An Uninvited Guest

by

RONTO THE JACK had entered the concrete bungalow owned by Banker Esquelle on Calores Beach, finding the sleeping-porch screens easily penetrated, and the doorways open to his touch when he applied a master key. The building was not very large, but it was beautiful, within as well as without, and when Pronto the Jack inspected the various rooms by the light of the distant moon and a nearby electric street lamp, he was quite well satisfied with what he found.

The pantry was old-fashioned, and there were stacks on stacks of canned goods, including two score or so of fruits which Mrs. Esquelle had had preserved according to the formulas of their less prosperous days. The family had also purchased a good many tins from the government sales, through the post office, and Pronto the Jack realized his hopes and discovered an opportunity beyond his best dreams. Here was a hiding place, all prepared for him, luxuriously furnished, and without the least need of worry beyond the common necessity of keeping cool and cautious watch.

With a laugh Pronto the Jack threw off his clothes, went into the bath room and turned on the gas, to heat the boiler; in five minutes he was luxuriating under conditions that were wholly to his liking. Despite his name, taken or adapted from the prospectors' burros, Pronto the Jack hoped that some day he would be wealthy and enjoy these fine things which were the distinction of the industrious, the thrifty, and the careful. But Pronto the Jack knew, now, that one need be neither industrious nor careful to obtain the purchase price of all his desires

He had sewed up in his waistcoat a fortune consisting of hundreds of bank and treasury notes. Pronto the Jack's specialty, which was sneak thieving, had brought him marvelous success. With a slender wire, a distracted bank cashier, and his nerve all working together, a packet of currency, labeled $26,700 had been transfered from a public institution to a private and exceedingly unscrupulous possession.

Pronto the Jack, his lift made, and his retirement from the immediate environment of the famous orange city an assured thing, scurried to Calores Beach, where the owner of the institution just despoiled owned this cottage, which was closed for the winter season. He had seen to his get-away before he undertook his game. He had intended merely to occupy the bungalow a few days and nights, till the excitement and intensive search for the daring thief should be discontinued, or at least abated. For that purpose a few concentrated meats and vegetables, bought from small wayside counters and suburban stores, and buried among a clump of cypress beside the road to the beach, seemed adequate. But this small bundle of self-selected provender was as nothing to the gorgeous, the glorious feed already in the banker's bungalow needing only a can opener to make them wholly available, and there were several kinds of can openers among the kitchen cutlery.

Instead of a mere transient apartment, to be occupied for a few days, or till his meager supply of food lasted, Pronto the Jack had come upon a winter residence, of a most attractive type, and all that remained to be discovered was whether the owner or his family were likely to be down for the week-ends. The question was answered by the condition of things in the bungalow. Everything was wrapped up securely and stowed away, so that the moist air of the ocean breezes would not corrupt them with mildew or rust. With his knife's keenest blade Pronto  the Jack brought out the few woolen blankets and linen that he needed, and spread it upon a three-quarter brass  bedstead that took his fancy. He hung his own padded vest among the banker's own summer clothes, which included beach fishing suits.

He slept soundly, that first night, and through half the daylight hours of the following morning. Then he stirred up, turned on the gas for hot water, and bathed. Next he breakfasted, cooking over the kitchen gas range. He had never drank better coffee than he had from the percolator—nor better tea, for his dinner consisted of a single leaf from an Oriental box that Pronto recognized as a mandarin's tea chest. That tea, with a value in China of $16 a pound, was pleasant to the taste of the crook.

Pronto the Jack, driven from pillar to post during many years, with memories of nights out on bleak, cold prairies, and anxious hours in the summer camps of people in the mountains, and with the nerve-wrack of hasty journeys up and down the freight, passenger, and other train by stages and in automobiles, by wagons and on foot, years that had been mere camping ages, now settled down to rest in the delights that he had found in the banker's bungalow—the very banker, at that, whose stacks of currency he had raided so successfully.

At times Pronto the Jack laughed over his simple, but effective, ruse. He had chosen, unquestionably, the most secure hiding place for himself that existed; no desert, no mountain range, no far and remote city offered such a chance to hide out. once within the building and the window fastened down, with curtains drawn, Pronto the Jack was safe—as safe as any fugitive from justice could hope to be.

He need not stir outdoors: in fact, he must not show himself outside. He did not. Of news none came to him, but he needed to know nothing about the world's happenings. He knew, without being told, that all the detective agencies in the world were ransacking all the gaudy places, doing their best to find the thief who had stolen that bundle of tied up currency.

It might be, by time, that the police knew Pronto the Jack  had been seen in Los Angeles. There seemed to be no question about it that the tip had been given them, for Pronto the Jack been in familiar places there—to Chink's and to Farascoe's, and had visited an old flame. He had seen too many people who knew him, to expect his own presence at the scene of so daring an effort to pass unreported to the police. But what did it matter? He had made his escape, successfully had eluded the immediate hue and cry—if there was one. The evening papers had not said the bank was robbed; quite possibly the theft was not discovered till the balance was struck at the day's end, and compared with the cash. Possibly the bank and the authorities had elected to keep it dark.

Pronto the Jack counted his money, having removed it from the diversified and cunningly sewed pockets. He stacked it up and leaned back to look at it in the faint light that came through the downstairs windows. In the second floor, a place of two rooms and low ceiling, was a shadeless window, and here he studied the money, bill by bill, to love the sight of so much value—in fifties, hundreds, five hundreds, and some thousand or so in comfortable twenties and tens. Then he put it back, and hung it in the press.

“I'll remain here till I've grown a good mustache, and I'll shave with old Moneybag's safety!” Pronto grinned to himself, and he did shave, every day, and he ate full meals, morning, noon, and evening.

When one has a few hundred dollars' worth of supplies, from government sales and private purchases—canned goods from roast beef to bacon and ham, and hardy, lasting roots like potatoes and carrots and similar provender in large, tight-galvanized recepticles [sic]; and when the list of jams comprises many varieties, and when there are raw materials, like barrel sugar, a keg each of several kinds of molasses, tinned mince meat, and flour, cornmeal, and other handy things—why not live on the best of it? Why not bake one's own pies, and make one's own hashes and soups and all manner of roadside grub?

Pronto the Jack, as he stirred and mixed, baked and invented, kept the kitchen hot. If it was a cold day he burned the gas under the big water boiler till the whole building lost its chill. He dared not, of course, build a fire in any of the fireplaces, but there were two gas heaters, and he used these, full blast, on a chill day or two, though the hot-water boiler was enough for ordinary cool occasions.

A week, two weeks—time sped by, and Pronto the Jack knew that all hue and cry must have ceased. The police, detectives, reward seekers, had wasted their intensive efforts, and were now settling back to wait and hope for chance to favor them.

Banker Esquelle himself forgot to curse for hours at a time because the money did not show up. The fact was, it simply vanished. No one in the bank admitted knowing a thing about it. That was the curious fact about the matter. There wasn't any kind of a hue and cry. No one ever thought of Pronto the Jack. No one at the bank had seen him; no one came forth with the information that he had been in town, or that he had been anywhere near town. The underworld had not heard that a “big one” had been pulled off, and there was no incentive to report the presence of any one. In fact, the presence of Pronto the Jack had utterly escaped the attention of every and any stool pigeons.

For once a master thief of considerable reputation had come, struck, and taken his departure, leaving no visible trace, not even leaving in any one's mind but his own the certainty that a crime had been committed. It might, in fact, have been an accident, had Pronto the Jack not been responsible!

Banker Esquelle's investigators could learn nothing. They were quite blinded by the lack of trail or hint of trail. Nowhere in the country's underworld did a crook show up with more money than could be explained or connected with this particular case.

But Banker Esquelle felt poor. If his bank lost any money it gave him a qualm, and when $26,700 turned up missing, he was ready to cut down his own personal expenses by a whole squad of hired servants; he didn't buy a suit of clothes on that account, and he was grumpy when his son asked for ten cents—it was a very young son. He began to look over his accounts, and to estimate them, with a view of saving somewhere or other.

It was at this point that a bill for gas came to him, amounting to $27.60. He stared at the bill with stiffening amazement. He sprang to his feet and swore. Since when had it been necessary to pay $27.60 for gas at any of his houses? He owned several houses, and in the sheaf of gas bills, this one rivaled his own town house bill.

Minutes passed before he made a discovery more amazing than all the others; the bill was for November, and it purported to be for gas used in his Calores Beach bungalow—the least pretentious, the most economical of all his camps and mansions and houses. He had servant, farm, estate, and other residences, with gas accounts. Never before had the bungalow cut up so outrageously, or figured so conspicuous! Upon a moment's thought, the banker determined to his own satisfaction to see what was the matter; the meter reader had charged for the whole season, and not for the month—besides, the bungalow had been closed for the season. A mistake was possible; the auditor  had credited the banker with somebody else's bill.

Banker Esquelle summoned his stenographer, dictated a letter, and returned the bill with the caustic comment:

The banker felt better. He had saved $27.60, which was a considerable sum. He examined his other bills with care, to make sure that none of his househeholds were being run extravagantly, and that he wasn't being mulcted for things not had. He didn't object to paying a fair price for what he obtained, but he wouldn't pay for things he didn't get.

Gas companies don't like to offend bankers. They wish to have things and as regards bankers precisely right, and in strict accordance with the well-known finalities of arithmetics, meters, and other indisputable affairs. In this case the meter reader was shown his own record and he was surprised. He had been told that the season was closed as regards Banker Esquelle's bungalow—and yet he had recorded from that meter, a reading that had, so to speak, made the owner's hair stand on end.

“Yes, sir,” he admitted. “It's my mistake probably. Anyhow—I got a sick baby—had one, about that time. I must have been crazy.”

Accordingly a letter was dispatched to Banker Esquelle, and he had a great feeling of satisfaction over the matter. But when the meter reader went to the bungalow, and looked in upon the outside meter cubby, to compare it with his notebook, he stared. Since that other, and disputed reading, $11.35 worth of gas had been counted through, according to the automatic comptometer.

The meter reader backed away from the closed and silent bungalow with a disquiet feeling.

“Gracious!” he muttered “I bet it's a leak—or burners left on in the gas range—or something! I bet that place'd blow to forty kingdoms if a match went off, inside!

Great sea swells of the Pacific were rolling in upon the beach and falling with pounding crash to the heavy sands, Gulls and terns, snipe and many birds were screaming along, darting in and out at the edge of the running foam up the brown slope. For several minutes the gas meter reader figured on the matter. Here was a chance to square himself with Banker Esquelle—direct. As a matter of form he would report to the company, the company would file and investigate, and in about a week, make a report on the matter. In the meanwhile another $10 worth of gas would be used up in this way. The reader walked down to the corner store telephone and telephoned to Banker Esquelle, a personal and prepaid—a quarter, which the reader could ill spare, but he had a bit of gambling spirit.

He told Banker Esquelle personally that the meter was moving around visibly, and counting up dollars and dollars. Banker Esquelle hesitated for three seconds, and then said:

“Much obliged. Who are you?”

“Meter reader No. 11.”

“I mean your name?”

“John Fabric.”

“I'll remember, Fabric.”

The meter reader went about his business, and made his formal report to the company that evening when he turned in his books at four fifty-nine o'clock by the time recorder.

At four o'clock Banker Esquelle stepped into his automobile, ran around to the town house, took down a key to the Calores Beach bungalow, and drove out to take a look for himself. He drove his own car, for his chauffeur had bespoke that evening for a dinner with his best girl—and the second chauffeur didn't come on till six o'clock, two hours too late.

Banker Esquelle hopped out of his car, bounded up the two concrete steps, hustled along the concrete walk, and tried the key in the front door, but remembered that it was the side door key, cursed under his breath, and ran around to the side door. He opened the door with a jerk, and stepped inside. Then his light went out—upon him fell an extraordinary blank.

Long hours afterwards Banker Esquelle recovered a dim feeling of intelligence out of an aching void. It was dark. It was in some place that seemed unfamiliar. It was gray and full of brilliant moons, stars, and colorful rainbows. He found an electric lamp, turned it on, and knew that this was his Calores Beach bungalow.

The books of his library were scattered around on the tables and floor and chairs. The odor of stale cooking was in the house, and he found the kitchen a terrible mess. The place seemed fearfully hot, and he found in the bath room, that the gas heater of the water boiler was burning full blast. Two beds had been occupied, and all mussed up. Furniture and bedding and table linen had been cut out of their oilcloth wrappings and scattered about.

He staggered to the wash bowl and bathed his aching head; by the electric light he saw the water flush pink, and then a dull red. His scalp was cut wide open over the left ear. That showed why he ached. He tried to call through the telephone, but it was some time before he remembered that the line had been disconnected. He stumbled to the door and went out into the night. He went out to the street, and as he looked up and down, quick steps on the asphalt pavement awakened uneasiness in his thoughts. Too late, he realized why he was uneasy. Upon him fell a burly and energetic policeman, who had seen some one come furtively from the great banker Esquelle's closed up bungalow. For good luck, the cop banged the intruder in the dark, and dragged him to the nearest police telephone.

At the police station it was found that the prisoner was Banker Esquelle, whose head was bleeding in several places; the unhappy policeman found himself the victim of evidence that was far from circumstantial. In vain he explained to the captain, the chief, and all his other superiors. There were started then investigations, examinations, and all manner of searching for the right dope.

Banker Esquelle, fair and honorable, exculpated the policeman and saved him from dismissal. The appearances had been wholly and unmistakably deceitful. The fact was plain; some one had been living for several weeks in the locked-up bungalow, but there was no way of telling who had been there. It looked as though some beach comber had squatted in the apartment.

After such questionable occupation, the reordering of the bungalow, and its careful cleaning and fumigating were plainly necessary, and Mrs. Carlixe, the family housekeeper, went out with two servants, a man and woman, to superintend the job. She did her work thoroughly.

Among other things she found hanging up among the banker's own summer beach clothes an old and wholly desreputable waistcoat. This waistcoat was a bit too small for the banker, but it had been padded very thickly, so that the squatter would be kept warm, if he should run into a cold snap. That was her deduction. It was thrown into the fireplace with a few handfulls of dry seaweed and kindlings. Then a match was lighted and thrown upon the fuel, and a cheerful little blaze flamed up, the dry seaweeds burning brilliantly.

Away off yonder, sitting morosely beside a smoky tin pail in the open Mohave Desert, a plump, well-fed sort of a fellow squatted and glared at a waistcoat which he had hung upon a stick beyond the fire. This was a perfectly wonderful waistcoat, and any seashore fisherman would have recognized it as a fine protection for the lungs and back, while leaving the arms free to make a prodigious cast of hooks and sinkers out across the surf.

The waistcoat belonged to Banker Esquelle, and the man beside the fire was one Pronto the Jack.

“There!” he groaned. “An' when I beat it in the dark I grabbed the wrong padded jacket. H—l!”