Hubbard. And for a third, the dead man had Hubbard’s phony beard. That’s a few too many coincidences, says I. That’s why we were hoping you could tell us who the victim is.”
Mr. Clemens took the photograph again and stared at it a while longer. “If I ever knew him, the name’s escaped me. He’s a bit too young to be one of the old crew I knew along the river,” he finally said, passing it back to me.
“But Hubbard’s from the river, and he wanted to see you,” said the detective. “And now you’re headed back there. Are you sure there’s not more involved in this trip than you’ve told me?”
Mr. Clemens shook his head. “A lecture tour and research for a book,” he said. “My backer says my last Mississippi book was a great success, and he suggests I do another one. As it happens, I need the money, so I’m willing to listen to suggestions.”
“Aye,” said Berrigan, “I brought along a copy of that very book for reading on the train. I was of a mind it might give me an idea what to look out for.”
“I see,” said Mr. Clemens, raising one eyebrow. “So you’ll be traveling with us down the river?”
“Unless I catch my man first. Maybe Hubbard planted the beard on this fellow to cover his own escape, or maybe the dead man grabbed it from him. Either way, I think he’ll come looking for you. That’s why I’m on the train with you, and it’s why I’ll be riding on the steamboat with you. And it’s why I’m wondering if there isn’t more to this story than you’ve told me so far, Mr. Twain.” He paused, then continued in a lower tone. “This is a murder we’re talking about, Mr. Twain. You could be putting yourself in a lot of danger by withholding information from us.”
“I’m well aware of that,” said my employer. “I’ve been around some rough characters in my time, and lived to tell the tale so far, so I know what they’re capable of. I didn’t get these white hairs by taking foolish chances, and I’m not about to start. Believe me, if I see hide or hair of Farmer Jack Hubbard, you’ll be the first to know.”
I had picked up the grisly photograph for another look, racking my memory, and suddenly recalled where I’d seen the dead man. “This fellow was at your lecture the other night,” I blurted, and both of them turned to stare at me. “He sat slightly ahead of me, on the right-side aisle.”
“Now I’m sure I’m on the right trail,” crowed Berrigan.
For his part, Mr. Clemens just took the picture from my hands, and looked at it, frowning. “What name did the landlord say this fellow gave him?” he asked at last.
“Lee Russell,” said Berrigan.
“Never heard of him,” said Mr. Clemens, and his frown went even darker. “But I’m afraid we haven’t seen the last of him.”
At dinner, Mr. Clemens ordered us a bottle of champagne—“to celebrate the start of the tour,” he said. In keeping with the occasion, he maintained a constant stream of amusing, if trifling, patter all through the meal, entertaining not only me but our fellow diners; but it seemed to me that his mind was elsewhere. After dinner, in a quiet corner of the smoking car, he confirmed my suspicions.
“Murder or no murder,” he growled, “a man ought to have a right to his privacy, instead of the police dogging his heels halfway across the blasted continent. You’d think we were the suspects, instead of that old swindler Hubbard. Still, I never would have thought Jack had it in him to stab a man.”
“Yes, I wonder what he wanted with you. It makes me shiver to think that you and I might have returned to the hotel to find a killer waiting for us.”
“Well, not for you, strictly speaking,” said Mr. Clemens, with a wry grin. He swirled his whisky glass and took a meditative sip. “And Berrigan’s not here for you, either. You could get off at the next stop and go home to Connecticut and never hear another word of this. But if I decided to take a side trip to Timbuktu on my way to that place in Arkansas”—by which I took it that he meant the town where the gold was supposedly still hidden—“that impertinent flat-footed Irishman would follow me—and to the moon, too, if I decided to go there.”
He prepared still another cigar—I had already given up trying to keep track of how many he smoked in a day. “And if the detective does try to follow us all the way downriver, what’s to stop him from trailing along when I go look for Ritter’s money? And what’s to stop him from deciding it’s stolen property and confiscating it? That’d be the last we ever saw of it, I promise you—never mind that the rightful owner’s probably long dead, even if we could figure out who he is.” He lit up the cigar and breathed the smoke in deeply.
“I myself am far more concerned about the possibility of a killer following us to the treasure,” I protested. “You can’t deny that having a policeman near at hand makes us both a good bit safer.”
“I wouldn’t bet a nickel on it. Unless he’s going to scrub my back in the bathtub, and sit up watching me every time I take a nap, and make himself even more of a damned nuisance than he is already, there’ll always be a chance for somebody to sneak up behind me and do me in. And besides, I don’t think anybody here has that kind of grudge against me.”
“But what about that fellow coming to your lecture before he was killed?”
Mr. Clemens scowled at his glass. “Plenty of things happen at the same time and in the same place without being related. Enough people get murdered in New York City as it is; it could be sheer chance that one of them was at my lecture a few days before.”
“And that he had your name in his pocket? In the same handwriting as on a note in your hotel? Isn’t that a few too many coincidences just to ignore?”
“I’m not ignoring them, Wentworth—I just don’t believe that having a detective along will magically clear up all those coincidences. Policemen are very clever at finding sinister implications behind perfectly innocent things; they have to, to justify their impertinence. The way I see it, this rascal Berrigan has managed to convince his chief that I’m being stalked by a murderer and have to be watched every second. If he plays his cards right, he gets a paid vacation on a cruise to New Orleans, and the relatively painless duty of keeping an eye on an old man, whom he undoubtedly expects to be eternally grateful. It’s a perfect hoax; almost a work of art, if you admire such things. The biggest danger, from Berrigan’s point of view, is that his chief will recognize the whole thing for the shameless fraud it is, and assign himself to trail me.”
“I wish I could share your belief that there’s no danger,” I said. “You still haven’t explained the notes.”
“There needn’t be anything sinister in the notes,” said Mr. Clemens. “It’s possible Jack Hubbard found out I was in New York and came looking for a handout. He wouldn’t be the first to think that knowing me thirty years ago entitled him to an endless string of baksheesh. He goes to the hotel, doesn’t find me, and leaves a note—if he wore his farmer outfit, they wouldn’t have let him sit around the lobby for very long; I’m surprised they let him in in the first place. He leaves me a note, and because he’s uncomfortable about begging, doesn’t call me by the name he used in the old days. Then, on the way home, this other fellow tries to rob him in an alley, and Hubbard defends himself with a knife. In the struggle, the other fellow grabs him by the false beard and it comes off. When Hubbard realizes he’s killed the other man, he skedaddles.”
“And how did the other man come to have your name in his pocket?” I persisted.
“He picked Hubbard’s pocket. Or Hubbard put it there, to lay a false trail. Or—damn it all, Wentworth, you’ll give me a headache if you keep this up! Go see if you can get me another whisky; easy on the soda water, this time.” I took this as a clear signal to end the discussion; I got him his drink, listened to him chat on general subjects for another half hour, and then retired for the