Robert Welles Ritchie

“ Did I know enough—have a big enough grip on truth to go boldly to Doctor Tokonoku and demand the restoration of the packet? That would be to accuse him of murder, and my chain of circumstantial evidence was not strong enough to withstand any sudden twist he might put upon it. Where would I stand if I couldn’t bluff him into surrendering what I thought he had—if he defied me to fasten murder and theft upon him?
Two curiously ground lenses in a gold frame and a single black hair sixteen or eighteen inches long—all my evidence! ”

“ Mather, missing the wallet after Madatoya’s clever ruse of the day of the deck games, had suspected the thief, awaited his opportunity, and then struck the Japanese to the heart in a desperate moment of encounter. But why, then, his hysterical outpouring to me and Captain Kendall of the robbery tale and his naming of Madatoya as the man he suspected of the theft; why the placing of himself deliberately in the path of a pointing finger? ”

“ About the saloon and the smoke room, the two oases of life in the desert of the ocean dark, rallied the Siberia’s passengers; in the one to listen to bad music and chatter, and in the other to eddy around the card tables. Mather, whose eyes bothered him increasingly, went to bed early with a bad headache. I climbed into a cave of rugs on the deck forward to nurse a brier and moil over once more the endless chain of the ship’s mystery. ”

“ Was not hers the hand that was slipped through Mather’s opened port;-her arm being so short that she had to push her head through also to reach the washstand—and was it not her blunder that had left her father's pince-nez in the grip of dead fingers?
Those chilled eyes of fear I had seen in the crack of the stateroom door seemed to answer this question. Some tremendous urge of filial duty, such as is ingrained in. the Japanese woman above all women in the world, had whirled this mite of femininity into the grim business of killing. Japanese legend is replete with just such instances. ”

“ But how could cold facts be avoided? Was it conceivable that there was anybody else among the Siberia's passengers—or even among the crew—who possessed a motive for murdering the Japanese so strong as Mather’s, or who had any motive whatever for doing Madatoya harm? To what other man besides the young secretary of legation was given the knowledge that in the leather wallet stolen from him lay secrets of tremendous value in a certain quarter? ”

“ Was all this hysteria of his—the visit to my stateroom and the subsequent repetition of his tale to the captain—mere play acting to cover a grisly back trail of murder, and had the cunning intelligence of a slayer overlooked the one inevitable telltale circumstance said to exist to confound every taker of life—in this instance the pince-nez? Of course, I had known this man but twelve days, and I might have been deceived by his personable surface character. One does not sound the depths of a man in twelve days. ”

“ No light, Burke! The dark-the dark is better. Where’s the couch?"
I took his hand to guide him to the divan that ran the width of the deck stateroom which I, fortunately, had by myself; the hand was cold, and a twitching came down from the elbow to make all the fingers jerk and flex. Though I could not see Mather’s face, this clawlike hand, the whistling of his breath, told me that the man was in the last extremity of fear or nervous exhaustion under strain. I had him on the divan in an instant, could see the vague shape of his head and shoulders outlined against the lighter dark of my window. ”

“ Find the murderer of Madatoya? Hadn’t I done so? It was credible—almost as moral certainty—that the one who would steal Mather’s pince-nez with the evident intention of leaving them as damning evidence in the fingers of the slain man was the same who had plunged a short sword into the back of the secret-service agent. Here was Doctor Tokonoku wearing Mather’s specs in an attempt to cover the loss of his own—a ruse which might have succeeded had he not risked safety for his chess passion; his artificial eyes were those found in the murdered man’s grip ”

“ How, then, could little Tokonoku have been guilty of a blunder which marked him as a murderer when he had taken such infinite precaution as to provide, by the stolen pince-nez, evidence of Mather’s guilt? Wasn't this very blunder sufficient proof of the participation of a second individual in the murder? Some one, say, who wasn’t aware of Tokonoku’s provision of the stolen pince-nez, or who didn’t give him time to arrange the substitution of Mather’s glasses for his own after the blow had fallen.
That long black hair stuck in the hinge of Mather’s port! A Japanese woman’s hair. ”

“ Granting this hypothesis, where was that packet of state-department secrets upon which hung the safety of the American secret-service agent in Japan and the honor of Pierce Mather? Where but in the possession of Doctor Tokonoku and his daughter? Why one Japanese had murdered another to gain possession of something profitable to their common country-this was absolutely beyond guessing. ”

“ Where foreigners are concerned every ricksha man, every house servant is a potential spy; espionage seems to be ingrained in the nature of the lower-caste Japanese. Well I remember the petty annoyances of observation to which I was subjected when I first took up my duties in Tokyo. Mather’s words instantly brought to my mind comprehension of the American agent’s peril. A man detached by very virtue of his calling from his government’s protection—one walking blindfolded amid the pitfalls of an Oriental jungle. ”

“ Why, you’re mad, man!” I could not help exclaiming. “You—a stranger in a land full of the most impossible contradictions and surprises—you try single-handed, or even with my help, to find a packet small enough to be carried in a wallet? Absurd! Better go straight to the ambassador and make a clean report of it all. No blame can be attached to you. You were not lax in your duty. Besides, the ambassador must be prepared to shape his position to meet any move the Japanese government may make in the light of the information it gains from the stolen papers.”
Mather groaned. ”

“ You, Burke, will be the only person in Japan who will know that such a man as Pierce Mather debarked from the steamship Siberia, because from the moment the first landing boat touches the pier at Yokohama until such time as the communications from the secretary of state to the ambassador are laid in his hands with seals unbroken Pierce Mather will cease to exist to all but you. ”

“ Mather, on principal I’d say you would be foolish to take this matter to the captain. If you had no suspicion to work on it would be simply letting another person into the secret of your loss to do so. But I think what you’ve told me about the jujutsu lesson justifies you in having a very well-founded suspicion of this fellow Madatoya and that the captain will have excuse to exercise his authority in a search of the man’s stateroom and person, at least. Even if we are wrong the gravity of the case and the strength of the evidence will excuse the mistake. ”

“ With a quick catching of the breath I noted that the secretary of legation had on either side of his rather sharply bridged nose an indented mark—the mark of pince-nez. In my brief ship acquaintance with him I had not noticed before that he was a user of glasses; such a minor detail of a man’s appearance naturally would not register one time in a hundred with the ordinary individual meeting so many people as I do in the course of affairs. I looked at my friend’s waistcoat, hoping to see pinned there the little spring coil many slaves of the pince-nez prefer to the ear loop ”

“ The Japanese government keeps one or more secret agents at Washington—that’s regular enough, for every country does it and we have ours abroad. One of these agents learns you are going to Tokyo—perhaps he even knows definitely what he would reasonably suspect: that the state department takes the opportunity of your going to send by you certain messages which it would not care to intrust to cable or mail. Of course it is his duty to accompany you and watch his chance to lift that valuable information. It does not take a very sharp eye to see, day by day, the shape of a wallet inside your coat ”

“ After the finish of the three-legged race I dropped into a chair up forward by the saloon door, and this chap Madatoya came and sat down beside me. He congratulated me on winning one of the prizes, and our talk ran to athletics in Japan. He told me about the training the schoolboys get and how all candidates for the police force are put through a jujutsu course. I asked him some questions about how a jujutsu wrestler could stand up before an expert boxer, and he, laughing, offered to demonstrate a defense against fists. ”

“ His face was like a war mask of old Japan, made more hideous by the coarse black hair that streamed down all around it even as far as his breast. Captain Kendall stood beside him, in one hand a heavy brown envelope splashed with red sealing wax. Miss Tokonoku was not of the group.
“Ah, Mr. Burke, you’re back!” came the_captain’s dry greeting, faint under the roaring in my ears. “I see you’ve matched that hair you found on Mather’s port.” He jerked his finger toward the fearsome figure of the bound man. “It isn’t everybody who’ll tackle a Japanese wrestler. I congratulate you.” ”

“ I cautioned. “This isn’t proof that Doctor Tokonoku killed Madatoya; it only tends to fix the theft of your glasses on him. Besides, Captain Kendall feels himself thoroughly competent to do the police work on this ship”—this a savage whack at Kendall’s bumptiousness on my part—“and there’s no reason why we shouldn’t let him. Perhaps before this time to-morrow you and I can turn over the slayer of Madatoya to the skipper, neatly bound and tagged—and have your precious papers back as well. Now just set those lenses back in place, and I’ll take them down to Doctor Tokonoku.” ”

“ Captain Kendall’s weather-stained face was breaking into an eager smile. “I don’t want to whistle to false signals again,” he exclaimed, “but I should say we want to look for a man with no lenses in his eyes.”
“Big contract, captain,” Doctor Sparks warned. “Nearly three hundred men on this ship, counting Chinos, and you can’t tell by looking at a man’s eyes whether——”
“We can cut it down to the men in the saloon,” I put in. “Sailors and steerage passengers are not given to gold-rimmed pince-nez.”
"Limit it further to the Japanese in the first cabin,” Mather added. ”

“ I volunteered, and I moved over to the couch where Mather sat and began pawing behind some of the dead man’s effects piled there.
“The matter of searching for evidence is entirely the duty of the ship’s officers, Mr. Burke,” Captain Kendall stopped me with a sharp tone of command. “I think you may assist Mr. Mather to his stateroom now. Surgeon Sparks and I will take charge, and we would rather act alone. I must command you both that you say nothing of what you have seen and heard here to any of the other passengers. ”

“ None but a wrestler in Nippon allows his thatch to grow like a woman’s.
“Lock this fellow up in the brig until we want him!” Kendall ordered a bos’n. “And, Mr. Burke, who was the Japanese woman we saw running away from here when we answered your cry for help?”
“Miss Tokonoku,” I answered.
“Go fetch her to my quarters,” the skipper directed one of the stewards. “Bring her father, too.”
Very weak and shaky from the throttling I had experienced at the hands of the wrestler, I followed Kendall and Sparks to the former’s cabin behind the chart room. ”

“ I said, trying to put into my voice an element of hope I did not feel. “We’re five days out of Yokohama and much can be done in that time. You can be sure your reports won’t be destroyed; the thief wants them for the information they contain, but he must also save them to lay before his superiors—visible proof of their contents. Of course we can guess the nationality of the thief.”
"But there are thirty-odd Japanese gentlemen aboard,” Mather protested. “And we took on some forty or fifty coolies at Honolulu, didn't we? How can we accuse one at random?” ”

“ The legation does not know that I have been appointed to fill the vacancy; does not know, in fact, that any one has been assigned by the department in Washington. The department has a way of boggling along and filling positions in its own good time without advance notification of its actions. So the American ambassador at Tokyo does not know that Pierce Mather is coming to join his staff and does not know, either, that Pierce Mather is supposed to be bringing with him an important communication from the secretary. ”

“ Her father’s that little chap who carries a chess-problem board around in his pocket and picks at it twelve hours a day. As well suspect the Queen of England climbing that bench outside and slipping any arm in this porthole to snatch a pair of glasses. I think we can disregard this hair, Mr. Burke, unless we find a woman aboard with more of its kind on her head and a character to fit the part of murderess better than the little Tokonoku lady. ”