Laughing Bill Hyde and Other Stories, Rex Beach [moboreader TXT] 📗

was strong, therefore he lost himself to his surroundings. Finally, however, he roused himself from his abstraction and realized the irony of this situation. He, the weakest, the most inexperienced of all the men who had tried, had been set to solve this mystery, and starvation was to be the fruit of his failure.

He saw that it had begun to snow outside. In the lobby it was warm and bright and vivid with jostling life; the music of a stringed orchestra somewhere back of him was calling well-dressed men and women in to dinner. All of them seemed happy, hopeful, purposeful. He noted, furthermore, that three days without food makes a man cold, even in a warm place, and light-headed, too. The north wind had bitten him cruelly as he crossed the street, and now as he peered out of the plate-glass windows the night seemed to hold other lurking horrors besides. His want was like a burden, and he shuddered weakly, hesitating to venture out where the wind could harry him. It was a great temptation to remain here where there was warmth and laughter and life; nevertheless, he rose and slunk shivering out into the darkness, then laid a course toward the Morgue.

While Anderson trod the snowy streets a slack-jowled editor sat at supper with some friends at the Press Club, eating and drinking heartily, as is the custom of newspaper men let down for a moment from the strain of their work. He had told a story, and his caustic way of telling it had amused his hearers, for each and every one of them remembered the shabby applicant for work, and all of them had wasted baffling hours on the mystery of this girl with the golden hair.

"I guess I put a crimp in him," giggled Mr. Burns. "I gave him a chance to show those talents he recommends so highly."

"The Morgue, on a night like this, is a pretty dismal place for a hungry man," said one of the others. "It's none too cheerful in the daytime."

The others agreed, and Burns wabbled anew in his chair in appreciation of his humor.

Young Anderson had never seen a morgue, and to-night, owing to his condition, his dread of it was child-like. It seemed as if this particular charnel-house harbored some grisly thing which stood between him and food and warmth and hope; the nearer he drew to it the greater grew his dread. A discourteous man, shrunken as if from the chill of the place, was hunched up in front of a glowing stove. He greeted Anderson sourly:

"Out into that courtyard; turn to the left—second door," he directed.
"She's in the third compartment."

Anderson lacked courage to ask the fellow to come along, but stumbled out into a snow-filled areaway lighted by a swinging incandescent which danced to the swirling eddies.

Compartment! He supposed bodies were kept upon slabs or tables, or something like that. He had steeled himself to see rows of unspeakable sights, played upon by dripping water, but he found nothing of the sort.

The second door opened into a room which he discovered was colder than the night outside, evidently the result of artificial refrigeration. He was relieved to find the place utterly bare except for a sort of car or truck which ran around the room on a track beneath a row of square doors. These doors evidently opened into the compartments alluded to by the keeper.

Which compartment had the fellow said? Paul abruptly discovered that he was rattled, terribly rattled, and he turned back out of the place. He paused shortly, however, and took hold of himself.

"Now, now!" he said, aloud. "You're a bum reporter, my boy." An instant later he forced himself to jerk open the first door at his hand.

For what seemed a full minute he stared into the cavern, as if petrified, then he closed the door softly. Sweat had started from his every pore. Alone once more in the great room, he stood shivering. "God!" he muttered. This was newspaper training indeed.

He remembered now having read, several days before, about an Italian laborer who had been crushed by a falling column. To one unaccustomed to death in any form that object, head-on in the obscurity of the compartment, had been a trying sight. He began to wonder if it were really cold or stiflingly hot.

The boy ground his teeth and flung open the next door, slamming it hurriedly again to blot out what it exposed. Why didn't they keep them covered? Why didn't they show a card outside? Must he examine every grisly corpse upon the premises?

He stepped to the third door and wrenched it open. He knew the girl at once by her wealth of yellow hair and the beauty of her still, white face. There was no horror here, no ghastly sight to weaken a man's muscles and sicken his stomach; only a tired girl asleep. Anderson felt a great pity as he wheeled the truck opposite the door and reverently drew out the slab on which the body lay. He gazed upon her intently for some time. She was not at all as he had pictured her, and yet there could be no mistake. He took the printed description from his pocket and reread it carefully, comparing it point by point. When he had finished he found that it was a composite word photograph, vaguely like and yet totally unlike the person it was intended to portray, and so lacking in character that no one knowing the original intimately would have been likely to recognize her from it.

So that was why no word had come in answer to all this newspaper publicity. After all, this case might not be so difficult as it had seemed; for the first time the dispirited youth felt a faint glow of encouragement. He began to formulate a plan.

Hurriedly he fumbled for his note-book, and there, in that house of death, with his paper propped against the wall, he wrote a two-hundred-word description; a description so photographically exact that to this day it is preserved in the Buffalo police archives as a perfect model.

He replaced the body in its resting-place and went out. There was no chill in him now, no stumbling nor weakness of any sort. He had found a starting-point, had uncovered what all those trained newspaper men had missed, and he felt that he had a chance to win.

Twenty minutes later Burns, who had just come in from supper, turned back from his desk with annoyance and challenge in his little, narrow eyes.

"Well?"

"I think I've got her, Mr. Burns."

"Nonsense!"

"Anyhow, I've got a description that her father or her mother or her friends can recognize. The one you and the other papers printed disguised her so that nobody could tell who she was—it might have covered a hundred girls."

Rapidly, and without noting the editor's growing impatience, Paul read the two descriptions, then ran on, breathlessly:

"All we have to do is print ten or twenty thousand of these and mail them out with the morning edition—separate sheets, posters, you understand?—so they can be nailed up in every post-office within two hundred miles. Send some to the police of all the cities, and we'll have a flash in twenty-four hours."

Burns made no comment for a moment. Instead, he looked the young man over angrily from his eager face to his unblacked shoes. His silence, his stare, were eloquent.

"Why? Why not?" Anderson demanded, querulously. "I tell you this description isn't right. It—it's nothing like her, nothing at all."

"Say! I thought I'd seen the last of you," growled the corpulent man.
"Aren't you on to yourself yet?"

"Do you—mean that your talk this evening don't go?" Paul demanded, quietly. "Do you mean to say you won't even give me the chance you promised?"

"No! I don't mean that. What I said goes, all right, but I told you to identify this girl. I didn't agree to do it. What d'you think this paper is, anyhow? We want stories in this office. We don't care who or what this girl is unless there's a story in her. We're not running a job-print shop nor a mail-order business to identify strayed females. Twenty thousand posters! Bah! And say—don't you know that no two men can write similar descriptions of anybody or anything? What's the difference whether her hair is burnished gold or 'raw gold' or her eyes bluish gray instead of grayish blue? Rats! Beat it!"

"But I tell you—"

"What's her name? Where does she live? What killed her? That's what I want to know. I'd look fine, wouldn't I, circularizing a dead story? Wouldn't that be a laugh on me? No, Mr. Anderson, author, artist, and playwright, I'm getting damned tired of being pestered by you, and you needn't come back here until you bring the goods. Do I make myself plain?"

It was anger which cut short the younger man's reply. On account of petty economy, for fear of ridicule, this editor refused to relieve some withered old woman, some bent and worried old man, who might be, who probably were, waiting, waiting, waiting in some out-of-the-way village. So Anderson reflected. Because there might not be a story in it this girl would go to the Potter's Field and her people would never know. And yet, by Heaven, they would know! Something told him there was a story back of this girl's death, and he swore to get it. With a mighty effort he swallowed his chagrin and, disregarding the insult to himself, replied:

"Very well. I've got you this time."

"Humph!" Burns grunted, viciously.

"I don't know how I'll turn the trick, but I'll turn it." For the second time that evening he left the office with his jaws set stubbornly.

Paul Anderson walked straight to his boarding-house and bearded his landlady. "I've got a job," said he.

"I'm very glad," the lady told him, honestly enough. "I feared you were going to move out."

"Yes!" he repeated. "I've got a job that carries the highest salary on the paper. You remember the yellow-haired girl who killed herself awhile ago?" he asked.

"Indeed I do. Everybody knows about that case."

"Well, it got too tough for the police and the other reporters, so they turned it over to me. It's a bully assignment, and my pay starts when I solve the mystery. Now I'm starved; I wish you'd rustle me some grub."

"But, Mr. Anderson, you're bill for this week? You know I get paid in—"

"Tut, tut! You know how newspapers are. They don't pay in advance, and
I can't pay you until they pay me. You'll probably have to wait until
Saturday, for I'm a little out of practice on detective stuff. But
I'll have this thing cleared up by then. You don't appreciate—you
can't appreciate—what a corking assignment it is."

Anderson had a peculiarly engaging smile, and five minutes later he was wrecking the pantry of all the edibles his fellow-boarders had overlooked, the while his landlady told him her life's history, wept over the memory of her departed husband, and confessed that she hoped to get out of the boarding-house business some time.

A good night's sleep and a hearty breakfast put the young man in fine fettle, and about ten o'clock he repaired to a certain rooming-house on Main Street, the number of which he obtained from the clipping in his pocket.

A girl answered his ring, but at sight of him she shut the door hurriedly, explaining through the crack:

"Mrs. MacDougal is out and you can't come in."

"But I want to talk to you."

"I'm not allowed to talk to reporters," she declared. "Mrs. MacDougal won't let me."

A slight Scotch accent gave Anderson his cue. "MacDougal is a good
Scotch name. I'm Scotch myself, and so are you." He smiled his
boarding-house smile, and the girl's eyes twinkled back at him.
"Didn't she tell you I was coming?"

"Why, no, sir. Aren't you a reporter?"

"I've been told that I'm not. I came to look at a room."

"What room?" the girl asked, quickly. "We haven't any vacant rooms."

"That's queer," Anderson frowned. "I can't be mistaken. I'm sure Mrs.
MacDougal said there was one."

The door opened slowly. "Maybe she meant the one on the second floor."

"Precisely." An instant later he was following his guide up-stairs.

Anderson recognized the room at a glance, from its description, but the girl did not mention the tragedy which had occurred therein, so he proceeded to talk terms with her, prolonging his stay as long as possible, meanwhile using his eyes to the best advantage. He invented an elaborate ancestry which he traced backward through