The Mystery of the Fiddling Cracksman by Harry Stephen Keeler

Author:Harry Stephen Keeler
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: mystery, detective, volcano, webwork, classic
Publisher: Wildside Press LLC
Published: 2018-02-13T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER XIII

The Tracks to Nowhere

Dawn came—at least for the druggists on the Detroit-St. Louis Convention Special!—with the sun peeping through the mists on the Eastern horizon; then full-fledged morning, and moon-face bawling up and down the coach and awakening all the passengers. When breakfast was called, and thus a general emptying of the car was achieved for moon-face, Billy Hemple, entirely minus sleep, entered the dining-car but ordered only a pot of coffee, for his appetite seemed somehow to have deserted him. The sinister aspect of what seemed to lie back of the John Craig affair now commenced to weigh heavily on him.

He returned to his seat. His berth was now made up and he sat for the remainder of the morning with his chin in his hands, staring out at the monotonous flat fields and fences scurrying ceaselessly past the car window, wondering about the strange occurrence of the previous night, which now, in the light of day, seemed almost imaginary.

Promptly on schedule, the train rolled across the big Eads Bridge that spans the Mississippi River. Ten minutes later it was backing into the long train shed at St. Louis from the peculiarly radiating train yard.

Hemple was one of the first to make his escape, as he had no baggage. He smiled a little in spite of himself as he noticed all the other passengers—superannuated druggists, most of them—lugging heavy suitcases and ponderous traveling bags.

At the Postal-Union counter in the waiting-room he managed to wedge his way in past the mob who were now, one and all, telegraphing back to their substitute clerks the afterthought that the hieroglyphic writing on Dr. Hackenblitz’s prescription for old Mrs. Jones should be read as “ipecac” and not as “strychnine,” and wrote out a single wire which he read over before despatching. It ran:

LARAL CRAIG, 4505 N. Lawndale Ave. Chicago.

Just arrived St. Louis. I read your playlet en route and I think it is swell, and if you ask me, it is too good for all the fool Hoggenheimers. You are a real literary artist, and when I compare my junk to what you have written I realize I am just a story carpenter at best. Now starting to investigate the other matter, and will wire later.

BILLY.

Out in the pre-noon-hour sunshine, he paused in front of the gray-stone Union Station, his eyes roving up and down Market Street with its photo galleries, its noisy penny arcades, its shooting galleries, its restaurants, each and every one with a waiter posted in front, waving a dinner bell and a napkin. On the curbing next to the depot, a long line of smart cars as well as dingy taxicabs and antediluvian vehicles of various sorts were lined up to catch the extra throng of passengers that today would provide, the drivers gesticulating and shouting.

Hemple paused a moment and then stepped up the street a ways to a rickety Ford sedan type cab with a row of hand-drawn green clover leaves painted clear around it, and manned by an old negro with a battered plug hat and white woolly hair.

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