The Red Ledger

by Frank L. Packard

  "Rug—Stranway," stuttered Mr. Blaine. "I——"

  "When he confronted the Count in his room." Charlebois snapped out the meagre information, as though even that were a waste of time. "That's what Stranway was here for, though you may have thought otherwise."

  "I don't understand!" Marjorie Blaine came suddenly forward. "How do you know all this? Why have you done what you have?"

  The stern look vanished instantly from Charlebois' eyes, and a soft light took its place.

  "It was a debt I owed," he said, smiling at her. "Listen! I will tell you about it. A great many years ago a very little girl was playing in a field, and she found a man—a very forlorn and ragged looking object I imagine he was too!—lying wearily on the grass. She asked the man if he was hungry, and he said he was. He hadn't had anything to eat for a very, very long time, you know. Then she wanted to know why he didn't buy something, and he said he hadn't any money. The little girl was carrying a toy bank and she gave the bank to the man." Charlebois' hand went into his pocket, and came out with a child's iron bank made in the shape of a safe.

  Growing wonder was in Marjorie Blaine's face—she caught her hands quickly together.

  "Then," continued Charlebois, "she showed the man how to shake the coins out of the little slot on top where they were only supposed to be deposited—I am afraid she burglarised her own safe pretty often, for she was very adept—like this!" Charlebois advanced to the table, turned the bank upside down, began to shake it, and one by one a number of coins rolled out on the table top.

  "Oh!" cried Marjorie. "I remember! I remember!"

  Mr. and Mrs. Blaine crowded abruptly forward.

  "There were ninety-one cents in it," Charlebois went on softly. "Two quarters, three dimes, two nickels, and a copper—just as there are here." He counted the money on the table. "There wasn't any key to the door of the bank, but the man had one made in after years." Charlebois' hand again went to his pocket and this time came out with a tiny key, which he fitted into the equally tiny keyhole. "And now"—he placed the safe in Marjorie's hands—"and now the man, who has become a very old man, gives back to the little girl, who has become a young woman, her safe and her ninety-one cents; and, for the accrued interest, the prospect, he hopes, of many happy years to come with some man who shall be really worthy of her, and——"

  A startled exclamation burst suddenly from Marjorie's lips; a cry from her mother; another from Mr. Blaine. From the door of the little bank that Marjorie had opened, a gleaming stream of diamonds tumbled to the table.

  "The necklace!" screamed Mrs. Blaine.

  "Exactly," smiled Charlebois. "The necklace—that is what I was about to say."

  "What—what does this mean?" stammered Mr. Blaine. "You said that the Count——"

  "Quite so," interrupted Charlebois placidly. "There is no mystery about it. The Count has the necklace in his possession that he stole last night—but it is paste—a duplicate in design of this one that I took the precaution to have made. Your coiffeuse, Miss Marjorie, whose sudden leave-taking this morning I am sure you regret, substituted the paste necklace in your jewel-box almost as soon as you had taken it from the safe-deposit vault. This, the original, has been in my keeping ever since. That is all, quite all, except, of course, that you understand Mr. Stranway did not communicate with any detectives, that nothing is known of this outside ourselves, that the Count's departure, being quite natural, will cause no talk, and"—Charlebois paused significantly—"and that he will never return to America."

  Marjorie came to him crying softly, and put out her hands.

  "He would have asked me to marry him, and I—and I—oh, how can I thank——"

  "No! No-no-no!" cried Charlebois, suddenly quite helpless. "I cannot be thanked. I—I dislike thanks. There should be no thanks. It is a debt—a debt paid"—and clutching Stranway's arm he fairly ran from the room.

  Chapter XXII.

  On the Debit Side

  Table of Contents

  It was just past twilight three evenings later in the Red Room of 2½ Dominic Court. The Red Ledger—that singular volume which had never known its counterpart, and which in all human probability never would—lay with its three great hasps unlocked on the antique mahogany desk before Stranway and Henri Raoul Charlebois.

  "Page two hundred and nine," said the little old gentleman, in a strangely musing way, as he turned the pages with quick, deft fingers. "Krinler—you know Krinler, do you not?"

  Stranway shook his head a little doubtfully.

  "I'm not sure that I do, at least in the sense you mean," he answered. "I am aware that the name of Krinler is there in the Ledger; but, as you know, it is one of those cases that you yourself set aside for your own individual attention, and, as such reports have always gone directly to you, I have never seen any one of them. The name itself, however, thanks to the newspapers, is of course more or less familiar to everybody as the name of the proprietor of that small wholesale dry-goods house, who, with some of the big departmental stores, has been the victim of those imported silk robberies that have been going on for the past year or so. Is it the same Krinler?"

  "It is," said the little old gentleman softly. "And to-night, unless I am greatly mistaken, those robberies will come to an end."

  "Then it's a case of two birds with one stone!" Stranway ejaculated impulsively. "That's good! Those robberies have baffled the police of two countries—France and our own."

  The little old gentleman shrugged his shoulders.

  "I care nothing for that," he said crisply. "That is police work, not ours—we are not the police, I am concerned with it only so far as those whose names are written here"—his hand brushed the open page of the Red Ledger with a rapid motion—"are concerned with it; in this case—Krinler."

  "Well, then, I'm glad on his account," Stranway returned heartily, "for he is certainly far less able to stand the losses than any of the big stores."

  An affectionate, tolerant light crept into the little old gentleman's steel-blue eyes, died away, and a whimsical expression took its place.

  "I think I have told you before, my boy," he said, "that your greatest fault, perhaps but a kindly one at worst, is that you sometimes allow your heart to rule your head—and I fear that your sympathy is too often wasted. In the present instance, before you are through with Krinler, you will, unless I am again mistaken, find him to be a malignant, tricky, and most dangerous character."

  "What!" gasped Stranway in amazement. "You mean——"

  "Yes," broke in the little old gentleman grimly, "I mean just that. I am afraid that you will have to play a very perilous part to-night, but I see no other way, and for your own protection, and that you may be thoroughly on your guard against him, you must know the man intimately for what he is. And I know of no better way of making you acquainted with him than to tell you how his name came to be written on these pages. The debt, as do all these others here, goes back many years to that period of illness and destitution in my life of which I have spoken to you so often. Krinler is a man of fifty now; he was a young man of about twenty-six then, running a notorious saloon in a small mining town in one of the Western States. He had a hard name even then, and this even amongst a class of men whose very environment led them to be somewhat callous themselves where ethics were involved." Charlebois paused, looked at Stranway an instant—and the tassel on the red skullcap seemed to bob in a sort of grim concordance, as he nodded his head slowly, while the wrinkles gathered ominously at the corners of his eyes. "I must not make a long story of it—it is the sequel to-night that interests us most. I was miserably clothed, and destitute in the uttermost sense of the word the night I stumbled into that little town and asked at the hotel for food and shelter. I say 'hotel' because that is what Krinler called the hell he ran; though, for that matter, everything of the sort was dignified by the name of 'hotel' in that section then. In what I believed was a big-hearted way that was cloaked by a rough, hard-tongued exterior, he took me in and gave
me a shakedown for the night—and I was very grateful."

  Again the little old gentleman paused, and a glint as of steel on flint showed for an instant in his eyes, while his hand, resting on the Red Ledger's page, curled into a clenched fist—then his shoulders moved with a curiously eloquent little lift, and he smiled impassively.

  "The mail in that mountain region," he went on, "was carried between the towns in cruder fashion then than it is now—a rider slung the bags across his saddle bow, and that was all there was to it, you understand? Late in the afternoon before I reached Krinler's, the mail-carrier, who had a very valuable registered package—a special consignment of banknotes, in fact, for the monthly pay roll of a mining company in the next town—was murdered about four miles away on the mountain trail, the bags slashed open, and the contents taken. The mail-carrier's horse evidently ran away before the murderer could secure him, and in the evening wandered into the town toward which his master had been heading. The animal was recognised, and a search party, which was immediately organised, started back along the trail between the two towns. At midnight they found the mail-carrier's body. He had been shot through the back of the head.

  "Meanwhile, I had gone to sleep on the bunk Krinler had pointed out to me in the lean-to. At perhaps two o'clock in the morning, I was snatched roughly from the bunk, jerked to my feet, and thrown outside into the hands of an infuriated group of men who had gathered there. I cannot well describe my feelings. I do not think I am a coward—but I was afraid then. They were yelling out: 'Lynch him! Lynch him! Lynch the damned skunk!'—and they meant business. It was a moment before I could understand; and then I understood too well—that I had not a single chance. When the news of the murder reached Krinler's hotel, Krinler produced a letter—one that had obviously been in the mail-carrier's bags, since it did not bear the stamp of any receiving office—which he said he had found on the floor of the lean-to after I had turned in. That was enough to start the ball rolling. I was a stranger, and wholly disreputable in appearance at that. They rushed in upon me, as I have said. I had, of course, taken off my coat before I lay down—and in the pockets were several bundles of letters from the mail bags, still tied in packages."

  Stranway, his face suddenly hard, turned abruptly from the desk, drew up a chair opposite Charlebois, and sat down.

  "I understand," he said in a strained way. "It was Krinler who——"

  "Yes," said the little old gentleman, with a smile in which there was no mirth. "Yes; it was Krinler. He came into the lean-to after I was in the bunk for the purpose of putting the letters in my pockets, and explained his presence there to me—for I was awake, though it was too dark to see what he was about, and, besides, I of course suspected nothing—by saying that he had just come in to make sure I was all right. And he explained his visit to the others—accounting speciously for his having been in the lean-to at all, and having found the first letter on the floor—by saying he wanted to see that the 'hard-looking ticket' he had taken pity on wasn't up to any mischief, or hadn't made off with anything he could lay his hands upon. What chance had I?" Charlebois flung out his arms suddenly in a swift, impulsive gesture. "I hadn't the actual money, or any weapon with which I might have shot the mail-carrier, it is true—but both money and weapon might readily have been hidden. In any case, mob law, swayed by excitement and passion, seldom stops to reason. They would have lynched me on the spot—they nearly did—the rope was around my neck when the sheriff came upon the scene and rescued me."

  "And then?" prompted Stranway tensely, as the little old gentleman paused once more.

  Charlebois smiled whimsically.

  "I am not an advocate of over indulgence in 'red-eye,' as they called their liquor out there," he said quaintly, "but nevertheless, strange as it may seem, that was what saved my life that night. The sheriff locked me up in a shack and placed a man on guard over it. One of the miners, who had been drinking heavily all through the evening in Krinler's place, became imbued in maudlin fashion with the idea that his sense of fair play was outraged in that a whole town should pit itself against one man—and he unwittingly helped me to escape. I got through a small window at the back of the shack, while he was quarrelling so noisily with the guard in front that he raised enough disturbance to drown out any sound I made within. That is the story, my boy. The details of the days and nights of hunted horror before I finally made my ultimate escape from that section of the country can wait for another time; we must give our attention now to——"

  "Yes; but just a second," Stranway interposed quickly. "The truth of it all—did it never come out? And Krinler——"

  "As I have said, this occurred a great many years ago," Charlebois interrupted, with a grim smile; "but I believe that for a long time I was 'wanted' in those parts." He rose abruptly to his feet, pushed back his chair—and his voice suddenly took on a harsher tone as he began to pace up and down the room.

  "'Wanted!'—that is the word, is it not? I—Henri Raoul Charlebois—'wanted' for as brutal and wanton a deed as any with which the lowest criminal has ever been charged, and for which, but for a drunken freak, I should have paid with my life! And as for Krinler, what proof had I against him? None. I knew he did it—but that was quite another matter."

  "You say 'for a long time.'" Stranway leaned intently forward in his chair. "If the charge was eventually dropped, proof of some sort exonerating you must have come out."

  "Of a sort—yes," Charlebois replied. "Krinler had an accomplice in the crime—a man by the name of Jackson. Jackson died some ten years ago confessing his share in the affair, but refusing to divulge the name or incriminate the one implicated with him in it. In his statement, however, he swore solemnly that the man, the tramp they had accused that night, had had nothing to do with it, and had only been used by them as a means of diverting suspicion from themselves."

  "I see." Stranway nodded thoughtfully; then alertly: "And now?"

  "And now?" The little old gentleman came to a sudden halt before Stranway's chair. "Now," he said sternly, "it is my turn! If I cannot make Krinler answer for that night, because I cannot prove his guilt, I can at least make him answer for another crime, which, if less serious, is still serious enough to place him behind penitentiary walls and rid society of him for many years to come. I have waited long—fourteen years—to catch him red-handed in some crime that, knowing the man for what he is, I was confident he would commit sooner or later. No"—he put up his hand as Stranway was about to speak—"no; I am not confusing my dates. It was fourteen years ago, when this organisation was in its infancy, less perfect, less powerful than it is to-day, that I first got track of him again here in New York—and from that day I have never lost sight of him. More than once I have believed I had him in my power, but each time he has eluded me. The task has been more than ordinarily difficult, for, shortly after Jackson signed his confession, Krinler discovered that I was watching him and discovered my identity as well—since then he has not only been doubly on his guard, but on more than one occasion has even attempted my life."

  Stranway nodded curtly, his eyes suddenly hard.

  "I can quite understand that!" he said. "But Krinler, you say, is at the bottom of these silk robberies, and I am afraid I am not quite clear on that point. There is profit in it, of course—I believe the losses have amounted to something like fifteen or twenty thousand dollars in the last year—but that is not very much; not enough, I should imagine, to make it profitable to maintain so elaborate a blind as a business establishment on lower Broadway where rents and expenses are high."

  "You are quite right, my boy," the little old gentleman answered gravely. "Krinler, however, is a man of two lives. His real business is the same business that he carried on in that little Western town—he runs a number of unsavoury 'speak-easies' on the East Side, and is, in fact, acknowledged as a leader and the court of last appeal by a certain fraternity in gangland to whom he is known as an entirely different man from the pseudo eminently-respectable merchant, a
nd, equally, by an entirely different name—not an uncommon one—Jake Sullivan. His dry-goods business, such as it is, was started by him when he first came to New York purely as a cloak of respectability that would enable him to pose as an honest man. The business was not established for the purpose of covering up any specific crime such as the silk thefts—that came much later, you understand?—it was simply a means already at hand of carrying out still another criminal operation, which, when the idea presented itself to him, he no doubt considered was, even as a side issue, too good to be overlooked."

  "But how did you discover that Krinler was at the bottom of these robberies?" demanded Stranway.

  The little old gentleman smiled.

  "The first loss by theft was reported by Krinler himself—a clever move if he had had only the authorities to deal with. After that, first one and then another of the large retail establishments began to report like thefts, and occasionally again Krinler would do so himself. It is not surprising, I think, that I read the handwriting on the wall."

  "But it has been going on for nearly a year and a half," Stranway objected. "If you knew, why didn't——"

  "Proof!" Charlebois broke in a little bitterly. "It is the same old story—proof, proof, proof! Of what avail to be morally certain of a fact—and lack the proof? I have it all now except for the one final link in the chain of evidence that I am counting upon to-night to furnish—but it has taken the whole of that year and a half to reach this point. His plan was ingenious, for, whatever else Krinler is, he is clever enough where viciousness and deviltry are in question. You know what the public knows through the newspapers: merely that cases of silk from France have again and again mysteriously disappeared from the steamship docks. Just how the cases were stolen I did not know, and I do not know even yet, except that Krinler goes to the docks in a motor launch for them—we shall see to-night—but I do know that every yard of the stolen goods was sold over his counters in plain daylight and under the noses of the police, to whom he complained most bitterly of his losses and of the lack of protection they afforded him!"