Flynn’s Weekly Detective Fiction. Vol. 25, No. 2, August 13, 1927

This story began in Flynn’s Weekly Detective Fiction for July 23

His talents would have shot him to the top of whatever career he selected and he used them unstintingly in crime

Revolting against the drab life of bank clerk Jack Lawrence executed a clever holdup of Jerry Larkin, proprietor of a road house which Jack occasionally patronized with his wealthier friends. Through inexperience he was captured and served two years at the State Reformatory. There he was Johnny-up, ruler of the inmates, which resulted in his being taken into the powerful “mob” of Slim Gegan on his release. After six months with this gang he made a sensational robbery of the fashionable Gregory School, was again caught, and confessed to save Elsie Lane, an innocent girl who loved him, from suspicion and trial. During Jack’s three-year term in Sing Sing, Madge Kimberly, under Slim’s orders, constantly had written to him, declaring her affection, and on his release, met him and drove to Slim’s apartment. Elsie, meanwhile, had become a movie star under the name of Anna Gray. Her letters to Jack had been destroyed by Slim’s hirelings, and Lawrence thought she had deserted him. However, she, too, was at the gate, just as Jack drove off, not seeing her. She trailed the car bearing him to the Riverside Drive apartment which Slim occupied under the name of Mr. Allen, and by a trick learned his destination.

Chapter XXXII Showdown — of a Kind

While awaiting Madge, whom he had sent in his car to Sing Sing to meet Jack and return with his protégé in crime to the apartment, Slim Gegan had amused himself this morning with his favorite indoor sport of torturing Dopey Buddy, the youthful drug fiend, whom he took a vicious pleasure in reducing to degrading abjection by withholding the potion that had actually come to mean life for the wretched creature.

All the instincts of cruelty of a savage were unmodified by civilization in the nature of the dapper, slim, gray criminal. The feeling also of holding another human creature so absolutely in his power, make a slave of him, whetted his viciousness to an unspeakable degree.

For fully an hour he had inhumanly baited the white-faced, emaciated lad. He had withheld the drug from him till Dopey Buddy had come to him crawling, whining, sobbing, begging in mercy’s name for Slim to open that drawer in his desk which the youth wildly eyed and dole him out the precious white powder that would relieve his mental and physical agony. With a tightening smile of his thin lips Slim held off minute after minute, ten minutes, a quarter of an hour, a half hour.

He had the boy on his knees before him, wiping off his shoes, kissing his hand, writhing, hysterical. Now and then he would reach toward the drawer where the drug was kept. But as the lad’s distorted lips opened to emit an animal cry of joy he would snap the partly open drawer back again and laugh at the gibbering suffering of the half-demented lad.

Dopey Buddy was on his knees praying to him, as if he were a god, when the stocky, dour-faced butler, a full-fledged member of the Gegan gang, knocked and told him of the telephone announcement of the arrival of Lawrence and Madge.

Then only did the torture cease. He opened the drawer, flung the half-mad boy the paper packet so infinitely precious to his drug-ridden body. Slim grinned like a mask as he saw Dopey Buddy take the powder down in a single, avid gulp.

It struck his notice that the lad did not behave as usual, which was to babble half-incoherent expressions of gratitude as the drug afforded swift and intense relief. Slim grinned the wider as, happening to look up, he caught the youth looking back at him with a gleaming glance of hatred cast over his shoulder.

“He’ll be wiping my boots again in the morning,” thought Slim. “Licking ’em clean if I tell him to.”

Then he was up on his feet, both hands extended to greet Jack Lawrence.

“Well... well, Johnny-up! A little pale, my boy. But I’ve got a wad in the safe that’ll take you down to seashore and put a good healthy tan on you in no time. ’Lo, Madge. I suppose you’re feeling fine, too — your big boy back again?”

“I’m feeling so good I hurt!” gurgled the red-lipped, brown-eyed young woman.

“Is it too soon, Slim, to ask you just how I stand with you? What’s coming out of the Gregory swag?”

“Got it all here in black and white. Abe Trummell took a chunk of it, of course. Had to let Phil skip his five thousand dollar bond. Been sending you a pretty, reg’lar income up in stir. Taxed you a little on Jerry’s funeral money — even if he did double cross us. His brother knew too much. Had to salve him a little. All in all — what would you say to ten thousand?”

“Guess that’s all right. How much can I have right now?”

“Will two grand hold you?”

“Sure.”

Slim moved over to a wall safe, opened it and brought out a sheaf of new yellow money which he handed Jack, saying: “I hope you are not discouraged with the game because they’ve knocked you off twice. It was just a bum chance that brought Tunney up from the city on the case. Otherwise there’d have been a dean get-away.”

“I’m putting it all down to experience,” nodded Jack. “I don’t think they’ll ever get me again.”

“You don’t mean you are going to pull away — go back to punching a time clock?”

“I’ll say not. What I mean is, Slim—”

There came a knock on the door.

When Slim opened it his butler conveyed with a slight nod of the head that he desired to speak with his master privately. Slim stepped out into the hallway and closed the door behind him.

“There’s a good-looking young woman in the hall,” said the butler, “says she must see Lawrence. I tried to say he wasn’t here. But she said she knew better. She said she knew him and had seen him enter the apartment house and had learned that he had gone to Mr. Allen’s rooms.

“Says she must see him. She’ll wait, she says, in the hallway till he comes out if she isn’t permitted to see him right away. She’ll wait, she says, if she has to wait all night. She talks like she means it. Talks like she would make trouble if put to it, Mr. Gegan.”

“Give a name?”

“Elsie Lane — that’s the young woman, ain’t it, that—”

“Shut up.”

Slim was troubled, as he had every reason to be. If Elsie saw Jack, she was bound to demand why he had never answered any of her letters. Jack might start an inquiry at the post office — serious predicaments might arise.

If Jack loved the girl he would be furious. She would hold the trump cards for winning him over. And, in his rage, he might turn on him, Slim, and — the girl must not be allowed to see Lawrence, must not. He must take swift and drastic measures.

“Go back and tell her that she’ll see Lawrence in a few minutes. Slip her into the little reception room. But don’t let her get out of it until I signal with the buzzer. Then bring her in here — into my room.”

“Yes, sir.”

Slim stepped back, closed the door and said:

“Pretty important matter come up. Fellow I’ve got to see right away. Madge, you take Jack into the music room and I’ll have Markey take you in some champagne. I guess you and Jack are ripe for a few more hours of talk, eh? I don’t expect this interview is going to take very long. I’ll join you soon as I can, Johnny-up, and we’ll talk over the future.”

“Yes, Slim. I’m anxious to do that with you. As I said, I’ve—”

“Well, hold it a little while, Johnny-up. Take him along, Madge.”

There were three doors in the room. The one at the front led into the main hallway. The door in the rear led to a private back stairway that dropped three flights before it admitted one into the main hallway of the apartment house below, where, if one desired, one might continue down four more rear flights to a rear door that opened on an alley along the side of the apartment house and running from the rear into the street.

The third door of Slim’s room opened into an interior hallway from which entrance was to be had to several bedrooms, a large music room and a still larger salon.

It was through this center door that Slim motioned Jack and Madge, and he watched them as they traversed its length and disappeared into the music room. He reentered his library, locked the center door, went to his big mahogany table, and touched a button beneath its top.

Very shortly thereafter Markey ushered Elsie Lane before him, and discreetly closed the door.

Miss Lane gazed coolly at the little, gray, ferret-faced master crook.

“I asked to see Mr. John Lawrence,” she said.

“What if Mr. Lawrence doesn’t care to see you, miss?”

“When he tells me so himself I’ll believe it.”

“Only that way, hey?”

“Only that way. May I ask who you are?”

“They told you my name downstairs, didn’t they, when you asked where Mr. Lawrence had gone?”

“They called you Mr. Allen.”

“That’s who I am.”

“Here, perhaps; Slim Gegan elsewhere, I fancy.”

“Oh, you do?”

“I’m certain of it. But I didn’t come here to see you, but to see Jack Lawrence.”

“And I’ve kind of hinted that perhaps he doesn’t want to see you.”

“I’ve said I would only believe that when he told me so himself.”

Slim relighted the cigar, which had gone out.

“No,” he said. “Lawrence wouldn’t have to tell you, if you knew what I knew.”

“What do you mean by that?” demanded Elsie.

“You’re in love with him, ain’t you?”

She blushed furiously and made him no answer.

“And you think he’s still in love with you? Because he told you he was the day before he was sent away.”

“He proved that he was by what he did to clear me,” said Elsie hotly.

“But three years in prison make big changes in a man. Besides you’ve grown famous. And you went too far away. There’s been another girl seeing him all this time — visiting him up in prison — as his sister. He saw her, talked to her, touched her hand, while he saw nothing of you, got only letters from you that read like Sunday school tracts.”

“What do you know of my letters?” asked Elsie.

“Oh, I saw him now and then. He told me.”

“Still I demand an opportunity here and now to see Jack Lawrence.”

Slim arose.

“All right. That goes. You’ll get a chance to see him. And then if you want to speak to him — if after you’ve seen, it turns out that your pride is so small, so contemptible — why, I’ve got nothing against you, Miss Lane, I’m only trying to make it easy for you.

“I’m only trying to let you know that whatever you may have been to Lawrence, whatever he may have thought of you once... well, he never gives you a thought now. It’s all right — all right. You are going to see him — mighty quick. After that it will be up to you.”

“I don’t understand what you are driving at.”

“You just wait here a second and you will... you will. You just wait a second. I’ll be right back.”

Slim unlocked the center door, opened it and passed out of the room. He moved hastily to the music salon. There he drew back a heavy velvet curtain and looked in on Jack and Madge as they sat chatting, champagne glasses in hand.

“Just a minute, Madge — just a word with you.”

She joined Slim in the hallway. He whispered to her swiftly. She gave him a nod of understanding and returned to the music room as Slim stepped briskly back along the hallway to his library.

He paused outside the door and listened until he heard the sound of a dance record as uttered by a gramophone from the music room. A small twist of a smile crossed his lips as he opened the library door and said:

“Suppose you come this way, Miss Lane.”

Chapter XXXIII “The Law Couldn’t Get You, But I Can!”

Slim Gegan paused at the curtain shutting off the view of the interior of the music room. Then he drew it slightly aside and was satisfied. His whispered instructions to Madge had been that she start the gramophone in the tune of a dance.

This would place her in Jack’s arms. She was to watch the curtain, and when he opened it slightly it would be her cue to be suddenly overcome with such an emotion of love for Jack that she was to wind her arms tightly around his neck and, willy nilly, press her lips to his own.

As Slim moved the curtain slightly aside and peeked in Madge was looking at him over Jack’s shoulder. She winked to say that she had caught the cue.

Slim opened the curtain slightly wider.

“Suppose, Miss Lane, you look in without yourself being seen.”

Before she realized that she was spying, Elsie had done so. While the gay music rippled off the phonograph she looked in on two figures that scarcely moved — Madge and Jack Lawrence, lips joined and in a full embrace.

Elsie recoiled from the spectacle. Her face became very white. She turned swiftly and fairly ran back to Slim’s library, the little, gray man at her heels.

Once again in the room, he said to her, trying to put a touch of kindliness in his voice:

“I guess that finished your wanting to see Jack Lawrence, doesn’t it?”

Elsie stared at Slim Gegan as if she didn’t see him.

He went on:

“I know who you are and what brought you here. You are Jack’s good angel, aren’t you? And you came to take him away from my influence — rescue him from the villain’s clutches. Well, my dear young woman, you are wasting your time.

“He wants the life. He wants kick, adventure, and quick money. He wants me as much — more, much more than I have any need of him. He wants her, and he’s got her. And, by the same token, you can see how much he wants you — how warm a welcome you could expect if you came preaching to him. Especially right now after three years of unnatural restraint.”

“I am ready to leave here, if you please,” said Elsie, holding back her tears and holding her voice steady with a great effort. “Will you kindly have your servant show me out?”

Slim seated himself before his big mahogany table. He tapped his delicate fingers on the polished surface of the table top. Then, very decisively, he shook his head in the negative.

“I can’t do that — let you leave. Not for a week at least. Perhaps ten days.”

“You can’t mean that you will dare to keep me prisoner? You had better consider the danger of that.”

“You can’t blame me,” he said, touching another match coolly to his long cigar. “You walked into it yourself. The only way you could have found out where I live was by following my automobile from Sing Sing. Well, then, you had no business following Lawrence here.”

“I demand to be permitted to leave this house this instant!”

“Don’t try hysterics. They’ll get you nothing, Miss Lane,” he retorted, looking squarely into her blazing eyes. “You see, you know who I am.”

“Slim Gegan, the man who has fostered Jack Lawrence in a life of habitual crime!” she blurted.

“There you see. And the first thing you’d do when you got out of here would be to tell the police where I make my home. I can’t permit it. You’ll have to be my guest for awhile, Miss Lane.

“Oh, your person will be perfectly safe. I haven’t the slightest intention of offering you any insult or attacking you. This isn’t a movie. You see, I know too many other beautiful women who are more of my kind — more to my mind.

“I realize it will put you to a great inconvenience and cause tremendous anxiety to two or three movie magnates by my holding you here for, say, ten days. But please consider the tremendous inconvenience to which you are putting me. I’m certain you’d talk tell where you found me.

“It would be very annoying and upset several of my plans to have the headquarters bulls and stools spying around here on me. It means that I will have to move elsewhere, much as I hate to do so. I am situated very comfortably here.

“But I’ll have to get out — go to live somewhere of which you know nothing about. And while that little transfer is being made, you are going to stay here. As I said before, you’ve brought it upon yourself. That should be clear to you.”

“Why, it would be kidnaping! You wouldn’t dare?”

“Miss Lane, spare yourself any useless display of emotion. On the other hand, consider that I am really being very mild with you. Only kidnaping when,” and he fixed her with a hard, clear gaze, “at my order I might put you out of my way for good and all!”

“Murder?”

“You’d get me if you could — send me to prison for the rest of my life, if it was in your power to do so. You already know too much. I don’t want blood on my hands, but you’ve walked into my parlor unbidden, unwanted, trouble-seeking, and now you’ll have to take your medicine. It will not serve you in the least to scream or shriek. For very good reasons of my own, I have had the walls of this room made absolutely sound proof.”

He stepped toward the big table.

“Please go quietly with my butler when he comes. He will take you to his wife, my housekeeper.

“She will give you a comfortable room and see that you are supplied with whatever woman’s stuff you’ll need to wear while you are here. Please don’t make a fuss, because if you do we will not be able to deal with you gently. We’ll bind and gag you if necessary, Miss Lane.”

She stood gazing at him with the silence of the spellbound as he put his fingers forward to the button under the table.

But he didn’t touch it. Instead he snatched his hand away as if stung.

For the door at the rear of the room flew open with a force that sent it banging against the wall.

Miss Lane uttered an involuntary scream at the wild-eyed and disheveled figure she saw there.

It was Dopey Buddy. His long, pale, straw-colored hair was in a tangle on his forehead, falling half over pale-blue, red-lined, inflamed eyes. Bright red patches burned in his otherwise chalk-white cheeks. His loose, weak mouth was writhing, his malformed chin quivering.

Slim’s small head darted forward on his shoulders like the head of a viper. His eyes shone with white anger.

“What the hell do you mean, you dog, you less than dog, by breaking into this room in that manner?” he snapped.

“Less than dog, I was, I may have been!” screamed the youth. “But I’ll be no more a dog of yours — no more your whining, whimpering cur! What a fool I’ve been to grovel at your feet, to beg, to kiss your hand for the relief I must have when I could all along have so easily changed it all; as I’m going to change it now.”

“Get out of this room or I’ll have Markey tie you to a bedpost and I’ll whip and lash you raw!” cried Slim Gegan.

But Dopey Buddy laughed at him, loudly, with the stridency of the insane.

“Listen, Gegan, I can’t live a month. I found that out at a hospital a few days ago. The drugs you’ve given me have eaten the very heart out of me. I can’t live a month, you understand? But, Gegan, you’re not going to live another minute! The law can’t get you, but, by God, I can!”

His right hand whipped out of his pocket. His lean, white wasted fingers were clutching an automatic.

Gegan put out his hand toward a drawer in the table where he kept a pistol.

“Don’t move!” cried the boy. “Or I’ll shoot!”

“Buddy, don’t be a fool. Don’t put murder on your soul.”

His tone was now that of one addressing a child.

“There — over there is the drawer that holds a six months’ supply for you. Go over and take it.”

Now the young drug-fiend’s voice came very calmly.

“I am going to do that when I have finished the job. It is just as I said, Gegan. The law couldn’t get you, but I can.”

With a gesture that appeared queerly nonchalant he lifted the weapon and fired once, twice, thrice at Slim Gegan’s heart.

The little, gray master crook grasped at the end of the table, stood swaying for a second, not more. His gray face took on the green-gray pallor of death. His head suddenly fell striking the table, bounded away from it and it was the corpse of Slim Gegan that curled on the floor.

Dopey Buddy stared at it. He chattered at it and laughed at it. Then he rushed for the drawer and with a queer cry of joy possessed himself of the box from which Gegan had long doled him the drug at the cost of his complete degradation and poignant suffering.

The box tucked under his coat, the pistol slipped back into another pocket, he suddenly appeared to become conscious of Elsie’s presence.

“Nobody has heard,” he said. “No sounds can get out of this room. You’ve got time to get out of here. I don’t know who you are, but you look — look decent. You don’t want to be in this. Get out of here. Through the door I came in.

“Three flights down, then into the main hall and keep to the back stairway. It lets you out on an alley. You can get away from the place without the boys in the hall seeing you.

“Hurry. It will be lots of trouble for you, if the police come before you get away. Although I’m going to tell them that I did it. I’m proud that I did it. That wasn’t a man I killed. It was a devil. He belonged where I sent him — to hell!”

By this time Elsie was at the door. She fled down the rear stairways and with a relieved heart made her way out of the apartment house unseen. She hastened to her car and was soon a way.

Fifteen minutes later she was in her room at her hotel, shaken, cowering, unable to dismiss from her vision the wild-eyed youth, the white-faced terror that had flashed into Slim Gegan’s face when the shots rang out, the grotesque manner in which his head had bumped the table, rebounded, and his small body had curled or, rather, flopped spinelessly and lifeless to the floor.

Dopey, after her flight, had stood for nearly a minute leering at the upturned face of the murdered man. Then his frail body had suddenly straightened. He ran from door to door of Gegan’s library and down each hallway screamed wildly:

“I’ve killed him! I’ve killed the fiend of hell!”

His cries brought Markey, the butler, and Jack and Madge running into the room where they halted, shocked at the spectacle of the slain, crumpled body on the floor.

In the rear doorway stood Dopey Buddy pointing, leering at the corpse. But before either of the three could speak to him he turned and darted down the rear stairs, filling the corridor as he went with the sounds of cracked and hideous laughter.

Emerging from the apartment house he dashed through the alleyway into the street. There he paused to open the box of drugs. One, two three of the paper packets he opened and gobbled the white powders they contained.

He waved his arms and yelled incoherences as he started once more to run at top speed. But at the second corner he came to a gasping halt. He tottered toward a lamp-post and succeeded in flinging a supporting arm around it. But his head with its disorder of long, straw-colored hair sagged against the mail box affixed to the post. His knees gave way. And next he sagged into the arms of a traffic policeman.

“The law couldn’t get him!” said the boy with a slow smile, “but I did!” Ten minutes later an ambulance surgeon said to the policeman:

“Morphine — heart. Dead as a doornail.”

Chapter XXXIV Out of Thin Air

Mr. Rodney Fairfax paid twenty-five thousand dollars a year for a suite in a Park Avenue apartment. But this didn’t constitute his home. That was a grand mansion amid lakes and hanging gardens situated in one of the woodland sections of Long Island with the broad, blue Sound beyond. The Park Avenue establishment was merely for the use of himself and wife when the opera season was on and the affairs of society generally at their height.

All of which suggests that Mr. Rodney Fairfax was a man of great wealth. He was indeed. Millions had been inherited and by his own business acumen augmented until his fortune stood at figures to seem fabulous.

His wife, Grace, shared the fame of his riches with a celebrity apart. She was known as the possessor of jewels enormous in quantity, exquisite and rare as to quality. It may be recorded that they were insured for one million and five hundred thousand dollars.

Nor were these gems allowed to glitter unseen in safety deposit vaults and other strong boxes. Mrs. Fairfax was unhappy if unadorned by them, even by day. At night in her opera or theater box or at this or that ball, reception, dance, she blazed with them.

There were separate sets for different costumes. Sometimes she appeared wholly in the prismatic flare of diamonds. Again in the creamy sheen of lovely pearls. Or the red glow of rubies, the soft blue of turquoise, the pale green of rare Chinese jade or shimmering in the flash and fire of gorgeous emeralds.

Not that Mrs. Fairfax entirely ignored the use of safety deposit vaults. But when in town she was passing in and out of them frequently, taking one or two sets of her famous jewelry away while replacing others she had recently worn. Twice a week unfailingly she appeared in her opera box in the world-renowned “Diamond Horseshoe” and on such occasions always wore the stones appropriate to that celebrated oval.

And now comes the record of a morning in the Fairfax apartment in Park Avenue when Mr. Fairfax arose by custom at nine for his bath while his wife continued to sleep beneath the purple satin and white lace coverings of the twin bed adjoining. When he had emerged from the bathroom, his valet shaved him and then laid him a light breakfast in the small sun parlor.

In this room the servant also put out his master’s clothing and, having dressed, Mr. Fairfax returned to his bedchamber to pick up the watch and gold-mounted bill-folder that was invariably left on top of his dresser with whatever small change he might have in his pockets when he undressed.

Neither watch, billfolder, which he remembered had contained something in the neighborhood of two hundred dollars, or even the small change were where he expected to find them. Or anywhere else in the rooms. The pockets of his evening clothes were searched. Dresser drawers were hauled out. No sign of watch, billfold, or small change.

Yet at this time it did not occur to Mr. Fairfax that he had been robbed. The room showed no least sign of disturbance. He opened again a dresser drawer in which he kept several leather boxes that contained small articles of jewelry of his own. But these boxes were lying in order, the lid of none removed.

He pushed back the drawer and began to wonder regarding the honesty of his valet and the other servants. For the life of him he could not work up suspicion of them. His valet had been in his service for ten years. The servants he had brought to town were all long in his service, the pick of the Long Island mansion staff.

As he stood frowning and puzzled his wife said:

“What does all the fussing about mean, Rod?”

His rummaging and pulling in and snapping back of drawers had aroused her to complete wakefulness. He sharply and succinctly told her.

She was on her feet in an instant.

“My diamonds!” she cried. “I did not put them away in the wall safe last night! I left them in the top drawer of my dresser! Oh, my diamonds!”

She ignored the dainty slippers at her bedside, rushed across the room and swiftly drew out the dresser drawer.

“Well?” demanded Fairfax.

“Oh, Rod — they are all right!” she cried with intense relief. “Not a thing disturbed!”

“Well, it’s certainly darn queer about my watch and—”

He stopped short in the speech because his wife had screamed:

“They’re gone! My diamonds! Gone!”

“I thought you said they were all right?”

“I thought so when I first looked in the drawer. The cases were all as I left them. Lids on and everything. They did not look as if they had been disturbed. But, oh, Rod, I opened one. See — it’s empty!”

She came toward him holding the jewel case with lid raised. Then she rushed back and snapped open the other cases.

“All gone! All my wonderful diamonds gone!”

She fell to her knees before the dresser and began to sob uncontrollably. As suddenly she arose:

“My jade set! It — I put it in the wall safe. Open the safe, Rod!”

“Well, a burglar couldn’t have blown the wall out while we were sleeping,” retorted Fairfax still standing with a black stare in his eyes. But he went to the wall safe nevertheless, twisted the knob this way and that, opened the door and then fell back.

“Cleaned out, by God!”

“My jade?”

“Your jade. And an envelope with a thousand cash in it I put in there day before yesterday!”

“But how could—”

“I fancy,” said the wealthy Fairfax ruefully, “it’s quite true about those thieves who can open a combination lock by the sense of touch. They say that such experts can open any lock that’s been used six months. Sandpaper their finger tips and cultivate a sense of touch so refined they can tell by the fall of the hammer in the cog which cogs are those used.”

“I saw that in a play and didn’t believe it,” gasped Mrs. Fairfax.

“Well, I guess... er... we both do now!”

“But the burglar alarms, were they set?”

“Absolutely. I attended to it myself when we got home last night.”

“But there isn’t a sign anywhere about the room of a thief having been here.”

“That’s right. You’d think we were robbed by a ghost — a phantom. Not a sound heard — not a thing apparently disturbed when I woke up. Yet everything of real value gone! Some expert.”

“Oh, Rod! My diamonds — my wonderful diamonds! My jade — my exquisite jade!”

“Well, dammit, Grace, I’ve told you that your constant appearance in public fairly crusted with gems would some day lead to something like this. You’ve made a walking temptation of yourself.”

“Rod — don’t!” cried Mrs. Fairfax.

Frowning he lifted the telephone and presently was connected with police headquarters. He was informed that the most capable detectives of the department would be sent to his rooms forthwith. Then being a kindly man at bottom, he went to his wife’s bedside and comforted her with assurances that he carried insurance to the full value of her diamonds and she should have another set as gorgeous as those of which she had been robbed.

Two tall lean men, dapper in dress, appearing surprisingly unlike detectives, were soon flashing their shields at the entrance of the Fairfax apartment. But in so far as their inquiry appeared to lead them it was only to add to the mystery. For their closest investigation not only failed of establishing any manner of clew, but their expert eyes could trace no method of entrance by the thief. Windows and locks had not been tampered with in so far as any examination by the headquarters stars could detect.

The Fairfax apartment being on the twelfth floor of a sixteen-story building, the only avenue of entrance available to a marauder was either by forcing his way through the outer hall doorway or through the rear windows leading into the kitchen past two of which ran fire escapes. But these windows had been securely fastened and their fastenings found undisturbed. Nor had the burglar alarm wiring attached to them been in the least tampered with.

On the face of it then, the detectives concluded, it must be an inside job. The Fairfax servants were questioned long and harshly, but unless they were all in a plot of robbery, their innocence was presumptive, for their characters had long been unblemished and they supported each other in testimony that all had retired to their rooms and to sleep about an hour before the return at half past midnight of their master and mistress.

A strict espionage was established on all of them, however. Special orders from the commissioner himself found their way to every detective on the force and every captain and lieutenant that the closest watch be kept on every known fence in the city and a description of the missing jewelry broadcast over the entire country.

Chapter XXXV Phantom Thief

The newspapers were still headlining the Fairfax “two hundred and fifty thousand-dollar robbery,” when public and police, especially the police, got a new jolt.

One of the grand, old brownstone mansions on aristocratic Brooklyn Heights, the home of the last of the Pearsons, wealthy since Colonial times, had been thoroughly ransacked. All of aged Mrs. Pearson’s jewels, largely consisting of heirlooms, and thousands of dollars’ worth stolen in the form of a solid gold table service, with jewels and gold plate had also been taken together with a sum of three thousand dollars in cash, and from a strong box certain negotiable bonds as easily disposed of as cash itself. The loot here was estimated at one hundred thousand dollars at least.

From the first there was no doubt that the robbery of the Pearson mansion had been effected by the same baffling, silent, ghostlike thief who plundered the Fairfax apartment.

The morning had opened at the Pearson residence without any outward sign of his visitation. All the furnishings in dining room and library whence the loot had been taken, had been left as if no hand had touched an article of the premises.

The mansion was arranged with an electric burglar alarm, but it had not sounded its signal at the headquarters of the agency engaged to protect the house. The windows of basement and ground floor were faced with steel bars affixed for protection as well as ornament.

None had been pried apart. The only open windows had been those of the servants’ rooms on the fourth floor, and one window open in the master’s room on the third floor for ventilation. Unaided, a man would have to be a monkey to scale the sheer wall of smooth brownstone blocks to such a height.

But the detectives discovered that in the wooden casement of a window of Judge Pearson’s room the thief had left his mark. It was a deep indentation, obviously freshly made by the long point of a sharp instrument which had dug deeply into the wood.

“A hook on the end of a rope ladder,” surmised one of the headquarters men.

“But I am a very light sleeper,” protested Judge Pearson. “He must have thrown the hook up to catch its sharp point in the woodwork. Equally that must have made a noise and the slightest unusual sound in the night always has the effect of awakening me. Positively no man could have thrown that hook up to the window casement and drawn it into the wood to such a depth without my having heard it.”

“But there’s the mark — fresh and new to prove that’s just what he must have done!” came the protest from one of the sleuths.

“As you say — there is the mark, but I... I can’t understand how it could have been done without waking me!”

The detectives shrugged their shoulders behind the old man’s back.

Nevertheless they were worried men. And back at headquarters faced a chief of the detective bureau who plainly came to the decision that they had not been up to their jobs, for he assigned three other men with reputations as expert crook snatchers to pick up the thread of the mystery and see if they could follow it to some satisfactory conclusion. But they returned equally empty-handed as to results.

What proved worse was that the robberies of the Fairfax apartment and the Pearson mansion were but the forerunners of a score more evidently effected by the same skilled hand and with the same weird, ghostly finesse.

While puzzlement and exasperation racked the police department, the newspapers exhausted their largest type in recording fresh depredations of the thief to whom burglar alarms meant nothing, the combination locks on safes the same, who entered none could tell in just what manner and worked noiselessly, but with a startling thoroughness that overlooked nothing of value which was easily portable.

Within two months the “Phantom Thief,” as the newspapers titled him, was notorious not only over the entire United States and Canada, but London, Berlin, and Paris journals were discussing him.

The quiet of his coming and departures, the effectiveness of his methods, the silence he maintained throughout his operations so that never a sleeper stirred, the wealth he was accumulating — it was estimated that twenty robberies had netted him something close to a half million dollars — made of him a figure in crime so strikingly mysterious and romantic that the public grew keenly hungry for every detail of his exploits and, over the chagrined reticence of the police, the newspapers did their very best to supply this demand.

The only clew to himself the amazing robber had thus far given was that he was a man of culture in the matter of things artistic. For in several of the houses he had visited he had, with a nice discrimination, plundered them of their rarest Chinese and Egyptian ceramics. Spurious things of such character in other houses and flats he had contemptuously left behind.

Five times he revisited Park Avenue; three times more the mansions of Brooklyn Heights; Long Island and Westchester country palaces suffered his deft touch and never had he been heard, never had he been seen. Nor did any of his loot ever turn up in the hands of the professional fences who had fallen into despair of being able to do business at all because of the closeness with which their affairs were watched by the now thoroughly angered and thoroughly aroused and alert detectives.

From coaxing and wheedling the “bulls” had passed to threatening their stool pigeons that if some clew of identification of the Phantom Thief was not forthcoming, they would all suffer the common fate of a general round-up, and some old charges that had been forgotten would be diligently revived.

But the stool pigeons always came back with the same story — the Phantom Thief was not known to any of the mobs, he wasn’t a regular, he was an outsider, a “swell guy” gone crooked was the best they could make of it.

The while the fences protested at the daily grilling they were getting, swearing each and all that no articles of jewelry resembling those stolen by the Phantom Thief had been offered them and no unset stones offered that would match up from the descriptions of the exceptional Fairfax diamonds and the ancient and equally celebrated Pearson pearls. They were as anxious to have the mysterious marauder caught as the policemen themselves, and the detectives came to realize it.

Twenty robberies was the Phantom Thief’s score with the police at the end of that imposing string in just the same situation as they had found themselves after the first robbery — utterly balked, baffled, beaten.

While on a night about this time the Phantom Thief, had they but known him, might have been “knocked off,” which is the technical police jargon for an arrest, as he sat in an orchestra seat of the Metropolitan Opera House, sweeping the fashionable and wealthy occupants of the boxes in the Diamond Horseshoe with a powerful pair of glasses, studying the glittering jewels of the women with a trained and cultured eye and smiling slightly as he selected his next victim.

Chapter XXXVI Figure of Darkness

The young man thus employed was a handsome figure in his correct evening clothes. As he finished his scrutiny of the Diamond Horseshoe and arose to make his way out into the foyer many feminine eyes took more than a passing glance at him. His hair, they noticed, was a glossy, curly auburn, and well arched and strongly defined eyebrows of the same color caught one’s attention, as did a small, jaunty mustache with sharply waxed ends.

Out on the promenade it soon became apparent that the young man was well and favorably known to the ushers and check room attendants. Smiles and bows came to him whenever one of them saw him — smiles and bows he affably returned.

Tips, substantial while not being extravagant, had paved the way toward all this good will. Besides, the young gentleman had been found to be charmingly democratic and as charmingly frank regarding this being his first season as an habitué of the famous opera house.

He confided to this usher and that, this checkroom boy or girl, of his passionate fondness for good music ungratified up to this winter in New York, when he happily found himself with the leisure to enjoy it.

He had casually mentioned his profession as being that of an architect, and his home, he had said, was in California. He was in New York studying the great new skyscrapers that were going up in such number and with such clever adaptations from the ancient Egyptian beauty and grandeur of structure.

He was frankly most intensely interested in the personages who sat regally in the Diamond Horseshoe, and the attendants were pleased to identify them for him, to yield him in gossip what they knew of them, their wealth, their jewels, and frequently volunteered information as to the location of their homes, a question the young man put himself.

Much valuable information had the Phantom Thief thus acquired toward the direction of his energies. But, in the main, he achieved his knowledge of prospective victims at first hand.

To-night, for instance, he had fixed on the Corcoran jewel collection as displayed in magnificent profusion by the celebrated social dowager of that name. When the final curtain descended the young man swiftly left the opera house and made for a side street where a speed roadster had been left parked.

Immediately he discarded the black coat he had been wearing over his evening clothes and with it the silk crush hat. From beneath a seat in the tonneau he abstracted substitutes — a gray ulster with a broad fur collar and a rakish sports cap.

Then, before taking his seat at the wheel, with three deft movements he took off his red eyebrows and small red mustache and was a clean-shaven young man with brown eyebrows. His face for the matter of that was nearly entirely concealed by the big turned up fur collar.

He whisked his car around the corner and traveled it up and down the block in front of the Metropolitan, his maneuvers being wholly inconspicuous because of the large number of other cars moving in both directions. Finally he caught sight of the Corcoran dowager, her jewels hidden by an ermine opera cloak caught snugly around her throat.

Corcoran, the financier, was the most easily recognizable. The Phantom Thief saw them enter their big foreign made car, and took up the trail of it with an expert hand on the wheel. As on several other similar occasions, his shadowing led him into Park Avenue, where the Corcoran car halted before an enormous and palatial apartment house.

Swiftly, before the Corcorans had alighted, he slipped his own ear into a side street, parked it there, and in a jiffy had changed back into opera hat and black overcoat and, without sign of haste, sauntered into the lobby of the apartment house in time to enter the same elevator with the financier and his wife.

His overcoat, opened as he walked through the revolving door, made a display of evening attire marking him for a type usual in the corridors of the huge, luxurious warren of the rich. Its occupants were so numerous, their town guests so many, that none of the attendants thought for an instant to question the right of this correctly attired young man to ride up on the elevator with the renownedly wealthy Corcorans.

Not many minutes later he descended to the ground floor, but was particular that he did so by an elevator other than that in which he had gone up. Back he sauntered to his car and, when certain the street was empty, changed again to cap and fur-collared ulster and drove happily away in possession of the knowledge he desired. He knew the floor, number, and exact location of the Corcoran rooms.

Next day, as a very well dressed young man, who presented an architect’s card with a San Francisco address at the municipal building department offices, he was readily and courteously accorded the privilege of examining the general plans of some of New York’s largest apartment houses, and among them found that in which the Corcoran’s resided.

Thus the complete layout of the rooms was soon under his eye and swiftly copied. When he gained entrance to the apartment he would know exactly which way to direct his steps to further his purpose.

Now followed a daily examination of the columns of the newspapers which recorded the affairs of society most fully. Through these he found that Mr. and Mrs. Corcoran appeared as patrons of a large charity ball to be held on a certain near date, and as the names of the other patrons were of social importance equal to their own, the young man deemed it a fair inference that, in addition to lending their names as patrons the Corcorans would actually attend.

This, on the night of that particular date he found to be the case. At about hall past nine o’clock he recognized the Corcoran limousine and chauffeur in front of the apartment house, and not long afterward he saw the wealthy couple enter their car and watched it drive away.

He then strolled down Park Avenue for about three blocks when he called a taxi and was driven to a Broadway moving picture theater, where he remained until a quarter to eleven o’clock. Leaving the theater, he summoned another taxi and was driven openly to the door of the Park Avenue apartment.

Again he entered nonchalantly, taking care to display the fact that he was in evening clothes, however, and. all unquestioned, sauntered to an open elevator, entered and left it at a floor three above that on which the Corcorans lived.

Down the back stairs he moved lightly and then to the door of the Corcoran apartment. He listened outside for some time. He knew that in addition to Corcoran and his wife there were five servants: a butler, valet, cook, chambermaid, and Mrs. Corcoran’s personal maid.

His copied plans of the premises informed him that the servants’ rooms were all in the rear of the apartment. His plan further told him that the door before which he stood led into a wide corridor, and that the third door toward the rear as one entered would be that leading to the bedchamber of the financier and his wife.

He reasoned that in the hour and more in which he had waited the servants would have had ample time to correct any disorder in which the Corcorans may have left their dressing room and bedchamber when preparing to attend the ball.

His ten to fifteen minutes of intent listening distinguished no footfall in the corridors. Some of the servants had doubtless taken advantage of the absence of master and mistress and gone out for recreation themselves. Those remaining could now reasonably be counted on to be in the rear of the apartment.

He ungloved his hands and fishing into a right hand waistcoat pocket brought out a steel blade about six inches long. It was very thin. He paid no attention to the big patent lock on the door, but swiftly inserted the thin flange between door and casement.

He probed with it as a surgeon might for a foreign substance in a human body — delicately, and then, apparently finding what he sought began to manipulate the steel blade from side to side with sudden violent motions which, however, were soundless.

The blade had the flexibility of whalebone. So finely tempered was it that though, at times, in his side to side motions with it, he all but bent it double, it never snapped.

Suddenly there sounded a quick click. It was so faint he might not have heard it had he not been intently listening for just that thing. When it happened he continued to hold the blade between door and casement, took the knob in a firm grasp and turned it very slowly, very steadily. Then he applied a little inward pressure to the door and found that it was now to be readily opened. He did open it ever so slightly, merely sufficient for a quick look into the broad hallway and saw that it was empty.

Thus satisfied, he whipped out of the inside pocket of his overcoat a thin black silk scarf that opened up into large dimensions. This he knotted around his neck, tucking the dangling corners into his right and left waistcoat pockets. The black silk scarf completely concealed his white collar and shirt front. Then he changed his white evening gloves for black ones.

Next he doffed his hat, while from a side pocket of his overcoat he drew a black hood like a hangman’s cap. He enveloped head, ears, and face in this dull black covering. There were slits in the mask through which he might see, but as he stood there he produced a black make-up pencil and rimmed his eyes thickly with it.

If he lowered the lids no part whatsoever of his countenance could be seen. He now stood a figure completely black from head to feet. No gloss or sheen was on any of his garments. Even his shoes were of dull, gunmetal tone. Concealed in a closet behind garments of dark color he would be invisible. Moving about a room with the soundlessness that rubber soles and heels guaranteed, he would be as indiscernible as a deep shadow.

Quickly he darted into the inside hallway and then into the spacious Corcoran sleeping chamber. From the plan of the rooms, especially studied as to this particular one, he moved directly to electric switch and flashed on the light. He took a swift survey of the furnishings, noting the situations of beds, closets, bureaus, a wall safe, a small desk, and reassured himself that there was a fire escape outside the windows. Its disadvantage was that it led down to an interior court. But this dubious fact he must face.

It was evidently not his plan to become immediately busy. The charity ball was a big affair, to which Mrs. Corcoran would doubtless wear her finest jewelry. He proceeded to investigate the closets and selected that of the financier in which to hide. There were several dark blue and brown suits of clothing hanging there behind which he could merge himself completely into hiding. Behind them he would be as undiscoverable as if he were actually gifted with the invisible cap of fairyland.

Reckoning he would have a long wait, he switched on the electric bulb that he saw in a wall socket in the closet, turned off the light in the room, and, leaving the closet door very slightly open for the air it would afford, seated himself with his back to the wall and brought out a book he had recently purchased, published in Amsterdam but printed in French.

It was a technical volume dealing exhaustively with the ramifications of the diamond trade. Some of the knowledge was shortly to be vital to him, for he would soon need to put it to practical use.

And thus he engaged himself till he heard the door in the outer hall opened with the noisy snap of the lock. He closed his book softly and instantly switched off the light in the closet.

At half past two a sleepy elevator attendant, aroused by a prolonged and erratic ringing of the signal bell, ran the car to a gate three floors above that on which the Corcorans lived.

He admitted a good-looking man in evening clothes whose head waggled a trifle and whose friendly smile just missed being downright silly.

“Friend of Mistuh Pearson’s and Mistuh Hobbs,” thought the sable-skinned attendant, these being two convivial young bachelors with rooms on this floor.

The young gentleman entered the car with an unsteady step and regarded the elevator attendant with an amiable smile.

“Went and woke you up, did I? Not nice of me, was it, at this hour? How this — to square it?”

An ear to ear grin was the black boy’s response, for a dollar note had been slipped into his fingers.

Thus easily, with his pockets lined with one hundred thousand dollars’ worth of jewelry did the Phantom Thief pass away into the night. He grinned to think that never once as he gathered up the gems and the financier’s billfold and watch, valuable cuff links and shirt buttons, all carelessly piled upon a dresser for the night, had he broken in on the heavy snores of Corcoran of Wall Street or disturbed the more delicate wheezing of the plump matron in the twin bed beside that of her lord.

Chapter XXXVII New Tricks in an Ancient Trade

When, at three o’clock this same morning, Jack Lawrence alighted from a taxi in front of the apartment house in the Nineties just off Riverside Drive, he remembered that his twenty-eighth birthday was about to dawn.

Twenty-eight years old!

How different the outcome of this night’s pillaging adventure to that sad, bungling job on his twenty-first birthday, his disastrous criminal beginning when he toppled headlong over a chair in Jerry Larkin’s inn and in the struggle which followed with Jerry’s henchman, nearly added the killing of a human being to the crime!

He continued thinking about it as he undressed, got under a shower, put on pyjamas and a dressing robe and ran his feet into red Morocco leather slippers.

In seven years he had become — if you were to believe the statements of the detectives as recorded in the newspapers — the cleverest thief known for a quarter of a century. Indeed, one of them had declared him to be the cleverest that had ever happened in the records of the department.

He touched a match to logs arranged in the spacious fireplace, drew before it a small lacquered table, spread a black velvet cloth over it, and on this laid out the jewels which he removed from his discarded evening clothes.

He took a seat at the table and began deftly prodding the sparkling gems out of their settings with a long, finely pointed steel pin and a small pair of pliers.

Seven years! And when he finally disposed of all the loot he now had he would be a wealthy man!

But, he reflected, nearly six of those seven years had been behind prison walls. The first “stretch” had been hard to bear. The shame and disgrace, his mother’s illness and death, his bitter war for supremacy among the desperate youths with whom he had been incarcerated. The second stretch had seemed shorter.

He had not gone sick of the deadly monotony and sordidness of the life. This was because he had been mentally busy with his future plans, his mind tingling over the fascinating problem of how, when he regained his freedom, he would certainly acquire riches by an ingenuity that would hold the law helpless.

“It was my college course,” he told himself, beaming in the glow of the flames from the logs. “It takes other men a good many times seven years to acquire what I’ve gathered now. Few ever do in seventy years. And more, lots more to come. I know my business now!”

One of the most important results was the resolve he had made that when freedom came to him once again he would work absolutely alone, have nothing whatsoever to do with other crooks. No confederates, no pals, no mob. This is what he had meant to announce to Slim Gegan on the day Madge motored him to Slim’s apartment, but Dopey Buddy’s bullet had robbed him of the opportunity.

Slim killed, the mob had been thrown into panic. In their extremity, even the aged experts joining in the offer, the mob had offered Jack Slim’s captaincy. This was tempting. But he put it aside. His plan was the right one. So he made them believe that he had decided on a straight future.

He was going West to take on a job as an architectural draftsman. The boys could rely on their secrets being safe with him for all time. Slim had treated him white. But he felt that he couldn’t live through another prison stretch and survive with his health and reason.

In truth, had he been sincere he might have done the thing he told them, for he was by this time thoroughly well qualified to hold such a position in an architect’s office. In prison by day he had actually and faithfully continued the study of a subject which had not only a natural fascination for him, but the added advantage of being a convincing gesture to the prison authorities that he was genuinely intent on a life of reformation when his term was finished.

It was the unflagging application he displayed at his drawing board in the hours allowed the men for study and recreation that had brought about for him his release promptly on the expiration of his minimum sentence.

They certainly would not have been so prompt, Jack reflected, if they had known what other studies he had the while been also pursuing — studies to which he applied himself when night’s darkness made secret activities possible in his cell.

Slim’s power with the underground had kept Jack supplied with the necessary materials for practice. In which time he acquired a wizardy in the use of the flat, six-inch steel flange, an elastic jimmy it might properly be named. Save for his black mask, other make-up, and a small but powerful flash light it was all he carried, his only tool. But it was all he needed for the opening of doors, windows, strong boxes, locked jewel cases.

In the case of a door secured with patent locks thought burglar proof, the trick was to insert the thin flange between the door and its frame. He then worked the point of the flange in snakelike convolutions till it wormed its way into the receiving socket and back of the tongue of the lock.

With an expert twist of the wrist, the flange brought pressure on the tongue and forced it back into the lock and the thing was done. By similar manipulations chests, jewel boxes, locked drawers, anything short of a combination safe lock yielded to his magic wand.

With combination locks he had worked ceaselessly at night, sand papering his finger tips to an exquisite sensitiveness until he had acquired the rare but acknowledgedly possible feat of detecting the worn grooves into which the lock’s hammer fell and thus reading the combination.

Previously has been described the methods of the Phantom Thief in spotting his victims, following their social engagements, timing his entrance to an apartment during such hours as master and mistress would be away and the servants “at play” or, at any rate, relaxed and off guard.

And then to remain hidden until his victims laden with jewelry he coveted returned, retired, and soundly slept. He was already in upon them. Risk of awakening them on entrance as other burglars so frequently did, was eliminated.

When it was a country mansion set in the midst of open ground that he had selected for plundering, he usually chose the dinner hour for entrance. With the members of the household below stairs and darkness without shielding him, he would produce an ingenious contrivance. It was in two parts. One was a collapsible steel pole that could be extended for a full fifty feet. In a bracket on its top he firmly set a steel hook that came to a very sharp, thin point.

From the hook hung forty feet of silk rope ladder, tightly woven, trusty to his weight as if it were fashioned of steel like the pole and hook. When it was lifted on the end of the pole, the ladder fell noiselessly against the side of the house.

He lifted the hook until it was set firmly against the base of the wooden window casement. Then he dragged down on the pole until the ladder’s hook was firmly and deeply imbedded. He could test it till certain it would bear his slim weight.

Watchdogs at this hour would not have been released to prowl the grounds, and if such grew sufficiently noisy to attract the attention of those within and caused any person to come outside to investigate — which when it did happen would, of course, be previous to his affixing of the ladder — they would be met by a young man in evening clothes and motor coat and cap who would indicate his car in the road and ask if this was the residence of some other person of wealth of the vicinity.

In such instances, suspicion had never been aroused. He looked so well the part of the young society man abroad on the roads in his motor. But, if all went well, as it usually had, he was free to gain entrance unseen and unheard, conceal himself till the household slumbered and, invariably armed with a plan of the premises, effect his plundering in his usual amazingly expert fashion.

Only twice had his movements about a room awakened sleepers. On each occasion he had slipped into a closet before a light was flashed up. On each occasion the person viewing the room in its usual aspect, undisturbed, bearing no signs of an intruder had concluded he, in one case, she in another, had been falsely alarmed, switched off the light, and gone back to slumber.

This part of his business, it will now be seen, he thoroughly knew.

But Jack had considered in the long prison nights, that many another burglar made successful entries, gathered his loot unseen and unheard, only afterward to be traced by the police and captured.

Why? And how?

For three chief reasons — the stool pigeon, the fence, a woman.

Mobs, he knew, were honey-combed by stool pigeons. They were, as a rule, cowardly, inexpert criminals over whom detectives held knowledge which would send them to prison if they did not do the bidding of the “knockers,” The incautious word, the single minute’s boasting of wine or whisky stirred vanity, had betrayed many a clever thief to the bulls.

Therefore Jack had resolved that when he worked anew he would eschew association with other crooks entirely. He would work with no pal. He would have no confederates. Not one. He would never be seen at resorts known to the bulls to be thieves’ “fleabags.”

The next danger was the fence. Where the plunder was big, the persons robbed, important financially and socially, the bulls would bring a heavy threatening attitude to the fences. It usually resulted in their betrayal of the “big gun” that they might the more freely go on with their immensely profitable trading with the smaller fry of crookdom.

And why give the fence two-thirds of the profit on that for which he had himself risked life and liberty? There must be a way around it. He would deal with no fence. But, how, if he did not, was he to dispose of his stolen gems and gold and platinum?

In his cell he had thought of the way to do without them — to reap in full for himself the profits for the great risks he ran. The method was bold but new, and already he had partly put it into action successfully, though the major feature of the scheme had still to be enacted. But Lawrence was supremely confident that it was “bull-proof.”

A woman, wife, or sweetheart — it was always one of the earliest moves of a detective to discover if a suspected crook possessed such. If he had fled, her mail would be watched in confidence that after a time he would seek to establish communication with her.

Her every movement would be shadowed in expectation that she would finally lead them to their quarry. Bitter third degrees would be imposed on her to wring from her scared lips the knowledge sought of a criminal’s whereabouts. The results had long — for as long as there had been such a thing as police — justified the strategy.

Well, he would have to condemn himself to a life even more solitary than when he was in prison. Many of the crooks he knew were gay and likable companions against whose fascination other chance company would seem deadly dull. Pretty women he would allow himself only the briefest contacts with such as could be most easily met. None of these would ever win a word of confidence from him.

Just give him another season as good this had been! And that would end it. Then he would enter on the enjoyment of a fine future. He had that future all schemed out. A young man would arrive in London who had made a fortune in the cobalt mines and oil fields of Canada. A fortune of a million would be invested in sound securities.

He would travel the famous resorts of the world. And would be free then to travel with an eye sharp for romantic adventure. Finally a pretty wife, children, a country estate, probably in England. That would be fine. If only the woman could be Elsie Lane! But with that thought came a frown. She was done with him. He couldn’t blame her either. Yet it was bitter that as soon as fame beckoned to her she had downed all sentiment of loyalty toward him, abandoned him to crime.

But there was Madge.

He couldn’t deny her great attractiveness. She loved him. She was almost too frank about it. Surely, he could trust her. But he must beware of her — must never trust her too far, never place her in possession of sufficient information concerning himself and his plans which might lead to her unwittingly betraying him.

For Madge wasn’t sharp and clever. She wasn’t cool and sane like Elsie. She was all emotionalism and self-indulgence. Yet he could not bear to think of dismissing her entirely from his life. Besides she already knew too much about him. Ignored, scorned, she might prove dangerous.

So he frequently passed time in her company — a dinner, theater, supper. His tact was always put to its utmost on such occasions to fend off her efforts to form the ties of complete comradeship, to make her understand the reasons why she must not know where he lived or under what names, why he must not confide, even to her, the activities which made him able to afford costly motor cars, the finest of clothing, and converted the costliest dinners and most expensive theater checks into nothing to worry about.

He was circumspect in all his actions. His “profession” demanded imperatively of hint the steady nerves of a boxer, wrestler, or circus acrobat. Alcohol and tobacco he used meagerly when he used them at all. And in a certain principal branch of the Y. M. C. A. it would have given the striplings, who were the habitues of its gymnasium, the thrill of big surprise had they known that swinging on the rings, vaulting the bars, pulling the weights and thrashing in the swimming pool daily in common with themselves was to be found the sensationally chronicled Phantom Thief, most celebrated fugitive of the law.

Chapter XXXVIII Three in One

Kudi, Jack Lawrence’s Japanese valet, who slept out, let himself very quietly into the apartment at half past nine o’clock, passed into the kitchen and there spelled over an English newspaper for an hour before beginning the preparation of his master’s breakfast. It was the young, wealthy American’s custom to arise late, and that suited Kudi very well.

By eleven o’clock, however, he appeared at Jack’s bedside with a steaming cup of tea, drew his bath and then in a sunny bow window from the West Side from which could be viewed the big, gleaming Hudson River, he laid a breakfast of grape fruit, bacon and eggs garnished heavily with water cress, toasted muffins, and a silver coffee pot.

To Kudi, Jack Lawrence was Mr. Lloyd Le Valley, as he was to the superintendent of the apartment, the proprietor of the garage where he stored his two cars. And for one of these cars the valet telephoned in his master’s name while Lawrence was finishing attiring himself in a dark blue suit, tan-colored overcoat, and soft felt hat of the same hue and other articles of wear, a selection from not less than forty other suits of clothing, twenty top coats, about two hundred scarfs, one hundred shirts and some fifty pairs of shoes which the crook de luxe possessed.

Then he went forth with the becapped Jap at his side and flashed his car up and down Riverside Drive in the snappy winter air and sunshine, finally abandoning it to Kudi and entering a subway kiosk at Seventy-Second Street, alighting from an express train at the Cortlandt Street station. From thence he went to Maiden Lane and to the fifth floor of a modest building and to a door whose upper panel of opaque glass presented the lettering:

Within a single large office room was a vault set in the wall, a handsome desk of mahogany, a swivel chair behind it and in front two heavy leather cushioned chairs such as might be offered callers.

It was apparent that Mr. Lloyd Le Valley engaged no assistants, not even an office boy. This would excite no curiosity in one of his pursuit as announced by the lettering on the door. There are many such middlemen in the commerce of precious stones and metals, many such who travel the country with a king’s ransom tucked in a wallet on in an inside pocket.

The fact that his visits to his office and vault were sporadic was also in keeping with the part he assumed in the jewelry district of the great city. The very matter of his engaging an office in this closely, thoroughly watched district was, in itself, a recommendation of his probity.

He opened his safe and in one of the compartments placed the flashing, sparkling gems he had removed from their settings the night before. The settings themselves he tossed into another steel box, adding it to a large mound of settings already there.

Then from an inner recess of the safe he produced a small traveling bag of pigskin and dumped the entire accumulation of settings into it, snapped the bag together, locked it and soon thereafter Mr. Lloyd Le Valley departed from his office, bag in hand.

He walked west to the Cortlandt Street station of the Ninth Avenue “El” and left the train at Christopher Street. This brought him into a section of the city where there was an odd mingling of the offices and warehouses of wholesale provision and vegetable and chemical dealers, big laboratories of drug wholesale firms, interspersed with neighborhood barber shops, groceries and meat markets with tenement dwellings above them.

The aspect of those who crowded its streets in the early afternoon was as curiously mixed between poverty and affluence. Very well-dressed men rubbed elbows with very shabby ones. A well-dressed man would here be no such mark for observation as in another slum section of the town nor a shabbily dressed man as he would be in the stately precincts of upper Fifth Avenue or the broad lane of huge, modern apartment buildings that now constitutes Park Avenue.

None, therefore, gave Mr. Lloyd Le Valley the slightest attention as he passed through a dirty doorway and ascended a flight of oil cloth covered steps to a squalid hall room on the third story. There he quickly doffed all his fine clothing, even to his shoes and was soon attired in overalls, sheepskin coat, brogans and with a smudged face and hands and a canvas, leather-bound bag from which protruded a big wrench and a heavy pair of pliers, soon emerged into teeming Greenwich Street.

But as well, in the mechanic’s bag was a big tangle of gold and platinum settings which had once touched the flesh of American aristocracy.

It would have been only in his present disguise that his Greenwich Street landlord would have known him — James Martin, a steady young mechanic who paid his weekly rent on the dot and was, therefore, a cause of neither worry or further curiosity on the part of said landlord.

The bag was heavy, very, and Martin, the mechanic, weighed down on one side, made his way slowly to Fourteenth Street. There he boarded a surface car bound east. At First Avenue he alighted.

He made his way to an old brick building, the ground floor of which was a junk shop. Its two windows were crammed with a mass of rusty metal bedsteads, pieces of wrecked machinery, old tools, lanterns, some of them from ships, and locks and bolts and bars of all description.

The old Hebrew proprietor, his flowing red beard the color of the rust that marked everything about the place, was standing in the doorway. He gave the approaching mechanic a cordial greeting with an expansive gesture of both hands, as Lawrence-Le Valley-Martin passed through a side door and upstairs to a garret, the door of which was new and stout and festooned with two formidable brass padlocks of an expensive make.

Had you inquired of old Abe Goldfogle as to the identity of his top floor lodger, you would have been informed that he was a very nice young goy feller named William Green, who paid his rent promptly and was a skilled mechanic whose jobs mostly came from out of town so that he did not use his room much.

But he had need of the garret, Goldfogle would have told you, because he was an ambitious young goy who was working on an invention.

Just what this invention was... well, the young feller wasn’t such a big damn fool. as to tell people, and as long as he paid his rent promptly like he did, his business was his business and none of Mr. Goldfogle’s business and none of anybody else’s either.

But considerable heavy metal was used in it because it wasn’t movable, and when the young feller went off on his out of town jobs he had to have a place to leave his machine where it could be kept securely under lock and key and away from prying eyes.

All of which, be it understood, Mr. Goldfogle thoroughly believed himself. And the lodger certainly was no trouble. Now and then when he was at work up there on his invention acrid fumes crept through the hallways, but this was small objection to a house that was odoriferous anyway.

As a matter of fact, what Jack Lawrence maintained in this East Side garret, was a miniature but effective smelter plant. In it he separated chemically the gold and platinum from their alloys and welded the precious metals into solid, virgin bars.

By the time darkness fell, he left his hidden plant, snapped the two big brass locks into place, and once again, carrying his mechanic’s kit, traveled to his room on the other side of the city and, in the cover of night, left his Greenwich Street rooms again attired for the role of Mr. Lloyd Le Valley, occupant of the luxurious uptown apartment and once more with the expensive small grip in hand.

Kudi was not there when Jack arrived home, for he had told the valet he would dine out. He bathed, donned evening attire, enjoyed a light but delicious repast at a celebrated hotel, and soon thereafter was passing his usual pleasant greetings to the Metropolitan Opera House attendants who came in his path.

But that night he didn’t scan the Diamond Horseshoe for another victim. A new step in the furtherance of his grand plan of thievery was now imminent. On this night he gave himself over wholly to the enjoyment of the fine music to which his ear was rapidly being cultivated, to the rich symphony of the orchestra and the golden voices of Caruso, Garden, and Scotti.

In dismissing Kudi the day before, he had apprised him of an early rising, and by ten o’clock next day had breakfasted and was ready for the street. Again impeccably attired and again carrying his pig skin bag he made his way to the financial district and into the assayer’s office of the United States Treasury. Here the card of Mr. Lloyd Le Valley had already become known. There was no delay of admittance to the one in authority. And two bars of virgin gold were weighed, valued, and soon purchased for a sum in the neighborhood of thirty-five thousand dollars. Quite as he had disposed of several other such bars in the months preceding.

The Phantom Thief had chosen Uncle Sam for his fence!

As to the bar of platinum, he went with it to Fifth Avenue and received twenty-five thousand dollars for it from the metal expert of one of the most celebrated jewelry firms in the world — another fence created by the Phantom Thief, the only thief in the world, he smilingly reflected as he left the stately establishment which was a treasure house of rare and gorgeous things, who had ever received full value in money for his plunder!

Chapter XXXIX Female of the Species

On a bright morning when the sun had taken on the geniality of spring, Jack Lawrence, in the role of Lloyd Le Valley, stepped aboard the Titania, bound for Havre. It was the beginning of the great annual exodus of Americans of social prestige and great wealth, of the buyers for the wholesale and retail houses which deal in foreign finery, of theatrical managers carrying blank contracts to which they hoped to affix the names of celebrated stage personalities abroad, of American stage and musical celebrities hoping to win European approbation, and of those generally bitten by the wanderlust that stirs when an April sun begins to shine.

He had come to the final move of his long and well-planned game. And as he ascended the Titania’s gangplank things looked smooth as glass ahead — smooth as the waters of the lower bay of New York harbor when the little tugs which had been clinging to bow and stem of the Titania, having completed their guidance of the sea giantess through the Narrows, fell away from her and she continued majestically onward toward the great and open sea.

But there is that adage of “man proposing,” et cetera, and the other of Bobby Burns, “the well-laid plans of men go oft’ agley.”

While such was not going to prove wholly the case with Jack Lawrence, yet happenings entirely unforeseen were imminently upon him, surprises three in number. Out of one he was to get amusement. But the second was disconcerting, the third harrowing. And both of these last moved in the van of tragedy as yet hidden from his eyes.

It was one o’clock in the afternoon when the Titania had passed down the bay toward the Highlands and Sandy Hook. And about the time she swung out into open water, Mr. Lloyd Le Valley’s steward fetched him a steamer chair and set it on a deck already lined with many other such reclining seats, all of them occupied.

The “merchant in precious stones and metals” seated himself, cigarette between his lips, book in hand, when he heard a voice that was feminine but deep of tone saying:

“Oh, the police! The detectives! The stupidest creatures in the world, my dear Mrs. Fanshawe! My jewels are simply hopelessly lost, and instead of being at Newport, where I would infinitely rather be, I assure you, I am forced to make a trip to Europe to replenish my jewel cases.

“A cool hundred thousand dollars’ worth the sharp wretch stole from me. And, to think that nobody heard or saw him. Not the slightest sound. Why, it wasn’t until Mr. Corcoran and I had been up half an hour that we knew we had been robbed!

“The shrewd devil left everything in the room as he had found it — except, of course, the most valuable things, my jewels. But I mean there wasn’t a sign of anybody having been thieving in the rooms.

“All the drawers were properly closed, and he left my emptied jewel boxes arranged in the drawers just as I always arranged them myself! It was really astounding, the man’s cool thoroughness and cleverness.

“As Mr. Corcoran says, if any of the detectives only had half his brains there might be a chance of his being arrested. But — pouf! There isn’t the slightest possibility, apparently. Except that the detectives keep assuring us that when he tries to dispose of the jewels they will get trace of them, and of him too.

“Well, it happened three months ago and they have still to admit they know nothing of him or the jewels. Mr. Corcoran also engaged a private detective concern in which he has great faith, but they have done no better than the regular police.”

“A dangerous thief, indeed, to be at large,” commented Mrs. Fanshawe, nervously fingering a gleaming diamond and emerald bracelet.

“I should say so! I would really be willing to forfeit almost half the value of the jewels for just a look at the creature — to see what a sly, expert thief looks like. What a social sensation I could cause by holding a luncheon in his honor!”

This thought caused both ladies of fashion to burst into laughter. Jack Lawrence couldn’t help a chuckle himself. And, happening to look up then, he found himself glancing directly into Mrs. Corcoran’s large, faded, pouchy blue eyes. She saw that he was smiling, and apparently didn’t resent his joining in amusement at the notion which had come to her.

But to Lawrence, of course, it was a better joke than the wealthy Mrs. Corcoran was aware. With himself sitting looking squarely at her and her diamonds, emeralds and rubies in a wallet in his pocket!

He found it impossible afterward to concentrate on his book, so, snapping it closed, he lighted a fresh cigarette and started to make a circle of the deck.

Then a hand touched his shoulder from behind. That is always a most unpleasant sensation to a criminal, and Jack started in spite of himself, although the touch was not that of a heavy-handed detective, it was quick and light, and a feminine call of his name — his real name — accompanied it.

He turned to see Madge.

Her brown eyes had not now the sparkling cordiality that had always been in them on their previous meetings. Her red mouth was not provocatively curved and pouted for a kiss. Her eyes were flashing, but plainly with anger, her lips curved, but in an expression of aggression.

“You!” he said, and added sharply: “What are you doing here? You shouldn’t have come! You — oh, why must you women be tricky, silly? You are always getting a man like me in trouble. If I had wanted you to come on this trip I would have asked you. But I had very good reasons for making no such invitation. And you must have realized that. And yet you consult only your own silly whim. I tell you, as I’ve told you a hundred times before — it will not do for us to be seen too much together!”

He stood utterly disconcerted, remembering that he had felt an explanation of his coming absence due her and had rashly confided that he meant to take a trip to Havre on the Titania as an important step in an affair which he expected to yield him a big profit.

There it was again — the crook and his moll! The very thing he so well knew had brought men as clever as himself low full many a time, the very factor, the woman in the case, for which the police always immediately hunted when a criminal came under suspicion.

As yet, in so far as he knew, he was absolutely unsuspected. Yet, of course, he might very well be under suspicion right at that minute and not be aware of it. If that were true, Madge had already been found out, shadowed, probably trailed to the Titania itself and followed aboard the ship. At that very second he might be under espionage!

“If I’d wanted you,” he reiterated bitterly, “I’d have said so.”

“Oh, I knew well enough you didn’t want me. And the reason for it, too!” she retorted hotly.

“Of course you knew. And yet you do the very’ thing you knew I didn’t want you to do — the very thing that might make trouble for me just when things are going exactly as I’ve planned them.”

“Of course I knew you didn’t want me along. And the reason. I know very little of the plans you talk about so glibly. You’ve never told me anything of them that I can remember, except that it was going to be necessary to take a trip abroad and that you were going to make it on the Titania. I suppose now you could bite your tongue off for having so thoughtlessly named the ship. As if I wouldn’t have suspected when I saw the article in the newspaper about her!”

“Her!”

“As if you didn’t know?”

“I don’t.”

“That’s a lie. Jack Lawrence. A big, silly lie!”

“Her? What are you talking about? What’s on your mind?”

“Anna Gray — that’s who is on my mind, Jack Lawrence! Anna Gray — star of ‘Little Dorrit!’ The great Anna Gray! Miss Sweetness! Miss Goody-good!”

“Do you mean that Elsie Lane is aboard the Titania?”

Madge might have read the sincerity of his query by the sudden whiteness that came over his face, the surprise in his eyes.

But she was too far beyond herself in anger to read these signs.

“As if you didn’t know it?” she laughed shrilly. “As if that wasn’t the ‘important affair’ you had on hand! For a man who thinks himself as clever as you do, what stupidity it was to think you could hide it from me.

“You must have forgotten what an important person the little village maiden has become — the Cinderella of our old high school! Why, she can’t travel a step without getting into the newspapers. Her picture was all over them a few days ago. On her way to Paris and then to Switzerland. Going to do the role of Cinderella. No, of course, you didn’t know anything about it!”

“I didn’t.”

“Well, I don’t suppose she wrote you at that. It seems she left off writing to you, didn’t she, when the chance for fame came. A convict sweetheart might be all right for Elsie Lane. But it would never do for Anna Gray!”

“Now,” answered Lawrence, “you said exactly what should convince you that I had no idea of meeting her aboard this ship. You know well that whatever the understanding there was between Elsie and myself, it came to nothing long ago. And I have no bitterness against her for it either.

“There could be only one sort of an affair between a girl of her character and myself — marriage. It became impossible — that’s all. And she must have made good friends who advised her that it was impossible. And I have loved her so truly that I am glad she came in contact with such friends.”

Madge shook her head, her big brown eyes still flashing angrily.

“That’s stage stuff you’re talking now, Jack, and you know it. She loved you long before you ever woke up to the idea that you were in love with her. You know well she did. All we girls in the old days used to laugh at little Miss Prim and how plainly her adoration of you stuck out in her eyes every time she looked at you.

“I don’t know what suddenly brought you to her feet. But it happened. And it seems to be lasting. And it seems to have taken all the pride out of you. Here you are on this boat trying to put yourself in her way — trying to see if you can’t work your old fascination on her. That’s what you are here for, and there’s no use denying it.”

“It is pretty evident that there is no use denying it to you. But you are crazy when you think that way. I’ve been too busy arranging for this trip in the last few days to do more than take a hasty look at the morning newspapers — saw none of the afternoon papers.”

“If your trip on this boat isn’t to meet Elsie Lane, what is it for?” came the flat demand.

Jack’s impulse was to tell her. But he decided otherwise. It was against all the reasoning he had done in his cell. It was dangerous to have this girl know — know anything more about him. If she was convinced that he was still hopeful of attracting Elsie to him, she might become spiteful, vindictive, and in that mood she could be highly dangerous.

She didn’t know him for the Phantom Thief of present world-wide notoriety. But she did know, couldn’t have helped but observe, that he was enjoying a rich graft of some sort. She had only to direct police attention to him on that statement alone to put him in peril again of his liberty, indeed, of complete exposure.

Her own thoughts had been moving in the same direction.

“I was faithful to you when she abandoned you,” said Madge. “I wrote to you when she failed you. I was at the prison gate to welcome you back to liberty. To all appearances you found great pleasure in my company. But now I find you sneaking away from me to put yourself again in Elsie Lane’s path. I will not be cast aside as easily as that, Jack. Don’t think it.”

“I tell you I have no desire — no, I’ll be absolutely honest — no hope of ever interesting Elsie Lane again. There’s the width of an ocean between us now in our places in life. Can’t you see that? Can’t you see I’d be a fool to dream otherwise?”

“Will you promise that you will make no effort to speak to her if you meet on shipboard, as, of course, you must — I mean see each other? Will you promise that? For if you don’t, Jack—”

“That’s a promise easily given. I have no intention of seeking her recognition or of speaking to her.”

“That’s the only thing will convince me that you two are not passengers on the same boat by arrangement.”

“Very well. But if she speaks to me?”

This, of course, might happen, probably would, and Madge’s heart sickened at the prospect, at the certainty that Elsie Lane’s first question to Jack Lawrence would be concerning his failure to answer the letters she had written him, the letters that he never got, but which, instead, through the corrupting money of Slim Gegan, had been given over to that arch captain of rascality, those “goody-goody” letters of Elsie’s over which Madge and Slim had enjoyed such hearty laughter!

“But if she speaks to you, why if you’ve any pride you’ll cut her dead after the way she threw you down.”

Jack shook his head.

“If she should come to me — speak to me—”

“Suppose,” said Madge with sudden earnestness, “we wait until she does?”

She seized Jack’s hands, and the pressure of her own was tense.

“Can I really believe that her sailing and your sailing on the same boat was accidental?”

“It’s the truth, Madge.”

She studied his face closely.

“Thank God,” she said, “I’m beginning to be half able to believe it. Because if I saw any sign of her trying to regain her old influence over you, I’d—”

Jack interrupted, attempting to lighten the tone of their talk.

“Aha, desperate woman!” he said with a grin. “Just what do you think you’d do?”

“Not what I think — what I know I’d do.”

“And just what would that be?” he demanded.

“Jack,” answered the woman, “if she ever got you away from me now — at the first sign that she might succeed, I’d kill her!”

Chapter XL “Hell Hath No Fury”

Jack Lawrence was on the point of laughing at Madge as one might laugh at an overwrought child. But the laughter died on his lips. The expression of her eves killed. And he saw that her hands were clenched so tight the knuckles of her fingers were turned white.

Nor could his mind gainsay his ears. There had been the timbre of deadly earnestness in her voice when she made the threat.

She meant what she said. And he knew her as being prone to act on any impulse. She could be rash. The abruptness with which she had turned her back on her home and parents, the recklessness with which she had flung herself into the most feverish form of New York life, her complete acceptance by Slim Gegan and his ilk as being one of their own kind and tendencies, all these signs gave warning that Madge, sufficiently aroused, could actually be dangerous to the degree of murder.

It had been a mistake, for all her attractiveness, ever to have taken her back into his life when he came out of prison. It had been against the dictates of his own program for beating the law on a pirate’s path to wealth.

Yet it had seemed harmless, their association of so superficial a character that he could toss it aside whenever it might become desirable to do so. But this decision he now knew to have been a serious error. He had been playing with fire. He must use his wits, and quickly.

He linked his arm in her’s and began walking the deck with her, speaking rapidly, his voice softened and surcharged with all the earnestness he could put into it. He doubled his assurances that Elsie Lane, the now famous Anna Gray, had been dismissed completely from his thoughts of the future.

He feared to lie to her, to invent a reason which might ring false. He told her, therefore, what actually had placed him aboard the liner. It could not but sound credible to Madge. She squeezed his arm tightly when he confided the ingenious scheme he had evolved for marketing his stolen gems.

“Lord, Jack, that’s smart — that’s keen!” she told him.

By the time she left Lawrence to go to her stateroom to dress for dinner, she had apparently forgotten Elsie Lane completely. She and Jack had come back to their old status of gay camaraderie. Yet it was a worried Jack Lawrence who returned in his dinner clothes and went to the section of the deck where it was agreed he was to rejoin her.

It even occurred to him that it might be advisable to write a letter to Elsie Lane warning her that if she saw him aboard kindly to ignore him, neither to bow or speak to him no matter what her impulse might be. But, then, what reason had he to think that Elsie would do anything else? Of course, the now famous Elsie Lane — Anna Gray — would do exactly that — ignore him.

Nevertheless, he felt himself thrilled, his heart accelerated as he speculated on whether he was soon to have a sight of Elsie’s appealing beauty in the dining salon.

Of course, he might not expect to set eyes on the simple, ingenuous girl he had known long ago. She would be much changed. Perhaps he might find that his love, so long suppressed in his thoughts, would vanish completely at sight of her in her new role of international celebrity. He had hoped that this would prove true.

On the brilliantly lighted deck, standing outside the broad entrance to the dining salon he saw Madge, her white cloak trimmed with ermine clinging to her shapeliness, her cheeks flushed, her red lips smiling their prettiest at him.

It would appear that she felt her own beauty could challenge that of Elsie Lane. She was certainly resplendent, thought Lawrence as he drew near. And she had been faithful to him, and she was one of his sort — the right one to stick to. So he approached her with a smile to meet in full the cordiality of her own.

When Jack entered the huge, glittering restaurant of the floating ocean palace he was grateful to the stately major-domo who led him and Madge to a remote corner table designed only to seat two. From this outlook he scanned the scores of other tables already occupied, and was relieved to find Elsie Lane seated at none of them.

For he was doing his best to quell the stirring desire to see her which had overwhelmed him a little while before. It could only arouse emotion that was best dormant. The thought came to him of Elsie’s innate modesty, and that she would probably elect to dine in her own suite and avoid the stares and comment certain to mount in the public salon when one of her celebrity entered.

But even as he reflected that for his own sake this was just as well, he beheld the giant form of the major-domo heading a procession of men and women toward a table not ten feet away — a long table which he observed for the first time marked by a sign: “Reserved.”

The generalissimo of the dining salon was putting on his finest flourishes and gestures as he ushered this large party to the big table.

Four of the men were stout and middle-aged, their faces florid with good living and much grooming. The faces of two of them were easily identified from frequently printed newspapers photographs — Lupek and Grimes, high captains in the moving picture industry. Then, tall and slender behind them, moved Rennold Dupree, male emotional star, with the face of a classic statue of young manhood save for his overlarge, long-lashed, dull, black eyes.

Behind him, her small figure in an unadorned evening gown of light blue silk, not a jewel flashing at her throat, on her wrists or her fingers, walked Anna Gray.

Not Anna Gray to Jack Lawrence.

This was Elsie Lane — Elsie unchanged.

The same fine limpidity of eyes, the same kindly, gentle turn of the lips of her tender, pretty mouth, the same effortless grace in the carriage of her small, slender body. Elsie Lane — still a young girl in all appearance — still the girl of the old days whose love for him then he had been too stupid to realize!

Jack had forgotten Madge.

Her back was turned to the oncoming group.

But she read quickly the sudden intensity of gaze Jack was directing over her shoulder and past her.

She turned sharply and just in time to see the major-domo with his best and most pompous suavity holding back for Elsie Lane a chair at the right of Lupek, top multimillionaire of all the multimillionaires of the golden cinema world.

Elsie Lane triumphant — the once scorned, poor, shabby Elsie Lane queening it over the entire glittering assemblage in the vast, resplendent salon! Elsie Lane holding Jack Lawrence’s gaze in complete and absolute fascination!

“You knew that table was reserved for her. You have deliberately put yourself in her way!” she whispered at Jack furiously.

“Oh, don’t be a fool!” he retorted in exasperation. “If you wish, if it will bring you to your senses, I will arrange for a table as far away from her as we can get.”

“Only to make yourself the more conspicuous by passing in front of her eyes!”

“If you won’t be reasonable,” said Lawrence, “I’ll get up and leave the room entirely. See here, Madge, don’t you know that if there is anything which puts a person in the most absurd possible light it is a display of jealousy? If you care as much about — about my liking you as you say you do, for Heaven’s sake, cut this stuff out or—”

And then the red mounted into Lawrence’s cheeks. It happened just at this instant that his eyes wandered back toward Elsie Lane to find her own, clear blue eyes fixed on him with the stare of very sudden surprise.

In spite of the trouble he knew well it must brew, he could not take his eyes from those of the girl who had once frankly confessed her love for him, promised to be faithful to it and then had so suddenly and strangely dismissed him from her life.

He could plainly observe that she was not indifferent to him now — to the sight of him. After the first flare of astonishment in her glance, her eyes became uncertain, troubled and a deep flush suffused her white bosom and throat and blazed up into her face. A lifted glass in her hand trembled, and she hastily put it down as if she feared she would drop it.

“Take your eyes off her — take them off her or I’ll create a scene here and now!” Madge cried to him in suppressed tones, her brown eyes streaming resentment as she looked from the countenance of Elsie to that of Jack and back again.

Then Lawrence saw that Elsie had noticed Madge and recognized her. Instantly the features of the celebrated actress became immobile. All light of expression died from her countenance. She turned quickly and gave ear to something Lupek said to her and made him a lively, laughing reply which caused his fat, rosy cheeks to swell and his portly stomach to bob as he chuckled tremendously.

Jack and Madge ate hastily and in silence. She saw that Lawrence never again during the meal turned his eyes in Elsie’s direction. And he was the first to rise at the end of the dinner, frankly anxious to leave the salon as soon as possible.