On Secret Service

It was about a month later that the little town of Northport, up in the extreme northeastern corner of Washington, awoke to find a stranger in its midst. Strangers were something of a novelty in Northport, and this one – a man named Marks, who stated that he was "prospectin' for some good lumber" – caused quite a bit of talk for a day or two. Then the town gossips discovered that he was not working in the interest of a large company, as had been rumored, but solely on his own hook, so they left him severely alone. Besides, it was the height of the logging season and there was too much work to be done along the Columbia River to worry about strangers.

Marks hadn't taken this into consideration when he neared the eastern part of the state, but he was just as well pleased. If logs and logging served to center the attention of the natives elsewhere, so much the better. It would give him greater opportunity for observation and possibly the chance to pick up some information. Up to this time his trip along the border had been singularly uneventful and lacking in results. In fact, it was practically a toss-up with him whether he would continue on into Idaho and Montana, on the hope that he would find something there, or go back to Seattle and start fresh.

However, he figured that it wouldn't do any harm to spend a week or two in the neighborhood of the Columbia – and, as events turned out, it was a very wise move.

Partly out of curiosity and partly because it was in keeping with his self-assumed character of lumber prospector, Marks made a point of joining the gangs of men who worked all day and sometimes long into the night keeping the river clear of log jams and otherwise assisting in the movement of timber downstream. Like everyone who views these operations for the first time, he marveled at the dexterity of the loggers who perched upon the treacherous slippery trunks with as little thought for danger as if they had been crossing a country road. But their years of familiarity with the current and the logs themselves had given them a sense of balance which appeared to inure them to peril.

Nor was this ability to ride logs confined wholly to the men. Some of the girls from the near-by country often worked in with the men, handling the lighter jobs and attending to details which did not call for the possession of a great amount of strength.

One of these, Marks noted, was particularly proficient in her work. Apparently there wasn't a man in Northport who could give her points in log riding, and the very fact that she was small and wiry provided her with a distinct advantage over men who were twice her weight. Apart from her grace and beauty, there was something extremely appealing about the girl, and Ezra found himself watching her time after time as she almost danced across the swirling, bark-covered trunks – hardly seeming to touch them as she moved.

The girl was by no means oblivious of the stranger's interest in her ability to handle at least a part of the men's work. She caught his eye the very first day he came down to the river, and after that, whenever she noted that he was present she seemed to take a new delight in skipping lightly from log to log, lingering on each just long enough to cause it to spin dangerously and then leaping to the next.

But one afternoon she tried the trick once too often. Either she miscalculated her distance or a sudden swirl of the current carried the log for which she was aiming out of her path, for her foot just touched it, slipped and, before she could recover her balance, she was in the water – surrounded by logs that threatened to crush the life out of her at any moment.

Startled by her cry for help, three of the lumbermen started toward her – but the river, like a thing alive, appeared to thwart their efforts by opening up a rift in the jam on either side, leaving a gap too wide to be leaped, and a current too strong to be risked by men who were hampered by their heavy hobnailed shoes.

Marks, who had been watching the girl, had his coat off almost as soon as she hit the water. An instant later he had discarded his shoes and had plunged in, breasting the river with long overhand strokes that carried him forward at an almost unbelievable speed. Before the men on the logs knew what was happening, the operative was beside the girl, using one hand to keep her head above water, and the other to fend off the logs which were closing in from every side.

"Quick!" he called. "A rope! A – " but the trunk of a tree, striking his head a glancing blow, cut short his cry and forced him to devote every atom of his strength to remaining afloat until assistance arrived. After an interval which appeared to be measured in hours, rather than seconds, a rope splashed within reach and the pair were hauled to safety.

The girl, apparently unhurt by her drenching, shook herself like a wet spaniel and then turned to where Marks was seated, trying to recover his breath.

"Thanks," she said, extending her hand. "I don't know who you are, stranger, but you're a man!"

"It wasn't anything to make a fuss about," returned Ezra, rising and turning suspiciously red around the ears, for it was the first time that a girl had spoken to him in that way for more years than he cared to remember. Then, with the Vermont drawl that always came to the surface when he was excited or embarrassed, he added: "It was worth gettin' wet to have you speak like that."

This time it was the girl who flushed, and, with a palpable effort to cover her confusion, she turned away, stopping to call back over her shoulder, "If you'll come up to dad's place to-night I'll see that you're properly thanked."

"Dad's place?" repeated Ezra to one of the men near by. "Where's that?"

"She means her stepfather's house up the river," replied the lumberman. "You can't miss it. Just this side the border. Ask anybody where Old Man Petersen lives."

Though the directions were rather vague, Marks started "up the river" shortly before sunset, and found but little difficulty in locating the big house – half bungalow and half cabin – where Petersen and his stepdaughter resided, in company with half a dozen foremen of lumber gangs, and an Indian woman who had acted as nurse and chaperon and cook and general servant ever since the death of the girl's mother a number of years before.

While he was still stumbling along, trying to pierce the gloom which settled almost instantly after sunset, Marks was startled to see a white figure rise suddenly before him and to hear a feminine voice remark, "I wondered if you'd come."

"Didn't you know I would?" replied Ezra. "Your spill in the river had me scared stiff for a moment, but it was a mighty lucky accident for me."

At the girl's suggestion they seated themselves outside, being joined before long by Petersen himself, who, with more than a trace of his Slavic ancestry apparent in his voice, thanked Marks for rescuing his daughter. It was when the older man left them and the girl's figure was outlined with startling distinctness by the light from the open door, that Ezra received a shock which brought him to earth with a crash.

In the semidarkness he had been merely aware that the girl was wearing a dress which he would have characterized as "something white." But once he saw her standing in the center of the path of light which streamed from the interior of the house there could be no mistake.

The dress was of white silk!

More than that, it was made from material which Marks would have sworn had been cut from the same bolt as the sample which the Collector had shown him in Seattle!

"What's the matter, Mr. Marks?" inquired the girl, evidently noting the surprise which Ezra was unable completely to suppress. "Seen a ghost or something?"

"I thought for a moment I had," was the operative's reply, as he played for time. "It must be your dress. My – my sister had one just like it once."

"It is rather pretty, isn't it? In spite of the fact that I made it myself – out of some silk that dad – that dad brought home."

Ezra thought it best to change the subject, and as soon as he could find the opportunity said good night, with a promise to be on hand the next day to see that the plunge in the river wasn't repeated.

But the next morning he kept as far away from the girl – Fay Petersen – as he could, without appearing to make a point of the matter. He had thought the whole thing over from every angle and his conclusion was always the same. The Petersens were either hand in glove with the gang that was running the silk across the border or they were doing the smuggling themselves. The lonely cabin, the proximity to the border, the air of restraint which he had noted the previous evening (based principally upon the fact that he had not been invited indoors), the silk dress – all were signs which pointed at least to a knowledge of the plot to beat the customs.

More than that, when Marks commenced to make some guarded inquiries about the family of the girl whom he had saved from drowning, he met with a decidedly cool reception.

"Old Man Petersen has some big loggin' interests in these parts," declared the most loquacious of his informants, "an' they say he's made a pile o' money in the last few months. Some say it's timber an' others say it's – well, it ain't nobody's concern how a man makes a livin' in these parts, s'long as he behaves himself."

"Isn't Petersen behaving himself?" asked Ezra.

"Stranger," was the reply, "it ain't always healthy to pry into another man's affairs. Better be satisfied with goin' to see the girl. That's more than anybody around here's allowed to do."

"So there was an air of mystery about the Petersen house, after all!" Marks thought. It hadn't been his imagination or an idea founded solely upon the sight of the silk dress!

The next fortnight found the operative a constant and apparently a welcome visitor at the house up the river. But, hint as he might, he was never asked indoors – a fact that made him all the more determined to see what was going on. While he solaced himself with the thought that his visits were made strictly in the line of duty, that his only purpose was to discover Petersen's connection with the smuggled silk, Ezra was unable entirely to stifle another feeling – something which he hadn't known since the old days in Vermont, when the announcement of a girl's wedding to another man had caused him to leave home and seek his fortunes in Boston.

Fay Petersen was pretty. There was no denying that fact. Also she was very evidently prepossessed in favor of the man who had saved her from the river. But this fact, instead of soothing Marks's conscience, only irritated it the more. Here he was on the verge of making love to a girl – really in love with her, as he admitted to himself – and at the same time planning and hoping to send her stepfather to the penitentiary. He had hoped that the fact that Petersen was not her own father might make things a little easier for him, but the girl had shown in a number of ways that she was just as fond of her foster-parent as she would have been of her own.

"He's all the daddy I ever knew," she said one night, "and if anything ever happened to him I think it would drive me crazy," which fell far short of easing Ezra's mind, though it strengthened his determination to settle the matter definitely.

The next evening that he visited the Petersens he left a little earlier than usual, and only followed the road back to Northport sufficiently far to make certain that he was not being trailed. Then retracing his steps, he approached the house from the rear, his soft moccasins moving silently across the ground, his figure crouched until he appeared little more than a shadow between the trees.

Just as he reached the clearing which separated the dwelling from the woods, he stumbled and almost fell. His foot had caught against something which felt like the trunk of a fallen tree, but which moved with an ease entirely foreign to a log of that size.

Puzzled, Marks waited until a cloud which had concealed the moon had drifted by, and then commenced his examination. Yes, it was a log – and a big one, still damp from its immersion in the river. But it was so light that he could lift it unaided and it rang to a rap from his knuckles. The end which he first examined was solid, but at the other end the log was a mere shell, not more than an inch of wood remaining inside the bark.

It was not until he discovered a round plug of wood – a stopper, which fitted precisely into the open end of the log – that the solution of the whole mystery dawned upon him. The silk had been shipped across the border from Canada inside the trunks of trees, hollowed out for the purpose! Wrapping the bolts in oiled silk would keep them perfectly waterproof and the plan was so simple as to be impervious to detection, save by accident.

Emboldened by his discovery, Marks slipped silently across the cleared space to the shadow of the house, and thence around to the side, where a few cautious cuts of his bowie knife opened a peep hole in the shutter which covered the window. Through this he saw what he had hoped for, yet feared to find – Petersen and three of his men packing bolts of white silk in boxes for reshipment. What was more, he caught snatches of their conversation which told him that another consignment of the smuggled goods was due from Trail, just across the border, within the week.

Retreating as noiselessly as he had come, Marks made his way back to Northport, where he wrote two letters – or, rather, a letter and a note. The first, addressed to the sheriff, directed that personage to collect a posse and report to Ezra Marks, of the Customs Service, on the second day following. This was forwarded by special messenger, but Marks pocketed the note and slipped it cautiously under the door of the Petersen house the next evening.

"It's a fifty-fifty split," he consoled his conscience. "The government gets the silk and the Petersens get their warning. I don't suppose I'll get anything but the devil for not landing them!"

The next morning when the sheriff and his posse arrived they found, only an empty house, but in the main room were piled boxes containing no less than thirty thousand yards of white silk – valued at something over one hundred thousand dollars. On top of the boxes was an envelope addressed to Ezra Marks, Esq., and within it a note which read, "I don't know who you are, Mr. Customs Officer, but you're a man!"

There was no signature, but the writing was distinctly feminine.

"And was that all Marks ever heard from her?" I asked, when Quinn paused.

"So far as I know," said the former operative. "Of course, Washington never heard about that part of the case. They were too well satisfied with Ezra's haul and the incoming cargo, which they also landed, to care much about the Petersens. So the whole thing was entered on Marks's record precisely as he had figured it – a fifty-fifty split. You see, even government agents aren't always completely successful – especially when they're fighting Cupid as well as crooks!"

XIX

THE CLUE IN THE CLASSIFIED COLUMN

Quinn tossed his evening paper aside with a gesture in which disgust was mingled in equal proportion with annoyance.

"Why is it," he inquired, testily, "that some fools never learn anything?"

"Possibly that's because they're fools," I suggested. "What's the trouble now?"

"Look at that!" And the former Secret Service operative recovered the paper long enough to indicate a short news item near the bottom of the first page – an item which bore the headline, "New Fifty-Dollar Counterfeit Discovered."

"Yes," I agreed, "there always are people foolish enough to change bills without examining them any too closely. But possibly this one is very cleverly faked."

"Fools not to examine them!" echoed Quinn. "That isn't the direction in which the idiocy lies. The fools are the people who think they can counterfeit Uncle Sam's currency and get away with it. Barnum must have been right. There's a sucker born every minute – and those that don't try to beat the ponies or buck the stock market turn to counterfeiting for a living. They get it, too, in Leavenworth or Atlanta or some other place that maintains a federal penitentiary.

"They never seem to learn anything by others' experience, either. You'd think, after the Thurene case, it would be perfectly apparent that no one could beat the counterfeiting game for long."

"The Thurene case? I don't seem to remember that. The name is unusual, but – "

"Yes, and that wasn't the only part of the affair that was out of the ordinary," Quinn cut in. "Spencer Graham also contributed some work that was well off the beaten path – not forgetting the assistance rendered by a certain young woman."

Probably the most remarkable portion of the case [continued Quinn] was the fact that Graham didn't get in on it until Thurene had been arrested. Nevertheless, if it hadn't been for his work in breaking through an ironclad alibi the government might have been left high and dry, with a trunkful of suspicions and mighty little else.

Somewhere around the latter part of August the New York branch of the Secret Service informed Washington that a remarkably clever counterfeit fifty-dollar bill had turned up in Albany – a bill in which the engraving was practically perfect and the only thing missing from the paper was the silk fiber. This, however, was replaced by tiny red and blue lines, drawn in indelible ink. The finished product was so exceptionally good that, if it had not been for the lynxlike eyes of a paying teller – plus the highly developed sense of touch which bank officials accumulate – the note would have been changed without a moment's hesitation.

The man who presented it, who happened to be well known to the bank officials, was informed that the bill was counterfeit and the matter was reported through the usual channels. A few days later another bill, evidently from the same batch, was picked up in Syracuse, and from that time on it rained counterfeits so hard that every teller in the state threw a fit whenever a fifty-dollar bill came in, either for deposit or for change.

Hardly had the flow of upstate counterfeits lessened than the bills began to make their appearance in and around New York, sometimes in banks, but more often in the resorts patronized by bookmakers from Jamaica and the other near-by race tracks.

The significance of this fact didn't strike the Secret Service men assigned to the case until the horses had moved southward. The instant one of the bills was reported in Baltimore two operatives were ordered to haunt the pari-mutuel booths at Pimlico, with instructions to pay particular attention to the windows where the larger wagers were laid. An expert in counterfeits also took up his position inside the cage, to signal the men outside as soon as a phony bill was presented.

It was during the rush of the betting after the two-year-olds had gone to the post for the first race that the signal came – indicating that a man about forty-five years of age, well dressed and well groomed, had exchanged two of the counterfeits for a one hundred-dollar ticket on the favorite.

Hollister and Sheehan, the Secret Service men, took no chances with their prey. Neither did they run the risk of arresting him prematurely. Figuring that it was well within the realms of possibility that he had received the bills in exchange for other money, and that he was therefore ignorant of the fact that they were spurious, they contented themselves with keeping close to him during the race and the interval which followed.

When the favorite won, the man they were watching cashed his bet and stowed his winnings away in a trousers pocket. Then, after a prolonged examination of the jockeys, the past performances and the weights of the various horses, he made his way back to the window to place another bet.

Again the signal – and this time Hollister and Sheehan closed in on their man, notifying him that he was under arrest and advising him to come along without creating any disturbance.

"Arrest for what?" he demanded.

"Passing counterfeit money," replied Hollister, flashing his badge. Then, as the man started to protest, Sheehan counseled him to reserve his arguments until later, and the trio made their way out of the inclosure in silence.

When searched, in Baltimore, two sums of money were found upon the suspect – one roll in his left-hand trousers pocket being made up of genuine currency, including that which he had received for picking the winner of the first race, and the one in the right-hand pocket being entirely of counterfeit fifty-dollar bills – forty-eight in number.

When questioned, the prisoner claimed that his name was Robert J. Thurene of New Haven, and added that there were plenty of people in the Connecticut city who would vouch for his respectability.

"Then why," inquired the chief of the Secret Service, who had come over from Washington to take charge of the case, "do you happen to have two thousand four hundred dollars in counterfeit money on you?"

At that moment Thurene dropped his bomb – or, rather, one of the many which rendered the case far from monotonous.

"If you'll search my room at the Belvedere," he suggested, "you'll find some five thousand dollars more."

"What?" demanded the chief. "Do you admit that you deliberately brought seven thousand five hundred dollars of counterfeit money here and tried to pass it?"

"I admit nothing," corrected the arrested man. "You stated that the fifty-dollar bills which you found upon me when I was searched against my will were false. I'll take your word for that. But if they are counterfeit, I'm merely telling you that there are a hundred more like them in my room at the hotel."

"Of course you're willing to state where they came from?" suggested the chief, who was beginning to sense the fact that something underlay Thurene's apparent sincerity.

"Certainly. I found them."

"Old stuff," sneered one of the operatives standing near by. "Not only an old alibi, but one which you'll have a pretty hard time proving."

"Do you happen to have a copy of yesterday's News handy?" Thurene asked.

When the paper was produced he turned rapidly to the Lost and Found column and pointed to an advertisement which appeared there:

FOUND – An envelope containing a sum of money. Owner may recover same by notifying Robert J. Thurene, Belvedere Hotel, and proving property.

"There," he continued, after reading the advertisement aloud, "that is the notice which I inserted after finding the money which you say is counterfeit."

"Where did you find it?"

"In the Pennsylvania station, night before last. I had just come in from New York, and chanced to see the envelope lying under one of the rows of seats in the center of the waiting room. It attracted my attention, but when I examined it I was amazed to find that it contained one hundred and fifty fifty-dollar bills, all apparently brand new. Naturally, I didn't care to part with the money unless I was certain that I was giving it up to the rightful owner, so I carried it with me to the hotel and advertised the loss at once.

"The next afternoon I went out to the track and found, when it was too late, that the only money I had with me was that contained in the envelope. I used a couple of the bills, won, and, being superstitious, decided to continue betting with that money. That's the reason I used it this afternoon. Come to think of it, you won't find the original five thousand dollars in my room. Part of it is the money which I received at the track and which I replaced in order to make up the sum I found. But most of the bills are there."

"You said," remarked the chief, striking another tack, "that your name is Thurene and that you live in New Haven. What business are you in?"

"Stationery. You'll find that my rating in Bradstreet's is excellent, even though my capital may not be large. What's more" – and here the man's voice became almost aggressive – "any bank in New Haven and any member of the Chamber of Commerce will vouch for me. I've a record of ten years there and some ten in Lowell, Mass., which will bear the closest possible inspection."

And he was right, at that.

In the first place, a search of his room at the hotel brought to light a large official envelope containing just the sum of money he had mentioned, counterfeit bills and real ones. Secondly, a wire to New Haven elicited the information that "Robert J. Thurene, answering to description in inquiry received, has operated a successful stationery store here for the past ten years. Financial standing excellent. Wide circle of friends, all of whom vouch for his character and integrity."