The Secret Toll

"The police are efficient in ordinary cases. These people, however, operate mysteriously. So far, the police have been helpless."

The two men who thus discussed a criminal clique which was extorting money from prominent and wealthy citizens were seated in an exclusive Michigan Avenue club. From their deeply upholstered leather chairs they looked out across the busy street, with its hundreds of automobiles and strolling pedestrians, to the green lawns and leafing trees of Grant Park, awakened into renewed life by the soft breezes and warm sunshine of early June.

To the first speaker, Robert Forrester, lately returned from army service in Europe, and familiar with the privations, struggles and horrors of the great war, it seemed ridiculous that a band of criminals could endanger life in the heart of this bustling, crowded, well-policed city. Yet the threat was in his hand, and his older and presumably wiser companion assured him that they could make good the threat.

Robert Forrester was a young man of thirty--tall, dark and broad shouldered; his face deeply tanned by long army service. As a member of an old and wealthy family, of which he was the sole male survivor and head, Forrester might have followed the path selected by many of his boyhood chums and spent his life in the pursuit of pleasure or more or less indifferent occupations. He had chosen, however, to become a civil engineer; was graduated with honors, and had taken active part in the completion of several big railroad projects before the great war.

When the United States entered the war he at once enlisted and went to France as an army engineer. He had been home now for several months and was planning to resume work in his profession at the first opportunity. The financial and business condition of the country did not favor large construction work at this time, so he was still lingering in Chicago, spending much of his time at the club, where he could keep in close touch with some of the far-sighted and influential men who planned and made possible the big undertakings which would give him the opportunity he sought.

His companion and confidant of the moment, Frederick Prentice, was past middle age. The possessor of large, inherited wealth, he was totally unlike the younger and more energetic man. He had never entered business, and the only times he ever condescended to visit a business office were occasioned by infrequent plunges into speculation through a broker friend, or the necessity of calling on his lawyer.

In his easy-going, well-financed existence he had had few problems or worries. To Prentice the easiest way out was the logical course.

Forrester knew this as well as any man, and was therefore little inclined to heed the well-meant advice which Prentice was giving him--to yield without a murmur to the outrageous and exorbitant demand that had been made upon him.

The young man opened the clenched hand in which he had crushed the warning message when making his vehement declaration. He smoothed out the offending paper on his knee and glared at it--reading again the words that enraged him more each time he studied them. The message was crudely hand-printed on a square of ordinary wrapping paper such as can be found in any store. At the top was the rough drawing of a human skull. Forrester read the words aloud.

In Jasper lane two hundred feet west of Sheridan Road you will see a great oak tree on the left side. Before midnight Saturday place$10,000 in the opening you will find in this tree. Failure to comply means death. Be warned! Friends of the Poor

"On the other side," declared Forrester, "we lived and tramped and fought with spies and informers at our elbows. Enemy agents, ready to turn a dastardly trick at any moment, were on every hand. Though conditions were just ripe for them, sooner or later we spotted them--practically every one. Do you mean to tell me that here, in a peaceful, law-abiding city, with trained police and intelligent detectives, we can't run down a blackmailing crew like this one?"