R. Holmes & Co., John Kendrick Bangs [best ereader for comics .TXT] 📗

twenty-dollar bills, Mr. Grouch. You may leave them in the safe along with the other valuables."

"Thank you, Mr. Holmes," said Grouch, rising. "It shall be as you say. Before I go, sir, may I ask how you knew me and by what principle of deduction you came to guess my business so accurately?"

"It was simple enough," said Holmes. "I knew, in the first place, that so eminent a person as Mr. Blank would not come to me in the guise of a Mr. Grouch if he hadn't some very serious trouble on his mind. I knew, from reading the society items in the _Whirald_, that Mr. Bobby Wilbraham would celebrate the attainment of his majority by a big fete on the 17th of next month. Everybody knows that Mr. Blank is Mr. Wilbraham's trustee until he comes of age. It was easy enough to surmise from that what the nature of the trouble was. Two and two almost invariably make four, Mr. Grouch."

"And how the devil," demanded Grouch, angrily--"how the devil did you know I was Blank?"

"Mr. Blank passes the plate at the church I go to every Sunday," said Holmes, laughing, "and it would take a great sight more than a two-dollar wig and a pair of fifty-cent whiskers to conceal that pompous manner of his."

"Tush! You would better not make me angry, Mr. Holmes," said Grouch, reddening.

"You can get as angry as you think you can afford to, for all I care, Mr. Blank," said Holmes. "It's none of my funeral, you know."

And so the matter was settled. The unmasked Blank, seeing that wrath was useless, calmed down and accepted Holmes's terms and method for his relief.

"I'll have my man there at 4 A.M., October 17th, Mr. Blank," said Holmes. "See that your end of it is ready. The coast must be kept clear or the scheme falls through."

Grouch went heavily out, and Holmes called me back into the room.

"Jenkins," said he, "that man is one of the biggest scoundrels in creation, and I'm going to give him a jolt."

"Where are you going to get the retired burglar?" I asked.

"Sir," returned Raffles Holmes, "this is to be a personally conducted enterprise. It's a job worthy of may grandsire on my mother's side. Raffles will turn the trick."

And it turned out so to be, for the affair went through without a hitch. The night of October 16th I spend at Raffles's apartments. He was as calm as though nothing unusual were on hand. He sang songs, played the piano, and up to midnight was as gay and skittish as a school-boy on vacation. As twelve o'clock struck, however, he sobered down, put on his hat and coat, and, bidding me remain where I was, departed by means of the fire-escape.

"Keep up the talk, Jenkins," he said. "The walls are thin here, and it's just as well, in matters of this sort, that our neighbors should have the impression that I have _not_ gone out. I've filled the machine up with a choice lot of songs and small-talk to take care of my end of it. A consolidated gas company, life yourself, should have no difficulty in filling in the gaps."

And with that he left me to as merry and withal as nervous a three hours as I ever spent in my life. Raffles had indeed filled that talking-machine-- thirteen full cylinders of it--with as choice an assortment of causeries and humorous anecdotes as any one could have wished to hear. Now and again it would bid me cheer up and not worry about him. Once, along about 2 A.M., it cried out: "You ought to see me now, Jenkins. I'm right in the middle of this Grouch job, and it's a dandy. I'll teach _him_ a lesson." The effect of all this was most uncanny. It was as if Raffles Holmes himself spoke to me from the depths of that dark room in the Blank household, where he was engaged in an enterprise of dreadful risk merely to save the good name of one who no longer deserved to bear such a thing. In spite of all this, however, as the hours passed I began to grow more and more nervous. The talking-machine sang and chattered, but when four o'clock came and Holmes had not yet returned, I became almost frenzied with excitement--and then at the climax of the tension came the flash of his dark-lantern on the fire- escape, and he climbed heavily into the room.

"Thank Heaven you're back," I cried.

"You have reason to," said Holmes, sinking into a chair. "Give me some whiskey. That man Blank is a worse scoundrel than I took him for."

"What's happened?" I asked. "Didn't he play square?"

"No," said Holmes, breathing heavily. "He waited until I had busted the thing open and was on my way out in the dark hall, and then pounced on me with his butler and valet. I bowled the butler down the kitchen stairs, and sent the valet holing into the dining-room with an appendicitis jab in the stomach and had the pleasure of blacking both of Mr. Blank's eyes."

"And the stuff?"

"Right here," said Holmes, tapping his chest. "I was afraid something might happen on the way out and I kept both hands free. I haven't much confidence in philanthropists like Blank. Fortunately the scrimmage was in the dark, so Blank will never know who hit him."

"What are you going to do with the $35,000?" I queried, as we went over the booty later and found it all there.

"Don't know--haven't made up my mind," said Holmes, laconically. "I'm too tired to think about that now. It's me for bed." And with that he turned in.

Two days later, about nine o'clock in the evening, Mr. Grouch again called, and Holmes received him courteously.

"Well, Mr. Holmes," Grouch observed, unctuously, rubbing his hands together, "it was a nice job, neatly done. It saved the day for me. Wilbraham was satisfied, and has given me a whole year to make good the loss. My reputation is saved, and--"

"Excuse me, Mr. Blank--or Grouch--er--to what do you refer?" asked Holmes.

"Why, our little transaction of Monday night--or was it Tuesday morning?" said Grouch.

"Oh--that!" said Holmes. "Well, I'm glad to hear you managed to pull it off satisfactorily. I was a little worried about it. I was afraid you were done for."

"Done for?" said Grouch. "No, indeed. The little plan when off without a hitch."

"Good," said Holmes. "I congratulate you. _Whom did you get to do the job?_"

"Who--what--what--why, what do you mean, Mr. Holmes?" gasped Grouch.

"Precisely what I say--or maybe you don't like to tell me--such things are apt to be on a confidential basis. Anyhow, I'm glad you're safe, Mr. Grouch, and I hope your troubles are over."

"They will be when you give me back my $30,000," said Grouch.

"Your what?" demanded Holmes, with well-feigned surprise.

"My $30,000," repeated Blank, his voice rising to a shout.

"My dear Mr. Grouch," said Holmes, "how should I know anything about your $30,000?"

"Didn't your--your man take it?" demanded Grouch, huskily.

"My man? Really, Mr. Grouch, you speak in riddles this evening. Pray make yourself more clear."

"Your reformed burglar, who broke open my safe, and--" Grouch went on.

"I have no such man, Mr. Grouch."

"Didn't you send a man to my house, Mr. Raffles, to break open my safe, and take certain specified parcels of negotiable property therefrom?" said Grouch, rising and pounding the table with his fists.

"_I did not!_" returned Holmes, with equal emphasis. "I have never in my life sent anybody to your house, sir."

"Then who in the name of Heaven did?" roared Grouch. "The stuff is gone."

Holmes shrugged his shoulders.

"I am willing," said he, calmly, "to undertake to find out who did it, if anybody, if that is what you mean, Mr. Grouch. Ferreting out crime is my profession. Otherwise, I beg to assure you that my interest in the case ceases at this moment."

Here Holmes rose with quiet dignity and walked to the door.

"You will find me at my office in the morning, Mr. Grouch." he remarked, "in case you wish to consult me professionally."

"Hah!" sneered Grouch. "You think you can put me off this way, do you?"

"I think so," said Holmes, with a glittering eye. "No gentleman or other person may try to raise a disturbance in my private apartments and remain there."

"We'll see what the police have to say about this, Mr. Raffles Holmes," Grouch shrieked, as he made for the door.

"Very well," said Holmes. "I've no doubt they will find our discussion of the other sinners very interesting. They are welcome to the whole story as far as I am concerned."

And he closed the door on the ashen face of the suffering Mr. Grouch.


"What shall I do with your share of the $30,000, Jenkins?" said Raffles Holmes a week later.

"Anything you please," said I. "Only don't offer any of it to me. I can't question the abstract justice of your mulcting old Blank for the amount, but, somehow or other, I don't want any of it myself. Send it to the Board of Foreign Missions."

"Good!" said Holmes. "That's what I've done with my share. See!"

And he showed me an evening paper in which the board conveyed its acknowledgment of the generosity of an unknown donor of the princely sum of $15,000.



VII THE REDEMPTION OF YOUNG BILLINGTON RAND

"Jenkins," said Raffles Holmes, lighting his pipe and throwing himself down upon my couch, "don't you sometimes pine for those good old days of Jack Sheppard and Dick Turpin? Hang it all--I'm getting blisteringly tired of the modern refinements in crime, and yearn for the period when the highwayman met you on the road and made you stand and deliver at the point of the pistol."

"Indeed I don't!" I ejaculated. "I'm not chicken-livered, Raffles, but I'm mighty glad my lines are cast in less strenuous scenes. When a book-agent comes in here, for instance, and holds me up for nineteen dollars a volume for a set of Kipling in words of one syllable, illustrated by his aunt, and every volume autographed by his uncle's step-sister, it's a game of wits between us as to whether I shall buy or not buy, and if he gets away with my signature to a contract it is because he has legitimately outwitted me. But your ancient Turpin overcame you by brute force; you hadn't a run for your money from the moment he got his eye on you, and no percentage of the swag was ever returned to you has in the case of the Double-Cross Edition of Kipling, in which you get at least fifty cents worth of paper and print for every nineteen dollars you give up."

"That is merely the commercial way of looking at it," protested Holmes. "You reckon up the situation on a basis of mere dollars, strike a balance and charge the thing up to profit and loss. But the romance of it all, the element of the picturesque, the delicious, tingling sense of adventure which was inseparable from a road experience with a commanding personality like Turpin--these things are all lost in your prosaic book-agent methods of our day. No man writing his memoirs for the enlightenment of posterity would ever dream of setting down upon paper the story of how a book-agent robbed