The Right Way to Do Wrong Read Free Page A

not shown to Kleppini. This promise also was given, and he departed, keeping the cuffs in his possession four hours. Of course I knew that during this time Kleppini was familiarizing himself with the cuffs, but I still had a trick up my own sleeve.
    That night at the circus I occupied a box seat, andwhen Kleppini threw out his daring challenge, I entered the ring with my bag of cuffs. I said that I had no objection to his advertising his willingness to let me handcuff him, but I did object to his stating he could get out until he had made good. The audience was with me, and I told him to take his choice of the twelve cuffs.
    As I anticipated, he sprang like a tiger on the French letter cuff. He had taken them closed, and ran with feverish haste into his cabinet.
    He remained within about three minutes, whereupon I cried: “Ladies and gentlemen, do not let him tell you that the cuffs have been locked. They are open. He will return and say he opened them.”
    This brought him out of his cabinet waving the cuffs like a crazy man, and crying, “I will open these cuffs. I challenge Houdini to lock them on me. I’ll show him that it is us Germans who lead the world.”
    As he had tried the cuffs in the cabinet, he was positive that he could beat them. And I was just as positive that the opposite conditions would prevail.
    He now started to goad me into locking them on quickly, pressing me all over the circus. So violent were my efforts, that my heart beat like a trip hammer, and my face turned pale from exertion. From this Kleppini gathered that I thought myself even then defeated. So he walked to the center of the ring, with the handcuffs locked upon him, and cried: “After I open these handcuffs, I will allow Madame Kleppini to open them. She is very clever in this branch of work, and she will open them in five seconds.”
    I smiled grimly and took the floor. “Ladies and gentlemen, you can all go home. I do not lock a cuff on aman merely to let him escape. If he tries this cuff until doomsday, he cannot open it. To prove this, though the regular closing time of the circus is 10.30, I will allow him to remain here until 2.30.”
    He went into his cabinet at nine o’clock. When the big ballet feature came on at 9.30, he was not ready. At 11, almost the entire audience had gone, and Kleppini was still in his cabinet. Herr Director Sidoli became enraged, and instructed his servants to “out with Kleppini,” and they lifted the cabinet up bodily and threw it over. Kleppini ran like a hunted animal into the manager’s dressing room. The rest of the show might have gone on, but the audience rose as a man and went out.
    At midnight, by which time I had left my place in the box, and was standing guard over the dressing-room door, I permitted Madame Kleppini to join her husband, at his request. About one o’clock the manager asked Kleppini if he would give up, and Kleppini begged me to enter the room and release him, which I refused to do without witnesses. We then sent for the Herr Director Sidoli, Herr Reutter, and a reporter. At last Kleppini said he had the word, “Clefs,” and I laughed.
    â€œYou are wrong. If you want to know the word which opens the lock, it is just what you are—‘fraud.’ ”
    And with this I grabbed his hands, quickly turned the letters till they spelled “fraud,” and as they fell into their respective places he was freed.
    The locks, you see, were changeable, and it required only a short moment for me to change the word. When he went into the cabinet, he tried the cuff, and it responded to the word “Clefs.” While locking them on him, I changed the word to “fraud,” and he, evenwith his eagle eye, failed to recognize that he had been trapped.
    The next day, however, being a boastful man, and unwilling to acknowledge defeat, he actually circulated bills stating that he had defeated Houdini and won 5,000