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THE CASE OF THE TRANSPOSED LEGS

 

Chapter I

 

SECRET INFORMATION

 

Warden Westman Pembroke, of the Northern State Penitentiary, stared incredulously at the opening lines of the brief purple handwritten communication which had just come in with his afternoon’s mail. For, British as he was—or at least had been born!—he just could not grasp the idea of anything that ran counter to Fair play. And those opening lines, minus even an introduction by which to identify their writer, ran:

 

Dear Wes:

Watch your step! There is a political plot—fully hatched!—and ready to be sprung in a dozen hours or even less from the moment you get this—that will oust you immediately as warden of Moundsville Pen.

 

The remainder of the day’s official letters, brought in, at the same time as this one, from the Post Office at Moundsville, the little town near which the prison was situated, lay as yet unopened on Pembroke’s desk.

This one he had opened first—because of its urgent, if not downright startling, appearance: an appearance calculated, as was plainly evident, to compel one blackclad elderly man with grey and thinning hair, and gold pince-nez on his nose framing thoughtful ever-troubled ash-coloured eyes, to open it immediately.

For the square white envelope containing the communication had received its postmark of September 6th in Central City, at the tip of the state, and some 200 miles north of the prison; and, minus any revealing corner-card, and addressed also in purple handwriting, had been literally plastered with green one-cent stamps and rubber-stamped both “Airmail” and “Special Delivery.” The communication itself covered but a single sheet of unprinted foolscap—was signed in a way that conveyed nothing to Pembroke—just “You Know Who”; and the warden, unable to digest the information in those opening lines—wondering, indeed, whether he had not somehow passed up the unmistakable stigmata of a typically American practical joke—a “rib”—commenced the letter all over again from the beginning.

 

Dear Wes:

Watch your step! There is a political plot—fully hatched!—and ready to be sprung in a dozen hours or even less from the moment you get this—that will oust you immediately as warden of Moundsville Pen.

And knowing, Westman, how damned badly you need this berth of yours—at least for a few more years—after those tough twelve years when you were “out of things,” and teaching Social Economics for $25 a week!—knowing, Westman, from my own brother, who’s handled your policies, how badly mortgaged your life—insurance policies are with loans—well, I feel I must send you this tip-off so you can do what you can to try at least to protect yourself.

Except that, unfortunately, I cannot tell you exactly what the plot is! For my own unimpeachable source—

 

A sudden angry shout of “Hold your end, you nit-wit!” caused Warden Pembroke to look sharply up.

Seated as he was just now in his commodious grey-carpeted office, at the big glass-covered flat-topped mahogany desk carrying only its two telephones, its large cage-like brass paper-incinerator, its black ebony paper-knife, and its stack of as—yet—unopened letters, he was able to look directly out into and across the high-walled brick-paved prison yard. The rear edge of the desk lay snugly along the broad arched window, with powerful iron bars on the outside, and the long row of green potted plants along the inner sill, that gave full view of every square foot of “the Yard.” Across this, as Pembroke was able to see, two blue-denim-clad convicts, piloted by a brass-buttoned guard, were carrying a heavy wooden beam. The man on the rear end was craftily grasping the beam—as might have been expected!—so near its tip that the man on the front end was getting the larger part of the weight, with the result that the man on the front end, momentarily looking back.

Thus assured that what he had heard, was but an angry—even justifiable—outburst, and not the beginning of one of those bitter prison fights that might have compelled him to do the thing he so disliked to do—to put two men into solitary—Pembroke brought his gaze back to the communication in his hands. He frowned—but not because its source was still either mysterious or sinister, since certain early references in it revealed it to be indisputably from none other than Fenn Fenchurch, friend of Pembroke since early youth, and now unsuccessful clerk in the City Hall, Central City.

Good, faithful, loyal old Penn! Back over Pembroke swept the memories of how, when orphaned in Liverpool at sixteen, he had come desperately to America on a returning cattleboat to find an uncle in Central City who proved, however, to be no longer alive. Fenn’s folks had taken him in; Fenn had proved his first American friend; Fenn had—

No, Pembroke gazed frowningly at the communication because—of what it was telling him! In fact, he now resumed it at a point a couple of lines above the point where he had broken off:

Except that, unfortunately, I cannot tell you exactly what the plot is! For my own unimpeachable source, a disgruntled politician here in Central City, does not know himself. But the scheme is apparently foolproof, and is elaborate enough, all in all, to include, after you are ousted by it, a complete “blackwashing” of you as ex-warden of the pen—through a phoney exposé of “rotten conditions” as were there “under your reign.”

The man who is going to be “induced” to sign this ghosted exposé is one who is scheduled to go out on discharge in a couple of days. A man named Uberhulf. Rudolph Uberhulf. Called, as I also understand, “Big Rudy.” Whether the Powers-that-Be back of the plot against you have some knowledge that Uberhulf’s actually guilty of the murder for which the State couldn’t—or wouldn’t—convict him—or whether they may have other things on him, they have elected him to sign that ghosted exposé, since he will have been more or less the last man out, at that time, and will, moreover, be safe from any reprisals from within the prison. But—and get this, Wes!—Uberhulf himself doesn’t even know all this yet. About, I mean, the cooked—up exposé, and all that, much less that he’s to sign it. He—

 

Here one of the two phones on Pembroke’s glass-topped desk rang sharply. Much as he would like to have driven on with the surprising facts that were being privately given him, he drew the instrument promptly over; for in a big prison like Moundsville Penitentiary one could never be sure that a call did not announce that a prison break was in progress—or that a convict had gone berserk—or that a guard had been found dead somewhere—or—

“Warden speaking,” he said hastily.

And by those simple words he proceeded to introduce himself, as it were, to a mystery that—a mystery which was destined to become, as day wore on, more baffling, more enigmatic; a mystery revolving about none other than a certain individual scheduled to sign a certain spurious ghosted exposé, and involving a certain deposed warden!

The individual was named Rudolph Uberhulf; and he was rightly, correctly, and truly known as—“the toughest man in Moundsville stir”!

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