Detective Fiction Weekly. Vol. 36, No. 4, October 20, 1928

And more important to me was the fact that she made it possible for our International Police and Detective Organization to assist the United States Customs service in arresting and convicting a man and his wife who were doing most of the “go-between” smuggling work between the Paris crooks and the Jewelers’ Exchange on the Bowery.

These two malefactors, including one of the principal members of the fake Bowery exchange, received eight years each in Atlanta.

Six months after these cases were all finished and I was back in Paris on some other work, I came across the old scrub woman of St. Roch, nor did she seem inclined to avoid me. We met early one morning in the great market of the Halles. I asked her what she was doing, and if she was still the scrub woman at St. Roch.

“Ah, no, monsieur,” said she. “You see, I was working there as an excuse and to enable me to come across rich visitors like yourself. Now mademoiselle and I are very good. She runs a small shop on the rue St. Honoré, and will be overjoyed if you will visit us.”

The Crucifix by Richard Keith

The simple strategy of a country sheriff reveals the miracle of cabaret Joe’s charmed life.

I

It certainly promised to be a dull day for Sheriff Bob McKenzie. At nine o’clock that morning he took a bootlegger to the district court to be arraigned; between nine-thirty and ten he read last night’s Lakewood Camera, and after that he went to the post office for the mail, stopping at Harry Dennett’s drug store on his way back for his morning pick-me-up of cherry phosphate.

But now, back in his office in the county courthouse, his big feet cocked on his roll top desk, the sheriff was not sure that the day would be so dull after all. In fact quite the opposite. He pondered long and carefully over a letter and some official-looking papers before he tucked them in his pocket and dropped his feet to the floor.

“Neil!” he called.

Neil Blum, the sheriff’s chief deputy, appeared in the doorway smoking a cigarette.

“Yes, Bob,” he drawled.

“I’ve got to go to Caribou.”

“That so?”

“Yup. If Jim Vivian comes in, tell him we’ll draw that venire as soon as I get back.”

“All right, Bob.”

Sheriff McKenzie clapped his slouch hat on his gray head, lighted a cigar and strolled down the courthouse steps to his car, parked under the gnarled old cottonwood tree that spread its drooping branches over the main street of a little Western town.

He peered up at the blue sky, exhaled a cloud of cigar smoke and waved to a man who stood picking his teeth in a restaurant doorway across the street.

“You can’t beat a Colorado spring, Louie!” he shouted.

“Ain’t you right, Bob,” came a nasal guffaw.

The burly sheriff smiled and, climbing into his car, drove slowly along the main street of the county seat until he came to the mouth of a narrow canon bordered on both sides by overhanging red sandstone cliffs, and, farther back and higher up on the sloping foothills were blue-black spruce trees and prickly pear shrubs. He stepped on the gas and his car shot up the steep canon road.

An hour later he stopped, his car on a hill that ran through the once populous but now desolate and almost deserted mining camp of Caribou. The camp, once the mecca for thousands of fortune hunters, gamblers and adventurers, at present boasted only a few dozen rattletrap frame houses, a pool hall, garage, and a general store.

The sheriff placed a rock under his right rear tire, entered the general store and took the proprietor, a thin, sandy-haired man, behind an iron grating marked “Post Office.” There he talked while the proprietor listened attentively, nodding his head at intervals.

“Yep, Bob,” he said gravely when the sheriff had finished. “They’re livin’ in Eben Teal’s cabin across the creek.”

Sheriff McKenzie gave the storekeeper a cigar and trudged up to the crest of Caribou Hill. There, easily visible to any one who might chance to be in the valley below, he lighted another cigar and glanced clown at a cabin in a clearing on the far side of a narrow creek.

He studied the cabin a minute or two, then dropped down a rocky trail, crossed a pine log bridge over the creek and, walking up to the cabin in the clearing, knocked on the door.

A wisp of a girl not over twenty-one, white-faced and red-lipped, opened the door and looked up at the sheriff. Immediately she took a handkerchief from the sleeve of her shabby gray silk dress and dabbed at her eyes. The sheriff removed his hat.

“Mrs. Joe Carrol?” he asked politely.

The girl nodded.

“Sorry,” said Bob McKenzie, “but I’m the county sheriff and I—”

The girl did not wait for the sheriff to finish. She seized him by the arm and led him around back of the cabin to a mound of fresh earth, at one end of which stood a pine slab inscribed “Joe Carrol.” She sank down on her knees beside the mound and sobbed hysterically.

“Joe’s dead!” she wailed. “Joe’s dead!”