The Victorian Rogues MEGAPACK ™: 28 Classic Tales

by Maurice Leblanc

  That night Fred the Count, ex-convict, landed at the San Francisco ferry and dived, like a rabbit to its warren, into the sheltering purlieus of the city. A week later at a fashionable hotel there appeared in his stead Sir Harry Westwood Cameron, English gentleman, apparently of unlimited leisure and wealth, but whose wardrobe seemed surprisingly new for a man whose luggage indicated an extensive tour.

  Sir Harry—it is only fair to accord him the privilege of the name he chose after a careful study of “Burke’s Peerage”—lay in his suite reading and rereading a trivial item in the morning’s paper. It announced the arrival in San Francisco of Sir Arthur Caveness of London on a secret mission supposed to involve the purchase of vast quantities of war-supplies for the British Government. He had been the guest of honor at a banquet given by the British consul.

  Beside this item Sir Harry laid another clipped from the same paper. It related the fact that Miss Bettina Girard, daughter of Sherwood Girard, pioneer Mendocino lumberman, had celebrated her eighteenth birthday with a dance at which the countryside fox-trotted and one-stepped on the waxed stump of a single giant redwood tree. The paragraph added that Miss Girard was the sole heiress of her father, owner of the largest tract of uncut redwood in the State.

  For a full hour Sir Harry, with mind keyed to its highest pitch of concentration, conned the possibilities for him contained in the two bits of news. Then he rose, bowed to his reflection in the mirror, and went down to dinner, satisfied with himself and the world.

  During the next three days Sir Harry made a number of preparations with business-like dispatch. First he wrote a letter to the British consul—omitting the “Sir” from his signature, stating he was an Englishman desiring to enlist and asking instructions. He got them, of course, by return mail on consulate stationery and over the consul’s signature. Then, after nightfall, he visited a dirty, dilapidated little print-shop located in a single room in an alley near Chinatown. The sole occupant of the place was a misshapen little man lying on a couch in a frowsy dressing-gown. To him—evidently an old acquaintance from their greeting—Sir Harry showed the consulate letter and asked for duplicate stationery and a sheaf of checks bearing the same identifying insignia.

  “They’ll be ready tomorrow night, Fred,” the little old man wheezed after examining the sample with a microscope, “and the charge to you will be twenty dollars—which I’ll take now.”

  “Twenty dollars! That’s robbery,” remonstrated Sir Harry angrily.

  “No, no, Fred, no robbery about it,” chuckled the hunchback. “I charge one dollar for doing the work and nineteen for forgetting I did it. Cheap enough, when you think it over, ain’t it?”

  Sir Harry handed him a twenty-dollar bill.

  When he received the papers ordered from the print-shop, he bought a plate of glass cut to fit inside one of his suit-cases, and an electric-light extension-cord; then he locked himself in his room and drew down the curtains. On the bottom of the glass he carefully pasted the genuine letter received from the British consul. Next he laid the glass across the top of his open suit-case with a lighted incandescent beneath it. On the top of the glass he laid, one after another, a series of letters he had personally typed on the stationery provided by the printer, and traced on each, with a deftness and accuracy that proved long experience at the task, the exact duplicate of the consul’s signature—the light beneath the glass outlining the genuine signature on the blank papers as clearly as though it were written there. These letters, addressed to himself, he mailed and received back again properly stamped by the postal service.

  That night Sir Harry Westwood Cameron packed his luggage, paid his hotel-bill, ordered a taxi in time for an early morning train and fell asleep contentedly, in blissful anticipation of an approaching golden harvest.

  While Sir Harry slept, an underworld jury of six—four men and two women, grouped round a table in a secluded flat—discussed him with the same consciousness of solemn responsibility with which a court jury debates a death-verdict against a man already adjudged guilty. From the hour of his release from Folsom one or more of the six had been at his heels—following, watching, waiting with silent, purposeful doggedness. Each of Sir Harry’s preparations for an approaching flier in high finance had been observed and reported to Boston Blackie, the “mob” chief, who sat at the head of the group, grave and taciturn. K. Y. Lewes, whose hotel-room adjoined the Englishman’s, had brought the news that Sir Harry had paid his bill and was ready to leave town. That the time to strike had come was the evident sentiment of the majority. Jimmy the Joke was speaking.

  “If he’s going to blow town in the morning, tonight’s the time to ring down his curtain, and here’s the way to do it! There’s an eight-inch ledge between K. Y.’s room window and his. Out one window and in the other; a clout over the head with a sap, and a poke with a shiv” (knife), “and he’ll be hard to wake when they call him for his train in the morning.” Jimmy illustrated with gestures more vivid than words. “Say the word, Blackie, and it’ll be all over by daylight.”

  One of the two women—Boston Blackie’s Mary, who sat beside him—shivered slightly. The other, a girl with the face of a child and eyes old with worldliness, stared unseeingly before her as though trying to visualize the scene just described—a sleeping man, a dark shadow slipping through a window, a quick blow, a knife-stab, a groan—and silence. There was no trace of mercy in the set lines of her face, for the man this child-woman loved as only such as she can love was he whom Fred the Count had sought to betray to the hangman and who because of that treachery was still behind prison bars instead of at her side.

  They all turned toward Boston Blackie and waited. In all things he was the final arbiter.

  “I don’t want him bumped off.”

  A sigh of relief from Mary, and a low gasp of surprise from the rest followed Boston Blackie’s words.

  “Why, Blackie? Oh, why, why?” cried the girl, asking the question in every mind.

  “Because, little Miss Happy, it’s too easy, too quick, too inadequate,” Blackie answered. “Unless the future holds something worse than death for Fred the Count, he has escaped us. Only years of suffering filled with the gnawing knowledge of why he suffers can square the debt this man has taken on himself. Death wont do. We must wait and take him when—” Boston Blackie paused. “Jimmy,” he continued after a moment’s thought, “pick him up at the hotel in the morning and trail him wherever he goes. It won’t be far. He’s ready to pull one of his regular capers. He’ll take you up to some out-of-the-way place and begin work. The moment he does, wire me. And Jimmy, don’t risk one chance—not even one—of losing him.”

  As the group disbanded mutteringly, little Miss Happy crossed the room and took hold of Boston Blackie’s arm.

  “You won’t let him get away, will you Blackie?” she pleaded. “If I thought there was even a chance he might, I’d—” She stopped short.

  “Don’t worry, little girl,” Blackie answered, laying his hand on her head. “He’ll not escape this time—I promise it.”

  The following afternoon a puffing little logging-train left Sir Harry Westwood Cameron at Sherwood, a mountain village in the heart of California’s great redwood forest. Before night he was talking lumber with old Sherwood Girard the pioneer, to whom he had displayed credentials revealing a mission that made him the most honored guest ever received into the lumberman’s home, where, in the simple, open-hearted fashion of the mountains, all travelers were welcome.

  While Sir Harry talked to her father, Betty Girard, who some day soon would own the vast, unbroken stretches of virgin forest that rolled away ridge below ridge to the horizon, changed the gingham apron in which the visitor had found her, for her most becoming “party-dress” and nervously piled the golden braids of hair that had hung about her shoulders, high on her head in the most womanly coiffure she knew. Sir Harry was the first “real” b
aronet she had ever seen; and at supper that night, as he noted the flushed face and eager eyes with which the motherless little heiress listened to his stories of an ancestral (and visionary) home in England, Sir Harry exultingly blessed the happy chance that had sent him to Sherwood, for it was plain the aged master of the house, already bound by feebleness to his wheelchair, could measure in months or even weeks the life that remained to him.

  In his room that night Sir Harry summed up his prospects with keen elation. Simple-minded, guileless Betty, who judged him by her mountain standards and listened to his stories of London with the fresh zest and perfect belief of a child, would be, he foresaw, easy prey for a man like himself, skilled in the deception of women far more sophisticated than she. When he married Betty—already an accepted fact to him—nothing would stand between him and the sole possession of the vast forests on every side but the life of an old man slipping palpably and inexorably toward an early grave. He was thankful there was no mother to combat and convince. Mothers, he had found, were strangely intuitive sometimes.

  “It’ll be the best job of my life,” Sir Harry assured himself delightedly.

  CHAPTER X

  THE PRICE OF SUCCESS

  During the weeks that followed, Sir Harry had no reason to doubt the truth of his boast. Detail after detail of his plan of campaign worked like smooth-running machinery. His first step was a call at the Sherwood offices of President Muir of the milling company which turned endless trainloads of Girard logs into sawed timber. To Muir, a Scotchman with all the shrewdness of his race, Sir Harry presented papers, seemingly unimpeachable, accrediting him as a representative of the British Government instructed to purchase vast supplies of lumber. He showed a specification-list detailing sizes and quantities and asked for a bid on the largest order ever placed in California lumber annals. He made but one stipulation—for Government reasons, the entire transaction must remain an absolute and inviolate secret.

  Muir considered his visitor with innate caution.

  “It’s mighty big business ye speak of, Sir Harry?” he said. “Who’s to pay, and how?”

  “A perfectly proper question,” Sir Harry answered. “I will pay, and”—he leaned over and tapped the desk to emphasize his words—“in lieu of the usual investigation you, as a business man, naturally would make of my finances, I make this suggestion: If we agree on prices, I will make an advance payment of ten thousand dollars on the day we sign the contract. As the lumber is delivered at the seaboard each month, I will pay spot cash for the shipments before they are moved from the wharves. You get my money before I get your lumber. Is that satisfactory?”

  “Ah I It sounds fair and business-like,” admitted the Scotchman, and he plunged into a discussion of costs. In this phase of the negotiations Sir Harry further lulled Muir’s really groundless doubts of himself by displaying an intimate knowledge of lumber-values and a marked disposition to haggle over every penny. They parted with the lumberman convinced that good fortune had sent him a customer who would keep his mill running night and day for months.

  While he continued to argue costs and delivery details day after day with Muir, Sir Harry devoted himself with the skill of experience to winning the second and greater part of the stake for which he was playing—the heart of Betty Girard.

  This was an easy task; for to Betty, Sir Harry Westwood Cameron became in a week the dream prince for whom all girls, young and not so young, wait and watch and long—and sometimes really find. He was the personification of romance, the realization of secretly treasured hopes, the fulfillment of desire, for she saw him with eyes blinded by girlish visions of an imaginary Prince Charming. His thin lips, steely, half-veiled eyes and mirthless laugh were to her only delightfully “aristocratic.” Glibly casual references to England’s best names helped to build the pedestal from the foot of which she looked up to him in awed wonder that she, a simple mountain girl, should have the privilege of intimacy with one who belonged in such exalted circles. In a word, Betty Girard was eighteen and motherless.

  Sir Harry wooed her with calculated artistry—and never a word of love. One day he showed her a photograph of himself lounging on a lawn before a baronial-looking country home. Betty could not guess, of course, that it was a picture of one of England’s show places that all Cheapside might visit, if it chose, for a shilling fee.

  “Betty, I’ve wondered very often lately—” Sir Harry checked himself as if with an effort.

  “What?” she urged, studying the photograph with a new thrill.

  “Whether you—” He stopped again and shook his head as she looked up at him. “It isn’t fair to tell you—now,” he continued with a gesture of pained self-denial.

  Betty was too much a woman not to guess the purport of the words he denied her. Why wasn’t it fair to tell her, if he wished to, she wondered. The possibility that some obstacle might bar a still-unconfessed love helped to fan the flame Sir Harry wished to kindle and brought her to an inwardly made admission that she did love Sir Harry Westwood Cameron and always would love him, no matter what threatened to separate them. She cried herself to sleep.

  It never occurred to Betty to ask herself whether she loved Sir Harry enough to go with him to a mountain cabin and be happy there in calico. At eighteen—and sometimes at thirty-eight—women forget to test their love with such unromantic possibilities.

  With the intuitive knowledge of women that is the gift of such men, Sir Harry kept the girl’s mind always centered on himself—sometimes in doubt, sometimes in hope, but always on him. At the end of a fortnight he was satisfied Betty was his for the asking…

  On the day he changed his last twenty-dollar bill, Sir Harry Westwood Cameron decided he had jockeyed long enough with Muir and his lumber bid and that the time had come to marry Betty, collect his toll from the village of Sherwood and vanish. Success now was almost within the reach of his grasping fingers. And so with a look that thrilled Betty’s hero-worshipping heart, he asked her to take him for a last drive in her car.

  “My work in Sherwood is almost done, Betty,” he said. “I must leave in a few days, and before I go, there is something I must tell you. I have tried to keep silent—and failed. Do you care enough to listen?”

  Betty nodded. At last she was to hear the secret she thought would determine whether happiness or sorrow was to be hers.

  Sir Harry was silent until their car stopped on the edge of a rocky promontory which overlooked miles of the Girard forests. Then suddenly he leaned toward her and caught her hands.

  “Betty dear,” he cried as though an overflowing heart were forcing the unbidden words from his lips, “you know I love you. Love like mine reveals itself without words. You’ve seen in my eyes and felt in the touch of my hand all that my lips have longed for days to say. Shall I tell you why I have not spoken? Shall I tell you why, if I could, I would have gone away without speaking?”

  “Yes,” Betty whispered.

  “Because I’m going back to England—back to France, where what is left of my regiment is fighting on the Somme front. In one month or six after I reach French soil I may be a maimed cripple—a burden forever to myself and the wife I long for. I have no right to ask you to leave such a home a’ yours to risk such a future. And yet—when they love—women like you are such willing martyrs to that love that sometimes I have almost dared to hope. Betty, are you brave enough, do you—can you—care enough to go back to England with me and share as my wife what the future has in store?”

  Betty, thrilled beyond bounds with the joy of knowing the hero she loved had with knightly magnanimity hesitated to ask her to accept even a share of the sacrifice for patriotism he chose uncomplainingly for himself, sobbed contentedly on his breast and promised she would.

  A motor coasting silently down the hill suddenly rounded a turn in the road. Betty Girard sprang away from Sir Harry’s encircling arms and va
inly strove to smooth her disheveled hair and hide her flushed cheeks. The driver, a woman, gave the pair one quick glance and passed on out of sight without apparent interest.

  “She saw us!” exclaimed Betty, hanging her head, blushingly.

  “Why should we care, dear? Who is she, anyway? I have seen her a dozen times lately when we’ve been out driving,” Sir Harry answered.

  “She’s one of a vacation party that has been camped in the woods below our house for the last week or two,” Betty replied, stretching out her hands for him to help her to her feet. “Will you drive me home, Harry,”—she used his name for the first time, with a blush—“and let me tell Dad how very, very happy I am?”

  While Betty told her father that night that some day she was to be Lady Cameron, Mary described to Boston Blackie, in his camp within gunshot of the Girard home, the scene on the promontory of rock.

  “They’re engaged now, beyond a doubt, Blackie,” she concluded.

  “Which means that she’ll be married to him within a week, if be has his way,” Blackie added. “Our hour is coming swiftly now, and the price of success is going to be everlasting watchfulness. Isn’t this a strange old world, Mary? Think of it—the fate of this innocent little mountain girl we had never heard of two weeks ago depends now on us—a crook mob the world would cage, rightly enough, like wild beasts if it could!”

  On the second day after Betty Girard had promised to marry him, Sir Harry Westwood Cameron sat in the office of the mill company reading a contract just handed him by its president. By the terms of the agreement Sir Harry contracted to purchase fifty million feet of redwood lumber, the company agreeing to deliver the timber at the seaboard in monthly lots of five million feet each, with a sharp price-discount as a penalty for delayed deliveries. On his part, Sir Harry agreed to pay spot cash for the lumber as it reached the wharves, with an additional advance payment of ten thousand dollars to stand as a forfeit in case any of the subsequent payments should be defaulted. The contract was a tightly drawn document—Muir had seen carefully to that—and there was no conceivable way in which the mill company could lose or be defrauded under its terms.