darrell’s face took place as the Negro girl addressed her mistress by the name of “Mis’ Iris,” and he continued to look back over his shoulder at her Gubbio with apparent disinterest in the conversation. But Rita Thorne — Rita Thorne who was called by her maid “Mis’ Iris” — responded quickly, too quickly, the reporter thought.

  “About an hour, Snowwhite. When you put it on let me know and I’ll watch the clock for you.”

  “But yo’ daddy, de ol’ Cun’l Shaf’sb’y, done say we-all shouldn’t eat no roas cook’ only dat short. He say — ”

  “That will do, Snowwhite,” replied her mistress. “I will time it for you.”

  And the black head reluctantly disappeared.

  Now that they were alone once more she fastened her great violet eyes on Darrell.

  “Mr. Darrell, I have enjoyed our little chat about pottery very much, yet this of course was not what you came to see me about. I have waited patiently for you to state your errand, yet you seem to have avoided it. Now may I ask you to tell me just what information you were seeking?”

  He was conscious of a sudden chill in her words, and he realized full well that the Negro maid by her reference to “yo’ daddy, de ol’ Cun’l Shaf’sb’y” had divulged something which was supposed to remain concealed. Although not a pencil moved from his pocket, his brain recorded the slip as’ though hammered out by a typewriter on a piece of clean white paper.

  He gazed at her. “Yes, Miss Thorne,” he said politely, “I did not come to see you about pottery, although I have enjoyed my visit here because I have met some one who knows and appreciates a field which few people understand. What I did come here for was something connected with my purely reportorial duty on a great newspaper.” Then, without reservation he told the story of Napoleon Foy and handed her the copy of the message.

  “And now I should like to ask you to give me the inside story of this very strange method of getting a message to you — as well as the peculiar allusions in it. Will you do that, Miss Thorne?”

  He watched her as her eyes roved troubled over the message from the first word to the last. Twice she read it fully through, and again the third time. At last, with it still clutched in her slender fingers, she spoke.

  “I — I don’t know what I can tell you that you — you can print in your paper. I — ” She stopped. She turned to him impulsively. “Mr. Darrell, surely there is some bond between you and me — both lovers of a great science such as pottery collecting.” He smiled faintly, for he knew how she was appealing desperately to the one bond which had so unexpectedly developed between them. If only she knew the power of those great dark eyes, he reflected, how little she would have to lean upon such slim things as pottery. “Mr. Darrell, must this message and what you have told me go into the paper? Must it?”

  He nodded slowly.

  “It should go in,” he replied. “It is news, you know, although rather obscure at present.” It was on the point of his tongue to tell her that three men, by name Jurkins, Johnson, and Jarndyce had died in the past month, but the newspaper man’s caution in him prevented him from revealing all he knew. “The end of the message speaks half jokingly — half seriously — of a certain J. C. J. remaining dead.” He paused. “Perhaps if you do not see your way clear to give me any information, the Mr. Catherwood mentioned in it might be willing.” He was sorry he had spoken thus, immediately the words were uttered, for they sounded only like a vicious threat, the which they were not intended by him.

  But her reply as to his Mr. Catherwood was somewhat of a puzzler in itself.

  “There would be no use, Mr. Darrell, of your interviewing all the Catherwoods you could locate in Chicago, for you would not be able to find the one for whom you were seeking. You would only — ” She broke off and bit her lip in vexation. “Where — where is the original message of which this is the copy?”

  He smiled. “Locked tightly up in a hand-carved wooden cabinet in the back room of the laundry of this same Napoleon Foy.” He regarded her a second or two in silence. “Come, Miss Thorne, won’t you be kind enough to give me the inside of this strange and peculiar affair?”

  She appeared not to hear his final words. Instead, she troubledly repeated aloud his statement as to the location of the original message. “Locked tightly up in a hand-carved wooden cabinet in his laundry.” She nodded her head slowly. “I see.” She bit her lower lip as though in great confusion as how to handle this complication. Then suddenly she reached out a hand, and gently touched Darrell’s arm.

  “Mr. Darrell, I — I do not see how I can give you any — any facts. So far as the fifty dollars goes, I will be glad to live up to that part of the message. But — but I cannot very well render any explanations to appear in print. Nor can I even give them to you personally. Instead — instead — I am going to appeal to you to do something for me — to help me to fulfill the terms of this same message you have just brought me. I am a Southern girl, Mr. Darrell, of a chivalrous race. Where I come from men give women unquestioningly what they ask — and require no favors in return.” She paused.

  “Mr. Darrell, for reasons which even I myself do not know I have been delegated to do. a thing which I cannot do. My ankle is badly sprained, so badly that I cannot take a single step upon it. Snowwhite, the Negro girl whom you just saw, can neither read nor write. She doesn’t know one side of Chicago from the other — nor could she even read a street sign. She is as ignorant to-day as her first progenitor who came over from Africa. For this reason I ask of you a great favor — not a favor of Mr. Jeffrey Darrell, a newspaper reporter, but of my friend, Jeffrey Darrell. Would you be willing to go to both these places mentioned in this paper — this Schimski and Rees — and secure a certain clock for me if I give you the money with which to obtain it? See — I trust you, Mr. Darrell. Will — will you do this for me?”

  He gazed down into her great dark eyes. And in that moment a full-fledged reporter for the Call, relegated to a subsidiary position due to the acquisition of the famous pet of the Frisco Despatch, Marvin Feldock, metamorphosed quickly into a quite human man.

  “I’ll be very glad to help you out, Miss Thorne,” he said. “Tell me just what you wish me to do?”

  For perhaps a minute the girl regarded him troubledly, as though weighing undecidedly in her own mind whether she had been rash in asking an utter stranger to undertake such an odd errand for her.

  “Thank you, Mr. Darrell.” She paused for several long seconds. “All I want you to do is to do exactly what I have been requested in this message: to go to the two places mentioned in it. Please — please do not put any questions to me about it. I cannot answer them because — because I do not fully understand it all myself. You are chivalrous — it stands out all over you. That is enough.” She paused.

  “I will give you money — what I have. With it you will find this” — she glanced down at the message — “this Schimski and this Rees. You — you will ask each one for an alarm clock purchased presumably from the effects of a dead man who lived at 1370 Ritchie Court. I do not know when they were bought. The dead man’s name was Edward Thurston Jarndyce. That — this is all I am to tell you.” She wrinkled up her white brows as in recollection, and for a moment closed her eyes with their long, black lashes. Then she opened them.

  “There were, evidently, two alarm clocks in his home — one belonging to the servant’s room and one to his own. They would be cheap nickel-plated clocks, worth not more than o
ne dollar and fifty cents apiece. Pay what you must for each — or learn where it is located if it has been sold. That is all I can say. You will do this for me — even though I do not tell you what lies behind it all?”

  “Have I not assured you that I would do it, Miss Thorne?” was Darrell’s reply, delivered just a bit stiffly.

  She gazed undecidedly about her. “Have you money — but no, I must furnish that myself.”

  Darrell laughed — a bit bitterly, for his curiosity had been aroused, and now instead of having been satisfied it had been neatly sidetracked by an appeal to his chivalry. He spoke.

  “Miss Thorne, if all that is involved are two alarm clocks that were sold among a dead man’s household furniture by order of court, or otherwise, then rest assured you won’t have to pay any big money such as your message states. A five-dollar at the most will recover either one — if it hasn’t yet been sold. If it has, the same five-dollar bill should recover it from the purchaser.”

  “Perhaps,” she agreed dubiously. “And perhaps not. Who can tell?” She looked down at the copy of the message and sighed deeply. Then she gazed across the room, where at the end farthest from the window was visible the bright round disk comprising the face of a recently installed wall safe. “My money — money which perhaps you must have — is in that wall safe. My ankle won’t — ” Her eyes turned with dismay to her muslin-bound ankle.

  “If you could trust me to carry you over to it,” Darrell suggested apologetically. “Really — I would not try to walk on that ankle if I were you.”

  She reached out her arms thankfully. “Will you do that, Mr. Darrell? I know it’s a bit unconventional, but — ”

  Without a word he leaned carefully over the big davenport, and, raising the soft, feminine body in his arms, lifted her as though she were a child. His heart beat wildly as her form rested against his, as the fragrance of her soft skin reached his nostrils, and a tendril of her jet hair brushed lightly across his cheek. He crossed the room quickly with her, a tiny lilt of laughter emanating from his burden at her mode of transport, and then stood squarely in front of the wall safe. “Just turn your dial, Miss Thorpe. I’ll promise not to look — and you’re no load at all, so just take it easily.”

  She spun the dial, he heard the door swing open, felt her extract therefrom something, heard the round door close and click sharply together again, and then she spoke. “Now — if you will just get me back on the davenport once more.”

  He carried her back, and laid her safely down in the soft cushions from which he had abstracted her. In her hand was a huge roll of bills. She opened them out and counted them one by one. They were twenties, and there were but thirty of them. Impulsively she handed them all to him.

  “As you say, Mr. Darrell, a few dollars should suffice to secure these two clocks — but — ask no questions; just pay whatever you must to secure them both. It is not given to me to take issue with the methods suggested to me. I can only follow them. And I trust you fully, as you can see now for yourself.”

  “Sufficient unto the day is the command thereof,” Darrell replied, tucking the capacious roll away in his pocket. “If I don’t get tempted to abscond with this six hundred dollars, Miss Thorne, I’ll be back with both of Mr. Edward Thurston Jarndyce’s clocks.”

  She smiled.

  “I have no fear of your absconding, Mr. Darrell.” She called to the Negro maid. “Snowwhite, show Mr. Darrell out, please.”

  And with a faint backward smile to her, Darrell left the room, stepped forth into the quiet, outer hall of the Bradbury and thence down upon Independence Boulevard once more, now brightly lighted by a sun which hung in the skies at a point not far from noontime.

  If he had come for a story, he had certainly gotten further toward securing the story even though it had been delayed; for — lo and behold! — he had been drafted in upon a strange errand connected with the very story on which he had come. All well and good. But the first thing he did was to telephone the Call. He asked for Jimmie Halverson, a young cub who had recently joined the staff.

  “Jimmie,” he ordered, as soon as he had that young man on the telephone, “I want you to look up in the ‘Who’s Who’ — this year’s issue and several years back, if necessary — and see if any such person as Shaftsbury is entered, presumably a Southern colonel. I’ll hold this wire while you do it.”

  It was nearly ten minutes before Halverson returned. He was brimming with information. He evidently had a book in his hand. He read over the wire what he saw therein. It ran:

  SHAFTSBURY — COLONEL HIGGINS SHAFTSBURY, b. 1846. Residence, Arcadyville, Louisiana. Former cotton grower. Well-known collector of pottery and author of several monographs on subject. Veteran Civil War. Appointed to colonelship Spanish-American War. Married in 1898, wife died in 1910. One daughter.

  As Halverson stopped reading he spoke. “Your man Shaftsbury must be dead, Darrell, for the ‘Who’s Who’ of last year has the notice, but it’s missing from the new current volume which just arrived yesterday.”

  “That’s undoubtedly the case,” agreed Darrell quickly. “For the ‘Who’s Who’ carries only the living. Well that’s all, Jimmie. Much obliged.”

  Lingering in the telephone booth he fell to reflecting on the matter with a deep frown of puzzlement between his eyes. What was this girl, this Iris Shaftsbury, whose young life had been entwined with the pottery of her father, “de ol’ Cun’l Shaf’sb’y” as the Negro girl called him, doing in Chicago under the assumed name of Rita Thorne? Was there some strange game — a criminal game of some sort — afoot? Surely that girl with those great dark eyes was no adventuress; and yet he was troubled, for in those eyes was that peculiar mystery which might mask either the soul of a heartless devil, or the soul of a woman capable of brimming over with love. And he, Darrell, who had met many women of both types in his professional work, for once was completely stumped.

  CHAPTER VIII

  Mr. Darrell Meets with the Unexpected

  ABOUT half an hour later Jeff Darrell entered a basement in Grady Court on the city’s southwest side. Grady Court proved to be in a tangle of short blind streets constituting that portion of Chicago known as Little Ireland, where billy goats grazed tranquilly in dilapidated front yards, and fences covered with tattered election posters told mutely the local political history wherein the O’Mooneys and the O’Flannagans ran for various offices against the McGuirks and the McDuffys; where old Irishmen with shrewd eyes sat on badly leaning porches smoking clay pipes, and above it all the air of those who possessed none too much of the world’s goods. It was fairly full of a tangled assortment of old-fashioned furniture, pictures, crockery — all sorts of household odds and ends.

  Working on an old-fashioned velvet chair, a glue-pot in one hand, was an old man, his corncob pipe burning freshly from a new package of tobacco which stood near by, his scant hair white, his old face seamed with lines, a pair of gold-rimmed spectacles perched on the end of his nose. This, from the descriptions and directions furnished Darrell by several children of the vicinity as undoubtedly “Daddy” Rees.

  The old man stood up and motioned with a polite bow to an armchair into which Darrell, after a very dubious glance, sank down carefully. “What can I do for you, sir?” he quavered in an old, yet very courteous voice.

  “Mr. Rees, I’m over here to recover an article which was accidentally sold to you, so far as I know, but to which, unfortunately, a value not quite measurable in dollars and cents — we’ll say for argument, a sentimental value, for instance — still attaches. And in that respect I want to treat you quite fairly in regaining it.” He paused. “Some time ago did you not purchase some household goods at the residence of a Mr. Edward Thurston Jarndyce who formerly lived on Ritchie Court over on the North Side? And if so, I’d be glad to have the details of the transaction.”

  The old man nodded. “I did, sir. About a week after I read in the paper that Mr. Jarndyce was dead, and that he was an old-timer. I found a young man alone
in the little house owned by Mr. Jarndyce dividing up the household furniture, and taking up the carpets. He told me the stuff could not be sold until a certain date — May 24th, I believe it was — on account of getting a certain order certified by the probate court. He told me to select what I was interested in, and if we could agree on a price we could set it aside.”

  “By the way,” asked Darrell, “do you happen to know the name of that young man with whom you dealt?”

  The old man looked a bit surprised at the question. “I do not, sir. I did not ask. I gathered the impression that he was some relative of old Mr. Jarndyce’s, closing up his estate by direction of the probate court. He seemed to be within his rights. You don’t mean,” he asked tremulously, “that I bought what I did illegally?”

  “No indeed,” said Darrell assuringly. “Nothing like that, Mr. Rees. So many people are concerned, don’t you know, with an estate, that I was not able to place in my mind with whom you dealt.” Which was far nearer the truth, probably, than his hearer guessed! “Well, this is after all of no consequence. Among the household stuff in the Jarndyce home was there an alarm clock?”

  “There were two,” the old man replied without hesitation. “I put one of them off to one side with my heap of stuff, and left the other. I didn’t think I cared to handle two of them.”

  “And that clock is what I am interested in,” said Darrell with an engaging smile. “It really wasn’t intended to be among this stuff. What would you like to have me pay you for it to regain it, Mr. Rees?”

  The little old man looked puzzled, even troubled. “Well, sir, if a mistake of any kind was made, rest assured I would be only too glad to give back the clock without any compensation. But people are always coming down in my basement shop to get household things they need — and only yesterday I sold it.”

  “Sold it!” said Darrell, sitting up.