The Mystery Megapack: 25 Modern and Classic Mystery Stories

by Talley, Marcia

  “Go away!” he called. “We don’t feed tramps.”

  “Mr. Whitecotton,” said George. “I’m no tramp, and you’ve got to listen to me. I’m a chauffeur, and—”

  “Save your breath; I don’t need a chauffeur. I haven’t any automobile—not with gasoline at thirty cents a gallon. Sinful extravagance, that is!”

  “I don’t want a job, either,” went on George Bascom; “I don’t want money or free food or a job. All I want is that you should listen to me.”

  “Well, so long as it don’t cost anything,” agreed Banker Whitecotton a little less grudgingly, “I’ll listen.”

  “To keep you from throwing me off the place for a lunatic,” began George, “I’ll show you some of these newspaper clippings.” He poked a grimy hand into his pocket and brought out a half dozen badly worn newspaper clippings. “Just glance over those, and then I’ll talk.”

  Flint Whitecotton did glance them over, and his impatience gave way to curiosity.

  “Well?” he demanded.

  “Maybe you wonder why I come to you,” went on George. “I’ll tell you why. It’s because I’m too dead broke to buy so much as a shovel to dig for the gold that is buried—I won’t tell you where until we make a deal. Any minute I’m liable to be arrested as a vagrant. Your city marshal followed me three blocks when I got off the train. Two hundred thousand dollars in gold weighs a lot more than anyone man can pack. There’s got to be a car to take it away. Understand? I’ve got to have help. Sure, I might have gone in with some crook, but he’d probably have knifed me in the back for my share.

  “If I tell you where it’s buried, do we split fifty-fifty? There’s only two people on earth who know where it’s hid, me and the woman, and she don’t dare to make a move, on account of the government agents watching her so close. Do we make a deal?”

  There was a light of fascination in Flint Whitecotton’s cold, blue eyes; as Mr. Clackworthy had predicted, he could hardly believe it, and yet he dared not doubt it entirely. There was just one thing that decided him—no expense was involved.

  “I’ll go in with you,” he agreed, “I’ll buy the shovels. We don’t have to go to the cost of hiring an automobile until we’re sure it’s where you say it was buried. Where is that place?”

  “On your own land,” answered George Bascom, “that patch of yours out on the State road. It’s buried four feet down in the clay. I can take you right to the spot; I’ll take you now.”

  A hoarse cry burst through the lips of the miserly banker. The land that he had sold for two thousand dollars was worth almost a quarter of a million dollars in buried treasure!

  VI.

  Even Mr. Clackworthy in his most confident moments had not anticipated that things would go through to such a whirlwind finish. He had not dreamed that the banker’s greed would be so sharply whetted that he would plunge in, head over heels, within a few hours. The reason for it, no doubt, was Whitecotton’s fear that George Bascom, to all appearances the penniless, desperate possessor of a two-hundred-thousand dollar secret, would discover that he, the banker, was no longer the owner of the treasure-bearing twenty acres. George, too, must have told his story well and convincingly for the cautious, canny miser to have swallowed it, hook, line, and sinker.

  But that is just what happened, and Mr. Clackworthy, who had planned many further elaborate details, was totally unprepared to receive a summons from Flint Whitecotton the next morning.

  “Mr. Clackworthy,” began the banker, “perhaps I was—um—rather hasty with you during our last talk. However, I have—ah—been thinking it over, and I have decided that I owe it as my duty as a—ah—a public-spirited citizen to take an interest in this budding enterprise of yours. That letter you showed to me, in which you were offered twenty thousand dollars to sell out—that in itself shows that your venture must have merit.”

  Mr. Clackworthy looked discouraged.

  “I was just on the verge of sending a wire to the New York firm, telling them that I would accept twenty-five thousand dollars and get out. They expected, of course, to raise the ante when they offered twenty thousand dollars. The truth of it is, Mr. Whitecotton, that I’m too small a fellow to fight the big combine; that’s what scared off the capital that had been promised me. My hands are up; I quit. There’s no use in talking things over; I’m going to sell out.”

  “I wouldn’t do that,” interposed Banker Whitecotton hastily. “Now why can’t we form a company? Perhaps I would put up ten thousand dollars, but—um—I would, of course, expect to control.”

  “I’d rather sell out than be frozen out later,” retorted Mr. Clackworthy shrewdly. “No, so long as I’m whipped, I’ll take all the money I can get.” He started to get from his chair, but the banker stopped him insistently. They talked for two long, haggling hours, and at length, cold sweat pouring from his bald forehead, Flint Whitecotton, the stingiest man whom Amos Clackworthy had ever done business with, inclined his head slowly, reluctantly; he agreed to give twenty-five thousand dollars.

  * * * *

  Again Mr. Clackworthy and The Early Bird were passengers on the non-Pullman train on the branch line which terminated at Alschoola. This time, however, they were bound away from the shabby, unprogressive town, for which James was thankful; within the wallet of the master confidence man reposed twenty-five thousand dollars in currency, and for this they were both thankful.

  But The Early Bird’s forehead was corrugated with a puzzled frown.

  “I ain’t got it all through the old bean yet, boss,” he admitted. “You’re tryin’ to tell me that the old dollar squeezer come across with twenty-five thousand smackers because he swallowed George Bascom’s fairy tale about there bein’ a coupla hundred thousand in the yellow stuff in the terra firma of that clay farm you bought off’n him for a coupla thousand berries?”

  “It was realism, that did the trick, my dear James,” said Mr. Clackworthy, chuckling. “That, and his naturally greedy, grasping nature. Moreover, he thought he was playing safe so far as his twenty-five thousand is concerned. Before he closed with me, he sent a wire to The Gotham Chemical Corporation, asking them if they would give twenty-five thousand dollars to buy me out; since The Gotham Chemical Corporation is Pop Blanchard, the answer was ‘Yes.’ He didn’t suspect a flimflam, because he couldn’t imagine any sane man who would risk paying out two thousand dollars on a long chance.”

  “What I’m gettin’ at, boss,” said The Early Bird, “is, what was the hocus-pocus that made him fall for George Bascom’s fake about that buried gold?”

  “You’re hopeless,” and Mr. Clackworthy sighed. “You read the newspapers every day, too. Certainly you should recall that for some time there has been a Congressional inquiry regarding a certain war slacker named Grover Blindhouse, who escaped from army imprisonment and made his way to Europe. The Congressional inquiry brought out that the young man’s mother, the widow of a wealthy Pennsylvania brewer, got together the astounding sum of two hundred thousand dollars in cash and buried it not many miles from Philadelphia for her son’s use in his flight. However, the money is still buried; she dare not try to recover it, for fear that secret-service agents will shadow her and the government confiscate it, and she won’t tell where it was buried. The clipping which gave me the inspiration for this very profitable adventure of ours—”

  He paused and reached into his pocket. The Early Bird accepted the scrap of paper and read:

  ***

  SEEK BLINDHOUSE

  CHAUFFEUR WHO DROVE

  $200,000 TREASURE CAR

  _____

  Congressional Inquiry Reveals Name of

  Man Who Can Lead Way

  to Buried Wealth.

  ***

  “I gotcha, boss!” exclaimed The Early Bird. “George Bascom slipped Whitecotton a yarn about bein’ the missin’ chauffeur.”

  “As a finishing touch,” continued Mr. Clackworthy, “I’ve given the old miser something to puzzle about. At the spot where he will dig, t
here is planted an iron chest containing—a hundred dollars in pennies. And that’s your money, by the way, James.”

  “But,” said The Early Bird with an apprehensive shudder, “that bird is gonna be some wild—if he don’t drop dead on the spot. What if he starts investigatin’ an’ find’s that fake chemical company—”

  “Checkmate!” exclaimed Mr. Clackworthy. “The only way he can get us convicted, my dear James, is to plead guilty himself to a conspiracy against the government. We have got him, as they say, going and coming.”

  THE MONKEY GOD, by Seabury Quinn

  Professor Harvey Forrester was having a beastly time. He had confided as much to himself more than once in the past twenty-four hours, and each passing minute confirmed the truth of it.

  The Professor did not dance, and the younger members of the company fox-trotted from breakfast to luncheon, from luncheon to dinner and from dinner to bedtime. The Professor did not care for music, except classical compositions or the simple folk songs of primitive peoples, and the Milsted house was filled with the cacophonies of jazz from radio and phonograph all day and three-quarters of the night. The Professor despised bridge as a moronic substitute for intelligent conversation, and the older members of the company played for a cent a point from dinner till midnight with the avidity of professional gamblers.

  The Professor was having a beastly time.

  But old Horatio Milsted, in honor of whose son the house party was given, possessed one of the finest collections of oriental curios in the country, wherefore Forrester had accepted the invitation tendered him and Rosalie Osterhaut, his ward; for he greatly desired to examine a certain statuette of Hanuman, the Monkey God, which was the supreme jewel in the collection that Milsted had inherited from a sea-roving (and none too scrupulous) grandsire.

  Two days—forty-eight interminable hours of fox trotting, syncopated music and card-ruffling—the Professor had endured, and as yet had not caught sight of the little monkey god’s effigy. Each time he broached the subject to Milsted his host put him off with some excuse. The house party would break up the following morning, and meantime the Professor cooled his back against the wall of the Milsted drawing room while his anger rose hot and seething within him.

  “Oh, Professor Forrester,” whispered Arabella Milsted, the host’s unmarried sister, in the irritatingly high, thin voice possessed by so many short, fat women, “you look so romantically aloof standing there all by yourself. Tell me, don’t you ever unbend, even for a teeny, tinsy moment?” She looked archly at him above the serrated edge of her black fan and simpered with bovine coquettishness.

  “Do you know,” she went on in a more confidential whisper, her little, pale-blue eyes growing circular with sudden seriousness, “I have a presentiment—a premonition—that something terrible is going to happen?”

  “Umpf?” growled Forrester noncommittally, gazing first at the obese damsel, then across the crowded dance floor in an effort to descry an exit. “Umpf!”

  “Yes—” Miss Milsted, who would never again see forty, but dressed in a manner becoming to twenty, and talked chiefly in Italics, replied—“oh, yes; I’m very psychic, you know. Poor dear Mamma used to say—”

  Poor dear Mamma’s profound observations will never be known to posterity, for at that moment Horatio Milsted, looking anything but the urbane host, strode into the drawing room and commanded sharply, “Shut off that infernal music!”

  “Hear, hear!” murmured the Professor under his breath.

  Young Carmody, a vapid-faced youth in too-fashionably cut dinner clothes, who stood nearest the radio, turned the rheostat, and the lively dance tune expired with a dismal squawk.

  “Someone has been tampering with my collection,” Milsted announced in a hard, metallic voice. “Some infernal thief has stolen a priceless relic—the statue of Hanuman. Now, I don’t make any accusations; but I want that curio back. I think I know the thief, and while I’d be justified in turning him over to the police, I’ll give him a chance to return my property without a scandal—if he will. The museum is just beyond the library. I want everyone here—everyone—to step into the library, then go, one at a time, into the museum. There’s only one door, and the windows are barred, so the thief can’t get away. Each of you will be allowed thirty seconds—by himself—in the museum. There’ll be a handkerchief on the table, and if I don’t find the statuette under that handkerchief when the last of you has passed through the museum, why—” he swept the company with another frigid stare—“I shall have to ask you all to wait while I send for the sheriff. Is that clear?”

  A wondering, frightened murmur of assent ran round the brightly lighted room, and the host turned on his heel as he shot out, “This way, if you please.”

  Rosalie, the Professor’s ward, glanced backward at her guardian as she accompanied her dancing partner and two other couples into the library, and the look in her wide, topaz eyes was a troubled one. She had lived with the Professor nearly a year, now, and knew him as only a woman can know the man she idolizes. The straight-backed little scientist was the soul of honor and propriety, but so immersed in his beloved study of anthropology that theft or murder would scarcely deter him from the acquisition of a relic of scientific value. “What if he should—” she shook her narrow shoulders as one who puts away an unpleasant thought, and stepped across the library threshold.

  “I know something terrible will happen,” Miss Milsted wailed softly in the Professor’s ear.

  “Nonsense, Madam; control yourself!” Forrester replied sharply, his narrow nostrils quivering with excitement.

  The north wind, sweeping furiously across the rolling Maryland hills, hurled a barrage of sleet and snow against the windows, a man coughed with the abrupt sharpness of nervousness, and a woman tittered with embarrassment. The logs in the hall fireplace snapped and crackled; otherwise the house was as silent as a Quaker meeting before the Spirit moves. Two minutes dragged slowly by while the party in the drawing room watched the library door with bated breath. What drama was being enacted behind those unresponsive panels?

  “Oh, I know—” the Milsted person began her dismal prophecy once more, then checked her speech with a little squeak like that of an unsuspecting mouse suddenly snared in a trap. Dying with a short flare, like a shred of dried grass touched with a match, the electric lights winked out, and, save for the reflection of the blazing logs in the hall fireplace, the house was hooded in darkness.

  “Oh, I knew it—” Miss Milsted asserted, but Professor Forrester strode impatiently across the polished floor toward the closed door of the library.

  “Control yourself, Madam,” he snapped. “The wires have been short-circuited by the storm. Here, somebody, bring some candles!” It was characteristic of him that he should assume command in the emergency. The man who had braved sandstorms in the Sahara, glaciers in the Himalayas and natives of Somaliland while tracing the footprints of early civilizations was not to be daunted by imperfect electric power systems. “Fetch some candles,” he repeated sharply; “we can’t—”

  Voices rose in angry discord behind the library door. A man’s shout, a woman’s scream, Milsted’s half-uttered curse mingled in sudden, sharp babel, then bang! the wicked, whip-like snap of a pistol shot punctuated the hubbub.

  The Professor was first to reach the library. He darted through the door, swinging it shut behind him, stilled the renewed voices with a single, sharp command, and struck a match, kneeling over a long, inert object stretched before the grate of glowing coke beneath the mantelpiece.

  “Oh, I know something terrible is going to happen! I know it—” Miss Milsted screamed, clawing futilely at the coat-sleeve of the nearest man.

  “Madam, be still!” the Professor’s voice, dry and sharp with suppressed excitement, cut through the gloom as he re-entered the drawing room. “Be quiet; nothing terrible is going to happen. It’s already happened. Mr. Milsted is dead.”

  “Dead!” the dreadful word flew from lip to lip about the cir
cle of frightened guests. And, as if the tragic announcement were the cue to a theatrical electrician, the dimmed lights of the big country house suddenly sprang into brightness once more, shedding their sharp, yellow rays on the group of pale, terrified faces and bringing the rouge on lips and cheeks into ghastly prominence as frightened women turned hysterically to equally frightened men for comfort and protection.

  “How—” began young Carmody, but the Professor cut him short.

  “Call the nearest post of state troopers,” he ordered curtly. “Then get in touch with the sheriff and the county coroner. Everyone stay where he is, please; the authorities will tell us when we may leave.

  “Now”—Forrester closed the door against the chattering throng in the drawing room and faced the six people in the library—“just what happened?”

  “We had just come in, Uncle Harvey,” Rosalie answered, speaking with slow care, for in times of excitement her English, still only a half-familiar tongue, completely deserted her; “we had just come in here, and Mr. Milsted was deciding which one of us should go into the museum first, when the lights went out. Somehow, just at the same time, that window there”—she pointed to a casement between two ceiling-high bookcases—“blew open, and, it seemed to me, I saw a head at the opening. I’m not sure about that, though. Mr. Carpenter here started across the room to close the window, and I think someone else did, too, though I don’t know who it was, and Mr. Milsted began to swear and ran toward me, then there was a flash and a report, and—”

  “And he shot himself,” young Mr. Carpenter supplied, interrupting the girl’s story. “I don’t know why he did it, but we all saw the flash and heard him cry out with a sort of choke, and saw him fall. There was light enough from the fire for us to see that much.”