The Amazing Web

by Harry Stephen Keeler

  JEFF WHITTLESBEE of Melbourne.

  The message contains not only a story of horror, but a revelation as well of modern navigation methods as practised on certain lines plying in Pacific waters, and carrying women and children across the world.

  In the opinion of shipping authorities, the remaining living man of this unfortunate pair must long since have gone the way of his companion, as the date of the bottle is so far back and no report has ever been made by any foreign or American shipmaster of rescuing any man by the name of Whittlesbee. There are thousands of hopelessly bare volcanic islands in the Southern Pacific Ocean at which ships never think of touching, and the chances of the bleached bones of these two men with the loot of the one ever being even accidentally found are close to zero.

  Courney’s escape was made, according to officials of the Pacific and Southern Navigation Company, on the night of December 19, 1923, when the ship at a standstill remained in mid-ocean from nine in the evening until midnight while the mechanics were disentangling a mass of seaweed from one of the two propellers. He was aided not only by the excitement and flurry existing between these hours, but by the fact that many of the women passengers were out at the rail watching the crew working at the propeller by torch-lights. This latter circumstance gave him the opportunity of ransacking a number of the open state-rooms and picking up whatever of value lay at hand. The reports on the log of the ship, in possession of the Company, made the morning after Courney’s disappearance, show that the same articles described by the man Whittlesbee were reported stolen, by various women passengers on the Ocean Queen. The total valuation, however, including jewellery and money, was slightly under 1,100 dollars.

  As to the location of the island on which Courney and the man Whittlesbee were swept, and on which Courney died, evidently from exposure, little or nothing can be hazarded. The incoherent letter of the man Whittlesbee might indicate either a travel of but a few days or a travel of many days. One thing is certain: The island which Whittlesbee so confidently described as being volcanic, arid and uninhabited, is but one of thousands of this description that fill the entire South Seas.

  At least the Pinkertons are to be congratulated that one more noted crook’s card can be moved over to the file marked “finis,” and that one more of the accomplished nitro-glycerine experts of the old school, spawned in the slums of Cape Town and Johannesburg to prey on another continent, has passed on.

  When he had come to the last word of the news clipping, Melford looked up, studying his visitor intently. “I don’t quite get your connection with affairs.”

  “I’ll explain.” He paused. “Mr. Melford, something over a year and a half ago I was an ignorant attorney practising law in a country town in Kansas. I let a client go to the penitentiary on account of my own pompousness, my willingness to lie down and take the easiest way out of a difficulty. That client was a girl, a young girl. I could have saved her, cleared her, for later facts brought out her innocence and showed that had I been anywhere near what I thought I was — a lawyer — I could have made a sweeping victory of her case. Yet I let her go to the penitentiary, and thought because her sentence was only one year that I had won a legal victory.” He stopped.

  Melford’s glance broadened into one of sympathy. “Go on, my boy,” he urged.

  An unhappy look had flooded the face of his visitor. “She was pardoned from the penitentiary unexpectedly, and with some 360 dollars in her pocket went to San Francisco. She was bitter, hurt, despondent. She determined to change her name completely, and having an uncle — a brother of her mother’s — who lived on a tiny farm in some partially inaccessible part of Australia, who knew nothing of whom her mother had married, started for Australia to find him and to stay with him for the rest of her days. She alone knew the location of his farm, knew the ‘station’ in Australia which was nearest to it. She alone knew the new name she had decided to adopt. But she innocently had that name and her uncle’s address which was now to be hers, engraved on the inside of her meshbag before she left San Francisco. That handbag was a meshbag made by an old rheumatic sailor in San Francisco out of silver sixpences — a novel thing, beyond doubt, and the only one he ever made. Where did I get these facts, you ask? First from a letter she wrote to the warden of the penitentiary just before she sailed from San Francisco, and second from a trip of investigation which I made to this city back in the early months of 1924.”

  “I gather,” Melford commented, leaning forward interestedly, “that she sailed on the Ocean Queen?”

  Crosby nodded.

  “Under a temporary name corresponding to a ticket and a passport which she innocently purchased from a young woman at reduced rates, she sailed,” he explained. “The very morning I learned the truth I cabled clear to Sydney, thinking that perhaps the liner had been delayed. But no — it had docked two days before, and every passenger had disembarked. The chance of catching her there was gone. It appears that although the girl herself knew something of her mother’s kinsfolk — particularly this brother and his whereabouts in Australia, she had never mentioned or divulged the fact, even to the Miles’, my half-brother’s family, with whom she worked for a while as seamstress. In fact, a thorough canvass of every connection with the Trents’ life in Brossville and adjoining towns gave not an iota of information, and Dan Trent and his wife had died, and their daughter was now thousands of miles away.”

  David Crosby paused a moment, and then continued: “So I came to San Francisco here, with a few dollars I had saved up, and made a pretty thorough investigation of things. I located the rooming-house on Market and Fremont Streets where Lindell Trent had lived, prior to leaving America. While there she had registered by the same name she had always had — her own name. She had checked out there the morning of December 6, which was the morning the Ocean Queen sailed. I found the old Australian sailor who worked around the rooming-house. He had sold her a meshbag made of Australian sixpences, made by his own hand in his spare hours, and the only thing of its kind he had ever attempted. She had paid him 25 dollars for it. He readily identified an enlarged picture of it which I had made from a photograph of herself which Lindell had sent to the penitentiary warden, and which showed her with the odd meshbag in her hand. He too knew her only by the name I knew her by — her right one, Lindell Trent.”

  “I presume your next move,” hazarded Melford, “was to secure a copy of the passenger list that sailed on the Ocean Queen?”

  “Exactly,” said his visitor. “That passenger list contained the names of fifty-nine women, both with the prefixes Miss and Mrs., unaccompanied by either husbands, brothers or other relatives.”

  “I see,” answered Melford in a friendly spirit, leaning back in his swivel chair. “Go ahead. I’ll take the story in your own way, Mr. Crosby.” He paused. “I presume you advertised for the girl in the Australian newspapers, using the name by which you knew her in America here, Lindell Trent?”

  “Advertised?” repeated Crosby bitterly. “Indeed I have. I daresay I know a good deal more about Australia to-day than many people walking the streets of Melbourne itself. But to no avail. When Lindell Trent wrote her last letter to the warden she said that her uncle lived on a little farm in an out-of-the-way place, that he was a queer individual, that he did not read the papers. And that tells the story. Out in some far-away wild place, the Australian ‘bush’ as they call it, she is living with her uncle, never seeing a newspaper, never caring to see one in all probability, content with a few books as she used to be.”

  “But this surprising new development of civilization, radio — as surprising in its way as rum-running and bootlegging?” asked Melford. “Have you thought of that? Have you ever tried that?”

  “Indeed, I have thought of it,” said his visitor bitterly. “I have had sent out many times over Australian broadcasting stations at heartbreaking expense to myself a message carefully couched so as not to tell her painful story to her new world. The message has gone out thus: ‘Lindell Trent, legal
charges found to be false. Write to your attorney and obtain full facts.’ But a certain one sentence in her letter to the warden of the penitentiary stands out always in my mind as though burned in fire. She wrote of her uncle: ‘He believes that electricity is a weapon and invention of the Devil.’ Can you imagine a stern old religious fanatic like that accepting as a boon to mankind a modern radio set with its wires and bulbs and vacuum tubes and batteries?” Crosby shook his head despairingly. “Yes, I’ve thought of radio and I’ve tried radio. I’ll always continue to try it. But even ether waves can’t pierce through the wall of crank ignorance and fanaticism.”

  “Well, you surely have had every channel of communication closed tight against you,” agreed Melford, shaking his head. He tapped the clipping on his desk. “But — this story of Cape Town Eddy Courney and the stolen jewellery, containing the meshbag of silver sixpences. And this is the reason why you are here to-day, seeing me?”

  “Yes,” said the younger man determinedly, “that is why I am here to-day seeing you. At last, after a year and a half, a chance has come to get on her trail once more. At last, after a year and a half, a message arrives from a poor devil whom Courney forced to aid him to escape, and I find myself through accident face to face with the surprising knowledge that Lindell Trent’s meshbag lies on a volcanic island in the South Seas, together with the skeletons of two men and a few other pieces of jewellery which, of course, mean nothing to me.” He leaned forward, his eyes gleaming with a strange resolve. “It means that to find the town or place in Australia that can serve as a focus for combing the country for a hundred miles around to find Lindell Trent, I must find that meshbag with her name and address engraved on it. Do you see how it’s the only clue left to me, Mr. Melford?”

  Melford nodded in slow approval. “I get you, Mr. Crosby. You’re right, beyond doubt.” He paused. “Do you think the girl would have lost sufficient money in the theft of that handbag to have changed her plans, anyway?”

  Crosby shook his head. “Chances are altogether that she kept her precious meagre store in a chamois skin-bag around her neck, or in her stocking. The handbag would have been for adornment, no more. I doubt whether she lost anything more than a handful of change by the theft of it.” He smiled. “Mr. Melford, I am no fool, at least to-day, I hope.”

  “Hm! I can see that you’re no fool,” Melford stated slowly. “Have you ever stopped to consider that some ship captain may have touched at this island and taken up the jewellery?”

  Crosby shook his head. “I have. But I’m banking on the honesty of ship captains in general. If this had ever happened, I’m sure it would have been reported. No, I’m convinced that the only man who’ll ever find that tarnished meshbag is the man who goes out into the South Seas with the necessary capital and time to spend, and the resolution to stick on the job till he locates it.”

  Nothing was said by either of the two men for a minute. Then Crosby again spoke.

  “As you can guess from my association with Mr. Weidekamp’s offices in Chicago, Mr. Melford, I am trying to specialize in criminal law. And I have seen Mr. Weidekamp at work on it, spending weeks on the task, using his own time and that of us three assistants. It has been a revelation to me. And following his example, I have done everything that mortal man can do in this peculiar case of mine, but have been blocked at every step by a malignant fate which seems to declare that this young girl is never to know the truth from my lips. Australia is the haystack. Lindell Trent is the needle. At least this was the case until the day that this fateful bottle message was picked up in the ocean. Now there’s a chance to locate that needle, for the handbag tells us whereabouts in the haystack to search.”

  Crosby paused for the fraction of a second and then went on vehemently: “To the few people I have broached this matter to, I am looked at as a wild dreamer. But it is my intention to raise the money somehow, some way, to charter a ship and crew to steam out to the Southern Pacific for the necessary year, or even two years, to search out those thousands of volcanic islands one by one, one a day, two a day, three a day — whatever speed I can make — till I find the one that’s got the skeletons of Jeff Whittlesbee and English Eddy Courney on it with that jewellery and, best of all, that meshbag. Then, at last, I’ll have in my possession the name that Lindell Trent finally took for her own, and the isolated place in the world to which she went to begin a new life. And from that I’ll find her. I tell you I’ve got to find her.” He paused for breath. “Well, Mr. Melford, what do you think about the project?”

  Melford reflected for a long two or three minutes, his fingers drumming on his desk. He liked this young man from Chicago, somehow. He could easily see how Crosby could be called a dreamer, but the latter’s project was not impossible of accomplishment by any means. If a well-equipped ship, supplied with plenty of food and water and coal, could afford to explore each island in turn, recording its location by a careful determination of its longitude and latitude and thus eliminating it, it was not unlikely that the one on which Whittlesbee and Courney had died could be found. But Melford knew, too, the expense of such a feat, and he admired his visitor for the unwavering perseverance with which the latter stuck to his forlorn chase like a cat after an unseen mouse.

  He nodded his head very slowly. “Now, Mr. Crosby, this thing can be done. Of that you can be fairly certain. But it would cost you some money. It would require a swift small steamship — one large enough, remember, to weather the typhoons and gales of that part of the earth — one that could work hour after hour, day after day, month after month, always on the job. It would require a first-class twenty-foot launch swung on davits in order to make landings. It would require men that could help in the search of each island, for some of them are larger than you imagine. Much of your time would be spent in searching the rocks themselves, you see, and you would need to cut down this element as much as possible. You’d need, of course, a registered captain, trained mariners who could take accurate latitude and longitude determinations and thus not retrace their own steps in and out the waters of the Pacific. You’d need a crew who wouldn’t be restless and discontented because of being held to one long unbroken voyage, and to overcome that feeling you’d have to add extra wages or a bonus. Now for the cost.”

  Enos Milford drew forth a ruled sheet of paper from a small drawer cabinet on his desk, and with a pen figured on a blank pad at his side, entering each item down on the ruled sheet as he came to his final figures. At last he turned in his chair and, drying his sheet with a blotter, handed it to Crosby.

  “There, my boy,” he said, “is as close an estimate, I believe, as you will be able to find anywhere. The total cost, you see, estimated on a basis of one year, comes to 22,500 dollars. I am certain that you cannot possibly beat this price. The reason is that Melford and Melford stand willing to fit you out practically at cost. You will note that the heaviest single item of expense is the rent of the vessel itself. You cannot fill out that item, I think, for less than the amount I have set down: 11,000 dollars.”

  Crosby had taken out his pencil and note-book, apparently in order to copy down the figures.

  “Just keep the entire sheet,” Melford directed. “You may want to study it over in your leisure moments.”

  The man from Chicago folded it up and placed it carefully away in his breast pocket. He looked at his watch and rose. “I’m taking up your valuable time, I’m afraid.” His voice held a grateful tone in it. “I thank you greatly. Of course, even 22,500 dollars is a fortune for a clerk in a lawyer’s office, earning 50 dollars a month.” He smiled ruefully.

  “I expect it is,” agreed Melford. He too rose. “I expect it is.” He paused. “I’d like to help you, Mr. Crosby. Your case is a strange one. In fact, I’m in readiness to fit you out on a cost basis — my figures prove that. I’m sorry, for your sake, that you haven’t the necessary amount.”

  “No,” Crosby returned wearily, “I haven’t the necessary amount — not one-tenth of it. But I have health, a
consuming ambition, some training along the lines I expect to follow, and what’s most valuable of all, a bitter lesson in life. But one of these days my day will come. And when it does, I’ll find those two skeletons and that silver meshbag — my only clue to Lindell Trent — if I have to work ten years afterwards to pay for it.” He took up his hat. “I’ll be back here one of these days, Mr. Melford, to take advantage of your kindness and interest. I don’t know when. But I’ll be back and with the money in my pocket. And then to the search. Good-bye, sir.”

  “Good-bye, my boy, and good luck.” Enos Melford took the proffered hand.

  After Mr. Crosby of Chicago had left the office, Enos Melford sat for several moments in deep reflection.

  “He’ll get the money or I’m no reader of men,” he said confidently. “And he’ll never give up the scheme.”

  CHAPTER V

  THE MAN WHO WOULD NOT TALK

  ARCHIBALD CHALMERS, bon vivant and member of as many London clubs as of Chicago ones, had not slept for hours as he lay in his comfortable bed in his bachelor quarters on Drexel Boulevard, Chicago. This city — so often termed the London of the West — claimed one-half of his time exactly as the gay and real London claimed the other half, and when the police pounded in their very American-like way on the door of his Chicago headquarters at two o’clock in the morning of January 22, 1928, it was himself who, clad in his rich brown silk dressing-gown, his bright red hair slightly awry, answered the door. There they stood, two of them plain-clothes men, jaws set, eyes keen and hard, and two of them with stolid expressionless faces, clad in blue uniforms.