The Popular Magazine/Volume 29/Number 3/In Somaliland

by Robert Welles Ritchie

 

In Somaliland

By Robert Welles Ritchie
Author of “Fate Maketh His Circuit,” “The Goblins Treasure House,” Etc.

The man who writes red-blood stories about adventurers extraordinary is not necessarily an adventurer. In this story you will hear of a fictionist of the red-blood school who was domiciled in the peaceful borough of Brooklyn and had never himself been flung into anything more strenuous than a Brooklyn Bridge crush at 5:30 p.m. Came the one big moment, however, when Opportunity gripped him and he woke from his quiet to find himself in a very whirlpool of adventure whose eddies laved the coast of far-away Somaliland.

(A Novelette)

Chapter I.

And so,” said the red-necked adventurer, “we hiked out for Somaliland in a dhow—Rough Mike Pidgin and me. And we had the pearls sewed up in a shark-skin bag next my chest—those pearls we'd swiped from the Sultan Ali Beg's daughter after killing the three eunuchs. Sky like the inside of a copper bowl above us; water just crawling with sharks about us; and back there at Djibouti a Frenchy gunboat casting off to give us the hot chase through the blasted Red Sea.”

T. Berkeley Manners took three gulps of his Medoc superieur in exultant abandon, warming and thrilling to the tips of his polished finger nails. Ye gods! Pearls in a shark-skin bag—crawling with sharks! Here was life! Red, raw romance this!

“And I said to Rough Mike Pidgin, said I: 'When we get to Wadi Humpha—God and that Frenchy gunboat being willing—we'll have to knock these Somali boys who are sailing us over the head, leave 'em in the dhow, and let her wallow out to the black horizon. Dead men are safe men,' I said.

“'Better plug 'em each with an automatic pill,' Rough Mike replies, 'and cast 'em overboard to the tigers. Easier and safer, that.'”

T. Berkeley Manners nudged his companion, who was the man from Spitzbergen, and nodded at him, bright-eyed.

“This is the stuff that gets me!” chortled T. Berkeley, in an ecstatic whisper. “To have the real thing—Life, you know—brought to Sixth Avenue and dropped, dripping, on a table where all sorts of good fellows from all sorts of places can grab it firsthand. Nothing in my experience——”

The red-necked adventurer held up his hand with a dramatic palm outward. Imperiously he hushed even a buzz of appreciation.

“And then, gentlemen, the stars popped out like diamonds on a Burmah girl's forehead, and back there where the day had suddenly been doused was a black streak against the sky—the gun-boat, racing like the wind, and us a good five miles from Wadi Humpha. I leave it to you, Mr. Man from Saigon—you over there who's just told us about stepping on a basketful of cobras in the dark—didn't I have the edge on you for thrills out there in that stinking Red Sea, with death playing seven-come-eleven at my elbow? Rather!”

Undoubtedly he did. He had patted Death on the head, and called him by his middle name. To T. Berkeley Manners, writer of red-blooded tales of the untamed West, and here at this board in Paquin's in this rare company of swashbucklers and adventurers by dispensation of sweet providence and the editor of Ripping Romance, the red-necked adventurer was superman. With what straightforward naïveté he told his tale of grim endeavor; how with the rough words of a doer, and not a writer, he sketched in the blood and iron background of his story! T. Berkeley was somewhat shocked when he looked across the horseshoe table to where the editor of Ripping Romance was seated at the right hand of the Guatemalan conspirator, and saw that he was idly toying with his cigarette holder. Harkins, that corking judge of real knock-out fiction, discoverer of One-eyed Wilkins, the sailor poet, didn't seem to be warming up to this tale of Somaliland.

Still, T. Berkeley reflected, Harkins must be more or less inured to this sort of thing; the edge of this rough-hewn material straight from the quarry must be rubbed off for him, who had to read all those manuscripts submitted to Ripping Romance. His was the critical attitude. T. Berkeley, mentally toasting the pearls in the shark-skin bag as he quaffed deeply his Medoc, thanked whatever gods a strong man can recognize that he had the creative, not the critical, faculty. Bright idea, though, this stunt of Harkins to bring together in a New York restaurant all these chaps who had traveled the world's jungle paths. Ruddy Kip—good old Ruddy Kip, who knew the game—had dashed off some lines once to the Company of Adventurers, or something like that. T. Berkeley wished he could recall them; he'd get 'em off when it came his turn to speak. But meanwhile——

“There under the moon I fought him—yes, gentlemen—fought him to a standstill, the dead Somali boys cumbering our feet as we each tried for a leg hold; the sharks bobbing their noses out of the sickly green and white phosphorescence—thick like molasses—to see how the fight was going on. And when I'd got him down and had my fingers on his gullet, I said to him, said I: 'Rough Mike, we'll divide these here pearls; that's what we'll do. We won't kill each other for them.'

“Just then whang! comes the first shot from the gunboat, and our mast drops down like a shot giraffe——”

“Fella's lying forty ways from the ace,” the man from Spitzbergen breathed into T. Berkeley's ear. “Dhows don't have what you could regularly call masts; I've ridden in 'em—before I went whaling to Spitzbergen.”

“It is hard for real adventurers to sit in judgment on another man's word,” said T. Berkeley, with simple severity. “It's not playing the game.”

Then he turned just a shade of a shoulder to the man from Spitzbergen—enough to be appreciated by a sensitive mind—spilled a splash of his wine on the table in refilling his glass, and surrendered once more to the stygian night, its mysteries of Somaliland. The tale whirled to a roaring end. Applause crashed from hands that had hurled the walrus spear in Baffin Bay or slain the bounding kangaroo on his antipodean heath. The next man to take up the wondrous story of action in frontier lands was a bronzed and bearded orchid hunter from Dutch Guiana. Then came the ex-soldier's story of how he was once a dato in Mindanao. T. Berkeley Manners began to worry; his turn was only three removed, and——

To be perfectly frank, as proxy for T. Berkeley Manners, one puts his case baldly thus: He had always lived in Brooklyn, except the years he was at school in Massachusetts, and he never had an adventure. T. Berkeley was a perfectly dandy boy. He sold sectional bookcases six days a week, and on Sundays he wrote red-blood stories about the Great Desert in California and the thin, retreating line of the cowmen. When he put over that “Desert Threnody” his editor hoisted him to three cents a word, and he had his photograph taken in broad brown “chaps,” worn back side before. Though the only time he had seen a Joshua tree was when he visited the Bronx botanical gardens, T. Berkeley could create Nevada atmosphere that would make a coyote run headfirst into his manuscript before realizing the deception. In fact, atmosphere was T. Berkeley's forte—that and sentiment. Even as he rode to his home on a Union Street car each night after work, he saw outside the windows not the flat roofs of the tenement houses, but wind-scoured mesas; not the self-assertive Gowanus Canal, but the tenuous, thirst-inciting mirage.

Withal, successful though he had been at writing stories of forty-fours and squaw men, the soul of T. Berkeley had long thirsted for a firmer grounding in the knowledge of human nature by experience on the edge of things civilized. He had advanced so far in the secondary stage of wanderlust that the fore-sheet of a purple boat nosing into a golden West Indian harbor for sixty-seven dollars and up gave him a catch in the throat, and when Trinity's bells chimed the half hour they said “Hongkong—Kow-loon—Chee-foo Amoy.” In a word, he was prime ripe for a dinner of adventurers, but green at adventure.

So when it came his turn to add to the wonder tales of the Seven Seas and the lands thereabouts, the creator of Honest Horace, of the Flying Flatiron, asked all the good fellows who had been gathered together that night for the first time—a veritable Lost Legion of Jerusalem—to believe him when he said that by their presence Romance had been made to rear her head for a fleeting hour on Sixth Avenue, and the rosy light of Things That Can Never Be conjured to penetrate even to the garish white night of Broadway. T. Berkeley would not speak of the festering borax lakes of Death Valley before men who had heard the splash of fluid lava in New Zealand and seen the sun devouring the basalt cliffs beyond the Mountains of the Moon. He would only recall to their minds the perfectly corking stuff got off by one R. Kipling when he wrote—ah—when he wrote that—how did it run now?—well, anyway, everybody knew what he meant; something about the chaps who drift—and drift—and, well, drift was the word. (T. Berkeley Manners cursed the vineyardist who first distilled Medoc superieur.)

But, whatever that was old Ruddy Kip said so patly, wasn't it true that there was nothing in life but just the joy of playing tag with Adventure and dropping the handkerchief behind Romance every time you passed the little girl? A cowboy friend of his out on the Split Circle Range had a way of putting the thing somehow like this: “The happy maverick's the fella that allus stays in the long grass just one jump ahead of a boiled shirt and a hard hat.”

“So here's to the 'happy mavericks' around this table!” T. Berkeley shouted, lifting his glass with a devilish flourish. “And may we all keep in the long grass on the fringe of the old humdrum world!”

T. Berkeley never could remember definitely just how conversation between his neighbor on the left—the man from Spitzbergen—and the fellow on his right, who was just up from Honduras, happened to take the turn toward the comparative merits as fighters of tarantulas and walruses. He did recall afterward that, as one familiar with the fauna of Nevada, he had upheld with some heat the tigerish ferocity of the hairy spider, and had matched tale with tale the proofs adduced by the Honduranian exile. One thing led to another—they always do when French wines, lights, and heat are in conjunction—and before he knew it T. Berkeley saw the dinner breaking up, little groups forming in the midst of cigarette clouds, men hunching themselves into overcoats. Then it must have been, as the author of the “Desert Threnody” afterward pieced together the loose ends of the film, that the person from Honduras said:

“You fellows jump in a taxi with me around to my rooms, and I'll show you how a tarantula can scrap.”

Then the fellows—two or five-—maybe four, including T. Berkeley—boiled into a taxi. Lights—a traffic cop—honk, honk!—Jamaica boy at the elevator—up and up—— “Step in, gentlemen; make yourselves right at home.”

One long living room with bay window looking out on the fire escape; then a bathroom, and behind a bedroom. Very nifty furniture all around, and a framed photograph of a banana plantation on the wall over the fireplace. Over on the other side of the living room a trunk with a pair of khaki riding breeches lying on top; a repeating rifle standing in the corner; a small, brown, and fuzzy monkey looking sleepily up from a Mexican serape on the couch. Typical man's room.

Of course, the first thing the Honduranian did was to have the bell boy bring up cracked ice and a bottle of seltzer; then he took a strange, crook-necked bottle out of the trunk, and said something about how “it will build a fire under you.” All the fellows clinked their glasses; the monkey, with an angry squeak, dropped a piece of ice his master had handed to him, and a fire was built under T. Berkeley Manners of a surety.

“And now, gentlemen, just help me pile up these rugs and things somewhere above the floor, so we can have a free space there; then we'll pull off the hottest and weirdest fight Manhattan has ever seen.”

They put the three chairs on the couch, piled rugs over them, cleared the corners of the room of papers and littered Spanish-American magazines, tidied everything up a good two feet above the floor level. T. Berkeley felt a little muscle behind each knee twittering; his forehead was damp, and breathing was hard. What in the name of all unholy was going to come off?

“Now, gentlemen, each climb up somewhere—on the trunk, or the mantelpiece, anywhere above the floor; it will be dangerous down there.”

They obeyed with alacrity. The man from Spitzbergen chose the trunk; the fellow with the scar—chap from China or Anam he was—scaled the precipice of piled-up chairs on the couch, and sat on the topmost one. T. Berkeley cautiously planted himself between the clock and the Alsatian shepherdess on the mantel. And at the request of the host he held the brown monkey. Then the Honduranian disappeared in the bedroom for a minute; when he came back he held in either hand two little wicker cages, strangely woven. He set them down in the middle of the floor about two feet apart.

“Everybody safe?” queried the man who crouched over the two little pyramids of woven withes. “Then—let 'er go!”

He made a jump for the trunk, in each hand the detached tops of the wicker cages. The two round board cage bottoms remained on the floor, two feet apart. Against the white, planed surface of each, under the slicing light from the electrolier, showed a three-inch horror. One was a tarantula, furry with the mangy, red-brown fur of an orang-utan. Round of body, radiating high, crooked legs from nearly every point of a sinister circumference, the insect's bulk was lifted an inch above the floor by the stiltlike members. A pair of short, curved mandibles, like bison's horns in miniature, pushed out from the leprous wool marking the creature's head. The whole would have straddled a butter dish. Brown as mahogany, high polished like Japanese lacquer, the chain-linked figure of a giant scorpion was cut into the whiteness of the opposite board. The thing squatted low; two lobster claws, held menacingly outward, branched from the stubble of straddling legs under the short, mail-clad body of the thing. Like a stiff-wired chain of polished wood beads, a tail stretched out behind and curved over the body—a tail which twitched and brandished the double-pronged sting at its tip. Light glanced in arrow sheaves from the shifting weapon.

Absolute passivity for a full moment. The monkey in T. Berkeley's arms shivered and uttered a single screech. Then the tarantula whirled with the quickness of thought to face his adversary on the opposite board. A strangling, rancid odor filled the room. The giant spider raised and lowered his body spasmodically several times upon the furred hinges of his legs; it was as if he were measuring the distance for a leap. The scorpion lay motionless, its barbed tail poised rigidly above its back.

“Now!”

The man from Honduras had hardly shouted the warning when a ball of red-brown fur was launched through the air, and, with a faint plop—the sound of a small coin falling on felt—it landed on the scorpion's platform. To the ears of the men balancing on the high edges of the furniture came the distinct click of the spider's mandibles biting nothing. For a quick backward leap had whisked the scorpion off the board and onto the polished floor a foot or more away. There it lay poised, tense, expectant, tail once more thrust sturdily forward like a lance. Again the tarantula balanced himself gingerly on his wire-tensed legs; the scorpion crouched even lower with a single little motion of setting himself for a shock. A leap—the upward thrust of a steel-rigid tail—a tiny shock of collision, and then the pit, pit, pit of pin-point, dancing feet. The tarantula was sheering off sideways in jerky leaps, inches long. A thin, dry noise, as of grains. of rice dropped on a hard table—the scorpion was pursuing in quick, darting rushes.

A soft rope suddenly twined about T. Berkeley's neck. He gasped, and went suddenly faint as he whipped a hand up to his throat. It was only the monkey's tail. He looked down at the beast. A furry ball huddled far back in the hollow of his arm; eyes popped out from the wrinkled brow in a ghastly counterfeit of human fear; red lips were drawn back from two lines of white teeth, and a dry clucking sounded from the simian throat. T. Berkeley, of a sudden very limp, darted a glance at the other faces in the room. He saw jaws tensed, brows furrowed in excitement, primitive lust of battle in the eyes of the others.

“Look at that!”

The strangled ejaculation came from the scar-faced fellow. T. Berkeley's eyes whipped back to the arena below. Just in time to see the charge of the tarantula. In short, jerking leaps the devil bug of the tropics cleared half the distance of the room—the noise of his footfalls was the nightmare patter of ghosts' finger nails on a headboard—and in the last jump he lit fairly on the coiled watch spring of shining scales.

Micrographic handgrips of Titans! Combat of gladiators reduced to the nth power—the sword bearer against the trident and net! Creation's rule of all life exemplified on a parquet floor!

An instant they were locked. The tick, click of tiny jaws sounded. A minute clatter of scale armor—the very small noise of stabbing and lunging. Then the scorpion uncoiled with a sharp spasm, and threw his antagonist five inches from him. The tarantula ran madly around in a circle, one side of his body canting downward, a hairy leg flexed and quivered on the shining boards, quite severed. As for the mailed thing with the claws and sting, a strange trembling seized it; the tail lashed madly up and down; the claws weaved in fantastic parabolas.

“Che-e-ep! Chut, chut, chut!” screamed the monkey.

“Oh, stop it! Stop it!” babbled T. Berkeley.

“'S great!” yelled the man from Honduras. “More coming!”

T. Berkeley Manners shut his eyes, and clamped one hand over the monkey's. The sickening, fetid odor of the insects' combat gagged him. He trembled in an ague fit. To his ears came the dreadful little sounds of pit-patting feet, of springing, prancing, unworldly. feet. Oh, Lord, why did he ever——

Crash! Bang—bang—bang!

A thin, high scream—pounding of feet—hoarse bellows—trill of a police whistle—and then bang, bang, bang!

All of this outside the room where scorpion and tarantula were doing murder. It was out in the night somewhere—out beyond the grille of the fire escape.

Bang, bang, bang!

“Its a raid!” the man from Honduras bawled from his perch atop the trunk. “Honest Mike McGurke's next door. They tipped me here in this house it was coming off soon.”

“A raid—what?” called the man from Anam, balancing himself on the mountain of chairs as he tried to peer out of the window.

“Gambling joint, of course,” the host answered. “One of you fellows nearest drop a shoe on those critters so we can come down and see what's doing.”

Then the window opened, and a woman in a pink silk evening gown swung herself in from the fire-escape platform.

Chapter II.

T. Berkeley did not jump; he fell from the mantel, and sprawled on all fours. He heard a shout from the others, a gasp from the window, and with precision he pushed out a foot and stepped on something brown and furry that was lurching in crazy zig-zags across the floor straight for him. Then from his knees he looked up to the vision in pink framed by the white curtains.

She stood there, one hand clutching a white throat, terror and madness fighting for place in great black eyes, lips parted wide in labored breathing. Piled-up masses of black hair had slipped low over her brow, and a diamond crescent pin which had crowned her coiffure, now loosened and dangling over her forehead, shivered and darted icy lights. Fair witch of the night she was—a plaything of the dark, tumbled and suddenly thrown, discarded, into the white light. Four men gazed at her, petrified.

“Oh, the brutes!” she finally gasped. “The yellow hounds of police!”

“Yes, ma'am,” T. Berkeley. murmured automatically.

“They—they—nobody thought they would—oh, dear, which of you gentlemen——”

“I will,” T. Berkeley promptly put in before any of the other three could collect his fuddled wits. He made a little bow, cast a swift glance over his shoulder to see where the scorpion, still undispatched, might be lurking, and stepped closer to the girl with the wide eyes. The Honduranian person was down from his perch by this time; so were the man from Spitzbergen and the Anam chap. They crowded around her. The gong of a patrol wagon clang-lang-langed out in the street; there was a noise of raucous shouting, of stumbling feet, and glass splintering. The girl shuddered and swiftly drew the curtains between herself and the window

“I don't know how I managed,” she stuttered, in half-spoken thought; “they had the get-away blocked; I climbed along the ledge—jumped—ugh! But please which of you——”

“I said I would,” T. Berkeley caught her up stoutly, and while the other men stared, not grasping the sense of the unfinished question, he slipped one of her hands through his arm with an assured air, and started with her toward the door. Maybe the others protested; that was another detail of the evening's activities which T. Berkeley could not definitely recall. However, the assurance which made him a good salesman of sectional bookcases gave him success as a squire of dames—of one dame in distress at least. She clung to his arm while she smiled her thanks to the others with an engagingly distrait air, and she stopped short in front of the mirror over the mantel to pat her disheveled hair into place and skewer it with the diamond crescent.

The soft, trailing folds of her gown brushed a dying scorpion as on the arm of the gallant tale teller she passed from the room.

In a palm-screened nook of the gilt-and-gold corridor downstairs they waited until a taxicab, hailed by a Jamaican Mercury at T. Berkeley's behest, trundled up to the rear entrance of the hotel, away from the still-simmering excitement in front. T. Berkeley did not hear the address she gave to the chauffeur. Perhaps it was the exaltation of adventure that so thrummed and bubbled through his brain as to drown all incidental sounds. For he walked in the garden path of a delectable Versailles of dreams; he heard the plashing of fairy fountains, and the street lamps were flambeaux in the hands of turbaned blackamoors, lighting the way to—what?

“You—you are thinking about—me—and why I should come through the window of a gentleman's apartment several floors above the street?”

The murmur came to T. Berkeley's ears out of the gloom of the cab; came also a rare breath of acacia, of androgyme—some exotic scent that carried with it the picture of caravan camels kneeling about the bases of palm trunks in a desert. The taxi had been speeding through a black cañon of blind brownstone fronts for a full five minutes before the girl broke the silence. T. Berkeley had not wanted to; he was too occupied with conning the new frontier of romance to which he had come.

“No, I am not,” he therefore answered truthfully. She sighed tremulously.

“If you could but know!” she breathed; and T. Berkeley thought he felt just the least little pressure of her shoulder against his—a yearning touch. “But of course you cannot—and, even knowing, would never understand. I—I am fearfully alone in this thing.”

“But, my dear madam, I am with you,” the red-blooded novelist was quick to contradict. “A rare good fortune has thrown in your path a man who——”

T. Berkeley felt a cold little hand laid on his in gentle expostulation. Automatically he imprisoned it in his own, and thete was no resistance to the liberty.

“Ah, yes; for a minute you come out of the night to rescue me from a—a perilous situation, and for that I thank you out of the bottom of my heart. But like a night shadow you come, and in an instant you will be gone, and then—and then——”

Her voice trailed off in a distrait catching of the breath. T. Berkeley felt two little fingers, groping blindly, clutch his ring finger—sweet tendrils of despair. A rare tumult surged within him. In the presence of maidenly distress, of sweet mystery, the fantasy of a prankish hour, the man who from his two rooms and bath in Brooklyn had ridden cattle rustlers into the Black Hole without the flicker of an eyelash now felt all his bones dissolve to water and his resolution turn to pulp. He breathed heavily, scenting always the androgyme and the acacia of the romantic presence beside him; he felt a little trickle of perspiration course under his neckband.

The auto drew up to a curb with a quick stop. F. Berkeley somehow blundered out, and handed his companion to the sidewalk. For an instant they stood fronting each other in awkward hesitation. He could see her great eyes glowing like burnished metal in the dim light of the electric arc a half block away. Then resolution seemed suddenly to come to the girl.

“Pay the chauffeur and dismiss him, please,” she said. “You must stay with me a few minutes more—until you have learned some things.”

T. Berkeley parted from a five-dollar bill with the wooden celerity of an automaton, followed the faint silken rustle of skirts up a broad stone stair, and heard the click of a lock. A door closed behind him, and for an instant he was in musky blackness; the mystery of interstellar space bore down on him like a weight. Then a faint click, and, seemingly afar off, a little star glowed a pomegranate red, a subdued golden aureole was diffused from somewhere above, a clear white light split itself into segments through crystal. Under this fairy light shadows clotted and took shape; here the great carved back of a bishop's chair, damasked in dusky tapestry; there the crystal sides of a dull-glowing, gold cabinet filled with jades and cameos. White arms of statues lifted grotesquely out of pitchy corners. Saracens with ringlets of chain armor about their ears glowered from the smudged perspectives of ancient tapestries. The white fangs of a tiger lay in wait for unwary feet on the velvet softness of the floor.

Over all this jungle of richness played the winking, fitful light, gold and pomegranate red and prismatic white, and in the midst stood a woman witchingly beautiful—all pink of gown and livid white of breast and arm, and with great, piled-up masses of hair, black as a beetle's back, crowning her godlike height.

T. Berkeley mentally clawed the illimitable fields of the Infinite to find and put a diamond hitch on his ego.

“Since this might be considered highly irregular,” she was saying, “though you and I will just call it unconventional, let us just make believe that we were little playmates at the old red schoolhouse together, reunited after long years of bitter absence. Better yet—we're Jack and Jill before the fall—and with no unpleasant household duties ahead of us such as fetching pails of water.”

T. Berkeley's goddess of the fire escape laughed in a full-throated contralto crescendo when her eyes caught the blank wonder in his face, and she took him by the hand, led him to a huge chair, made a hollow niche of white by a great polar-bear skin that was thrown over it, and there bowed him to his seat with mock obeisance. Gone was her air of breathless terror; gone the attitude of clinging helplessness that had made her pitiful in the taxicab. Instead, here was a willful gypsy on a frolic—a Juno off her dignity behind the eyes of Olympus. Laughter was hiding in the curve of her red lips, sparked from her eyes. Her voice was vibrant with suppressed fun, rollicking, hobbledehoy humor.

“Come, come, Jack!” She flounced before T. Berkeley, sitting dumb and open-mouthed, and she made a wry face at him. “No Jill would ever trust herself to fetch a pail of water with such a brilliant conversationalist; he'd have her in convulsions with his repartee before ever the top of the hill was reached. You don't mean to confess that you can be surprised into silence by the mere fact of unconventionality?

“Perish the thought, my dear Jack! Music—ah, would that bridge the chasm of embarrassment? Presto, we have it!”

The girl skipped lightly to one of the darker corners of the room, and; as if she had tapped an aërial pipe line from the Metropolitan Opera House, rippling, liquid music followed her in a cataract. It was the overture of Berlioz's “Carnival Romain,” in the crystal clarity of some remarkable Swiss music cabinet. Even while the opening bars of the exotic music fell like the clinking of shattered icicles the magician of this melody disappeared through dusky velvet curtains into the dark beyond. T. Berkeley was left alone in complete paralysis of body and spirit. He heard, somewhere far off, tinkling chimes, followed by two deep, booming strokes—the hour echoed on other clocks in other keys.

Soon she was back again, carrying a tray of crystal, upon which stood a beaker of pounded Arabian brass. and two cobweb Venetian glasses,

“Thy slave anticipates the master's every want,” the girl murmured, and she stood before T. Berkeley and filled both tiny glasses with a rich amber liqueur. “He has music; he has wine from Bagdad, and he has—his slave.”

T. Berkeley Manners suddenly got into action. As he reached for the glass he attempted to make with his other arm an advance en escalade upon the trim, satin escarpment that offered itself for attack. Instantly he regretted his impetuosity and boggled. Not that rebuke came, but simply that the writer of roaring romances could make his hero carry off Dew-of-the-morning, kicking across his saddle bow, but found no such cavalier audacity in himself. The author of his confusion smiled impishly, curled up at his feet, and ticked the edge of her glass against his.

“It is the custom of Bagdad,” she began, “for the slave of the lord to entertain him while he sups his nectar. Maybe Jill simply told Jack stories, but in Bagdad they told tales. Harken, my lord.

“A certain Sultan of Araby cherished his only daughter as the apple of his eye—of course, Jack, nobody has apples in his eye; but in tales they do—and he lavished upon her pearls of great price, and the maiden was the richest dowered in Araby.”

“What was the sultan's name?” T. Berkeley asked, trying to assume the part of the pampered overlord in this strange play wherein he found himself a mummer.

“Ali Beg, excellent one—a mighty man, and a terrible in anger. And he guarded his daughter in her harem with a great number of eunuchs and men at arms, allowing no man to approach near. But there came to those shores two desperate Englishmen, disguised as sellers of Christian Bibles, let us say. They had heard of the pearls of Ali Beg's daughter, and their hearts were covetous.

“And in the dark of the moon they slew three eunuchs who lay outside the door of the sultan's daughter, broke into her bedchamber, seized the pearls about her neck, and were outside the city before the alarm was given. The serene gems they hid in a shark-skin bag, which they took from the——”

“Shark-skin bag!” T. Berkeley shot out the interruption with the suddenness of a tire explosion.

“Why, yes, Jack—I mean, supreme excellency, lord of the faithful. Why do you start?”

“Oh, nothing—just a sort of funny bag, that's all. Go on.” T. Berkeley felt that leg muscle twittering again just as it had while he was witnessing the battle between the tarantula and the scorpion earlier that night—or was it a week ago?

“Well, the pearls were in a shark-skin bag, and the two desperadoes escaped with their plunder to London. There they sold the pearls to a very wealthy American nabob, O son of the prophet. But the Sultan Ali Beg, beside himself with fury, was not to be robbed and left crying helplessly like a child. He set upon the trail of the thieves soft-footed men of the East—men with the eyes of serpents and the noses of hounds—who should bring back those plundered pearls at any cost, and from any corner of the universe. Does the effendi follow?”

T. Berkeley had been watching the sloe-black eyes of the kneeling girl during her recital; he had been held by the points of light in their depths—like sharp cones of radiance gleaming from a far corner of a darkened room. Gradually the altered timbre of her voice had been borne in on him; the first fresh note of abandon was gone, and though the form of the tale he was harkening to was the form of mummery he suddenly realized that the sense was becoming instinct with verity. Groping, floundering through all the bewilderment of recent happenings and present circumstances, his mind was striving to find a key to the riddle being laid around him.

“I hear,” he stuttered. “Keep on.”

“Now, the American nabob designed the pearls he purchased from the thieves as a gift for the Light of His Life,” the low, vibrant voice at the writer's knee continued. “Little did he know whence came the treasure he had paid dearly for; nor did he reckon on the soft-footed ones from the East who turned from the trail of the two who had done murder in the sultan's harem to follow unerringly the scent of the pearls under new ownership. To America they trailed the nabob, and they traced the pearls straight to the hand of the fair one who was the object of the nabob's favor and adoration.

“Before ever they could be set in a chain, or even taken from the shark-skin bag, where they had reposed since the night murder was done in possessing them, the innocent one into whose hands they had finally fallen heard the call for their delivery. The call came secretly from the hounds of the Sultan Ali Beg; promise of sure death was the alternative to yielding them. Even now they——”

“Even now,” T. Berkeley interrupted, gagging in his excitement, “you have them there in the bodice of your gown.” He leveled his finger so that it almost touched the girl's breast as she shrank back. “No, no—don't deny—see how your hand covers the place where they lie hidden even as I speak.

“Oh, I know all about the shark-skin bag”—T. Berkeley's voice shrilled to a fife's squeak—“and the flight in the dhow on the Red Sea, and how Rough Mike Pidgin and that other fellow fought all over the boat. Why, not three hours ago I was sitting ten feet from one of the men who robbed the sultan's daughter.”

The black eyes widened until the white showed above and below the pupils. The girl caught at her throat, and her shoulders lifted as if to brace themselves under a descending weight.

“You saw him—you saw Jim Rolfe? Where?”

“At Paquin's—at a dinner given by a lot of world wanderers and such.”

A sob, the flashing of white arms—and T. Berkeley found a black head, lustrous and wonderful, on his knee.

“And I—and I—thought he would be at McGurke's gambling place!” came a smothered voice, tear-choked. White arms crept snakily up to T. Berkeley's waistcoat, and white hands seemed to be mutely beseeching strong, reassuring ones to grasp them.

“So—and so—I risked everything, and went there to meet Rolfe and give him back those dreadful pearls. You—you know—the raid—horrors!”

“But—but why give them back—these priceless things?” T. Berkeley managed to stammer.

The black head suddenly lifted, and those compelling eyes, tear-jeweled, sought his, and, finding, rested there steadily, unblinking.

“Listen, my very dear friend.” She spoke with an intensity that was awesome. “Because death is right outside that door every added minute that I have them. The sultan's soft-footed men—those vipers who know how to sting in the dark—must have those pearls or my life. I won't give them up tamely. By the greatest good fortune, I learned that Jim Rolfe, who with Pidgin first stole the pearls, is in New York. He is willing to keep them for me until the men from the East are off the track. Now do you understand? Do you see in what a desperate strait I am?”

T. Berkeley was greatly agitated. The moving beauty of his strange hostess needed only the show of distress added to whisk away all of his few remaining intrenchments of reserve. He reached out bold arms, put a hand on each bare shoulder of the girl who crouched before him, and looked searchingly into her face.

“And so—and so you need me in your hour of peril,” he said simply.

“Yes,” she answered; “more than I can tell you.”

“And when you began, as my slave, to tell me the story of the Sultan Ali Beg's pearls, you cloaked the story that way—in fun—because you did not yet know whether you could trust me?”

She slowly nodded.

“Do you think now that you can trust me—and you will, girl?” T. Berkeley's soul was on his lips now.

“Yes,” she answered, her eyes light as stars.

“Tell me one thing first,” T. Berkeley commanded. “You are not yet the wife of—of that tremendously wealthy nabob?”

She lowered her eyes as if in pain, and shook her head.

“All right. Now, command me,” he said.

She sat for a full minute, her brows bent in thought; then she spoke:

“You must first make me a promise before I tell you how you can save me. Promise me that when you leave my door to-night you will not look at the number, and that you will not look for the name of the street until you have walked ten minutes by your watch.”

“Does that mean I may never——”

“It means that you must never see me here. When I dare I will arrange a way to meet you elsewhere.”

“But you don't even know my name—my address.”

“I will arrange a way to meet you,” she repeated, smiling. “And now——”

She rose and gently insinuated the way to the front door. T. Berkeley followed out into an entrance hall, where a giant in full armor menaced him with a halberd.

“But you have not told me how I can help you,” he expostulated, as she held the door slightly off the catch as if in polite restraint against hurrying a parting guest.

“I tell you now, dear friend.” Her voice thrilled as if with a passion that dared not loose itself, and she was so close to T. Berkeley that again the aura of androgyme and of acacia that seemed to wrap her being in a veil of the musky East intoxicated the senses of the story writer, and had his head reeling. “To-morrow night at ten o'clock go to number three hundred and twenty St. Mary's Place, in Hoboken. Knock twice at the door, and ask for Jim Rolfe.

“When he comes to you, say simply this: 'The girl with the pearls says White Mice, thirteen-thirteen.' He will say nothing; he will do nothing; but my life will be saved.”

“'White Mice, thirteen-thirteen,'” T. Berkeley repeated.

“Those little words tell all—and now, my friend of a night, it is farewell.”

T. Berkeley, caught in a swirl of madness, looked into the dusky depths of two black eyes, started, stopped—then crushed her to him, and kissed her furiously on the lips. His own were boldly met.

The heavens fell; all the stars exploded like chestnuts; the skyscrapers were little wax tapers, burning blue—and T. Berkeley Manners had walked a mile before he came to a street he couldn't cross. It wasn't a street; it was the East River.

He had actually wavered on the edge of a stringpiece over the streaked black tide when, dumped from the chariot tail of dreams, he suddenly realized the presence of things terrestrial—and imminently wet. He thought of the promise he had made the fair enchantress back in Bagdad not to look at the street signs until he had walked ten minutes. T. Berkeley smiled foolishly as his hand went to his watch pocket. The smile was wiped from his face with the speed of light when his searching fingers found not a watch, but something—something!

Out came a stiff, crackling bag no longer than the palm of T. Berkeley's hand; at least, it felt like a bag, and in the dark he could trace with a wondering forefinger the outlines of an object that was like an elongated tobacco pouch. He thought he could feel many hard, round pellets, like buckshot, under the stiff texture of the envelope. In a daze, he patted himself down the expanse of coat and waistcoat, covering each pocket in turn.

Decidedly no watch; just the coarse, gritty, and altogether out-of-place bag.

The father of Honest Horace, of the Flying Flatiron, and all his merry crew of rollicking companions of the rope and branding iron felt a decided shock even though his reflexes had been sorely tried this night. Here he was on the edge of Manhattan Island at some time after two o'clock in the morning, suddenly bereft of his most intimate article of personal furniture; by black magic he carried instead a mummy's skin with bullets in it—or maybe antediluvian corn from a king's tomb. There was a single sputtering arc light back a ways from the wharf, slicing pie cuts out of the side of a lumber pile, black-shadowed. Thither T. Berkeley went, and as soon as the light was strong enough he examined the thing he held in his hand.

It was gray white and pearly—like a pouch of frosted glass—and the texture of it was ridged and lozenged in infinitely perfect geometry. Across one face of the bag sprawled some weird lettering, like a woman's aigret gone daft. T. Berkeley had a faint idea he had seen something like that on the face of a cigarette box. Somehow or other, he was reminded, looking at that pearly-gray object, of the hilt of a Japanese sword crisscrossed by metal. What was the binding of a Japanese sword hilt?

Shark skin, as there are stars above!

T. Berkeley's teeth clicked a tattoo, and his fingers trembled so that he could hardly spread the drawstrings at the mouth of the sack. “Shark skin—shark skin!” He finally managed, by dint of using his teeth, to open the harsh vent of the pouch. Then he cupped a palm, and poured into it what the pouch contained.

With a suave, dry clicking and a rattle there piled up in his hand a wondrous mound of frozen tears—round as the frosted tips of icicles was each, white with the luster of light that filters through green fathoms of ocean, softly, seductively effulgent.

Pearls!

Chapter III.

Major General J. Cæsar never went through the country of the Helvetii with ears more erect than were those of T. Berkeley Manners as he stole away from the river and back through the haunts of the city's gunmen and gentlemanly knights of the blackjack with untold wealth of pearls in his possession. That journey was an agony. Every lumber pile concealed a thug, and each fire hydrant was a crouching footpad. T. Berkeley was certain that the precious jewels in the shark-skin bag, which he had slipped into one shoe, by the way, must be as aniseeds for the hounds of disorder; the scent must carry eke through the heaviest slumber of the most slothful highwayman. Even when he ducked like a spent hare into a subway kiosk and made a slow journey under the river and over to more lawful Brooklyn in a local train, he was sure the guard favored him with a most baleful survey, and the pink-cheeked young man on the poster glared at him knowingly over the top of a Korking Kollege Kollar.

Safe at last in his own room, T. Berkeley tried to bring his mind down to a dispassionate review of the night's kinemacolor events. Pajamas lent him a certain degree of intimacy with himself; so dight he sat on the bed, and, sixty-five wonderful pearls in his hand, he began at the first of the series of astounding events that had led to the altogether voluntary and unsought-for possession of these baubles.

First there was the red-necked adventurer at the dinner of the world wanderers; he had told the story of the theft of the pearls from the fair daughter of the Sultan Ali Beg—pearls in a shark-skin bag. Merely an incident—that—in a gentlemen's entertainment. Then had come the jaunt to the room of the Honduranian exile, and the horrid fight between the tarantula and the scorpion—another detached incident, bearing in no way upon the mystery of the pearls there in his hand. And then—the raid on the gambling house next door, and a goddess in pink, with a glittering diamond crescent in her raven hair, bursting through the window from the fire escape. A prodigy—not an incident.

What was it she had said in explanation of her astounding intrusion? “The get-away was blocked!” T. Berkeley, pondering that phrase out of his limited experience with the ways of crime, was inclined to believe there was a certain smack of sophistication about it: “The get-away.” But no; had she not explained her presence in the gambling house beyond cavil? She had gone there in desperation, believing she would find Jim Rolfe there, and that he would relieve her of the deadly menace that dogged her possession of the Orient gems; Jim Rolfe was without doubt that same red-necked adventurer who had told the story of the rape of the sultana's pearls at the feast. Astounding impudence on his part when, as the radiant girl out of the Thousand and One Nights had fearfully admitted,-desperate agents of the Sultan Ali Beg were already in New York, seeking vengeance and the recovery of the precious jewels.

Then that scene in the house of wonders whose address he could no more have guessed than he could the number of flakes in the Milky Way; did ever a plain salesman of sectional bookcases, or even an insurance agent, experience such an adventure? What wonderful poise—what grace that girl had shown in a trying situation, in desperate fear of her life, yet weaving an allegory in a simulated spirit of fun to test his worthiness to assist her. How touching——

T. Berkeley bounded to his feet, the reflex of a sudden illuminating thought galvanizing him.

Then it was she who had put that shark-skin bagful of pearls in his waistcoat pocket! Who else?

Had she not admitted she had them? Had she not confessed that it was their possession that jeopardized her very existence? That minute when she had let her head rest on his knees and her hands had gone searching blindly for some reassuring clasp from his—that minute she must have slipped the precious and dreadful treasure in his pocket. Poor, distraught, helpless girl! She dared not ask him outright to relieve her of her burden of fear; she had trusted him sufficiently to shift her weight of terror to his shoulders blindly, unconditionally. “When I dare,” she had murmured, in that husky contralto, so vibrant with the allure of a sympathetic nature, “I will arrange a way to meet you elsewhere.” That meant she would take back the pearls when the soft-footed men from the East were off the trail.

But had she taken T. Berkeley's watch at the same time she dropped the pearls in his pocket?

The author of desert epics flushed the color of his pajamas at such an unworthy thought. Annihilate the suggestion! Did not that—ah, did not that farewell kiss linger burningly on his lips? Was it the kiss of a pickpocket?

His brain fatigued by vain wanderings in this maze of circumstance, T. Berkeley opened the neck of the bag to slip back into it the ransom of a satrap. His prodding finger encountered a piece of metal. He inverted the stiff sack, and shook into his hand a most curiously wrought key of steel—flat, slender, with no notches to catch the secret grips of a lock, but with a mystifying cylindrical hole in the end. It was like a skate key.

Dully T. Berkeley wondered what part of the runic riddle this latest product of black art fitted; then he tucked the key back with the pearls, stowed the bag among the springs of his bed, and went to sleep over them. He dreamed of swart-faced men in red turned-up slippers, and redolent of attar of roses, carving the full name of the Sultan Ali Beg on his back with Damascus daggers.

A few hours later when his alarm clock had called to duty, and T. Berkeley Manners, now a salesman of sectional bookcases only, was riding, sleepy-eyed, on the Union Street car to his office, all of his nerve centers exploded simultaneously. The cause of the combustion was the black-faced italic heading on the front page of his newspaper and what stretched in portentous array of type under it.

$30,000 PEARL ROBBERY!

Sixty-five Matched Gems Are Stolen on “Icelandic.”

That's the way the first two lines of the heading read. The story started thus:

Despite the sedulous efforts of headquarters detectives to bottle up the facts, the Earth has uncovered the details of the theft of sixty-five matched pearls, valued at more than thirty thousand dollars, from Tavshan Harooglian, the well-known Fifth Avenue jeweler and dealer in Oriental objects of art, while he was a passenger aboard the White Crescent line steamship Icelandic, in port last Wednesday from Alexandria and other ports of the Orient. The robbery, easily one of the most daring and greatest in the history of transatlantic travel, has absolutely baffled Deputy Commissioner O'Shaughnessy and his corps of sleuths, for the trail of the daring crooks ends at the white Crescent pier, on North River.

Mr. Harooglian, considered an expert in the characteristic gems of the Near East—pearls, round-cut rubies, et cetera—had made a special visit to a certain jewel mart abroad to bring back a much-prized string of perfectly matched pearls, designed to fill an order given by a Pittsburgh multimillionaire. He was successful in his quest, and it is whispered that he succeeded in obtaining the cherished collection of a petty potentate of some satrapy in Persia or Arabia. There were sixty-five wonderful pearls in the collection, each reputed to have a history of Oriental intrigue and mysterious death behind it.

What the price he paid for the collection, which he values at thirty thousand dollars and more, and from whom he bought the pearls Mr. Harooglian refuses to divulge. But he admits that when he boarded the Icelandic at Southampton the sixty-five objects of a petty sultan's one-time adoration were safely stowed away in a strangely fashioned shark-skin bag, the original receptacle designed by the first owner, and carried in an inside pocket of the Harooglian waistcoat. He was so cautious that he did not even trust his valuable burden to the ship's purser.

The night before the Icelandic entered the Ambrose Channel the Fifth Avenue dealer missed the shark-skin bag as he was disrobing in his stateroom. After an exhaustive search of his effects he quietly notified Captain Bulger of his loss, and a wireless was sent to police headquarters here, as well as to the Firestone Detective Agency. When the Icelandic docked detectives swarmed the White Crescent pier, on the lookout for the face of some known international crook. Detectives stood by while the customs men examined the baggage of the Icelandic's passengers on the frail chance that the stolen baubles might be uncovered in a trunk's false bottom. Not a trace of the jewels was found.

Both O'Shaughnessy's men and the sleuths of the private agency were utterly in the dark until a reporter of the Earth uncovered, by inquiry among the Icelandic's officers and some of the ship's passengers, who are residents of New York, a clew which the professional crime artists have seized with eagerness as the only one extant. This relates to a remarkably beautiful young woman who was a passenger on the Icelandic, and whose name, though known, is withheld for obvious reasons. Mr. Harooglian made her acquaintance the day the big liner left Southampton, and the casual promenade-deck friendship speedily ripened to most assiduous attention on the pearl buyer's part, according to the word of the ship's officers.

Mr. Harooglian admitted yesterday that he “had made the acquaintance of a very charming young lady,” but he was inclined to wax wroth at the suggestion that she might have known something about the levitation of his pearls.

It was learned on good authority that O'Shaughnessy's hawkshaws have succeeded in getting a good description of this young woman, acting on the Earth's tip, and, after tracing her baggage, are quietly shadowing her. That she is not acting alone, but is one of a clever gang of transatlantic crooks, some of whom are probably in New York now, is the conviction of the detectives.

T. Berkeley read no more. In an ague fit, he suddenly rushed past the conductor of the car, leaped off the platform almost in the path of a pugnacious auto van, dodged to the sidewalk, and plunged through crystal swinging doors into the first available caravansary of deceitful beverages. There before the near mahogany he hurled into himself two hookers of rum, thereby skidding around the sharp corner of probity; he had never had an early-morning drink before.

The sting of the liquor still strong in his mouth, T. Berkeley called his office manager on the phone, and told him a sudden illness would prevent his appearance that day. T. Berkeley took no liberties with the star-eyed goddess, Truth, when he babbled this tale into the telephone; he was sick—sick with that sinking fear that clogs the gorge and unhinges the knees, curdles all the brain pan holds with horrid apprehension. His absence from his office once guaranteed by the sympathetic “take care of yourself” of his manager, the miserable young man went forth to wander through Brooklyn like a dog touched with the heat. His steps led him along the water front and the odorous reaches of the Gowanus Canal until suddenly, glancing at a group of shaggy stevedores, his blood congealed within him, and he almost ran into more respectable streets. What folly to chaperon thirty thousand dollars' worth of pearls in so questionable a neighborhood!

T. Berkeley found himself almost unconsciously dodging policemen; he crossed the street when he saw the heavy blue shoulders holding up some cigar-store front in his path. He recalled with a fresh pang having once read of a certain “Camera-eyed” Cassidy, of the headquarters staff, whose unerring optics could spot a crook in evening clothes, nail a yeggman even in the Vanosterbilt box at the opera. Without doubt this same Camera-eyed was now ranging Brooklyn on the track of the stolen pearls, and under the X ray of his orbs the thickness of the Manners coat and waistcoat covering the missing jewels would be as gossamer. The distressed young man hastily reviewed the possible clews he had left to mark his trail since he had quit the house of the enchantress in the small hours of the morning—detectives of O'Shaughnessy's squad could send a man to the chair on a suspender button—give him “life” on a laundry mark.

As he passed under the shadow of the triumphant eagles guarding the entrance to the leafy wilderness of Prospect Park, T. Berkeley recalled again the loss of his watch. The inscription on the inner case of that nifty time-piece read boldly: “To T. Berkeley Manners from Mamma.” Heavens! Whoever had that watch had T. Berkeley in his power. Beyond the shadow of a doubt, Camera-eyed Cassidy, wearing a square-crowned derby hat, square-toed shoes, and a square-cut coat—how perfectly T. Berkeley could get the picture!—was now sitting in his room back on the Park Slope, waiting for his return, and reading about Honest Horace, of the Flying Flatiron, as he waited. The watch from mamma ticked in the Cassidy pocket.

T. Berkeley found a secluded bench in the shade of a rhododendron thicket where the park lake sent plashing ripples almost to his feet. There, when he looked carefully about him, and saw that no camera eyes were spying on him, he pulled from the inner pocket of his waistcoat the fateful shark-skin bag, with its insane stamp of scrolled lettering, and poured into his hand a little mountain of softly glowing sun spawn. The plebeian key dropped last of all upon the top of the piled-up splendor, its dead, cold metal light marring the massed iridescence of the jewels. As the fascinated eyes of T. Berkeley feasted themselves upon the constellation of deep-sea stars, tinted with the coruscations of countless tempered sunbeams, a form of hypnotism seemed to seize him. He could not do what he had come there to do.

The distracted writer of romances had fully determined to cast the pearls in the lake, and rid himself for all time of complicity in a crime; a flick of the hand, a splash, and at once he would be a free man, out of the toils of those ruthless detectives the paper had mentioned. But, ah, the glory and the beauty of them, to be buried for eternity under three feet of municipal water—possibly to be dived for and pouched by municipal ducks and swans! No man easily salutes thirty thousand dollars with a parting kiss, especially when nobody compels him to do so. And then—and then——

T. Berkeley's moral sense began to push up through the panic in his soul. Were these pearls his to throw away? Who gave him the right so to dispose of the property of another? Had not that wonderful girl in the clinging pink—the girl with the raven hair and the compelling eyes—given them to him virtually in trust, saying that when she dared she would find a way to see him, which meant to recover the treasure from him? But she was a thief! No; by what warrant did he say that? Was he a thief because he happened to have stolen pearls in his possession? How could he know that this girl—this girl who had thrown herself upon him for protection, and in doing so had only partially revealed a dark story of terror—how could he know that she was any more a thief than he himself?

Then give the pearls to the police?

The writer laughed hollowly. A fine picture he would make in O'Shaughnessy's office when he was asked to give the name of the woman from whom he thought—thought, mind you—he had received the plunder, and to tell the address of the house where the transaction occurred!

T. Berkeley suddenly remembered the mission for that night he had promised the girl to fulfill. He was to go to number three hundred and twenty St. Mary's Place, in Hoboken, ask for Jim Rolfe, and deliver the cryptic message: “White Mice, thirteen-thirteen.” Perhaps that would be the clearing point in the whole mystery; peradventure some understanding genius at number three hundred and twenty St. Mary's Place would relieve him of the pearls and the responsibility at once. At least there would be developments.

T. Berkeley put the pearls and the strange key back in the shark-skin bag, pocketed the dreadful weight securely, and strode through the odorous valley of the rhododendrons to the park restaurant. As he was nibbling a sandwich, seated where he could see the door and the path to its approach, his eye suddenly fell on a telephone booth. He faded into the gloom of the little glass box when the waitress was out of the dining room, and called the office of the Ripping Romance. Harkins, the editor, the man who had inspired the dinner of adventurers at Paquin's, answered.

“Hello! This is T. Berkeley Manners. Yes; fine, thank you. Say, remember that fellow who told that story at the dinner last night about the pearls and the Red Sea stuff?”

“You mean Sanderson?” the question came back to T. Berkeley's ears.

“Why, no; I mean the fellow who robbed the Sultan Ali Beg's daughter. Name's Rolfe—Jim Rolfe, isn't it?”

“No,” said Harkins. “That chap's name is Something-or-other Sanderson. I didn't pay much attention to his story because I'd heard it before. Fact is, I bought the story from him a month ago, and it's now in type to appear in the next number of the magazine. I didn't admire his taste in telling a story after he'd sold it to me and before it appeared in the magazine.”

“Yes, but—Rolfe,” T. Berkeley insisted. “Wasn't it a man named Jim Rolfe who really did that robbery business and escaped in a dhow to Somaliland?”

“Never heard of Rolfe. What's more, Sanderson wouldn't hurt a puppy. It wasn't he who committed high murder and piracy in Arabia. He told me he got that story from Tavshan Harooglian, the jeweler—and, by the way, it looks as if those same pearls have been stolen from Harooglian. Read the story in the Earth this morning?”

“Haroog—Haroog——” T. Berkeley stuttered, and hung up the phone receiver.

Chapter IV.

T. Berkeley paid his score, tipped the waitress a dollar in his utter confusion, and stumbled out of the restaurant like a man half blind. “Walking typhoid,” the waitress murmured sympathetically as she folded the dollar bill to fit her apron pocket. “Walking paranoia” would have fitted T. Berkeley's case better. He felt himself to be slipping dangerously on the slippery shore of sanity; he saw a flood of mental oblivion, each wave tipped with glistening pearls, sweeping in on him like a tide rip. When he paused before the bears' cage he envied the fat gray Cadiac grizzily, who had nothing to do but eat and stretch himself in the sun. As he weighed the expediency of climbing over the bars and kicking that grizzly in the stomach—one way out of life was as good as another—he tried to rearrange the new pieces in the puzzle just dumped off the board by the telephone conversation with Harkins.

It was not Jim Rolfe who told that story of the levitation of the pearls from the bloody harem of the sultan's: daughter; it was some ridiculous outsider named Sanderson, who hadn't even committed murder and larceny. Yet had not the girl of last night's enchantment instantly identified his picture of the tale teller as being that of Rolfe, the mysterious slayer whom he was to meet after dark in Hoboken? And Tavshan Harooglian, the jeweler from whom a fortune in precious gems had been stolen during the run across on the Icelandic—here he was revealed as the inspirer of a tale in Ripping Romance; he had told a writer of the sinister story of how the pride of Ali Beg's coffers had been plundered, and the story. was standing in type a month before the robbery of Harooglian on the White Crescent liner.

A man who had never robbed boasted of a robbery; a man who was robbed prepared beforehand an advertisement of the goods to be snatched from him. Was there any sane solution of this rebus? T. Berkeley thought not, and he braved the hypothetical presence of Camera-eyed Cassidy in his room to seek his bed and there find sleep.

There was no Cassidy in a square-crowned derby hat awaiting him, but a bundle of dynamite in a smaller compass was there, right under his door. “A letter for you, Mr. Manners,” the shrill-voiced landlady greeted him as he entered the house. “Brung by a messenger boy, and I tucked it under your door, not knowing, of course, you was to be home early. An' I will say, Mr. Manners”—this with the playful giggle of the willing widow—“that it smells something wonderful of Mary Jardin cologne.”

A single sheet dropped from the snipped envelope into T. Berkeley's palsied hand. In a round, bold script a message read:

Jack: A key—a strangely shaped key with a hole in the end of it—I am sure you have it by some fatal mischance. It was in the bag with the—the pills, I will say, when I gave it to you.

Yes, I admit I gave them to you without knowledge—to keep for me in your strong hands until such time as I can recover them with safety. But the key I must have. Everything—my comfort, even my safety, depends on my regaining that at all costs.

To-night when you go to carry that message I intrusted to you—and I know you will do this for me—take the key with you. Some one I can trust will receive it from you and return it to me. The other things—the pills—keep as you value my regard for you. And, whatever you hear, whatever you may read, try to be strong in the faith an innocent and helpless girl has placed in you.

Jill.

P. S.—You see, I do not find it hard to communicate with you, even though I, for a little time, must remain simply your Jill.

T. Berkeley would not have believed there was room left in his organs of mental perception for a new thrill; but a new thrill undeniably was what he experienced from the reading of the scented note. With the complete collapse of his analytical faculties, sorely tried by the events of twelve hours, he sought not an explanation of how the girl whose firm white wrist had crooked itself over these bold pot hooks and heavy shadings of the missive had been able to send him a letter in his name and true address; he merely accepted this as another marvel in the necromancy of Chance. What did bring a catch to T. Berkeley's throat and a stoppage in the blood flow through his aorta was that pitifully wistful appeal: “Whatever you hear, whatever you may read, try to be strong in the faith an innocent and helpless girl has placed in you.”

Then she had read the story in the Earth! Then she did know that the pearls of which she had been possessor were stolen property! And she begged that he would not judge her a thief; she was strong in her reliance upon him to help.

“Nor is your trust in vain, O glorious girl with the eyes of a goddess!” T. Berkeley covertly cast a side glance into his mirror to see if his pose—hand upraised, and chin thrust pugnaciously forward—were not worthy of James K. Hackett himself. He felt thrilled with a remarkable exhilaration. He knew that he would stand between the beagle hounds of O'Shaughnessy and the clinging woman who needed his trust, come what might.

Then he went out for his dinner, and after that Hoboken and whatever the playful gods of mischance might lay on the boards for him.

The professional tale teller would not pick Hoboken, New Jersey, as the proper stage set for adventures—for romance; T. Berkeley himself, with his keenly developed sense of literary values, would have believed that Hoboken was but a place where Weber & Fields studied new wheezes for their dialect skits, and the well-known Gambrinus vine trailed over every solid Teutonic porch front. As a matter of fact, he had never been in this little sister city of straddling New York, which looks unperturbed over the busy Hudson to the amazing madhouse that is Manhattan. So it was with the undefined malaise of a strange dog among new kennels that he stepped from the ferryboat near ten o'clock that night and disentangled from a German policeman's speech directions to St. Mary's Place.

The thoroughly shaken young man approached the shaded street of his destination with a dread sense of the impending demonstration of more prodigies of ill fortune. Had a wooden Indian descended from his pedestal before a cigar store and offered him a stogie from the painted bundle in his hand, T. Berkeley would have accepted the gift without question.

He reached the three-hundred block on St. Mary's Place; it was a superlatively quiet street of small shops with apartments built over them. He passed number three hundred and ten; it was a saloon; then came three hundred and twelve to three hundred and sixteen, vacant stores with dead, staring windows, splotched with ghostly theater posters. Then a vacant lot, and—T. Berkeley caught himself holding his breath—three hundred and twenty. The two show windows startled him at first; he was prepared for anything, and his eyes flashed the quick message that he had come upon a massacre.

Human limbs dangled in both windows like trophies hung there by some victorious Formosan aborigine; grisly, severed legs and arms, pink with the flush of life. Strange harnesses and hoops were interlaced between the severed members. A whitey-brown skeleton flaunted his nakedness behind the fringe of mournful relics. An unpleasant glass eyeball, magnified many times and articulated to show all its motive machinery, glared at him with basilisk intentness,

ERNESTUS KRUMP

MANUFACTURER OF ARTIFICIAL LIMBS

Agency of the Krump Interlock Sanitary Arm and Leg

That was the sign, in faded gilt lettering and illuminated by sickly gas flames, across the face of each window. The number three hundred and twenty was also emblazoned there; no doubt of that.

T. Berkeley walked on doubtfully to the corner beyond, and there hesitated. He heard a clock striking ten. Decision was crystallized in him; he wheeled, stalked back to the place of papier-mâché slaughter, and entered. A little, old-fashioned doorbell on a spring chirped above his head; somewhere a parrot exploded like a machine gun. A brown little man, wearing a smoking jacket that belled away in a sweeping skirt from his thin legs, and with a quaint, embroidered skullcap on his head, came out of a rear room, and advanced toward T. Berkeley, bowing and scraping like a dancing master.

“I am Ernestus Krump, at your service,” he said, with an unctuous inflection.

“I would like to speak with Mr. Jim Rolfe,” said T. Berkeley.

“Mr. Rolfe—Mr. Jim Rolfe? Is he a customer of mine, may I ask?”

“Well—ah—I'm sure I don't know,” stammered the writer. “I do not know him myself, but I came here to—well, I was led to believe I would find a Jim Rolfe at number three hundred and twenty St. Mary's Place. I have a message to deliver—a message from a young woman.”

The agent of the Krump Interlock smiled with all the enthusiasm permitted a connoisseur in sanitary limbs.

“Perhaps,” he ventured, “if I knew the nature of the message I might throw some light on your difficulty.”

Without thought, T. Berkeley blurted out the rigmarole he had balanced on the tip of his tongue:

“White Mice, thirteen-thirteen.”

“Ah, ha!” quoth the garrulous Krump. “A light begins to shine, as it were. You are Mr. T. Berkeley Manners, then?”

The object of the artificial limb maker's osseous smile sensed a whirring of all the loosened cogs in his brain. He weakly nodded.

“Well, then, I have a package to deliver to you. You have quite properly identified yourself.”

Krump trotted back into the room behind the shop, and quickly reappeared bearing a neat little box-shaped bundle, tied daintily with white ribbon. This he laid in T. Berkeley's nerveless hand. The young man began to stutter.

“No, no!” The artificer of necessary substitute accessories held up a warning hand. “She—ah—the person who brought this here to be delivered to you said a note in the package would explain all. And may I not ask if you have something in return to be delivered to—to the person who left this package? I was told that you would leave in my care something very greatly desired by this—ah—party.'

The insinuating words of the dealer in artificial legs recalled to T. Berkeley's mind the injunction in the message that had been slipped under his door a few hours before—he should leaves that strange key in the pearl bag with “some one I can trust” at number three hundred and twenty St. Mary's Place. So the girl had commanded. Surely this Krump person must be——

He was already reaching for the precious shark skin when a horrid fear assailed him. To get the key he would have to open the bag in the presence of this stranger—this petrified Rameses of unholy papier-mâché subterfuges, He would have to reveal to the raisin eyes of this little gnome the glories of the pearls. Even if the man were not tempted. to robbery, he might see enough to become a sharer in the secret which T. Berkeley had pledged life and honor to keep.

“I think you are mistaken,” T. Berkeley mumbled. “I know of nothing I was supposed to leave here.” He turned toward the door.

“Wait, wait!” professional eagerness was in the little brown man's voice. “Now that you are in my place of business, why not improve the shining hour? Though I take it you have no present need for artificial limbs, in these days of six-cylinder automobiles and aëroplanes, you 'know not the day nor the hour,' as Holy Writ puts it.”

Krump had a death grip on the lapel of T. Berkeley's coat, and had dragged him to a long line of crooked limbs dangling from a wire over a counter. He waved his disengaged hand at the array with the air of a diamond merchant displaying his treasures to a Fifth Avenue dowager.

“I know, my dear sir, it will interest you not a little to be told that your 'White Mice, thirteen-thirteen,' is nothing more or less than a professional term—is, in fact, the trade name and number of this beautiful left limb”—here Krump disengaged a plump shell of composition, jointed with ball and socket at the knee, and tapering the length of a well-modeled calf to a hinged ankle. Fearsome harness, with buckles, topped the grisly counterfeit. Krump patted it tenderly.

“Yes, Krump Interlock Sanitary,” he crooned—“a perfect female left. But to denominate for the trade anything so fine by the general term 'Interlock Sanitary' would be destructive. One may be a poet and still remain an inventor and manufacturer of one of the most useful commodities of the age. You will recall Sir John Suckling's 'Ballad Upon a Wedding':

“Her feet beneath her petticoat
Like little mice stole in and out.”

The unhappy author smiled polite recognition of the couplet.

“Well, there you have it. 'White Mice' by poetic license; 'thirteen-thirteen' the dimensions of the limb. Could anything be neater in my trade? And here in the male line we find 'Hearts of Oak'—that's for a rather heavy man, I may say parenthetically—and this severely simple right is the Peter Stuyvesant model. To my mind——”

The smoke-dried Krump suddenly chopped his chatter short, and over his wrinkled face spread a gargoyle stamp of fear. An instant he stood paralyzed. T. Berkeley heard the screeching of an automobile brake in the street outside, and caught the flash of an acetylene headlight swinging in a turn. Krump leaped to the front door, peered out through the glass under a shading hand for the space of a breath, then violently threw a bolt. He wheeled, choking and clawing at his collar.

“They! They!' the man gurgled, and skittered past, making for the little back room. T. Berkeley leaped after him in the blind instinct of imitative action. He was vaguely conscious of taking the breadth of some cluttered bedroom in two bounds, of setting his feet to the lower tread of a dark stairway just as the thud of a heavy body against the door of the shop behind him started the little spring bell to jangling riotously. Up the stairs he plunged, hands outstretched to touch the guiding walls on either side. A snap, a creak, and he saw above him a patch of star space open out of the blackness surrounding; the spidery figure of Krump was silhouetted for a second against the lesser dark.

He jumped up the last steps to follow, and the roof trap banged on his head.

“Go back! Go back!' Krump snarled; and he tried with all his might to jam the wooden hatch down on the other. T. Berkeley gave a heave with his shoulders, and won to the roof. Krump, thrown sprawling, spryly picked himself up, and went speeding like some banshee of ill favor over the crunching gravel of the flat housetop. T. Berkeley was on his heels, desperately, blindly following, he cared not where. The animal sense of danger, strong inheritance from anthropoid ancestors, had turned his feet to flight before ever his reason could know the cause.

Glass crashed somewhere down in the void below the roof parapet. A police whistle shrilled. The siren of an automobile screeched in a dreadful call to all the night that the law was pursuing his transgressors. The trill of the police alarm galvanized T. Berkeley's wildly questioning mind; it was the answer.

The police were on the track of the pearls, and Krump was privy to the theft of them.

Madly he jumped parapets between houses; desperately he clambered up a four-foot standpipe to a higher level; fear greater than fear of death carried him sailing over fathomless slices of blackness in his path. Every ounce of energy, every sentient fiber in his body, was bent on one end—to keep in sight of the dodging, scarecrow figure in the flapping smoking jacket. For Krump was running like a fox to his appointed hole of safety with the sureness of studied design.

An invisible telephone wire caught T. Berkeley squarely across the chest, and hurled him ten feet onto his back. As he fell he felt something leave his fingers; it was the ribbon-tied package which Krump had delivered to him not fifteen minutes before. It struck the roof somewhere beyond him, and when he quickly scrambled to his feet he spent a precious half minute groping for it. Baffled, he straightened, and his eyes strained for glimpse of Krump. The prancing flibbertigibbet in the outlandish coat had disappeared.

Chapter V.

Somewhere behind him in the night desert of chimney pots and clothes posts a revolver popped five times.

T. Berkeley leaped for the hump-shouldered braces of a fire escape that showed over the edge of the roof at his left hand. He swung his legs out into space, grasped the two rough perpendiculars of the iron ladder with his gloved hands, and slid down. Bungling through the apertures in fire balconies, groping with searching feet for the rungs of safety, somehow he descended. He recalled afterward having passed at an open window the white form of a woman, who mowed and sputtered at him, and having gasped a “Good evening” quite automatically. From the end of the ladder he dropped to a wooden store awning, thence to a street, mercifully deserted.

Until T. Berkeley Manners commands a quarter-column obituary in the papers he will be troubled frequently with bad dreams. The dreams inevitably will have to do with mad flight through the streets of a strange town, skulking in dark doorways, crawling through the rank weeds of a vacant lot; somewhere in the course of the a dream enters a milk wagon—a kindly driver willing to cover a fugitive with his horse blanket—a ride through miles of dreary marsh—then the rear room of a saloon somewhere and a peg of burning stuff.

It must be recorded as sober fact that the heartening noggin of liquor was quaffed in the company of the milkman—as a thank offering to the milkman—in a Hackensack saloon. Hackensack is several miles from Hoboken. It was three o' the morning. T. Berkeley took a four-o'clock train for Newark, rode thence to the interesting city of Perth Amboy on an owl trolley, crossed the Kill von Kull to Tottenville on the Staten Island shore, and went to bed in Streeter's Hotel. Tottenville, so the fagged brain of the fugitive told him, was the last place in the world where the police would look for him. It is no slander on Tottenville to say that T. Berkeley was right. Most innocent, as well as most remote, outpost of Greater New York is Tottenville.

He slept the troubled sleep of a fagged murderer, and the pearls in the shark-skin bag were under his head.

It was a desperate, hunted criminal that went to sleep on Streeter's bed; a sober-minded salesman of sectional bookcases who knew his duty as a citizen awoke there. T. Berkeley made a simple breakfast in the hotel dining room at four o'clock in the afternoon, and took the train for Manhattan, He was going to give himself up at police headquarters. So resigned was he when he boarded the ferry to cross from Staten Island to the Battery that even the black letters strung across seven columns of an afternoon paper he picked up from a news stand in the St. George ferryhouse did not revive the old panic of a whirlwind yesterday.

PEARL THIEVES ELUDE FEDERAL DETECTIVES!

So the block type screeched the nubbin of last night's adventure. T. Berkeley even smiled, so unassailable was his composure. Then Krump, the sly fox, had made a good get-away as well as he, the writer mused. His eye began to slip over the “bank” of smaller head type at the top of the two right-hand columns.

T, BERKELEY MANNERS, POPULAR WRITER, BELIEVED TO BE INVOLVED IN ROBBERY.

HIS WATCH IS FOUND ON ROOF!

The old horror rose and smacked T. Berkeley in the face; the mad fantasy of two nights and a day swooped out from the closet of forgetfulness and engulfed him. Lines of type galloped under his eyes as he sped down the double-column measure, seeking the justification for this branding of him in the headlines.

“Secret-service men—conjunction with Hoboken police—posing under the name of Ernestus Krump, but believed to be in league with the crooks—and a companion believed to have been T. Berkeley Manners took to the roof.” (“Yes, yes,” whispered the reader, with dry lips; “but——”) “Shots fired—panic——” “Ah, here?!”)

 

After it was apparent to the secret-service men that the Hoboken detectives had failed to close all avenues of escape, and that the birds had flown, the Federal detectives made a careful examination of the roofs in the block. About one hundred feet away from the trapdoor above Krump's shop they found a small package, tied with white ribbon. Removal of the wrapper disclosed a jewel box bearing the name of a prominent Fifth Avenue jeweler.

This contained a gold watch and a note. The watch was inscribed on its inner case: “To T. Berkeley Manners from Mamma.”

The detectives, at first unwilling to give the contents of the note to the press, finally permitted an Evening Breeze man to make exclusively a copy of the mysterious missive. It read thus:

Jack: In exchange for the key, which I know you will have given to our little friend of the patent limbs ere this, I am returning a little keepsake, which I took from your pocket when I put the bag of—pills there. I took it for a purpose, and, the purpose fulfilled, I am restoring it to its rightful owner.

You will remember I said I would find a way to communicate with you? Well, mamma's inscription and the city directory have shown the way, as you knew when you received my earlier note to-day. I took this way of learning your identity, for it would not have been fair to ask you directly who you were and still have kept my identity secret—which I must still do.

Be strong in your trust, Jack, dear, whatever may happen and deserve the love of your Jill.

P. S.—Jim Rolfe was a necessary fiction. Don't look for him further, for Jim does not exist. Will explain all to you some day.

The newspaper story continued to say that inquiry at the home of T. Berkeley Manners, number five-five-five Gouverneur Street, Brooklyn, had developed the fact that he had not been home all night. Mrs. Mary Jingles, his landlady, told the reporters he had returned to his room unexpectedly yesterday afternoon, and had found waiting him a note delivered earlier by a messenger boy. Mrs. Jingles surmised the note was from a woman, for the paper was strangely scented. Manners had left the house, she said, in manifest agitation shortly after receiving the missive.

Two stone lions couch on the steps of the handsome building on Center Street, New York, called police headquarters. Those lions maintain the imperious demeanor of guardians of a sacred institution. Stonily they glare upon the just and the unjust alike. Murderers pass their dread scrutiny; safe blowers and pickpockets shuffle within reach of their punishing paws; politicians pat them familiarly on the head on their way to important conferences within the hallowed portals. If the frozen jaws of those janissaries of justice were ever loosed in confidence, who knows but that they might confess that, taking a backward look into the secrets of the building, they consciously threw into their pose of stern and upright dignity a little extra “side” to cover the obliquity behind them? However, speculation on the mental attitude of stone lions is hardly profitable, and the only relevant fact in this context is that never had those lions spotted so palpable a criminal as the young man with the jaded eyes who set timorous foot on the steps between them this day—T. Berkeley Manners, novelist.

Vaguely he wondered, as he entered the echoing corridor within the door, if convicts in Sing Sing were allowed to press their trousers; whether their pajamas were striped or just plain gray. The harsh voice of the man in blue asking what he wanted there' was assuredly that of the keeper of the black cells. T. Berkeley managed to gasp that he wanted an interview with O'Shaughnessy; and thereafter he was shunted, bandied from one bluecoat to another bluecoat, glared at and growled at, until finally he found himself pushed through a rosewood door onto a green plush carpet. A big man, tilted back in a spring chair and voraciously eating a big cigar as he would a sprig of endive, eyed him not unkindly over a cluttered desk.

“Well, sir, and what can we do for you?” O'Shaughnessy asked, in a voice like the drumming of a steam pipe.

“I—I am T. Berkeley Manners,” was the story writer's halting introduction of himself. “I came to give myself—er——”

“Well, well—Mr. T. Berkeley Manners, is it! This is interesting, Mr. Manners. And you are the gentleman who gave the Hoboken detectives the slip over the roofs last night? Well, well!”

“——up,” cackled T. Berkeley. “I came to give myself up.”

“Give yourself up?” Geniality in O'Shaughnessy's voice was thick as cream in a jug. “And what do you want to give yourself up for? What have you been doing against the law?”

T. Berkeley had read of how the chief of detectives played with criminals like a cat with a mouse before he put them through the rigors of the “third degree.” It was ghastly, this suavity.

“For the pearl robbery,” he mumbled. “And I have the stolen pearls with me.”

“Just wait a minute, Mr. Manners,” O'Shaughnessy pushed a bell button on his desk. “There's a gentleman in talking to the commissioner right now who is more interested in these pearls than I am. Tell Mr. Reilly I'd like to see him right away if he can come.” This to the uniformed man who answered the summons.

“You know, Mr. Manners, this pearl case is a secret-service job entirely,” O'Shaughnessy purred; “and, much as I've been itching to horn in on it, it's beyond my jurisdiction. Mr. Reilly's head of the New York branch of the service, and—ah, Reilly, come in; here's something to interest you.”

A tall, heavily built man with a mild blue eye strode in, and found a seat near O'Shaughnessy's desk. He carried no handcuffs. He shook hands with T. Berkeley, on the contrary, at O'Shaughnessy's introduction.

“Smoke up!” the head of the city's detectives roared, passing a cigar box to Reilly, then to the fiction spinner. T. Berkeley looked the cigar all over, guessed that it was drugged, but lit it in desperation.

“Now, Mr. Manners,” was O'Shaughnessy's throaty bellow, “come through, and go as far as you like. Just you tell it to Reilly here; I'll listen. I bet it's hot stuff.”

The unhappy young man who had found Somaliland within five miles of Manhattan's city hall made a strong mental effort to get himself in hand; then reached into his inner waistcoat pocket, and brought out the shark-skin bag. He spread the drawstrings, and spilled the whole precious heap of glimmering pearls on O'Shaughnessy's desk. The homely key dropped out last of all. Not unconscious of dramatic values, T. Berkeley sat back, and waited the effect of his dénouement. Not a murmur; not a whisper. Reilly only reached out and picked up the key from the top of the heap of white luster.

“Where did you get this, Mr. Manners?” he queried, paying no heed whatever to the pearls.

“Why, that—that was with the pearls when they were given to me.”

“Um-m! A key, eh? Rather a strange-looking key. I don't know that I've ever seen anything quite like it.”

“Yes; and I am led to think—that is, I believe it must be a very valuable key to a certain young lady who knows something about the stolen pearls.” T. Berkeley, feeling no nickel-plated “nippers” clamped instantly on his wrists, began to recover a few shreds of his self-confidence.

“Nobody said anything about 'stolen' pearls but the newspapers,” Reilly commented quietly. “What makes you think these pearls were stolen?”

“What makes me think—pearls not stolen!” The writer sat in open-mouthed astonishment. “You mean the pearls—the pearls there on that desk were not stolen!”

He was trembling; perspiration stood thickly on his forehead, and the suspected O'Shaughnessy cigar smoldered unnoticed on the floor. He had a feeling about his shoulders as if a heavy pack, like that Pilgrim carried through all the bewildering desert of woodcuts, was loosened and might slip off.

“So far as I know, Mr. Manners,” came the steady monotone of the secret-service man, “there has been no pearl robbery. If there was, Mr. O'Shaughnessy here, and not I, would be handling the case; he takes care of the peace of New York, you know, not the Federal service. But still I think you may interest me in another way. Where did you get these things you just dumped out of a bag?”

“Yes, yes, Manners, tell Reilly and me your straightaway story just as you want to,” O'Shaughnessy reassured him. “Bet it's going to be grand stuff.”

Whereupon T. Berkeley, breathing easier in the glimmering hope that, after all, he might not be particeps criminis, but understanding not at all Reilly's summary sweeping away of the great pearl robbery, told his story from the beginning, about the table at Paquin's, down to the end of the early-morning flight at Tottenville. As he repeated the tumbled incidents of dynamic action his powers of a tale spinner asserted themselves; he carefully led up to his climaxes, polished the high spots. He noticed that as he dwelt upon his interview with Krump, the artificial-limb manufacturer, Reilly, though still listening, picked up the key from the midst of the pearls, and examined it carefully, perplexedly. He drew a sheaf of papers from his pocket, thumbed several pages of what appeared to be a folder, and seemed to be making comparisons between the flat piece of metal and the text of the booklet. Finally T. Berkeley brought his narration to a whirring close. O'Shaughnessy beamed appreciation. Reilly smoked thoughtfully for a minute.

“Did she limp?” he suddenly asked.

“Who—the girl? Why, yes”—T. Berkeley strained his memory to snatch at details. “I think she did. Probably twisted her ankle when she was coming through the window from the gambling house. I hadn't remembered noticing it until you asked.”

“And she said her comfort, maybe her safety, depended on her recovering this key from you?”

“Yes, indeed; she was very earnest about that.”

“Lookahere, Manners,” the secret-service man speared the story-teller with an abrupt glance. “You swear you never met this girl before the night you tell about—never saw her, or heard of her through a third party?”

“Why, certainly,” T. Berkeley found himself answering rather warmly.

“Do you know Tavshan Harooglian, the Fifth Avenue jeweler?”

“The man who was robbed on the Icelandic, you mean?”

“I didn't say he was robbed,” Reilly corrected.

“I did not even know of the man until I read the paper yesterday,” T. Berkeley answered.

“What you think of this, O'Shaughnessy?” the government detective asked—and once more he lifted the thin steel key from the desk, laid it flat on the circular he had been turning about in his fingers, and put both objects under the eye of the chief.

O'Shaughnessy's lips moved as he read from the circular; he picked up the key, and held it close to one eye, examining the shank minutely.

“Uh-huh; that, clinches it, I guess,” he grunted.

Reilly turned, and addressed T. Berkeley crisply:

“Well, Mr. Manners, you have been skating pretty near a crime without knowing it; but you have helped us clinch one point that was missing. We're much obliged to you. You can go—and you can take these knickknacks with you as a souvenir if you'd like to.”

He cupped his hand; and made a scoop sweep of the pearls on O'Shaughnessy's desk. T. Berkeley jumped from his chair.

“What! You're giving me thirty thousand dollars' worth of pearls?” he yammered.

“I'm offering you about three dollars and fifty cents' worth of fish-scale imitations—and poor ones, at that,” Reilly said. “All I'll keep is the key.”

“But—but I don't understand.”

Reilly smiled. O'Shaughnessy took his cigar from his mouth.

“Aw, tell the poor boob the whole business,” he rumbled.

The Federal agent seemed to hesitate, weighing something in his mind. Then he began:

“After all, I don't suppose there's any danger you will repeat what I say to the papers if I promise to give out to them enough to square you for having your name in the afternoon editions to-day.”

T. Berkeley shook his head in a positive pledge of secrecy.

“Well, we'll put it this way: A prominent Oriental dealer in rugs and jewelry, with a place on Fifth Avenue, isn't making money fast enough; so he decides to go in for beating the customs a little on the side. He does it, and gets away with it in fine shape for a couple of years, and then he frames a grand clean-up. He takes a girl in with him—a very beautiful, very clever young girl she is, too.”

“Not——” T. Berkeley began, a stab searching his heart.

“I'm naming no names, young man,” Reilly rebuked. “So he takes a girl in with him, and he gets together—or has made to order—a bunch of sixty-five matched fish-scale pearls. That's the dummy to hang on the goat when the goat comes along. He leaves those phony pearls in his shop here, and goes over to Europe to buy the real pearls, the girl having preceded him by several weeks.

“Mr. Jeweler makes no bones about hiding his purchase of the real pearls from the treasury agents over there. He buys 'em right out in meeting, so to speak. Meanwhile, he's got a friend—your fellow Sanderson—who's an innocent fiction writer like yourself; he feeds a fine press-agent story about the Sultan Ali Beg's pearls, and how they were stolen in Arabia, to Sanderson, knowing Sanderson will fall for it. He wants to build up a bloody mystery about his string of pearls like the stories of the Hope diamond, you see.

“So far, so good. Mr. Jeweler buys the pearls; we know about it on this side, and are ready to spot them for duty when he arrives. On the ship he meets a beautiful young girl, as the papers had it; and he courts her hard in the eyes of the passengers. Bluff! The girl's his lady friend, who's in with him on the scheme. She's got the real pearls all the time. But after Mr. Jeweler's made out his declaration all right and proper he's robbed the night before the ship gets into port. When he come to the customs pier he's got no pearls to pay duty on, for he's been frisked. The girl has made declaration of a few hundred dollars' worth of stuff—dresses and such—and she walks off the pier with the thirty thousand dollars matched pearls on her. Do you get me?”

T. Berkeley nodded dully.

“Now, the real pearls once in the country, what's their game? They want a little advertising on the side; that they get from the papers. But they want more than that to plant the phony pearls on some goat, hoping somehow they'll come to light and verify the robbery story. All right if some expert does say when the fish-scale pearls are discovered that they're not genuine; Mr. Jeweler will admit he was fooled, and he'll be getting away with the real stuff anyway.”

“It looks—it looks,” said T. Berkeley, “as if here is where I come in.”

“You do,” was Reilly's hearty assurance. “You fall in. You're the goat. You see, the secret service begins to tumble to the little game, and watch Mr. Jeweler a bit. He and the girl decide to give the third member of the gang the double cross. The third man is Krump, the manufacturer of handsome artificial legs. The girl discovers all of a sudden she's lost something she needs in her business; finds out she's slipped it to you by mistake. Hoping the secret-service men are already beginning to feel out Krump, she sends you—the goat—over to Krump to kill two birds with one stone; slip him this key here, which she very much needs because it is a number-one clew to her identity as long as it is kicking around loose, and incidentally attract the detectives to Krump.”

“I guess I attracted the detectives, all right,” murmured T. Berkeley, with a wan smile.

“Yes; and while the secret-service men were hopping after you and Krump over the roofs of Hoboken, Mr. Jeweler and Miss Girl make their quick get-away by different routes.”

“What! Harooglian and—and She got away?” An eager flash came in T. Berkeley's eyes.

“She did—worse luck; but Harooglian didn't. Just got a wire this afternoon saying they caught Mr. Jeweler up at Malone, New York, on the boundary. We landed Krump, too, sneaking out of Hoboken in a coal car this morning.”

“But the girl—she's really gone?” T. Berkeley grabbed the detective's sleeve in his excitement.

“For a while, son, for a while. Don't be too happy; she'll have to come back here some day; they all do; and then we'll|——”

There was silence in O'Shaughnessy's office. It was broken by a faint, metallic ring. Reilly had dropped the mysterious key onto the arm extension of the chief's desk. He picked up the bit of metal, and looked at it quizzically.

“But she'll surely need this—yes, she will,” he chuckled.

“Why?” from the mixer of red-blooded highballs innocently.

“Look here.”

Reilly pushed the key close to T. Berkeley's eyes, and pointed out with a finger nail the tiny figures “1313” stamped in the flat shank near the top.

“Look here, too.”

He held out a turned-back folder, upon the uppermost page of which was a lithographed artificial leg. In bold-faced type above a paragraph of description were the words and figures “White Mice, 1313.” Opposite was the cut of a key, identical with that Reilly held. “Key to Krump's Interlock Sanitary” was the legend under the cut.

“You said she limped, didn't you?” Reilly demanded, his eyes twinkling with grim humor.

“But you don't mean to say she has—you don't tell me——”

“Yes, I do mean she has one—and that's the reason why she was such a good pearl smuggler. Figure it out, son; figure it out,” laughed the head of the secret-service branch.