“And you have given me something that is very valuable — the message itself,” he smiled back. He thought a moment. “No, I don’t believe there is anything more I wish to ask, considering that I have all the names in the case. Let’s see. You say this Foy Yi — or Napoleon Foy — has locked the handkerchief in a cabinet in his back room? Probably till he receives instructions from Chi Tsung Liang, I presume?”
The little Chinese woman nodded. “Yes. Foy Yi son of wood carver in China. No can get that kind of work here in America. Must be laundryman. He work on big cabinet, lock with Chinese key of shark’s bone and lock like you no understand. Maybe some day when finished he sell to rich American. Who can tell?” She paused. “And there handkerchief is till you, Jeffrey Darrell, say what is to do.” Again a little pause. “And of course you not forget fifty dollars that is to go to poor Foy Yi?”
“I should say not,” said Darrell, folding up the message and placing it in his breast pocket. “I’ll make somebody peel loose according to instructions, O Ming Chi, if it’s the last thing I do. Foy Yi shall have his fifty dollars. And I’ll let either you people or Foy Yi know what is best to do about the handkerchief.”
Once down on the sidewalk, again he read the message in the fading light of evening. “There’s half a dozen good leads at least on this thing to follow up,” he said jubilantly to himself.
He traversed the short distance which encompassed Chinatown and wending his way into a drug store on the outer fringe of that picturesque region proceeded to look in the telephone book for the name of Rita Thorne, who evidently resided in an apartment house, called the Bradbury. He did not find any Thorne living on Independence Boulevard, but after calling information found what he was seeking in short order. He called the number, but there came no answer.
He made his way to the office of the Call, now at this hour of the evening a beehive of activity.
He did not go into the city room on the first floor, however, but instead went straight upstairs to the morgue, that all-embracing depository of clippings, news stories, and photographs, each classified by an intricate cross-filing system, the whole run in conjunetion with nearby cut-room or “bone yard.” There, with greetings to Bishop, the old white-haired, one-time reporter who, relegated by his age to being keeper of the morgue, sat smoking under the solitary bulb that lighted up the screened-off room, Darrell called for the city directory and for the bound files of the Call for the past three months.
With his notebook and pencil at hand, ready to put down the addresses and full names of the two or three, Catherwoods he might find in the city directory, he proceeded to look that very aristocratic cognomen. Much to his annoyance, the city directory boasted, not merely two or three persons bearing the name of Catherwood, but more than a score, and for several moments he was busy transferring the entire string to his notebook. This rather laborious procedure completed, he now turned to the bound files of the Call.
After some rumination he decided, for the present, to begin his peculiar search with the issue dated just a month previous to the present date. Whereupon he turned to the issue of March 19, that year, and at once began to scan the death notices rapidly, concentrating his attention only on those which, in the alphabetically indexed column, began with the initial J. More and more the conviction was borne in upon him, for some strange, intuitive reason, that sooner or later he was to come upon the death notice of some one whose initials corresponded to those signed to the note. Which forsooth he did. For the issue of the Call dated March 25th, he found that one Jason Charles Johnson, of 2450 Windfield Avenue, aged fifty-nine, had died on the 24th of May.
He transferred the notice carefully, even word for word, to his notebook. Again he riffled over the leaves. But in the issue of the Call dated June 1st, much to his surprise, he again came upon the mystic combination. This time the notice informed him that one Joseph Chester Jurkins, aged thirty-two, had died at his home, 3666 West Fifty-fourth Street, on the 29th of March.
A little perplexedly, Darrell proceeded to add the details of this second notice to those of the first that he had already copied down in his notebook. Then, like a thorough journalist, he continued his search, although knowing that he would not again strike this mystic combination of letters.
But he was destined to disappointment — or was it gratification? — when he came upon still a third reappearance of the combination J. C. J. This one occurred in the Call dated March 8th, just eleven days ago. In its entirety it read:
JARNDYCE, John Cooper, March 7, at his home, 2930 Logan Boulevard. Age 27. Funeral from Bross’ Chapel, 2535-37 Milwaukee Avenue, Friday, March 9, at 2 p.m., thence by carriage to Greenwood Cemetery.
Once more, by this time rather vexed at the preponderance of J. C. J.’s among the death notices, Darrell copied down each and every word of the brief notice, and again pursued his search clear up to the current issue of the Call. But not again did he come to a repetition of the combination of letters for which he was looking.
Leaning back in his chair in front of the heavy files, Darrell wrinkled up his brows. Johnson, Jurkins, and Jarndyce. “Until then yours truly remains defunct, J. C. J.” What did it all mean? What was the significance of an order coming through such strange channels, and directing some one to pay as high as two thousand dollars for an alarm clock? Which one of all these Catherwoods in the city directory was the one who must be specifically informed that the clock was secured? What was the strange story which beckoned him with its ghostlike fingers through this tangle of names and addresses? Suddenly he turned to Bishop, who smoked away in silence, feet tilted up on his desk, in the adjacent chair.
“Bishop, you’ve been in charge up here for over a year. Likewise I’ve been engaged on out-of-the-city stories several times in the past months. Now which of these names, if any, sounds familiar to you? Ever recall any of them mixed up in any story of any kind, small or large?” He repeated slowly: “Johnson, Jurkins, Jarndyce?”
“Ah — Jarndyce,” replied Bishop slowly. “An odd name that. And I remember it. I filed something under that name about two months ago. I recall the name distinctly, but I don’t think the story was anything of importance.” He rose from his comfortable chair, and consulting a card index nodded to the file which lay in front of Darrell. “Look on page four, issue of April 25th, a little less than two months ago. Name Edward Thurston Jarndyce.”
The article was brief, and told nothing. Edward Thurston Jarndyce, a well-to-do old-timer of Chicago, living on Ritchie Court, had died of heart disease. He was one of the few remaining of those that had formed the interesting days of earlier Chicago. He was childless, likewise a widower, his wife’s demise having preceded his by some fourteen years. That and nothing more.
Darrell sat back in his chair, staring thoughtfully at the opposite wall. Was Edward Thurston Jarndyce the man referred to in the handkerchief message as “uncle”? Was it by any chance Edward Thurston Jarndyce’s clock which some one was trying to obtain in a hurry? The mere existence of two unobtrusive newspaper notices, both simply involving the name Jarndyce, proved nothing definitely in themselves, Darrell reflected; at least they proved nothing unless it could be substantiated that one John Cooper Jarndyce was the nephew of one Edward Thurston Jarndyce. What was the object of all this furtive communication about the clock?
He closed up the files, and with a perfunctory nod to Bishop made his way downstairs. Again he called up the mysterious Rita Thorne, but only an empty buzz rewarded his efforts.
“Out for the evening, all right,” he said to himself. “Might as well make it an early-morning get-up to-morrow, and see whether Miss Rita Thorne won’t be generous with the great American institution known as the Press. After all, the message belongs to her. For the present might as well get back on that Brixby story that blocked itself up on me this afternoon.”
With which determination he turned his footsteps back to the city room to get one or two papers in his desk. To-morrow bright and early, he told hims
elf, he would be at the Bradbury, interviewing Rita Thorne of the mystery message. And if Rita Thorne should be in the mood to clear up for Jeffrey Darrell alone this little matter hinted at by the handkerchief, which now reposed in Foy’s cabinet under lock and key, it might well mean that the Call would go to press Wednesday morning with something it sorely needed — a live, exclusive story.
But he groaned inwardly. For whatever the story — and particularly a story with such roundly sensational elements as alarm clocks with a market value of two thousand dollars cold cash, Chinese laundrymen, defunct penners of handkerchief messages, mysterious villains by the name of Catherwood foiled by chilled-steel safety vaults, epistolary communications from London — it must of necessity now appear under the name of Marvin Feldock, the new acquisition of the Call. The old news-hunting life, now that it had evolved into an existence consecrated to hunting down exclusive stories for other men, was no longer the fascinating game it once had been.
CHAPTER VII
A Gentleman Sent A-Clock-Hunting
WHEN at the very godly hour of ten next morning, Darrell, after a good night’s sleep, stopped in front of the Bradbury, situated on a broad boulevard where rushing motor cars whirled ceaselessly and monotonously back and forth, he surveyed it with a gaze in which last night’s interest had far from died. He stepped into the big entrance and scanned the dozens of mail boxes. A neat, engraved card proclaimed that Miss Rita Thorne resided in apartment 2-L. Whereupon, instead of pushing the button with his thumb with the result that a discussion per speaking tube would be necessitated, and even possibly bring down on his head a refusal to see him, he took himself over to a battery of three automatic elevators and carried himself in one of them to the second floor.
His knock was followed by what appeared to be voices as of two women, then silence; and a second later the door swung open and a very coal-black Negro girl, with a white apron on stood in the doorway.
“Is Miss Rita Thorne in?” Darrell asked.
“Miss Tho’ne,” repeated the Negro girl. “Well-urn — sah — Ah don’ jes’ know whethah Miss Tho’ne can see you. Huh ankle — well — I jus’ ask de mist’ess — if’n you’ll wait a minute. W’at name I give de mist’ess, sah?”
Darrell, standing in the doorway, peering at the tiny hall with its lone telephone stand and wee strip of rug, which led into what appeared to be a large and sunny living room, told her simply:
“Tell Miss Thorne that Mr. Jeffrey Darrell of the Morning Call would like to have a brief interview with her.”
Presently the colored maid reappeared. “Jes’ to please step in de livin’ room, sah. Miss Tho’ne’ll see you.”
Darrell made his way along the tiny hallway, and across the threshold of the living room, the maid behind him. In that pretty apartment, however, there was one more thing which more than any other ornament in the room seized Darrell’s eyes. On an overstuffed davenport of taupe tapestry — a great luxurious piece of furniture it was — sunk deep in its soft cushions, lay a girl of about twenty-five years of age with great eyes that were as pools of purple velvet, her smooth skin and pretty exposed neck a soft and almost creamy whiteness, her lips two vivid splashes of crimson. Her hair, luxuriant and jet black, was waved over her head in hundreds of tiny ringlets, some of which tumbled entrancingly over the white temples. She was clad in a peignoir of blue silk, with wide patch pockets trimmed with silken rosebuds, and while her left foot was incased in a dainty blue silk slipper her entire right foot and ankle reposed on a low, flat cushion, tightly bound in white muslin.
In those few seconds in which Darrell stood upon the threshold of that room, he drew in his breath with a sharp intake. For in that brief space of time it was given him to realize that in the person of Rita Thorne, the addressee as it were, of Napoleon Foy’s mysterious handkerchief message, he had in truth come upon a beautiful girl-woman. And in that same instant, his newspaper experience told him that that skin of ivory texture, that jet-black hair, those eyes whose color seemed to change from black to purple, all belonged to a girl of the sunny south.
The Negro girl behind him was speaking. “Dis is de gemmun, mist’ess, w’at wan’ to see you.”
The girl imprisoned on the davenport riveted her deep, dark eyes a bit curiously upon Darrell, then smiled — just a wee bit — not so much invitingly as courteously. She motioned him to a rocker close to the davenport.
“I beg pardon,” she said in tones which were as the ripples of a soft, Southern brook, “for receiving a visitor, either social or business, in this manner, but I am temporarily disabled by an ankle which is badly, badly sprained. I attended the opera last night, and it happened on the way home. Won’t you be seated? Mr. Darrell, of the Call, I believe I heard you tell Snowwhite in the outer doorway?”
He sat down in the chair.
“Please make no apologies, Miss Thorne. It is I who should apologize, if anyone, for coming here at this unseemly hour of the morning.” He glanced at her tightly bound ankle. “You have a very painful thing there, and I’ll warrant your doctor has informed you that you will not be able to walk upon it for a full week.”
She nodded her head vexedly. “Those were precisely his words, delivered to me just around midnight,” she agreed. “A week — a whole week — lying on a davenport!” She made a little moue. Then she fastened her eyes on him, as though waiting politely for him to state his business.
The Negro girl had retired into the kitchen. The faint sound of dishes being gently washed filtered to Darrell’s ears. They were alone. He spoke.
“Miss Thorne, I am here on a rather peculiar errand, to ask you one or two questions. I tried twice to get you last night, but your own statement that you were at the opera explains my failure. Now I hope that you won’t consider me obtrusive, nor even impudent. I am, as you are forewarned, a newspaper man, you see.
Hence — ” His lips stopped, as adjusting his rocker around more easily to talk with the girl, he caught a glimpse of something from the tail of his eye. Then as his eyes rested fully upon it, they widened into a look of artistic appreciation. He rose suddenly from his comfortable chair and crossed the room to the mantel where he stood with his hands clasped behind him, looking down at what he saw there.
Standing upright on the mantel, the chief splotch of color in the very simple-toned room, its base held from slipping by a tiny block of wood glued thereon, was an unusually heavy dish, perhaps eleven or twelve inches in diameter. Its wide flat rim bore upon it what appeared to be a formal scrollwork consisting of honeysuckle ornament in lustered brown, green, and red, on a dark-blue ground; the lusters were strange and eye gripping. The center of the dish was sunken fairly deeply, and in it, in crude but masterful strokes, was the picture of a child clinging to a gnarled oak. Around the well of the dish was a narrow band of luminescent yellow, surrounded on each side by a band of gorgeous — almost startling — ruby red.
To another person the wide, round dish standing securely upon the mantel might have seemed to be just a dish — just a glazed dish with a vivid pattern — but to Darrell’s eye, trained both in the science and appreciation of pottery, antique as well as modern, it marked itself at once for what it was: a genuine Gubbio for such as which collectors wrangled among themselves to add to their collections.
He surveyed it close, then some distance off, taking in every detail of its shape and pattern; then he turned from the mantel. His words were the words of an enthusiast.
“Miss Thorne, pardon my abrupt leaving of the subject on which I called, but when I glimpsed upon your mantel a copy of the ‘Child and Tree,’ I confess I quite lost my interest for the moment in the business which brought me here. I knew that it was either a Gubbio — or a mighty unusual imitation of one. May I request the favor of inspecting the opposite side of the plate?”
Across the girl’s eyes flashed a look which held in it something which savored for the first time of distrust for her visitor. Darrell caught it instantly and smiled.
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p; “Pray don’t be alarmed at my actions, Miss Thorne. I’ll get back to earth in a minute and be just Jeffrey Darrell of the Call.”
At his mention of his reportorial connections the look of suspicion on her face wavered, then her lips broke into a smile.
“Very well,” she said. “Look it over all you wish, Mr. Darrell.”
In silence he removed the plate from the mantel and turned it over. With the eye of the connoisseur he inspected the tiny markings comprising the signature on the back, then laid the plate reverently back in its place on the mantel so that, as before, it was held from slipping by the tiny block of wood glued to the mantel itself.
“I take it, Miss Thorne, that you’re fully aware that you have a genuine Gubbio there?”
She gazed quizzically at him.
“It has been appraised,’ she said, “by an expert who is well versed in commercial values as being worth two thousand five hundred dollars. While, as you yourself know, there are thousands of Gubbios there are only three of the ‘Child and Tree.’ One, broken into a thousand pieces, is carefully mended and is in the possession of a Toronto collector. That one, broken as it is, has changed hands several times at figures around nine hundred dollars. The second ‘Child and Tree,’ a perfect one like my own, is in a museum in Memphis, Tennessee. For that one the museum trustees paid two thousand five hundred dollars in cash. And mine here, also perfect, is the third of that trio.”
“Then with a difference in value between two thousand five hundred dollars as a perfect Gubbio,” Darrell commented, “and nine hundred dollars as a reconstructed one, it will behoove you to hold it very tightly when you handle it, Miss Thorpe. If ever you drop it — well — it will be a one-thousand-six-hundred-dollar crash, will it not?”
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