The Bradys Beyond Their Depth Part 15

"No, but I carry a gun in my pocket!" hissed Mason, furiously.

"Oh, pshaw! That don't scare me a bit, my boy. Then you won't confess----"

"I'll tell you nothing of my personal affairs!" roared Mason. "Clear out! Mind your own business. Leave me alone! I don't want to have anything to do with you fellows! Do you understand?"

And he scowled and stamped his foot on the pavement and rushed past them and hastily entered his house.

The Bradys laughed and walked away.

"He's getting afraid of us," said Harry.

"Yes. We are wearing on his nerves. He knows we are watching him, and it makes him very uneasy. However, when we get good proof of his guilt, we'll nail him, and that will end his rascality."

They felt confident that Mason would not come out again that night and therefore went home.

On the following morning a great surprise awaited them.

Harry was reading the daily paper and caught view of this item:

"The missing man found. Oliver Dalton, the well-known Broad street broker, found drowned in the East river. At ten o'clock last night Martin Kelly, an old junk dealer, picked up the mutilated corpse of a well-dressed man in the East river off the foot of East Forty-second street. He towed it behind his skiff to the morgue, and turned the corpse over to the authorities, with an account of his ghastly find. The body had been in the water so long it would have been unrecognizable if it were not for some private papers found in the pockets, by means of which the man's ident.i.ty was established. A reporter was the first one to bring the news to the dead man's daughter, etc."

When Harry read the item aloud, Old King Brady cried:

"Harry, had Mason's trip on the river anything to do with finding that corpse?"

"Let us go down to the morgue and get the facts."

Old King Brady nodded and they hastened across town.

CHAPTER VIII.

WHAT THE BROKER'S WILL SAID.

When the Bradys entered the morgue they found Lizzie Dalton there, bitterly weeping, and the keeper showing her the body said to be her father's.

The man's head was gone, as if it had been severed by the wheels of a pa.s.sing boat. The hands were nearly destroyed and the clothing was in a good state. The keeper was asking the girl:

"An' yer recognize him as yer father?"

"It must be," replied Lizzie, with a sob. "On the finger is a ring which I know belonged to him, the clothing certainly is his and the keys, papers and penknife found in the pockets belonged to him. As you can see, the envelopes have his name and address on them."

Just then the girl saw the Bradys.

They bowed to her and Old King Brady said, in kindly tones:

"We hope you will make no error, Miss Dalton. Let the identification be complete. Everything depends upon your verdict."

"Oh, I am positive it is poor papa," said the weeping girl, "for no one but he could have had the things found on this corpse."

The detectives examined the body and the effects.

They then left the Morgue with the girl.

She was deeply affected and they brought her home in a carriage.

When they left her at her door and departed, the Bradys were in a bewildered state of mind and the old detective said:

"Harry, I'm completely puzzled again."

"On account of the girl's positive identification of that body?"

"Yes. If it wasn't Dalton's corpse she would not declare it was."

"But how about the body we traced to the swamp in Georgia? Could it have been brought North again and thrown in the river here?"

"Such a thing might have occurred."

"It seems improbable, though."

"Very true. But there's no way to account for the finding of this body here unless that's what happened."

"Then we are beyond our depth again."

"So it appears. We may be deep enough to solve an ordinary mystery, but the depth of this one seems to be too much for us. At first we imagined we had the whole thing thoroughly sifted out. Now we've received a severe setback. It brings us to where we started, practically. All our theories may have been wrong. Sim Johnson and Ronald Mason may be innocent men. Perhaps we wronged them by unjust suspicions based upon circ.u.mstantial evidence."

"Then you think we had better drop the case?"

Old King Brady nodded, and replied:

"I don't see what else we can do now. If the man found in the river is Dalton, the body is in such a state that it will be utterly impossible to tell whether he was a victim of foul play, suicide, or accident.

There is absolutely nothing about the body to indicate what the cause of his death was."

"I don't fancy giving up the case."

"Well, we never before found a job we couldn't finish successfully,"

said the old detective. "But how we are to unravel the mystery of this man's death is beyond my power of thinking."

Harry pondered a few moments in silence.

Several ideas pa.s.sed through his mind and he finally said:

"Will you stick to the case a while longer if I do?"

"Certainly. Why did you ask that question?"