Nemesis in Good Humor

by Raymond S. Spears

 

Nemesis
in Good Humor

A Story by RAYMOND S. SPEARS : : : Illustrated by BLENDON CAMPBELL

MR. COPRON COLPHETE nursed a grievance against the Polefat National Bank. He was cashier of the bank, and therefore his grievance was a matter of concern for everyone—but only Colphete knew of the spite. He had been with the bank twenty years, and had attended strictly to business. He would have been ideal if his heart had not been sore.

He had tagged President Densten up from “boy,” and stepped into Densten’s shoes as cashier. Densten grew wealthy, from the time he became president, while Colphete remained poor. The fact that Densten was fifteen years older than Colphete did not count in the cashier’s mind—he saw the president’s automobile, his fine mansion, his increasing dignity, but not his gray hairs. All Colphete wanted was an independent income equal to his wages—$1,200 a year. That would have satisfied him, and he would have gratified his longings for the outdoors.

Harboring so much resentment, Colphete came to the point where he could see no wrong in doing what he made up his mind to do when his opportunity came, and his opportunity was in the Kipple Tract deal. There were exactly one thousand $50 bills required for this transaction, and the bills were all in one neat little package that weighed almost four pounds, including, of course, the wrapping, sealing wax, etc.

MR. COLPHETE wrapped a package exactly like that package—seals, twine, paper, and all—except that instead of $50 bills it contained slips of green paper the exact size of $50 bills. He wrapped this package in a newspaper and took it to the bank on the Saturday morning before he was going on his vacation, which this year he elected to take in late September. At the proper moment, in the vault, he placed the substitute beside the package of bills in its box. Later—when he was alone, of course—he took the package out and walked quietly homeward to his desolate boarding house.

Never had an absconding cashier had a better opportunity, and never was a man able to make a cleaner get-away. It was Saturday afternoon. He could start at once without suspicion, since he was going on his vacation. The money would not be missed until the following Wednesday when the paper mill would apply for the package to pay Old Joe Holbet for his thousand acres of virgin spruce.

MR. COLPHETE had a sense of humor; he grinned with real ecstasy as he thought of Mr. William Bostes’s calm dignity when he handed the package from the vault box to the paper mill’s representative, and of the shrewd, old, and suspicious lumberman and landowner, and the paper mill crowd gathering around the table to arrange the final details of the land sale. President Bocker of the mill company would nonchalantly, and with just the slightest show of contempt, toss the package over to Old Joe.

Then Old Joe would break the seals, untie the strings, and carefully unwrap the paper, the thick yellow banking manila, and then the oiled inner wrapping, and finally open up the solid mass of—of neatly trimmed rectangles of green paper.

“Oh, gee!” Mr. Colphete whispered maliciously. “I’d like to see Old Joe’s face and their faces that minute!”

The arrangements for the get-away were as perfect as human ingenuity could contrive. Mr. Copron Colphete had been planning for ten years. He knew exactly what he would do, every turn he would make in every emergency. He could write it out by heart at full speed without a moment’s hesitation, and while he waited calmly for train time, he wrote it out again, and he could see himself going through each stage of the journey.

Over and over again he imagined the scene when the fake package was opened; he fancied the rush to the bank, the notifying of the detective agency, the hurried tracing of the money package back from hand to hand, the doubt, the good reputation of everybody concerned—the rush of the newspaper men, the startling headlines:

$50,000 MISSING

ANOTHER MAN GONE WRONG!

Who Put Up This Job On Old Joe Holbet?

He chuckled as he realized how the reporters would try to slide around the libel law and yet give all the readers to understand that “Mr. Colphete is away on his vacation, and it is hoped he will be able to clear up the mystery”—and so on, to indicate that Mr. Colphete could if he would, or would if he could, only he is missing, and his vacation intentions are unknown to any of his friends.

In due course, by the clock, Mr. Colphete stepped away toward the railway station. He bought a ticket to the Junction, slipped on board an accommodation that took him to Utica, jumped the trolley for Syracuse, and there changed for the railroad to Batavia, from which place he came to Rochester, and from Rochester he doubled back to Buffalo, whence he crossed over to Pittsburgh, an entirely different man.

AT THE Junction he had changed his black derby for a brown fedora, and his black coat for a mail-order business suit coat. He found opportunity to change his trousers, and from the time he jumped the Utica trolley, he no longer minced his footsteps, but stepped out with unwonted freedom. Moreover, knowing how well bank cashiers know money, he broke no $50 bill, muttering to himself:

“Time enough fo’ dat
When my money git slack!”

He had plenty of “change” to keep him two or three years.

When he arrived in Pittsburgh, he had a swing to his gait, and the initials were “M. O.”—Manly Osburg—instead of “C. C.,” for he was a very methodical person, and had for many years planned every feature and every detail of the thing that would make him rich and his get-away clean. The idea that human ingenuity could not contrive a flawless and unpursuable escape was to his mind ridiculous.

Illustration: He read along comfortably. It was a delight to be so carefree

Pittsburgh is the jumping-of place for the able fugitive who is acquainted with the world. If a banker walks through Pittsburgh, with due care and foresight, he would have no trouble in emerging therefrom a genius, a hobo, a manufacturer, a gypsy, or a shanty boater. Colphete elected to emerge a shanty beater, which indicates the discretion and unusual intelligence of the Polefat National Bank’s cashier.

GENERALLY, fugitive bank cashiers leave trails behind them that lead straight to the hotbeds of wickedness. They jump from city to city—from nation to nation with reckless, unintelligent, wide-eyed fear. Nemesis scorns that kind and refuses to have the agony long drawn out. In a year or two Nemesis brings the fool back to face the consequences of his folly—suffering from conscience and prison terror. But let a fugitive be a real wise one, with a sense of humor, and Nemesis after a blink or two of surprise at the novelty, hands him one in kind.

Copron Colphete entered Pittsburgh and emerged on the far side, a little sooty, but jaunty and smiling. He didn’t even glance backward uneasily, for he knew that even Burns couldn’t follow that trail. At the Monongahela wharf he upended the suit case, and sat on the “M. O.” end, took out a second-hand briar wood, tucked some long cut into it, and began to smoke.

The river looked good. It was boiling under an unexpected September rise. On the far side, a coal fleet was nudging out into the current, bound for New Orleans. Some dirty little gasoline launches were tearing up the glassy surface, and there was a pile-driver being nosed upstream. Downstream a ways were some very beautiful gasoline launches moored in an artificial harbor by a floating clubhouse, and upstream were some little house-boats, but he did not call them house-boats. He knew what they were in fact: they were shanty boats.

SHANTY BOATS! It is a magic term. Of ten thousand absconding bank cashiers, only one had ever dreamed of shanty boats—and that one now gazed fondly at the consummation of his dreams. There they were, some reddish brown, some blackish white, some bluish gray, and some just plain tar-paper shacks on driftwood scows. At the borderland of the dream world it is worth while to pause and look ahead with joyous anticipation. Colphete did this, for he was not only humorous but poetic. With fond gaze he viewed the Pittsburgh shanty boat town, which no humorous, poetic absconding bank cashier had ever seen before.

After a time he sauntered up to the floating village, and again sat down on his suit case, close at hand. He sighed with relief. He gave one fleeting glance at the past. He reminded himself of the single regret that he had pretended to have at depriving the Polefat skinflints of their money, and chuckled at the way in which they would take his departure, and the way in which he was taking it.

“Say, you wanter buy a shanty bo’t?” a voice rumbled at his elbow

“Why, I ain’t so overly anxious!” Colphete answered, though his heart thumped with exultation.

“That red shanty there’s mine—pine bottom, hemlock stringers, oak carlins, an’ matched spruce sidin’—tight an’ sound. Hit’s a good bo’t! I'd sell hit for a hundred!”

“Them bow-lines is rotten,” Copron nodded judiciously.

“She’s got a new stove’n cupboard, and them’s the best oars on a shanty boat on the Ohier River!”

“Um-m. I'll give ye seventy for hit!”

“Now, say, old feller, I cayn’t sell hit for no seventy! You gin me eighty for hit—”

“No! I’ll split the difference, though—seventy-five?”

“Well, all right—you see, I gotter job for the winter. I ’lowed to trip down to Memphis!”

AS they bargained, they looked at cabin and hold, bow and stern, cupboard and iron bed. The owner sold it all to the buyer, and when Colphete had the boat in possession, he cast off and floated out into the river, down past Pittsburgh Point, into the Ohio and away. He had flung himself over the jumping-off place.

Sitting on the bow of the boat, he counted up the days he had been away from Polefat. He had started on Saturday—Sunday, Monday, Tuesday—this was Wednesday! This was the day. He glanced at his watch—and this was the hour: two o’clock p.m. They were just about getting ready to get down to business. The package, all sealed and fast, was there on the table in the paper mill company’s office. There were the sleek attorneys, the smiling, good-fellow president of the paper company, and there was rusty and dusty Old Joe Holbet, his gnarled, cracked hands hooking at the papers, and viewing them suspiciously to see that they did not call for more than the land he was selling.

As he floated down, Colphete watched his watch, and reckons on the the time it would take for each move in the big business deal, the biggest cash deal in several years at Polefat. He could almost imagine the exact words, the precise gestures, the whole procedure, and after an hour he gave a little shiver, for now it was time for Old Joe to put down his name—but first he would demand to see the color of his money—the thousand yellow boys, the fifty-dollar gold certificates.

As he thought of the breaking of the seals, as he fancied Old Joe opening the package, he almost laughed out loud. He was sorry that he couldn’t see the suspicious old woodsman picking away the covering and untying the knots—he would surely stop to untie the string—and then—and then!

“Oh, gee!” Colphete chuckled and then really laughed aloud, though his voice startled him, and he looked to the river banks, a third of a mile away, and up and down the river—he was far from anybody. None could read his thoughts. Standing up, he looked over the roof of the cabin toward Pittsburgh, whose black aureole was now fading in the distance. He laughed again, unrestrained, and when night came he tied in at a little eddy on the south side of the river, and slept as he had not slept in years.

The plumb comfort that a man has when he has been up to some bit of mischief, played a pretty little joke, and got away with it, was his. No dream disturbed him, no uneasiness made him restless. He did not even have a conscientious dread of being caught. He had solved the problem of a clean get-away.

At dawn he pulled out into the river with the sweeps, and, as he floated, he cooked his breakfast—ham, eggs, potatoes, coffee. He chuckled as he did so. Not one of all the people in Polefat knew that he was an outdoor man, that he was a rough-and-ready sport. For years and years he had concealed his inmost desires. Never once had the name of the Ohio River passed his lips, never a person knew that he was a constant reader of shanty-boat literature; never a man, woman, or child in all the world dreamed that he had ten thousand newspaper clippings about the Mississippi shanty boats, gleaned from the clipping bureaus under an assumed name! Those clippings and the package of fifty-dollar bills were about the only contents of his suit case, for he had gotten rid of everything that might connect him with the past.

TOWARD night he landed in at Wellsville and bought the Pittsburgh papers for three days back, casually remarking to the newsdealer that he had not seen a paper in two weeks, not since he dropped out of Pittsburgh. This was covering his trail. He bought a few supplies and returned to his boat, and dropped down the river till night was near at hand. Then he landed in another little eddy, tied up, and after supper—navigating the boat and the joy of the river restrained his desire to read—he turned to the newspapers.

He glanced over the first-page head lines, and felt a vague disappointment There was not a “$50,000 GONE!” in any of the papers. Then he went down through the little headlines, wondering if his little business was going to be a mere item in the news of the day. The idea somewhat exasperated him. There was not a line in all the papers that indicated the theft had been discovered. Colphete at last felt a thrill of satisfaction; the bank was going to keep it secret—they were going to fool him! They were going to have a silent pursuit.

“Oh, gee!” Colphete muttered to himself, “what a time they’ll have picking up my trail!”

Colphete did not loiter on the way. He shoved down the river at the rate of sixty miles a day, and, when the moon came up and he was in the broader bends and reaches three hundred miles downstream, he gained speed, and on the eighth day he passed Louisville and the falls of the Ohio

He whistled and sang, and with a little repeating rifle took shots at the migrating ducks—the early fall birds that came as far as the Ohio and then lingered for the frost. He was glad he had taken his vacation in the fall—waiting, in fact, for that chance that had come to him. He had been afraid that he would have to put off his permanent departure for another year.

HE bought papers with increasing wonder, for not a whisper had reached them about the stolen money. If he had not been positive that the detectives were picking up the trail—trying to do it!—half the fun of the trip would have been lost Colphete belonged to that breed of game that enjoys a race for life, and he was glad of the race that was worth while, glad of being a fugitive.

Between navigating the shanty boat and inking of the pursuit, Colphete was busy all day long. He knew about all there was to know concerning the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers. He had read the newspapers and had located every town from Pittsburgh to the Gulf. He had studied the Government List of Post Lights till he knew them and their mileage by heart. He had read histories and clippings till he was familiar with ancient history and recent news as regards the river. It seemed as though he must have been down the river many times before, his dreams had so accurately portrayed the wonders and commonplaces thereof. And yet the actualities were a thousandfold more novel than the best of his dreams.

AS to navigating the shanty boat, it was no more than rowing a huge skiff with a cabin on it, and it was the most glorious camping out that Colphete had ever dreamed of! It would be useless and unnecessary to go into the details of the joyous abandon of the fugitive as he whooped away toward the Mississippi Bottoms.

Once in a while, in the evening, he would pick out the heavy package and turn it over in his hands and then put it back again. He had plenty of spare change, and it would be best not to begin to scatter the fifty-dollar bills. He could not tell in how many thousand banks the cashiers were on the lookout for that particular series of fifty-dollar bills. He spent his evenings reading the old clippings.

The ecstasy of it all! There he was in the gently rocking cabin boat, reading those items which had thrilled his heart with river hunger for a dozen years, listening to the lapping of the waves and the silence of the wide river in the lonesome bends.

In the darkness, after the moon went down, he would stare at the river lights, and he would gaze all day long at the banks moving past him—stone bluffs, corn-fields, patches of woods and mouths of creeks and rivers—towns and cities and farms and ferry landings.

Once or twice there was a catch in his heart. This was his freedom—and, after this full breath of it, suppose he should be caught! There was a whiff of raw chill in that thought—he sensed the coldness of a steel cell and a stone floor, the march of guards who held him there relentlessly through the long years. He knew what it was to be locked in; he had not been in the bank’s cage with the key turned for twenty years for nothing. He had never gotten over that feeling that in the bank cage he was a prisoner, and now his flight was flight from the cage—flight to freedom!

When he passed Louisville he counted up the days of his vacation. He had left on Saturday, and this was Wednesday a week. He had till Monday morning to get back! He smiled grimly at that thought with what eagerness they were all waiting for him back there in Polefat! With what a rush they would come to seize him! With what smiles of satisfaction they would hang on to him!

IT was Saturday when he started to read the newspapers he had purchased at Louisville. He had made up his mind that it was a race without tongue, and he was more satisfied than he had been before. They knew he was a shrewd man, and they had told no one of the loss of the money. For years the detectives would hang on to his trail—they would never quit, and they would never find him. They would search the capitals of Europe, they would watch the seaports of the Orient, they would scan the faces of the Great White Ways of America. They would never dream of a man with $50,000 not burning the earth with it!

Colphete was not extravagant. All he had desired was plenty of the simple life. His expenses would not be $3 a week; he saw that. His living would take $200 a year, hardly more. In ten or fifteen years he could invest his $47,000 or so in assured dividend-paying stocks and bonds, and grow richer and richer, beyond his utmost avarice. The detectives would never think of looking for a man with $50,000 among the Mississippi River shanty boaters.

As for Nemsis, Colphete chuckled. His case would prove the exception to the rule that Nemesis always overtakes the thief.

No pleasanter trip was ever enjoyed on the Ohio River than Colphete had. He dropped into Cairo on a Saturday morning. Three miles below was the Mississippi, and he could see it dimly from where he tied his boat to the wharf. He intended to go up to the stores to stock up with a goodly supply of things to eat, and ammunition. It was, however, so early in the morning, and he had floated so much of the previous night, that he was a little lazy. He sat down on the bow of his boat to read a little, and the Louisville papers were on top of his reading matter.

HE saw that the coming elections were regarded with interest by the politicians, and that several cities were trying to grow excited over the prospect of reform movements being successful. There was a war cloud dimly, visibly overhanging Europe, and he was startled to read:

“Bank Cashier Absconds!”

But that bank cashier was down East somewhere, in one of the New England States. Then, on the financial page, he began to read some stock quotations, wondering what stocks and bonds he would buy when it came time to invest. He thought he would better pretend to be a river fisherman or trapper or drifter, and invest a few hundred dollars a year, beginning in three or four years.

e read along comfortably. It was a delight to be so carefree and to feel so rich.

Colphete was almost drowsy over the papers, and then he picked up the Pittsburgh paper which he had purchased at Louisville. It suggested home—suggested the sour old landlady and the bank cage and Polefat—ugh! Suddenly his soul was shaken to the core:

“Promotion for Bank Cashier”

He read the single line of full-face lower case, and then continued with thunderings in his ears:

Polefat, Sept 27.—The directors of the Polefat National Bank to-day promoted Cashier Copron Colphete to the the place made vacant by the resignation of President Densten, who retired from business on his fortieth wedding anniversary last week. Mr. Colphete is at present away on his vacation, and it is thought he will not return until next Monday, as he always takes full advantage of his annual two weeks. Efforts to reach him by telegrams are being made.”

“Oh, gee! Oh, gee!” Colphete gasped, and then he started to his feet, almost wild-eyed.

“By gum!” he muttered; “but those detectives are cute! That’s their trick—they’ve got that into all the papers so would see it, and think they didn’t suspect about the theft—”

“Hey, you shanty boater!” a voice sounded from the wharf, and, as he turned, Colphete saw a man waving a yellow envelope at him, “is your name Copron Colphete?

“Yes—yeh—” the fugitive gasped, almost staggering back, and answering before he realized what he was saying.

“Well, here’s a telegram for you—this here town doesn’t allow shanty boaters to land in here for more than four hours!”

“All right!” Colphete nodded, taking the telegram with trembling fingers.

The telegram was addressed:

“Copron Colphete, in a House-boat!”

It read:

“President Densten has resigned. You are elected to succeed him. Congratulations. (Signed”) Bostes

“Why—why—” Colphete gasped, his nerve gone, “they know where I am—they’re giving me a chance to make good to save—to save me!”

He staggered into his cabin, shaken as by palsy. He stumbled over to his bunk and drew the suit case from its hiding place in the hold. He opened the case—stood staring at the yellow sealed package for a long time. Suddenly his eyes bulged and his jaw dropped.

He snatched out his pocketknife and slashed the string, and with a wrench broke the seals. Then he tore open the oiled paper. The next instant he began to laugh hysterically; the package contained neatly trimmed strips of green paper and no more. He laughed and cackled, growing more and more calm. By and by he shook with a deep joy. He bundled the stuff all up again, hung a chunk of railroad iron on it, and from the stern of the cabin boat heaved it out into Ohio tide, where it sank, swirling.

Some shanty boaters came across to the wharf boat on the ferry and Colphete sold his outfit for $125, for he was a good business man. Then he took the noon train East and headed for Polefat.

On Monday morning he tramped toward the bank, trying to walk with his old-time mincing step. Bostes greeted him effusively, for Bostes was the new cashier.

“We've been telegraphing all over for you—what an odd idea, going down the Ohio in a house-boat! It was thoughtful of you, though, to leave your itinerary with your landlady!”

COLPHETE nodded, unwilling to trust his voice. He blinked, however, with emotion, which Bostes did not interpret correctly. That night Colphete whispered to himself:

“Gee! But Nemesis played a good—and kind—one on me that time!”