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  “But, Crosby, many of Feldock’s biggest stories on the Despatch were garnered in by him, so I understand, solely through his acquaintance in the Frisco underworld. Does he know the ropes of this town sufficiently to enable him to deliver the same kind of goods?”

  “No, he does not. Chicago is an absolutely new field to him. For a couple of months he will have to put in his time, as you say, learning the ropes of a new arena. He has been perfectly willing to be an ordinary leg man on small stuff so that he can orientate himself, and this is the manner in which we have agreed to employ him for the present. But I have a plan by which we can nevertheless use Marvin Feldock while he is digging up the reportorial acquaintanceship which will make him a high-priced man in value as well as salary. It devolves about Jeff Darrell. Darrell, Mr. Brayton, has of course been our star man thus far. We have been foolish, as I now see, in featuring his stories and particularly in running them under his name, for I am about to shove him into the darkness to make way for the more brilliant illumination cast by Feldock. In other words my plans are to use Jeff Darrell’s tremendous acquaintanceship in both the underworld and the upper world, together with his keen and alert mind, and his snappy writing style, to evolve a weekly crime or mystery story — oftener, if others break — and run these weekly stories in the Call under Marvin Feldock’s name.”

  “You mean that Jeff Darrell will unearth Feldock’s stories for him for a few months, run down the details, write them up, and that Feldock’s name will go over them?”

  “Precisely. It is the only way, so far I can see, that we can immediately begin to utilize Feldock’s name. Darrell will do the work — and Feldock will get the credit.”

  “Urn,” commented Brayton. There was a dubious tone in his voice. “But will Darrell stand for it, Crosby? Will he stay with us under those conditions? I’ll warrant he’s rather proud of those personally signed stories of his.”

  “I know blamed well he will,” said Crosby confidently. “You see, Mr. Brayton, at the time I arranged to feature Darrell’s stuff for the first time in his career, I protected us by that contract which, while it doesn’t prevent him from leaving us and going over to another paper, does prevent the use of his name as a feature writer on any other paper for a year. Considering that the Call was helping to make him, this was just and fair. Now as for his going over to another paper, times are mighty bad for a newspaper man just now. A goodly number of old-timers and crack men are walking Market Street, looking for berths. I doubt that, as good a man as he is, he can land a berth just now on any Chicago newspaper without the legal right to use the name which we’ve boomed up for him. As to our plan involving him and Feldock, it’ll be a case of root-hog-or-die for him.”

  Brayton nodded slowly.

  “I can appreciate the chagrin that he’ll probably feel, but after all, his specialty is too much the same as Feldock’s to allow the use of the two names. And the Call itself is the main thing to consider. Every man on it must subserve his own interests to those of the paper. You’re right, Crosby. This is the way to handle the Marvin Feldock scoop for a few months until Feldock gets firmly set in Chicago. Now let’s have a look at the letter from the Despatch — I know Emerick, the managing editor, well — worked with him years ago on the Denver Times when we were both cubs.”

  He scanned the letter which Crosby took from a file. “Yes,” he nodded. “I can see from his words that Feldock is a bit touchy and difficult to handle. Well — we can afford to use gloves, I think, for the use of that famous name.” He handed the paper back. “You wanted me to meet him before going on home, did you?”

  “Yes,” said Crosby rising. “Before I send him out on a story.” He pushed a button. A white-faced youngster of an office and copy boy appeared. “Benny, ask Mr. Feldock to step into my office at once.”

  CHAPTER III

  The Blonde Beast of Bremen

  THE individual who stepped across the threshold of Crosby’s private office a moment later was a keen-looking man of about thirty-five, whose blue eyes fringed with dark lashes and black hair described plainer than a genealogy the Irish derivation of the name Feldock. His dress was the dress of the Englishman, however; the typical tweed cloth with the extreme Norfolk belt and pockets. About his features, however, was an unmistakable look — the supercilious — even disdainful — expression which proclaimed a man whose journalistic achievements had been acclaimed to the world with much tooting of horns and blazoning of trumpets. He stood at attention inside the threshold of Crosby’s office till the latter spoke.

  “Mr. Feldock, I want you to meet Mr. Brayton. Mr. Brayton is the chief of the Call. Mr. Brayton, this is Mr. Feldock, formerly of the San Francisco Despatch.”

  The big man arose and shook the hand of the newcomer to the gathering. “Very glad to meet you, Mr. Feldock. Just have a chair if you’re not busy. We’re talking over some plans concerning you.” He drew forth from his vest pocket two cigars, and proffering one to Feldock took the other. In a trice the third chair had been drawn up, Crosby had closed the door of his office, and the cigars were going.

  “I have been telling Mr. Brayton,” Crosby began, “of the clause in your contract with the Despatch which expires to-morrow night, June seventeenth, and thereafter allows your name to appear on any paper east of the Rockies. This means that the time has come for us to begin to slap your name across the first page — to announce the arrival of Marvin Feldock, of the Frisco Despatch. Now as I suggested to you, Mr. Feldock, I think that the best man on the staff to unearth your particular type of story and develop it will be Jeff Darrell. Darrell has a most phenomenal acquaintanceship in Chicago which brings him many exclusive inside tips on Chicago stories, as well as a terse writing style very similar to your own. As to yourself, I want you just to spend the next two months getting in touch with this city of ours and its people.”

  Feldock was listening intently. He nodded in assent. Then he spoke.

  “If you’ll pardon the comment of an outsider, Mr. Crosby, I think young Darrell has what is commonly known as the swelled head. Just the bit of featuring he’s had on the Call, according to the back files which I’ve been looking over, has put his head clear in the clouds. He’s too young a man to be having his name on the front page. It will do him good to have it cut off a while.”

  Crosby’s face showed his dislike at having his editorial policies criticized in the presence of his chief. But evidently wary of antagonizing a very touchy specimen of the genus special writer, he made no retort. Brayton spoke, between puffs on his cigar.

  “You were telling me, Crosby, that Jeff Darrell fell down utterly on this Blonde Beast story. What was the complete story? And in what way did he muff it? It’s given the best of us to fall down now and then in this game.”

  “But not in the way Darrell fell down, according to what I hear around the office,” commented Feldock with a sneer in his voice. He inclined his head toward Crosby, to show that he was only commenting, and did not wish the center of the floor.

  Crosby crossed his legs and leaned back in his swivel chair. “The Blonde Beast, Mr. Brayton, was — to be more explicit — the Blonde Beast of Bremen. His right name is Carl von Tresseler. From what data we have on him, he was born of itinerant circus people in Germany. The ‘von’ appears to have been inherited from some past progenitor, granting that was not spuriously inserted at some point on the family history by a family more or less criminally inclined. So much for that. Von Tresseler’s parents, as I have said, were circus people in Germany. One grandfather served time in a Hamburg prison for swindling. Von Tresseler himself was brought up by his parents for the stage, and in his youth was an itinerant juggler and ventriloquist. He is known to have toured the American vaudeville houses with a German troupe when a young man in his teens, and in this way is supposed to have learned to speak very good English; as good, in fact, as the French which he picked up similarly in the provinces of Flanders. Evidently he had decided to branch out from the ventriloquist and pe
rformer’s stage in Germany when the war broke out, for on that date he was under an indictment for a rather ingenious swindling scheme, the details of which do not concern us. The war, coupled with restitution on his part, appears to have closed this affair up, followed by his induction into the German army together with the rest of Germany’s man power. Once in the army, he showed marked military ability chiefly in the manner of utter brutality in discipline. It appears, also, that either through luck or pull of some sort he was never sent to the front, but instead, step by step, became head of the great Innesbaden prison camp. You’ve heard of it, I’m sure — the most brutal camp in Germany — the place to which wounded Allied prisoners dreaded most to be sent.”

  Brayton nodded. “Unless I mistake the name Lieutenant Von Tresseler for Lieutenant Von Somebody Else — it seems just barely familiar to me — wasn’t he the man who was assaulted a number of times by desperate prisoners on account of his cruelty?”

  “He is the one,” agreed Crosby. He paused. “At any rate, the next we hear of Von Tresseler was when the German empire turned into the first republic. He was well in the fore — but this time where the gold was being handled — and it seems that he got his hands on a goodly sum of it and fled Germany with his loot into Switzerland, thence across to New York. On account of the quick crumbling of the political forces of that first republic, there was no machinery nor person to prosecute him, no method of indicting him, no treaty under which to extradite him; and so, due to the hopeless demoralization of Germany, he escaped scot-free. In New York he spent his stealings with a lavish hand, with the result that we again hear of him twice — the first time when he is mixed up once more in a clever swindling game whose nature shows that the man was not only a paragon of bestial cruelty, but had in him the faculty — the genius, we might call it — of the world swindler. The second time was of course the recent story — the murder of Matilda Heinemann.”

  “So the Blonde Beast story was a murder, eh?” queried Brayton. “Only the barest details — none of them even completely corroborated — were in the late-news column of the paper which I carried aboard the Constantino as I embarked for Naples. And this same story, Crosby, is the one which Jeff Darrell muffed?”

  “Yes, or rather an important development of it,” assented his managing editor. “But here are the details. Von Tresseler had met Matilda Heinemann in New York, and finding that she was an heiress and a spinster evidently made court to her. It appears, however, that she was not the obtuse German maiden lady he took her for; that in some way she became conversant with some swindling scheme he was fostering, for what does he do, either in desperation or rage, but stop her threatened exposure of him by strangling her to death in her apartment on One Hundred and Fifty-fourth Street, and then, in order to cover up his crime, jamming her body into a trunk and checking the trunk, fully locked and strapped, out on the Twentieth Century Limited before her absence should be discovered. He fled westward, evidently intending somehow to get rid of the body here in Chicago, but as luck would have it the trunk failed to get out on the same train with himself, a New York brakeman tumbled it off a platform in the Grand Central depot, and opening up — there was the body of Matilda Heinemann, the fiancée of Carl von Tresseler of Bremen.”

  “Did they beat his train with their wire to Chicago?” asked Brayton.

  “They wired immediately,” replied Crosby, “and we were fortunate to get a hot tip — the only tip — before any other paper. Our friend, Inspector Notman over at the detective bureau, remembered us as usual. Carl von Tresseler beat the Chicago police by no more than one minute, for sixty seconds after they drove up to the depot in a rapid taxicab the Twentieth Century had pulled in, he had disembarked and had vanished in the crowds. Thus it came about that I sent Jeff Darrell out on the story, for on account of some very odd circumstances the story belonged to him more than any other man on the staff.”

  Brayton appeared slightly puzzled by Crosby’s cryptic remark, but appeared willing to wait until Crosby should be willing to explain it. Instead he asked: “And what results did he get?”

  “Although the police failed utterly to pick up a clue, Darrell had his usual devil’s own luck, for he located no one else than the cabby himself who had carried the murderer from the depot — an old cabby who it appears had a twenty-four-carat grudge against the police — and by means of that engaging smile of his and that friendship which seems to reach out everywhere, got out of the man the full details of Von Tresseler’s movements as he fled the depot. The cabby had carried him to a South Side hotel. Instead of notifying the police, Darrell ascertained first that the room on the top floor occupied by the man had no fire escape, then prepared to make an attempt to get a look at the occupant first — as Darrell himself claims, merely to get the sound of the latter’s voice. So he went to the room and knocked. A more or less indistinct voice inside asked who it was, and Darrell, pretending to be an electrical inspector, said that he wanted to look over the electrical fixtures inside. The man told Darrell he was taking a bath and asked him to wait outside a moment until he could get some clothes on.” Crosby smiled a grim, mirthless smile.

  “And Jeff Darrell is waiting yet, Mr. Brayton. For Von Tresseler, in those few moments before Darrell woke up, called the police, and had the door broken in, got out a trapdoor in the roof of the old-fashioned bathroom, crossed the roofs a full block and came down to the street through the back porches of a tenement building, leaving behind him a valise and papers which proved indubitably that the murderer of Matilda Heinemann of New York had been located — and lost again.”

  Brayton shook his head slowly.

  “That seems to me to be a bad fluke, Crosby. The Blonde Beast must have taken alarm on that electrical-fixture stuff. Why in the devil did Darrell have to have a look at the man first — much less get the sound of the latter’s voice as you state?”

  “Because,” declared Crosby, “Darrell has heard that voice under strange circumstances once before in his life. In other words he has himself met Carl von Tresseler, and he has reason to remember the man — to hate him with all his soul. I’m inclined to believe that if anybody has any regrets to-day that the Blonde Beast was lost in those few precious minutes, it is Jeff Darrell himself. But so long as we’ve got to call him in to arrange this vicarious writing arrangement between him and Feldock, suppose I let him give you his own side of the case first.” He rang the bell. Benny Taylor appeared. “Ben, send in Jeff Darrell.”

  CHAPTER IV

  Chi Tsung Liang on the Wire

  JEFF DARRELL, hammering away at lightning speed on his typewriter in the city room of the Call, writing the closing lines of a small story, was quite oblivious to the shrill cry of Benny Taylor in his ear that “old Cross-beam wants to see you,” until the thin, wizen-faced boy had twice repeated it. Then, bringing the rapid oscillation of the carriage of his machine to an abrupt stop, he turned to the boy who repeated the message, and a minute later arose from his chair and wended his way toward the door of the inner sanctum.

  Much to his surprise, as he entered the room, his hand flicking away from his forehead the tangled mass of brown hair which persisted in straying over it, he saw the form of no other than William G. Brayton, the man who controlled the Call, and Marvin Feldock, the famous reporter-detective of the Despatch whom Crosby had been evidently keeping as some sort of surprise on the public these last three weeks.

  For Brayton he had always felt a liking, even though the big man held only a formal acquaintanceship with the employees of the paper other than the department heads, and seldom honored them with more than a brief bow in passing. Feldock he frankly did not like, for the man carried with him always an air that proclaimed to the others of the Call staff that he was of the journalistic élite, forced only by circumstances to waste his genius upon a paper published neither in the East-eastly nor the West-westly! Crosby, from his chair by his desk, was the first to speak.

  “Come in, Darrell. Close the door behind you.
Draw up a chair. We’re just discussing you. Also the Blonde Beast case.”

  The Blonde Beast case! It was like the thrust of a knife to Jeff Darrell, that reminder of the day when he could himself have effected the capture of the worst-hated man in America as well as an atrocious and cold-blooded murderer, and had allowed his quarry to give him the laugh. He essayed a bitter smile, but it resulted only in a grimace — a mirthless distortion of the face muscles. He sat down. Brayton was the first to speak.

  “Mr. Darrell, Mr. Crosby has been telling me about the local stories of the past month, and particularly about your failure to land this Von Tresseler whom they call the Blonde Beast of Bremen. It has been more than interesting, quite naturally, considering that the Call came so close to delivering the goods and then fell down. Now may I ask just why you took such useless chances on a man locked in a top-story room which contained a roof trap which allowed his escape, when you might have landed him with the help of the police?”

  “Well,” replied Darrell frankly, “it was for the honor of the Call. I knew if I called in the precinct station nearest the hotel, that the story, if story of the capture there was to be, would be common knowledge of every sheet in town. Frankly, I wanted definitely to be sure I had located the Blonde Beast, then have the arrest made by our friend, Inspector Notman, from downtown here, thus getting a big scoop for the paper. I dared not go ahead, however, without making some slight efforts to substantiate my belief that I had located Carl von Tresseler, and not some other man.” He shrugged his shoulders. “I admit now, however, that I made a serious mistake.”