Flynn’s Weekly Detective Fiction. Vol. 27, No. 2, September 24, 1927

“Better yet. Of course it was a fraud. Harold Ward took his mother to New Hampshire yesterday morning.”

They stepped into the laboratory.

“Well, Mr. Mac, we thought we had lost you for a little while. Most of us went to police headquarters with the prisoners. Clapp and Bolton stayed with the officers who discovered Ed Castle. They found him in the back alley, shot through the throat. Some one brought a priest before he died, and he confessed that he had shot Wesley Stone.”

“It was sheer luck how Mr. Steele learned about you, though,” said Clapp.

“Yes,” the investigator explained, “I was at headquarters waiting to use the telephone when a man named Keady reported his car stolen from Oliver Street. He told the police that a certain Kendall McArthur had engaged him to drive to South Wyndham at midnight. Of course he gave the number of his car.

“Marvin certainly burned the road for us this time. Not the way you do, Mr. Mac, yet rather fast. Beyond Hillbury I noticed a fence broken on a curve, and I thought I’d investigate.”

“We just saw our friend Muir up here,” Somers offered. “Did you see him?”

“I did,” McArthur answered.

“By the way,” remarked Steele, “when I examined your car in the cornfield, I found this note lying on the front seat cushion.”

On a sheet of note paper had been penciled hastily:

Dear Mr. Mac:

I am leaving this with your driver and I hope he will give it to you. Don’t go into that house to-night. They know what you are, and their going to kill you.

I shouldn’t tell you this. I should hate you, because you made a lot of trouble for me. The cops say I must leave town for awhile or else take a rap. But the doc tells me I’m in for the moka finish pretty soon, anyway. I don’t hate you, because your the only man that’s ever treated me with respect.

I don’t hate you. Honest, I don’t. Good-by.

Evelyn.

Muir was given five years, despite all the eloquence of Keenan. Harrison received two years. The Chinese was sentenced to one year; and the assistant on the top floor to nine months. The patrons escaped with fines or defaulted bail. Not such a big result, considering all the effort and hardship involved; but the owner of Harrison’s house broke the gambler’s lease, and the joint on Warrington Street is closed forever.

Special Officer McNulty has been sent to a beat in Hyde Oaks, a remote district of the city. With him is Officer Harvey.

As for McArthur, he is still playing the game. What game? Any game that’s hard enough. He stands for thirty minutes at a time before a glass, blinking at himself, adjusting and readjusting his necktie to the tiniest fraction of an inch. And from the pennant above his mirror the chief smiles down at him.

The Two Mrs. Thomas by Robert W. Sneddon

A Story of Fact

It had been better had Mrs. Thomas opened her door to a tigress with four legs than this one with two.

* * *

Richmond is one of the most beautiful of many beauty spots near London. Poets have sung of Richmond Park and the wide sweep of the Thames spanned here by a noble five arch bridge.

On the terraces which rise one above the other, with their rows of houses overlooking the river, elderly gentlemen and ladies sun themselves in summer and look down on the river alive with lovers in punts, canoes and other river craft. These spectators are mostly retired tradesmen, old maids and widows, who struggle along on tiny incomes and make a brave showing on very little.

Mrs. Thomas lived in a semi-detached two-story villa in Park Road, which she rented from her next door neighbor, Miss Ives. She had a nice little garden in which she pottered about with her plants and flowers, and everything was quite “genteel,” though there was a horrid public house, “The Hole in the Wall,” just a little way off.

Mrs. Thomas was a widow whose two marriages had brought her just enough to live on comfortably, though foolishly she led her neighbors and tradesmen to believe her fortune was greater than it really was.

She dressed well in black silk, with a cameo pin, wore a number of rings, a gold watch, and had other jewelry and some silver plate. Her relatives thought her eccentric and flighty, for she loved changes and refused to stay put. She never stayed long in one house but had to be up and away.