Miss Lonelyhearts and a Cool Million Page 3

  “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.

  8

  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 Dir
ectoire. 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.

  (Wu Fong was a great stickler for detail, and, like many another man, if he had expended as much energy and thought honestly he would have made even more money without having to carry the stigma of being a brothel-keeper. Alas!)

  So resilient are the spirits of the young that Betty did the breakfast full justice. She even ordered a second helping of pie, which was brought to her at once by the darky.

  After Betty had finished eating, she was given some embroidery to do. With the reader’s kind permission we will leave her while she is still sewing, and before the arrival of her first client, a pockmarked Armenian rug merchant from Malta.

  9

  Justice will out. I am happy to acquaint my readers with the fact that the real criminal, Mr. Wellington Mape, was apprehended by the police some weeks after Lem had been incarcerated in the state penitentiary.

  But our hero was in a sorry state when the Governor’s pardon arrived, and for a while it looked as though the reprieve had come too late. The poor lad was in the prison infirmary with a bad case of pneumonia. Weakened greatly by the drawing of all his teeth, he had caught cold after the thirteenth icy shower and the fourteenth had damaged his lungs.

  Due to his strong physique, however, and a constitution that had never been undermined by the use of either tobacco or alcohol, Lem succeeded in passing the crisis of the dread pulmonary disease.

  On the first day that his vision was normal, he was surprised to see Shagpoke Whipple go through the prison infirmary carrying what was evidently a bedpan and dressed in the uniform of a convict.

  “Mr. Whipple,” Lem called. “Mr. Whipple.”

  The ex-President turned and came towards the boy’s bed.

  “Hello, Lem,” said Shagpoke, putting down the utensil he was carrying. “I’m glad to see that you’re better.”

  “Thank you, sir. But what are you doing here?” asked Lem with bewildered surprise.

  “I’m the trusty in charge of this ward. But what you really mean, I take it, is why am I here?”

  The elderly statesman looked around. He saw that the guard was busy talking to a pretty nurse and drew up a chair.

  “It’s a long story,” said Mr. Whipple with a sigh. “But the long and short of it is that the Rat River National failed and its depositors sent me here.”

  “That’s too bad, sir,” Lem said sympathetically. “And after all you had done for the town.”

  “Such is the gratitude of the mob, but in a way I can’t blame them,” Mr. Whipple said with all the horse sense for which he was famous. “Rather do I blame Wall Street and the Jewish international bankers. They loaded me up with a lot of European and South American bonds, then they forced me to the wall. It was Wall Street working hand in hand with the Communists that caused my downfall. The bankers broke me, and the Communists circulated lying rumors about my bank in Doc Slack’s barber shop. I was the victim of an un-American conspiracy.”

  Mr. Whipple sighed again, then said in a militant tone of voice: “My boy, when we get out of here, there are two evils undermining this country which we must fight with tooth and nail. These two archenemies of the American Spirit, the spirit of fair play and open competition, are Wall Street and the Communists.”

  “But how is my mother?” interrupted Lem, “and whatever became of our house? And the cow—did you have to sell her?” Our hero’s voice trembled as he asked these questions, for he feared the worst.

  “Alas,” sighed Mr. Whipple, “Squire Bird foreclosed his mortgage and Asa Goldstein took your home to his store in New York City. There is some talk of his selling it to the Metropolitan Museum. As for the cow, the creditors of my bank sheriffed her. Your mother disappeared. She wandered off during the foreclosure sale, and neither hair nor hide of her was seen again.”

  This terrible intelligence made our hero literally groan with anguish.

  In an effort to cheer the boy up, Mr. Whipple kept on talking. “Your cow taught me a lesson,” he said. “She was about the only collateral I had that paid one hundred cents on the dollar. The European bonds didn’t bring ten cents on the dollar. The next bank I own will mortgage nothing but cows, good American cows.”

  “You expect to keep a bank again?” asked Lem, making a brave attempt not to think of his own troubles.

  “Why, certainly,” replied Shagpoke. “My friends will have me out of here shortly. Then I will run for political office, and after I have shown the American people that Shagpoke is still Shagpoke, I will retire from politics and open another bank. In fact, I am even considering opening the Rat River National a second time. I should be able to buy it in for a few cents on the dollar.”

  “Do you really think you can do it?” asked our hero with wonder and admiration.

  “Why, of course I can,” answered Mr. Whipple. “I am an American businessman, and this place is just an incident in my career. My boy, I believe I once told you that you had an almost certain chance to succeed because you were born poor and on a farm. Let me now tell you that your chance is even better because you have been in prison.”

  “But what am I to do when I get out?” asked Lem with ill-concealed desperation.

  “Be an inventor,” Mr. Whipple replied without a moment’s hesitation. “The American mind is noted for its ingenuity. All the devices of the modern world, from the safety pin to four-wheel brakes, were invented by us.”

  “But I don’t know what to invent,” said Lem.

  “That’s easy. Before you leave here I will give you several of my inventions to work on. If you perfect them we will split fifty-fifty.”

  “That’ll be great!” exclaimed Lem with increased cheerfulness.

  “My young friend, you don’t want me to think that you were in any way discouraged by the misfortun
es that befell your asked Mr. Whipple with simulated surprise.

  “But I didn’t even get to New York,” apologized Lem.

  “America is still a young country,” Mr. Whipple said, assuming his public manner, “and like all young countries, it is rough and unsettled. Here a man is a millionaire one day and a pauper the next, but no one thinks the worse of him. The wheel will turn, for that is the nature of wheels. Don’t believe the fools who tell you that the poor man hasn’t got a chance to get rich any more because the country is full of chain stores. Office boys still marry their employers’ daughters. Shipping clerks are still becoming presidents of railroads. Why, only the other day, I read where an elevator operator won a hundred thousand dollars in a sweepstake and was made a partner in a brokerage house. Despite the Communists and their vile propaganda against individualism, this is still the golden land of opportunity. Oil wells are still found in people’s back yards. There are still gold mines hidden away in our mountain fastnesses. America is…”

  But while Shagpoke was still speaking, a prison guard came by and forced him hurriedly to resume his duties. He left with his bedpan before Lem had an opportunity to thank him properly for his inspiring little talk.

  Helped not a little by the encouragement Mr. Whipple had given him, our hero mended rapidly. One day he was summoned to the office of Mr. Purdy, the warden. That official showed him the pardon from the Governor. As a parting gift, he presented Lem with a set of false teeth. He then conducted him to the prison gates, and stood there awhile with the boy, for he had grown fond of him.

  Shaking Lem’s hand in a hearty farewell, Mr. Purdy said:

  “Suppose you had obtained a job in New York City that paid fifteen dollars a week. You were here with us in all twenty weeks, so you lost the use of three hundred dollars. However, you paid no board while you were here, which was a saving for you of about seven dollars a week or one hundred and forty dollars. This leaves you the loser by one hundred and sixty dollars. But it would have cost you at least two hundred dollars to have all your teeth extracted, so you’re really ahead of the game forty dollars. Also, the set of false teeth I gave you cost twenty dollars new and is worth at least fifteen dollars in its present condition. This makes your profit about fifty-five dollars. Not at all a bad sum for a lad of your age to save in twenty weeks.”