The Pursuit of the House-Boat by John Kendrick Bangs (great novels txt) 📗

say that the gentleman’s remarks rather interest me.”

“Of course they do,” ejaculated Solomon.  “He agreed with you.  That ought to make him interesting to everybody.  Freaks usually are.”

“That is not the reason at all,” retorted Dr. Johnson.  “Cold water agrees with me, but it doesn’t interest me.  What I do think, however, is that our unknown friend seems to have a grasp on the situation by which we are confronted, and he’s going at the matter in hand in a very comprehensive fashion.  I move, therefore, that Solomon be laid on the table, and that the privileges of the—ah—of the wharf be extended indefinitely to our friend on the string-piece.”

The motion, having been seconded, was duly carried, and the stranger resumed.

“I will explain for the benefit of his Majesty King Solomon, whose wisdom I have always admired, and whose endurance as the husband of three hundred wives has filled me with wonder,” he said, “that before starting in pursuit of the stolen vessel we must select a craft of some sort for the purpose, and that in selecting the pursuer it is quite essential that we should choose a vessel of greater speed than the one we desire to overtake.  It would hardly be proper, I think, if the House-boat can sail four knots an hour to attempt to overhaul her with a launch, or other nautical craft, with a maximum speed of two knots an hour.”

“Hear! hear!” ejaculated Cæsar.

“That is my reason, your Majesty, for inquiring as to the speed of your late club-house,” said the stranger, bowing courteously to Solomon.  “Now, if Sir Christopher Wren can give me her measurements, we can very soon determine at about what rate she is leaving us behind under favorable circumstances.”

“’Tisn’t necessary for Sir Christopher to do anything of the sort,” said Noah, rising and manifesting somewhat more heat than the occasion seemed to require.  “As long as we are discussing the question I will take the liberty of stating what I have never mentioned before, that the designer of the House-boat merely appropriated the lines of the Ark.  Shem, Ham, and Japhet will bear testimony to the truth of that statement.”

“There can be no quarrel on that score, Mr. Chairman,” assented Sir Christopher, with cutting frigidity.  “I am perfectly willing to admit that practically the two vessels were built on the same lines, but with modifications which would enable my boat to sail twenty miles to windward and back in six days’ less time than it would have taken the Ark to cover the same distance, and it could have taken all the wash of the excursion steamers into the bargain.”

“Bosh!” ejaculated Noah, angrily.  “Strip your old tub down to a flying balloon-jib and a marline-spike, and ballast the Ark with elephants until every inch of her reeked with ivory and peanuts, and she’d outfoot you on every leg, in a cyclone or a zephyr.  Give me the Ark and a breeze, and your House-boat wouldn’t be within hailing distance of her five minutes after the start if she had 40,000 square yards of canvas spread before a gale.”

“This discussion is waxing very unprofitable,” observed Confucius.  “If these gentlemen cannot be made to confine themselves to the subject that is agitating this body, I move we call in the authorities and have them confined in the bottomless pit.”

“I did not precipitate the quarrel,” said Noah.  “I was merely trying to assist our friend on the string-piece.  I was going to say that as the Ark was probably a hundred times faster than Sir Christopher Wren’s—tub, which he himself says can take care of all the wash of the excursion boats, thereby becoming on his own admission a wash-tub—”

“Order! order!” cried Sir Christopher.

“I was going to say that this wash-tub could be overhauled by a launch or any other craft with a speed of thirty knots a mouth,” continued Noah, ignoring the interruption.

“Took him forty days to get to Mount Ararat!” sneered Sir Christopher.

“Well, your boat would have got there two weeks sooner, I’ll admit,” retorted Noah, “if she’d sprung a leak at the right time.”

“Granting the truth of Noah’s statement,” said Sir Walter, motioning to the angry architect to be quiet—“not that we take any side in the issue between the two gentlemen, but merely for the sake of argument—I wish to ask the stranger who has been good enough to interest himself in our trouble what he proposes to do—how can you establish your course in case a boat were provided?”

“Also vot vill be dher gost, if any?” put in Shylock.

A murmur of disapprobation greeted this remark.

“The cost need not trouble you, sir,” said Sir Walter, indignantly, addressing the stranger; “you will have carte blanche.”

“Den ve are ruint!” cried Shylock, displaying his palms, and showing by that act a select assortment of diamond rings.

“Oh,” laughed the stranger, “that is a simple matter.  Captain Kidd has gone to London.”

“To London!” cried several members at once.  “How do you know that?”

“By this,” said the stranger, holding up the tiny stub end of a cigar.

“Tut-tut!” ejaculated Solomon.  “What child’s play is this!”

“No, your Majesty,” observed the stranger, “it is not child’s play; it is fact.  That cigar end was thrown aside here on the wharf by Captain Kidd just before he stepped on board the House-boat.”

“How do you know that?” demanded Raleigh.  “And granting the truth of the assertion, what does it prove?”

“I will tell you,” said the stranger.  And he at once proceeded as follows.

p. 19II
THE STRANGER UNRAVELS A MYSTERY AND REVEALS HIMSELF

“I have made a hobby of the study of cigar ends,” said the stranger, as the Associated Shades settled back to hear his account of himself.  “From my earliest youth, when I used surreptitiously to remove the unsmoked ends of my father’s cigars and break them up, and, in hiding, smoke them in an old clay pipe which I had presented to me by an ancient sea-captain of my acquaintance, I have been interested in tobacco in all forms, even including these self-same despised unsmoked ends; for they convey to my mind messages, sentiments, farces, comedies, and tragedies which to your minds would never become manifest through their agency.”

The company drew closer together and formed themselves in a more compact mass about the speaker.  It was evident that they were beginning to feel an unusual interest in this extraordinary person, who had come among them unheralded and unknown.  Even Shylock stopped calculating percentages for an instant to listen.

“Do you mean to tell us,” demanded Shakespeare, “that the unsmoked stub of a cigar will suggest the story of him who smoked it to your mind?”

“I do,” replied the stranger, with a confident smile.  “Take this one, for instance, that I have picked up here upon the wharf; it tells me the whole story of the intentions of Captain Kidd at the moment when, in utter disregard of your rights, he stepped aboard your House-boat, and, in his usual piratical fashion, made off with it into unknown seas.”

“But how do you know he smoked it?” asked Solomon, who deemed it the part of wisdom to be suspicious of the stranger.

“There are two curious indentations in it which prove that.  The marks of two teeth, with a hiatus between, which you will see if you look closely,” said the stranger, handing the small bit of tobacco to Sir Walter, “make that point evident beyond peradventure.  The Captain lost an eye-tooth in one of his later raids; it was knocked out by a marine-spike which had been hurled at him by one of the crew of the treasure-ship he and his followers had attacked.  The adjacent teeth were broken, but not removed.  The cigar end bears the marks of those two jagged molars, with the hiatus, which, as I have indicated, is due to the destruction of the eye-tooth between them.  It is not likely that there was another man in the pirate’s crew with teeth exactly like the commander’s, therefore I say there can be no doubt that the cigar end was that of the Captain himself.”

“Very interesting indeed,” observed Blackstone, removing his wig and fanning himself with it; “but I must confess, Mr. Chairman, that in any properly constituted law court this evidence would long since have been ruled out as irrelevant and absurd.  The idea of two or three hundred dignified spirits like ourselves, gathered together to devise a means for the recovery of our property and the rescue of our wives, yielding the floor to the delivering of a lecture by an entire stranger on ‘Cigar Ends He Has Met,’ strikes me as ridiculous in the extreme.  Of what earthly interest is it to us to know that this or that cigar was smoked by Captain Kidd?”

“Merely that it will help us on, your honor, to discover the whereabouts of the said Kidd,” interposed the stranger.  “It is by trifles, seeming trifles, that the greatest detective work is done.  My friends Le Coq, Hawkshaw, and Old Sleuth will bear me out in this, I think, however much in other respects our methods may have differed.  They left no stone unturned in the pursuit of a criminal; no detail, however trifling, uncared for.  No more should we in the present instance overlook the minutest bit of evidence, however irrelevant and absurd at first blush it may appear to be.  The truth of what I say was very effectually proven in the strange case of the Brokedale tiara, in which I figured somewhat conspicuously, but which have never made public, because it involves a secret affecting the integrity of one of the noblest families in the British Empire.  I really believe that mystery was solved easily and at once because I happened to remember that the number of my watch was 86507B.  How trivial and yet how important it was, to what then transpired, you will realize when I tell you the incident.”

The stranger’s manner was so impressive that there was a unanimous and simultaneous movement upon the part of all present to get up closer, so as the more readily to hear what he said, as a result of which poor old Boswell was pushed overboard, and fell, with a loud splash into the Styx.  Fortunately, however, one of Charon’s pleasure-boats was close at hand, and in a short while the dripping, sputtering spirit was drawn into it, wrung out, and sent home to dry.  The excitement attending this diversion having subsided, Solomon asked:

“What was the incident of the lost tiara?”

“I am about to tell you,” returned the stranger; “and it must be understood that you are told in the strictest confidence, for, as I say, the incident involves a state secret of great magnitude.  In life—in the mortal life—gentlemen, I was a detective by profession, and, if I do say it, who perhaps should not, I was one of the most interesting for purely literary purposes that has ever been known.  I did not find it necessary to go about saying ‘Ha! ha!’ as M. Le Coq was accustomed to do to advertise his cleverness; neither did I disguise myself as a drum-major and hide under a kitchen-table for the purpose of solving a mystery involving the abduction of a parlor stove, after the manner of the talented Hawkshaw.  By mental concentration alone, without fireworks or orchestral accompaniment of any sort whatsoever, did I go about my business, and for that very reason many of my fellow-sleuths were forced to go out of real detective work into that line of the business with which the stage has familiarized the most of us—a line in which nothing but stupidity, luck, and a yellow wig is required of him who pursues it.”

“This man is an impostor,” whispered Le Coq to Hawkshaw.

“I’ve known that all along by the mole on his left wrist,” returned Hawkshaw, contemptuously.

“I suspected it the minute I saw he was not disguised,” returned Le Coq, knowingly.  “I have observed that the greatest villains latterly have discarded disguises, as being too easily penetrated, and therefore of no avail, and merely a useless expense.”

“Silence!” cried Confucius, impatiently.  “How can the gentleman proceed, with all this conversation going on in the rear?”

Hawkshaw and Le Coq immediately subsided, and the stranger went on.

“It was in this way that I treated the strange case of the lost tiara,” resumed the stranger.  “Mental concentration upon seemingly insignificant details alone enabled me to bring about the desired results in that instance.  A brief outline of the case is as follows: It was late one evening in the early spring of 1894.  The London season was at its height.  Dances, fêtes of all kinds, opera, and the theatres were in full blast, when all of a sudden society was paralyzed by a most audacious robbery.  A diamond tiara valued at £50,000 sterling had been stolen from the Duchess of Brokedale, and under circumstances which threw society itself and every individual in it under suspicion—even his Royal Highness the Prince himself, for he had danced frequently with the Duchess, and was known to be a great admirer of her tiara.  It was at half-past eleven