Chapter VII
The defendant’s closing remarks, in the case of the State of Washington vs. Samuel Smith, never were heard, as at that moment the almost breathless quiet of the courtroom was shattered by the loud explosion of a revolver shot and Prosecuting Attorney Randolph Raggan took the stand before a higher court to answer for his crimes.
Ananias Ltd.
by Elizabeth Dudley
I
There are thousands of tons of gold locked up in God’s eternal mountains which men will never see nor spend. But that fact doesn’t keep them from trying. There is something about yellow metal which turns heads, transforms morals and grows devils in the soil of saints. Merely an instance of this is the case of the Hectopus mine, with which I, as a Post Office Inspector, was well acquainted for the space of a month.
I had been called into the case on a complaint made by Jedidiah Quinot, of Boston, an esteemed gentleman of his community, who shed real tears, nearly wore out his glasses in polishings and blew his nose prodigiously as he told me the story of his suspicions concerning his harum-scarum nephew — one Herbert Cryder, whom he feared had not only hopelessly involved himself but disgraced the family in a gold mine speculation.
After I had called upon Cryder, a few days later, I did not blame the old gentleman for his suspicions. If there ever was an outfit which bore all the marks of a fraud it was this Hectopus mine concern. As usual, it was quartered in the most expensive office building in the city, and the boss himself was twice as hard to see as the President of the United States. Inside the usual railing, with a boy at the gate, were a dozen stenographers copying names out of telephone directories or pages out of books — anything to keep them busy.
In a room opening off that was Dick Garrity, one of the shrewdest mine swindlers in America, with his name brazenly on the door and the title of “General Manager.” In the front office — when I finally got there — was the most impressive and expensive set of mahogany office furniture I have ever seen, and behind the big desk in the center of the room a clean-cut chap of about thirty, bronzed, smiling, devil-may-care and a most disarming way of waving a visitor to a chair and forcing him to take two cigars at once.
And this was Herbert Cryder, a disgrace to his family, a worry to his old friends, suspected by the Government of being a thief, facing the world and Atlanta prison not only with a smile but with a laugh that refused to stay bottled.
I had met many crooks but this was a new type, so new that I am afraid I made a poor job of my role as a prospective investor. As to that I do not know to this day whether he really suspected my errand or whether it was only a part of his plan when he laughed at my proposal to invest a few thousand dollars in the stock of the Hectopus Mining and Exploration Co., slapped me on the back and literally pushed me out into the hall with a third cigar clutched in my hand.
Whatever he thought, he had left me no recourse but to go back to old Jedidiah with such information as I had been able to pick up on the outside, and the two of us spent the evening going over the cards we held in our hands and speculating on what the young scapegrace held in his.
That he was the most brazen young swindler outside a penitentiary, I was convinced. Jedidiah did not have to tell me that. Those girls in his outer office — twelve of them busy when there was not work enough for two — were the plainest sort of bait for the unwary. Dick Garrity, I knew, would be lost with an honest concern; he knew so much about mining that he wouldn’t accept a gold piece in change at a bank. Then that mahogany office; it was far too gorgeous to be true. And as a crowning piece of effrontery, on the wall just behind Cryder’s chair, was a picture — a painting at that — of an Indian spearing a fish from a little platform above a raging torrent. I had not noticed what kind of fish it was, but to me it looked like a sucker and I gasped almost aloud as I grasped the daring nerve of the laughing man who had placed it there.
Herbert Cryder, I had found out, came of one of the best families in New England. Mixed in his blood somewhere must have been a strong element of the old-time whalers or sea captains of some sort because even as a boy he had been a daring, adventurous young devil. The more conservative expressed the opinion that it was God’s mercy that his parents were dead, and even those who were still on good terms with him socially threw up their hands when his name was mentioned in casual conversation.
Old Jedidiah had told me the young man had a long police record, and I wasted a whole day before I found out that this consisted of a score of arrests for crimes ranging from the theft of a barber’s striped pole to an unproved charge of driving an automobile while intoxicated. I must have shown my disgust at such evidence because Quinot went to great pains to explain to me that his nephew was such a skilful liar that it had been impossible to convict him of numerous grave offenses of which he had undoubtedly been guilty, but I could not pin him down to just what these were.
Young Cryder, it seemed, according to Jedidiah, was absolutely untrustworthy where facts were concerned and a lover of mischief to such an extent that serious trouble had always been predicted for him.
“Why, do you know,” said the old man, “that scapegrace disappeared two years or so ago for six months and came back with a most remarkable tale about elephant shooting in East Africa. At my own expense I cabled to Nairobi and found he had never been there. Then what did he do? He produced two of the finest elephant tusks you ever saw and the foot of one of the beasts mounted as a humidor. Furthermore, he had the impudence to present the humidor to me — to me who had exposed him. There it is on the mantel. In my own club he met and talked for two hours with a man who had spent years in East Africa without making a single slip.”
“Maybe he was there,” I ventured.
“He certainly was not,” Jedidiah replied with some heat. “After I had been laughed at to such an extent that I did not dare visit my club, I investigated still further. He had spent those six months in Paris. He bought the elephant trophies by cable in London after I had questioned his story, and he spent a month reading every book on Africa and elephant hunting he could find.
“He isn’t any mere fibber, Mr. Guernsey. When he sets out to tell a lie, he makes a thorough job of it.”
With the picture of that wonderful office fresh in my mind, I was of the opinion that there was much strength in Jedidiah’s opinion.
The Hectopus Mining and Exploration Co., it seemed, was in somewhat the same category as the elephant trophies. The story of the mine had followed another of the young man’s more or less regular but mysterious absences. This time he had not told where he had been, but lent an air of mystery to his recent experiences. For three or four weeks after his reappearance at home he had gone about clad in laced boots and wearing a tourist-style Stetson, khaki riding breeches and a Norfolk jacket. His face was bronzed, his hands calloused and he had cultivated a drawl that might have been acquired in Georgia, Arizona or the Blue Ridge mountains. To all inquiries as to where he had been, he had replied by placing a finger to his lips, glancing furtively about and whispering the one word — “Gold.”
According to Quinot, his nephew had followed up this bit of playacting with a lie as elaborate as the elephant story. But with this difference — he had commercialized his mendacity. In the case of the elephant he had reached his climax by the gift of the humidor trophy to his indignant uncle; in the present episode he had gone to the length of selling for money stock in a gold mine which did not exist.