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Show ; ... N 1! ' V' ? 5 ' : : vv I li I FLOYD GIBBONS Adventurers7 Club "The Clue That Spelled Death" By FLOYD GIBBONS Famous Headline Hunter. WELL sir, we've got a detective story to tell today and a real detective to tell it. He is Richard D. Smith, and he spins us a swell yarn of how he went out looking for clues and found Adventure instead. Or maybe I should say that Dick Smith found Adventure, too for he found the clues he was looking for. Dick says he's fifty-one, ami feels Just as flt as he ever did. He's a magician now not a detective. Today he goes around to clubs and parties, giving other people mysteries to think over, Instead of solving them himself. But not so many years ago he was one of the trusted operatives of an internationally known detective agency. And according to some of the newspaper clippings. Dick must have been a wonder. Remember all those detective stories you've ever read? Most of them start off: "The telephone rang in the office of the detective detec-tive bureau' Well, this one is no exception to that rule. The only difference is that this story is a true one and the telephone rang In Dick's home, one night in August,. 1923, while he sat there listening to the radio. Dick answered that phone. It was the otiice. The ollice told Dick to take the night train for Ogdensburg, N. Y., way up on the St. Lawrence river, report to the general manager of the Rutland railroad, and see if he could And out anything about 300 bags of sugar that had been stolen from the railroad's warehouse on the waterfront wa-terfront This Was a Sweet Case Looking for Stolen Sugar. Dick arrived In Ogdensburg on the following day. He talked to tb railroad cops and the local police he looked the scene of the robbery over. The police knew nothing definite and the scene of the crime yielded "It Turned and Rammed Us Directly in the Center." no clues. Then Dick went and looked up a friend In the D. S. customs service whose Job was to watch the river for smugglers trying to run liquor In from Canada. Dick knew that the men of the underworld have very few secrets among themselves, and he had a notion that if he could get the customs men to co-operate by capturing a crew of rumrunners, rum-runners, he could learn something from those rum-runners about the sugar theft. The customs men fell In with his idea, and that same night, five of them and Dick along with them went out in a government launch and hid in a cove a little way up the river. The first night they spent well Just waiting. Nothing happened. But the second night they spied a dark object out In the middle of the river and waited until it had come across to the American side. Then they set out full speed ahead after their quarry, and the next 10 minutes were the most exciting of Dick's life. First Blood in Battle of Boats. Says Dick: "When the other boat saw It could not get away, it turned and rammed us directly in the center. The other boat was heavier than ours. Our boat, was cut clean In two, and I, with my five friends, was thrown Into the river. Then, not satisfied with having disabled us and thrown us In the water, the rum-ruuoers came back circled around us trying to brain each of us as we were trying to get our bearings In the water." There followed the fight of Dick's life. The customs men's guns were behind them in the wrecked boat. Dick was the only one who had a revolver on him. "I drew it out and tried to shoot it out with the rum-runners," he says, "but a piece of iron pipe came down from a boat and knocked the gun out of my hand. "The man who was yielding that piece of pipe could work a lot faster than I could in the water. The blow that knocked the gun from my hand also broke the hand Itself. The pipe went up and came down again, this time hitting me a hard clout on the head. I could feel my senses slipping away from me. Then, for once In my life, I thought my time had come, Dick Learns Why It Pays to Buy Life Insurance. "Jly last thought was the satisfying one that I had paid my life Insurance In-surance premium for a month. I said to myself that the folks back home would have a house to live in, and a five thousand dollar Insurance policy to live on. Then I felt myself going down under the surface of the water." When Dick came to, they told him that he had gone down a second and was going down for the third time before help came to him. In the meantime an approaching boat had frightened off the rum-runners and one of the customs men managed to reach him with part of the wrecked boat. He held Dick up until the rest of the men could get there. Then, somehow, they all managed man-aged to get to the shore. All that trouble for a clue and still no clue In sight But after Dick had spent a few days in bed resting up, he went out again with the same crew of men and another boat They were after rum runners, and no fooling this time. They caught them four of them and Dick talked to them something like this. You're in a tough spot now but It might be worse. Give me a tip on who copped that sugar, and well we'll forget we ever saw you. That's the way a lot of crimes are solved. And on the tip-off those birds gave him. Dick got the men he was after. WNU Service. |