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The Man in Lower Ten

by Mary Roberts Rinehart · English · Gutenberg #1869 · 373,016 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: The Man in Lower Ten

Author: Mary Roberts Rinehart


        
Release date: August 1, 1999 [eBook #1869]
                Most recently updated: May 28, 2021

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/1869

Credits: An Anonymous Project Gutenberg Volunteer and David Widger


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE MAN IN LOWER TEN ***

[Illustration]




The Man in Lower Ten

by Mary Roberts Rinehart


Contents

  CHAPTER I. I GO TO PITTSBURG
  CHAPTER II. A TORN TELEGRAM
  CHAPTER III. ACROSS THE AISLE
  CHAPTER IV. NUMBERS SEVEN AND NINE
  CHAPTER V. THE WOMAN IN THE NEXT CAR
  CHAPTER VI. THE GIRL IN BLUE
  CHAPTER VII. A FINE GOLD CHAIN
  CHAPTER VIII. THE SECOND SECTION
  CHAPTER IX. THE HALCYON BREAKFAST
  CHAPTER X. MISS WEST’S REQUEST
  CHAPTER XI. THE NAME WAS SULLIVAN
  CHAPTER XII. THE GOLD BAG
  CHAPTER XIII. FADED ROSES
  CHAPTER XIV. THE TRAP-DOOR
  CHAPTER XV. THE CINEMATOGRAPH
  CHAPTER XVI. THE SHADOW OF A GIRL
  CHAPTER XVII. AT THE FARM-HOUSE AGAIN
  CHAPTER XVIII. A NEW WORLD
  CHAPTER XIX. AT THE TABLE NEXT
  CHAPTER XX. THE NOTES AND A BARGAIN
  CHAPTER XXI. McKNIGHT’S THEORY
  CHAPTER XXII. AT THE BOARDING-HOUSE
  CHAPTER XXIII. A NIGHT AT THE LAURELS
  CHAPTER XXIV. HIS WIFE’S FATHER
  CHAPTER XXV. AT THE STATION
  CHAPTER XXVI. ON TO RICHMOND
  CHAPTER XXVII. THE SEA, THE SAND, THE STARS
  CHAPTER XXVIII.ALISON’S STORY
  CHAPTER XXIX. IN THE DINING-ROOM
  CHAPTER XXX. FINER DETAILS
  CHAPTER XXXI. AND ONLY ONE ARM

[Illustration]




THE MAN IN LOWER TEN




CHAPTER I.
I GO TO PITTSBURG


McKnight is gradually taking over the criminal end of the business. I
never liked it, and since the strange case of the man in lower ten, I
have been a bit squeamish. Given a case like that, where you can build
up a network of clues that absolutely incriminate three entirely
different people, only one of whom can be guilty, and your faith in
circumstantial evidence dies of overcrowding. I never see a shivering,
white-faced wretch in the prisoners’ dock that I do not hark back with
shuddering horror to the strange events on the Pullman car Ontario,
between Washington and Pittsburg, on the night of September ninth,
last.

McKnight could tell the story a great deal better than I, although he
can not spell three consecutive words correctly. But, while he has
imagination and humor, he is lazy.

“It didn’t happen to me, anyhow,” he protested, when I put it up to
him. “And nobody cares for second-hand thrills. Besides, you want the
unvarnished and ungarnished truth, and I’m no hand for that. I’m a
lawyer.”

So am I, although there have been times when my assumption in that
particular has been disputed. I am unmarried, and just old enough to
dance with the grown-up little sisters of the girls I used to know. I
am fond of outdoors, prefer horses to the aforesaid grown-up little
sisters, am without sentiment (_am_ crossed out and _was_
substituted.—Ed.) and completely ruled and frequently routed by my
housekeeper, an elderly widow.

In fact, of all the men of my acquaintance, I was probably the most
prosaic, the least adventurous, the one man in a hundred who would be
likely to go without a deviation from the normal through the orderly
procession of the seasons, summer suits to winter flannels, golf to
bridge.

So it was a queer freak of the demons of chance to perch on my
unsusceptible thirty-year-old chest, tie me up with a crime, ticket me
with a love affair, and start me on that sensational and not always
respectable journey that ended so surprisingly less than three weeks
later in the firm’s private office. It had been the most remarkable
period of my life. I would neither give it up nor live it again under
any inducement, and yet all that I lost was some twenty yards off my
drive!

It was really McKnight’s turn to make the next journey. I had a
tournament at Chevy Chase for Saturday, and a short yacht cruise
planned for Sunday, and when a man has been grinding at statute law for
a week, he needs relaxation. But McKnight begged off. It was not the
first time he had shirked that summer in order to run down to Richmond,
and I was surly about it. But this time he had a new excuse. “I
wouldn’t be able to look after the business if I did go,” he said. He
has a sort of wide-eyed frankness that makes one ashamed to doubt him.
“I’m always car sick crossing the mountains. It’s a fact, Lollie.
See-sawing over the peaks does it. Why, crossing the Alleghany
Mountains has the Gulf Stream to Bermuda beaten to a frazzle.”

So I gave him up finally and went home to pack. He came later in the
evening with his machine, the Cannonball, to take me to the station,
and he brought the forged notes in the Bronson case.

“Guard them with your life,” he warned me. “They are more precious than
honor. Sew them in your chest protector, or wherever people keep
valuables. I never keep any. I’ll not be happy until I see Gentleman
Andy doing the lockstep.”

He sat down on my clean collars, found my cigarettes and struck a match
on the mahogany bed post with one movement.

“Where’s the Pirate?” he demanded. The Pirate is my housekeeper, Mrs.
Klopton, a very worthy woman, so labeled—and libeled—because of a
ferocious pair of eyes and what McKnight called a bucaneering nose. I
quietly closed the door into the hall.

“Keep your voice down, Richey,” I said. “She is looking for the evening
paper to see if it is going to rain. She has my raincoat and an
umbrella waiting in the hall.”

The collars being damaged beyond repair, he left them and went to the
window. He stood there for some time, staring at the blackness that
represented the wall of the house next door.

“It’s raining now,” he said over his shoulder, and closed the window
and the shutters. Something in his voice made me glance up, but he was
watching me, his hands idly in his pockets.

“Who lives next door?” he inquired in a perfunctory tone, after a
pause. I was packing my razor.

“House is empty,” I returned absently. “If the landlord would put it in
some sort of shape—”

“Did you put those notes in your pocket?” he broke in.

“Yes.” I was impatient. “Along with my certificates of registration,
baptism and vaccination. Whoever wants them will have to steal my coat
to get them.”

“Well, I would move them, if I were you. Somebody in the next house was
confoundedly anxious to see where you put them. Somebody right at that
window opposite.”

I scoffed at the idea, but nevertheless I moved the papers, putting
them in my traveling-bag, well down at the bottom. McKnight watched me
uneasily.

“I have a hunch that you are going to have trouble,” he said, as I
locked the alligator bag. “Darned if I like starting anything important
on Friday.”

“You have a congenital dislike to start anything on any old day,” I
retorted, still sore from my lost Saturday. “And if you knew the owner
of that house as I do you would know that if there was any one at that
window he is paying rent for the privilege.”

Mrs. Klopton rapped at the door and spoke discreetly from the hall.

“Did Mr. McKnight bring the evening paper?” she inquired.

“Sorry, but I didn’t, Mrs. Klopton,” McKnight called. “The Cubs won,
three to nothing.” He listened, grinning, as she moved away with little
irritated rustles of her black silk gown.

I finished my packing, changed my collar and was ready to go. Then very
cautiously we put out the light and opened the shutters. The window
across was merely a deeper black in the darkness. It was closed and
dirty. And yet, probably owing to Richey’s suggestion, I had an uneasy
sensation of eyes staring across at me. The next moment we were at the
door, poised for flight.

“We’ll have to run for it,” I said in a whisper. “She’s down there with
a package of some sort, sandwiches probably. And she’s threatened me
with overshoes for a month. Ready now!”

I had a kaleidoscopic view of Mrs. Klopton in the lower hall, holding
out an armful of such traveling impedimenta as she deemed essential,
while beside her, Euphemia, the colored housemaid, grinned over a
white-wrapped box.

“Awfully sorry—no time—back Sunday,” I panted over my shoulder. Then
the door closed and the car was moving away.

McKnight bent forward and stared at the façade of the empty house next
door as we passed. It was black, staring, mysterious, as empty
buildings are apt to be.

“I’d like to hold a post-mortem on that corpse of a house,” he said
thoughtfully. “By George, I’ve a notion to get out and take a look.”

“Somebody after the brass pipes,” I scoffed. “House has been empty for
a year.”

With one hand on the steering wheel McKnight held out the other for my
cigarette case. “Perhaps,” he said; “but I don’t see what she would
want with brass pipe.”

“A woman!” I laughed outright. “You have been looking too hard at the
picture in the back of your watch, that’s all. There’s an experiment
like that: if you stare long enough—”

But McKnight was growing sulky: he sat looking rigidly ahead, and he
did not speak again until he brought the Cannonball to a stop at the
station. Even then it was only a perfunctory remark. He went through
the gate with me, and with five minutes to spare, we lounged and smoked
in the train shed. My mind had slid away from my surroundings and had
wandered to a polo pony that I couldn’t afford and intended to buy
anyhow. Then McKnight shook off his taciturnity.

“For heaven’s sake, don’t look so martyred,” he burst out; “I know
you’ve done all the traveling this summer. I know you’re missing a game
to-morrow. But don’t be a patient mother; confound it, I have to go to
Richmond on Sunday. I—I want to see a girl.”

“Oh, don’t mind me,” I observed politely. “Personally, I wouldn’t
change places with you. What’s her name—North? South?”

“West,” he snapped. “Don’t try to be funny. And all I have to say,
Blakeley, is that if you ever fall in love I hope you make an egregious
ass of yourself.”

In view of what followed, this came rather close to prophecy.

The trip west was without incident. I played bridge with a furniture
dealer from Grand Rapids, a sales agent for a Pittsburg iron firm and a
young professor from an eastern college. I won three rubbers out of
four, finished what cigarettes McKnight had left me, and went to bed at
one o’clock. It was growing cooler, and the rain had ceased. Once,
toward morning, I wakened with a start, for no apparent reason, and sat
bolt upright. I had an uneasy feeling that some one had been looking at
me, the same sensation I had experienced earlier in the evening at the
window. But I could feel the bag with the notes, between me and the
window, and with my arm thrown over it for security, I lapsed again
into slumber. Later, when I tried to piece together the fragments of
that journey, I remembered that my coat, which had been folded and
placed beyond my restless tossing, had been rescued in the morning from
a heterogeneous jumble of blankets, evening papers and cravat, had been
shaken out with profanity and donned with wrath. At the time, nothing
occurred to me but the necessity of writing to the Pullman Company and
asking them if they ever traveled in their own cars. I even formulated
some of the letter.

“If they are built to scale, why not take a man of ordinary stature as
your unit?” I wrote mentally. “I can not fold together like the
traveling cup with which I drink your abominable water.”

I was more cheerful after I had had a cup of coffee in the Union
Station. It was too early to attend to business, and I lounged in the
restaurant and hid behind the morning papers. As I had expected, they
had got hold of my visit and its object. On the first page was a
staring announcement that the forged papers in the Bronson case had
been brought to Pittsburg. Underneath, a telegram from Washington
stated that Lawrence Blakeley, of Blakeley and McKnight, had left for
Pittsburg the night before, and that, owing to the approaching trial of
the Bronson case and the illness of John Gilmore, the Pittsburg
millionaire, who was the chief witness for the prosecution, it was
supposed that the visit was intimately concerned with the trial.

I looked around apprehensively. There were no reporters yet in sight,
and thankful to have escaped notice I paid for my breakfast and left.
At the cab-stand I chose the least dilapidated hansom I could find, and
giving the driver the address of the Gilmore residence, in the East
end, I got in.

I was just in time. As the cab turned and rolled off, a slim young man
in a straw hat separated himself from a little group of men and hurried
toward us.

“Hey! Wait a minute there!” he called, breaking into a trot.

But the cabby did not hear, or perhaps did not care to. We jogged
comfortably along, to my relief, leaving the young man far behind. I
avoid reporters on principle, having learned long ago that I am an easy
mark for a clever interviewer.

It was perhaps nine o’clock when I left the station. Our way was along
the boulevard which hugged the side of one of the city’s great hills.
Far below, to the left, lay the railroad tracks and the seventy times
seven looming stacks of the mills. The white mist of the river, the
grays and blacks of the smoke blended into a half-revealing haze,
dotted here and there with fire. It was unlovely, tremendous. Whistler
might have painted it with its pathos, its majesty, but he would have
missed what made it infinitely suggestive—the rattle and roar of iron
on iron, the rumble of wheels, the throbbing beat, against the ears, of
fire and heat and brawn welding prosperity.

Something of this I voiced to the grim old millionaire who was
responsible for at least part of it. He was propped up in bed in his
East end home, listening to the market reports read by a nurse, and he
smiled a little at my enthusiasm.

“I can’t see much beauty in it myself,” he said. “But it’s our badge of
prosperity. The full dinner pail here means a nose that looks like a
flue. Pittsburg without smoke wouldn’t be Pittsburg, any more than New
York without prohibition would be New York. Sit down for a few minutes,
Mr. Blakeley. Now, Miss Gardner, Westinghouse Electric.”

The nurse resumed her reading in a monotonous voice. She read literally
and without understanding, using initials and abbreviations as they
came. But the shrewd old man followed her easily. Once, however, he
stopped her.

“D-o is ditto,” he said gently, “not _do_.”

As the nurse droned along, I found myself looking curiously at a
photograph in a silver frame on the bed-side table. It was the picture
of a girl in white, with her hands clasped loosely before her. Against
the dark background her figure stood out slim and young. Perhaps it was
the rather grim environment, possibly it was my mood, but although as a
general thing photographs of young girls make no appeal to me, this one
did. I found my eyes straying back to it. By a little finesse I even
made out the name written across the corner, “Alison.”

Mr. Gilmore lay back among his pillows and listened to the nurse’s
listless voice. But he was watching me from under his heavy eyebrows,
for when the reading was over, and we were alone, he indicated the
picture with a gesture.

“I keep it there to remind myself that I am an old man,” he said. “That
is my granddaughter, Alison West.”

I expressed the customary polite surprise, at which, finding me
responsive, he told me his age with a chuckle of pride. More surprise,
this time genuine. From that we went to what he ate for breakfast and
did not eat for luncheon, and then to his reserve power, which at
sixty-five becomes a matter for thought. And so, in a wide circle, back
to where we started, the picture.

“Father was a rascal,” John Gilmore said, picking up the frame. “The
happiest day of my life was when I knew he was safely dead in bed and
not hanged. If the child had looked like him, I—well, she doesn’t.
She’s a Gilmore, every inch. Supposed to look like me.”

“Very noticeably,” I agreed soberly.

I had produced the notes by that time, and replacing the picture Mr.
Gilmore gathered his spectacles from beside it. He went over the four
notes methodically, examining each carefully and putting it down before
he picked up the next. Then he leaned back and took off his glasses.

“They’re not so bad,” he said thoughtfully. “Not so bad. But I never
saw them before. That’s my unofficial signature. I am inclined to
think—” he was speaking partly to himself—“to think that he has got
hold of a letter of mine, probably to Alison. Bronson was a friend of
her rapscallion of a father.”

I took Mr. Gilmore’s deposition and put it into my traveling-bag with
the forged notes. When I saw them again, almost three weeks later, they
were unrecognizable, a mass of charred paper on a copper ashtray. In
the interval other and bigger things had happened: the Bronson forgery
case had shrunk beside the greater and more imminent mystery of the man
in lower ten. And Alison West had come into the story and into my life.




CHAPTER II.
A TORN TELEGRAM


I lunched alone at the Gilmore house, and went back to the city at
once. The sun had lifted the mists, and a fresh summer wind had cleared
away the smoke pall. The boulevard was full of cars flying countryward
for the Saturday half-holiday, toward golf and tennis, green fields and
babbling girls. I gritted my teeth and thought of McKnight at Richmond,
visiting the lady with the geographical name. And then, for the first
time, I associated John Gilmore’s granddaughter with the “West” that
McKnight had irritably flung at me.

I still carried my traveling-bag, for McKnight’s vision at the window
of the empty house had not been without effect. I did not transfer the
notes to my pocket, and, if I had, it would not have altered the
situation later. Only the other day McKnight put this very thing up to
me.

“I warned you,” he reminded me. “I told you there were queer things
coming, and to be on your guard. You ought to have taken your
revolver.”

“It would have been of exactly as much use as a bucket of snow in
Africa,” I retorted. “If I had never closed my eyes, or if I had kept
my finger on the trigger of a six-shooter (which is novelesque for
revolver), the result would have been the same. And the next time you
want a little excitement with every variety of thrill thrown in, I can
put you by way of it. You begin by getting the wrong berth in a Pullman
car, and end—”

“Oh, I know how it ends,” he finished shortly. “Don’t you suppose the
whole thing’s written on my spinal marrow?”

But I am wandering again. That is the difficulty with the
unprofessional story-teller: he yaws back and forth and can’t keep in
the wind; he drops his characters overboard when he hasn’t any further
use for them and drowns them; he forgets the coffee-pot and the
frying-pan and all the other small essentials, and, if he carries a
love affair, he mutters a fervent “Allah be praised” when he lands
them, drenched with adventures, at the matrimonial dock at the end of
the final chapter.

I put in a thoroughly unsatisfactory afternoon. Time dragged eternally.
I dropped in at a summer vaudeville, and bought some ties at a
haberdasher’s. I was bored but unexpectant; I had no premonition of
what was to come. Nothing unusual had ever happened to me; friends of
mine had sometimes sailed the high seas of adventure or skirted the
coasts of chance, but all of the shipwrecks had occurred after a woman
passenger had been taken on. “_Ergo_,” I had always said “no women!” I
repeated it to myself that evening almost savagely, when I found my
thoughts straying back to the picture of John Gilmore’s granddaughter.
I even argued as I ate my solitary dinner at a downtown restaurant.

“Haven’t you troubles enough,” I reflected, “without looking for more?
Hasn’t Bad News gone lame, with a matinée race booked for next week?
Otherwise aren’t you comfortable? Isn’t your house in order? Do you
want to sell a pony in order to have the library done over in mission
or the drawing-room in gold? Do you want somebody to count the empty
cigarette boxes lying around every morning?”

Lay it to the long idle afternoon, to the new environment, to anything
you like, but I began to think that perhaps I did. I was confoundedly
lonely. For the first time in my life its even course began to waver:
the needle registered warning marks on the matrimonial seismograph,
lines vague enough, but lines.

My alligator bag lay at my feet, still locked. While I waited for my
coffee I leaned back and surveyed the people incuriously. There were
the usual couples intent on each other: my new state of mind made me
regard them with tolerance. But at the next table, where a man and
woman dined together, a different atmosphere prevailed. My attention
was first caught by the woman’s face. She had been speaking earnestly
across the table, her profile turned to me. I had noticed casually her
earnest manner, her somber clothes, and the great mass of odd,
bronze-colored hair on her neck. But suddenly she glanced toward me and
the utter hopelessness—almost tragedy—of her expression struck me with
a shock. She half closed her eyes and drew a long breath, then she
turned again to the man across the table.

Neither one was eating. He sat low in his chair, his chin on his chest,
ugly folds of thick flesh protruding over his collar. He was probably
fifty, bald, grotesque, sullen, and yet not without a suggestion of
power. But he had been drinking; as I looked, he raised an unsteady
hand and summoned a waiter with a wine list.

The young woman bent across the table and spoke again quickly. She had
unconsciously raised her voice. Not beautiful, in her earnestness and
stress she rather interested me. I had an idle inclination to advise
the waiter to remove the bottled temptation from the table. I wonder
what would have happened if I had? Suppose Harrington had not been
intoxicated when he entered the Pullman car Ontario that night!

For they were about to make a journey, I gathered, and the young woman
wished to go alone. I drank three cups of coffee, which accounted for
my wakefulness later, and shamelessly watched the tableau before me.
The woman’s protest evidently went for nothing: across the table the
man grunted monosyllabic replies and grew more and more lowering and
sullen. Once, during a brief unexpected _pianissimo_ in the music, her
voice came to me sharply:

“If I could only see him in time!” she was saying. “Oh, it’s terrible!”

In spite of my interest I would have forgotten the whole incident at
once, erased it from my mind as one does the inessentials and
clutterings of memory, had I not met them again, later that evening, in
the Pennsylvania station. The situation between them had not visibly
altered: the same dogged determination showed in the man’s face, but
the young woman—daughter or wife? I wondered—had drawn down her veil
and I could only suspect what white misery lay beneath.

I bought my berth after waiting in a line of some eight or ten people.
When, step by step, I had almost reached the window, a tall woman whom
I had not noticed before spoke to me from my elbow. She had a ticket
and money in her hand.

“Will you try to get me a lower when you buy yours?” she asked. “I have
traveled for three nights in uppers.”

I consented, of course; beyond that I hardly noticed the woman. I had a
vague impression of height and a certain amount of stateliness, but the
crowd was pushing behind me, and some one was standing on my foot. I
got two lowers easily, and, turning with the change and berths, held
out the tickets.

“Which will you have?” I asked. “Lower eleven or lower ten?”

“It makes no difference,” she said. “Thank you very much indeed.”

At random I gave her lower eleven, and called a porter to help her with
her luggage. I followed them leisurely to the train shed, and ten
minutes more saw us under way.

I looked into my car, but it presented the peculiarly unattractive
appearance common to sleepers. The berths were made up; the center
aisle was a path between walls of dingy, breeze-repelling curtains,
while the two seats at each end of the car were piled high with
suitcases and umbrellas. The perspiring porter was trying to be six
places at once: somebody has said that Pullman porters are black so
they won’t show the dirt, but they certainly show the heat.

Nine-fifteen was an outrageous hour to go to bed, especially since I
sleep little or not at all on the train, so I made my way to the smoker
and passed the time until nearly eleven with cigarettes and a magazine.
The car was very close. It was a warm night, and before turning in I
stood a short time in the vestibule. The train had been stopping at
frequent intervals, and, finding the brakeman there, I asked the
trouble.

It seemed that there was a hot-box on the next car, and that not only
were we late, but we were delaying the second section, just behind. I
was beginning to feel pleasantly drowsy, and the air was growing cooler
as we got into the mountains. I said good night to the brakeman and
went back to my berth. To my surprise, lower ten was already occupied—a
suit-case projected from beneath, a pair of shoes stood on the floor,
and from behind the curtains came the heavy, unmistakable breathing of
deep sleep. I hunted out the porter and together we investigated.

“Are you asleep, sir?” asked the porter, leaning over deferentially. No
answer forthcoming, he opened the curtains and looked in. Yes, the
intruder was asleep—very much asleep—and an overwhelming odor of whisky
proclaimed that he would probably remain asleep until morning. I was
irritated. The car was full, and I was not disposed to take an upper in
order to allow this drunken interloper to sleep comfortably in my
berth.

“You’ll have to get out of this,” I said, shaking him angrily. But he
merely grunted and turned over. As he did so, I saw his features for
the first time. It was the quarrelsome man of the restaurant.

I was less disposed than ever to relinquish my claim, but the porter,
after a little quiet investigation, offered a solution of the
difficulty. “There’s no one in lower nine,” he suggested, pulling open
the curtains just across. “It’s likely nine’s his berth, and he’s made
a mistake, owing to his condition. You’d better take nine, sir.”

I did, with a firm resolution that if nine’s rightful owner turned up
later I should be just as unwakable as the man opposite. I undressed
leisurely, making sure of the safety of the forged notes, and placing
my grip as before between myself and the window.

Being a man of systematic habits, I arranged my clothes carefully,
putting my shoes out for the porter to polish, and stowing my collar
and scarf in the little hammock swung for the purpose.

At last, with my pillows so arranged that I could see out comfortably,
and with the unhygienic-looking blanket turned back—I have always a
distrust of those much-used affairs—I prepared to wait gradually for
sleep.

But sleep did not visit me. The train came to frequent, grating stops,
and I surmised the hot box again. I am not a nervous man, but there was
something chilling in the thought of the second section pounding along
behind us. Once, as I was dozing, our locomotive whistled a shrill
warning—“You keep back where you belong,” it screamed to my drowsy
ears, and from somewhere behind came a chastened “All-right-I-will.”

I grew more and more wide-awake. At Cresson I got up on my elbow and
blinked out at the station lights. Some passengers boarded the train
there and I heard a woman’s low tones, a southern voice, rich and full.
Then quiet again. Every nerve was tense: time passed, perhaps ten
minutes, possibly half an hour. Then, without the slightest warning, as
the train rounded a curve, a heavy body was thrown into my berth. The
incident, trivial as it seemed, was startling in its suddenness, for
although my ears were painfully strained and awake, I had heard no step
outside. The next instant the curtain hung limp again; still without a
sound, my disturber had slipped away into the gloom and darkness. In a
frenzy of wakefulness, I sat up, drew on a pair of slippers and fumbled
for my bath-robe.

From a berth across, probably lower ten, came that particular
aggravating snore which begins lightly, delicately, faintly soprano,
goes down the scale a note with every breath, and, after keeping the
listener tense with expectation, ends with an explosion that tears the
very air. I was more and more irritable: I sat on the edge of the berth
and hoped the snorer would choke to death. He had considerable
vitality, however; he withstood one shock after another and survived to
start again with new vigor. In desperation I found some cigarettes and
one match, piled my blankets over my grip, and drawing the curtains
together as though the berth were still occupied, I made my way to the
vestibule of the car.

I was not clad for dress parade. Is it because the male is so
restricted to gloom in his every-day attire that he blossoms into gaudy
colors in his pajamas and dressing-gowns? It would take a Turk to feel
at home before an audience in my red and yellow bathrobe, a Christmas
remembrance from Mrs. Klopton, with slippers to match.

So, naturally, when I saw a feminine figure on the platform, my first
instinct was to dodge. The woman, however, was quicker than I; she gave
me a startled glance, wheeled and disappeared, with a flash of two
bronze-colored braids, into the next car.

Cigarette box in one hand, match in the other, I leaned against the
uncertain frame of the door and gazed after her vanished figure. The
mountain air flapped my bath-robe around my bare ankles, my one match
burned to the end and went out, and still I stared. For I had seen on
her expressive face a haunting look that was horror, nothing less.
Heaven knows, I am not psychological. Emotions have to be written large
before I can read them. But a woman in trouble always appeals to me,
and this woman was more than that. She was in deadly fear.

If I had not been afraid of being ridiculous, I would have followed
her. But I fancied that the apparition of a man in a red and yellow
bath-robe, with an unkempt thatch of hair, walking up to her and
assuring her that he would protect her would probably put her into
hysterics. I had done that once before, when burglars had tried to
break into the house, and had startled the parlor maid into bed for a
week. So I tried to assure myself that I had imagined the lady’s
distress—or caused it, perhaps—and to dismiss her from my mind. Perhaps
she was merely anxious about the unpleasant gentleman of the
restaurant. I thought smugly that I could have told her all about him:
that he was sleeping the sleep of the just and the intoxicated in a
berth that ought, by all that was fair and right, to have been mine,
and that if I were tied to a man who snored like that I should have him
anæsthetized and his soft palate put where it would never again flap
like a loose sail in the wind.

We passed Harrisburg as I stood there. It was starlight, and the great
crests of the Alleghanies had given way to low hills. At intervals we
passed smudges of gray white, no doubt in daytime comfortable farms,
which McKnight says is a good way of putting it, the farms being a lot
more comfortable than the people on them.

I was growing drowsy: the woman with the bronze hair and the horrified
face was fading in retrospect. It was colder, too, and I turned with a
shiver to go in. As I did so a bit of paper fluttered into the air and
settled on my sleeve, like a butterfly on a gorgeous red and yellow
blossom. I picked it up curiously and glanced at it. It was part of a
telegram that had been torn into bits.

There were only parts of four words on the scrap, but it left me
puzzled and thoughtful. It read, “—ower ten, car seve—.”

“Lower ten, car seven,” was my berth—the one I had bought and found
preempted.




CHAPTER III.
ACROSS THE AISLE


No solution offering itself, I went back to my berth. The snorer across
had apparently strangled, or turned over, and so after a time I dropped
asleep, to be awakened by the morning sunlight across my face.

I felt for my watch, yawning prodigiously. I reached under the pillow
and failed to find it, but something scratched the back of my hand. I
sat up irritably and nursed the wound, which was bleeding a little.
Still drowsy, I felt more cautiously for what I supposed had been my
scarf pin, but there was nothing there. Wide awake now, I reached for
my traveling-bag, on the chance that I had put my watch in there. I had
drawn the satchel to me and had my hand on the lock before I realized
that it was not my own!

Mine was of alligator hide. I had killed the beast in Florida, after
the expenditure of enough money to have bought a house and enough
energy to have built one. The bag I held in my hand was a black one,
sealskin, I think. The staggering thought of what the loss of my bag
meant to me put my finger on the bell and kept it there until the
porter came.

“Did you ring, sir?” he asked, poking his head through the curtains
obsequiously. McKnight objects that nobody can poke his head through a
curtain and be obsequious. But Pullman porters can and do.

“No,” I snapped. “It rang itself. What in thunder do you mean by
exchanging my valise for this one? You’ll have to find it if you waken
the entire car to do it. There are important papers in that grip.”

“Porter,” called a feminine voice from an upper berth near-by. “Porter,
am I to dangle here all day?”

“Let her dangle,” I said savagely. “You find that bag of mine.”

The porter frowned. Then he looked at me with injured dignity. “I
brought in your overcoat, sir. You carried your own valise.”

The fellow was right! In an excess of caution I had refused to
relinquish my alligator bag, and had turned over my other traps to the
porter. It was clear enough then. I was simply a victim of the usual
sleeping-car robbery. I was in a lather of perspiration by that time:
the lady down the car was still dangling and talking about it: still
nearer a feminine voice was giving quick orders in French, presumably
to a maid. The porter was on his knees, looking under the berth.

“Not there, sir,” he said, dusting his knees. He was visibly more
cheerful, having been absolved of responsibility. “Reckon it was taken
while you was wanderin’ around the car last night.”

“I’ll give you fifty dollars if you find it,” I said. “A hundred. Reach
up my shoes and I’ll—”

I stopped abruptly. My eyes were fixed in stupefied amazement on a coat
that hung from a hook at the foot of my berth. From the coat they
traveled, dazed, to the soft-bosomed shirt beside it, and from there to
the collar and cravat in the net hammock across the windows.

“A hundred!” the porter repeated, showing his teeth. But I caught him
by the arm and pointed to the foot of the berth.

“What—what color’s that coat?” I asked unsteadily.

“Gray, sir.” His tone was one of gentle reproof.

“And—the trousers?”

He reached over and held up one creased leg. “Gray, too,” he grinned.

“Gray!” I could not believe even his corroboration of my own eyes. “But
my clothes were blue!” The porter was amused: he dived under the
curtains and brought up a pair of shoes. “Your shoes, sir,” he said
with a flourish. “Reckon you’ve been dreaming, sir.”

Now, there are two things I always avoid in my dress—possibly an
idiosyncrasy of my bachelor existence. These tabooed articles are red
neckties and tan shoes. And not only were the shoes the porter lifted
from the floor of a gorgeous shade of yellow, but the scarf which was
run through the turned over collar was a gaudy red. It took a full
minute for the real import of things to penetrate my dazed
intelligence. Then I gave a vindictive kick at the offending ensemble.

“They’re not mine, any of them,” I snarled. “They are some other
fellow’s. I’ll sit here until I take root before I put them on.”

“They’re nice lookin’ clothes,” the porter put in, eying the red tie
with appreciation. “Ain’t everybody would have left you anything.”

“Call the conductor,” I said shortly. Then a possible explanation
occurred to me. “Oh, porter—what’s the number of this berth?”

“Seven, sir. If you cain’t wear those shoes—”

“Seven!” In my relief I almost shouted it. “Why, then, it’s simple
enough. I’m in the wrong berth, that’s all. My berth is nine.
Only—where the deuce is the man who belongs here?”

“Likely in nine, sir.” The darky was enjoying himself. “You and the
other gentleman just got mixed in the night. That’s all, sir.” It was
clear that he thought I had been drinking.

I drew a long breath. Of course, that was the explanation. This was
number seven’s berth, that was his soft hat, this his umbrella, his
coat, his bag. My rage turned to irritation at myself.

The porter went to the next berth and I could hear his softly
insinuating voice. “Time to get up, sir. Are you awake? Time to get
up.”

There was no response from number nine. I guessed that he had opened
the curtains and was looking in. Then he came back.

“Number nine’s empty,” he said.

“Empty! Do you mean my clothes aren’t there?” I demanded. “My valise?
Why don’t you answer me?”

“You doan’ give me time,” he retorted. “There ain’t nothin’ there. But
it’s been slept in.”

The disappointment was the greater for my few moments of hope. I sat up
in a white fury and put on the clothes that had been left me. Then,
still raging, I sat on the edge of the berth and put on the obnoxious
tan shoes. The porter, called to his duties, made little excursions
back to me, to offer assistance and to chuckle at my discomfiture. He
stood by, outwardly decorous, but with little irritating grins of
amusement around his mouth, when I finally emerged with the red tie in
my hand.

“Bet the owner of those clothes didn’t become them any more than you
do,” he said, as he plied the ubiquitous whisk broom.

“When I get the owner of these clothes,” I retorted grimly, “he will
need a shroud. Where’s the conductor?”

The conductor was coming, he assured me; also that there was no bag
answering the description of mine on the car. I slammed my way to the
dressing-room, washed, choked my fifteen and a half neck into a fifteen
collar, and was back again in less than five minutes. The car, as well
as its occupants, was gradually taking on a daylight appearance. I
hobbled in, for one of the shoes was abominably tight, and found myself
facing a young woman in blue with an unforgettable face. (“Three women
already.” McKnight says: “That’s going some, even if you don’t count
the Gilmore nurse.”) She stood, half-turned toward me, one hand idly
drooping, the other steadying her as she gazed out at the flying
landscape. I had an instant impression that I had met her somewhere,
under different circumstances, more cheerful ones, I thought, for the
girl’s dejection now was evident. Beside her, sitting down, a small
dark woman, considerably older, was talking in a rapid undertone. The
girl nodded indifferently now and then. I fancied, although I was not
sure, that my appearance brought a startled look into the young woman’s
face. I sat down and, hands thrust deep into the other man’s pockets,
stared ruefully at the other man’s shoes.

The stage was set. In a moment the curtain was going up on the first
act of the play. And for a while we would all say our little speeches
and sing our little songs, and I, the villain, would hold center stage
while the gallery hissed.

The porter was standing beside lower ten. He had reached in and was
knocking valiantly. But his efforts met with no response. He winked at
me over his shoulder; then he unfastened the curtains and bent forward.
Behind him, I saw him stiffen, heard his muttered exclamation, saw the
bluish pallor that spread over his face and neck. As he retreated a
step the interior of lower ten lay open to the day.

The man in it was on his back, the early morning sun striking full on
his upturned face. But the light did not disturb him. A small stain of
red dyed the front of his night clothes and trailed across the sheet;
his half-open eyes were fixed, without seeing, on the shining wood
above.

I grasped the porter’s shaking shoulders and stared down to where the
train imparted to the body a grisly suggestion of motion. “Good Lord,”
I gasped. “The man’s been murdered!”




CHAPTER IV.
NUMBERS SEVEN AND NINE


Afterwards, when I tried to recall our discovery of the body in lower
ten, I found that my most vivid impression was not that made by the
revelation of the opened curtain. I had an instantaneous picture of a
slender blue-gowned girl who seemed to sense my words rather than hear
them, of two small hands that clutched desperately at the seat beside
them. The girl in the aisle stood, bent toward us, perplexity and alarm
fighting in her face.

With twitching hands the porter attempted to draw the curtains
together. Then in a paralysis of shock, he collapsed on the edge of my
berth and sat there swaying. In my excitement I shook him.

“For Heaven’s sake, keep your nerve, man,” I said bruskly. “You’ll have
every woman in the car in hysterics. And if you do, you’ll wish you
could change places with the man in there.” He rolled his eyes.

A man near, who had been reading last night’s paper, dropped it quickly
and tiptoed toward us. He peered between the partly open curtains,
closed them quietly and went back, ostentatiously solemn, to his seat.
The very crackle with which he opened his paper added to the bursting
curiosity of the car. For the passengers knew that something was amiss:
I was conscious of a sudden tension.

With the curtains closed the porter was more himself; he wiped his lips
with a handkerchief and stood erect.

“It’s my last trip in _this_ car,” he remarked heavily. “There’s
something wrong with that berth. Last trip the woman in it took an
overdose of some sleeping stuff, and we found her, jes’ like that,
dead! And it ain’t more’n three months now since there was twins born
in that very spot. No, sir, it ain’t natural.”

At that moment a thin man with prominent eyes and a spare grayish
goatee creaked up the aisle and paused beside me.

“Porter sick?” he inquired, taking in with a professional eye the
porter’s horror-struck face, my own excitement and the slightly gaping
curtains of lower ten. He reached for the darky’s pulse and pulled out
an old-fashioned gold watch.

“Hm! Only fifty! What’s the matter? Had a shock?” he asked shrewdly.

“Yes,” I answered for the porter. “We’ve both had one. If you are a
doctor, I wish you would look at the man in the berth across, lower
ten. I’m afraid it’s too late, but I’m not experienced in such
matters.”

Together we opened the curtains, and the doctor, bending down, gave a
comprehensive glance that took in the rolling head, the relaxed jaw,
the ugly stain on the sheet. The examination needed only a moment.
Death was written in the clear white of the nostrils, the colorless
lips, the smoothing away of the sinister lines of the night before.
With its new dignity the face was not unhandsome: the gray hair was
still plentiful, the features strong and well cut.

The doctor straightened himself and turned to me. “Dead for some time,”
he said, running a professional finger over the stains. “These are dry
and darkened, you see, and _rigor mortis_ is well established. A friend
of yours?”

“I don’t know him at all,” I replied. “Never saw him but once before.”

“Then you don’t know if he is traveling alone?”

“No, he was not—that is, I don’t know anything about him,” I corrected
myself. It was my first blunder: the doctor glanced up at me quickly
and then turned his attention again to the body. Like a flash there had
come to me the vision of the woman with the bronze hair and the tragic
face, whom I had surprised in the vestibule between the cars, somewhere
in the small hours of the morning. I had acted on my first impulse—the
masculine one of shielding a woman.

The doctor had unfastened the coat of the striped pajamas and exposed
the dead man’s chest. On the left side was a small punctured wound of
insignificant size.

“Very neatly done,” the doctor said with appreciation. “Couldn’t have
done it better myself. Right through the intercostal space: no time
even to grunt.”

“Isn’t the heart around there somewhere?” I asked. The medical man
turned toward me and smiled austerely.

“That’s where it belongs, just under that puncture, when it isn’t
gadding around in a man’s throat or his boots.”

I had a new respect for the doctor, for any one indeed who could crack
even a feeble joke under such circumstances, or who could run an
impersonal finger over that wound and those stains. Odd how a healthy,
normal man holds the medical profession in half contemptuous regard
until he gets sick, or an emergency like this arises, and then turns
meekly to the man who knows the ins and outs of his mortal tenement,
takes his pills or his patronage, ties to him like a rudderless ship in
a gale.

“Suicide, is it, doctor?” I asked.

He stood erect, after drawing the bed-clothing over the face, and,
taking off his glasses, he wiped them slowly.

“No, it is not suicide,” he announced decisively. “It is murder.”

Of course, I had expected that, but the word itself brought a shiver. I
was just a bit dizzy. Curious faces through the car were turned toward
us, and I could hear the porter behind me breathing audibly. A stout
woman in negligee came down the aisle and querulously confronted the
porter. She wore a pink dressing-jacket and carried portions of her
clothing.

“Porter,” she began, in the voice of the lady who had “dangled,” “is
there a rule of this company that will allow a woman to occupy the
dressing-room for one hour and curl her hair with an alcohol lamp while
respectable people haven’t a place where they can hook their—”

She stopped suddenly and stared into lower ten. Her shining pink cheeks
grew pasty, her jaw fell. I remember trying to think of something to
say, and of saying nothing at all. Then—she had buried her eyes in the
nondescript garments that hung from her arm and tottered back the way
she had come. Slowly a little knot of men gathered around us, silent
for the most part. The doctor was making a search of the berth when the
conductor elbowed his way through, followed by the inquisitive man, who
had evidently summoned him. I had lost sight, for a time, of the girl
in blue.

“Do it himself?” the conductor queried, after a businesslike glance at
the body.

“No, he didn’t,” the doctor asserted. “There’s no weapon here, and the
window is closed. He couldn’t have thrown it out, and he didn’t swallow
it. What on earth are you looking for, man?”

Some one was on the floor at our feet, face down, head peering under
the berth. Now he got up without apology, revealing the man who had
summoned the conductor. He was dusty, alert, cheerful, and he dragged
up with him the dead man’s suit-case. The sight of it brought back to
me at once my own predicament.

“I don’t know whether there’s any connection or not, conductor,” I
said, “but I am a victim, too, in less degree; I’ve been robbed of
everything I possess, except a red and yellow bath-robe. I happened to
be wearing the bath-robe, which was probably the reason the thief
overlooked it.”

There was a fresh murmur in the crowd. Some body laughed nervously. The
conductor was irritated.

“I can’t bother with that now,” he snarled. “The railroad company is
responsible for transportation, not for clothes, jewelry and morals. If
people want to be stabbed and robbed in the company’s cars, it’s their
affair. Why didn’t you sleep in your clothes? I do.”

I took an angry step forward. Then somebody touched my arm, and I
unclenched my fist. I could understand the conductor’s position, and
beside, in the law, I had been guilty myself of contributory
negligence.

“I’m not trying to make you responsible,” I protested as amiably as I
could, “and I believe the clothes the thief left are as good as my own.
They are certainly newer. But my valise contained valuable papers and
it is to your interest as well as mine to find the man who stole it.”

“Why, of course,” the conductor said shrewdly. “Find the man who
skipped out with this gentleman’s clothes, and you’ve probably got the
murderer.”

“I went to bed in lower nine,” I said, my mind full again of my lost
papers, “and I wakened in number seven. I was up in the night prowling
around, as I was unable to sleep, and I must have gone back to the
wrong berth. Anyhow, until the porter wakened me this morning I knew
nothing of my mistake. In the interval the thief—murderer, too,
perhaps—must have come back, discovered my error, and taken advantage
of it to further his escape.”

The inquisitive man looked at me from between narrowed eyelids,
ferret-like.

“Did any one on the train suspect you of having valuable papers?” he
inquired. The crowd was listening intently.

“No one,” I answered promptly and positively. The doctor was
investigating the murdered man’s effects. The pockets of his trousers
contained the usual miscellany of keys and small change, while in his
hip pocket was found a small pearl-handled revolver of the type women
usually keep around. A gold watch with a Masonic charm had slid down
between the mattress and the window, while a showy diamond stud was
still fastened in the bosom of his shirt. Taken as a whole, the
personal belongings were those of a man of some means, but without any
particular degree of breeding. The doctor heaped them together.

“Either robbery was not the motive,” he reflected, “or the thief
overlooked these things in his hurry.”

The latter hypothesis seemed the more tenable, when, after a thorough
search, we found no pocketbook and less than a dollar in small change.

The suit-case gave no clue. It contained one empty leather-covered
flask and a pint bottle, also empty, a change of linen and some collars
with the laundry mark, S. H. In the leather tag on the handle was a
card with the name Simon Harrington, Pittsburg. The conductor sat down
on my unmade berth, across, and made an entry of the name and address.
Then, on an old envelope, he wrote a few words and gave it to the
porter, who disappeared.

“I guess that’s all I can do,” he said. “I’ve had enough trouble this
trip to last for a year. They don’t need a conductor on these trains
any more; what they ought to have is a sheriff and a _posse_.”

The porter from the next car came in and whispered to him. The
conductor rose unhappily.

“Next car’s caught the disease,” he grumbled. “Doctor, a woman back
there has got mumps or bubonic plague, or something. Will you come
back?”

The strange porter stood aside.

“Lady about the middle of the car,” he said, “in black, sir, with
queer-looking hair—sort of copper color, I think, sir.”




CHAPTER V.
THE WOMAN IN THE NEXT CAR


With the departure of the conductor and the doctor, the group around
lower ten broke up, to re-form in smaller knots through the car. The
porter remained on guard. With something of relief I sank into a seat.
I wanted to think, to try to remember the details of the previous
night. But my inquisitive acquaintance had other intentions. He came up
and sat down beside me. Like the conductor, he had taken notes of the
dead man’s belongings, his name, address, clothing and the general
circumstances of the crime. Now with his little note-book open before
him, he prepared to enjoy the minor sensation of the robbery.

“And now for the second victim,” he began cheerfully. “What is your
name and address, please?” I eyed him with suspicion.

“I have lost everything but my name and address,” I parried. “What do
you want them for? Publication?”

“Oh, no; dear, no!” he said, shocked at my misapprehension. “Merely for
my own enlightenment. I like to gather data of this kind and draw my
own conclusions. Most interesting and engrossing. Once or twice I have
forestalled the results of police investigation—but entirely for my own
amusement.”

I nodded tolerantly. Most of us have hobbies; I knew a man once who
carried his handkerchief up his sleeve and had a mania for old colored
prints cut out of Godey’s _Lady’s Book_.

“I use that inductive method originated by Poe and followed since with
such success by Conan Doyle. Have you ever read _Gaboriau?_ Ah, you
have missed a treat, indeed. And now, to get down to business, what is
the name of our escaped thief and probable murderer?”

“How on earth do I know?” I demanded impatiently. “He didn’t write it
in blood anywhere, did he?”

The little man looked hurt and disappointed.

“Do you mean to say,” he asked, “that the pockets of those clothes are
entirely empty?” The pockets! In the excitement I had forgotten
entirely the sealskin grip which the porter now sat at my feet, and I
had not investigated the pockets at all. With the inquisitive man’s
pencil taking note of everything that I found, I emptied them on the
opposite seat.

Upper left-hand waist-coat, two lead pencils and a fountain pen; lower
right waist-coat, match-box and a small stamp book; right-hand pocket
coat, pair of gray suede gloves, new, size seven and a half; left-hand
pocket, gun-metal cigarette case studded with pearls, half-full of
Egyptian cigarettes. The trousers pockets contained a gold penknife, a
small amount of money in bills and change, and a handkerchief with the
initial “S” on it.

Further search through the coat discovered a card-case with cards
bearing the name Henry Pinckney Sullivan, and a leather flask with gold
mountings, filled with what seemed to be very fair whisky, and
monogrammed H. P. S.

“His name evidently is Henry Pinckney Sullivan,” said the cheerful
follower of Poe, as he wrote it down. “Address as yet unknown. Blond,
probably. Have you noticed that it is almost always the blond men who
affect a very light gray, with a touch of red in the scarf? Fact, I
assure you. I kept a record once of the summer attire of men, and
ninety per cent, followed my rule. Dark men like you affect navy blue,
or brown.”

In spite of myself I was amused at the man’s shrewdness.

“Yes; the suit he took was dark—a blue,” I said. He rubbed his hands
and smiled at me delightedly. “Then you wore black shoes, not tan,” he
said, with a glance at the aggressive yellow ones I wore.

“Right again,” I acknowledged. “Black low shoes and black embroidered
hose. If you keep on you’ll have a motive for the crime, and the
murderer’s present place of hiding. And if you come back to the smoker
with me, I’ll give you an opportunity to judge if he knew good whisky
from bad.”

I put the articles from the pockets back again and got up. “I wonder if
there is a diner on?” I said. “I need something sustaining after all
this.”

I was conscious then of some one at my elbow. I turned to see the young
woman whose face was so vaguely familiar. In the very act of speaking
she drew back suddenly and colored.

“Oh,—I beg your pardon,” she said hurriedly, “I—thought you were—some
one else.” She was looking in a puzzled fashion at my coat. I felt all
the cringing guilt of a man who has accidentally picked up the wrong
umbrella: my borrowed collar sat tight on my neck.

“I’m sorry,” I said idiotically. “I’m sorry, but—I’m not.” I have
learned since that she has bright brown hair, with a loose wave in it
that drops over her ears, and dark blue eyes with black lashes and—but
what does it matter? One enjoys a picture as a whole: not as the sum of
its parts.

She saw the flask then, and her errand came back to her. “One of the
ladies at the end of car has fainted,” she explained. “I thought
perhaps a stimulant—”

I picked up the flask at once and followed my guide down the aisle. Two
or three women were working over the woman who had fainted. They had
opened her collar and taken out her hairpins, whatever good that might
do. The stout woman was vigorously rubbing her wrists, with the idea,
no doubt, of working up her pulse! The unconscious woman was the one
for whom I had secured lower eleven at the station.

I poured a little liquor in a bungling masculine fashion between her
lips as she leaned back, with closed eyes. She choked, coughed, and
rallied somewhat.

“Poor thing,” said the stout lady. “As she lies back that way I could
almost think it was my mother; she used to faint so much.”

“It would make anybody faint,” chimed in another. “Murder and robbery
in one night and on one car. I’m thankful I always wear my rings in a
bag around my neck—even if they do get under me and keep me awake.”

The girl in blue was looking at us with wide, startled eyes. I saw her
pale a little, saw the quick, apprehensive glance which she threw at
her traveling companion, the small woman I had noticed before. There
was an exchange—almost a clash—of glances. The small woman frowned.
That was all. I turned my attention again to my patient.

She had revived somewhat, and now she asked to have the window opened.
The train had stopped again and the car was oppressively hot. People
around were looking at their watches and grumbling over the delay. The
doctor bustled in with a remark about its being his busy day. The
amateur detective and the porter together mounted guard over lower ten.
Outside the heat rose in shimmering waves from the tracks: the very
wood of the car was hot to touch. A Camberwell Beauty darted through
the open door and made its way, in erratic plunges, great wings waving,
down the sunny aisle. All around lay the peace of harvested fields, the
quiet of the country.




CHAPTER VI.
THE GIRL IN BLUE


I was growing more and more irritable. The thought of what the loss of
the notes meant was fast crowding the murder to the back of my mind.
The forced inaction was intolerable.

The porter had reported no bag answering the description of mine on the
train, but I was disposed to make my own investigation. I made a tour
of the cars, scrutinizing every variety of hand luggage, ranging from
luxurious English bags with gold mountings to the wicker nondescripts
of the day coach at the rear. I was not alone in my quest, for the girl
in blue was just ahead of me. Car by car she preceded me through the
train, unconscious that I was behind her, looking at each passenger as
she passed. I fancied the proceeding was distasteful, but that she had
determined on a course and was carrying it through. We reached the end
of the train almost together—empty-handed, both of us.

The girl went out to the platform. When she saw me she moved aside, and
I stepped out beside her. Behind us the track curved sharply; the early
sunshine threw the train, in long black shadow, over the hot earth.
Forward somewhere they were hammering. The girl said nothing, but her
profile was strained and anxious.

“I—if you have lost anything,” I began, “I wish you would let me try to
help. Not that my own success is anything to boast of.”

She hardly glanced at me. It was not flattering. “I have not been
robbed, if that is what you mean,” she replied quietly. “I
am—perplexed. That is all.”

There was nothing to say to that. I lifted my hat—the other fellow’s
hat—and turned to go back to my car. Two or three members of the train
crew, including the conductor, were standing in the shadow talking. And
at that moment, from a farm-house near came the swift clang of the
breakfast bell, calling in the hands from barn and pasture. I turned
back to the girl.

“We may be here for an hour,” I said, “and there is no buffet car on.
If I remember my youth, that bell means ham and eggs and country butter
and coffee. If you care to run the risk—”

“I am not hungry,” she said, “but perhaps a cup of coffee—dear me, I
believe I _am_ hungry,” she finished. “Only—” She glanced back of her.

“I can bring your companion,” I suggested, without enthusiasm. But the
young woman shook her head.

“She is not hungry,” she objected, “and she is very—well, I know she
wouldn’t come. Do you suppose we could make it if we run?”

“I haven’t any idea,” I said cheerfully. “Any old train would be better
than this one, if it does leave us behind.”

“Yes. Any train would be better than this one,” she repeated gravely. I
found myself watching her changing expression. I had spoken two dozen
words to her and already I felt that I knew the lights and shades in
her voice,—I, who had always known how a woman rode to hounds, and who
never could have told the color of her hair.

I stepped down on the ties and turned to assist her, and together we
walked back to where the conductor and the porter from our car were in
close conversation. Instinctively my hand went to my cigarette pocket
and came out empty. She saw the gesture.

“If you want to smoke, you may,” she said. “I have a big cousin who
smokes all the time. He says I am ‘kippered.’”

I drew out the gun-metal cigarette case and opened it. But this most
commonplace action had an extraordinary result: the girl beside me
stopped dead still and stood staring at it with fascinated eyes.

“Is—where did you get that?” she demanded, with a catch in her voice;
her gaze still fixed on the cigarette case.

“Then you haven’t heard the rest of the tragedy?” I asked, holding out
the case. “It’s frightfully bad luck for me, but it makes a good story.
You see—”

At that moment the conductor and porter ceased their colloquy. The
conductor came directly toward me, tugging as he came at his bristling
gray mustache.

“I would like to talk to you in the car,” he said to me, with a curious
glance at the young lady.

“Can’t it wait?” I objected. “We are on our way to a cup of coffee and
a slice of bacon. Be merciful, as you are powerful.”

“I’m afraid the breakfast will have to wait,” he replied. “I won’t keep
you long.” There was a note of authority in his voice which I resented;
but, after all, the circumstances were unusual.

“We’ll have to defer that cup of coffee for a while,” I said to the
girl; “but don’t despair; there’s breakfast somewhere.”

As we entered the car, she stood aside, but I felt rather than saw that
she followed us. I was surprised to see a half dozen men gathered
around the berth in which I had wakened, number seven. It had not yet
been made up.

As we passed along the aisle, I was conscious of a new expression on
the faces of the passengers. The tall woman who had fainted was
searching my face with narrowed eyes, while the stout woman of the
kindly heart avoided my gaze, and pretended to look out the window.

As we pushed our way through the group, I fancied that it closed around
me ominously. The conductor said nothing, but led the way without
ceremony to the side of the berth.

“What’s the matter?” I inquired. I was puzzled, but not apprehensive.
“Have you some of my things? I’d be thankful even for my shoes; these
are confoundedly tight.”

Nobody spoke, and I fell silent, too. For one of the pillows had been
turned over, and the under side of the white case was streaked with
brownish stains. I think it was a perceptible time before I realized
that the stains were blood, and that the faces around were filled with
suspicion and distrust.

“Why, it—that looks like blood,” I said vacuously. There was an
incessant pounding in my ears, and the conductor’s voice came from far
off.

“It is blood,” he asserted grimly.

I looked around with a dizzy attempt at nonchalance. “Even if it is,” I
remonstrated, “surely you don’t suppose for a moment that I know
anything about it!”

The amateur detective elbowed his way in. He had a scrap of transparent
paper in his hand, and a pencil.

“I would like permission to trace the stains,” he began eagerly.
“Also”—to me—“if you will kindly jab your finger with a
pin—needle—anything—”

“If you don’t keep out of this,” the conductor said savagely, “I will
do some jabbing myself. As for you, sir—” he turned to me. I was
absolutely innocent, but I knew that I presented a typical picture of
guilt; I was covered with cold sweat, and the pounding in my ears kept
up dizzily. “As for you, sir—”

The irrepressible amateur detective made a quick pounce at the pillow
and pushed back the cover. Before our incredulous eyes he drew out a
narrow steel dirk which had been buried to the small cross that served
as a head.

There was a chorus of voices around, a quick surging forward of the
crowd. So that was what had scratched my hand! I buried the wound in my
coat pocket.

“Well,” I said, trying to speak naturally, “doesn’t that prove what I
have been telling you? The man who committed the murder belonged to
this berth, and made an exchange in some way after the crime. How do
you know he didn’t change the tags so I would come back to this berth?”
This was an inspiration; I was pleased with it. “That’s what he did, he
changed the tags,” I reiterated.

There was a murmur of assent around. The doctor, who was standing
beside me, put his hand on my arm. “If this gentleman committed this
crime, and I for one feel sure he did not, then who is the fellow who
got away? And why did he go?”

“We have only one man’s word for that,” the conductor snarled. “I’ve
traveled some in these cars myself, and no one ever changed berths with
_me_.”

Somebody on the edge of the group asserted that hereafter he would
travel by daylight. I glanced up and caught the eye of the girl in
blue.

“They are all mad,” she said. Her tone was low, but I heard her
distinctly. “Don’t take them seriously enough to defend yourself.”

“I am glad you think I didn’t do it,” I observed meekly, over the
crowd. “Nothing else is of any importance.”

The conductor had pulled out his note-book again. “Your name, please,”
he said gruffly.

“Lawrence Blakeley, Washington.”

“Your occupation?”

“Attorney. A member of the firm of Blakeley and McKnight.”

“Mr. Blakeley, you say you have occupied the wrong berth and have been
robbed. Do you know anything of the man who did it?”

“Only from what he left behind,” I answered. “These clothes—”

“They fit you,” he said with quick suspicion. “Isn’t that rather a
coincidence? You are a large man.”

“Good Heavens,” I retorted, stung into fury, “do I look like a man who
would wear this kind of a necktie? Do you suppose I carry purple and
green barred silk handkerchiefs? Would any man in his senses wear a
pair of shoes a full size too small?”

The conductor was inclined to hedge. “You will have to grant that I am
in a peculiar position,” he said. “I have only your word as to the
exchange of berths, and you understand I am merely doing my duty. Are
there any clues in the pockets?”

For the second time I emptied them of their contents, which he noted.
“Is that all?” he finished. “There was nothing else?”

“Nothing.”

“That’s not all, sir,” broke in the porter, stepping forward. “There
was a small black satchel.”

“That’s so,” I exclaimed. “I forgot the bag. I don’t even know where it
is.”

The easily swayed crowd looked suspicious again. I’ve grown so
accustomed to reading the faces of a jury, seeing them swing from doubt
to belief, and back again to doubt, that I instinctively watch
expressions. I saw that my forgetfulness had done me harm—that
suspicion was roused again.

The bag was found a couple of seats away, under somebody’s
raincoat—another dubious circumstance. Was I hiding it? It was brought
to the berth and placed beside the conductor, who opened it at once.

It contained the usual traveling impedimenta—change of linen, collars,
handkerchiefs, a bronze-green scarf, and a safety razor. But the
attention of the crowd riveted itself on a flat, Russia leather wallet,
around which a heavy gum band was wrapped, and which bore in gilt
letters the name “Simon Harrington.”




CHAPTER VII.
A FINE GOLD CHAIN


The conductor held it out to me, his face sternly accusing.

“Is this another coincidence?” he asked. “Did the man who left you his
clothes and the barred silk handkerchief and the tight shoes leave you
the spoil of the murder?”

The men standing around had drawn off a little, and I saw the absolute
futility of any remonstrance. Have you ever seen a fly, who, in these
hygienic days, finding no cobwebs to entangle him, is caught in a sheet
of fly paper, finds himself more and more mired, and is finally quiet
with the sticky stillness of despair?

Well, I was the fly. I had seen too much of circumstantial evidence to
have any belief that the establishing of my identity would weigh much
against the other incriminating details. It meant imprisonment and
trial, probably, with all the notoriety and loss of practice they would
entail. A man thinks quickly at a time like that. All the probable
consequences of the finding of that pocket-book flashed through my mind
as I extended my hand to take it. Then I drew my arm back.

“I don’t want it,” I said. “Look inside. Maybe the other man took the
money and left the wallet.”

The conductor opened it, and again there was a curious surging forward
of the crowd. To my intense disappointment the money was still there.

I stood blankly miserable while it was counted out—five
one-hundred-dollar bills, six twenties, and some fives and ones that
brought the total to six hundred and fifty dollars.

The little man with the note-book insisted on taking the numbers of the
notes, to the conductor’s annoyance. It was immaterial to me: small
things had lost their power to irritate. I was seeing myself in the
prisoner’s box, going through all the nerve-racking routine of a trial
for murder—the challenging of the jury, the endless cross-examinations,
the alternate hope and fear. I believe I said before that I had no
nerves, but for a few minutes that morning I was as near as a man ever
comes to hysteria.

I folded my arms and gave myself a mental shake. I seemed to be the
center of a hundred eyes, expressing every shade of doubt and distrust,
but I tried not to flinch. Then some one created a diversion.

The amateur detective was busy again with the seal-skin bag,
investigating the make of the safety razor and the manufacturer’s name
on the bronze-green tie. Now, however, he paused and frowned, as though
some pet theory had been upset.

Then from a corner of the bag he drew out and held up for our
inspection some three inches of fine gold chain, one end of which was
blackened and stained with blood!

The conductor held out his hand for it, but the little man was not
ready to give it up. He turned to me.

“You say no watch was left you? Was there a piece of chain like that?”

“No chain at all,” I said sulkily. “No jewelry of any kind, except
plain gold buttons in the shirt I am wearing.”

“Where are your glasses?” he threw at me suddenly: instinctively my
hand went to my eyes. My glasses had been gone all morning, and I had
not even noticed their absence. The little man smiled cynically and
held out the chain.

“I must ask you to examine this,” he insisted. “Isn’t it a part of the
fine gold chain you wear over your ear?”

I didn’t want to touch the thing: the stain at the end made me shudder.
But with a baker’s dozen of suspicious eyes—well, we’ll say fourteen:
there were no one-eyed men—I took the fragment in the tips of my
fingers and looked at it helplessly.

“Very fine chains are much alike,” I managed to say. “For all I know,
this may be mine, but I don’t know how it got into that sealskin bag. I
never saw the bag until this morning after daylight.”

“He admits that he had the bag,” somebody said behind me. “How did you
guess that he wore glasses, anyhow?” to the amateur sleuth.

That gentleman cleared his throat. “There were two reasons,” he said,
“for suspecting it. When you see a man with the lines of his face
drooping, a healthy individual with a pensive eye,—suspect astigmatism.
Besides, this gentleman has a pronounced line across the bridge of his
nose and a mark on his ear from the chain.”

After this remarkable exhibition of the theoretical as combined with
the practical, he sank into a seat near-by, and still holding the
chain, sat with closed eyes and pursed lips. It was evident to all the
car that the solution of the mystery was a question of moments. Once he
bent forward eagerly and putting the chain on the window-sill,
proceeded to go over it with a pocket magnifying glass, only to shake
his head in disappointment. All the people around shook their heads
too, although they had not the slightest idea what it was about.

The pounding in my ears began again. The group around me seemed to be
suddenly motionless in the very act of moving, as if a hypnotist had
called “Rigid!” The girl in blue was looking at me, and above the din I
thought she said she must speak to me—something vital. The pounding
grew louder and merged into a scream. With a grinding and splintering
the car rose under my feet. Then it fell away into darkness.




CHAPTER VIII.
THE SECOND SECTION


Have you ever been picked up out of your three-meals-a-day life,
whirled around in a tornado of events, and landed in a situation so
grotesque and yet so horrible that you laugh even while you are
groaning, and straining at its hopelessness? McKnight says that is
hysteria, and that no man worthy of the name ever admits to it.

Also, as McKnight says, it sounds like a tank drama. Just as the
revolving saw is about to cut the hero into stove lengths, the second
villain blows up the sawmill. The hero goes up through the roof and
alights on the bank of a stream at the feet of his lady love, who is
making daisy chains.

Nevertheless, when I was safely home again, with Mrs. Klopton brewing
strange drinks that came in paper packets from the pharmacy, and that
smelled to heaven, I remember staggering to the door and closing it,
and then going back to bed and howling out the absurdity and the
madness of the whole thing. And while I laughed my very soul was sick,
for the girl was gone by that time, and I knew by all the loyalty that
answers between men for honor that I would have to put her out of my
mind.

And yet, all the night that followed, filled as it was with the
shrieking demons of pain, I saw her as I had seen her last, in the
queer hat with green ribbons. I told the doctor this, guardedly, the
next morning, and he said it was the morphia, and that I was lucky not
to have seen a row of devils with green tails.

I don’t know anything about the wreck of September ninth last. You who
swallowed the details with your coffee and digested the horrors with
your chop, probably know a great deal more than I do. I remember very
distinctly that the jumping and throbbing in my arm brought me back to
a world that at first was nothing but sky, a heap of clouds that I
thought hazily were the meringue on a blue charlotte russe. As the
sense of hearing was slowly added to vision, I heard a woman near me
sobbing that she had lost her hat pin, and she couldn’t keep her hat
on.

I think I dropped back into unconsciousness again, for the next thing I
remember was of my blue patch of sky clouded with smoke, of a strange
roaring and crackling, of a rain of fiery sparks on my face and of
somebody beating at me with feeble hands. I opened my eyes and closed
them again: the girl in blue was bending over me. With that
imperviousness to big things and keenness to small that is the first
effect of shock, I tried to be facetious, when a spark stung my cheek.

“You will have to rouse yourself!” the girl was repeating desperately.
“You’ve been on fire twice already.” A piece of striped ticking floated
slowly over my head. As the wind caught it its charring edges leaped
into flame.

“Looks like a kite, doesn’t it?” I remarked cheerfully. And then, as my
arm gave an excruciating throb—“Jove, how my arm hurts!”

The girl bent over and spoke slowly, distinctly, as one might speak to
a deaf person or a child.

“Listen, Mr. Blakeley,” she said earnestly. “You _must_ rouse yourself.
There has been a terrible accident. The second section ran into us. The
wreck is burning now, and if we don’t move, we will catch fire. Do you
hear?”

Her voice and my arm were bringing me to my senses. “I hear,” I said.
“I—I’ll sit up in a second. Are you hurt?”

“No, only bruised. Do you think you can walk?”

I drew up one foot after another, gingerly.

“They seem to move all right,” I remarked dubiously. “Would you mind
telling me where the back of my head has gone? I can’t help thinking it
isn’t there.”

She made a quick examination. “It’s pretty badly bumped,” she said.
“You must have fallen on it.”

I had got up on my uninjured elbow by that time, but the pain threw me
back. “Don’t look at the wreck,” I entreated her. “It’s no sight for a
woman. If—if there is any way to tie up this arm, I might be able to do
something. There may be people under those cars!”

“Then it is too late to help,” she replied solemnly. A little shower of
feathers, each carrying its fiery lamp, blew over us from some burning
pillow. A part of the wreck collapsed with a crash. In a resolute
endeavor to play a man’s part in the tragedy going on around, I got to
my knees. Then I realized what I had not noticed before: the hand and
wrist of the broken left arm were jammed through the handle of the
sealskin grip. I gasped and sat down suddenly.

[Illustration]

“You must not do that,” the girl insisted. I noticed now that she kept
her back to the wreck, her eyes averted. “The weight of the
traveling-bag must be agony. Let me support the valise until we get
back a few yards. Then you must lie down until we can get it cut off.”

“Will it have to be cut off?” I asked as calmly as possible. There were
red-hot stabs of agony clear to my neck, but we were moving slowly away
from the track.

“Yes,” she replied, with dumfounding coolness. “If I had a knife I
could do it myself. You might sit here and lean against this fence.”

By that time my returning faculties had realized that she was going to
cut off the satchel, not the arm. The dizziness was leaving and I was
gradually becoming myself.

“If you pull, it might come,” I suggested. “And with that weight gone,
I think I will cease to be five feet eleven inches of baby.”

She tried gently to loosen the handle, but it would not move, and at
last, with great drops of cold perspiration over me, I had to give up.

“I’m afraid I can’t stand it,” I said. “But there’s a knife somewhere
around these clothes, and if I can find it, perhaps you can cut the
leather.”

As I gave her the knife she turned it over, examining it with a
peculiar expression, bewilderment rather than surprise. But she said
nothing. She set to work deftly, and in a few minutes the bag dropped
free.

“That’s better,” I declared, sitting up. “Now, if you can pin my sleeve
to my coat, it will support the arm so we can get away from here.”

“The pin might give,” she objected, “and the jerk would be terrible.”
She looked around, puzzled; then she got up, coming back in a minute
with a draggled, partly scorched sheet. This she tore into a large
square, and after she had folded it, she slipped it under the broken
arm and tied it securely at the back of my neck.

The relief was immediate, and, picking up the sealskin bag, I walked
slowly beside her, away from the track.

The first act was over: the curtain fallen. The scene was “struck.”




CHAPTER IX.
THE HALCYON BREAKFAST


We were still dazed, I think, for we wandered like two troubled
children, our one idea at first to get as far away as we could from the
horror behind us. We were both bareheaded, grimy, pallid through the
grit. Now and then we met little groups of country folk hurrying to the
track: they stared at us curiously, and some wished to question us. But
we hurried past them; we had put the wreck behind us. That way lay
madness.

Only once the girl turned and looked behind her. The wreck was hidden,
but the smoke cloud hung heavy and dense. For the first time I
remembered that my companion had not been alone on the train.

“It is quiet here,” I suggested. “If you will sit down on the bank I
will go back and make some inquiries. I’ve been criminally thoughtless.
Your traveling companion—”

She interrupted me, and something of her splendid poise was gone.
“Please don’t go back,” she said. “I am afraid it would be of no use.
And I don’t want to be left alone.”

Heaven knows I did not want her to be alone. I was more than content to
walk along beside her aimlessly, for any length of time. Gradually, as
she lost the exaltation of the moment, I was gaining my normal
condition of mind. I was beginning to realize that I had lacked the
morning grace of a shave, that I looked like some lost hope of
yesterday, and that my left shoe pinched outrageously. A man does not
rise triumphant above such handicaps. The girl, for all her disordered
hair and the crumpled linen of her waist, in spite of her missing hat
and the small gold bag that hung forlornly from a broken chain, looked
exceedingly lovely.

“Then I won’t leave you alone,” I said manfully, and we stumbled on
together. Thus far we had seen nobody from the wreck, but well up the
lane we came across the tall dark woman who had occupied lower eleven.
She was half crouching beside the road, her black hair about her
shoulders, and an ugly bruise over her eye. She did not seem to know
us, and refused to accompany us. We left her there at last, babbling
incoherently and rolling in her hands a dozen pebbles she had gathered
in the road.

The girl shuddered as we went on. Once she turned and glanced at my
bandage. “Does it hurt very much?” she asked.

“It’s growing rather numb. But it might be worse,” I answered
mendaciously. If anything in this world could be worse, I had never
experienced it.

And so we trudged on bareheaded under the summer sun, growing parched
and dusty and weary, doggedly leaving behind us the pillar of smoke. I
thought I knew of a trolley line somewhere in the direction we were
going, or perhaps we could find a horse and trap to take us into
Baltimore. The girl smiled when I suggested it.

“We will create a sensation, won’t we?” she asked. “Isn’t it queer—or
perhaps it’s my state of mind—but I keep wishing for a pair of gloves,
when I haven’t even a hat!”

When we reached the main road we sat down for a moment, and her hair,
which had been coming loose for some time, fell over her shoulders in
little waves that were most alluring. It seemed a pity to twist it up
again, but when I suggested this, cautiously, she said it was
troublesome and got in her eyes when it was loose. So she gathered it
up, while I held a row of little shell combs and pins, and when it was
done it was vastly becoming, too. Funny about hair: a man never knows
he has it until he begins to lose it, but it’s different with a girl.
Something of the unconventional situation began to dawn on her as she
put in the last hair-pin and patted some stray locks to place.

“I have not told you my name,” she said abruptly. “I forgot that
because I know who you are, you know nothing about me. I am Alison
West, and my home is in Richmond.”

So that was it! This was the girl of the photograph on John Gilmore’s
bedside table. The girl McKnight expected to see in Richmond the next
day, Sunday! She was on her way back to meet him! Well, what difference
did it make, anyhow? We had been thrown together by the merest chance.
In an hour or two at the most we would be back in civilization and she
would recall me, if she remembered me at all, as an unshaven creature
in a red cravat and tan shoes, with a soiled Pullman sheet tied around
my neck. I drew a deep breath.

“Just a twinge,” I said, when she glanced up quickly. “It’s very good
of you to let me know, Miss West. I have been hearing delightful things
about you for three months.”

“From Richey McKnight?” She was frankly curious.

“Yes. From Richey McKnight,” I assented. Was it any wonder McKnight was
crazy about her? I dug my heels into the dust.

“I have been visiting near Cresson, in the mountains,” Miss West was
saying. “The person you mentioned, Mrs. Curtis, was my hostess. We—we
were on our way to Washington together.” She spoke slowly, as if she
wished to give the minimum of explanation. Across her face had come
again the baffling expression of perplexity and trouble I had seen
before.

“You were on your way home, I suppose? Richey spoke about seeing you,”
I floundered, finding it necessary to say something. She looked at me
with level, direct eyes.

“No,” she returned quietly. “I did not intend to go home. I—well, it
doesn’t matter; I am going home now.”

A woman in a calico dress, with two children, each an exact duplicate
of the other, had come quickly down the road. She took in the situation
at a glance, and was explosively hospitable.

“You poor things,” she said. “If you’ll take the first road to the left
over there, and turn in at the second pigsty, you will find breakfast
on the table and a coffee-pot on the stove. And there’s plenty of soap
and water, too. Don’t say one word. There isn’t a soul there to see
you.”

We accepted the invitation and she hurried on toward the excitement and
the railroad. I got up carefully and helped Miss West to her feet.

“At the second pigsty to the left,” I repeated, “we will find the
breakfast I promised you seven eternities ago. Forward to the pigsty!”

We said very little for the remainder of that walk. I had almost
reached the limit of endurance: with every step the broken ends of the
bone grated together. We found the farm-house without difficulty, and I
remember wondering if I could hold out to the end of the old stone walk
that led between hedges to the door.

“Allah be praised,” I said with all the voice I could muster. “Behold
the coffee-pot!” And then I put down the grip and folded up like a
jack-knife on the porch floor.

When I came around something hot was trickling down my neck, and a
despairing voice was saying, “Oh, I don’t seem to be able to pour it
into your mouth. Please open your eyes.”

“But I don’t want it in my eyes,” I replied dreamily. “I haven’t any
idea what came over me. It was the shoes, I think: the left one is a
red-hot torture.” I was sitting by that time and looking across into
her face.

Never before or since have I fainted, but I would do it joyfully, a
dozen times a day, if I could waken again to the blissful touch of soft
fingers on my face, the hot ecstasy of coffee spilled by those fingers
down my neck. There was a thrill in every tone of her voice that
morning. Before long my loyalty to McKnight would step between me and
the girl he loved: life would develop new complexities. In those early
hours after the wreck, full of pain as they were, there was nothing of
the suspicion and distrust that came later. Shorn of our gauds and
baubles, we were primitive man and woman, together: our world for the
hour was the deserted farm-house, the slope of wheat-field that led to
the road, the woodland lot, the pasture.

We breakfasted together across the homely table. Our cheerfulness, at
first sheer reaction, became less forced as we ate great slices of
bread from the granny oven back of the house, and drank hot fluid that
smelled like coffee and tasted like nothing that I have ever swallowed.
We found cream in stone jars, sunk deep in the chill water of the
spring house. And there were eggs, great yellow-brown ones,—a basket of
them.

So, like two children awakened from a nightmare, we chattered over our
food: we hunted mutual friends, we laughed together at my feeble
witticisms, but we put the horror behind us resolutely. After all, it
was the hat with the green ribbons that brought back the strangeness of
the situation.

All along I had had the impression that Alison West was deliberately
putting out of her mind something that obtruded now and then. It
brought with it a return of the puzzled expression that I had surprised
early in the day, before the wreck. I caught it once, when, breakfast
over, she was tightening the sling that held the broken arm. I had
prolonged the morning meal as much as I could, but when the wooden
clock with the pink roses on the dial pointed to half after ten, and
the mother with the duplicate youngsters had not come back, Miss West
made the move I had dreaded.

“If we are to get into Baltimore at all we must start,” she said,
rising. “You ought to see a doctor as soon as possible.”

“Hush,” I said warningly. “Don’t mention the arm, please; it is asleep
now. You may rouse it.”

“If I only had a hat,” she reflected. “It wouldn’t need to be much of
one, but—” She gave a little cry and darted to the corner. “Look,” she
said triumphantly, “the very thing. With the green streamers tied up in
a bow, like this—do you suppose the child would mind? I can put five
dollars or so here—that would buy a dozen of them.”

It was a queer affair of straw, that hat, with a round crown and a rim
that flopped dismally. With a single movement she had turned it up at
one side and fitted it to her head. Grotesque by itself, when she wore
it it was a thing of joy.

Evidently the lack of head covering had troubled her, for she was
elated at her find. She left me, scrawling a note of thanks and pinning
it with a bill to the table-cloth, and ran up-stairs to the mirror and
the promised soap and water.

I did not see her when she came down. I had discovered a bench with a
tin basin outside the kitchen door, and was washing, in a helpless,
one-sided way. I felt rather than saw that she was standing in the
door-way, and I made a final plunge into the basin.

“How is it possible for a man with only a right hand to wash his left
ear?” I asked from the roller towel. I was distinctly uncomfortable:
men are more rigidly creatures of convention than women, whether they
admit it or not. “There is so much soap on me still that if I laugh I
will blow bubbles. Washing with rain-water and home-made soap is like
motoring on a slippery road. I only struck the high places.”

Then, having achieved a brilliant polish with the towel, I looked at
the girl.

She was leaning against the frame of the door, her face perfectly
colorless, her breath coming in slow, difficult respirations. The
erratic hat was pinned to place, but it had slid rakishly to one side.
When I realized that she was staring, not at me, but past me to the
road along which we had come, I turned and followed her gaze. There was
no one in sight: the lane stretched dust white in the sun,—no moving
figure on it, no sign of life.




CHAPTER X.
MISS WEST’S REQUEST


The surprising change in her held me speechless. All the animation of
the breakfast table was gone: there was no hint of the response with
which, before, she had met my nonsensical sallies. She stood there,
white-lipped, unsmiling, staring down the dusty road. One hand was
clenched tight over some small object. Her eyes dropped to it from the
distant road, and then closed, with a quick, indrawn breath. Her color
came back slowly. Whatever had caused the change, she said nothing. She
was anxious to leave at once, almost impatient over my deliberate
masculine way of getting my things together. Afterward I recalled that
I had wanted to explore the barn for a horse and some sort of a vehicle
to take us to the trolley, and that she had refused to allow me to
look. I remembered many things later that might have helped me, and did
not. At the time, I was only completely bewildered. Save the wreck, the
responsibility for which lay between Providence and the engineer of the
second section, all the events of that strange morning were logically
connected; they came from one cause, and tended unerringly to one end.
But the cause was buried, the end not yet in view.

Not until we had left the house well behind did the girl’s face relax
its tense lines. I was watching her more closely than I had realized,
for when we had gone a little way along the road she turned to me
almost petulantly. “Please don’t stare so at me,” she said, to my
sudden confusion. “I know the hat is dreadful. Green always makes me
look ghastly.”

“Perhaps it was the green.” I was unaccountably relieved. “Do you know,
a few minutes ago, you looked almost pallid to me!”

She glanced at me quickly, but I was gazing ahead. We were out of sight
of the house, now, and with every step away from it the girl was
obviously relieved. Whatever she held in her hand, she never glanced at
it. But she was conscious of it every second. She seemed to come to a
decision about it while we were still in sight of the gate, for she
murmured something and turned back alone, going swiftly, her feet
stirring up small puffs of dust at every step. She fastened something
to the gate-post,—I could see the nervous haste with which she worked.
When she joined me again it was without explanation. But the clenched
fingers were free now, and while she looked tired and worn, the strain
had visibly relaxed.

We walked along slowly in the general direction of the suburban trolley
line. Once a man with an empty wagon offered us a lift, but after a
glance at the springless vehicle I declined.

“The ends of the bone think they are castanets as it is,” I explained.
“But the lady—”

The young lady, however, declined and we went on together. Once, when
the trolley line was in sight, she got a pebble in her low shoe, and we
sat down under a tree until she found the cause of the trouble.

“I—I don’t know what I should have done without you,” I blundered.
“Moral support and—and all that. Do you know, my first conscious
thought after the wreck was of relief that you had not been hurt?”

She was sitting beside me, where a big chestnut tree shaded the road,
and I surprised a look of misery on her face that certainly my words
had not been meant to produce.

“And my first thought,” she said slowly, “was regret that I—that I
hadn’t been obliterated, blown out like a candle. Please don’t look
like that! I am only talking.”

But her lips were trembling, and because the little shams of society
are forgotten at times like this, I leaned over and patted her hand
lightly, where it rested on the grass beside me.

“You must not say those things,” I expostulated. “Perhaps, after all,
your friends—”

“I had no friends on the train.” Her voice was hard again, her tone
final. She drew her hand from under mine, not quickly, but decisively.
A car was in sight, coming toward us. The steel finger of civilization,
of propriety, of visiting cards and formal introductions was beckoning
us in. Miss West put on her shoe.

We said little on the car. The few passengers stared at us frankly, and
discussed the wreck, emphasizing its horrors. The girl did not seem to
hear. Once she turned to me with the quick, unexpected movement that
was one of her charms.

“I do not wish my mother to know I was in the accident,” she said.
“Will you please not tell Richey about having met me?”

I gave my promise, of course. Again, when we were almost into
Baltimore, she asked to examine the gun-metal cigarette case, and sat
silent with it in her hands, while I told of the early morning’s events
on the Ontario.

“So you see,” I finished, “this grip, everything I have on, belongs to
a fellow named Sullivan. He probably left the train before the
wreck,—perhaps just after the murder.”

“And so—you think he committed the—the crime?” Her eyes were on the
cigarette case.

“Naturally,” I said. “A man doesn’t jump off a Pullman car in the
middle of the night in another man’s clothes, unless he is trying to
get away from something. Besides the dirk, there were the stains that
you saw. Why, I have the murdered man’s pocket-book in this valise at
my feet. What does that look like?”

I colored when I saw the ghost of a smile hovering around the corners
of her mouth. “That is,” I finished, “if you care to believe that I am
innocent.”

The sustaining chain of her small gold bag gave way just then. She did
not notice it. I picked it up and slid the trinket into my pocket for
safekeeping, where I promptly forgot it. Afterwards I wished I had let
it lie unnoticed on the floor of that dirty little suburban car, and
even now, when I see a woman carelessly dangling a similar feminine
trinket, I shudder involuntarily: there comes back to me the memory of
a girl’s puzzled eyes under the brim of a flopping hat, the haunting
suspicion of the sleepless nights that followed.

Just then I was determined that my companion should not stray back to
the wreck, and to that end I was determinedly facetious.

“Do you know that it is Sunday?” she asked suddenly, “and that we are
actually ragged?”

“Never mind that,” I retorted. “All Baltimore is divided on Sunday into
three parts, those who rise up and go to church, those who rise up and
read the newspapers, and those who don’t rise up. The first are
somewhere between the creed and the sermon, and we need not worry about
the others.”

“You treat me like a child,” she said almost pettishly. “Don’t try so
hard to be cheerful. It—it is almost ghastly.”

After that I subsided like a pricked balloon, and the remainder of the
ride was made in silence. The information that she would go to friends
in the city was a shock: it meant an earlier separation than I had
planned for. But my arm was beginning again. In putting her into a cab
I struck it and gritted my teeth with the pain. It was probably for
that reason that I forgot the gold bag.

She leaned forward and held out her hand. “I may not have another
chance to thank you,” she said, “and I think I would better not try,
anyhow. I cannot tell you how grateful I am.” I muttered something
about the gratitude being mine: owing to the knock I was seeing two
cabs, and two girls were holding out two hands.

“Remember,” they were both saying, “you have never met me, Mr.
Blakeley. And—if you ever hear anything about me—that is not—pleasant,
I want you to think the best you can of me. Will you?”

The two girls were one now, with little flashes of white light playing
all around. “I—I’m afraid that I shall think too well for my own good,”
I said unsteadily. And the cab drove on.




CHAPTER XI.
THE NAME WAS SULLIVAN


I had my arm done up temporarily in Baltimore and took the next train
home. I was pretty far gone when I stumbled out of a cab almost into
the scandalized arms of Mrs. Klopton. In fifteen minutes I was in bed,
with that good woman piling on blankets and blistering me in
unprotected places with hot-water bottles. And in an hour I had a whiff
of chloroform and Doctor Williams had set the broken bone.

I dropped asleep then, waking in the late twilight to a realization
that I was at home again, without the papers that meant conviction for
Andy Bronson, with a charge of murder hanging over my head, and with
something more than an impression of the girl my best friend was in
love with, a girl moreover who was almost as great an enigma as the
crime itself.

“And I’m no hand at guessing riddles,” I groaned half aloud. Mrs.
Klopton came over promptly and put a cold cloth on my forehead.

“Euphemia,” she said to some one outside the door, “telephone the
doctor that he is still rambling, but that he has switched from green
ribbons to riddles.”

“There’s nothing the matter with me, Mrs. Klopton,” I rebelled. “I was
only thinking out loud. Confound that cloth: it’s trickling all over
me!” I gave it a fling, and heard it land with a soggy thud on the
floor.

“Thinking out loud is delirium,” Mrs. Klopton said imperturbably. “A
fresh cloth, Euphemia.”

This time she held it on with a firm pressure that I was too weak to
resist. I expostulated feebly that I was drowning, which she also laid
to my mental exaltation, and then I finally dropped into a damp sleep.
It was probably midnight when I roused again. I had been dreaming of
the wreck, and it was inexpressibly comforting to feel the stability of
my bed, and to realize the equal stability of Mrs. Klopton, who sat,
fully attired, by the night light, reading _Science and Health_.

“Does that book say anything about opening the windows on a hot night?”
I suggested, when I had got my bearings.

She put it down immediately and came over to me. If there is one time
when Mrs. Klopton is chastened—and it is the only time—it is when she
reads _Science and Health_. “I don’t like to open the shutters, Mr.
Lawrence,” she explained. “Not since the night you went away.”

But, pressed further, she refused to explain. “The doctor said you were
not to be excited,” she persisted. “Here’s your beef tea.”

“Not a drop until you tell me,” I said firmly. “Besides, you know very
well there’s nothing the matter with me. This arm of mine is only a
false belief.” I sat up gingerly. “Now—why don’t you open that window?”

Mrs. Klopton succumbed. “Because there are queer goings-on in that
house next door,” she said. “If you will take the beef tea, Mr.
Lawrence, I will tell you.”

The queer goings-on, however, proved to be slightly disappointing. It
seemed that after I left on Friday night, a light was seen flitting
fitfully through the empty house next door. Euphemia had seen it first
and called Mrs. Klopton. Together they had watched it breathlessly
until it disappeared on the lower floor.

“You should have been a writer of ghost stories,” I said, giving my
pillows a thump. “And so it was fitting flitfully!”

“That’s what it was doing,” she reiterated. “Fitting flitfully—I mean
flitting fitfully—how you do throw me out, Mr. Lawrence! And what’s
more, it came again!”

“Oh, come now, Mrs. Klopton,” I objected, “ghosts are like lightning;
they never strike twice in the same night. That is only worth half a
cup of beef tea.”

“You may ask Euphemia,” she retorted with dignity. “Not more than an
hour after, there was a light there again. We saw it through the chinks
of the shutters. Only—_this time it began at the lower floor and
climbed!_”

“You oughtn’t to tell ghost stories at night,” came McKnight’s voice
from the doorway. “Really, Mrs. Klopton, I’m amazed at you. You old
duffer! I’ve got you to thank for the worst day of my life.”

Mrs. Klopton gulped. Then realizing that the “old duffer” was meant for
me, she took her empty cup and went out muttering.

“The Pirate’s crazy about me, isn’t she?” McKnight said to the closing
door. Then he swung around and held out his hand.

“By Jove,” he said, “I’ve been laying you out all day, lilies on the
door-bell, black gloves, everything. If you had had the sense of a
mosquito in a snow-storm, you would have telephoned me.”

“I never even thought of it.” I was filled with remorse. “Upon my word,
Rich, I hadn’t an idea beyond getting away from that place. If you had
seen what I saw—”

McKnight stopped me. “Seen it! Why, you lunatic, I’ve been digging for
you all day in the ruins! I’ve lunched and dined on horrors. Give me
something to rinse them down, Lollie.”

He had fished the key of the cellarette from its hiding-place in my
shoe bag and was mixing himself what he called a Bernard Shaw—a
foundation of brandy and soda, with a little of everything else in
sight to give it snap. Now that I saw him clearly, he looked weary and
grimy. I hated to tell him what I knew he was waiting to hear, but
there was no use wading in by inches. I ducked and got it over.

“The notes are gone, Rich,” I said, as quietly as I could. In spite of
himself his face fell.

“I—of course I expected it,” he said. “But—Mrs. Klopton said over the
telephone that you had brought home a grip and I hoped—well, Lord knows
we ought not to complain. You’re here, damaged, but here.” He lifted
his glass. “Happy days, old man!”

“If you will give me that black bottle and a teaspoon, I’ll drink that
in arnica, or whatever the stuff is; Rich,—the notes were gone before
the wreck!”

He wheeled and stared at me, the bottle in his hand. “Lost, strayed or
stolen?” he queried with forced lightness.

“Stolen, although I believe the theft was incidental to something
else.”

Mrs. Klopton came in at that moment, with an egg-nog in her hand. She
glanced at the clock, and, without addressing any one in particular,
she intimated that it was time for self-respecting folks to be at home
in bed. McKnight, who could never resist a fling at her back, spoke to
me in a stage whisper.

“Is she talking still? or again?” he asked, just before the door
closed. There was a second’s indecision with the knob, then, judging
discretion the better part, Mrs. Klopton went away.

“Now, then,” McKnight said, settling himself in a chair beside the bed,
“spit it out. Not the wreck—I know all I want about that. But the
theft. I can tell you beforehand that it was a woman.”

I had crawled painfully out of bed, and was in the act of pouring the
egg-nog down the pipe of the washstand. I paused, with the glass in the
air.

“A woman!” I repeated, startled. “What makes you think that?”

“You don’t know the first principles of a good detective yarn,” he said
scornfully. “Of course, it was the woman in the empty house next door.
You said it was brass pipes, you will remember. Well—on with the dance:
let joy be unconfined.”

So I told the story; I had told it so many times that day that I did it
automatically. And I told about the girl with the bronze hair, and my
suspicions. But I did not mention Alison West. McKnight listened to the
end without interruption. When I had finished he drew a long breath.

“Well!” he said. “That’s something of a mess, isn’t it? If you can only
prove your mild and child-like disposition, they couldn’t hold you for
the murder—which is a regular ten-twent-thirt crime, anyhow. But the
notes—that’s different. They are not burned, anyhow. Your man wasn’t on
the train—therefore, he wasn’t in the wreck. If he didn’t know what he
was taking, as you seem to think, he probably reads the papers, and
unless he is a fathead, he’s awake by this time to what he’s got. He’ll
try to sell them to Bronson, probably.”

“Or to us,” I put in.

We said nothing for a few minutes. McKnight smoked a cigarette and
stared at a photograph of Candida over the mantel. Candida is the best
pony for a heavy mount in seven states.

“I didn’t go to Richmond,” he observed finally. The remark followed my
own thoughts so closely that I started. “Miss West is not home yet from
Seal Harbor.”

Receiving no response, he lapsed again into thoughtful silence. Mrs.
Klopton came in just as the clock struck one, and made preparation for
the night by putting a large gaudy comfortable into an arm-chair in the
dressing-room, with a smaller, stiff-backed chair for her feet. She was
wonderfully attired in a dressing-gown that was reminiscent, in parts,
of all the ones she had given me for a half dozen Christmases, and she
had a purple veil wrapped around her head, to hide Heaven knows what
deficiency. She examined the empty egg-nog glass, inquired what the
evening paper had said about the weather, and then stalked into the
dressing-room, and prepared, with much ostentatious creaking, to sit up
all night.

We fell silent again, while McKnight traced a rough outline of the
berths on the white table-cover, and puzzled it out slowly. It was
something like this:

[Illustration]

“You think he changed the tags on seven and nine, so that when you went
back to bed you thought you were crawling into nine, when it was really
seven, eh?”

“Probably—yes.”

“Then toward morning, when everybody was asleep, your theory is that he
changed the numbers again and left the train.”

“I can’t think of anything else,” I replied wearily.

“Jove, what a game of bridge that fellow would play! It was like
finessing an eight-spot and winning out. They would scarcely have
doubted your story had the tags been reversed in the morning. He
certainly left you in a bad way. Not a jury in the country would stand
out against the stains, the stiletto, and the murdered man’s
pocket-book in your possession.”

“Then you think Sullivan did it?” I asked.

“Of course,” said McKnight confidently. “Unless you did it in your
sleep. Look at the stains on his pillow, and the dirk stuck into it.
And didn’t he have the man Harrington’s pocket-book?”

“But why did he go off without the money?” I persisted. “And where does
the bronze-haired girl come in?”

“Search me,” McKnight retorted flippantly. “Inflammation of the
imagination on your part.”

“Then there is the piece of telegram. It said lower ten, car seven.
It’s extremely likely that she had it. That telegram was about me,
Richey.”

“I’m getting a headache,” he said, putting out his cigarette against
the sole of his shoe. “All I’m certain of just now is that if there
hadn’t been a wreck, by this time you’d be sitting in an eight by ten
cell, and feeling like the rhyme for it.”

“But listen to this,” I contended, as he picked up his hat, “this
fellow Sullivan is a fugitive, and he’s a lot more likely to make
advances to Bronson than to us. We could have the case continued,
release Bronson on bail and set a watch on him.”

“Not my watch,” McKnight protested. “It’s a family heirloom.”

“You’d better go home,” I said firmly. “Go home and go to bed. You’re
sleepy. You can have Sullivan’s red necktie to dream over if you think
it will help any.”

Mrs. Klopton’s voice came drowsily from the next room, punctuated by a
yawn. “Oh, I forgot to tell you,” she called, with the suspicious lisp
which characterizes her at night, “somebody called up about noon, Mr.
Lawrence. It was long distance, and he said he would call again. The
name was”—she yawned—“Sullivan.”




CHAPTER XII.
THE GOLD BAG


I have always smiled at those cases of spontaneous combustion which,
like fusing the component parts of a seidlitz powder, unite two people
in a bubbling and ephemeral ecstasy. But surely there is possible, with
but a single meeting, an attraction so great, a community of mind and
interest so strong, that between that first meeting and the next the
bond may grow into something stronger. This is especially true, I
fancy, of people with temperament, the modern substitute for
imagination. It is a nice question whether lovers begin to love when
they are together, or when they are apart.

Not that I followed any such line of reasoning at the time. I would not
even admit my folly to myself. But during the restless hours of that
first night after the accident, when my back ached with lying on it,
and any other position was torture, I found my thoughts constantly
going back to Alison West. I dropped into a doze, to dream of touching
her fingers again to comfort her, and awoke to find I had patted a
teaspoonful of medicine out of Mrs. Klopton’s indignant hand. What was
it McKnight had said about making an egregious ass of myself?

And that brought me back to Richey, and I fancy I groaned. There is no
use expatiating on the friendship between two men who have gone
together through college, have quarreled and made it up, fussed
together over politics and debated creeds for years: men don’t need to
be told, and women can not understand. Nevertheless, I groaned. If it
had been any one but Rich!

Some things were mine, however, and I would hold them: the halcyon
breakfast, the queer hat, the pebble in her small shoe, the gold bag
with the broken chain—the bag! Why, it was in my pocket at that moment.

I got up painfully and found my coat. Yes, there was the purse, bulging
with an opulent suggestion of wealth inside. I went back to bed again,
somewhat dizzy, between effort and the touch of the trinket, so lately
hers. I held it up by its broken chain and gloated over it. By careful
attention to orders, I ought to be out in a day or so. Then—I could
return it to her. I really ought to do that: it was valuable, and I
wouldn’t care to trust it to the mail. I could run down to Richmond,
and see her once—there was no disloyalty to Rich in that.

I had no intention of opening the little bag. I put it under my
pillow—which was my reason for refusing to have the linen slips
changed, to Mrs. Klopton’s dismay. And sometimes during the morning,
while I lay under a virgin field of white, ornamented with strange
flowers, my cigarettes hidden beyond discovery, and _Science and
Health_ on a table by my elbow, as if by the merest accident, I slid my
hand under my pillow and touched it reverently.

McKnight came in about eleven. I heard his car at the curb, followed
almost immediately by his slam at the front door, and his usual clamor
on the stairs. He had a bottle under his arm, rightly surmising that I
had been forbidden stimulant, and a large box of cigarettes in his
pocket, suspecting my deprivation.

“Well,” he said cheerfully. “How did you sleep after keeping me up half
the night?”

I slid my hand around: the purse was well covered. “Have it now, or
wait till I get the cork out?” he rattled on.

“I don’t want anything,” I protested. “I wish you wouldn’t be so darned
cheerful, Richey.” He stopped whistling to stare at me.

“‘I am saddest when I sing!’” he quoted unctuously. “It’s pure
reaction, Lollie. Yesterday the sky was low: I was digging for my best
friend. To-day—he lies before me, his peevish self. Yesterday I thought
the notes were burned: to-day—I look forward to a good cross-country
chase, and with luck we will draw.” His voice changed suddenly.
“Yesterday—she was in Seal Harbor. To-day—she is here.”

“Here in Washington?” I asked, as naturally as I could.

“Yes. Going to stay a week or two.”

“Oh, I had a little hen and she had a wooden leg
And nearly every morning she used to lay an egg—”


“Will you stop that racket, Rich! It’s the real thing this time, I
suppose?”

“She’s the best little chicken that we have on the farm
And another little drink won’t do us any harm—”


he finished, twisting out the corkscrew. Then he came over and sat down
on the bed.

“Well,” he said judicially, “since you drag it from me, I think perhaps
it is. You—you’re such a confirmed woman-hater that I hardly knew how
you would take it.”

“Nothing of the sort,” I denied testily. “Because a man reaches the age
of thirty without making maudlin love to every—”

“I’ve taken to long country rides,” he went on reflectively, without
listening to me, “and yesterday I ran over a sheep; nearly went into
the ditch. But there’s a Providence that watches over fools and lovers,
and just now I know darned well that I’m one, and I have a sneaking
idea I’m both.”

“You are both,” I said with disgust. “If you can be rational for one
moment, I wish you would tell me why that man Sullivan called me over
the telephone yesterday morning.”

“Probably hadn’t yet discovered the Bronson notes—providing you hold to
your theory that the theft was incidental to the murder. May have
wanted his own clothes again, or to thank you for yours. Search me: I
can’t think of anything else.” The doctor came in just then.

As I said before, I think a lot of my doctor—when I am ill. He is a
young man, with an air of breezy self-confidence and good humor. He
looked directly past the bottle, which is a very valuable
accomplishment, and shook hands with McKnight until I could put the
cigarettes under the bedclothes. He had interdicted tobacco. Then he
sat down beside the bed and felt around the bandages with hands as
gentle as a baby’s.

“Pretty good shape,” he said. “How did you sleep?”

“Oh, occasionally,” I replied. “I would like to sit up, doctor.”

“Nonsense. Take a rest while you have an excuse for it. I wish to
thunder I could stay in bed for a day or so. I was up all night.”

“Have a drink,” McKnight said, pushing over the bottle.

“Twins!” The doctor grinned.

“Have two drinks.”

But the medical man refused.

“I wouldn’t even wear a champagne-colored necktie during business
hours,” he explained. “By the way, I had another case from your
accident, Mr. Blakeley, late yesterday afternoon. Under the tongue,
please.” He stuck a thermometer in my mouth.

I had a sudden terrible vision of the amateur detective coming to
light, note-book, cheerful impertinence and incriminating data. “A
small man?” I demanded, “gray hair—”

“Keep your mouth closed,” the doctor said peremptorily. “No. A woman,
with a fractured skull. Beautiful case. Van Kirk was up to his eyes and
sent for me. Hemorrhage, right-sided paralysis, irregular pupils—all
the trimmings. Worked for two hours.”

“Did she recover?” McKnight put in. He was examining the doctor with a
new awe.

“She lifted her right arm before I left,” the doctor finished cheerily,
“so the operation was a success, even if she should die.”

“Good Heavens,” McKnight broke in, “and I thought you were just an
ordinary mortal, like the rest of us! Let me touch you for luck. Was
she pretty?”

“Yes, and young. Had a wealth of bronze-colored hair. Upon my soul, I
hated to cut it.”

McKnight and I exchanged glances.

“Do you know her name, doctor?” I asked.

“No. The nurses said her clothes came from a Pittsburg tailor.”

“She is not conscious, I suppose?”

“No; she may be, to-morrow—or in a week.”

He looked at the thermometer, murmured something about liquid diet,
avoiding my eye—Mrs. Klopton was broiling a chop at the time—and took
his departure, humming cheerfully as he went down-stairs. McKnight
looked after him wistfully.

“Jove, I wish I had his constitution,” he exclaimed. “Neither nerves
nor heart! What a chauffeur he would make!”

But I was serious.

“I have an idea,” I said grimly, “that this small matter of the murder
is going to come up again, and that your uncle will be in the deuce of
a fix if it does. If that woman is going to die, somebody ought to be
around to take her deposition. She knows a lot, if she didn’t do it
herself. I wish you would go down to the telephone and get the
hospital. Find out her name, and if she is conscious.”

McKnight went under protest. “I haven’t much time,” he said, looking at
his watch. “I’m to meet Mrs. West and Alison at one. I want you to know
them, Lollie. You would like the mother.”

“Why not the daughter?” I inquired. I touched the little gold bag under
the pillow.

“Well,” he said judicially, “you’ve always declared against the
immaturity and romantic nonsense of very young women—”

“I never said anything of the sort,” I retorted furiously.

“‘There is more satisfaction to be had out of a good saddle horse!’” he
quoted me. “‘More excitement out of a polo pony, and as for the eternal
matrimonial chase, give me instead a good stubble, a fox, some decent
hounds and a hunter, and I’ll show you the real joys of the chase!’”

“For Heaven’s sake, go down to the telephone, you make my head ache,” I
said savagely.

I hardly know what prompted me to take out the gold purse and look at
it. It was an imbecile thing to do—call it impulse, sentimentality,
what you wish. I brought it out, one eye on the door, for Mrs. Klopton
has a ready eye and a noiseless shoe. But the house was quiet.
Down-stairs McKnight was flirting with the telephone central and there
was an odor of boneset tea in the air. I think Mrs. Klopton was
fascinated out of her theories by the “boneset” in connection with the
fractured arm.

Anyhow, I held up the bag and looked at it. It must have been
unfastened, for the next instant there was an avalanche on the
snowfield of the counterpane—some money, a wisp of a handkerchief, a
tiny booklet with thin leaves, covered with a powdery substance—and a
necklace. I drew myself up slowly and stared at the necklace.

It was one of the semi-barbaric affairs that women are wearing now, a
heavy pendant of gold chains and carved cameos, swung from a thin neck
chain of the same metal. The necklace was broken: in three places the
links were pulled apart and the cameos swung loose and partly detached.
But it was the supporting chain that held my eye and fascinated with
its sinister suggestion. Three inches of it had been snapped off, and
as well as I knew anything on earth, I knew that the bit of chain that
the amateur detective had found, blood-stain and all, belonged just
there.

And there was no one I could talk to about it, no one to tell me how
hideously absurd it was, no one to give me a slap and tell me there are
tons of fine gold chains made every year, or to point out the long arm
of coincidence!

With my one useful hand I fumbled the things back into the bag and
thrust it deep out of sight among the pillows. Then I lay back in a
cold perspiration. What connection had Alison West with this crime? Why
had she stared so at the gun-metal cigarette case that morning on the
train? What had alarmed her so at the farm-house? What had she taken
back to the gate? Why did she wish she had not escaped from the wreck?
And last, in Heaven’s name, how did a part of her necklace become torn
off and covered with blood?

Down-stairs McKnight was still at the telephone, and amusing himself
with Mrs. Klopton in the interval of waiting.

“Why did he come home in a gray suit, when he went away in a blue?” he
repeated. “Well, wrecks are queer things, Mrs. Klopton. The suit may
have turned gray with fright. Or perhaps wrecks do as queer stunts as
lightning. Friend of mine once was struck by lightning; he and the
caddy had taken refuge under a tree. After the flash, when they
recovered consciousness, there was my friend in the caddy’s clothes,
and the caddy in his. And as my friend was a large man and the caddy a
very small boy—”

McKnight’s story was interrupted by the indignant slam of the
dining-room door. He was obliged to wait some time, and even his
eternal cheerfulness was ebbing when he finally got the hospital.

“Is Doctor Van Kirk there?” he asked. “Not there? Well, can you tell me
how the patient is whom Doctor Williams, from Washington, operated on
last night? Well, I’m glad of that. Is she conscious? Do you happen to
know her name? Yes, I’ll hold the line.” There was a long pause, then
McKnight’s voice:

“Hello—yes. Thank you very much. Good-by.”

He came up-stairs, two steps at a time.

“Look here,” he said, bursting into the room, “there may be something
in your theory, after all. The woman’s name—it may be a coincidence,
but it’s curious—her name is Sullivan.”

“What did I tell you?” I said, sitting up suddenly in bed. “She’s
probably a sister of that scoundrel in lower seven, and she was afraid
of what he might do.”

“Well, I’ll go there some day soon. She’s not conscious yet. In the
meantime, the only thing I can do is to keep an eye, through a
detective, on the people who try to approach Bronson. We’ll have the
case continued, anyhow, in the hope that the stolen notes will sooner
or later turn up.”

“Confound this arm,” I said, paying for my energy with some
excruciating throbs. “There’s so much to be looked after, and here I
am, bandaged, splinted, and generally useless. It’s a beastly shame.”

“Don’t forget that I am here,” said McKnight pompously. “And another
thing, when you feel this way just remember there are two less
desirable places where you might be. One is jail, and the other is—” He
strummed on an imaginary harp, with devotional eyes.

But McKnight’s light-heartedness jarred on me that morning. I lay and
frowned under my helplessness. When by chance I touched the little gold
bag, it seemed to scorch my fingers. Richey, finding me unresponsive,
left to keep his luncheon engagement with Alison West. As he clattered
down the stairs, I turned my back to the morning sunshine and abandoned
myself to misery. By what strain on her frayed nerves was Alison West
keeping up, I wondered? Under the circumstances, would I dare to return
the bag? Knowing that I had it, would she hate me for my knowledge? Or
had I exaggerated the importance of the necklace, and in that case had
she forgotten me already?

But McKnight had not gone, after all. I heard him coming back, his
voice preceding him, and I groaned with irritation.

“Wake up!” he called. “Somebody’s sent you a lot of flowers. Please
hold the box, Mrs. Klopton; I’m going out to be run down by an
automobile.”

I roused to feeble interest. My brother’s wife is punctilious about
such things; all the new babies in the family have silver rattles, and
all the sick people flowers.

McKnight pulled up an armful of roses, and held them out to me.

“Wonder who they’re from?” he said, fumbling in the box for a card.
“There’s no name—yes, here’s one.”

He held it up and read it with exasperating slowness.

“‘Best wishes for an early recovery.
                    A COMPANION IN MISFORTUNE.’


“Well, what do you know about that!” he exclaimed. “That’s something
you didn’t tell me, Lollie.”

“It was hardly worth mentioning,” I said mendaciously, with my heart
beating until I could hear it. She had not forgotten, after all.

McKnight took a bud and fastened it in his button-hole. I’m afraid I
was not especially pleasant about it. They were her roses, and anyhow,
they were meant for me. Richey left very soon, with an irritating final
grin at the box.

“Good-by, sir woman-hater,” he jeered at me from the door.

So he wore one of the roses she had sent me, to luncheon with her, and
I lay back among my pillows and tried to remember that it was his game,
anyhow, and that I wasn’t even drawing cards. To remember that, and to
forget the broken necklace under my head!




CHAPTER XIII.
FADED ROSES


I was in the house for a week. Much of that time I spent in composing
and destroying letters of thanks to Miss West, and in growling at the
doctor. McKnight dropped in daily, but he was less cheerful than usual.
Now and then I caught him eying me as if he had something to say, but
whatever it was he kept it to himself. Once during the week he went to
Baltimore and saw the woman in the hospital there. From the description
I had little difficulty in recognizing the young woman who had been
with the murdered man in Pittsburg. But she was still unconscious. An
elderly aunt had appeared, a gaunt person in black, who sat around like
a buzzard on a fence, according to McKnight, and wept, in a mixed
figure, into a damp handkerchief.

On the last day of my imprisonment he stopped in to thrash out a case
that was coming up in court the next day, and to play a game of double
solitaire with me.

“Who won the ball game?” I asked.

“We were licked. Ask me something pleasant. Oh, by the way, Bronson’s
out to-day.”

“I’m glad I’m not on his bond,” I said pessimistically. “He’ll clear
out.”

“Not he.” McKnight pounced on my ace. “He’s no fool. Don’t you suppose
he knows you took those notes to Pittsburg? The papers were full of it.
And he knows you escaped with your life and a broken arm from the
wreck. What do we do next? The Commonwealth continues the case. A deaf
man on a dark night would know those notes are missing.”

“Don’t play so fast,” I remonstrated. “I have only one arm to your two.
Who is trailing Bronson? Did you try to get Johnson?”

“I asked for him, but he had some work on hand.”

“The murder’s evidently a dead issue,” I reflected. “No, I’m not
joking. The wreck destroyed all the evidence. But I’m firmly convinced
those notes will be offered, either to us or to Bronson very soon.
Johnson’s a blackguard, but he’s a good detective. He could make his
fortune as a game dog. What’s he doing?”

McKnight put down his cards, and rising, went to the window. As he held
the curtain back his customary grin looked a little forced.

“To tell you the truth, Lollie,” he said, “for the last two days he has
been watching a well-known Washington attorney named Lawrence Blakeley.
He’s across the street now.”

It took a moment for me to grasp what he meant.

“Why, it’s ridiculous,” I asserted. “What would they trail me for? Go
over and tell Johnson to get out of there, or I’ll pot at him with my
revolver.”

“You can tell him that yourself.” McKnight paused and bent forward.
“Hello, here’s a visitor; little man with string halt.”

“I won’t see him,” I said firmly. “I’ve been bothered enough with
reporters.”

We listened together to Mrs. Klopton’s expostulating tones in the lower
hall and the creak of the boards as she came heavily up the stairs. She
had a piece of paper in her hand torn from a pocket account-book, and
on it was the name, “Mr. Wilson Budd Hotchkiss. Important business.”

“Oh, well, show him up,” I said resignedly. “You’d better put those
cards away, Richey. I fancy it’s the rector of the church around the
corner.”

But when the door opened to admit a curiously alert little man,
adjusting his glasses with nervous fingers, my face must have shown my
dismay.

It was the amateur detective of the Ontario!

I shook hands without enthusiasm. Here was the one survivor of the
wrecked car who could do me any amount of harm. There was no hope that
he had forgotten any of the incriminating details. In fact, he held in
his hand the very note-book which contained them.

His manner was restrained, but it was evident he was highly excited. I
introduced him to McKnight, who has the imagination I lack, and who
placed him at once, mentally.

“I only learned yesterday that you had been—er—saved,” he said rapidly.
“Terrible accident—unspeakable. Dream about it all night and think
about it all day. Broken arm?”

“No. He just wears the splint to be different from other people,”
McKnight drawled lazily. I glared at him: there was nothing to be
gained by antagonizing the little man.

“Yes, a fractured humerus, which isn’t as funny as it sounds.”

“Humerus—humorous! Pretty good,” he cackled. “I must say you keep up
your spirits pretty well, considering everything.”

“You seem to have escaped injury,” I parried. He was fumbling for
something in his pockets.

“Yes, I escaped,” he replied abstractedly. “Remarkable thing, too. I
haven’t a doubt I would have broken my neck, but I landed on—you’ll
never guess what! I landed head first on the very pillow which was
under inspection at the time of the wreck. You remember, don’t you?
Where did I put that package?”

He found it finally and opened it on a table, displaying with some
theatricalism a rectangular piece of muslin and a similar patch of
striped ticking.

“You recognize it?” he said. “The stains, you see, and the hole made by
the dirk. I tried to bring away the entire pillow, but they thought I
was stealing it, and made me give it up.”

Richey touched the pieces gingerly. “By George,” he said, “and you
carry that around in your pocket! What if you should mistake it for
your handkerchief?”

But Mr. Hotchkiss was not listening. He stood bent somewhat forward,
leaning over the table, and fixed me with his ferret-like eyes.

“Have you seen the evening papers, Mr. Blakeley?” he inquired.

I glanced to where they lay unopened, and shook my head.

“Then I have a disagreeable task,” he said with evident relish. “Of
course, you had considered the matter of the man Harrington’s death
closed, after the wreck. I did myself. As far as I was concerned, I
meant to let it remain so. There were no other survivors, at least none
that I knew of, and in spite of circumstances, there were a number of
points in your favor.”

“Thank you,” I put in with a sarcasm that was lost on him.

“I verified your identity, for instance, as soon as I recovered from
the shock. Also—I found on inquiring of your tailor that you invariably
wore dark clothing.”

McKnight came forward threateningly. “Who are you, anyhow?” he
demanded. “And how is this any business of yours?” Mr. Hotchkiss was
entirely unruffled.

“I have a minor position here,” he said, reaching for a visiting card.
“I am a very small patch on the seat of government, sir.”

McKnight muttered something about certain offensive designs against the
said patch and retired grumbling to the window. Our visitor was opening
the paper with a tremendous expenditure of energy.

“Here it is. Listen.” He read rapidly aloud:

“The Pittsburg police have sent to Baltimore two detectives who are
looking up the survivors of the ill-fated Washington Flier. It has
transpired that Simon Harrington, the Wood Street merchant of that
city, was not killed in the wreck, but was murdered in his berth the
night preceding the accident. Shortly before the collision, John
Flanders, the conductor of the Flier, sent this telegram to the chief
of police:

“‘Body of Simon Harrington found stabbed in his berth, lower ten,
Ontario, at six-thirty this morning.
                    JOHN FLANDERS, Conductor.’


“It is hoped that the survivors of the wrecked car Ontario will be
found, to tell what they know of the discovery of the crime.

“Mr. John Gilmore, head of the steel company for which Mr. Harrington
was purchasing agent, has signified his intention of sifting the matter
to the bottom.”

“So you see,” Hotchkiss concluded, “there’s trouble brewing. You and I
are the only survivors of that unfortunate car.”

I did not contradict him, but I knew of two others, at least: Alison
West, and the woman we had left beside the road that morning, babbling
incoherently, her black hair tumbling over her white face.

“Unless we can find the man who occupied lower seven,” I suggested.

“I have already tried and failed. To find him would not clear you, of
course, unless we could establish some connection between him and the
murdered man. It is the only thing I see, however. I have learned this
much,” Hotchkiss concluded: “Lower seven was reserved from Cresson.”

Cresson! Where Alison West and Mrs. Curtis had taken the train!

McKnight came forward and suddenly held out his hand. “Mr. Hotchkiss,”
he said, “I—I’m sorry if I have been offensive. I thought when you came
in, that, like the Irishman and the government, you were ‘forninst’ us.
If you will put those cheerful relics out of sight somewhere, I should
be glad to have you dine with me at the Incubator.” (His name for his
bachelor apartment.) “Compared with Johnson, you are the great original
protoplasm.”

The strength of this was lost on Hotchkiss, but the invitation was
clear. They went out together, and from my window I watched them get
into McKnight’s car. It was raining, and at the corner the Cannonball
skidded. Across the street my detective, Johnson, looked after them
with his crooked smile. As he turned up his collar he saw me, and
lifted his hat.

I left the window and sat down in the growing dusk. So the occupant of
lower seven had got on the car at Cresson, probably with Alison West
and her companion. There was some one she cared about enough to shield.
I went irritably to the door and summoned Mrs. Klopton.

“You may throw out those roses,” I said without looking at her. “They
are quite dead.”

“They have been quite dead for three days,” she retorted spitefully.
“Euphemia said you threatened to dismiss her if she touched them.”




CHAPTER XIV.
THE TRAP-DOOR


By Sunday evening, a week after the wreck, my inaction had goaded me to
frenzy. The very sight of Johnson across the street or lurking, always
within sight of the house, kept me constantly exasperated. It was on
that day that things began to come to a focus, a burning-glass of
events that seemed to center on me.

I dined alone that evening in no cheerful frame of mind. There had been
a polo game the day before and I had lent a pony, which is always a bad
thing to do. And she had wrenched her shoulder, besides helping to lose
the game. There was no one in town: the temperature was ninety and
climbing, and my left hand persistently cramped under its bandage.

Mrs. Klopton herself saw me served, my bread buttered and cut in
tidbits, my meat ready for my fork. She hovered around me maternally,
obviously trying to cheer me.

“The paper says still warmer,” she ventured. “The thermometer is
ninety-two now.”

“And this coffee is two hundred and fifty,” I said, putting down my
cup. “Where is Euphemia? I haven’t seen her around, or heard a dish
smash all day.”

“Euphemia is in bed,” Mrs. Klopton said gravely. “Is your meat cut
small enough, Mr. Lawrence?” Mrs. Klopton can throw more mystery into
an ordinary sentence than any one I know. She can say, “Are your sheets
damp, sir?” And I can tell from her tone that the house across the
street has been robbed, or that my left hand neighbor has appendicitis.
So now I looked up and asked the question she was waiting for.

“What’s the matter with Euphemia?” I inquired idly.

“Frightened into her bed,” Mrs. Klopton said in a stage whisper. “She’s
had three hot water bottles and she hasn’t done a thing all day but
moan.”

“She oughtn’t to take hot water bottles,” I said in my severest tone.
“One would make me moan. You need not wait, I’ll ring if I need
anything.”

Mrs. Klopton sailed to the door, where she stopped and wheeled
indignantly. “I only hope you won’t laugh on the wrong side of your
face some morning, Mr. Lawrence,” she declared, with Christian
fortitude. “But I warn you, I am going to have the police watch that
house next door.”

I was half inclined to tell her that both it and we were under police
surveillance at that moment. But I like Mrs. Klopton, in spite of the
fact that I make her life a torment for her, so I refrained.

“Last night, when the paper said it was going to storm, I sent Euphemia
to the roof to bring the rugs in. Eliza had slipped out, although it
was her evening in. Euphemia went up to the roof—it was eleven
o’clock—and soon I heard her running down-stairs crying. When she got
to my room she just folded up on the floor. She said there was a black
figure sitting on the parapet of the house next door—the empty
house—and that when she appeared it rose and waved long black arms at
her and spit like a cat.”

I had finished my dinner and was lighting a cigarette. “If there was
any one up there, which I doubt, they probably sneezed,” I suggested.
“But if you feel uneasy, I’ll take a look around the roof to-night
before I turn in. As far as Euphemia goes, I wouldn’t be uneasy about
her—doesn’t she always have an attack of some sort when Eliza rings in
an extra evening on her?”

So I made a superficial examination of the window locks that night,
visiting parts of the house that I had not seen since I bought it. Then
I went to the roof. Evidently it had not been intended for any purpose
save to cover the house, for unlike the houses around, there was no
staircase. A ladder and a trap-door led to it, and it required some
nice balancing on my part to get up with my useless arm. I made it,
however, and found this unexplored part of my domain rather attractive.
It was cooler than down-stairs, and I sat on the brick parapet and
smoked my final cigarette. The roof of the empty house adjoined mine
along the back wing, but investigation showed that the trap-door across
the low dividing wall was bolted underneath.

There was nothing out of the ordinary anywhere, and so I assured Mrs.
Klopton. Needless to say, I did not tell her that I had left the
trap-door open, to see if it would improve the temperature of the
house. I went to bed at midnight, merely because there was nothing else
to do. I turned on the night lamp at the head of my bed, and picked up
a volume of Shaw at random (it was _Arms and the Man_, and I remember
thinking grimly that I was a good bit of a chocolate cream soldier
myself), and prepared to go to sleep. Shaw always puts me to sleep. I
have no apologies to make for what occurred that night, and not even an
explanation that I am sure of. I did a foolish thing under impulse, and
I have not been sorry.

It was something after two when the door-bell rang. It rang quickly,
twice. I got up drowsily, for the maids and Mrs. Klopton always lock
themselves beyond reach of the bell at night, and put on a
dressing-gown. The bell rang again on my way down-stairs. I lit the
hall light and opened the door. I was wide-awake now, and I saw that it
was Johnson. His bald head shone in the light—his crooked mouth was
twisted in a smile.

“Good Heavens, man,” I said irritably. “Don’t you ever go home and go
to bed?”

He closed the vestibule door behind him and cavalierly turned out the
light. Our dialogue was sharp, staccato.

“Have you a key to the empty house next door?” he demanded. “Somebody’s
in there, and the latch is caught.”

“The houses are alike. The key to this door may fit. Did you see them
go in?”

“No. There’s a light moving up from room to room. I saw something like
it last night, and I have been watching. The patrolman reported queer
doings there a week or so ago.”

“A light!” I exclaimed. “Do you mean that you—”

“Very likely,” he said grimly. “Have you a revolver?”

“All kinds in the gun rack,” I replied, and going into the den, I came
back with a Smith and Wesson. “I’m not much use,” I explained, “with
this arm, but I’ll do what I can. There may be somebody there. The
servants here have been uneasy.”

Johnson planned the campaign. He suggested on account of my familiarity
with the roof, that I go there and cut off escape in that direction. “I
have Robison out there now—the patrolman on the beat,” he said. “He’ll
watch below and you above, while I search the house. Be as quiet as
possible.”

I was rather amused. I put on some clothes and felt my way carefully up
the stairs, the revolver swinging free in my pocket, my hand on the
rail. At the foot of the ladder I stopped and looked up. Above me there
was a gray rectangle of sky dotted with stars. It occurred to me that
with my one serviceable hand holding the ladder, I was hardly in a
position to defend myself, that I was about to hoist a body that I am
rather careful of into a danger I couldn’t see and wasn’t particularly
keen about anyhow. I don’t mind saying that the seconds it took me to
scramble up the ladder were among the most unpleasant that I recall.

I got to the top, however, without incident. I could see fairly well
after the darkness of the house beneath, but there was nothing
suspicious in sight. The roofs, separated by two feet of brick wall,
stretched around me, unbroken save by an occasional chimney. I went
very softly over to the other trap, the one belonging to the suspected
house. It was closed, but I imagined I could hear Johnson’s footsteps
ascending heavily. Then even that was gone. A near-by clock struck
three as I stood waiting. I examined my revolver then, for the first
time, and found it was empty!

I had been rather skeptical until now. I had had the usual tolerant
attitude of the man who is summoned from his bed to search for
burglars, combined with the artificial courage of firearms. With the
discovery of my empty gun, I felt like a man on the top of a volcano in
lively eruption. Suddenly I found myself staring incredulously at the
trap-door at my feet. I had examined it early in the evening and found
it bolted. Did I imagine it, or had it raised about an inch? Wasn’t it
moving slowly as I looked? No, I am not a hero: I was startled almost
into a panic. I had one arm, and whoever was raising that trap-door had
two. My knees had a queer inclination to bend the wrong way.

Johnson’s footsteps were distinct enough, but he was evidently far
below. The trap, raised perhaps two inches now, remained stationary.
There was no sound from beneath it: once I thought I heard two or three
gasping respirations: I am not sure they were not my own. I wanted
desperately to stand on one leg at a time and hold the other up out of
focus of a possible revolver.

I did not see the hand appear. There was nothing there, and then it was
there, clutching the frame of the trap. I did the only thing I could
think of; I put my foot on it!

There was not a sound from beneath. The next moment I was kneeling and
had clutched the wrist just above the hand. After a second’s struggle,
the arm was still. With something real to face, I was myself again.

“Don’t move, or I’ll stand on the trap and break your arm,” I panted.
What else could I threaten? I couldn’t shoot, I couldn’t even fight.
“Johnson!” I called.

And then I realized the thing that stayed with me for a month, the
thing I can not think of even now without a shudder. The hand lay ice
cold, strangely quiescent. Under my fingers, an artery was beating
feebly. The wrist was as slender as—I held the hand to the light. Then
I let it drop.

“Good Lord,” I muttered, and remained on my knees, staring at the spot
where the hand had been. It was gone now: there was a faint rustle in
the darkness below, and then silence.

I held up my own hand in the starlight and stared at a long scratch in
the palm. “A woman!” I said to myself stupidly. “By all that’s
ridiculous, a woman!”

Johnson was striking matches below and swearing softly to himself. “How
the devil do you get to the roof?” he called. “I think I’ve broken my
nose.”

He found the ladder after a short search and stood at the bottom,
looking up at me. “Well, I suppose you haven’t seen him?” he inquired.
“There are enough darned cubbyholes in this house to hide a patrol
wagon load of thieves.” He lighted a fresh match. “Hello, here’s
another door!”

By the sound of his diminishing footsteps I supposed it was a rear
staircase. He came up again in ten minutes or so, this time with the
policeman.

“He’s gone, all right,” he said ruefully. “If you’d been attending to
your business, Robison, you’d have watched the back door.”

“I’m not twins.” Robison was surly.

“Well,” I broke in, as cheerfully as I could, “if you are through with
this jolly little affair, and can get down my ladder without having my
housekeeper ring the burglar alarm, I have some good Monongahela
whisky—eh?”

They came without a second invitation across the roof, and with them
safely away from the house I breathed more freely. Down in the den I
fulfilled my promise, which Johnson drank to the toast, “Coming through
the rye.” He examined my gun rack with the eye of a connoisseur, and
even when he was about to go he cast a loving eye back at the weapons.

“Ever been in the army?” he inquired.

“No,” I said with a bitterness that he noticed but failed to
comprehend. “I’m a chocolate cream soldier—you don’t read Shaw, I
suppose, Johnson?”

“Never heard of him,” the detective said indifferently. “Well, good
night, Mr. Blakeley. Much obliged.” At the door he hesitated and
coughed.

“I suppose you understand, Mr. Blakeley,” he said awkwardly, “that
this—er—surveillance is all in the day’s work. I don’t like it, but
it’s duty. Every man to his duty, sir.”

“Sometime when you are in an open mood, Johnson,” I returned, “you can
explain why I am being watched at all.”




CHAPTER XV.
THE CINEMATOGRAPH


On Monday I went out for the first time. I did not go to the office. I
wanted to walk. I thought fresh air and exercise would drive away the
blue devils that had me by the throat. McKnight insisted on a long day
in his car, but I refused.

“I don’t know why not,” he said sulkily. “I can’t walk. I haven’t
walked two consecutive blocks in three years. Automobiles have made
legs mere ornaments—and some not even that. We could have Johnson out
there chasing us over the country at five dollars an hour!”

“He can chase us just as well at five miles an hour,” I said. “But what
gets me, McKnight, is why I am under surveillance at all. How do the
police know _I_ was accused of that thing?”

“The young lady who sent the flowers—she isn’t likely to talk, is she?”

“No. That is, I didn’t say it was a lady.” I groaned as I tried to get
my splinted arm into a coat. “Anyhow, she didn’t tell,” I finished with
conviction, and McKnight laughed.

It had rained in the early morning, and Mrs. Klopton predicted more
showers. In fact, so firm was her belief and so determined her eye that
I took the umbrella she proffered me.

“Never mind,” I said. “We can leave it next door; I have a story to
tell you, Richey, and it requires proper setting.”

McKnight was puzzled, but he followed me obediently round to the
kitchen entrance of the empty house. It was unlocked, as I had
expected. While we climbed to the upper floor I retailed the events of
the previous night.

“It’s the finest thing I ever heard of,” McKnight said, staring up at
the ladder and the trap. “What a vaudeville skit it would make! Only
you ought not to have put your foot on her hand. They don’t do it in
the best circles.”

I wheeled on him impatiently.

“You don’t understand the situation at all, Richey!” I exclaimed. “What
would you say if I tell you it was the hand of a lady? It was covered
with rings.”

“A lady!” he repeated. “Why, I’d say it was a darned compromising
situation, and that the less you say of it the better. Look here,
Lawrence, I think you dreamed it. You’ve been in the house too much. I
take it all back: you do need exercise.”

“She escaped through this door, I suppose,” I said as patiently as I
could. “Evidently down the back staircase. We might as well go down
that way.”

“According to the best precedents in these affairs, we should find a
glove about here,” he said as we started down. But he was more
impressed than he cared to own. He examined the dusty steps carefully,
and once, when a bit of loose plaster fell just behind him, he started
like a nervous woman.

“What I don’t understand is why you let her go,” he said, stopping
once, puzzled. “You’re not usually quixotic.”

“When we get out into the country, Richey,” I replied gravely, “I am
going to tell you another story, and if you don’t tell me I’m a fool
and a craven, on the strength of it, you are no friend of mine.”

We stumbled through the twilight of the staircase into the blackness of
the shuttered kitchen. The house had the moldy smell of closed
buildings: even on that warm September morning it was damp and chilly.
As we stepped into the sunshine McKnight gave a shiver.

“Now that we are out,” he said, “I don’t mind telling you that I have
been there before. Do you remember the night you left, and, the face at
the window?”

“When you speak of it—yes.”

“Well, I was curious about that thing,” he went on, as we started up
the street, “and I went back. The street door was unlocked, and I
examined every room. I was Mrs. Klopton’s ghost that carried a light,
and clumb.”

“Did you find anything?”

“Only a clean place rubbed on the window opposite your dressing-room.
Splendid view of an untidy interior. If that house is ever occupied,
you’d better put stained glass in that window of yours.”

As we turned the corner I glanced back. Half a block behind us Johnson
was moving our way slowly. When he saw me he stopped and proceeded with
great deliberation to light a cigar. By hurrying, however, he caught
the car that we took, and stood unobtrusively on the rear platform. He
looked fagged, and absent-mindedly paid our fares, to McKnight’s
delight.

“We will give him a run for his money,” he declared, as the car moved
countryward. “Conductor, let us off at the muddiest lane you can find.”

At one o’clock, after a six-mile ramble, we entered a small country
hotel. We had seen nothing of Johnson for a half hour. At that time he
was a quarter of a mile behind us, and losing rapidly. Before we had
finished our luncheon he staggered into the inn. One of his boots was
under his arm, and his whole appearance was deplorable. He was coated
with mud, streaked with perspiration, and he limped as he walked. He
chose a table not far from us and ordered Scotch. Beyond touching his
hat he paid no attention to us.

“I’m just getting my second wind,” McKnight declared. “How do you feel,
Mr. Johnson? Six or eight miles more and we’ll all enjoy our dinners.”
Johnson put down the glass he had raised to his lips without replying.

The fact was, however, that I was like Johnson. I was soft from my
week’s inaction, and I was pretty well done up. McKnight, who was a
well spring of vitality and high spirits, ordered a strange concoction,
made of nearly everything in the bar, and sent it over to the
detective, but Johnson refused it.

“I hate that kind of person,” McKnight said pettishly. “Kind of a
fellow that thinks you’re going to poison his dog if you offer him a
bone.”

When we got back to the car line, with Johnson a draggled and drooping
tail to the kite, I was in better spirits. I had told McKnight the
story of the three hours just after the wreck; I had not named the
girl, of course; she had my promise of secrecy. But I told him
everything else. It was a relief to have a fresh mind on it: I had
puzzled so much over the incident at the farm-house, and the necklace
in the gold bag, that I had lost perspective.

He had been interested, but inclined to be amused, until I came to the
broken chain. Then he had whistled softly.

“But there are tons of fine gold chains made every year,” he said. “Why
in the world do you think that the—er—smeary piece came from that
necklace?”

I had looked around. Johnson was far behind, scraping the mud off his
feet with a piece of stick.

“I have the short end of the chain in the sealskin bag,” I reminded
him. “When I couldn’t sleep this morning I thought I would settle it,
one way or the other. It was hell to go along the way I had been doing.
And—there’s no doubt about it, Rich. It’s the same chain.”

We walked along in silence until we caught the car back to town.

“Well,” he said finally, “you know the girl, of course, and I don’t.
But if you like her—and I think myself you’re rather hard hit, old
man—I wouldn’t give a whoop about the chain in the gold purse. It’s
just one of the little coincidences that hang people now and then. And
as for last night—if she’s the kind of a girl you say she is, and you
think she had anything to do with that, you—you’re addled, that’s all.
You can depend on it, the lady of the empty house last week is the lady
of last night. And yet your train acquaintance was in Altoona at that
time.”

Just before we got off the car, I reverted to the subject again. It was
never far back in my mind.

“About the—young lady of the train, Rich,” I said, with what I suppose
was elaborate carelessness, “I don’t want you to get a wrong
impression. I am rather unlikely to see her again, but even if I do,
I—I believe she is already ‘bespoke,’ or next thing to it.”

He made no reply, but as I opened the door with my latch-key he stood
looking up at me from the pavement with his quizzical smile.

“Love is like the measles,” he orated. “The older you get it, the worse
the attack.”

Johnson did not appear again that day. A small man in a raincoat took
his place. The next morning I made my initial trip to the office, the
raincoat still on hand. I had a short conference with Miller, the
district attorney, at eleven. Bronson was under surveillance, he said,
and any attempt to sell the notes to him would probably result in their
recovery. In the meantime, as I knew, the Commonwealth had continued
the case, in hope of such contingency.

At noon I left the office and took a veterinarian to see Candida, the
injured pony. By one o’clock my first day’s duties were performed, and
a long Sahara of hot afternoon stretched ahead. McKnight, always glad
to escape from the grind, suggested a vaudeville, and in sheer _ennui_
I consented. I could neither ride, drive nor golf, and my own company
bored me to distraction.

“Coolest place in town these days,” he declared. “Electric fans, breezy
songs, airy costumes. And there’s Johnson just behind—the coldest
proposition in Washington.”

He gravely bought three tickets and presented the detective with one.
Then we went in. Having lived a normal, busy life, the theater in the
afternoon is to me about on a par with ice-cream for breakfast. Up on
the stage a very stout woman in short pink skirts, with a smile that
McKnight declared looked like a slash in a roll of butter, was singing
nasally, with a laborious kick at the end of each verse. Johnson, two
rows ahead, went to sleep. McKnight prodded me with his elbow.

“Look at the first box to the right,” he said, in a stage whisper. “I
want you to come over at the end of this act.”

It was the first time I had seen her since I put her in the cab at
Baltimore. Outwardly I presume I was calm, for no one turned to stare
at me, but every atom of me cried out at the sight of her. She was
leaning, bent forward, lips slightly parted, gazing raptly at the
Japanese conjurer who had replaced what McKnight disrespectfully called
the Columns of Hercules. Compared with the draggled lady of the
farm-house, she was radiant.

For that first moment there was nothing but joy at the sight of her.
McKnight’s touch on my arm brought me back to reality.

“Come over and meet them,” he said. “That’s the cousin Miss West is
visiting, Mrs. Dallas.”

But I would not go. After he went I sat there alone, painfully
conscious that I was being pointed out and stared at from the box. The
abominable Japanese gave way to yet more atrocious performing dogs.

“How many offers of marriage will the young lady in the box have?” The
dog stopped sagely at ‘none,’ and then pulled out a card that said
eight. Wild shouts of glee by the audience. “The fools,” I muttered.

After a little I glanced over. Mrs. Dallas was talking to McKnight, but
She was looking straight at me. She was flushed, but more calm than I,
and she did not bow. I fumbled for my hat, but the next moment I saw
that they were going, and I sat still. When McKnight came back he was
triumphant.

“I’ve made an engagement for you,” he said. “Mrs. Dallas asked me to
bring you to dinner to-night, and I said I knew you would fall all over
yourself to go. You are requested to bring along the broken arm, and
any other souvenirs of the wreck that you may possess.”

“I’ll do nothing of the sort,” I declared, struggling against my
inclination. “I can’t even tie my necktie, and I have to have my food
cut for me.”

“Oh, that’s all right,” he said easily. “I’ll send Stogie over to fix
you up, and Mrs. Dal knows all about the arm. I told her.”

(Stogie is his Japanese factotum, so called because he is lean, a
yellowish brown in color, and because he claims to have been shipped
into this country in a box.)

The Cinematograph was finishing the program. The house was dark and the
music had stopped, as it does in the circus just before somebody risks
his neck at so much a neck in the Dip of Death, or the hundred-foot
dive. Then, with a sort of shock, I saw on the white curtain the
announcement:

THE NEXT PICTURE


IS THE DOOMED WASHINGTON FLIER, TAKEN A SHORT DISTANCE FROM THE SCENE
OF THE WRECK ON THE FATAL MORNING OF SEPTEMBER TENTH. TWO MILES FARTHER
ON IT MET WITH ALMOST COMPLETE ANNIHILATION.


I confess to a return of some of the sickening sensations of the wreck;
people around me were leaning forward with tense faces. Then the
letters were gone, and I saw a long level stretch of track, even the
broken stone between the ties standing out distinctly. Far off under a
cloud of smoke a small object was rushing toward us and growing larger
as it came.

Now it was on us, a mammoth in size, with huge drivers and a colossal
tender. The engine leaped aside, as if just in time to save us from
destruction, with a glimpse of a stooping fireman and a grimy engineer.
The long train of sleepers followed. From a forward vestibule a porter
in a white coat waved his hand. The rest of the cars seemed still
wrapped in slumber. With mixed sensations I saw my own car, Ontario,
fly past, and then I rose to my feet and gripped McKnight’s shoulder.

On the lowest step at the last car, one foot hanging free, was a man.
His black derby hat was pulled well down to keep it from blowing away,
and his coat was flying open in the wind. He was swung well out from
the car, his free hand gripping a small valise, every muscle tense for
a jump.

“Good God, that’s my man!” I said hoarsely, as the audience broke into
applause. McKnight half rose: in his seat ahead Johnson stifled a yawn
and turned to eye me.

I dropped into my chair limply, and tried to control my excitement.
“The man on the last platform of the train,” I said. “He was just about
to leap; I’ll swear that was my bag.”

“Could you see his face?” McKnight asked in an undertone. “Would you
know him again?”

“No. His hat was pulled down and his head was bent. I’m going back to
find out where that picture was taken. They say two miles, but it may
have been forty.”

The audience, busy with its wraps, had not noticed. Mrs. Dallas and
Alison West had gone. In front of us Johnson had dropped his hat and
was stooping for it.

“This way,” I motioned to McKnight, and we wheeled into the narrow
passage beside us, back of the boxes. At the end there was a door
leading into the wings, and as we went boldly through I turned the key.

The final set was being struck, and no one paid any attention to us.
Luckily they were similarly indifferent to a banging at the door I had
locked, a banging which, I judged, signified Johnson.

“I guess we’ve broken up his interference,” McKnight chuckled.

Stage hands were hurrying in every direction; pieces of the side wall
of the last drawing-room menaced us; a switchboard behind us was
singing like a tea-kettle. Everywhere we stepped we were in somebody’s
way. At last we were across, confronting a man in his shirt sleeves,
who by dots and dashes of profanity seemed to be directing the chaos.

“Well?” he said, wheeling on us. “What can I do for you?”

“I would like to ask,” I replied, “if you have any idea just where the
last cinematograph picture was taken.”

“Broken board—picnickers—lake?”

“No. The Washington Flier.”

He glanced at my bandaged arm.

“The announcement says two miles,” McKnight put in, “but we should like
to know whether it is railroad miles, automobile miles, or policeman
miles.”

“I am sorry I can’t tell you,” he replied, more civilly. “We get those
pictures by contract. We don’t take them ourselves.”

“Where are the company’s offices?”

“New York.” He stepped forward and grasped a super by the shoulder.
“What in blazes are you doing with that gold chair in a kitchen set?
Take that piece of pink plush there and throw it over a soap box, if
you haven’t got a kitchen chair.”

I had not realized the extent of the shock, but now I dropped into a
chair and wiped my forehead. The unexpected glimpse of Alison West,
followed almost immediately by the revelation of the picture, had left
me limp and unnerved. McKnight was looking at his watch.

“He says the moving picture people have an office down-town. We can
make it if we go now.”

So he called a cab, and we started at a gallop. There was no sign of
the detective. “Upon my word,” Richey said, “I feel lonely without
him.”

The people at the down-town office of the cinematograph company were
very obliging. The picture had been taken, they said, at M——, just two
miles beyond the scene of the wreck. It was not much, but it was
something to work on. I decided not to go home, but to send McKnight’s
Jap for my clothes, and to dress at the Incubator. I was determined, if
possible, to make my next day’s investigations without Johnson. In the
meantime, even if it was for the last time, I would see Her that night.
I gave Stogie a note for Mrs. Klopton, and with my dinner clothes there
came back the gold bag, wrapped in tissue paper.




CHAPTER XVI.
THE SHADOW OF A GIRL


Certain things about the dinner at the Dallas house will always be
obscure to me. Dallas was something in the Fish Commission, and I
remember his reeling off fish eggs in billions while we ate our caviar.
He had some particular stunt he had been urging the government to for
years—something about forbidding the establishment of mills and
factories on river-banks—it seems they kill the fish, either the smoke,
or the noise, or something they pour into the water.

Mrs. Dallas was there, I think. Of course, I suppose she must have
been; and there was a woman in yellow: I took her in to dinner, and I
remember she loosened my clams for me so I could get them. But the only
real person at the table was a girl across in white, a sublimated young
woman who was as brilliant as I was stupid, who never by any chance
looked directly at me, and who appeared and disappeared across the
candles and orchids in a sort of halo of radiance.

When the dinner had progressed from salmon to roast, and the
conversation had done the same thing—from fish to scandal—the yellow
gown turned to me. “We have been awfully good, haven’t we, Mr.
Blakeley?” she asked. “Although I am crazy to hear, I have not said
‘wreck’ once. I’m sure you must feel like the survivor of Waterloo, or
something of the sort.”

“If you want me to tell you about the wreck,” I said, glancing across
the table, “I’m sorry to be disappointing, but I don’t remember
anything.”

“You are fortunate to be able to forget it.” It was the first word Miss
West had spoken directly to me, and it went to my head.

“There are some things I have not forgotten,” I said, over the candles.
“I recall coming to myself some time after, and that a girl, a
beautiful girl—”

“Ah!” said the lady in yellow, leaning forward breathlessly. Miss West
was staring at me coldly, but, once started, I had to stumble on.

“That a girl was trying to rouse me, and that she told me I had been on
fire twice already.” A shudder went around the table.

“But surely that isn’t the end of the story,” Mrs. Dallas put in
aggrievedly. “Why, that’s the most tantalizing thing I ever heard.”

“I’m afraid that’s all,” I said. “She went her way and I went mine. If
she recalls me at all, she probably thinks of me as a weak-kneed
individual who faints like a woman when everything is over.”

“What did I tell you?” Mrs. Dallas asserted triumphantly. “He fainted,
did you hear? when everything was over! He hasn’t begun to tell it.”

I would have given a lot by that time if I had not mentioned the girl.
But McKnight took it up there and carried it on.

“Blakeley is a regular geyser,” he said. “He never spouts until he
reaches the boiling point. And by that same token, although he hasn’t
said much about the Lady of the Wreck, I think he is crazy about her.
In fact, I am sure of it. He thinks he has locked his secret in the
caves of his soul, but I call you to witness that he has it nailed to
his face. Look at him!”

I squirmed miserably and tried to avoid the startled eyes of the girl
across the table. I wanted to choke McKnight and murder the rest of the
party.

“It isn’t fair,” I said as coolly as I could. “I have my fingers
crossed; you are five against one.”

“And to think that there was a murder on that very train,” broke in the
lady in yellow. “It was a perfect crescendo of horrors, wasn’t it? And
what became of the murdered man, Mr. Blakeley?”

McKnight had the sense to jump into the conversation and save my reply.

“They say good Pittsburgers go to Atlantic City when they die,” he
said. “So—we are reasonably certain the gentleman did _not_ go to the
seashore.”

The meal was over at last, and once in the drawing-room it was clear we
hung heavy on the hostess’ hands. “It is so hard to get people for
bridge in September,” she wailed, “there is absolutely nobody in town.
Six is a dreadful number.”

“It’s a good poker number,” her husband suggested.

The matter settled itself, however. I was hopeless, save as a dummy;
Miss West said it was too hot for cards, and went out on a balcony that
overlooked the Mall. With obvious relief Mrs. Dallas had the card-table
brought, and I was face to face with the minute I had dreaded and hoped
for for a week.

Now it had come, it was more difficult than I had anticipated. I do not
know if there was a moon, but there was the urban substitute for it—the
arc light. It threw the shadow of the balcony railing in long black
bars against her white gown, and as it swung sometimes her face was in
the light. I drew a chair close so that I could watch her.

“Do you know,” I said, when she made no effort at speech, “that you are
a much more formidable person to-night, in that gown, than you were the
last time I saw you?”

The light swung on her face; she was smiling faintly. “The hat with the
green ribbons!” she said. “I must take it back; I had almost
forgotten.”

“I have not forgotten—anything.” I pulled myself up short. This was
hardly loyalty to Richey. His voice came through the window just then,
and perhaps I was wrong, but I thought she raised her head to listen.

“Look at this hand,” he was saying. “Regular pianola: you could play it
with your feet.”

“He’s a dear, isn’t he?” Alison said unexpectedly. “No matter how
depressed and downhearted I am, I always cheer up when I see Richey.”

“He’s more than that,” I returned warmly. “He is the most honorable
fellow I know. If he wasn’t so much that way, he would have a career
before him. He wanted to put on the doors of our offices, Blakeley and
McKnight, P. B. H., which is Poor But Honest.”

From my comparative poverty to the wealth of the girl beside me was a
single mental leap. From that wealth to the grandfather who was
responsible for it was another.

“I wonder if you know that I had been to Pittsburg to see your
grandfather when I met you?” I said.

“You?” She was surprised.

“Yes. And you remember the alligator bag that I told you was exchanged
for the one you cut off my arm?” She nodded expectantly. “Well, in that
valise were the forged Andy Bronson notes, and Mr. Gilmore’s deposition
that they were forged.”

She was on her feet in an instant. “In that bag!” she cried. “Oh, why
didn’t you tell me that before? Oh, it’s so ridiculous, so—so hopeless.
Why, I could—”

She stopped suddenly and sat down again. “I do not know that I am
sorry, after all,” she said after a pause. “Mr. Bronson was a friend of
my father’s. I—I suppose it was a bad thing for you, losing the
papers?”

“Well, it was not a good thing,” I conceded. “While we are on the
subject of losing things, do you remember—do you know that I still have
your gold purse?”

She did not reply at once. The shadow of a column was over her face,
but I guessed that she was staring at me.

“_You_ have it!” She almost whispered.

“I picked it up in the street car,” I said, with a cheerfulness I did
not feel. “It looks like a very opulent little purse.”

Why didn’t she speak about the necklace? For just a careless word to
make me sane again!

“You!” she repeated, horror-stricken. And then I produced the purse and
held it out on my palm. “I should have sent it to you before, I
suppose, but, as you know, I have been laid up since the wreck.”

We both saw McKnight at the same moment. He had pulled the curtains
aside and was standing looking out at us. The tableau of give and take
was unmistakable; the gold purse, her outstretched hand, my own
attitude. It was over in a second; then he came out and lounged on the
balcony railing.

“They’re mad at me in there,” he said airily, “so I came out. I suppose
the reason they call it bridge is because so many people get cross over
it.”

The heat broke up the card group soon after, and they all came out for
the night breeze. I had no more words alone with Alison.

I went back to the Incubator for the night. We said almost nothing on
the way home; there was a constraint between us for the first time that
I could remember. It was too early for bed, and so we smoked in the
living-room and tried to talk of trivial things. After a time even
those failed, and we sat silent. It was McKnight who finally broached
the subject.

“And so she wasn’t at Seal Harbor at all.”

“No.”

“Do you know where she was, Lollie?”

“Somewhere near Cresson.”

“And that was the purse—her purse—with the broken necklace in it?”

“Yes, it was. You understand, don’t you, Rich, that, having given her
my word, I couldn’t tell you?”

“I understand a lot of things,” he said, without bitterness.

We sat for some time and smoked. Then Richey got up and stretched
himself. “I’m off to bed, old man,” he said. “Need any help with that
game arm of yours?”

“No, thanks,” I returned.

I heard him go into his room and lock the door. It was a bad hour for
me. The first shadow between us, and the shadow of a girl at that.




CHAPTER XVII.
AT THE FARM-HOUSE AGAIN


McKnight is always a sympathizer with the early worm. It was late when
he appeared. Perhaps, like myself, he had not slept well. But he was
apparently cheerful enough, and he made a better breakfast than I did.
It was one o’clock before we got to Baltimore. After a half hour’s wait
we took a local for M——, the station near which the cinematograph
picture had been taken.

We passed the scene of the wreck, McKnight with curiosity, I with a
sickening sense of horror. Back in the fields was the little farm-house
where Alison West and I had intended getting coffee, and winding away
from the track, maple trees shading it on each side, was the lane where
we had stopped to rest, and where I had—it seemed presumption beyond
belief now—where I had tried to comfort her by patting her hand.

We got out at M——, a small place with two or three houses and a general
store. The station was a one-roomed affair, with a railed-off place at
the end, where a scale, a telegraph instrument and a chair constituted
the entire furnishing.

The station agent was a young man with a shrewd face. He stopped
hammering a piece of wood over a hole in the floor to ask where we
wanted to go.

“We’re not going,” said McKnight, “we’re coming. Have a cigar?”

The agent took it with an inquiring glance, first at it and then at us.

“We want to ask you a few questions,” began McKnight, perching himself
on the railing and kicking the chair forward for me. “Or, rather, this
gentleman does.”

“Wait a minute,” said the agent, glancing through the window. “There’s
a hen in that crate choking herself to death.”

He was back in a minute, and took up his position near a sawdust-filled
box that did duty as a cuspidor.

“Now fire away,” he said.

“In the first place,” I began, “do you remember the day the Washington
Flier was wrecked below here?”

“Do I!” he said. “Did Jonah remember the whale?”

“Were you on the platform here when the first section passed?”

“I was.”

“Do you recall seeing a man hanging to the platform of the last car?”

“There was no one hanging there when she passed here,” he said with
conviction. “I watched her out of sight.”

“Did you see anything that morning of a man about my size, carrying a
small grip, and wearing dark clothes and a derby hat?” I asked eagerly.

McKnight was trying to look unconcerned, but I was frankly anxious. It
was clear that the man had jumped somewhere in the mile of track just
beyond.

“Well, yes, I did.” The agent cleared his throat. “When the smash came
the operator at MX sent word along the wire, both ways. I got it here,
and I was pretty near crazy, though I knew it wasn’t any fault of mine.

“I was standing on the track looking down, for I couldn’t leave the
office, when a young fellow with light hair limped up to me and asked
me what that smoke was over there.

“‘That’s what’s left of the Washington Flier,’ I said, ‘and I guess
there’s souls going up in that smoke.’

“‘Do you mean the first section?’ he said, getting kind of
greenish-yellow.

“‘That’s what I mean,’ I said; ‘split to kindling wood because
Rafferty, on the second section, didn’t want to be late.’

“He put his hand out in front of him, and the satchel fell with a bang.

“‘My God!’ he said, and dropped right on the track in a heap.

“I got him into the station and he came around, but he kept on groaning
something awful. He’d sprained his ankle, and when he got a little
better I drove him over in Carter’s milk wagon to the Carter place, and
I reckon he stayed there a spell.”

“That’s all, is it?” I asked.

“That’s all—or, no, there’s something else. About noon that day one of
the Carter twins came down with a note from him asking me to send a
long-distance message to some one in Washington.”

“To whom?” I asked eagerly.

“I reckon I’ve forgot the name, but the message was that this
fellow—Sullivan was his name—was at M——, and if the man had escaped
from the wreck would he come to see him.”

“He wouldn’t have sent that message to me,” I said to McKnight, rather
crestfallen. “He’d have every object in keeping out of my way.”

“There might be reasons,” McKnight observed judicially. “He might not
have found the papers then.”

“Was the name Blakeley?” I asked.

“It might have been—I can’t say. But the man wasn’t there, and there
was a lot of noise. I couldn’t hear well. Then in half an hour down
came the other twin to say the gentleman was taking on awful and didn’t
want the message sent.”

“He’s gone, of course?”

“Yes. Limped down here in about three days and took the noon train for
the city.”

It seemed a certainty now that our man, having hurt himself somewhat in
his jump, had stayed quietly in the farm-house until he was able to
travel. But, to be positive, we decided to visit the Carter place.

I gave the station agent a five-dollar bill, which he rolled up with a
couple of others and stuck in his pocket. I turned as we got to a bend
in the road, and he was looking curiously after us.

It was not until we had climbed the hill and turned onto the road to
the Carter place that I realized where we were going. Although we
approached it from another direction, I knew the farm-house at once. It
was the one where Alison West and I had breakfasted nine days before.
With the new restraint between us, I did not tell McKnight. I wondered
afterward if he had suspected it. I saw him looking hard at the
gate-post which had figured in one of our mysteries, but he asked no
questions. Afterward he grew almost taciturn, for him, and let me do
most of the talking.

We opened the front gate of the Carter place and went slowly up the
walk. Two ragged youngsters, alike even to freckles and squints, were
playing in the yard.

“Is your mother around?” I asked.

“In the front room. Walk in,” they answered in identical tones.

As we got to the porch we heard voices, and stopped. I knocked, but the
people within, engaged in animated, rather one-sided conversation, did
not answer.

“‘In the front room. Walk in,’” quoted McKnight, and did so.

In the stuffy farm parlor two people were sitting. One, a
pleasant-faced woman with a checked apron, rose, somewhat embarrassed,
to meet us. She did not know me, and I was thankful. But our attention
was riveted on a little man who was sitting before a table, writing
busily. It was Hotchkiss!

He got up when he saw us, and had the grace to look uncomfortable.

“Such an interesting case,” he said nervously, “I took the liberty—”

“Look here,” said McKnight suddenly, “did you make any inquiries at the
station?”

“A few,” he confessed. “I went to the theater last night—I felt the
need of a little relaxation—and the sight of a picture there, a
cinematograph affair, started a new line of thought. Probably the same
clue brought you gentlemen. I learned a good bit from the station
agent.”

“The son-of-a-gun,” said McKnight. “And you paid him, I suppose?”

“I gave him five dollars,” was the apologetic answer. Mrs. Carter,
hearing sounds of strife in the yard, went out, and Hotchkiss folded up
his papers.

“I think the identity of the man is established,” he said. “What number
of hat do you wear, Mr. Blakeley?”

“Seven and a quarter,” I replied.

“Well, it’s only piling up evidence,” he said cheerfully. “On the night
of the murder you wore light gray silk underclothing, with the second
button of the shirt missing. Your hat had ‘L. B.’ in gilt letters
inside, and there was a very minute hole in the toe of one black sock.”

“Hush,” McKnight protested. “If word gets to Mrs. Klopton that Mr.
Blakeley was wrecked, or robbed, or whatever it was, with a button
missing and a hole in one sock, she’ll retire to the Old Ladies’ Home.
I’ve heard her threaten it.”

Mr. Hotchkiss was without a sense of humor. He regarded McKnight
gravely and went on:

“I’ve been up in the room where the man lay while he was unable to get
away, and there is nothing there. But I found what may be a possible
clue in the dust heap.

“Mrs. Carter tells me that in unpacking his grip the other day she took
out of the coat of the pajamas some pieces of a telegram. As I figure
it, the pajamas were his own. He probably had them on when he effected
the exchange.”

I nodded assent. All I had retained of my own clothing was the suit of
pajamas I was wearing and my bath-robe.

“Therefore the telegram was his, not yours. I have pieces here, but
some are missing. I am not discouraged, however.”

He spread out some bits of yellow paper, and we bent over them
curiously. It was something like this:

Man with p— Get—
                        Br—


We spelled it out slowly.

“Now,” Hotchkiss announced, “I make it something like this: The ‘p.—’
is one of two things, pistol—you remember the little pearl-handled
affair belonging to the murdered man—or it is pocket-book. I am
inclined to the latter view, as the pocket-book had been disturbed and
the pistol had not.”

I took the piece of paper from the table and scrawled four words on it.

“Now,” I said, rearranging them, “it happens, Mr. Hotchkiss, that I
found one of these pieces of the telegram on the train. I thought it
had been dropped by some one else, you see, but that’s immaterial.
Arranged this way it almost makes sense. Fill out that ‘p.—’ with the
rest of the word, as I imagine it, and it makes ‘papers,’ and add this
scrap and you have:

“‘Man with papers (in) lower ten, car seven. Get (them).’”


McKnight slapped Hotchkiss on the back. “You’re a trump,” he said. “Br—
is Bronson, of course. It’s almost too easy. You see, Mr. Blakeley here
engaged lower ten, but found it occupied by the man who was later
murdered there. The man who did the thing was a friend of Bronson’s,
evidently, and in trying to get the papers we have the motive for the
crime.”

“There are still some things to be explained.” Mr. Hotchkiss wiped his
glasses and put them on. “For one thing, Mr. Blakeley, I am puzzled by
that bit of chain.”

I did not glance at McKnight. I felt that the hand, with which I was
gathering up the bits of torn paper were shaking. It seemed to me that
this astute little man was going to drag in the girl in spite of me.




CHAPTER XVIII.
A NEW WORLD


Hotchkiss jotted down the bits of telegram and rose.

“Well,” he said, “we’ve done something. We’ve found where the murderer
left the train, we know what day he went to Baltimore, and, most
important of all, we have a motive for the crime.”

“It seems the irony of fate,” said McKnight, getting up, “that a man
should kill another man for certain papers he is supposed to be
carrying, find he hasn’t got them after all, decide to throw suspicion
on another man by changing berths and getting out, bag and baggage, and
then, by the merest fluke of chance, take with him, in the valise he
changed for his own, the very notes he was after. It was a bit of luck
for him.”

“Then why,” put in Hotchkiss doubtfully, “why did he collapse when he
heard of the wreck? And what about the telephone message the station
agent sent? You remember they tried to countermand it, and with some
excitement.”

“We will ask him those questions when we get him,” McKnight said. We
were on the unrailed front porch by that time, and Hotchkiss had put
away his notebook. The mother of the twins followed us to the steps.

“Dear me,” she exclaimed volubly, “and to think I was forgetting to
tell you! I put the young man to bed with a spice poultice on his
ankle: my mother always was a firm believer in spice poultices. It’s
wonderful what they will do in croup! And then I took the children and
went down to see the wreck. It was Sunday, and the mister had gone to
church; hasn’t missed a day since he took the pledge nine years ago.
And on the way I met two people, a man and a woman. They looked half
dead, so I sent them right here for breakfast and some soap and water.
I always say soap is better than liquor after a shock.”

Hotchkiss was listening absently: McKnight was whistling under his
breath, staring down across the field to where a break in the woods
showed a half dozen telegraph poles, the line of the railroad.

“It must have been twelve o’clock when we got back; I wanted the
children to see everything, because it isn’t likely they’ll ever see
another wreck like that. Rows of—”

“About twelve o’clock,” I broke in, “and what then?”

“The young man up-stairs was awake,” she went on, “and hammering at his
door like all possessed. And it was locked on the outside!” She paused
to enjoy her sensation.

“I would like to see that lock,” Hotchkiss said promptly, but for some
reason the woman demurred.

“I will bring the key down,” she said and disappeared. When she
returned she held out an ordinary door key of the cheapest variety.

“We had to break the lock,” she volunteered, “and the key didn’t turn
up for two days. Then one of the twins found the turkey gobbler trying
to swallow it. It has been washed since,” she hastened to assure
Hotchkiss, who showed an inclination to drop it.

“You don’t think he locked the door himself and threw the key out of
the window?” the little man asked.

“The windows are covered with mosquito netting, nailed on. The mister
blamed it on the children, and it might have been Obadiah. He’s the
quiet kind, and you never know what he’s about.”

“He’s about to strangle, isn’t he,” McKnight remarked lazily, “or is
that Obadiah?”

Mrs. Carter picked the boy up and inverted him, talking amiably all the
time. “He’s always doing it,” she said, giving him a shake. “Whenever
we miss anything we look to see if Obadiah’s black in the face.” She
gave him another shake, and the quarter I had given him shot out as if
blown from a gun. Then we prepared to go back to the station.

From where I stood I could look into the cheery farm kitchen, where
Alison West and I had eaten our _al fresco_ breakfast. I looked at the
table with mixed emotions, and then, gradually, the meaning of
something on it penetrated my mind. Still in its papers, evidently just
opened, was a hat box, and protruding over the edge of the box was a
streamer of vivid green ribbon.

On the plea that I wished to ask Mrs. Carter a few more questions, I
let the others go on. I watched them down the flagstone walk; saw
McKnight stop and examine the gate-posts and saw, too, the quick glance
he threw back at the house. Then I turned to Mrs. Carter.

“I would like to speak to the young lady up-stairs,” I said.

She threw up her hands with a quick gesture of surrender. “I’ve done
all I could,” she exclaimed. “She won’t like it very well, but—she’s in
the room over the parlor.”

I went eagerly up the ladder-like stairs, to the rag-carpeted hall. Two
doors were open, showing interiors of four poster beds and high
bureaus. The door of the room over the parlor was almost closed. I
hesitated in the hallway: after all, what right had I to intrude on
her? But she settled my difficulty by throwing open the door and facing
me.

“I—I beg your pardon, Miss West,” I stammered. “It has just occurred to
me that I am unpardonably rude. I saw the hat down-stairs and I—I
guessed—”

“The hat!” she said. “I might have known. Does Richey know I am here?”

“I don’t think so.” I turned to go down the stairs again. Then I
halted. “The fact is,” I said, in an attempt at justification, “I’m in
rather a mess these days, and I’m apt to do irresponsible things. It is
not impossible that I shall be arrested, in a day or so, for the murder
of Simon Harrington.”

She drew her breath in sharply. “Murder!” she echoed. “Then they have
found you after all!”

“I don’t regard it as anything more than—er—inconvenient,” I lied.
“They can’t convict me, you know. Almost all the witnesses are dead.”

She was not deceived for a moment. She came over to me and stood, both
hands on the rail of the stair. “I know just how grave it is,” she said
quietly. “My grandfather will not leave one stone unturned, and he can
be terrible—terrible. But”—she looked directly into my eyes as I stood
below her on the stairs—“the time may come—soon—when I can help you.
I’m afraid I shall not want to; I’m a dreadful coward, Mr. Blakeley.
But—I will.” She tried to smile.

“I wish you would let _me_ help _you_,” I said unsteadily. “Let us make
it a bargain: each help the other!”

The girl shook her head with a sad little smile. “I am only as unhappy
as I deserve to be,” she said. And when I protested and took a step
toward her she retreated, with her hands out before her.

“Why don’t you ask me all the questions you are thinking?” she
demanded, with a catch in her voice. “Oh, I know them. Or are you
afraid to ask?”

I looked at her, at the lines around her eyes, at the drawn look about
her mouth. Then I held out my hand. “Afraid!” I said, as she gave me
hers. “There is nothing in God’s green earth I am afraid of, save of
trouble for you. To ask questions would be to imply a lack of faith. I
ask you nothing. Some day, perhaps, you will come to me yourself and
let me help you.”

The next moment I was out in the golden sunshine: the birds were
singing carols of joy: I walked dizzily through rainbow-colored clouds,
past the twins, cherubs now, swinging on the gate. It was a new world
into which I stepped from the Carter farm-house that morning, for—I had
kissed her!




CHAPTER XIX.
AT THE TABLE NEXT


McKnight and Hotchkiss were sauntering slowly down the road as I caught
up with them. As usual, the little man was busy with some abstruse
mental problem.

“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 up-stairs. 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 business-like 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 pocket-book 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 disappe

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