IT WAS Thursday morning, the day following that on which the snake story had appeared in the Herald-Examiner, and the precise day, moreover, when Mrs. Galioto and her lawyer were expected to call, when Carson, poring over a local map of Arizona in which a new spurious mine had been reported as roping in innocents at a point which as a mining engineer he knew had thus far been quite devoid of any kind of precious metal whatever, heard his telephone bell ring sharply. Rising up from the map laid out on the table in the inside room, he stepped into the outer office and lifting the receiver of the telephone recognized the voice on the end at once as that of the little girl who was to become Mrs. Clifford Carson before many more weeks.
“Cliff,” Marcia told him hastily, “I wish it were possible for you to come over here. Someone — I am sure, Cliff — has been inside this house during the night.”
“Been in the house during the night!” he ejaculated. “Burglars?”
“I don’t know,” she replied troubledly. “There is nothing missing. But there has been someone here. Someone has been in Grandfather’s library.”
“How do you know this, honey-girl?” he asked.
“Because,” she said, “I swept up there yesterday afternoon and this morning when I went in to get Grandfather’s dictionary to look up a certain word, I found a slip of manilla paper lying on the floor almost underneath the safe. There are certain pencil tracings on the door of the safe, as though one person had been tracing out some mechanism for another. And then I examined the house, Cliff. One of the swinging cellar windows had been apparently forced away from its fastening. If this were the case it would have been easy for an intruder to come up the cellar stairs and get in the house proper.”
“But, my dear girl,” he interposed, feeling quite sure that the typical fears of her sex relative to house-breakers had gotten the better of her, “if anyone were after the contents of that safe, surely — did you look in the safe?” he broke off suddenly, as the memory of the newspaper story describing the location of the Zuri serpent flashed across his brain.
“Yes indeed, Cliff. I lost no time in opening it up. Everything is intact. No one has been inside. The stuffed snake lies there on the newspaper exactly as you placed it when we locked it up Tuesday afternoon. If anyone were here, they went away without obtaining what they were after. Cliff, I feel that they were after that Zuri snake.”
“Hm.” He thought for a moment. “Honey-girl, I’ll jump in a taxi and be out there in a jiffy. Perhaps there’s something to what you say. I don’t know. I’ll come immediately so as not to keep you out of bed any longer than necessary. As a matter of fact, I’ve got to get back, because a certain Mrs. Galioto and her lawyer are going to take me for a ride!”
“Take you for a ride, Cliff! Why — ”
He laughed. “They’d like to,” he explained. “It’s that Tex Helium certificate that Cary let slip. He told you about it, of course. It can be said to be actually out of existence now — for it’s transferred on the books of the company, reissued, and in Germany to boot. A German company’s the holder of it now — a company which evidently has at least thirty-three and one-third percent American ownership in order to comply with the Lydon Act regulating the export of helium from America. Anyway, the original owner of the stock, a Mrs. Angelo Galioto, and her lawyer, are due in here after lunch to demand it. Mrs. Galioto had some hectic dream about it, and her fortune-teller told her not to sell it under any conditions. So she doesn’t want the ten thousand dollars that Cary deposited in my account out of that money his father sent us all — she wants the stock, and she wants that very certificate.”
“But — but what are you going to do with them, Cliff? What can you say — what can you do — with such people, against dreams and fortune-tellers?”
“Yes — what? Well, I ran over to Little Sicily last night and fortified myself with some data. And I’ve got some other things to say. I don’t know how it’ll come out. But I’ve got to keep Mrs. Galioto from making any fool inquiries at Washington. That’s certain. But don’t worry about it. Leave it to me. And I’ll start now for your place.” And he hung up.
He took his hat from the rack in the corner and giving a few orders to his stenographer, went downstairs to the street and boarded the first yellow taxi that came bowling along, giving the driver the destination which lay so far away from that better-known part of Chicago that the latter had to look it up first in his street guide. It was thirty minutes later when Carson reached St. Giles Lane, and it was a rather perturbed Marcia who met him at the front door. He hung his hat on the hallrack and she led him without further words to the library, snapping on the overhanging electric bulb to show more plainly what she had to exhibit.
She knelt down, and he stooped over to watch her slender finger. “See, Cliff,” she directed.
Sure enough he could see, due to the reflected glare of the electric light from the surface of the safe, the lazy tracing of a light pencil line as though someone with pencil in hand were demonstrating the position and type of certain supposed mechanism which lay hidden back of the dial. He inspected it in silence for a second or two. Then he spoke.
“Honey, just throw open that door for me if you will.”
With the door wide open, and Mr. Zuri with his blue glass eyes calmly contemplating the performance, Carson compared the light tracings on the front of the door with the fairly simple mechanism that lay exposed back of it. It was plain that whoever had been there the night before had had a perfect mental picture of that mechanism, for the pencil tracings followed almost to a hair’s-breadth the direction of the bolts, sockets and tumbler operating device which was hidden from the eye of anyone outside the strongbox. At length Carson bid her close the door and lock it, and then he arose.
“Now we’ll look at that cellar window,” he said.
Without a word she took him out the rear door and around the side of the house to where a transom-like window, hinged at the top, gave light to an empty cellar to whose dirt floor only a drop of about four feet would have been necessitated. It appeared that a sharp bar of iron had been inserted at the bottom, prying the swinging window backward and snapping the rusty bolt which held it fast on the inside.
“As I said to you on the phone, Cliff,” she told him while he inspected it frowningly, “I don’t know for sure that this happened last night. Boys play ball in these vacant lots, and one cannot tell just when a depredation like this might have happened. Then, too, tramps from the railroad over to the east may have forced entrance at some time during the past weeks thinking that there were preserves or jellies in the cellar. But this broken lock taken in conjunction with these other things — ”
“And also that slip of paper you spoke of,” he added for her, “certainly makes it look as though someone was in this house last night while it was empty.” He paused thinking. “And nothing of this nature, I presume, Marcia, has ever happened since old Professor Jones, your Grandfather’s friend of his teaching days, left him the house?”
“No, Cliff. Not during the three years we’ve lived in it have we had any trouble in the way of housebreaking.”
He nodded, and turning away from the window spoke. “Now suppose we go in and see this slip of paper you speak about.”
So together they repaired back in the house. From a desk in the hallway she took a slip of manilla paper one edge of which was rough where part of it had been torn away. She handed it to him. In the light from the halldoor he inspected it carefully. The printed words, “Chicago Public Library,” with the words in smaller print beneath them, “General Reading Room,” met his eyes. Still below this on a blank line was a number pencilled in soft, very black pencil, K 1990; and next to it, on the same line, evidently written by a different and harder pencil, was the hastily scrawled word “Out.” Carson looked up.
“So you found this nearly underneath the safe?” he asked. “Does Cary or Grandfather ever go to the Public Library Reading Room?”
“Cary never, so far as I know,” Marcia told him. “Grandfather occasionally went down there when he had a chance to write up a little nature article for extra money. But the point is, Cliff, that I swept this room carefully yesterday. I know I did not overlook this slip.”
“Did you use a carpet sweeper, a broom, or a vacuum cleaner?” he queried.
“A broom,” she said wonderingly. “Why do you ask?”
“Carpet sweepers — also vacuum cleaners,” he replied with a smile, “sometimes drop pieces they have taken up weeks before. But I daresay you know that as well as I.” He paused, studying the torn slip of paper. “Well, we have here half of a printed reading-room slip from the public library. We have also the evidence that somebody endeavored to draw out a book whose number was K 1990, but that the book was out. Who that somebody is we don’t know because the lower half of the slip bearing the lines in which the drawer writes his name and address has been torn off. Now my venture, Marcia, is that a piece of paper was required to note down the name and number of this safe, the supposed mechanism of which had just been outlined in a few words and demonstrated with a pencil, and that somebody tore off half of this slip, which happened to be in one of their pockets, to use for the notation. The other half got dropped on the floor in the discussion, and here it is. But, unfortunately, the half that was used — the same half that was carried away again — is the half we require.”
He studied the slip for a moment. “And yet, honey-girl, I wonder if after all this isn’t all we need?” He turned to her. “Did you ever try to get a non-fiction book at the library, the slip for which came back to you marked ‘out,’ without trying to draw another one along the same lines? I never did, particularly in the case of a non-fiction book such as this one is as denoted by the classification K. By golly, I’ll do it!”
He folded up the fractional slip and put it carefully away in his pocket. “Agamemnon Church, a friend of mine, is assistant librarian at the Public Library and if anybody can get any data or records, I think I’m the one who can do it. Now, little girl, go to bed and get your sleep. If anybody were here — if anybody intends to come back again — that person or persons know your movements far better than you know them yourself. They’ll not come so long as you’re in the house, you may bank upon that. So go to sleep with perfect assurance.”
At the front door he kissed her on her moist warm red lips and, clasping her slim little form in his arms, took his departure. By means of changing over from the surface line to the elevated road as soon as he reached the intersection, he managed to reach the thundering Loop considerably ahead of the time the trip would have taken on the surface alone.
Arriving at the big stone building on Randolph and Michigan he went at once to the information desk in the large tessellated room on the third floor, used for drawing out books for home consumption. “Can you tell me the general classification of this number?” he asked.
The young man addressed looked at it through hornshell glasses. “That’s natural history,” he said promptly. “Let’s see.” He ran through a series of bound typed sheets of paper. “This particular number would range around reptiles, snakes, turtles and crawling animals.”
This was getting somewhere; so Carson made his way to the floor above and down a long marble corridor to the card catalogue room, where he lost no time in examining the indexed drawer which contained the heading “Snakes.” Sure enough, among the nine or ten books devoted directly to reptiles, he came upon the same number as that on the slip in his pocket — ? 1990 — and found that its full title was “Reptiles of the World,” with colored plates, by Horatio Griscomb; and that it was published by Ward Lock and Company, Salisbury Square, London, England. Now he was becoming what in the old parlor game was known as “warm”! If he had had any doubts thus far that someone interested in the Zuri snake of Mr. Jake Jennings, now locked fast at detective headquarters, had been in the St. Giles Lane house, they were completely swept away. And he almost knew instinctively that if that someone had at some time previous been trying to get a book or some technical information about Zuri snakes, and had found the most likely book, this one by Horatio Griscomb, out, the person whoever it might be would hardly have stopped the search without examining some of the volumes which were not out.
So he copied down meticulously on the back of a letter taken from his pocket the titles of the remaining eight books devoted to snakes and reptiles. His copied list ran:
| K 3015 | Catalogue of the Colubridae Snakes. Adolph Guenther. |
| K 8046 | The Ophidians. The zoological arrangement of the different genera. S. Higgins. |
| K 6709 | Researches on the venom of the Rattlesnake and the Cobra, with colored plates of all the poisonous reptiles of the world. Mitchell. |
| K 4446 | How to distinguish between poisonous and non-poisonous reptiles by the shape of the head and nostrils. Illustrated. Adrian Le Veaux. |
| K 1992 | The Reptiles of India. Colored plates. Vanmouth. |
| K 1993 | The Reptiles of Africa. Colored plates. Vanmouth. |
| K 1994 | The Reptiles of Australia. Colored plates. Vanmouth. |
| K 1995 | The Reptiles of America. Work begun by father and completed by son. Colored plates. Vanmouth, Senior and Junior. |
Armed by this battery of numbers belonging to books devoted to snakes, Carson went downstairs at once to the offices of Agamemnon Church, his friend the assistant librarian. Greetings with the long lean cadaverous-looking custodian of the books, whose eye nevertheless reflected a quite unacademic twinkle, were soon over and Carson went straight to the task in hand.
“Ag, I’m trying to get a line on someone who has been referring to books of a certain classification. I want an order from you letting me see the Reading Room slips put in yesterday, the day before, and even before that if necessary.”
“So — ho,” remarked Agamemnon Church, “and the recently appointed Government Investigator for Fraudulent Mining Stocks is about to make his first capture, eh? All right, old investigator. Our Miss Minerva Wentley-Brown, up in the Reading Room, will give you access to whatever you want.” And he handed Carson a scrawled order.
So upstairs to the fifth floor Carson went again, the joy of the chase in his blood like the scent of the prey in the nostrils of a fox hound. He received from Miss Minerva Wentley-Brown, a staid-looking spinster in stiffly starched shirtwaist who surveyed the order from her superior over her round eyeglasses with marked disapprobation, a bulky packet of tied-up manilla slips all stamped “Returned” in red ink, together with the hour of the return, and all arranged, as he was very shortly to find, in alphabetical and numerical order according to the classification of the first book on each slip.
“These are yesterday’s,” Miss Minerva Wentley-Brown informed him. “You may have the day previous to this if you do not find what you require.”
Carson took the slips over to one of the nearby tables and proceeded to examine them carefully one by one. Thus he was engaged from about ten-thirty to ten-forty-five when suddenly he came upon two slips close to each other. One called for number ? 1992 on the list he had made out, and one for number ? 3015 on the same list. Each bore at the bottom the name of one Casper Wolff. Each bore below that name, the address 525 Wabasha Street.
At first glance Carson concluded fatuously that he had unearthed a vital clue, a Wabash Avenue street number in the big city of Chicago. But the word “street” instead of “avenue” was written plainly after the name of the thoroughfare, and what was perhaps more disconcerting was the fact that the final “a” of the word “Wabasha” was written so plainly that it could not be assumed to be a slip of the pencil. Wabasha Street it was and not at all Wabash Avenue. Now he was fairly certain that Chicago boasted no such thoroughfare, but to make doubly sure he went over to the information counter, secured a street guide and corroborated this fact. And there he paused to reflect. It was plain that somebody — one Casper Wolff — by the automatic action of his subconscious mind had jotted down on the library slip his address in a city other than Chicago. So now to find where Wabasha Street was.
There was no catalogue by which to find in what city one of America’s millions of streets was located, but Carson had in mind a logical method which he was almost certain would provide the answer. That method hinged about the fact that yearly thousands of small business entrepreneurs, sparsely supplied with that vital thing imagination, opened up thousands of precarious little businesses which for want of a better name they called by the street on which they thrived or failed to thrive. Was there ever a Main Street that did not have its Main Street Confectionery, its Main Street Shoe Repair Shop, its Main Street Fruit Market and various other prosaic combinations? Armed with which reasoning Carson went to the civics room adjoining, where telephone directories and city directories of every metropolis in America were to be found. He started in with the big cities at first, and within ten minutes a grey-backed telephone directory in his hand bearing the title “St. Paul — Minneapolis, Minnesota,” gave forth in the W’s of its St. Paul section the names of a Wabasha Street Confectionery, a Wabasha Street Shoe Repair Shop — and wonders of wonders for the infallible system — a Wabasha Street Fruit Market! So Wabasha Street was in St. Paul.
This was enough. The piecing together of facts was now considerably easier than it had been. Casper Wolff of 525 Wabasha Street, St. Paul, had made a trip to Chicago, had investigated the subject of snakes at the public library and had been on St. Giles Lane the night just passed. Now all that remained was to find out who Casper Wolff might be. This proved to be the simplest of all. In the same directory which gave him the Wabasha Street Confectionery and various other business enterprises gracing the name of the street whereon they were located, he turned to the Wo’s instead of the Wa’s, and there found the entry: Casper Wolff, atty., 525 Wabasha Street.
He was done so far as his work in the library went. Replacing the telephone directory on the rack, Carson left the library thinking deeply. He did not go back to his own office but wended his way instead to that occupied by Ramsey Gordon, the ever-genial Ramsey Gordon who appeared more willing to do work for others than to attend to his own. He found him in, and closeted with him, he went straight to the point.
“Mr. Gordon, do you know anyone in the legal business in St. Paul?”
“Sure do,” was Gordon’s reply. “Jim Goddard, Sam Stillman, George Barron. Also a few others. What can I do for you?”
“I wonder if you could get me a speedy telegraphic report, confidential of course, and as complete as possible, on one Casper Wolff, an attorney in St. Paul listed at 525 Wabasha Street?”
Ramsey Gordon took out a yellow telegraph blank from one of the pigeonholes of his desk. He wrote on it in flowing hand:
Mr. Sam Stillman, Ryan Building, St. Paul, Minn.
Telegraph me immediately and confidentially what you can find out about Casper Wolff, lawyer, of
Ramsey Gordon.
“Now fill in the data you just gave me, Mr. Carson,” he smiled through his even white teeth, “and we’ll get this off without delay.”
Carson wrote in quickly the full address he had obtained through his peregrinations through the marble halls of the public library. Gordon called his stenographer. “Send this at once, Mary,” he ordered. He turned to Carson. “I’ll send the answer over to you by my office boy as soon as it comes in,” he added. “And if Sam Stillman, who knows everybody in St. Paul, is in town, you can bank on it he’ll write the report as soon as he gets this wire,”