and never hear another word of this. But if I decided to take a side trip to Timbuktu on my way to that place in Arkansas”—by which I took it that he meant the town where the gold was supposedly still hidden—“that impertinent flat-footed Irishman would follow me—and to the moon, too, if I decided to go there.”
He prepared still another cigar—I had already given up trying to keep track of how many he smoked in a day. “And if the detective does try to follow us all the way downriver, what’s to stop him from trailing along when I go look for Ritter’s money? And what’s to stop him from deciding it’s stolen property and confiscating it? That’d be the last we ever saw of it, I promise you—never mind that the rightful owner’s probably long dead, even if we could figure out who he is.” He lit up the cigar and breathed the smoke in deeply.
“I myself am far more concerned about the possibility of a killer following us to the treasure,” I protested. “You can’t deny that having a policeman near at hand makes us both a good bit safer.”
“I wouldn’t bet a nickel on it. Unless he’s going to scrub my back in the bathtub, and sit up watching me every time I take a nap, and make himself even more of a damned nuisance than he is already, there’ll always be a chance for somebody to sneak up behind me and do me in. And besides, I don’t think anybody here has that kind of grudge against me.”
“But what about that fellow coming to your lecture before he was killed?”
Mr. Clemens scowled at his glass. “Plenty of things happen at the same time and in the same place without being related. Enough people get murdered in New York City as it is; it could be sheer chance that one of them was at my lecture a few days before.”
“And that he had your name in his pocket? In the same handwriting as on a note in your hotel? Isn’t that a few too many coincidences just to ignore?”
“I’m not ignoring them, Wentworth—I just don’t believe that having a detective along will magically clear up all those coincidences. Policemen are very clever at finding sinister implications behind perfectly innocent things; they have to, to justify their impertinence. The way I see it, this rascal Berrigan has managed to convince his chief that I’m being stalked by a murderer and have to be watched every second. If he plays his cards right, he gets a paid vacation on a cruise to New Orleans, and the relatively painless duty of keeping an eye on an old man, whom he undoubtedly expects to be eternally grateful. It’s a perfect hoax; almost a work of art, if you admire such things. The biggest danger, from Berrigan’s point of view, is that his chief will recognize the whole thing for the shameless fraud it is, and assign himself to trail me.”
“I wish I could share your belief that there’s no danger,” I said. “You still haven’t explained the notes.”
“There needn’t be anything sinister in the notes,” said Mr. Clemens. “It’s possible Jack Hubbard found out I was in New York and came looking for a handout. He wouldn’t be the first to think that knowing me thirty years ago entitled him to an endless string of baksheesh. He goes to the hotel, doesn’t find me, and leaves a note—if he wore his farmer outfit, they wouldn’t have let him sit around the lobby for very long; I’m surprised they let him in in the first place. He leaves me a note, and because he’s uncomfortable about begging, doesn’t call me by the name he used in the old days. Then, on the way home, this other fellow tries to rob him in an alley, and Hubbard defends himself with a knife. In the struggle, the other fellow grabs him by the false beard and it comes off. When Hubbard realizes he’s killed the other man, he skedaddles.”
“And how did the other man come to have your name in his pocket?” I persisted.
“He picked Hubbard’s pocket. Or Hubbard put it there, to lay a false trail. Or—damn it all, Wentworth, you’ll give me a headache if you keep this up! Go see if you can get me another whisky; easy on the soda water, this time.” I took this as a clear signal to end the discussion; I got him his drink, listened to him chat on general subjects for another half hour, and then retired for the evening. It had been a long day, and despite the unfamiliarity of sleeping on a rapidly moving train, I was asleep almost as soon as my head touched the pillow.
In the morning, I awoke to find the landscape had flattened out, with widely spaced farmhouses each in its little grove of trees—Indiana. A night’s sleep had done wonders for me, and I was looking forward to the second day of my new adventure.
Mr. Clemens, wearing a fresh white suit, joined me for breakfast—steak again for him, ham and eggs for me, and plenty of biscuits and strong coffee for both of us. Even before his second cup of coffee, he was grumbling about “being followed halfway to Hell and back,” complaining that “a man can’t take a breath in peace” and expressing other sentiments less printable. I listened without comment, although I myself was rather pleased that the police seemed to be taking the case seriously. Still, I was being paid to handle his business and correspondence, not to contradict him.
After our meal, my employer and I went to the onboard barbershop, in my own case primarily for the novelty—I had grown used to shaving myself while at Yale, and was in fact a bit apprehensive about exposing my neck to a sharp razor wielded by a stranger on a moving train. But the fellow who shaved me was an expert, and I arose from the chair without as much as a single nick, and feeling much refreshed. By then, we could see Lake Michigan (I could have taken it for an arm of the sea, it was so extensive) on the right side of the train. We pulled into the station promptly at 9:45 central time; I saw Berrigan dismount at the same time we did, but the crowd separated us and I dismissed him from my thoughts. Luckily, Mr. Clemens did not notice the detective, or it might have set off a fresh diatribe.
At our hotel, a sixteen-story building near the Customs House, my employer went to the telephone office to make a long-distance call to New York, while I supervised the delivery of our luggage to the rooms. These were on the top floor, to which I took an elevator with a bellboy carrying the bags. I wondered what business Mr. Clemens might have urgent enough to call New York for on a Saturday morning; I was not long in finding out.
I had barely begun to organize my belongings when I heard him slam the door to his room, and moments later pound on the connecting double door. I opened it, and at his gesture, entered his room. He waved in the general direction of a chair, which I settled myself into while he paced back and forth in an agitated manner, all the while letting loose a stream of invective as hot as anything I’d ever heard in my life.
“Why, what on earth has happened?” I inquired when he finally paused for breath. I had not seen him like this before, and wondered at it.
“I thought Abe Lincoln had done away with slavery, but it was all a barefaced lie, a sham and an imposture. These money-grubbing New York capitalists think they’ve bought me like a bushel of corn, and now they’ve gone and hired a scarecrow so the birds can’t get at me.”
“I’m sure this is all very important, but I don’t understand a word of what you’re saying,” I protested. He stopped his pacing and turned to look at me with an expression that could have ignited one of his cigars from across the room, then shrugged his shoulders and resumed pacing, his hands clasped behind his back.
“Sorry, Wentworth—I keep forgetting that you don’t know my affairs yet,” he said in a somewhat calmer tone. “The long and short of it is, I’ve been told I have to put up with Berrigan. It seems my backer, Henry Rogers in New York, specifically asked the police to assign a detective to protect me.”
“Surely you can ask Mr. Rogers to recall Berrigan?” I suggested, in as reasonable a tone as I could muster.
“It’s not as simple as that,” said Mr. Clemens. “I thought I was
