The Riddle of the Yellow Zuri

by Harry Stephen Keeler

  CHAPTER XVI

  CAPITAL LIMITED

  “THE first thing that Jennings thought,” Wolff continued, “was that the two deputies had gotten wise to the scheme and had toted the whole bunch of circular letters over to the lock-up and were searching them one by one. Then it was that he remembered something he had entirely forgotten in the excitement: that, on the way from the photographer’s to the bank, he had talked with the hotel-keeper’s young son and offered him a dollar if he would come up about eleven o’clock that day, stamp all those thousand envelopes lying in boxes, with postage which would be found in the table drawer, seal them up likewise and carry them all over to the Post Office on his express wagon. He got the hotel-keeper’s son up, a red-headed freckle-faced boy. And Jake Jennings’ guess was right. It appears that the boy had come up to the room not long after Lola had been taken over to the town police headquarters, had sealed up all the envelopes, stamped them, loaded them on his red wagon and carried them to the Post Office as per Jennings’ instructions.

  “But this wasn’t a serious catastrophe,” Wolff went on. “At least it didn’t appear to be at the moment. Jennings still had his list of suckers — in fact, he had two lists, the original that was given him and a direct copy he had made intending to sell it himself again as soon as he had worked the list thoroughly. According to Lo, she had counted off the envelopes in the identical box he had indicated — which was of course the box containing the A’s and B’s — starting from the front o it, letting the black tip of the tiger snake’s tail represent the first one, and each black ring thereafter another envelope. Where the broken ring had occurred, there she had stopped and in the envelope corresponding numerically to it had substituted the prepared blotter for the one already in it. Hence all Jake needed to do was to find precisely which envelope it was by counting down on his typewritten list, starting with the first name, then going to the Post Office and getting back the envelope corresponding to that name from the old postmaster.”

  “But the snake was gone for some reason?” interpolated Carson.

  “So Lola’s story goes,” admitted Wolff. “They found the screened box tipped over as though by a heavy foot. The snake was missing. And now they knew that it was up to them to get the whole bunch of letters back from the postmaster and rip them open — at least the first fifty or so, in order to regain the stolen bill.”

  “But the letters, I take it, he would not give up?”

  Wolff shook his head. “No, such was not the case, according to Lo’s story to me. It seems that the old man had already sorted them all out as eastbound and westbound, as soon as the boy had brought them in. The westbound letters had gone out on a one o’clock train that had been through long since, the eastbound had gone out on another train thirty minutes later. Every letter was gone.”

  “And then what did they do?” asked Carson.

  “Jake, Lola tells me, was pretty downcast and abused her up and down for what really wasn’t her fault at all. He plotted over a dozen schemes in his mind in quick succession. One thing was certain, he assured Lo. Blotters that come in through the mail are practically never discarded before they have had a certain amount of use. The blotter company who had sold him the blank blotters had sent him some interesting statistics to the effect, so near as I can get it out of Lola, that advertising blotters are 99.44 retained by the recipients because they possess a utility value. The blotter company had, apparently, shown the identity of the figures with the famous Ivory soap purity statistics, for it was all connected up in her mind somehow with Ivory soap, and it took a good deal of cross-examination on my part to elicit the basis of the comparison. And this being so, there was but fifty-six hundredths of one per cent chance that the blotter would not be kept or filed away by its recipient. Whoever he was, he would, barring perhaps some accident like tipping over a bottle of ink, use it for several days at least — in all probability for several weeks.

  “Now Lola,” Wolff continued, “hadn’t the least idea of the number of black rings counting from the tip of the snake’s tail to the broken one — her ideas were hazy and chaotic to the nth degree for the simple reason that she has practically no conception of number beyond that which the savage possesses — namely five, or the number of fingers on one hand. She thought it might be fifteen — she thought it might be twenty — she thought it might be only ten — she even thought it might be twenty-five. In trying to estimate the total thickness of all the envelopes which she traversed in that ?-B box, she is maddeningly vague, estimating it at one time thus, and a few minutes later extremely different. Every effort she makes to depict on paper the approximate number of rings disagrees hopelessly with every other effort. She puzzled me so — I confess I was convinced that she was lying to me — that I called in a consulting psychologist who has an office across from mine — a friend of mine — and without telling him any of the facts, asked him to make a few simple tests on her. His verdict was that she is nearly totally without a sense of numerical perspective — she has an actual blind spot with respect to number and its derivative concepts, dimensional relationship and calibration. This is as definite an anomaly in her, he says, as is color blindness in other people, but it has become intensely exaggerated by her subnormal mental development and her complete illiteracy. Nothing, he declared emphatically as he went back to his office, that she might ever estimate about numerical relationship could be relied upon in any degree.” Wolff paused a second. “It is certain that she knows what she did, all right, but unfortunately she cannot translate it, or at least with any reliability, into those concrete things called figures which the rest of us ever use to orientate ourselves in this universe.”

  Wolff was regretfully silent a moment, chin in hand. Then he went on.

  “As for Jake, he no doubt knew all about this characteristic of hers, but he too, she says, tried and tried her out in a dozen ways trying to get some kind of consistent estimates of how far she had gone into that envelope box with her fatally cunning scheme of ‘counting off.’ As for the snake itself, Jake had never paid any attention to it beyond a passing glance, and he didn’t know whether the rings were narrow and many or thick and few. In attempting himself to estimate the exact party who was to receive that blotter he was entirely checkmated. The more he abused Lola, the more hopelessly confused she got, and the wider became her psychic blind spot. And the final decision on the matter, arrived at by Jake, and glibly repeated now by Lola to whom it conveys no mental pictures whatsoever, was that the blotter may have been substituted anywhere from as low as the tenth to as high as the twentieth envelope, with a further chance for further slight error up or down — making it, say, as low as the eighth or as high as the twenty-second. And after trying Lola out as I have, I, too, am inclined to accept Jake Jennings’ approximation of matters.”

  “I suppose then,” Carson interpolated, “that Jennings considered the possibility of writing to each party from — say — the eighth to the twenty-second on that list, and asking for the return of the blotter sent them?”

  “He did, it seems, for about five seconds,” was Wolff’s ironic response, “and then discarded the plan at once. He told Lola that such a request would only result in the probably slightly thickened blotter being examined, its contents being found, and the whole scheme exposed — either the law or some third party getting hold of the twenty thousand dollar note. No,” added Wolff, “having come through thus far without a fall, Jake Jennings evidently decided that a cool hand and a methodical play was necessary.”

  “Well just tell me one thing then,” put in Carson curiously. “Why didn’t Jennings make a trip at once, calling on those fifteen odd people lying from the eighth to the twenty-second name on that list, and try and get hold personally of each of their blotters?”

  “I’ll tell you why very quickly,” said Wolff with a curt laugh. “It was Jake Jennings’ intention all right to learn the exact party who was to receive, or who had received, the twenty thousand dollar blotter, using
the list and the Zuri snake for a key; then he intended to charter a plane, get to that city as swiftly as possible, call on the party in question either in the latter’s home or his office, use some sort of subterfuge by which to induce the recipient to show him the blotter that had come in with the mining booklet, and then grab it bodily and get out in a hurry. As he confided to Lola, he’d ‘make it on the sock-and-clout, if necessary!’ But I can demonstrate for you exactly why Jennings didn’t attempt with his limited capital to try and cover the territory embraced by those — say — fifteen names and addresses.” Wolff withdrew from his pocket several sheets of typewritten paper folded together, and showing close single-spaced typewriting in a column down the middle of the whole sheet. “Here is the duplicate list which Jake copied line by line from the original, and which Lola stole when she left Jennings for good Sunday night. It even contains his checkmarks made in rechecking it with the one he copied it from. Let me read you, without bothering you with the names or street addresses, the actual cities involved in the fifteen names from the eighth to the twenty-second inclusive.” In rapid succession Wolff read off:

  Chesterburg, Pennsylvania.

  Moosejaw, Province, Saskatchewan, Canada.

  Pasadena, California.

  Dover, Maryland.

  Mountain Home, Idaho.

  Caribou, Maine.

  Albuquerque, New Mexico.

  Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada.

  New York City, N. Y.

  Miami, Florida.

  San Diego, California.

  Indianapolis, Ind.

  Tucson, Arizona.

  Beattyville, Kentucky.

  Prairie City, Oregon.

  Wolff looked up. “And there you have it. The reason why Jake Jennings couldn’t possibly cover the circuit completely himself wasn’t so much, as you probably have imagined, that the blotter might not stay in whosever desk or table it arrived upon, as it was that his capital, Lo tells me, was down to a hundred dollars and a Chinese diamond ring that he wore. To straighten out those towns I’ve just read off into any kind of a logically connected circuit, and to cover that circuit fully, if you’ll measure its zigzagging path with a ruler, meant a trip of nearly ten thousand miles. At three to four cents per mile by steam alone, they would use up from three hundred to four hundred dollars for transportation only. Hotel expenses would add no less than from fifty to two hundred dollars more, depending on what sort of railroad connections he could make on such a crazy circuit. At least two precious weeks, more in fact, would be consumed in the search. While it’s obvious that he might strike the lucky blotter on the very first prospect, it’s equally obvious that if luck were against him he might strike the blotter at or near the end of the entire circuit. And so far as taking a chance on just part of the circuit the psychology of Jake Jennings, it appears, is that the blotter would be in the next city directly following the one where his money would run out!”

  “Yet, according to the doctrine of chance,” said Carson, “the blotter with the twenty thousand dollar gold note in it had a greater probability of having been sent to the midmost town in that column of city names you just read off, with slightly decreasing possibilities, according to some logarithmic law, as you go one name upward or one name downward from that in the table.”

  Wolff smiled grimly. “The six towns which comprise the middle stretch of this range of names,” he said, “calling Vancouver, British Columbia, the middlemost name of all, if you care to study them, peg out all by themselves the entire United States from the tips of all its peninsulas to regions up in Canada itself. If even they alone were taken, they would again use up practically ten thousand miles, and nearly as much money as the entire circuit of fifteen cities. However, calling Vancouver the town which possesses greatest mathematical chance of having received the lucky blotter, note that a single error in chance, of a single envelope, throws the lucky blotter instead three thousand miles to the east — to New York City, in fact; or a single envelope backward throws the blotter about fifteen hundred miles south-east to Albuquerque, New Mexico. Note again that a single deviation in envelopes at the Miami, Florida, point throws the blotter fifteen hundred miles to the north, to New York City again, or fully three thousand miles across the continent to San Diego, California. A flip of an envelope — a single snake ring — and that blotter flies like Aladdin’s carpet over prairies, lakes, cities, forests, streams, rivers, deserts. More money than Jake could raise, to cover all of them — and more than he could raise to cover even the six most probable ones — and still no absolute assurance then that it would lie at that point. And so that’s why, as you can gather, Jake decided to make a straight play from a central point for the actual city name itself, and then plunge everything on a swift plane.”

  “How did he discover — likewise yourself and Mrs. Jennings — that the snake was in Chicago?” was Carson’s query at this point.

  “Well,” Wolff told him, “it was plain that the snake, after one of the officers had accidentally overturned its screened box, had wriggled under the door of the room and made its way to liberty, for the old door was shrunken and warped and hung so crazily on its hinges that there was a big space under one side of it. A thorough search in the closets and under the beds of the Mansion House revealed nothing; so it was practically certain that the Zuri had gotten to the outside through the rickety doors that hung in the country hotel. Lola and Jennings beat the whole space around the hotel, and in turn searched the country around there till dark that night, particularly after learning that an old man who had been drinking bootleg whiskey had come home swearing that a tiger shaped exactly like a snake had crossed Main Street, and had signed the pledge at once. Next morning, Sunday, they started in again to beat the country around, figuring that they had more than a chance to scare the Zuri up from its hiding place in some clump of weeds or a thicket. Finally they ran into a youngster by the name of Willie Bruck. Willie, it appears, had been playing on the station platform the day before when the Chicago-bound train had steamed in from the West. He had seen a snake colored yellow with black rings crawl into a roll of linoleum lying on the station platform, and he had likewise seen the roll lifted up into the express car by the express agent.

  “Prompt investigation at the depot by Jennings developed the fact that the roll of linoleum was something that had been ordered from a Chicago mail-order house by a woman of the town and shipped back because it was the wrong pattern. Inquiries from the Chicago express master by telegraph elicited the fact that no missing pet snake, according to the express messenger, had been found in the express car, and a search, by Jennings’ telegraphed instructions, of the roll of linoleum lying in the depot express room at Chicago developed nothing other than that the roll after being taken from the express car just two hours before had lain on the platform for nearly that length of time. Consequently Jake knew that the snake must have travelled to Chicago concealed in the roll, it must have been thrown out with the roll on the station platform, and there had finally crawled out when things got quiet. His next move was determined almost automatically. He decided to make for Chicago at once.”

  “But you say Lola Jennings and he have broken up?”

  “I guess they have all right, and for good,” averred Wolff. “They had a furious quarrel Sunday around the middle of the afternoon, according to Lola’s story to me. Jennings gave her considerable of a beating. As soon as he packed his valise and took the late afternoon train for St. Paul, so that he could be in Chicago the next morning, which was fully as quick as he could have gotten here by air, she too packed up. She left Bixburg early next morning and arrived in St. Paul around noontime, where she managed to get in touch with me. She told me the whole story. And I — well — youngster, I confess that the chance to get that sum of money literally turned my head. I put the girl up at a hotel there for the balance of the day until I could clean up a hard-fought case I was trying, then I brought her to Chicago Tuesday determined to work out some plan and risk
the few hundred dollars I had, if needs be, to grab off that twenty thousand dollars for myself alone. I figured I had as much chance as Jake Jennings, and if he should start an advertising campaign for the missing snake, I might be able to snatch it out from under his very nose. That’s all, I guess.” Wolff paused. “And now I suppose you’ve no objections to telling me what your connection is with the case, so long as I’ve lived up to the agreement to come clean?”

  Carson thought for a moment. “No, I have no objections. As you can partly guess, Jennings offered my fiancée and myself two hundred and fifty dollars if we would regain through an advertisement to be inserted under her grandfather’s name, a once-noted zoologist, this striped tiger snake. And we figured we needed the money as much as anyone else — so we accepted the proposition.”

  There was silence for a moment. Then Carson spoke:

  “Now I’ll trouble you for that copy of the original list which Jennings left behind him, and which his wife brought to you,” he said, thrusting out his hand for the article in question. “Then there’s a little further information I’d like, and we’ll discuss our plans for sending you home to St. Paul, a little sadder and a little wiser, perhaps.”

  Wolff, with an attitude of reluctance, combined with philosophical forbearance, drew from his pocket for the second time the typewritten sheets described and handed them to Carson who stowed them in his own breast pocket without a further inspection. This done, the younger man again broke the silence.

  “Well, Wolff, it looks as though you’ve come clean now, and as far as I’m concerned I’m in a frame of mind where I can induce myself to forget you. My name is Clifford Carson — my attorney is Ramsey Gordon of the First National Bank Building, this city. I see by your face, however, that you recognize the name. Good enough, then. You won’t need to fear any crooked work on my part, or any double-crossing of you. Now I’m going to make a couple of demands upon you if you wish to wash yourself clear of this skullduggery you’ve been mixing in. In the first place, I want you to put this girl Lola Jennings on a train bound for the Ozarks and send her back to her people. If she hasn’t sufficient money, then pay her fare. But get her started home. Then I want to see you board the next plane travelling northwestward toward St. Paul and get out of this town completely — and keep out! You’ve come near being badly singed — you’ve been under the law nothing other than a burglar — and I could send you over the road for fully five years or longer if I wanted to. But you’ve come clean with me according to my own proposition, and that ends it. Now one thing, pack. But before you pack up, tell me exactly what happened last night — and also who this Kate Barwick is that you referred to.”