The Man in Lower Ten

“The idea is this,” he was saying, his brows knitted in thought, “if a left-handed man, standing in the position of the man in the picture, should jump from a car, would he be likely to sprain his right ankle? When a right-handed man prepares for a leap of that kind, my theory is that he would hold on with his right hand, and alight at the proper time, on his right foot. Of course - ”

“I imagine, although I don’t know,” interrupted McKnight, “that a man either ambidextrous or one-armed, jumping from the Washington Flier, would be more likely to land on his head.”

“Anyhow,” I interposed, “what difference does it make whether Sullivan used one hand or the other? One pair of handcuffs will put both hands out of commission.

As usual when one of his pet theories was attacked, Hotchkiss looked aggrieved.

“My dear sir,” he expostulated, “don’t you understand what bearing this has on the case? How was the murdered man lying when he was found?”

“On his back,” I said promptly, “head toward the engine.”

“Very well,” he retorted, “and what then? Your heart lies under your fifth intercostal space, and to reach it a right-handed blow would have struck either down or directly in.

“But, gentleman, the point of entrance for the stiletto was below the heart, striking up! As Harrington lay with his head toward the engine, a person in the aisle must have used the left hand.”

McKnight’s eyes sought mine and he winked at me solemnly as I unostentatiously transferred the hat I was carrying to my right hand. Long training has largely counterbalanced heredity in my case, but I still pitch ball, play tennis and carve with my left hand. But Hotchkiss was too busy with his theories to notice me.

We were only just in time for our train back to Baltimore, but McKnight took advantage of a second’s delay to shake the station agent warmly by the hand.

“I want to express my admiration for you,” he said beamingly. “Ability of your order is thrown away here. You should have been a city policeman, my friend.”

The agent looked a trifle uncertain.

“The young lady was the one who told me to keep still,” he said.

McKnight glanced at me, gave the agent’s hand a final shake, and climbed on board. But I knew perfectly that he had guessed the reason for my delay.

He was very silent on the way home. Hotchkiss, too, had little to say. He was reading over his notes intently, stopping now and then to make a penciled addition. Just before we left the train Richey turned to me. “I suppose it was the key to the door that she tied to the gate?”

“Probably. I did not ask her.”

“Curious, her locking that fellow in,” he reflected. “You may depend on it, there was a good reason for it all. And I wish you wouldn’t be so suspicious of motives, Rich,” I said warmly.

“Only yesterday you were the suspicious one,” he retorted, and we lapsed into strained silence.

It was late when we got to Washington. One of Mrs. Klopton’s small tyrannies was exacting punctuality at meals, and, like several other things, I respected it. There are always some concessions that should be made in return for faithful service.

So, as my dinner hour of seven was long past, McKnight and I went to a little restaurant down town where they have a very decent way of fixing chicken a la King. Hotchkiss had departed, economically bent, for a small hotel where he lived on the American plan.

“I want to think some things over,” he said in response to my invitation to dinner, “and, anyhow, there’s no use dining out when I pay the same, dinner or no dinner, where I am stopping.”

The day had been hot, and the first floor dining-room was sultry in spite of the palms and fans which attempted to simulate the verdure and breezes of the country.

It was crowded, too, with a typical summer night crowd, and, after sitting for a few minutes in a sweltering corner, we got up and went to the smaller dining-room upstairs. Here it was not so warm, and we settled ourselves comfortably by a window.

Over in a corner half a dozen boys on their way back to school were ragging a perspiring waiter, a proceeding so exactly to McKnight’s taste that he insisted on going over to join them. But their table was full, and somehow that kind of fun had lost its point for me.

Not far from us a very stout, middle-aged man, apoplectic with the heat, was elephantinely jolly for the benefit of a bored-looking girl across the table from him, and at the next table a newspaper woman ate alone, the last edition propped against the water-bottle before her, her hat, for coolness, on the corner of the table. It was a motley Bohemian crowd.

I looked over the room casually, while McKnight ordered the meal. Then my attention was attracted to the table next to ours. Two people were sitting there, so deep in conversation that they did not notice us. The woman’s face was hidden under her hat, as she traced the pattern of the cloth mechanically with her fork. But the man’s features stood out clear in the light of the candles on the table. It was Bronson!

“He shows the strain, doesn’t he?” McKnight said, holding up the wine list as if he read from it. “Who’s the woman?”

“Search me,” I replied, in the same way.

When the chicken came, I still found myself gazing now and then at the abstracted couple near me. Evidently the subject of conversation was unpleasant. Bronson was eating little, the woman not at all. Finally he got up, pushed his chair back noisily, thrust a bill at the waiter and stalked out.

The woman sat still for a moment; then, with an apparent resolution to make the best of it, she began slowly to eat the meal before her.

But the quarrel had taken away her appetite, for the mixture in our chafing-dish was hardly ready to serve before she pushed her chair back a little and looked around the room.

I caught my first glimpse of her face then, and I confess it startled me. It was the tall, stately woman of the Ontario, the woman I had last seen cowering beside the road, rolling pebbles in her hand, blood streaming from a cut over her eye. I could see the scar now, a little affair, about an inch long, gleaming red through its layers of powder.

And then, quite unexpectedly, she turned and looked directly at me. After a minute’s uncertainty, she bowed, letting her eyes rest on mine with a calmly insolent stare. She glanced at McKnight for a moment, then back to me. When she looked away again I breathed easier.

“Who is it?” asked McKnight under his breath.

“Ontario.” I formed it with my lips rather than said it. McKnight’s eyebrows went up and he looked with increased interest at the black-gowned figure.

I ate little after that. The situation was rather bad for me, I began to see. Here was a woman who could, if she wished, and had any motive for so doing, put me in jail under a capital charge. A word from her to the police, and polite surveillance would become active interference.

Then, too, she could say that she had seen me, just after the wreck, with a young woman from the murdered man’s car, and thus probably bring Alison West into the case.

It is not surprising, then, that I ate little. The woman across seemed in no hurry to go. She loitered over a demi-tasse, and that finished, sat with her elbow on the table, her chin in her hand, looking darkly at the changing groups in the room.

The fun at the table where the college boys sat began to grow a little noisy; the fat man, now a purplish shade, ambled away behind his slim companion; the newspaper woman pinned on her businesslike hat and stalked out. Still the woman at the next table waited.

It was a relief when the meal was over. We got our hats and were about to leave the room, when a waiter touched me on the arm.

“I beg your pardon, sir,” he said, “but the lady at the table near the window, the lady in black, sir, would like to speak to you.”

I looked down between the rows of tables to where the woman sat alone, her chin still resting on her hand, her black eyes still insolently staring, this time at me.

“I’ll have to go,” I said to McKnight hurriedly. “She knows all about that affair and she’d be a bad enemy.”

“I don’t like her lamps,” McKnight observed, after a glance at her. “Better jolly her a little. Good-by.”

CHAPTER XX

THE NOTES AND A BARGAIN

I went back slowly to where the woman sat alone.

She smiled rather oddly as I drew near, and pointed to the chair Bronson had vacated.

“Sit down, Mr. Blakeley,” she said, “I am going to take a few minutes of your valuable time.”

“Certainly.” I sat down opposite her and glanced at a cuckoo clock on the wall. “I am sorry, but I have only a few minutes. If you - ” She laughed a little, not very pleasantly, and opening a small black fan covered with spangles, waved it slowly.

“The fact is,” she said, “I think we are about to make a bargain.”

“A bargain?” I asked incredulously. “You have a second advantage of me. You know my name” - I paused suggestively and she took the cue.

“I am Mrs. Conway,” she said, and flicked a crumb off the table with an over-manicured finger.

The name was scarcely a surprise. I had already surmised that this might be the woman whom rumor credited as being Bronson’s common-law wife. Rumor, I remembered, had said other things even less pleasant, things which had been brought out at Bronson’s arrest for forgery.

“We met last under less fortunate circumstances,” she was saying. “I have been fit for nothing since that terrible day. And you - you had a broken arm, I think.”

“I still have it,” I said, with a lame attempt at jocularity; “but to have escaped at all was a miracle. We have much, indeed, to be thankful for.”

“I suppose we have,” she said carelessly, “although sometimes I doubt it.” She was looking somberly toward the door through which her late companion had made his exit.

“You sent for me - ” I said.

“Yes, I sent for you.” She roused herself and sat erect. “Now, Mr. Blakeley, have you found those papers?”

“The papers? What papers?” I parried. I needed time to think.

“Mr. Blakeley,” she said quietly, “I think we can lay aside all subterfuge. In the first place let me refresh your mind about a few things. The Pittsburg police are looking for the survivors of the car Ontario; there are three that I know of - yourself, the young woman with whom you left the scene of the wreck, and myself. The wreck, you will admit, was a fortunate one for you.”

I nodded without speaking.

“At the time of the collision you were in rather a hole,” she went on, looking at me with a disagreeable smile. “You were, if I remember, accused of a rather atrocious crime. There was a lot of corroborative evidence, was there not? I seem to remember a dirk and the murdered man’s pocketbook in your possession, and a few other things that were - well, rather unpleasant.”

I was thrown a bit off my guard.

“You remember also,” I said quickly, “that a man disappeared from the car, taking my clothes, papers and everything.”

“I remember that you said so.” Her tone was quietly insulting, and I bit my lip at having been caught. It was no time to make a defense.

“You have missed one calculation,” I said coldly, “and that is, the discovery of the man who left the train.”

“You have found him?” She bent forward, and again I regretted my hasty speech. “I knew it; I said so.”

“We are going to find him,” I asserted, with a confidence I did not feel. “We can produce at any time proof that a man left the Flier a few miles beyond the wreck. And we can find him, I am positive.”

“But you have not found him yet?” She was clearly disappointed. “Well, so be it. Now for our bargain. You will admit that I am no fool.”

I made no such admission, and she smiled mockingly.

“How flattering you are!” she said. “Very well. Now for the premises. You take to Pittsburg four notes held by the Mechanics’ National Bank, to have Mr. Gilmore, who is ill, declare his indorsement of them forged.

“On the journey back to Pittsburg two things happen to you: you lose your clothing, your valise and your papers, including the notes, and you are accused of murder. In fact, Mr. Blakeley, the circumstances were most singular, and the evidence - well, almost conclusive.”

I was completely at her mercy, but I gnawed my lip with irritation.

“Now for the bargain.” She leaned over and lowered her voice. “A fair exchange, you know. The minute you put those four notes in my hand - that minute the blow to my head has caused complete forgetfulness as to the events of that awful morning. I am the only witness, and I will be silent. Do you understand? They will call off their dogs.”

My head was buzzing with the strangeness of the idea.

“But,” I said, striving to gain time, “I haven’t the notes. I can’t give you what I haven’t got.”

“You have had the case continued,” she said sharply. “You expect to find them. Another thing,” she added slowly, watching my face, “if you don’t get them soon, Bronson will have them. They have been offered to him already, but at a prohibitive price.”

“But,” I said, bewildered, “what is your object in coming to me? If Bronson will get them anyhow - ”

She shut her fan with a click and her face was not particularly pleasant to look at.

“You are dense,” she said insolently. “I want those papers - for myself, not for Andy Bronson.”

“Then the idea is,” I said, ignoring her tone, “that you think you have me in a hole, and that if I find those papers and give them to you you will let me out. As I understand it, our friend Bronson, under those circumstances, will also be in a hole.”

She nodded.

“The notes would be of no use to you for a limited length of time,” I went on, watching her narrowly. “If they are not turned over to the state’s attorney within a reasonable time there will have to be a nolle pros - that is, the case will simply be dropped for lack of evidence.”

“A week would answer, I think,” she said slowly. “You will do it, then?”

I laughed, although I was not especially cheerful.

“No, I’ll not do it. I expect to come across the notes any time now, and I expect just as certainly to turn them over to the state’s attorney when I get them.”

She got up suddenly, pushing her chair back with a noisy grating sound that turned many eyes toward us.

“You’re more of a fool than I thought you,” she sneered, and left me at the table.

CHAPTER XXI

Mc KNIGHT’S THEORY

I confess I was staggered. The people at the surrounding tables, after glancing curiously in my direction, looked away again.

I got my hat and went out in a very uncomfortable frame of mind. That she would inform the police at once of what she knew I never doubted, unless possibly she would give a day or two’s grace in the hope that I would change my mind.

I reviewed the situation as I waited for a car. Two passed me going in the opposite direction, and on the first one I saw Bronson, his hat over his eyes, his arms folded, looking moodily ahead. Was it imagination? or was the small man huddled in the corner of the rear seat Hotchkiss?

As the car rolled on I found myself smiling. The alert little man was for all the world like a terrier, ever on the scent, and scouring about in every direction.

I found McKnight at the Incubator, with his coat off, working with enthusiasm and a manicure file over the horn of his auto.

“It’s the worst horn I ever ran across,” he groaned, without looking up, as I came in. “The blankety-blank thing won’t blow.”

He punched it savagely, finally eliciting a faint throaty croak.

“Sounds like croup,” I suggested. “My sister-in-law uses camphor and goose greese for it; or how about a spice poultice?”

But McKnight never sees any jokes but his own. He flung the horn clattering into a corner, and collapsed sulkily into a chair.

“Now,” I said, “if you’re through manicuring that horn, I’ll tell you about my talk with the lady in black.”

“What’s wrong?” asked McKnight languidly. “Police watching her, too?”

“Not exactly. The fact is, Rich, there’s the mischief to pay.”

Stogie came in, bringing a few additions to our comfort. When he went out I told my story.

“You must remember,” I said, “that I had seen this woman before the morning of the wreck. She was buying her Pullman ticket when I did. Then the next morning, when the murder was discovered, she grew hysterical, and I gave her some whisky. The third and last time I saw her, until to-night, was when she crouched beside the road, after the wreck.”

McKnight slid down in his chair until his weight rested on the small of his back, and put his feet on the big reading table.

“It is rather a facer,” he said. “It’s really too good a situation for a commonplace lawyer. It ought to be dramatized. You can’t agree, of course; and by refusing you run the chance of jail, at least, and of having Alison brought into publicity, which is out of the question. You say she was at the Pullman window when you were?”

“Yes; I bought her ticket for her. Gave her lower eleven.”

“And you took ten?”

“Lower ten.”

McKnight straightened up and looked at me.

“Then she thought you were in lower ten.”

“I suppose she did, if she thought at all.”

“But listen, man.” McKnight was growing excited. “What do you figure out of this? The Conway woman knows you have taken the notes to Pittsburg. The probabilities are that she follows you there, on the chance of an opportunity to get them, either for Bronson or herself.

“Nothing doing during the trip over or during the day in Pittsburg; but she learns the number of your berth as you buy it at the Pullman ticket office in Pittsburg, and she thinks she sees her chance. No one could have foreseen that that drunken fellow would have crawled into your berth.

“Now, I figure it out this way: She wanted those notes desperately - does still - not for Bronson, but to hold over his head for some purpose. In the night, when everything is quiet, she slips behind the curtains of lower ten, where the man’s breathing shows he is asleep. Didn’t you say he snored?”

“He did!” I affirmed. “But I tell you - ”

“Now keep still and listen. She gropes cautiously around in the darkness, finally discovering the wallet under the pillow. Can’t you see it yourself?”

He was leaning forward, excitedly, and I could almost see the gruesome tragedy he was depicting.

“She draws out the wallet. Then, perhaps she remembers the alligator bag, and on the possibility that the notes are there, instead of in the pocketbook, she gropes around for it. Suddenly, the man awakes and clutches at the nearest object, perhaps her neck chain, which breaks. She drops the pocketbook and tries to escape, but he has caught her right hand.

“It is all in silence; the man is still stupidly drunk. But he holds her in a tight grip. Then the tragedy. She must get away; in a minute the car will be aroused. Such a woman, on such an errand, does not go without some sort of a weapon, in this case a dagger, which, unlike a revolver, is noiseless.

“With a quick thrust - she’s a big woman and a bold one - she strikes. Possibly Hotchkiss is right about the left-hand blow. Harrington may have held her right hand, or perhaps she held the dirk in her left hand as she groped with her right. Then, as the man falls back, and his grasp relaxes, she straightens and attempts to get away. The swaying of the car throws her almost into your berth, and, trembling with terror, she crouches behind the curtains of lower ten until everything is still. Then she goes noiselessly back to her berth.”

I nodded.

“It seems to fit partly, at least,” I said, “In the morning when she found that the crime had been not only fruitless, but that she had searched the wrong berth and killed the wrong man; when she saw me emerge, unhurt, just as she was bracing herself for the discovery of my dead body, then she went into hysterics. You remember, I gave her some whisky.

“It really seems a tenable theory. But, like the Sullivan theory, there are one or two things that don’t agree with the rest. For one thing, how did the remainder of that chain get into Alison West’s possession?”

“She may have picked it up on the floor.”

“We’ll admit that,” I said; “and I’m sure I hope so. Then how did the murdered man’s pocketbook get into the sealskin bag? And the dirk, how account for that, and the blood-stains?”

“Now what’s the use,” asked McKnight aggrievedly, “of my building up beautiful theories for you to pull down? We’ll take it to Hotchkiss. Maybe he can tell from the blood-stains if the murderer’s finger nails were square or pointed.”

“Hotchkiss is no fool,” I said warmly. “Under all his theories there’s a good hard layer of common sense. And we must remember, Rich, that neither of our theories includes the woman at Doctor Van Kirk’s hospital, that the charming picture you have just drawn does not account for Alison West’s connection with the case, or for the bits of telegram in the Sullivan fellow’s pajamas pocket. You are like the man who put the clock together; you’ve got half of the works left over.”

“Oh, go home,” said McKnight disgustedly. “I’m no Edgar Allan Poe. What’s the use of coming here and asking me things if you’re so particular?”

With one of his quick changes of mood, he picked up his guitar.

“Listen to this,” he said. “It is a Hawaiian song about a fat lady, oh, ignorant one! and how she fell off her mule.”

But for all the lightness of the words, the voice that followed me down the stairs was anything but cheery.

“There was a Kanaka in Balu did dwell, Who had for his daughter a monstrous fat girl—

he sang in his clear tenor. I paused on the lower floor and listened. He had stopped singing as abruptly as he had begun.

CHAPTER XXII

AT THE BOARDING-HOUSE

I had not been home for thirty-six hours, since the morning of the preceding day. Johnson was not in sight, and I let myself in quietly with my latchkey. It was almost midnight, and I had hardly settled myself in the library when the bell rang and I was surprised to find Hotchkiss, much out of breath, in the vestibule.

“Why, come in, Mr. Hotchkiss,” I said. “I thought you were going home to go to bed.”

“So I was, so I was.” He dropped into a chair beside my reading lamp and mopped his face. “And here it is almost midnight, and I’m wider awake than ever. I’ve seen Sullivan, Mr. Blakeley.”

“You have!”

“I have,” he said impressively.

“You were following Bronson at eight o’clock. Was that when it happened?”

“Something of the sort. When I left you at the door of the restaurant, I turned and almost ran into a plain clothes man from the central office. I know him pretty well; once or twice he has taken me with him on interesting bits of work. He knows my hobby.”

“You know him, too, probably. It was the man Arnold, the detective whom the state’s attorney has had watching Bronson.”

Johnson being otherwise occupied, I had asked for Arnold myself.

I nodded.

“Well, he stopped me at once; said he’d been on the fellow’s tracks since early morning and had had no time for luncheon. Bronson, it seems, isn’t eating much these days. I at once jotted down the fact, because it argued that he was being bothered by the man with the notes.”

“It might point to other things,” I suggested. “Indigestion, you know.”

Hotchkiss ignored me. “Well, Arnold had some reason for thinking that Bronson would try to give him the slip that night, so he asked me to stay around the private entrance there while he ran across the Street and got something to eat. It seemed a fair presumption that, as he had gone there with a lady, they would dine leisurely, and Arnold would have plenty of time to get back.”

“What about your own dinner?” I asked curiously.

“Sir,” he said pompously, “I have given you a wrong estimate of Wilson Budd Hotchkiss if you think that a question of dinner would even obtrude itself on his mind at such a time as this.”

He was a frail little man, and to-night he looked pale with heat and over-exertion.

“Did you have any luncheon?” I asked.

He was somewhat embarrassed at that.

“I - really, Mr. Blakeley, the events of the day were so engrossing - ”

“Well,” I said, “I’m not going to see you drop on the floor from exhaustion. Just wait a minute.”

I went back to the pantry, only to be confronted with rows of locked doors and empty dishes. Downstairs, in the basement kitchen, however, I found two unattractive looking cold chops, some dry bread and a piece of cake, wrapped in a napkin, and from its surreptitious and generally hang-dog appearance, destined for the coachman in the stable at the rear. Trays there were none - everything but the chairs and tables seemed under lock and key, and there was neither napkin, knife nor fork to be found.

The luncheon was not attractive in appearance, but Hotchkiss ate his cold chops and gnawed at the crusts as though he had been famished, while he told his story.

“I had been there only a few minutes,” he said, with a chop in one hand and the cake in the other, “when Bronson rushed out and cut across the street. He’s a tall man, Mr. Blakeley, and I had had work keeping close. It was a relief when he jumped on a passing car, although being well behind, it was a hard run for me to catch him. He had left the lady. “Once on the car, we simply rode from one end of the line to the other and back again. I suppose he was passing the time, for he looked at his watch now and then, and when I did once get a look at us face it made me - er - uncomfortable. He could have crushed me like a fly, sir.”

I had brought Mr. Hotchkiss a glass of wine, and he was looking better. He stopped to finish it, declining with a wave of his hand to have it refilled, and continued:

“About nine o’clock or a little later he got off somewhere near Washington Circle. He went along one of the residence streets there, turned to his left a square or two, and rang a bell. He had been admitted when I got there, but I guessed from the appearance of the place that it was a boarding-house.

“I waited a few minutes and rang the bell. When a maid answered it, I asked for Mr. Sullivan. Of course there was no Mr. Sullivan there.

“I said I was sorry; that the man I was looking for was a new boarder. She was sure there was no such boarder in the house; the only new arrival was a man on the third floor - she thought his name was Stuart.

“‘My friend has a cousin by that name,’ I said. ‘I’ll just go up and see.’

“She wanted to show me up, but I said it was unnecessary. So after telling me it was the bedroom and sitting-room on the third floor front, I went up.

“I met a couple of men on the stairs, but neither of them paid any attention to me. A boarding-house is the easiest place in the world to enter.”

“They’re not always so easy to leave,” I put in, to his evident irritation.

“When I got to the third story, I took out a bunch of keys and posted myself by a door near the ones the girl had indicated. I could hear voices in one of the front rooms, but could not understand what they said.

“There was no violent dispute, but a steady hum. Then Bronson jerked the door open. If he had stepped into the hall he would have seen me fitting a key into the door before me. But he spoke before he came out.

“‘You’re acting like a maniac,’ he said. ‘You know I can get those things some way; I’m not going to threaten you. It isn’t necessary. You know me.’

“‘It would be no use,’ the other man said. ‘I tell you, I haven’t seen the notes for ten days.’

“‘But you will,’ Bronson said savagely. ‘You’re standing in your own way, that’s all. If you’re holding out expecting me to raise my figure, you’re making a mistake. It’s my last offer.’

“‘I couldn’t take it if it was for a million,’ said the man inside the room. ‘I’d do it, I expect, if I could. The best of us have our price.’

“Bronson slammed the door then, and flung past me down the hall.

“After a couple of minutes I knocked at the door, and a tall man about your size, Mr. Blakeley, opened it. He was very blond, with a smooth face and blue eyes - what I think you would call a handsome man.

“‘I beg your pardon for disturbing you,’ I said. ‘Can you tell me which is Mr. Johnson’s room? Mr. Francis Johnson?’

“‘I can not say,’ he replied civilly. ‘I’ve only been here a few days.’

“I thanked him and left, but I had had a good look at him, and I think I’d know him readily any place.”

I sat for a few minutes thinking it over. “But what did he mean by saying he hadn’t seen the notes for ten days? And why is Bronson making the overtures?”

“I think he was lying,” Hotchkiss reflected. “Bronson hasn’t reached his figure.”

“It’s a big advance, Mr. Hotchkiss, and I appreciate what you have done more than I can tell you,” I said. “And now, if you can locate any of my property in this fellow’s room, we’ll send him up for larceny, and at least have him where we can get at him. I’m going to Cresson to-morrow, to try to trace him a little from there. But I’ll be back in a couple of days, and we’ll begin to gather in these scattered threads.”

Hotchkiss rubbed his hands together delightedly.

“That’s it,” he said. “That’s what we want to do, Mr. Blakeley. We’ll gather up the threads ourselves; if we let the police in too soon, they’ll tangle it up again. I’m not vindictive by nature; but when a fellow like Sullivan not only commits a murder, but goes to all sorts of trouble to put the burden of guilt on an innocent man - I say hunt him down, sir!”

“You are convinced, of course, that Sullivan did it?”

“Who else?” He looked over his glasses at me with the air of a man whose mental attitude is unassailable. “Well, listen to this,” I said.

Then I told him at length of my encounter with Bronson in the restaurant, of the bargain proposed by Mrs. Conway, and finally of McKnight’s new theory. But, although he was impressed, he was far from convinced.

“It’s a very vivid piece of imagination,” he said drily; “but while it fits the evidence as far as it goes, it doesn’t go far enough. How about the stains in lower seven, the dirk, and the wallet? Haven’t we even got motive in that telegram from Bronson?”

“Yes,” I admitted, “but that bit of chain - ”

“Pooh,” he said shortly. “Perhaps, like yourself, Sullivan wore glasses with a chain. Our not finding them does not prove they did not exist.”

And there I made an error; half confidences are always mistakes. I could not tell of the broken chain in Alison West’s gold purse.

It was one o’clock when Hotchkiss finally left. We had by that time arranged a definite course of action - Hotchkiss to search Sullivan’s rooms and if possible find evidence to have him held for larceny, while I went to Cresson.

Strangely enough, however, when I entered the train the following morning, Hotchkiss was already there. He had bought a new notebook, and was sharpening a fresh pencil.

“I changed my plans, you see,” he said, bustling his newspaper aside for me. “It is no discredit to your intelligence, Mr. Blakeley, but you lack the professional eye, the analytical mind. You legal gentlemen call a spade a spade, although it may be a shovel.”

“‘A primrose by the river’s brim A yellow primrose was to him, And nothing more!’”

I quoted as the train pulled out.

CHAPTER XXIII

A NIGHT AT THE LAURELS

I slept most of the way to Cresson, to the disgust of the little detective. Finally he struck up an acquaintance with a kindly-faced old priest on his way home to his convent school, armed with a roll of dance music and surreptitious bundles that looked like boxes of candy. From scraps of conversation I gleaned that there had been mysterious occurrences at the convent, - ending in the theft of what the reverend father called vaguely, “a quantity of undermuslins.” I dropped asleep at that point, and when I roused a few moments later, the conversation had progressed. Hotchkiss had a diagram on an envelope.

“With this window bolted, and that one inaccessible, and if, as you say, the - er - garments were in a tub here at X, then, as you hold the key to the other door, - I think you said the convent dog did not raise any disturbance? Pardon a personal question, but do you ever walk in your sleep?”

The priest looked bewildered.

“I’ll tell you what to do,” Hotchkiss said cheerfully, leaning forward, “look around a little yourself before you call in the police. Somnambulism is a queer thing. It’s a question whether we are most ourselves sleeping or waking. Ever think of that? Live a saintly life all day, prayers and matins and all that, and the subconscious mind hikes you out of bed at night to steal undermuslins! Subliminal theft, so to speak. Better examine the roof.”

I dozed again. When I wakened Hotchkiss sat alone, and the priest, from a corner, was staring at him dazedly, over his breviary.

It was raining when we reached Cresson, a wind-driven rain that had forced the agent at the newsstand to close himself in, and that beat back from the rails in parallel lines of white spray. As he went up the main street, Hotchkiss was cheerfully oblivious of the weather, of the threatening dusk, of our generally draggled condition. My draggled condition, I should say, for he improved every moment, - his eyes brighter, his ruddy face ruddier, his collar newer and glossier. Sometime, when it does not encircle the little man’s neck, I shall test that collar with a match.

I was growing steadily more depressed: I loathed my errand and its necessity. I had always held that a man who played the spy on a woman was beneath contempt. Then, I admit I was afraid of what I might learn. For a time, however, this promised to be a negligible quantity. The streets of the straggling little mountain town had been clean-washed of humanity by the downpour. Windows and doors were inhospitably shut, and from around an occasional drawn shade came narrow strips of light that merely emphasized our gloom. When Hotchkiss’ umbrella turned inside out, I stopped.

“I don’t know where you are going,” I snarled, “I don’t care. But I’m going to get under cover inside of ten seconds. I’m not amphibious.”

I ducked into the next shelter, which happened to be the yawning entrance to a livery stable, and shook myself, dog fashion. Hotchkiss wiped his collar with his handkerchief. It emerged gleaming and unwilted.

“This will do as well as any place,” he said, raising his voice above the rattle of the rain. “Got to make a beginning.”

I sat down on the usual chair without a back, just inside the door, and stared out at the darkening street. The whole affair had an air of unreality. Now that I was there, I doubted the necessity, or the value, of the journey. I was wet and uncomfortable. Around me, with Cresson as a center, stretched an irregular circumference of mountain, with possibly a ten-mile radius, and in it I was to find the residence of a woman whose first name I did not know, and a man who, so far, had been a purely chimerical person.

Hotchkiss had penetrated the steaming interior of the cave, and now his voice, punctuated by the occasional thud of horses’ hoofs, came to me.

“Something light will do,” he was saying. “A runabout, perhaps.” He came forward rubbing his hands, followed by a thin man in overalls. “Mr. Peck says,” he began, - “this is Mr. Peck of Peck and Peck, - says that the place we are looking for is about seven miles from the town. It’s clearing, isn’t it?”

“It is not,” I returned savagely. “And we don’t want a runabout, Mr. Peck. What we require is hermetically sealed diving suit. I suppose there isn’t a machine to be had?” Mr. Peck gazed at me, in silence: machine to him meant other things than motors. “Automobile,” I supplemented. His face cleared.

“None but private affairs. I can give you a good buggy with a rubber apron. Mike, is the doctor’s horse in?”

I am still uncertain as to whether the raw-boned roan we took out that night over the mountains was the doctor’s horse or not. If it was, the doctor may be a good doctor, but he doesn’t know anything about a horse. And furthermore, I hope he didn’t need the beast that miserable evening.

While they harnessed the horse, Hotchkiss told me what he had learned.

“Six Curtises in the town and vicinity,” he said. “Sort of family name around here. One of them is telegraph operator at the station. Person we are looking for is - was - a wealthy widow with a brother named Sullivan! Both supposed to have been killed on the Flier.”

“Her brother,” I repeated stupidly.

“You see,” Hotchkiss went on, “three people, in one party, took the train here that night, Miss West, Mrs. Curtis and Sullivan. The two women had the drawing-room, Sullivan had lower seven. What we want to find out is just who these people were, where they came from, if Bronson knew them, and how Miss West became entangled with them. She may have married Sullivan, for one thing.”

I fell into gloom after that. The roan was led unwillingly into the weather, Hotchkiss and I in eclipse behind the blanket. The liveryman stood in the doorway and called directions to us. “You can’t miss it,” he finished. “Got the name over the gate anyhow, ‘The Laurels.’ The servants are still there: leastways, we didn’t bring them down.” He even took a step into the rain as Hotchkiss picked up the lines. “If you’re going to settle the estate,” he bawled, “don’t forget us, Peck and Peck. A half-bushel of name and a bushel of service.

Hotchkiss could not drive. Born a clerk, he guided the roan much as he would drive a bad pen. And the roan spattered through puddles and splashed ink - mud, that is - until I was in a frenzy of irritation.

“What are we going to say when we get there?” I asked after I had finally taken the reins in my one useful hand. “Get out there at midnight and tell the servants we have come to ask a few questions about the family? It’s an idiotic trip anyhow; I wish I had stayed at home.”

The roan fell just then, and we had to crawl out and help him up. By the time we had partly unharnessed him our matches were gone, and the small bicycle lamp on the buggy was wavering only too certainly. We were covered with mud, panting with exertion, and even Hotchkiss showed a disposition to be surly. The rain, which had lessened for a time, came on again, the lightning flashes doing more than anything else to reveal our isolated position.

Another mile saw us, if possible, more despondent. The water in our clothes had had time to penetrate: the roan had sprained his shoulder, and drew us along in a series of convulsive jerks. And then through the rain-spattered window of the blanket, I saw a light. It was a small light, rather yellow, and it lasted perhaps thirty seconds. Hotchkiss missed it, and was inclined to doubt me. But in a couple of minutes the roan hobbled to the side of the road and stopped, and I made out a break in the pines and an arched gate.

It was a small gate, too narrow for the buggy. I pulled the horse into as much shelter as possible under the trees, and we got out. Hotchkiss tied the beast and we left him there, head down against the driving rain, drooping and dejected. Then we went toward the house.

It was a long walk. The path bent and twisted, and now and then we lost it. We were climbing as we went. Oddly there were no lights ahead, although it was only ten o’clock, - not later. Hotchkiss kept a little ahead of me, knocking into trees now and then, but finding the path in half the time I should have taken. Once, as I felt my way around a tree in the blackness, I put my hand unexpectedly on his shoulder, and felt a shudder go down my back.

“What do you expect me to do?” he protested, when I remonstrated. “Hang out a red lantern? What was that? Listen.”

We both stood peering into the gloom. The sharp patter of the rain on leaves had ceased, and from just ahead there came back to us the stealthy padding of feet in wet soil. My hand closed on Hotchkiss’ shoulder, and we listened together, warily. The steps were close by, unmistakable. The next flash of lightning showed nothing moving: the house was in full view now, dark and uninviting, looming huge above a terrace, with an Italian garden at the side. Then the blackness again. Somebody’s teeth were chattering: I accused Hotchkiss but he denied it.

“Although I’m not very comfortable, I’ll admit,” he confessed; “there was something breathing right at my elbow here a moment ago.”

“Nonsense!” I took his elbow and steered him in what I made out to be the direction of the steps of the Italian garden. “I saw a deer just ahead by the last flash; that’s what you heard. By Jove, I hear wheels.”

We paused to listen and Hotchkiss put his hand on something close to us. “Here’s your deer,” he said. “Bronze.”

As we neared the house the sense of surveillance we had had in the park gradually left us. Stumbling over flower beds, running afoul of a sun-dial, groping our way savagely along hedges and thorny banks, we reached the steps finally and climbed the terrace.

It was then that Hotchkiss fell over one of the two stone urns which, with tall boxwood trees in them, mounted guard at each side of the door. He didn’t make any attempt to get up. He sat in a puddle on the brick floor of the terrace and clutched his leg and swore softly in Government English.

The occasional relief of the lightning was gone. I could not see an outline of the house before me. We had no matches, and an instant’s investigation showed that the windows were boarded and the house closed. Hotchkiss, still recumbent, was ascertaining the damage, tenderly peeling down his stocking.

“Upon my soul,” he said finally, “I don’t know whether this moisture is blood or rain. I think I’ve broken a bone.”

“Blood is thicker than water,” I suggested. “Is it sticky? See if you can move your toes.”

There was a pause: Hotchkiss moved his toes. By that time I had found a knocker and was making the night hideous. But there was no response save the wind that blew sodden leaves derisively in our faces. Once Hotchkiss declared he heard a window-sash lifted, but renewed violence with the knocker produced no effect.

“There’s only one thing to do,” I said finally. “I’ll go back and try to bring the buggy up for you. You can’t walk, can you?”

Hotchkiss sat back in his puddle and said he didn’t think he could stir, but for me to go back to town and leave him, that he didn’t have any family dependent on him, and that if he was going to have pneumonia he had probably got it already. I left him there, and started back to get the horse.

If possible, it was worse than before. There was no lightning, and only by a miracle did I find the little gate again. I drew a long breath of relief, followed by another, equally long, of dismay. For I had found the hitching strap and there was nothing at the end of it! In a lull of the wind I seemed to hear, far off, the eager thud of stable-bound feet. So for the second time I climbed the slope to the Laurels, and on the way I thought of many things to say.

I struck the house at a new angle, for I found a veranda, destitute of chairs and furnishings, but dry and evidently roofed. It was better than the terrace, and so, by groping along the wall, I tried to make my way to Hotchkiss. That was how I found the open window. I had passed perhaps six, all closed, and to have my hand grope for the next one, and to find instead the soft drapery of an inner curtain, was startling, to say the least.

I found Hotchkiss at last around an angle of the stone wall1 and told him that the horse was gone. He was disconcerted, but not abased; maintaining that it was a new kind of knot that couldn’t slip and that the horse must have chewed the halter through! He was less enthusiastic than I had expected about the window.

“It looks uncommonly like a trap,” he said. “I tell you there was some one in the park below when we were coming up. Man has a sixth sense that scientists ignore - a sense of the nearness of things. And all the time you have been gone, some one has been watching me.”

“Couldn’t see you,” I maintained; “I can’t see you now. And your sense of contiguity didn’t tell you about that flower crock.”

In the end, of course, he consented to go with me. He was very lame, and I helped him around to the open window. He was full of moral courage, the little man: it was only the physical in him that quailed. And as we groped along, he insisted on going through the window first.

“If it is a trap,” he whispered, “I have two arms to your one, and, besides, as I said before, life holds much for you. As for me, the government would merely lose an indifferent employee.”

When he found I was going first he was rather hurt, but I did not wait for his protests. I swung my feet over the sill and dropped. I made a clutch at the window-frame with my good hand when I found no floor under my feet, but I was too late. I dropped probably ten feet and landed with a crash that seemed to split my ear-drums. I was thoroughly shaken, but in some miraculous way the bandaged arm had escaped injury.

“For Heaven’s sake,” Hotchkiss was calling from above, “have you broken your back?”

“No,” I returned, as steadily as I could, “merely driven it up through my skull. This is a staircase. I’m coming up to open another window.”

It was eerie work, but I accomplished it finally, discovering, not without mishap, a room filled with more tables than I had ever dreamed of, tables that seemed to waylay and strike at me. When I had got a window open, Hotchkiss crawled through, and we were at last under shelter.

Our first thought was for a light. The same laborious investigation that had landed us where we were, revealed that the house was lighted by electricity, and that the plant was not in operation. By accident I stumbled across a tabouret with smoking materials, and found a half dozen matches. The first one showed us the magnitude of the room we stood in, and revealed also a brass candle-stick by the open fireplace, a candle-stick almost four feet high, supporting a candle of similar colossal proportions. It was Hotchkiss who discovered that it had been recently lighted. He held the match to it and peered at it over his glasses.

“Within ten minutes,” he announced impressively, this candle has been burning. Look at the wax! And the wick! Both soft.”

“Perhaps it’s the damp weather,” I ventured, moving a little nearer to the circle of light. A gust of wind came in just then, and the flame turned over on its side and threatened demise. There was something almost ridiculous in the haste with which we put down the window and nursed the flicker to life.

The peculiarly ghost-like appearance of the room added to the uncanniness of the situation. The furniture was swathed in white covers for the winter; even the pictures wore shrouds. And in a niche between two windows a bust on a pedestal, similarly wrapped, one arm extended under its winding sheet, made a most life-like ghost, if any ghost can be life-like.

In the light of the candle we surveyed each other, and we were objects for mirth. Hotchkiss was taking off his sodden shoes and preparing to make himself comfortable, while I hung my muddy raincoat over the ghost in the corner. Thus habited, he presented a rakish but distinctly more comfortable appearance.

“When these people built,” Hotchkiss said, surveying the huge dimensions of the room, “they must have bought a mountain and built all over it. What a room!”

It seemed to be a living-room, although Hotchkiss remarked that it was much more like a dead one. It was probably fifty feet long and twenty-five feet wide. It was very high, too, with a domed ceiling, and a gallery ran around the entire room, about fifteen feet above the floor. The candle light did not penetrate beyond the dim outlines of the gallery rail, but I fancied the wall there hung with smaller pictures.

Hotchkiss had discovered a fire laid in the enormous fireplace, and in a few minutes we were steaming before a cheerful blaze. Within the radius of its light and heat, we were comfortable again. But the brightness merely emphasized the gloom of the ghostly corners. We talked in subdued tones, and I smoked, a box of Russian cigarettes which I found in a table drawer. We had decided to stay all night, there being nothing else to do. I suggested a game of double-dummy bridge, but did not urge it when my companion asked me if it resembled euchre. Gradually, as the ecclesiastical candle paled in the firelight, we grew drowsy. I drew a divan into the cheerful area, and stretched myself out for sleep. Hotchkiss, who aid the pain in his leg made him wakeful, sat wide-eyed by the fire, smoking a pipe.

I have no idea how much time had passed when something threw itself violently on my chest. I roused with a start and leaped to my feet, and a large Angora cat fell with a thump to the floor. The fire was still bright, and there was an odor of scorched leather through the room, from Hotchkiss’ shoes. The little detective was sound asleep, his dead pipe in his fingers. The cat sat back on its haunches and wailed.

The curtain at the door into the hallway bellied slowly out into the room and fell again. The cat looked toward it and opened its mouth for another howl. I thrust at it with my foot, but it refused to move. Hotchkiss stirred uneasily, and his pipe clattered to the floor.

The cat was standing at my feet, staring behind me. Apparently it was following with its eyes, an object unseen to me, that moved behind me. The tip of its tail waved threateningly, but when I wheeled I saw nothing.

I took the candle and made a circuit of the room. Behind the curtain that had moved the door was securely closed. The windows were shut and locked, and everywhere the silence was absolute. The cat followed me majestically. I stooped and stroked its head, but it persisted in its uncanny watching of the corners of the room.

When I went back to my divan, after putting a fresh log on the fire, I was reassured. I took the precaution, and smiled at myself for doing it, to put the fire tongs within reach of my hand. But the cat would not let me sleep. After a time I decided that it wanted water, and I started out in search of some, carrying the candle without the stand. I wandered through several rooms, all closed and dismantled, before I found a small lavatory opening off a billiard room. The cat lapped steadily, and I filled a glass to take back with me. The candle flickered in a sickly fashion that threatened to leave me there lost in the wanderings of the many hallways, and from somewhere there came an occasional violent puff of wind. The cat stuck by my feet, with the hair on its back raised menacingly. I don’t like cats; there is something psychic about them.

Hotchkiss was still asleep when I got back to the big room. I moved his boots back from the fire, and trimmed the candle. Then, with sleep gone from me, I lay back on my divan and reflected on many things: on my idiocy in coming; on Alison West, and the fact that only a week before she had been a guest in this very house; on Richey and the constraint that had come between us. From that I drifted back to Alison, and to the barrier my comparative poverty would be.

The emptiness, the stillness were oppressive. Once I heard footsteps coming, rhythmical steps that neither hurried nor dragged, and seemed to mount endless staircases without coming any closer. I realized finally that I had not quite turned off the tap, and that the lavatory, which I had circled to reach, must be quite close.

The cat lay by the fire, its nose on its folded paws, content in the warmth and companionship. I watched it idly. Now and then the green wood hissed in the fire, but the cat never batted an eye. Through an unshuttered window the lightning flashed. Suddenly the cat looked up. It lifted its head and stared directly at the gallery above. Then it blinked, and stared again. I was amused. Not until it had got up on its feet, eyes still riveted on the balcony, tail waving at the tip, the hair on its back a bristling brush, did I glance casually over my head.

>From among the shadows a face gazed down at me, a face that seemed a fitting tenant of the ghostly room below. I saw it as plainly as I might see my own face in a mirror. While I stared at it with horrified eyes, the apparition faded. The rail was there, the Bokhara rug still swung from it, but the gallery was empty.

The cat threw back its head and wailed.

CHAPTER XXIV

HIS WIFE’S FATHER

I jumped up and seized the fire tongs. The cat’s wail had roused Hotchkiss, who was wide-awake at once. He took in my offensive attitude, the tongs, the direction of my gaze, and needed nothing more. As he picked up the candle and darted out into the hall, I followed him. He made directly for the staircase, and part way up he turned off to the right through a small door. We were on the gallery itself; below us the fire gleamed cheerfully, the cat was not in sight. There was no sign of my ghostly visitant, but as we stood there the Bokhara rug, without warning, slid over the railing and fell to the floor below.

“Man or woman?” Hotchkiss inquired in his most professional tone.

“Neither - that is, I don’t know. I didn’t notice anything but the eyes,” I muttered. “They were looking a hole in me. If you’d seen that cat you would realize my state of mind. That was a traditional graveyard yowl.”

“I don’t think you saw anything at all,” he lied cheerfully. “You dozed off, and the rest is the natural result of a meal on a buffet car.”

Nevertheless, he examined the Bokhara carefully when we went down, and when I finally went to sleep he was reading the only book in sight - Elwell on Bridge. The first rays of daylight were coming mistily into the room when he roused me. He had his finger on his lips, and he whispered sibilantly while I tried to draw on my distorted boots.

“I think we have him,” he said triumphantly. “I’ve been looking around some, and I can tell you this much. Just before we came in through the window last night, another man came. Only - he did not drop, as you did. He swung over to the stair railing, and then down. The rail is scratched. He was long enough ahead of us to go into the dining-room and get a decanter out of the sideboard. He poured out the liquor into a glass, left the decanter there, and took the whisky into the library across the hall. Then - he broke into a desk, using a paper knife for a jimmy.”

“Good Lord, Hotchkiss,” I exclaimed; “why, it may have been Sullivan himself! Confound your theories - he’s getting farther away every minute.”

“It was Sullivan,” Hotchkiss returned imperturbably. “And he has not gone. His boots are by the library fire.”

“He probably had a dozen pairs where he could get them,” I scoffed. “And while you and I sat and slept, the very man we want to get our hands on leered at us over that railing.”

“Softly, softly, my friend,” Hotchkiss said, as I stamped into my other shoe. “I did not say he was gone. Don’t jump at conclusions. It is fatal to reasoning. As a matter of fact, he didn’t relish a night on the mountains any more than we did. After he had unintentionally frightened you almost into paralysis, what would my gentleman naturally do? Go out in the storm again? Not if I know the Alice-sit-by-the-fire type. He went upstairs, well up near the roof, locked himself in and went to bed.”

“And he is there now?”

“He is there now.”

We had no weapons. I am aware that the traditional hero is always armed, and that Hotchkiss as the low comedian should have had a revolver that missed fire. As a fact, we had nothing of the sort. Hotchkiss carried the fire tongs, but my sense of humor was too strong for me; I declined the poker.

“All we want is a little peaceable conversation with him,” I demurred. “We can’t brain him first and converse with him afterward. And anyhow, while I can’t put my finger on the place, I think your theory is weak. If he wouldn’t run a hundred miles through fire and water to get away from us, then he is not the man we want.”

Hotchkiss, however, was certain. He had found the room and listened outside the door to the sleeper’s heavy breathing, and so we climbed past luxurious suites, revealed in the deepening daylight, past long vistas of hall and boudoir. And we were both badly winded when we got there. It was a tower room, reached by narrow stairs, and well above the roof level. Hotchkiss was glowing.

“It is partly good luck, but not all,” he panted in a whisper. “If we had persisted in the search last night, he would have taken alarm and fled. Now - we have him. Are you ready?”

He gave a mighty rap at the door with the fire tongs, and stood expectant. Certainly he was right; some one moved within.

“Hello! Hello there!” Hotchkiss bawled. “You might as well come out. We won’t hurt you, if you’ll come peaceably.”

“Tell him we represent the law,” I prompted. “That’s the customary thing, you know.”

But at that moment a bullet came squarely through the door and flattened itself with a sharp pst against the wall of the tower staircase. We ducked unanimously, dropped back out of range, and Hotchkiss retaliated with a spirited bang at the door with the tongs. This brought another bullet. It was a ridiculous situation. Under the circumstances, no doubt, we should have retired, at least until we had armed ourselves, but Hotchkiss had no end of fighting spirit, and as for me, my blood was up.

“Break the lock,” I suggested, and Hotchkiss, standing at the side, out of range, retaliated for every bullet by a smashing blow with the tongs. The shots ceased after a half dozen, and the door was giving, slowly. One of us on each side of the door, we were ready for almost any kind of desperate resistance. As it swung open Hotchkiss poised the tongs; I stood, bent forward, my arm drawn back for a blow.

Nothing happened.

There was not a sound. Finally, at the risk of losing an eye which I justly value, I peered around and into the room. There was no desperado there: only a fresh-faced, trembling-lipped servant, sitting on the edge of her bed, with a quilt around her shoulders and the empty revolver at her feet.

We were victorious, but no conquered army ever beat such a retreat as ours down the tower stairs and into the refuge of the living-room. There, with the door closed, sprawled on the divan, I went from one spasm of mirth into another, becoming sane at intervals, and suffering relapse again every time I saw Hotchkiss’ disgruntled countenance. He was pacing the room, the tongs still in his hand, his mouth pursed with irritation. Finally he stopped in front of me and compelled my attention.

“When you have finished cackling,” he said with dignity, “I wish to justify my position. Do you think the - er - young woman upstairs put a pair of number eight boots to dry in the library last night? Do you think she poured the whisky out of that decanter?”

“They have been known to do it,” I put in, but his eye silenced me.

“Moreover, if she had been the person who peered at you over the gallery railing last night, don’t you suppose, with her - er - belligerent disposition, she could have filled you as full of lead as a window weight?”

“I do,” I assented. “It wasn’t Alice-sit-by-the-fire. I grant you that. Then who was it?”

Hotchkiss felt certain that it had been Sullivan, but I was not so sure. Why would he have crawled like a thief into his own house? If he had crossed the park, as seemed probable, when we did, he had not made any attempt to use the knocker. I gave it up finally, and made an effort to conciliate the young woman in the tower.

We had heard no sound since our spectacular entrance into her room. I was distinctly uncomfortable as, alone this time, I climbed to the tower staircase. Reasoning from before, she would probably throw a chair at me. I stopped at the foot of the staircase and called.

“Hello up there,” I said, in as debonair a manner as I could summon. “Good morning. Wie geht es bei ihen?”

No reply.

“Bon jour, mademoiselle,” I tried again. This time there was a movement of some sort from above, but nothing fell on me.

“I - we want to apologize for rousing you so - er - unexpectedly this morning,” I went on. “The fact is, we wanted to talk to you, and you - you were hard to waken. We are travelers, lost in your mountains, and we crave a breakfast and an audience.”

She came to the door then. I could feel that she was investigating the top of my head from above. “Is Mr. Sullivan with you?” she asked. It was the first word from her, and she was not sure of her voice.

“No. We are alone. If you will come down and look at us you will find us two perfectly harmless people, whose horse - curses on him - departed without leave last night and left us at your gate.”

She relaxed somewhat then and came down a step or two. “I was afraid I had killed somebody,” she said. “The housekeeper left yesterday, and the other maids went with her.”

When she saw that I was comparatively young and lacked the earmarks of the highwayman, she was greatly relieved. She was inclined to fight shy of Hotchkiss, however, for some reason. She gave us a breakfast of a sort, for there was little in the house, and afterward we telephoned to the town for a vehicle. While Hotchkiss examined scratches and replaced the Bokhara rug, I engaged Jennie in conversation.

“Can you tell me,” I asked, “who is managing the estate since Mrs. Curtis was killed?”

“No one,” she returned shortly.

“Has - any member of the family been here since the accident?”

“No, sir. There was only the two, and some think Mr. Sullivan was killed as well as his sister.”

“You don’t?”

“No,” with conviction.

“Why?”

She wheeled on me with quick suspicion.

“Are you a detective?” she demanded.

“No.”

“You told him to say you represented the law.”

“I am a lawyer. Some of them misrepresent the law, but I - ”

She broke in impatiently.

“A sheriff’s officer?”

“No. Look here, Jennie; I am all that I should be. You’ll have to believe that. And I’m in a bad position through no fault of my own. I want you to answer some questions. If you will help me, I will do what I can for you. Do you live near here?”

Her chin quivered. It was the first sign of weakness she had shown.

“My home is in Pittsburg,” she said, “and I haven’t enough money to get there. They hadn’t paid any wages for two months. They didn’t pay anybody.”

“Very well,” I returned. “I’ll send you back to Pittsburg, Pullman included, if you will tell me some things I want to know.”

She agreed eagerly. Outside the window Hotchkiss was bending over, examining footprints in the drive.

“Now,” I began, “there has been a Miss West staying here?”

“Yes.”

“Mr. Sullivan was attentive to her?”

“Yes. She was the granddaughter of a wealthy man in Pittsburg. My aunt has been in his family for twenty years. Mrs. Curtis wanted her brother to marry Miss West.”

“Do you think he did marry her?” I could not keep the excitement out of my voice.

“No. There were reasons” - she stopped abruptly.

“Do you know anything of the family? Are they - were they New Yorkers?”

“They came from somewhere in the south. I have heard Mrs. Curtis say her mother was a Cuban. I don’t know much about them, but Mr. Sullivan had a wicked temper, though he didn’t look it. Folks say big, light-haired people are easy going, but I don’t believe it, sir.”

“How long was Miss West here?”

“Two weeks.”

I hesitated about further questioning. Critical as my position was, I could not pry deeper into Alison West’s affairs. If she had got into the hands of adventurers, as Sullivan and his sister appeared to have been, she was safely away from them again. But something of the situation in the car Ontario was forming itself in my mind: the incident at the farmhouse lacked only motive to be complete. Was Sullivan, after all, a rascal or a criminal? Was the murderer Sullivan or Mrs. Conway? The lady or the tiger again.

Jennie was speaking.

“I hope Miss West was not hurt?” she asked. “We liked her, all of us. She was not like Mrs. Curtis.”

I wanted to say that she was not like anybody in the world. Instead - “She escaped with some bruises,” I said.

She glanced at my arm. “You were on the train?”

“Yes.”

She waited for more questions, but none coming, she went to the door. Then she closed it softly and came back.

“Mrs. Curtis is dead? You are sure of it?” she asked.

“She was killed instantly, I believe. The body was not recovered. But I have reasons for believing that Mr. Sullivan is living.”

“I knew it,” she said. “I - I think he was here the night before last. That is why I went to the tower room. I believe he would kill me if he could.” As nearly as her round and comely face could express it, Jennie’s expression was tragic at that moment. I made a quick resolution, and acted on it at once.

“You are not entirely frank with me, Jennie,” I protested. “And I am going to tell you more than I have. We are talking at cross purposes.”

“I was on the wrecked train, in the same car with Mrs. Curtis, Miss West and Mr. Sullivan. During the night there was a crime committed in that car and Mr. Sullivan disappeared. But he left behind him a chain of circumstantial evidence that involved me completely, so that I may, at any time, be arrested.”

Apparently she did not comprehend for a moment. Then, as if the meaning of my words had just dawned on her, she looked up and gasped:

“You mean - Mr. Sullivan committed the crime himself?”

“I think he did.”

“What was it?”

“It was murder,” I said deliberately.

Her hands clenched involuntarily, and she shrank back. “A woman?” She could scarcely form her words.

“No, a man; a Mr. Simon Harrington, of Pittsburg.”

Her effort to retain her self-control was pitiful. Then she broke down and cried, her head on the back of a tall chair.

“It was my fault,” she said wretchedly, “my fault, I should not have sent them the word.”

After a few minutes she grew quiet. She seemed to hesitate over something, and finally determined to say it.

“You will understand better, sir, when I say that I was raised in the Harrington family. Mr. Harrington was Mr. Sullivan’s wife’s father!”

CHAPTER XXV

AT THE STATION

So it had been the tiger, not the lady! Well, I had held to that theory all through. Jennie suddenly became a valuable person; if necessary she could prove the connection between Sullivan and the murdered man, and show a motive for the crime. I was triumphant when Hotchkiss came in. When the girl had produced a photograph of Mrs. Sullivan, and I had recognized the bronze-haired girl of the train, we were both well satisfied - which goes to prove the ephemeral nature of most human contentments.

Jennie either had nothing more to say, or feared she had said too much. She was evidently uneasy before Hotchkiss. I told her that Mrs. Sullivan was recovering in a Baltimore hospital, but she already knew it, from some source, and merely nodded. She made a few preparations for leaving, while Hotchkiss and I compared notes, and then, with the cat in her arms, she climbed into the trap from the town. I sat with her, and on the way down she told me a little, not much.

“If you see Mrs. Sullivan,” she advised, “and she is conscious, she probably thinks that both her husband and her father were killed in the wreck. She will be in a bad way, sir.”

“You mean that she - still cares about her husband?”

The cat crawled over on to my knee, and rubbed its bead against my hand invitingly. Jennie stared at the undulating line of the mountain crests, a colossal sun against a blue ocean of sky. “Yes, she cares,” she said softly. “Women are made like that. They say they are cats, but Peter there in your lap wouldn’t come back and lick your hand if you kicked him. If - if you have to tell her the truth, be as gentle as you can, sir. She has been good to me - that’s why I have played the spy here all summer. It’s a thankless thing, spying on people.”

“It is that,” I agreed soberly.

Hotchkiss and I arrived in Washington late that evening, and, rather than arouse the household, I went to the club. I was at the office early the next morning and admitted myself. McKnight rarely appeared before half after ten, and our modest office force some time after nine. I looked over my previous day’s mail and waited, with such patience as I possessed, for McKnight. In the interval I called up Mrs. Klopton and announced that I would dine at home that night. What my household subsists on during my numerous absences I have never discovered. Tea, probably, and crackers. Diligent search when I have made a midnight arrival, never reveals anything more substantial. Possibly I imagine it, but the announcement that I am about to make a journey always seems to create a general atmosphere of depression throughout the house, as though Euphemia and Eliza, and Thomas, the stableman, were already subsisting, in imagination, on Mrs. Klopton’s meager fare.

So I called her up and announced my arrival. There was something unusual in her tone, as though her throat was tense with indignation. Always shrill, her elderly voice rasped my ear painfully through the receiver.

“I have changed the butcher, Mr. Lawrence,” she announced portentously. “The last roast was a pound short, and his mutton-chops - any self-respecting sheep would refuse to acknowledge them.”

As I said before, I can always tell from the voice in which Mrs. Klopton conveys the most indifferent matters, if something of real significance has occurred. Also, through long habit, I have learned how quickest to bring her to the point.

“You are pessimistic this morning,” I returned. “What’s the matter, Mrs. Klopton? You haven’t used that tone since Euphemia baked a pie for the iceman. What is it now? Somebody poison the dog?”

She cleared her throat.

“The house has been broken into, Mr. Lawrence,” she said. “I have lived in the best families, and never have I stood by and seen what I saw yesterday - every bureau drawer opened, and my - my most sacred belongings - ” she choked.

“Did you notify the police?” I asked sharply.

“Police!” she sniffed. “Police! It was the police that did it - two detectives with a search warrant. I - I wouldn’t dare tell you over the telephone what one of them said when he found the whisky and rock candy for my cough.”

“Did they take anything?” I demanded, every nerve on edge.

“They took the cough medicine,” she returned indignantly, “and they said - ”

“Confound the cough medicine!” I was frantic. “Did they take anything else? Were they in my dressing-room?”

“Yes. I threatened to sue them, and I told them what you would do when you came back. But they wouldn’t listen. They took away that black sealskin bag you brought home from Pittsburg with you!”

I knew then that my hours of freedom were numbered. To have found Sullivan and then, in support of my case against him, to have produced the bag, minus the bit of chain, had been my intention. But the police had the bag, and, beyond knowing something of Sullivan’s history, I was practically no nearer his discovery than before. Hotchkiss hoped he had his man in the house off Washington Circle, but on the very night he had seen him Jennie claimed that Sullivan had tried to enter the Laurels. Then - suppose we found Sullivan and proved the satchel and its contents his? Since the police had the bit of chain it might mean involving Alison in the story. I sat down and buried my face in my hands. There was no escape. I figured it out despondingly.

Against me was the evidence of the survivors of the Ontario that I had been accused of the murder at the time. There had been blood-stains on my pillow and a hidden dagger. Into the bargain, in my possession had been found a traveling-bag containing the dead man’s pocketbook.

In my favor was McKnight’s theory against Mrs. Conway. She had a motive for wishing to secure the notes, she believed I was in lower ten, and she had collapsed at the discovery of the crime in the morning.

Against both of these theories, I accuse a purely chimerical person named Sullivan, who was not seen by any of the survivors - save one, Alison, whom I could not bring into the case. I could find a motive for his murdering his father-in-law, whom he hated, but again - I would have to drag in the girl.

And not one of the theories explained the telegram and the broken necklace.

Outside the office force was arriving. They were comfortably ignorant of my presence, and over the transom floated scraps of dialogue and the stenographer’s gurgling laugh. McKnight had a relative, who was reading law with him, in the intervals between calling up the young women of his acquaintance. He came in singing, and the office boy joined in with the uncertainty of voice of fifteen. I smiled grimly. I was too busy with my own troubles to find any joy in opening the door and startling them into silence. I even heard, without resentment, Blobs of the uncertain voice inquire when “Blake” would be back.

I hoped McKnight would arrive before the arrest occurred. There were many things to arrange. But when at last, impatient of his delay, I telephoned, I found he had been gone for more than an hour. Clearly he was not coming directly to the office, and with such resignation as I could muster I paced the floor and waited.

I felt more alone than I have ever felt in my life. “Born an orphan,” as Richey said, I had made my own way, carved out myself such success as had been mine. I had built up my house of life on the props of law and order, and now some unknown hand had withdrawn the supports, and I stood among ruins.

I suppose it is the maternal in a woman that makes a man turn to her when everything else fails. The eternal boy in him goes to have his wounded pride bandaged, his tattered self-respect repaired. If he loves the woman, he wants her to kiss the hurt.

The longing to see Alison, always with me, was stronger than I was that morning. It might be that I would not see her again. I had nothing to say to her save one thing, and that, under the cloud that hung over me, I did not dare to say. But I wanted to see her, to touch her hand - as only a lonely man can crave it, I wanted the comfort of her, the peace that lay in her presence. And so, with every step outside the door a threat, I telephoned to her.

She was gone! The disappointment was great, for my need was great. In a fury of revolt against the scheme of things, I heard that she had started home to Richmond - but that she might still be caught at the station.

To see her had by that time become an obsession. I picked up my hat, threw open the door, and, oblivious of the shock to the office force of my presence, followed so immediately by my exit, I dashed out to the elevator. As I went down in one cage I caught a glimpse of Johnson and two other men going up in the next. I hardly gave them a thought. There was no hansom in sight, and I jumped on a passing car. Let come what might, arrest, prison, disgrace, I was going to see Alison.

I saw her. I flung into the station, saw that it was empty - empty, for she was not there. Then I hurried back to the gates. She was there, a familiar figure in blue, the very gown in which I always thought of her, the one she had worn when, Heaven help me - I had kissed her, at the Carter farm. And she was not alone. Bending over her, talking earnestly, with all his boyish heart in his face, was Richey.

They did not see me, and I was glad of it. After all, it had been McKnight’s game first. I turned on my heel and made my way blindly out of the station. Before I lost them I turned once and looked toward them, standing apart from the crowd, absorbed in each other. They were the only two people on earth that I cared about, and I left them there together. Then I went back miserably to the office and awaited arrest.

CHAPTER XXVI

ON TO RICHMOND

Strangely enough, I was not disturbed that day. McKnight did not appear at all. I sat at my desk and transacted routine business all afternoon, working with feverish energy. Like a man on the verge of a critical illness or a hazardous journey, I cleared up my correspondence, paid bills until I had writer’s cramp from signing checks, read over my will, and paid up my life insurance, made to the benefit of an elderly sister of my mother’s. I no longer dreaded arrest. After that morning in the station, I felt that anything would be a relief from the tension. I went home with perfect openness, courting the warrant that I knew was waiting, but I was not molested. The delay puzzled me. The early part of the evening was uneventful. I read until late, with occasional lapses, when my book lay at my elbow, and I smoked and thought. Mrs. Klopton closed the house with ostentatious caution, about eleven, and hung around waiting to enlarge on the outrageousness of the police search. I did not encourage her.

“One would think,” she concluded pompously, one foot in the hall, “that you were something you oughtn’t to be, Mr. Lawrence. They acted as though you had committed a crime.”

“I’m not sure that I didn’t, Mrs. Klopton,” I said wearily. “Somebody did, the general verdict seems to point my way.”

She stared at me in speechless indignation. Then she flounced out. She came back once to say that the paper predicted cooler weather, and that she had put a blanket on my bed, but, to her disappointment, I refused to reopen the subject.

At half past eleven McKnight and Hotchkiss came in. Richey has a habit of stopping his car in front of the house and honking until some one comes out. He has a code of signals with the horn, which I never remember. Two long and a short blast mean, I believe, “Send out a box of cigarettes,” and six short blasts, which sound like a police call, mean “Can you lend me some money?” To-night I knew something was up, for he got out and rang the door-bell like a Christian.

They came into the library, and Hotchkiss wiped his collar until it gleamed. McKnight was aggressively cheerful.

“Not pinched yet!” he exclaimed. “What do you think of that for luck! You always were a fortunate devil, Lawrence.”

“Yes,” I assented, with some bitterness, “I hardly know how to contain myself for joy sometimes. I suppose you know” - to Hotchkiss - “that the police were here while we were at Cresson, and that they found the bag that I brought from the wreck?”

“Things are coming to a head,” he said thoughtfully “unless a little plan that I have in mind - ” he hesitated.

“I hope so; I am pretty nearly desperate,” I said doggedly. “I’ve got a mental toothache, and the sooner it’s pulled the better.”

“Tut, tut,” said McKnight, “think of the disgrace to the firm if its senior member goes up for life, or - ” he twisted his handkerchief into a noose, and went through an elaborate pantomime.

“Although jail isn’t so bad, anyhow,” he finished, “there are fellows that get the habit and keep going back and going back.” He looked at his watch, and I fancied his cheerfulness was strained. Hotchkiss was nervously fumbling my book.

“Did you ever read The Purloined Letter, Mr Blakeley?” he inquired.

“Probably, years ago,” I said. “Poe, isn’t it?”

He was choked at my indifference. “It is a masterpiece,” he said, with enthusiasm. “I re-read it to-day.”

“And what happened?”

“Then I inspected the rooms in the house off Washington Circle. I - I made some discoveries, Mr. Blakeley. For one thing, our man there is left-handed.” He looked around for our approval. “There was a small cushion on the dresser, and the scarf pins in it had been stuck in with the left hand.”

“Somebody may have twisted the cushion,” I objected, but he looked hurt, and I desisted.

“There is only one discrepancy,” he admitted, “but it troubles me. According to Mrs. Carter, at the farmhouse, our man wore gaudy pajamas, while I found here only the most severely plain night-shirts.”

“Any buttons off?” McKnight inquired, looking again at his watch.

“The buttons were there,” the amateur detective answered gravely, “but the buttonhole next the top one was torn through.”

McKnight winked at me furtively.

“I am convinced of one thing,” Hotchkiss went on, clearing his throat, “the papers are not in that room. Either he carries them with him, or he has sold them.”

A sound on the street made both my visitors listen sharply. Whatever it was it passed on, however. I was growing curious and the restraint was telling on McKnight. He has no talent for secrecy. In the interval we discussed the strange occurrence at Cresson, which lost nothing by Hotchkiss’ dry narration.

“And so,” he concluded, “the woman in the Baltimore hospital is the wife of Henry Sullivan and the daughter of the man he murdered. No wonder he collapsed when he heard of the wreck.”

“Joy, probably,” McKnight put in. “Is that clock right, Lawrence? Never mind, it doesn’t matter. By the way, Mrs. Conway dropped in the office yesterday, while you were away.”

“What!” I sprang from my chair.

“Sure thing. Said she had heard great things of us, and wanted us to handle her case against the railroad.”

“I would like to know what she is driving at,” I reflected. “Is she trying to reach me through you?”

Richey’s flippancy is often a cloak for deeper feeling. He dropped it now. “Yes,” he said, “she’s after the notes, of course. And I’ll tell you I felt like a poltroon - whatever that may be - when I turned her down. She stood by the door with her face white, and told me contemptuously that I could save you from a murder charge and wouldn’t do it. She made me feel like a cur. I was just as guilty as if I could have obliged her. She hinted that there were reasons and she laid my attitude to beastly motives.”

“Nonsense,” I said, as easily as I could. Hotchkiss had gone to the window. “She was excited. There are no ‘reasons,’ whatever she means.”

Richey put his hand on my shoulder. “We’ve been together too long to let any ‘reasons’ or ‘unreasons’ come between us, old man,” he said, not very steadily. Hotchkiss, who had been silent, here came forward in his most impressive manner. He put his hands under his coat-tails and coughed.

“Mr. Blakeley,” he began, “by Mr. McKnight’s advice we have arranged a little interview here to-night. If all has gone as I planned, Mr. Henry Pinckney Sullivan is by this time under arrest. Within a very few minutes - he will be here.”

“I wanted to talk to him before be was locked up,” Richey explained. “He’s clever enough to be worth knowing, and, besides, I’m not so cocksure of his guilt as our friend the Patch on the Seat of Government. No murderer worthy of the name needs six different motives for the same crime, beginning with robbery, and ending with an unpleasant father-in-law.”

We were all silent for a while. McKnight stationed himself at a window, and Hotchkiss paced the floor expectantly. “It’s a great day for modern detective methods,” he chirruped. “While the police have been guarding houses and standing with their mouths open waiting for clues to fall in and choke them, we have pieced together, bit by bit, a fabric - ”

The door-bell rang, followed immediately by sounds of footsteps in the hall. McKnight threw the door open, and Hotchkiss, raised on his toes, flung out his arm in a gesture of superb eloquence.

“Behold - your man!” he declaimed.

Through the open doorway came a tall, blond fellow, clad in light gray, wearing tan shoes, and followed closely by an officer.

“I brought him here as you suggested, Mr. McKnight,” said the constable.

But McKnight was doubled over the library table in silent convulsions of mirth, and I was almost as bad. Little Hotchkiss stood up, his important attitude finally changing to one of chagrin, while the blond man ceased to look angry, and became sheepish.

It was Stuart, our confidential clerk for the last half dozen years!

McKnight sat up and wiped his eyes.

“Stuart,” he said sternly, “there are two very serious things we have learned about you. First, you jab your scarf pins into your cushion with your left hand, which is most reprehensible; second, you wear - er - night-shirts, instead of pajamas. Worse than that, perhaps, we find that one of them has a buttonhole torn out at the neck.”

Stuart was bewildered. He looked from McKnight to me, and then at the crestfallen Hotchkiss.

“I haven’t any idea what it’s all about,” he said. “I was arrested as I reached my boarding-house to-night, after the theater, and brought directly here. I told the officer it was a mistake.”

Poor Hotchkiss tried bravely to justify the fiasco. “You can not deny,” he contended, “that Mr. Andrew Bronson followed you to your rooms last Monday evening.”

Stuart looked at us and flushed.

“No, I don’t deny it,” he said, “but there was nothing criminal about it, on my part, at least. Mr. Bronson has been trying to induce me to secure the forged notes for him. But I did not even know where they were.”

“And you were not on the wrecked Washington Flier?” persisted Hotchkiss. But McKnight interfered.

“There is no use trying to put the other man’s identity on Stuart, Mr. Hotchkiss,” he protested. “He has been our confidential clerk for six years, and has not been away from the office a day for a year. I am afraid that the beautiful fabric we have pieced out of all these scraps is going to be a crazy quilt.” His tone was facetious, but I could detect the undercurrent of real disappointment.

I paid the constable for his trouble, and he departed. Stuart, still indignant, left to go back to Washington Circle. He shook hands with McKnight and myself magnanimously, but he hurled a look of utter hatred at Hotchkiss, sunk crestfallen in his chair.

“As far as I can see,” said McKnight dryly, “we’re exactly as far along as we were the day we met at the Carter place. We’re not a step nearer to finding our man.”

“We have one thing that may be of value,” I suggested. “He is the husband of a bronze-haired woman at Van Kirk’s hospital, and it is just possible we may trace him through her. I hope we are not going to lose your valuable co-operation, Mr. Hotchkiss?” I asked.

He roused at that to feeble interest, “I - oh, of course not, if you still care to have me, I - I was wondering about - the man who just went out, Stuart, you say? I - told his landlady to-night that he wouldn’t need the room again. I hope she hasn’t rented it to somebody else.”

We cheered him as best we could, and I suggested that we go to Baltimore the next day and try to find the real Sullivan through his wife. He left sometime after midnight, and Richey and I were alone.

He drew a chair near the lamp and lighted a cigarette, and for a time we were silent. I was in the shadow, and I sat back and watched him. It was not surprising, I thought, that she cared for him: women had always loved him, perhaps because he always loved them. There was no disloyalty in the thought: it was the lad’s nature to give and crave affection. Only - I was different. I had never really cared about a girl before, and my life had been singularly loveless. I had fought a lonely battle always. Once before, in college, we had both laid ourselves and our callow devotions at the feet of the same girl. Her name was Dorothy - I had forgotten the rest - but I remembered the sequel. In a spirit of quixotic youth I had relinquished my claim in favor of Richey and had gone cheerfully on my way, elevated by my heroic sacrifice to a somber, white-hot martyrdom. As is often the case, McKnight’s first words showed our parallel lines of thought.

“I say, Lollie,” he asked, “do you remember Dorothy Browne?” Browne, that was it!

“Dorothy Browne?” I repeated. “Oh - why yes, I recall her now. Why?”

“Nothing,” he said. “I was thinking about her. That’s all. You remember you were crazy about her, and dropped back because she preferred me.”

“I got out,” I said with dignity, “because you declared you would shoot yourself if she didn’t go with you to something or other!”

“Oh, why yes, I recall now!” he mimicked. He tossed his cigarette in the general direction of the hearth and got up. We were both a little conscious, and he stood with his back to me, fingering a Japanese vase on the mantel.

“I was thinking,” he began, turning the vase around, “that, if you feel pretty well again, and - and ready to take hold, that I should like to go away for a week or so. Things are fairly well cleaned up at the office.”

“Do you mean - you are going to Richmond?” I asked, after a scarcely perceptible pause. He turned and faced me, with his hands thrust in his pockets.

“No. That’s off, Lollie. The Sieberts are going for a week’s cruise along the coast. I - the hot weather has played hob with me and the cruise means seven days’ breeze and bridge.”

I lighted a cigarette and offered him the box, but he refused. He was looking haggard and suddenly tired. I could not think of anything to say, and neither could he, evidently. The matter between us lay too deep for speech.

“How’s Candida?” he asked.

“Martin says a month, and she will be all right,” I returned, in the same tone. He picked up his hat, but he had something more to say. He blurted it out, finally, half way to the door.

“The Seiberts are not going for a couple of days,” he said, “and if you want a day or so off to go down to Richmond yourself - ”

“Perhaps I shall,” I returned, as indifferently as I could. “Not going yet, are you?”

“Yes. It is late.” He drew in his breath as if he had something more to say, but the impulse passed. “Well, good night,” he said from the doorway.

“Good night, old man.”

The next moment the outer door slammed and I heard the engine of the Cannonball throbbing in the street. Then the quiet settled down around me again, and there in the lamplight I dreamed dreams. I was going to see her.

Suddenly the idea of being shut away, even temporarily, from so great and wonderful a world became intolerable. The possibility of arrest before I could get to Richmond was hideous, the night without end.

I made my escape the next morning through the stable back of the house, and then, by devious dark and winding ways, to the office. There, after a conference with Blobs, whose features fairly jerked with excitement, I double-locked the door of my private office and finished off some imperative work. By ten o’clock I was free, and for the twentieth time I consulted my train schedule. At five minutes after ten, with McKnight not yet in sight, Blobs knocked at the door, the double rap we had agreed upon, and on being admitted slipped in and quietly closed the door behind him. His eyes were glistening with excitement, and a purple dab of typewriter ink gave him a peculiarly villainous and stealthy expression.

“They’re here,” he said, “two of ‘em, and that crazy Stuart wasn’t on, and said you were somewhere in the building.”

A door slammed outside, followed by steps on the uncarpeted outer office.

“This way,” said Blobs, in a husky undertone, and, darting into a lavatory, threw open a door that I had always supposed locked. Thence into a back hall piled high with boxes and past the presses of a bookbindery to the freight elevator.

Greatly to Blobs’ disappointment, there was no pursuit. I was exhilarated but out of breath when we emerged into an alleyway, and the sharp daylight shone on Blobs’ excited face.

“Great sport, isn’t it? I panted, dropping a dollar into his palm, inked to correspond with his face. “Regular walk-away in the hundred-yard dash.”

“Gimme two dollars more and I’ll drop ‘em down the elevator shaft,” he suggested ferociously. I left him there with his blood-thirsty schemes, and started for the station. I had a tendency to look behind me now and then, but I reached the station unnoticed. The afternoon was hot, the train rolled slowly along, stopping to pant at sweltering stations, from whose roofs the heat rose in waves. But I noticed these things objectively, not subjectively, for at the end of the journey was a girl with blue eyes and dark brown hair, hair that could - had I not seen it? - hang loose in bewitching tangles or be twisted into little coils of delight.

CHAPTER XXVII

THE SEA, THE SAND, THE STARS

I telephoned as soon as I reached my hotel, and I had not known how much I had hoped from seeing her until I learned that she was out of town. I hung up the receiver, almost dizzy with disappointment, and it was fully five minutes before I thought of calling up again and asking if she was within telephone reach. It seemed she was down on the bay staying with the Samuel Forbeses.

Sammy Forbes! It was a name to conjure with just then. In the old days at college I had rather flouted him, but now I was ready to take him to my heart. I remembered that he had always meant well, anyhow, and that he was explosively generous. I called him up.

“By the fumes of gasoline!” he said, when I told him who I was. “Blakeley, the Fount of Wisdom against Woman! Blakeley, the Great Unkissed! Welcome to our city!”

Whereupon he proceeded to urge me to come down to the Shack, and to say that I was an agreeable surprise, because four times in two hours youths had called up to ask if Alison West was stopping with him, and to suggest that they had a vacant day or two. “Oh - Miss West!” I shouted politely. There was a buzzing on the line. “Is she there?” Sam had no suspicions. Was not I in his mind always the Great Unkissed? - which sounds like the Great Unwashed and is even more of a reproach. He asked me down promptly, as I had hoped, and thrust aside my objections.

“Nonsense,” he said. “Bring yourself. The lady that keeps my boarding-house is calling to me to insist. You remember Dorothy, don’t you, Dorothy Browne? She says unless you have lost your figure you can wear my clothes all right. All you need here is a bathing suit for daytime and a dinner coat for evening.”

“It sounds cool,” I temporized. “If you are sure I won’t put you out - very well, Sam, since you and your wife are good enough. I have a couple of days free. Give my love to Dorothy until I can do it myself.”

Sam met me himself and drove me out to the Shack, which proved to be a substantial house overlooking the water. On the way he confided to me that lots of married men thought they were contented when they were merely resigned, but that it was the only life, and that Sam, Junior, could swim like a duck. Incidentally, he said that Alison was his wife’s cousin, their respective grandmothers having, at proper intervals, married the same man, and that Alison would lose her good looks if she was not careful.

“I say she’s worried, and I stick to it,” he said, as he threw the lines to a groom and prepared to get out. “You know her, and she’s the kind of girl you think you can read like a book. But you can’t; don’t fool yourself. Take a good look at her at dinner, Blake; you won’t lose your head like the other fellows - and then tell me what’s wrong with her. We’re mighty fond of Allie.”

He went ponderously up the steps, for Sam had put on weight since I knew him. At the door he turned around. “Do you happen to know the MacLure’s at Seal Harbor?” he asked irrelevantly, but Mrs. Sam came into the hall just then, both hands out to greet me, and, whatever Forbes had meant to say, he did not pick up the subject again.

“We are having tea in here,” Dorothy said gaily, indicating the door behind her. “Tea by courtesy, because I think tea is the only beverage that isn’t represented. And then we must dress, for this is hop night at the club.”

“Which is as great a misnomer as the tea,” Sam put in, ponderously struggling out of his linen driving coat. “It’s bridge night, and the only hops are in the beer.”

He was still gurgling over this as he took me upstairs. He showed me my room himself, and then began the fruitless search for evening raiment that kept me home that night from the club. For I couldn’t wear Sam’s clothes. That was clear, after a perspiring seance of a half hour.

“I won’t do it, Sam,” I said, when I had draped his dress-coat on me toga fashion. “Who am I to have clothing to spare, like this, when many a poor chap hasn’t even a cellar door to cover him. I won’t do it; I’m selfish, but not that selfish.”

“Lord,” he said, wiping his face, “how you’ve kept your figure! I can’t wear a belt any more; got to have suspenders.”

He reflected over his grievance for some time, sitting on the side of the bed. “You could go as you are,” he said finally. “We do it all the time, only to-night happens to be the annual something or other, and - ” he trailed off into silence, trying to buckle my belt around him. “A good six inches,” he sighed. “I never get into a hansom cab any more that I don’t expect to see the horse fly up into the air. Well, Allie isn’t going either. She turned down Granger this afternoon, the Annapolis fellow you met on the stairs, pigeon-breasted chap - and she always gets a headache on those occasions.

He got up heavily and went to the door. “Granger is leaving,” he said, “I may be able to get his dinner coat for you. How well do you know her?” he asked, with his hand on the knob.

“If you mean Dolly - ?”

“Alison.”

“Fairly well,” I said cautiously. “Not as well as I would like to. I dined with her last week in Washington. And - I knew her before that.”

Forbes touched the bell instead of going out, and told the servant who answered to see if Mr. Granger’s suitcase had gone. If not, to bring it across the hail. Then he came back to his former position on the bed.

“You see, we feel responsible for Allie - near relation and all that,” he began pompously. “And we can’t talk to the people here at the house - all the men are in love with her, and all the women are jealous. Then - there’s a lot of money, too, or will be.”

“Confound the money!” I muttered. “That is - nothing. Razor slipped.”

“I can tell you,” he went on, “because you don’t lose your head over every pretty face - although Allie is more than that, of course. But about a month ago she went away - to Seal Harbor, to visit Janet MacLure. Know her?”

“She came home to Richmond yesterday, and then came down here - Allie, I mean. And yesterday afternoon Dolly had a letter from Janet - something about a second man - and saying she was disappointed not to have had Alison there, that she had promised them a two weeks’ visit! What do you make of that? And that isn’t the worst. Allie herself wasn’t in the room, but there were eight other women, and because Dolly had put belladonna in her eyes the night before to see how she would look, and as a result couldn’t see anything nearer than across the room, some one read the letter aloud to her, and the whole story is out. One of the cats told Granger and the boy proposed to Allie to-day, to show her he didn’t care a tinker’s dam where she had been.”

“Good boy!” I said, with enthusiasm. I liked the Granger fellow - since he was out of the running. But Sam was looking at me with suspicion.

“Blake,” he said, “if I didn’t know you for what you are, I’d say you were interested there yourself.”

Being so near her, under the same roof, with even the tie of a dubious secret between us, was making me heady. I pushed Forbes toward the door.

“I interested!” I retorted, holding him by the shoulders. “There isn’t a word in your vocabulary to fit my condition. I am an island in a sunlit sea of emotion, Sam, a - an empty place surrounded by longing - a - ”

“An empty place surrounded by longing!” he retorted. “You want your dinner, that’s what’s the matter with you - ”

I shut the door on him then. He seemed suddenly sordid. Dinner, I thought! Although, as matter of fact, I made a very fair meal when, Granger’s suitcase not having gone, in his coat and some other man’s trousers, I was finally fit for the amenities. Alison did not come down to dinner, so it was clear she would not go over to the club-house dance. I pled my injured arm and a ficticious, vaguely located sprain from the wreck, as an excuse for remaining at home. Sam regaled the table with accounts of my distrust of women, my one love affair - with Dorothy; to which I responded, as was expected, that only my failure there had kept me single all these years, and that if Sam should be mysteriously missing during the bathing hour to-morrow, and so on.

And when the endless meal was over, and yards of white veils had been tied over pounds of hair - or is it, too, bought by the yard? - and some eight ensembles with their abject complements had been packed into three automobiles and a trap, I drew a long breath and faced about. I had just then only one object in life - to find Alison, to assure her of my absolute faith and confidence in her, and to offer my help and my poor self, if she would let me, in her service.

She was not easy to find. I searched the lower floor, the verandas and the grounds, circumspectly. Then I ran into a little English girl who turned out to be her maid, and who also was searching. She was concerned because her mistress had had no dinner, and because the tray of food she carried would soon be cold. I took the tray from her, on the glimpse of something white on the shore, and that was how I met the Girl again.

She was sitting on an over-turned boat, her chin in her hands, staring out to sea. The soft tide of the bay lapped almost at her feet, and the draperies of her white gown melted hazily into the sands. She looked like a wraith, a despondent phantom of the sea, although the adjective is redundant. Nobody ever thinks of a cheerful phantom. Strangely enough, considering her evident sadness, she was whistling softly to herself, over and over, some dreary little minor air that sounded like a Bohemian dirge. She glanced up quickly when I made a misstep and my dishes jingled. All considered, the tray was out of the picture: the sea, the misty starlight, the girl, with her beauty - even the sad little whistle that stopped now and then to go bravely on again, as though it fought against the odds of a trembling lip. And then I came, accompanied by a tray of little silver dishes that jingled and an unmistakable odor of broiled chicken!

“Oh!” she said quickly; and then, “Oh! I thought you were Jenkins.”

“Timeo Danaos - what’s the rest of it?” I asked, tendering my offering. “You didn’t have any dinner, you know.” I sat down beside her. “See, I’ll be the table. What was the old fairy tale? ‘Little goat bleat: little table appear!’ I’m perfectly willing to be the goat, too.”

She was laughing rather tremulously.

“We never do meet like other people, do we?” she asked. “We really ought to shake hands and say how are you.”

“I don’t want to meet you like other people, and I suppose you always think of me as wearing the other fellow’s clothes,” I returned meekly. “I’m doing it again: I don’t seem to be able to help it. These are Granger’s that I have on now.”

She threw back her head and laughed again, joyously, this time.

“Oh, it’s so ridiculous,” she said, “and you have never seen me when I was not eating! It’s too prosaic!”

“Which reminds me that the chicken is getting cold, and the ice warm,” I suggested. “At the time, I thought there could be no place better than the farmhouse kitchen - but this is. I ordered all this for something I want to say to you - the sea, the sand, the stars.”

“How alliterative you are!” she said, trying to be flippant. “You are not to say anything until I have had my supper. Look how the things are spilled around!”

But she ate nothing, after all, and pretty soon I put the tray down in the sand. I said little; there was no hurry. We were together, and time meant nothing against that age-long wash of the sea. The air blew her hair in small damp curls against her face, and little by little the tide retreated, leaving our boat an oasis in a waste of gray sand.

“If seven maids with seven mops swept it for half a year Do you suppose, the walrus said, that they could get it clear?”

she threw at me once when she must have known I was going to speak. I held her hand, and as long as I merely held it she let it lie warm in mine. But when I raised it to my lips, and kissed the soft, open palm, she drew it away without displeasure.

“Not that, please,” she protested, and fell to whistling softly again, her chin in her hands. “I can’t sing,” she said, to break an awkward pause, “and so, when I’m fidgety, or have something on my mind, I whistle. I hope you don’t dislike it?”

“I love it,” I asserted warmly. I did; when she pursed her lips like that I was mad to kiss them.

“I saw you - at the station,” she said’ suddenly. “You - you were in a hurry to go.” I did not say anything, and after a pause she drew a long breath. “Men are queer, aren’t they?” she said, and fell to whistling again.

After a while she sat up as if she had made a resolution. “I am going to confess something,” she announced suddenly. “You said, you know, that you had ordered all this for something you - you wanted to say to me. But the fact is, I fixed it all - came here, I mean, because - I knew you would come, and I had something to tell you. It was such a miserable thing I - needed the accessories to help me out.”

“I don’t want to hear anything that distresses you to tell,” I assured her. “I didn’t come here to force your confidence, Alison. I came because I couldn’t help it.” She did not object to my use of her name.

“Have you found - your papers?” she asked, looking directly at me for almost the first time.

“Not yet. We hope to.”

“The - police have not interfered with you?”

“They haven’t had any opportunity,” I equivocated. “You needn’t distress yourself about that, anyhow.”

“But I do. I wonder why you still believe in me? Nobody else does.”

“I wonder,” I repeated, “why I do!”

“If you produce Harry Sullivan,” she was saying, partly to herself, “and if you could connect him with Mr. Bronson, and get a full account of why he was on the train, and all that, it - it would help, wouldn’t it?”

I acknowledged that it would. Now that the whole truth was almost in my possession, I was stricken with the old cowardice. I did not want to know what she might tell me. The yellow line on the horizon, where the moon was coming up, was a broken bit of golden chain: my heel in the sand was again pressed on a woman’s yielding fingers: I pulled myself together with a jerk.

“In order that what you might tell me may help me, if it will,” I said constrainedly, “it would be necessary, perhaps, that you tell it to the police. Since they have found the end of the necklace - ”

“The end of the necklace!” she repeated slowly. “What about the end of the necklace?”

I stared at her. “Don’t you remember” - I leaned forward - “the end of the cameo necklace, the part that was broken off, and was found in the black sealskin bag, stained with - with blood?”

“Blood,” she said dully. “You mean that you found the broken end? And then - you had my gold pocketbook, and you saw the necklace in it, and you - must have thought - ”

“I didn’t think anything,” I hastened to assure her. “I tell you, Alison, I never thought of anything but that you were unhappy, and that I had no right to help you. God knows, I thought you didn’t want me to help you.”

She held out her hand to me and I took it between both of mine. No word of love had passed between us, but I felt that she knew and understood. It was one of the moments that come seldom in a lifetime, and then only in great crises, a moment of perfect understanding and trust.

Then she drew her hand away and sat, erect and determined, her fingers laced in her lap. As she talked the moon came up slowly and threw its bright pathway across the water. Back of us, in the trees beyond the sea wall, a sleepy bird chirruped drowsily, and a wave, larger and bolder than its brothers, sped up the sand, bringing the moon’s silver to our very feet. I bent toward the girl.

“I am going to ask just one question.”

“Anything you like.” Her voice was almost dreary. “Was it because of anything you are going to tell me that you refused Richey?”

She drew her breath in sharply.

“No,” she said, without looking at me. “No. That was not the reason.”

CHAPTER XXVIII

ALISON’S STORY

She told her story evenly, with her eyes on the water, only now and then, when I, too, sat looking seaward, I thought she glanced at me furtively. And once, in the middle of it, she stopped altogether.

“You don’t realize it, probably,” she protested, “but you look like a - a war god. Your face is horrible.”

“I will turn my back, if it will help any,” I said stormily, “but if you expect me to look anything but murderous, why, you don’t know what I am going through with. That’s all.”

The story of her meeting with the Curtis woman was brief enough. They had met in Rome first, where Alison and her mother had taken a villa for a year. Mrs. Curtis had hovered on the ragged edges of society there, pleading the poverty of the south since the war as a reason for not going out more. There was talk of a brother, but Alison had not seen him, and after a scandal which implicated Mrs. Curtis and a young attache of the Austrian embassy, Alison had been forbidden to see the woman.

“The women had never liked her, anyhow,” she said. “She did unconventional things, and they are very conventional there. And they said she did not always pay her - her gambling debts. I didn’t like them. I thought they didn’t like her because she was poor - and popular. Then - we came home, and I almost forgot her, but last spring, when mother was not well - she had taken grandfather to the Riviera, and it always uses her up - we went to Virginia Hot Springs, and we met them there, the brother, too, this time. His name was Sullivan, Harry Pinckney Sullivan.”

“I know. Go on.”

“Mother had a nurse, and I was alone a great deal, and they were very kind to me. I - I saw a lot of them. The brother rather attracted me, partly - partly because he did not make love to me. He even seemed to avoid me, and I was piqued. I had been spoiled, I suppose. Most of the other men I knew had - had - ”

“I know that, too,” I said bitterly, and moved away from her a trifle. I was brutal, but the whole story was a long torture. I think she knew what I was suffering, for she showed no resentment.

“It was early and there were few people around - none that I cared about. And mother and the nurse played cribbage eternally, until I felt as though the little pegs were driven into my brain. And when Mrs. Curtis arranged drives and picnics, I - I slipped away and went. I suppose you won’t believe me, but I had never done that kind of thing before, and I - well, I have paid up, I think.”

“What sort of looking chap was Sullivan?” I demanded. I had got up and was pacing back and forward on the sand. I remember kicking savagely at a bit of water-soaked board that lay in my way.

“Very handsome - as large as you are, but fair, and even more erect.”

I drew my shoulders up sharply. I am straight enough, but I was fairly sagging with jealous rage.

“When mother began to get around, somebody told her that I had been going about with Mrs. Curtis and her brother, and we had a dreadful time. I was dragged home like a bad child. Did anybody ever do that to you?”

“Nobody ever cared. I was born an orphan,” I said, with a cheerless attempt at levity. “Go on.”

“If Mrs. Curtis knew, she never said anything. She wrote me charming letters, and in the summer, when they went to Cresson, she asked me to visit her there. I was too proud to let her know that I could not go where I wished, and so - I sent Polly, my maid, to her aunt’s in the country, pretended to go to Seal Harbor, and really went to Cresson. You see I warned you it would be an unpleasant story.”

I went over and stood in front of her. All the accumulated jealousy of the last few weeks had been fired by what she told me. If Sullivan had come across the sands just then, I think I would have strangled him with my hands, out of pure hate.

“Did you marry him?” I demanded. My voice sounded hoarse and strange in my ears. “That’s all I want to know. Did you marry him?”

“No.”

I drew a long breath.

“You - cared about him?”

She hesitated.

“No,” she said finally. “I did not care about him.”

I sat down on the edge of the boat and mopped my hot face. I was heartily ashamed of myself, and mingled with my abasement was a great relief. If she had not married him, and had not cared for him, nothing else was of any importance.

“I was sorry, of course, the moment the train had started, but I had wired I was coming, and I could not go back, and then when I got there, the place was charming. There were no neighbors, but we fished and rode and motored, and - it was moonlight, like this.”

I put my hand over both of hers, clasped in her lap. “I know,” I acknowledged repentantly, “and - people do queer things when it is moonlight. The moon has got me to-night, Alison. If I am a boor, remember that, won’t you?”

Her fingers lay quiet under mine. “And so,” she went on with a little sigh, “I began to think perhaps I cared. But. all the time felt that there was something not quite right. Now and then Mrs. Curtis would say or do something that gave me a queer start, as if she had dropped a mask for a moment. And there was trouble with the servants; they were almost insolent. I couldn’t understand. I don’t know when it dawned on me that the old Baron Cavalcanti had been right when he said they were not my kind of people. But I wanted to get away, wanted it desperately.”

“Of course, they were not your kind,” I cried. “The man was married! The girl Jennie, a housemaid, was a spy in Mrs. Sullivan’s employ. If he had pretended to marry you I would have killed him! Not only that, but the man he murdered, Harrington, was his wife’s father. And I’ll see him hang by the neck yet if it takes every energy and every penny I possess.”

I could have told her so much more gently, have broken the shock for her; I have never been proud of that evening on the sand. I was alternately a boor and a ruffian - like a hurt youngster who passes the blow that has hurt him on to his playmate, that both may bawl together. And now Alison sat, white and cold, without speech.

“Married!” she said finally, in a small voice. “Why, I don’t think it is possible, is it? I - I was on my way to Baltimore to marry him myself, when the wreck came.”

“But you said you didn’t care for him!” I protested, my heavy masculine mind unable to jump the gaps in her story. And then, without the slightest warning, I realized that she was crying. She shook off my hand and fumbled for her handkerchief, and failing to find it, she accepted the one I thrust into her wet fingers.

Then, little by little, she told me from the handkerchief, a sordid story of a motor trip in the mountains without Mrs. Curtis, of a lost road and a broken car, and a rainy night when they - she and Sullivan, tramped eternally and did not get home. And of Mrs. Curtis, when they got home at dawn, suddenly grown conventional and deeply shocked. Of her own proud, half-disdainful consent to make possible the hackneyed compromising situation by marrying the rascal, and then - of his disappearance from the train. It was so terrible to her, such a Heavensent relief to me, in spite of my rage against Sullivan, that I laughed aloud. At which she looked at me over the handkerchief.

“I know it’s funny,” she said, with a catch in her breath. “When I think that I nearly married a murderer - and didn’t - I cry for sheer joy.” Then she buried her face and cried again.

“Please don’t,” I protested unsteadily. “I won’t be responsible if you keep on crying like that. I may forget that I have a capital charge hanging over my head, and that I may be arrested at any moment.”

That brought her out of the handkerchief at once. “I meant to be so helpful,” she said, “and I’ve thought of nothing but myself! There were some things I meant to tell you. If Jennie was - what you say, then I understand why she came to me just before I left. She had been packing my things and she must have seen what condition I was in, for she came over to me when I was getting my wraps on, to leave, and said, ‘Don’t do it, Miss West, I beg you won’t do it; you’ll be sorry ever after.’ And just then Mrs. Curtis came in and Jennie slipped out.”

“That was all?”

“No. As we went through the station the telegraph operator gave Har - Mr. Sullivan a message. He read it on the platform, and it excited him terribly. He took his sister aside and they talked together. He was white with either fear or anger - I don’t know which. Then, when we boarded the train, a woman in black, with beautiful hair, who was standing on the car platform, touched him on the arm and then drew back. He looked at her and glanced away again, but she reeled as if he had struck her.”

“Then what?” The situation was growing clearer.

“Mrs. Curtis and I had the drawing-room. I had a dreadful night, just sleeping a little now and then. I dreaded to see dawn come. It was to be my wedding-day. When we found Harry had disappeared in the night, Mrs. Curtis was in a frenzy. Then - I saw his cigarette case in your hand. I had given it to him. You wore his clothes. The murder was discovered and you were accused of it! What could I do? And then, afterward, when I saw him asleep at the farmhouse, I - I was panic-stricken. I locked him in and ran. I didn’t know why he did it, but - he had killed a man.”

Some one was calling Alison through a megaphone, from the veranda. It sounded like Sam. “All-ee,” he called. “All-ee! I’m going to have some anchovies on toast! All-ee!” Neither of us heard.

“I wonder,” I reflected, “if you would be willing to repeat a part of that story - just from the telegram on - to a couple of detectives, say on Monday. If you would tell that, and - how the end of your necklace got into the sealskin bag - ”

“My necklace!” she repeated. “But it isn’t mine. I picked it up in the car.”

“All-ee!” Sam again. “I see you down there. I’m making a julep!”

Alison turned and called through her hands. “Coming in a moment, Sam,” she said, and rose. “It must be very late: Sam is home. We would better go back to the house.”

“Don’t,” I begged her. “Anchovies and juleps and Sam will go on for ever, and I have you such a little time. I suppose I am only one of a dozen or so, but - you are the only girl in the world. You know I love you, don’t you, dear?”

Sam was whistling, an irritating bird call, over and over. She pursed her red lips and answered him in kind. It was more than I could endure.

“Sam or no Sam,” I said firmly, “I am going to kiss you!”

But Sam’s voice came strident through the megaphone. “Be good, you two,” he bellowed, “I’ve got the binoculars!” And so, under fire, we walked sedately back to the house. My pulses were throbbing - the little swish of her dress beside me on the grass was pain and ecstasy. I had but to put out my hand to touch her, and I dared not.

Sam, armed with a megaphone and field glasses, bent over the rail and watched us with gleeful malignity.

“Home early, aren’t you?” Alison called, when we reached the steps.

“Led a club when my partner had doubled no-trumps, and she fainted. Damn the heart convention!” he said cheerfully. “The others are not here yet.”

Three hours later I went up to bed. I had not seen Alison alone again. The noise was at its height below, and I glanced down into the garden, still bright in the moonlight. Leaning against a tree, and staring interestedly into the billiard room, was Johnson.

CHAPTER XXIX

IN THE DINING-ROOM

That was Saturday night, two weeks after the wreck. The previous five days had been full of swift-following events - the woman in the house next door, the picture in the theater of a man about to leap from the doomed train, the dinner at the Dallases, and Richey’s discovery that Alison was the girl in the case. In quick succession had come our visit to the Carter place, the finding of the rest of the telegram, my seeing Alison there, and the strange interview with Mrs. Conway. The Cresson trip stood out in my memory for its serio-comic horrors and its one real thrill. Then - the discovery by the police of the sealskin bag and the bit of chain; Hotchkiss producing triumphantly Stuart for Sullivan and his subsequent discomfiture; McKnight at the station with Alison, and later the confession that he was out of the running.

And yet, when I thought it all over, the entire week and its events were two sides of a triangle that was narrowing rapidly to an apex, a point. And the said apex was at that moment in the drive below my window, resting his long legs by sitting on a carriage block, and smoking a pipe that made the night hideous. The sense of the ridiculous is very close to the sense of tragedy. I opened my screen and whistled, and Johnson looked up and grinned. We said nothing. I held up a handful of cigars, he extended his hat, and when I finally went to sleep, it was to a soothing breeze that wafted in salt air and a faint aroma of good tobacco. I was thoroughly tired, but I slept restlessly, dreaming of two detectives with Pittsburg warrants being held up by Hotchkiss at the point of a splint, while Alison fastened their hands with a chain that was broken and much too short. I was roused about dawn by a light rap at the door, and, opening it, I found Forbes, in a pair of trousers and a pajama coat. He was as pleasant as most fleshy people are when they have to get up at night, and he said the telephone had been ringing for an hour, and he didn’t know why somebody else in the blankety-blank house couldn’t have heard it. He wouldn’t get to sleep until noon.

As he was palpably asleep on his feet, I left him grumbling and went to the telephone. It proved to be Richey, who had found me by the simple expedient of tracing Alison, and he was jubilant.

“You’ll have to come back,” he said. “Got a railroad schedule there?”

“I don’t sleep with one in my pocket,” I retorted, “but if you’ll hold the line I’ll call out the window to Johnson. He’s probably got one.”’

“Johnson!” I could hear the laugh with which McKnight comprehended the situation. He was still chuckling when I came back.

“Train to Richmond at six-thirty A.M.,” I said. “What time is it now?”

“Four. Listen, Lollie. We’ve got him. Do you hear? Through the woman at Baltimore. Then the other woman, the lady of the restaurant” - he was obviously avoiding names - “she is playing our cards for us. No - I don’t know why, and I don’t care. But you be at the Incubator to-night at eight o’clock. If you can’t shake Johnson, bring him, bless him.”

To this day I believe the Sam Forbeses have not recovered from the surprise of my unexpected arrival, my one appearance at dinner in Granger’s clothes, and the note on my dresser which informed them the next morning that I had folded my tents like the Arabs and silently stole away. For at half after five Johnson and I, the former as uninquisitive as ever, were on our way through the dust to the station, three miles away, and by four that afternoon we were in Washington. The journey had been uneventful. Johnson relaxed under the influence of my tobacco, and spoke at some length on the latest improvements in gallows, dilating on the absurdity of cutting out the former free passes to see the affair in operation. I remember, too, that he mentioned the curious anomaly that permits a man about to be hanged to eat a hearty meal. I did not enjoy my dinner that night.

Before we got into Washington I had made an arrangement with Johnson to surrender myself at two the following afternoon. Also, I had wired to Alison, asking her if she would carry out the contract she had made. The detective saw me home, and left me there. Mrs. Klopton received me with dignified reserve. The very tone in which she asked me when I would dine told me that something was wrong.

“Now - what is it, Mrs. Klopton?” I demanded finally, when she had informed me, in a patient and long-suffering tone, that she felt worn out and thought she needed a rest.

“When I lived with Mr. Justice Springer,” she began acidly, her mending-basket in her hands, “it was an orderly, well-conducted household. You can ask any of the neighbors. Meals were cooked and, what’s more, they were eaten; there was none of this ‘here one day and gone the next’ business.”

“Nonsense,” I observed. “You’re tired, that’s all, Mrs. Klopton. And I wish you would go out; I want to bathe.”

“That’s not all,” she said with dignity, from the doorway. “Women coming and going here, women whose shoes I am not fit - I mean, women who are not fit to touch my shoes - coming here as insolent as you please, and asking for you.”

“Good heavens!” I exclaimed. “What did you tell them - her, whichever it was?”

“Told her you were sick in a hospital and wouldn’t be out for a year!” she said triumphantly. “And when she said she thought she’d come in and wait for you, I slammed the door on her.”

“What time was she here?”

“Late last night. And she had a light-haired man across the street. If she thought I didn’t see him, she don’t know me.” Then she closed the door and left me to my bath and my reflections.

At five minutes before eight I was at the Incubator, where I found Hotchkiss and McKnight. They were bending over a table, on which lay McKnight’s total armament - a pair of pistols, an elephant gun and an old cavalry saber.

“Draw up a chair and help yourself to pie,’ he said, pointing to the arsenal. “This is for the benefit of our friend Hotchkiss here, who says he is a small man and fond of life.”

Hotchkiss, who had been trying to get the wrong end of a cartridge into the barrel of one of the revolvers, straightened himself and mopped his face.

“We have desperate people to handle,” he said pompously, “and we may need desperate means.”

“Hotchkiss is like the small boy whose one ambition was to have people grow ashen and tremble at the mention of his name,” McKnight jibed. But they were serious enough, both of them, under it all, and when they had told me what they planned, I was serious, too.

“You’re compounding a felony,” I remonstrated, when they had explained. “I’m not eager to be locked away, but, by Jove, to offer her the stolen notes in exchange for Sullivan!”

“We haven’t got either of them, you know,” McKnight remonstrated, “and we won’t have, if we don’t start. Come along, Fido,” to Hotchkiss.

The plan was simplicity itself. According to Hotchkiss, Sullivan was to meet Bronson at Mrs. Conway’s apartment, at eight-thirty that night, with the notes. He was to be paid there and the papers destroyed. “But just before that interesting finale,” McKnight ended, “we will walk in, take the notes, grab Sullivan, and give the police a jolt that will put them out of the count.”

I suppose not one of us, slewing around corners in the machine that night, had the faintest doubt that we were on the right track, or that Fate, scurvy enough before, was playing into our hands at last. Little Hotchkiss was in a state of fever; he alternately twitched and examined the revolver, and a fear that the two movements might be synchronous kept me uneasy. He produced and dilated on the scrap of pillow slip from the wreck, and showed me the stiletto, with its point in cotton batting for safekeeping. And in the intervals he implored Richey not to make such fine calculations at the corners.

We were all grave enough and very quiet, however, when we reached the large building where Mrs. Conway had her apartment. McKnight left the power on, in case we might want to make a quick get-away, and Hotchkiss gave a final look at the revolver. I had no weapon. Somehow it all seemed melodramatic to the verge of farce. In the doorway Hotchkiss was a half dozen feet ahead; Richey fell back beside me. He dropped his affectation of gayety, and I thought he looked tired. “Same old Sam, I suppose?” he asked.

“Same, only more of him.”

“I suppose Alison was there? How is she?” he inquired irrelevantly.

“Very well. I did not see her this morning.”

Hotchkiss was waiting near the elevator. McKnight put his hand on my arm. “Now, look here, old man,” he said, “I’ve got two arms and a revolver, and you’ve got one arm and a splint. If Hotchkiss is right, and there is a row, you crawl under a table.”

“The deuce I will!” I declared scornfully.

We crowded out of the elevator at the fourth floor, and found ourselves in a rather theatrical hallway of draperies and armor. It was very quiet; we stood uncertainly after the car had gone, and looked at the two or three doors in sight. They were heavy, covered with metal, and sound proof. From somewhere above came the metallic accuracy of a player-piano, and through the open window we could hear - or feel - the throb of the Cannonball’s engine.

“Well, Sherlock,” McKnight said, “what’s the next move in the game? Is it our jump, or theirs? You brought us here.”

None of us knew just what to do next. No sound of conversation penetrated the heavy doors. We waited uneasily for some minutes, and Hotchkiss looked at his watch. Then he put it to his ear.

“Good gracious!” he exclaimed, his head cocked on one side, “I believe it has stopped. I’m afraid we are late.”

We were late. My watch and Hotchkiss’ agreed at nine o clock, and, with the discovery that our man might have come and gone, our zest in the adventure began to flag. McKnight motioned us away from the door and rang the bell. There was no response, no sound within. He rang it twice, the last time long and vigorously, without result. Then he turned and looked at us.

“I don’t half like this,” he said. “That woman is in; you heard me ask the elevator boy. For two cents I’d - ”

I had seen it when he did. The door was ajar about an inch, and a narrow wedge of rose-colored light showed beyond. I pushed the door a little and listened. Then, with both men at my heels, I stepped into the private corridor of the apartment and looked around. It was a square reception hall, with rugs on the floor, a tall mahogany rack for hats, and a couple of chairs. A lantern of rose-colored glass and a desk light over a writing-table across made the room bright and cheerful. It was empty.

None of us was comfortable. The place was full of feminine trifles that made us feel the weakness of our position. Some such instinct made McKnight suggest division.

“We look like an invading army,” he said. “If she’s here alone, we will startle her into a spasm. One of us could take a look around and - ”

“What was that? Didn’t you hear something?”

The sound, whatever it had been, was not repeated. We went awkwardly out into the hall, very uncomfortable, all of us, and flipped a coin. The choice fell to me, which was right enough, for the affair was mine, primarily.

“Wait just inside the door,” I directed, “and if Sullivan comes, or anybody that answers his description, grab him without ceremony and ask him questions afterwards.”

The apartment, save in the hallway, was unlighted. By one of those freaks of arrangement possible only in the modern flat, I found the kitchen first, and was struck a smart and unexpected blow by a swinging door. I carried a handful of matches, and by the time I had passed through a butler’s pantry and a refrigerator room I was completely lost in the darkness. Until then the situation had been merely uncomfortable; suddenly it became grisly. From somewhere near came a long-sustained groan, followed almost instantly by the crash of something - glass or china - on the floor.

I struck a fresh match, and found myself in a narrow rear hallway. Behind me was the door by which I must have come; with a keen desire to get back to the place I had started from, I opened the door and attempted to cross the room. I thought I had kept my sense of direction, but I crashed without warning into what, from the resulting jangle, was the dining-table, probably laid for dinner. I cursed my stupidity in getting into such a situation, and I cursed my nerves for making my hand shake when I tried to strike a match. The groan had not been repeated.

I braced myself against the table and struck the match sharply against the sole of my shoe. It flickered faintly and went out. And then, without the slightest warning, another dish went off the table. It fell with a thousand splinterings; the very air seemed broken into crashing waves of sound. I stood still, braced against the table, holding the red end of the dying match, and listened. I had not long to wait; the groan came again, and I recognized it, the cry of a dog in straits. I breathed again.

“Come, old fellow,” I said. “Come on, old man. “Let’s have a look at you.”

I could hear the thud of his tail on the floor, but he did not move. He only whimpered. There is something companionable in the presence of a dog, and I fancied this dog in trouble. Slowly I began to work my way around the table toward him.

“Good boy,” I said, as he whimpered. “We’ll find the light, which ought to be somewhere or other around here, and then - ”

I stumbled over something, and I drew back my foot almost instantly. “Did I step on you, old man I exclaimed, and bent to pat him. I remember straightening suddenly and hearing the dog pad softly toward me around the table. I recall even that I had put the matches down and could not find them. Then, with a bursting horror of the room and its contents, of the gibbering dark around me, I turned and made for the door by which I had entered.

I could not find it. I felt along the endless wainscoting, past miles of wall. The dog was beside me, I think, but he was part and parcel now, to my excited mind, with the Thing under the table. And when, after aeons of search, I found a knob and stumbled into the reception hall, I was as nearly in a panic as any man could be.

I was myself again in a second, and by the light from the hall I led the way back to the tragedy I had stumbled on. Bronson still sat at the table, his elbows propped on it, his cigarette still lighted, burning a hole in the cloth. Partly under the table lay Mrs. Conway face down. The dog stood over her and wagged his tail.

McKnight pointed silently to a large copper ashtray, filled with ashes and charred bits of paper.

“The notes, probably,” he said ruefully. “He got them after all, and burned them before her. It was more than she could stand. Stabbed him first and then herself.”

Hotchkiss got up and took off his hat. “They are dead,” he announced solemnly, and took his notebook out of his hatband.

McKnight and I did the only thing we could think of - drove Hotchkiss and the dog out of the room, and closed and locked the door. “It’s a matter for the police,” McKnight asserted. “I suppose you’ve got an officer tied to you somewhere, Lawrence? You usually have.”

We left Hotchkiss in charge and went down-stairs. It was McKnight who first saw Johnson, leaning against a park railing across the street, and called him over. We told him in a few words what we had found, and he grinned at me cheerfully.

“After while, in a few weeks or months, Mr. Blakeley,” he said, “when you get tired of monkeying around with the blood-stain and finger-print specialist upstairs, you come to me. I’ve had that fellow you want under surveillance for ten days!”

CHAPTER XXX

FINER DETAILS

At ten minutes before two the following day, Monday, I arrived at my office. I had spent the morning putting my affairs in shape, and in a trip to the stable. The afternoon would see me either a free man or a prisoner for an indefinite length of time, and, in spite of Johnson’s promise to produce Sullivan, I was more prepared for the latter than the former.

Blobs was watching for me outside the door, and it was clear that he was in a state of excitement bordering on delirium. He did nothing, however, save to tip me a wink that meant “As man to man, I’m for you.” I was too much engrossed either to reprove him or return the courtesy, but I heard him follow me down the hall to the small room where we keep outgrown lawbooks, typewriter supplies and, incidentally, our wraps. I was wondering vaguely if I would ever hang my hat on its nail again, when the door closed behind me. It shut firmly, without any particular amount of sound, and I was left in the dark. I groped my way to it, irritably, to find it locked on the outside. I shook it frantically, and was rewarded by a sibilant whisper through the keyhole.

“Keep quiet,” Blobs was saying huskily. “You’re in deadly peril. The police are waiting in your office, three of ‘em. I’m goin’ to lock the whole bunch in and throw the key out of the window.”

“Come back here, you imp of Satan!” I called furiously, but I could hear him speeding down the corridor, and the slam of the outer office door by which he always announced his presence. And so I stood there in that ridiculous cupboard, hot with the heat of a steaming September day, musty with the smell of old leather bindings, littered with broken overshoes and handleless umbrellas. I was apoplectic with rage one minute, and choked with laughter the next. It seemed an hour before Blobs came back.

He came without haste, strutting with new dignity, and paused outside my prison door.

“Well, I guess that will hold them for a while,” he remarked comfortably, and proceeded to turn the key. “I’ve got ‘em fastened up like sardines in a can!” he explained, working with the lock. “Gee whiz! you’d ought to hear ‘em!” When he got his breath after the shaking I gave him, he began to splutter. “How’d I know?” he demanded sulkily. “You nearly broke your neck gettin’ away the other time. And I haven’t got the old key. It’s lost.”

“Where’s it lost?” I demanded, with another gesture toward his coat collar.

“Down the elevator shaft.” There was a gleam of indignant satisfaction through his tears of rage and humiliation.

And so, while he hunted the key in the debris at the bottom of the shaft, I quieted his prisoners with the assurance that the lock had slipped, and that they would be free as lords as soon as we could find the janitor with a pass-key. Stuart went down finally and discovered Blobs, with the key in his pocket, telling the engineer how he had tried to save me from arrest and failed. When Stuart came up he was almost cheerful, but Blobs did not appear again that day.

Simultaneous with the finding of the key came Hotchkiss, and we went in together. I shook hands with two men who, with Hotchkiss, made a not very animated group. The taller one, an oldish man, lean and hard, announced his errand at once.

“A Pittsburg warrant?” I inquired, unlocking my cigar drawer.

“Yes. Allegheny County has assumed jurisdiction, the exact locality where the crime was committed being in doubt.” He seemed to be the spokesman. The other, shorter and rotund, kept an amiable silence. “We hope you will see the wisdom of waiving extradition,” he went on. “It will save time.”

“I’ll come, of course,” I agreed. “The sooner the better. But I want you to give me an hour here, gentlemen. I think we can interest you. Have a cigar?”

The lean man took a cigar; the rotund man took three, putting two in his pocket.

“How about the catch of that door?” he inquired jovially. “Any danger of it going off again?” Really, considering the circumstances, they were remarkably cheerful. Hotchkiss, however, was not. He paced the floor uneasily, his hands under his coat-tails. The arrival of McKnight created a diversion; he carried a long package and a corkscrew, and shook hands with the police and opened the bottle with a single gesture.

“I always want something to cheer on these occasions,” he said. “Where’s the water, Blakeley? Everybody ready?” Then in French he toasted the two detectives.

“To your eternal discomfiture,” he said, bowing ceremoniously. “May you go home and never come back! If you take Monsieur Blakeley with you, I hope you choke.”

The lean man nodded gravely. “Prosit,” he said. But the fat one leaned back and laughed consumedly.

Hotchkiss finished a mental synopsis of his position, and put down his glass. “Gentlemen,” he said pompously, “within five minutes the man you want will be here, a murderer caught in a net of evidence so fine that a mosquito could not get through.”

The detectives glanced at each other solemnly. Had they not in their possession a sealskin bag containing a wallet and a bit of gold chain, which, by putting the crime on me, would leave a gap big enough for Sullivan himself to crawl through?

“Why don’t you say your little speech before Johnson brings the other man, Lawrence?” McKnight inquired. “They won’t believe you, but it will help them to understand what is coming.”

“You understand, of course,” the lean man put in gravely, “that what you say may be used against you.”

“I’ll take the risk,” I answered impatiently.

It took some time to tell the story of my worse than useless trip to Pittsburg, and its sequel. They listened gravely, without interruption.

“Mr. Hotchkiss here,” I finished, “believes that the man Sullivan, whom we are momentarily expecting, committed the crime. Mr. McKnight is inclined to implicate Mrs. Conway, who stabbed Bronson and then herself last night. As for myself, I am open to conviction.”

“I hope not,” said the stout detective quizzically. And then Alison was announced. My impulse to go out and meet her was forestalled by the detectives, who rose when I did. McKnight, therefore, brought her in, and I met her at the door.

“I have put you to a great deal of trouble,” I said contritely, when I saw her glance around the room. “I wish I had not - ”

“It is only right that I should come,” she replied, looking up at me. “I am the unconscious cause of most of it, I am afraid. Mrs. Dallas is going to wait in the outer office.”

I presented Hotchkiss and the two detectives, who eyed her with interest. In her poise, her beauty, even in her gown, I fancy she represented a new type to them. They remained standing until she sat down.

“I have brought the necklace,” she began, holding out a white-wrapped box, “as you asked me to.”

I passed it, unopened, to the detectives. “The necklace from which was broken the fragment you found in the sealskin bag,” I explained. “Miss West found it on the floor of the car, near lower ten.”

“When did you find it?” asked the lean detective, bending forward.

“In the morning, not long before the wreck.”

“Did you ever see it before?”

“I am not certain,” she replied. “I have seen one very much like it.” Her tone was troubled. She glanced at me as if for help, but I was powerless.

“Where?” The detective was watching her closely. At that moment there came an interruption. The door opened without ceremony, and Johnson ushered in a tall, blond man, a stranger to all of us: I glanced at Alison; she was pale, but composed and scornful. She met the new-coiner’s eyes full, and, caught unawares, he took a hasty backward step.

“Sit down, Mr. Sullivan,” McKnight beamed cordially. “Have a cigar? I beg your pardon, Alison, do you mind this smoke?”

“Not at all,” she said composedly. Sullivan had had a second to sound his bearings.

“No - no, thanks,” he mumbled. “If you will be good enough to explain - ”

“But that’s what you’re to do,” McKnight said cheerfully, pulling up a chair. “You’ve got the most attentive audience you could ask. These two gentlemen are detectives from Pittsburg, and we are all curious to know the finer details of what happened on the car Ontario two weeks ago, the night your father-in-law was murdered.” Sullivan gripped the arms of his chair. “We are not prejudiced, either. The gentlemen from Pittsburg are betting on Mr. Blakeley, over there. Mr. Hotchkiss, the gentleman by the radiator, is ready to place ten to one odds on you. And some of us have still other theories.”

“Gentlemen,” Sullivan said slowly, “I give you my word of honor that I did not kill Simon Harrington, and that I do not know who did.”

“Fiddlededee!” cried Hotchkiss, bustling forward. “Why, I can tell you - ” But McKnight pushed him firmly into a chair and held him there.

“I am ready to plead guilty to the larceny,” Sullivan went on. “I took Mr. Blakeley’s clothes, I admit. If I can reimburse him in any way for the inconvenience—

The stout detective was listening with his mouth open. “Do you mean to say,” he demanded, “that you got into Mr. Blakeley’s berth, as he contends, took his clothes and forged notes, and left the train before the wreck?”

“Yes.”

“The notes, then?”

“I gave them to Bronson yesterday. Much good they did him!” bitterly. We were all silent for a moment. The two detectives were adjusting themselves with difficulty to a new point of view; Sullivan was looking dejectedly at the floor, his hands hanging loose between his knees. I was watching Alison; from where I stood, behind her, I could almost touch the soft hair behind her ear.

“I have no intention of pressing any charge against you,” I said with forced civility, for my hands were itching to get at him, “if you will give us a clear account of what happened on the Ontario that night.”

Sullivan raised his handsome, haggard head and looked around at me. “I’ve seen you before, haven’t I?” he asked. “Weren’t you an uninvited guest at the Laurels a few days - or nights - ago? The cat, you remember, and the rug that slipped?”

“I remember,” I said shortly. He glanced from me to Alison and quickly away.

“The truth can’t hurt me,” he said, “but it’s devilish unpleasant. Alison, you know all this. You would better go out.”

His use of her name crazed me. I stepped in front of her and stood over him. “You will not bring Miss West into the conversation,” I threatened, “and she will stay if she wishes.”

“Oh, very well,” he said with assumed indifference. Hotchkiss just then escaped from Richey’s grasp and crossed the room.

“Did you ever wear glasses?” he asked eagerly.

“Never.” Sullivan glanced with some contempt at mine.

“I’d better begin by going back a little,” he went on sullenly. “I suppose you know I was married to Ida Harrington about five years ago. She was a good girl, and I thought a lot of her. But her father opposed the marriage - he’d never liked me, and he refused to make any sort of settlement.

“I had thought, of course, that there would be money, and it was a bad day when I found out I’d made a mistake. My sister was wild with disappointment. We were pretty hard up, my sister and I.”

I was watching Alison. Her hands were tightly clasped in her lap, and she was staring out of the window at the cheerless roof below. She had set her lips a little, but that was all.

“You understand, of course, that I’m not defending myself,” went on the sullen voice. “The day came when old Harrington put us both out of the house at the point of a revolver, and I threatened - I suppose you know that, too - I threatened to kill him.

“My sister and I had hard times after that. We lived on the continent for a while. I was at Monte Carlo and she was in Italy. She met a young lady there, the granddaughter of a steel manufacturer and an heiress, and she sent for me. When I got to Rome the girl was gone. Last winter I was all in - social secretary to an Englishman, a wholesale grocer with a new title, but we had a row, and I came home. I went out to the Heaton boys’ ranch in Wyoming, and met Bronson there. He lent me money, and I’ve been doing his dirty work ever since.”

Sullivan got up then and walked slowly forward and back as he talked, his eyes on the faded pattern of the office rug.

“If you want to live in hell,” he said savagely, “put yourself in another man’s power. Bronson got into trouble, forging John Gilmore’s name to those notes, and in some way he learned that a man was bringing the papers back to Washington on the Flier. He even learned the number of his berth, and the night before the wreck, just as I was boarding the train, I got a telegram.”

Hotchkiss stepped forward once more importantly. “Which read, I think: ‘Man with papers in lower ten, car seven. Get them.’”

Sullivan looked at the little man with sulky blue eyes.

“It was something like that, anyhow. But it was a nasty business, and it made matters worse that he didn’t care that a telegram which must pass through a half dozen hands was more or less incriminating to me.

“Then, to add to the unpleasantness of my position, just after we boarded the train - I was accompanying my sister and this young lady, Miss West - a woman touched me on the sleeve, and I turned to face - my wife!

“That took away my last bit of nerve. I told my sister, and you can understand she was in a bad way, too. We knew what it meant. Ida had heard that I was going - ”

He stopped and glanced uneasily at Alison.

“Go on,” she said coldly. “It is too late to shield me. The time to have done that was when I was your guest.”

“Well,” he went on, his eyes turned carefully away from my face, which must have presented certainly anything but a pleasant sight. “Miss West was going to do me the honor to marry me, and - ”

“You scoundrel!” I burst forth, thrusting past Alison West’s chair. “You - you infernal cur!”

One of the detectives got up and stood between us. “You must remember, Mr. Blakeley, that you are forcing this story from this man. These details are unpleasant, but important. You were going to marry this young lady,” he said, turning to Sullivan, “although you already had a wife living?”

“It was my sister’s plan, and I was in a bad way for money. If I could marry, secretly, a wealthy girl and go to Europe, it was unlikely that Ida - that is, Mrs. Sullivan - would hear of it.

“So it was more than a shock to see my wife on the train, and to realize from her face that she knew what was going on. I don’t know yet, unless some of the servants - well, never mind that.

“It meant that the whole thing had gone up. Old Harrington had carried a gun for me for years, and the same train wouldn’t hold both of us. Of course, I thought that he was in the coach just behind ours.”

Hotchkiss was leaning forward now, his eyes narrowed, his thin lips drawn to a line.

“Are you left-handed, Mr. Sullivan?” he asked.

Sullivan stopped in surprise.

“No,” he said gruffly. “Can’t do anything with my left hand.” Hotchkiss subsided, crestfallen but alert. “I tore up that cursed telegram, but I was afraid to throw the scraps away. Then I looked around for lower ten. It was almost exactly across - my berth was lower seven, and it was, of course, a bit of exceptional luck for me that the car was number seven.”

“Did you tell your sister of the telegram from Bronson?” I asked.

“No. It would do no good, and she was in a bad way without that to make her worse.”

“Your sister was killed, think.” The shorter detective took a small package from his pocket and held it in his hand, snapping the rubber band which held it.

“Yes, she was killed,” Sullivan said soberly. “What I say now can do her no harm.”

He stopped to push back the heavy hair which dropped over his forehead, and went on more connectedly.

“It was late, after midnight, and we went at once to our berths. I undressed, and then I lay there for an hour, wondering how I was going to get the notes. Some one in lower nine was restless and wide awake, but finally became quiet.

“The man in ten was sleeping heavily. I could hear his breathing, and it seemed to be only a question of getting across and behind the curtains of his berth without being seen. After that, it was a mere matter of quiet searching.

“The car became very still. I was about to try for the other berth, when some one brushed softly past, and I lay back again.

“Finally, however, when things had been quiet for a time, I got up, and after looking along the aisle, I slipped behind the curtains of lower ten. You understand, Mr. Blakeley, that I thought you were in lower ten, with the notes.”

I nodded curtly.

“I’m not trying to defend myself,” he went on. “I was ready to steal the notes - I had to. But murder!”

He wiped his forehead with his handkerchief.

“Well, I slipped across and behind the curtains. It was very still. The man in ten didn’t move, although my heart was thumping until I thought he would hear it.

“I felt around cautiously. It was perfectly dark, and I came across a bit of chain, about as long as my finger. It seemed a queer thing to find there, and it was sticky, too.”

He shuddered, and I could see Alison’s hands clenching and unclenching with the strain.

“All at once it struck me that the man was strangely silent, and I think I lost my nerve. Anyhow, I drew the curtains open a little, and let the light fall on my hands. They were red, blood-red.”

He leaned one hand on the back of the chair, and was silent for a moment, as though he lived over again the awful events of that more than awful night.

The stout detective had let his cigar go out; he was still drawing at it nervously. Richey had picked up a paper-weight and was tossing it from hand to hand; when it slipped and fell to the floor, a startled shudder passed through the room.

“There was something glittering in there,” Sullivan resumed, “and on impulse I picked it up. Then I dropped the curtains and stumbled back to my own berth.”

“Where you wiped your hands on the bedclothing and stuck the dirk into the pillow.” Hotchkiss was seeing his carefully built structure crumbling to pieces, and he looked chagrined.

“I suppose I did - I’m not very clear about what happened then. But when I rallied a little I saw a Russia leather wallet lying in the aisle almost at my feet, and, like a fool, I stuck it, with the bit of chain, into my bag.

“I sat there, shivering, for what seemed hours. It was still perfectly quiet, except for some one snoring. I thought that would drive me crazy.

“The more I thought of it the worse things looked. The telegram was the first thing against me - it would put the police on my track at once, when it was discovered that the man in lower ten had been killed.

“Then I remembered the notes, and I took out the wallet and opened it.”

He stopped for a minute, as if the recalling of the next occurrence was almost beyond him.

“I took out the wallet,” he said simply, “and opening it, held it to the light. In gilt letters was the name, Simon Harrington.”

The detectives were leaning forward now, their eyes on his face.

“Things seemed to whirl around for a while. I sat there almost paralyzed, wondering what this new development meant for me.

“My wife, I knew, would swear I had killed her father; nobody would be likely to believe the truth.

“Do you believe me now?” He rooked around at us defiantly. “I am telling the absolute truth, and not one of you believes me!

“After a bit the man in lower nine got up and walked along the aisle toward the smoking compartment. I heard him go, and, leaning from my berth, watched him out of sight.

“It was then I got the idea of changing berths with him, getting into his clothes, and leaving the train. I give you my word I had no idea of throwing suspicion on him.”

Alison looked scornfully incredulous, but I felt that the man was telling the truth.

“I changed the numbers of the berths, and it worked well. I got into the other man’s berth, and he came back to mine. The rest was easy. I dressed in his clothes - luckily, they fitted - and jumped the train not far from Baltimore, just before the wreck.”

“There is something else you must clear up,” I said. “Why did you try to telephone me from M-, and why did you change your mind about the message?”

He looked astounded.

“You knew I was at M-?” he stammered.

“Yes, we traced you. What about the message?”

“Well, it was this way: of course, I did not know your name, Mr. Blakeley. The telegram said, ‘Man with papers in lower ten, car seven,” and after I had made what I considered my escape, I began to think I had left the man in my berth in a bad way.

“He would probably be accused of the crime. So, although when the wreck occurred I supposed every one connected with the affair had been killed, there was a chance that you had survived. I’ve not been of much account, but I didn’t want a man to swing because I’d left him in my place. Besides, I began to have a theory of my own.

“As we entered the car a tall, dark woman passed us, with a glass of water in her hand, and I vaguely remembered her. She was amazingly like Blanche Conway.

“If she, too, thought the man with the notes was in lower ten, it explained a lot, including that piece of a woman’s necklace. She was a fury, Blanche Conway, capable of anything.”

“Then why did you countermand that message?” I asked curiously.

“When I got to the Carter house, and got to bed - I had sprained my ankle in the jump - I went through the alligator bag I had taken from lower nine. When I found your name, I sent the first message. Then, soon after, I came across the notes. It seemed too good to be true, and I was crazy for fear the message had gone.

“At first I was going to send them to Bronson; then I began to see what the possession of the notes meant to me. It meant power over Bronson, money, influence, everything. He was a devil, that man.”

“Well, he’s at home now,” said McKnight, and we were glad to laugh and relieve the tension.

Alison put her hand over her eyes, as if to shut out the sight of the man she had so nearly married, and I furtively touched one of the soft little curls that nestled at the back of her neck.

“When I was able to walk,” went on the sullen voice, “I came at once to Washington. I tried to sell the notes to Bronson, but he was almost at the end of his rope. Not even my threat to send them back to you, Mr. Blakeley, could make him meet my figure. He didn’t have the money.

McKnight was triumphant.

“I think you gentlemen will see reason in my theory now,” he said. “Mrs. Conway wanted the notes to force a legal marriage, I suppose?”

“Yes.”

The detective with the small package carefully rolled off the rubber band, and unwrapped it. I held my breath as he took out, first, the Russia leather wallet.

“These things, Mr. Blakeley, we found in the sealskin bag Mr. Sullivan says he left you. This wallet, Mr. Sullivan - is this the one you found on the floor of the car?”

Sullivan opened it, and, glancing at the name inside, “Simon Harrington,” nodded affirmatively.

“And this,” went on the detective - “this is a piece of gold chain?”

“It seems to be,” said Sullivan, recoiling at the blood-stained end.

“This, I believe, is the dagger.” He held it up, and Alison gave a faint cry of astonishment and dismay. Sullivan’s face grew ghastly, and he sat down weakly on the nearest chair.

The detective looked at him shrewdly, then at Alison’s agitated face.

“Where have you seen this dagger before, young lady?” he asked, kindly enough.

“Oh, don’t ask me!” she gasped breathlessly, her eyes turned on Sullivan. “It’s - it’s too terrible!”

“Tell him,” I advised, leaning over to her. “It will be found out later, anyhow.”

“Ask him,” she said, nodding toward Sullivan. The detective unwrapped the small box Alison had brought, disclosing the trampled necklace and broken chain. With clumsy fingers he spread it on the table and fitted into place the bit of chain. There could be no doubt that it belonged there.

“Where did you find that chain?” Sullivan asked hoarsely, looking for the first time at Alison.

“On the floor, near the murdered man’s berth.”

“Now, Mr. Sullivan,” said the detective civilly, “I believe you can tell us, in the light of these two exhibits, who really did murder Simon Harrington.”

Sullivan looked again at the dagger, a sharp little bit of steel with a Florentine handle. Then he picked up the locket and pressed a hidden spring under one of the cameos. Inside, very neatly engraved, was the name and a date.

“Gentlemen,” he said, his face ghastly, “it is of no use for me to attempt a denial. The dagger and necklace belonged to my sister, Alice Curtis!”

CHAPTER XXXI

AND ONLY ONE ARM

Hotchkiss was the first to break the tension.

‘Mr. Sullivan,” he asked suddenly, “was your sister left-handed?”

“Yes.”

Hotchkiss put away his notebook and looked around with an air of triumphant vindication. It gave us a chance to smile and look relieved. After all, Mrs. Curtis was dead. It was the happiest solution of the unhappy affair. McKnight brought Sullivan some whisky, and he braced up a little.

“I learned through the papers that my wife was in a Baltimore hospital, and yesterday I ventured there to see her. I felt if she would help me to keep straight, that now, with her father and my sister both dead, we might be happy together.

“I understand now what puzzled me then. It seemed that my sister went into the next car and tried to make my wife promise not to interfere. But Ida - Mrs. Sullivan - was firm, of course. She said her father had papers, certificates and so on, that would stop the marriage at once.

“She said, also, that her father was in our car, and that there would be the mischief to pay in the morning. It was probably when my sister tried to get the papers that he awakened, and she had to do - what she did.”

It was over. Save for a technicality or two, I was a free man. Alison rose quietly and prepared to go; the men stood to let her pass, save Sullivan who sat crouched in his chair, his face buried in his hands. Hotchkiss, who had been tapping the desk with his pencil, looked up abruptly and pointed the pencil at me.

“If all this is true, and I believe it is, - then who was in the house next door, Blakeley, the night you and Mr. Johnson searched? You remember, you said it was a woman’s hand at the trap door.”

I glanced hastily at Johnson, whose face was impassive. He had his hand on the knob of the door and he opened it before he spoke.

“There were a number of scratches on Mrs. Conway’s right hand,” he observed to the room in general. “Her wrist was bandaged and badly bruised.”

He went out then, but he turned as he closed the door and threw at me a glance of half-amused, half-contemptuous tolerance.

McKnight saw Alison, with Mrs. Dallas, to their carriage, and came back again. The gathering in the office was breaking up. Sullivan, looking worn and old, was standing by the window, staring at the broken necklace in his hand. When he saw me watching him, he put it on the desk and picked up his hat.

“If I can not do anything more - ” he hesitated.

“I think you have done about enough,” I replied grimly, and he went out.

I believe that Richey and Hotchkiss led me somewhere to dinner, and that, for fear I would be lonely without him, they sent for Johnson. And I recall a spirited discussion in which Hotchkiss told the detective that he could manage certain cases, but that he lacked induction. Richey and I were mainly silent. My thoughts would slip ahead to that hour, later in the evening, when I should see Alison again.

I dressed in savage haste finally, and was so particular about my tie that Mrs. Klopton gave up in despair.

“I wish, until your arm is better, that you would buy the kind that hooks on,” she protested, almost tearfully. “I’m sure they look very nice, Mr. Lawrence. My late husband always - ”

“That’s a lover’s knot you’ve tied this time,” I snarled, and, jerking open the bow knot she had so painfully executed, looked out the window for Johnson - until I recalled that he no longer belonged in my perspective. I ended by driving frantically to the club and getting George to do it.

I was late, of course. The drawing-room and library at the Dallas home were empty. I could hear billiard balls rolling somewhere, and I turned the other way. I found Alison at last on the balcony, sitting much as she had that night on the beach, - her chin in her hands, her eyes fixed unseeingly on the trees and lights of the square across. She was even whistling a little, softly. But this time the plaintiveness was gone. It was a tender little tune. She did not move, as I stood beside her, looking down. And now, when the moment had come, all the thousand and one things I had been waiting to say forsook me, precipitately beat a retreat, and left me unsupported. The arc-moon sent little fugitive lights over her hair, her eyes, her gown.

“Don’t - do that,” I said unsteadily. “You - you know what I want to do when you whistle!”

She glanced up at me, and she did not stop. She did not stop! She went on whistling softly, a bit tremulously. And straightway I forgot the street, the chance of passers-by, the voices in the house behind us. “The world doesn’t hold any one but you,” I said reverently. “It is our world, sweetheart. I love you.”

And I kissed her.

A boy was whistling on the pavement below. I let her go reluctantly and sat back where I could see her.

“I haven’t done this the way I intended to at all,” I confessed. “In books they get things all settled, and then kiss the lady.”

“Settled?” she inquired.

“Oh, about getting married and that sort of thing,” I explained with elaborate carelessness. “We - we could go down to Bermuda - or - or Jamaica, say in December.”

She drew her hand away and faced me squarely.

“I believe you are afraid!” she declared. “I refuse to marry you unless you propose properly. Everybody does it. And it is a woman’s privilege: she wants to have that to look back to.”

“Very well,” I consented with an exaggerated sigh. “If you will promise not to think I look like an idiot, I shall do it, knee and all.”

I had to pass her to close the door behind us, but when I kissed her again she protested that we were not really engaged.

I turned to look down at her. “It is a terrible thing,” I said exultantly, “to love a girl the way I love you, and to have only one arm!” Then I closed the door.

>From across the street there came a sharp crescendo whistle, and a vaguely familiar figure separated itself from the perk railing.

“Say,” he called, in a hoarse whisper, “shall I throw the key down the elevator shaft?”