THE IMPORTANCE OF TRIFLES

WHEN “THE IMPORTANCE OF TRIFLES” appeared in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine (January 1969) the editors diverged from their normal policy of “blurbing” each story with a brief paragraph. Instead, they published a full page of comments, setting the tale in its historical context and praising it and its author. This unusual attention was well justified.

As early as December of 1958 Avram Davidson had written to Frederic Dannay (one half of “Ellery Queen”) about a proposed series of stories and asking for advice on his research. The series was to be “set in the days when Mordecai Manuel Noah was Sherrif (or Sheriff) of New York and Jacob Hays was High Constable.” The stories would involve “the New York criminal scene, @ 1830, give or take a decade or so.” Later in the same letter Avram added, “I am fond of the Jacksonian Era and rather believe that I can do some good stories on the Noah/Hays teeter-totter; certainly I shall enjoy doing them.”

It was a decade before “The Importance of Trifles” saw print, and it seems to have been the only story actually written in the planned series. It is a splendid piece of work, a fine police procedural complete with crime, clues, suspects, deduction, and action. It deals also with the social issues of its day—which are not so different from the social issues of ours—and with the seemingly perpetual struggle (Avram’s “teeter-totter”) between political appointees and law-enforcement professionals. It is that rare story that truly merits the too-often awarded designation of tour de force.

—RAL

 

Jacob Hays, high constable of the City of New-York, had eaten his usual breakfast of fried eggs and beefsteak, broiled fish (shad, this time), a heap of pan-cakes, a pair of chickens’ wings, hot buttered rolls, and tea. More and more people were drinking coffee, as the nineteenth century rolled into its fourth decade, but Jacob Hays still imbibed hyson rather than java.

“Promise me, Mr. Hays,” his wife demanded, as he rose to leave, “that if it commences rain you’ll take the Broad-way caravan.”

“Mrs. Hays, good morning,” said her husband briefly. And walked out of the house with brisk strides.

The day was dark, but it would be darker than it had ever been before he would spend eight cents to ride a mile. Many a mickle makes a muckle, his mother used to say; and his father’s advice had been: Take care of the pennies and the pounds will take care of you. Besides, did it befit the holder of his office to cram into a crowded caravan like a commission-merchant or a law-clerk? Would the people not think he was doddering if they saw him in an omnibus? He, who patrolled the city afoot by day and by night? Just so.

Presumably, it had been a quiet night, for no message had come to pull him out from his featherbed. No riots or major fires—a mercy.

It had been twenty-six years since old Governor De Witt Clinton, then Mayor of New-York, had appointed him High Constable, and in all that time the City had never ceased to grow—nor had crime ever ceased to keep pace with commerce and culture. Jacob Hays had come to relish quiet nights, though scarcely even one of these passed in which he did not awaken, straining his ears for some sound—near or far—betokening a conflagration in South-street or a murderous “hooley” in the Five-Points. And yet there were citizens who still expected him to undertake the functions of a hog-warden!

The very thought of it made him snort. He looked around challengingly—then smiled. There was no trouble in the Broad-way at this time of morning, or, indeed, at any other time of day. The wide, clean street, lined with fashionable hotels and shops and busy office buildings, stretched along for almost three miles, the wonder of the country—proud New-Yorkers said, of the world. And all along it, from the Battery to Twentieth-street, looked upon from wooden shacks and towering five-storey brick buildings alike, a press of carts, drays, wagons, carriages, cabs, and omnibuses filled the eighty-foot width of the road with a ceaseless rumbling.

“Good-morning, High Constable,” said a dry-goods merchant, setting out open boxes of new percales and nankeens for passers-by to examine at pleasure. “Good-morning, Mr. Hays,” said an admiralty-lawyer, on his way to visit the forest of masts along the lower East-River. “Good-morning, Jacob,” said old Alderman Ter Williger.

And two young bloods, of the sort which had begun to infest the Bowery-road, hats cocked as sharply over carefully-soaped locks of hair as gravity would allow, nudged one the other sharply, and hissed, “Old Hays!”

Their expression, as they met his cold, knowledgeable eye, changed from one of studied insolence to a mixture of uneasiness and would-be defiance. He gave his high-constabular staff, which he always carried with him, a slight shake in their direction, and they lowered their gaze and slunk by. No, they were just strutting, and would make no trouble in the Broad-way.

The unpaven, narrow, pig-ridden, and stinking side-streets of the lower city, ill-lit and under-patrolled (but try to obtain additional money for more constables from the Board of Aldermen!)—these were the places they would choose for crime. And it was in the Bowery, with its popular theatres and pleasure gardens, that they would seek their amusement: jostling citizens, insulting ladies, and causing commotions in general.

Once in his office Hays ignored the view of the City Hall Park, and dealt rapidly with that portion of the day’s new business which responded to rapid treatment. Then he looked over his correspondence—runaway daughters and fugitive sons; complaints of bogus lotteries and similar frauds which seemed to go on forever—like “The Spanish Prisoner” swindle, the “English-Estate-in-Chancery-to-which-you-are-heir” swindle.

“Any new ‘cards’?” he asked his assistant. There were—there always were. Bank robbery in Portland, green-goods merchant hastily departed from Philadelphia, murder in Albany, funds embezzled from London, cargo of rum stolen in Boston, shipment of cotton made off with in Georgia, eleven absconded apprentices, two fugitive slaves, piracy in the Gulph of Mexico.

“Post those with descriptions,” he directed. “What’s next?”

“Next” was a young Colored man whose bright red shirt, wide-bottomed trousers, and glazed hat—the last held respectfully in his hands—told Hays of the man’s profession before he even looked at the paper held out to him.

WHEREAS, an ACT of the CONGRESS of the Year 1818, intituled AN ACT TO DEFINE AND PROTECT THE STATUS OF SEAMEN [Hays read], does not mention the Status of Seamen who are Persons of Color, and WHEREAS, the Legislature of the STATE OF NEW-YORK in the Year 1820 has authorized the Certification of Seamen domiciled or denizened in the State of New-York who are Free Persons of Color, now, THEREFORE, be it known that I, Jefferson Van Der Wett, a Clerk of the CITY OF NEW-YORK, do hereby certify that the bearer, Lucas Oaks, a Seaman of this City, and a Man of Color, is known to me on good evidence to be a FREE MAN, and I do further Enjoin all Men of whatsoever Cities, States, Territories, and Nations, to recognize him in such Status and not to Hold, Use, nor Dispose of him, the aforesaid Lucas Oaks, a FREE MAN of Color, as if he were not in Fact FREE.

“Anything against him?” Hays asked. The Constable shook his head. Hays dipped his quill, wrote No Criminal Record. J. Hays. High Constable, C. of N-Y., scattered sand, and handed it to the Negro who departed with thanks.

And so the day proceeded. The Five-Points—that foul and teeming human rookery where Cross, Anthony, Littlewater, Orange, and Mulberry meet—had had its usual murder. The usual sailor had been found dead by violence. This time the almost nightly occurrence was not the same, though often enough it was a sailor found dead in the Five-Points; often in its black and filthy heart—the swarming, putrefying tenement called the Old Brewery.

There was little chance of discovering the killers at the moment, if ever. The night had witnessed their deeds, and as little as the night would testify, so little would the furtive inhabitants of the criminal world testify. Until and unless, of course, the cut-throats had a falling out. In which case there might be a dirty, illiterate note some morning on Hays’s desk—a whisper in the ear of the Watch (as the Constabulary was also called)—notes and whispers which might lead to arrest or conviction. Or might not.

It sometimes seemed to Jacob Hays that the work-houses, paupers’ wards, and felon-cells of all the world, European as well as American, were pouring their wretched contents into New-York; although he knew well enough that most of the ever-increasing stream of immigrants were good people. It would ill behoove him to rail against “foreigners,” as some were doing. Had not his own mother been born abroad? And his father’s parents? When you came down to it, whose stock was entirely “Native American”?—except for the Indians. And there were those who claimed (Hays recalled a recent sermon at Scotch Presbyterian Church) that the Indians themselves were none other than the Lost Tribes of Israel!

It was Hays’s custom, if the affairs of the morning permitted, to take some light refreshment about ten o’clock, and then to read through all the newspapers. That is, not to read every word, but to have a look at the items marked for him by his assistant, Constable Moore, who had standing instructions to check off any bit of news referring to crime or the police. It was always amusing—sometimes instructive—to observe the way in which the same incident was treated in different newspapers, and to see how they agreed (or, more often, disagreed) with the official report of the same incident.

In the staid Commercial Gazette of this morning, for example, there was the single line: The body of a man, as yet unidentified, was found yesterday in Dunstan-Slip. That was all. A man. Not, Hays noted, a gentleman. In the lives or deaths of the lower orders of society the Commercial Gazette was supremely uninterested.

The News-Letter had this to say:

Yesterday afternoon the body of a man was discerned floating in the River at Dunstan-Slip by a woman of the neighborhood. The dead person, who, by his dress, was evidently a member of the sea-faring class, had not long been exposed to the briny element, and appeared to be in his middle years. It is opined that he came to his death by natural causes. His name has not yet been learned.

The recently-established True Citizen and Temperance Advocate, however, had learned—or said it had learned—his name.

An intelligent and respectable female identified the remains to this journal as that of one Gorman or Gormby, a sailingman, much given to the prevalent vice of his class (though not only of his class) vide licet, imbibing large quantities of alcoholic liquors—we do not denominate them ‘beverages.’ Whilst in a condition of intoxication, the dead man, we adduce, fell into the Slip and drowned. Within four blocks of the fatal scene our reporter counted no less than thirty-nine dram-stores, grog-shops, gin-mills, brandy-houses, and so-called “grocery” establishments, these last entirely devoted to purveying raw spirits to the ignorant. When will a supine administration awaken to the menace, et cetera, et cetera.

And the Register devoted a full column to what it called a

dastardly crime, undoubtedly committed by a gang of crimps, bent on conveying the innocent seaman against his will to the cruel mercies of a conscienceless master-mariner bound for foreign ports where the writ of the American Republic runs not. It was doubtless owing to his reluctance to be forced into a berth he did not desire that the unfortunate Jack-Tar resisted so vigorously that his kidnappers decided on his Death. He was tossed into the brackish waters of Dunstan-Slip where, being like the generality of sea-farers, unable to swim, he expired by drowning.

Old Hays snorted. “Catch any crimps tossing twenty dollars worth of two-footed merchandise away! Those they don’t dope, they bash—but, one way or another, they get them aboard alive. Any wounds on him, Neddy?”

“Few bruises, Mr. High—but no wounds,” said Constable Edward Moore. “Course he wasn’t no Gorman nor Gormby, any more than he was crimped.” His tone of voice indicated that he realized he was not telling his superior anything the latter didn’t know.

Hays nodded, picked up the official constabulary report, mumbled the words to himself, adding his own comments. “Bruises on breast, abdomen, and face; also, back of neck. Couldn’t have gotten them all by falling down: been fighting. Clothes worn and dirty—been on shore a long time. Not known to the Watch or any of our water-front friends—didn’t ship out of the port of New-York. Shoes show signs of recent hard use—walked from his last port.”

“Wasn’t killed for his fortune, we may be sure,” said Moore.

“The Coroner’s inquisition?”

“Dead before he hit the water, seems like. Neck broke. Lungs dry. Hardly swollen, scarcely a mark on him from fish or crabs.” Hays thought about his breakfast shad, but he had a strong stomach (twenty-six years as High Constable!) and didn’t think about it long. “He was found in mid-afternoon, and conjecture is that he’d been dead since the night before. Woman emptying a slop-bucket spied him.”

The two men mused on this unusual fastidiousness in a district where slops were emptied, usually, out the nearest window. Then Moore continued: “Noteworthy features? Had a great swelling of the left ear-lobe. Forget what you call it. Key-something.”

But Hays remembered. “A keloid. Scarred over and swelled when he had it pierced for an earring, I expect. Sometimes happens so. We’d know he was a sailor from that alone. Potter’s Field?” Constable Moore nodded.

Hays started to put the report down, then sensed, rather than saw, that his assistant had something else to tell him; and waited.

“He had this in his mouth.” The Constable held out a screw of paper, unwrapped it. Inside lay a piece of fibre, yellowish-brown in color. “Cotton—raw cotton. A trifle, but I thought I’d save it for you. What do you think?”

Hays shook his head. “No idea. But glad you kept it. File it with the report. What’s next?”

“Lady robbed of a diamond heirloom ring wants to see you about it, personal. Englishman with letter of introduction from Lord Mayor of London. Three candidates for the Watch. Man from Eagle Hotel with information about the gang of baggage-thieves. A—”

The High Constable raised his hand. “That’ll do for the while. Lady first…”

*   *   *

TWO NIGHTS LATER there was a wild fight involving the crews of three ships moored in South-street. The Night Constable-in-charge was new to the post and, not trusting to his own ability to discriminate between riots major and minor, sent for Hays. He came quickly enough, though the brawl was over by then; most of the men had either stumbled aboard their vessels or staggered away for further entertainment. The few who insisted upon continuing the affair had been hauled off to the Watch-house to meditate on their sins. And several of the spectators vanished the instant they saw the High Constable’s well-known figure come in sight.

But by that time something else had developed.

“Hold up your lanterns,” Hays directed his men. “The gaslight from the street is so dim I—that’s better. Ah, me. More sailors must die ashore than at sea, I think.”

The alley was wide enough to accommodate only two men, and one of these was dead. Hays patted the pockets of the peacoat, was rewarded with a jingle, and thrust a hand inside. “Thirty cents.”

For thirty cents a man could eat well and drink himself into a stupor and still have enough left for a night’s lodging if he was sober enough to want more than the floor of the city to sleep on. Men were killed for much less than thirty cents. Therefore—

Word had gotten around, and a knot of night-crawlers, still excited from the fight, crowded into the alley, pressing and craning for a glimpse. Hays rose and looked at them; at once several caps were pulled low and faces sunk into collars. He held out his staff. “Clear the alley, citizens. Just so. Constables, take the body out. Has a cart been summoned? Lay him down here. No, don’t cover his face. I want him identified, if possible.”

It proved easily possible. The dead man was identified before his coat touched the sidewalk. “Tim Scott. Everyone knew Tim Scott. Poor Tim. Poor Tim’s a-cold.” (This last from a gentleman later identified as a play-actor at the Park Theatre.) “Spent his money like a gentleman. Who saw him last alive? Well…” A reluctance to be identified in this capacity was at once apparent.

But other information continued to come forth. “Not so long ago Tim bought wine for everyone at Niblo’s Gardens. And segars. Yes, segars, too, for all the gentlemen. Did this more than once a night, and for more than a few nights, too.… Enemies? Not a one in the world.”

“I suppose his friends killed him, then?” Silence again. Cart-wheels rattled, and the crowd, gathered from all the dram-cellars whose yellow lights beckoned dimly through dirty window-panes, parted. As the body was lifted into the cart Hays removed his hat, and—one by one—reluctance evidently springing not so much from contumacy as from ignorance that this little gesture was customary or expected—one by one the greasy hats and dirty caps came off. Then the cart clattered away again. The crowd, still eager for excitement, stirred restlessly.

“All good citizens,” said Hays, “will now go home.” He did not expect the suggestion to be taken literally. If “home” was a lumpy, dirty pallet on a filthy floor it naturally had no appeal to match that of a brandy-shop or an oyster-stall, where some of the “good citizens” were even now heading to satisfy newly-awakened or previously-ungratified appetites; even if “home” was the streets, the mud, filth, and dim lights were no deterrents—there was nothing better at home. In the streets there were at least company and excitement. But the crowd dissolved, and this was all Hays had hoped for.

The next day Hays paid a further visit to Tim Scott, now naked on scrubbed pine-boards. Constables Breakstone and Onderdonk accompanied him. Both young Watch-officers had taken to heart Hays’s almost constant insistence on the importance of “trifles,” which was more than could be said for most of the Watch, to whom a crime was insolvable if not accompanied by a knife with the knifer’s name burned in the hilt.

“How much would it take to treat the house at Niblo’s to wine and segars several times a night, several nights running?” Hays asked, looking at the dead man’s face. The death pallor could not dispel entirely the tokens of sun and wind.

“More than a sailingman would be likely to make on a coasting voyage,” Constable Breakstone said. He was the son of a ship-chandler, had grown up along the water-front, and knew its ways. At Hays’s look of inquiry he continued, “Tim had said his last trip was on a coaster, but he didn’t say where to. Besides, he hadn’t been gone long enough for an overseas voyage. But that money in his pocket, sir, it wasn’t the last of what he’d had.”

“You mean there’s more somewheres?”

“No, sir. I mean that he’d spent it all some time ago. He’d been cadging off the lads since then. Then the other day he said he was going to get some more. He turned up at Barney Boots’s gin-parlor last night with a dollar, and the thirty cents was the last of that. And he was heard to say that this was just the beginning—that he was going to get more very soon. I asked did he have a particular friend, and it seems he did—Billy Walters. Some think they’d sailed together on this last trip. But no one has seen Billy lately. And that’s all I know, sir.”

Hays nodded. “That’s a good bit to go on. Meanwhile—” He lowered the sheet. “Just so. I thought these would show up better today.” On the dead man’s muscular throat were two sets of small and ugly marks. “Strangled, you see. And strangled from behind, too. Either someone crept up on him unbeknownst, or he knew the man behind him and wasn’t expecting violence. Mr. Breakstone, hold the body up. Now you, Mr. Onderdonk, stand behind him. Let’s have your hands. Big ones, a wide spread—just like these. Let your fingers rest where I place them.”

One by one he placed the young man’s fingers so that each rested on one of the finger marks, or as near to it as possible. Leaving them so, he peered at the skin of the dead man’s back. “Just so. Jabbed up his knee, used it as a lever, grabbed the throat, and squeezed. Tim Scott was a strong man. This fellow was stronger. Had finicking ways, though. All right, let him down.”

Breakstone covered the face. “‘Finicking ways,’ Mr. High?”

“Yes,” said Hays thoughtfully. “Let the little finger of his left hand stick out whilst he was doing his evil work. Like he was drinking a dish of tea. Mr. Breakstone—”

“Sir?”

“You might see that the word is passed among those who enjoyed the late Tim Scott’s hospitality at Niblo’s—and those who enjoyed his business anywhere else, like Barney Boots, for instance—that it would be the mark of a good citizen and a good Christian to contribute for funeral expenses.”

“I’ll do that.”

“Let it be known,” said Jacob Hays reflectively, “that I particularly favor such contributions. Yes. Just so.”

*   *   *

CRIME NEVER SLEEPS, but it is no coincidence that in warmer weather it is more restless than commonly. As the shad run dropped off and Spring, on its way into Summer, continued to crowd the trees with green, the residents of those districts in which few trees grew seemed more and more to fall into those lawless ways from which they had taken a partial vacation during the Winter months. Which often proved unfortunate for visitors to those districts. Mrs. Jacob Hays, however, was unsympathetic.

“Do not tell me, Mr. Hays,” she said, “that you intend to spend the greater part of yet another night on patrol.” Her husband, as if obedience itself, did not tell her that, nor anything else—but addressed himself to his supper. “I cannot believe,” she continued presently, “that these people who get themselves into trouble are truly innocent of improper intention. What is a respectable person doing in the Five-Points? Tell me that, if you please, Mr. Hays.”

Evidently he did not please, for he said, “Mrs. Hays, good-evening,” rose, and departed. He had doubled the patrol in the Five-Points these nights, and that meant taking men away from other places. Wall-street and South-street would howl; well, let them. Or, rather, let them come out in favor of higher taxes to pay for the extra protection the city needed. Let them pave the streets, too, while they were at it; and put up more gas-lamps. Let them—

He stopped. There was some one very near at hand, some one who did not wish to be seen, some one in the pool of darkness which was the space between two buildings at his left. “I know you are there,” said Jacob Hays.

And from the darkness a low voice said, “There is a body in the Old Brewery.”

“There usually is. What floor?”

“Second.”

“Just so. What else?” But there was nothing else. His ears had heard no sound of departure, but he knew that whoever it was had gone. And he walked faster.

On Anthony-street he found Constables Breakstone and Onderdonk, gestured them with his staff to follow him. As he approached the looming hulk of the Old Brewery, the neighborhood was in its usual uproar—screams, shouts, obscenities, drunken songs, the raucous cries which would go on almost till dawn, and then begin again almost at once. Then—from somewhere—not in a shout or scream, not in any tone of hate, but with a sharp note of warning—“Old Hays!”—and silence fell.

That is, comparative silence: quiet enough to hear his own and his men’s feet on the muddy sidewalk and then, as they entered the building, on the rotten wood of the floor, or, rather, on the accumulated filth of years which lay inches thick over the rotten wood except where the flooring had given way and left ugly, dangerous holes.

“Turn up your lamps,” he directed. It was small enough light they gave at best, though enough to keep them from breaking a leg. It was a wonder that the tiny lamps burned at all in here, the air was so foul. There was no railing on the sloping stairs, but still the three men gave the walls a wide enough berth, alive and rippling with vermin as they were.

And all the time there was a murmuring, a muttering, a whispering, a hissing from the darkness. Doors were ajar and dim lights shone and bodies slunk past, but no faces were seen. Rats’ claws scrabbled. The stench grew more fearful, more noisome. Doors closed softly as they approached, opened after they passed. But the door at the end of the first corridor did not move, and behind it Hays found what he had come for.

The dead man was sprawled in a chair at the table, head backwards and upwards. A bottle had been spilled recently—the sharp odor of “brandy” (as the raw, white whiskey was called) filled the room and the liquor itself was still damp; but of the bottle there was no trace. Gift horses were seldom looked long in the mouth at the Old Brewery. The dead man’s face was bruised, and blood welled from his nose and from a cut over one eye, an eye which stared in fierce amazement at the shadowy ceiling.

In his ribs on the left side a knife had been driven. It was still there.

They examined the floor carefully, but nothing was there except blood and dirt. In one corner was a foul-looking bed whose greasy rags yielded nothing. A cracked water-jug. An empty ditty-bag. And that was all.

As Hays ended his scrutiny of the room he saw that young Breakstone was intently looking at the dead man’s face. The Constable caught his eye, and nodded. “I’ve seen him before, sir. He came into my father’s place a few times, on and off, when his ships were in port, to sell his adventures. But I can’t put my mind on his name or his ships! Maybe they will come to me, by and by.”

“Any big adventures?”

Breakstone shook his head. “I don’t think so. A chest of tea. A few sacks of coffee or wool. A barrel of sugar or molasses. That sort of thing. Once, I think, he had a bale of cotton—that was the biggest.”

“Ah, well. Let me hold the lanterns while you get a grip on him. I’ll go ahead and light your way. Mind your—” He stopped and bent over just as they passed through the door. Something was on the floor. He picked it up, stuffed it in his pocket, and straightened. “Mind your step. Careful, now.”

Slowly and gingerly they made their way down the corridor, down the stairs, and out to the street. And all the while, moved by invisible hands, doors closed as they approached and opened after they passed; and all the while there was a murmuring, a muttering, a whispering, a hissing from the fetid darkness, and the scrabbling of rats in the walls.

*   *   *

OF COURSE HAYS found out nothing when, the body having been carted away, he returned to question the inhabitants—particularly those in rooms adjoining the one in which the dead man was found. No one had seen any thing, heard any thing; no one knew any thing, or suspected any thing. By the time he had finished, his head was reeling from the foul air, and the street seemed deliciously cool and fresh in comparison.

As Hays and his men left the Five-Points they heard the unexpected quiet broken by what seemed like a howl from hundreds of throats—a howl of defiance, execration, an utterly evil triumph.

Breakstone half-turned, but his superior’s hand kept him steady. “The water-front is no sabbath-school,” Breakstone said. “But it was never like that. At least you have the clean winds from the harbor, and the people give you a smile and a laugh and mostly folks try to keep themselves a bit decent in some ways, anyway. But those in the Old Brewery now—what makes them like that?”

They walked on in silence. Then Hays said, “I don’t know, Mr. Breakstone. There’s a whole green continent before them, wide-open under the sweet air of Heaven. But they choose to dwell in the dark and the mire. Why are they like that? As well ask the mole and the mudfish, I suppose.”

*   *   *

IT WAS PAST mid-night when he reached home. And next day there was no time for speculation on social philosophy. The baggage-gang had extended their depredations; and complaints of thefts poured in from the docks around Jay-street, where Hudson-River boats put in, and from the Battery, whence the ferries plied to Jersey, Staten-Island, Brooklyn, and from the great packet-ships in the Upper Harbor. From mere sneak-thieves the ring had advanced to a pretense of being regular baggage-porters and hotel-runners. A genuine rustic, parted from his old cow-hide trunk, was apt to set up an immediate clamor—in which case there was a chance, though a slim one, of its recovery. But a visitor from a small town, with just enough polish to desire not to be known for what he was, would delay out of embarrassment; in which case there was usually no hope for his luggage.

The problems of taking men from elsewhere to patrol the docks, of uncovering information about who was “fencing” (and where), in addition to routine duties of a sort which could neither be postponed nor delegated, kept Hays from seeing Constable Breakstone until late in the afternoon.

*   *   *

“TRY AS I would,” the young man said, “I couldn’t remember that sailor’s name. So I looked up old Poppie Vanderclooster, who used to help Father in the shop at one time, and took him along to the dead-house. And he knew the face at once. Henry Roberts. They called him Roaring Roberts; he had a big, booming voice. I’ve asked around, and it seems he’d turned to the bad of late years. Some of the adventures he sold weren’t his to sell. He had a lot of money not so long ago, and was throwing it around like a drunken sailor—which, of course, is just what he was. I guess he must have spent it all, or else what would he have been doing in that hole of the Old Brewery?”

The two of them were on their way back to the dead-house. Hays gave an exclamation, and began patting his pockets. “Ah, here it is,” he said. “I found it just outside the door of the room, last night, there in the Five-Points. What do you make of it? Not the sort of thing generally worn in the Old Brewery, is it?”

“A gentleman’s glove? No—and not the sort of thing Roaring Roberts would’ve worn, generally, either. Though he might, when he was spending all that money, have bought himself a pair.”

“Just so. Well, we’ll see.”

White-haired old Whitby, the dead-house keeper, surveyed them reproachfully through red-rimmed eyes as they came over to Roberts’s body. “You’re late,” he said. “The inquisition’s been over for hours. We’re about set to coffin him. Coroner’s jury reached the verdict that Deceased had come to his death through haemorrhage caused by forcible entry of a knife, length of the blade four and one-half inches, between the fourth and fifth ribs, thus occasioning the severance of veins and arteries—”

“All right, Whit, we know that—hold up your left hand, Constable.” The glove slipped on easily enough; if anything, it was a size too large. “It might be his,” said Hays reflectively. “Then again, it might not have anything to do with the matter. I did find it outside the room.”

As he slipped the glove off, something fell to the floor. Old Whitby bent down and picked it up.

“Flax? Wool?” he asked, rolling the fibre between his fingers.

“Give it here, Whit,” Hays said shortly. At the door he stopped, handed the glove to Breakstone. “Check all the haberdashers,” he said. “See what you can find.”

*   *   *

ALDERMAN NICHOLAS TER Williger had his counting-house in the same building as his ware-house. Once, when business was smaller and Ter Williger (not yet an alderman) younger, he and his family had lived up stairs. But that old Knickerbocker fashion was going out of style nowadays. Besides, his children—and some of his grand-children—had their own establishments, and Mrs. Ter Williger was dead.

The clerks looked at Hays from their high stools with unabashed astonishment, but his cold grey eyes stared them back to their ledgers. He stalked through the counting-house to the office in the back where, as expected, he found the proprietor.

“Hello, Jacob,” said Ter Williger. “It’s been too long. I meant to stop and say a few words the other morning, but you seemed preoccupied with deep thoughts. Mrs. Hays is well, I trust?”

“Quite well.”

“Capital. Convey my respects. And now. I have a piece of nice, clean Saugerties ice here and I was about to compound a sherry-cobbler. I shall compound two.”

“‘Take a little wine for thy stomach’s sake, and for thine often infirmities,’ eh, Nick?”

The old gentleman cut lemons, broke off pieces of sugar-loaf. “Exactly. You may worship Scotch Presbyterian instead of Dutch Reformed, but you’re a fellow-Calvinist and know that ‘Man born of woman is born to sorrow as the sparks fly upwards,’ and hence predestined to a multitude of ‘often infirmities,’ for some of which—my long years have taught me—sherry-cobbler is a sovereign remedy.” He nodded, pounded ice.

The drink was cool and gratifying. It was quiet in the office, with its dark walls, from which engravings of President and Lady Washington looked down with stern benignancy. After a long moment Nicholas Ter Williger sighed. “I know you and your Caledonian conscience too well, Jacob,” he said, “to believe it would allow you to pay a purely social call in the daytime. What aspect of rogue-catching brings you to the office of a respectable, if almost super-annuated, cotton-broker?”

“Cotton brings me here,” said Hays. He produced two tiny paper packets, unfolded them, pushed them across the desk. At once Ter Williger’s hooded eyes grew sharp. “Nankeen,” he said instantly. Then he took up the pieces, pulled the fibres, compared them. “Same crop, too, I’d say. Good quality Nankeen.… Where does it grow? Well, China, originally. Nankeen or Nanking, that’s a city over there. But we grow it here in our own South nowadays, more than enough for own uses. ‘Slave cotton,’ they call it, too, sometimes.”

Hays considered. Then, “What do you mean, ‘slave cotton’? Isn’t most cotton grown by slaves?”

Ter Williger nodded. “Yes, but—well, here’s how it works, Jacob. Some of the plantations allow their people to grow a little cotton on their own, after quitting time in the big fields, and when this cotton is sold the people get to keep the money. They use it, oh, say, to buy some relish to add to their victuals—salt-fish, maybe, as a change from pork and corn-meal—or perhaps a piece of bright cloth for a shirt or a dress. Maybe some trumpery jewelry. Well, just to keep temptation out of their way, because, being property himself, the slave doesn’t have much sense of property—here, let me show you.”

From the shelf behind him Ter Williger took some sample lengths of fibre. “This is what we call Sea-Island. And this is Uplands. See how much different they are in color from Nankeen? How much lighter, whiter? No slave would be foolish enough to steal some of his master’s cotton and try and mix it with his own yellow Nankeen. I don’t deal in it myself. Jenkins does, but he’s not here now.”

Something stirred in Hays’s mind. “I had a card not so long ago—large quantity of cotton stolen from Georgia, somewheres.”

Ter Williger nodded rapidly. “Yes, I know about that. But that was Sea-Island, not Nankeen. Planter named Remington was holding back quite some bales, hoping for a rise in the market. St. Simon’s-Island. Cotton was already baled and in a shed by the wharf. Came morning they found the Negro watchman dead and the bales gone. Sea-Island, you know, fetches top price. Not Nankeen, though.” He took up his glass, but it was empty, and he set it down again, regretfully.

Hays rose. “Then Nankeen doesn’t grow in any one particular locality?”

The older man pursed his mouth. Then he said, “I tell you what. Why not ask Jenkins? He’d be able to give you better answers.… Who’s he? Well, not exactly a partner. An associate. We have an understanding, and he uses my premises, too. An up-and-coming young man. Pushes a bit more than I care to. When you get old—matter of fact, Jacob, why don’t you come along with me and talk to him? I’m going to his boarding-house now. A dicty place near Greenwich-Village.”

Ter Williger reached for his hat, chuckled. “Matter of fact, I live there myself. Jeremiah Gale keeps it, with his wife. She orders the help around and he plays whist with the guests. A well-spread table, and a brightly-furnished house. Just the thing for old moss-backs like me—and for young couples like the Jenkinses. House property is high, and so are house-rents and servants’ wages. Time enough for them to set up for themselves when they have a few children.”

In a few minutes they were sitting in a cab and old Ter Williger rambled on about the fashion for boarding-house living, the prices of butcher’s meat, game, fish, wine, clothing; and how much cheaper every thing had been twenty, thirty-five, and fifty years ago.

“Nicholas, I need more men,” Hays said presently. “I can’t even keep up with crime with my present force, let alone keep ahead of it. I need more men, and the Board of Aldermen has got to give me the money to pay for them.”

The City had cooled off as late afternoon faded into early evening. The cab rolled along between rows of neat brick houses, freshly-painted red, with trim white lines drawn to simulate mortar. Green-clad tree branches arched over the street. There was not a pig in sight. It was quite a change from the hustle of the Broad-way, or the squalor of the Five-Points.

Nicholas Ter Williger sighed. “What can I do, Jacob? I’m just an old Federalist who’s hung on past his time, and they all know it down at City Hall. I shall not run again, and they all know that, too. It’s a Tammany-man you should be talking to about this. Am I right?”

He tipped his hat to a passing lady, and Hays followed suit. “Yes,” the High Constable agreed, “but if I talk to a Tammany-man about needing more men, he’ll smile like a bucketful of chips, say he agrees with me completely, and knows just the men. Two of them will be his nephews, three of them will be his cousins, and the rest of them will be broken-down oyster-men or some thing of that sort, unfit for any sort of work, but all from his ward, and all deserving Democrats. Damnation, Nick, I like to hire my own men! I—oh, are we here now? Just so.”

Jeremiah Gale’s establishment for paying guests was undistinguishable, with its scrubbed-white stoop and its bright green shutters, from any of the other houses in the row. A neatly-dressed Irish maid opened the door to them. Her manner was staid and respectful, but there was a look in her eye which convinced Hays that she would not always be content to take gentlemen’s hats, to say, “Yes, sir,” and “Yes, ma’am,” to haul firewood, coal, and hot water up three and four flights of stairs, and to toil fourteen hours a day for the $5 a month which was the most she could hope for. Servants did not stay servants long—at least, not in New-York.

The house of Jeremiah Gale was richly, almost sumptuously furnished. Silken draperies, satin-upholstered furniture, mahogany, rosewood, marble, and gilt were everywhere. Jeremiah Gale himself came forward to greet them, a short and rosy gentleman of full habit, in claret-colored coat, pepper-and-salt trousers, and white silk stockings contrasting with the black sheen of his highly-polished shoes. There was a hum of conversation from inside, in which female voices predominated, and some one was playing on the pianoforte.

“Mr. Alderman Ter Williger!” One might have thought it had been last year instead of this morning that they had parted. “I trust I see you well, and not overly fatigued from the duties of the day?” A genteel bow, and then another genteel bow. “Mr. High Constable Hays! Delighted to meet you again!” (To the best of Hays’s recollection they had never met before.) “How very happy I am that Mr. Alderman Ter Williger has honored us by bringing you to dinner. You will do us the pleasure of taking dinner, sir? My cook has dressed a pair of turkey-hens with bread-sauce—”

But Hays pleaded his wife’s discomfiture, were he to spoil the edge of his appetite for her supper by partaking of Mr. Gale’s cook’s pair of turkey-hens; and Mr. Gale was obliged to smile ruefully, and express a hope amounting to certainty that the High Constable would honor them on another occasion. Then he led them into the parlor.

The pianoforte had ceased, but the lady seated at it was talking busily to another, who had evidently been turning the music for her. She raked the new-comers with a swift glance, but kept on talking.

“Ah, mais non, mais non!” she exclaimed. “Two months in England and two weeks in France? Incroyable! Au contraire—that is to say, on the contrary; you must revise your plans and spend two months in France and only two weeks in England. Do you not agree with me, Mr. Jenkins?”

“Perfectly, my dear.”

“If, indeed, it is absolutely necessary to visit England at all! The land of our fathers it may be, call it the Old Home, but—oh, my dear, so cold, so coarse! That fat old king and his ugly wife! And so unwelcoming to Americans, are they not, Mr. Jenkins?”

“Alas, my dear, we found it so.”

“Mais, ooh, la belle France! There you have civilization—fashion—ton. We will give you the names of dear friends we visited, Mr. James Jenkins and I, two years ago—people of the finest quality, the most exquisite manners, the epitome of elegance, mais oui; and here I see dear Alderman Ter Williger with a distinguished-looking guest. Who can it be?”

And at this point the lady (presumably Mrs. Jenkins) arose from the pianoforte and took what Hays was absolutely certain was her first breath since she had begun speaking.

Mrs. Jenkins was as expensively dressed as it was morally possible for a lady to be, and quite handsome, too. Mr. James Jenkins was a large-framed man with a red, smooth-shaven, and smiling face. Mrs. Van Dam (the unwise, would-be spender of two months in England) was thin and sallow. Mr. Van Dam—a whale-oil commission-merchant—was thinner and sallower. Miss Cadwallader was a boney lady of a certain age and of over-poweringly aristocratic family. Mr. O’Donovan made it known at once that he was from Northern Ireland and a Protestant as well. Mr. Blessington was superintendent of an assurance agency and evidently had nothing to say when away from the premises of that essential if unromantic business. And Mrs. Bladen was a widow-woman with a lap-dog and two fat, unmarried daughters.

Such, with the addition of Alderman Ter Williger, were Mr. Jeremiah Gale’s paying guests.

In the small sitting-room to which Mr. Gale showed them, Mr. Jenkins listened with the greatest good-nature to Hays’s questions. “Nankeen grows over a wide area,” he said, “and while there are people who’ll insist—particularly down South—that they can tell from what location a given staple comes, even from which plantation or field, I must regard a claim to such close knowledge as rather—well, pretentious.… Have I been in the South? Frequently.”

The Alderman, who had been listening with some small signs of impatience for the dinner-bell, said now, “Mr. Jenkins made a trip South not long ago to buy Nankeen.” The High Constable asked where it had been stored in New-York, and Jenkins said it had not been stored there at all, but had been trans-shipped immediately.

The Liverpool packet-boat was about to sail, he explained, it being the first of the month, the traditional sailing date for packets; and he had heard that the Captain not only had cargo space aboard but was looking for an adventure—the private cargo which all ships’ personnel were entitled to take aboard in amounts varying according to rank. The Captain had bought Mr. Jenkins’s entire shipment.

The dinner-bell rang, and all three rose. “So there is not, then,” Hays inquired, “any way to trace a small amount of this cotton?”

“None that I know of. It comes in to the City all the time, lays on the wharves, and anyone can draw a handful from a bale; samples are pulled in the Exchange and discarded—why, sir, the wind blows it about the streets. Can we trace the wind?”

*   *   *

SO MUCH FOR that, Hays thought, as the cab rolled its way downtown. The two murdered men had been sailors and probably had access to baled cotton, at sea or on shore, a hundred times a year—though why one would put it in his mouth and another in his glove was a question which baffled him completely. Perhaps Breakstone had discovered some thing about the glove itself.

But the Constable hadn’t. It was an ordinary gentleman’s glove, the haberdashers all said, sold by the dozens and the gross.

Hays sighed, tossed the glove to his desk, and looked at it discontentedly. “I can’t believe,” he said at last, “that it isn’t a clew. Gentleman’s gloves in the Old Brewery? No, my boy, it has to signify. Of course some one might have stolen a pair—no one would steal just one—but he’d not have carried them all the way back home with him; he’d have sold them for a half-dime to the first fence he came across—yes, and drunk up the half-dime directly, too. I am convinced that this glove was dropped by the man who killed Roberts. In which case it does have some thing to tell me. Perhaps I’ve not been listening. Hmm.”

He picked up the glove and began to examine it carefully, inch by inch, holding it close to his eyes. Suddenly his frown vanished, gave way to a look in which astonishment vied with self-reproach.

“Ahh!” he exclaimed. “Here’s something I hadn’t noticed before—and shame upon me, too. Do you see it, Mr. Breakstone? No? Fie upon you! Look here.”

Hays began to turn the glove inside-out, poking at the fingers with the small end of a pen-holder until they were all reversed. “See it now? Eh?”

Breakstone said, “I see these few wisps of cotton here, sir. But we knew there was cotton in the glove. I still don’t see why. Do you?”

But Hays did not answer the question directly. “I want you to set to work on a riddle: What connection is there between Roaring Roberts and Tim Scott? And what connection between those two and the man found dead in Dunstan-Slip? What connections in life?—and in death?”

It was at this moment that the steam-tug Unicorn happened to ram the ferry-boat Governor Tompkins half-way between New-York and Brooklyn. Twenty passengers were thrown overboard, and only nine picked up from the water alive. Hays was no better with a boat-hook than any one else, but his presence on the river served to discourage the presence of those “volunteers” who were more interested in the contents of water-soaked pockets than in seeing the dead brought ashore for Christian burial.

Five of the missing eleven were found, by and by; and Hays retired from the scene. Experience told him that the rest wouldn’t show up for some time.

As Breakstone, himself rather wet about the sleeves and shirt-front, made his way along South-street early that evening, he overheard this point discussed. Some thought the full moon would “draw” the dead to the surface, while others insisted that only the concussion of water-borne cannonry could dislodge them.

Meanwhile, the life of the city roared along. Cargo was laden aboard many of the vessels whose bow-sprits pointed toward the top storeys of the South-street buildings, and cargo was taken ashore from many others. Men with blackened clothes and faces poured coal into the holds of new-fangled steamers. “Cream! Cream! D’licious ice-cream!” shouted the peddlers, not even ceasing their hoarse cries when setting down their wooden pails to serve a clerk or apprentice, safely out of employer’s sight.

Wine by the pipe, sugar and tobacco by the hogshead, potash by the barrel, rum by the puncheon, nails by the keg, tea by the chest, cotton by the bale, and wool by the bag; shouting supercargoes, cursing carters, hoarse auctioneers, brokers scurrying between ship and shore and sale; grave old merchants and hard young sea-captains, red-faced dray- and barrow-men, pale-faced clerks and fresh faced ’prentice-boys; the reek of salt-fish, the cloying odor of molasses, the spicy scent of cinnamon-bark, the healthy smell of horses, and the sharp tang of new leather—all this was South-street, the city’s premier water-front and the focal point of all New-York’s commerce.

“Leatherhead! Leatherhead!” yelled a barefooted, dirty-legged boy, passing on the run. Breakstone paid no attention. The leather helmet he wore may not have been pretty, and it was often hot and heavy in the summertime, but—besides the protection it offered from brick-bars, stones, and clubs—it was the only article of uniform the New-York City Watch wore, and he was proud of it.

Otterburne’s West-India Coffee-House was where Hays had said he would meet him, and there, in an upstairs room overlooking the East-River and Upper Harbor, was the High Constable himself, dipping his mahogany-colored face, for a change, into a mug of Mocha and milk.

“Have you got the answer to my riddle?” Hays asked, wiping his mouth on the back of one huge hand.

“Parts of it—I think.” Then Breakstone abandoned his reserve and leaned forward eagerly. “I found out quite a bit when I was out in the boats. Do you know a Captain Lemuel Pierce, who has the Sarah coasting-sloop?” Hays considered for a second, then nodded. “Well, here’s what it comes to: Roaring Roberts, who we found dead in the Old Brewery, had been seen more than once in company with Tim Scott—who we found in the alley three streets up from here. I’d mentioned to you that Scott had spoken of a mate named Billy Walters? Yes, and Billy Walters—who hasn’t been seen of late!—had a great keloid on his left ear-lobe—”

Hays blew out his cheeks. “So he was the man they pulled out of Dunstan-Slip! This ties all three together with a second cord. And Lem Pierce—?” Billy Walters was said to have sailed with Captain Lem on their last voyage; Pierce’s sloop was a coaster, and Tim Scott’s last voyage was also on a coaster. “Lem has a wicked reputation,” Hays said thoughtfully. “Coercion, crimping, blackmail, barratry, usurpation … I dare say he’s turned his hand to a touch of piracy in his time, too. Where does the Sarah lie now, Constable? You’ve done well,” he added, before Breakstone could answer. “Many a mickle makes a muckle—go on, you were saying?”

Breakstone said that the Sarah sloop had been down in Perth-Amboy, being over-hauled. Report was that she was on her way to the City, with only the Captain and a man from the ship-yard handling her, and should arrive just before sundown at Bayard’s Wharf.

“Over-hauling costs money,” Hays observed. “Scott and Roberts had been spending a lot of money, too. Bound together with a third cord, you see. And ‘a three-fold cord is not easily broken,’ says the Proverbs of King Solomon. Come to think of it, there’s another king mentioned in the Book of Proverbs. Yes. Just so. King Lemuel! Well, late to-night, about ten or so, we’ll go down and visit this Lemuel and discuss Scripture—and other things!”

But when they visited that Lemuel they found him dead.

*   *   *

THEY HAD PICKED their way along the wharf through heaps of firewood the sawyers had prepared and left for galley-stoves. It was well past the farthest zone of gas-light, and neither the dim ships’-lamps nor the tiny Watch-lanterns that Hays’s men had did much more than make the ambient darkness seem darker.

“Ahoy, there!” Hays hailed a dim figure enjoying a pipe in the cool of above-decks. “Where’s the Sarah? A sloop, just came in early this evening?”

Afterwards, he was to regret that hail. Then—“Sarah? Don’t know the name, but a sloop made fast a few hours back, to the forward end of the wharf.”

Her lamp was trim and bright, her paint fresh, her name bold and red. Captain Lemuel Pierce had clearly not been trying to hide. But no one answered the call and they boarded the vessel in silence. The cabin-door swung open and inside, on the deck, with his scabbard empty at his belt and his knife deep into his throat, lay the sloop’s Captain.

“He’s still bleeding!” Breakstone exclaimed.

“Search the ship,” said Hays tersely. And then they heard it—a scrabble, a clatter, a thump, and the sound of running feet. They rushed top-side in time to see a man on the next wharf vanish into the darkness. Pursuit proved vain.

“He must have hopped over onto the ship behind this one,” Hays said as they returned, winded and chagrined, “when he heard me hail and ask for the Sarah. Ah, well, let’s do as we were about to do, anyway—search the ship.”

But aside from water-ballast and a very small amount of stores, there was nothing to be found in the hold. Captain Pierce had bought a deal of new clothes, and in one coat-pocket there was a handful of gold eagles.

“A hundred dollars,” Hays said, slipping the ten coins back. “A fortune for a sailor, but not so for a master. Did we scare off a robber before he could find it? Or was he a robber at all? The log—”

The log, however, listed nothing between the voyage from Perth-Amboy and one of six months previously to Wilmington, with a mixed cargo of linen, wine, rice, and flour: which was much too early for the voyage.

“Not an honest man at all, you see,” said Hays, almost sorrowfully. “Didn’t keep a proper log. Even so—to murder a master of craft under my very nose, as it were! There’s insolence for you! Ahum. What is that behind your feet, Mr. Breakstone?”

The Constable tried to move forward and look backward at the same time, and before he had even completed the movement he answered that it was “Just a scrap of paper.” He blinked at Hays’s steady gaze and air of still waiting, then he blushed. He stooped and picked it up, looked at it, handed it over. Hays gave it a quick glance.

“Just a scrap of paper? Look again—Leatherhead!”

The scrap was straight on one edge and jagged on the other, and it had a few words or parts of words on one side.

“It seems to be part of some kind of legal paper,” Breakstone said, after a moment.

“Just so.” Hays’s tone was almost grudging. “You ought to have seen it at once and handed it to me to find out what kind of legal paper. Trifles, trifles—but it’s trifles that count! I sign this kind of legal paper by the dozen. Had I a quarter-of-a-dollar fee for each one—which I don’t!—I could have bought a summer-cottage up at Spikin-Duyvil by now. Well, listen: I’ll emphasize the words you see here:

“‘…a Seaman of this city, and a Man of Color, is known to me on good evidence to be a FREE MAN, and I do further Enjoin all Men of whatsoever Cities, States, Territories, and Nations, to recognize him in such Status and—,’ and so forth. We give these to the Black seamen in case they put in to a port of a slave state or a slave-holding colony or country, to keep them from being seized and sold. Now, what does it tell you?”

“That the man who killed the Captain was a Black seaman?”

“Not necessarily—but it hints at that, very powerfully, yes. Some one who wanted the papers of a free Negro sailor was here to see Pierce—he grabbed for it—but Pierce held on tight—it tore. Let’s follow the obvious trail first. We know that Captain Lem had come into money lately. We know the same of Tim Scott and Roaring Roberts. Pierce spent his on the sloop. The other two poured it out like wine. Now. Do you know of any Colored sailors who’ve been known to spend lavishly of late?”

The wake of a passing vessel rocked the sloop. The cabin-lamp stayed level in its gimbals, but its light trembled a bit just the same, sending shadows across the High Constable’s craggy face.

“No, not lavishly—that’s to say, not foolishly. But now that I think about it,” Breakstone mused aloud, “Cudjo Washington used to sail, on and off. And just a little while ago he opened an oyster-cellar in lower Collect-street, not far south of Anthony. A dicty place, as I think of it now—dicty for an oyster-cellar in Collect-street, that is. It must have cost him something.”

Hays summoned the two Night Constables who had been standing guard at the foot of Bayard’s Wharf and the one next to it, told one to rattle at the Coroner’s shutters, and the other one to stand by the body—a task he plainly had no fancy for, but plainly he had even less fancy to refuse Old Hays.

“And now,” said Old Hays, “we’ll call on Cudjo Washington. I could relish a basin of little-necks or cherry-stones, I believe. But I’d relish information even more.”

*   *   *

THERE WERE MORE men about that night than was usual for the hour, and presently some one called out from a little group which was gathered under a lamp-post.

“Jacob! Hello, there! Stop a bit.” Hays crossed over and recognized Alderman Ter Williger, Mr. Jenkins, Mr. Jonathan Goodhue the fancy dry-goods importer, and his partner, Mr. Perit.

“These are late hours, gentlemen,” Hays commented, “for merchants who must be up early tomorrow.”

“Ah, it’s to-morrow that keeps us up so late to-night,” said Ter Williger genially. “To-morrow is the first of the month—that means tonight is packet-night—we’ve all been staying late at our counting-houses getting everything in order against the packet-vessels’ sailing in the morning. Come and take a glass of lager-beer with us, Jacob: join us in a well-earned quarter-hour of ease.” And, with a Yes, yes, and a Do, sir, Messrs. Goodhue and Perit seconded the invitation.

But Hays shook his head. “I’m off to Collect-street on business. And while lager is available there, I’ll not invite you to join me. An ugly business and an ugly neighborhood.”

Ter Williger, Goodhue, and Perit pursed their lips and raised their eyebrows. Jenkins drew out a segar, a match, and a piece of glassed paper, struck fire and lit up.

“Is that one of the new Congreve matches?” Mr. Perit asked. Jenkins, his mouth occupied with drawing smoke, didn’t answer.

“Yes, it is,” said Goodhue. “A great improvement over the old acid bottle. Well, well, then, Mr. Hays, we daren’t detain you. Another time, perhaps.”

“To be sure. Yes, we must go now. A good-night, gentlemen.”

Collect-street, below Anthony-street, while not offering the amenities of, say, Washington-square, was still a cut or two above the Five-Points. A stranger might be lured into a room here, and beaten and robbed, and he might die of it; but he was not likely to be murdered in the open street for fun.

Several fences operated almost openly, ready to buy anything from a dead man’s dirty shirt for a penny to a nob’s gold watch for a dollar. There were the usual saloons and “grocery” stores, including that of the infamous Rosanna Spears. But tonight only one place of business on the street interested Jacob Hays. It was easy enough to spot; its lights were brighter and its paint fresher than the rest.

The Great Republic Oyster-Cellar, by C. Washington, stated a sign-board; and continued, Fresh and Pickled Oysters, Clams, Hard-shell and Soft-shell Crabs, Garnished Lobsters. Fringed Hams, Fresh Country Fruit.

The interior was neat and clean and contained several tables, a row of booths along one wall, and even the unusual glory of a glass-fronted show-case in which reposed half of a fringed ham, a huge platter heaped high with fried soft-shell crabs, bowls of fruit, and part of a roasted pig with a lemon in its mouth. A whitewashed keg displayed the necks of bottles of ginger-beer, porter, lager-beer, and mead, the rest of the bottles being concealed by cracked ice. On the rear wall were large steel engravings of Generals Washington and Jackson, and a smaller one of Governor Clinton.

It was, indeed, “rather a dicty place for Collect-street.” It could not very well have been furnished and provisioned on the savings from a seaman’s wages.

Present in the room were a Negro couple, evidently the proprietor and his wife, and several white couples, the men and women dressed in clothes which managed to look at the same time both flashy and bedraggled. The customers glanced up from their refreshments, sat for a moment transfixed at the sight of Hays and Breakstone, tensed, exchanged glances, and then as it was made obvious that the door was not being blocked and that none of them was engaging the attention of the law—relaxed somewhat: that is, if slouching in their seats and hiding their faces with arms propped on elbows may be considered relaxing.

The proprietor, a powerfully-built man in his early middle years, pressed himself back against the wall with something clenched in his fist. His wife retreated wordlessly to a corner.

“Cudjo Washington,” said Hays, advancing and holding out his staff, “I call upon you, as a citizen of this city, to lay down that oyster-knife.” The implement fell with a clatter.

After a second Washington said, “Before the Lord, I didn’t know it was you, gentlemen. I thought—” He ran his tongue over his lips, then came forward to the counter with a mechanical smile and an attitude of well-practised deference. “What will you gentlemen be pleased to have?” he asked.

“A few words with you in your back-room. Your wife can stay here to wait on the patrons.” Breakstone posted himself outside.

“Well?” asked Hays. It was dark in the room. Only a small piece of candle burned in a saucer.

“I didn’t know what they was up to, Mr. High Constable. I never found out until it was too late.” The man’s voice was low, but it came from a huge chest and throat, and rumbled out into the shadows. As to what he meant by what he had said, Jacob Hays had no idea at all. He generally avoided opening a conversation with a suspected man in terms of accusing him of a specific crime. Well? was usually opening enough. Often the single syllable put mind and tongue to something quite different from what the High Constable had been thinking of, something of which the High Constable had known nothing. One could, after all, always take up later the matter which had prompted the inquiry in the first place.

“He hadn’t no right to keep hold of my papers. No right a-tall,” Cudjo was saying. But this was not exactly what Hays was expecting him to say. Ah, well, wait a bit. Let the man talk. But all the talk, it became obvious, was on lines other than the first comment. Had Cudjo realized that he had started to give himself away? And, so considering, Hays realized that he himself was no longer thinking in terms of a simple murder.

He would have to lead the conversation, after all. Well, so be it. “What were they up to, Cudjo, and just when did you find it out?”

The man’s eyes seemed red in the candle-light. Was there cunning in them? “You says—what, sir?” Hays repeated his words. “I mean to say,” Cudjo evaded, “what was he up to, keeping my papers? Now, they was mine, legal. So—”

“So you killed him.”

A confident laugh. “Cap’n Pierce? No, sir! He too mean to die!”

“Not when he’d gotten a knife in his throat, he wasn’t.” The laugh ebbed away, the man scanned Hays’s face. His huge chest swelled. He shook his head dumbly. “Mr. Breakstone! Send the woman in here.… Now, what time did your husband come back tonight?”

“Why ’twas about—” She checked herself and looked at her husband. But he sat still, utterly still. Her voice dropped a notch, became uncertain. “Why, master, he was here all night. He never go out.” She looked from Hays to her husband, pleadingly. But neither offered aught for her comfort. She began to wail.

Cudjo accompanied them quietly to the Watch-house.

“If you didn’t kill Captain Pierce,” Hays asked, and asked over and over again, “then why were you so afraid when we walked in? Why did you pick up the oyster-knife? You said, ‘I didn’t know it was you. I thought—’ What did you think? Who were you expecting? Who are the ‘they’ you talked about? What was it you ‘found out they were up to’? Why was it ‘too late’ by then?”

Then, still getting no response, Hays put to him the brutally suggestive, but terribly pertinent, question, “Cudjo, have you ever seen a man hanged?”

Sweat popped out on the man’s broad face. He began to shake his head—and continued to shake it. It seemed he could not stop. Soon his whole body was shaking from side to side. He essayed speech, but his voice clicked in his throat. Hays brought him a mug of water, and he swallowed it greedily.

“I will tell you, master,” he said, after a moment. “I see there is no help for it. I will tell you everything. It begin two, three months ago.”

*   *   *

TWO OR THREE months previously, Cudjo had been living in a corner of a room in the Shambles tenement on Cherry-street, in the Fourth Ward. He had had no job in a long time, and only the pittance which his wife earned by peddling hot-roasted corn through the streets kept them from actual starvation. Captain Lemuel Pierce came and offered him a berth for a coasting voyage, and Cudjo had jumped at it.

“You got your free papers, don’t you, Cudj?” There had been no slaves in New-York State since the Emancipation of 1827, and Cudjo had been free even before then, for his owner had brought him North and manumitted him. He knew that Captain Pierce must be referring to his seaman’s papers.

“Yes, sir. I got’m. We going South, Cap’n?”

Pierce smiled, showed yellow teeth. “We ain’t goin’ to Nova-Scoshy. Better hand them papers over to me for safekeeping, Cudj. That way, I c’n take care.”

Pierce was obliging enough to advance $2 on wages, which were given to Phoebe Washington, and to promise warm clothes as soon as they got aboard. The two proceeded to Staten-Island, where the Sarah was lying off a small creek which emptied into the Kill-Van-Kull. Roaring Roberts was first mate. Tim Scott and Billy Walters made up the rest of the crew. They put out to sea on the next tide.

“He never come out of the cabin till the second day,” said Cudjo. “But I knew his face.”

“Whose?” Hays asked.

“Mr. Jones’s.” And who was he and what did he look like? He was a big man with a red face. Cudjo had “seen him around”; more he knew not. Mentally Hays ran over all the Joneses he could think of, from Ap Jones the cow-keeper to Zimri Jones, who sold woollens. None fitted the picture.

The Sarah was dirty, but Captain Pierce had kept her in good shape otherwise. He and Mr. Jones had had words right from the start. Jones, who apparently had chartered the sloop, objected to any one’s—particularly the Captain’s—drinking “until the job’s done.” Pierce had said that he was master aboard his own vessel and would drink what and when he pleased; forthwith he applied himself to his demijohn.

Neither Cudjo nor any of the three White sailors had any idea of where they were bound, except that it was, in Pierce’s words, “Somewhere South and warm.” It was after they had passed Cape Fear that Pierce and Jones revealed their destination to him. “They had to,” Washington said. “They needed me. Cap’n Pierce knew I was born in Brunswick and had sailed all those waters.”

“You ought to know St. Simon’s Sound pretty well, I guess,” said Pierce.

“Oh, yes, sir. My old master—”

“Damn your old master!” said Pierce. “Do you know where Remington’s Landing is? You do. All right. You’ll pilot us there.”

They lay well off shore till dark, then entered St. Simon’s Sound, then Tuppah Cove. Remington’s Landing lay up an inlet into the Cove. The moon was full and bright. Captain Pierce, aided by the winds, had planned well.

“Take care, Cudj,” he said; and then a while before they came up to the wharf, “you—no noise!”

The ship’s-lamps were extinguished. Silent as a ghost ship, the sloop moored. The shed by the wharf was full of baled cotton. Without words, directed by gestures, they all set to work loading it aboard. Even Pierce and Jones took off their coats and pitched in.

After a while—Cudjo didn’t know how long—they became aware that some one was looking at them. It was the Negro watchman. Evidently he had been taking a nap on one of the bales. He stared at the scene—and an eerie scene it must have been, too—the six strange men toiling silently in the pool of moonlight. His voice, when he spoke, was tremulous.

“What—what are you White men doing with that there cotton? It belongs to Master Remington, and I know it ain’t done been sold!”

They could have told him some lie and kept him silent, Cudjo said, recounting the story to Hays. Tied him up, maybe. But Jones pulled out a knife and at the sight of it the watchman turned and was off like the wind. He had no chance, of course. They were on him before he could cry out. Cudjo, standing aghast, saw an arm rise and fall twice. Then the five men dragged the body aside into the grass. Cudjo was still standing, numbly, when they returned, and gestured him back to work.

They were at sea again by dawn.

“What happened to the cotton?” Hays asked.

It was hot in the Watch-house; the wick in the whale-oil lamp needed trimming, but somehow he could not put his mind to asking the Night Constable-in-charge to take care of it. Here, then, was the story of the theft of the Sea-Island cotton in Georgia, of which he had been notified weeks back. It had been carried out by men recruited under his very nose, so to speak: Billy Walters, Roaring Roberts, Tim Scott, Captain Pierce, Cudjo Washington. Who had been behind it? Mr. Jones. Which ones were still alive? Cudjo Washington and Mr. Jones.

“What happened to the cotton?” Hays asked again. He knew well enough what had happened to the men.

The proprietor of The Great Republic Oyster-Cellar shook his head. “I don’t know, Mr. High Constable. We put in to Philadelphia—didn’t tie up, though, just lay out in the river—and Mr. Jones and Captain Pierce rowed ashore. They come back inside of an hour and Mr. Jones had a sight of money with him. I expect he’d been to the bank. They paid us off and told us to get our gear together and go ashore. Not to come back. He warned us—Mr. Jones, I mean. ‘Don’t let me see you in New-York,’ he said. ‘I’m paying you extra for that,’ he said, ‘so you better not try to fool me.’ Said to me, ‘Send for your wife. Don’t go back for her.’ He had a mean look to him. A hard man.”

“And you took the money? The proceeds of the stolen cotton? For you knew that’s what it was, for all he paid you in advance.”

Cudjo nodded. “He said I had to take it. Said he’d kill me if I didn’t. ‘You’re in this, too,’ he said, ‘the same as the rest of us. If I were you I’d go far away.’ So I took it. And I was afraid to say any thing. I could’ve thrown it away, all but my wages. But it was more money than I’d ever seen, almost. I thought, I’ll hold on to it for a while and study this. Then—‘Send for your wife,’ he said. I can’t write and she can’t read. I come up here to see her and study what to do. And when I saw that rat’s-hole we were living in—in the Shambles—and her tired out from crying hot-roasting-ears up and down the streets—”

*   *   *

HE HAD SUCCUMBED to the temptation and had used the money to fit up the oyster-cellar. A sailor’s life was hard, and usually, not a long one. The rest of the story was easy enough—in part—for Hays to imagine. One by one the three other sailors made their way back to New-York in defiance of “Mr. Jones’s” warning. One of them must have preferred to spend his share of the crime in Philadelphia, or—Hays remembered the worn, worn shoes found on another’s feet—or in some other place no closer to New-York.

“Jones” must have been a fool to think they would stay away. As soon as their money was spent they must have tried to blackmail him—tried alone, almost certainly, not in concert, for each had been killed alone and separately. Perhaps Jones hadn’t even known that Cudjo had returned to New-York.

“What happened on the sloop tonight?” Hays asked. Somewhere off in the city a church-bell sounded the hour. How quickly the night was passing!

Washington had forgotten to ask for his free papers in Philadelphia. Presently he remembered, but did nothing. If he needed them, by some dire chance, to go to sea again, he could get another set. Chiefly, though, he worried about their remaining in the hands of Captain Pierce—Captain Pierce, whose evil reputation he knew as well as Hays did, and whose evil nature he knew even better, having sailed under him. But Pierce was off in Perth-Amboy, having the Sarah over-hauled.

“Are you going to wait in your cellar till he picks his own time and come to kill you, like he did the others? Well, I’m not,” Pierce had said. “You’d think he’d know better than to threaten me, wouldn’t you? You’d think he’d speak sweet to me, but no. ‘Stay out of New-York, Pierce. I warn you!’” Cap’n Lem had mimicked “Jones.” Cap’n Lem had been drinking, in his little cabin there in the sloop at Bayard’s Wharf. “Well, I don’t fancy staying out of New-York, see? And I don’t relish the idea of being killed on some dark night. No, Cudj, I tell you: there’s only this—kill him before he kills us!”

But Cudjo had had enough of that. Four men were already killed, including the slave watchman down on St. Simon’s-Island. It was Cudjo’s belief that the White men would still be living if they hadn’t tried to get more money out of “Jones.” All that Cudjo wanted was his free papers back. And Captain Lemuel Pierce refused to deliver them. He showed them, he laughed, he drew them back. They were to be the price of Cudjo’s assistance in the death of “Jones.” They had quarreled, the master of the Sarah grew ugly, Cudjo had snatched at papers and torn them from Pierce’s grasp. Then he had run off. That was all. That was his story.

Hays was rather inclined to believe him.

But who was “Jones”?

*   *   *

A FEW HOURS’ sleep, and the High Constable was up and on duty again. As soon as breakfast was over he stalked down-town, on his way to Ter Williger’s place of business. Old Nick would be pleased to know that the matter of theft of the Sea-Island cotton from St. Simon’s had been solved.

And then, as if his thoughts had become tangible, the word “Gloves” appeared in front of his eyes. Hays stopped short, looked carefully. There it was, in the window of that little shop. D. MacNab, Leather and Leather-Findings. Cobbler’s Supplies. Saddlery and Harness. Books Bound. Gloves Mended. Fire-men’s and Watch-men’s Helmets.

Hays passed under the wooden awning and walked up three steps. A bell tinkled as he opened the door.

“What can you tell me any thing about this glove?” he asked.

“That it’s no’ yours, Mr. Hays.”

The High Constable laughed shortly. “I know that. And if you do, it must mean that you know whose it is, Mr. MacNab.”

“Och aye? Must it? It’s nae muckle thing to ken whose hand fits a glove, and whose doesna.” And, as Hays digested this, and ruefully admitted the man was right, MacNab said, “But it sae happens that I do ken whose it is, for I mended it masel’. And what’s mare, I mended another for the same mon—slashed across the palm it was—and handed it back not an hour syne.”

Not trying to conceal his excitement, Hays leaned across the counter. “What’s his name, MacNab?”

But MacNab said, “Och, that I dinna ken. A big man, wi’ a sonsy red face on him. He didna come in himsel’, this time, he sent the coachman wi’ the money. ‘Mak’ haste,’ says the coachie, ‘for he’s complainin’ we won’t get to the Battery in time to catch the packet-ship.’ So I took the siller and gave over the glove, and that’s all I ken aboot it.”

Calling his thanks over his shoulder, Hays ran out.

It took three cabs, one after the other, to get him to the Battery without the horses foundering. And all the clocks along the route displayed each a truly Republican and Democratic spirit of independence, no two agreeing. He was in constant agony that he might not make his destination in time. He pondered, not for the first time, on the absurdity of the head of the only effective police-force in the State (if not the nation!) being dependent on common carriers to convey him wherever his own feet could not. He allowed himself the uncommon luxury of a dream: a light carriage, the property of the Watch, drawn by a team of swift and strong horses, ditto. But it was only a dream. “Economy in government” was the official policy—except, of course, where official corruption was the cord. So far, at any rate, the sachems of the Tammany Wigwam had refrained from taking over the Watch. Which meant economy.

Blocks before the Battery he began to groan, for the crowds streaming away meant that all the farewells had been said and the ferry for the packet-ships had already left. The spectacle of the speeding cab (though devilish little speed could it manage in these crowded streets despite the fact that Hays was standing half-up and gesturing other vehicles aside) attracted the attention of the crowd, and there were loud comments—most of which contained the words Old Hays!

He leapt from the cab as soon as it drew up at the wharf, and dashed through the lingering groups of people. A corner of his eye observed three known pick-pockets, but he did not stop. That is, he did not stop until he saw that the ferry had gone, gone so definitely that he could not even pick it out amidst the thronged shipping of the harbor. As he drew up short, dismay large and plain upon his rugged face, a fierce and stalwart young man, with cold blue eyes and a rather hard-looking mouth, appeared out of the crowd and demanded, “What’s up?”

“Oh, Corneel—I’ve got to get aboard the packet-ship before she leaves—”

“Which one? Two bound for Liverpool, two for New Orleans, and one each for London, Havre, and Charleston. Take your pick, I’ve got a steam-launch.”

Which one, indeed? Liverpool was the cotton-port of England, and Jenkins had done business with the Captain of one of the Liverpool packets, at any rate. But, through the noise and clamor, he heard, as if in his ear, the voice of Mrs. Jenkins: Mais, ooh, la belle France!

“The Havre packet, Corneel! That’ll be it! But can we make it in time?”

With a flurry of oaths Corneel declared that he would soon put Hays aboard her, and ripped out orders. Almost at once a small, trim steam-launch appeared and they tumbled into it. Corneel took the wheel himself, and in another minute the paddles were thrashing and the whistle was screaming.

“Damn my tripes!” Corneel shouted. “This is like the old days! Remember when I was Captain of old Gibbons’s steamer, hey?”

Hays nodded. “In open violation of the monopoly that New-York State had given Livingstone and Fulton,” he pointed out. “Wherefore, it was my plain duty to arrest you. I told you I’d do it if I had to carry you ashore. I did do it and I did have to carry you ashore!”

Corneel roared with laughter, damned his tripes again, and various other things, swore luridly at the pilots of any vessels which did not instantly veer out of his way at the sound of his whistle; and in very short time they had beaten a white, frothy path across the blue waters and were in the cool shadow of the huge ocean-goer.

“Ahoy, the Hannibal packet!” Corneel shouted, his crewman seizing the ladder—which was still down to let the pilot off—with the boat-hook; then quickly fastening on with the line.

A row of curious faces looked down at them from above. Corneel and Hays clambered up the ladder and confronted the somewhat astonished Captain. Hays lifted his staff of office. His eyes picked out one face from the crowd, and a thickly-packed crowd it was, too; for few had chosen to go below and miss the passage down the Bay and through the Narrows. It was a face easy to pick out, once it had been described. “A big man with a red face,” Cudjo had said. “A sonsy red face,” was MacNab’s description. Hays wondered at his never having made the connection.

“What brings you aboard, Mr. Hays?” asked Captain Delano.

“A desire to ask a question or two of your passenger, here—” Hays stopped in front of the man, who greeted him with the same affable smile he had worn at their previous meeting.

“Good morning, Mr. Hays. Have you had any success in your quest for information about Nankeen?” he inquired.

“Good morning, Mr. Jenkins. Yes, I have. Do you know this glove?”

For just a fleeting second the smile seemed to slip. “No, I’m afraid I don’t.”

“Try it on,” said Hays. “Let me have your left hand.”

Jenkins drew the hand away and Hays caught it. For a moment they stood face to face, breast to breast, hand in hand. A little breeze blew across the deck. No one else spoke. Jenkins was a large man and a powerful one. But, still, slowly but surely, inch by inch, Hays drew his right hand back, and clenched in his right hand was the left hand of Mr. James Jenkins.

Suddenly Jenkins laughed. “An odd jest, sir. But I’m willing to oblige you.”

His resistance ceased, and he held out the reluctant hand, clad in a fawn-colored glove. For all his amiability he moved slowly, but the fawn-colored glove came off and the glove Hays held out—one of grey leather—went on.

“Now, sir, are you content?” Jenkins demanded, still smiling.

“Perfectly.” Hays held out his High Constable’s staff. “James Jenkins, alias Jones,” he said, “I take you into custody on a charge of having murdered Billy Walters, Tim Scott, Henry Roberts, and Lemuel Pierce, all in the City of New-York; and one Negro man, a slave, name unknown to me, on St. Simon’s-Island in the State of Georgia.”

The smile entirely left Jenkins’s face, which had gone white—then the color came flooding back, but not the smile.

“Captain Delano,” said Hays, “I trust you will render whatever aid may be necessary.”

Jenkins had found his tongue, and turned it glibly on the Captain. “I’ve never heard of any of these men, sir,” he said stoutly. “Nor have I ever been to St. Simon’s-Island. What is this nonsense about gloves and murders? I know many passengers will vouch for my character.”

“There are those ashore,” said Hays, “who can vouch for it, too! Went South not long ago to buy Nankeen, did you? Never a bit of it! Chartered Lem Pierce’s sloop to go South and fill it full of stolen Sea-Island cotton is what you did! And killed the poor Negro who was guarding it! No wonder you got rid of the bales so fast—sold them to the master of the outward-bound Liverpool packet just by good luck? Never a bit of it! Planned, planned! Every step of the way!

“But you hadn’t planned on your accomplices returning to blackmail you, did you? Still, you drew up a plan soon enough for that: you lured them to dark places under pretense of payment, and there you killed them. Billy Walters was the first one. He was found with a piece of cotton in his mouth. Raw cotton—Nankeen—such as you dealt in, Jenkins. What was the cotton doing in a dead man’s mouth? Here—”

Hays plucked the grey glove from the hand in which Jenkins, having taken it off, was holding it.

“Roaring Roberts, another of the lot, was found dead in the Old Brewery, and this glove at the entrance to his room. And Tim Scott, the third sailor of the crew of the sloop, was strangled to death in an alley off South-street. What is the connection in the circumstances of their deaths? Why, this—on Scott’s neck were the marks of only nine fingers. Where was the tenth?”

In an instant Hays had seized the left hand of James Jenkins and held it up for all to see.

“There is no tenth,” he said. “Jenkins has only four fingers on his left hand! That is why he always wears gloves! Look at the little finger of this glove: it has no creases. If I were to turn it inside out you’d see how the leather is darkened by use on the other four digits—but not on this one! And to hide the fact of his missing finger even more, Jenkins always stuffs the empty digit with raw cotton fibre. Look at this—”

Hays held out the fawn-colored glove. Four of its fingers hung loosely, but the fifth stayed as plump as if it had a flesh-and-blood finger inside it. Hays fished inside and the little finger went limp as he pulled out a piece of cotton stuffing.

Some thing like a sigh went up from the crowd.

“Now, examine the little finger of this first glove again,” Hays continued. “See how the thread at the end is a lighter color? Why? The end had been mended and the thread hadn’t yet worn as dark as the rest. But why did it need mending? Because when you, Jenkins, attacked Walters, he bit your hand, tearing the glove open and forcing the cotton stuffing out through the rip his teeth made! And before he could spit it out, his neck was broken, and he was a dead man! And in your fight with Roberts you lost the glove and were afraid to go back for it, weren’t you?”

Jenkins, unsmiling now, said nothing.

“You had Duncan MacNab mend the first glove. He did his job well, so when you killed Captain Lem Pierce and found the palm of the glove that you had on then had been slashed by Pierce’s knife, you took it to MacNab, too. And just got it back to-day. Let’s see the other glove to this fawn-colored pair, Jenkins.”

Jenkins thrust both hands deep into his pockets. There was a hard, ugly expression upon his face. “Let’s see your warrant—Leatherhead!” he demanded.

Hays shook his head. “None needed to apprehend a fugitive fleeing the State to avoid prosecution.”

Jenkins sneered, “You don’t know much law, Leatherhead. Your jurisdiction ended back at the Battery.”

Hays said calmly that they were still in New-York State waters, and that if it became necessary, he was prepared to make a citizen’s arrest. Jenkins had something to say about that, but there was an interruption.

“Damn my tripes! Are you trying to keep us talking till we’re out past the three-mile limit? Belay that!” And Corneel rushed forward, seized Jenkins around the waist and threw him over the side of the ship. He fell, screaming and kicking, while the ladies shrieked and swooned. Without even waiting for the splash, Corneel clattered down the ladder, Hays behind him.

Jenkins surfaced, and screamed in terror. “I can’t swim! Help me, I can’t swim!” He grabbed at and caught the boat-hook and was hoisted aboard the launch, where he lay, sodden and sobbing.

“If he makes any trouble, Corneel, hit him with the boat-hook—the blunt end.” Hays craned his neck upward. “If Mrs. Jenkins wishes to come ashore,” he called, “we’ll wait for her.” They waited several minutes. Then a steward pushed his head over.

“She won’t come, sir. She’s locked the door of her cabin and she says she won’t come out.”

Jenkins’s face swelled.

“Cast off,” Corneel directed.

“The trull!” Jenkins said, his voice thick. “The slut! I’d never have done it if it weren’t for her. ‘When are we going to have a house of our own, Mr. Jenkins? When are we going to have a carriage of our own?’ And now the dirty—”

But Corneel told him to mind his tongue and not speak that way of ladies. Jenkins looked at him with his red eyes. “Who in the devil’s name are you?” he asked.

“Cornelius Vanderbilt. Not at your service, except as the High Constable directs. Killed five men, did he, Hays?”

“Three sailors and a sea-captain in New-York and a slave down in Georgia.”

Corneel took off his cap. “May the Lord have mercy on their souls.” He clapped it back on again and blew his whistle and damned the eyes of the pilot of the New-Brunswick ferry. There were death and evil in Jenkins’s face as he looked at them, but Hays held the boat-hook, and all around them were the deep, deep waters.

The crowd at the Battery, far from having dispersed, was larger than it had been. Word of the High Constable’s chase and his dash across the harbor had evidently gotten around. No one could any more believe that Old Hays had gone hunting off to Europe than they could believe it of the Battery itself. Every spy-glass in town seemed to have followed the steam-launch, and there were cheers as they stepped on shore.

They’ll cheer at the hanging, too, Hays thought, for hanged Jenkins would certainly be. Not even a member of the Cotton Exchange could get away with four local murders. Cudjo would get off, though, if he turned State’s evidence; as he would have to in order to avoid extradition on the Georgia charge.

There were four Constables waiting to take the prisoner into custody. One of them was young Breakstone. “Now we know the answer,” he said, “to who has nine fingers and kills sailors.” But Jenkins said not one word.

An officious, well-dressed, and over-fed man slapped Hays on the back. “A marvellous job of work, High Constable!” he crowed, as if he had directed it himself. “You may well congratulate yourself that it’s done. Now it’s up to the judge and jury—your job is over!”

Hays looked at the man’s pompous and moon-like face. Then he looked out over the teeming harbor, and then back to the city almost hid behind the forest of masts along the waterfront; the city ever growing, thronged with new-comers from Europe and America.

As he thought of its swarming and wretched tenements and its corrupt administration, the High Constable reflected that crime—as witness Jenkins—was found in high places as well as low, and that greed and vice would go always hand in hand. Hays shook his head sadly.

“No,” he said, “it’s not done. It’s not even begun.”

The plump citizen seemed to feel a response was expected of him. He chuckled. But a slight blankness on his bland countenance seemed to indicate that he did not quite take in the High Constable Hays’s meaning.