The Mystery & Suspense Novella

by Fletcher Flora

  The gray on the horizon, which had been becoming alarmingly pale the last few moments as he stared at it, now undeniably was spread with purple and pink from behind the water’s edge. Decide he must, he knew, within a very few minutes or the rising sun would find him as faltering in his mind as he was the night before when he had given himself till daybreak to form his decision. The sportsman shut his teeth determinedly. No matter how fruitless the hours of darkness when he had matched mercy with vengeance; no matter how hopeless he had found it during the earlier moments of that slow December dawn to say whether he would recognize that his young friend had merely taken the law into his own hands and done bare justice, and therefore the past could be left buried, or whether he must return retribution upon that young man and bring back all that hidden and forgotten past—all was no matter; he must decide now within five minutes. For it was a sportsman’s compact he had made with himself to rise with the sun and act one way or the other, and he kept compacts with himself as obstinately and as unflinchingly as a man must who has lived decently a long life alone, without any employment or outside discipline.

  Now the great, crimson aurora shooting up into the sky warned him that day was close upon him; now the semi-circle of gray waters was bisected by a broad and blood red pathway; now white darts at the aurora’s center foretold the coming of the sun. He swung his feet out of bed and sat up—a stalwart, rosy, obstinate old man, his thick, white, wiry hair touseled in his indecision—and, reaching over swiftly, snatched up a loose coin which lay with his watch and keys upon the table beside his bed.

  “I’ll give him equal chances anyway,” he satisfied himself as he sat on the edge of the bed with the coin in his hands. “Tails, he goes free, but heads, he—hangs!”

  Then waiting for the first direct gleam of the sun to give him his signal, he spun it and put his bare foot upon it as it twirled upon the floor.

  “Heads!” He removed his foot and looked at it without stooping. He pushed his feet into the slippers beside his bed, threw his dressing-gown over his shoulders, went directly to the telephone and called up the North Side Police Station.

  “I want you to arrest Jim Tyler—James Tyler at the Alden Club at once!” he commanded abruptly. “Yes; that’s it. What charge? What do I care what charge you arrest him on—auto speeding—anything you want—only get him!” The old sportsman spoke with even sharper brevity than usual. “Look him up and I’ll come with my charges against him soon enough. See here; do you know who this is, speaking? This is Steve Sheppard. Ask your Captain Crowley whether I have to swear to a warrant at this time in the morning to have a man arrested. All right!

  “That starts it!” he recognized grimly to himself, as he slammed down the receiver. The opposition at the police station had given the needed drive to his determination. “Now I’ll follow it through. Beginning with that fellow—Trant,” he recollected, as he found upon his desk the memorandum which he had made the night before, in case he should decide this way.

  “Mr. Trant; you got my note of last night?” he said, a little less sharply, after he had called the number noted as Trant’s room address at his club. “I am Stephen Sheppard—brother of the late Neal Sheppard. I have a criminal case and—as I wrote you I might—I want your help at once. If you leave your rooms immediately, I will call for you at your office before eight; I want you to meet a train with me at eight-thirty. Very well!”

  He rang for his man, then, to order his motor and to tell him to bring coffee and rolls to his room, which he gulped down while he dressed. Fifteen minutes later he jumped onto the front seat of his car, displacing the chauffeur, and himself drove the car rapidly down town.

  A crisp, sharp breeze blew in upon them from the lake, scattering dry, rare flakes of snow. It was a clear, perfect day for the first of December in Chicago. But Stephen Sheppard was oblivious to it. In the northern woods beyond the Canada boundary line the breeze would be sharper and cleaner that day and smell less of the streets and—it was the very height of his hunting season for big game in those woods! Up there he would still have been shooting, but as the papers had put it, “the woods had taken their toll” again this year, and his brother’s life had been part of that toll.

  “Neal Sheppard’s Body Found in the Woods!” He read the headlines in the paper which the boy thrust into his face, and he slowed the car at the Rush Street bridge. “Victim of Stray Shot Being Brought to Chicago.” Well! That was the way it was known! Stephen Sheppard released his brake, with a jerk; crossed the bridge and, eight minutes later, brought up the car with a sharper shock before the First National Bank Building.

  He had never met the man he had come to see—had heard of him only through startling successes in the psychological detection of crime with which this comparative youth, fresh from the laboratory of a university and using methods new to the criminals and their pursuers alike, had startled the public and the wiser heads of the police. But finding the door to Trant’s office on the twelfth floor standing open, and the psychologist himself taking off his things, Sheppard first stared over the stocky, red-haired youth, and then clicked his tongue with satisfaction.

  “It’s lucky you’re early, Mr. Trant,” he approved bluffly. “There is short enough time as it is, before we meet the train.” He had glanced at the clock as he spoke, and pulled off his gloves without ceremony. “You look like what I expected—what I’d heard you were. Now—you know me?”

  “By reputation, at least, Mr. Sheppard,” Trant replied. “There has been enough in the papers these last two weeks, and as you spoke of yourself over the telephone just now as the brother of the late Neal Sheppard, I suppose this morning’s report is correct. That is, your brother has finally been found in the woods—dead?”

  “So you’ve been following it, have you?”

  “Only in the papers. I saw, of course, that Mr. Neal Sheppard was missing from your hunting party in Northern Ontario two weeks ago,” Trant replied. “I saw that you had been unable to find him and had given him up for drowned in one of the lakes or dead in the woods, and therefore you had come home the first of the week to tell his daughter. Then this morning I saw Mr. Chapin and your guide, whom you had left to keep up the search, had reported they found him—killed, apparently, by a stray shot.”

  “I see. I told Chapin to give that out till he saw me, no matter how he found him.” Sheppard tossed his fur cap upon Trant’s flat-topped desk before him and slapped his heavy gloves, one after the other, beside it.

  “You mean that you have private information that your brother was not shot accidentally?” Trant leaned over his desk intently.

  “Exactly. But I’ve not come to mince matters with you, Trant. He was murdered, man,—murdered!”

  “Murdered? I understand then!” Trant straightened back.

  “No, you don’t,” his client contradicted bluntly. “I haven’t come to ask you to find the murderer for me. I named him to the police and ordered his arrest before I called you this morning. He is Jim Tyler; and, as I know he was at his club, they must have him by this time. There’s mighty little psychology in this case, Trant. But if I’m going to hang young Jim, I’m going to hang him quick—for it’s not a pleasant job; and I have called for you merely to hear the proofs that Chapin and the Indian are bringing—they’ve sent word only that it is murder, as I suspected—so that when we put those proofs into the hands of the state’s attorney, they can finish Jim quick—and be done with it!”

  “Tyler?” Trant leaned quickly toward his client again, not trying now to conceal his surprise. “Young Tyler, your shooting-mate and your partner in the new Sheppard-Tyler Gun Company?”

  “Yes, Tyler,” the other returned brusquely, but rising as he spoke, and turning his back upon the pretext of closing the transom. “My shooting-mate for the last three years and I guess he’s rather more than my partner in the gun company; for, to tell the truth, it was for him I put up the money to s
tart the business. And there are more reasons than that for making me want to let him go—though he shot my brother. But those reasons—I decided this morning—are not enough this late in the day! So I decided also to hold back nothing—to keep back nothing of what’s behind this crime, whoever it hurts! I said I haven’t come to mince matters with you, Trant. Well—I shan’t!”

  He turned back from the transom, and glanced once more swiftly at the clock.

  “I shall be very glad to go over the evidence for you, Mr. Sheppard,” Trant acquiesced, following the older man’s glance; “and as you have come here half an hour before we need start to meet the train—”

  “Just so,” the other interrupted bluntly. “I am here to tell you as much as I am able before we meet the others. That’s why I asked you if you knew me. So now—exactly how much do you know about me, Trant?”

  “I know you are a wealthy man—a large holder of real estate, the papers say, which has advanced greatly in value; and I know—this is from the papers too—that you belong to a coterie of men who have grown up with the city,—old settlers of thirty years’ standing.”

  “Quite right. Neal and I came here broke—without a cent, to pick up what we could in Chicago after the fire. And we made our fortunes then, easy—or easily, as I’ve learned to say now,” he smiled to himself grimly, “by buying up lots about the city when they were cheap and everybody scared and selling them for a song, and we had only to hold them until they made us rich. I am now a rich old bachelor, Trant, hunting in season and trap-shooting out, and setting up Jim Tyler in the gun business between times. The worst that was said about Neal was his drinking and bad temper; for Leigh, his daughter, goes as well as anybody else in her circle; and even young Jim Tyler has the run of a dozen clubs. That’s all good, respectable and satisfactory, isn’t it? And is that all you know?”

  “That’s all,” replied Trant curtly.

  “Never heard of Sheppard’s White Palace, did you? Don’t know that when you speak to one of those old boys of thirty years ago—the coterie, you called them—about Mr. Stephen Sheppard, the thought that comes into his head is, ‘Oh! you mean Steve Sheppard, the gambler!’ Thirty years ago, more or less, we were making our money to buy those lots in a liquor palace and gambling hell—Neal and I and Jim Tyler’s father—old Jim.”

  “There were more than just Neal and old Tyler and me, though,” he burst on, pacing the length of the rug beside Trant’s desk and not looking at his consultant at all. “There were the Findlays besides—Enoch, who was up in the woods with us, he gets his picture in the paper every six months or so for paying a thousand dollars for a thousand-year-old cent piece; and Enoch’s brother, and Chapin, whom we’re going to meet in a few minutes. We ran a square game—as square as any; understand that! But we had every other devilment that comes even to a square gambling house in a wide open town—fights, suicide, and—murder.”

  He broke off, meeting Trant’s quick and questioning glance for a fraction of an instant with a steely glitter of his gray-green eyes.

  “Sure—murder!” he repeated with rougher defiance. “Men shot themselves and, a good deal oftener, shot each other in our house or somewhere else, on account of what went on there. But we got things passed up a deal easier in those days, and we seldom bothered ourselves about a little shooting till—well, the habit spread to us. I mean, one night one of us—Len Findlay it was—was shot under conditions that made it certain that one of us other five—Tyler, or Chapin, or Enoch Findlay, his brother, or Neal, or I, must have shot him. You see, a pleasant thing to drop into our happy family! Made it certain only to us, of course; we got it passed up as a suicide with the police. And that wasn’t all; for as soon afterward as it was safe to have another ‘suicide,’ old Jim Tyler was shot; and this time we knew it was either Enoch Findlay or—I told you I wouldn’t mince matters—or Neal. That broke up the game and the partnership—”

  “Wait, wait!” Trant interrupted. “Do you mean me to understand that your brother shot Tyler?”

  “I mean you to understand just what I said,” the old man’s straight lips closed tightly under his short white mustache; “for I’ve seen too much trouble come out of just words to be careless with them. Either Enoch or Neal shot Jim; I don’t know which.”

  “In retaliation, because he thought Tyler had shot Len Findlay?”

  “Perhaps; but I never thought so, and I don’t think so now,” Sheppard returned decisively. “For old Jim Tyler was the least up to that sort of thing of any of us—a tongue-tied, inoffensive old fellow—and he was dealer in our games; but outside of that Jim didn’t have nerve enough to handle his own money. But for some reason Neal seemed sure it was old Jim who had shot Len, and he made Enoch Findlay believe it, too. So, no matter who actually fired the bullet, it was Neal. Well, it was up to me to look after old Jim’s widow and his boy. That was necessary; for after Jim was dead, I found a funny thing. He had taken his share with the rest of us in the profits of the game; and the rest of us were getting rich by that time—for we weren’t any of us gamblers; not in the way of playing it back into the game, that is; but though I had always supposed that Jim was buying his land like the rest—and his widow told me so, too—I found nothing when he was dead!”

  “But you implied just now,” Trant put in again quickly, “that Tyler might have had someone else investing for him. Did you look into that at the time?”

  “Yes; I asked them all, but no one knew anything. But we’re coming to that,” the old man answered impatiently. “I wanted you to see how it was that I began to look after young Jim and take an interest in him and do things for him till—till he became what he was to me. Neal never liked my looking after the boy from the first; we quarreled about it time and again, and especially after young Jim began growing up and Neal’s girl was growing up, too; and a year or so ago, when he began seeing that Leigh was caring for young Jim more than for anyone else, in spite of what he said, Neal hated the boy worse. He forbade him his house; and he did a good many other things against him, and the reason for all of it even I couldn’t make out until this last hunt.”

  The old sportsman stood still now, picked up his fur cap and thoughtfully began drawing on his big gloves.

  “We had gone up this year, as of course you know from the papers, into the Ontario reserve, just north of the Temagami region, for deer and moose. The season is good there, but short, closing the middle of November. Then we were going to cross into Quebec where the season stays till January. Young Jim Tyler wasn’t with us, for this hunt was a sort of exclusive fixture just for the old ones, Neal and I, Findlay and Chapin. But this time, the second day in camp, young Jim Tyler comes running in upon us—or rather, in on me, for I was the only one in camp that day, laid up with a bad ankle. He had his gun with him, one of our new Sheppard-Tylers which we were all trying out for the first time this year. But he hadn’t followed us for moose. He’d come to see Neal. For the people that had bought his father’s old house had been tearing it down to make room for a business building, and they’d found some papers between the floors which they’d given to young Jim, and that was what sent him after us, hot after Neal. He showed them to me; and I understood.

  “You see, the only real objection that Neal had been able to keep against young Jim was that he was a pauper—penniless but for me. And these papers Jim had were notes and memorandum which showed why Jim was a pauper and who had made him that, and how Neal himself had got the better half of old Jim’s best properties. For the papers were private notes and memoranda of money that old Jim Tyler had given Neal to invest in land for him; among them a paper in Neal’s writing acknowledging old Jim’s half interest in Neal’s best lots. Then there were some personal memorandum of Tyler’s stuck with these, part of which we couldn’t make out, except that it had to do with the shooting of Len Findlay; but the rest was clear—showed clear that, just before he was shot, old Jim Tyler had become afraid of Neal an
d was trying to make him convert his papers into regular titles and take his things out of Neal’s hands.

  “I saw, of course, that young Jim must know everything then; so the only thing I could do was to stop him from hunting up Neal that morning and in that mood with a gun in his hand. But he laughed at me; said I ought to know he hadn’t come to kill Leigh’s father, but only to force a different understanding then and there; and his gun might come in handy—but he would keep his head as well as his gun. But he didn’t. For though he didn’t find Neal then, he came across Findlay and Chapin and blurted it all out to them, so that they stayed with him till he promised to go home, which he didn’t do either; for one of our Indians, coming up the trail early next morning with supplies, met him only half a dozen miles from camp. Jim said he’d laid up over night because of the snowstorm, but didn’t come back to camp because he didn’t want to see Neal after the promise he’d made. And there had been a big snow that night. Chapin and Findlay didn’t get in till all hours because of it; Chapin about eleven, Findlay not till near two, dead beat out from tramping through the new snow; and Neal—he never got in at all.

  “I stayed four days after that looking for Neal; but we couldn’t find him. Then I left Chapin with the Indians to keep on searching, while I came down, more to see Jim, you understand, than to break the news to Leigh. Jim admitted he’d stayed near camp till the next morning but denied he’d even seen Neal, and denied it so strongly that he fooled me into giving him the benefit of the doubt until last night; and then Chapin wired me they had found Neal’s body, and to meet them with a detective, as they have plain evidence against young Jim that he murdered my brother!”