The Substitute Millionaire Page #9

Jack Norman had no idea he was Silas Gyde's sole heir—until the multimillionaire was killed by an anarchist's bomb and Jack found himself the richest man in New York. The inheritance included a warning from his benefactor about an elaborate protection scheme promising to protect the wealthy from anarchists, in which Gyde had declined to enroll. Recognizing his own danger, Jack enlists a out-of-work actor to take on his own identity, while he, in the guise of Jack Norman's secretary, works furiously behind the scenes to break up the gang and unmask their leader, the mysterious Mr. B.

• Fiction
• Mystery

								


"'No wife nor chick?' she said, with her rare soft smile.  'Poor Silas! How useless your wealth must seem to you!'

"Then I saw as in a great white light that I had only been a fool for my pains.  I returned to New York and automatically resumed the business of making money.  I could not stop.  It was all I knew.  It filled my days and kept me from thinking.

"I often wished to change my way of life, but it was too late then.  I was already known as Silas Gyde the usurer, and men had hardened their hearts against me.  My diffident attempts to make friends were rebuffed.  I was forced back into the rut I had worn for myself.  There was nothing for me to do but earn the reputation the world had given me.

"I have told you that in fancy I often gave you advice.  But it is not as a good example that I desire to hold myself up to you.  I urge you to avoid my example.  Never let money get the upper hand of you.  Old Silas Gyde the miser tells you money is no good except to spend.  I have succeeded in creating the incubus of wealth, and in so doing lost my soul.  I leave you the harder task of ridding yourself of it, without losing yours.

  "Your well-wisher,
      "Silas Gyde."

Under a date two years later the letter was resumed:

"I have opened this to add a warning.  When you inherit my money, you are bound to inherit my cares also.  Ever since I became rich enough to be notorious, I have been a target for men's envy and hate.  I expected it.  Indeed, I enjoyed it in a way.  I gloated over my books of clippings.  Their hatred gave me a sense of being somebody in the world.

"In my daily mail I received, and still receive, hundreds of letters, appealing, threatening, abusive; letters from every kind of crank.  I ignore them.  But lately a real danger has begun to threaten me in the spread of anarchistic doctrines among the people.  And there are not lacking those to turn the justifiable discontent of the people to their own blackguardly advantage.  My threatening missives now have an organized hatred behind them.

"The culmination was reached a month ago in the shocking death of Ames Benton, the first tragedy of the kind that has occurred in America--but not the last I fear.  I knew the man; I did business with him; I had talked to him the day before his death.  What brought it closer home to me was the fact that Benton was what you'd call a popular man; openhanded, affable, of a kindly nature.  If they did this to him, what will my fate be!

"The affair may be forgotten by the time you read this, so I will say Benton was a prominent and wealthy man--though not so rich as I--president and director in many corporations.  He was blown to pieces in his bed at night by an anarchist's bomb.  The man that threw it likewise lost his life in the explosion.  How he succeeded in reaching Mr. Benton's bedroom will always remain a mystery.  Among Mr. Benton's effects were found threatening letters similar to those I have received.  The assassin's accomplices--it is believed that he must have had accomplices--have never been found.

"This affair has not helped me to sleep better of nights.  My courage is of the daylight variety.  So long as I can have my eyes open and my wits about me, I am willing to take my chances, but at the thought of being attacked in my bed I confess my heart turns to water.  So I have taken my measures.

"The Madagascar Hotel which I was building was all but complete.  To secure light and air on the West I had already bought the adjoining dwelling on Forty ----th street.  I got it cheap because it had been a private insane asylum and was in bad odor in the neighborhood.  The transaction had been effected through agents, and it was not known that I was the owner.

"I had an opening cut between the hotel and this dwelling.  By distributing the work among many hands I was able to conceal my eventual purpose from all.  The people who put in the steel doors thought that the rear door was to give on a shallow cupboard in the wall.  When the doors were in I knocked out this cupboard myself and had a clear way through.  Nobody who knew thought it at all out of the way that Silas Gyde should put in a steel vault in connection with his suite in the hotel.

"I have installed myself in a rear room of the old dwelling.  The front of the house which has been boarded up for years I was careful not to disturb.  Here I can sleep in peace.  If the ghosts of the poor insane patients stalk through the halls, they do not trouble me.

"But they may get me yet, of course, and I am writing to put you in possession of all the particulars.  I am sure now, that there is a devilishly able brain using the anarchistic agitation to further a blackmailing scheme on a gigantic scale.

"For instance, immediately after poor Benton's death I received a letter threatening me with the same fate, and I have reason to believe that many other rich men received similar letters.  I promptly put mine in the hands of the police, as did others, with what result?  None, except that I instantly received another letter apprising me that my act was known, and that if I did not immediately cease all dealings with the police I would be shot down in the street.

"I ignored this letter, and three days later I got a bullet through my hat in City Hall Square.  The newspapers seemed to take the attitude that it was no more than my due.  But the other rich men appreciated the significance of the act, and I have no doubt the blackmailing business was much stimulated thereby.  Still the police did nothing, and I resolved to have no more to do with those gentry, but to protect myself.

"Now observe.  A week after the attack on me I was called upon in my office by a polite young man who handed me the card of the 'Eureka Protective Association.'  His proposition in brief was, that for a stated sum paid every month (four hundred dollars was the amount named) his organization would guarantee to protect me against all threats from Anarchists, and would warn me in advance of any plans that were laid to attempt my life.  Since the police had failed to suppress the Reds, he said, his people had succeeded in placing their agents in every circle of anarchists, to take note of and report on all their activities.

"Ingenious, was it not?  I could well imagine that many of my timorous wealthy acquaintances would fall for it eagerly after all the agitations of the past few weeks.  But to me it smelled rank of blackmail.  It seemed to me that if I once submitted, the impost would promptly be doubled, trebled, quadrupled, and instead of securing peace I would be letting myself in for a life of continuous alarms.  I might as well die at once.  Anyhow, I thought, it wasn't possible that every rich man would submit, and they couldn't very well assassinate us all. My chance was as good as another's.

"So I turned the polite young man down, and took my own measures.  I closed my office down-town, and carried my business under my hat, as they say.  I traded impartially through every broker in town.  I have moved into my retreat in the old house, and venture out only by daylight, keeping to the crowded streets.  The secret of my sleeping-place is still a secret I am sure.  I have had no more threatening letters, and I hope they have crossed me off their lists as a hopeless prospect.  But if they do get me, you will know all the circumstances."
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