On Secret Service

"Well," replied the postmaster, "you know about the Tyson letters and – "

"I don't know about a thing," Elmer cut in. "Or at least we'll work on the assumption that I don't. Then I'll be sure not to miss any points and at the same time I'll get a fresh outline of the entire situation."

Some two hours later Postmaster Gordon finished his résumé of the various cases which were puzzling the police and the postal officials, for a number of the best men on the police force had been quietly at work trying to trace the poison-pen letters.

"Are these all the letters that have been received?" Allison inquired, indicating some thirty communications which lay before him on the desk.

"All that have been called to the attention of this office. Of course, there's no telling how many more have been written, about which no complaint has been made. Knowing human nature, I should say that at least three times that number have been received and possibly paid for. But the recipients didn't report the matter – for reasons best known to themselves. As a matter of fact – But you're not interested in gossip."

"I most certainly am!" declared Allison. "When you're handling a matter of this kind, where back-stairs intrigue and servants-hall talk is likely to play a large part, gossip forms a most important factor. What does Dame Rumor say in this case?"

"So far as these letters are concerned, nothing at all. Certain influences, which it's hardly necessary to explain in detail, have kept this affair out of the papers – but gossip has it that at least three divorces within as many months have been caused by the receipt of anonymous letters, and that there are a number of other homes which are on the verge of being broken up for a similar reason."

"That would appear to bear out your contention that other people have received letters like these, but preferred to take private action upon them. Also that, if blackmail were attempted, it sometimes failed – otherwise the matter wouldn't have gotten as far as the divorce court."

Then, after a careful study of several of the sample letters on the desk, Allison continued, "I suppose you have noted the fact that no two of these appear to have been written by the same person?"

"Yes, but that is a point upon which handwriting experts fail to agree. Some of them claim that each was written by a different person. Others maintain that one woman was responsible for all of them, and a third school holds that either two or three people wrote them. What're you going to do when experts disagree?"

"Don't worry about any of 'em," retorted Allison. "If we're successful at all we won't have much trouble in proving our case without the assistance of a bunch of so-called experts who only gum up the testimony with long words that a jury can't understand. Where are the envelopes in which these letters were mailed?"

"Most of the people who brought them in failed to keep the envelopes. But we did manage to dig up a few. Here they are," and the postmaster tossed over a packet of about half a dozen, of various shapes and sizes.

"Hum!" mused the postal operative, "all comparatively inexpensive stationery. Might have been bought at nearly any corner drug store. Any clue in the postmarks?"

"Not the slightest. As you will note, they were mailed either at the central post office or at the railroad station – places so public that it's impossible to keep a strict watch for the person who mailed 'em. In one case – that of the Osgoods – we cautioned the wife to say nothing whatever about the matter, and then ordered every clerk in the post office to look out for letters in that handwriting which might be slipped through the slot. In fact, we closed all the slots save one and placed a man on guard inside night and day."

"Well, what happened?" inquired Allison, a trifle impatiently, as the postmaster paused.

"The joke was on us. Some two days later a letter which looked suspiciously like these was mailed. Our man caught it in time to dart outside and nail the person who posted it. Fortunately we discovered that she was Mrs. Osgood's sister-in-law and that the letter was a perfectly innocent one."

"No chance of her being mixed up in the affair?"

"No. Her husband is a prominent lawyer here, and, besides, we've watched every move she's made since that time. She's one of the few people in town that we're certain of."

"Yet, you say her handwriting was similar to that which appears on these letters?"

"Yes, that's one of the many puzzling phases of the whole matter. Every single letter is written in a hand which closely resembles that of a relative of the person to whom it is addressed! So much so, in fact, that at least four of the complainants have insisted upon the arrest of these relatives, and have been distinctly displeased at our refusal to place them in jail merely because their handwriting is similar to that of a blackmailer."

"Why do you say blackmailer? Do you know of any demand for money which has been made?"

"Not directly – but what other purpose could a person have than to extract money? They'd hardly run the risk of going to the pen in order to gratify a whim for causing trouble."

"How about the Tysons and the Osgoods and the other people who brought these letters in – didn't they receive subsequent demands for money?"

"They received nothing – not another single letter of any kind."

"You mean that the simple fact of making a report to your office appeared to stop the receipt of the threats."

"Precisely. Now that you put it that way, it does look odd. But that's what happened."

Allison whistled. This was the first ray of light that had penetrated a very dark and mysterious case, and, with its aid, he felt that he might, after all, be successful.

Contenting himself with a few more questions, including the names of the couples whom gossip stated had been separated through the receipt of anonymous communications, Allison bundled the letters together and slipped them into his pocket.

"It's quite possible," he stated, as he opened the door leading out of the postmaster's private office, "that you won't hear anything more from me for some time. I hardly think it would be wise to report here too often, or that if you happen to run into me on the street that you would register recognition. I won't be using the name of Allison, anyhow, but that of Gregg – Alvin Gregg – who has made a fortune in the operation of chain stores and is looking over the field with a view to establishing connections here. Gregg, by the way, is stopping at the Majestic Hotel, if you care to reach him," and with that he was gone.

Allison's first move after establishing his identity at the hotel, was to send a wire to a certain Alice Norcross in Chicago – a wire which informed her that "My sister, Mrs. Mabel Kennedy, requests your presence in Madison, Wisconsin. Urgent and immediate." The signature was "Alvin Gregg, E. A.," and to an inquisitive telegraph operator who inquired the meaning of the initials, Allison replied: "Electrical Assistant, of course," and walked away before the matter could be further discussed.

The next evening Mrs. Mabel Kennedy registered at the Majestic Hotel, and went up to the room which Mr. Gregg had reserved for her – the one next to his.

"It's all right, Alice," he informed her a few moments later, after a careful survey had satisfied him that the hall was clear of prying ears. "I told them all about you – that you were my sister 'n' everything. So it's quite respectable."

"Mrs. Kennedy," or Alice Norcross, as she was known to the members of the Postal Service whom she had assisted on more than one occasion when the services of a woman with brains were demanded, merely smiled and continued to fix her hair before the mirror.

"I'm not worrying about that," she replied. "You boys can always be trusted to arrange the details – but traveling always did play the dickens with my hair! What's the idea, anyhow? Why am I Mrs. Mabel Kennedy, and what's she supposed to do?"

In a few words Allison outlined what he was up against – evidently the operation of a very skillful gang of blackmailers who were not only perfectly sure of their facts, but who didn't run any risks until their victims were too thoroughly cowed to offer any resistance.

"The only weak spot in the whole plan," concluded the operative, "is that the letters invariably cease when the prospective victims lay their case before the postmaster."

"You mean that you think he's implicated?"

"No – but some one in his office is!" snapped Allison. "Else how would they know when to lay off? That's the only lead we have, and I don't want to work from it, but up to it. Do you know anyone who's socially prominent in Madison?"

"Not a soul, but it's no trick to get letters of introduction – even for Mrs. Mabel Kennedy."

"Fine! Go to it! The minute you get 'em start a social campaign here. Stage several luncheons, bridge parties, and the like. Be sure to create the impression of a woman of means – and if you can drop a few hints about your none too spotless past, so much the better."

"You want to draw their fire, eh?"

"Precisely. It's unfortunate that we can't rig up a husband for you – that would make things easier, but when it's known that I, Alvin Gregg, am your brother, I think it's more than likely that they'll risk a couple of shots."

It was about a month later that Mrs. Kennedy called up her brother at the Hotel Majestic and asked him to come over to her apartment at once.

"Something stirring?" inquired Allison as he entered the drawing-room of the suite which his assistant had rented in order to bolster up her social campaign.

"The first nibble," replied the girl, holding out a sheet of violet-tinted paper, on which appeared the words:

Of course your brother and your friends know all about the night you spent alone with a certain man in a cabin in the Sierras?

"Great Scott!" ejaculated Allison. "Do you mean to say it worked?"

"Like clockwork," was the girl's reply. "Acting on your instructions, I made a special play for Snaith, the postmaster's confidential secretary and general assistant. I invited him to several of my parties and paid particular attention to what I said when he was around. The first night I got off some clever little remark about conventions – laughing at the fact that it was all right for a woman to spend a day with a man, but hardly respectable for her to spend the evening. The next time he was there – and he was the only one in the party who had been present on the previous occasion – I turned the conversation to snowstorms and admitted that I had once been trapped in a storm in the Sierra Nevadas and had been forced to spend the night in a cabin. But I didn't say anything then about any companion. The third evening – when an entirely different crowd, with the exception of Snaith, was present – some one brought up the subject of what constitutes a gentleman, and my contribution was a speech to the effect that 'one never knows what a man is until he is placed in a position where his brute instincts would naturally come to the front.'

"Not a single one of those remarks was incriminating or even suspicious – but it didn't take a master mind to add them together and make this note! Snaith was the only man who could add them, because he was the only one who was present when they were all made!"

"Fine work!" applauded Allison. "But there's one point you've overlooked. This letter, unlike the rest of its kind, is postmarked Kansas City, while Snaith was here day before yesterday when this was mailed. I know, because Clarke's been camping on his trail for the past three weeks."

"Then that means – "

"That Snaith is only one of the gang – the stool-pigeon – or, in this case, the lounge-lizard – who collects the information and passes it on to his chief? Exactly. Now, having Mr. Snaith where I want him and knowing pretty well how to deal with his breed, I think the rest will be easy. I knew that somebody in the postmaster's office must be mixed up in the affair and your very astute friend was the most likely prospect. Congratulations on landing him so neatly!"

"Thanks," said the girl, "but what next?"

"For you, not a thing. You've handled your part to perfection. The rest is likely to entail a considerable amount of strong-arm work, and I'd rather not have you around. Might cramp my style."

That night – or, rather, about three o'clock on the following morning – Sylvester Snaith, confidential secretary to the postmaster of Madison, was awakened by the sound of some one moving stealthily about the bedroom of his bachelor apartment. Before he could utter a sound the beam of light from an electric torch blazed in his eyes and a curt voice from the darkness ordered him to put up his hands. Then:

"What do you know about the anonymous letters which have been sent to a number of persons in this city?" demanded the voice.

"Not – not a thing," stammered the clerk, trying to collect his badly scattered senses.

"That's a lie! We know that you supplied the information upon which those letters were based! Now come through with the whole dope or, by hell I'll – " the blue-steel muzzle of an automatic which was visible just outside the path of light from the torch completed the threat. Snaith, thoroughly cowed, "came through" – told more than even Allison had hoped for when he had planned the night raid on a man whom he had sized up as a physical coward.

Less than an hour after the secretary had finished, Elmer was on his way to Kansas City, armed with information which he proceeded to lay before the chief of police.

"'Spencerian Peter,' eh?" grunted the chief. "Sure, I know where to lay my hands on him – been watching him more or less ever since he got out of Leavenworth a couple of years back. But I never connected him with this case."

"What do you mean – this case?" demanded Allison. "Did you know anything about the poison-pen letters in Madison?"

"Madison? No – but I know about the ones that have set certain people here by the ears for the past month. I thought that was what you wanted him for. Evidently the game isn't new."

"Far from it," Elmer replied. "I don't know how much he cleaned up in Wisconsin, but I'll bet he got away with a nice pile. Had a social pet there, who happened to be the postmaster's right-hand man, collect the scandal for him and then he'd fix up the letters – faking some relative's handwriting with that infernal skill of his. Then his Man Friday would tip him off when they made a holler to headquarters and he'd look for other suckers rather than run the risk of getting the department on his trail by playing the same fish too long. That's what finally gave him away – that and the fact that his assistant was bluffed by an electric torch and an empty gun."

"Well, I'll be hanged," muttered the chief. "You might have been explaining the situation here – except that we don't know who his society informant is. I think we better drop in for a call on 'Spencerian' this evening."

"The call was made on scheduled time," Quinn concluded, "but it was hardly of a social nature. You wouldn't expect a post-office operative, a chief of police, and half a dozen cops to stage a pink tea. Their methods are inclined to be a trifle more abrupt – though Pete, as it happened, didn't attempt to pull any rough stuff. He dropped his gun the moment he saw how many guests were present, and it wasn't very long before they presented him with a formal invitation to resume his none too comfortable but extremely exclusive apartment in Leavenworth. Snaith, being only an accomplice, got off with two years. The man who wrote the letters and who was the principal beneficiary of the money which they produced, drew ten."

"And who got the credit for solving the puzzle?" I inquired. "Allison or the Norcross girl?"

"Allison," replied Quinn. "Alice Norcross only worked on condition that her connection with the Service be kept quite as much of a secret as the fact that her real name was Mrs. Elmer Allison."

"What? She was Allison's wife?" I demanded.

"Quite so," said the former operative. "If you don't believe me, there's a piece of her wedding dress draped over that picture up there," and he pointed to a strip of white silk that hung over one of the framed photographs on the wall.

"But I thought you said – "

"That that was part of the famous thirty thousand yards which was nailed just after it had been smuggled across the Canadian border? I did. But Allison got hold of a piece of it and had it made up into a dress for Alice. So that bit up there has a double story. You know one of them. Remind me to tell you the other sometime."

XVIII

THIRTY THOUSAND YARDS OF SILK

"I'd sure like to lead the life of one of those fictional detective heroes," muttered Bill Quinn, formerly of the United States Secret Service, as he tossed aside the latest volume of crime stories that had come to his attention. "Nothing to do but trail murderers and find the person who lifted the diamond necklace and stuff of that kind. They never have a case that isn't interesting or, for that matter, one in which they aren't successful. Must be a great life!"

"But aren't the detective stories of real life interesting and oftentimes exciting?" I inquired, adding that those which Quinn had already told me indicated that the career of a government operative was far from being deadly monotonous.

"Some of them are," he admitted, "but many of them drag along for months or even years, sometimes petering out for pure lack of evidence. Those, of course, are the cases you never hear of – the ones where Uncle Sam's men fall down on the job. Oh yes, they're fallible, all right. They can't solve every case – any more than a doctor can save the life of every patient he attends. But their percentage, though high, doesn't approach the success of your Sherlock Holmeses and your Thinking Machines, your Gryces and Sweetwaters and Lecoqs."

"How is it, then, that every story you've told dealt with the success of a government agent – never with his failure?"

Quinn smiled reminiscently for a moment.

Then, "What do doctors do with their mistakes?" he asked. "They bury 'em. And that's what any real detective will do – try to forget, except for hoping that some day he'll run up against the man who tricked him. Again, most of the yarns I've told you revolved around some of the relics of this room" – waving his hand to indicate the walls of his library – "and these are all mementoes of successful cases. There's no use in keeping the other kind. Failures are too common and brains too scarce. That bit of silk up there – "

"Oh yes," I interrupted, "the one that formed part of Alice Norcross's wedding dress."

"And figured in one of the most sensational plots to defraud the government that was ever uncovered," added Quinn. "If Ezra Marks hadn't located that shipment I wouldn't have had that piece of silk and there wouldn't be any story to tell. So you see, it's really a circle, after all."

Marks [Quinn went on] was one of the few men connected with any branch of the government organizations who really lived up to the press-agent notices of the detectives you read about. In the first place, he looked like he might have stepped out of a book – big and long-legged and lanky. A typical Yankee, with all of the New-Englander's shrewdness and common sense. If you turned Ezra loose on a case you could be sure that he wouldn't sit down and try to work it out by deduction. Neither would he plunge in and attempt by sheer bravado and gun play to put the thing over. He'd mix the two methods and, more often than not, come back with the answer.

Then, too, Marks had the very happy faculty of drawing assignments that turned out to be interesting. Maybe it was luck, but more than likely it was because he followed plans that made 'em so – preferring to wait until he had all the strings to a case and then stage a big round-up of the people implicated. You remember the case of the Englishman who smuggled uncut diamonds in the bowl of his pipe and the one you wrote under the title of "Wah Lee and the Flower of Heaven"? Well, those were typical of Ezra's methods – the first was almost entirely analytical, the second mainly gun play plus a painstaking survey of the field he had to cover.

But when Marks was notified that it was up to him to find out who was running big shipments of valuable silks across the Canadian border, without the formality of visiting the customhouse and making the customary payments, he found it advisable to combine the two courses.

It was through a wholesale dealer in silks in Seattle, Washington, that the Customs Service first learned of the arrival of a considerable quantity of this valuable merchandise, offered through certain underground channels at a price which clearly labeled it as smuggled. Possibly the dealer was peeved because he didn't learn of the shipment in time to secure any of it. But his reasons for calling the affair to the attention of the Treasury Department don't really matter. The main idea was that the silk was there, that it hadn't paid duty, and that some one ought to find out how it happened.

When a second and then a third shipment was reported, Marks was notified by wire to get to Seattle as fast as he could, and there to confer with the Collector of the Port.

It wasn't until after he had arrived that Ezra knew what the trouble was, for the story of the smuggled silk hadn't penetrated as far south as San Francisco, where he had been engaged in trying to find a cargo of smuggled coolies.

"Here's a sample of the silk," announced the Collector of the Port at Seattle, producing a piece of very heavy material, evidently of foreign manufacture. "Beyond the fact that we've spotted three of the shipments and know where to lay our hands on them if wanted, I've got to admit that we don't know a thing about the case. The department, of course, doesn't want us to trace the silk from this end. The minute you do that you lay yourself open to all sorts of legal tangles and delays – to say nothing of giving the other side plenty of time to frame up a case that would sound mighty good in court. Besides, I haven't enough men to handle the job in the short space of time necessary. So you'll have to dig into it and find out who got the stuff in and how. Then we'll attend to the fences who've been handling it here."

"The old game of passing the buck," thought Ezra, as he fingered the sample of silk meditatively. "I'll do the work and they'll get the glory. Oh, well – "

"Any idea of where the shipments came from?" he inquired.

"There's no doubt but that it's of Japanese manufacture, which, of course, would appear to point to a shipping conspiracy of some nature. But I hardly think that's true here. Already eighteen bolts of silk have been reported in Seattle, and, as you know, that's a pretty good sized consignment. You couldn't stuff 'em into a pill box or carry 'em inside a walking stick, like you could diamonds. Whoever's handling this job is doing it across the border, rather than via the shipping route."

"No chance of a slip-up in your information, is there, Chief?" Ezra inquired, anxiously. "I'd hate to start combing the border and then find that the stuff was being slipped in through the port."

"No," and the Collector of Customs was positive in his reply. "I'm not taking a chance on that tip. I know what I'm talking about. My men have been watching the shipping like hawks. Ever since that consignment of antique ivory got through last year we've gone over every vessel with a microscope, probing the mattresses and even pawing around in the coal bins. I'm positive that there isn't a place big enough to conceal a yard of silk that the boys haven't looked into – to say nothing of eighteen bolts.

"Besides," added the Collector, "the arrival of the silk hasn't coincided with the arrival of any of the ships from Japan – not by any stretch of the imagination."

"All right, I'll take up the trail northward then," replied Marks. "Don't be surprised if you fail to hear from me for a couple of months or more. If Washington inquires, tell them that I'm up on the border somewhere and let it go at that."

"Going to take anybody with you?"

"Not a soul, except maybe a guide that I'll pick up when I need him. If there is a concerted movement to ship silk across the line – and it appears that there is – the more men you have working with you the less chance there is for success. Border runners are like moonshiners, they're not afraid of one man, but if they see a posse they run for cover and keep out of sight until the storm blows over. And there isn't one chance in a thousand of finding 'em meanwhile. You've got to play them, just like you would a fish, so the next time you hear from me you will know that I've either landed my sharks or that they've slipped off the hook!"