The Sturgis wager E-Book

Edgar Morette

• Herausgeber: Librorium Editions
• Kategorie: Abenteuer, Thriller, Horror
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2024

Beschreibung

It was bitterly cold. The keen December wind swept down the crowded thoroughfare, nipping the noses and ears of the gay pedestrians, comfortably muffled in their warm wraps.
Broadway was thronged with the usual holiday shoppers and pleasure-seekers. Cabs with their jaded steeds driven by weatherbeaten jehus, and private carriages behind well-groomed horses handled by liveried coachmen, deftly made their way through the crowds and deposited their fares at the entrances of the brightly lighted theaters or fashionable restaurants. A wizened hag, seated on the curbstone at the corner, seemed to shrink into herself with the cold as she turned the crank of her tiny barrel-organ and ground out a dismal and scarcely audible cacophony; while an anxious-eyed newsboy, not yet in his teens, shivered on the opposite side of the way, as, with tremulous lips, he solicited a purchaser for his unsold stock. One could hardly be expected to open a warm overcoat on such a night, at the risk of taking cold, for the sake of throwing a cent to an old beggar woman, or of buying a newspaper from a ragged urchin. Even the gaily decorated shop windows failed to arrest the idle passers-by; for it required perpetual motion to keep the blood in circulation.

Leseprobe

Table of Contents

THE STURGIS WAGER

CONTENTS

The Sturgis Wager.

CHAPTER I.

CHAPTER II.

CHAPTER III.

CHAPTER IV.

CHAPTER V.

CHAPTER VI.

CHAPTER VII.

CHAPTER VIII.

CHAPTER IX.

CHAPTER X.

CHAPTER XI.

CHAPTER XII.

CHAPTER XIII.

CHAPTER XIV.

CHAPTER XV.

CHAPTER XVI.

CHAPTER XVII.

CHAPTER XVIII.

CHAPTER XIX.

CHAPTER XX.

CHAPTER XXI.

CHAPTER XXII.

CHAPTER XXIII.

CHAPTER XXIV.

CHAPTER XXV.

THE STURGIS WAGER

A Detective Story

BY EDGAR MORETTE

© 2024 Librorium Editions

ISBN : 9782385748036

CONTENTS

I.

THE CABMAN'S FARE

II.

THE WAGER

III.

DOCTOR MURDOCK'S PROBLEM

IV.

THE BANK PRESIDENT

V.

A FOUNDATION OF FACTS

VI.

THE ARTIST

VII.

AGNES MURDOCK

VIII.

THE PORTRAIT

IX.

THE KNICKERBOCKER BANK

X.

PIECING THE EVIDENCE

XI.

A RECONSTRUCTED DRAMA

XII.

THE BOOKKEEPER'S CONFESSION

XIII.

THE LOST TRAIL

XIV.

THE LETTER

XV.

TWO LOVERS

XVI.

THE ROENTGEN RAYS

XVII.

THE QUARRY

XVIII.

THE EXTENSION

XIX.

THE UNDERGROUND PASSAGE

XX.

THE LEAD-LINED VAT

XXI.

THE DEATH CHAMBER

XXII.

FATHER AND DAUGHTER

XXIII.

THE SPEAKING-TUBE

XXIV.

CHECKMATE!

XXV.

THE MURDER SYNDICATE

The Sturgis Wager.

CHAPTER I.

THE CABMAN'S FARE.

It was bitterly cold. The keen December wind swept down the crowded thoroughfare, nipping the noses and ears of the gay pedestrians, comfortably muffled in their warm wraps.

Broadway was thronged with the usual holiday shoppers and pleasure-seekers. Cabs with their jaded steeds driven by weatherbeaten jehus, and private carriages behind well-groomed horses handled by liveried coachmen, deftly made their way through the crowds and deposited their fares at the entrances of the brightly lighted theaters or fashionable restaurants. A wizened hag, seated on the curbstone at the corner, seemed to shrink into herself with the cold as she turned the crank of her tiny barrel-organ and ground out a dismal and scarcely audible cacophony; while an anxious-eyed newsboy, not yet in his teens, shivered on the opposite side of the way, as, with tremulous lips, he solicited a purchaser for his unsold stock. One could hardly be expected to open a warm overcoat on such a night, at the risk of taking cold, for the sake of throwing a cent to an old beggar woman, or of buying a newspaper from a ragged urchin. Even the gaily decorated shop windows failed to arrest the idle passers-by; for it required perpetual motion to keep the blood in circulation.

The giant policeman on the crossing, representing the majesty of the law, swayed the crowd of vehicles and pedestrians with the authoritative gestures of his ponderous hands, and gallantly escorted bands of timid women through the inextricable moving maze.

And withal, the cable cars, with their discordant clangor, rumbled rapidly to and fro, like noisy shuttles, shooting the woof of the many-hued fabric which is the life of a great city.

Presently from one of the side streets there came a cab, which started leisurely to cross Broadway. The big policeman, with his eyes fixed upon an approaching car, held up a warning hand, to which the driver seemed to pay no attention, for the reins remained slack and the listless horse continued to move slowly across the avenue.

Several people turned to look with mild curiosity at the bold cabman who dared thus to disregard the authority of blue cloth and brass buttons. Their surprise changed quickly to amazement and dismay when their eyes rested upon him; for his head had fallen forward upon his chest and his limp body swayed upon the box with every motion of the cab. He seemed unconscious of his surroundings, like one drunk or in a stupor.

At his side sat a young man closely muffled in his overcoat, and with a sealskin cap pulled well down over his ears. His face was deathly pale. Those who caught sight of his features saw that his bloodless lips were firmly set, and that his eyes glittered with a feverish light. He carried one hand in the lapel of his coat. With the other he shook the inert form of the unconscious cabman, in a vain effort to arouse him to a sense of the impending danger.

The situation flashed upon the gripman on the car. Instantly he threw his weight upon the brakewheel, at the same time loudly sounding his gong. The policeman, too, understood in a twinkling what was about to happen, and rushed for the horse's head. But it was too late. The cab was fairly across the track when the car, with slackened speed, crashed into it.

Just before the collision, the young man in the sealskin cap sprang from the box to the street. He landed upon his feet; but, losing his balance, he fell forward upon his left arm, which still remained in the lapel of his coat. He must have hurt himself; for those standing near him heard him groan. But the center of interest was elsewhere, and no one paid much attention to the young man, who, arising quickly, disappeared in the crowd.

The cab, after tottering for an instant on two wheels, fell over upon its side, with a loud noise of splintering wood and breaking glass. The driver rolled off the box in a heap. At the same time, the panic-stricken passengers on the car rushed madly for the doors, fighting like wild beasts in their haste to reach a place of safety.

After the first frenzied moment, it became evident that, although badly shaken up, the passengers had received no injuries, except such bruises as they had inflicted upon each other in their mad struggle to escape. By this time a crowd had collected about the overturned cab, and several more policemen had come to the assistance of the first one, who was now seated serenely upon the head of the cab-horse, a precaution seemingly superfluous, for the poor beast, though uninjured, appeared to be quite satisfied to rest where he lay until he should be forced once more to resume the grind of his unhappy existence.

The cabman had been rudely shaken by his fall. He had lain as though unconscious for the space of a few seconds; then, with assistance, he had managed to struggle to his feet. He stood now as though dazed by the shock, trying to understand what had happened.

"Are you hurt?" inquired one of the policemen.

The man, mumbling an unintelligible reply, raised his hand to a scalp wound from which the blood was flowing rather freely.

At that moment two men forced their way through the crowd which a circle of policemen had some difficulty in keeping at a distance from the wounded cabman. One was a middle-aged individual, who gave his name as Doctor Thurston and offered his services as a physician; the other was a young man with keen gray eyes, who said nothing, but exhibited a reporter's badge.

The physician at once turned his attention to the cabman; felt him, thumped him, pinched him; smelt his breath; and then delivered his verdict:

"No bones broken. The slight scalp wound doesn't amount to anything. The man has been drinking heavily. He is simply drunk."

The horse had by this time been unharnessed and the cab had been lifted upon its wheels again.

The reporter stood by a silent and apparently listless spectator of the scene.

Doctor Thurston turned to him:

"Come along, Sturgis; neither you nor I are needed here; and if we do not hurry, Sprague's dinner will have to wait for us. It is a quarter to eight now."

The reporter seemed about to follow his friend, but he stood for an instant irresolute.

"I say, Doctor," he inquired at last, "are you sure the man is drunk?"

"He has certainly been drinking heavily. Why?"

"Because it seems to me——Hello, we cannot go yet; the passenger is more badly hurt than the driver."

"The passenger?" queried the physician, turning in surprise to the policeman.

"What passenger?" asked the policeman, looking at the cabman. "Have you a passenger inside, young feller?"

"Naw," replied the cabman, who seemed to be partially sobered by the shock and loss of blood. "Naw, I aint got no fare, barrin' the man wot was on the box."

The reporter observed the man closely as he spoke; and then, pointing to the step of the cab, which was plainly visible in the glare of a neighboring electric lamp:

"I mean the passenger whose blood is trickling there," he said quietly.

Every eye was turned in the direction of his outstretched hand.

A few drops of a thick dark liquid had oozed from under the door, and was dripping upon the iron step. The cab door was closed and the curtain was drawn down over the sash, the glass of which had been shattered by the fall.

One of the policemen tried to open the door. It stuck in the jamb. Then he exerted upon it the whole of his brute strength; and, of a sudden, it yielded. As it flew open, the body of a man lurched from the inside of the cab, and before any one could catch it, tumbled in a heap upon the pavement.

A low cry of horror escaped from the crowd.

The cabman's passenger was a man past middle age, neatly but plainly dressed.

As Doctor Thurston and a policeman bent over the prostrate form, the reporter shot a keen glance in the direction of the cabman, who stood staring at the body with a look of ghastly terror in his bulging eyes.

Presently the physician started to his feet with a low exclamation of surprise.

"Is he dead, Doctor?" asked the policeman.

"He has been dead for some time," replied the physician, impressively; "the body is almost cold."

"Been dead for some time?" echoed the policeman.

"Yes; this man was shot. See there!"

As he spoke, he pointed to a red streak which, starting from the left side of the dead man's coat, extended downward and marked the course of the tiny stream in which the life blood had flowed to a little pool on the floor of the cab.

"Shot!" exclaimed the policeman, who turned immediately to one of his brother officers. "Keep your eye on the cabman, Jim. We'll have to take him in. And look out for the other man, quick!"

Then, addressing the cabman, upon each of whose shoulders a policeman's hand was immediately placed, he asked roughly:

"Who is this man?"

The cabman was completely sober now. He stood, pale and trembling, between his two captors, as he replied solemnly:

"Before God, I don't know, boss. I never saw him before."

The policeman looked at the man in blank amazement for an instant. Then he turned away contemptuously:

"All right, young feller," he said, "you don't have to confess to me. But I guess you'll have a chance to tell that story to a judge and jury."

Then he proceeded to examine the dead man's pockets. They were empty.

"Looks like robbery," he murmured. "What is it, Jim? Haven't you got the other man?"

Jim had not found the other man; for the pale young fellow in the sealskin cap had disappeared.

The reporter was stooping over the body, while Doctor Thurston cut through the clothing and laid bare a small round wound.

"Here is another bullet wound," said Sturgis, turning over the body slightly, and pointing out a second round hole in the back of the dead man.

He seemed to take great interest in this discovery. He whipped out a steel tape and rapidly but carefully took a number of measurements, as if to locate the positions of the two wounds. Then he stepped into the cab; and, striking match after match, he spent several minutes apparently in eager search for something which he could not find.

"That is strange," he muttered to himself, as he came out at last.

"What is it?" inquired Thurston, who alone had caught the words.

But the reporter either did not hear or did not care to answer. He at once renewed his search on the brilliantly lighted pavement in the immediate vicinity of the cab; examining every stone, investigating every joint and every rut, prodding with his cane every lump of frozen mud, turning every stray scrap of paper.

"Well, Doctor," he said, when at length he rejoined his companion, "if you have done all that you can we may as well go. It is one of the prettiest problems I have met; but there is nothing more for me to learn here for the present. By the way, as I was saying when I interrupted myself a little while ago; are you sure the cabman is drunk? I wish you would take another good look at him. The question may be more important than it seemed at first."

A few minutes later, the physician and the reporter were hurrying along to make up for the time they had lost; the cab and the cabman had disappeared in the custody of the police, and the cabman's grewsome fare was jolting through Twenty-sixth Street, in the direction of a small building which stands near the East River, and in which the stranded waifs of the new-world metropolis can find rest at last, upon a stone slab, in the beginning of their eternal sleep.

Broadway had resumed its holiday aspect; the wizened hag at the corner still patiently ground out her plaintive discords; the tearful newsboy, with his slowly diminishing armful of newspapers, continued to shiver in the cold wind, as he offered his stock to the hurrying pedestrians; the big policeman again piloted his fair charges through the mass of moving vehicles, and the clanging cable cars started once more on their rumbling course, as if the snapping of a thread in the fabric of the city's life were a thing of constant occurrence and of no moment.

A few tiny dark red stains upon the pavement were all that remained to tell the story of the scene which had so recently been enacted in the busy thoroughfare. Presently even these were obliterated by the random stroke of a horse's hoof.

The ripple had disappeared from the surface. The stream of life was flowing steadily once more through the arteries of the metropolis.

CHAPTER II.

THE WAGER.

"What I mean to assert," said Ralph Sturgis, with quiet conviction, "is that every crime is its own historian; that all its minutest details are written in circumstantial evidence as completely as an eye-witness could see them,—aye, more fully and more truly than they could be described by the criminal himself."

The reporter was a man of about thirty, whose regular features bore the unmistakable stamp of intelligence and refinement. In repose, they wore an habitual expression of introspective concentration, which might have led a careless observer to class Ralph Sturgis in the category of aimless dreamers. But a single flash of the piercing gray eyes generally sufficed to dispel any such impression; and told of keen perception and underlying power. The mouth was firm and kind; the bearing that of a gentleman and a man of education.

"But," objected the host, "you surely do not mean to express a belief in the infallibility of circumstantial evidence?"

"Why not?"

"Because you must know as well as any one how misleading uncorroborated circumstantial evidence is. I do not forget what remarkable results you have often accomplished for the Daily Tempest in detecting and following up clues to which the official detectives were blind. But, frankly, were not your conclusions usually the result of lucky guesses, which would have remained comparatively useless as evidence had they not been subsequently proved correct by direct testimony?"

"Let me reply to your question by another, Sprague," answered Sturgis. "When you draw a check, does the paying teller at the bank require the testimony of witnesses to your signature before admitting its genuineness?"

"No; of course not."

"Precisely. He probably knows the signature of Harvey M. Sprague, the depositor, better than he does the face of Sprague, the artist. And yet the evidence here is purely circumstantial. I know of at least one recent instance in which the officials of a New York bank placed their implicit reliance upon circumstantial evidence of this sort, in spite of the direct testimony of the depositor, who was willing to acknowledge the genuineness of a check to which his name had been forged."

"I suppose you refer to the Forsyth case," said Sprague; "but you must remember that Colonel Forsyth was actuated by the desire to shield the forger, who was his own scapegrace son."

"That is just the point," replied Sturgis; "another witness will be biased by his interests or prejudices, blinded by jealousy, love or hatred, or handicapped by overzealousness, stupidity, lack of memory, or what not. Circumstantial evidence is always impartial, truthful, absolute. When the geologist reads the history of the earth, as it is written in its crust; when a Kepler or a Newton formulates the immutable laws of the universe, as they are recorded in the motions of the heavenly bodies, they draw their conclusions from evidence which is entirely circumstantial."

"Yes; but you forget that science has often been mistaken in its conclusions," interrupted Sprague, "so that it has constantly been necessary to alter theories to fit newly acquired or better understood facts."

"Granted," rejoined Sturgis, "but that is because the interpreters of the evidence are fallible; not because the evidence itself is incomplete. The same cause will always produce the same effect; the same chain of events will invariably terminate in one and the same catastrophe. The apparent deviations from this law are due to unrecognized differences in the producing causes, to additional or missing links in the chain of evidence. Therefore I hold that a criminal, however clever he may be, leaves behind him a complete trace of his every act, from which his crime may be reconstructed with absolute certainty by a competent detective."

"In short, 'Murder will out!'" said a man who had been a silent listener to the conversation up to this point. He spoke with a quiet smile, which barely escaped being a polite sneer.

Sturgis's keen eyes met his interlocutor's as he replied gravely:

"I should hardly care to make so sweeping an affirmation, Doctor Murdock. I have merely stated that the history of every crime is indelibly written in tangible evidence. The writing is on the wall, but of course a blind man cannot see it, nor can an illiterate man understand it. Every event, however trivial, owes its occurrence to a natural cause, and leaves its indelible impress upon nature. The Indian on the trail reads with an experienced eye the story of his enemy's passage, as it has been recorded in trodden turf and broken twigs; while the bloodhound follows, with unerring judgment, a still surer though less tangible trail. The latter's quarry has left behind, at every step, an invisible, imponderable, and yet unmistakable part of itself. Perhaps my meaning can be made clear by an illustration. When a photographer in his dark room takes an exposed plate from his camera, it is apparently a blank; but in reality there is upon this plate the minutely detailed history of an event, which, in proper hands, can be brought before the least competent of observers as irrefutable evidence. Here, the actinic rays of the sunlight are the authors of the evidence; but every natural force, in one way or another, conspires with the detective to run the criminal to earth."

"Unless," suggested Murdock, "the ability happens to be on the side of the quarry; in which case, the conspiracy of Nature's forces turns against the hunter."

"Ah!" retorted the reporter, "the game is not an equal one. The dice are loaded. For while on the one hand, the detective, if he falls into an error, has a lifetime in which to correct it, any misstep on the part of the criminal is fatal. And who is infallible?"

"Not the detective, at any rate," answered Murdock with suave irony. "It has always seemed to me that the halo which has been conferred upon him, chiefly through the efforts of imaginative writers of sensational fiction, is entirely undeserved. In the first place, most of the crimes of which we hear are committed either by men of a low order of intelligence or else by madmen, in which latter category I include all criminals acting under the impulse of any of the passions—hatred, love, jealousy, anger. And then, while the detective takes good care that his successes shall be proclaimed from the house-tops, he is equally careful to smother all accounts, or to suppress every detail, of his failures, whenever there is any possibility of so doing. You can cite, I know, plenty of cases in which, even after the lapse of years, the crime has been discovered and the criminal has been confronted with his guilt, but——"

"In my opinion," piped the shrill voice of an elderly man of clerical aspect, "conscience is the surest detective, after all."