The Best American Mystery Stories of the Nineteenth Century

by Penzler, Otto

  “‘Let me catch you smoking with that Chink again and I’ll smash that baby-face of yours and have nothing more to do with you.’

  “She turned around with a proud look she could always put on, and said: ‘You may do as you please about having anything to do with me, but don’t ever lay a hand on me or you’ll regret it.’

  “‘Just let me see you laying on the same bunk with him again,’ was all I answered.

  “George Butler and I had to meet a sucker in Philadelphia that day and it was late the following morning when I got to the joint. Ida had gone home. I smoked a few pills and then asked Tommy Wilson:

  “‘Who was Ida smoking with last night?’

  “‘She and Georgie Appo had a lay-out between them,’ he answered.

  “‘The gang kept kidding her that you were pinched and she went home early.’

  “I never said a word, but got my fill of dope and then went to the flat. Ida had just undressed and as she opened the door for me she threw her arms around me and said:

  “‘Oh, Jim, where have you been? The boys wouldn’t tell me and I’ve been awful anxious.’

  “I pushed her away and asked: ‘What did I tell you about smoking with that Chink?’

  “She put on that proud look of hers again, and said something about her right to smoke with anybody she liked as long as they treated her right. Well, it was the first time I ever struck a woman, but she set me crazy, and, getting hold of her long hair, I pounded her face until she was a sight. Then I let her sink to the floor, gave her a few kicks for good measure, and said: ‘Get your traps out of here, you Chinese——. I’m done with you.’

  “She just lay on the floor with the blood flowing over her nightgown and the carpet, and kept moaning: ‘Oh, Jim! and I loved you so much. Oh, Jim!’

  “I left her laying there and went to bed. When I got up in the afternoon she was gone. I went to the damper to see if she had taken the roll, but there wasn’t a cent gone. I felt sorry for what I’d done and would have given a good many dollars to undo it. I had just got dressed when there came a knock at the door. ‘There she is now,’ I said to myself. I opened the door and my lady, with three Central Office people, came in. She raised her veil—you should have seen how her pretty face was banged up—and said: ‘You’ll find what you want in the fireplace there.’

  “Well, I tell you, I was paralyzed, for I knew I was done. Pete Reagan and Kid Carroll had turned off some big nabob, and, getting leery, had given me the stuff to keep until the thing blew over. There was a lot of diamonds and jewelry, and Ida, seeing me bury the stuff, thought it was my job. She had hurried off to headquarters while I was asleep to get square for the punching.

  “‘I told you I’d make you regret it if you laid your hand on me,’ she said, as the flatties closed in on me to put on the nippers before looking up the stuff. I managed to let a vase fly at her before they got me, just missing her nut by an inch. Well, they found the stuff all right, and were taking me out, when suddenly my lady went down on her knees, begging them to take the stuff and let me go. And, by——! they had to fight her to get me away.

  “Well, to cut the story short, the gang spent a barrel, but it was money thrown away. The sucker and his wife had been chloroformed and one of the servants knocked over the head, and the thing couldn’t be fixed. I was game and didn’t open my mouth on Reagan and the Kid. Ida couldn’t be found by the flatties when they went to get her as a witness, but it didn’t make any difference. The fellow who had his nut opened swore positively I was the man he met in the hall, and who had hit him with a billy. It was a clear case against me, and I got soaked for fourteen years and two months. I was just getting into the hearse after being sentenced when Ida ran up, and, before I knew what was what, had her arms around me, and was kissing me with a ‘Good-by, dear Jim! God forgive me.’ Well, if she’d got the kick I made at her, she might have been done for then and there.

  “I had been up about a year when Georgie Appo was brought along for snatching a ‘yellow bird’ on Park Row. I wouldn’t have anything to do with him, for, although nobody knew anything about it, I blamed him for the trouble I was in. However, I was anxious to hear something about the boys, for nobody had come to see me. It’s queer how soon you’re forgot when you’re put away. I’d got so that I might have forgiven Ida if she’d come or written to me, but I never heard of her, and I supposed she was with somebody else, which didn’t make me feel any too good towards Appo. But I wanted news, and one day I spoke to him. One thing led to another, and it wasn’t long before I learned that Ida had been all straight with Appo; that she had smoked with Appo because the boys were constantly making play for her, and she wouldn’t listen to them. On the last night she had smoked with Appo she had told him that I didn’t like her to smoke with him, and that she was not coming down to the joint any more. She would smoke at home alone, and try and give up the habit altogether.

  “So you see,” concluded Jim, “that while there was a woman in my going away, she wasn’t so very much to blame, although her pride had something to do with it. But I blame myself only for the nine years I done.”

  “But,” asked Jennie, “didn’t she ever write or care to see you in all that time?”

  Jim was slowly kneading a pill with a faraway look in his eyes, and simply shook his head.

  “That’s just like a woman,” said the Kid, warmly.

  “No, it isn’t,” flashed Jennie, with tears in her eyes. “I think it’s very cruel of her. Of course, Jim treated her dreadfully, but if she loved him she’d have forgotten all when he was in prison. I can overlook her rushing to the police in a passion. But not the other. I’m sure she never really loved you, Jim.”

  “I think she did, Jen,” said Jim in a low tone, “for the morning after I was sentenced they found her dead in bed, with the gas turned on.”

  1894

  PERCIVAL POLLARD

  Lingo Dan

  One of the rarest books in the world of crime fiction (no copy has been known to be offered for sale in more than fifty years), Lingo Dan is a collection of stories about an extremely unusual fictional character. Receiving his sobriquet because of the flowery language he uses, he is a hobo, thief, con man, and shockingly cold-blooded murderer—extremely unusual for the nineteenth century. Although Lingo Dan also proves himself to be a patriotic American with a deep streak of sentimentality, he remains an unpleasant fellow who nonetheless has a significant position in the history of the mystery story: the year of the first story and the subsequent book make him the first serial criminal in American literature.

  (JOSEPH) PERCIVAL POLLARD (1869–1911) was an important literary critic in his day, befriended by both Ambrose Bierce and H. L. Mencken. He wrote twelve books before his early death at the age of forty-two, but Lingo Dan was his only mystery. He was best known for his works of literary criticism, most successfully Their Day in Court (1909).

  In his scholarly work The Detective Short Story: A Bibliography, Ellery Queen (a collector and scholar of mystery fiction as well as a best-selling novelist), quotes from an inscribed copy of the book in which Pollard wrote: “I expect for [Lingo Dan] neither the success of Sherlock Holmes, Raffles, etc., nor yet the immunity from comparison with those gentlemen. Yet it is at least one thing the others are not: American.” Today no one compares his character to those he cites, as Lingo Dan is one of the forgotten figures in the literature of roguery.

  “Lingo Dan” was first published in the San Francisco Argonaut in 1894. It was first published in book form in Lingo Dan (Washington, D.C.: Neale Publishing Co., 1903).

  ***

  THE SNOW THAT lined the sides of what the railroad men of that section called the “Brighton Cut” was, fortunately for two persons who suddenly found themselves transported from the cold hospitality of a freight-car to the colder embraces of the wide, white world that encompassed the track, very deep. After a moment or two of partial insensibility, more the result of bewilderment than of actual physical hurt, th
ese two lifted their heads up out of the white counterpane that clung to them like some active envelope, and looked after the train that was now merely a mist of smoke and an echo faint beyond the curves of the forest.

  “H’m,” said the first one of the two derelicts to rise and shake the snow off his thin form, “that was a fearful breach of hospitality. We invest a common carrier, so termed in law, with the dignity of carrying such uncommon personages as ourselves, and this—this is the treatment we receive! Billy, this is a heathen country!” He took off his cap and passed eight long and bony fingers through his snow-invested hair.

  “Damn his eyes!” said Billy. He was a person of few words, and fewer attractions. He was short, and his general effect was toward the loutish.

  “Yes,” the other replied, looking about him, “I have no doubt you are right. Billy, your explanation is a most agreeable one. It was owing to some curious defect in that brakeman’s eyes, doubtless, that he failed to notice our high estate; if any part of him is to suffer condemnation, it is his eyes. Billy, I agree with you; say it again!”

  Billy, for a brief minute, looked as if he would like to include other and nearer eyes in his anathema. He contented himself, however, with a muttered “Argh!” a circular look at the prospect of sloping meadow-land, and a “What next, cully?”

  “Stranded as we are upon an apparently shoreless sea of snow,” responded the gentleman addressed, “our next move should be toward shelter.” He paused to kick some snow out of a boot that was, as to the toes, over-hospitable to the elements. “This is a dismal spot!”

  To tell the truth, the “Brighton Cut” is one of the bleakest places in the State. The railway track comes winding down a steep grade until it reaches this cut; the soil thereabouts is not tillable, and there are no fences for over half a mile. A thin strip of forest shuts out the western view. On a gray afternoon in midwinter it looks very lonely, and there is something in the silence of it, after the rattle of a freight-train has echoed away, that strikes a chill even when the sun is shining. It was no wonder, then, that to these two, just stranded there, from the comparatively warm recesses of a lumber-car, the place should seem decidedly dismal. They were used to dismal things, to be sure; but that ever-present yearning for luxury and its attendant inexertion—a yearning that had made them what they were—rebelled at every repetition of the unwelcome reality. It is not necessary to state very particularly who these two were. The one with the tall frame and the taller language might have been a great many things, some of them great; the fact that he was none of these is explanation enough for his title as a tramp. As for the other one, it is doubtful whether he had ever had even possibilities; he was, by lapse of all other capabilities, a tramp for sure. Just as it is sufficient of a man to say that he is a king, so it is enough introduction to make certain that he is a tramp. These two were indubitably tramps. It was evident in the consummate grace with which they wore their curiously allotted clothes. It was patent in the air of nobility that stamped them as true lords of the air. It was on their breath.

  “I may say, without exaggeration,” continued the taller of the two, “that this is a place unfit for such as we are to rest in. Wherefore, let us reconnoiter.”

  As they passed up the slope toward the north it began to snow steadily. Over in the west, the faint, gray light of day was dimming to the almost colorless shade of white upon white. It was an arduous task, stamping through the drifting snow. From time to time one might have heard, had one been within earshot, the voice of Billy, cursing as he walked.

  On what is known in that county as the Brighton Mill Road, there is, for the most part, a sprinkling of as fine farms as there are anywhere in the West. The farm-houses are well-painted, and the barns are roomy and new enough to be the envy of many a man who has gone further toward the plains and rented a log cabin. For a distance of about a mile, east and west, however, this highway passes through a barren district that is marked by nothing save a tumble-down shanty, with a roof the bricks of which have fallen eastward. This shanty stands at a point where the highway is nearest to that point on the railway known as the “Brighton Cut,” on the summit of the arid slope leading down to the rails. For a good many years this shanty had been the home, if one may use the word so lightly, of a certain Doc Middals, concerning whom but little seemed to be known, save that he was “baching it.” Just what presumption of ownership or interest in the shanty or its surroundings went with Middals’s system of occupation there seemed to be no one willing to testify. This Doc Middals was a queer fellow who rarely spent more than a month or two at a time in the shanty, and his goings and comings were so erratic, his place so remote from the view of other habitations, that the question of his presence or absence was always an open one. The farmers who passed on the highway had long since given up speculating on the subject; Middals frequently denied himself a fire even in midwinter, so not even the absence of smoke about the shattered chimney was proof positive of the man’s presence elsewhere.

  It was in this cottage that Lingo Dan—by this sobriquet was the taller of the two tramps, who had been lately deposited in the “Brighton Cut” by an inhospitable brakeman, known in such circles as knew him at all intimately—and his partner Billy were housed about a week after their advent in that part of the country. By a marvelous, instinctive faculty of penetration, of stilling his own curiosity, Lingo Dan had fully possessed himself of all the facts in connection with that shanty before he entered it.

  Covered by the drifting of the snow, the presence of these two was absolutely unknown to a soul. In the driving storm that followed their arrival like a wail of omen, all their tracks through the snow had been obliterated.

  Looking out of the eastern window of the Middals shanty, Lingo Dan gave a sigh of admiration. The sun was making a million diamonds dance about the crust of snow that stretched away over the fields and on the highway; it was like a rollicking cowboy shooting until his victims dance for dear life. Clear as crystal, the air was intensely sensitive to tone; a far-off ringing of sleigh-bells sounded with a distinctness that belied distance. Out of the blue of the sky, the glitter of the sun, and the fierce purity of the snow, there arose a splendid dazzlement that blinded unaccustomed eyes.

  “It would be pathetic,” mused Lingo Dan aloud, after passing his hand over his eyes to shut out the glare that began to hurt him, “if we should find our opportunity on such a day. Look, Billy, what a day it is! H’m, I had not thought this country capable of so magnificent an effect. And yet, do you know, I think it is going to snow again before night.”

  Billy offered no reply. He was engaged in cleaning out a rifle, and at intervals he contorted his face into a squint so that he might gauge the nicety of the barrel’s internal polish.

  “When I come to consider the matter,” Lingo Dan went on, “I begin to regret my harsh words anent that brakeman. He was, as I now see it, an instrument of a benign providence. Providence is, indeed, singularly benign. What could be handier to our purpose than this cottage and its associations? Occupied by a harmless hermit, it takes on all the innocuousness possible. Benign providence! This man Middals is absent, leaving us his shanty and his shooting irons. Benign providence! I feel it in my veins, now tingling with the excitation so beautiful a day has put me in, that there will presently come some one whose necessity is not so great as ours. In the interests of liberty and equality, we must relieve his person of its valuables ere we release him. I trust he will not resist. I sincerely trust so. But if he does—” He looked at Billy’s employment. “Is it clean?”

  “Slick as grease,” was Billy’s answer.

  “Benign providence!”

  It was as if in response to Lingo Dan’s devout utterance that the eastern hilltop became at this moment slightly clouded with a fine powdery mist. Then the forms of two persons on horseback appeared upon the slope; it was evident that their ascent of the farther side had been accomplished at a canter. Even at that distance, so clear was the day, the breath of t
he horses’ nostrils could be seen rising about them like a halo. At the first sight of them, Lingo Dan, smiling unctuously, said: “Ah, Billy, our prey approaches.”

  “One?”

  “No; there are two of them. They are riding. One is a man; the other, a woman. They are young. Judging by their present loitering and the interest each exhibits in the other, I should say they were lovers.”

  “No good—they ain’t!” Billy gave the rifle a last vicious wipe, and laid it upon a shelf.

  “Haste, my boy, is a dangerous indulgence. I beg to differ; I think we are in particularly good luck. Such slight observance of the ways of my kind as I have been able to take has taught me that in certain walks of life a young man never permits himself the company of a young lady without being sure that he has money in his pocket. Yonder young man is of that walk in life. There are, you see, so many possibilities, such contingencies, that to provide one’s self with money before providing one’s self with a companion is merely to prove one’s appreciation of the world we live in; this applies to a ride of an hour as well as to a marriage for life.”

  Billy was apparently used to such lengthy philosophics, for he replied, as if unconscious of the other’s wordy efforts: “Say! How about getting away?”

  “Easy—ridiculously easy. After obtaining the reward of our exertions, we drift gently down the slope to the railway, and presently, boarding a freight, turn our faces to the Golden West. I have observed a ledge of rock from which we can easily propel ourselves on to the moving cars while the train is toiling up the steep grade of the cut. We will not be found—if we ever are—until many miles have been traversed; an alibi will be complete.”

  “But our tracks from here to the cut?”

  “Billy, you are singularly slow. Do you see that cloud on the horizon? Before night it will snow; our foot-marks will be utterly wiped out.”