The Victorian Rogues MEGAPACK ™: 28 Classic Tales

by Maurice Leblanc

  “English Bill” Tatman—once Sir Arthur Cumberland—looked on with grim humor and a running fire of comment as the boxes were unpacked, one by one, in the sanctuary of the First National’s gold-room.

  “Look at it, Scotty,” he said to his morose pal with a wave of his hand toward the steadily growing pile of gold bars. “There’s enough tin to make ’onest churchmen of us and the bobbies too. Deuced lucky, ’owever, that we didn’t ’ave any of the stuff in our luggage.”

  As the easy-tempered prisoner rambled on with his monologue the bank messengers threw back the lid of another chest. As it opened, they uttered a cry of dismay. Inside, replacing the gold that should have been there, was a neat pile of bars, half of them pig-iron, half of them lead.

  Before dawn flaring newspaper extras told the city of Seattle that sixty thousand dollars in gold bars had been stolen from the strong-room of the Humboldt and that though two known crooks had been taken at the dock and were safely locked in cells, the missing gold inexplicably had been spirited ashore and safely away, although every piece of baggage on the ship was searched inside and out.

  As the enthusiastic police reporters informed their city editors, the story was turning out to be “a whale of a mystery yarn.”

  While the gloomy conference at the bank was still in progress, Boston Blackie’s Mary admitted herself to a modest bungalow on the outskirts of the city.

  Within was the white-haired, motherly woman who with her four daughters had been passengers on the Humboldt from Victoria.

  “All here?” Mary inquired eagerly.

  “All but Blackie and Lewes,” answered the woman. “There was no ‘rumble’ at the dock, was there?”

  “None. Blackie was through the gate and safely away before I left. It was a wonderful job, wonderfully pulled,” asserted Mary, relaxing from the long strain. “Blackie should be here any minute now. Then we have only to put the gold in a safe place and drop out of sight for awhile. You have given up this house regularly, without risking suspicion?”

  “I arranged it all yesterday before we left for Victoria, and exactly as Blackie directed me,” the woman returned. “The rental agent knows I’m moving in the morning. The girls are gone already. They caught the night train for the south.”

  The doorbell rang.

  “That’s Blackie, now,” cried Mary, rushing to the door. She flung it open unhesitatingly, an eager, welcoming smile on her face; then as she glimpsed the form outside she stepped quickly forward and barred the entrance.

  On the doorstep stood Miss Nina Francisco.

  “You!” cried Mary, startled beyond further speech.

  “Miss Whitney!” ejaculated the woman, equally amazed. Then she began to laugh, but with a strained, false note in her merriment.

  “How stupid of me not to have guessed who you really are during all those days we spent together on shipboard!” she said with a shake of her dark head.

  “Why are you here? Where did you get this address?” demanded Mary.

  Nina drew a slip of paper from her pocket and handed it to her frankly suspicious friend. On it was written in Blackie’s well-known hand the street number, with these words added: “Immediately upon landing.”

  “Come in,” invited Mary reluctantly. “I don’t understand all this, but Blackie’s note seems to make it all right. Who are you, Miss Francisco? Have we ever met?”

  “Never,” said the visitor with an elusive half smile. “I never saw you before I boarded the Humboldt, though you must have seen a letter I once wrote, I believe—a letter written long ago, Mary Dawson, when your Blackie was risking his life to save a pal from death on the scaffold at Folsom Prison, California. Do you remember that letter? It was signed by a woman called Rita, and it told how she had done for Boston Blackie’s sake the one thing he couldn’t do himself for his pal because Fred the Count betrayed him. Do you remember now?”

  “Rita!” cried Mary. “The woman who saved the Cushions Kid—the woman who—”

  She stopped, a quick flush dyeing her face.

  “Yes,” continued Rita, taking up the interrupted sentence and meeting Mary’s eyes with a level, unflinching glance, “the woman who isn’t ashamed to admit she would give everything in this world for what she knows you have and will never lose—Boston Blackie’s love.”

  Another ring at the doorbell ended an awkward silence.

  Mary recognized Lewes and Blackie in the two forms on the step. As she opened the door, Blackie caught her in his arms and held her to his breast.

  “We’ve won, little sweetheart,” he cried joyously. “All here and everything O. K., little girl?”

  As Mary nodded, he caught sight of the visitor within.

  “Rita!” he exclaimed. “You lost no time in finding the house—which is well, for we’re leaving before dawn.”

  He dropped into a chair and began to laugh.

  “Share the joke,” demanded Mary.

  “I can’t help laughing,” he cried, “when I think of the paper you wasted warning me against Miss Nina Francisco, detective, while Miss Francisco was equally busy writing notes warning me against the dangerous machinations of Miss Marie Whitney, also a detective. It was better than a farce.”

  “I saw you the night I boarded the Humboldt at Nome, and when I saw parts of that note Mary wrote, with Wireless—treasure-room—detectives’ so suggestively appearing in it, I suspected her, for the ship’s people had managed to let everyone know there were detectives aboard. I knew you wouldn’t travel to Alaska for your health; I knew we carried a fortune in gold in the strong-room; and putting two to two, I guessed it was you they planned to trap,” the girl explained. “But I was a fool not to know you could and would protect yourself.”

  “Never!” Blackie denied promptly. “You proved yourself true blue, particularly when you risked everything to knock that revolver from Cumberland’s hand. You did do it, didn’t you?”

  “Yes,” said Nina without enthusiasm. “And Mary was just behind, ready to knock my gun from my hand if I hadn’t attacked the right man.”

  “Rita,” said Blackie seriously, “we owe you something for that timely blow. It entitles you to a bit with the rest of us. You’ve earned a share of the gold.”

  The woman shook her head.

  “Not me, Blackie,” she said soberly. “I don’t want money from you.”

  Her mood changed with the words, and she smiled up at him.

  “There’s something I do want, Blackie,” she said. “I want to know how it all was done—if you’ll trust me.

  “Trust you! Of course I do,” Blackie assured her. “You’re one of us since that night in Sacramento when you saved my pal from the rope. How did we do it? Rita, it was as simple as taking eggs from a hen’s nest. Mary’s was the only difficult part—getting the wax impressions of the two keys.”

  “I led the purser on to show me the strong-room on the northbound trip while it was empty, and there was no reason why anyone mightn’t be admitted,” said Mary in response to Blackie’s nod to begin. “I pretended to be amazed that his two tiny keys could protect such a vast treasure as he said the Humboldt would carry back from Nome. I picked them up as they lay in his hand—and accidentally, of course—dropped one. As I fumbled about my feet for it, I took impressions of both keys on a circlet of locksmith’s wax which was ready on my wrist.”

  “Of course!” said Rita; then turning to Blackie: “But how did you get the gold out of the strong-room? How did you get it ashore?”

  “All much simpler than getting the keys,” Blackie said. “On the night of the battle outside the strong-room, I had been inside with the treasure since the previous night. Lewes let me in and locked the door behind me. He had just removed the padlock to release me when the Englishman appeared to try his luck at the game. His idea evidently must hav
e been to saw or burn off the original padlock and substitute the duplicate for which he had keys. He could then have entered the treasure-room and removed the gold when he pleased. Lewes jumped him and with your help put him out. Meanwhile I slipped back to my stateroom.”

  “But the gold? Surely you couldn’t have carried it with you—and besides they searched all the cabins immediately and found nothing!”

  “They didn’t find any gold outside the strong-room because there wasn’t any outside. It was still in the strong-room, and there it stayed until the Humboldt was docking.”

  “I can’t guess the answer to that,” said Rita.

  “No. Well, perhaps you remember that my little pal Mary was on the steamer, and being a woman, naturally she had trunks with her. One of those trunks was turned over to the purser for safe-keeping; so, having been stored in the strong-room, it was inside with me and the gold during the twenty-four hours I spent there. Beastly dull twenty-four hours, too, for it didn’t take but one to empty a chest, transfer the gold bars to Mary’s trunk and substitute in the chest the iron and lead bars that had been in her trunk. Then I replaced the broken seal with the duplicate Lewes made in Nome as soon as he saw the kind used on the treasure-chests.”

  “So all the time they were hunting the ship for gold, it was still in the strong-room, but in Mary’s trunk!” cried Rita with rapt appreciation. “That’s worthy even of you, Blackie. But how did you get it ashore? They searched Mary’s trunk with all the rest.”

  “Certainly—but they found nothing, because the gold was no longer in Mary’s trunk when it reached the Custom House men,” Blackie said. “Tell her, Mary.”

  “Do you remember the girls I met on the ship after we left Victoria? My old school friends, you know, to whom I introduced you,” began Mary. “Well, those young ladies didn’t carry any baggage except ordinary one-night traveling bags; but when they came off the Humboldt, each of them—even including their nice white-haired old mother—had one of these contrivances strapped round her waist under her clothes.”

  Mary opened a closet and dragged from the floor a canvas belt in which, bent to fit snugly against a woman’s body, was one of the missing gold bars for which the Seattle police were combing the city.

  “I bent them to the proper shape while I was in the strong-room, reproaching myself that I could only allow myself one hundred and fifty pounds from the tons of old Clancy’s gold that lay there, mine for the taking,” said Blackie. “That’s the whole story, Rita, except that when I got Mary’s warning that a woman in Scuttle had tipped off our game to the cop-piers, I knew that we hadn’t been tipped off, for no one, not even good old Mother Archer or the four girls with her, knew what was wanted of them or what we planned to do until Mary told them today on the Humboldt. Therefore I naturally concluded there must be another ‘mob’ on board the Humboldt on the same errand as ourselves, and that when we reached the dock at Seattle, the detectives would be waiting for them, not us. And so it turned out. Now you know it all, Rita.” He rose and beckoned to Lewes.

  “We’ve work to do,” he said. “This stuff has to be taken to the safe place I prepared for it—immediately too, for it never pays to take unnecessary chances. You’d better do as I suggest and take a share of the stuff for yourself, Rita.”

  “No, Blackie—nothing for me.”

  “Good-by, then, and good luck,” he answered as he and Lewes staggered out, each laden with belts of gold.

  As the men disappeared, Mary and Rita eyed each other throughout a silence palpably heavy with thoughts neither cared to utter.

  “I’m going now,” said Rita finally, rising and moving quickly toward the door.

  Mary made no comment or protest.

  As she stood in the doorway, Rita turned and laid both hands on Mary’s shoulders.

  “Good-by dear,” she said gently. “If you were not Boston Blackie’s Mary and I were not Rita, a woman who would give her soul to have his love, we could be good pals. But as it is—I imagine the only word we may say to each other in friendship is—good-by.”

  “Good-by, Rita,” said Mary, and watched her guest pass swiftly into the street and vanish in the darkness.

  Mary locked the door and began to make coffee for Blackie.

  CHAPTER XVI

  THE FRAME-UP

  The robbery of the S. S. Humboldt grew to be a very nasty thorn in the tender side of the Seattle police.

  Larry Rentor, chief of detectives, slammed up his ’phone, chewed the end from the unlighted cigar between his clenched teeth and banged a heavy, hairy fist upon his desk in savage exasperation.

  “Wants his gold bars back or my job, does he?” Rentor growled angrily. “It’s safe to trust old Jim Clancy to want somebody’s scalp if anything happens to singe his hide. Does the doddering idiot think a crook smart enough to make sixty thousand dollars in gold vanish at sea from a steamer’s double-locked strong-room is likely to leave it lying around where my bunch of half-witted four-flushers can find it?”

  Chief Rentor spat out the mutilated remnant of his cigar and eyed his ’phone speculatively and with growing gravity. Over it but a moment before he had been told by James J. Clancy, aged and irascible president of the Northwestern Steamship Company, that unless the Humboldt’s mysteriously missing gold was recovered, the resultant police shake-up would jar loose the gold star at present glittering on the breast of Rentor’s uniform. The harried Chief knew that Clancy had both the will and political prestige to uphold his threat.

  “It’s up to me to get busy or get out, and I’ll not get out—not if I can help it,” the Chief said to the empty room. “I’ll get the gold if I can. If I can’t, I’ll find a goat and tie this caper to him.”

  Then, being a shrewd and politic detective well aware of the undeniable advantage of favorable publicity, Larry Rentor pressed a button and told his secretary to admit the newspaper men waiting impatiently in the outer office. To these he dictated an interview brimming with assurance, in which he hinted a solution of the mystery was at hand, predicted the early arrest of the Humboldt robber gang and promised the recovery of the loot “within a few hours.” With the reporters satisfied and out of his way for the moment, the Chief seized a fresh cigar, sagged down in his chair and concentrated the full power of his by no means mediocre mentality on the problem that confronted him.

  Three unbroken days and nights of unmitigated third degree harrying had developed nothing more satisfactory than increasingly vehement denials of guilt from Tatman and his partner; and Chief Rentor, shrewd in judging men of their type, at last was forced to the conclusion that they spoke the truth.

  Who, then, had stolen the gold?

  “If Tatman is innocent, as I know he is,” Rentor said to himself, “the man I want is the one who struck him down outside the strong-room door. No one on shipboard, passenger, officer or seaman, admits giving the blow. That proves it wasn’t struck to protect the gold.”

  The detective’s mind leaped to the logical conclusion.

  “One of two things is true,” he decided. “There was another crook ‘mob’ aboard the steamer, and it, not a Tatman, got the gold, or this business was an ‘inside job’ and the thieves are on the steamer payroll. Nothing amazing in that! Gold by the hundredweight will tempt anything human.”

  Had Rentor guessed that Boston Blackie and Mary, his wife and pal, were among the Humboldt’s passengers, his summing up of the possibilities would have ended with the first alternative. From the standpoint of a man unaware of this all-important fact, however, Rentor’s second theory was far from implausible. The unbroken but open padlock found near the door of the looted treasure-room, and the fact that the missing gold was not found when the steamer was searched immediately after the robbery, or in the baggage of any of the passengers, strengthened the thought growing in Rentor’s mind that the vanished fortune might sti
ll be hidden on shipboard. Gold bars two feet long and weighing thirty pounds each are not easily hidden within a passenger’s cabin.

  Rentor touched the button that summoned his secretary.

  “McNaughton, captain of the Humboldt, is coming down shortly,” he said. “When he arrives, bring him in at once and admit no one else till I ring.”

  As he waited, the gossamer clues upon which he must work expanded in the brain of the detective.

  “The strong-room lock was opened by keys made for it,” he mused. “The purser had one, the captain the other, and there were no duplicates. That’s a fact that means something.”

  The door opened to admit the big, bluff, white-bearded commander of the Humboldt.

  “What progress, Chief?” asked McNaughton anxiously.

  Rentor studied the face of the visitor silently.

  “Considerable, Captain,” he said slowly. “More than you would imagine possible. What would you say if I told you I know the Humboldt was robbed by men paid to protect her treasure—by men on the ship’s pay-roll?”

  Rentor watched the effect of his question with keen eyes half concealed by drooping lids. McNaughton, startled by the suggestion, met the Chief’s gaze squarely.

  “Impossible,” he said at last. “No member of the crew had an opportunity; and my officers—well, sir, I know them all. There’s not a thief among them.”

  Rentor leaned across the table and tapped its top.

  “And yet,” he said, “the padlock was removed intact from your strong-room door by two keys that fitted it. The most expert locksmith in America couldn’t have made duplicate keys without the originals as models. That means one of two things; either the original keys were used to open the treasure-room door, or as patterns for the duplicates that did open it. Which was it, McNaughton? You and the purser are the two men who had the keys in your keeping.”