The Big Book of Rogues and Villains

by Otto Penzler

  “ ’Twon’t take long,” said Hagan, trying to smile. “She’s my wife. The sickness took all we had. I—I kinder got behind in the rent and things. They were going to fire us out of here—tomorrow. And there wasn’t any money for the medicine, and—and the things she had to have. Maybe you wouldn’t have done it—but I did. I couldn’t see her dying there for the want of something a little money’d buy—and—and I couldn’t”—he caught his voice in a little sob—“I couldn’t see her thrown out on the street like that.”

  “And so,” said Jimmie Dale, “instead of putting old Isaac’s cash in the safe this evening when you locked up, you put it in your pocket instead—eh? Didn’t you know you’d get caught?”

  “What did it matter?” said the boy. He was twirling his misshappen hat between his fingers. “I knew they’d know it was me in the morning when old Isaac found it gone, because there wasn’t anybody else to do it. But I paid the rent for four months ahead tonight, and I fixed it so’s she’d have medicine and things to eat. I was going to beat it before daylight myself—I”—he brushed his hand hurriedly across his cheek—“I didn’t want to go—to leave her till I had to.”

  “Well, say”—there was wonderment in Jimmie Dale’s tones, and his English lapsed into ungrammatical, reassuring vernacular—“ain’t that queer! Say, I’m no detective. Gee, kid, did you think I was? Say, listen to this! I cracked old Isaac’s safe half an hour ago—and I guess there won’t be any idea going around that you got the money and I pulled a lemon. Say, I ain’t superstitious, but it looks like luck meant you to have another chance, don’t it?”

  The hat dropped from Hagan’s hands to the floor, and he swayed a little.

  “You—you ain’t a dick!” he stammered. “Then how’d you know about me and my name when you found the safe empty? Who told you?”

  A wry grimace spread suddenly over Jimmie Dale’s face beneath the mask, and he swallowed hard. Jimmie Dale would have given a good deal to have been able to answer that question himself.

  “Oh, that!” said Jimmie Dale. “That’s easy—I knew you worked there. Say, it’s the limit, ain’t it? Talk about your luck being in, why all you’ve got to do is to sit tight and keep your mouth shut, and you’re safe as a church. Only say, what are you going to do about the money, now you’ve got a four months’ start and are kind of landed on your feet?”

  “Do?” said the boy. “I’ll pay it back, little by little. I meant to. I ain’t no—” He stopped abruptly.

  “Crook,” supplied Jimmie Dale pleasantly. “Spit it right out, kid; you won’t hurt my feelings none. Well, I’ll tell you—you’re talking the way I like to hear you—you pay that back, slide it in without his knowing it, a bit at a time, whenever you can, and you’ll never hear a yip out of me; but if you don’t, why it kind of looks as though I have a right to come down your street and get my share or know the reason why—eh?”

  “Then you never get any share,” said Hagan, with a catch in his voice. “I pay it back as fast as I can.”

  “Sure,” said Jimmie Dale. “That’s right—that’s what I said. Well, so long—Hagan.” And Jimmie Dale had opened the door and slipped outside.

  An hour later, in his dressing room in his house on Riverside Drive, Jimmie Dale was removing his coat as the telephone, a hand instrument on the table, rang. Jimmie Dale glanced at it—and leisurely proceeded to remove his vest. Again the telephone rang. Jimmie Dale took off his curious, pocketed leather belt—as the telephone repeated its summons. He picked out the little drill he had used a short while before, and inspected it critically—feeling its point with his thumb, as one might feel a razor’s blade. Again the telephone rang insistently. He reached languidly for the receiver, took it off its hook, and held it to his ear.

  “Hello!” said Jimmie Dale, with a sleepy yawn. “Hello! Hello! Why the deuce don’t you yank a man out of bed at two o’clock in the morning and have done with it, and—eh? Oh, that you, Carruthers?”

  “Yes,” came Carruthers’s voice excitedly. “Jimmie, listen—listen! The Gray Seal’s come to life! He’s just pulled a break on West Broadway!”

  “Good Lord!” gasped Jimmie Dale. “You don’t say!”

  Villain: Lingo Dan

  The Dignity of Honest Labor

  PERCIVAL POLLARD

  LINGO DAN (1903), one of the rarest books in the mystery genre with no copy catalogued or auctioned in a half-century, is a collection of stories about an extremely unusual fictional character. Receiving his sobriquet because of the flowery language he uses, he is a hobo, thief, con man, and a shockingly cold-blooded murderer—extremely unusual for nineteenth-century crooks. Although Lingo Dan also proves himself to be a patriotic American with a deep streak of sentimentality, he remains an unpleasant fellow who nonetheless has a significant position in the history of the mystery story: the year of the first story and the subsequent book makes him the first serial criminal in American literature.

  Joseph Percival Pollard (1869–1911) was an important literary critic in his day, befriended both by Ambrose Bierce and H. L. Mencken. He wrote twelve books before his early death at the age of forty-two, but Lingo Dan was his only mystery. He was best known for his works of literary criticism, most successfully with Their Day in Court (1909).

  In his scholarly work The Detective Short Story: A Bibliography (1942), Ellery Queen (a collector and scholar of mystery fiction as well as a bestselling novelist) quotes from an inscribed copy of the book in which Pollard wrote: “I expect for [Lingo Dan] neither the success of Sherlock Holmes, Raffles, etc., nor yet the immunity from comparison with those gentlemen. Yet it is at least one thing the others are not: American.” Today, no one compares his character to those he cites, as Lingo Dan is an utterly forgotten figure in the literature of roguery.

  “The Dignity of Honest Labor” was first published in book form in Lingo Dan (Washington, D.C., Neale Publishing Co., 1903).

  THE DIGNITY OF HONEST LABOR

  Percival Pollard

  TO THE SOUND of the rattling husks being pulled from the yellow maize came the voice of Lingo Dan.

  “It is passing wonderful,” he said, “what a fascination your industry has for me, Billy! There is something so rare, so unusual, so bizarre, about it! Indeed, this past month or so—how quaint our lives have been. We have been engaged in honest toil——”

  “You, eh?” Billy grunted, and stuffed some husks into a sack so viciously that the sharp edges of the dry leaves cut his hand like a knife. “Yes, you have—like Hell!” He wiped the scarred hand across his hair.

  “My good Billy, you forget the ethic basis of the division of labor. It is true that yours has been of the hands—here is a handkerchief, Billy, to bind over that somewhat unsightly cut; a kerchief washed by Miss Mollie’s own fair hands, I dare say—while mine has been of the head. I have been planning our deliverance, Billy. Do you think these elaborations come to me of their own accord? You judge me too highly.” He stretched his legs out at full length, and, his hands clasped behind his head, stared out through a chink of the log-built crib. He sighed. From without came the monotonous buzzing of the cotton gin. “Why is it, Billy,” he went on, “that we can not find contentment in these peaceful ways of life? Think, Billy—to watch the white fluffs of cotton blossoming on one’s own land; to hear the wind whispering in the aisles of one’s own cornfield; to feel that just so much of fair fresh air and sunshine was one’s own—were it not pleasant?—I beg your pardon? Oh—really, Billy, your language is scarce academic. But you are right—we hardly seem the proper figures for that setting. We lack some atom of the elemental human; we are the victims of our versatilities.” For a time there was no sound save that of the savage ripping with which Billy denuded the ears of corn. Then the other spoke again, in a voice from which the abstract and the dreamy was suddenly absent. “You are sure we were not noticed that Sunday?”

  “Sure!” said Billy.

  “And that you have your part of the business well in mind?” />
  “Dead easy.”

  “Then it becomes merely a question as to how soon that coquette, Opportunity, chooses to beckon to us. Hush a moment, Billy! Yes, our friend, the Deacon, approaches.”

  Billy handed over a sack that was half full of the corn shucks. When the farmer whose hired men these two were opened the door of the crib and called them to dinner, Lingo Dan was husking the one ear of corn that had engaged his attention that day.

  When his daughter Mollie was setting the table for supper that evening, Sam Travis, familiar to the fellow members of his church as Deacon Travis, came in from the kitchen chuckling to himself. “Been a’figuring things out,” he said, “and dinged if the two of ’em’s done a speck more’n one man’s work o’ shucking that there corn! One man’s work—and we feeds the two of ’em. But the fact is I sort er reckin listening to the tall cuss is as good as reading a magazine. Ever know sech a gift o’ gab, Mollie?”

  “No. But he never learnt it on a farm!”

  “That’s right, too, Moll; but I ain’t a’going to make no man’s past lead me to the sin of curiosity, Moll—leastwise not in Texas. Ah—h! Wish your mother was alive to smell that cornbread o’ yours, Moll!”

  Molly smiled with pleasure. But as the others came in, and while she moved about serving the dishes, her face took on lines of pain. Presently her father noticed that she was making the merest pretence of eating. “Ain’t you well, Moll?” he asked.

  “One o’ my headaches, dad,” was the girl’s answer.

  “Too bad! An’ tomorrow Sunday! The first Sunday ’the month; an’ me not there to pass the plate!” Deacon Travis passed his cup for more tea, and sighed sadly.

  “I’m sorry, dad. Can’t you go without me?”

  “No—sir! Not much! Got to see to your having camphor on your forehead right along.”

  There was a coughing noise from Lingo Dan. “If you really find yourself unable to go, would it be asking too much, might the buggy be allowed to take my companion and myself to holy worship? It is—not often,” he paused and smiled wistfully at the Deacon, “that we have a chance.”

  Deacon Travis looked pleased. “Sure thing, you can have the team. Never thought you was given to churchgoing; might ’er asked you before. Sure you know the way?”

  “Perfectly; it is very kind of you.”

  When they were alone with each other once more, Deacon Travis remarked to his daughter that it was perhaps a sort of special Providence that had given her a headache, so that two thirsty souls might have an opportunity to drink of the spiritual waters of the Word. Which philosophic point of view, however, was not completely cheering to Miss Mollie herself.

  The little frame church, where the farmers of that region are wont to congregate every Sunday, stands on a slight lift of the prairie, where a narrow cross road leaves the North Road for the mountains. Nowhere else in the world would these hills be termed mountains; but here, contrasting vividly enough with the monotonous level of the prairie, they seem somehow to merit the title easily enough. Cedar-clad, these mountains make the horizon, at one point of the compass at least, green and fresh and picturesque. In the hot days, that are the rule in Texas, the shade of these cedars becomes a veritable oasis for travelers whose road takes them in that direction.

  And it may be possible that many of the good farm folk being driven churchward that bright, torrid Sunday morning, would have preferred, in their heart of hearts, the cool of the cedar mountains to the hot church benches. Still, if such thoughts came to them while the white dust skurried with and behind their wheels, they put them away again as speedily as possible. They felt that they had every right to be proud of having a church at all. There were communities, in the same county, and not such a vast distance away, either, that were as godless as they were unprosperous. To feel that their own congregation was one made up of well-to-do folk, and to drive through the fields that showed such bountiful harvests was to be glad, also, that they had had the grace, years ago, to call to them a clergyman from the East, to build a church, to support it in every fitting, and, frequently, many a magnificent way. Good fortune, or good judgment, had ordained that the Rev. Martin Dawson prove himself exactly the best pastor in the world for that community. He was an oldish man, not too much the doctrinarian, a pleasant companion personally, and popular not only with the members of his congregation, but with the Eastern folk he had left when coming to Texas. His popularity, and the pleasant manner of his life reacted happily upon his congregation in another direction. After his old college chum, the Rev. James Langan, had paid him a visit some years ago, such glowing reports had been taken back East that thereafter this little Texas farm community had constantly the advantage of hearing many really admirable preachers in their little church. When their good pastor arose as the services opened, and introduced to them his “brother in the Lord” from say Hartford, and there followed a sermon as eloquent as occurs in the towns only where the pew rents are based on such incomes as millionaires have, these good people were no longer surprised. They listened, with interest and gratitude, and thanked fortune once more for giving them such a pastor. As for the visiting clergymen, such visits to their old friend Dawson were by way of holiday. That none of these visitors were the kind that might attempt any discourse tinctured with indoor rather than outdoor theology, was a point rigorously watched by Mr. Dawson.

  The Rev. Martin Dawson was a bachelor. Alone with an old servant, who now acted as sexton, verger, and church warden rolled into one, he lived in a small house some two miles from the church, on the road that eventually passed Sam Travis’s farm. Every Sunday morning these two old people betook themselves with surplice and sermon into the little road wagon, and allowed a lazy, easy-going grey mare to convey them leisurely to church. Then followed the duties of the day; the minister prayed and preached, his servant took up the collection. There were some moments in which the minister, his surplice laid aside, chatted cheerily with the members of his congregation, refusing, perhaps, many an invitation to dinner, and then home again, behind the grey mare to convey them leisurely to church. Frequently, to be sure, there was the clerical visitor also; and once or twice it had happened that the visitor had come alone with the old servant, the Rev. Dawson being heir to a gout that, at times, took him quite off his feet.

  As the many vehicles of various shapes and capacities came bowling along the dusty roads that approached the church from the different points of the compass, one young farmer with sharper eyes than most people have, identified a buggy that was coming at right angles to his own.

  “There’s the Travis rig,” he remarked to his wife.

  “Mollie’s been promising me a recipe for putting up Alexandrias; I hope to goodness she ain’t forgot it today.”

  “I reckon,” he went on, “you’ll have to wait for that recipe. It’s the Travis rig, but it ain’t the folks. Looks more like some of parson’s friends.”

  “Shaw—I’m sorry! One of Moll’s headaches, I guess.” And they drove on, joggedly.

  In the Travis buggy, Lingo Dan was discoursing on the curious inconsistencies in human nature.

  “A dear old soul, that parson! Eh, Billy—a dear old soul! But only human, after all. No strength of spiritual warp can break the bonds imposed by such coarse creature things as—as ourselves. I hardly think it likely he can break that rope unaided. And as for the partner of the righteous household, I believe you corded him up pretty securely, didn’t you, Billy? Yes, I think we may be sure they are safely fettered for a while. Quite allegorical, this act of ours, Billy; do you not note the allegory? The fetters of the flesh—fetters of the flesh; if your education, Billy, had not been shamefully neglected, you would find many a Sunday school memory in that dear old phrase: The fetters of the flesh. In a measure I regret that force was necessary. A crude thing, after all, is force. If one had been able to obtain their promises, their holy oaths—how much finer, how much more of the age of Honor! But that—that was impossible. A dear old soul! But shor
t in his breath—very short! And then the inconsistency of him—did you note that? While he thought we merely came for common robbery, he seemed to feel little, save, perhaps regret for our misguided ways; but the instant I laid hands on his sermon and his surplice—Olympus, that was a mighty rage, eh, Billy! I was glad I had him bound by that time; had he been free just then, his rage—there is no telling what the dear old soul might not have done. A wonderfully inconsistent thing, human nature! Faceted like the brilliant; as full of surprises as—the weather!”

  During all this monologue, jerked out with sudden silences, and laughings, at intervals, Billy sat stolidly binding a handkerchief about one hand.

  “Bit me,” he growled, “old beast!”

  “Hush, Billy! A sexton—your late antagonist—a sexton, a man whose solemn office it is to aid materially the Last, the Great Divorce—the soul’s decree of separation from the body—to call such a man a—a beast—oh, Billy!”

  As they neared the church their eyes caught gladly the sight of the numerous vehicles standing about the fence, and approaching on the different highways.

  “It is a case of ‘Auspice Deo,’ ” Lingo Dan went on. “Eh, Billy? Nil desperandum, auspice Deo! Observe what a pleasant congregation we are to have. Glorious, glorious! You have the key to the vestry?”

  “Right here,” Billy tapped his pocket.

  “And for my part—how delightful are the ways and means of modern civilization sometimes—the dear old soul’s sermon is typewritten! Although,” and here the speaker lowered his voice, as if unwilling to parade whatever had the least glimmer of vanity about it, “I dare say I should not be so utterly bad at an impromptu. I have known the time—in days that are now dead—”

  “And buried!” This came from Billy like a fierce reproach. It was evident that gropings into the past had no more charms for him.