A Rascal's Nemesis

by Raymond S. Spears

 

A Rascal's Nemesis

^by Raymond S. Spears

Author of “An Uninvited Guest,” etc.

DAYLONE was a living example of what a man should not be. The simplest of acts in daily life became in him sinister and evil beyond ordinary comprehension; his smile was a wicked lure, like the flower that gives the cot- ton-mouth moccasin its name; his compassion was an ulterior motive to persuade friendly people into his toils, and he never performed a gracious act that was not intended to entrap some guileless victim.

He was a man of medium height, broad shoulders, smiling lips, and squinting eyes; his nose was large, but there was a lumpy end that gave his profile a mean expression; he pretended to good looks, but no woman ever manufactured so ceaselessly to bring about this effect.

Daylone was in business with a man who went by the name of Topas, and this business was like his personality; it edged along close to the legal limits, and hardly a night went by that Daylone did not share with Topas a questionable profit—the winnings of a gambler in sure things.

Then there was the frequent little rake-off that follows the transactions of a smugglers' fence. So insidious and constant were Daylone's private transactions that he seldom seen twice with the same ring on his fingers, the same diamond stud, the same fanciful assortment of trinkets and gew-gaws—and all these were smuggled in, and through him were spread throughout the border world in which he moved. He sold jewelry with the characteristitc mountings of France, or Antwerp, or Potsdam, of wherever jewels were manufactured and stones set without paying a cent of duty.

Few men were wider in their illicit interests than this suave, graceful, and near-popular man who maintained an excellent air of respectability, and yet succeeded in a thousand transactions, not one of which would give an honest man pride, or a crooked dealer cause of genuine alarm.

Daylone was known to no one in all his activities. He succeeded in showing but one facet of his paste to each of his associates. If one knew him as the mixer of very pretty and dangerous drinks, another knew that he was a very expert man in judging the strength of a fellow player's hand after the draw. Not one of his people knew that sometimes he slipped away from town and enjoyed a week of duck shooting down on the marshes below Baltimore along the Chesapeake.

Every spring he went down there to shoot ducks and wild geese. He was the owner of a shooting lodge on Sinsink River, and the member of a little club that flourished there. Men of several States and common tastes owned this club, and it declared dividends after the muskrat season, for the marsh it owned yielded upward of ten thousand muskrats annually, and, if these sold for fifty cents each, all the club expenses were paid; but when the price of rat skins went past four dollars each, and the catch went to fifteen thousand pelts, there was a dividend declared that gave every member three thousand dollars in cash.

Daylone was treasurer of the club. He made his reports, which corresponded with the secretary's in every particular, and the annual meeting was always at the height of the spring flight, whether there was a law protecting the ducks or not. At this meeting, business was attended to, and projects laid for the future.

The final meeting of the club was as jolly, as good-natured, and as above-board as usual. Not a hint, not a suspicion was breathed that anything unusual was developing, but when the members had all scattered, and when they had received, by mail, their annual club dues, as they called the dividends, there was included in the letters a statement by Daylone that astonished and dismayed every one of his fellows. It read briefly:

And now, gentlemen of the Sinsink Club, I desire to announce that the property of this social organization has come under my personal control, owing to the laws governing wild lands, and association properties; I purchased these lands at tax sales, owing to the failure of the club's president and secretary to see that the taxes were paid properly, and according to law.

When the club's attorney, also its secretary, investigated the matter, he discovered that the condition was exactly as Daylone had described it. The whole marsh, now worth more than one hundred thousand dollars merely as a muskrat farm, had passed into the possession of Daylone through his cunning working of the tax laws. For more than fifteen years he had laid his plans and carried them out, so that while he was the good fellow, the gayest of the entertainers in the Sinsink Club, he was fastening his clutches on their property, and by the president's failing to pay the taxes—under the club's constitution as he had had it amended before the election of a careless man to the office, the one financial duty of the president—he had succeeded. Not one of the members but recalled that amendment, urged suavely by Daylone—and now they saw why he had done it.

By one act the club was destroyed. Daylone laughed up his sleeve at his success. He jeered his fellow members, when they wrote personal appeals to him, and when they scolded him, cursed him for his faithlessness, he put up new trespass signs in his own name, and the first man he prosecuted was one of his former club associates; and he won the case from the justice's court to the supreme court—and the litigation merely fixed his claim more firmly on the property.

His excuse for this thing was quite typical. He told himself that he needed the money as he had foreseen he would for fifteen years. The trickery of his life in the metropolis could not always support him in his extravagance; he could not always depend on his interests in illicit business and gambling ventures. Sometimes he lost in them. Two or three times he escaped exposure, so narrow in his ventures, that it cost him a year's income to bribe and buy himself out of his complicity in a great jewel robbery.

He lived, however, with a feeling of security because his dupes and his associates were all easily baffled and easily hoodwinked. The cowardice of his criminal connections protected him. There was the hour that struck when he betrayed the clientele in Europe, which sent him for sale the famous pearls stolen from the apartments of one of the most noted and beautiful women of court circles. These pearls were so splendid that it seemed impossible that any one would dare pilfer them, but when the dying woman asked to look on their loveliness once more they were brought to the room; they roused a waning smile of the victim of beauty, fame, and a new epoch in the world's affairs.

She died and the pearls disappeared. One moment they were there in all their splendor, estimated at a hundred thousand pounds value at the least. Men and women hunted everywhere for them, and the confusion of the great castle was chaotic. But the pearls were gone—the magnificent ropes had utterly vanished.

And within two weeks they were handed to Daylone in his own house by a bow lookout from one of the great transatlantic liners. Daylone smiled at their loveliness but neglected to notify his pals on the far side of his satisfaction. When coded cables made inquiry he sent word back, in his usual cynical fashion, to the effect that all bets were now off.

Threats were leveled at him, and he retaliated by tipping off three great continental police forces as to where the center of very considerable criminal activities would be found. The five men, and even the two women of his foreign connections, were picked up and jailed—they were imprisoned for terms of years that insured their being broken and old upon their emerging into the world again. Daylone's own connection with the affair did not attain the sound of a whisper under the breath—for the old gang did not know what had hit them.

There was another curious feature of the man's steadily successful methods of betrayal. It concerned a little transaction in oils in the far Southwest. He met two professional swindlers who had heard that he was a very successful operator in questionable games close to the law's edge. They wanted him to work with them in a little project of their own.

Their idea was to put a few thousand dollars into an oil rig, and set it going down there near the border, somewhere. Then they would send in very encouraging reports, and on the strength of them float a lot of stock on the market, and in due course they would drop out of sight. To this Daylone gave reluctant consent. He would look after matters around home—they could peddle the stock up and down the country, and they would whack up.

Accordingly, the two swindlers allowed Daylone to go down to Texas and put the oil rig on a quarter section, and set it to digging. Immediately Daylone reported good progress, and the two swindlers sold a lot of oil stock, which they had had printed. Daylone returned to New York, and met them; and he took his third of the rake-off—trust him for that. Then, as the devil's luck would have it, the drillers struck oil and sent a telegram to that effect—a sixty-barrel well was brought in.

The swindlers were amazed, and they went out and bought back the stock they had sold, paying more for it than they had received, but upon their return with the stock, Daylone laughed at them.

“You fools,” he said, “the rig wasn't working on the company's section of land, but on a few acres I picked up in the Pagon Pool district——”

There was almost a fight, then. Daylone came as near having real trouble as he ever had in his life, but the two swindlers were in his own house, and they had left their guns in their suit cases. Daylone, when they started to their feet, drew an automatic and within the second had them covered.

“You poor fools,” he said, “get out of here—or you'll be pulled for that little motor business you were in, out on Lake Michigan!”

He bluffed them; they couldn't say a word; they had sold all the stock and brought Daylone the cash! They didn't have a scrap of paper to show for anything—not even the deed for the oil company's land, which they had thought was being drilled. They faded out of sight. Daylone had another respite from bankruptcy.

Then there was the mean little trick that Daylone played on a hopeful young man who came up from Chesapeake Bay to begin life in New York. He had worked on Daylone's marsh tract, trapping muskrats, and he had managed to save five hundred dollars from his wages, for trapping on public lands, Daylone promised him good work in artistic photography, took three hundred dollars to bribe the boy into a great photographer's establishment, a necessary procedure, Daylone said. Then he kicked the boy into the street and threw the boy's camera after him, not knowing that the instrument had cost nearly one hundred dollars, else he would have kept it.

But he soon learned that there was such a photographer in the world as he had never dreamed of. Wherever Daylone went, he now found himeslf the target of a picture-maker who kept out of sight—and yet sent him prints from films that showed Daylone about his various private affairs.

There was a photograph that showed up in the mail, revealing to Daylone the fact that his visit to Ong Cheong Pao's was somewhere known in undeniable proof—a photograph that revealed Daylone's quick dart from the “tea store” to his runabout.

When Daylone went to visit Mrs. Toyval Lesonel, the wealthy widow toward whom he had displayed every attention of a lover, seeking to marry her, he was reminded of the publicity of his supposed intentions by a film print that arrived two days later by mail. That photograph prevented his undertaking a certain financial transaction he had planned.

Day after day, there arrived in Daylone's mail a print, two or three prints, which recorded his every activity. If he went to the horse races, he found himself pictured in any wild gesture he might make; and worse yet, passing a picture-post-card stand one day, he looked himself in the face, as he had stumbled along after drinking overmuch—a flash-light photograph which he remembered, now that he was reminded of it. The sentiment expressed on the card was: “You may be dry, but I'm thoroughly lit.”

He remembered, then, that visitor, Tibas Kenten, with his camera and the three hundred dollars. Daylone, for the first time in his life, found himself shrinking from the activity of one of his victims. He had always believed himself to be the superior of any sucker who permitted himself to be swindled within the limits of the law, or who dared not make an outcry in case of strong-arm work. He had taken a chance in robbing Tibas, but it had seemed a justified chance, till this moment when he saw the fact that the boy was getting the money back by selling post cards that showed a typical man-about-town.

Discovering this picture card, Daylone's eyes were quickened to the possibilities, and sure enough, there was a photograph that showed him with one foot high in the air, like a ballet dancer, just about to fall upon a banana and there was the fall, too! The photographer had hunted him like a hound.

Daylone looked around, nervously, to see if he was watched now. He saw, on the instant, a black little circle—the lens of a camera in the crowd, and he knew that he was once more a victim. Within a week, he found himself in that very gesture in a new series of post cards, labeled: “You got me!”

Daylone tried to sneak around town, but he found himself picked up, inevitably. The man-about-town series grew popular, it grew to be a jest—and Daylone's acquaintances, by this time growing wary of his scoundrelly life, found amusement in the predicament that enveloped him. They said among themselves that he had played the game once too often, and that now some one was getting even. It was only a whisper, but collecting post cards of Daylone pictures was becoming a sly amusement of his circle, when there was a sudden outcry of news.

Daylone had been out of town; on his return, he left the railway station, caught a taxi, and started for home. But he canceled the order and went uptown, on the other side of the park, instead. He left the taxi at a corner, three blocks from the house of Mrs. Lesonel. It was then about four o'clock p.m. He walked uptown and over into her block, started up the steps, turned and dashed down them, and started in pursuit of a young man with a camera.

Two days later his photograph was on a thousand stands, in post-card form, showing him waving his cane and displaying a beautiful close-up of a highly indignant man under whose feet were the black words: “I'll catch you yet!”

The comic artist who portrayed his wife's parents in all their wild squabbles had nothing on the young man who was cashing in on the sly and detestable schemer about town. The genial smile of Daylone began to give way to a nervous twitching; wrinkles deepened in his face, and his years began to tell; one day, in a fit of exasperation and nervousness, he choked and his false teeth bounded out onto the pavement. It was the luck of the photographing caricaturist that he caught the man in his unhappy predicament.

It was funny, but there was a desperate drama in the affair, too. The photographs showed a deeper purpose than that of mere ridicule, and Daylone felt their blows, one by one. That visit at the opium headquarters was followed by an equally questionable recording of Daylone's going afloat at night in a launch—a picture showed him sneaking ashore up North River with his hands clutching two bags, containing thousands of dollars' worth of prepared cocaine, as Daylone knew. “Soft Crabbing!” the post card called it.

Daylone shrank from the revelation of his night-voyaging down the bay. He had seen the terrific flashlight—but while he was blinded in the unforeseen flare, the picture maker escaped. It would not have done to kill him there with a gunshot, anyhow!

More desperate than Daylone ever dreamed of being, he went hunting for Tibas Kenten, and soon learned where he boarded on the Heights, in Brooklyn. He learned that Kenten made more than a hundred dollars a week with his post-card series, having turned the tables on the thief who had robbed him. Daylone planned his revenge with uttermost care. It was a cunning scheme, based on that diverse knowledge of his.

Kenten received a telegram one day from Camboy, down on Sinsink River. It read:

Tibas; are you never coming back to see me? ⁠Lilla.

It was a shock to Tibas Kenten. It was Lilla's indifference that had led him to abandon the marsh country of the Eastern Shore to go to New York and forget her. The telegram started anew all the fervor of his youth and he could not hurry fast enough back to his old home country, having telegraphed word that he was coming.

Lilla was a heartless girl, looking for the main chance. Hoping to win a smile from the wealthy and eminent Mr. Archright Daylone, she had consented to play this little joke on the susceptible Kenten. Of the doings in the faraway metropolis she had not the least inkling. But when Kenten arrived in Camboy, he brought with him the masterpieces of this photographic ability and inspiration.

He showed them all to Lilla, who laughed lightly as he displayed the series, and, boy-fashion, he bragged of his turning the crooked Mr. Daylone's meanness into a fine income. Lilla laughed, and beguiled him, even as the scoundrel had done. In her turn, she told of Daylone's presence in that great marsh of his, and added that she would help Kenten add to his collection of negatives. She was as good as her word, telling Kenten the fact that the post cards had changed her heart as regards Daylone.

With Daylone she arranged for what the scoundrel thought would be a fine chance to murder the photographer. Then she posted Kenten where he could photograph everything that happened there in that wild, tall-reeded marsh.

Daylone, sneaking down a little slough with a double-barrel shotgun loaded to kill his tormentor, was caught in a dozen poses in his ducking punt. He hunted around, but the photographer, all his life a bay-boy, was crafty in his blind. Daylone did not know that he was a dupe until, arriving back on the railroad, he found “The Duck Huntin' Chappy” displayed in all the grim and desperate poses assumed by the bushwhacker in his angry search for the picture maker who had bushwhacked him.

Furious and amazed, Daylone slunk home to his house. He crept up the front steps, humped up like a wizened old man. Into the hallway he stepped, and some one there shot him dead where he stood. The man, with baffled murder in his heart, died before he slumped to the long, narrow rug.

One shot—one bullet—and the deed was fatally executed. It was mid-afternoon—an hour of unusual quiet on that block. A truck passing had muffled the sound of the shot. No one could guess who the murderer was, nor how the killer had escaped without leaving the least trace behind for identification.

There was no lack of pictures of the victim, and there were almost a thousand people who, for one reason or another, must rejoice at the violent and deserved death of the sharper. The very number of men and women who could reasonably have worked themselves into a passion against the man prevented any real clew being found.

The police decided on the very instant, that Tibas Kenten might well be investigated, examined—after he signed a waiver—and his activities traced back. Kenten submitted with blushing and embarrassed nervousness to their inquiries. He saw his great collection of camera films scrutinized, and the prints examined, one by one, under powerful reading glasses.

The photographs enabled the public to follow Daylone's career for two years and a week, and no more thorough record of a man's activities had ever been made. Kenten admitted that enemies of Daylone had kept him posted about Daylone's comings and goings. Thinking himself a master of keeping the work of his left hand from his right, Daylone had been betrayed by some one—none could guess whom. If Kenten knew, he refused to divulge his source of information.

But Kenten handed to the police the list that he had used; it was a pile of post cards a foot high, addressed with a typewriter of small type and with the briefest statements on the writing side:

To-night, lands Riverside, below Tomb.

Tuesday, goes to Long Island rendezvous.

Watch the chink's to-day, and have taxi ready!

Kenten denied knowing who had helped him so valuably. The police and investigators were all baffled. They had seized Kenten's camera and the films which he had exposed. They found, in his coat, in one roll six pictures of Daylone's arrival in the city, his going uptown to his house; and they found a picture of the baffled, worried, hunted man retreating into the doorway beyond which, within ten seconds, he was to fall dead.

Kenten, if anybody, was a witness! But Kenten admitted taking the pictures, but declared that he had instantly turned as he removed the roll full of exposed film and walked up the street and around the corner, to go home:

“I had a lot of the bay pictures to print,” he explained, “for there was a big demand for the chappy-hunter series. The girl I'd hired to make the prints hadn't showed up for several days, and I was behind in my orders. I didn't dare trust the films outside, for fear that old rascal would get hold of them.”

There the matter rested, for there was no proof of anything. No one could find any clew to the perpetrator of the mysterious murder. There was a question which might have been put to Kenten, in a casual, fishing sort of way;

“With whom did you walk around the corner when you went away?”

No one asked it; no one had seen the incident; but the fact was, Kenten had instantly handed a woman the final roll of film which he removed from the camera. The other one was in his pocket, where the police found it when, a few hours later, they took him up for questioning.

Scores of people were questioned. Surmise, speculation, and investigation revealed nothing. But one day, a long time afterward. there was an odd little rumor going around that the widow, Mrs. Toyval Lesonel, was seen here and there with the well-known specialist of post-card caricature photography. She had met him during the investigation into the unsolved mystery of the murder of Daylone, to whom, it had been reported, she was engaged.

Then, rather quietly, she was married to Tibas Kenten. She was a radiant bride, and he was the happiest of young men, though perhaps a year and a day younger than his sweetheart.

To them there was no mystery in the matter. Daylone had succeeded in obtaining possession of Mrs. Lesonel's stocks and bonds, and when he was away, she had gone to his house, and found them in a wall safe. The key had been obtained away down there on the Sinsink River by Lilla, for a price, but Daylone had arrived home just a day sooner than he was expected.

As the front door opened, she turned and saw him enter. She saw him draw a pistol and shoot himself dead in a torment of utter despair.

That was all, except that the pistol he killed himself with belonged to Mrs. Lesonel—a pearl-handled, gold-inlaid weapon, with her name cut along the breech. There she was, and there was her pistol—and Daylone there dead!

There was a chance in a million of escape, and she tried fate. She took her stocks and bonds, tucked the pistol into her waist and emerged, closing the door behind her. As she walked down the steps she saw Kenten taking her photograph.

She saw him take picture after picture, six in succession. Then she walked up to him, slipped her hand into his elbow and said:

“Won't you come with me? I want to talk to you.”

Before he knew what she had to tell he had handed her the roll of film.

“I beg your pardon,” he said. “I don't know why I took those pictures of you—I'm sorry! I had it in for Daylone—but not for—for——”

“His victims?” she inquired, and, thus coolly, she took Kenten with her as she walked homeward.

To Kenten she told the whole truth, and he believed her. She showed him the stocks and bonds the scoundrel had inveigled into his possession, also the beautiful pistol, with its intricately engraved—nevertheless a deadly weapon. Had she not been there to take it, she would have been instantly suspected and accused of doing what the man had done himself. On her would have fallen a notoriety she dreaded and did not deserve.

The rest of the affair was no one's business. Kenten's gallantry, his ability, his sense of humor, and originality, added to her gratitude, aroused in her heart a genuine admiration and then love for him. Kenten's revenge became his fortune.

“Now tell me,” he asked doubtfully, “didn't you send me all those post-card tips?”

“I did, indeed!” she admitted. “Oh—how I hated that man!”