by Otto Penzler
Armiston nodded gloomily. The very thought of her now sent him into a cold sweat.
“Mr. Godahl, the obliging,” continued the deputy, “notes one thing to begin with: The house cannot be entered from the outside. So it must be an inside job. How can this be accomplished? Well, there is the deaf butler. Why is he deaf? Godahl ponders. Ha! He has it! The Wentworths are so dependent on servants that they must have them round at all times. This butler is the one who is constantly about them. They are worried to death by their possession of this white ruby. Their house has been raided from the inside a dozen times. Nothing is taken, mind you. They suspect their servants. This thing haunts them, but the woman will not give up this foolish bauble. So she has as her major domo a man who cannot understand a word in any language unless he is looking at the speaker and is in a bright light. He can only understand the lips. Handy, isn’t it? In a dull light or with their backs turned they can talk about anything they want to. This is a jewel of a butler.
“But,” added Byrnes, “one day a man calls. He is a lawyer. He tells the butler he is heir to a fortune—fifty thousand dollars. He must go to Ireland to claim it. Your friend on the train—he is the man of course—sends your butler to Ireland. So this precious butler is lost. They must have another. Only a deaf one will do. And they find just the man they want—quite accidentally, you understand. Of course it is Godahl, with forged letters saying he has been in service in great houses. Presto! The great Godahl himself is now the butler. It is simple enough to play deaf. You say this is fiction. Let me tell you this: Six weeks ago the Wentworths actually changed butlers. That hasn’t come out in the papers yet.”
Armiston, who had listened to the deputy’s review of his story listlessly, now sat up with a start. He suddenly exclaimed gleefully:
“But my story didn’t come out till two days ago!”
“Ah, yes; but you forget that it has been in the hands of your publishers for three months. A man who was clever enough to dupe the great Armiston wouldn’t shirk the task of getting hold of a proof of that story.”
Armiston sank deeper into his chair.
“Once Godahl got inside the house the rest was simple. He corrupted one of the servants. He opened the steel-lined door with the flame of an oxyacetylene blast. As you say in your story that flame cuts steel like wax; he didn’t have to bother about the lock. He simply cut the door down. Then he put his confederate in good humor by telling him to fill his pockets with the diamonds and other junk in the safe, which he obligingly opens. One thing bothers me, Armiston. How did you find out about that infernal contraption that killed the confederate?”
Armiston buried his face in his hands. Byrnes rudely shook him.
“Come,” he said; “you murdered that man, though you are innocent. Tell me how.”
“Is this the third degree?” said Armiston.
“It looks like it,” said the deputy grimly as he gnawed at his stubby mustache. Armiston drew a long breath, like one who realizes how hopeless is his situation. He began to speak in a low tone. All the while the deputy glared at Godahl’s inventor with his accusing eye.
“When I was sitting in the treasure room with the Wentworths and my wife, playing auction bridge, I dismissed the puzzle of the door as easily solved by means of the brazing flame. The problem was not to get into the house or into this room, but to find the ruby. It was not in the safe.”
“No, of course not. I suppose your friend on the train was kind enough to tell you that. He had probably looked there himself.”
“Gad! He did tell me that, come to think of it. Well, I studied that room. I was sure the white ruby, if it really existed, was within ten feet of me. I examined the floor, the ceiling, the walls. No result. But,” he said, shivering as if in a draft of cold air, “there was a chest in that room made of Lombardy oak.” The harassed author buried his face in his hands. “Oh, this is terrible!” he moaned.
“Go on,” said the deputy in his colorless voice.
“I can’t. I tell it all in the story, Heaven help me!”
“I know you tell it all in the story,” came the rasping voice of Byrnes; “but I want you to tell it to me. I want to hear it from your own lips—as Armiston, you understand, whose deviltry has just killed a man; not as your damnable Godahl.”
“The chest was not solid oak,” went on Armiston. “It was solid steel covered with oak to disguise it.”
“How did you know that?”
“I had seen it before.”
“Where?”
“In Italy fifteen years ago, in a decayed castle, back through the Soldini pass from Lugano. It was the possession of an old nobleman, a friend of a friend of mine.”
“Humph!” grunted the deputy. And then: “Well, how did you know it was the same one?”
“By the inscription carved on the front. It was—but I have told all this in print already. Why need I go over it all again?”
“I want to hear it again from your own lips. Maybe there are some points you did not tell in print. Go on!”
“The inscription was ‘Sanctus Dominus.’ ”
The deputy smiled grimly.
“Very fitting, I should say. Praise the Lord with the most diabolical engine of destruction I have ever seen.”
“And then,” said Armiston, “there was the owner’s name—‘Arno Petronii.’ Queer name that.”
“Yes,” said the deputy dryly. “How did you hit on this as the receptacle for the white ruby?”
“If it were the same one I saw in Lugano—and I felt sure it was—it was certain death to attempt to open it—that is, for one who did not know how. Such machines were common enough in the Middle Ages. There was an obvious way to open it. It was meant to be obvious. To open it that way was inevitable death. It released tremendous springs that crushed anything within a radius of five feet. You saw that?”
“I did,” said the deputy, and he shuddered as he spoke. Then, bringing his fierce face within an inch of the cowering Armiston, he said:
“You knew the secret spring by which that safe could be opened as simply as a shoebox, eh?”
Armiston nodded his head.
“But Godahl did not,” he said. “Having recognized this terrible chest,” went on the author, “I guessed it must be the hiding-place of the jewel—for two reasons: In the first place Mrs. Wentworth had avoided showing it to us. She passed it by as a mere bit of curious furniture. Second, it was too big to go through the door or any one of the windows. They must have gone to the trouble of taking down the wall to get that thing in there. Something of a task, too, considering it weighs about two tons.”
“You didn’t bring out that point in your story.”
“Didn’t I? I fully intended to.”
“Maybe,” said the deputy, watching his man sharply, “it so impressed your friend who paid your carfare to New Haven that he clipped it out of the manuscript when he borrowed it.”
“There is no humor in this affair, sir, if you will pardon me,” said Armiston.
“That is quite true. Go ahead.”
“The rest you know. Godahl, in my story—the thief in real life—had to sacrifice a life to open that chest. So he corrupted a small kitchen servant, filling his pockets with these other jewels, and told him to touch the spring.”
“You murdered that man in cold blood,” said the deputy, rising and pacing the floor. “The poor deluded devil, from the looks of what’s left of him, never let out a whimper, never knew what hit him. Here, take some more of this brandy. Your nerves are in a bad way.”
“What I can’t make out is this,” said Armiston after a time. “There was a million dollars’ worth of stuff in that room that could have been put into a quart measure. Why did not this thief, who was willing to go to all the trouble to get the white ruby, take some of the jewels? Nothing is missing besides the white ruby, as I understand it. Is there?”
“No,” said the deputy. “Not a thing. Here comes a messenger boy.”
“For Mr
. Armiston? Yes,” he said to the entering maid. The boy handed him a package for which the deputy signed.
“This is for you,” he said, turning to Armiston as he closed the door. “Open it.”
When the package was opened the first object to greet their eyes was a roll of bills.
“This grows interesting,” said Byrnes. He counted the money. “Thirty-nine dollars. Your friend evidently is returning the money he stole from you at the station. What does he have to say for himself? I see there is a note.”
He reached over and took the paper out of Armiston’s hands. It was ordinary bond stationery, with no identifying marks of any consequence. The note was written in bronze ink, in a careful copperplate hand, very small and precise. It read:
“Most Excellency Sir: Herewith, most honored dollars I am dispatching complete. Regretful extremely of sad blood being not to be prevented. Accept trifle from true friend.”
That was all.
“There’s a jeweler’s box,” said Byrnes. “Open it.”
Inside the box was a lozenge-shaped diamond about the size of a little fingernail. It hung from a tiny bar of silver, highly polished and devoid of ornament. On the back under the clasp-pin were several microscopic characters.
—
There were several obvious clues to be followed—the messenger boy, the lawyers who induced the deaf butler to go to Ireland on what later proved to be a wild-goose chase, the employment agency through which the new butler had been secured, and so on. But all of these avenues proved too respectable to yield results. Deputy Byrnes had early arrived at his own conclusions, by virtue of the knowledge he had gained as government agent, yet to appease the popular indignation he kept up a desultory search for the criminal.
It was natural that Armiston should think of his friend Johanssen at this juncture. Johanssen possessed that wonderful oriental capacity of aloofness which we Westerners are so ready to term indifference or lack of curiosity.
“No, I thank you,” said Johanssen. “I’d rather not mix in.”
The pleadings of the author were in vain. His words fell on deaf ears.
“If you will not lift a hand because of your friendship for me,” said Armiston bitterly, “then think of the law. Surely there is something due justice, when both robbery and bloody murder have been committed!”
“Justice!” cried Johanssen in scorn. “Justice, you say! My friend, if you steal from me, and I reclaim by force that which is mine, is that injustice? If you cannot see the idea behind that, surely, then, I cannot explain it to you.”
“Answer one question,” said Armiston. “Have you any idea who the man was I met on the train?”
“For your own peace of mind—yes. As a clue leading to what you so glibly term justice—pshaw! Tonight’s sundown would be easier for you to catch than this man if I know him. Mind you, Armiston, I do not know. But I believe. Here is what I believe:
“In a dozen courts of kings and petty princelings that I know of in the East there are Westerners retained as advisers—fiscal agents they usually call them. Usually they are American or English, or occasionally German.
“Now I ask you a question. Say that you were in the hire of a heathen prince, and a grievous wrong were done that prince, say, by a thoughtless woman who had not the least conception of the beauty of an idea she had outraged. Merely for the possession of a bauble, valueless to her except to appease vanity, she ruthlessly rode down a superstition that was as holy to this prince as your own belief in Christ is to you. What would you do?”
Without waiting for Armiston to answer, Johanssen went on:
“I know a man——You say this man you met on the train had wonderful hands, did he not? Yes, I thought so. Armiston, I know a man who would not sit idly by and smile to himself over the ridiculous fuss occasioned by the loss of an imperfect stone—off color, badly cut, and everything else. Neither would he laugh at the superstition behind it. He would say to himself: ‘This superstition is older by several thousand years than I or my people.’ And this man, whom I know, is brave enough to right that wrong himself if his underlings failed.”
“I follow,” said Armiston dully.
“But,” said Johanssen, leaning forward and tapping the author on the knee—“but the task proves too big for him. What did he do? He asked the cleverest man in the world to help him. And Godahl helped him. That,” said Johanssen, interrupting Armiston with a raised finger, “is the story of the white ruby. ‘The Story of the White Ruby’ you see, is something infinitely finer than mere vulgar robbery and murder, as the author of the Infallible Godahl conceived it.”
Johanssen said a great deal more. In the end he took the lozenge-shaped diamond pendant and put the glass on the silver bar, that his friend might see the inscription on the back. He told him what the inscription signified—“Brother of a King,” and, furthermore, how few men alive possessed the capacity for brotherhood.
“I think,” said Armiston as he was about to take his leave, “that I will travel in the Straits this winter.”
“If you do,” said Johanssen, “I earnestly advise you to leave your Godahl and his decoration at home.”
Villain: The Cisco Kid
The Caballero’s Way
O. HENRY
IN “THE CABALLERO’S WAY,” O. Henry, the pseudonym of William Sydney Porter (1862–1910), created a character who went on to become a beloved figure in motion pictures, radio, television, comic books, and comic strips, undergoing a major change from his original incarnation. The Cisco Kid is not a heroic figure in this short story, but the exact opposite, a killer and multiple murderer who is transformed in the first film, In Old Arizona (1929), into a sartorial, dressed-all-in-black, turn-of-the-century Mexican hero who captures outlaws and rescues damsels in distress. Warner Baxter won the Best Actor Oscar, the second ever given, for his portrayal of the Cisco Kid. There were multiple films about him, plus 156 half-hour television programs (among the first to be shot in color) between 1950 and 1956. He was played by Duncan Renaldo; his sidekick, Pancho (a character not in the original story), was played for comic effect by Leo Carrillo.
As O. Henry, Porter wrote approximately six hundred short stories that once were as critically acclaimed as they were popular. Often undervalued today because of their sentimentality, many nonetheless remain iconic and familiar, notably such classics as “The Gift of the Magi,” “The Furnished Room,” “A Retrieved Reformation” (better known for its several stage and film versions as Alias Jimmy Valentine), and “The Ransom of Red Chief.” The O. Henry Prize Stories, a prestigious annual anthology of the year’s best short stories named in his honor, has been published since 1919.
“The Caballero’s Way” was originally published in the July 1907 issue of Everybody’s; it was first published in book form in O. Henry’s Heart of the West (New York, McClure, 1907).
THE CABALLERO’S WAY
O. Henry
THE CISCO KID had killed six men in more or less fair scrimmages, had murdered twice as many (mostly Mexicans), and had winged a larger number whom he modestly forbore to count. Therefore a woman loved him.
The Kid was twenty-five, looked twenty; and a careful insurance company would have estimated the probable time of his demise at, say, twenty-six. His habitat was anywhere between the Frio and the Rio Grande. He killed for the love of it—because he was quick-tempered—to avoid arrest—for his own amusement—any reason that came to his mind would suffice. He had escaped capture because he could shoot five-sixths of a second sooner than any sheriff or ranger in the service, and because he rode a speckled roan horse that knew every cow-path in the mesquite and pear thickets from San Antonio to Matamoras.
Tonia Perez, the girl who loved the Cisco Kid, was half Carmen, half Madonna, and the rest—oh, yes, a woman who is half Carmen and half Madonna can always be something more—the rest, let us say, was humming-bird. She lived in a grass-roofed jacal near a little Mexican settlement at the Lone Wolf Crossing of the Frio. With her lived a
father or grandfather, a lineal Aztec, somewhat less than a thousand years old, who herded a hundred goats and lived in a continuous drunken dream from drinking mescal. Back of the jacal a tremendous forest of bristling pear, twenty feet high at its worst, crowded almost to its door. It was along the bewildering maze of this spinous thicket that the speckled roan would bring the Kid to see his girl. And once, clinging like a lizard to the ridge-pole, high up under the peaked grass roof, he had heard Tonia, with her Madonna face and Carmen beauty and humming-bird soul, parley with the sheriff’s posse, denying knowledge of her man in her soft melange of Spanish and English.
One day the adjutant-general of the State, who is, ex officio, commander of the ranger forces, wrote some sarcastic lines to Captain Duval of Company X, stationed at Laredo, relative to the serene and undisturbed existence led by murderers and desperadoes in the said captain’s territory.
The captain turned the colour of brick dust under his tan, and forwarded the letter, after adding a few comments, per ranger Private Bill Adamson, to ranger Lieutenant Sandridge, camped at a water hole on the Nueces with a squad of five men in preservation of law and order.
Lieutenant Sandridge turned a beautiful couleur de rose through his ordinary strawberry complexion, tucked the letter in his hip pocket, and chewed off the ends of his gamboge moustache.
The next morning he saddled his horse and rode alone to the Mexican settlement at the Lone Wolf Crossing of the Frio, twenty miles away.
Six feet two, blond as a Viking, quiet as a deacon, dangerous as a machine gun, Sandridge moved among the jacales, patiently seeking news of the Cisco Kid.
Far more than the law, the Mexicans dreaded the cold and certain vengeance of the lone rider that the ranger sought. It had been one of the Kid’s pastimes to shoot Mexicans “to see them kick”: if he demanded from them moribund Terpsichorean feats, simply that he might be entertained, what terrible and extreme penalties would be certain to follow should they anger him! One and all they lounged with upturned palms and shrugging shoulders, filling the air with “quien sabes” and denials of the Kid’s acquaintance.
