



Produced by David E. Brown and The Online Distributed
Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This file was
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Internet Archive)









LANAGAN


[Illustration: “TWO MORE SHOTS TORE THROUGH AND SPRAYED US WITH
SPLINTERS”]




  LANAGAN

  _AMATEUR DETECTIVE_

  BY
  EDWARD H. HURLBUT

  _WITH ILLUSTRATIONS BY
  FREDERIC DORR STEELE_

  New York
  STURGIS & WALTON
  COMPANY
  1913




  COPYRIGHT, 1913, BY
  STURGIS & WALTON COMPANY

  Set up and electrotyped. Published March, 1913




CONTENTS


CHAPTER                                 PAGE

     I WHITHER THOU GOEST                  3

    II THE PATHS OF JUDGMENT              31

   III THE CONSPIRACY OF ONE              63

    IV WHOM THE GODS DESTROY              93

     V THE AMBASSADOR’S STICK-PIN        121

    VI WHATSOEVER A MAN SOWETH           151

   VII THE PENDELTON LEGACY              181

  VIII AT THE END OF THE LONG NIGHT      209

    IX THE DOMINANT STRAIN               235

     X OUT OF THE DEPTHS                 263




ILLUSTRATIONS

  FROM DRAWINGS BY
  FREDERICK DORR STEELE


  “Two more shots tore through, and sprayed
  us with splinters”                                      _Frontispiece_

                                                             FACING PAGE

  “Then Lanagan took his leisurely turn, drawing up an
  easy chair”                                                         96

  “He lit a match”                                                   260

  “On the floor they placed the figure they bore, a stalwart
  figure of a man”                                                   280




LANAGAN

_AMATEUR DETECTIVE_




I

WHITHER THOU GOEST




I

WHITHER THOU GOEST


Jack Lanagan of the San Francisco _Enquirer_ was conceded to have
“arrived” as the premier police reporter of San Francisco. This honour
was his not solely through a series of brilliant newspaper feats in his
especial field, but as well by reason of an entente that permitted him
to call half the patrolmen on the force by their given names; enjoy the
confidences of detective sergeants, a close-mouthed brotherhood; dine
tête-à-tête in private at French restaurants with well-groomed police
captains on canvasback or quail out of season, and sit nonchalantly on
a corner of the chief’s desk and absent-mindedly smoke up the chief’s
two-bit cigars.

It was an intimacy that carried much of the lore of the force with it:
that vital knowledge not of books. Bill Dougherty on the “pawnbroker
detail” knew scarcely more “fences” than did Lanagan; Charley Hartley,
who handled the bunco detail, found himself nettled now and then when
Lanagan would pick him up casually at the ferry building and point out
some “worker” among the incoming rustics whom Hartley had not “made,”
and debonair Harry O’Brien, who spent his time among the banks, was
more than once rudely jarred when Lanagan would slip over on the front
page of the _Enquirer_ a defalcation that had been engaging O’Brien’s
attention for a week.

So it went with Lanagan; from the “bell hops” of big hotels, the bar
boys of clubs, down to the coldest-blooded unpenned felon of the
Barbary Coast who sold impossible whiskey with one hand and wielded a
blackjack with the other, the police sources were his.

Consequently Lanagan, having “arrived,” may be accorded a few more
liberties than the average reporter and permitted to spend a little
more time than they in poker in the back room at Fogarty’s, hard
by the Hall of Justice. Here, when times were dull, he could drift
occasionally to fraternise with a “shyster,” those buzzards of the
police courts and the city prisons who served Fogarty; or with one of
the police court prosecuting attorneys affiliated with the Fogarty
political machine, for Fogarty was popularly credited with having at
least two and possibly three of the police judges in his vest pocket.
Or he could rattle the dice with a police judge himself and get the
“inside” on a closed-door hearing or the latest complaint on