THE Stockslager case will be recalled immediately upon the Pacific Coast as a crime of some years ago marked by the peculiar atrocity of the circumstances. Aged Mrs. Stockslager, living in a small cottage at the extreme northern end of Thirty-third Avenue—in those days a region sparsely settled and visited chiefly by picknickers bound for Baker’s Beach—was found one Sunday morning literally hacked to pieces.

From the location of portions of the dismembered body it was apparent that the author had planned to carry the evidences of the crime away and sink them in the waters of the ocean, which tumbled and rolled on the rocks at the base of the steep cliff that marked the extremity of Thirty-third Avenue. A potato sack, with the torso, was found near the rear door to the cottage, indicating that whoever had committed the deed had probably been interrupted while carrying the remains to the bay; and had then fled.

A kitchen butcher knife was the weapon used. Robbery was evidently the motive, for the hut had been ransacked thoroughly, such poor and mean[Pg 264] trinkets as the recluse was known to possess having been taken.

Mrs. Stockslager did a small business in sandwiches, pop corn and soda water with the picknickers. The rumours of a miser’s hoard that usually attached to such as she had long been current. But whether the slayer or slayers realised a profit in money could not be determined as there was no one who could be found sufficiently familiar with her life to say whether she did or did not have a store of money on the premises.

Such were the general facts which Sampson, city editor of the Enquirer, skeletonised tersely to Lanagan as that police reporter of superior talents reported for duty after a lapse of more than ordinary duration.

“Hop to it, Jack,” added Sampson. “You’ve had your salary for two weeks. Show your appreciation.”

Those were the days before automobiles might be requisitioned—occasionally—for big assignments, and Lanagan, taking the steam line that in those days twisted around the ocean shore, was considerably later than the coroner’s deputies, who had already discharged their functions and now were engaged in making an impromptu meal upon the old woman’s supply of sandwiches, the only loot available.

Phillips and Castle, special duty men from the Golden Gate Park police station, were also on the[Pg 265] scene. The “upper office” at headquarters is recruited—where it is not recruited by politics or favouritism—by these active young officers on special duty at the outside stations, and Lanagan knew that this particular brace of plain-clothes men were hardworking and ambitious and without the “strings” that many times bring the ablest of upper office men a trifle too considerately into touch with the outlaw clans.

“What do you make of it, Phillips?” asked Lanagan, as the officer placed his note-book in his pocket.

“Wouldn’t call it a suicide, exactly,” replied Phillips, offishly.

Lanagan laughed. “No?” he drawled. “I wouldn’t put it past you to call it natural causes, though.”

Phillips flushed to the base of his thick neck but held himself from answering. He knew Lanagan by reputation and did not care to match wits with him. Lanagan worked with most of the “upper office” men on intimate terms, but found it occasionally necessary to put a “crimp” in the arrogance, or ignorance, of the outside station officers, who do not come into contact with newspaper men as frequently as the down town men and at times elect to affect the same impartiality with which they treat ordinary persons. Such Lanagan took pride in bringing to a proper appreciation of the honourable place occupied by the brothers of the Tribe.

Lanagan ignored the two detectives and gave his[Pg 266] attention to the coroner’s deputies, the cottage and outskirts, and the contents of the wicker basket. Before the next train arrived, bringing a dozen reporters and camera men from the other papers, and myself, Lanagan had finished his investigations. I found him seated on a salt grass hummock, smoking and gazing absently up and down the ragged, rocky shore line. The surf was tumbling heavily although a few hundred yards out the sea was an undulating swell of greenish beauty.

“Some fine day,” was his greeting. “Let’s take a stroll down.”

We made our way down the cliff to the rocks at the water’s edge.

“Imagination is oftentimes a great thing in solving crime,” he remarked, as he poised himself perilously on a slippery rock and relit his cigar. “That and the ‘take a chance’ instinct. Call it a hunch, bull-luck, accident, or as one great French detective said, ‘le grand hasard.’ Beautiful picture, is it not?”

He pointed toward the Heads, where a Pacific Mail steamship was just putting her pilot down the side. She made a fine picture in truth, with her clean, lithe lines and her smoke blowing back like the wind-blown tresses of a girl.

We strolled along the intermittent stretches of sandy beach or clambered over the rocks and it finally struck me that Lanagan’s ferret eyes were not at all absent-minded or entirely busied with the[Pg 267] natural beauties of the scene, but that he was examining closely every square inch of the ground we travelled; and the waters as we passed.

“Phillips is rather cagey,” he remarked. “He’ll have to be taught his place. He’s a good officer, though; and Leslie has his eye on him. We must look out for that chap. He not only has good legs, a prime requisite of a detective or a reporter, but he has a head that really works once in a while.”

He sat down finally under the shelter of a great rock and motioned me to do likewise. Then he pulled from his pocket, carefully tucked away, a V-shaped piece of paper written over with Chinese characters. The corner that made the apex of the V was crinkled.

“What do you make of it?”

“It’s a piece of a Chinese newspaper,” I replied.

“Really! You would do credit to Phillips. Examine it this time.”

I tried again, but could make nothing of it.

“Look.”

He uncrumpled the slight crinkling at the apex and a tiny bit of red paper was exposed. I was ashamed of my own lack of observation; but just as puzzled as before and said so.

“I should say,” said Lanagan, “that this paper with the Chinese characters was a piece of wrapping paper; that someone tore it from a package with his finger nails and that a portion of the red wrapper of the package itself, came off in his finger[Pg 268] nails. See?” He crumpled it up and sure enough it fitted neatly into the space under his finger nail.

“Well?” I asked, vaguely. Then I had an inspiration. The Chinese burial ground was only an eighth of a mile away. Lanagan obviously had some theory connecting Chinese with the crime, the bit of paper evidently having dropped from a Chinaman’s blouse. I told him so. He laughed immoderately but indulgently and carefully put the bit of paper away in his pocket.

“You’re a stem-winder when it comes to writing fancy leads for my police stories,” he said, still chuckling, “but I guess I’ll have to give up for keeps trying to make a detective out of you. I have shown you in perspective as it were, during the past twenty minutes, the solution of this entire crime—if my theory is not altogether wrong—and you can’t see it. Let’s get busy. Your legs can at least be of service to me.

“I want you to stick around here for a couple of hours. Tackle everybody in sight for a knowledge of Mrs. Stockslager; how long she has been out here, her past, who her family are if any, who her visitors have been; if she had any particular idiosyncrasies or hobbies. Take in all the houses within a radius of a mile—there are only four or five—and try to get some kind of a line on her. Don’t overlook the small boy. In out-of-the-way regions like this he is the pioneer of civilisation and you may tumble on to more through some roving[Pg 269] urchin than all the grown-ups in the county. I will leave instructions at the office where to meet me later. I anticipate lively entertainment ahead.”

When we got back to the cottage the coroner’s deputies had gone, as had Phillips and Castle. Camera men were taking the house from many angles; artists were busy sketching the interior—that was the heyday of “yellow journalism”—marking the “spot” with the old familiar cross. Reporters were still cluttering around. A crowd of morbid persons, attracted out of the very sky like vultures, were already gathered.

“Suppose you’ve got it all cleared?” remarked Bradley of the Times to Lanagan. He was Lanagan’s nearest approach to a rival as a police reporter.

“Clear as print can make it,” replied Lanagan as he turned for the train.

He ran for the car, leaving Bradley secretly uneasy. He had a wholesome regard for Lanagan and knew that he was of few words and not given to wasting them. I slipped the rest of the newspaper men and tramped the sandhills “covering” all the houses, “buzzing” an occasional small boy. The best I could get for two hours’ hard work—and the first “tip” came from an unwashed, sling-shooting young American—was a vague story that no one could substantiate, that Mrs. Stockslager had a worthless son who infrequently visited her for money. I hugged this information close until[Pg 270] I could see Lanagan. It so happened he ordered me to keep it quiet for that day, giving no reasons.

I was chagrined the next morning to awaken and find that Bradley had the same piece of information and had “flashed” it on the front page for an exclusive double-leaded feature to his story.

The search then turned to the son. He could be traced to within six or seven months of the murder. I had to lumber along as best I could in handling the story without Lanagan’s assistance. The stories in all of the papers became monotonously uniform. On the third day the interest was thinning. There had not been a single new fact discovered; nor, so far as the Enquirer was concerned, had there been a word from Lanagan.

“He must have something,” Sampson said to me irritably on the third day. “But take a flier through his hangouts on the chance that he might have gone off again.”

I shook my head. “That isn’t Lanagan with a story on,” I said. “He does his drinking when the story is turned in.” Nevertheless I took a quick skirmish to Connor’s, Fogarty’s and “Red” Murphy’s; looked up “Kid” Monahan and some of Lanagan’s intimates in the upper office. I could find no trace of him.

Toward evening I dropped back to the Enquirer after a final round-up of the ends of the story at police headquarters, and there Lanagan sat with his heels on Sampson’s desk, with that pulseless individual[Pg 271] shooting questions at him with the speed and precision of an automatic revolver.

“I’ve given you all I am free to give just now,” said Lanagan, shutting down on the questioning. “You’ve got a good enough scoop to hold the story for to-morrow. Let me handle the rest in my own way, will you?” He was nettled. “Don’t be so didactic. Do you think I’ve been spending the last three days with a dry nurse?” He was the only man on the Enquirer who could take that tone with Sampson and hold his job.

“No. I know you’ve been on your toes hard, Jack, and I appreciate it. Only the news-call gets the best of me and this story has us all on edge,” replied Sampson.

“You’re not to go near the prison,” continued Lanagan. “I need Norton to-night. Let Martin write the story from here. Stockslager is absolutely out of it. He has been a trusty at the city prison for about six months, which clears him up. Name he goes under is ‘Swede’ Stockley. The police have known it all along but they have kept it dark for certain reasons which I am not at liberty now to state.

“Lend me that nice, new mackintosh of yours, Sampson. It’s raining like blazes and the enthusiastic Mr. Norton and myself will have a hard stand to-night. Take your raincoat, Norton. We are going out looking for ghosts around the Stockslager cottage. There’s a real ghost of the old lady[Pg 272] out there and I’ve wanted for a long time to have a run-in with a genuine spook. She was seen on the cliff last night as the train stopped. McCluskey, the conductor, thought he heard a sort of moaning. He’s a pretty nervy chap and the moans, coming it seemed from the hut, didn’t scare him much. He walked over that way and silhouetted at the edge of the cliff he swears he saw the old lady herself. It was too much even for McCluskey and he ran back to the train.

“He and the engineer, Roberts, went back with a couple of crowbars although he didn’t say what good crowbars would do in tackling a bonafide ghost. They just got one glimpse of the thing and it disappeared and they both swear it couldn’t have had time to get any place before they reached the scene. It was a fairly clear night, during a break in the storm, and they wasted five minutes and then went back to their train.

“I was out there to-day and McCluskey told me the yarn. They’ve kept it quiet around the car barn for fear of being ridiculed. I have them pledged to secrecy. Don’t use that angle of the story to-morrow, though, as I want to do some ghost hunting before the whole town hears about it and flocks out there.

“Come on, Norrie. Got your gun?”

That ghost talk gave me all sorts of forebodings. With a black night ahead and a driving rain, ghost hunting on the scene of the murder, in an environment[Pg 273] sufficiently forbidding on a wintry night in any event, failed to stir me to any particular height of enthusiasm.

“Fire ahead,” said Sampson, with one of his mirthless grins. But he was sitting comfortably in a steam-heated office.

It was nine o’clock when we boarded the steam cars at the old Central Avenue terminal. McCluskey was a solid-jawed, sensible, self-reliant looking chap. It puzzled me. A sober, steady man like that must have seen something very convincing before sponsoring talk of ghosts.

“Ghost hunting?” he asked.

“Yes,” replied Lanagan. “Good feature story, this ghost stuff. Keep it quiet for a day or two longer, will you?”

“Sure. I’ll be on the watch for the Enquirer to see about it. Looked for it to-night, but didn’t see it.”

He slowed down for us about an eighth of a mile from the Thirty-third Avenue stop and we dropped off into a bitter rain.

That rain would have quenched the tail fires of hell.

We struggled on, heads down. There was no use in trying to talk and I knew Lanagan would take his own time about giving me any information. We suddenly pulled stiffly up against two bulky, raincoated figures. A dark lantern flashed, first in my face, then in Lanagan’s.

[Pg 274]“Well, well!” It was Lanagan’s ready voice, pitched a trifle high on account of the beating rain. “If it isn’t Messrs. Phillips and Castle! Walking to reduce weight, I presume?”

“What are you fellows doing out here?” asked Phillips, gruffly.

“Well, Phillips, seeing that it’s you, I’ll tell you: It’s none of your business. Maybe we’re going to swim to the Farallones. Do you understand me perfectly?”

“Isn’t it? We’ll see. And I don’t know whether we want you snuffing around here or not,” replied Phillips. He was a choleric man, was Phillips, with a neck too thick even for a policeman. I thought for a moment Lanagan would have us both ordered back, but he only laughed, in that mocking, Machiavelian laugh of his that could rasp like a file on a sore tooth.

“Dear me,” he said, “your mood fits the weather, Phillips; very disagreeable. I am not concerned with your wants. I’m going to snuff to my heart’s content. Now please step off the right of way and permit us to pass. We are both citizens of this great and glorious city that overpays you most disgracefully in proportion to your attainments; and as such citizens our powers and privileges on the county domain are precisely as full and complete as yours. Phillips, you’ll never do. No policeman ever succeeds who begins by antagonising newspaper men. I’m telling you, you won’t do. Step[Pg 275] aside, please. We want to go on and we don’t purpose to walk around you to do it.”

For a moment things looked ugly, with Phillips standing fast. Castle took him by the arm.

“Come on, Tom, you’re wrong,” he said, and the two officers stepped to one side and we passed on, with Lanagan chuckling aloud.

“Ghost hunting is becoming a regular fad,” he said finally. “And I shouldn’t be surprised to find a few more hunters scattered around. We will let Phillips and Castle pass.”

We stepped quickly to one side and sank down behind a hill............