II
Jimmy Dacey was a middle-aged reporter on a morning newspaper, a walking gold-mine of miscellaneous information, and the owner of a memory like a filing-cabinet. All sorts of interesting things were stored away in his head, to be turned up at the price of a question. Privately, he believed that the Great Gilmore was the cleverest fraud out of jail, but since the doctor was "getting away with it," Dacey gave him the credit due under the circumstances.
Dacey interested the doctor; the doctor interested Dacey. It was an even exchange. Neither man asked or expected perfect confidence.
The chat over the coffee and cigars ranged far and wide, and touched upon many things, from politics to petty larceny—not so great a journey, perhaps, after all. Then the doctor dropped a chance remark into the tide of conversation.
"By the way, Jimmy," said he, carelessly, "those were very clever articles you wrote about the new penitentiary system and the warden's ideas of handling the prisoners. I read them with deep interest. It seemed to me it was a pity to waste them on a daily paper."
"Uh huh!" said Dacey, noncommittally. "Wish I could strike a magazine-editor who thought so!"
"You had pretty much a free hand down there," said Gilmore. "Talked with a lot of the convicts and that sort of thing?"
Dacey nodded.
"I wonder," Gilmore continued, blinking dreamily, "if, in the course of your work, you came into contact with a convict named—Horan? No, that's not the name! I'll get it in a minute. Moran, is it? John Moran?"
"Buckshot John?" ejaculated Dacey. He flashed a swift glance at the doctor, but his host was carefully removing a band from a fresh cigar, a feat which seemed to require all his attention. "That old scoundrel?" continued Dacey. "I should say I have come in contact with him! Why, I've interviewed the old coot three times in the last fifteen years. He's supposed to know something about all that money and stuff that the Kennedy outfit got away with. What made you ask about him, doc?"
"I don't know. My recollection is very hazy, but it seems to me I saw the name in a newspaper somewhere. Don't recall where it was. What was the Kennedy outfit? A bunch of pickpockets?"
Dacey snorted indignantly.
"Where have you been the last fifteen years?" he demanded. "Pickpockets! They never went up against anything softer than a bank or an express-train! Why, doc, you surely don't mean to tell me that you never heard of Bad Jake Kennedy's gang?"
Gilmore flicked the ash from his cigar and beckoned to the hovering waiter.
"Why, certainly!" he said. "‘Bad Jake,' sounds familiar. I'd forgotten that he had a last name."
There, at least, he spoke the truth. Time was when Bad Jake's name had been exceedingly familiar, particularly in the inter-mountain States. Kennedy and his cutthroats had been the scourge of southern Colorado and northern New Mexico, where for a brief but bloody period they made life interesting for railroads, express companies, overland passengers, and small bankers. Retribution had finally come to them on the flying hoofs of a posse.
In the rapid scene-shifting of a new Western State, Bad Jake and his men, though less than fifteen years in their dishonored graves, were now no more than an uneasy tradition of the border—a story with which to frighten tourists. Gilmore had often read of their evil record, and he listened once more to the brief but stirring narrative of the wiping out of "the Bad Jake bunch."
"For about two years," said Dacey, "they simply ripped the southern end of the State to pieces. They stuck up trains just for the fun of the thing, and kept their hand in by cleaning out little banks. Then they got too gay, and went after a bigger bank in broad daylight, and the whole county swarmed after 'em. They were surrounded over by Clayton, but they put up an awful fight. They didn't want to be taken alive, and they killed six of the posse and wounded a lot more. The boys played even by getting Mexican Frank, Curly Dupree, Joe White, the Whistling Kid, and a couple more who were lucky enough to be killed outright. Bad Jake, Charley Elms, Hairtrigger Jordan, and this fellow Buckshot John were taken alive, all more or less wounded. That accounted for the whole works."
"A nice clean-up," commented Gilmore. "It doesn't happen very often that they get 'em all at the same time. What did they do to Kennedy?"
"The usual," said Dacey. "The boys got impatient. The prisoners were brought into Clayton about dark, and that evening the citizens busted into the calaboose, got Bad Jake, Jordan, and Elms, and hung 'em to the same tree. Jake died game, and so did Jordan, but Charley Elms went all to pieces and cried like a baby. Buckshot John told me once that he always knew Elms had a yellow streak. He was only a kid, anyway, but he had an awful record—four notches on his gun, not counting Mexicans."
There was a short silence.
"And where," inquired the doctor, idly watching the smoke of his cigar, "was your friend Buckshot John when all this took place?"
Dacey chuckled.
"That's a good story in itself," he said. "Moran was all shot to pieces when they brought him into town, and old Doc Pattee, who had been out with the posse, took him to his own house and went to work to fix him up. When the doc got wind of the evening's entertainment, he got out his old muzzle-loading scatter-gun, oiled her up, and filled her clean to the ears with slugs. Then he sat down on the front steps of his house and waited for the committee with the gun in his lap. When the boys came along, looking for John, he announced himself. Said he hadn't had a patient in six months, and if they took this one away from him, he'd just naturally be forced to let drive where the crowd was biggest, and get some new ones, if he had to make 'em himself. They knew the doc would do it, too, so they let him alone. Anyway, nobody thought Moran would live through the night. No sense in hanging a dying man.
"The express companies and the bankers put up a terrible squeal about that lynching. You see, Bad Jake had a world of money and stuff hid away in the hills somewhere. When he cleaned a train, he cleaned it right down to the rings off the passengers' fingers. They thought Jake should have been given time to make a confession and tell where the stuff was cached. But the boys were kind of peevish—six of their friends had been bumped off by the gang—and they stepped in and made a tidy job of it. To this day, they've never been able to get back a splinter of the loot. It's down there in the hills yet, I suppose."
The doctor lifted his tiny brandy-glass and twirled it thoughtfully between finger and thumb.
"Of course," he said, "this man Moran doesn't know where it is, or they would have brought pressure to bear on him long ago."
"They brought pressure, all right," admitted Dacey, "but it didn't do any good. He's told the same story all the way through. He claimed that Bad Jake never let them have anything but the small money, and kept all the big express shipments and the bank stuff hid in a private cache, under agreement to split it when they got ready to leave the country. That was his way of holding 'em together, it seems. Buckshot John stood his trial, lying on a cot in the court-room, and because they thought he'd die anyway and they couldn't fasten any of the real killings onto him, he got off light—with thirty years. For a long time the Bad Jake treasure was our star mystery story, and I've been after Buckshot about it three separate times. He always hands out the same story. If I'm any judge, he's telling the truth when he says he doesn't know where Bad Jake hid the stuff.
"But the old rascal fooled 'em; he got well after all. Must have had the constitution of a grizzly bear. I didn't see him the last time I was down at Canyon City, because he was out with a road gang. He's been a 'trusty' for years, and the warden tells me the old coot has got religion now. What do you know about that for a combination?"
"Strange," remarked Gilmore, "but the more abandoned the life a man has led, the stronger he takes to religion when it does hit him. Now, I knew a case once in Pittsburgh—"
Half an hour later, the doctor was pulling on his gloves in the lobby.
"The cleaning up of that Kennedy gang must have been a wonderful newspaper story," said he thoughtfully. "Every element that goes with the making of a romance—treasure, adventure, sudden death—everything! Jimmy, that ought to be worth looking up in the files."
"It certainly was a great chance," assented the reporter. "We had a man on the spot with the posse, and the presses were held for him that night. He turned it loose all over two pages. Come over to the office some time when you haven't anything to do, and I'll have the old files dug up for you."
"I'd like it immensely!" said Gilmore. "Look here, why not to-night? I haven't a thing to do, and I'm interested in the psychology of the Western bad man. Fascinating study, I've always found it."
Dacey's evening assignment kept him busy until after midnight, but when he looked through the door into the little private room where he had left the doctor, surrounded by dusty, volumes of the middle eighties, he was amazed to find the Great Gilmore still there, hat and coat off, and buried to the elbows in the files. A great stack of index cards lay in front of him, by the aid of which he had been able to trace the Kennedy gang from its first appearance in print to the sensational finish.
As Dacey looked in at the door, Gilmore was making entries in a small leather notebook. The reporter opened his mouth to speak, changed his mind, and withdrew silently. By a visit to the filing-cabinet, he ascertained that every card on John Moran had been taken out of its place.
When at length the doctor stood up and struck his dusty palms together, he had read every word that had been printed about Buckshot John and his pocket note-book bore a complete record of the history of the Bad Jake gang. He was fortified with names, dates, incidents, and a neatly tabulated list of stolen property, the sum total of which ran well into six figures.
Gilmore was slightly surprised to find Dacey waiting for him in the city room.
"Well, doc," said Jimmy innocently, "you've made a night of it, haven't you?"
"I have been admirably entertained," said Gilmore simply. "Admirably! Wonderfully well written stories. Nothing like the old-time reporters, these days! You know; a man in my line of—research should be interested in life in all its phases. Human nature, Jimmy! Ah, there isn't a study in the world like it!"
"And that's right, too," said the reporter.
Dacey stood on the corner, waiting for his car, and watched the Great Gilmore swing down the street, twirling his cane.
"Something doing here!" said the reporter to himself. "Something coming off, as sure as a gun! Now what is it? Guess I'll study a little human nature myself!"