Page:Bedford-Jones--The Mardi Gras Mystery.djvu/234

 heritage of their fathers. On the Pacific coast lotteries obtain and will obtain wherever there is a Chinatown. In Louisiana the days of the grand lottery have never been forgotten. The last two years of high wages had made every Negro wealthy, comparatively speaking. The lottery mongers would naturally find them a ripe harvest for the picking. And who would gravitate to this harvest field if not the great Gumberts, the uncaught Memphis Izzy, the promoter who had never been "mugged!"

Here, at one stroke, stumbling on the thing by sheer blind accident, Gramont had located the nucleus of the whole business!

Gradually his brain cooled to the realization of what work lay before him. He was through Paradis, almost without seeing the town, and switched on his lights as he took the highway to Houma. Sober reflection seized him. Not only was this crowd of crooks working a lottery, but they were also managing a stupendous thievery of automobiles, in which cars were looted by wholesale! And the man at the head of it all, the man above Memphis Izzy and his crooks, was Jachin Fell of New Orleans.

Did Lucie Ledanois dream such a thing? No. Gramont dismissed the question at once.