This comfortable fortune was exhibited during banking hours on Tuesday and Wednesday under the jealous eyes of two guards stationed within the bank and two others at either side of the window on the street outside. There really was no danger of robbery. The heap of gold weighed over a thousand pounds and the window was heavily and closely barred inside and out. The guards were nearly as much a part of the peep-show as the gold, the additional and necessary touch to give it the proper importance in the public eye. At night the gold was transferred from the window to the bank vault, with due ceremony, lapsing there to its proper measure of importance in a bank that reckoned its resources by the million.
So much for the stage setting. Now for the first scene of the comedy-drama.
Chapter IV
Perhaps it had better be called prologue, since it happened nearly a week before the arrival and display of the gold — to be exact, on the very day that the Bertha cleared from Skagway. At that time it attracted no greater attention than any other of the many routine transactions of the Totem National, being merely the leasing of a safe-deposit box, one of the largest, such as generally is used for the safe keeping of large books or other bulky records of value.
The lessor gave his name as Seth C. Seeley; address, temporary, Hotel Savoy, Seattle; permanent. Bankers' Trust Company, New York; business, dealer in securities.. In less than an hour after receiving his card of identification and key Seeley returned with a large parcel heavily wrapped and corded, apparently of considerable weight and of a size that just fitted into and filled the box. Remarking pettishly that the Totem National should be prepared to supply its customers with more adequate accommodations, Seeley grumblingly hired the two adjoining boxes of the same size as the first and in turn filled them with similar parcels. These, like the first, he carried and put in place with his own hands, despite their evident weight, roughly declining all assistance proffered by the banks employees.
Thursday morning of that week Daniels, first assistant cashier of the Totem National, unlocked the vault to withdraw the cash necessary for the day's business and to superintend the removal of the $200,000 gold to its place in the limelight. He took one step within the battleship-armored doorway, gasped, and took two steps backward, yelling for help.
There were two entirely sufficient causes for the first assistant cashier's excitement. The most apparent was the body of a man lying sprawled on the vault floor, very evidently and most completely dead. The second, to Daniels' trained eyes, the almost equally obvious fact that the vault had been looted — of the $200,000 in gold and he did not know how much more.
For reasons that all bankers will understand and sympathize with, but toward which newspaper men hold very different attitudes, the officials of the Totem National made every effort and used every means at their command to keep all news of the robbery from the public, to such good effect that no suspicion of any of the happenings here related reached the newspapers until the whole incident was history. The body of the dead man added annoying complications to this hushing-up process, but the power of money is great even when it lies fallow in banks, so no insinuation of bribe tendering or acceptance is intended here.
Far be it from me to even remotely suggest that a banker would give or a policeman take money for the suppression of the truth. The police were only too willing to keep the whole thing quiet until they should have arrested the thief and murderer, which consummation, they assured the bank, would be a matter of only hours or days, as is the optimistic, not to say egotistic way of policemen the world over.
Whatever the views on publicity held by the board of directors of the Totem National, they were not disposed to take their loss philosophically or inactively. While they assured Chief Stein, of the Seattle police, that they had every confidence in his zeal and ability to both capture the thief or thieves and recover the stolen valuables, they also availed themselves of the additional services of the Pinkertons and the Government secret service men, the latter being interested by reason of the fact that part of the loot taken was some thousands of dollars' worth of revenue and excise stamps temporarily in the care of the bank while in transit to other points of distribution.
As this indicates, the $200,000 worth of gold was not all of the treasure that was missing, the total figure reaching to over the million mark when, the careful check of the vault's contents had been made. This sum was made up, in addition to the gold brought by the Bertha, of gold coin, bank notes and easily negotiable securities. Silver specie, bills of small denomination, and papers of problematical value to the thieves were found scattered about the floor of the vault around and under the dead body, discarded as contemptuously as this now insensate and useless clay.
The body was that of a man about five feet eleven inches in height, weight one hundred and sixty to one hundred and seventy pounds, in his late thirties or early forties, with neatly trimmed brown mustache and Vandyke beard. It was dressed in a suit of blue serge, double-breasted coat, tan shoes. On the floor near by lay a lightweight gray overcoat, a broad brimmed black soft hat, the broken pieces of what had been spectacles with large, rimless, egg-shaped lenses, a black Gladstone bag and a sole-leather suitcase.
The last named was empty, but the bag was partially filled with pajamas, shirts, collars and the usual toilet accessories of a man particular about his appearance. In the pockets of the clothes there was found nothing by which to identify the dead man except a card-case stamped with and containing cards engraved with the name, "Samuel Smith," and receipted bills made out in the same name and all bearing the same date, that of the previous day, from seven Seattle hotels.
But the foregoing might apply in a general way to the body of any dead man under normal circumstances. What took this body out of the ordinary was not only its inexplicable presence in the locked and guarded vault but also the fact that from the back there protruded the handle of a large hunting knife — one of the elkhorn variety never carried except by chechahco hunters. The long blade was buried in the body just below and to the right of the left shoulder-blade, between it and the spine, and had been driven in with such a forceful blow that the haft made an indentation in the flesh about the wound.
An inquiry, conducted quietly and circumspectly out of regard for the tender feelings of the Totem National, developed the fact that a man answering to this description and the name of Samuel Smith had stopped at each and all of the hotels indicated by the bills, that he had settled his accounts and departed the day before, Wednesday, for a destination unknown to any of the clerks, leaving no forwarding address. But the policeman in plain clothes who reported on this feature of the case was not gifted with imagination above "carrying a message to Garcia," and so he did only what he was told to do and asked only what he had been told to ask, thus he overlooked the coincidence in the times of arrival and departure of the said Smith, which later was developed.
The Chief of Police and the city detectives working under him on the case were unanimous in their opinion of the dead man's part in the problem. There was not the slightest doubt, Chief Stein declared, and the others echoed, that the man must have been one of the gang that turned the trick, and that he had been murdered by his confederates during a quarrel over the division of the spoils.