The Midnight Passenger, Richard Henry Savage [best reads of all time txt] 📗

special counsel of the Western Trading Company.

In the awkward pause which followed, Ferris remarked boldly: "I intended to ask for an indefinite leave on account of breaking health. I shall now remain here, as an ordinary witness, subject to your orders, and with no other interest than to clear up the mystery."

In half an hour Ferris had closed his artful disclosures. "Any matters occurring between the late Mr. Worthington and myself are confidential as between lawyer and client."

In the circle, Messrs. Boardman and Warner watched with ferret eyes every movement of the man who only gazed into the faces of enemies.

"That is all, for the present," significantly said Stillwell, when the chief of police, the head detective, and himself had hurled the last questions at Ferris.

"I will then retire," defiantly remarked Ferris. "With this statement to all men, I shall now be mute to all questioners save the proper authorities. I have turned twenty reporters away this morning without a word, and the police authorities can reach me at my hotel, until they have closed their labors. Then my connection with this company and its affairs terminates forever."

He gazed fiercely at the impassive face of John Witherspoon, and rising, with a bow of general adieu, stalked into the hall.

But he turned as Boardman, Warner, and Witherspoon, following, drew him into the room where Clayton had fought out his life struggles.

"You may now deliver us the papers taken from this desk, and so, escape a prosecution," firmly remarked Boardman. Ferris sat down at the table and wrote a few lines. Handing the paper to the senior executor, he said, with a cutting sneer:

"There is my bill for one hundred thousand dollars for legal services in the last five years for Hugh Worthington. Upon its approval and payment, I will deliver over all the papers of our long intimacy, and sign clean receipts.

"I will then stipulate not to approach Miss Worthington in any manner. Here are all the valueless papers you demand. Will you give me a receipt for them?"

"You took them surreptitiously! You can well afford to trust our honor," snappishly said Warner. "Very good," added Boardman. "You will hear from us, as to your claim, in due time."

When Arthur Ferris' footfall died out upon the stair, Boardman drily remarked, as he pocketed the bill, "The price of a scoundrel's silence! Well, we will see! But the fellow really knows nothing of the murder! Let us go to work, gentlemen."

When they returned to the conference room, below them, on the street, the deposed favorite of fortune was chatting with a new officer on the beat.

"McNerney? Oh, yes," grinned the strange policeman. "He has taken two-months' leave and goes over to see his ould mother, in Oireland. His home address, sure, I don't know. Mayhap the sergeant can tell ye."

While the bluecoat sauntered away, Ferris mentally recorded another mistake. "I should have thrown the hat-box after the hat," he murmured. "A few hundred dollars would have been well spent. And yet he is probably in their ring now. His 'leave of absence' indicates a very sudden return of affection for the 'ould mother.'"

Ferris now decided upon a policy of open frankness and calm indifference. "There is no one I could have made use of, but that Jew office boy," he mused, as he sauntered up Broadway, "and they have bought him out, over my head. I will let my little bill for "legal services" ripen. I can afford to let my 'legal field' lie fallow for the summer."

And yet he cursed the memory of the innocent victim of the mysterious murder. "But for her sentimental hubbub, I could have easily managed Alice. This fellow's strange death gives him the halo of martyrdom. He is out of my reach now. The old man must have feared the 'Iron Gate' of Death! And, after all, his plans to 'efface' Clayton were only inchoate. I cannot terrify them with any hearsay projects. I must get what I can, cling to Dunham, and keep silence.

"The marriage! That means just the one hundred thousand dollars! I will save it and my good name by submitting in silence."

He signalled a passing carriage and ordered the man to drive him far "up the road," out of range of the shrill-voiced newsboys, hawking their "extras," with "Full accounts of the great murder mystery."

For a brief day the name of Randall Clayton was on every one's lips. There were hundreds clustered around the morgue, where already the mute witness who had drifted back under the arch of the Brooklyn Bridge lay in the gloomy state of death. The hasty verdict of "death from murder committed by parties unknown," was all the record of the darkly-veiled happening.

It was a blind trail, after all, which had ended this open and honorable career in the sight of all men. The electric lights were throwing fitful gleams upon the black waters whirling past the Brooklyn Bridge, when the executors, with Witherspoon, gathered around Miss Alice Worthington in the drawing-room of the Stillwell residence.

There was also the tired counsellor, who had also vainly probed the officials of the company, the employees of the Astor Place Bank, and every reachable occupant of the huge business building.

Poor old Somers, for the hundredth time, had rehearsed his story, and yet it all ended in a blind trail.

While they talked of the dead, in hushed voices, Policeman Dennis McNerney was chatting with Emil Einstein over the counter of the Magdal Pharmacy. The keen-eyed policeman noted the efflorescent jewelry, and the resplendent garb of the too-prosperous-looking lad.

Notwithstanding the Jewish boy's sudden prosperity, there were deeply-marked dark circles about his eyes. The Bowery's delights were telling upon the frightened lad, who had sealed his glib tongue now behind lying lips. Flattered by the "cop's" familiar manner, Emil greedily swallowed the ground bait artfully scattered by the cool Irish-American.

He reeled off the story which he had told to the inquisitors of parting in the office with Clayton after Somers had given over the deposits. Before the two separated, Einstein had forgotten his Hebrew timidity.

"Let me know if you pick up any items," said McNerney, giving the lad a ten-dollar bill, with a secret sorrow at throwing good money away. "My chum, Jim Condon, and I hope to help get this reward into our Precinct Squad. Come down to-morrow night to the station, and I'll introduce you. He'll look out for you, and he can write me and keep on the trail. I take the next Cunard steamer for Queenstown."

Mr. Ben Timmins, as host, drew McNerney into the little back room, and the three smacked their lips over the "medicinal brandy," which had been Fritz Braun's pride.

"Where's the boss?" casually demanded the officer. "He went over to Germany a couple of months ago," volubly explained Timmins. "I'm cock o' the walk for a few months now. Drop in and see me, on the d. q."

Two hours later, from a dark angle opposite, Officer McNerney saw Emil Einstein, with swinging steps, cigar in mouth, speed along eastwardly.

In plain clothes, his brow covered with a soft hat, the athletic policeman dashed along, keeping his prey in view. The lightning change of uniform gave him a clear protection, and in the thirty minutes of his necessary absence, the mustache which was McNerney's pride had disappeared.

"Either he goes to his girl, or else to meet the woman of the carriage," mused the man, who had sworn to reach a portion of the now heavily increased award. "Once I locate his 'stamping ground,' I am on the road to success."

It was twenty minutes before the excited McNerney saw Einstein slacken his determined pace down the Bowery. McNerney's heart beat, in wild hopes, as the lad, with furtive glances around, began to linger around the corner of the Dry Dock Bank.

"Is it the ten dollars burning in his pocket?" murmured the excited man. "Some cheap woman foolery?"

His practiced eye soon told him of the lad's determined purpose. For, in all the hovering movements, the office boy never left one or the other front of the bank building.

And none of the loungers, no street waif, no bedaubed siren lingered in colloquy there in the shadows of the respected fiduciary institution. "It's a poor fishing ground for the fancy," growled McNerney, as he suddenly darted forward in pursuit.

A woman, whose gliding walk and shapely voluptuousness of body indicated the Polish Jewess, paused, and bending her head, without a word of salutation, listened to the eager lad. The hands of the two met, in the darkness, and then Einstein sped back into the glaring Bowery, while the dark-robed woman pursued her way toward the East River.

"No bad walker," was McNerney's forced conclusion, as he gathered himself. The unknown had swept around the corner from the south and turned eastwardly to meet the waiting lad, with the sure gait of one who knew she was waited for.

On, onward, with undulating lissom swing, the veiled woman sped, McNerney judiciously regulating his gait. And all her settled purpose was evident in the measured flight, the head never once turned in curious gaze, and the singularity of her march.

At last, halting before a respectable-looking tenement-house on First Avenue, the woman turned into the open hallway and paused at the door of the lefthand apartment.

In an instant there was a flash of light within, and then the dimly outlined shadows of a woman moving from behind the linen curtains.

"Fairly run to earth! It's a good night's work!" laughed McNerney. "Things are going my way at last!" He hastened off and, jumping on the nearest car, sought his own home by a round-about way. "Now, Dennis, my boy," he said, as he stuffed his pipe. "One bit of hurry, and ye are ruined! I have two birds to watch. And I know her perch, their meetingplace, and the boy's own den!" He now saw airy castles of Spain gaily rising in the smoke wreaths around him.

"To-morrow," he said, "I will prospect, and I think I'll borrow Mrs. Haggerty's boy, Dan, to hunt for a tailor in that building. He is sharp and he can knock at the door by mistake, so I'll get her general description.

"If the janitor is a fair man to jolly, Dan must then find out his pet saloon, and I'll make a new friend on the East Side.

"But I must disappear, after I have met this boy Einstein at the station. I'll have to slip on a false mustache for ten minutes. Jim Condon can bring him out to me in the dark. He can tell him I don't care to run up against the sergeant."

On Central Park West there was a circle of astonished listeners, when Doctor William Atwater had closed the conference by reporting his inability to trace a single enemy of the murdered man. Counsellor Stillwell, in a grave reverie, listened and abandoned all present hope of any clue to the cowardly murder.

"All seems darkness around us, now," he sighed. "The journals, the police, the detectives, and our own private searches have failed to locate any suspicion, however fleeting.

"It only remains for us, while awaiting some unravelling of the mystery, to unite in the fitting burial of the unfortunate gentleman, when the Coroner has finished his dreary labors. He had