Rensselaer Journal, Volume 10, Number 49, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 16 May 1901 — THE IVORY QUEEN [ARTICLE+ILLUSTRATION]

THE IVORY QUEEN

As rainbow-chasing Is the only political amusement left to the democrats it would be cruel to deprive them of that. Their sanguine predictions amuse them and hurt nobody. The lowest of all thieving is that of those trusted with the money of others and there has been an unusual amount of that sort of thing among bank offic ials of late. Prompt punishment is about the best remedy. ■WWSMMWMHIMMSWMS The members of that Cuban committee were doubtless fully convinced during their interview with President McKinley that Gen. Wood is a truthful man, and that the Platt amendment said all that this government had to say. Where there’s smoke there’s apt to be fire. The southern democratic editors are showing signs of alarm at the steady growth of sentiment in that section in favor of honest money, protection and expansion, all republican doctrines. Ex Senator Wolcott, of Colorado, is said to have made a forcund since he retired from Congress. We hope he has, as he deserves all the good things and knows how, not only to enjoy them himself, but to make others participate in the enjoyment. Aguinaldo may mean every word he says in his manifesto, but Gen. McArthur shows good sense in keep ing a guard over him. The best, way to be certain of his good faith is to give him no opportunity to be tempted. He hasjallen several times and he might fall again.

Only thosefive thousand dollar tastes and one thousand-dollar incomes can fully appreciate the absurdity of attempting to say what income a man should have to marry. To make even a reasonable guess it would be neces sary to know something of the tastes of both. The U. S. now ranks third in the export of coal, Germany being second and Great Britain first. In 1890 our exports of coal were less than 2,000,000 tons, while for the fiscal year ending Juno 30, next, it will reach 8,000,000 tons. In the production of coal theU. S. leads the world, having within the last two years passed Great Britain, which had been first for many years. If the tone of the press represents public sentiment, and it usually does, * the second administration of President McKinley will be lenown in history as our most marked era of good feeling. Even the rankest partisan editors are expressing wishes that the Presidefit’s trip to the Pacific coast will be enjoyable to him, and the preparations for his reception all along the route are being participated in by men of all political parties. This is as it should be, and the longer it continues the better it will be for the country. The fact that the U. S. government now owns gold to a greater vaiue than was ever owned by any government on earth, of which there is any trustworthy record, tells the story of our great prosperity in a language that can be read by the whole world. That this gold was accumulated under laws passed by a republican congress and administered by a republican administration tells a story that will not be forgotten by the voters of this country for a generation to come, if it ever is The party that does this is the party to keep in power.

A Detective Story Of a Chicago Suburb. The Murder at The Grange and Hew Its Mystery Wit Solved by Darrent the Amer* lean Lecoq.

BY NORMAN HURST.

| ’ [UONTINUXD.] "i am not going to attempt to deceive you, Mr. Ridgeway,” he exclaimed. “I tell you frankly I am a detective, inquiring into the murder of your cousin, Josiah Marsden.” The manager, with his eyes riveted upon the knife, nodded his head, but said nothing. “When did you see Josiah Marsden last?” “Two years ago, when he foreclosed on his mortgage on this theater and turned me into the streets almost mined. I was the proprietor then. Now I’m only the manager, ” Ridgeway replied, with suppressed passion in his voice. “Never seen him since then and always prayed I never would—in case of accidents. ’ ’ ‘ ‘Ah I Have you ever seen that knife before?” Ridgeway caught his breath. “Marsden was murdered with that knife. Do you remember ever seeing it before?” “Never,” the manager replied, turning his gaze from the knife to his own boots and nervously fingering the stem of his wineglass. “Never? That lam absolutely certain of.” “A good hearted fellow,” was Darrent’s mental note as he observed the obviovs embarrassment of the man. “He’s not used to telling lies, but it’s no use. ” “Seen Astray Marsden lately?” he interjected. “No.” “He’s abroad, is he not?” “So they say.” “Ah!” “Good he>vene, sir!” exclaimed Arthur Ridgeway, jumping to his feet “You don’t mean to say you suspect him ? It’s impossible. He wouldn’t do it, I’d stake my right hand on it. He’s a trump, ae white a man as was ever made.” *“And so is his friend, Arthur Ridgeway, ’ ’ Darrent interposed, slapping him on the back. “There, don’t disturb yourself. If he’s innocent, he’ll be able to prove it right enough. ” And, wringing the man’s hand, Herbert Darrent strolled out of the theater and toward the railway station. 7 ' “Arthur Ridgeway recognizes the knife and knows that Astray Marsden has returned,” he muses. “Very well; things are getting closer. Now to see whether young Marsden is worthy of this man’s good opinion or is one of the biggest scoundrels breathing.”

CHAPTER V. DARRENT MAKES AN ARREST. If Herbert Darrent possessed one fault more than another, it was that of being a little too self confident. In the profession that he had chosen to adopt and of which he was decidedly proud he had been phenomenally successful, partly owing to his own perceptive faculties and partly, he owned it himself, to good luck. Although he was always ready to regard his clews from different points of view and test them well before he took decisive action, those cases that he had woven out of a single thread in the past had always proved his deductions to be so correct and well founded that, being still a young man, he was sometimes inclined to be led away by ideas of his own infallibility. He was invariably cautious, uniformly prudent and generally right. What a comfortable feeling for a man until one day the awakening c comes, and comes a little rudely I In order that Policeman Thompson should gain no real inkling of the direction in which his thoughts were tending, he had that morning proved to him conclusively that the murderer could be none other than Astray Marsden and then, just as clearly a few minutes later, that he very probably was not, and now he smiled a quiet smile of amused self satisfaction at the perplexity into which he had thrown that worthy officer of the law. It was a harmless conceit, a little joke of Darrent’s own, that he had frequently indulged in to the amazement of many whom he had chanced to meet—the building up of the most damning evidence from the very slenderest of clews and then, presto, the demolition of the whole thing, the crumbling away of •the entire fabric as he placed a different interpretation upon each piece of evidence, and the whole thing faded into less than nothing 1 A Harmless sport enough this in itself, but a dangerous game when the stake was life or death. The detective, comfortably ensconced in a seat of the train for Chicago, was reading over the notes that he had made in regard to the case and now and again glancing at one or other of the relics of the murder as he wished to confirm a point, whistling through his teeth the while a chorus from the latest comic opera. It was not that Herbert Darrent was in himself callous of death or of murder, but when one’s daily life is given to the constant handling of relics of crime they cease to be objects of awe, lose their grewsome associations and simply become clews that shall assist the chase. The stained knife with which the deed was committed would doubtless freeze the blood of any favored visitor when it was added to a detective bureau’s collection of criminal weapons, but to Darrent it formed only one im-

portant item in the complicated puzzle that he was putting together. He put it together piece by piece. It seemed to him to fit too easily. Everything pointed too much in one direction. What to an ordinarily constituted mind would have looked so exceedingly simple became to Darrent all the more difficult because of that very simplicity. Every bit of evidence that he had collected pointed directly to Astray Marsden as the murderer. There was no getting away from it, for already the knife had been recognized. Astray was condemned by every circumstance and, more strongly than all, by the letter of the murdered man, the stained and crumpled letter that Dobson had tried to conceal. Darrent could hardly keep from half wishing that old Marsden had not left the paper. He felt a little annoyed that what promised to be a big mystery, upon which he could exercise his talents, should turn out to be none and that he, the American Lecoq, should be sent down to discover the murderer, to trace him inch by inch, when a casual acquaintance on the ice had told him at once who had done the deed and a dunder headed fraud of a policeman had tried to conceal the actual paper that accused the murderer. To a clever detective who had hoped for a tangled skein to unnravel, which would add yet another laurel to the many which he wore, it was annoying, and when Darrent arrived in Chicago and took a cab to headquarters he was not in the very best frame of mind and really regarded himself as a little ill used. At 10 o’clock next morning Darrent alighted from a hansom at a corner near the Royal hotel, and as he started to cross the street a tali bootblack accosted him. “Shine, boss?” The detective halted and slowly took off his glove. “It’sall right,” the bootblack rapidly continued in an undertone. “He’s still there. Theater last night; not out since. ” And he accepted with becoming humility the coin which Darrent dropped, at a respectful distance, into a very dirty palm. “Send my card up to Mr. Marsden,” was Darrent’g instruction to the clerk at the Royal hotel, “and say that I must see him at once on important African.business. ’ ’ Astray Marsden, who sat idling over his breakfast and skimming the morning paper, glanced at the card which the smart page boy brought him and listened to the message. “ ‘The Honorable Rupert Grey. ’ Hum I Don’t know the name, and I’m not used to calls from honorables, especially in this country. Very well; show the gentleman up.” “The Honorable Rupert Grey,” he repeated. “Well, it doesn’t matter, after all. I suppose I shall soon learn his business; bought a claim out there, perhaps. But how in the world does he know me or that I’m staying here?” Rising from the table, he stood by the fire, with his elbow on the mantelpiece and his chin resting in his hand, awaiting the arrival of his visitor. Astray Marsden was a fine, well built and tolerably good looking, half Americanized young Englishman, with the figure of a Hercules, but Dame Nature, in one of the many, tricks she is so fond of playing upqp her children, had given him an utterly weak disposition, which was betrayed by a glance at his sac a form of strength, a mind of weakness ; a good fellow, but no backbone; ever ready to procrastinate, never ready to act. He was a man people would turn and look back on in the streets, as he towered above the passersby. The embodiment of strength without, they could not Know how weak and vacillating he was within. He was simply the outcome of one of nature’s little humors that prevent monotony in the human race. 1 Herbert Darrent could scarcely repress a start as he entered the room. Astray Marsden was as he had himself described, as he had pictured him to the life even to the position in which he stood, the very position that the detective had conjured up as he stood in the library at The Grange. It was only, another proof of the wonderful accuracy of his deductions. It reallv seemed that the man had posed to complete me case which the detective from such tiny clews had woven so skillfully around him. “The Honorable Rupert Grey?” said Astray interrogatively. Darrent shrugged his shoulders and, taking the card from Astray’s hand, quietly tossed it behind the fire as he replied: “Herbert Darrent of the Chicago detective bureau. One is obliged to use an alias sometimes. The enemies of the force usually do, so we’re level on that.’’ The effect of his words certainly surprised Darrent, used as he was to surprises under similar situations, for the man seemed to utterly collapse before his eyes and fell back into a chair by the fireside, the very picture of abject terror and despair. “Herbert Darrent, the detective?” Astray gasped. Darrent nodded his head. “You have come to arrest me?” Again the detective nodded. He felt a bit perplexed. This was different from any of his previous captures, where the criminal had either lied or shown fight and attempted to escape.

’•For tne mnraer of my guardian, Josiah Marsden, eh ?” Astray continued, his tongue wetting his parched lips. “Yes, for the murder of Josiah Marsden on Jan. 12 at his country home, which he called The Grange, Norcombe, and I warn you”— “I know what you warn me,” the other gasped—“that whatever I may say may be taken down and used in evidence against me. Then use it. I am innocent. I swear it. I’ve been here, and now the worst has happened, and I shall be hanged—hanged because I can’t clear myself, like many another poor wretch has been because fate was against him. Yes, I shall be hanged because a man in his hatred of me condemned me to death and then went with the devil’s own sin upon his soul to face eternity. He hated me. He always hated me. When I left him that night, he cursed me, and as he died he conceived the vilest, most villainous lie.” “You had better tell this to your counsel. ’ ’ “I want no counsel. The rope is round my neck already. ’ ’ He put his finger- up and loosened his collar, as though he already felt the clinging grip of the hemp. “I can’t escape when he himself condemned me. ’ ’ “Shall I order a cab?” “Why order a cab? Why not handcuff me and drag me through the streets of Chicago ? Let the world see an innocent man who will be done to death to satisfy the law, the bloodhounds of the law, who yelp for vengeance, who must hang some one, because public sentiment shrieks for a victim.” Darrent shrugged his shoulders. He was beginning to feel more at home now that Astray had launched out into this tirade. He had been called a bloodhouird so often by criminals he had traced and captured that it sounded almost like a confession of guilt. “You’re not condemned yet,” he coldly answered. “You’re only arrested

on suspicion. If you can provw an alibi”— “I can’t 1 You know I can’t. “I know nothing of the kind.' “Look here, I’ll tell you all.” “I strongly advise you, for your own sake, to wait until you’re calmer,” Darrent observed, pausing in the work of jotting down in a very prosaic way Astray’s rambling statements. “I mean to tell you all that happened that night, and you can do what you choose with it and bring me to the scaffold if you like. ” “My dear sir, you are talking wildly. The law has no desire to bring you to the scaffold if you’re innocent.” “I swear I am!” “Then, if you are and can put me on the track of the guilty party, so much the better.” Darrent replied, seating himself and preparing to listen to tne weak story of defense, which he was sure would only be like many others that he had so often heard. “On the night of the 10th of January, just a week ago, I returned to Chicago from South Africa.” “And traveled to Barnstaple by the 3 o’clock train next day,” Darrent interjected. “Yes; I hadn’t seen my guardian for two years. When I left him in 1894, it was after a serious quarrel. H% wanted me to marry one girl, and I wouldn’t because I loved another, ’ ’ Astray continued, with a stronger look in his face than he had worn throughout the interview. “Well?”,/

“1 returned to The Grange, and he welcomed me.” “You entered the library and stood on the left hand side of the fireplace, ae you were standing when I came into the room, with your elbow resting on the mantelpiece.” Darrent continued, “and then you quarreled about the lady again. Your uncle asked you if you had outgrown your mad infatuation, and you answered ‘No.’ Then he aeked, ‘Will you marry the wife I have chosen for you?’ and you said, ‘No, no, no I’ and emphasized each word by a blow of your fist on the mantelshelf?” Astray glared at Darrent in astonishment. “How do you know?” he asked. “Because I’m a bloodhound of the law,” Darrent replied, sneering in his excitement. “Then you both got more and more heated in the discussion, and at last the old man, overwrought with excitement, became faint and asked you to reach him some brandy from the sideboard, and you did so.” “Yes; that’s right.” “Presently he grew calmer, and you settled down and talked of other things. ” “Yes, of my travels.” “He became interested and asked you to tell him more. You drew up your chair opposite him and lighted your pipe, meerschaum.” “Yes.” “It wouldn’t draw. You took out your knife and cleared the dry, hard tobacco away from the bottom of the bowl, refilled it and tried again, but the stem was choked. Old Marsden offered you a cigar. You got out a box, a fresh and unopened box, from the sideboard, and pried it open with your knife, a Norwegian knife—this one.” And Darrent suddenly displayed the knife, with the letter “A” burned into it, before Astray’s eyes. “Yes; it’s true. That’s it.” “I know it’s true. I know this is the knife and that this knife killed old Marsden.” “Go on, hang me! You mean to!” “You quarreled again. Old men always get back to the same topic, and he brought you back. You got angry, lost all control of your temper and”— Darrent shrugged his shoulders. “And left. I swear it. I left in a rage, turned the wrong way by mistake”— “And you know the country by heart.” “I was blind with rage. I did not know where I was walking. I walked for miles. Then the snow came down, and I took shelter in a shed and when the storm was over went back to the village hotel.” “At a quarter past 2. Next day Chief Dobson called and showed you the paper. You said you would see him later, and then you fled. ” “Yes; that’s true. At first I meant to come to some arrangement with him —it looked as if he held my life in his hands—but afterward I grew frightened and came to Chicago. You’re only just in time. I intended to start for Africa tomorrow. ’ ’ “You would not have reached New York. ’ ’ “You mean I have been watched?” “Certainly, every step, every movement. Was running away the act of an innocent man?” “I was dazed when Dobson showed me the paper. It took all the life out of me. It doomed me to death. There, in Marsden’s own handwriting, was my condemnation, and so all my courage vanished as soon as he had gone, and I sought refuge in flight. ’ ’ “Without even bidding farewell to the girl you had promised to marry. ’ ’ “I felt I should be pursued. I dared not go to Bideford. Chicago was my only chance, and then, if I could escape, Africa. What more can I say?” “You have said too much already, Mr. Marsden,” the detective answered quietly as he made a note that Astray’s fiancee lived at Bideford. “You should have reserved this statement for your counsel. For the present you must consider yourself under arrest. I think we may as well be going. ’ ’ Tn half an hour the arrest of the Norcombe murderer was known all over Chicago. The papers came out with extras and sensational headlines, and Herbert Darrent’s name was on every one’s lips. The American Lecoq had scored another triumph, and every evening newspaper lauded him to the skies. It was nothing less than their duty to praise one who at a time of stagnation, when there wqs absolutely no news to help the sale of the papers, had placed columns of a great sensation within their grasp. Rarely had a crime received so much publicity. For weeks the excitement was maintained at fever heat and fed by descriptive and imaginative reports. The preliminary police court proceedings filled more columns The great trial was given verbatim day after day. and all the while louder and louder swelled the chorus that sang the praises of that prince of all detectives. Herbert Darrent WB CONTI NUKD.I

“The Honorable Rupert Grey?” said Astray interrogatively.