The Gold Pince-Nez

Chapter I

BURKE! Burke! For God’s sake!”

I do not know how long in the borderland of sleep this hail had come to me, accompanied as it was by a soft tap-tapping on the shutter door of my stateroom. I became conscious of it all of a sudden—sat up in my bunk broad awake.

“Burke, wake up and let me in! Oh, Burke!”

A man’s poignant agony was in that low, cautious cry. I thought I recognized the voice as Mather’s. With bound I was at the stateroom screen door and had thrown it back. A whiff of fog, damp and clammy, whisked in from the dark; also the body of a man—of Pierce Mather. He stumbled over the brass-capped baseboard and fell against me drunkenly. I heard him sigh. His dead weight was against my shoulder. I fumbled for the light switch, but his hand groped in the dark and checked mine.

“No, no!” he croaked. “No light, Burke! The dark-the dark is better. Where’s the couch?"

I took his hand to guide him to the divan that ran the width of the deck stateroom which I, fortunately, had by myself; the hand was cold, and a twitching came down from the elbow to make all the fingers jerk and flex. Though I could not see Mather’s face, this clawlike hand, the whistling of his breath, told me that the man was in the last extremity of fear or nervous exhaustion under strain. I had him on the divan in an instant, could see the vague shape of his head and shoulders outlined against the lighter dark of my window. My brandy flask was handy; I gave him a shot.

“Take a bracer, man! What’s got into you since I left you in the smoke room an hour ago?"

Mather did not answer directly, but kept mumbling under his breath: “Burke! Burke! For God’s sake!” During a busy life with the news I had never seen a person more completely prostrated mentally. Waking out of a sound sleep to find in the dark a fellow passenger and comrade of the voyage thus on the verge of collapse; why, it was a blood-chilling business! I shook him roughly—even slapped his cheeks soundly with my open palm. At this latter treatment he pulled himself together with a faint gasp of protest and held up a checking hand.

“It’s all right now—all right,” he said in an altered and steadied voice. “Find a seat where I can feel you near me—and listen.”

I drew up the camp stool to a position where, sitting, my pajama-clad knees brushed his. I could not see his features-only the blurred outline of his head and shoulders, but I could guess what was the heavy stamp of fear that rested on his face.

“Listen, Burke. I’ve been robbed!”

“Such things happen even on Pacific mail liners,” I answered shortly, wondering how the loss of a watch or even of a considerable sum of money could so completely subvert a man’s mind.

“But—but you don’t know all—the terrible feature of it,” he answered in the petulance of rasped nerves. “This robbery means sure death to one man and—and disgrace to another.”

“Well?” I waited for Mather to explain in his own good time.

“I—I’m about at the end of my string, Burke; this thing’s almost put me off my dot; I’ve simply got to get advice, and so—and so I come to you. I’ve come right to, you—didn’t know until fifteen minutes ago that I’d been robbed. You—you’re almost one of us in the diplomatic service—you’re a diplomat of the news, which is the next thing; you’ve lived in Japan; you know, of course, the situation between the two countries—Japan and America. Burke, I’ve simply got to tell you the whole thing.”

Mather seemed ready to slip back into his first hysteria. I fumbled for his hand in the dark, found it, and gripped it to steady him. The marvel that this suave, self-centered, young Bostonian with his Harvard veneer heightened to a ruby gloss by several years on the emery wheel of official Washington life could thus be stripped bare of all his reserve and come begging for a confidant was still strong with me. We had known each other just a week. A deck-chair acquaintance on the Siberia had ripened with more than usual speed because I was an old resident of Japan, and he, outward bound for the islands on his first trip, was eager to know much of the land. The fact that I was head of the Central Press Agency in the Far East, with headquarters at Tokyo, gave my word on things Japanese authority in his eyes, I suppose. All that I knew of Pierce Mather on the night he came crying to my stateroom door was what he had told me—that he was in the state department at Washington and was traveling to Tokyo on government business.

“I need not pledge you to secrecy, Burke,” my visitor in the dark began in a voice again controlled. “You know that I would not be coming to you in this extremity if I did not trust you—did not have to trust you in this terrible situation. I2”

“You remember what T. Roosevelt once said about reposing confidences in newspaper men,” I interrupted somewhat dryly. “Next to himself, he said, he’d trust2”

“Yes, yes; excuse me if I boggle things to-night. I’m—I’m2 But this is the way of it, Burke. Three weeks ago I was detached from duty in the state department and assigned temporarily as secretary to the legation at Tokyo to take the place vacated by the promotion of Edgerton Miles. The secretary of state took the opportunity of my mission to send to the ambassador some confidential reports which could not be intrusted to cable code or the mails. I know the contents of those reports. They have tremendous bearing on the present relations between the two countries—in fact, they convey to the ambassador information upon which the immediate relations—and very serious consequences—of the two nations hang. I will have to leave you to guess which international problem they bear upon.”

“Perhaps I can guess,” I put in shortly.

“But more than that,” the shadow before me continued in a shaken voice, “in those reports was mentioned the name of a certain person—one connected with the secret-service bureau of the state department who has been in Japan for more than a year without the knowledge of the ambassador or any one else beside the president and the secretary of state. The reports not only reveal the identity of this agent, but convey to the ambassador the information this agent has secured which bears on the pressing problem confronting the two countries. You, who’ve lived in Japan, can understand how perilous is the position of this secret agent once his identity is known to the Japanese government. Washington cannot take official cognizance of the agent’s presence in Japan—could never even protest if he should drop out of sight. Tokyo does not know officially that such a citizen of the United States is in the empire; Tokyo, therefore, could not know officially of his disappearance. Do you see it, Burke? Once his name is known to the Japanese secret police, that agent’s life is on a spider web—there wouldn’t be a bubble on the surface to mark his passing.”

I saw it only too well—I, who was thoroughly schooled to the ways of the Japanese police system. Where foreigners are concerned every ricksha man, every house servant is a potential spy; espionage seems to be ingrained in the nature of the lower-caste Japanese. Well I remember the petty annoyances of observation to which I was subjected when I first took up my duties in Tokyo. Mather’s words instantly brought to my mind comprehension of the American agent’s peril. A man detached by very virtue of his calling from his government’s protection—one walking blindfolded amid the pitfalls of an Oriental jungle.

“So you have been robbed of those reports?” I asked unnecessarily.

“Yes, Burke.” A shiver gripped the limbs of my companion of the dark. “Some time—it must have been to-night—the leather wallet—out of the very pocket of my coat—the inside pocket. It is beyond explaining.”

“You had carried the wallet on your person all the time aboard here?"

“Every minute—even in the pocket of my pajamas when I slept,” the wretched young man answered. “To-night after you left me on deck I went to the smoke room for an hour or so and watched the poker game; then to my stateroom. When I started to undress I took the wallet from my pocket and laid it on the bunk. Something—somehow it didn’t look right—looked smaller. I picked it up to examine it—opened it. Nothing inside but two Pacific Mail folders from the writing room. I2”

"Then it wasn’t the same wallet you started from Washington with?" I interrupted. “Somebody worked a substitution on you?"

“It was not the same—not quite,” Mather whispered. “Same leather—same fold and leather tongue clasp, but a shade smaller than the one containing the confidential reports; I’m sure of that.”

“When had you last examined the papers in the original wallet?” I asked, striving to find some corner to grip in the mystery.

“Why—ah—night before last. I usually looked over the papers every night before I retired to be sure; but last night I think—yes, I’m sure—I went to bed without looking in the wallet. Those three-legged races on deck, you know—they rather took it out of me; I was dog tired.”

“Then the substitution might have been made yesterday or to-day,” I summarized. “Any time in the last forty-eight hours. You have no idea when or how the trick was done?”

“Positively none,” Mather groaned hopelessly. “Some one of the four hundred odd people on this ship is a robber; somewhere on this ship is that bundle of papers upon which a man’s life—the dignity of my country—my own honor hang, and—and they might as well be five hundred fathoms down for all my power to recover them.”

“Buck up, man!” I said, trying to put into my voice an element of hope I did not feel. “We’re five days out of Yokohama and much can be done in that time. You can be sure your reports won’t be destroyed; the thief wants them for the information they contain, but he must also save them to lay before his superiors—visible proof of their contents. Of course we can guess the nationality of the thief.”

"But there are thirty-odd Japanese gentlemen aboard,” Mather protested. “And we took on some forty or fifty coolies at Honolulu, didn't we? How can we accuse one at random?”

“Well, at least,” I put in defensively, “the nature of the case permits us to limit our suspicions to seventy or so out of four hundred; that’s a start. Let’s build up the hypothesis something like this: The Japanese government keeps one or more secret agents at Washington—that’s regular enough, for every country does it and we have ours abroad. One of these agents learns you are going to Tokyo—perhaps he even knows definitely what he would reasonably suspect: that the state department takes the opportunity of your going to send by you certain messages which it would not care to intrust to cable or mail. Of course it is his duty to accompany you and watch his chance to lift that valuable information. It does not take a very sharp eye to see, day by day, the shape of a wallet inside your coat; anybody, he reasons, who carries a stiff and bulky wallet constantly in his coat pocket—and even sticks to the habit when he changes to summer whites as you did on leaving Honolulu—must value the contents of that wallet highly. So, knowing where his game lies, he has only to contrive a substitution—either while you slept, which is improbable; or by some sleight-of-hand work in broad day and right under your nose, which is more likely. Now if you can remember just which of the Japanese passengers you have talked with—strolled about the deck with—we’ve got a flying start on the search for the thief.”

I do not pride myself on any peculiar, analytical traits of the Sherlock Holmes variety, and I am frank to admit that in building up this all too-obvious hypothesis I was leaving holes in it big enough to drive a sprinkling cart through; but my single aim was to try to lift the unfortunate Mather out of a despond which threatened to be a real menace to his sanity. I realized that there in the dark of my stateroom in mid-Pacific I had been called upon to doctor a man’s soul and my dose was not homeopathic. He, poor devil, was ready enough to snatch at it.

“Well, I’ve associated with a good many of them,” my companion faltered, evidently straining to focus his recollection. “Thought I’d like to get acquainted with as many as possible because of future relations in Tokyo, you know. There’s little Doctor Tokonoku; I’ve had a couple of games of chess in the smoke room with him and2"

“Tokonoku’s harmless; I know him,” I cut in. “Played with him myself.”

“2and that little chap who says he’s been studying cotton raising in Texas—little Something-or-other Matsu. A couple of games of shuffleboard with him.”

“Shuffleboard sounds harmless,” I ventured.

“And—by the Lord, Burke; it couldn’t be!” Mather trembled afresh, and his lowered voice squeaked and cracked under a sudden thrust of excitement. “That fellow Mad—Madatoya—the silk agent from London; he was showing me some jujutsu holds after the games on deck yesterday afternoon, and2”

“Steady now, Mather!” I cautioned. “Tell just what he did; how he did it; how many people were looking on; everything.”

I heard the shadowy shape before me take a long breath.

“After the finish of the three-legged race I dropped into a chair up forward by the saloon door, and this chap Madatoya came and sat down beside me. He congratulated me on winning one of the prizes, and our talk ran to athletics in Japan. He told me about the training the schoolboys get and how all candidates for the police force are put through a jujutsu course. I asked him some questions about how a jujutsu wrestler could stand up before an expert boxer, and he, laughing, offered to demonstrate a defense against fists.

“As a joke, of course, I took him up. We stood up, and I squared off at him.”

“Wait a minute,” I broke in, “who were in the chairs thereabouts—any spectators?”

“Only old Mrs. Jenkins, as I remember. She was doing some crocheting in the chair next to mine, and2”

“And Mrs. Jenkins is nearsighted,” I reminded Mather. “Remember the day she thought the alligator pear at your plate was her grandson’s rubber ball?”

“Madatoya crouched in front of me, his hands spread out at the level of his knees. I feinted with my left and swung a light right cross to his face, and like a flash he was under my guard, with one elbow under the chin, forcing my head back, and the other arm around my waist with the fingers pressing against my spine. He could have thrown me or broken my back. He held me that way a second or so, as I remember, laughingly taunting me to break the grip; then he let me go.”

“Was your head thrown back so that you could not see him during all the time he held you?" I asked.

“As I remember, yes. I thought at the time how helpless I was.”

“Then what?”

“Oh, he showed me one or two other simple tricks of tripping, and we went down to the smoke room for a cocktail. I thought nothing more of it until this minute.”

I put another question:

“And that night—the night after the jujutsu lesson—when you went to bed you didn't examine to see if you had your wallet?”

“No, Burke, I didn’t. I was so dog tired I just fell into my bunk.”

For several minutes we sat there in the dark, no word between us. Finally I spoke the result of my deliberations:

"Mather, on principal I’d say you would be foolish to take this matter to the captain. If you had no suspicion to work on it would be simply letting another person into the secret of your loss to do so. But I think what you’ve told me about the jujutsu lesson justifies you in having a very well-founded suspicion of this fellow Madatoya and that the captain will have excuse to exercise his authority in a search of the man’s stateroom and person, at least. Even if we are wrong the gravity of the case and the strength of the evidence will excuse the mistake.”

The young secretary of legation was on his feet instantly, eager to follow my suggestion. I threw a raincoat over my pajamas, slipped my feet into straw sandals, and we went out onto the dripping deck. Seven bells were just being struck when we climbed to the shadowy bridge. The second officer, on watch there, demurred at first against rousing Captain Kendall, but upon my assuring him that it was a matter of the gravest importance that needed the captain’s attention, and one that couldn’t wait, he disappeared into the murk toward the door of the captain’s cabin back of the bridge. He soon returned to tell us Captain Kendall awaited us in his cabin, and he guided us to the door.

We found the skipper sitting on the edge of his berth, his uniform jacket hastily thrown over his sleeping clothes. He received us somewhat brusquely—a manner we could well pardon under the circumstances—but when Mather began in his nervous, slightly hysterical manner to detail the circumstances of the robbery Captain Kendall’s first flash of irritation was quickly dissipated by acute interest. The gray old master of the Siberia leaned eagerly forward, his hands clutching the raised side of his berth and the eyes under his heavy white brows never leaving Mather’s face. When the tale was finished Captain Kendall bent his head for a minute and seemed to be studying the pattern of the Chinese rattan “mules” he had on his bare feet.

“Mr. Mather, sir,” he began, “the captain of a ship at sea has wide responsibilities and unusual police powers, but he hesitates to use them except in the most extreme circumstances because he will be held to account for his actions by his owners, and, like as not, the government whose protection an arrested passenger may claim. In this case a mistake would be peculiarly unfortunate for me, running as I do into three Japanese ports; these Japanese are very touchy on points of honor. Moreover, I would not care to have word of a scandal pass among my passengers. I think the best way to do would be to have this Japanese gentleman summoned here now; we can then question him, and, if necessary, detain him while his room is being searched.”

He brought a passenger list out of a drawer and studied it a minute; then pressed an electric button. A petty officer appeared in the door and saluted.

“Banks,” said the captain, “go down to stateroom No. 141, present the captain’s compliments to Mr. Madatoya, and ask him to come to my room as soon as he can.”

The man at the door slipped into the gloom, and we were left in an embarrassing silence. I began to feel very poignant unrest; doubts as to the soundness of my snap deduction against the Japanese jutjutsu demonstrator pattered against my consciousness fast as the congealing drops of fog on the panes of the stateroom windows. I began to wonder how far into the halter I had thrust my head out of impulsive sympathy for the distress of another man. Surely if this Madatoya should prove a man of some consequence in Japan and we should be unable to pin the theft on him swift vengeance would be taken against the representative in Tokyo, of the Central Press, for one.

Hurried footsteps sounded outside the cabin, the door Was hastily jerked open, and the captain’s messenger thrust a white face into the square of radiance cut out of the night.

“I think you’d better come below, sir,” he stuttered. “Somethin’s happened to the gent’mun you sent me to fetch.”

“What’s that! What’s that!” Captain Kendall was already reaching for his greatcoat. Mather and I leaped to our feet. The three of us burst out of the door and were stumbling down the ladder to the boat deck the next instant. The fog was cold and gray; the deck seemed an interminable wet alley leading to blank space; the feel of vast ocean spaces and the mysteries they brew was in the air—charged it with a pricking sense of the Weird. We hurried down the grand staircase to the saloon, then followed the lead of the bos’n down a long alley of staterooms—an alley dim and sleep heavy. The noises of sleepers sounded all about us—stirrings, mutterings, the whimper of a child, the stilling coo of a mother.

Beyond a linen closet and the shield of a bulkhead three stateroom doors opened from the passage—three state-rooms isolated in part from the rest by the bulkhead shield. Two of the doors were hooked back so that the unoccupied space of the staterooms showed beyond them; the third was shut, and before this the bos’n paused.

“I had to bust it in with my shoulder, sir, when the gent’mun didn’t answer my knock,” he said and opened the door. He put his arm in and turned the light switch.

The blaze of light showed the figure of a Japanese in a blue crape kimono sprawled on the floor; his bare legs straddled out from under the cloud of flying storks on the garment in an attitude of a runner thunderbolted in full flight. Just below one shoulder the carved ivory handle of a Japanese dagger stuck up abruptly from the body. Near an outstretched hand—a hand that seemed vainly gripping for the thing just beyond reach—lay a black leather wallet.

Mather swooped upon it, pawed through its pockets, then turned to the captain and me a face gray green and ghastly.

“M-mine,” he stammered, “but I—I’m too late! Empty!”

Chapter II

For more than a minute, I think, we three stood there over that grotesque thing the flying storks covered, stricken cold and dumb. Then2

“Gentlemen, this is a murder,” Captain Kendall said sententiously, and at the moment nothing redundant in his statement appealed to us. Mather, still gripping the empty wallet convulsively, sank weakly to the couch and covered his eyes. The man was shaking as in an ague; for an instant I feared he was going to scream like a woman.

“Anything I c’n do, sir?” the bos’n nervously inquired from the alleyway outside the door.

“Go at once and wake up the surgeon,” commanded the captain. “Bring him here, then take your station outside the bulkhead door and let no one else pass.”

We heard the soft padding of the bos’n’s feet on the carpeted alleyway; then silence fell. None of us moved or spoke; there was only the sobbing respiration of Mather on the couch. Perhaps five dreadful minutes passed thus before footfalls again sounded without, and Doctor Sparks, the Siberia's surgeon, crossed the baseboard of the stateroom. He was in his pajamas and with feet slippered; the sleep was not yet out of his eyes. Captain Kendall merely pointed to the bundle of blue and white crape on the floor as the surgeon entered. A sharp gasp from Doctor Sparks and he was on his knees beside the body, his ready, professional hands at their exploring almost out of instinct.

With some effort he drew the short sword or one-edged Japanese dagger out of the wound and laid it carefully on a towel. Then he rolled the body of Madatoya over so that the narrow, crescent eyes stared unwinkingly at the cluster of electrics on the ceiling. Perfunctorily he laid a hand over the heart, a finger on the jugular, and shook his head.

“The stab from below the shoulder reached the man’s heart,” he said, “and he was dead before he struck the floor. There wasn’t any struggle as far as I can see. Hello—what’s this?”

The surgeon suddenly reached down the length of the murdered man’s right arm, which had been folded under the body when we discovered the tragedy, but had fallen limply to one side under Doctor Sparks’ manipulations. The hand was all but covered by a fold of the kimono; only the tips of the fingers remained visible. Sparks carefully disengaged the fingers from some small object they grasped, and held it up to the light. It was a gold-mounted pince-nez with a two-inch fragment of very fine gold chain depending from the tiny hole in the upper corner of the left-hand lens. The surgeon passed the glasses to Captain Kendall and began pawing about on the floor near the body. With a satisfied grunt he held up to our view a small gold hoop such as is worn behind the ear of those affecting the pince-nez; the companion fragment of the broken gold chain dangled from the loop.

“These were not the dead man’s,” the surgeon said as he pointed to the base of Madatoya’s nose. “No pinch marks here; there would be if he was a wearer of glasses.”

Doctor Sparks rose, took the glasses from the captain’s hand, and carefully examined them under the light.

“I’m not a sharp on optics, captain,” he said, “but I should say these lenses were built to rectify a fairly pronounced myopia. The man who wore these will miss them.”

“He can come to me for them,” Captain Kendall grimly remarked as he wrapped the glasses and the ear loop in his handkerchief and tucked the bundle carefully into the pocket of his great-coat. As he did so I saw him cast a sudden shrewd glance at Mather, who had removed his hands from his face and now sat staring blankly up at the frosted incandescents. With a quick catching of the breath I noted that the secretary of legation had on either side of his rather sharply bridged nose an indented mark—the mark of pince-nez. In my brief ship acquaintance with him I had not noticed before that he was a user of glasses; such a minor detail of a man’s appearance naturally would not register one time in a hundred with the ordinary individual meeting so many people as I do in the course of affairs. I looked at my friend’s waistcoat, hoping to see pinned there the little spring coil many slaves of the pince-nez prefer to the ear loop; there was none.

Of course, so it came to me in a flash, this scrutiny of mine was wild and extravagant and induced by the clap of tragedy just broken on us by the bewildering turn given to the affair of the missing state papers. But why that sudden searching glance of Captain Kendall’s? Captain Kendall had no bias to pull him to partisanship in Mather’s favor, such as I had; he merely saw facts as fate played them on the table. The facts, as so far revealed, pointed inexorably to Pierce Mather of all the four-hundred-odd souls aboard the Siberia the single one possessing a motive compelling enough to lead to murder. Was all this hysteria of his—the visit to my stateroom and the subsequent repetition of his tale to the captain—mere play acting to cover a grisly back trail of murder, and had the cunning intelligence of a slayer overlooked the one inevitable telltale circumstance said to exist to confound every taker of life—in this instance the pince-nez? Of course, I had known this man but twelve days, and I might have been deceived by his personable surface character. One does not sound the depths of a man in twelve days.

“Doctor,” I asked, vaguely laying a foundation of defense for my friend against accusation only hinted at in the captain’s sharp look, “how long would you say this man has been dead?”

“Not more than an hour—two at the most,” the surgeon answered. “Rigor mortis has not yet set in.”

I looked at my watch; the hour was twelve-fifteen. It had been just about an hour since I was roused from sleep by Mather’s frantic summons at my lattice door.

“I should think the scabbard of that sword should be around somewhere,” I volunteered, and I moved over to the couch where Mather sat and began pawing behind some of the dead man’s effects piled there.

“The matter of searching for evidence is entirely the duty of the ship’s officers, Mr. Burke,” Captain Kendall stopped me with a sharp tone of command. “I think you may assist Mr. Mather to his stateroom now. Surgeon Sparks and I will take charge, and we would rather act alone. I must command you both that you say nothing of what you have seen and heard here to any of the other passengers. If we are to lay hands on the murderer it is imperative that as little as possible of the events of this night shall be noised about decks. Now, if you please, gentlemen2’

There was no gainsaying the captain’s orders even though I strongly desired to share in probing the mystery of the Japanese passenger's death. Mather rose mechanically at my beckon, and we went out into the alleyway together. I accompanied him to his stateroom, which opened from the starboard deck a few doors from mine. No word passed between us until we paused at the door of his quarters. Then he put a hand falteringly on my shoulder and spoke in a low, tense voice: