Evening Star Newspaper, June 22, 1930, Page 89

THE. SUNDAY STAR, WASHINGTON, D. C, JUNE 22, : s = did Reeder give his name than he was ushered into the plainly furnished roora whe-e the su- perintendent sat. It was not unnatural that Eastleigh should have as his assistant in the good work so fa- mous an organizer as Mr. Arthur Lassard. Mr. Lassard’s activities in the philanthropic world were many. A broad-shouldered man with a jolly red face and a bald head, he had survived all the attacks which come the way of men engaged in charitable work, and was not particularly impressed by a recent visit he bad had from Harry Carlin. “I don’t wish to be unkind,” he said, “but our friend called here on such a lame excuse that I can't help feeling that his real object was to secure a sheet of my stationery. I did, in fact, leave him in the room for a few min- utes, and he had the opportunity to purloin the paper if he desired.” “What was the excuse?” asked Mr. Reeder, and the other shrugged. “He wanted money. At first he was civil and asked me to persuade his uncle; then he grew abusive, said that I was conspiring to rob him-—I and my ‘infernal charities!” He chuckled, but grew grave again. “The situation is mystericus to me,” he said. “Evidently Carlin has committed some crime against Mr. Eastleigh, for he is terrified of him!” “You think Mr. Carlin forged your name and secured the money?” The superintendent spread out his arms in despair. “Whom else can I suspect?” he asked. Mr. Reeder took the forged letter from his pocket and read it again. “I've just ’phoned to Mr. Eastleigh,” Mr. Lassard went on. “He is waiting, of course, to hear your report, and if you have failed to make this young man confess his guilt, Mr. Eastleigh intends seeing his nephew tonight and making an appeal to him. I can hardly believe that Mr. Carlin could have done this wicked thing. though the circumstances seem very suspicious Have you seen him, Mr Reeder?” “I1 have seen him,” said Mr. Reeder shortly. *Oh, yes. 1 have seen him!” MR. ARTHUR LASSARD was scrutinizing his face as though he were trying to read the conclusion which the detective had reached, but Mr. Reeder's face was notoriously expres- sionless. He ofiered a limp hand and went back to the Eastleigh office. The interview was short and on the whole disagreeable. T never dreemed he would confess to you.” sajd Mr. Eastleigh with 1l-disguised contempt. “Barry needs somebody to frighten him, and, 1930. my God! I'm the man to do it! I'm seeing him tonight.” A fit of coughing stopped him and he gulped savagely from a little medicine bottle that stood on his desk, “I'll see him tonight,” he gasped, “and I'll tell him what I intend doing! I've spared him hitherto because of his relationship. But I'm through. Every cent I have goes to charity I'm good for 20 years yet, but every penny—— He stopped. He was a man who never dis- guished his emotion, and Mr. Reeder, who understood men, saw the struggle that was going on in Eastleigh's mind. “He says he hasn't had a chance. I may have treated him unfairly—we shall see.” He waved the detective from the room as though he were dismissing a strange dog that had intruded upon his privacy, and Mr. Reeder went out reluctantly, for he had something to tell the millicnaire. It was peculiar to him that, in his more secretive moments, he sought the privacy of his old-fashioned study at home. For two hours he sat at his desk calling a succession of numbers—and curiously enough, the gentlemen to whom he spoke were men of not very good reputation. Most of them he knew. In the 's when he was the greatest expert in the world on forged currency, he had been brought into contact with a class which is often the innocent medium by which the forger dis- tributed his handicraft—and more often the instrument of his detection. It was a Friday, a day on which most of the principals were in their offices till a late hour. At 8 o'clock he finished, wrote a note and, ‘phoning for a messenger, sent his letter on its fateful errand. He spent the rest of the evening musing on past experiences and in refreshing his mem- ory from the thin scrap-books which filled two shelves in his study. What happened elsewhere that evening can best be told in the plain language of the wit- ness box. Mr. Eastleigh had gone home after his interview with Mr. Reeder suffering from a feverish cold, and was disposed, according to the evidence of his secretary, to put off the interview which he had arranged with his nephew. A telephone message had been sent to Mr. Carlin’s hotel, but he was out. Until 9 v'clock Mr. Eastleigh was busy with the affatrs of his numerous charities, Mr. Lassard being n attendance. Mr. Eastleigh was working in a small study which opened from his bed room. At 2 quarter past 9 Carlin arrived and was shown upstairs by the keitler, who subsequently staged that he heard voices raised in anger. Me Carlin came downstairs and was shown out as the clock struck half-past 8, and & few min- utes later the bell rang for Eastleigh's valet, who went up to assist his master to bed. At half-past 7 the next morning, the valet, who slept in an adjoining apartment, went into his master's room. He found his employer ly- ing face downward on the fioor; he was dead, and had been dead for some hours. There was no sign of wounds, and at first glance it looked as though this man of 60 had collapsed in the night. But there were circumstances which pointed to some unusual happening. In Mr. Eastleigh's bed room was a small steel wall safe. and the first thing the valet noticed was that this was open, papers were lving on the floor, and that in the grate was a heap of paper which, except for one corner. was entirely burned. The valet telephoned immediately for the doctor and for the police, and from that mo- ment the case went out of Mr. Reeder's able hands. I ATER that morning he reported briefly to “ his superior the result of his inquiries. “Murder, I am afriad,” he said sadly. “The doctors are perfectly certain that it is a case of aconitine poisoning. The paper in the hearth has been photographed, and there is no doubt whatever that the burned document is the will by which Eastleigh left all his property to vari- ous charitable institutions.” He paused here. “Well?” asked his chief, “what does that mean?” Mr. Reeder coughed. “It means that if this will cannot be proved, and I doubt whether it can. Eastleigh died in- testate. The property goes “To Carlin?” asked the startled district at- torney. Mr. Reeder nodded. “There were other things burned; four small oblong slips of paper, which had evidently been fastened together by a pin. These are quite indecipherable.” He sighed again “You haven't mentioned the letter that ar- rived by special after Mr. Eastleigh had retired for the night.” Mr. Reeder rubbed his chin. “No, I didn’t mention that,” he said reluc- tantly. “Has it been found?"” Mr. Reeder hesitated. “I don’t know. I rather think that it has not been,” he said. “Would it throw any light upon the crime, do you think?” Mr. Reeder scratched his chin with some sign of embarrassment. “I should think it might,” he said you excuse me, sir? Detective Salter is waiting for me.” And he was out of the room before his chief could frame any further inquiry. Salter was striding impatiently up and down the little room when Mr. Reeder came back. They left the building together. The car that was waiting for them brought them to the Jermyn Hotel in a few minutes. Outside the hotel three plain-clothes men were waiting, evidently for the arrival of their chief, and Salter passed into the building. followed closely by Mr. Reeder. They were half-way up the stairs when Reeder asked: “Does Carlin know you?” “He ought to,” was the grim reply. “I did my best to get him jailed before he skipped from the country.” “Humph!” said Mr. Reeder. knows you.” “Why?” Salter stopped on the stairs to ask the question. “Because he saw us getting out of the taxi. I caught sight of his face, and He stopped suddenly. The sound of a shot “Will “I'm sorry he e b red through the house, and in another second the two men were racing up the stairs two at a time and had burst into the suite which Carlin occupied. A glimpse of the prostrate figure told them shey were too late. The detective bent over the dead man. “That has saved the country the cost of a murder trial,” he said. “I think not,” said Mr. Reeder gently, and explained his reasons. Half an hour later, as Mr. Lassard walked out of his office, a detective tapped him on the shoulder. “Your name is Elter,” he said, “and 1 want you for murder.” ¢JT was a very simple case, really, sir,” ex- plained Mr. Reeder to his chief. “Elter, of course, was known to me personally, but I remembered especially that he could not spell the word ‘able,” and I recognized this peculiarity in our friend the moment I saw the letter which he wrote to his patron asking for the money. It was Elter himself who drew the $25,000; of that I am convinced. The man is, and always has been, an inveterate gambler, and I did not have to make many inquiries be- fore I discovered that he was owing a large sum of money. That would have meant the end of Mr. Lassard, the philanthropic custodian of children. Which, by the way. was always Elter's role. He ran bogus charitable societies— it is extraordinarily easy to find dupes who sre willing to subscribe for philanthropic objects. Many years ago, when I was a young mam L was instrumental in getting him seven vears, I'd lost sight of him since until I saw the letter he sent to Mr. Eastleigh. Unfortunately for him, one line ran: ‘I shall be glad if you are abel to let my messenger have the money' —and he spelled ‘able’ in the Elter way. I called on him and made sure. And then I wrote tc Mr. Eastleigh, who apparently did not open the letter till late that night “Elter had called on him earlier in the eve- ning and had had a long talk with him. I only surmise that Eastleigh had expressed a doubt as to whether he ought to leave his nephew penniless, scoundrel though he was; and Elter was terrified that his scheme for get- ting possession of the old man’s money was in danger of failing. Moreover, my appearance in the case had scared him. He decided to kill Eastleigh that night, took aconitine with him to the house and introduced it into the medi- cine, a bottle of which always stood on East- leigh’s de: Whether the old man destroyed the will which disinherited his nephew before he discovered he had been poisoned, or whether he did it after, we shall never know. When I had satisfied myself that Lassard was Elter, T sent a letter by special messenger to Eastleigh 2 “That was the letter deiivered by special messenger?” Mr. Reeder nodded. “It is possible that Eastleigh was salready under the influence of the drug when he burned the will, and burned too the four checks . which Carlin had forged and which the old man had held over his head as a threat. Carlin may have known his uncle was dead: he cer- tainly recognized the detective when he stepped out of the cab, and, thinking he was to be ar- rested, shot himself.” Mr. Reeder pursed his lips and his melancholy face grew longer. “I wish T had never known Mrs. Carlin—my acquaintance with her introduces that element of coincidence which is permissible in stories but is so distressing in actual life. It shakes one’s confidence in the logic of things.’ (Copyright, 1930.) Last of the Dime-Novel Heroes. Continued from Tenth Page a man named Post. Ingraham wrote a bio- graphy of Texas Jack. Jim Beckwourth, the mulatto frontiersman, had his story told. So did Big Foot Wallace, Idaho Dan, Picayune Pete, Cactus Joe, Mustang Sam and all the others, From end to end of the country readers soon were scanning such scenes as, “Quick as a flash his trusty rifle leaped to his shoulder. There was a report, a wild yell from the bared fangs of Indian Pete and the intrepid trapper lingered by the ravine's edge yet a moment ere he heard the dull, sickening thud as the body struck the rocks below.” Or. “ ‘Do not mov ordered Maj. Harrington from between clenched teeth. ‘My revolver is at your heart and at the slightest evidence of treachery I will use it. You are dealing with a man now —not a weak and defensless woman.’” ’I‘HROUGHOUT the heyday of the dime novel there had been a series of weekly and semiweekly magazines published in New York and specializing in the thriller sort of fiction. They followed the Beadle type of story pretty closely and had en their staffs versatile writers who turned out from 30,000 to 35,000 words a weck. Gradually the Wild West fiction began to lose its appeal, and these magazines were the first to heed the warn- ing. They cast about for something new. They turned to detective stories. Detectives had plaved a big part in the Beadle books. as can be seen by glancing at the Wheeler series immortalizing Deadwood Dick. But now the purely detective story came into its own in the guise of Nick Carter. John R. Coryell created Nick Carter. As early as the late eighties Coryell wrote several serials about Nick. The demand grew and he did others, and finally had to have assistants to keep Nick before the public in the quantities demanded. One of these assistants was Col. E. Z. C. Judson, who used the pen name Ned Buntline. He had taken to fiction back in 1868 and is often credited with being the pioneer writer of the sensational novel in America. But the most colorful of those who helped Coryell with Nick Carter was Frederick Van Rensselaer Dey, who, in all, turned out more than 1,000 Nick Carter volumes, many of th:m as long as the modern novel. But even Nick Carter had waned long before Mr. Dey ended his earthly romance in stark™ tragedy. To be sure, Nick had had innumerable imitators, and they all sold—still continue to sell, in fact, in their paper-backed bindings So does Nick, for that matter. But the trend had been elsewhere. The action thriller had gone through its depression and was returning in a new guise—juvenile fiction. The prolific writers who had slaved over their desks turning out daring deeds of the Deadwood Dick type were now slaving away at “The Log Cabin li- brary,” “The Boys in the Wilderness,” “The Boy Trappers” and, soon after, the Fred Pear- not Series. But they, too, waned. The motion-picture in- dustry was born. Thrills, visual thrills, could be had by the hour for the price of a book, The movies had the added attraction of novel- - ty and, as time went on, the pace of American . life quickened. Youngsters as well as adults grudged the time to wallow through page after page of printed thrills when two hours at the corner play house would give them just as - vivid memories of brave heroes and hissing vil- . lains, The heyday of the dime novel was gone, The roasing presses slowed down or were fed - new manuscripts, Now the era is little more than a memaory., Even the creators of those famed old novels - are passing. Coryell is gone. Dey is gone, Buffa- . lo Bill and Deadwood Dick and Edward Wheeler are gone. But to those with fond - memories there is a decided letdown when they realize that Deadwood Dick has shot his last enemy, that Picayune Pete has at last been killed for good, that the swooned for the last time in the hero's arms | and that even the final redskin has bitten the dust. Great days—and greater nights<—have vanished. (Copyright, 1930.) World Coal Production. ’I‘I;E world production of coal last year created - a sizable collective hole in the crust of the Planet, 1,540,000,000 tons having been dug. The United States led with 552,465,000 tons, Germany ranking second with 352,156,000 tons a#nd Great Britain third with 264,816,000 tone y ] fair maiden has o