Читать книгу A Stolen Name; Or, The Man Who Defied Nick Carter - Carter Nicholas - Страница 3

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Bare-Faced Jimmy, so-called gentleman crook, expert cracksman, and a master criminal in any department of the underworld to which he cared to devote his attention, leaned backward in his chair until it tilted against the wall behind him, blew a cloud of Perfecto smoke ceilingward, and remarked:

“It will be the easiest thing in the world, Juno. If the objective point were a fortune—even a moderate one; if the thing contemplated included the theft of a single dollar, in cash or in estate, it would be different; but it doesn’t. No, it does not. Really, Juno, if one pauses to think seriously about it, from that point of view, it is almost laughable.”

“That is why I have been smiling at the idea ever since you mentioned it,” returned the woman, applying a lighted match to a cigarette with all the grace and abandon of one who had been long accustomed to the practice.

“As a matter of fact,” Jimmy continued, as if he had not heard her remark, “if I do decide to undertake it, the only things that I steal will be a lot of debts; and who ever heard of stealing debts? Eh?”

“There certainly is novelty in the thought,” was the quick reply. “If some gracious person had done you the honor to steal yours, long ago——”

“Oh, yes, my dear; that is quite true; only we won’t go into the ‘long ago’ matters, just now, if you please.”

The woman shrugged her shoulders and picked up from her lap a book that she had been reading. For a time she devoted her attention to the pages, and then her companion broke the silence again.

“I think I’ll do it,” he said decidedly. “I see great possibilities in the adventure. Juno, will you be good enough to lay that book aside for a few moments, and to give me your undivided attention?”

“Gladly,” she replied, “if you will condescend to speak out plainly, instead of confining yourself to generalities.”

“All right, my dear; here goes. In the State of Virginia, bordering on the Potomac River, and washed by the waters of two other streams—which by courtesy are also called rivers—lies an estate which consists of something more than eight hundred acres. The title to that estate is in the name of James Ledger Dinwiddie, who——”

“Who, at the present moment lies dead in the adjoining room in this house,” she interrupted him; but he only chuckled as he responded:

“On the contrary, he is seated here before you, now; he is talking with you; he is referring to that dear old plantation in dearer old Virginia which, ever since the days of Bushrod Washington, has been called by the name of Kingsgift—the Lord only knows why, unless some dead and forgotten king gave it as a present to the original Dinwiddie. Henceforth, my dear, I am Ledger Dinwiddie, owner of an estate in Virginia that is mortgaged for more than it was ever worth; for much more than it would ever bring at a forced sale. I am also the undisputed owner of a choice collection of debts, of an old colonial house that is now falling into ruins, of numerous other buildings that are in various stages of dilapidation, and of numerous other things of the same sort, all of which are not only entirely worthless, but are really much worse than worthless; and there you are.”

“Will you tell me, Jimmy, just what you expect to gain, then, by this remarkable adventure, as you call it?” the woman asked quizzically.

“Decidedly I will tell you. I gain the one thing I need most, just now—a name. My own—but I have never told you what my own really was, have I? No; and there is no use going into that, now—but my own name has been so long abandoned that I have forgotten the use of it; especially the application of it. The name that has been given me by the police of various localities, isn’t sufficiently high-sounding; and——”

“No. Bare-Faced Jimmy is hardly a name to have engraved upon one’s cards,” she interrupted him.

“——and, as I was saying, James Duryea, who has been called Bare-Faced Jimmy, is popularly supposed to lie buried on an island in the Sound, just off South Norwalk, Connecticut. I would much rather that the police should not be undeceived about that, and so we will let Jimmy Duryea, cracksman, lie there and rot; eh?”

“If you please. I don’t mind. A rose by any other name, you know.”

“Yes; I know. And that reminds me. In the future I will thank you to address me as Ledger. Eh? By Jove! Juno, that chap in there was the most unbalanced ledger I ever saw in my life. If he hadn’t sort of come to, during the last hours of his life, and told all he ever knew about himself and his people, this idea would never have occurred to me.”

“It looks to me like a fool idea, anyhow,” she commented, with a toss of her beautiful and shapely head, crowned as it was with a wealth of raven-black hair. Juno was undeniably a beautiful woman—a fact of which she was perfectly well aware.

“Fool idea?” he retorted. “Not much. It’s a splendid one. It is the idea of my life, and it is worth about three or four times as much as it would have been had the chap in there left a million in money and unencumbered estates behind him when he died. I would rather have his debts than a fortune that he might have left. Really, I don’t think that I would have undertaken the thing if he had left property that was worth anything.”

“Why?”

“Why, to what, Juno?”

“Why is the name and the identity of that poor fellow worth more to you, so, than if he had left a fortune behind him?”

“Why? Can you, my dear, ask such a question as that?”

“I do ask it.”

“Then know this: Nobody will want what Dinwiddie has left behind him. No one will be desirous of shouldering his debts; and consequently nobody will step forward to dispute the rights that I shall assert belong to me. Word will travel around the neighborhood, and throughout the county, that Ledger Dinwiddie has come back; then there will be a few convulsive shrugs of a few shoulders, a score or so of knowing winks—and that will be about all. On the other hand, if there was property, there would be a hundred disinterested persons, neighbors and otherwise, who would find a chance to doubt if I were the real Dinwiddie returned to what had once been his own.”

“But what do you get out of it, Jimmy?”

“I get a name, my dear; an old, old name; an older lineage, than which there is none better in the Old Dominion; an ancestry that is unimpeachable; a reputation which stands for gentility, and which has stood for gentility for generations; a career, all made in a moment, but which is, nevertheless, three centuries old; an established place in the world which none can deny me—Heaven knows that I need one just now; and a safe refuge in which I can hide myself for the rest of my natural life, without the trouble of attempting to disguise my face, or my mannerisms.”

“All the same, Jimmy, there are plenty of people in the world, honest men and crooks, policemen and judges on the bench, lawyers and ex-convicts, who will quickly recognize the features of Jimmy Duryea, if those features happen to be seen.”

“Juno, that is just the point; they won’t. Ledger Dinwiddie will bear a strong resemblance to the late lamented Bare-Faced Jimmy, to be sure, but nobody will ever think of associating the two; never. Besides, if the necessity should arise, Ledger Dinwiddie could establish his identity beyond question. People could be found who knew him when he was a boy.”

“And you might even claim, if you choose, that the defunct Jimmy was a distant relation who went to the bad in his early youth, and who had been cast off by ‘the family,’” said Juno.

“Precisely. Not at all a bad idea.”

“Well, what then?”

“Everything then, Juno. Like Monte Cristo, the world will be mine. I will only have to reach out my two hands and take it. And with my accomplishments I do not anticipate that it will be a difficult task to do so.”

“Probably not—with your accomplishments.”

“It will never occur to any of those Virginians, up there, that a man would be ass enough to lay claim to a worthless estate, encumbered by unnumbered debts; to a broken fortune—and all that. They will accept me on the spot, and without asking a question.”

“Yet, Jimmy, you do not in the least resemble that dead man in there.”

“I know it. What of it?”

“There may be a few persons left alive, at or near Kingsgift, who will remember the young man who left his home in Virginia, so long ago.”

“Bah! Nonsense, my dear. They will look at me and exclaim. ‘How you have changed!’ or, ‘You’re right smart altered since you went away, Ledger.’ But to offset that, there will be dozens who do not remember at all how Dinwiddie really looked, who will declare, ‘Why, boy, I’d have known you anywhere. You ain’t a mite changed since you was a leetle chap, so high.’ That is the way of the world, Juno.”

“But what will you do with the name, and with the mortgaged estates, when you get them?” Juno asked lightly. “Considering that part of it as settled, for you generally accomplish whatever you undertake to do, what will you do with it all?”

“I’ll make your fortune and mine. I’ll square Dinwiddie with the people around there, and tell them all what a great man I intend to make of myself. I’ll pay off a year’s interest on the mortgages and other debts, and make out new papers, just to give them confidence in me. When that is done, I’ll be ready for the real work of—succeeding.”

“Succeeding at what?”

“At making a fortune.”

“And you really think that you can do it?”

“With such a name, such a lineage, such a reputation for gentility? Of course I can do it.”

“It doesn’t strike me that people will be any more eager to lend you money——”

“Lend me money? I don’t want them to do that.”

“Then how——”

“I shall take it. If they accept me, they must take the consequences.”

“Do you mean that you will do it in the old way?”

“Sure. What other way do I know?”

“What if you should get caught at it, Jimmy?”

“Caught at it? Ledger Dinwiddie caught at burglary? At thievery? What an absurd idea! Oh, no, I won’t get caught at it. Not at all. And the world will open itself wide, inviting me to take it. I’ll have a winter home for you, in Washington; I’ll get those fools to send me to Congress, and—— You’ll see!”

Such was the beginning of the “Great Coup” undertaken by James Duryea, alias Bare-Faced Jimmy, the gentleman crook, alias Howard Drummond, one-time gentleman, graduate of Rugby and Cambridge, ex-officer in the dragoons, and ex- a lot of other things which had come to him by inheritance.

But Jimmy had run the gamut of his short, but varied career.

Nothing had been too swift for him to overtake it, to distance it, and finally to wear out its usefulness, and finally his own, too.

Once, according to Nick Carter’s records, the man had really tried to reform; “had made a stab at it,” as he expressed it; but the old temptations had been too strong for him; the “call of the contest” had proved too alluring. The desire to pit his own wit against the representatives of law and order had overcome the better self that reposed somewhere within the strange complexity of this man, and he had gone again, deliberately, into the life of the underworld.

The woman who was seated upon the chair opposite, and to whom his conversation was addressed, had proved herself to be the only person of whom Jimmy had ever stood in the least in awe.

The name by which Jimmy addressed her, was one that he had bestowed upon her himself.

She had never been known by that name to any other person than this man who had just determined to steal a birthright, although there were half a dozen aliases by which she had been known to the authorities of Paris, Vienna, Berlin, St. Petersburg, and London; and under each one of those half dozen aliases she had earned reputations which filled pages of private but official records of the secret police of five different nations.

Her dossier had been written down in five languages—and more; and now, as Juno, she had started out to carve a new career for herself, with the aid of Jimmy, whom she respected for his wit, his daring, for his past achievements and the promise he gave of attempting new and greater ones.

These two represented the masculine and the feminine of all that is masterful in the life of rogues; they were the perfection of the imperfect, if the expression may be used.

Jimmy was a handsome man, and one who would be noticeable in any company. He was distinguished in appearance, Chesterfieldian in his manners, graceful in his motions—a somebody in everything that he did, educated, refined by instinct and by early training; he was a graduated crook in every part and branch of the “profession.”

And Juno? Draw her picture for yourself. It cannot be too strongly, too perfectly outlined.

She was of that type of beauty which only the Latin races achieve, and it had been vouchsafed to her in the superlative degree. Her hair was black, beautiful, and there were masses of it. Her complexion was almost fair, but there was just enough of the olive tint to give to the red blood in her cheeks an added warmth. Her eyes were large, luminous, dreamy, or ablaze with eagerness or passion as the case might be. Her figure was perfect, her hands and her feet were “dreams for the contemplation of an artist,” her every motion was lithe, lissome, sinuous, catlike in the sense that she could not have been lacking in grace had she made the effort. Indeed, there was something about Juno’s every act which suggested the black leopard—and that was one of the aliases by which she had one time been known in Paris. Reduced to five words, Juno’s description was entirely comprehended by the expression: She was a beautiful woman.

Juno’s antecedents were no less aristocratic than Jimmy’s.

She, too, had been born and bred within the exclusiveness of the blue-blooded. Her father and her mother had worn titles of distinction; she had been given all the “advantages” when she was a child, and a young woman—she was that, still. She spoke many languages, and spoke each one so perfectly that it was a matter of indifference to her which one she made use of.

In the long-ago, when both had been respectable children, she and Jimmy had played together. Many years after that, when Jimmy had gone to the bad, and Juno had achieved an international reputation in her various lines, they met again—to drift apart as they had done in those early days.

After that there was another lapse of years during which Jimmy had visited South Africa, had married, had drifted to New York with his wife, had been sent to Sing Sing, had been divorced, and then, according to official reports concerning him, had died and was buried on an island in Long Island Sound. During these years Juno had served the Nihilists of Russia, the Socialists of Germany, the secret societies of other nations—during which she had been a spy, also, for these several governments, and had won an international reputation, and become almost everything that a beautiful woman should not be.

But the continent of Europe, and the British Isles, had grown too hot for her. She came to America—and almost the first person she encountered after leaving the steamer that brought her here, was Bare-Faced Jimmy. And this happened within the year that followed upon his supposed death.

“Two souls with but a single thought,” although by no means a sentimental one, might well have applied to them; the single thought being their desire to victimize the rest of mankind.

“Let’s strike up a partnership, Juno,” Jimmy had said to her. “Together, with your craftiness and my skill, nothing can stop us. Let’s strike up a partnership;” and she had replied:

“Very good, Jimmy; but a minister, not a lawyer, shall draw the contract.”

And so they were married—strangely enough, under their right names, too.

Jimmy had more than twenty thousand dollars cached away in a secret hiding place; Juno possessed half as much more. The marriage occurred in the late fall, and they went South, to one of the Florida beaches, where they secured a villa, and where they passed what was really a honeymoon.

When issuing from their cottage door one morning, they had found the insensible form of a man upon their doorstep.

One may be a crook, a burglar, and all that, and still possess much kindness of heart; two may be so, and these two were.

Together they carried their unconscious burden inside the cottage, summoned the one servant who waited upon their wants, and attended to the stricken man.

They did not ask where he came from, nor how it happened that he had fallen upon their doorstep in his present condition; and he could not have informed them, then, if the questions had been asked.

But they ministered to him; they kept him there and cared for him, making no inquiries concerning him, since by doing so they would have attracted attention to themselves, which was the one great thing they desired to avoid.

But the stricken man had arrived at the end of his journey. He had fallen upon their doorstep to die, and die he did, after three weeks, easily, painlessly, composedly, and tenderly cared for until the last, by these two bits of flotsam.

And there had been some hours of clearness of vision, of return to memory, before death claimed its prize. He had told them his name, and all about himself—and also that nowhere in the world did there remain one person who was nearly enough related to him to care whether he lived or died; that he was the last of his race, in the direct line, and that he bore an old and honored name upon which there had never been a blemish, save that one which poverty imposes.

Ledger Dinwiddie died in the spare bedroom of that cottage inhabited by these two products of the underworld, cared for during his last hours by two as uncompromising crooks and rogues as ever lived to prey upon mankind.

And so, Ledger Dinwiddie did not die, but lived on again in the person of Bare-Faced Jimmy, who adopted the name and the lineage of his uninvited guest, and who went forth, presently, to assume all the prerogatives which the possession of that name could bestow upon him.