The Man with the Mole

Front matter

by J. Allan Dunn.

Author of “The Shred of Serge," “The Malay Creese,” “Treasure for Treasure,” etc.

1. Forgery

CHAPTER I.

FORGERY.

DAZEDLY JACK SPERRY stared at the pink slip in his hand. He turned it from the front, where his stepfather’s clear signature—Simeon Cairns—appeared as drafter of a check for ten thousand dollars, to the back, where showed the endorsement of John J. Sperry in handwriting so like his own that it staggered him. The check was payable to the same John J. Sperry.

The three men grouped on the side of the desk opposite to him gazed at him uncompromisingly. The one in the central chair, Simeon Cairns himself, spoke.

“That is your signature on the back of the check, is it not?”

The aggressiveness of the tone brought Sperry a little to his senses.

“It looks very much like my writing, sir. But it cannot be. I have not endorsed any check of yours for any such amount: none at all since the last payment of my allowance.”

“Indeed? This is a check bearing my name, bearing a number considerably in advance of the last issued by me. I find it has been torn from the back pages of my check book, kept by me in the drawer of this desk, as you are well aware. You know this gentleman, Mr. Hilliard, president of the Agricultural National, of Longfield, and Mr. Burnside, cashier of the same institution.” The speaker looked expectantly at the bank president.

“This check,” said Hilliard in a dry, commercial voice, “was presented to our junior paying teller, Mr. Remington, yesterday morning by this young man. He is well known to Remington and to the rest of us, as your stepson. No question was raised of identity, or of the authenticity of your signature, or of the amount of the check. Your stepson intimated to Remington that he was going into business on his own account, and that this sum had been advanced, or presented to him, as his working capital. A majority portion of it was to go toward a partnership, I understand.”

Sperry gasped and then broke into expostulation. Cairns interrupted him.

“You shall have your say in a moment. Go on, Mr. Hillard.”

“There is little more to say. The cash was paid out, as desired. Ordinarily the irregularity would not have been noticed for another twenty-four hours had you not requested the exact amount of your balance early this afternoon, Mr. Cairns. Upon your declaration that this check must be a forgery, we came up to see you immediately after closing hours. I understand you do repudiate this signature?”

“It is cleverly done, but it is not mine,” said Cairns.

“Naturally the bank does not feel inclined to sustain this loss. We are compelled to protect ourselves, to guard ourselves against such attacks. We are, however, inclined to view the matter with an leniency equal to your own, Mr. Cairns, providing, of course, the money is restored.”

“Do you hear that, Jack?” demanded his stepfather. “Restore this money, and, for your mother’s sake, as well as for your own2”

“But I did not cash that check,” said Sperry. “I2”

The cashier’s voice struck in, coldly metallic.

“You did cash a check in the bank yesterday?”

“I did. But it was one of my own. I have a balance of two hundred and fifty odd. Wait.” He produced his own pocket check book while the others looked on cynically. “My balance is two hundred and sixty-three dollars. I drew a check for twenty-five dollars. There is the stub. Remington gave me two tens and a five. Look for yourselves.” He flung the check book on the big library desk. No attempt was made to pick it up.

Burnside went on:

“Your balance is exactly two hundred and eighty-eight dollars. Remington states that you presented only the one check, this signed by Mr. Cairns, and took the money in five one-thousand-dollar bills and ten five-hundred-dollar bills. I am sorry for you, Sperry, but the evidence is overwhelmingly against you.”

Sperry’s eyes flashed and he pounded the desk with his fist.

“Do you mean to insinuate that I forged the name of Simeon Cairns and tried to appropriate ten thousand dollars? Why, there is a hundred thousand dollars held for me in trust by my mother under my father’s will.”

“And not available until you are thirty, five years from now. Unless, in the meantime, your mother and her advisers become convinced that you are capable of successfully applying the sum to business methods,” spoke up Cairns. “And, unfortunately, she is not so convinced. You have been sowing wild oats. Jack, and this is the harvest, my lad. Why didn’t you come to me frankly and own up to your entanglement?”

“All that is a lie,” cried Sperry. “I am in no entanglement. You have attempted to prejudice my mother against me. You have magnified little things into wild escapades. And you would have been the last person for me to apply to for aid.”

“There is no use talking that way, Jack,” said Cairns with a shrug of his shoulders. “I am glad your mother is away for the present. The issue is, are you going to restore that money? If so, I will say nothing more of it. Mr. Hilliard has expressed his will toward leniency. If you will not do the honest, repentant thing2” He shrugged his shoulders once again.

“I haven’t got it!” e&claimed Jack. “I never had it!”

Hilliard got up, Burnside with him.

“We cannot waste time in this matter,” said the president. “We are still willing to give twenty-four hours for the return of the ten thousand dollars. If not, we shall be compelled to adopt the usual course. One way or another, the penalty must be paid. Aside from the financial loss we have no real right to countenance crime.”

Jack Sperry, feeling like an animal that has suddenly found itself in a trap, looked at the three men. They were utterly aloof from him, unsympathetic. It was evident they believed him guilty, that he was in peril of arrest.

“For the sake of Mrs. Cairns, the unhappy boy’s mother,” Cairns said, “I will make good the loss to the bank. I do not wish a prosecution. If other means fail, I shall send you my check the first thing in the morning.”

“Very well,” said Hilliard coldly. “That closes the incident. Remington, of course, has been discharged. He should have detected the forgery.”

“That hardly seems fair,” said Cairns. “It is excellently done. But I suppose discipline must be maintained. I shall see what I can do for the young man. He should not suffer from another’s crime.”

Hillard and Burnside took their leave formally, Cairns seeing them to the door of his library, while Sperry, boiling with resentment, awaited his return to the desk.

The Cairn’s household was a divided one. Jack Sperry’s mother had remarried, and Jack had not approved the match, though he did not voice his opinion openly, understanding somewhat of his mother’s nature, essentially feminine, demanding some one upon whom to lean. He had tried his best to get along with his new relation, but he resented the dominant aggressiveness of Simeon Cairns, disbelieved in his easily assumed suavity, and objected to his assumption of parental authority, his complete reorganization of the household.

Jack Sperry was twenty-five, and his own master: or he would be When fairly launched on his own career. After college he had taken up civil engineering in earnest, serving an apprenticeship with such success that he had been, offered a partnership. The capital for this he had looked to, under the terms of his father’s will, as mentioned by Hilliard, from his mother. The hundred thousand dollars was his rightful heritage, leaving ample for his mother during her lifetime: an equal sum, in fact, that would supposedly revert to Sperry on her death, being meanwhile excellently invested.

Since Mrs. Sperry had married Cairns, the latter’s masterful ways had, by devious methods, blocked Jack’s ambitions, or so the latter fully believed. Cairns affected to treat him as a headstrong boy, using a bonhomie that Jack merely believed a cover to his true personality. And his mother, somewhat an invalid of late, seemed more and more inclined to accept as infallible her second husband’s wisdom.

More, Cairns had made the most of certain affairs, particularly one in which Jack had aided a fraternity brother to get out of a serious scrape. He had managed to imbue Mrs. Cairns with the idea that her son was still unsuited for the responsibilities of business and the handling of capital. All in all, the two rubbed together no more smoothly than do a coarse file and a rough casting. Jack’s mother was wintering in Florida, and the friction between the two had been more open of late. Now had come this astounding accusation, leaving Jack gasping, like a fish in a net, at the meshes of evidence surrounding him.

Cairns came back to the desk with a frown on his face.

“Don’t be obstinate, Jack,” he said. “If you can’t get the money, if you’ve applied it elsewhere, confess it to me and I’ll advance it temporarily.”

“You’ve always hated me,” said Sperry. “You have tried to estrange me from my mother: you have tried to run my affairs as well as hers. This thing is a lie, a trick, and you know it. Somewhere or other you are back of this infernal business!”

“Are you accusing the president and cashier of the Agricultural Bank, together with the paying teller, who has been forced to give up his position: together with myself, of trying to fasten a crime upon you that will, I sadly fear, break your mother’s heart if not jeopardize her health?”

"You leave her name out of it,” said Sperry fiercely.

“You forget that she is my wife, the woman I love,” said Cairns with a certain dignity. “She cannot be left out of it. If you persist in your denial of this thing I shall restore the money but, after that, I shall wash my hands of it. It is not to be expected that this young—er—Remington will accept his forced loss of a job quietly. There will undoubtedly be publicity. I shall see your mother immediately in order to break the news to her as softly as possible.”

“I shall see her first,” broke in Sperry.

“I think not,” said Cairns softly. “I had a letter from her this morning. She has left the Royal Poinciana and gone—elsewhere. Under the circumstances I do not feel justified in letting you know where that is. I shall wire her tonight of my departure, and I shall see,” he went on blandly, “that whatever mail comes for you from her is, temporarily at least, withheld. Since you are resolved to stay hardened, I also remind you that your presence in this house, from this moment, is not to be tolerated.”

Sperry glared at him. He believed that his stepfather’s eyes were full of mockery and malice.

“You have no right,” he cried hotly, “no right to hold my mail! You have no right to throw me out of my mother’s house!”

“I think I should not be considered an usurper,” answered Cairns. “As for yourself, you have no rights. A felon forfeits such things. Your appeal to the law might prove unfortunate. This is my house. Your mother has made it over to me in exchange for other matters.”

A glaring light seemed to break through Sperry’s brain, still confused from the charges, the crushing evidence against him.

“And you seek to have me disinherited,” he said. “I am on to your crafty game now. It is you who are a criminal, a sneaking2”

Simeon Cairn’s usually pallid face flamed crimson. He struck Sperry with his open hand, a resounding blow that left the mark of livid fingers on the latter’s cheek.

Beside himself, reeling back, Sperry clutched a heavy inkstand of glass and hurled it at his stepfather. He saw it strike, saw the ink cover Cairn’s face and, as the latter fell to the rug, saw crimson well out and mingle with the black of the ink. Cairns lay prone, his eyes staring. Sperry heard footsteps in the hall and realized that their voices had mounted in the rapidly culminating quarrel. “Felon!” The word surged in his brain. Now he was fairly in the mesh of circumstances.

He sprang to the door and encountered Peters, the butler with whom Cairns had supplanted the former functionary, as he had all the original servants. Peters, heavy, inclined to stoutness, grasped for Sperry and the latter drove home a blow with all his weight to the butler’s stomach and floored him, breathless, agonized. Snatching his hat and coat from the rack, Sperry raced out into the gloom of the early evening.

2. Flight

CHAPTER II.

FLIGHT.

THE Sperry house was in the Berkshires. They had an apartment in New York also, but the Berkshire place, at Swiftbrook Bowl, was kept open usually until Christmas, though Mrs. Cairns had gone South with the first approach of fall. A street railway connected with the manufacturing town of Longfield, which was four hours from New York by the express trains.

As Sperry sped through the dusk, out of the grounds and down the road toward the car line, he saw, clear through the almost naked trees, the headlight of an approaching trolley, and raced to make connection with it, barely accomplishing his end.

In his pocket was the slim remnant of the twenty-five dollars he had drawn from the bank, some six dollars in all. His first intention of seeking his mother and attempting to establish with her his innocence, died away in hopelessness. He could raise a little money on the jewelry he wore, but not nearly enough, even if he knew where she was. His balance in the bank would undoubtedly be appropriated: at any rate checks would not be honored, and, if he dared to go where he could cash a check, he was in no mind to have them returned “No Funds.” It would only add to his apparent dishonesty. Also, it would help them to trace him. By now the butler would have roused the police at Longfield; they would be on the alert, stations would be watched, the very trolley he was on would be searched as soon as the telephones got working!

To-morrow the threatened publicity would contain the additional news that he had murdered his stepfather. He was an outcast, a fugitive. There would be a reward on his head. One faint hope lingered, that he had not killed Cairns. He would know that by the papers. And, if that crime was spared him, he was not going to be caught, already condemned, and be put away without an attempt to establish his innocence.

Remington, the paying teller, had lied. To what end? He had been discharged. And how could he prove the man a liar, how discredit the rest of the damning evidence? Sperry burned to find Remington, to choke the truth out of him. That would mean his own immediate arrest. But there were others back of Remington. Hilliard and Burnside had been taken in by the evidence. It was Cairns who was at the bottom of all this! Yet Cairns had, undeniably, plenty of money. His balance at the bank was large. Sperry was helpless—practically penniless. And he was an outlaw.

Sperry groaned. Some one, a man he knew, leaned over from the seat back of him and asked him if he was ill.

This would not do. He forced a smile. “Ulcerated tooth,” he said. “Got to have it fixed to-morrow.”

The man said something commiserating and sat back again.

Sperry forced his wits to work coherently, dispassionately. The attack on Cairns, the forgery, his mother’s attitude—he could not help those for the time. He had to get away or he would be irretrievably condemned, branded. If he had only taken his own roadster! But there would not have been time for that. They could have cut him off or traced him.

Swiftbrook Bowl, that fashionable resort, lay closer to New York than Longfield. And there was another station between the Bowl and Longfield. A plan formed itself.

He swung off at a corner, about a quarter of a mile from this station, Langley Dale, and struck up an unlit side road as the trolley sped away. In half a mile he hit the railroad near a siding and dodged into a thicket. Night had practically fallen and he was safe for the present. Twenty minutes later the express for New York, ignoring Langley Dale, roared past him. Thirty minutes after that a local chugged through, bound in the opposite direction. It reached the station and stayed there for what seemed to Sperry a long time as he watched from his concealment the red tail light.

Perhaps they were searching it for him? Then the red light began to back toward him with much snorting of the engine. He crouched low, shivering. The train came to a standstill opposite him and he could see the people through the lighted windows, carefree, save for their delay, eager to get home. And he was homeless! A sense of despair seemed to numb him and he shook it off.

There was the sound of a train panting up the grade the other side of the Dale. No other passenger was due for two hours. This must be the freight he had hoped for. Probably a long line of empties going back to New York, great coal trucks, a car or two. Hope revived. It would come in between him and the local that had been backed on to the siding to let it pass.

He lay low till the searching headlight lifted over the crest of the grade, flared down the right of way, and passed him. The freight was gathering speed now but Sperry would have tried for it had it been going twice as fast. Better to trip, to fall and be mangled, than caught, arrested, prosecuted, and condemned—a swift sequence that would inevitably follow.

Steel coal trucks were passing him, punt-shaped. The train seemed slowing down a little. He jumped and found a footing and a grip for his hands on the cold rim of a truck as he flung himself upward. In a moment he had scuttled over the edge and slid down the sloping end into a rubble of coal dust.

For the present he was safe. Hobos at this time were rarities. There would be no search of the train as it lumbered on through the darkness. Somewhere in the yards of upper Manhattan he could get off, round about midnight. He would find a subway and get far downtown in New York. There his plans ceased, save that vaguely he resolved on smothering his identity, and—if Cairns was only still alive—somehow hanging on until, by hook or crook—for surely fortune must turn some time—he could reinstate himself. If Cairns were dead? He would wait till morning for that, he tried to tell himself, huddled in the empty truck, jolted unmercifully, bruised, flung headlong with the changing motions of the train, grimed, cold, and, as the night wore on, hungry.

The vision of Cairns lying in the rug with the crimson and the ink streaking the pale face in fantastic patterns, would not leave him.

At two in the morning he found himself far downtown in Manhattan. He had bought himself two drinks of whisky and two sandwiches in a saloon on the East Side, near the river, and stopped the numbness that had begun to turn to a poignant ache between his shoulders. He could not afford to risk pneumonia from exposure. That meant a hospital and recognition, when the dirt had been cleansed from him. As soon as he could find a cheap lodging house and get some sleep, he realized that he must change his clothes. Filthy as they were from his trip, their cut and the quality of their cloth had already made him an object of suspicion. In this neighborhood they were shrewd of eye, and Sperry already felt that he had been sized up for what he was, a defaulter from his caste, a gentleman gone wrong; not a master crook, but an amateur, one to whom a reward might be attached. He managed to get some of the muck from his face and hands in the lavatory of the saloon, thankful for the sanitary paper towel. Then he went out into the streets to look for a bed.

It was bitterly cold. The searching wind blew off the river, and Sperry was glad now of the good texture of his clothes. But he ached intolerably and he longed for some shelter where he could rest and think. His thoughts would not co-ordinate. They were a jumble of what had happened, and wild conjectures as to what had led up to his entanglement. Silent, furtive figures slunk by him, slid into nauseous alleys or into such side-doors of protected saloons as he had found his own way. Some of them staggered into the uninviting doorway of rooming houses advertising “Beds for Men Only. 25c and up.”

Fastidious, more from habit than present consciousness, Sperry hesitated to enter these caravanseries of the poor. His imagination, far too vivid to ease his present plight, conjured up horrors abovestairs. Further, he could not shake off the idea that he was being trailed.

“It’s absurd,” he told himself again and again. “If they had managed in some manner to spread the net so far already, they would not hesitate to draw in the folds.” But he was out of place here, a palpable misfit, and therefore to be suspected, to be watched, to be exploited for what there might be in it. To hide successfully in such a neighborhood he must be one of those who dwelt here and dodged the law and defied it, knowing the manners and the codes of the underworld. Yet he must have some place to hide away, to sleep, to wait the coming of the morning and the announcement of the newspapers.

A vicious gust of wind, flung down a side street, pierced him as a spear might have stabbed him to the vitals. He suddenly felt sick in mind and body. “What’s the use?” he asked himself bitterly, his overstrung nerves reacting. Then came the rebound. He must brace up, put on a bold front, and accept the conditions of his surroundings: he must assume a toughness and demand a bed with a swagger and a tone that would deceive any one who might want to pry into his identity. He still had most of his six dollars, and he could pay for a room to himself. Another drink would bolster his courage. The reek of it on his breath would give him, as it were, a local color.

Down an alley he saw a figure come out from a door near a distant corner, a door above which a light burned dimly. Another entered. Here was traffic, a saloon. He hurried down the alley. Close to the door was piled a clutter of empty boxes, an array of refuse and ash cans. Some one was groping among these as Sperry passed, but that person did not look at him.

“Some penniless devil looking for cast-off food,” thought Sperry, and the impulse came to ask the man in for a drink and some food. But he could not do that, he told himself. He must look out for his own safety first. The man might be inquisitive. As he reached the door a burly figure came out, lurching a little as if intoxicated. Sperry saw the face under the lamp.

The upper part was shaded with the brim of a derby hat. The lower showed a firm chin and a thin-lipped mouth under a prominent nose. To the right of the lips was a prominent mole, almost black in that light, curiously, distinctively shaped. Sperry stood aside as the man passed in the direction he himself had come. Casually he watched him as he went, wondering idly if he would safely avoid the cans and boxes. The man with the mole almost brushed Sperry, and Jack was aware of a shaded glitter of searching eyes upon him, that, somehow, did not accord with the drunken gait.

Then a figure leaped from the medley of ash and refuse containers, leaped swiftly, and silently, just as the burly man went by. And, by the lamp, Sperry saw the hand of the bum he had thought of inviting to a drink, shift to a hip pocket, saw a glint of nickel, and, in sheer instinct, he flung himself upon the would-be killer, gripping the wrist of the hand that was freeing the pistol, and cruelly twisting it as he flung his forearm round the man’s neck, forcing back his chin.

The gun clattered to the cobbles of the alley. The burly man with the mole had turned with a swift precision that belied intoxication and instantly shot a short, hard punch to the projecting jaw. The killer crumpled in Sperry’s grasp and slid to the ground. The other coolly picked up the gun and put it into his pocket, nodding to Sperry.

“Thanks,” he said. “I owe you something for that, pal.”

3. Baldy Brown

CHAPTER III.

BALDY BROWN.

THE killer had fallen face downward on the slimy stones. The man with the mole turned him over with one foot and a hand and surveyed him keenly. The killer showed faint signs of returning consciousness, and the other picked him up easily, much as if he was a half-stuffed sack of bran, and jammed him into a sitting posture on top of one of the ash cans, propped against the wall of the saloon. To Sperry he said nothing until he had completed this process unaided, and had satisfactorily balanced his late opponent. Then he turned to Sperry, surveying him with a comprehensive glance.

“What were you doing in this dumping ground at this time of night?” he asked. His voice was gruff but friendly, and there was a compelling quality in it that somehow gave Sperry a hazy impression that, even if he had not grasped the killer’s wrist, the burly one would have found a means to take care of himself.

“I was going to get a drink,” he said. “Then I was going to find a bed somewhere.”

“A shot and a flop?” said the other. “We’ll fix that. Hello, you!”

The killer was coming sullenly, viciously out of his trance, glaring at the man he would have shot in the back. Then Sperry saw the hate in his eyes change to uncertainty. The man with the mole had taken off his hat, displaying a skull practically bald, and he was grinning at the killer. Front teeth liberally filled with gold shone under the lamp.

“Just why were you tryin’ to bump me off, pal?” he was saying. “What’s the reason? Who did you take me for, a dick? An’ who’re you? I’ll know you next time, but I’ll swear this is the first.”

The perplexity in the little rat eyes of the killer deepened. He mumbled uncertainly and tried to get down from the ash can. The man with the mole set him back with a firm hand.

“What’s your moniker, pard?” he persisted. “An’, if there’s any reason why I shouldn’t bash your dial in and send you to the slab, you’d better come across with it now!” he cried, with a sudden ferocity and a snarl of his gold-filled teeth that made the killer shrink in terror.

“I’m Curly,” the latter managed to articulate. “Curly Luke Conklin. I—say, I was in wrong, cull. I just got out off stir, see? The dick who sent me up was Jim Farrell, the low-livered crook. I swore I’d get him w’en I come down the river, an’ I see you in at Dumpy’s there takin’ a drink, an’2”

“You thought I was what’s-his-name Farrell, a dick, did you? You must be full of hop. I never met the flat-foot. I’m Baldy Brown of Chi’, and I struck town three weeks ago. I ain’t met with your dick pals—yet. And I don’t consider it over and above easy bein’ taken for one, either. Sit up, you, and take a good look at me. Do you think I look like a dick? Do you?”

His face was so venomous that even Sperry, disinterested in the controversy, drew back, but Baldy Brown suddenly put out an arm and held him with a grip of steel. Curly Conklin stuttered a denial, an absolute disclaimer.

“If I’d seen you wit your dicer off,” he said; “or, if I’d piped that beauty mark2”

“Never mind the beauty spot,” gruffly put in Baldy. “I ain’t stuck on it. Some day I’m goin’ to get needled. You didn’t take a good look, and, but for my young pal here, you’d have bumped me off. I’ve got a good mind to2” He broke into a hearty laugh and shoved out a hand for Curly to grasp. “It’s a good one on me after all,” he said. “I’ll tell the boys. Took me for a dick! Oh, Lord! We’ll call it off, Curly, if you promise to wear glasses. And I’ll buy three drinks of Dumpy’s best right now. Come on in, both of you.”

Still held by the arm, Sperry followed, willy-nilly, into the unsavory drinking shop. Perhaps a dozen men were there, at tables or at the bar. Baldly advanced to the latter between the two.

“Drinks for the house on me,” he said. “No rotgut, Dumpy: open a bottle of case goods. Drinks on me. Here’s Curly Conklin, just out of stir, and takes me for a dick! Oh, Lord! He was goin’ to bump me off with a gat when my pal here jumps him.”