The Mystery Megapack

sweep up and down the columns from left to right and from right to left again. He remained as puzzled as before. True enough, there were several Associated Press dispatches from Pennsylvania, but he found none of them mentioning the town with the queer-sounding name of Alschoola. In Philadelphia, a judge had suffered a nervous breakdown as a result of trying more than a thousand divorce cases; in Pittsburgh a kidnapped boy had been returned to his broken-hearted parents.
    With an impatient growl, The Early Bird threw down the paper and turned on his heel.
    “Watcha goin’ to this here Alschoola for?” he demanded flatly.
    “Money,” answered Mr. Clackworthy with unilluminating brevity.
    II.
    James Early did not find his first glimpse of Alschoola reassuring. As he and the master confidence man disembarked from a non-Pullman train, the only kind that operated over the twenty-five-mile branch, his first impression was that the railroad company did not care enough about Alschoola to bestow upon it a respectable passenger station. Away from the shabby depot there extended a bumpy cobblestone street, leading uphill toward the business section.
    The Early Bird wasn’t wildly enthusiastic about the business part of the town, either. Accusingly he swung upon the master confidence man and glared.
    “I hope you ain’t got no idear that we’re gonna take any dough outta this place?” he demanded with disgusted skepticism. “Huh! The whole burg wouldn’t auction off for fifty berries—of my jack.”
    “Appearances,” reminded Mr. Clackworthy, “are often deceiving. And permit me to say that a town is but the composite of its strongest personalities, now and then of but one dominating personality; towns, like the men who make them, have traits of individuality. What strikes you, on the surface, as being Alschoola’s outstanding trait?”
    “Freezin’ onto the jack,” snapped The Early Bird promptly; “squeezin’ down on the silver dollar until the eagle squawks an’ Lady Columbia sobs for mercy.”
    “Right!” and Mr. Clackworthy nodded. “Step to the head of the class.” He gestured toward the shabby buildings and the poorly paved, ill-lighted street ahead of them. “Here we see a miserly municipal spirit and a horror of high taxes. I think it would be a safe guess to say that Alschoola is dominated by a clique of dollar-worshiping gentlemen who find progress too expensive for their tastes. Such men, my dear James, are the sort we like to pluck.”
    The Early Bird grunted without enthusiasm; for himself, he preferred to have some visible evidence of the wealth that they proposed to gather in.
    “When I was liftin’ leathers,” he said, referring to those days previous to his association with the master confidence man, “I never picked out no panhandlers when the fins was itchin’ for a fat roll.”
    There was no station bus, the lack of a public conveyance being explained by the proximity of the hotel sign, “Alschoola House,” prominently displayed half a block up the dingy street. There being, likewise, no hotel porter to lighten their burden, the two plotters had no choice but to pick up their bags and make their way hotelward.
    On the corner, before reaching the hostelry, they had to pass a rusty-looking building with peelly lettering on the plate-glass window which announced: “Alschoola State Bank.” Crowded up against the window was a desk before which sat a man who at the moment was fondling a packet of currency.
    “See the money buzzard!” remarked The Early Bird.
    Mr. Clackworthy smiled; he had to admit that there was something about the man at the bank desk, onion-smooth of pate, narrow-eyed, and with a beaked nose curving down over the upper lips of his thin mouth, which did make one think of a bird of prey.
    “I wonder if that is the chief mogul of Alschoola,” he said. “What a joy it would be to separate him from some of the money which he strokes so fondly!”
    “Yeah,” snorted The Early Bird, “an’ what a joy it would be to breeze into the subtreasury some quiet P.M., an’ stroll leisurely forth with a coupla suit cases full of thousand-case notes. It would be easier to take two or three million outta the mint than to bilk that bozo outta two bits.”
    The Alschoola House extended no cordial hand of welcome. The lazy-eyed, slow-moving clerk was smoking a corncob pipe as he watched two bearded oldsters engrossed with a game of checkers. Almost reluctantly, he tore