New York (N.Y.) -- Social life and customs -- Fiction; Short stories
“Well, we three made a sneak around the edge of town so as not to be
seen. We got tangled in vines and ferns and the banana bushes and
tropical scenery a good deal. The monkey suburbs was as wild as places
in Central Park. We came out on the beach a good half mile below. A
brown chap was lying asleep under a cocoanut tree, with a ten-foot
musket beside him. Mr. Wahrfield takes up the gun and pitches it into
the sea. ‘The coast is guarded,’ he says. ‘Rebellion and plots ripen
like fruit.’ He pointed to the sleeping man, who never stirred. ‘Thus,’
he says, ‘they perform trusts. Children!’
“I saw our boat coming, and I struck a match and lit a piece of
newspaper to show them where we were. In thirty minutes we were on
board the yacht.
“The first thing, Mr. Wahrfield and his daughter and I took the grip
into the owner’s cabin, opened it up, and took an inventory. There was
one hundred and five thousand dollars, United States treasury notes, in
it, besides a lot of diamond jewelry and a couple of hundred Havana
cigars. I gave the old man the cigars and a receipt for the rest of the
lot, as agent for the company, and locked the stuff up in my private
quarters.
“I never had a pleasanter trip than that one. After we got to sea the
young lady turned out to be the jolliest ever. The very first time we
sat down to dinner, and the steward filled her glass with
champagne—that director’s yacht was a regular floating
Waldorf-Astoria—she winks at me and says, ‘What’s the use to borrow
trouble, Mr. Fly Cop? Here’s hoping you may live to eat the hen that
scratches on your grave.’ There was a piano on board, and she sat down
to it and sung better than you give up two cases to hear plenty times.
She knew about nine operas clear through. She was sure enough _bon ton_
and swell. She wasn’t one of the ‘among others present’ kind; she
belonged on the special mention list!
“The old man, too, perked up amazingly on the way. He passed the
cigars, and says to me once, quite chipper, out of a cloud of smoke,
‘Mr. O’Day, somehow I think the Republic Company will not give me the
much trouble. Guard well the gripvalise of the money, Mr. O’Day, for
that it must be returned to them that it belongs when we finish to
arrive.’
“When we landed in New York I ’phoned to the chief to meet us in that
director’s office. We got in a cab and went there. I carried the grip,
and we walked in, and I was pleased to see that the chief had got
together that same old crowd of moneybugs with pink faces and white
vests to see us march in. I set the grip on the table. ‘There’s the
money,’ I said.
“‘And your prisoner?’ said the chief.
“I pointed to Mr. Wahrfield, and he stepped forward and says:
“‘The honour of a word with you, sir, to explain.’
“He and the chief went into another room and stayed ten minutes. When
they came back the chief looked as black as a ton of coal.
“‘Did this gentleman,’ he says to me, ‘have this valise in his
possession when you first saw him?’
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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