Find the Clock

by Harry Stephen Keeler

  The girl regarded him wonderingly, then continued.

  “He was apparently convinced this time,” she said, “that I told the truth. I was so frightened that I must have carried conviction, I guess. He paused a moment and then asked me a further question. ‘Where is the letter you got from London?’ he demanded. I gave him the only answer I could — the truth. ‘No letter from London has ever reached me,’ I told him. ‘I do not know from whom in London a letter is to come to me.’ Again he paused, thinking under that black mask. Then suddenly, as though he had decided something in his mind, he drew out of one bulging coat pocket a mass of that whiplike cord, tossed it at the feet of the colored girl and ordered her to tie me hand and foot. She was so frightened she obeyed to the last letter. He gagged me with his cruel fingers then — but it was quite unnecessary, I assure you. Then he ordered her into the closet and locked the door on her. Then it was that I knew he had brought an electric drill with him, for he unwrapped a paper bundle under his right arm and produced it. He attached it to the central fixture there, and shoving the mahogany table over beneath the wall safe, climbed up on it with his crude feet and set to work drilling it. He had worked only a minute or two when we heard you knocking at the outer door — then the sound of your coming in and closing the door behind you. Long before you traversed the tiny hall and appeared in the doorway of the room he was waiting for you with his gun leveled at the doorway. And I was afraid — I was in terror — that he was going to shoot you down in cold blood.”

  “So you were really afraid for me?” he asked.

  “Greatly,” she answered. “No matter what accusations you had made against me it suddenly seemed to come to me in those few seconds that the most horrible thing that could happen to me would be to have you die.”

  “Then you had already begun to care?” he said.

  She nodded.

  “Yes. The day you came to me and knew all about pottery — my pottery — I began to wonder whether you were not the dream man that was to come some day. And to-day — in that one instant when you stood in the doorway covered by his gun and I did not know whether it was to spurt flame and death toward you, I knew it beyond all doubt.”

  He leaned over and placing his cheek against her softer one, stroked her black ringlets gently. “We have found each other,” he said quietly, “That is much — a great deal — the biggest thing of all that could have happened.”

  A pause ensued, then he broke it.

  “Now that you have offered to tell me more about this case involving John Cooper Jarndyce you may rest assured, Iris, that I want to hear it. But first I am going to tell you who this man was. Or do you know?”

  She shook her head gravely. “I have not the least dea in the world. I know practically no one in Chicago.”

  “Suppose I should tell you that man is one who is known more commonly as the Blonde Beast of Bremen, a notorious German prison-camp officer, a man who is wanted for murder in New York, and who has one of the keenest swindling brains that has ever been bestowed upon a man. A man who, when I was once upon a time wounded and sick and blinded, struck me across the face, as he did you, beat me to my knees, because he was forced to write out a paper which was to carry me from his hell-hole camp Innesbaden, Germany into Holland.”

  She looked up at him wide-eyed. “You know this?” she asked.

  “There is little doubt that Carl von Tresseler himself visited this room,” he said. “His supercautious pains consisting of a complete mask instead of a partial one, evidently donned in the dark outer corridor before the colored girl answered the door, show how he intended to conceal his features from any minds in this apartment too inclined to permanently record such things; that voice which now I know only too well is the ventriloquist’s throat voice — he was a circus ventriloquist in his youth — these things show how he intended to nurse along the belief of the Chicago police, highly valuable to him, that he had long since slid from the city — or even made Mexico. Yet if he had known that the stranger who walked in on him here held documentary proof that he was still in Chicago, I veritably believe he would have gained ferocity enough to have killed me. But of that I’ll tell you.”

  Whereupon Darrell related to her concisely the facts of how he himself, once before in his life, had lost a chance to capture that monster of vileness, and how later, by virtue of the order written out for the illiterate Jake Schimski, the Blonde Beast in his attempt to obtain the box in the freight office containing the clock, had left his trail behind him for the one human hound who was in a position to identify it.

  He told her fully now what he had not told her at the earlier visit; how he had ascertained that Von Tresseler had secured the supposed Schimski clock and had then vanished from sight again.

  “And now,” he finished, “he has subsequently learned that the other of the two clocks from the Jarndyce residence went into the hands of old Daddy Rees. He had, or others connected with him have, I will venture, made inquiries there early this morning and learned that a girl secured the clock the other day. They have jumped to the conclusion that they were too late: Rita Thorne has beaten them to it. And then — but have you had any telephone inquiries?”

  “Yes,” she said, surprised. “A man’s voice called this morning and asked if Miss Rita Thorne were in. Snowwhite answered on the phone and told him I was confined to bed with an injured ankle and had been for some time. He was apparently cut off. I concluded that it must have been you.”

  “No,” said Darrell. “It was either the Blonde Beast, or some one who is working with him. Which one it was doesn’t hardly matter at all. The chief thing of interest to us is that they added together the three facts and deduced that if you were laid up, the only safety vault you could have taken the clock to would have been the wall safe in your own apartment. A council of war was held — probably there were some cold feet displayed — and the upshot of it was that the Blonde Beast, who is far from deficient in courage and daring, had to make the play himself to gain the clock. There is the thing reconstructed. But first — let me go to that telephone.”

  Darrell rose and went to the telephone. Looking at the cramped notation in his notebook which had been made by Daddy Rees’ stiff old fingers, he rang the number it represented and waited while a little girl, whose remonstrations were audible in the receiver, was dispatched “across the street for gran’pa.” Presently, “gran’pa” himself arrived at the telephone, and Darrell conversed for several minutes before he hung up. He came back to the davenport. The girl made room for him to sit at her side. But as he sat down, she gave vent to a sudden ejaculation.

  “You have been hurt!” were her words, her eyes resting upon his neck on which the light evidently now fell at a changed angle. “There — there is a welt on your neck as red as fire.”

  “Just forget it,” Darrell assured her with a laugh. “I was neatly creased by the second bullet sent out by that devil marksman after he blew your glass revolver out of my hand with his first shot. It stings and burns like the lash of a whip — but that is all. It will all pass away. Not even the skin was broken.” He hastily changed the subject.

  “As you could gather,” he told her, “I was talking to Daddy Rees. What he tells me corroborates the reconstruction. At seven o’clock this morning a little, shifty-looking man of about forty-five with sandy hair and mustache called at the basement shop to get that second Jarndyce clock. Daddy Rees was just starting out on the hunt at which I’ve been making him work; so he could only tell the man what he originally had told me: that the clock had been sold to a girl the other day.

  “And now for interesting news. Since the man left, Daddy Rees has at last succeeded in locating the girl, and he says he now has the clock itself hidden safely away. The girl who bought it was a young milliner on the edge of Little Ireland. But this crew believes, of course, that that girl is yourself. And likewise, by virtue of the fact that Mrs. Jake Schimski switched clocks in that shipment, the Blonde Beast received what proved no
t to be the right one, leaving it absolutely evident to him at least that the Grady Court clock is the one which must be recovered. Could anything be plainer?”

  She nodded slowly. “That is beyond doubt the correct reconstruction of what has happened. But how do you account for this, may I ask? Almost forty-eight hours have elapsed between their efforts to get the Schimski clock and their efforts to get the Rees clock. What has caused them to learn the whereabouts of the Rees clock so long after they knew where the Schimski clock was?”

  “That,” said Darrell grimly, “is the easiest question of all to answer. Napoleon Foy was murdered last night, his cabinet pried open, the handkerchief message containing both the names of Schimski and Rees and the locations of these two men stolen. That is why at seven o’clock this morning a man was at Daddy Rees’ trying to secure the clock.”

  “Yes,” said the girl reluctantly, “but if their movements depended upon the data in that message, how is it explained that before they obtained it — by murder — they had nevertheless been to Schimski’s?”

  “That,” declared Darrell, wrinkling his brows, “is a question that I cannot answer. It appears that they had only a portion of the necessary data — but not all of it! And they took desperate measures to complete their information.” He looked down at her gravely. “Little girl with the big eyes, do you realize that as yet you have told me nothing? Do you realize that I am still in the dark in this strange case involving a Chinaman, a putatively dead man who is dead in wax only, a notorious swindler and murderer, and the girl who has become the girl of my heart?” His eyes rested upon hers — and he waited.

  “Then you shall know all that I know,” she replied quickly. “The time has indeed come when I cannot remain silent any longer — at least with you.”

  She paused for a long moment. And then she began the facts which thus far she had held back.

  “My name,” she said, “as you surmised — and as Snowwhite probably let slip through her calling me Miss Iris and her reference to my father — is Iris Shaftsbury, and not Rita Thorne. We will not dwell on that for the present. My father was Colonel Higgins Shaftsbury, an enthusiastic collector of antiques — particularly pottery. We lived in Arcadyville, Louisiana, a small town about fifty miles from New Orleans.”

  “Your father is dead?” asked Darrell.

  “Yes, for about six months now. Poor daddy — he died hopelessly in debt. Every one of his curios had to be sold to pay his many obligations. A small plantation he had proved to be completely covered with mortgages. The valuable Gubbio” — she pointed ruefully at the jagged pieces strewn over the floor — “was the only thing left over from his estate which I might say I inherited from him. And my inheritance of that came about in a strange way.” She paused in reflection for a moment.

  “But this is getting away from the main track of my story, and I will return to it in a few moments. What you wish to know more about is John Cooper Jarndyce, whose name is twined up in your investigations. John Cooper Jarndyce is my cousin. There are three of us cousins altogether. The third one is named Catherwood Jarndyce.”

  “Catherwood!” ejaculated Darrell. “And Catherwood is the name mentioned in the Foy message. Catherwood Jarndyce instead of Somebody Catherwood! So that was why you told me I would waste my time interviewing the Catherwoods in the Chicago directory?”

  “Yes,” she said. “That was the reason. Catherwood Jarndyce. Catherwood, John and I — the three cousins; two of us nephews and one of us a niece of — ”

  “Of Edward Thurston Jarndyce who lived on Ritchie Court?”

  She nodded. “But let me tell you more of John Cooper Jarndyce. It is doubtful whether, never having met John Cooper, you can form any idea in your mind as to his bizarre personality. And whether I myself can make you see him in the spirit instead of in the flesh — ”

  “Instead of in the wax,” Darrell corrected with a half smile.

  “Yes — in the wax,” she agreed, likewise with a half smile, “I doubt.” She paused a moment in retrospection. “John Cooper Jarndyce was always a strange boy. Some people wrongfully termed him an egotist. He was not that at all. Perhaps he was an egoist — but never an egotist. But I doubt whether he was really either. John Cooper Jarndyce, for want of a better term, was a sensationalist — a sensationalist to the nth power. There were no lengths to which he would not go to create a sensation. For instance: when only ten years old, and down in Arcadyville visiting daddy and me, he plastered the trees for several miles around announcing that he would make a great parachute jump off the barn the following day. The following day came, and also a hundred boys and girls from miles around — half of them white — half of them pickaninnies. Daddy was in New Orleans, and old Aunt Dinah who watched over us children was up the road visiting. So off John Cooper jumped with a teamster’s umbrella from the very tip of the high barn — and promptly broke his leg. It cost him two months in bed.

  “This was at the age of ten, mind you. His subsequent life was full of incidents pointing to this trait of his nature — his desire for sensationalism. When he was with us again five years after — John Cooper was then about fifteen — he launched his second talk-producing venture. He announced to a gang of Negroes and whites that in a secret place in the woods he had constructed a giant rocket shaped like a boomerang which held a chamber for an observer and one for the powder. He further declared that in his rocket he intended to leave the earth and swing in a path about the moon close to its surface, coming back to earth again at a point somewhat removed from the starting point on account of the earth’s rotation in the meanwhile. To protect him in his return to earth he claimed that he had carefully calculated this point, and had stretched a great net between four trees to catch the burned-out rocket.

  “John disappeared shortly after this announcement which you may rest assured got plenty of publicity around the countryside — but I, as a girl, recall very well that he carried along with him plenty of things for camping out. At the end of a week he appeared powder-stained and dirty on a road one day with the statement that he had been clear around the moon — within a mile of its surface — and back again. He produced carefully written notes describing the entire trip, and took them to the editor of the Arcadyville paper. The editor evidently thought them too good not to publish, and so he gave them space. And do you know — there are hundreds of illiterate swamp dwellers and Negroes in that section who even to this day talk about the white boy that once shot himself to the moon, John Cooper’s descriptions were so vivid, and his photographs of the other side of the moon so startling.”

  “His photographs!” ejaculated Darrell. “Where on earth did he get photographs?”

  The girl smiled. “Up in our garret I found afterward several oranges, a spool of black thread, a bottle of ink, and a candle.” She laughed lightly. “You are beginning now to know John Cooper Jarndyce a bit better are you not?”

  He nodded. “A sensationalist, all right — and a sensationalist who stops at nothing. And when I dug up in our old files how he had sued a tailor here for ten thousand dollars I was quite certain in my own mind that he was just a petty swindler. But pray go on, Iris.”

  “Well,” she continued, “the conditions under which I last saw my cousin, John Cooper Jarndyce, were down in Arcadyville, Louisiana, about two months ago. At least it was shortly after the death of our uncle, Edward Thurston Jarndyce, up here in Chicago. I was living with an aunt in Arcadyville, trying bit by bit to close up daddy’s affairs and settle his estate even though he had been dead for several months. John stayed with us for several days, and one day when he and I were out walking alone he told me of the greatest practical joke that had ever been conceived.”

  “Of being the central figure in a spurious death and burial?” asked Darrell puzzledly.

  She nodded. “His idea — his inspiration as he called it — had come to him on a winter’s night a number of months previous to the time he visited me in Arcadyville. It seems that one cold, snowy n
ight a ragged man, hungry and trembling from drinking too much illicit whisky, accosted him for a dime on a street in Chicago. John had a bachelor bungalow which he had bought second hand out near Logan Square, and he took the man home, fed him and put him to bed. This man, after he sobered up, proved to be one of the wax workers who had constructed many of the most famous and difficult figures in the Eden Musée in New York City. He had gone gradually to pieces from drink and other things, however, and now was trying to work his way across the continent to Honolulu where he had a well-to-do sister.

  “In that instant was the inspiration born in John Cooper’s mind — the wild project of dying, of being buried, and — all his friends had quite become used to the idea that John Cooper Jarndyce was no more — of reappearing in all their offices one by one, and seeing them stare hopelessly as though they were having a hallucination. Even worse — he selected the six men he most disliked in Chicago, and resolved to make them the pallbearers in his ghastly hoax.” The girl shook her head slowly as though in reminiscence of the conversation she had had with her erratic cousin.

  “No sooner conceived than acted upon,” she continued. “That was John Cooper every time. He struck a bargain with this wax worker. He agreed to transport the latter to Honolulu at his own expense if he would construct a wax shell of himself with his eyes closed — apparently in death — to be used, as he assured this man, in a practical joke. And in twenty-four hours they had purchased the peculiar materials necessary and John Cooper Jarndyce was sitting for the strangest portrait for which a man can sit — his duplicate in wax.” She stopped, and Darrell asked a question.

  “All this must have cost him a little something. It’s plain, however, that he was a youth who would never stop at expense to create a sensational hoax — but just how was he fixed financially?”

  Iris turned her big eyes upon the reporter.