The Black Mask — page 8: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

6 The Man Who Was Seven into and filled the box. Remarking pet- tishly that the Totem National should be prepared to supply its customers with more adequate accommodations, Seeley grumblingly hired the two ad- joining boxes of the same size as the first and in turn filled them with sim- ilar parcels. These, like the first, he carried and put in place with his own hands, despite their evident weight, roughly declining all assistance prof- fered 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 Dan- iels’ trained eyes, the almost equally ebvious 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 un- derstand 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 sus- picion 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 proc- ess, but the power of money is great. even when it lies fallow in banks, so no insiniiation of bribe tendering or ac- ceptance is intended here. Far be it from me to even remotely suggest that a banker would give or a policeman take money for the suppres- sion 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 consum- mation, 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 inac- tively. 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 Gov- ernment 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 care- ful 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 spe- cie, 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 contemptu- ously 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 Oo ea oe a =