A Cool Million (4 page)

“
Begorra
,
we’ve got him,” said Sergeant Clancy, who was in charge of the police squad.

“But I haven’t done anything,”
expostulated
Lem
, turning pale.

“None of your lip, sweetheart,” said
the sergeant. “Will you go quietly or will you go quietly?” Before the poor lad
had a chance to express his willingness to go, the police officer struck him an
extremely hard blow on the head with his club.

Lem
slumped down in his seat and Sergeant Clancy ordered his men to carry the boy
off the train. A patrol wagon was waiting at the depot.
Lem’s
unconscious form was dumped into the “Black Maria” and the police drove to the
station house.

When our hero regained consciousness
some hours later, he was lying on the stone floor of a cell. The room was full
of detectives and the air was foul with cigar smoke.
Lem
opened one eye, unwittingly giving the signal for the detectives to go into
action.

“‘Fess up,” said Detective Grogan,
but before the boy could speak he kicked him in the stomach with his heavy
boot.

“Faith now,”
interfered
Detective Reynolds, “give the lad a chance.” He bent over
Lem’s
prostrate form with a kind smile on his face and said, “Me lad, the jig is up.”

“I’m innocent,” protested
Lem
. “I didn’t do anything.”

“You stole a diamond ring and sold
it,” said another detective.

“I did not,” replied
Lem
, with as much fire as he could muster under the
circumstances. “A pickpocket dropped it in my pocket and I pawned it with a
stranger for thirty dollars.”

“Thirty dollars!” exclaimed
Detective Reynolds, his voice giving great evidence of disbelief.
“Thirty dollars for a ring that cost more than a thousand.
Me lad, it won’t wash.” So saying the detective drew
back
his foot and kicked poor
Lem
behind the ear even
harder than his colleague had done.

Our hero lost consciousness again,
as was to be expected, and the detectives left his cell, having first made sure
that he was still alive.

A few days later,
Lem
was brought to trial, but neither judge nor jury would
believe his story.

Unfortunately, Stamford, the town in
which he had been arrested, was in the midst of a crime wave and both the
police and the judiciary were anxious to send people to jail. It also counted
heavily against him that the man who had posed as a pawnbroker on the train was
in reality Hiram Glazer, alias “The Pinhead,” a
notorius
underworld character. This criminal turned state’s evidence and blamed the
crime on our hero in return for a small fee from the district attorney, who was
shortly coming up for re-election.

Once the verdict of guilty had been
brought in,
Lem
was treated with great kindness by
everyone, even by the detectives who had been so brutal in the station house.
It was through their recommendations, based on what they called his willingness
to cooperate, that he received only fifteen years in the penitentiary.

Our hero was immediately transferred
to prison, where he was incarcerated exactly five weeks after his departure
from Ottsville. It would be hard to say from this that justice is not swift,
although, knowing the
truth,
we must add that it is
not always sure.

The warden of the state prison,
Ezekiel Purdy, was a kind man if stern. He invariably made all newcomers a
little speech of welcome and greeted
Lem
with the
following words:

“My son, the way of the transgressor
is hard, but at your age it is still possible to turn from it. However, do not
squirm, for you will get no sermon from me.”

(
Lem
was
not squirming. The warden’s expression was purely rhetorical.)

“Sit down for a moment,” added Mr.
Purdy, indicating the chair in which he wanted
Lem
to
sit. “Your new duties can wait yet awhile, as can the prison barber and tailor.”

The warden leaned back in his chair
and sucked meditatively on his enormous calabash pipe. When he began to talk
again, it was with ardor and conviction.

“The first thing to do is to draw
all your teeth,” he said. “Teeth are often a source of infection and it pays to
be on the safe side. At the same time we will begin a series of cold showers.
Cold water is an excellent cure for morbidity.”

“But I am innocent,” cried
Lem
, when the full significance of what the warden had said
dawned on him. “I am not morbid and I never had a toothache in my life.”

Mr. Purdy dismissed the poor lad’s
protests with an airy wave of his hand. “In my eyes,” he said, “the sick are
never guilty. You are merely sick, as are all criminals. And as for your other
argument; please remember that an ounce of prevention is worth a ton of cure.
Because you have never had a toothache does not mean that you will never have
one.”

Lem
could
not help but groan.

“Be of good cheer, my son,” said the
warden brightly, as he pressed a button on his desk to summon a guard.

A few minutes later our hero was led
off to the prison dentist, where we will not follow him just yet.

Several chapters back I left our
heroine, Betty
Prail
, lying naked under a bush. She
was not quite
so
fortunate as
Lem
,
and did not regain consciousness until after he had returned home.

When she recovered the full
possession of her faculties, she found herself in what she thought was a large
box that was being roughly shaken by some unknown agency. In a little while,
however, she realized that she was in reality lying on the bottom of a wagon.

“Could it be that she was dead?” she
asked herself. But no, she heard voices, and besides she was still naked. “No
matter how poor a person is,” she comforted herself, “they wrap him or her up
in something before burial.”

There were evidently two men on the
driver’s seat of the wagon. She tried to understand what they were saying, but
could not because they spoke a foreign tongue. She was able to recognize their
language as Italian, however, having had some few music lessons in the orphan
asylum.

“
Gli
diede
uno
scudo
,
it
the lo
rese
subito
gentile,” said one of her captors to the other in a
guttural voice.

“Si,
si
,”
affirmed the other.
“Questa vita
terrena
e quasi un
prato
,
che’l
serpente
tra
fiori
giace
.”
After this bit of homely philosophy,
they both lapsed into silence.

But I do not want to mystify my
readers any longer. The truth was that the poor girl had been found by white
slavers, and was being taken to a house of ill fame in New York City.

The trip was an exceedingly rough
one for our heroine. The wagon in which she was conveyed had no springs to
speak
of,
and her two captors made her serve a severe
apprenticeship to the profession they planned for her to follow.

Late one night, the Italians halted
their vehicle before the door of a Chinese laundry somewhere near Mott Street.
After descending from their dilapidated conveyance, they scanned the street
both up and down for a possible policeman. When they had made sure that it was
deserted, they covered their captive with some old sacking and bundled her into
the laundry.

There they were greeted by an
ancient Chinaman, who was doing sums on an abacus. This son of the Celestial
Empire was a graduate of the Yale University in Shanghai, and he spoke Italian
perfectly.

“
Qualche
cosa
de
nuovo
, signori?” he asked.

“Molto, molto,” said the older and
more villainous looking of the two foreigners. “La
vostra
lettera
l’abbiamo
ricevuto
, ma
il
danaro
no,” he added with a shrewd smile.

“
Queste
sette
medaglie
le
trovero
,
compaesano
,” answered
the Chinaman in the same language.

After this rather cryptic dialogue,
the Chinaman led Betty through a secret door into a sort of reception room.
This chamber was furnished in luxurious oriental splendor. The walls were
sheathed in a pink satin that had been embroidered with herons in silver by
some cunning workman. On the floor was a silk rug that must have cost more than
a thousand dollars, the colors of which could well vie with the rainbow. Before
a hideous idol, incense was burning, and its heady odor filled the air. It was
evident that neither pains nor expense had been spared in the decoration of the
room.

The old Chinaman struck a gong, and
ere its musical note died away an oriental woman with bound feet came to lead
Betty off.

When she had gone, Wu Fong, for that
was the Chinaman’s name, began to haggle with the two Italians over her
purchase price. The bargaining was done in Italian, and rather than attempt to
make a word-for-word report of the transaction I shall give only the result.
Betty was knocked down to the Chinaman for six hundred dollars.

This was a big price, so far as
prices went in the white slave market. But Wu Fong was set on having her. In
fact it was he who had sent the two to scour the New England countryside for a
real American girl. Betty suited him down to the ground.

The reader may be curious to know
why he wanted an American girl so badly. Let me say now that Wu Fong’s
establishment was no ordinary house of ill fame. It was like that more famous
one in the Rue
Chabanis
, Paris, France—a “House of
All Nations.” In his institution he already had a girl from every country in
the known world except ours, and now Betty rounded out the collection.

Wu Fong was confident that he would
soon have his six hundred dollars back with interest, for many of his clients
were from non-Aryan countries and would appreciate the services of a genuine
American. Apropos of this, it is lamentable but a fact, nevertheless, that the
inferior races greatly desire the women of their superiors. This is why the
Negroes rape so many white women in our southern states.

Each one of the female inmates of Wu
Fong’s establishment had a tiny two-room suite for her own use, furnished and
decorated in the style of the country from which she came. Thus, Marie, the
French girl, had an apartment that was
Directoire
.
Celeste’s rooms (there were two French girls because of their traditional
popularity) were Louis the Fourteenth; she being the fatter of the two.

In her suite, the girl from Spain,
Conchita
, had a grand piano with a fancy shawl gracefully
draped over it. Her arm-chair was upholstered in horsehide fastened by large
buttons, and it had enormous steer horns for arms. On one of her walls a tiny
balcony had been painted by a poor but consummate artist.

There is little use in my listing
the equipment of the remaining some fifty-odd apartments. Suffice it to say
that the same idea was carried out with excellent taste and real historical
knowledge in all of them.

Still wearing the sacking into which
the Italians had bundled her, our heroine was led to the apartment that had
been prepared against her arrival.

The proprietor of the house had
hired
Asa
Goldstein to decorate this suite and it was
a perfect colonial interior. Antimacassars, ships in bottles, carved whalebone,
hooked rugs—all were there. It was Mr. Goldstein’s boast that even Governor
Windsor himself could not have found anything wrong with the design or
furnishings.

Betty was exhausted, and immediately
fell asleep on the poster bed with its candlewick spread. When she awoke, she
was given a hot bath, which greatly refreshed her. She was then dressed by two
skillful maids.

The costume that she was made to
wear had been especially designed to go with her surroundings. While not
exactly in period, it was very striking, and I will describe it as best I can
for the benefit of my feminine readers.

The dress had a full waist made with
a yoke and belt, a gored skirt, long, but not too long to afford a very
distinct view of a well-turned ankle and a small, shapely foot encased in a
snowy cotton stocking and a low-heeled black slipper. The material of the dress
was chintz—white ground with a tiny brown figure—finished at the neck with a
wide white ruffle. On her hands she was made to wear black silk mitts with
half-fingers. Her hair was worn in a little knot on the top of her head, and
one thick short curl was kept in place by a puff-comb on each side of her face.

Breakfast, for so much time had
elapsed, was served her by an old Negro in livery. It consisted of buckwheat
cakes with maple syrup, Rhode Island Johnny cakes, bacon biscuits, and a large
slice of apple pie.