THE DETECTIVE AND THE BANKER—A REMARKABLE NARRATIVE—A PECULIAR TRAIL—MILLIONS WITH NO OWNER—A GREAT TASK LOOMING UP FOR JACK—A MOMENT OF EXPECTANCY. "Your name is John Alvarez?" "That is my name, sir." An elderly man was seated at a table and a young man stood opposite to him. The elderly person was a well- known banker who had retired from business, and he had sent for the detective who had just entered his presence. "You are a detective?" "I claim to be, sir." The elderly man meditated a moment and then said: "A gentleman learning that I desired the services of a detective mentioned your name to me, and gave you a character for qualities which I think are specially needed in the service I may have for you." "I am glad, sir, that some good friend has spoken well of me." John Alvarez was a twin brother of Gil Alvarez....
“Then you really don’t intend to marry me, Wilfrid?” “The honour of being your husband, Tibbie, I must respectfully decline,” I said. “But I’d make you a very quiet, sociable wife, you know. I can ride to hounds, cook, sew clothes for old people, and drive a motor. What higher qualifications do you want?” “Well—love, for instance.” “Ah! That’s what I’m afraid I don’t possess, any more them you do,” she laughed. “It isn’t a family characteristic. With us, it’s everyone for herself,” and she beat a tattoo upon the window-pane with the tips of her slim, white fingers. “I know,” I said, smiling. “We are old friends enough to speak quite frankly, aren’t we?” “Of course. That’s why I asked you ‘your intentions’—as the mater calls them. But it seems that you haven’t any.” “Not in your direction, Tibbie.” “And yet you told me you loved me!” said the...
Every man has a right to be conceited until he is famous—so it is said; and perhaps unconsciously, Mark Brendon shared that opinion. His self-esteem was not, however, conspicuous, although he held that only a second-rate man is diffident. At thirty-five years of age he already stood high in the criminal investigation department of the police. He was indeed about to receive an inspectorship, well earned by those qualities of imagination and intuition which, added to the necessary endowment of courage, resource, and industry, had created his present solid success. A substantial record already stood behind him, and during the war certain international achievements were added to his credit. He felt complete assurance that in ten years he would retire from government employ and open that private and personal practice which it was his ambition to establish. And now Mark was taking holiday on Dartmoor, devoting himself to his hobby...
Considering it was nearly the height of the London winter season, the Great Empire Hotel was not unusually crowded. This might perhaps have been owing to the fact that two or three of the finest suites of rooms in the building had been engaged by Mark Fenwick, who was popularly supposed to be the last thing in the way of American multi-millionaires. No one knew precisely who Fenwick was, or how he had made his money; but during the last few months his name had bulked largely in the financial Press and the daily periodicals of a sensational character. So far, the man had hardly been seen, it being understood that he was suffering from a chill, contracted on his voyage to Europe. Up to the present moment he had taken all his meals in his rooms, but it was whispered now that the great man was coming down to...
IT was after midnight. Quiet had settled over the hospital, and in Ward 13 there was no sound and scarcely a movement. The nurse, a strong and beautiful figure, had fallen into a reverie, and the two patients, which were all the ward contained, lay in a sleep so deep that it seemed to foreshadow the death which was hovering over them both. They were both men. The one on the right of the nurse was middle-aged; the one on the left somewhat older. Both were gaunt, both were hollow-eyed, both had been given up by the doctors and attendants. Yet there was one point of difference between them. He on the left, the older of the two, had an incurable complaint for which no remedy was possible, while he on the right, though seemingly as ill as his fellow, was less seriously affected, and stood some chance of being...
The East End being, as it were, more akin to the technique and the mechanics of the thing, applauded the craftsmanship; the West End, a little grimly on the part of the men, and with a loquacity not wholly free from nervousness on the part of the women, wondered who would be next. "The cove as is runnin' that show," said the East End, with its tongue delightedly in its cheek, "knows 'is wye abaht. Wish I was 'im!" "The police are nincompoops!" said the outraged masculine West End. "Absolutely!" "Yes, of course! It's quite too impossible for words!" said the female of the West End. "One never knows when one's own— do let me give you some tea, dear Lady Wintern..." From something that had merely been of faint and passing interest, a subject of casual remark, it had grown steadily, insidiously, had become conversationally epidemic. All London talked;...
A wild wet night in the Channel, the white waves leaping, lashing, and tumbling together in that confusion of troubled waters, which nautical men call a "cross-sea." A dreary, dismal night on Calais sands: faint moonshine struggling through a low driving scud, the harbour-lights quenched and blurred in mist. Such a night as bids the trim French sentry hug himself in his watch-coat, calmly cursing the weather, while he hums the chorus of a comic opera, driving his thoughts by force of contrast to the lustrous glow of the wine-shop, the sparkling eyes and gold ear-rings of Mademoiselle Thérèse, who presides over Love and Bacchus therein. Such a night as gives the travellers in the mail-packet some notion of those ups and downs in life which landsmen may bless themselves to ignore, as hints to the Queen's Messenger, seasoned though he be, that ten minutes more of that heaving, pitching,...
Now for you to rightly get what I'm going to tell I'll have to begin with a description of Longwood village and the country round about. I've made a sort of diagram—it isn't drawn to scale but it gives the general effect, all right—and with that and what I'll describe you can get an idea of the lay of the land, which you have to have to understand things. [image] Longwood's in New Jersey, a real picturesque village of a thousand inhabitants. It's a little over an hour from New York by the main line and here and there round it are country places, mostly fine ones owned by rich people. There are some farms too, and along the railway and the turnpike are other villages. My exchange is the central office for a good radius of country, taking in Azalea, twenty-five miles above us on the main line, and...
Humdrum isn’t where you live; it’s what you are. Perhaps you are one of those whose lives are bound by neighbourly interests. Imaginatively, you never seek what lies under a gorgeous sunset; you are never stirred by any longing to investigate the ends of rainbows. You are more concerned by what your neighbour does every day than by what he might do if he were suddenly spun, whirled, jolted out of his poky orbit. The blank door of an empty house never intrigues you; you enter blind alleys without thrilling in the least; you hear a cry in the night and impute it to some marauding tom. Lord, what a life! And yet every move you make is governed by Chance—the Blind Madonna of the Pagan, as that great adventurer, Stevenson, called it. You never stop to consider that it is only by chance that you leave home and arrive...
“Heaven and earth,” sang the tenor, Mr. Henry Wallace, owner of the Wallace garage. His larynx, which gave him somewhat the effect of having swallowed a crab-apple and got it only part way down, protruded above his low collar. “Heaven and earth,” sang the bass, Mr. Edwin Goodno, of the meat market and the Boy Scouts. “Heaven and earth, are full—” His chin, large and fleshy, buried itself deep; his eyes were glued on the music sheet in his hand. “Are full, are full, are full,” sang the soprano, Clare Rossiter, of the yellow colonial house on the Ridgely Road. She sang with her eyes turned up, and as she reached G flat she lifted herself on her toes. “Of the majesty, of Thy glory.” “Ready,” barked the choir master. “Full now, and all together.” The choir room in the parish house resounded to the twenty voices of the choir....
On the southern edge of the populous parish of Paddington, in a parallelogram bounded by Oxford and Cambridge Terrace on the south, Praed Street on the north, and by Edgware Road on the east and Spring Street on the west, lies an assemblage of mean streets, the drab dulness of which forms a remarkable contrast to the pretentious architectural grandeurs of Sussex Square and Lancaster Gate, close by. In these streets the observant will always find all those evidences of depressing semi-poverty which are more evident in London than in any other English city. The houses look as if laughter was never heard within them. Where the window blinds are not torn, they are dirty; the folk who come out of the doors wear anxious and depressed faces. Such shops as are there are mainly kept for the sale of food of poor quality: the taverns at the corners are...
OR, THE HARDEST CREW ON RECORD BY NICHOLAS CARTER Author of the celebrated stories of Nick Carter’s adventures, which are published exclusively in the New Magnet Library , conceded to be among the best detective tales ever written. STREET & SMITH CORPORATION PUBLISHERS 79-89 Seventh Avenue, New York Copyright, 1909 By STREET & SMITH The Great Diamond Syndicate (Printed in the United States of America) All rights reserved, including that of translation into foreign languages, including the Scandinavian. THE GREAT DIAMOND SYNDICATE. “Your uncle murdered! It seems incredible!” Nick Carter leaned back in his chair and looked at his visitor, dismay showing in his face. “It is too true, old friend, Uncle Alvin was murdered in his bed last night, and diamonds to the value of half a million dollars stolen from the house.” The speaker, Charley Maynard, was greatly excited. He was a young man who had arrived at...
Sam Knox touched a button in the control room of the Wanderer , and the draperies slid back from her transparent nose. He stood a moment, a sturdy compact figure, gazing into the dark. "Look at them!" he said bitterly. "They hang there like stars." Before the Wanderer he could see the mining fleet at the edge of the Asteroid Belt, their identification lights twinkling out from the enshrouding ebon mantle of space. They might as well be stars, for all the progress he had made with them. He had been here a week, spreading his nets for asteroid fragments like the rest of them, and never a sign of his presence had they shown. They hung there, cold and aloof—almost suspicious, he would have thought, had they any reason to be suspicious. Not that they were unfriendly by nature, these men who spread their nets to trap the errant...
“No. I mean the girl in black. The one leading the pom.” “By jove! Yes. She’s uncommonly smart, isn’t she?” “Her friend isn’t half bad-looking, either?” “I don’t think so very much of her, Raife. But Southport at this time of year is always full of pretty girls.” “Not one of them can compare with the girl in black—she’s ripping!” declared Raife Remington, a tall, well-set up, dark-haired, hatless undergraduate, who, in grey flannels, was walking beside his college chum, Edward Mutimer, at whose father’s house he was staying during the vac. Both were at Trinity, Cambridge, and both, being in their last year, were reading hard for their degrees. Each morning in those warm August days by the summer sea they came out for a stroll on the seafront; bright with movement and gaiety, taking an airing before settling down to their studies for the day. On this particular...
“Come, have another hand, Burgoyne.” “I’ll have my revenge to-morrow, old fellow,” I replied. “Why not to-night?” “It’s past two, and I’ve a long walk home, remember.” “Very well; as you wish.” My friend, Robert Nugent, a journalist, was young man, tall and dark, twenty-seven at the outside, with a pleasant, smiling face. His wavy hair, worn rather long, and negligence of attire gave him a dash of the genial good-for-nothing. It was in the card-room of that Bohemian—but, alas, now defunct—institution, the Junior Garrick Club, where we had been indulging in a friendly hand. Having finished our game, we ordered some refreshment, and seated ourselves upon the balcony on Adelphi Terrace, smoking our last cigarettes, and watching the ripple of the stream, the broken reflection of the stars, and many lights that lined the Thames. All was dark in the houses on the opposite shore; the summer wind whispered...
1917 On a certain brilliant Spring morning in London's City the seed of the Story was lightly sown. Within the directors' room of the Aasvogel Syndicate, Manchester House, New Broad Street, was done and hidden away a deed, simple and commonplace, which in due season was fated to yield a weighty crop of consequences complex and extraordinary. At the table, pen in hand, sat a young man, slight of build, but of fresh complexion, and attractive, eager countenance, neither definitely fair nor definitely dark. He was silently reading over a document engrossed on bluish hand-made folio; not a lengthy document—nineteen lines, to be precise. And he was reading very slowly and carefully, chiefly to oblige the man standing behind his chair. This man, whose age might have been anything between forty and fifty, and whose colouring was dark and a trifle florid, would probably have evoked the epithet of "handsome"...
As Johnny Thompson stood in the dark doorway of the gray stone court-yard he shivered. He was not cold, though this was Siberia—Vladivostok—and a late winter night. But he was excited. Before him, slipping, sliding, rolling over and over on the hard packed snow of the narrow street, two men were gripped in a life and death struggle. They had been struggling thus for five minutes, each striving for the upper hand. The clock in the Greek Catholic church across the way told Johnny how long they had fought. He had been an accidental and entirely disinterested witness. He knew neither of the men; he had merely happened along just when the row began, and had lingered in the shadows to see it through. Twelve, yes, even six months before, he would have mixed in at once; that had always been his way in the States. Not that he was...
“Just in time, wasn’t it?” asked Mary Arkroyd. “Two days before the—the ceremony! Mercifully it had all been kept very quiet, because it was only three months since poor Gilly was killed. I forget whether you ever met Gilly? My half-brother, you know?” “Only once—in Collingham Gardens. He had an exeat , and dashed in one Saturday morning when we were just finishing our work. Don’t you remember?” “Yes, I think I do. But since my engagement I’d gone into colors. Oh, of course I’ve gone back into mourning now! And everything was ready—settlements and so on, you know. And rooms taken at Bournemouth. And then it all came out!” “How?” “Well, Eustace—Captain Cranster, I mean. Oh, I think he really must have had shell-shock, as he said, even though the doctor seemed to doubt it! He gave the Colonel as a reference in some shop, and—and the bank wouldn’t...
Everybody has been at me, right and left, to write this story from the great (represented by Lord Nasby) to the small (represented by our late maid of all work, Emily, whom I saw when I was last in England. “Lor’, miss, what a beyewtiful book you might make out of it all—just like the pictures!”). I’ll admit that I’ve certain qualifications for the task. I was mixed up in the affair from the very beginning, I was in the thick of it all through, and I was triumphantly “in at the death.” Very fortunately, too, the gaps that I cannot supply from my own knowledge are amply covered by Sir Eustace Pedler’s diary, of which he has kindly begged me to make use. So here goes. Anne Beddingfeld starts to narrate her adventures. I’d always longed for adventures. You see, my life had such a dreadful sameness. My father,...
Lord Loudwater was paying attention neither to his breakfast nor to the cat Melchisidec. Absorbed in a leader in The Times newspaper, now and again he tugged at his red-brown beard in order to quicken his comprehension of the weighty phrases of the leader-writer; now and again he made noises, chiefly with his nose, expressive of disgust. Lady Loudwater paid no attention to these noises. She did not even raise her eyes to her husband's face. She ate her breakfast with a thoughtful air, her brow puckered by a faint frown. She also paid no attention to her favourite, Melchisidec. Melchisidec, unduly excited by the smell of grilled sole, came to Lord Loudwater, rose on his hind legs, laid his paws on his trousers, and stuck some claws into his thigh. It was no more than gentle, arresting pricks; but the tender nobleman sprang from his chair with a short...