"She came two weeks before Wilkins," was the answer.

"Then you see what this means?" I asked, still groping about for my overcoat.

"What _can_ it mean?"

"They were working together--they were confederates."

Van Tuyl descended the stairs still carrying the table napkin full of jewelry. His eyes were wide with indignant wonder.

"It's gone!" he gasped. "He's taken your box!"

I emerged from the hall closet both a little startled and a little humiliated.

"Yes, and he's taken my hat and coat," I sadly confessed.

CHAPTER VII

THE PANAMA GOLD CHESTS

It is one of life's little ironies, I suppose, that man's surest escape from misery should be through the contemplation of people more miserable than himself. Such, however, happens to be the case. And prompted by this genial cross between a stoic and a cynic philosophy, I had formed the habit of periodically submerging myself in a bath of cleansing depravity.

The hopelessness of my fellow-beings, I found, seemed to give me something to live for. Collision with lives so putrescently abominable that my own by contrast seemed enviable, had a tendency to make me forget my troubles. And this developed me into a sort of calamity chaser. It still carried me, on those nights when sleep seemed beyond my reach, to many devious and astounding corners of the city, to unsavory cellars where lemon-steerers and slough-beaters foregathered, to ill-lit rooms where anarchists nightly ate the fire of their own ineffectual oratory, to heavy-fumed drinking-places where pocket-slashers and till-tappers and dummy-chuckers and dips forgot their more arduous hours.

But more and more often I found my steps unconsciously directed toward that particular den of subterranean iniquities known as _The Cafe of Failures_. For it was in this new-world _Cabaret du Neant_ that I had first heard of that engaging butler known to his confederates as "Sir Henry." And I still had hopes of recovering my stolen great-coat.

Night by night I went back to that dimly lit den of life's discards, the same as a bewildered beagle goes back to its last trace of aniseed.

I grew inured to its bad air, un.o.bservant of its s...o...b..tic waiters, undisturbed by its ominous-looking warren of private rooms, and apathetic before its meretricious blondes.

Yet at no time was I one of the circle about me. At no time was I anything more than a spectator of their ever-shifting and ever-mystifying dramas. And this not unnatural secretiveness on their part, combined with a not unnatural curiosity of my own, finally compelled me to a method of espionage in which I grew to take some little pride.

This method, for all its ingenuity, was simple enough to any one of even ordinary scientific attainments. When I found, for example, that the more select of those underworld conferences invariably took place in one of that tier of wood-part.i.tioned drinking-rooms which lined the cafe's east side, I perceived that if I could not invade those rooms in body I might at least be there in another form. So with the help of my friend Durkin, the reformed wire-tapper, I acquired a piece of machinery for the projection of the spirit into unwelcome corners.

This instrument, in fact, was little more than an enlargement of the ordinary telephone transmitter. It was made by attaching to an oblong of gla.s.s, const.i.tuting of course, an insulated base, two carbon supports, with cavities, and four cross-pieces, also of carbon, with pointed ends, fitting loosely into the cavities placed along the side of the two supports. The result was, this carbon being what electricians call "a high resistance" and the loose contact-points where the laterals rested making resistance still higher, that all vibration, however minute, jarred the points against their supports and varied resistance in proportion to the vibration itself. This, of course, produced a changing current in the "primary" of the induction coil, and was in turn reproduced, greatly magnified, in the "secondary"

where with the help of a small watch-case receiver it could be easily heard.

In other words, I acquired a mechanical sound-magnifier, a microphone, an instrument, of late called the dictaphone, which translates the lightest tap of a pencil-end into something which reached the ear with the force of a hammer-blow. And the whole thing, battery, coil, insulated wire, carbon bars and gla.s.s base, could be carried in its leather case or thrust under my coat as easily as a folded opera hat.

It was equally easy, I found, to let it hang flat against the side wall of that rancid little _chambre particuliere_ which stood next to the room where most of those star-chamber conspiracies seemed to take place. My method of adjusting the microphone was quite simple.

From the painted wooden part.i.tion I lifted down the gilt-framed picture of a baccha.n.a.lian lady whose semi-nudity disseminated the virtues of a champagne which I knew to be made from the refuse of the humble apple-evaporator. At the top-most edge of the square of dust where this picture had stood, I carefully screwed two L-hooks and on these hooks hung my microphone-base. Then I rehung the picture, leaving it there to screen my apparatus. My cloth-covered wires, which ran from this picture to the back of the worn leather couch against the wall, I very nicely concealed by pinning close under a stretch of gas pipe and poking in under the edge of the tattered brown linoleum.

Yet it was only on the third evening of my mildly exhilarating occupation in that stuffy little _camera obscura_ that certain things occurred to rob my espionage of its impersonal and half-hearted excitement. I had ordered a bottle of _Chianti_ and gone into that room to all intents and purposes a diffident and maundering _bon-vivant_ looking for nothing more than a quiet corner wherein to doze.

Yet for one long hour I had sat in that secret auditorium, with my watch-case receiver at my ear, while a garrulous quartette of strike-breakers enlarged on the beat.i.tude of beating up a "cop" who had ill-used one of their number.

It must have been a full half hour after they had gone before I again lifted the phone to my ear. What I heard this time was another man's voice, alert, eager, a little high-pitched with excitement.

"I tell you, Chuck," this thin eager voice was declaring, "the thing's a pipe! I got it worked out like a game o' checkers. But Redney 'nd me can't do a thing unless you stake us to a boat and a batch o' tools!"

"What kind o' tools?" asked a deep and cavernous ba.s.s voice. In that voice I could feel caution and stolidity, even an overtone of autocratic indifference.

"Ten bones'd get the whole outfit," was the other's answer.

"But what kind o' tools?" insisted the unperturbed ba.s.s voice.

There was a second or two of silence.

"That's spielin' the whole song," demurred the other.

"Well, the whole song's what I want to know," was the calm and cavernous answer. "You'll recall that three weeks ago I staked you boys for that expresswagon job--and I ain't seen nothing from it yet!"

"Aw, that was a frame-up," protested the first speaker. "Some squealer was layin' for us!"

It was a new voice that spoke next, a husky and quavering voice, as though it came from an alkaline throat not infrequently irrigated with fusel-oil whisky.

"Tony, we got to let Chuck in on this. We got to!"

"Why've we got to?"

"Two men can't work it alone," complained the latest speaker. "You know that. We can't take chances--and Gawd knows there's enough for three in this haul!"

Again there was a brief silence.

"You make me sick!" suddenly exploded the treble-voiced youth who had first spoken. "You'd think it was _me_ who's been singin' about keepin' this thing so quiet!"

"What're you boys beefin' about, anyway?" interposed the placid ba.s.s voice.

"I ain't beefin' about you. I ain't kickin' against lettin' you in.

But what I want to know is how're we goin' to split when you _are_ in?

Who follied this thing up from the first? Who did the dirty work on it? Who nosed round that pier and measured her off, and got a bead on the whole lay-out?"

"Then what'd you take _me_ in for?" demanded the worthy called Redney.

"Why didn't you go ahead and hog the whole thing, without havin' me trailin' round?"

"Cut that out. You know I've got to have help," was the treble-noted retort. "You know it's too big for one guy to handle."

"And it's so big you've got to have a boat and outfit," suggested the ba.s.s-voiced man. "And I'll bet you and Redney can't raise two bits between you."

"But _you_ get me a tub with a kicker in, and two or three tools, and then you've got the nerve to hold me up for a third rakeoff!"

"I don't see as I'm holdin' anybody up," retorted the deep-voiced man.

"You came to me, and I told you I was ready to talk business. You said you wanted help. Well, if you want help you've got to pay for it, same as I pay for those cigars."

"I'm willin' to pay for it," answered the high-voiced youth, with a quietness not altogether divorced from sulkiness.

"Then what're we wastin' good time over?" inquired the man known as Redney. "This ain't a case o' milkin' coffee-bags from a slip-lighter.