Diamond Tolls - Raymond S. Spears

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The man was as described by the customer. He had run his skiff into the bank in a little eddy, where the fisherman, when he passed down with some fish, about 11 o'clock, saw it moored to a stake. The skiff was gone when he returned about noon.

      With a good description of the skiff, word was sent up and down the river, and the skiff was found in a boat livery at Misquaw.

      "I'll be back Tuesday after it," the man had said, taking his suitcase and going to the train. He had bought a ticket to Cincinnati, but in Cincinnati no trace of him could be found.

      ​"He's an old timer," the detectives decided. "He knew about that customer, and he took in the cash—more than five thou'! Now how did he know about the customer? Easy enough! He rapped Goles over the head, carried away his stock and itinerary, and he knew it was safe to go to Warsaw———"

      The case was pigeonholed until they could trace out some of the men who were abroad who might pull such a job as that. But the matter remained pigeonholed only a week.

      From Warsaw arrived Judge C. Wrest, the purchaser of diamonds, limping and whimpering:

      "They stole my diamonds!" he wailed to Manager Grost. "A fellow came in and pulled a gun on me; he tied me to a chair, and he moved me up to the fire-place, and—and he put my feet against the coals. I couldn't stand it! I like to died—and I was muzzled so's I couldn't holler. I had to give 'em to 'im—most a hundred thousand I paid for 'em. But—but he didn't get 'em all!"

      "You told the officers?" Wrest was asked, for he had seen no mention of the theft in the newspapers.

      "Not a word!" the old man shook his head. "I don't know what to make of it!"

      "What kind of looking men held you up?"

      "Only one, suh—just an ornery looking fellow, kinda middling, you might say, and just a purring kind of ​voice. Not much of a man! Some no 'count white trash, I bet, but mean and trifling. I paid a hundred thousand for them. Here's the slips, how much they weighed and what I paid, but they's a sight more valuable now'n when I bought 'em."

      "What'd you keep that much around you for, anyhow?" Grost asked, exasperated to think that any one would have so much wealth in so exposed a place.

      "I—I 'lowed that nobody knowed about it, suh." Wrest shook his head. "I—I never 'lowed it'd leak out. Theh's been profit in diamonds! I aimed to sell, directly, and I'd be good interest ahead—I saw it a-coming! Now look 't me!"

      He grimaced, but added, cunningly:

      "But I got some left!"

      "You want us to look after those stones?"

      "Yes, sir, I'll spend some money to get them back—I brought this up, to kind of guarantee it—there's two thousand here. You boys look around, and see what you can find. It's kind of funny, that Gole feller turning up missing, and then they got me, right along! You look into it!"

      And with that, the quaint old customer of diamond merchant and detective agency hobbled out of the office, leaving the detective to the contemplation of the case, as stated accurately by the old man.

      ​

      Chapter 2

       Table of Contents

      CHAPTER II

      MANAGER GROST called in a trusty newspaper reporter who favoured the Agency on occasion, and who was in turn favoured when a good story broke that was safe to print. This reporter was Charles Urleigh, a slim, tall, blue-eyed bundle of nerve and nerves. He was a free lance, with a string of papers that reached from Nashville and Knoxville to Chicago and St. Louis and New York—trade journals and occasional articles in noted weekly semi-newspapers supplying him with his pocket money, and helped him meet the demands of his brokers when wheat broke or certain favourite industrials had a "temporary relapse."

      To Urleigh, Grost made a clean breast of the whole affair. The Agency was stumped. It did not know which way to turn. There was a certain tone to the double diamond robbery which had no ear marks familiar to the Agency's archives. They could not recall a single gem salesman specialist who would go to a salesman's private customer and sell him a line of the stolen diamonds and thus—perhaps—obtain information as to where the old fellow hid his hoard of gems.

      ​"That's just what happened, though," Grost told Urleigh. "They pulled a double play that time, and look what they got! Two hundred thousand—and they've made a clean getaway with it! Poor Goles—he's a deader now. Yet there's just one chance about him: If he survived the rap they gave him on the head, he may be somewhere around, though he's not in any hospital here or down in Warsaw. I believe he's in the Ohio, but if he is, I've an uncommonly strong hankering to see the corpse."

      "That's a real story!" Urleigh smiled. "It's all mine?

      "Yes, sir. Don't spring it here, though. Make the headline Warsaw, or Louisville, or Columbus, so that you don't mix us up in it. The police are working, you know; it'll be plumb amusing to me to hear their voices over the telephone asking me how long they've been working, when our local reporters have brought them the news from Chicago and Pittsburgh that Obert Goles disappeared between Cincinnati and Warsaw with a hundred thousand in diamonds, and that Warsaw's mysterious Mr. Wrest was held up and tortured and forced to give over another hundred thousand. Oh, I'm waiting for that!"

      The two laughed. Sheriffs, chiefs of police, and U. S. Secret Service workers often read the newspapers to find out what they were doing, now that Urleigh ​was working with Manager Grost of the National Agency.

      "I think I'll just marshal several stories," Urleigh smiled. "I'll mention despatches from Pittsburgh, Louisville, Columbus, Marietta—I always like to run Marietta into a live story, because they run to literature in that town, with more book stores than any other town down the Ohio—and I'll run my big story from Warsaw. I've been down there a few times, and I know the lay of the land. What's the town marshal's name, now? I'm going to have him very close mouthed on the subject and also the Sheriff of Gallatin County———"

      Grost laughed aloud.

      "That's just what I want you to do—have everyone busy! That'll worry the thieves, and they'll be watching the local authorities and the hooks in sheriffs' offices and police headquarters which carry the rewards offered for bad men. We're not to figure in it at all. Not a word about the National Agency. We're asleep, and our snores are deep. Possibly I may find it necessary to deny that we know anything whatever about the matter. Just to give it all to you—not for publication—we had a man after Goles; our man trailed him right up to the Fresco Restaurant door, and then dropped out of the case on orders. From that moment, noon, Goles has not been seen ​by any one who knew him. Volcon, who trailed him, says he was the most difficult man he ever saw to keep in sight—he would have made a perfect shadow, he made so little impression on any one. Why, jewellers here who knew him well could not give us the colour of his eyes, his height, weight, kind of clothes he wore, or a single detail of his appearance. We tried that, just to satisfy ourselves that Volcon was right."

      "No picture of him?"

      "Not a picture. They ransacked his apartment in New York, and found a lot of queer junk about gems and jewellery but not so much as a silhouette of him."

      "Well, much obliged, Grost! See you later—I want to get this written in six different ways, fifteen hundred words per each way, between now and 10 o'clock to-night. So long!"

      Thus the mighty engine of publicity—general publicity—was set in motion in the case of the Goles mystery and the Wrest robbery. Urleigh did his work well, at from five to nine dollars a column, and from the Mississippi to the Atlantic. Having the story well distributed as a news sensation, he followed it up with second-day stories, and the theories of rather surprised and wondering sheriffs and police and detective chiefs, who obtained their first information from Urleigh's own tales.

      Then

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